Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (4 page)

Valentine Baker, who was forced into exile after the incident on the train, but who went on to rebuild a successful career for himself overseas.

 Only members of the cloth seem to have been able to come through a compromising situation on the basis of their innocence generally being presumed. We shall never know exactly what was said or what went on when a young curate entered a compartment containing just a sixteen-year-old girl on a train of the Great Western Railway. The girl alleged that he had pulled her onto his knee, kissed her swan-like neck and whispered various intimate observations and suggestions into her ear.

The case went to court but the curate rejected all suggestions of wrongdoing on his part. He did admit that he had entered into conversation with the girl and had suggested that he might be able to get her a job playing the organ in his parish church. It was a most magnificent organ, he had boasted. Could this innocent comment have been taken as meaning something else? The court did not think so and the curate returned to his parish with his reputation unsullied.

In 1864 a gentleman sitting happily in the compartment of a London & South Western Railway train travelling between Surbiton and Woking was
startled out of his ruminations when he found himself staring into a woman’s face a few inches from his, looking in from the outside of the rapidly moving train. He leapt to help what clearly was a maiden in distress. She was standing on the footboard of the carriage and clinging on for dear life, clothes and hair streaming in the wind. It was no easy matter to haul her to safety but fortunately some people by the side of the line spotted her predicament and alerted the guard who quickly brought the train to a halt.

A dastardly character by the name of Nash had earlier specifically selected and entered a compartment containing two female passengers, one of whom of course was our woman on the footboard, Mary Moody. Nash had attempted, with a marked lack of subtlety, to chat up the other woman but she had alighted at Surbiton. When this happened, Mary also tried to leave the carriage but she was a few seconds too late, and as the train steamed out on its way to Woking she found herself alone with the singularly unsavoury Nash.

He began to ask her a string of questions full of sexual innuendo. Maybe Mary’s silence inflamed his passion because he first embraced her and then attempted to assault her indecently. That was when Mary saw little option but to attempt to escape his clutches via the compartment door and the carriage footboard. Nash was arrested and was hauled up in front of the magistrates.

In 1892 Mrs Mary Siddals, an attractive mother-of-two, was the victim of a serious sexual assault on a Midland Railway train travelling between Burton-on-Trent and Tamworth. She was alone in the compartment except for a man dressed in black who, having attacked her, tried to throw her out of the moving carriage. She was able to cling on for a few seconds but eventually fell off and tumbled down to the bottom of an embankment, receiving serious injuries.

A man was arrested and charged with assault and grievous bodily harm. His rather feeble defence was that Mary had been hallucinating. Two other witnesses came forward who attested that the man in black had made similar attacks on them. His work as a preacher and teacher of the young cut no ice with the court, and he was described as a ‘sanctimonious hypocrite’ before being sentenced to two years’ hard labour, which most people thought was overly lenient.

Not all cases of sexual assault turned out to be that. A man entered a compartment on a train of the North Eastern Railway near Durham. The only other passenger was a plump and homely looking woman aged about forty who sat opposite him. The train was only just pulling out of the station when she suddenly jumped up and asked him what he meant by what he had just done. He protested that he had not done anything except sit and look out of the window. A few minutes later the same thing happened again. This scenario was re-enacted several more times before the train slowed for a station, by which time the man was convinced that his fellow traveller was totally mad and a public danger.

Artistic licence is liberally employed in this view of Peterborough from the south. Crossing the bridge over the River Nene is a train on the Great Northern Railway, while another train can be seen on the tracks of the London & Birmingham Railway’s long cross-country line from Blisworth to Peterborough.

As the train pulled into the station the woman leant out of the window shouting to the guard. The racket she was creating attracted that august official and a knot of bystanders. She angrily accused the man of trying to pinch her legs. He vehemently denied such intent. The man was beginning to feel a horrible black hole opening up in front of him when the guard suddenly recalled that he had placed a basket under the seat on which the woman was sitting. She suddenly cried out that it had happened again! Everyone crowding around could see that it could not possibly have been the accused. The culprit of the assault was revealed as a rather irascible goose which was occupying the basket under the seat and venting its spleen in the only way possible – by lashing out with its beak!

Not long after the Muller case of 1864, a violent and deranged man joined passengers in a crowded train at King’s Cross. He proceeded to subject his fellow travellers on the 110-minute non-stop journey to Peterborough to a catalogue of horrifying experiences stopping short, however, of murder. In their compartment these passengers were literally captives, totally unable to alert the train crew to the activities of the maniac in their midst.

Public concern about these and similar events led to the passing in 1868 of The Regulation of Railways Act. It required that all passenger trains travelling
more than twenty miles without stopping must be equipped with a functioning system whereby passengers could communicate with ‘the servants of the company in charge of the train.’ The installation of such a system did not eliminate the possibility of attacks, but certainly helped to make passengers feel more secure.

By this time the railway was becoming a very safe medium of travel. Incidentally, the above act also brought in a penalty for misuse of the communication cord. This was fixed at a maximum of
£
5 and remained the same for around 100 years. In doing so it staunchly avoided inflationary trends in the economy, to the point where to be fined under the act could almost be described as being good value for money.

Passengers, being the quirky or sometimes stupid people they can be, sometimes misunderstood or misused the communication cord facility when there was nothing remotely approaching an emergency. Throughout the history of the railways there have been others for whom the very existence of the device and its ready accessibility was a source of wayward fascination. They obviously saw the cord as something of a challenge and many succumbed to its allure. They pulled it, they paid the penalty!

Before the passing of the 1868 Act, anyone finding themselves in a compartment on fire, where an assault or other crime was taking place, or where someone had been taken ill, was advised to tie a brightly coloured handkerchief to the end of a stick and wave it as far out of the carriage as was commensurate with safety. Hopefully this cunning ploy would catch the attention of one of the railwaymen on board who would assume that there was an emergency and therefore would stop the train.

Equally, the railwayman concerned might assume that the person waving the stick embellished with the hanky was simply using it to salute an acquaintance or relation by the side of the line, or just flourishing it out of a sense of joie de vivre. In such cases he might not stop the train. Of course he certainly would not stop the train if he had been looking in the opposite direction all the time.

Some interesting suggestions were put forward for ways in which beleaguered passengers might make their plight known to members of the train crew. One earnest correspondent of the
Morning Herald
newspaper advocated a device he thought would do the trick. The guard of the train should wear a belt round his waist. Attached to this would be a long chain passing through every carriage and anyone who wished to summon the assistance of the guard would be able to alert him by simply tugging the belt. Such a device was worthy of Heath Robinson at his very best.

Another suggestion, even more monstrously impractical, involved open parachutes above every carriage of a moving train. For any passenger needing to communicate urgently with the guard, it was simplicity itself. He or
she merely tugged a string to close the parachute whereupon the lynx-eyed guard, having spotted the deflation, would bring the train to an immediate halt. Another ingenious solution involved a speaking tube running the length of the train. A passenger in dire straits would be able to summon instant succour simply by speaking into the mouthpiece. So long, presumably, that the guard did not have his attention distracted by any of the thousand and one other duties his post entailed.

A professional railwayman who fancied himself as a serious, even groundbreaking, inventor, gave a public demonstration of an electrical apparatus which would set a bell ringing on the footplate when activated by a passenger needing assistance. He spent twenty minutes or so explaining the principles of physics that were involved in this cunning device. In doing this he bored his audience to the verge of insensibility but they perked up considerably when with a flourish he announced that he was now going to dazzle them by a demonstration of the capabilities of his failsafe apparatus.

Failsafe it may have been, foolproof it was not! The proud inventor, who became increasingly flustered and pompous, tried again and again without success to elicit a response from his brainchild against the background of a rising crescendo of ribald and unhelpful comments from his uncharitable audience. Eventually they made their way home, still holding their sides with painful and uncontrollable mirth. For them the demonstration had been a huge success.

In 1884 Captain John Preston of the Berkshire Militia, accompanied by his wife, entered a second-class compartment in a Great Western train. They joined it at Paddington. Its destination was Oxford. Two ladies already occupied the carriage. They were Mrs Frances de Windt and her sister, Miss Margaret Long. Mrs de Windt promptly informed them that the compartment was reserved for some friends she was expecting. Preston then told Mrs de Windt that the guard had pointed them to this particular compartment. Mrs de Windt then commented that this was just the sort of incident that occurred when one travelled with one’s social inferiors. Her next pronouncement was that she would have the guard dismissed. These kind words thankfully fell on deaf ears and Preston and his wife then attempted to sit down.

This was difficult because the original occupants of the compartment had randomly scattered a large and antediluvian collection of parcels all over the seats. They made no attempt to move these and so the good captain and his wife had to make the best of a bad job and sit, uncomfortably, where they could. When Preston ventured to place one of the parcels on the floor Mrs de Windt flew into a tantrum, asked him for his name and said that her husband would be calling on him the next day. He refused to give his name.

The journey continued in uneasy silence until the first stop at Reading where Mrs de Windt summoned the guard. She told him that the captain
had grossly insulted her and she loudly demanded to be assisted to another carriage. A crowd quickly gathered, avid for some free entertainment. They pricked up their ears when the words ‘grossly insulted’ were voiced. This was taken to suggest that the captain had uttered salacious words or acted in a lewd way towards Mrs de Windt.

Three days later Mr de Windt and a friend called Russell who was a retired army officer, arrived at Captain Preston’s home in Abingdon and handed him a note. It demanded an apology for his insulting behaviour towards Mrs de Windt on the train three days earlier. It questioned whether Captain Preston, despite being an officer, could properly be described as a gentleman since by definition no gentleman would insult a lady.

When Captain Preston tried to give his side of the story and refused to apologise, de Windt called him a damned scoundrel and punched him on the shoulder. When he attempted to land another blow Preston parried it and gripped his hand tightly whereupon de Windt squealed with pain and, calling Preston a brute, told him that he had broken his finger. Clearly de Windt was beside himself with rage because he then spat out the words ‘I wouldn’t be seen with you at a pig fight, you white-livered scoundrel,’ and added menacingly that he would see to it that Preston was blackballed by his club.

This instructive example of how certain members of the Victorian middle class exercised their interpersonal skills went to the courts for adjudication. Preston was vindicated because he was awarded
£
50 damages for assault. A counterclaim by de Windt for damages of
£
500 for his broken finger was contemptuously dismissed. It is obvious that oversensitivity and readiness to see insult ran in de Windt’s family. His father had once fought a duel with a man who had made disparaging remarks about the necktie he was wearing.