Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain

by Brandon, David

  That involving film began in December 1895 when the first motion picture, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, was shown in Paris to an invited audience. The film, by the Lumière brothers, showed a train pulling into a station, and although the theme was simple enough it caused the audience to duck behind their seats for fear that they might be run over. Given that the crime genre had long been popular in literature it was inevitable that it would be adapted successfully for the medium of film. The railways have provided an ideal setting for books and films dealing with murder, robbery and intrigue such as Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and The Lady Vanishes (1938 and 1979).

  Although these and many other films are set in Europe, the latter part of this chapter will focus on a selection of films set in Britain. We begin with what can only be a selective survey of literature dealing with railway crime. Industrial change, the growth of towns and a rapid increase in population brought a new kind of anxiety about crime during the nineteenth century. Widening opportunities for theft opened up with rich and poor living in very close proximity and with the greater quantity and visibility of goods and materials that were available for the criminal to steal. The railways themselves offered all kinds of new possibilities for criminal activity and this was quickly reflected in fictional literature. Only a small amount of Victorian crime fiction is still read but the Sherlock Holmes stories, mainly set in the late nineteenth century (although most were written in the twentieth century), have retained their popularity and are probably the most widely known.

  Crime fiction dates back before 1800 but in the nineteenth century crime writing began to aim at a mass market. The Newgate Calendar of the eighteenth century gave accounts of the lives and crimes of those felons condemned and executed at Newgate. It was prefaced with a moral warning about the consequence of committing the deeds that brought the wretches to such a pretty pass. However, these accounts gave way to fictional crime stories which began to give less attention to the criminal and more to those who caught them.

  The earliest recognised detective story is Edgar Allen Poe’s Murders on the Rue Morgue (1841) first published in Graham’s Magazine. The title of the pioneering British literary detective novel (some might suggest William Godwin’s Caleb Williams of 1794 although its plot bears little resemblance to detective fiction as we understand it) is credited to Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852). Although the detective, Inspector Bucket, solves a murder, it is only a small part of a much bigger story. Crime was given a prominent role in Dickens’ earlier novel, Oliver Twist (1837-39).

  It was in the 1860s that the ‘sensational novel’ came to prominence in the works of writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins. By the later years of the nineteenth century, crime and detective fiction as a genre had become established and was very popular, notably in the form of the short story. Dick Donovan, ‘the Glasgow Detective’, was a pseudonym used by Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock (1842-1934) who wrote nearly three hundred detective and mystery stories between 1889 and 1922. Although like Sherlock Holmes, Donovan appeared in the Strand in 1892, he was already a well-established popular detective. His exploits featured a number of encounters with trains while engaged in chasing murderers or mail-train robbers. Following in the Victorians’ footsteps were other writers like G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Morrison, R. Austin Freeman, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham.

  Despite, or even perhaps because of, a certain literary snobbishness towards the genre, the popularity of crime fiction has long been reflected in the sales of such books on railway station bookstalls and newsagents. Victorian writers soon began to utilise the railway as a setting or backdrop to a story. Charles Dickens was one of the earliest and he included trains in his writings from the 1840s. In his book Railways and Culture in Britain (2001), Ian Carter posed the question of why detective fiction and Britain’s railways went together like bacon and eggs, and suggested that with ‘railways enjoying a monopoly in passenger land transport beyond the strictly local, any British writer setting a crime story among travellers between 1830 and 1914 had little option but to describe railway travel’.

  Agatha Christie, the doyen of the British murder and detection story. Railways feature in several of her stories. She was born at Torquay in 1870 and is commemorated by this plaque at nearby Torre Abbey.

  Even if a crime did not always take place on a train, railways often entered the story as a means of conveying the sleuth to the scene of the offence or as a possible escape route for the perpetrator of the crime. The confines of the old-fashioned compartment; the later possibilities afforded by corridors and connections between carriages; the environs of stations and the minatory gloom of railway tunnels provided a galaxy of scenarios around which to weave a good tale.

  Despite his stories containing a number of mistakes about the operations of the railways, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) featured trains in several of his immortal Sherlock Holmes adventures. In Silver Blaze Holmes and Dr Watson are on a journey to King’s Pyland in Dartmoor to investigate a murder and the disappearance of the racehorse ‘Silver Blaze’. Whilst on the train Holmes, who is looking out the window and glancing at his watch, comments casually to the faithful Watson ‘We are going well… our rate at present is fifty-three and a half miles an hour… the telegraph posts upon this line are sixty yards apart, and the calculation is a simple one.’

  Crime-writers and film-makers have not been slow to exploit the opportunities to set scenes of skulduggery in railway tunnels. This is Clay Cross tunnel in Derbyshire, opened in 1840 on the then North Midland Railway. It is over a mile long. Note the castellated entrance. Early railway travellers were often nervous about tunnels and so engineers sometimes provided castle-like features to give a sense of solidity and permanence.

  Railway carriages provide a means whereby the mercurial Holmes can analyse and make his preparations for the case ahead as he travels on his way to solve it. In The Boscombe Valley Mystery, Holmes and Watson ‘leave Paddington by the 11.15’ to travel to rural Herefordshire. As they boarded they had the compartment to themselves where Holmes could peruse the ‘immense litter of papers [he] had brought with him. Among these he rummaged and read, with intervals of note-taking and of meditation, until we were past Reading’.

  Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson sally forth by train to solve the mystery of ‘Silver Blaze’. The artist, Sidney Pagett, did much to create the popular image of Sherlock Holmes.

  In The Bruce Partington Plans, the Metropolitan Railway is the setting for the murder of a man whose body was found along the underground tracks near Aldgate station. In his pocket were the top-secret plans for the Bruce-Partington Submarine. Holmes visits the scene of the crime to uncover clues. ‘Is it a coincidence that it [the body] is found at the very point where the train pitches and sways as it comes round on the points?… Either the body fell from the roof, or a very curious coincidence has occurred. Now, suppose that a train halted under such a window, would there be any difficulty in laying a body upon the roof?… Owing to the intersection of one of the larger railways, the underground trains are frequently held motionless for some minutes at that very spot.’ ‘Splendid, Holmes! You have got it!’ crooned the doggedly supportive Dr Watson, surely the greatest Sherlock Holmes fan ever.

  In The Final Problem, Conan Doyle attempts to kill Holmes off with a spectacular plummet into the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, still grappling with his arch-enemy, the egregious Professor Moriarty. Before this piece of melodrama, he and Watson had caught a train from Victoria only to spot Moriarty on the platform vainly trying to get someone to stop the train. Moriarty had obviously tracked them down and this then caused Holmes and Watson to change their route plan.

  They alighted at Canterbury and as they waited for another train, a special one-coach train roars past. It had, of course, been hired by Moriarty in an effort to overtake Holmes. The inseparable duo also travels from King’s Cross station in The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quart
er where Holmes suddenly exclaims that he has identified a starting point for their investigation. With that the engine whistles and the train plunges into the tunnel on the first part of its journey to Cambridge.

  The proliferation of magazines and ‘penny dreadfuls’ (much criticised in the 1870s for being a bad influence on young working-class boys) with their lurid serialisations provided a plentiful supply of stories set around trains, stations and tunnels. Short stories about crime on the railway were abundant. Plots, rarely subtle, included bodies thrown from trains, innocent damsels (or sometimes dynamite) tied to the tracks, foreign spies and even double agents, cads who travel first class on third-class tickets, smugglers, saboteurs, and dead bodies (sometimes dismembered), turning up in trunks on stations or trains. On a number of occasions discussed elsewhere, this proved to be a case of life imitating art. Examples of the ‘body-in-the-trunk’ genre can be found in Henry Holt’s Murder on the Bookstall (1934) which concerns the discovery of a woman’s body at the bookstall on Charing Cross station and Agatha Christie’s short story The Plymouth Express (1923), where a young naval officer on a train journey to Plymouth finds the dead body of a woman underneath one of the seats in his carriage.

  Although most actual recorded crimes relating to the railways involved theft – either on a passenger train or by an employee stealing from the company – fictional narratives tended to look to more exciting and gruesome action. Night train stories feature especially in European journeys. Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934) typifies the glamour of such continental travel with its elaborate meals, rich and exotic passengers and romantic places. Sherlock Holmes, always ready to announce that ‘the game is afoot’, kept a copy of Bradshaw’s European Railway Timetable on his mantelpiece. Nonetheless, Britain provided the setting for many of these overnight sleeper railway murders. In The Mystery of the Sleeping Car Express by Freeman Wills Crofts a murderer escapes from a moving train on the Euston to north Scotland line, while his victims and an innocent bystander are locked in their compartment.

  Aldgate station opened in 1876. This is the northern end of the station with three steam-hauled trains visible. The drivers and firemen of the Metropolitan Railway locomotives needed to be made of stern stuff. The line into the tunnel on the left goes to Aldgate East.

  Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch (1868-1933), a clergyman and author, wrote much detective fiction including Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912). This collection contains fifteen stories, the first nine of which feature wealthy amateur investigator Thorpe Hazell, vegetarian and railway hobbyist. The stories vary from theft on the railways (e.g. The Stolen Necklace and Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture), tobacco smuggling (Peter Crane’s Cigars) to foreign spies masquerading as locomotive firemen. He also wrote stories for the Strand Magazine and Railway Magazine from the 1890s. Whitechurch’s Murder on the Okehampton Line, which appeared in Pearson’s Magazine in December 1903, opens with a newspaper report of a murder:

  On the arrival of the last train from Exeter to Okehampton at the latter station last night, a gruesome discovery was made. A porter on the platform noticed a gentleman seated in the corner of a third class compartment and, as he made no attempt to get out of the carriage, opened the door to wake him, thinking he might be asleep. To his horror he discovered the man was dead and a subsequent examination revealed the fact that he been stabbed in the heart with some sharp instrument.

  A modern view of Aldgate station frontage. This busy station in the City of London is currently used by trains on the Metropolitan and Circle lines.

  As detective Godfrey Page investigates, his line of enquiry begins to resemble somewhat the Monty Python sketch (‘Agatha Christie Timetable’):

  Let me see, the last down train arrives at Okehampton at ten-fifty. It’s the one that leaves Waterloo at five-fifty and Exeter, St David’s, at ten-thirty. Of course, the great question is where did he get into the train and whereabouts was he murdered?…These two men…could not have got away by train, for this was the last one at the junction that night…Number 242 third coach is one that is kept at Plymouth as a spare carriage in case there is an abnormal number of passengers for the Paddington express. The night to which you refer it ran – on the eight –twenty p.m. from North Road, Plymouth arriving here at 10.03.

  What might seem to be nerdishly intimate knowledge of train timetables is crucial to getting the crime solved.

  Murder is the theme of Miles Burton’s Death in the Tunnel (1936) which features sleuths Desmond Merrion and Detective Inspector Arnold. They investigate the death of Sir Wilfred Saxonby who is discovered in a first-class carriage on the London to Stourford train. An eye-witness to a murder provides the opening to 4.50 from Paddington (1957) by Agatha Christie. A passenger on a train, Elspeth McGillicuddy, who is traveling from Scotland, sees a woman strangled in a passing train. What has happened to the body? Who was the unfortunate victim? Who murdered her and why?

  Thomas Hanshew (1857-1914) The Riddle of the 5.28. Written in 1910, this is one of the earliest stories to be set on the Brighton line from London. The train compartment becomes the scene of a gruesome discovery and the beginning of a deep and dark mystery. Typically where short stories are concerned there is no time to waste in getting to the point and Hanshew does this to good effect. A stationmaster at Anerley near Crystal Palace receives a communication: ‘Five-twenty-eight down from London Bridge just passed. One first-class carriage compartment in total darkness. Investigate.’ The porter and stationmaster do just that and find the said compartment with an ‘Engaged’ label on the window. As they unlock the door they make a dreadful discovery. ‘For there in a corner, with his face towards the engine, half sat, half leaned the figure of a dead man with a bullet hole between his eyes.’ What follows is an intriguing murder mystery, involving not only a whodunnit but also raising the question of how was it done given that ‘both doors were locked and both window closed’ when the body was discovered.

  Travelling on the underground can be a risky enterprise when the threat of murderers and assassins looms. The London Underground, the first part of which commenced operations in 1863 and which now possesses over 250 miles of track and about 288 stations, has provided the setting for many novels and short stories. It is an ideal atmospheric setting for dark tales. A Mystery of the Underground (1897) by John Oxenham (1853-1941), was effective in scaring its readers when it was first published weekly in To-Day. The story concerns an assassin who is murdering people every Tuesday night on the underground. The tone is established right from the outset: ‘The underground station at Charing Cross was the scene of considerable excitement on the night of Tuesday the fourth of November. As the 9.17 London & North Western train rumbled up the platform, a lady was standing at the door of one of the first-class carriages, frantically endeavouring to get out, and screaming wildly…she was in a state of violent hysterics.’ Railway cognoscenti will raise their eyebrows at the idea of a London & North Western train being found at Charing Cross.

  The presence of a dead body, sitting as though asleep, was the cause of the woman’s desperate behaviour. As another body is discovered a week later at Ealing Broadway station, people are becoming reluctant to take the train. However, the murders do not deter the morbidly curious who crowd the platforms of Charing Cross, Westminster, St James and Victoria ‘simply with the idea of being on the spot in case anything happens.’ These ‘throngs of people [wait] silently, in a damp fog, peering into carriage after carriage as the almost empty trains rolled slowly, like processions of funeral cars.’ The body count adds up as they fall victim to the mysterious assassin’s deadly bullets.

  Cover of Strand Magazine which published most of the Sherlock Holmes stories in serial form.

  Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s (1865-1947) ‘The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway’ appeared as a short story in the book The Old Man in the Corner (1909). What appears to be the suicide of a woman in a carriage on the Metropolitan Railway turns out to be a murder. Th
ere is some similarity with the discovery of the body to that in A Mystery of the Underground. The guard ‘noticed a lady sitting in the furthest corner, with her head turned away towards the window.’ When the guard asks which station she wants the lady does not move, giving the impression that she is asleep. ‘He touched her arm lightly and looked into her face…In the glassy eyes, the ashen colour of the cheeks, the rigidity of the head, there was the unmistakable look of death.’

  The railway carriage proved to be an ideal setting for many situations other than murder such as theft, furtive and clandestine trysts between lovers, secret confabulations between spies and even sexual encounters, planned or entirely casual and spontaneous. Ian Carter quotes the interesting example of frequent quickies between stops: ‘For a few years after 1866, services between Charing Cross and Cannon Street drew a curious traffic. Some ladies of the street had found that the South Eastern Railway’s first-class compartments, combined with the uninterrupted seven-minute run, provided ideal conditions for their activities at a rental that represented only a minute proportion of their income.’ The mind boggles.

  As we saw with Sherlock Holmes, the carriage allows the possibility for reflection and even the working out of a murder. In Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) The Man with no Face (1928) the discovery of a murdered man who had his ‘face cut about in the most dreadful manner’ on a beach at East Felpham becomes the topic of debate for passengers on a busy train who speculate about the foul deed. One of the passengers is Lord Peter Wimsey, the gentleman ‘detective’, who proceeds to solve the crime during the journey and beyond, just as you would expect.