The Railways Page 19
Precautions of a physical nature were not so tidily arranged. The practice of bodily protection against accident never took off; the ‘inflated railway caps’ listed in the Great Exhibition Catalogue were probably meant for comfort rather than security (and what can they have looked like?). The idea was spoofed by Punch in 1876 with a cartoon showing two travellers trussed up in grossly padded safety outfits (‘Patent First-Class Costume for the Collision Season’), like fat-suits from a theatrical wardrobe. As often in Punch, the image was topical: this issue is dated three days after the Radstock collision on the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway, then a hard-up and exceptionally badly run line (fifteen dead).
Other, less drastic measures could be taken. Anyone who thought about the matter could work out that neither the very front nor the very back of the train was a promising place in which to sit out a collision (‘Never heard of a middle carriage of a train getting smashed up, to speak of,’ someone says in F. E. Anstey’s Vice Versa); indeed, by the end of the century it was common to find the foremost compartment of the train locked out of use. In the event of a collision, the Railway Traveller’s Handy Book pointed out the advantage of sitting opposite an unoccupied, well-upholstered first-class seat – class distinctions even in catastrophe. The book also noted that hard, sharp-brimmed hats had inflicted ‘severe and fatal wounds’ on their own wearers in cases of accident, and should therefore be taken off when in motion. Other advice, such as the exact posture to be adopted when jumping from an overturning carriage, presumed a greater presence of mind than most travellers would have been able to muster. More helpfully, the book pointed out that some accidents were preceded by ‘a kind of bouncing or leaping of the train’, by way of forewarning.
This was the experience of Augustus Hare (1834–1903), the biographer, memoirist and travel writer, during a boyhood journey on the Great Western on 17 June 1845. Hare’s party seem to have been using one of the subdivided compartments of the company’s broad-gauge carriages, as described in Chapter 2. As the train approached Slough, his little cousin Lucebella asked to be held up to see if the flag was flying above Windsor Castle.
At that moment there was a frightful crash, and the carriage dashed violently from side to side. In an instant the dust was so intense that all became pitch darkness. ‘For God’s sake put up your feet and press backwards; I’ve been in this before,’ cried Lord S., and we did so. In the other compartment all the inmates were thrown violently on the floor, and jerked upwards with every lurch of the train. If the darkness cleared for an instant, I saw Lea’s set teeth and livid face opposite [Mary Lea, Augustus’s nurse] … After what seemed an endless time, the train suddenly stopped with a crash … Instantly a number of men surrounded the carriage. ‘There is not an instant to lose, another train is upon you, they will not be able to stop it,’ – and we were all dragged out and up the steep bank of the railway cutting.
Hare’s memory of receiving help as soon as the train stopped appears to corroborate The Times’s report that the guards travelling on the outside of the train escaped serious harm. The paper also noted that the uninjured passengers included the Great Western’s own chief engineer Mr Brunel and his traffic superintendent Seymour Clarke. There were no fatalities, nor was the derailment thought worth mention in the Great Western’s official history. The same is true of biographies of Brunel, whose crowded life included closer brushes with death: tumbling into an uncovered water tank (1827), almost drowning when the Thames Tunnel excavations flooded (1828), falling from a fire-damaged ladder into the engine room of the burning SS Great Western (1838), swallowing a sovereign while performing a conjuring trick, then undergoing a tracheotomy before it could be got out (1843). A non-fatal derailment was small beer.
It is striking too that ‘Lord S.’ (William Thomas Eardley-Twisleton-Fiennes, 9th Baron Saye and Sele) had already endured a railway accident, and knew how to brace his body rather as modern airline passengers are instructed to do. For the roll-call of deadly accidents was shadowed by a much longer list of Slough-style mishaps, which in turn shaded into the daily fusillade of jolts, bangs and shocks inflicted when trains ran less smoothly than they should. The thousands who were caught up in accidents large or small would each have had a tale to tell; in addition, every press report generated its own ripples of anxiety. The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book could only caution against unnecessary self-vexation by thoughts of catastrophe. The book also pointed out that pestering the guard with nervous questions might bring only ‘ambiguous and evasive replies’ – possibly making matters worse.
Those nervous of railway travel included the sovereign herself. The intrepid Albert had taken a train at the earliest opportunity, travelling up to London from Slough on the Great Western on 14 November 1839, at the end of his visit to Windsor to initiate the royal courtship. Eager for the full royal warrant, the GWR built a special carriage with furnishings and decorations à la Louis quatorze in 1840, the year of the royal wedding. Albert used this vehicle for further travels, as did Victoria’s widowed aunt Queen Adelaide. Finally, Albert persuaded his young queen to follow his example, and she took to the rails from Slough to London on 11 June 1842. This endorsement was enormously important; now the court would travel by train too.
Thereafter railways became a routine part of Victoria’s life, allowing her to write and conduct business while in motion, and permitting a measure of public display at stations and along the line when the carriage blinds were raised. After Albert’s death her progresses became more regular, and tens of thousands of miles were traversed on long-distance runs between Windsor, Deeside (for Balmoral) and Gosport (for sailing to Osborne). But the Queen remained anxious about speed, and a limit of 40 mph was supposed to apply throughout – a rule reminiscent of her neurotic horror of overheated rooms, for which fifteen degrees Celsius was the upper limit. When Victoria suspected that the train was going too fast, she made her feelings known. (Things changed as soon as the reign was over: Victoria’s funeral train from Gosport ran very smartly, so much so that her grandson the Kaiser is reported to have sent an equerry to congratulate the driver of the purple-draped locomotive on arrival at London.) In other words, like many ordinary travellers, she never quite lost her mistrust of the railways. Unlike them, she also had the option of writing letters in the following vein – sent from Balmoral to her least favourite prime minister on 3 October 1873 – with the expectation of receiving an unusually considered reply:
The Queen must again bring most seriously & earnestly before Mr Gladstone & the Cabinet the vy 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.
Even taking up a novel for distraction risked further shocks. Death in a railway accident, or under the wheels of a train, was a plot device too useful to waste, lying in wait as a nasty surprise for the susceptible reader in works by Dickens, Trollope, Gissing, Wilkie Collins, Mrs Humphry Ward, Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Elizabeth Braddon (‘… masses of shattered woodwork and iron heaped in direful confusion upon the blood-stained snow’, etc.; Henry Dunbar, 1864). Not even Lewis Carroll’s Alice escaped: her railway journey in Through the Looking-Glass dissolves in fright and confusion when the engine and carriage rear up to jump a brook.
Yet the striking fact remains that those killed while travelling on Britain’s railways before 1914 included nobody of particular celebrity. Huskisson remained the star name on a thoroughly humdrum bill of mortality. A list of notable victims from later accidents illustrates the point. Among the titled classes, no dukes, marquesses, earls or viscounts, only an Irish peer, the 7th Baron Farnham (1868, Abergele, collision and fire), with Sir Nicholas Chinnery, 3rd Baronet, and his lady (the same), and also Sir John Anson, 2nd Baronet (1873, Wigan, derailment). Among the clergy, Archdeacon Freeman of Exeter (1875), William Cureton, canon of
Westminster (1868), the Rev. Theodosius Hathaway, minister of the Floating Church at Greenwich (ditto), and the clerical headmasters of Horncastle and Lough-borough grammar schools (1854 and 1862 respectively); but no archbishop or bishop, or even so much as a dean. Among the professions, Judge William Boteler, ‘foremost authority of his day on the Law of Tithe’ (1845), Joseph Carpue, surgeon and anatomist (1846), Thomas Grainger, railway engineer (1852), William Baly, epidemiologist and Physician Extraordinary to Queen Victoria (derailment at Wimbledon, 1861). Among figures from the arts, Robert Brough ARSA, painter of promise, a follower of John Singer Sargent (1905, Cudworth, collision). Among the upper business classes, James Gibbs, one of the Great Western’s own directors, on his way to a board meeting (derailment, 1853), Charles Mitchell, publisher of the first British press directory (1859), and Henry Hoare, banker (Great Eastern Railway, 1866) – though Hoare brought mortal injury on himself, leaning too far out of the window as the train emerged from the Audley End Tunnel.
It is no disrespect to the memory of the dead, or to their sufferings before the end, to point out that these names have not made enduringly large claims on the attention of posterity. Even at the time, it is unlikely that many outside their immediate circles knew who they were – though the death of one of her physicians on a railway journey cannot have helped Queen Victoria’s nerves. And even this list is padded out with those who died from lingering injuries, some of whom – Henry Hoare was one – survived for more than a year after injury, thus relieving the railways from legal liability for their deaths.
One famous name has so far been omitted. He was not native-born, nor did he meet his end in Britain, but in a marshalling yard in Canada. Nor was he even human. This was Jumbo the mighty bull elephant, born in the Sudan and killed by a locomotive shunting at St Thomas, Ontario in 1885, after the management at London Zoo had sold him on to Phineas T. Barnum’s travelling show. Even Huskisson is now remembered above all for the manner of his death, but Jumbo is remembered for being Jumbo, which in a way is a sign of greater celebrity.
It could have been very different. At the end of Our Mutual Friend (1865), Dickens supplied his readers with a ‘Postscript, in lieu of a preface’, telling of his escape from a ‘terribly destructive accident’ on the South Eastern Railway on 9 June of that year. He had with him part of the manuscript of the novel, which was retrieved from his carriage, ‘soiled, but otherwise unhurt’, once he had done what he could to help others. ‘I remember with devout thankfulness than I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever than I was then.’
This was no exaggeration: of Dickens’s fellow passengers on the 2.38 p.m. boat train from Folkestone, ten failed to survive that day. The accident happened at a low viaduct at Staplehurst in Kent, which was undergoing repairs. These required the removal of the rails at the eastern end, so that the train came off the track just as it began to cross the viaduct. The locomotive and the first two carriages came safely to a halt, but the following seven carriages overturned into the little valley some ten feet below. The novelist was in the last carriage that stayed on the bridge.
The Staplehurst accident came about through a fatal conjunction of lax working practices and simple human error. Before the construction of deep-water harbours, the Channel boat trains ran on flexible schedules determined by the tides. On the day in question the foreman of the repair gang had looked up the wrong page of the timetable and was not expecting the train until two hours later. His mistake in itself should not have caused a crash; the rulebook also required a man with a red flag to be posted 1,000 yards from the obstruction, as well as the placing of fog signals (small detonators, exploded by the wheels of the train) by way of extra warning. But on this occasion the flagman had walked barely more than half the correct distance, which in turn gave the driver only enough time to halve his estimated approaching speed of 50 mph. Even then, all might have been well had the train guards heard his warning whistle and applied the carriage brakes; but they did not.
Dickens’s response was heroic. The derailed carriage went onwards for some distance, ‘beating the ground as the car of a half emptied balloon might’, before tilting over. Finding himself unharmed, he asked his companions to stay calm and made his way out of the window, uncertain at first whether the carriage might topple over to join the others. He next saw two guards running distractedly up and down on the bridge and asked them if they recognised him (‘We know you very well, Mr Dickens’). They supplied him with a key to the doors of his carriage, so that he could organise the release of the passengers. He then retrieved a flask of brandy and a travelling hat from his own carriage, filled the hat with water from the stream in the valley bottom and set to work.
What followed is distressing to read. Dickens first encountered a man staggering, with ‘such a frightful cut across the skull that I couldn’t bear to look at him’. He rinsed the man’s face, gave him some water and some brandy to drink and laid him on the grass by the stream, where he said only ‘I am gone,’ and shortly died. Next, a woman lying with her head against a tree, with a leaden-coloured face, over which blood was running ‘in a number of distinct little streams’; Dickens gave her brandy also, but when he next passed she too was dead. A man who had just married was looking for his wife; a witness described how Dickens ‘led him to another carriage and gradually prepared him for the sight. No sooner did he see her corpse than he rushed round a field at the top of his speed, his hands above his head, then dropped fainting.’ It was easier to help the seventeen-year-old Edward Dickenson (the parallel of surnames is poignant). The sole survivor from his wrecked carriage, he was sent to convalesce at the hotel at Charing Cross station, where his rescuer visited him several times. Never one to do things by halves, Dickens also made the patient one of his Christmas guests that year.
‘Among the dying and the dead’: Dickens at the Staplehurst accident in 1865, as imagined by the Penny Illustrated Paper
Much of this detail comes from Dickens’s letters, especially that to Thomas Mitton, his old friend and sometime solicitor. Some twenty-five more letters survive from the aftermath of the crash, some of them dictated, most of them brief and almost all repeating variations on the phrase that he had ‘worked some hours among the dying and the dead’. Short or long, Dickens’s accounts of the accident are evasive in one essential respect: he was not journeying alone, but with his mistress of seven years’ standing, the actress Ellen Ternan, and her mother. The three were returning from France, where it appears that Dickens had been maintaining the Ternans in a clandestine ménage near Boulogne. His public image as a happy family man had been a fiction since 1858, when he separated from his wife Catherine. The Dickens household at Gad’s Hill in Kent was kept together after that by Catherine’s sister, Georgina Hogarth. All this was handled in the accident letters extremely obliquely: ‘Two ladies were my fellow-passengers’, as if they had been sharing the compartment by chance. Even the account to Mitton of the words exchanged between the trio when the end seemed near managed to avoid making the relationship explicit.
As if the accident and its aftermath were not enough, the Staplehurst disaster therefore exposed Dickens to other dangers. He had always basked in recognition – even after the smash, he invited as much from the guards of his stricken train – and he enjoyed the privileges of fame, making sure to show his delighted appreciation by way of return. Railway journeys were no exception. On an earlier Channel crossing, a telegraph message was sent ahead to Dover to hold the train until the great man arrived. Later in life, he reportedly returned from Edinburgh via the East Coast main line in a royal saloon, procured after the General Manager of the North British Railway telegraphed to London. When it arrived, the manager obligingly equipped the carriage with bedding and furniture from his own home, ready for its celebrity passenger. Now this fame was suddenly a liability, as Dickens confronted the prospect of public testimony at the inquest, and the risk that his name would become explicitly linked with that of the Tern
ans. As he made clear to Mitton, he wished neither to speak in public concerning the day’s events, nor to turn it into material for publication (which did not stop the Penny Illustrated Paper’s artist depicting the wreckage with Dickens centre stage, hat full of water, tending to an insensible young woman). Even before the letter to Mitton was composed, Dickens had written to the stationmaster at Charing Cross in the hope of recovering jewellery lost by Ellen on the day of the accident, one item of which was engraved with her name; valuable articles, no doubt, but – the thought must have crossed his mind – more precious still to a blackmailer. Altogether the accident was a blow on the fault-line of his later life, threatening to shatter it in pieces.
The cover-up succeeded. Dickens escaped having to testify in court, and the relationship with Ellen remained the knowledge of a small and discreet circle. So matters rested until the 1930s, a good time for unfrocking and debagging Victorian heroes, and today the story of Ellen (‘Nelly’ to Dickens) is central to the understanding of the novelist’s later life, work and imagination.
Sometimes missing from this picture is a sense of how utterly this double life depended on the railway. Other men from Dickens’s circle who kept mistresses, such as his fellow-novelist Wilkie Collins, maintained separate establishments within walking distance. Dickens, recognisable everywhere, had to be less blatant. The installation of the Ternans in France, within reach of the Channel crossing, made sense within Dickens’s manically busy schedule of writing, speeches, readings, theatricals and conviviality only because the train could get him quickly there and back. His description of the fast new service to France in 1851, well before Nelly entered his life, concludes by ‘blessing the South Eastern Company for realising the Arabian Nights in these prose days’. Had the little party at the company’s Folkestone station fourteen years later happened to choose a carriage further down the train, these words would now seem cruelly inapt. As it was, Dickens’s relationship with the South Eastern Railway had to continue – it owned the line to Higham in Kent, the station for Gad’s Hill. But the French connection shortly ended, after he rented a cottage for Nelly at Slough early in 1866. Now there were two more railways in the picture: the Great Western, with its main line to the West, and the London & South Western. The pair vied for the traffic from royal Windsor, a shortish walk from Slough; both companies had opened branch lines there as soon as the Queen had allowed.