Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (19 page)

Murder at Kidsgrove

The station at Kidsgrove in North Staffordshire has experienced several changes in its name. As well as its existing name, it has also been known as Kidsgrove Junction (Harecastle), Harecastle & Kidsgrove, Harecastle and also Kidsgrove Central. This is all very confusing but in 1911 the station seems to have been named simply Harecastle. The station which was built by the North Staffordshire Railway Company still exists and is at the junction of the Crewe – Stoke and Manchester – Stoke lines, both electrified on the overhead system.

The area around Kidsgrove was formerly heavily industrialised and nearby was the very extensive Birchenwood Colliery dating back to the eighteenth century. Coking took place at the colliery complex and in 1911 an additional set of coke ovens was being constructed. It is interesting to note that the employment of foreign workers is the object of discussion in the UK in the current economic recession (2009), and that a number of German workers were employed on the contract for the building of the coke ovens. The foreman was named Lehr and among the small group of Germans was a Karl Kramer. He had been taken on because he had lived in England for some time and so he acted as an interpreter and intermediary when his fellow countrymen needed to communicate with English officialdom.

The gang of German workers were lodging in digs in Kidsgrove but Lehr, perhaps conscious of his relative status vis-à-vis his colleagues, decided to distance himself from them and take accommodation in a fine late Victorian villa not far away. He recruited Kramer and another man to help him with the removal and it is evident that during this operation Kramer had made a mental note of a cash box belonging to Lehr and the fact that it was kept in a particular drawer of a dressing table.

It seems that Kramer was something of a troublemaker because he was dismissed on 27 September 1911. He is thought to have left the area a couple of days later but was back on 2 October, being seen pedalling around the district on a bicycle. Secreted on his person were a hammer and a couple of chisels that he had surreptitiously removed from Lehr’s office shortly before he had been sacked. Clearly a plan had been formulating itself in his mind.

He made his way to the villa where Lehr was staying knowing that the man would be out at work and that in the middle of the day there was a good chance that no other member of the household would be in. He broke in and made his way to Lehr’s room only to be disturbed by the landlady, who was a widow, and her youngest daughter. He must have panicked for he killed them both and then also did for the housemaid who had come to see what all the commotion was about.

When the other children returned from school they were confronted with the horrible spectacle of three dead bodies. It would be hard to think of any experience more traumatic for a child but one of them at least kept their head and ran to inform authority. It was evident that robbery had been the motive of the break-in because the cash box which had contained
£
30 had been forced open and rifled.

Kramer left the district, complete with his trusty bicycle, and although he made efforts to alter his appearance there were several reported sightings of the fugitive over the next couple of days. On 6 October he was arrested at Doncaster, complaining bitterly that his money had been stolen by a prostitute. He was brought back to Kidsgrove by train on the same day and the tickets for the leg of the journey from Manchester, one for an adult and the other for a bicycle, are in the possession of the son of the ticket collector on duty that day.

Post-mortems on the victims showed that they had first been knocked out by Kramer and then stabbed with a chisel. Medical records produced at Kramer’s trial for murder showed a history of insanity and he was adjudged unfit to plead and ordered to be detained at His Majesty’s pleasure.

A Stationmaster Dies

Lintz Green was a rural wayside station in County Durham on the Derwent Valley branch line of the North Eastern Railway. In 1938 it enjoyed a roughly hourly service of trains running between Newcastle and Blackhill and, of course, vice versa. Passenger services were withdrawn in 1953. The station was fairly isolated with just a stationmaster’s house and a few cottages occupied by men who worked on the track. Burnopfield, itself no metropolis, was about three miles away.

Joseph Wilson as stationmaster presided over this small outpost of the North Eastern Railway and had the proper sense of dignity and self-importance which he thought was appropriate to his rank. He was a staunch and upright man, a pillar of the Methodist community thereabouts. He may have been punctilious about company business and slightly pompous and pedantic but he had no known enemies. It was difficult to think why anybody could dislike him. Indeed it was particularly difficult to find any reason why anyone should dislike him enough to murder him. But murdered he was.

On the night of Saturday 7 October 1911 three men stood on the down platform waiting for the arrival of the last train of the day from Newcastle. They were Wilson, Fred White the booking clerk and John Routlege, the porter who was waiting for the train to take him home. The train was a few minutes late, not an uncommon happening on a Saturday night when many of the folk from the pit villages in the vicinity put on their glad rags and went off by train to sample the fleshpots of Newcastle. Their revels usually involved the consumption of copious or even excessive quantities of alcohol, and while the majority remained good-humoured incidents did sometimes occur which required the attendance of the local constabulary, causing delays.

When the train panted into the station four passengers got off. One of them was a mate of White – the booking clerk – and he waited while the latter finished his duties, which included extinguishing the few station lights that were still on. These were oil lamps which gave out a mellow, yellow glow. The other three walked down the platform ramp, crossed the line and took a field-path towards their homes in the hamlet of Low Friarside about a mile away.

Wilson saw the train off into the Stygian obscurity of the autumn night, said goodnight to White and set off for his house which was less than a hundred yards away. White’s last duty of all was to lock the door to the booking office, and as he was doing so he and his friend heard a loud noise like the discharge of a firearm. They ran to the stationmaster’s house just as his daughter came out hysterically shouting that her father had been shot. The shock of all this was a bit too much for White and his friend who stood as if in suspended animation trying, but unable, to decide what to do next. Help was soon at hand. The three men who had gone off to Low Friarside had also heard the shot and appeared on the scene very quickly.

One of them almost fell over Wilson’s body. It was clear that the man was still alive but
in extremis
and so they carried him into the house. One of the men was experienced in what later became known as first aid but he had never seen anything as pitiful as the dying man over whom he was bending. While trying to give him some last-minute comfort and support he also wanted to elicit any information about Wilson’s attacker. The stationmaster expired just as he had seemed to be summoning up his sapping energy in order to speak.

Soon a doctor and senior police officers were on the scene, not that there was much they could do until it got light. There was of course nothing they could do for poor Wilson. It appeared that he had been killed by a single bullet fired from a large calibre revolver and indeed the spent bullet was found a few yards away. A few other items were found nearby. They were unable to decide whether or not these had anything to do with the crime. The motive seemed to be robbery. Local people knew that every night Wilson carried the day’s takings from the booking office the short distance to his house after the last train had left. What could not be explained for a man of such regular habits was why on this particular night he had performed this task somewhat earlier after the last train in the opposite direction had left.

A massive manhunt was launched but when it failed to produce any quick results the police found they were on the receiving end of a tidal wave of criticism orchestrated in the irresponsible and unhelpful manner often employed by the British press. However, there appeared to be a sudden breakthrough when the police decided to interview Samuel Atkinson, the relief porter at Lintz Green. He lived in Newcastle but witnesses said they had seen him hanging around the station after his shift had finished and after the time he normally caught his train home. He was arrested and charged but then it emerged that there were some procedural anomalies regarding whether or not he had been properly cautioned.

Atkinson appeared in the dock at Durham Assizes on 9 November but no sooner had the preliminaries been completed than the Chief Constable of the Durham police appeared and, to the amazement of all, told the court that no evidence was being offered against Atkinson and requesting that he be discharged. The murder was never solved and after the initial excitement Atkinson simply faded away into the obscurity which seems to have been his appointed role in life.

The railway tracks are long since gone, the formation being in use as an official footpath. Of the station there are few traces, but the platelayers’ cottages and the stationmaster’s house are still there, suitably modified for their role as twenty-first-century dwellings. Was Atkinson a lucky man to get away with it?

Murder at St Albans

The nominally independent Hatfield & St Albans Railway was incorporated in 1862 to build a branch line about six and a half miles long to join the two towns, the latter of which was also served by the London & North Western Railway and later by the Midland Railway. The line from Hatfield was absorbed by the Great Northern Railway who therefore gained a foothold
in the territory of these two major companies with whom it did not always enjoy the most genial of relationships. Such ploys were by no means uncommon in the days of railway imperialism and sometimes led to the construction of lines which probably should never have been built.

It is unlikely that this branch line ever contributed substantially to the GNR’s coffers and it led a fairly obscure existence until it closed to passengers in October 1951 and to goods and parcels traffic in 1964. The Great Northern and its successor the London & North Eastern Railway had a station located in London Road in St Albans, although trains terminated at the Abbey station where they shared facilities with the London & North Western Railway.

It was the station in London Road which provided the scenario for a brutal murder in 1918. The victim once again was the stationmaster. His name was Ellingham and in the days when the railways were a labour intensive industry he had a sizeable staff under his supervision. He was an effective and efficient manager well thought of by his staff and popular with the passengers as well as other users of the company’s facilities in St Albans.

He was celebrated locally as an avid horticulturalist and he spent every moment he could in the garden attached to the stationmaster’s house. His reputation as a gardener had spread beyond the confines of St Albans and he was always prepared to share his expertise with those who sought his advice. They sometimes came from considerable distances in order to pick his brains.

The downside of Mr Ellingham’s life was his marriage. His wife was not a happy bunny. She never had been. Perhaps the stationmaster sometimes wondered why he had married her as he ruminated gloomily over whatever could possibly have attracted either of them to the other in the first place. Not only did she find fault with his every action, she disliked his family and was heartily disliked in return. Just about everywhere that she went she managed to antagonise all those she met. Gossip circulated, as it does, and the locals were convinced that his Trojan efforts in his garden were more the result of his desire to have some time and space away from his wife than just simply because he had ‘green fingers’.

Ellingham was punctilious in those duties which are now euphemistically known as ‘customer care’. This meant supervising the prompt despatch of the trains, answering questions and lending a sympathetic – but practical – ear on those rare occasions that any of the railway users had complaints. He acted as a highly effective tribune for the company in the city of St Albans and surrounding district. In fact he was so popular that when the railway company wanted to promote him to a similar role at a more important station elsewhere on their system, a petition asking them to reconsider was sent in by those in St Albans who had dealings with him.

The vox populi response these days when there has been a murder is that no one expected it to happen in a decent neighbourhood like this, or to the
victim who had never made an enemy in his life. Imagine the shock and horror in St Albans when Ellingham’s battered and bloodied dead body was found in the company house he occupied close to the station. He had been conspicuous by his absence from his duties on the station from early on that day, duties to which he normally paid scrupulous attention.

Staff had eventually knocked on the door of the house as his absence became a prolonged one. There was no response from within and a couple of enterprising souls had found a ladder and used it to climb up and see if he had been taken ill. Nothing could be seen. By half past eight in the evening staff had become thoroughly alarmed, and when Ellingham’s daughter returned from work it was agreed that they should force entry to the house.

A horrible sight met their eyes. The stationmaster lay battered on the floor, surrounded by blood and clearly having been the victim of a violent assault. Mrs Ellingham was prostrated over a gas ring. She was still alive and it was immediately obvious that she had been deliberately breathing gas, probably in an attempt to commit suicide. This was confirmed when a suicide note of sorts was found. Letters addressed to various relations were nearby. A heavy hammer stamped with the initials ‘GNR’ was found bearing bloodstains. Seven wounds were found on the unfortunate Ellingham’s head and it was clear that these injuries had been inflicted with the hammer. More bloodstains were found in various other parts of the house.