Signals

Timing is everything

I’ve been a very busy bee of late, getting my second thesis chapter done and dusted, and helping out with my little sister’s wedding - this blog comes to you upon a tide of flour as I bake cupcakes.

This week’s story is one I told at the Brighton talk a few weeks ago. It ties in nicely with my forthcoming talk at Peterborough Museum about life and death on the Victorian railway. You can come and see me if you’re local: £5 a ticket, available at this link.

We tend to think of homicide as an act of interpersonal violence, a one-on-one action, but as this week’s tale shows, it can also be one-on-twenty-three. Let’s go to Brighton, 1861.

Brighton was once called Brighthelmstone. It was a fishing village, mostly washed into the sea, until the mid-eighteenth century. Its waters got a reputation for their healing properties, bathing at Brighthelmstone became a prescription for the rich invalid, and the Duke of Cumberland started visiting regularly. His nephew, the future Prince Regent, joined him in 1783 and loved it. His patronage led to the development of a fashionable resort, the building of the Royal Pavillion, and a mushrooming of hotels and villas.

Queen Victoria initially continued the royal patronage of Brighton (renamed in the early nineteenth century), and the first railway station was built in 1841. And with the railway came the masses. People poured into Brighton for day trips, for weekends, for convalescence, and for longer breaks. As now, they tended to visit in July and August.

By 1861, Brighton’s railway station was exceptionally busy, especially in summer with the arrival of regular excursion trains, ‘specials’ put on by railway companies to fulfil the new appetite for a seaside break. And Sunday 25th August 1861 was typical. Lots of people had come into Brighton on the previous Friday, and lots of people now needed to go home. Lots of other people were heading to other resorts, or to London for a day out. The station was full by 7:30am.

For clarity, I will refer to the three problem trains in this story as Train One, Train Two and Train Three. The types of engine were not recorded, but the services were.

Train One was an excursion train, running from Portsmouth to London. It left Portsmouth at 6am, and was scheduled to leave Brighton at 8:05am. Train Two was also an excursion train, running from Brighton to London, and scheduled to leave at 8:15am. The final train, Train Three, was a regular, and slow train, from Brighton to London, which left every day at 8:30am. The timetable was busy, but not unusually so for a summer morning.

But this particular morning was plagued with delays. The first train left at 8:28am, the second at 8:31am and the third at 8:35am. They were all on the same line, all in the same track section, all heading to London.

About six miles along this line sits Clayton Tunnel, in a steep cutting. The tunnel was unlit in 1861. A signalman was positioned in a cabin at each end, to signal when a train was in the tunnel and when the train had passed through. They used an automatic signal to transfer the message from one end of the tunnel to the other. The first train entered this piece of track, and disappeared into the tunnel.

The automatic signal failed to trip.

The second train approached soon after. The signalman, Henry Killick, attempted to manually turn the automatic signal to red - stop - but it didn’t respond. So he took out his red flag and waved it at the driver.

Stop.

Train Two entered the tunnel.

Train One exited the tunnel. Off it went to London, none the wiser.

Train Three approached. Henry Killick telegraphed the London end of the tunnel to find out whether the second train had passed through. And the London-end signalman replied

“All clear”

because he had no idea there were two trains in the tunnel, and one had come out.

Killick waved a white flag to Train Three. All clear.

Meanwhile, Train Two’s driver HAD seen the red flag - Henry Killick saw him turn the steam off to stop - but it takes a while to stop a steam engine, especially one with a fully laden train. By the time the train stopped, he was almost all the way through the tunnel. Rather than stay still, he proceeded to put the train into reverse.

Train Two began to reverse.

Train Three entered the tunnel.

The driver and fireman saw the lights of Train Two just before impact. They tried to get the train into reverse, and failing, held on for dear life.

The collision happened shortly before 9am and was catastrophic.

The engine of Train Three lurched upwards on impact. The final carriage of Train Two was completely destroyed, and the engine came to rest on the next carriage. The boiling water in the boiler ran on to the surviving passengers.

There was no light. The debris of the carriages blocked the tunnel from the Brighton end. It took ten minutes to get any light in there at all, and all that could be heard were the screams of absolute terror from the survivors, all convinced more trains would barrel down into the wreckage, or the engine of Train Three would explode. A grocer on Train Three had run to Hassocks as soon as he could get free of the tunnel, and the station staff there telegraphed directly to Brighton, stopping all trains on that section of track. A team of helpers came by train from Brighton, arriving within half an hour, and the evacuation began.

The survivors and walking wounded were evacuated to Hassocks station, the next one along. A team of men used ropes to shift the engine - which weighed around 160 tons - off the carriages, and found twenty-two dead bodies underneath it. The injuries were unimaginable, traumatic amputations, crushed heads, burns and scalds.

One hundred and seventy six people suffered some degree of injury, ten very severe. One of them died in hospital shortly after having a leg amputated. A toddler survived severe burns and bilateral leg amputation. A baby that was being breastfed at the time of the collision survived, but its mother did not. Bones were broken, flesh cut by broken glass, heads banged, there was a lot of mending to be done.

The dead were transferred to the Literary and Scientific Institute, then based at the Royal Albion Hotel, and laid out for identification. The newspapers commented on how they were dressed in their finest clothes, ready for a lovely day out. Once they were identified, their faces were covered. Some were unrecognisable, identifiable only by their possessions.

The inquest opened the day after the accident, on a Monday afternoon in a pub behind the railway works in Brighton. The inquest should have taken place under the jurisdiction of the East Sussex coroner, but the Brighton coroner took the lead, perhaps because the London, Brighton and South Coast railway was based in the town. Railways were funded by shareholders, and local businessmen often bought into burgeoning railways in order take advantage of both the profits and the custom of the railway. The coroner told the jury: if your livelihood depends on your shares in the railway company, speak now and be excused. A man named Mr Tozer asked to be excused on account of not having time to be a juror. His request was denied, and the jury remained in place. The railway had several representatives in the court, as did a couple of the victims’ families, and a government inspector was also present. The coroner took them to visit the bodies, and then moved the inquest to the Town Hall, where there was space for the huge crowds that wished to see proceedings. The bodies were identified, and then the jury went by omnibus to see the tunnel itself, and the signalling system. The inquest was then adjourned until the next morning.

Unusually, no railway staff were killed in the accident - you must understand, railway staff were killed in accidents all the time. It was rare for passengers to be killed, let alone twenty-three. The driver and stoker of Train Three somehow came away without a scratch. And this meant that the railway staff were available to be questioned.

It took nine days. Nine days to hear all the evidence, to question the witnesses at great length. And this was nine days in which the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway did everything in their power to avoid providing the information that showed that the assistant stationmaster, Charles Legg, had let three trains leave on the same line in seven minutes. The regulations stated that trains were supposed to leave no less than five minutes apart in fine weather. Legg told the coroner’s court the times he’d allowed the trains to leave…but he was lying and there were plenty of other witnesses, including the train drivers, prepared to testify to their true timings.

It also transpired that Henry Killick, aged 60, was working overtime to earn a day off. His ‘overtime’ meant he was just starting a 24 hour shift. He told the court that the automatic signal failed sometimes, every three or four months.

The railway company secretary was so obstructive, refusing to allow the coroner’s court to see the statements made by the train drivers after the accident, that Mr Black, the coroner, was on the verge of signing documents to prosecute him for contempt of court. The railway company’s board met urgently to decide whether or not to give the documents requested over.

The coroner’s jury were exhausted after their long service: inquests usually took a few hours, a quick afternoon’s work. For 45 minutes, the coroner summed up the evidence, and placed the blame squarely at the feet of Charles Legg, who had not only let the trains go far too close together, he’d lied about it.

The jury retired to discuss the case for four hours and five minutes, an exceptionally long time after an exceptionally long inquest - inquest and criminal juries alike often didn’t leave their seats before returning a verdict. They found Charles Legg was responsible for the manslaughter of the twenty-three victims. They found the driver of the second train, John Scott, partly responsible but not culpable. They acknowledged the signalling error, but did not blame the two signalmen.

So, Charles Legg was indicted for manslaughter. But he was bailed, and his indictment was not followed up at the magistrate’s court. He was not called to trial until March 27th 1862.

And the grand jury declined to continue the prosecution. Charles was called the stand, pleaded not guilty, told the prosecution was abandoned, and dismissed.

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So who was really to blame? For this was a cascade of negligence and neglect. The jury could have found the company culpable, through their neglect of the broken signal, the difficult working conditions of their signalmen, their lack of records noting the coming and going of trains, and their general mismanagement of the services through Brighton.

But the company was not some random business. They were a major local industry, with many shareholders among the townsmen, including the elites: the magistrates, the town councillors, the bigwigs. Charles Legg was not taken before the magistrates, an action which was not technically necessary, but would have reinforced his prosecution, and bound the many witnesses over to reappear in court. This omission was probably deliberate. There was no appetite to saddle a man with the culpability for so many deaths, not when there were so many other failures that contributed to the incident.

A lengthy report was made after the accident and presented to Parliament, in the blandly titled“Report of Inspecting Officers Of Railway Department on Accidents on Railways, Jun-Nov 1861”. And this report, made by Captain Tyler of the Royal Engineers - the Railway Inspector who attended the inquest — squarely blamed the shit record keeping of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, as well as the insufficient signals. His report begged the government to consider bringing in legislation to govern train timings, forcing them to be at least five minutes apart. He also advised that signals should use multiple telegraphs, as a failsafe, and that a 24 hour shift was far too long for any signalman. He ended his report hoping that the railway company would mend their ways. However, the railway company responded by saying they firmly believed that adding more signals would stop engine drivers using their own vigilance, and cause more accidents…. but they agreed to trial a new signalling system.

Charles Legg was forty when he let those three trains go without thinking much about the consequences. He was born in Henfield, and lived on Queen Street in Brighton from the mid-1840s onwards. He started working as a stationmaster in around 1858, having worked his way up the railway ranks as a guard. One might imagine that his (failed) prosecution and percieved responsibility for the accident would mean he lost his job and he did stop working as a stationmaster. However, he joined the railway police and served them until he retired in the 1870s. He died in 1891.

Twenty-three people died on that Sunday morning, but I think of Elizabeth Ellen Edwing, who was about eighteen months old. She lived in London but had been staying in Brighton on a little holiday with her mum. They were in the second train, in the final carriage, heading home. Her mother was killed outright, but Elizabeth was not. The third engine’s boiler emptied onto her little body, and both her legs were crushed - they were amputated in hospital. And all I know of Elizabeth’s later life is that, despite her severe scarring and disability, she married in 1885 and had four sons. I wonder what story she was told, and whether she remembered anything.

Ellen Lower, aged 47

John Ingledew, aged 69

Mary Gillett, aged 68

George Westcott, aged 12

Edward Charlwood, aged 40

Catherine Barnard, aged 70

Christina Manthorp, aged 34

John Greenfield, aged 17

William Hubbard, aged 61

Henry Hayward Hubbard, aged 18 months

Agnes Parker, aged 16

Mary Ann Parker, aged 9

John Wheeler, aged 46

Elizabeth Wheeler, aged 45

Daniel Wheeler, aged 18 months

George Gardner, aged 38

Maria Edwing, aged 29

Rebecca Barclay, aged 28

Mary Parker, aged 60

John Lockstone, aged 50

Jane Elizabeth Biden, aged 24

Elizabeth Wright, aged 17