The Necropolis Railway

SUMMARY:
Bright and ambitious, young Jim Stringer moves from the English countryside to London deter- mined to become a railway man. It is 1903, the dawn of the Edwardian age, when steam runs the nation and the railways drive progress. Jim can’t believe his luck to have gotten his foot in the door at South East Railway, run out of Waterloo Station. He finds, however, that his duties involve a graveyard shift, literally—a railway line that takes coffins from London morgues to the gigantic new cemeteries being dug in the city’s outskirts. He also learns that his predecessor had disappeared and that his coworkers seem to have formed an instant loathing for him. Forced to live by his wits and to arrive at his own deductions—assisted by his landlady, for whom he falls— he tries to figure out what is going on before he is issued a one-way ticket on the Necropolis Railway.

ANDREW MARTIN

F
aber
and faber

First published in
2002
by Faber and Faber Limited
3
Queen Square London
wc1
n
3AU
This paperback edition published in
2006
First published in this format in
2005

Typeset by Faber and Faber Ltd Printed in England by Mackays of Chatham pic, Chatham, Kent

All rights reserved © Andrew Martin,
2002

The right of Andrew Martin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section
77
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shal
l not, by way of trade or otherw
ise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

A
CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN
-57I-23393-7
ISBN
978
-
-57I-23393-9

2468
10
97531

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank, in no special order, Dominic Le Foe of the Player's Theatre; George Behrend and Frank McKenna, railway authors; John M. Clarke (anyone wanting the hard facts on the Necropolis line should consult his excellent short book,
The Brookwood Necropolis Railway);
Professor Chris Lawrence of The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at the UCL; Jonathon Green - a font of slang from all eras; Keith Gays and the staff of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway; Clive Groom of the 'Footplate Days and Ways' steam engine driving courses; ex-train drivers Les Willis and Ron Johnson; the archive staff of the National Rail Museum in York; Tim Baker-Jones of the W. H. Smith archive; the staff of the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution; the staff of the Silver Moon Women's Bookshop, which is now within Foyles; Matthew Sturgis for some tips on Edwardian mores; Elizabeth Cook, Barbara Blackford and Anna Rawlinson of the Highgate Bookshop; Bill Simpson (ex of Nine Elms Engine Shed); David McWilliam of the Institute of Directors; the staff of the London Ian Allan bookshop; Dave Notarius and the staff of Motor Books; the Reverend Paul Walker; and Messrs French of Lamb's Conduit Street, wci, undertakers.

All departures from historical accuracy are mine.

Author's Note

The London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company became the London Necropolis Company in 1927 and still exists under that name. It ran funeral trains from just outside Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery from 1854 to 1941, using locomotives and footplate crews supplied first by the London and South Western Railway, then the Southern Railway.

The service, roughly as it was in 1903, provides part of the backdrop to this story, but it should be stressed that no events such as those described here ever took place, nor did any people such as those presented here ever exist.

I am deeply indebted to the LNC for letting me employ the earlier name of their company in amongst my swirling imaginings.

by the same author

Bilton

The Bobby Dazzlers

IN THE JIM STRINGER, STEAM DETECTIVE SERIES:

The Blackpool Highflyer

THE NECROPOLIS RAILWAY

Chapter One

Saturday 14 November 1903

With the letters from Rowland Smith in my pocket, I had a lively ride from York to London: just four and a half hours in all. The engine was one of the new Atlantics of Mr Ivatt, and when she came down Stoke Bank I put aside
The Railway Magazine
I was reading, and leant out the window at the carriage end to experience the amazing velocity.

After Peterborough I took down my box and opened the parcel my dad had packed for me, which turned out to contain three tubs of Melton cream for my boots, and two tins of Nugget's polish, also for my boots. My dad was red-hot for smartness, smart boots especially. There was an alarm clock too - which was the next best thing to Dad coming with me because he'd always woken me up himself at home - and a green Lett's pocket diary, which might seem an out of the way sort of thing to give somebody, November sort of time, but I knew it was the kind of thing Dad would have thought gentlemanly.

I opened the first page, which was headed 'The King and the Royal Family, showing ages and annuities', and stared at it for a while, thinking: well, it's all right, but I would rather have a map of the railways. Then I took out from my pocket the letters from Rowland Smith, which had been sent to me, not from the place he worked, but from his home address: Granville Mansions, Dartmouth Park. Whenever I saw that I thought with wonder, 'In the house of the Lord there are many mansions.' It was in the Northern Division of London. I put the letters away after a few more minutes of marvelling but took them out over and again throughout the journey.

We came into Platform One at King's Cross, which was as I had expected, but what I ha
d not expected was that half of
London would be there, and most of them attempting to force me into the Ladies' Waiting Room, where I had no right nor any desire to be.

When I finally struggled free, the first thing I saw was the road packed with darting waggons, then, over the road from King's Cross, and three times the size, St Pancras. I could not believe there had ever been so many bricks in the world - it must have had more than the Eskdale viaduct and I knew for a fact there were more than five million in that. The clock said five to three; I turned back and looked at the clock on King's Cross, and that said five
after,
and I thought: now, that is strange, because it was impossible to imagine either the Midland or the Great Northern making a bloomer over the time, of all things, but one of them must have, and it seemed that I was only getting in everybody's way by standing there and fretting over it.

Then I spied a stream of hansoms pouring out of a little arch at the bottom of St Pancras like beetles from under a stone, and decided I would take one for the first time in my life. But as soon as I stepped into the road between King's Cross and St Pancras, I was put into another cab - one of a completely separate lot - by a lad who had lately been holding a horse's head and eating a fish. Now he was tipping his head back, and, blowing spinning bits of fish into the air from his mouth, saying, 'If this keeps up, we might be in with a fighting chance, eh, guv?'

He was talking about the sun. It had been raining in Yorkshire but the day was set fair in London, and I might just as well have stepped off a boat train, such was the newness and strangeness of it all.