Great Train Crimes: Murder and Robbery on the Railways Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

  Wharncliffe Books

  an imprint of

  Pen and Sword Books Limited,

  47 Church Street, Barnsley,

  South Yorkshire S70 2AS

  Copyright @ Jonathan Oates, 2010

  ISBN: 978 1 84563 112 3

  ePub ISBN: 9781844683260

  PRC ISBN: 9781844683277

  The right of Jonathan Oates to be identified as author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record of this book is available

  from the British Library.

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  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to all who have helped with this book; including, as ever, John Coulter and Reg Eden, and also Jonathan Feldman and Diann McDonald of Broadmoor Hospital. My thanks go out to those who helped more anonymously, including the staff at the National Archives and the British Library Newspaper Library in particular.

  This book is dedicated to David, himself a railwayman and the son of a railwayman.

  Contents

  List of Plates

  Introduction

  1 Railways and Crime

  2 The Gold Bullion Robbery, 1855

  3 The First Railway Murder, 1864

  4 An Officer, But Not a Gentleman? 1875

  5 The Murder on the Brighton Line, 1881

  6 The Death of a Farmer, 1901

  7 The Mystery of Merstham Tunnel, 1905

  8 The Newcastle to Alnmouth Railway Murder, 1910

  9 Murder on the Brighton Line, 1914

  10 The Most Foul of Murders, 1915

  11 Death of‘the White Queen’, 1920

  12 A Crime of Passion, 1927

  13 Murder on the Underground, 1939

  14 Wartime Murder, 1942

  15 Death at West Croydon Station, 1945

  16 Death of a Railway Servant, 1952

  17 The Difficult Passenger’s End, 1962

  18 Throat Cutting on a Slow Train, 1964

  19 Death of a Housewife, 1965

  20 Killed for a Snub, 1965

  21 Miscellaneous Train Crimes, 1897–2008

  Conclusion

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Plates

  George Stephenson’s Rocket at Newcastle station

  One of the first trains, 1830s

  Steam train, 1930s

  The scene of the crime, 1900s

  Metropolitan policeman, c.1914

  London Bridge, 2009

  Folkestone harbour

  London’s financial hub, c.1890s

  Clapton Square, 2009

  Hackney church, 2009

  Nelson Square, 2009

  St George’s Street, 2009

  Charles Dickens and his Kent home, 1860s

  Officers’ Headquarters, Aldershot, c.1900s

  Waterloo station, 2009

  Edward VII, 1900s

  Brighton railway station, c.1900

  Charing Cross station, c.1900

  Paddington station, c.1900

  Ludgate station, c.1900

  Windsor High Street and Castle, 1900s

  Tower of London, c.1900

  Winchester, 1900s

  Old Bailey, 1900s

  Portsmouth Town Hall, c.1900

  Vauxhall Bridge, 2009

  South Croydon station, 2009

  Lavender Hill, 2009

  Newcastle railway station, 1900s

  Grey Street, Newcastle, 1900s

  Morpeth, 1900s

  Lovers in a train carriage, 1900s

  Crawley High Street, 1900s

  Electric train on the Metropolitan line, c.1910

  Victoria railway station, 1920s

  Lewes, 1900s

  St Saviour’s church, Ealing, 1900s

  Florence Shore’s grave, 2009

  Homerton Terrace, 2009

  Deptford Park gates, 2009

  Liverpool Street station, 1920s

  Hackney police station, 2009

  Tottenham Court tube station, 2009

  Train at Carlisle railway station

  Train arriving at Basingstoke station, c.1960

  Cambridge Hospital, Aldershot

  Bognor Regis, 1950s

  Memorial plaque at Russell Square tube station to victims of 2005 terrorist bombing, 2009

  Introduction

  Mention railway crime and many people will think of the Great Train Robbery of 1963. Or perhaps the famous Agatha Christie story, Murder on the Orient Express. But there are many more real-life crimes which occurred on trains or at railway stations. Some of these are reasonably well known to crime buffs, such as the first railway murder ever to occur in Britain which was on a North London train in 1864. Most, however, are very obscure and have never been written about since they were committed.

  This book aims to survey serious crimes – including murders and significant thefts – which have occurred on Britain’s railways and on the London Underground. It does not include the cases where bodies or parts of bodies have been found at railway stations, but where the murders occurred elsewhere. Three such cases occurred in the 1930s, at Waterloo and at Brighton. Nor are the crimes of John Duffy, the Railway Rapist, who also killed three women in 1985–6 on London’s suburban rail network, written about here, because these took place near railway stations, not on them or on trains. Most of the crimes chronicled here are given a complete chapter. These include the first ever large-scale robbery on board a train, in which the thieves believed they had escaped scot free, a high-profile assault on a young woman by an army officer, terrorist bombs on the Underground in the 1880s and numerous murders either on board trains or at railway stations. Some of these killings went unsolved, but the majority were cleared up. Then there is a chapter summarizing accounts of other railway crimes which have either have been written about recently or are fictional or are in very recent memory (from the past three decades).

  The sources for this book are primarily ones which were created at the time of these crimes. Police files are a principal source. Metropolitan Police files and Assize papers, located at the National Archives, are very useful. They include witness statements, police reports, medical details and other relevant information. Some of this has never been used before. But police files do not always exist; nor are they always open for public inspection. Newspapers, both national and local, have been used. For the Victorian and Edwardian period, newspaper reporting of murders was very detailed indeed. Unfortunately, the column space devoted to them and indeed other news stories declined with time, even though the newspapers increased
in page length.

  The author has written six books about real-life crime already, but he has only one distant connection with railway crime. His paternal grandmother’s sister married into the middle-class Wheater family of Harrogate. One of this family was John Wheater, born in 1920, who became a solicitor. He was involved in the Great Train Robbery of 1963 and was sentenced to three years in gaol, though he had not taken any direct part in the theft itself (he had arranged the acquisition of the hideout in Buckinghamshire for the gang). On his release from gaol in 1966, he said that what he really objected to in prison was having to mix with criminals.

  The Railways and Crime

  I am not a timid man, but I never enter an English railway carriage

  without having in my pocket a loaded revolver.

  Much has been written about British trains and railways. This chapter aims to give the very briefest of summaries about British railway history and then to discuss railway crime and railway policing.

  The Stockton–Darlington Railway, which opened in 1825 was Britain’s – and the world’s – first railway. However, rudimentary railways had been in use in industrial districts since the sixteenth century, where coal was transported on carts which ran on rails. What made the Stockton–Darlington line different was that the train was powered by steam and that it carried passengers as well as goods. The Manchester to Liverpool railway of 1830, though, was the first to be powered solely by steam and carried mainly passengers. Railways were much faster than other methods of inland transport, such horse power and canals, though all three methods of transport coexisted for much of the nineteenth century.

  In the 1840s there was an explosion of railway building all over Britain, known as railway mania, as it was believed the railways were a way to a quick profit. A leading figure in this was George Hudson of York, who was not above sharp practice. This was all the work of private enterprise, the state not seeing for itself any role in administration nor supervision of them, though permission had to be sought by private Act of Parliament prior to construction. Many of these railway lines emanated from London. The first long-distance line was the London (Euston) to Birmingham railway, inaugurated in 1837. Another was the Great Western Railway, from London Paddington to (eventually) Bristol, in the following year. By the later nineteenth century, England was covered in a network of railways. Many of these train companies operated small lines and were often short-lived, being soon amalgamated with others.

  The coming of the railways was not without criticism. There were many misgivings. Some included the fact that they might disrupt hunting, or that they would pose a health risk to travellers. Conservatives feared that revolutionaries could travel about more easily and quicker. Others thought that criminals from the cities could swiftly travel to the countryside.

  Trains had more positive effects, too. They allowed goods to be transported more cheaply. They enabled people to travel around the country more quickly and this led to the breakdown of rural isolation. People saw more of their fellow Britons. Some historians have commented that train travel helped socially unify the island in a way that no other method had done hitherto. They also helped towns and cities to grow, by allowing suburbs to develop, enabling people to live at some distance from their workplace. This was especially the case around London.

  In London, the Underground system began in 1863, with the Metropolitan line from Baker Street to Farringdon. Commuter lines were constructed over the following decades, with the District line in the 1880s and the Central line in the early decades of the twentieth century. Electric power replaced steam power in the 1900s. In the 1920s, the different underground companies were amalgamated and nationalized under the London Transport Passengers’ Board.

  In the later twentieth century, however, the railways underwent a decline. In part, this was because of the increased competition from newer forms of transport, such as buses and cars. The latter became more prevalent as the century progressed. In 1923 there was a huge amalgamation of the hundreds of railway companies which had existed since the previous century into just four large concerns (London Midland and Scotland, Great Western, Southern and London and North Eastern). The Second World War wreaked havoc with the networks and in 1948 they were nationalized, becoming known as British Rail. At this time, there were about 19,000 miles of railway track, 5,000 stations and 1,000 tunnels, much of which would have been familiar to their Victorian forebears. Yet more swingeing change was to come. In the next two decades, thousands of lines of track were taken out of service, mostly after the Beeching Axe of 1963, which closed down many small stations. This led to a loss of identity and economic disruption in the affected areas, but also to the end of trains only carrying six people in a day. Diesel trains replaced steam wholly by the later 1960s. In the 1990s, the railways were controversially returned to private hands.

  Without wanting to sound like a spokesman for the railway companies, it is very, very unlikely that railway passengers will be murdered. Since the nineteenth century there have been less than 30 victims, excepting the underground bombings of 2005. Passengers are more likely to die from accidents, such as that at Harrow in 1952 (112 deaths) or that at Southall in 1997 (6 deaths). The worst single Underground accident was in 1975 when 42 people were killed when the train crashed into the barrier at Moorgate. Yet these figures pale in comparison to the thousands killed each year on Britain’s roads. As a previous writer on crime on railways has noted:

  statistics indicate that a person boarding a train which is not a football special is more likely to reach his destination unmurdered, not even molested, than if he had chosen some form of transport other than a bullet proof, bomb resistant, self catering, oxygen carrying automobile fitted with a carbon monoxide measuring gauge and driven by a nun.

  Another writer, one John Pendleton, in 1894, agreed, ‘on English railways the crime of murder has been rare’ pointing out that there had, to date, been 28 murders on French railways and only 4 on English trains (though there had been none in Germany).

  That having been said, train travellers are not immune from crime any more than travellers in any other form of transport are. Those on ships have risked pirates, and road travellers were once in danger from footpads and highwaymen. However, although the exploits of pirates and highwaymen have been glamorised and sanitised, those of train-board criminals have not, on the whole, been afforded such romanticizing. Perhaps this is because their crimes are all too recent and all too real and still currently dangerous, whereas the likes of the fictional Captain Jack Sparrow and the real life Dick Turpin are safely in the distant past, as far as Britons are concerned.

  The first Underground bombings, 1883–1885

  I heard an explosion something like the report of a cannon.

  It is unlikely that any readers of this book will have forgotten the terrible terrorist bombings on the London Underground on 7 July 2005, when three young Muslim men caused death and injury to hundreds of people. However, few if any among the media pointed out that this was not the first time that bombs had been used on the London Underground. The IRA rarely targeted the Underground, but in the late nineteenth century bombers chose this location for their attack.

  Until 1921, Ireland was ruled by Britain. This was resented by many Irish people. Violent attempts had been made to achieve independence in the late eighteenth century and at several times in the next century. In the years 1880–7 this took the form of a dynamite campaign in England and Scotland, with attacks being carried out in Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham and London. Some targeted prominent buildings, such as the Tower of London and the House of Parliament. Others were aimed at the railway network.

  The first bombs to go off in the Underground tunnels were heard on Tuesday 30 October 1883. One went off about 600 yards from Praed Street (since 1948 incorporated as part of Paddington) station on the Metropolitan line at 7.51 pm as the train was heading towards Edgware, and the other between Westminster station and Charing Cross on the District line, just a
fter 8 pm. In the former instance, there was a flash of white light, followed by a loud explosion. Those on the train were thrown off their feet and injured by glass. The second carriage to the last one suffered the most damage. Although the framework of the carriages was not badly damaged, the windows, door frames and outside panels were shattered. Nearby houses were said to have been shaken.

  One witness, Corporal Warren, said:

  All I remember of the explosion was a very bright flash immediately followed by a terrible report like that of a cannon. It was on the outside of the carriage. I was struck by something which knocked me insensible, and when the train arrived at the station I staggered across the platform. I remember nothing more, except that a soldier picked me up.

  William George, a fellow passenger, recalled:

  On Tuesday evening I was a passenger from Queen’s Road,Bayswater, to Gower Street [known as Euston Square since 1909]. The train was rather full. I was in the last carriage of the train. We passed along alright as far as Praed Street. Afterwards I heard an explosion something like the report of a cannon. I saw a flash, and the lights in our carriage went out suddenly. For one moment I thought it was caused by the lamp in our carriage, but the next moment I found myself scrambling among the other passengers. When I had collected myself I removed from my head a piece of glass about an inch and a half in length. I heard two reports – one a very sharp sound and the other a dull sound. I remembered no more.

  The second explosion occurred just as the Mansion House train was pulling into Charing Cross. This was less dangerous, with only lights and windows at the station being blown out. Volumes of black dust from the tunnel enveloped the platform, and at first a gas explosion was suspected. Telegraph lines were cut and trains had to be suspended pending investigations. Windows from the nearby St Stephen’s Club were also broken. Fortunately there were no trains in that part of the underground at that time. Mr Killingsworth Hedges, an engineer, remarked, ‘That the disaster was in no way due to anything connected with the trains is evident from the fact that at the time it occurred, there was no train in the section between Charing Cross and Westminster.’