Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (27 page)

The Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits soon after opening. Although the picture is incorrect in many details, it gives a good idea of the tubes through which the trains passed.

A recent view of the Britannia Bridge in its current form with the tubes removed and the road carried above the railway.

At this particular point there were three tracks, two for running purposes and one in the middle which usually contained empty passenger carriages. Fragments of bone and small pieces of broken glass lay on the ballast at the Liverpool end of a rake of carriages in this siding. Closer examination revealed that the guard’s small lookout window on the empty end carriage was broken. Human hairs were adhering to it. Could the driver’s explanation of what happened be a lie?

The compartment was examined very closely and bloodstains were found on the light bulb along with a fingerprint. It was clear that the bulb had first been removed and then replaced, most likely after the fireman had received his fatal injury. The rolling stock in the middle track was then subjected to close examination. A blood smear could be seen along the side of two of the coaches facing the side of the carriage where the fireman had allegedly been sitting.

Had the driver and the fireman been engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle as a result of which the fireman had been pushed out of the open window so far that his head had come into collision with the empty rolling stock on the adjacent line? Had his head then broken the window before he was hauled back into the compartment and the driver pulled the communication cord? Was there some dire feud between the two men? Why had the light bulb been removed and then replaced? The fingerprints of both men were on it. A theory of what actually happened was beginning to form itself in the minds of the investigating officers.

They thought that the idea of such a fight was unlikely although they did not summarily dismiss it. However, what if the fireman had been engaged in ‘dogging’ with the active assistance of the driver? Those who practised this particular form of sexual voyeurism usually did so at night having entered a compartment in a non-corridor coach and previously ascertained that the adjacent compartment was occupied by a young couple. They would remove the light bulb in their own compartment and then lean as far out of the window as they dared in order to see whether the couple were engaged in sexual activity. On this particular line both participants would have needed to ‘move quickly’ between stations, most of which were only about five minutes apart.

The driver admitted that his mate had indeed been dogging, although he went to great lengths to say that he himself had not been involved. The likely scenario was that the fireman had removed the light bulb and then leaned out of the window with the driver hanging on to his legs. When he leaned out too far he had come into collision with the guard’s van of the empty stock and the driver had then pulled him back into the compartment, pushed him into the seat, used a hand lamp to locate the light bulb, replaced it and then pulled the communication cord. A verdict of misadventure was passed on the deceased fireman.

Railways and the Chartists

Some luminary once said that politics is distilled economics. If economics is the study of the production, exchange, distribution and consumption of wealth, then perhaps politics could be characterised as the arguments concerning how that wealth and the power that goes with it should be shared out. If this is so it is not surprising that the railways have found themselves embroiled in political activity, and that sometimes that activity has broken the law of the land.

The economic, social and political impact of the Industrial Revolution in Britain has been endlessly studied. It involved a staggering increase in the wealth-producing capacity of manufacturing, mining and other business enterprises and was accompanied by a remarkable rise in the productivity and output of agriculture. Few people question that, over time, it led to a large rise in the living standards and expectations of the mass of the population. There was, however, a substantial human cost with the ‘tyranny of the clock’, brutal discipline in the workplace and with the creation of overcrowded, insanitary and polluted industrial settlements. The shared experience of working people led them to realise that the only means for them to improve their situation was through collective action.

Trade unions developed out of this experience as did the Chartist movement from the mid-1830s to the early 1850s. The Chartist movement could be described as the first political party of the working classes. It campaigned vigorously for a programme of reforms that it believed would enable Parliament to meet the needs and aspirations of ordinary people. Chartism was a broad and complex movement, a catch-all expression for a wide range of discontents and grievances and it embraced some who believed only in the methods of peaceful persuasion, those who were prepared to resort to armed struggle and others who were prepared to consider the use of both types of tactic depending on circumstances.

The Chartist movement was genuinely national but its support was largely to be found in and around industrial towns, large and small. Chartist meetings could attract mass audiences whose anger might be aroused by passionate speakers and this could threaten the maintenance of law and order. The authorities took the Chartist movement very seriously, at least when it was enjoying its peaks of popularity, and felt that, when and where it was deemed necessary, the State should make a show of force to discourage the insurrectionary tendencies that were always felt to be lurking under the surface when large numbers of disaffected working class and lower-middle class people got together.

The railways not only assisted Chartist speakers to travel around perfectly legally, addressing meetings up and down the country, but they could also be used to move troops far more quickly and easily to potential trouble spots than had previously been possible. In 1839, for example, trouble was expected at a
Chartist meeting at Coventry and the London & Birmingham Railway was used to transport a force of soldiers from Birmingham in double-quick time.

A large central barracks had been built at Weedon in Northamptonshire in 1803 and this was extended, partly because its position close to what became the West Coast Main Line made it ideal as the point of despatch of troops quickly by train. Other barracks were established especially in the north of England with the same purpose in mind.

Charlie Peace

Passenger trains were also used to convey prisoners under guard, a practice not relished by the majority of other travellers or, possibly, by railway employees, not least because on a few occasions such prisoners managed to escape, causing chaos in and around railway installations.

One such prisoner was the celebrated Charlie Peace. He was the proud possessor of an extremely impressive criminal curriculum vitae, so multi-faceted that it is impossible to do justice to it here. Much of his criminal activity consisted of audacious and highly skilled burglaries, which he often undertook in masterful disguises. He was a cat burglar or, as they called them so delightfully in those days, a ‘portico thief’. He was a compulsive and very successful philanderer but his relentless pursuit of the female sex led inevitably to considerable complications.

It was perhaps these complications that meant that Peace began to lose his grip, and having previously eschewed violence, turned to murder. In 1879 he was being brought from London to stand trial for a murder committed in Sheffield and was accompanied by two burly police officers in a reserved compartment of a Great Northern Railway train. Peace, despite being phenomenally ugly, could charm the birds off the trees, and he set about winning the confidence of these two officers. He was so plausible that after a couple of hours they undid his handcuffs.

By this time the train had passed Worksop and Peace knew that he had to move quickly. When they least expected it Peace made a jump for the door, opened it and tried to leap out. Unfortunately for him the more alert of the two officers grabbed his foot and refused to let go. The train was travelling quickly and anyone watching from the line-side would have been treated to the sight of Peace dangling out the carriage, his foot in the vice-like grip of the police officer and his body banging to and fro against the carriage side as the train sped along.

Perhaps the officers were too intent on trying not to let Peace go that it was a couple of miles before they got round to pulling the communication cord. With a desperate twist of his foot Peace managed to wriggle out of his shoe and drop to the ground, whereupon he slid down an embankment sustaining various injuries. He was quickly recaptured and atoned for his sins by being hanged in February 1879. The world became a better – if less colourful – place
the day that Charlie Peace died. It is interesting to note that Peace had broken free at Darnall. This eastern suburb of Sheffield was where he had once told people he wanted to be buried. Quite why Darnall should be honoured in this way is not obvious. It is not the most attractive of Sheffield’s suburbs!

A Chartist meeting at Kennington Common. Chartist speakers made considerable use of railways as they stomped around the country addressing meetings, usually in the open air.

Railways and Prize Fights

A little-known and curious misuse of railway facilities back in the nineteenth century was that of conveying passengers to prize fights. A number of long-standing recreational activities such as bear-baiting, bull-running and bare-knuckle boxing came to be thought of as immoral and barbaric under pressure from the rising middle-classes and the Evangelical movement in the Church of England. However, from the early eighteenth century through to the second half of the nineteenth, pugilism, as it was often called, enjoyed great popularity.

The contestants fought without any protection for their hands and could inflict appalling injuries on each other, deaths not being unknown. The leading fighters, men like Bendigo, Mendoza, Tom Cribb and Ben Caunt, could become rich. The major contests attracted enormous crowds who were often drunk and fiercely partisan, so much so that the supporters of the contestants frequently fought each other. They also became feverishly excited because of the number and value of the bets that were placed. They therefore posed a threat to public order and the magistrates, ever fearful of large assemblies of working people with their passions aroused, frequently banned the contests.

With so much money at stake, however, the organisers often connived with the railway companies to outthink the authorities and set up a contest in some secret and remote place, such as a natural hollow preferably hidden from the authorities. Special trains were laid on but the arrangements had to be kept as secret as possible until the very last minute. Often the driver had no idea where the train was going until it was time to set off and he opened a sealed package containing his instructions! The first such ‘pugilism special’ seems to have been that which carried passengers from London Bridge to Horley in February 1844. The railway companies did very well out of them until this ‘sporting activity’ went out of fashion a couple of decades later.