In 1937 the comedy classic, Oh Mr Porter, was released starring Will Hay (1888-1949) in his best-known role as the new stationmaster, William Porter, of a remote and highly rustic Northern Ireland railway station at Buggleskelly, not far from the border with the Republic. Together with his fellow workers, played by Moore Marriott as Jeremiah Harbottle and Graham Moffatt as Albert, they encounter the legend of ‘One-Eyed Joe’ a ghost who is said to haunt the lonely station. The local postman (Dave O’Toole) takes great pleasure in telling the legend to the new stationmaster: ‘Every night when the moon gives light, The ghost of the miller is seen, As he walks the track with a sack on his back, Down to the Black Borheen… He haunts the station, he haunts the hill, And the land that lies between.’
The legend, as with many other local legends, turns out to be a distraction used by gun-runners to conceal their criminal activities. This was a real tactic used in coastal villages when tales of ghosts coming out at night provided a means of keeping people off the street whilst smugglers went about their business. Filmed mainly around the abandoned Basingstoke–Alton branch line of the Southern Railway, the film was summed up by one review which commented on its timeless quality, ‘set in a poetic limbo, where nothing will ever change.’
The 1931 bestselling novel by A.J. Cronin, Hatter’s Castle (1933), was loosely adapted as a film in 1941. Made by Paramount Pictures it had a star cast which included Robert Newton, Deborah Kerr and James Mason. The story, set in the year 1879, is a bleak drama about the ruin that befalls a Scottish hatter (Newton), a social climber set on recapturing his imagined lost nobility. He lives in a castle-like residence nicknamed Hatter’s Castle and rules his family like a tyrant. His timid daughter, Mary (Kerr), is seduced, becomes pregnant and is thrown out of her home. The scene most pertinent to the railway is the one in which Mary leaves the train carriage to wander off into the darkness.
The decision is one that saves Mary’s life as the Tay Bridge collapses during a gale force wind with the train and all its passengers (including Dennis, played by Emlyn Wiliams, the man who seduced her), plunging to their deaths. More misery follows with bankruptcy for the hatter, Brodie. His son commits suicide after he is caught cheating in an exam and Brodie burns down his palatial home destroying himself along with it. It is believed that Hatter’s Castle is the only film that depicts the Tay Bridge disaster.
Waterloo Road (1944) is a Gainsborough picture starring John Mills, Stewart Granger and Alastair Sim. It is mainly concerned with life in wartime Britain and focuses on the problems faced by a number of different families in such difficult times. Although railway relevance is rather thin it does include a chase across the tracks outside Waterloo station. A very dangerous thing to do in view of the electric conductor rails.
Those familiar with the Basil Rathbone (Holmes) and Nigel Bruce (Watson) series of films about Sherlock Holmes will know they bear only the most tenuous connection to the Conan Doyle stories. In these films Holmes is variously fighting the Nazis or flying off to Washington. Nonetheless they proved enormously popular and established Rathbone, much to his regret, in the forefront of the pantheon of actors who have played Holmes. The film Terror by Night (1946) made by Universal Pictures in the USA is set almost entirely on an overnight train travelling from London to Edinburgh.
Accompanied by Dr Watson and Inspector Lestrade (Dennis Hoey), Holmes has been hired to prevent the theft of the Star of Rhodesia, an enormous 400-plus carat diamond owned by Lady Margaret Carstairs (Mary Forbes). As Holmes switches diamonds with Lady Margaret, her son Roland (Geoffrey Steele) is murdered shortly after and the fake diamond is stolen. Holmes believes that the notorious criminal Colonel Sebastian Moran (Professor Moriarty’s henchman) is involved in the murder and the theft. Plenty of action takes place on the train and in addition to the murder of Roland Carstairs, Holmes and Watson unearth in the luggage compartment a train guard murdered by a tiny poisonous dart made out of a fiendishly clever dissolving substance.
This is all that can now be seen of Cliddesden station on the highly rustic and long-closed Basingstoke to Alton railway line. This rather pointless line was built by the London & South Western Railway and it was immortalised by playing a central role in the film ‘Oh, Mr Porter’.
Filmed in black and white, Terror by Night creates a good atmosphere despite several gaffs, including some of the exterior shots of the train. These show trains of different companies and also include a model and some foreign trains. Enthusiasts will know that such faux pas are by no means unusual in films showing moving trains. As the film was made in 1946 the studio did not find it necessary to use the wartime propaganda prevalent in some of the earlier films.
After the war, restrictions on filming did not suffer from the same limitations but there had also been significant changes to the railway industry. The Labour government had a mandate to nationalise the railways and the Transport Act was passed in 1947. The railways were nationalised on 1 January 1948. The Act brought virtually all railways, including London Underground, under the control of the British Transport Commission (BTC) although the name British Railways came into immediate use for day-to-day purposes.
In Train of Events (1949) the London, Midland & Scottish Railway, which was absorbed into British Railways during the making of the film, provided the main locations around Willesden and Euston. The film offers a slight variation on the crashed train theme by attempting, not very successfully, to follow the stories of three sets of people as they travel on a night train from Euston to Liverpool. Although not specifically a ghost story, there is a sense of impending doom underpinning the tale.
The engine driver, played by Jack Warner, says what will be a tragic and inevitable farewell to his wife. The passengers include an actor who has murdered his unfaithful wife, an orphan girl who is in love with a fugitive German prisoner of war, and a famous conductor who cannot choose between his wife and a glamorous pianist. Although the doomed train will cruelly resolve the problems of the characters, the audience is left to speculate on who will survive.
During the 1950s British cinema went through a number of important changes as audiences fell and many cinemas closed down (as did railway stations). Many critics (not entirely correctly) viewed the decline in attendance as being accompanied by a decline in the standard of films. British films came to be seen as dull and conservative. The war film was popular (for example, The Cruel Sea (1953), The Dam Busters (1955), Reach for the Sky (1956), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)) as were comedy films, notably those coming out of Ealing Studios (The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955)). Ealing Studios are the oldest working film studios in the world, dating back over a century, and Ealing films became synonymous with genteel British comedy.
The Ladykillers (1955) is a dark comedy starring Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom and Jack Warner. ‘Professor’ Marcus (Guinness) rents rooms for a diverse gang of oddball criminals in a ramshackle house not far from King’s Cross, owned by an eccentric octogenarian widow, Mrs Louisa Wilberforce (Katie Johnson) who lives alone except for her parrots. The intention of the gang is to rob a security van at King’s Cross station. Meanwhile the Professor convinces Mrs Wilberforce that they are amateur musicians who want the room to rehearse, hence they carry instruments and play a recording of Boccherini’s Minuet, appropriately a string quintet, while they plan their heist.
Once they have completed their successful robbery they deposit the money in the station parcel office. Mrs Wilberforce stumbles on the truth when on leaving her house one of the gang manages to trap his cello case in the door allowing all the banknotes to flutter out. Fearing that she will tell the police, the gang decides it has no option but to get rid of her. However, no one actually wants to do it. They soon fall out and begin to kill each other with the bodies being dropped into railway wagons. In the end they are all dead and dear old Mrs Wilberforce is left holding the money.
Mrs Wilberforce’s ‘lopsided’ house was a set built at the western en
d of Frederica Street, directly above the southern portal of Copenhagen Tunnel on the railway line leading out of King’s Cross station. The film used a number of locations around King’s Cross including Copenhagen Tunnel; Cheney Road, St Pancras (the scene of the robbery); the North London Line; York Way; the famous King’s Cross Gasholders and various roads around Islington and Holloway. This film is a great favourite with railway enthusiasts because of its footage of steam trains working in and out of King’s Cross.
Four years previous to The Lady Killers, Mystery Junction (1951) was released. It follows a rather complicated plot with a crime novelist concocting a story about fellow passengers on the train for the benefit of a young woman. On the train is a prisoner who is being taken to court as a suspect in a murder case. The passengers are told by the policeman escorting him to disembark at a lonely snowbound station so that everybody can be interviewed while they wait for the police to arrive. As this is happening the lights go out and one of the prisoner’s accomplices cuts the phone line. Shots are fired and the policeman lies dead on the floor, suspicion falling on one of the passengers.
Murder and/or robbery have been the main staple for railway crime films. Robbery is very much the theme of The Flying Scot (1957). Travelling overnight on the Flying Scotsman, a group of robbers start to make a large hole between two compartments in order to gain access to sacks of money. When a young boy finds out what is happening, he informs the guard who throws a written message out of the window to a signalman telling him to call the police. The robbers are eventually arrested.
Ten years later came Robbery (1967) which was loosely based on the Great Train Robbery of 1963. With only the passing of four years the 1963 robbery was still fresh in the minds of the public and there was still some sensitivity which was evident in the use of twenty lawyers to ensure there was no possibility of libel against the film company. Starring Stanley Baker, James Booth and Frank Finlay, the film opens with a jewel robbery which is intended to fund a bigger, better organised robbery of the overnight mail train from Glasgow to London. The 12.30 night express is successfully held up and the gang members escape to an unused airfield to share out the £2.6 million. However, one of the robbers had foolishly called his wife from a phone box during the raid and the police had tapped his house phone. With one exception the robbers are all eventually arrested. One of the locations for the film was Husbands Bosworth near Market Harborough. The train robbery had a huge media coverage which provided a convenient distraction for the Conservative Government of the day who were deeply embarrassed at the time by the Profumo scandal.
The controversial Beeching report, produced while Richard Beeching was chairman of British Railways between 1963 and 1965, attempted to reduce the losses being sustained by the national railway system. It advocated widespread closures. In the event, more than 4,000 miles of railway and 3,000 stations closed in the decade following the report. The scrapping of a village station (and a nod to the Great Train Robbery) is the topical subject of the children’s film made in 1965, Runaway Railway. Barming station (Borden) has been targeted by Government cuts and its steam engine, Matilda, has to be scrapped. It is down to four children to try and run the line as a private concern with the help of local landowner, Lord Chalk.
As a Government official visits the village, the children try to buy time by sabotaging the train. In order to raise money for repairs a fund-raising dance for local children is held at the station. Lurking around the station are two dodgy-looking men claiming to be train enthusiasts but their real intent is to rob a London-bound mail van. In true fantasy style the children foil the robbery by driving Matilda, the lovable little steam engine. They receive a reward which goes towards saving the private line. It is almost reminiscent of an Ealing film, where the small rural community defeats not only the robbers but also chases the Government official (in standard pinstripe and umbrella) out of the village.
A train robbery from an earlier period, the Great South Eastern Train Robbery is the subject of The First Great Train Robbery (1978) starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland. Michael Crichton, who based it on his bestselling thriller, directed the film. Although set in London and Kent, most of the filming was done in Ireland. The original robbery took place in May 1855 when three London firms sent a box of gold bars and coins from London Bridge to Paris via the South Eastern Railway. The gold was stolen en route.
The story is loosely based on this robbery, in which Edward Pierce (Connery) is a master thief with the goal of stealing a shipment of gold bars en route to the Crimea. With the help of England’s greatest locksmith, Agar (Donald Sutherland), Pierce sets out to copy each of four keys needed to open the train’s vault, keys that are kept and guarded by different parties. The robbery was filmed on a vintage passenger train in which Pierce clambers along the entire length of the fast-moving train, leaping from carriage to carriage and ducking under low bridges.
1978 saw the third film adaptation of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935, 1959, 1978). In the 1935 version, which starred Robert Donat and Madelaine Carroll and was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Hannay is a Canadian visitor to London who goes to a music hall and sees ‘Mr Memory’s’ show, where he meets Annabella Smith who is trying to escape from secret agents. Hannay helps by hiding her in his flat where she claims to have uncovered a plot to steal vital British military secrets. She mentions the ‘thirty-nine steps’, but does not explain its meaning and the mystery further deepens when she is murdered by a mystery intruder during the night, using Hannay’s breadknife.
Now a key suspect, he goes on the run to break the spy ring. He takes a train to Scotland (because she had told him she was going to visit a man there), and as the police search the train in desperation, he enters a compartment and kisses the one person in it (Carroll), as a distraction. Still pursued, Hannay jumps from the train onto the Forth Rail Bridge and escapes. Hannay makes his way through parts of Scotland until he reaches his destination only to find that the occupant, the seemingly respectable Professor Jordan, is part of the spy ring. Hannay is eventually captured and handcuffed but he realises that the policemen are part of the conspiracy. Our hero escapes yet again and drags an unwilling Madelaine Carroll (Pamela) along.
The story concludes back in London at ‘Mr Memory’s’ show. The spies are cunningly using Mr Memory to smuggle the secrets out. Hannay asks ‘Mr Memory’, ‘What are the thirty-nine steps?’ to which he replies, ‘it is an organisation of spies, collecting information on behalf of the foreign office…’ The unfortunate Mr Memory is shot, but before he dies he tells of a design for a silent aircraft engine. The film does not stick to Buchan’s novel. There is a love interest in the film, and in the book the thirty-nine steps refer to physical steps (as do other film versions).
The 1959 version is very much a product of the 1950s with an array of almost comic characters. It still uses the Forth Bridge but the film does not match either the 1935 or the 1978 adaptation. In the latter, Robert Powell plays Hannay and the film adheres more faithfully to the book. Set in early 1914, before the onset of war, Colonel Scudder (John Mills), a retired British Intelligence Service agent has discovered a plot to assassinate the Greek Prime Minister on a visit to London. Hannay goes to the scene of Scudder’s murder at St Pancras station and discovers his much-thumbed notebook, full of vital information. Thereafter follows a series of escapes across the country, with both foreign agents and the police on Hannay’s trail.
Following the end of steam on British Railways in 1968, nostalgia became something of an industry, with steam appearing in a number of films including The Railway Children (1970) and Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974). In a different type of remembrance, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Great Train Robbery of 1963 was reflected in a film about one of the junior robbers. The robbery had made celebrities of some of the criminals, who raided the Glasgow to London mail train and made off with £2.6m in used bank notes on 8 August 1963.
Buster (1988
) tells the story of Buster Edwards played by Phil Collins. Opinions are divided over the train robbers. The fact that the fifteen men managed to plan the robbery in a very careful and meticulous way and steal £2.6 million contrasts with the bungling whereby they got themselves arrested and imprisoned. Buster projected itself as a romantic thriller, placing more emphasis on Edward’s relationship with his family than on the robbery itself. He and his family go into hiding before finally heading for Mexico. However, the money soon dries up and his wife (played by Julie Walters) misses her family, so Edwards decides to return to England and give himself up. Billed as a romantic thriller, Buster falls short of thrills and does not match up to Robbery (1967). The locations used in Buster included Loughborough and Rothley stations on the Great Central Railway in Leicestershire.
Paddington station makes a brief appearance in the British gangster film The Long Good Friday (1980) when Carol Benson (Patti Love) collects the body of her husband, murdered in Northern Ireland, while doing a spot of work for Jeff Hughes. The station was also featured in the murder mystery The October Man (1947) with John Mills and Joan Greenwood.
The London Underground has featured in numerous short stories and novels as well as many films and TV productions. Not all have been about crime, possibly because of the difficulties in sustaining a full-length story set on the underground that deals with crime. Horror or supernatural films, although only a few have been made, have featured better, such as Quatermass and the Pit (1967), Death Line (1972) and Creep (2004).
Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain Page 22