Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (20 page)

The authorities came to the conclusion that everyone expected, which was that Ellingham had been killed by his wife when she underwent a fit of sudden violent temper. Relations between the two of them had reached a nadir over the past period. Mrs Ellingham had become increasingly paranoid of late, being apparently resentful, even jealous, of her husband’s preoccupation with his garden. She also believed that everyone down to and including the station cat were conspiring against her. It was not thought that the crime was premeditated but that it had only needed some seemingly minor provocation to turn the stationmaster’s wife into a murderer. The jury found her guilty of murder and she was given a life sentence in a secure mental hospital.

The North London Railway Again

A train journey on the eve of the First World War from Chalk Farm to Broad Street station in the City of London would have offered few visual delights for anyone making the trip, had they bothered to gaze though the window at the passing scene. Were the same journey to be possible today what could be seen might have changed substantially but it would probably be every bit as dreary, although definitely not so sooty. After a slow and painful process of being run down, the pathetic remnant which was all that was left of the once fine Broad
Street station, closed in the mid-1980s. It is, however, still possible to travel on part of the route, on a train from Richmond-on-Thames to Stratford.

It is no longer possible to get on or off a train at Mildmay Park station because it closed in 1934. It was still doing business in 1914 when, on the afternoon of 8 January, a youth by the name of George Tillman climbed into an apparently empty compartment in one of the primitive, even spartan carriages operated by the North London Railway, which made up a train bound for Broad Street.

British travellers are not notably gregarious and there were always many people who chose an empty compartment whenever they could so that they could travel in solitude. Even a young man like Tillman, who was only sixteen, had already absorbed this behavioural quirk and had been gratified to find an empty compartment with ease. He could use the journey to ruminate alone and agreeably with his own thoughts. He hoped no one would intrude before his destination at Haggerston. He experienced a rapid change in mood when he realised that he was not entirely alone after all.

Under the opposite bench seat was something which looked awfully like the dead body of a small boy. Not daring to investigate, and initially rigid with terror, he tried without success to attract the attention of a railway official at Dalston. At Haggerston he left the train and managed to tell a porter abut his gory discovery. The man was too slow to prevent the train trundling off on its way but a message was telegraphed to Shoreditch, the next stop. There a member of the station staff met the train and gave the compartment a preliminary examination. The body of a curly haired little boy lay on the floor. Even to an untrained eye it was evident that the child had been strangled.

Meanwhile two women, beside themselves with worry, were desperately combing the streets of North London looking for a little boy with curly hair. The infant they were looking for was called Willie Starchfield, just five years of age; the women were his mother, Agnes, and her landlady, Emily Longstaff, from whom she rented rooms at No.191 Hampstead Road in the Camden district.

The boy had been missing for about four hours since Emily, who had been looking after him, had sent him on an errand to a nearby shop. Agnes had been absent, engaged in a futile attempt to find employment as a seamstress. She was only too well acquainted with the pleasures but also the bitter agonies of parenthood – death had already relieved her of two children. Willie was the survivor. She had always worried about him. He was what was euphemistically known in those days as a ‘delicate’ child.

While the women were searching for the boy with a growing sense of apprehension, Willie’s father, John Starchfield, who was estranged from Emily, would be expected to have been selling newspapers from his regular pitch at the busy junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. There he was
a well-known sight although many regarded him because of his humble role as little better than a piece of street furniture.

Indeed he did not cut a particularly impressive figure. He had once distinguished himself by bravely tackling and capturing a man who had run amok in a pub in Tottenham Court Road, receiving a bullet wound in the stomach which, a few millimetres in either direction, could easily have proved fatal at the time. This seems to have been only a short-lived aberration in his life, most of which was apparently spent attempting to avoid decisions and responsibilities. Something of a natural drifter, marriage to Agnes and parenthood could have been the making of him but after a few years of finding that the disadvantages of being a father and a husband outweighed any possible benefits, he had walked out only to end up as the denizen of a down-at-heel, louse-ridden common lodging house in Long Acre, close to Covent Garden. He had served two custodial sentences in prison for failure to provide maintenance.

The pathetic little body was readily identified as that of Willie Starchfield. Death was established as having occurred between two and three in the afternoon of the day on which the boy’s corpse was discovered in the compartment of the North London Railway train. John Starchfield showed little emotion when acquainted with the fact of his son’s death but he had a ready alibi. On the day of the murder, he said, he had stayed in bed at Long Acre until gone three in the afternoon, feeling the unpleasant effects of the bullet wound. This story was confirmed by another inmate of the dosshouse.

The story had been avariciously seized upon by the newspapers. They had whipped up what they chose to describe as ‘public opinion’ which, they said, was apparently demanding the immediate solving of the crime and the punishment of its wicked perpetrator who they had clearly already decided was Starchfield. Pieces of possible evidence came to light.

A signalman found a piece of cord by the track near Broad Street station. An eminent Home Office pathologist thought it may well have been used to strangle the child. A signalman in a signal box which the train had passed came forward to say that he had caught a glimpse of a dark-haired man apparently standing over a smaller figure with curly hair as a Chalk Farm to Broad Street train passed, just after two o’ clock. These revelations provided more questions that they answered. Additional and more concrete evidence was needed. The police did not yet have enough information to make a convincing case against Starchfield.

In appearance Starchfield was dark-haired, almost Mediterranean, and his face was decorated with one of those slightly absurd droopy walrus moustaches which large numbers of men sported at the time. The police then learned that on the day in question a woman shopping in the Kentish Town Road saw a man answering Starchfield’s description leading a little boy with a shock of curly hair.

This sounded like Willie and the woman had particularly noticed the couple on account of the child’s hair and also the fact that he was busily engaged in devouring some kind of cake. It was a coconut cake of a sort that matched some of the contents of the luckless Willy’s stomach. At the inquest she had no hesitation in picking Starchfield senior out as the man leading the child with the cake. Also at the inquest was a man who unhesitatingly pointed Starchfield out as the man he had seen with a small curly-haired boy at Camden Town station on the day which proved so fatal to little Willie.

Starchfield was charged with murder and tried at the Old Bailey but found not guilty, whereupon he was released and the newspapers then seamlessly and unblushingly converted him into the noble recipient of all that was best about the English judicial system. He died two years later of complications arising from his bullet wound.

Did Starchfield kill Willie? If he did, on a train and at the time when we can be fairly sure that the child died, how was it that no one else found the body, given that the train did at least one further return journey? He had a reputation for occasional bouts of ill-tempered violence but was he capable of cold-bloodedly killing his own child and why should he have done any such thing in the first place?

If Starchfield had got off the train after committing the murder, he must have known that it was only a matter of time before the body was discovered. Why had he not then made some attempt to hide the murder – by throwing the body out of the train, for example? How come the possible murder weapon was found near Broad Street? Had Starchfield stayed on the train to the Broad Street terminus after committing the murder and thrown it out there? And what about the alibi provided by the man who shared Starchfield’s squalid sleeping quarters? Why should he lie for someone likely to face a murder charge?

Starchfield advanced his own theory that Willie had been killed for revenge purposes by friends of the man who had shot him before he made the citizen’s arrest in Tottenham Court Road. Although this sounds highly fanciful the defence did produce three witnesses, two of whom attested that an hour or so before the earliest time the murder could have been committed they had seen Willie being led along the street by a woman. The third witness noted him with the woman on a bus from which they both alighted at Chalk Farm station. The tragic death of this little tousle-headed wean has never been fully explained. Nor will it ever be.

Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave…

On Wednesday 3 September 1924 Patrick Mahon was hanged at Wandsworth Prison in south-west London. He was aged only thirty-four but he had crammed an enormous amount of skulduggery and general villainy into
those years. As will be explained, Mahon and his activities only tangentially concern railways, but the appalling nature of the crime for which he paid the ultimate price has never failed to attract interest.

He was an experienced embezzler and plausible con man with the looks and easy personal charm that are the stock-in-trade of his kind. Although he embezzled relatively large amounts of money, he also managed to get himself caught regularly and had to serve custodial sentences as a consequence. This suggests that he was not quite as clever as his enormous ego led him to believe.

He was a serious if not altogether successful gambler and he had a philandering habit to which he was utterly devoted, possibly to the point of obsession. He met, flattered, charmed and seduced a continuous succession of women, all of whom he abandoned totally without any scruples once they had begun to bore him and had therefore served their purpose. In spite of systematically putting it about, as it were, he was married with a wife and a home which he seemed to need in order to provide at least some kind of base or stability in his life.

His wife loyally stood by him. It appears that she had had quickly realised what kind of man she had married but seemingly accepted him for what he was and equally accepted his frequent absences ‘on business’, usually of a shady character. Sometimes ‘on business’ was a euphemism for a dirty weekend with his latest fancy woman, or for visiting the race meetings that he had repeatedly assured his wife he never attended. He was also a robber and burglar who had a violent streak. He had battered a maid with a hammer when she interrupted him while he was committing a burglary, serving time for this offence.

In 1923 Mahon established a little love nest in a bungalow on the Sussex coast between Pevensey and Eastbourne to which he brought the most recent of his conquests, a woman slightly older than himself called Emily Kaye. He was by no means averse to getting his hands on any money that his lady friends had, and he quickly found out that Emily was particularly promising in that respect because she had
£
400 in her bank account. She proved to be especially bad in other respects. She was a determined and forceful woman, very much in love with Mahon and intent on having him for her own. Unlike most of Mahon’s women, she persisted even when it was evident that his ardour was diminishing. She simply would not take no for an answer.

She went through his things one day while he had popped out and found incriminating evidence about his illegal financial activities and at least one of his convictions. Armed with this, she made it clear that she would not be averse to a little blackmail. The police would be informed unless he agreed that they should leave the country together and live abroad. Mahon was horrified. Like most of his kind, he could hand them out but he could not take hard knocks himself. He made empty promises and played for time but nothing
dented Emily’s resolution. Very inconveniently, from Mahon’s point of view, she also declared that she was pregnant.

It is not surprising that the couple’s relationship became increasingly acrimonious. Emily found out about his embryonic relationship with a woman named Ethel and an argument developed over this and various other things. Mahon told the police that this became violent after Emily had apparently thrown an axe at him and then leapt at him, attempting to lacerate him with her fingernails. He said that he then lost his temper, hitting her and pushing her over. She fell heavily, banging her head on a coal scuttle, so he claimed, and at first he thought that she had knocked herself out. Shortly afterwards to his horror he realised that she was dead, so he said. It was, Mahon glibly assured the officers, an accident. The date almost certainly was 14 April.

Mahon had not allowed the problems he was embroiled in with Emily to get too much in the way of his continuing shenanigans with other women. On several occasions he had left Emily at the bungalow and gone up to London ‘on business’. On one such occasion, on 10 April, he had met a young lady by the name of Ethel Duncan for the first time. By dint of using every drop of charm he possessed he managed to get her to agree to a date. He would call her up soon, he said, when he had attended to various bits of business. He did not enlarge on what these involved. This is hardly surprising because one of these ‘bits of business’ involved a visit to a hardware shop in London SW1 where he purchased a large butcher’s knife and a meat saw, probably on 12 April.