Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (2 page)

Steam power dazzled, and mid-Victorians wondered and enthused at its vigour, energy and spirit. Emblematic of technocratic success, of enterprise, endurance, adventure and civilisation, trains delivered cotton to boats heading for China and India, they brought wool to Yorkshire and coal to the factories fuelling the industrial revolution. They took the post, delivered the exotic goods arriving in British docks from all over the world to shops in towns and villages, and enabled businesses to find new markets for their products. They spread the news of national and international events to the very edges of the country and they allowed Victorians to pursue their lives more quickly than ever had been imagined possible, encouraging leisure excursions among people who had, hitherto, rarely left the safety of their county boundaries.

Railway timetables forced the standardisation of time across the nation, enshrining
speed as the new principle
of public life: ‘railway time’ entered the lexicon, vast clocks adorned the façades of stations and it became a commonplace to assert that train journeys had ‘annihilated time’. Certainly, although the Bible was the volume at the centre of Victorian society,
Bradshaw’s Railway Timetables
– a brick-thick, monthly compendium covering an increasing number of lines with baffling complexity – was catching up.
Everybody grumbles at the railways
, wrote the celebrated railway historian John Pendleton during the 1890s;
they are the scorn of the punctual
,
the embarrassment of the tardy and the contempt of the irascible; but they have one great distinction – they have shaken us up
.

Trains, he wrote, had become the most
indispensable agent
in national life
. Yet, to a society caught between conservatism and progress, the railways fostered ambiguous reactions. In the whistle and shriek of every approaching engine was evidence of rapid
social and technological transformation. The stations, viaducts and embankments were conspicuously visible and new, signalling the investment of huge capital and the ascendancy of engineering achievement. They turned modest towns into sprawling cities and created startling new wealth. They were liberating, and they punctuated the map of Britain with possibilities, but they also devoured rural communities and displayed a perilous carelessness for human life – wheels ran off tracks, axles broke, boilers burst and there were countless collisions.

Woven into the excitement of railway travel, a corresponding nervousness had developed about the loss of individual control. The sense of being trapped in a box-like compartment, whirled along at speed and treated like just one in a stream of disposable, moveable goods was, at best, disorientating and, at worst, threatening. This vast force of industrial technology seeped into the language to spawn new metaphors – to ‘run out of steam’ or ‘off the tracks’ – and threw the
fragility and helplessness of human life
into relief. In 1862 the medical journal the
Lancet
published a paper noting that
uneasiness … amounting to actual fear
… pervades the generality of travellers by rail.
It believed that, disasters aside, train journeys could easily make passengers very unwell: deafening noise confounded the ears, speed taxed the eyes and vibrations had an adverse effect both on the brain and the skeleton. The mental tension of being so transported could, the journal concluded, bring on total physical collapse.

By the 1860s novelists had been exploring the public’s deepening apprehensions about the relentlessness of progress, technology and modernity for more than two decades, using the image of the speeding locomotive not just as a potent symbol of the advances of civilisation but of remorseless physical and moral destruction. Collapsing time with such ease, they questioned whether the railways might annihilate the human spirit with equal success. Dickens’ Dombey, gripped by gnawing jealousies after the death of his son, is dizzied by
the very speed at which
the train was whirled along … The power that forced itself upon its iron way … defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle, and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages, and degrees behind it … was a type of
the triumphant monster, Death
.

Feeling vulnerable, rail users voiced their concerns. In the late 1850s, a Commons Select Committee had recommended the adoption by all railway companies of some means of communication between the train guard and his passengers but its suggestions had been ignored. In the first years of the new decade newspapers regularly focused on the plight of ticket-holders trapped in locked carriages with no means of summoning assistance should they need it. There were accusations that railway directors were neglectful and careless and that the government was apathetic and there were repeated demands that train companies should be made
legally responsible for the safety
of their passengers.

In reality,
Victorian trains were fairly safe and reliable
. Yet, unsettled by headlines recording ‘frightful accidents’, a subliminal fear about the pitilessness of their railways had lodged in the minds of second-generation Victorians. What had not yet occurred to anyone was that a passenger might be violently attacked while travelling. With the discovery of the sinister, empty, blood-drenched carriage at Hackney Station, it was becoming clear that something momentous might have occurred.

CHAPTER 2

Saturday 9 July 1864

That morning, at about eight o’clock, a substantial and influential banker – aged sixty-nine, standing
five feet nine
and weighing between eleven and twelve stone – left home for work wearing a shiny black silk ‘chimneypot’ top hat and carrying a walking cane. Tucked into a small black leather bag was a gift for his favourite niece. Nothing about him suggested that he was marked out for notoriety.

This man, Thomas Briggs, proved the Victorian rule that success repays steady diligence. Moving to London from Lancashire in his late teens, he had soon married Mary, three years his senior, who raised their four sons and two daughters while he toiled in the City of London, dedicating himself to the values most prized by this age: progress and respectability. Within a handful of years he had moved his young family northwards, away from the grime of the capital to the clearer air of the small suburban town of Hackney.

Briggs was now chief clerk at Robarts, Curtis Bank and was established in a fashionably large Regency townhouse at 5 Clapton Square. Boasting a pretty leaded fanlight over the
front door, impressive cast-iron balconies and six-panelled doors, it was one of the best addresses in the neighbourhood, and he shared it with five women: Mary, his wife, her widowed sister Charlotte, an unmarried daughter also called Mary, a middle-aged cook and a young housemaid. The dark furniture gleamed, paintings hung in moulded frames and a prized collection of stuffed birds poised motionless under bright glass domes.

It promised to be a fine day as Thomas Briggs left home, turned right and quickly reached the end of the square. Crossing the main road, he strolled through the dappled shade of the churchyard of St John, skirted the medieval, white stone tower of St Augustine and, about six minutes after setting out, arrived at the modest timber structure of Hackney Station. Overhead, the arched, brick viaduct bore the clattering trains of the North London Railway. The station, the viaduct and the line were little more than
a decade old
and modest, recently built terraces stretched eastwards to meet the small-scale factories on the suburb’s borders. In the space of a generation Hackney had grown from a remote neighbourhood of church spires and nursery gardens into an expanding town for the upwardly mobile. No longer reliant on horse-drawn cabs, it now took the inhabitants just twenty minutes to reach the City by train.

Hackney was situated at the halfway point on the North London Railway line from Chalk Farm to Fenchurch Street, a journey that described – roughly speaking – three sides of a square. Briggs took a
first-class ticket
and sat, as usual, with his back to the engine so that he could open the window without being choked by the smoke and
soot that streamed from its chimneys
. As the train pulled off towards the east,
watercress fields receded
and then the waterproofing and bone-crushing factories and the rope and chemical works of Hackney Wick. Then the line curved south, passing the construction site of the vast new
Bryant & May match factory
, skirting the eastern boundary of
the grassy sweep of Victoria Park – London’s first public park – before entering districts choked with cheaply built terraces for the working classes. Passing through these neighbourhoods, the train tipped due west again, rattling towards a
fog of industrial smoke
pierced in all directions by church steeples and factory chimneys.

The small terminus at Fenchurch Street was tucked into the south-eastern corner of the part of the capital known as the City, disgorging noisy hordes of passengers from its four platforms into the streets beyond. Jostled, clutching his cane as he descended the steep stairs to the entrance, Thomas Briggs emerged under a warming sky filled with clouds smudged by greasy smog. His habitual route to work took him along Fenchurch Street, past a labyrinth of multiplying lanes and crowded courts and then across the broad sweep of Gracechurch Street. Down to his left was the River Thames with its clattering harvest of steam and riverboats; straight ahead was Lombard Street, gateway to the stone maze of the mile-square City.

Briggs made his way along the narrow, curving thoroughfare of Lombard Street, past tall stone buildings that dwarfed the scuttling commuters and tradesmen jamming its pavements. On the façades of the stately financial offices hung ornate and gilded clocks; crammed between impressive edifices were chop houses, taverns, shirt-makers, hat shops and silversmiths, each vying for the custom of the black-suited men hurrying past their doors. Running either side to the north and south were similar broad streets, all linked by narrow alleyways housing secondhand clothes merchants, drapers and inns. These were the arteries of the City, each converging on its twin hearts: the dumpy, flat-roofed Bank of England and the grander Royal Exchange.

Fifteen minutes after leaving his train, Briggs reached No. 15 Lombard Street and his bank’s imposing building. Every weekday between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. he worked here, raising capital by
issuing shares: money destined to fund new and developing industries, to build new bridges, factories and railway lines and to pump through the veins of the expanding British Empire. Today being Saturday, his working hours were shorter; by three o’clock, his work was done.

When he left work that July afternoon, Briggs turned left and was almost immediately at the end of Lombard Street. Ahead of him was
Cheapside
, one of the busiest streets in the capital, alive with an incessant stream of carts, cabs and drays, reaching way out to the west beyond the Central Criminal Court and the glowering mass of Newgate gaol, lined with elegant shops selling shawls, silver, feathers, scents and fancy goods from all corners of the world. As usual, hackney cabmen dodged gridlocks to escape into a web of narrow lanes; lawyers, merchants and stockbrokers hurried by under painted signs advertising boots, lace, plate glass or insurance. Men of leisure idled on the pavements, boys pushed handcarts, ragged children ran shouting into filthy courts and impoverished piece-work tailors carried their bundles to and from businesses in Threadneedle Street and St Swithin’s Lane. Rising above it all in the near distance was the vast dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, a soot-blackened edifice standing sentinel over the thundering tide of the City.

But Cheapside was not Briggs’ destination. Instead, he turned left, heading for the stands for the brightly painted
horse-drawn omnibuses
that ranged along spacious
King William Street
, each heading out over London Bridge before diverging to follow separate routes.
He paid sixpence
and took his place on one of the five-a-side seats for the twenty-five-minute journey to the Lord Nelson pub in Peckham. From this stop it was just a short walk to the home of his niece Caroline Buchan, and he arrived there
almost exactly at five o’clock
.

Three hours later, after dinner, Briggs pulled on a chain attached to the buttonhole of his waistcoat. Fixed to it were a small swivel seal inset with a broken red stone, an old-fashioned
key and a heavy gold watch. It was time to retrace his journey back to Hackney.

*

The sun was low and swallows wheeled in the sky as the banker alighted from his omnibus to walk back through the City’s stone warrens. Above him, the thin sliver of a bright new moon pulsed from between the clouds. The sounds of the metropolis had thinned. Passing under the great clock on the façade of Fenchurch Street Station and into the station with its modern vaulted roof, he nodded to the newsvendor. Eating his supper on a stool near the booking office, the ticket collector Thomas Fishbourne looked up as Briggs touched him on the shoulder and
said goodnight
. Alone, the old man mounted the stairs to the platforms, his empty black bag in one hand and his ivory-knobbed cane in the other.

A dozen or so late-comers were still hurrying to join the 9.45 p.m. train which was running
a few minutes behind time
as Briggs settled himself in the furthest forward of the first-class carriages, in the near-side corner of the compartment with his back towards the engine and his
cane and bag on the seat beside him
. The doors were slamming.