Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (34 page)

The Ladykillers
(1955) is a dark comedy starring Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom and Jack Warner. ‘Professor’ Marcus (Guinness) rents rooms for a diverse gang of oddball criminals in a ramshackle house not far from King’s Cross, owned by an eccentric octogenarian widow, Mrs Louisa Wilberforce (Katie Johnson) who lives alone except for her parrots. The intention of the gang is to rob a security van at King’s Cross station. Meanwhile the Professor convinces Mrs Wilberforce that they are amateur musicians who want the room to rehearse, hence they carry instruments and play a recording of Boccherini’s Minuet, appropriately a string quintet, while they plan their heist.

Once they have completed their successful robbery they deposit the money in the station parcel office. Mrs Wilberforce stumbles on the truth when on leaving her house one of the gang manages to trap his cello case in the door allowing all the banknotes to flutter out. Fearing that she will tell the police, the gang decides it has no option but to get rid of her. However, no one actually wants to do it. They soon fall out and begin to kill each other with the bodies being dropped into railway wagons. In the end they are all dead and dear old Mrs Wilberforce is left holding the money.

Mrs Wilberforce’s ‘lopsided’ house was a set built at the western end of Frederica Street, directly above the southern portal of Copenhagen Tunnel on the railway line leading out of King’s Cross station. The film used a number of locations around King’s Cross including Copenhagen Tunnel; Cheney Road, St Pancras (the scene of the robbery); the North London Line; York Way;
the famous King’s Cross Gasholders and various roads around Islington and Holloway. This film is a great favourite with railway enthusiasts because of its footage of steam trains working in and out of King’s Cross.

Four years previous to
The Lady Killers
,
Mystery Junction
(1951) was released. It follows a rather complicated plot with a crime novelist concocting a story about fellow passengers on the train for the benefit of a young woman. On the train is a prisoner who is being taken to court as a suspect in a murder case. The passengers are told by the policeman escorting him to disembark at a lonely snowbound station so that everybody can be interviewed while they wait for the police to arrive. As this is happening the lights go out and one of the prisoner’s accomplices cuts the phone line. Shots are fired and the policeman lies dead on the floor, suspicion falling on one of the passengers.

Murder and/or robbery have been the main staple for railway crime films. Robbery is very much the theme of
The Flying Scot
(1957). Travelling overnight on the
Flying Scotsman
, a group of robbers start to make a large hole between two compartments in order to gain access to sacks of money. When a young boy finds out what is happening, he informs the guard who throws a written message out of the window to a signalman telling him to call the police. The robbers are eventually arrested.

Ten years later came
Robbery
(1967) which was loosely based on the Great Train Robbery of 1963. With only the passing of four years the 1963 robbery was still fresh in the minds of the public and there was still some sensitivity which was evident in the use of twenty lawyers to ensure there was no possibility of libel against the film company. Starring Stanley Baker, James Booth and Frank Finlay, the film opens with a jewel robbery which is intended to fund a bigger, better organised robbery of the overnight mail train from Glasgow to London. The 12.30 night express is successfully held up and the gang members escape to an unused airfield to share out the
£
2.6 million. However, one of the robbers had foolishly called his wife from a phone box during the raid and the police had tapped his house phone. With one exception the robbers are all eventually arrested. One of the locations for the film was Husbands Bosworth near Market Harborough. The train robbery had a huge media coverage which provided a convenient distraction for the Conservative Government of the day who were deeply embarrassed at the time by the Profumo scandal.

The controversial Beeching report, produced while Richard Beeching was chairman of British Railways between 1963 and 1965, attempted to reduce the losses being sustained by the national railway system. It advocated widespread closures. In the event, more than 4,000 miles of railway and 3,000 stations closed in the decade following the report. The scrapping of a village station (and a nod to the Great Train Robbery) is the topical subject of the children’s film made in 1965,
Runaway Railway
. Barming station (Borden) has
been targeted by Government cuts and its steam engine,
Matilda
, has to be scrapped. It is down to four children to try and run the line as a private concern with the help of local landowner, Lord Chalk.

As a Government official visits the village, the children try to buy time by sabotaging the train. In order to raise money for repairs a fund-raising dance for local children is held at the station. Lurking around the station are two dodgy-looking men claiming to be train enthusiasts but their real intent is to rob a London-bound mail van. In true fantasy style the children foil the robbery by driving
Matilda
, the lovable little steam engine. They receive a reward which goes towards saving the private line. It is almost reminiscent of an Ealing film, where the small rural community defeats not only the robbers but also chases the Government official (in standard pinstripe and umbrella) out of the village.

A train robbery from an earlier period, the Great South Eastern Train Robbery is the subject of
The First Great Train Robbery
(1978) starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland. Michael Crichton, who based it on his bestselling thriller, directed the film. Although set in London and Kent, most of the filming was done in Ireland. The original robbery took place in May 1855 when three London firms sent a box of gold bars and coins from London Bridge to Paris via the South Eastern Railway. The gold was stolen en route.

The story is loosely based on this robbery, in which Edward Pierce (Connery) is a master thief with the goal of stealing a shipment of gold bars en route to the Crimea. With the help of England’s greatest locksmith, Agar (Donald Sutherland), Pierce sets out to copy each of four keys needed to open the train’s vault, keys that are kept and guarded by different parties. The robbery was filmed on a vintage passenger train in which Pierce clambers along the entire length of the fast-moving train, leaping from carriage to carriage and ducking under low bridges.

1978 saw the third film adaptation of John Buchan’s
The Thirty-Nine Steps
(1935, 1959, 1978). In the 1935 version, which starred Robert Donat and Madelaine Carroll and was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Hannay is a Canadian visitor to London who goes to a music hall and sees ‘Mr Memory’s’ show, where he meets Annabella Smith who is trying to escape from secret agents. Hannay helps by hiding her in his flat where she claims to have uncovered a plot to steal vital British military secrets. She mentions the ‘thirty-nine steps’, but does not explain its meaning and the mystery further deepens when she is murdered by a mystery intruder during the night, using Hannay’s breadknife.

Now a key suspect, he goes on the run to break the spy ring. He takes a train to Scotland (because she had told him she was going to visit a man there), and as the police search the train in desperation, he enters a compartment and kisses the one person in it (Carroll), as a distraction. Still pursued,
Hannay jumps from the train onto the Forth Rail Bridge and escapes. Hannay makes his way through parts of Scotland until he reaches his destination only to find that the occupant, the seemingly respectable Professor Jordan, is part of the spy ring. Hannay is eventually captured and handcuffed but he realises that the policemen are part of the conspiracy. Our hero escapes yet again and drags an unwilling Madelaine Carroll (Pamela) along.

The story concludes back in London at ‘Mr Memory’s’ show. The spies are cunningly using Mr Memory to smuggle the secrets out. Hannay asks ‘Mr Memory’, ‘What are the thirty-nine steps?’ to which he replies, ‘it is an organisation of spies, collecting information on behalf of the foreign office…’ The unfortunate Mr Memory is shot, but before he dies he tells of a design for a silent aircraft engine. The film does not stick to Buchan’s novel. There is a love interest in the film, and in the book the thirty-nine steps refer to physical steps (as do other film versions).

The 1959 version is very much a product of the 1950s with an array of almost comic characters. It still uses the Forth Bridge but the film does not match either the 1935 or the 1978 adaptation. In the latter, Robert Powell plays Hannay and the film adheres more faithfully to the book. Set in early 1914, before the onset of war, Colonel Scudder (John Mills), a retired British Intelligence Service agent has discovered a plot to assassinate the Greek Prime Minister on a visit to London. Hannay goes to the scene of Scudder’s murder at St Pancras station and discovers his much-thumbed notebook, full of vital information. Thereafter follows a series of escapes across the country, with both foreign agents and the police on Hannay’s trail.

Following the end of steam on British Railways in 1968, nostalgia became something of an industry, with steam appearing in a number of films including
The Railway Children
(1970) and Agatha Christie’s
Murder on the Orient
Express
(1974). In a different type of remembrance, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Great Train Robbery of 1963 was reflected in a film about one of the junior robbers. The robbery had made celebrities of some of the criminals, who raided the Glasgow to London mail train and made off with
£
2.6m in used bank notes on 8 August 1963.

Buster
(1988) tells the story of Buster Edwards played by Phil Collins. Opinions are divided over the train robbers. The fact that the fifteen men managed to plan the robbery in a very careful and meticulous way and steal
£
2.6 million contrasts with the bungling whereby they got themselves arrested and imprisoned.
Buster
projected itself as a romantic thriller, placing more emphasis on Edward’s relationship with his family than on the robbery itself. He and his family go into hiding before finally heading for Mexico. However, the money soon dries up and his wife (played by Julie Walters) misses her family, so Edwards decides to return to England and give himself up. Billed as a romantic thriller,
Buster
falls short of thrills and does not match
up to
Robbery
(1967). The locations used in
Buster
included Loughborough and Rothley stations on the Great Central Railway in Leicestershire.

Paddington station makes a brief appearance in the British gangster film
The Long Good Friday
(1980) when Carol Benson (Patti Love) collects the body of her husband, murdered in Northern Ireland, while doing a spot of work for Jeff Hughes. The station was also featured in the murder mystery
The
October Man
(1947) with John Mills and Joan Greenwood.

The London Underground has featured in numerous short stories and novels as well as many films and TV productions. Not all have been about crime, possibly because of the difficulties in sustaining a full-length story set on the underground that deals with crime. Horror or supernatural films, although only a few have been made, have featured better, such as
Quatermass
and the Pit
(1967),
Death Line
(1972) and
Creep
(2004).

Earlier films such as Roman Polanski’s
Repulsion
(1965), a study of a murderous psychopath, features South Kensington station. However, more recent films that include scenes on the underground are
The Fourth Protocol
(1987), which features a double agent being followed on the Piccadilly line between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park, although it was actually shot on the Jubilee line between Charing Cross and Green Park. There is also a scene in the film at Aldwych where Michael Caine takes his vengeance out on two racist yobs.

Also at Aldwych was
The Good Shepherd
(2006), a spy film starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie.
Die Another Day
(2002) is a James Bond film with Pierce Brosnan. Bond enters a small building on the south side of Westminster Bridge and descends to the disused ‘Vauxhall Cross’ station to meet ‘M’ (Judi Dench). In
Patriot Games
(1992) an IRA agent is chased from his bookshop on Charing Cross Road to a Piccadilly line station which is supposed to sound like Aldwych. There are some dreadful errors concerning the underground system in this film.
Green Street Hooligans
(2005), also known as
Hooligans
, is about a young American student (Elijah Wood) who moves to London and is introduced to drinking and football violence. Locations include Bank and East Finchley stations.
The Krays
(1990) has a scene of the Blitz where Aldwych is used for Bethnal Green, and
Killing Me Softly
(2002) features Canary Wharf.

A number of films have been made in the past two decades that have involved railway crime as the main setting for the plot, although most of these have either been made or set in countries other than Britain:
Money Train
(US 1995),
Death Train
(US 1993),
The Burning Train
(India 2000) and
The Taking of
Pelham 123
(US 2009 remake of the 1974 classic). Although trains are used as a backcloth, few British films or films set in Britain have taken the railways as the main location, but
Mona Lisa
(1986) uses Liverpool Street station.

The excellent
Navigators
(2001), directed by Ken Loach, was a timely reflection on the effects of privatisation of the railway. It drew on the experiences of Rob Dawber, a railway man of seventeen years, who sadly died while the
film was being made. Filmed at Loughborough and Sheffield the film is set during the 1980s when British Rail was being privatised. It follows the fortunes of a gang of workers who are faced with unpalatable changes brought on by corporate desire to maximise profits in every way possible.