Between 1835 and the 1850s, railway mania blossomed around Britain. Crime emerged as the railways developed, at first opportunistic crimes such as fare evasion and robberies, but gradually more inventive forms evolved, notably the minor clerk Redpath in the 1850s, whose shameless cooking of the books to live the high life exposed the lack of any kind of accountancy across the railway industry. The first train murder was not until the 1840s, and sparked great fear of foreigners as a German was charged and hanged for the crime. The outcry resulted in the communication cord being introduced to the railway carriages, so that no longer would they exist as completely separate spaces and passengers could alert the driver to any assault within.
This fascinating history covers all varieties of crime on the railways and how it has changed over the years, from assaults and robberies, to theft of goods, murder, vandalism, football and other crowd activity, suicide on the line, fraud and white collar crime, and also looks at the use of railway crime in film and literature.
Between 1835 and the 1850s, railway mania blossomed around Britain. Crime emerged as the railways developed, at first opportunistic crimes such as fare evasion and robberies, but gradually more inventive forms evolved, notably the minor clerk Redpath in the 1850s, whose shameless cooking of the books to live the high life exposed the lack of any kind of accountancy across the railway industry. The first train murder was not until the 1840s, and sparked great fear of foreigners as a German was charged and hanged for the crime. The outcry resulted in the communication cord being introduced to the railway carriages, so that no longer would they exist as completely separate spaces and passengers could alert the driver to any assault within.
This fascinating history covers all varieties of crime on the railways and how it has changed over the years, from assaults and robberies, to theft of goods, murder, vandalism, football and other crowd activity, suicide on the line, fraud and white collar crime, and also looks at the use of railway crime in film and literature.
Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain
192
Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain
192eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Between 1835 and the 1850s, railway mania blossomed around Britain. Crime emerged as the railways developed, at first opportunistic crimes such as fare evasion and robberies, but gradually more inventive forms evolved, notably the minor clerk Redpath in the 1850s, whose shameless cooking of the books to live the high life exposed the lack of any kind of accountancy across the railway industry. The first train murder was not until the 1840s, and sparked great fear of foreigners as a German was charged and hanged for the crime. The outcry resulted in the communication cord being introduced to the railway carriages, so that no longer would they exist as completely separate spaces and passengers could alert the driver to any assault within.
This fascinating history covers all varieties of crime on the railways and how it has changed over the years, from assaults and robberies, to theft of goods, murder, vandalism, football and other crowd activity, suicide on the line, fraud and white collar crime, and also looks at the use of railway crime in film and literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752462295 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 12/26/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
| Age Range: | 12 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Blood on the Tracks
By David Brandon, Alan Brooke
The History Press
Copyright © 2010 David Brandon & Alan BrookeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6229-5
CHAPTER 1
Assaults and Robberies
One early and enthusiastic historian of railways commented in 1851 that it was invariably safer to travel on the railway than to stay at home. Many of his contemporaries during the early years of the railways would not have agreed. Derailments, crashes and boiler explosions, for example, were unlikely to occur in the majority of homes, but were disconcertingly common experiences for railway travellers. So were spats with other travellers, as we shall see.
Travellers could rarely choose their fellow passengers. Antisocial behaviour resulting from overindulgence in alcohol led to many unsavoury scenes. Not the least of these occurred when men, with bladders clamouring for relief, exposed the necessary part of their anatomy in order to urinate out of moving trains. If the train was proceeding at speed, it was not unknown for passengers in carriages further down the train to find themselves subjected to a random shower of urine.
Many early railway carriages were, of course, open to the elements. Women especially, but also other men, could easily misconstrue the intentions of male travellers who started groping around in their nether regions in order to locate and extract their genitalia. Even this action, when intended for no more sinister a purpose than as the prelude to relieving themselves, was of course an infringement of public decency. A drunkard with a full bladder who was also believed to be a flasher or sex fiend really did not have a leg to stand on.
Many early passenger carriages contained a number of compartments, and the existence of this type of accommodation posed a whole world of problems for the sensitive traveller. The nature of the compartment meant that passengers were, by necessity, somewhat thrown together. In a crowded carriage there could be the most frightful situation of enforced physical intimacy, though those of a nervous disposition often found this easier to handle than the occupation of a compartment with just one fellow passenger. This stranger might turn out to be a robber, a sexual predator with curious or repulsive preferences, a homicidal maniac, a lunatic, a chain-smoker or a mind-numbingly tedious bore.
Robberies and assaults within the confinement of compartments were by no means uncommon. People felt trapped inside these small spaces, and although the vast majority of such journeys were completed without anything untoward happening, the reality that there was no easy way to stop the train, or even to contact a member of its crew, was a threatening one. Travellers therefore sometimes equipped themselves with weapons up to and including firearms before they embarked on train journeys. A traveller in 1854 admitted in a letter to a local newspaper that he never travelled by train without a loaded revolver in case he found himself tète-à-tète in an otherwise empty compartment with a lunatic or dangerous criminal on the run.
Before the days of lighting on trains, it was generally felt that tunnels were the places where assaults were most likely to happen. Advice to those alone in a compartment with only one other traveller was to be prepared for an attack by placing the hands and arms in the fashion best suited for defence. Ladies often had a hat pin at the ready. It was always felt that female travellers were more vulnerable to the various hazards of early train travel, especially those involving sexual or other forms of assault. For this reason some compartments were designated 'Ladies Only'. Of course simply labelling a compartment for the use of women only did not prevent some determined male reprobate from jumping in when the guard's back was turned. In Victorian melodramas the blackguard concerned would invariably proceed to subject his female victim to a fate worse than death.
Even railway employees were not above taking advantage of female travellers on their own. A guard of what later became the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway was dismissed in 1841 after he had very solicitously suggested to a female passenger that she move from one compartment to another which was more comfortable and reserved for ladies. He carried her bag for her, but then remained in the compartment when the train started and attempted to take what were coyly described as 'certain liberties' with her. She fought back, preserving her virtue, only to be ungraciously thrown out by the guard onto the platform of the next station at which the train stopped.
Many other horrors could await the female traveller in 'Ladies Only' compartments. She might have to put up with screaming or otherwise fractious mothers, children and/or babies, mothers breastfeeding (which was frowned upon by those who considered themselves genteel), women beggars and others with sob stories they needed to get off their chests. It was by no means unknown for prostitutes to ply their trade, particularly in otherwise empty 'Ladies Only' compartments. The especially determined ones thought nothing of ejecting a single female occupant and replacing her with the client of the moment. Ideally the trains involved in these activities were not stopping-at-all-stations trains on busy inner-city or suburban routes. 'Ladies Only' compartments finally disappeared in the 1970s.
It was not unknown for men travelling in a compartment with just an unknown woman for company to find themselves on the other end of a 'fate worse then death' situation. For reasons best known to themselves women passengers sometimes maliciously concocted stories that the men concerned had made indecent comments or suggestions, or had molested or sexually assaulted them. If there were no witnesses, the man, even if he was totally innocent, might find that his guilt was almost taken for granted, and he could very well find himself undertaking a lengthy and very uncongenial prison sentence.
Over the years small numbers of men had found themselves being blackmailed by women who pretended they had been assaulted and threatened to inform the authorities unless the man concerned parted with money. A woman who had shared a compartment with a male dentist on a train from Watford Junction to London Euston alleged that he had indecently assaulted her. She unwisely informed the court that the dastardly fellow had smoked a pipe throughout the entire journey. The court rejected her evidence on the basis that pipe-smoking and sexual assault were two activities which could not be carried out at the same time. It did not help her case that neither her body nor her clothes had borne any evidence that an assault had been made. However, it is no wonder that some men studiously avoided entering a compartment containing a lone female traveller, just as some other men with evil intentions would have made a beeline for one. Over the years a number of women prostitutes did time for demanding money with menaces from lone male passengers on trains.
In 1875 one of the greatest sexual scandals of the nineteenth century hit the headlines. The British public has a keen and constantly salacious appetite for sex scandals, especially if they involve members of the social elite. The main player was Colonel Valentine Baker (1827-87), a well-respected and eminent professional soldier. He was forty-four years of age at the time. At Liphook in Hampshire Baker entered a first-class compartment of a train of the London & South Western Railway. It contained only one other passenger – a young woman called Kate Dickinson. She was attractive and from a well-connected and wealthy family. Perhaps unwisely, Baker engaged Kate in conversation.
As the train headed for London someone on the platform at Woking noted a young woman apparently hanging out of a carriage door. He notified the station staff and the train was stopped near Esher. Kate informed the police that Baker had 'insulted' her, a euphemism for sexual assault. Baker had to attend court to face a charge of 'assault with attempt to ravish'. The scandal-mongers of the gutter press got to work with relish, unearthing real information and inventing imaginary stories as necessary, and publishing them to an extent that prejudiced Baker having a fair trial.
Unsubstantiated rumours circulated to the effect that this was not the first time that he had been implicated in this kind of thing. The papers made much of the fact that Baker had a brother who had earlier caused a scandal of a different sort when he married a young girl he had bought in a slave market, although this was hardly germane to the case under review. Baker was found guilty, but of assault rather than attempt to rape, sent to prison for a year, fined £500 and dismissed from the service. He spent much of his subsequent life gaining fame and honours as a mercenary soldier but he was never rehabilitated by society. Some people thought that the relative leniency of the law in dealing with him was evidence of the class bias of the courts towards those in 'high places'.
Only members of the cloth seem to have been able to come through a compromising situation on the basis of their innocence generally being presumed. We shall never know exactly what was said or what went on when a young curate entered a compartment containing just a sixteen-year-old girl on a train of the Great Western Railway. The girl alleged that he had pulled her onto his knee, kissed her swan-like neck and whispered various intimate observations and suggestions into her ear.
The case went to court but the curate rejected all suggestions of wrongdoing on his part. He did admit that he had entered into conversation with the girl and had suggested that he might be able to get her a job playing the organ in his parish church. It was a most magnificent organ, he had boasted. Could this innocent comment have been taken as meaning something else? The court did not think so and the curate returned to his parish with his reputation unsullied.
In 1864 a gentleman sitting happily in the compartment of a London & South Western Railway train travelling between Surbiton and Woking was startled out of his ruminations when he found himself staring into a woman's face a few inches from his, looking in from the outside of the rapidly moving train. He leapt to help what clearly was a maiden in distress. She was standing on the footboard of the carriage and clinging on for dear life, clothes and hair streaming in the wind. It was no easy matter to haul her to safety but fortunately some people by the side of the line spotted her predicament and alerted the guard who quickly brought the train to a halt.
A dastardly character by the name of Nash had earlier specifically selected and entered a compartment containing two female passengers, one of whom of course was our woman on the footboard, Mary Moody. Nash had attempted, with a marked lack of subtlety, to chat up the other woman but she had alighted at Surbiton. When this happened, Mary also tried to leave the carriage but she was a few seconds too late, and as the train steamed out on its way to Woking she found herself alone with the singularly unsavoury Nash.
He began to ask her a string of questions full of sexual innuendo. Maybe Mary's silence inflamed his passion because he first embraced her and then attempted to assault her indecently. That was when Mary saw little option but to attempt to escape his clutches via the compartment door and the carriage footboard. Nash was arrested and was hauled up in front of the magistrates.
In 1892 Mrs Mary Siddals, an attractive mother-of-two, was the victim of a serious sexual assault on a Midland Railway train travelling between Burton-on-Trent and Tamworth. She was alone in the compartment except for a man dressed in black who, having attacked her, tried to throw her out of the moving carriage. She was able to cling on for a few seconds but eventually fell off and tumbled down to the bottom of an embankment, receiving serious injuries.
A man was arrested and charged with assault and grievous bodily harm. His rather feeble defence was that Mary had been hallucinating. Two other witnesses came forward who attested that the man in black had made similar attacks on them. His work as a preacher and teacher of the young cut no ice with the court, and he was described as a 'sanctimonious hypocrite' before being sentenced to two years' hard labour, which most people thought was overly lenient.
Not all cases of sexual assault turned out to be that. A man entered a compartment on a train of the North Eastern Railway near Durham. The only other passenger was a plump and homely looking woman aged about forty who sat opposite him. The train was only just pulling out of the station when she suddenly jumped up and asked him what he meant by what he had just done. He protested that he had not done anything except sit and look out of the window. A few minutes later the same thing happened again. This scenario was re-enacted several more times before the train slowed for a station, by which time the man was convinced that his fellow traveller was totally mad and a public danger.
As the train pulled into the station the woman leant out of the window shouting to the guard. The racket she was creating attracted that august official and a knot of bystanders. She angrily accused the man of trying to pinch her legs. He vehemently denied such intent. The man was beginning to feel a horrible black hole opening up in front of him when the guard suddenly recalled that he had placed a basket under the seat on which the woman was sitting. She suddenly cried out that it had happened again! Everyone crowding around could see that it could not possibly have been the accused. The culprit of the assault was revealed as a rather irascible goose which was occupying the basket under the seat and venting its spleen in the only way possible – by lashing out with its beak!
Not long after the Muller case of 1864, a violent and deranged man joined passengers in a crowded train at King's Cross. He proceeded to subject his fellow travellers on the 110-minute non-stop journey to Peterborough to a catalogue of horrifying experiences stopping short, however, of murder. In their compartment these passengers were literally captives, totally unable to alert the train crew to the activities of the maniac in their midst.
Public concern about these and similar events led to the passing in 1868 of The Regulation of Railways Act. It required that all passenger trains travelling more than twenty miles without stopping must be equipped with a functioning system whereby passengers could communicate with 'the servants of the company in charge of the train.' The installation of such a system did not eliminate the possibility of attacks, but certainly helped to make passengers feel more secure.
By this time the railway was becoming a very safe medium of travel. Incidentally, the above act also brought in a penalty for misuse of the communication cord. This was fixed at a maximum of £5 and remained the same for around 100 years. In doing so it staunchly avoided inflationary trends in the economy, to the point where to be fined under the act could almost be described as being good value for money.
Passengers, being the quirky or sometimes stupid people they can be, sometimes misunderstood or misused the communication cord facility when there was nothing remotely approaching an emergency. Throughout the history of the railways there have been others for whom the very existence of the device and its ready accessibility was a source of wayward fascination. They obviously saw the cord as something of a challenge and many succumbed to its allure. They pulled it, they paid the penalty!
Before the passing of the 1868 Act, anyone finding themselves in a compartment on fire, where an assault or other crime was taking place, or where someone had been taken ill, was advised to tie a brightly coloured handkerchief to the end of a stick and wave it as far out of the carriage as was commensurate with safety. Hopefully this cunning ploy would catch the attention of one of the railwaymen on board who would assume that there was an emergency and therefore would stop the train.
Equally, the railwayman concerned might assume that the person waving the stick embellished with the hanky was simply using it to salute an acquaintance or relation by the side of the line, or just flourishing it out of a sense of joie de vivre. In such cases he might not stop the train. Of course he certainly would not stop the train if he had been looking in the opposite direction all the time.
Some interesting suggestions were put forward for ways in which beleaguered passengers might make their plight known to members of the train crew. One earnest correspondent of the Morning Herald newspaper advocated a device he thought would do the trick. The guard of the train should wear a belt round his waist. Attached to this would be a long chain passing through every carriage and anyone who wished to summon the assistance of the guard would be able to alert him by simply tugging the belt. Such a device was worthy of Heath Robinson at his very best.
Another suggestion, even more monstrously impractical, involved open parachutes above every carriage of a moving train. For any passenger needing to communicate urgently with the guard, it was simplicity itself. He or she merely tugged a string to close the parachute whereupon the lynx-eyed guard, having spotted the deflation, would bring the train to an immediate halt. Another ingenious solution involved a speaking tube running the length of the train. A passenger in dire straits would be able to summon instant succour simply by speaking into the mouthpiece. So long, presumably, that the guard did not have his attention distracted by any of the thousand and one other duties his post entailed.
A professional railwayman who fancied himself as a serious, even groundbreaking, inventor, gave a public demonstration of an electrical apparatus which would set a bell ringing on the footplate when activated by a passenger needing assistance. He spent twenty minutes or so explaining the principles of physics that were involved in this cunning device. In doing this he bored his audience to the verge of insensibility but they perked up considerably when with a flourish he announced that he was now going to dazzle them by a demonstration of the capabilities of his failsafe apparatus.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blood on the Tracks by David Brandon, Alan Brooke. Copyright © 2010 David Brandon & Alan Brooke. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Introduction,
Chapter One Assaults and Robberies,
Chapter Two Murder on the Line 1840-1900,
Chapter Three Railway Financial Fraud,
Chapter Four Murder on the Line 1900-2000,
Chapter Five Assorted Crime,
Chapter Six The Work of the Transport Police,
Chapter Seven Crime and the Railway in Film and Literature,
Railway Crime on the Screen,
Copyright,