Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (33 page)

Gainsborough also made the 1941 remake of
The Ghost Train.
This film was made at the Lime Grove studios because railway stations were unavailable for filming during the war. The film was shot in several locations around Devon and Cornwall. In addition to Askey (who plays Tommy Gander, a concert comedian) it included his straight-man Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch (1907-1990) who played Teddy Deakin. Many would regard Arthur Askey’s inane antics as spoiling what is otherwise a good film.

Although the sound film appeared in Britain in 1928, there were still long periods of silent footage.
The Flying Scotsman
(1930) which starred Ray Milland was such an example, and for the first half-hour it was silent. In the film an elderly engine driver, who is due to retire the following day, reports a fireman for drunkenness. The angry fireman sets out to get revenge by striking the driver on what is his last journey. The daughter of the driver comes to the rescue by taking over the train and bringing it to an eventual standstill. Despite some unfavourable reviews the film endeared itself to railway enthusiasts by depicting many scenes showing locomotives and trains of the London & North Eastern Railway.

More interestingly, according to John Huntley, the director Castleton Knight managed to make use of Gresley Pacific No.4472
Flying Scotsman
for ten Sunday mornings from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. In the 1933 film
Friday the Thirteenth
(nothing to do with the ‘slasher’ series of films) with Jessie Matthews and comedian Max Miller, King’s Cross station is used as the location in which to introduce two of the main characters.

The Silent Passenger
(1935) was the first adaptation of a Dorothy L. Sayer’s story involving Lord Peter Wimsey (played by Peter Haddon). The story, which
was written specifically for the screen, involves a scurrilous blackmailer who is murdered by the husband of one of his victims, railroad detective Henry Camberley (Henry Wolfit). However, it is the innocent John Ryder (John Loder) who is suspected of the crime when Camberley stuffs the dead body into his trunk. Wimsey sets about to prove his new friend’s innocence and the action takes place on a train trip from London to the English Channel.

Flying Scotsman
at Doncaster resplendent in London & North Eastern Railway apple green livery. Opinion continues to be divided about the aesthetic effect of the later modifications with the German-style smoke deflectors and the double chimney. This is arguably the world’s most famous steam locomotive.

Kate Plus Ten
(1937), which features some lively sequences of trains at speed, is a light-hearted comedy based on an Edgar Wallace novel written in 1917. The eponymous Kate Westhanger (Genevieve Tobin) is the leader of a gang of crooks as well as secretary to Lord Flamborough. Kate and her gang are planning to rob Flamborough’s
£
600,000 gold bullion shipment which is on a train between Seahampton and London (the scenes were filmed in and around
Bath). Scotland Yard Inspector Mike Pemberton (Jack Hulbert) is onto Kate’s scheme and unbeknown to Kate the gang members are double-crossing her. As the bullion arrives at Seahampton docks the thieves uncouple the carriage and make off with the bullion on a runaway train. Kate and Inspector Pemberton board a locomotive in an attempt to cut off the gang’s getaway cars.

Another film dealing with car and train chases and starring Jack Hulbert again in the pursuit of thieves is
Bulldog Jack
(1935). Captain Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond (Atholl Fleming) is injured when his sabotaged car is involved in a crash, and so Jack Pennington (Hulbert), a first-class cricketer, agrees to impersonate Drummond in order to help the heroine, Ann Manders (Fay Wray). She needs to find her jeweller grandfather who has been kidnapped by a gang of crooks who want him to copy a valuable necklace which they intend to steal. Their plan backfires in the British Museum and the film climaxes in an exciting chase on a runaway train in the London Underground. The interesting railway part of the film includes a number of scenes shot at the disused British Museum tube station which was closed in 1933.

Seven Sisters
(1936) moves from Nice and Paris to Hampshire and includes a murder, three train crashes and a gunfight.
The Last Journey
(1936) like
The
Flying Scotsman
, features an engine driver making his last journey. However, in this film the driver, finding it difficult to come to terms with his retirement and dwelling on his domestic problems, drives his train at breakneck speed, ignoring all signals. As the passengers become increasingly fearful they all wish they knew how to stop the train. The passengers include two petty criminals, a crook in a bigamous marriage and a detective in disguise. The Great Western Railway gave full co-operation to the film company, allowing them extensive use of track and signal boxes, trains and coaches as well as providing materials and technical advice.

In 1937 the comedy classic,
Oh Mr Porter
, was released starring Will Hay (1888-1949) in his best-known role as the new stationmaster, William Porter, of a remote and highly rustic Northern Ireland railway station at Buggleskelly, not far from the border with the Republic. Together with his fellow workers, played by Moore Marriott as Jeremiah Harbottle and Graham Moffatt as Albert, they encounter the legend of ‘One-Eyed Joe’ a ghost who is said to haunt the lonely station. The local postman (Dave O’Toole) takes great pleasure in telling the legend to the new stationmaster: ‘Every night when the moon gives light, The ghost of the miller is seen, As he walks the track with a sack on his back, Down to the Black Borheen… He haunts the station, he haunts the hill, And the land that lies between.’

The legend, as with many other local legends, turns out to be a distraction used by gun-runners to conceal their criminal activities. This was a real tactic used in coastal villages when tales of ghosts coming out at night provided a means of keeping people off the street whilst smugglers went about their
business. Filmed mainly around the abandoned Basingstoke–Alton branch line of the Southern Railway, the film was summed up by one review which commented on its timeless quality, ‘set in a poetic limbo, where nothing will ever change.’

The 1931 bestselling novel by A.J. Cronin,
Hatter’s Castle
(1933), was loosely adapted as a film in 1941. Made by Paramount Pictures it had a star cast which included Robert Newton, Deborah Kerr and James Mason. The story, set in the year 1879, is a bleak drama about the ruin that befalls a Scottish hatter (Newton), a social climber set on recapturing his imagined lost nobility. He lives in a castle-like residence nicknamed Hatter’s Castle and rules his family like a tyrant. His timid daughter, Mary (Kerr), is seduced, becomes pregnant and is thrown out of her home. The scene most pertinent to the railway is the one in which Mary leaves the train carriage to wander off into the darkness.

The decision is one that saves Mary’s life as the Tay Bridge collapses during a gale force wind with the train and all its passengers (including Dennis, played by Emlyn Wiliams, the man who seduced her), plunging to their deaths. More misery follows with bankruptcy for the hatter, Brodie. His son commits suicide after he is caught cheating in an exam and Brodie burns down his palatial home destroying himself along with it. It is believed that
Hatter’s Castle
is the only film that depicts the Tay Bridge disaster.

Waterloo Road
(1944) is a Gainsborough picture starring John Mills, Stewart Granger and Alastair Sim. It is mainly concerned with life in wartime Britain and focuses on the problems faced by a number of different families in such difficult times. Although railway relevance is rather thin it does include a chase across the tracks outside Waterloo station. A very dangerous thing to do in view of the electric conductor rails.

Those familiar with the Basil Rathbone (Holmes) and Nigel Bruce (Watson) series of films about Sherlock Holmes will know they bear only the most tenuous connection to the Conan Doyle stories. In these films Holmes is variously fighting the Nazis or flying off to Washington. Nonetheless they proved enormously popular and established Rathbone, much to his regret, in the forefront of the pantheon of actors who have played Holmes. The film
Terror by Night
(1946) made by Universal Pictures in the USA is set almost entirely on an overnight train travelling from London to Edinburgh.

Accompanied by Dr Watson and Inspector Lestrade (Dennis Hoey), Holmes has been hired to prevent the theft of the Star of Rhodesia, an enormous 400-plus carat diamond owned by Lady Margaret Carstairs (Mary Forbes). As Holmes switches diamonds with Lady Margaret, her son Roland (Geoffrey Steele) is murdered shortly after and the fake diamond is stolen. Holmes believes that the notorious criminal Colonel Sebastian Moran (Professor Moriarty’s henchman) is involved in the murder and the theft.
Plenty of action takes place on the train and in addition to the murder of Roland Carstairs, Holmes and Watson unearth in the luggage compartment a train guard murdered by a tiny poisonous dart made out of a fiendishly clever dissolving substance.

This is all that can now be seen of Cliddesden station on the highly rustic and long-closed Basingstoke to Alton railway line. This rather pointless line was built by the London & South Western Railway and it was immortalised by playing a central role in the film ‘Oh, Mr Porter’.

Filmed in black and white,
Terror by Night
creates a good atmosphere despite several gaffs, including some of the exterior shots of the train. These show trains of different companies and also include a model and some foreign trains. Enthusiasts will know that such faux pas are by no means unusual in films showing moving trains. As the film was made in 1946 the studio did not find it necessary to use the wartime propaganda prevalent in some of the earlier films.

After the war, restrictions on filming did not suffer from the same limitations but there had also been significant changes to the railway industry. The Labour government had a mandate to nationalise the railways and the Transport Act was passed in 1947. The railways were nationalised on 1 January 1948. The Act brought virtually all railways, including London Underground, under the control of the British Transport Commission (BTC) although the name British Railways came into immediate use for day-to-day purposes.

In
Train of Events
(1949) the London, Midland & Scottish Railway, which was absorbed into British Railways during the making of the film, provided the main locations around Willesden and Euston. The film offers a slight variation on the crashed train theme by attempting, not very successfully, to
follow the stories of three sets of people as they travel on a night train from Euston to Liverpool. Although not specifically a ghost story, there is a sense of impending doom underpinning the tale.

The engine driver, played by Jack Warner, says what will be a tragic and inevitable farewell to his wife. The passengers include an actor who has murdered his unfaithful wife, an orphan girl who is in love with a fugitive German prisoner of war, and a famous conductor who cannot choose between his wife and a glamorous pianist. Although the doomed train will cruelly resolve the problems of the characters, the audience is left to speculate on who will survive.

During the 1950s British cinema went through a number of important changes as audiences fell and many cinemas closed down (as did railway stations). Many critics (not entirely correctly) viewed the decline in attendance as being accompanied by a decline in the standard of films. British films came to be seen as dull and conservative. The war film was popular (for example,
The Cruel Sea
(1953),
The Dam Busters
(1955),
Reach for the Sky
(1956),
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957)) as were comedy films, notably those coming out of Ealing Studios (
The Lavender Hill Mob
(1951), and
The
Ladykillers
(1955)). Ealing Studios are the oldest working film studios in the world, dating back over a century, and Ealing films became synonymous with genteel British comedy.