Final Journey E-Book

Nicolas Wheatley

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 437

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This new history reveals the previously untold story of why and how trains have been used to transport the dead, enabling their burial in a place of significance to the bereaved. Profusely illustrated with many images, some never previously published, Nicolas Wheatley's work details how the mainline railways carried out this important yet often hidden work from the Victorian age to the 1980s, as well as how ceremonial funeral transport continues on heritage railways today. From royalty, aristocrats and other VIPs (including Sir Winston Churchill and the Unknown Warrior) to victims of accidents and ordinary people, Final Journey explores the way in which these people travelled for the last time by train before being laid to rest.

Leseprobe

To my daughtersLaura and Olivia.

First published 2020

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Nicolas Wheatley, 2020

The right of Nicolas Wheatley to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9635 8

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain byTJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Death and Railways

2. Funerals, Transport and Burials

3. Cemeteries and Their Rail Links, Actual or Planned

4. Taking the Fallen Heroes Home: Military Repatriations

5. Two Airship Tragedies: R101 and R38/ZR-2

6. Royal Funeral Trains

7. Sir Winston Churchill and His Extended Family

8. Other Known (And Unknown) People

9. Railway Technology: Vehicles and Equipment

10. Trams Used as Funeral Transport

11. Models and Drawings

12. Quirks and Curiosities

13. Ending and Continuation

Part 1: Ending on the Main Line

Part 2: Continuation on Heritage Railways

14. Conclusions

Epilogue

Gazetteer

Bibliography, Sources of Information and Further Reading

Notes

FOREWORD

This fascinating book is full of interesting historical facts concerning the manner in which the deceased through time were transported to their final resting place. Railways in particular played a prominent role in such events and I personally was involved in one such sombre movement. Operation ‘Hope Not’ was established in advance of the demise of Sir Winston Churchill and was known to but senior officials responsible for its overall execution. At Nine Elms depot, my driver, Alfred Hurley, and I were briefed by the Southern Region management on the part that we had been selected to perform. The funeral arrangements were precise and fitting for this ‘great man’. Our part, on the footplate of the ‘Battle of Britain’ locomotive bearing his name, was the last significant use of a steam locomotive to perform such a prominent role.

James (Jim) Lester – 70A

James (Jim) Lester was the then 22-year-old fireman on steam locomotive 34051 Winston Churchill that hauled the funeral train for Sir Winston Churchill from Waterloo to Long Handborough, Oxfordshire, on 30 January 1965. Further details of this event are contained in Chapter 7.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank an enormous number of people whose contributions have made this book possible. There are too many to name them all individually and the names of some the author either never knew or has unfortunately forgotten. However, the input of three people in particular has been crucial. The idea for this book developed over a period of time, following the author’s purchase of the then third edition of John Clarke’s book on the Brookwood Necropolis Railway. A visit to Brookwood Cemetery was made in November 2004 for the 150th anniversary celebrations of its opening and five years later another a visit followed, which happily involved a meeting with John when he kindly signed a copy of his book, by then in its fourth edition. Little did either of us know that this seminal meeting would one day lead to the production of this book. John’s considerable assistance along the way has been invaluable and much appreciated.

Critical to the book’s production has been the support and assistance provided by Dr Brian Parsons, whose knowledge of the history of funeral directors in Great Britain is unrivalled. He has most generously shared both his knowledge and his researches in the records of funeral directors, particularly on the sending of coffins by train, which has been invaluable. Without his numerous contributions, including the provision of many historic photographs, this book would not have been possible. The author also owes a huge debt of gratitude to Dr Helen Frisby, not only for sharing her extensive knowledge of Victorian funerals but also for her encouragement and support during the long processes of researching and writing this book.

Amongst the many others whose contributions (direct or indirect) must be acknowledged are, in no particular order: Dr Tony Walter, Dr John Troyer and Dr Kate Woodthorpe (Tuckwell), all from the University of Bath; Dr Julie Rugg, organiser of the annual Cemeteries Colloquium at the University of York; the many staff of the Search Engine at the National Railway Museum, York; James (Jim) Lester, fireman on Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral train; Colin Fenn, formerly of the Friends of West Norwood Cemetery; Robert Stephenson of the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery: several senior people in The Brookwood Cemetery Society; Brian Janes of the Colonel Stephens Museum, Tenterden, Kent; Roger T. Price of the Bluebell Railway; various members of The Pullman Society, in particular Terry Bye; Maxine Barton-Hawkins and many other people at the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway, where the author is a volunteer; the Great Western Trust, Didcot; John Brodribb of the South Devon Railway; Colin Marsden of Dawlish; Annette Everett, Business Manager and all her staff of the Railway Convalescent Home in Dawlish, where part of this book was written; Francis and Gill Crowther, friends of the author, whose support and encouragement has been much appreciated; the author’s late parents, Dr Bernard and Mrs Marion Wheatley, whose deaths provided the finances needed to carry out the research and writing for this book; and last, but by no means least, Amy Rigg, Commissioning Editor at The History Press, for so astutely recognising the potential in this book and arranging for it to be published, together with the staff at The History Press for their patience and assistance during its production. Any errors occurring in the book remain the responsibility of the author.

The author would also like to acknowledge the assistance of everyone who has helped with supplying any of the numerous photos used in this book, in particular Luci Gosling of the Mary Evans Picture Library, Colin Panter of PA Media, Justin Hobson of SSPL and Jane Skayman at Mortons Media. Many of the photographs are of historical events, so their quality is not always as high as desired. However, their inclusion is justified by their depiction of events relevant to the topic and sometimes by their rarity. The author is also most grateful to all those people who have generously allowed him to use photographs of their loved ones experiencing a final journey on a heritage (or private) railway. All reasonable efforts have been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain permissions to use the images and photographs in this book. However, if any have been missed then anyone whose rights or permissions have not been properly acknowledged should contact the author via the publishers and steps will be taken to correct any shortcomings in a future edition.

INTRODUCTION

The steam locomotive puffed gently as it moved slowly out of the station, sounding a short but mournful whistle, pulling the train with its special van containing the mortal remains of a very important person. As the train headed towards London on that November evening, many people stood by the lineside paying their respects to a person they thought they might have known, even though probably no one present had ever met them. Who was that person and when did this event take place?

The truth is that we shall never know whose remains were being transported in the special van. They were the remains of one of a million or so British people killed in what was known at the time as the Great War but has now become better known as the First World War. What we do know is that the person was a soldier from the British Army, whose remains had been selected very carefully so that his name was not known. He was therefore given a new identity as the Unknown Warrior, by which name he has been known to millions in the United Kingdom and worldwide ever since. Within Britain he represents all of those fallen in the Great War, so he might have been the husband, brother, son, sweetheart or other loved one of any of the people who stood by the lineside paying their respects as the train travelled to London on that November evening.

The event took place in 1920, two years after the signing of the Armistice that ended the fighting of the Great War, though the conflict itself did not officially finish until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919. It is the anniversary of the Armistice that is commemorated each 11 November rather than the signing of the treaty and this has been the case ever since 1919. The special van was carrying the remains of the Unknown Warrior to London on 10 November for burial in Westminster Abbey the following day. This was as part of the first major national commemoration of the ending of the Great War, a day of events that included the unveiling by King George V of the Cenotaph in Whitehall. A wooden temporary structure had been erected in 1919, but when the procession to the Abbey passed down Whitehall it stopped for the King to unveil the stone monument that is so familiar today.

The role of the special van in the train conveying the Unknown Warrior’s remains to London, and the procession taking his remains to the Abbey, provide an important illustration of the twin main themes of this book. The first is the functional role of railways in transporting the dead to their place of burial or at least to a station near to that place. The second theme is the way that the transportation of coffins by train is often part of the procession which forms an important part of the funeral ritual.

The special van used to transport the remains of the Unknown Warrior had been built by the South Eastern & Chatham Railway (SECR) at its Ashford (Kent) works, as the prototype of a new type of four-wheel luggage-carrying van. Painted umber with yellow lettering and given the number 132, it was originally known as the ‘Special Van’. It was specifically selected, when only a few weeks old, to perform its first duty of being used in May 1919 to transport the remains of Nurse Edith Cavell from Dover to London. She was being repatriated to England after having been executed by the Germans in occupied Belgium in October 1915. Nurse Cavell had been running a hospital caring for sick and injured soldiers and had assisted in the return to Britain of over 200 soldiers. Having been found guilty of what the Germans considered to be treasonable behaviour, she was executed by firing squad on 12 October 1915, thus becoming the most famous British woman to lose her life as a direct result of the Great War.

Her execution caused a major outcry internationally at the time and her repatriation when the Great War was over provided a focal point for the early days of remembrance and commemoration with which we are so conversant today. Such was the impact of this event, and the role of Van 132 as part of it, that the van itself became known as the ‘Cavell Van’. Indeed that name was later attached by generations of railwaymen to variations of the design of the four-wheel luggage van, which was produced in great numbers by the Southern Railway from 1923 and by British Railways until as late as 1951.

Remarkably, the original Cavell Van had been used in another high-profile repatriation only a few weeks after its solemn duties in the service of Nurse Cavell. In July 1919 it was used to transport the mortal remains of Captain Charles Fryatt on part of his final journey, on the section from Dover to London. Captain Fryatt was not a military man but was the master of a ship operated by the Great Eastern Railway during the Great War on the sea crossing from Harwich, Essex, to the Hook of Holland, in what was then neutral Netherlands. In brief, his claim to fame is that he was alleged to have rammed a German submarine whilst escaping from being captured by it. Unsurprisingly, the Germans took exception to this action and subsequently captured and executed Captain Fryatt, in July 1916.

The Prime Minister at the time, Herbert Asquith, described his execution as ‘murder’ and a massive outrage followed, both at home and internationally. Like Nurse Cavell before, he was regarded as a martyr and his repatriation to England, and subsequent burial in Dovercourt, near Harwich, was accompanied by considerable ceremony. Again, the SECR brought out the Cavell Van and used it for the Dover to London part of Captain Fryatt’s final journey. After a service in St Paul’s Cathedral and a road journey to Liverpool Street Station, he was taken by his former railway employers, the Great Eastern Railway (GER), by train to Dovercourt, Essex. That part of his final journey used the GER’s hearse van, No. 512, a six-wheeled vehicle that had been converted from a passenger carriage originally built in 1892. Coincidentally, that was the same hearse van that been used a few weeks earlier for Nurse Edith Cavell’s final journey from Liverpool Street Station to Norwich, where she was buried just outside the eastern end of the magnificent cathedral in that fine city.

Sadly, the Great Eastern Railway’s van 512 has not survived into preservation, though somewhat miraculously the original Cavell Van, the SECR’s Van 132, has survived. It is now restored and is on display as a memorial to Nurse Edith Cavell, Captain Charles Fryatt and the Unknown Warrior, usually located at Bodiam Station on the Kent & East Sussex Railway, though it has been displayed in other locations to commemorate specific events. In October 2015 it had been on display in Norwich for two weeks to commemorate the centenary of Nurse Cavell’s execution and in the summer of 2018 it spent several weeks on display at Arley Station on the Severn Valley Railway as part of that railway’s commemorations of wartime events. In late October 2018 the Cavell Van was displayed on the Harbour Arm in Folkestone in remembrance of when it was used to take the coffin for the Unknown Warrior to that port, so that it could be taken to France to collect the Warrior’s remains for repatriation to the UK. More recently, in July 2019 the Cavell Van spent two weeks in Harwich as part of the commemorations for the centenary of the repatriation of Captain Fryatt’s remains.

SECR Van 132 (later known as the Cavell Van) in ex-works condition as built at Ashford Works, 1919. (Courtesy of Brian Janes, Colonel Stephens Museum)

Another railway van that was used as a hearse to transport the remains of an even more famous person has also survived, equally miraculously, and is in the ownership of the Swanage Railway Trust. Having been under the care of the National Railway Museum, where it was on display initially in York from January 2015 and then later at the museum’s Locomotion branch in Shildon, it is now in the care of the One:One Collection based in the former Hornby factory warehouse in Margate, Kent. The van moved there in early September 2019, but the venue is not currently (January 2020) open to the public on a regular basis, though its owners hope to develop it as a visitor attraction in the future.

Funeral train of Sir Winston Churchill leaving Waterloo, 30 January 1965. (Photo from Chris Lade Archive, Courtesy of Nick Lade, via Terry Bye)

This van, known by its British Railways designation as S2464, is better remembered as the van in which the coffin containing the body of Sir Winston Churchill was transported on 30 January 1965 from Waterloo Station to Handborough in Oxfordshire. From that station he was taken by motor hearse for burial in the nearby churchyard at Bladon, close to Blenheim Palace where he had been born in 1874.

The three uses of the Cavell Van and Churchill’s funeral train are probably the most famous occasions when railways were used to transport the coffins of important but non-royal people. There were also several occasions when trains were used as part of important royal funerals, firstly for Queen Victoria in 1901, then for her son King Edward VII in 1910, followed by King George V in 1936 and finally King George VI in 1952. The funeral in 1979 of Earl Mountbatten should be added to that list, for although he was not a monarch he was related to the Royal Family and his funeral train, from Waterloo Station to Romsey, was the last time a private funeral train ran on the main line.

However, until British Rail stopped transporting coffins by train in 1988, the railway network had been used since its early days to carry the coffins of deceased ordinary people all over the UK, on their final journeys to a place of burial that had some significance to them or their loved ones. This book explores why that was done, how it was done by the railways (and sometimes by tramways), and provides more information about the use of trains in the funerals of the people already mentioned. It also takes a brief look at the lives of some of the many people already identified who had their final journeys by train, and many more are bound to be identified in the future.

There are examples of coffin transport that took place in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, with a couple of examples in the Isle of Man also included. Although the transport of coffins on the main line is no longer permitted, there are numerous occasions when heritage railways, and even a couple of miniature railways, have provided ceremonial final journeys for their respected volunteers or other people with significant links to the line. It is even possible to pay for a private funeral train on a narrow-gauge railway in Derbyshire, as will be described in Chapter 13.

The definition of a funeral train for the purposes of this book is one that is carrying a coffin, so trains (usually on heritage railways) on which a person’s ashes are placed into a steam locomotive’s firebox and blown through the chimney are excluded. Similarly, trains merely displaying a wreath in memory of a person who has died are also excluded. To record comprehensively either type of train would be an almost impossible task and is outside the scope of this book.

The story of funeral trains in the British Isles has never before been told in a comprehensive manner and there are some extraordinary tales to be recounted. Many of the people involved are famous names even now, such as the first Duke of Wellington – the ‘Iron Duke’ – (1852), George Hudson, ‘The Railway King’, (1871), Prime Minister William Gladstone (1898), Dr Thomas Barnardo (1905), Florence Nightingale (1910) and the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison (1913) to name but a very few. Others were famous in their day but are now largely and undeservedly forgotten, for example Britain’s first non-white circus proprietor, William Darby (1873) who under his stage name ‘Pablo Fanque’ is commemorated in a Beatles song on their ‘Sergeant Pepper’ album.1

Many others whose coffins were transported by train, with greater or lesser degrees of ceremony, include victims of accidents, such as those killed in the Salisbury train crash in 1906, the Quintinshill railway accident in 1915 and the victims of the R101 airship disaster in 1930, and indeed the R38 airship crash before that in 1921. However, there were also hundreds, indeed thousands, of other people whose coffins were transported by train, without great ceremony, simply to get them ‘home’ for burial in a place that was of significance to them or their loved ones.

Read on to find out more about these people and about some of the many others whose final journey was by train. How the railways undertook this solemn transport, what equipment was used, its legacy and some quirks and curiosities related to how coffins were transported are a few of the topics covered by this book. As a mixture of railway and social history, covering an aspect of the use of trains that has never previously been addressed in this manner, this unique book is not an academic study of either railway operations or funeral transport. However, it aims to provide an insight into an area of railway activity that was affected by, and in turn influenced, the development of funeral and burial practice.

Nevertheless, the book is not just about history because the ceremonial transport of coffins still occurs on some heritage railways and has occasionally taken place on a recreated tramway. There are even three examples of railway enthusiasts, one of them very well known, who were privileged enough to have their coffin ceremonially transported on their own private railway in the grounds of their estate. To find out who they were, read on!

1

DEATH AND RAILWAYS

Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that live must diePassing through nature to eternity.

Statement by the Queen, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

During the nineteenth century, railways changed the world. They changed how, and how far, people travelled, where they worked, how they worked, how they spent their recreational time, the food they ate and virtually all other aspects of the ways people went about their daily activities. In short, railways changed people’s lives, but what should not be overlooked is that railways also changed people’s experience of death.

This was a change not just because railway accidents were the cause of death for many people, but also because of what happened to their bodies after their deaths. In total, thousands of people were killed in countless accidents all over the United Kingdom, and it took many decades before safety measures that are now regarded as essential, such as proper signalling and continuous brakes on all coaches and wagons, were introduced. Often these changes were only introduced after a terrible accident, such as the ones at Abbots Ripton,1 in which fourteen people were killed in two collisions between three trains, and at Armagh,2 which left eighty people dead. Even after these changes train accidents still occurred, killing railway workers and passengers alike, with two notable accidents, at Quintinshill, near Gretna in Scotland, in 1915 and Harrow and Wealdstone in 1952, each resulting in over one hundred fatalities. The former was the UK’s worst-ever railway accident in terms of loss of life, with over 200 fatalities, mostly troops on their way to fight in Gallipoli during the Great War. The latter was the UK’s worst peacetime railway accident. It is perhaps no coincidence that each accident involved three trains, with a third train crashing into the wreckage of an initial collision between two trains, one of which was stationary.

The development of railways in Britain, from the opening in 1830 of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway,3 enabled people to travel further and faster than they could by horse alone or even by horse and stagecoach. The transformational impact of this on the life of the country cannot be underestimated. In the early nineteenth century this was characterised as ‘the annihilation of space and time’, whereby people could travel the same distance in a shorter time or a greater distance in the same amount of time. One writer on the history of railways4 discusses this concept in greater detail and there are many books and TV programmes than cover the general impact of railways on so many aspects of Victorian life. However, this book is the first general study of how death and burial were also affected by the development of railways.

By enabling people to travel, live and work away from their ‘home’ area, i.e. where they had been born or brought up, the spread of railways unwittingly meant that large numbers of people died away from a place with which they had a familial connection. Nevertheless this did not override a deep and enduring human desire to be laid to rest near to home, wherever that was. Often this was not necessarily a desire articulated by the deceased themselves, but was a wish on the part of their surviving loved ones, those responsible for organising the funeral and subsequent burial.

However, the railways also provided opportunities for bodies to be transported much greater distances than was possible by horse-drawn vehicles. This enabled bodies to be buried in a greater choice of places than merely in the churchyard nearest to where the person had died. In countless cases the availability of train services enabled bodies to be transported ‘home’, for example to a family burial plot5 or for burial in a cemetery where being interred conferred or reinforced some social status, e.g. Kensal Green in west London, West Norwood in south London, or later in Brookwood near Woking. Sometimes the place of burial conferred or reinforced an even greater status, on a national scale, for example being buried in Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s Cathedral, both in London.

Nowadays, in the twenty-first century, when air travel has enabled people to journey even further from home for work, holidays or just for adventure, there is still a desire by the relatives of those dying abroad to repatriate their bodies for burial or cremation in the UK. In effect this is just a modern way, using the currently available technology, of dealing with the same issue that railways dealt with, from their early days until motor hearses and cremation diminished and then terminated the role that railways played in the transportation of the dead.

The link between railways and death has a very long history, for it pre-dates even the tragic and well publicised accident that befell William Huskisson MP6 (1770–1830) at the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in September 1830. Huskisson was a senior political figure, having been President of the Board of Trade (1823–27) and Leader of the House of Commons (1827–28), though he did not hold any government office at the time of his death. Years earlier an accident took place on the Middleton Railway near Leeds, when a 13-year-old boy named John Bruce was reported7 to be the first member of the public killed by a steam locomotive, whilst running along the tracks. In February 1813 The Leeds Mercury reported the accident, saying it ‘should be a warning to others’.

Sadly that warning was not heeded by William Huskisson, who disregarded instructions from the railway company not to disembark from the train in which he was travelling. Having stepped down from his train, apparently to exchange greetings with the then Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, he could not get back into his carriage in time to avoid being knocked down and injured, ultimately fatally, by the pioneer locomotive Rocket, which was being driven on the parallel track by the famous railway engineer Joseph Locke. One cause of this accident was that Rocket had no brakes, a deficiency which persisted in locomotive design and construction for several decades, with the similar lack of brakes on coaches also being the cause of many later fatal accidents.

Although William Huskisson has gone down in railway history as being the first passenger to be killed in a train accident, he was not the first person whose coffin was transported by train. After the accident he was transported at the then unprecedented speed of 30mph to the home of a local vicar in Eccles where he died later that same day. His body was taken by horse-drawn hearse back to Liverpool, where he was buried in St James’s Cemetery. Having been the Member of Parliament for Chichester, Sussex, from 1812 to 1823, a large statue of him dressed as a Roman senator was later erected in Chichester Cathedral.

Curiously, coffin transport by train later features in relation to three elements of this story. After his death in 1852 at Walmer Castle, where he had an official residence as Warden of the Cinque Ports, the Duke of Wellington’s body was transported by train from Deal station to London. There he was given a lavish State funeral followed by burial in St Paul’s Cathedral. Rocket’s driver at the time of Huskisson’s accident, Joseph Locke, died in 1860 at Moffat in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and his body was returned to England by train to allow his burial in Kensal Green Cemetery in west London. Finally in relation to this story, Chichester Cathedral became the last resting place of Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, whose body was taken to Chichester by train from London in 1902. The Prince was not a member of the British royal family, though he was the nephew of Queen Adelaide, consort and later widow of King William IV. The Prince’s coffin was accompanied on his final journey by the Prince of Wales, later King George V, whose own coffin was transported by train from Paddington to Windsor after his death in 1936.

The early link between railways and death that was created by William Huskisson’s accident did not put people off travelling by train and soon railways were being built all over the country. Although initially developed to carry freight, receipts from which exceeded revenue from passengers until well into the twentieth century, Victorian people delighted in travelling by train, with one famous actress and later writer of the time, Fanny Kemble (1809–93), describing her experience of train travel on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830 as being ‘like flying’, saying she ‘had a perfect sense of security, and not the slightest fear’. A contemporary Whig politician, Thomas Creevey (1768–1838), who became famous posthumously for the publication in 1903 of his ‘Creevey Diaries’, had spoken in similar terms in 1829. He described a trip on Stephenson’s Rocket as ‘it is really flying’ though he expressed a concern that ‘it is impossible to divest yourself of the notion of instant death to all upon the least accident happening.’8 Considering the fatal encounter between Rocket and William Huskisson the following year, this concern seems remarkably prescient.

However, as people were to discover when powered aviation became a reality for humans after the first flight by the Wright Brothers in 1903, the technology of the early forms of these mechanised transports – trains and aircraft – was prone to failure and accidents, often fatal. Some of the earliest recorded fatalities involved railway workers, for example Thomas Port, who died in August 1838. He was a guard on the London & Birmingham Railway, which had been extended from London to Bletchley in June 1838 and was officially opened in September 1838. Port’s job involved passing along the outside of the train’s carriages, which in those days did not have internal corridors, to check passengers’ tickets. With an almost tragic degree of inevitability, he fell from a moving train near Harrow in north-west London and was severely injured as the train passed over him. His father, from Staffordshire, touchingly arranged for his grave, in the churchyard of nearby Harrow-on-the Hill, to be marked with a headstone that records in some detail the manner of his death. The writing on the headstone is worth setting out, as it shows the rather florid, even gruesome, language used in early Victorian descriptions of accidents.

THOMAS PORT’S HEADSTONE – Harrow-on-the Hill, London. (Unknown author, 1838)

TO THE MEMORY OF

THOMAS PORT

SON OF JOHN PORT OF BURTON UPON TRENT

IN THE COUNTY OF STAFFORD

HAT MANUFACTURER

WHO NEAR THIS TOWN HAD BOTH HIS LEGS

SEVERED FROM HIS BODY BY THE RAILWAY TRAIN

WITH THE GREATEST FORTITUDE

HE BORE A SECOND AMPUTATION BY THE SURGEONS

AND DIED FROM LOSS OF BLOOD

AUGUST 7TH, 1838 AGED 33 YEARS

Bright rose the morn and vig’rous’ rose poor Port

Gay on the train he used his wonted sport.

Ere noon arrived his mangled form they bore,

With pain distorted and o’erwhelmed with gore:

When evening came to close the fatal day,

A mutilated corpse the sufferer lay.

History has been enriched by John Port’s ability to memorialise his son in this way, though it is noticeable that the father has taken the opportunity to credit himself on the headstone almost as prominently as his son’s name. Sadly, Thomas Port’s widow and two children do not receive a mention on the headstone, as is often the case with memorials to people killed in accidents.

Another example of a fatal accident in the early days of the railways took place at Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, on the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway on 10 November 1840. A locomotive named Surprise (previously named Victoria but later renamed Eclipse after a new boiler was fitted)9 was being assessed for purchase when its boiler exploded, no doubt causing both consternation and surprise, as well as several injuries. More seriously, it also caused the deaths of Thomas Scaife and Joseph Rutherford, respectively the driver and fireman of the locomotive, though in the language of the time they were both described as ‘engineer’. They were buried in the nearby churchyard of St John the Baptist church, and two adjacent headstones were erected in 1841 and 1842. The one for Joseph Rutherford was ‘erected by his affectionate widow’ in 1841 and, clearly with a degree of co-ordination, a headstone of very similar design for Thomas Scaife was erected ‘at the joint expence [sic] of his fellow workmen’ in 1842.

Curiously, the locomotive depicted on the headstones is not Surprise, a British-built 0-2-2 well-tank design, as perhaps this would have perpetuated bad memories of the accident. Instead the locomotive shown in mirror image on the headstones is an American-built Norris 2-4-0 design that was only introduced to the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway in 1842. In trials in the US the design had proved itself capable of hauling trains up steep inclines, so it was suitable for hauling trains up the steep Lickey Incline that runs northwards from Bromsgrove. The headstones are made of soft sandstone, which is prone to deterioration, but given their historic value they have been restored several times since they were erected. A photo taken soon after a more recent restoration appears above, but it is worth setting out the wording of these wonderful memorials to the lives lost in the early days of unsafe railway technology.

Headstones in St John’s churchyard, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, to victims of a boiler explosion in 1840. (© Nicolas Wheatley)

BROMSGROVE HEADSTONE POEMS (unknown authors, 1840)

Thomas Scaife’s headstone reads:

SACRED

TO THE MEMORY OF THOMAS SCAIFE.

Late an Engineer on the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway

Who lost his life at Bromsgrove Station by the Explosion of

An Engine Boiler on Tuesday the 10th of November 1840.

He was 28 Years of Age, highly esteemed by his fellow workmen

For his many amiable qualities, and his Death will long be lamented

By all those who had the pleasure of his acquaintance.

The following lines were composed by an unknown Friend

As a Memento of the worthiness of the Deceased.

My engine now is cold and still.

No water does my boiler fill:

My coke affords its flames no more

My days of usefulness are o’er

My wheels deny their note speed.

No more my guiding hands they heed.

My whistle too, has lost its tone.

My valves are now thrown open wide.

My flanges all refuse to guide.

My clacks also once so strong

Refuse to aid the busy throng

No more I feel each urging breath

My steam is now condens’d in death

Life’s railway’s o’er each station past.

In death I’m stopped and rest at last.

Farewell dear friends and cease to weep.

In Christ I’m SAFE, in Him I sleep.

Joseph Rutherford’s headstone reads:

SACRED

TO THE MEMORY OF

JOSEPH RUTHERFORD

LATE ENGINEER TO THE BIRMINGHAM AND GLOUCESTER

RAILWAY COMPANY

Who died Nov 11th 1840 Aged 32 Years

Oh! Reader stay, and cast an eye

Upon this Grave wherein I lie

For cruel Death has challenged me.

And soon alas will call on thee:

Repent in time, make no delay

For Christ will call you all away.

My time was spent like a day in sun.

Beyond all cure my glass is run.

It will be noted that the deaths of Thomas Port, Thomas Scaife and Joseph Rutherford were all followed by burial in a nearby churchyard. It is not clear where their home towns or villages were, but the earliest identified (so far) transport of a coffin by train was in 1840, from London to Derby. This will be covered in greater detail in Chapter 2.

It was not only railway workers who lost their lives in train accidents in the early days. Shortly before 7.00 a.m. on 24 December 1841, an accident occurred in Sonning Cutting near Reading when a heavily laden luggage (goods) train ran into a blockage caused by an embankment which had slipped on to the track a few hours earlier. There were three open waggons carrying thirty-eight passengers, described as being ‘chiefly of the poorer class’, coupled between the tender of the locomotive and the following luggage waggons. The accident was reported in The Times newspaper on Christmas Day under the headline ‘Frightful Accident on Great Western Railway’. Altogether nine people were killed and the accident was widely reported at the time. An inquest into the deaths of the eight people killed at the scene was held within only a few days, but one passenger died six days after the accident, so another inquest was held, giving the story added coverage in the press and no doubt impressing upon the minds of early Victorians that railways could be dangerous. This was the first major accident on the developing railway network at the time and was a rare mass casualty event on the Great Western Railway, which later generally had a safety record that was better than many other railway companies.

Another accident that would have alarmed early Victorian railway travellers occurred not in Britain but outside Paris, France, in May 1842, though it was widely reported in the UK and across Europe. A heavily laden train was carrying people who had been at celebrations at the Palace of Versailles marking King Louis Philippe’s saint day back to Paris. An axle on the leading of two locomotives broke, causing a derailment. This resulted in the fire being spilled from the engine and when the rest of the train passed over the initial wreckage the carriages caught fire. The continental practice at the time was to lock the doors from the outside and many people were thus trapped inside the burning carriages. The fire was so intense that the number of casualties could not be definitively stated, but estimates of the number of deaths vary from 52 to 200 and it was the world’s worst railway accident at the time.

It was not surprising therefore that Victorian travellers developed a wariness, if not a fear, of train travel, though that did not put them off travelling in ever greater numbers. Advice was provided to people on how to use trains, for example in the ‘Handy Guide to Railway Travel’, which was published in 1862 and contained a chapter entitled ‘how to act in cases of threatened accidents’. This book was reprinted in facsimile form in 2010, with a cartoon on the cover that was first published in the popular satirical Punch magazine, in 1852, with the title Railway Undertaking. This shows an undertaker offering his business card to a nervous-looking traveller, thus reinforcing any fears of an accident befalling him that the traveller may have already had.

For reasons that probably need further research, excursion trains feature prominently in major accidents throughout the nineteenth century. In 1870 an excursion train hit a wagon that had derailed when its axle broke, resulting in sixteen deaths in the ensuing accident near Newark, Lincolnshire. This led to another popular magazine of the time, Tomahawk, publishing on 9 July 1870 a cartoon called Waiting for the Excursion! showing a skeleton dressed as a railway worker holding a lamp at a darkened station whilst a train approaches from the distance. The skeleton appears to be holding a lever for some points visible on the track, perhaps intending to derail the excursion train thereby causing some casualties.

Cartoon from Punch, 1852, Vol XXIII. An undertaker offers a puzzled traveller a business card: a comment on the dubious safety of rail travel. (Mary Evans Picture Library, 10724739)

Only four years later, on Christmas Eve 1874, the Great Western Railway (GWR) suffered its worst ever accident in terms of loss of life, though strangely this accident is not mentioned in some histories of the GWR. No fewer than thirty-four people lost their lives when a part of a heavily laden train bound for Birkenhead, via Birmingham Snow Hill, taking many people home for Christmas derailed at Hampton Gay, near Shipton-on-Cherwell, north of Oxford. A metal tyre had broken on the wheel of an old carriage that had been added to the scheduled service to accommodate the extra travellers. By an unfortunate twist of fate the derailment took place on an embankment next to where the railway crossed the River Cherwell and the Oxford and Birmingham canal. Although the derailed carriage crossed the river bridge, it plunged down the embankment, taking some of the other carriages with it, one of which fell into the canal. Many of the dead were taken to the paper store of nearby Hampton Gay mill, but some of the injured were transported by train back to Oxford. Sadly three died on the way and their bodies were kept in the second-class waiting room at Oxford station until the inquest was held a few days later. Afterwards many corpses were taken by train back to their home communities in the north, enabling them to complete their final journey, and only one victim, Benjamin Taylor from Wolverhampton, is buried in the churchyard of St Giles, Hampton Gay.

There were many other serious railway accidents in mid-Victorian times, including Clayton Tunnel (1861, twenty-three dead), Thorpe (Norwich), (1874, twenty-five dead), Abbots Ripton (1876, fourteen dead) and the Tay Bridge disaster (1879, estimated seventy-five dead) to name just a few of the well-known worst ones. Worse than any of these, however, was the Armagh accident in 1889, in what is now Northern Ireland, when no fewer than eighty people were killed, many of them children on a Sunday school outing. Another accident occurred in June 1897 to an excursion train returning from Barmouth, on the mid-Welsh coast, to Royton, near Oldham in Lancashire. On a stretch of line near Welshampton, in North Wales, the train derailed initially causing nine fatalities, whose remains were returned home by train the following day. A further two people died in hospital and their remains were probably sent back home by train later. Although only the last two of these accidents specifically involved excursion trains, it is not surprising that there was a fear of railway travel amongst some Victorian people.

Indeed, even Queen Victoria herself, who first travelled by train from Slough in 1842, to go back to London after staying at Windsor, was still wary of trains thirty years later. On 3 October 1873 she is recorded10 as having written to her least favourite Prime Minister11 stating:

The Queen must again bring most seriously & earnestly before Mr Gladstone & the Cabinet the very alarming and serious state of the Railways. Every day almost something occurs & every body trembles for their friends & for every one’s life … There must be fewer Trains, - the speed must be lessened to enable them to be stopped easily in case of danger & they must keep their time.

Once again Punch was able to feed into these fears with a cartoon showing passengers queuing to buy tickets for an excursion train which are being sold by a skeleton dressed as a railway worker. Taking its title from a notice on the side of the ticket office wall – ‘There and Back’ – the cartoon is entitled There and (Not) Back.

Despite this, the railway historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch opines that ‘the ever present fear of a potential disaster remained, however, only until the railroad had become part of normal everyday life. By the time Western Europe had culturally and psychically assimilated the railroad, that is, by the mid-19th century, these anxieties had vanished.’12 However, this view is not borne out on the evidence of Punch’s cartoon published in September 1878.

Part of the problem lay with the attitude of the railway companies themselves, which were slow to adopt and implement safety systems. The high (or low) point of this attitude was stated in chilling terms by the response from Frederick Slight, the Secretary of the London Brighton & South Coast Railway (LB&SC) to the report by Captain Tyler of the Board of Trade13 following his investigation into the Clayton Tunnel accident. He had recommended improved signalling and the introduction of an absolute block system, whereby trains would not permitted to enter a section of line until it had been confirmed by telegraphic means that any preceding train had cleared that section. The response was that:

Cartoon from Punch, 1878. Rail Accident Risk/There and (not) Back. A satirical comment on the remarkably high accident rate of excursion trains. (Mary Evans Picture Library, 10091754)

my board feel bound to state frankly that they have not seen reason to alter their views which they have so long entertained on this subject and they still fear that the telegraphic system of working recommended by the Board of Trade will, by transferring much of the responsibility from the engine drivers, augment rather than diminish the risk of accident. Indeed they think it is open to grave doubt whether the circumstances of the serious collision in question do not, when fairly considered, tend to prove that the increasing practice of multiplying signals, and thus lessening the responsibility of the engine driver who is in charge of the motive power, and whose own life is at stake, has not resulted in reducing rather than increasing the safety of railway locomotion.14

The railway company were clearly of the view that the responsibility for safety should rest with the drivers, whose lives were at stake, rather than fall on the railway company to provide a safe form of operating, requiring more signalling. Thankfully this attitude did not prevail and the LB&SCR did agree to give the block system a ‘fair trial’ on part of their line.

Another aspect of this problem was the way that railway employees – ‘servants’ in the language of the time – were forced to work long hours, which could result in compromises to safety. Shifts of more than twelve hours were commonplace and being on duty for many more hours than that was not unusual, even in safety-critical roles such as signalling and driving. This sometimes led to serious accidents such as at Thirsk, North Riding of Yorkshire (1892, ten dead, signalman was exhausted due to death in family) and Eastleigh (1890, driver asleep, see below). Eventually this led to strikes in the early 1900s and the introduction of shorter working hours, but by then several accidents had taken place in which fatigue was determined to be a factor.

One of these was an accident at Eastleigh in 1890 when the driver and fireman are thought to have fallen asleep or nearly so. This led to yet another cartoon in Punch, this time depicting the fate of the driver, entitled Death and his Brother Sleep. The cartoon shows the driver slumped on the floor of the locomotive whilst a ghostly shrouded figure (Death) is in charge of the train. It was produced by no less a person than Sir John Tenniel, perhaps now more famous for his illustrations of the Alice in Wonderland stories by Lewis Carroll than for his cartoons for Punch, though he drew more than 2,000 cartoons for Punch over a fifty-year period as its principal political cartoonist.

Along with this cartoon Punch published a hard-hitting poem questioning who was in charge of a train when the driver had fallen asleep through exhaustion, concluding that ‘Death is in charge of the clattering train’.

Cartoon from Punch, 1890. Death and his Brother Sleep. A ghostly shrouded figure haunts a collapsed train driver whilst Death drives the train. (Mary Evans Picture Library, 13048074)

DEATH AND HIS BROTHER SLEEP by ‘Queen Mab’. (From PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI, 4 October, 1890)

(Major Marindin, in his Report to the Board of Trade on the railway collision at Eastleigh, attributes it to the engine-driver and stoker having ‘failed to keep a proper look-out’. His opinion is, that ‘both men were asleep or nearly so’ owing to having been in duty for sixteen hours and a-half. ‘He expresses himself in very strong terms on the great danger to the public of working engine-drivers and firemen for too great a number of hours’ – Daily Chronicle)

Who is in charge of the clattering train?

The axles creak, and the couplings strain.

Ten minutes behind at the Junction. Yes!

And we’re twenty now to the bad – no less!

We must make it up on our flight to town.

Clatter and crash! That’s the last train down

Flashing by with a steamy trail.

Pile on the fuel! We must not fail.

At every mile we a minute must gain!

Who is in charge of the clattering train?

Why, flesh and blood, as a matter of course!

You may talk of iron, and prate of force:

But, after all and do what you can,

The best -and cheapest- machine is Man!

Wealth knows it well, and the hucksters feel

‘Tis safer to trust them to sinew than steel.

With a bit of brain, and a conscience, behind,

Muscle works better than steam or wind.

Better, and longer, and harder all round:

And cheap, so cheap! Men superabound

Men stalwart, vigilant, patient, bold;

The stokehole’s heat and the crow’s-nest cold,

The choking dust of the noisome mine,

The northern blast o’er the beating brine,

With dogged valour they coolly brave;

So on rattling rail, or on wind-scourged wave,

At engine lever, at furnace front,

Or steersman’s wheel, they must bear the brunt

Of lonely vigil or lengthened strain.

Man is in charge of the clattering train!

Man, in the shape of a modest chap

In fustian trousers and greasy cap;

A trifle stolid, and something gruff,

Yet, though unpolished, of sturdy stuff,

With grave grey eyes, and a knitted brow,

The glare of sun and the gleam of snow

Those eyes have stared on this many a year.

The crow’s feet gather in mazes queer

About their corners most apt to choke

With grime of fuel and fume of smoke.

Little to tickle the artist taste-

An oil-can, a fist-full of “cotton waste”,

The lever’s click and the furnace gleam,

And the mingled odour of oil and steam;

These are the matters that fill the brain

Of the Man in charge of the clattering train.

Only a Man, but away at his back,

In a dozen cars, on the steely track,

A hundred passengers place their trust

In this fellow of fustian, grease, and dust.

They cheerily chat, or they calmly sleep,

Sure that the driver his watch will keep

On the night-dark track, that he will not fail.

So the thud, thud, thud of wheel upon rail

The hiss of steam-spurts athwart the dark.

Lull them into confident drowsiness. Hark!

What is that sound? ‘Tis the stertorous breath

Of a slumbering man-and it smacks of death!

Full sixteen hours of continuous toil

Midst the fume of sulphur, the reek of oil,

Have told their tale on the man’s tired brain,

And Death is in charge of the clattering train!

Sleep - Death’s brother, as poets deem,

Stealeth soft to his side; a dream

Of home and rest on his spirit creeps,

That wearied man, as his engine leaps,

Throbbing, swaying along the line;

Those poppy fingers his head incline

Lower, lower in slumber’s trance;

The shadows fleet, and the gas-gleams dance

Faster, faster in mazy flight.

As the engine flashes across the night.

Mortal muscle and human nerve

Cheap to purchase, and stout to serve

Strained too fiercely will faint and swerve.

Over-weighted, and underpaid,

This human tool of exploiting Trade,

Though tougher than leather, tenser than steel,

Fails at last for his senses reel,

His nerves collapse, and, with sleep-sealed eyes,

Prone and helpless a log he lies!

A hundred hearts beat placidly on,

Unwitting they that their warder’s gone;

A hundred lips are babbling blithe,

Some seconds hence they in pain may writhe,

For the pace is hot, and the points are near,

And Sleep hath deadened the driver’s ear;

And signals flash through the night in vain,

Death is in charge of the clattering train!