Death, Dynamite and Disaster

A Grisly British Railway History

Rosa Matheson

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780750998949, 9780752492667
• eBook ISBN: 9780750957014
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Trasporti ferroviari

A safe mode of transport today, the railways were far from vehicles of sleepy commute when they first came into service; indeed, accidents were commonplace and sometimes were a result of something far more sinister. In this fresh approach to railway history, Rosa Matheson explores the grim and grisly railway past.

These horrible happenings include memorable disasters and accidents, the lack of burial grounds for London's dead, leading to the 'Necropolis Railway', the gruesome necessity of digging up the dead to accommodate the railways and how the discovery of dynamite gave rise to the 'Dynamite Wars' on the London Underground in the 1880s and 1890s. Join Rosa as she treads carefully through the fascinating gruesome history of Britain's railways.

DISASTER

6

HEXTHORPE – A RACE DAY ‘SPECIAL’

The railways brought many, and some surprising, new opportunities. Once Thomas Cook had started his famous ‘excursions’ with his Temperance group in July 1841, the scene was set for group or mass travel to a particular destination. The Illustrated London News, of September 1850, writes, ‘One of the most prominent social characteristics of the present time is the growth and progress of pleasure-travelling among the people … The great lines of railways of England, by granting facilities for ‘monster’ or excursion trains at cheap rates, have conferred a boon upon the public …’

Unhappily, along with the ‘boon’ of cheap tickets came a price of a different kind. The Saturday Review, 8 August 1863, reflected that, ‘As soon as ever the excursion trains begin to run plentifully, the accidents follow in like proportion … the railway accident season has begun …’

Racing, the sport of kings, was also a popular fancy for the lower and middle classes, and thousands had followed the horses at meetings all over the country for centuries. The railways were quick to seize the opportunity for a new source of revenue, and laid on ‘specials’ not just for the human fans, but also for the equine participants. Tolson and Vamplew tell us, in their work, Derailed: Railways and Horse-Racing Revisited, that the ‘Liverpool & Manchester Railway were operating excursions to Newton races in June 1831 less than a year after its opening’ and:

At Doncaster the railways demonstrated how one company – The Great Northern Railway – with only one modest main line station could co-ordinate the activities of up to eight companies so expertly that between 1848 and 1908 it handled an increase from about 8,000 racegoers to 190,000 in some 350 trains on St Leger Day alone. By suspending almost all freight traffic over its system and clearing up to seventy miles of sidings in the vicinity of Doncaster, the GNR was able to despatch a train every seventy-five seconds using just one regular passenger station and a couple of temporary locations.¹

Doncaster’s Gold Cup is the oldest significant flat race in horse racing in Britain, and ‘Cup Day’ is the highlight of Doncaster Race Week. On Friday 16 September 1887, a Midland Railway’s Race Week ‘Special’ was one of the aforementioned ‘monster’ excursion trains. Pulled by engine No. 1588, a six wheel coupled engine with tender, the train consisted of ‘brake van; one bogie third-class; one composite; two bogie composites; one bogie third-class carriage; and a bogie third-class brake carriage; or twelve passenger vehicles, considered with the bogie carriages to be the equal of a train with seventeen vehicles!’² (Bogies had been introduced by the Midland in 1874.³ The bogie, a pivoted framework, holding four or six wheels, enabled a greater body length and could allow the negation of sharper curves. They also gave a smoother, more comfortable ride and had a better safety factor than the old fixed-wheel carriage which would more easily leave the track.)

The Midland Railway were the first to introduce twelve wheeler upgrades of their third-class carriages, introducing bogies for better running and safety; however, most of the injured in the Hexthorpe accident were in third-class carriages.

The Midland excursion train was packed – even overloaded – with almost 1,000 race goers, all looking for a great day out. It left Sheffield at 11.20 a.m. as a ‘Race Special’, and stopped for the collection of tickets at Hexthorpe ticket platform at 12.13 p.m. Two minutes later, the 11.20 a.m. train found fame for all the wrong reasons. ⁴

Hexthorpe ticket platform was not one intended for alighting from or boarding a train, it was just for ticket collecting – a neat way of ensuring everyone had paid, and expediting entrance into the racecourse. The platform was merely a short, narrow, wooden structure, with a meadow on one side and the South Yorkshire line on the other. It was 1½ miles (2.4km) west of Doncaster, in the area known as Hexthorpe Flatts, just on the Doncaster side of the road bridge. The platform was situated on the Doncaster-bound line, and was used only for the collection of tickets, particularly on the days of excursions for Doncaster Race Week. Nobody in the train, or on the platform, expected anything untoward. It was business as usual, as it had been for the past seven years, but that was to change when the stationary excursion train was smashed into by the 8.40 a.m. Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (MS&L) daily express train travelling from Liverpool to Hull.

In the words of the Illustrated London News (24 September), who ran a large and detailed account and carried a graphic depiction of the scene:

The Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire Company’s train had nothing to do with the races; it carried many persons for Doncaster, but was a regular daily train, and was going on to Hull. In the ordinary way, the driver of this train would not stop at Hexthorpe ticket-platform; and the driver in charge of the engine was a man of considerable experience, who knew the train well; he belongs to Liverpool, and his name is Taylor … his train, nevertheless, rushed on at high speed, and struck the end of the Midland Company’s train with such momentum that the collision was a terrific force. The wood-work of the carriages was smashed and splintered as if the wood of a packing-case; the massive iron tires and frames and wheels were twisted into fantastic forms. The screeching of the escaping steam from the partially broken engine mingled with the agonising screams of the unfortunate people imprisoned by the wreck of the carriages, and with the groans of many who had sustained dreadful injuries. For a while, discipline seemed lost and reason suspended amongst officials and escaped passengers alike; but the panic did not last long; the work of succour and rescue was commenced, and within an hour nearly fifty persons were extricated and placed on the platform and in the adjoining sheds for the mineral traffic on the line, where they received prompt attention at the hands of surgeons and physicians.

All of the drama and horror of the smashed train and traumatised passengers is captured in this depiction from the Illustrated London News.

Incredibly, there were five doctors travelling in the express train and so medical help of some kind was immediately available. They worked as best they could, using horsehair stuffing from the torn and ripped seating to staunch bleeding wounds, and wood from the broken carriages as splints and stretchers. Others soon arrived, from Doncaster Infirmary, and more sophisticated procedures, such as amputations, were conducted on site. Sergeant Escexetz (? several spellings around of this), of Hexthorpe, was close by and saw the collision. He rushed to help and officiate, and found a nightmare of the first order, horrifying, hellish, and to make matters worse, it had started to rain. The sergeant found that there were already several dead, so he arrested the driver and the fireman of the MS&L train for manslaughter.

Reporting the Accident

Hexthorpe was one of the most serious accidents in the history of the railways up to that time. The media of the day – local and national newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines, in all parts of the country (and indeed in several parts of the world such as America and Australia) – covered the story of the accident in great detail; leaving nothing to the imagination, rather providing every last aspect possible. In the days without our modern media networks they saw it as their job to ‘paint the picture’ and ‘record the words’, so that the general public would miss nothing (and, of course, they would increase their sales). Their graphic descriptions would seem more than over the top in today’s reportage, but then we can easily resort to visual images, whilst they, like Charles Dickens, needed to provide words to conjure up the images that their readers readily devoured. The papers were also determined, and happy, to highlight the terrible cost that had been paid by the ordinary people because of the railway companies’ obstinacy, recalcitrance, or even greed.

On Saturday 17 September, the day after the accident, under the headline, TERRIBLE RAILWAY ACCIDENT NEAR DONCASTER, The Leeds Mercury carried a three and a half column intensive report, giving a blow-by-blow account of the accident and its painful consequences. It gave factual information:

The last carriage of the train [the Midland excursion] was a bogie composite consisting of a guard’s van and several passenger compartments. Into this vehicle the engine telescoped as far as the boiler dome losing its funnel, and rising more than a foot from the front wheels …

It is a remarkable fact that none of the carriages [of the MS&L express train] left the rails and the permanent way was not at all damaged …

About forty or fifty yards of the ticket platform was ripped away by the carriage doors flying open, and fifty yards of the handrail at the back of the platform was broken by the smashed framework of the vehicles.

It then goes on to paint the casualty scene with virtually every groan, gouge, decapitation and disembowelment covered:

Another painful incident and one which afforded, if one was necessary, proof of a mother’s love, was that of a woman who had evidently been carrying her child in her arms. When the shock occurred she must have folded it to her breast to shield it from harm, for when found the child was dead, suffocated by the pressure whilst the mother was almost decapitated … In another carriage was found a man suspended by the neck from the two hat racks which had been driven together like a vice.

The Illustrated London News painted the scene in somewhat broader, but still powerful brushstrokes, whilst, a few days later the Lloyd Weekly Newspaper⁵ blazed the atmospheric headline, ‘AN EXPRESS DASHING INTO AN EXCURSION TRAIN’, with the following:

The result of the collision was that the guard’s box was smashed nearly to atoms, but the guard being engaged in collecting tickets, escaped with his life. The last passenger carriage was telescoped over the next and this and the succeeding carriage were broken to splinters … The scene presented a moment after the collision will never be forgotten by those who saw it.

Then it provides lines and lines of gruesome and heartbreaking detail. It has to be said that the papers did a thorough job in bringing the reality of the horror and the human price of the accident to the public at large.

All the reports wrote about the state and appearance of the carriages, how they had been ‘smashed to pieces’, ‘broken to splinters’, ‘just like matchwood’ and ‘telescoped’. Carriages in those days were, of course, constructed mostly from woods chosen for their differing appearances, strengths and costs. The Midland had been through a programme of replacing all their old carriages with new stock from their new Carriage and Wagon works in Derby, and this programme was virtually completed by mid-1886. John Pendleton wrote, in his iconic work, Our Railways: Their Origin, Development, Incident and Romance, ‘The Midland Company were the first to discover that the third-class passenger was the life and soul of the English railway, and they have reaped the most benefit from accommodating him.’ They had already begun carrying third-class passengers on all trains from 1 April 1872, but from what was to be an historic day, 1 January 1875, they dispensed with the second class and replaced it with a much improved third class. They later introduced upholstered and buttoned seats stuffed with horsehair, and more leg room. Such radical action was looked upon with great scepticism and anger by other companies, some of whom even called it a ‘revolution’. (Ironically it was the MS&L that were the first to copy the Midland’s lead in this.)

Despite this upgrade, the carriages that were most affected in the accident were the lower class. Wood, broken under pressure, collapses, shatters, pinions and pierces, making it a lethal component in a situation like Hexthorpe. Perhaps the one small consolation was that these carriages were still oil-lit and not lit by gas, because leaking gas added to the danger of explosions in later collisions.

Eyewitness accounts filled many inches of the numerous columns, from passengers on both trains and from the railway employees. The witnesses expressed shock, relief, incredulity, but little apparent anger. That came later.

One eyewitness, who actually saw the accident in motion, was local Hexthorpe resident, Mrs Osborne. She was in her bedroom which overlooked the sidings, and she watched the excursion train draw up and stop at the platform. Then she heard a great crash and saw the engine of the Hull express ploughing into the back carriages of the stationary train:

One coach, the vehicle forming the tail end of the train, appeared to have simply been wiped out, and the locomot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Railway Accidents
• Death
• Dynamite
• Disaster
• Notes
• Bibliography