A Summer's Day in Kent - the Staplehurst accident

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The up train had just passed. John Benge consulted his timetable. Now there was nothing until the down at 4.15 pm - a nice gap of 80-odd minutes. There was a gap, too, in the rails on the small viaduct crossing the river - little more than a muddy ditch really - just ten feet below. But there was plenty of time to rectify that. Benge was foreman of a small gang renewing the longitudinal timbers supporting the twin tracks on the bridge. Thirty-one had already been done; there was just one more to go. This was on the Paddock Wood-Ashford section of the South Eastern Railway main line, newly extended to Charing Cross, but back in 1865 it wasn’t so busy.

According to the rules, someone in the gang should have checked the foreman’s reading. His leading carpenter had a timetable. Or would have had, if he hadn’t dropped it on the track, where a train had devoured it. But for safety’s sake Benge posted John Wiles, a platelayer’s labourer, to protect the up line with a red flag and detonators. Not five, as the rules stipulated, but just two, with the instruction only to use them if the weather turned foggy – an unlikely event on this sunny June afternoon. Nor did he place him 1000 ft ahead of the gap as required, but barely half that.

The last timber was back in place. Just two 21-ft rails remained to restore the line. There was still an hour to go before the next train, and that was on the down.

Wiles probably saw the train before he heard it. It was doing 50 on the straight, gently-graded track - quite fast for the time, the SER having an overall speed restriction of 60 mph. This was the Folkestone Boat Train, comprising a van and thirteen coaches and running all of 125 minutes ahead of the time Benge was expecting it. The train’s nickname, “The Tidal”, gives the clue to his error: this was the one train that ran to a varied daily schedule. When he checked the timetable, Benge had turned to the wrong day.

The van and first two carriages had Cramer’s patent brakes (not “Cremar’s”, as reported by the London Illustrated News, a name repeated by L T C Rolt in his classic Red for Danger, from which I’ve drawn much of this account). This crude predecessor of the continuous vacuum brake had a spring-operated mechanism, but, crucially, like the vacuum, was remotely operated by the guard. [Those of us who can recall the days of loose-coupled freights might appreciate the distinction between “fitted” and “piped” wagons on vacuum-braked freights. If it was indeed the leading vehicles that had the Cramer brake then the other carriages must have been the equivalent of piped, though I would guess in this case the mechanism would have been chains. How the chains were attached, and what proportion of carriages was equipped to carry them, must remain unanswered questions for the present.]

Surprise turned to horror as Benge realised the train wasn’t going to stop. The guard hadn’t seen the lookout’s flag and even when he got the signal to brake failed to apply the Cramer brakes immediately. Slowed to 30 mph, somehow the engine and leading carriage leapt across the gap, but then the bridge collapsed and the remaining carriages met disaster. Ten passengers died.

Among passengers in the lucky leading coach a tall man of 53, returning from a trip to France, was poring over the manuscript of his new novel. Physically uninjured himself, he helped others climb out of the carriage and attended to some of the injured. He then realised he had left the manuscript in the carriage and had to return to retrieve it. The novel was Our Mutual Friend, the writer Charles Dickens. When eventually published it included a postscript describing his experience.

Dickens continued his busy life after the accident, touring America in 1867. But the accident took its toll on his mental state. After putting the finishing touches to Our Mutual Friend he wrote no more novels until finally turning to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. But he was destined never to finish it, for, five years to the day after Staplehurst, he died of a stroke.

If the Staplehurst accident bequeathed us a mystery never to be solved (for there’s little doubt the crash shortened his life) it is commonly held to have inspired a short story centred on a railway accident, “The Signal-Man” (sic), most famous of a collection on railway topics called Mugby Junction, published in 1866.

The detail of the story itself bears little resemblance to Staplehurst: the narrator encounters a troubled signalman in a lonely box in a cutting at the mouth of a tunnel, who is haunted by a spectre that foreshadows a tragedy. The story closes with the signalman’s own death as he tries to stop a train emerging from the tunnel. It seems to have been influenced by the 1861 Clayton Tunnel accident on the LBSC main line. When Dickens wrote his story this was the worst railway accident in Britain, but it was not so much the casualty toll as the horror of a fire in a tunnel that captured the popular imagination until it was displaced by the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879.

As for foreman John Benge, he was blamed for “feloniously killing” the passengers at the inquest and so faced a manslaughter charge at the Kent Summer Assizes, along with the district inspector responsible for his gang. But after arguing his seniors shared the guilt of failing to ensure regulations were properly followed, the latter was acquitted on the direction of the judge, leaving Benge to serve nine months hard labour.

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