i The Poacher

For about ten years, between the ages of nine and nineteen, my father was a poacher. He was an honest man who did dishonest things. He had a dog, a lurcher, Our Mick, a cross between a Whippet and a Lakeland Terrier and he had a poacher’s coat with a deep and hidden pocket. He was often absent from school and failed to turn up at Boys Brigade band practices. He often stayed out all night, sleeping in barns or hedges.  

He learned to move quickly and quietly and how to be still.  Coming home he would stand for an hour watching the house, invisible against the tree line, like a man on the run, or a spy whose cover is blown. He waited to see if anyone was waiting for him. Going out poaching was going out thieving, meant stepping out of society and it was advisable to wait and watch before stepping back in. He was not afraid of the police. Many of them were not above a little poaching themselves and they would only come for him if forced to. If, for example, some landowner pressed them to catch whoever it was helping themselves to the birds, animals and fish on his estate. The gamekeepers, on the other hand, would need no prompting to seek him out and my father knew it. If they found him they would catch him by the heel, thrash him and threaten worse, then take Our Mick away and beat his brains in with a short billy. 

His mother, who  colluded in his poaching and who was grateful for the food, nevertheless beat him with a stick. She needed to beat someone. She had four children to care for and worry about and the other three were too young to beat so she beat my father for all of them.

At home he hung the paunched* rabbits and hares with the Pigeons and the Pheasants in his mother’s coal shed. On Saturdays he took his handcart ~ which he had purchased with money provided by the Bishop of Carlisle ~ and spent the early morning carrying loads of fresh vegetables from the market gardens north of Carlisle to the stall holders in the Covered Market. It was two miles there and two miles back. He would start at four in the morning and do two or three return trips depending on the time of year. It was a mighty struggle to stop the loaded cart running away down Stanwix Bank to the bridge over the River Eden. Then it was a mighty pull from the river, up Scotch Street to the market hall that stood high on the bluff above the river, shoulder to shoulder with the Castle and the Cathedral. 

After he had delivered the carrots and potatoes, the turnips and the leaks, the cabbages, sprouts and beetroot,  he sold the birds, and the rabbits and the hares he had taken in the week ~ all fair game ~ to one of the butchers with a stall in the covered market. His reward was, in one hand a few pennies and in the other a bloody parcel of bones and scraps, wrapped in a page of the Cumberland News, for Our Mick to feast on. 

Owning a poacher’s dog, a longdog or a lurcher, was a clear and reckless signal of your intention to commit a crime. With such a dog by your side the charge, if a charge were ever laid, would be the equivalent of “going equipped”. The dog was a tool as useful in the committing of a crime as a crowbar or a set of skeleton keys or a hand of brass knuckles. To the constables and magistrates “going equipped” to commit an offence, constituted an offence in itself.

Here and now, in the 21st Century, poachers are people who kill Rhinos for their horns, in the great savannas south of the Sahara or Tigers for their bones in the jungles of South East Asia. But in England and elsewhere for more than a thousand years poachers were folk-heroes celebrated in song and story. Robin Hood and his Merry Men were poachers. As was Geordie, who according to legend was hanged in a golden chain. Gold because of his noble lineage, but hanged all the same because he

Stole sixteen of the king's royal deer, 
And sold them in Bohenny.

The Roud Folk Song Index, which traces Geordie back to the 16th century, lists more than a hundred different versions of the song, forty from England, twenty-seven from Scotland, two from Ireland, fifty-two from the United States of America and eight from Canada.

The Lincolnshire Poacher, perhaps the most famous of them all, celebrated in a song first published in 1775 seems to have started poaching as a result of the grinding boredom, poverty and lack of autonomy that ~ we understand from other sources ~ characterised a seven year apprenticeship. He starts his tale with

When I was bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire
Full well I served my master for nigh on seven years
Till I took up to poaching as you shall quickly hear
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shining night in the season of the year.

and finishes with 

Bad luck to every magistrate that lives in Lincolnshire
Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare
Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shining night in the season of the year.

Poaching provided relief from a life of servitude, drudgery and exploitation. It brought greater rewards than simply providing food or, from time to time, a tiny amount of cash. Poaching provided a rare opportunity for a working man to choose his own path. Not every night was a shining night, however, and the pleasures of being out and about in the countryside were tempered by long hours of being freezing cold and soaking wet. 

There was nothing romantic or heroic about my father’s poaching. Poaching was work, hard work, and it was brutal. To be a poacher you needed to be both quick and “fly” and if you weren’t a hard man when you started poaching you either became one or you gave up the life. Poaching was a criminal act. Poachers like my father killed animals and birds to eat and to escape the oppression of the life they were born into

I don’t believe that my father was born to be a hard man. He was a kind man who rarely allowed his kindness to show. A proud and loving father who never told his children that he loved them or that he was proud of them. A man much loved by other men, the men who worked for him and with him and above all by the men who managed him. His handlers. The captains of industry and the guardians of the realm, the “gentlemen” poachers who used him, who saw clearly how useful am ungentlemanly poacher like him might be.

For nearly ninety years my father lived the life he lived because he needed to. Opportunities come to many men and most take advantage of their opportunities if they can. But a poacher doesn’t wait for a rabbit or a pheasant to cross his path. He moves quietly and  purposefully to position himself where all game is fair game and where he has a greater than fair chance of success

My father hoped that I would have a different life to his, a better life than his, but helping me to a better life was not his purpose in living. He shaped his life to stay alive and that meant staying one step ahead of the gamekeeper. He looked at me and my life with barely concealed astonishment. On two occasions in my life he was called upon to help me stay ahead of the gamekeeper. Even now I can hear his quiet laughter as he opened a door and let me in.

My father’s life as a poacher lasted less than a decade  but the skills and character he developed in those years; secrecy, a hard hearted pragmatism, watchfulness, circumspection, keeping his cards close to his chest, prepared him for what was to come. His secret life. His double life. Far from home.

At the end of his life the poacher, the watcher in the tree-line, the Boy on the Train, was silent and withdrawn. His grandchildren found little love in him and so assumed there was little in him to love. They were wrong, there was much to love in him and a lifetime’s accumulated love that he never found a way to let out. 

* The first known use of the word paunch meaning to clean the guts from a dead animal is in Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe a verse satire lambasting the Catholic Church and particularly Cardinal Wolsey. It was written by William Roy and Jerome Barlow published in 1528 and suppressed by Royal Proclamation in 1529 by King Henry VIII who soon enough would start his own campaign against Wolsey and the Church of Rome.

********

ii. The Race to The North

In the mid 1880s the number of rail passengers in Britain increased rapidly. As the number of passengers grew, the competition for their business became fiercer. The locomotives became bigger and faster. The trains got longer and heavier. The number of lines and services multiplied. The network grew and grew. 

By the middle of the century there were two, competing, long-haul services from London to Scotland. The West Coast Main Line service from London Euston to Edinburgh Prince’s Street Station via Carlisle and Perth and the East Coast Main Line service from London King's Cross to Edinburgh Waverly Station via York and Newcastle upon Tyne. 

The Royal Highlander service was the star of the west coast route and The Flying Scotsman ~ the service not the locomotive ~ the flag carrier on the east coast. At 539.7 miles the west coast route was sixteen and a half miles longer than the east coast route at 523.2 miles.

In the late 1880s the owner-operators of the East Coast Main Line and the West Coast Main Line services were running an informal but fiercely fought and widely publicised nightly race. "The Race to the North". 

The directors and senior executives of the two train-operating companies denied that The Race to the North existed. They needed to sustain this denial in order to avoid being accused of irresponsibility and recklessly endangering the lives of employees and customers alike.  Despite the denial the race took place in full sight and bookmakers on both sides of the Atlantic offered odds on the result of each night’s race. Journalists filed reports on the race by telegraph from London, York, Crewe, Tebay, Carlisle, and Edinburgh. Newspapers all over the world including the New York Herald printed the results of the races. On 23 August 1895 The Glasgow Herald devoted three thousand words to the previous night’s race.

Four days earlier three London journalists had made the journey from Kings Cross to Edinburgh at the invitation of the operators of the East Coast Main Line service. At Portobello, three miles to the east of Edinburgh city centre, the line describes a series of tight bends where the official speed-limit was 15 miles per hour. On this night, as they approached Portobello the journalists, travelling in a specially equipped carriage thoughtfully furnished by the rail company with comfortable seats and refreshments, stood-up to read the speed-dials fixed to the wall of the carriage. They had just enough time to note that the train was travelling at more than 81 miles per hour before the train encountered the Portobello bends and all three hacks were thrown violently to the floor of the carriage.

Most trains were equipped with a single brake-van managed by one train-guard at the rear of the train. On this trip, however, thinking to impress the journalists with the speed of the journey but to stop short of killing everyone on the train, the management had provided two, heavily over-ballasted, brake-vans. The journalists who had been upended at Portobello struggled back to their feet just in time to confirm that the train was still travelling at 64 miles per hour as it entered Edinburgh Waverley station, upon which the guards of both brake vans slammed on the brakes and hurled the journalists back onto the floor of the carriage.

iii. The Trains

The steam train which was beginning to provide affordable travel for ordinary people now provided free entertainment for the lowest classes who had little leisure time and hardly enough money for bread never mind circuses.

The locomotives that pulled the trains were the biggest, noisiest, fastest, most thrilling machines that ordinary people might ever come across in their daily lives. Close up the spectacle was awe-inspiring. The cabs of the huge machines were lit by the fierce glow from the open mouth of the firebox. The locomotives spouted long trailing banners of steam, smoke and fiery sparks. Express trains roared through the stations at over sixty miles an hour. The men on the footplate, the driver and the fireman, could easily be seen, for the cabs were open sided. 

To the men and women who watched them and the children who envied them, the men who rode upon the backs of these fire breathing mythic beasts were immortals, each one a super-hero living life in the fastest lane then available.

As the fame of the Race to the North grew, large crowds turned out at stations along the route, thronging the platforms and foot-bridges to cheer the trains on their way. The crowds gathered even when, as was often the case, the trains passed through in the early hours of the morning. In the early years of the race the locomotives and the crews were changed at Carlisle. Hundreds of men, women and children gathered on both the “up” and “down” platforms at two o’clock in the morning to see the two huge locomotives being changed. A task that was accomplished in less than 2½ minutes.

Before 1887 the Race to the North started in London and ended in Edinburgh. The two competing services arrived at different Edinburgh stations. Edinburgh Waverley and Edinburgh Prince’s Street. Reporters from London newspapers could be seen galloping their horses the length of Prince’s Street to report on the arrival of both competing trains. 

By 1895, however, the race had extended beyond Edinburgh to Aberdeen. This added hugely to the excitement. The early miles of the race still took place between trains on widely separated tracks. But now, as the trains drew close to Aberdeen, the two tracks ran within sight of each other across a flat plain. Often, after five hundred miles and fourteen hours of racing, the huge steam locomotives would burst out onto the flat before Kinnaber junction only seconds apart. 

Running light having used up the tons of coal and water they carried and at full steam they could now be seen together racing neck-and-neck across the plain, panting great puffs of smoke, straining for a half-minute advantage. That half minute was crucial for once they reached the signal box at Kinnaber Junction the services shared the same track into Aberdeen Central. Getting to Kinnaber Junction second meant getting to the finishing line last. 

The West Coast Mainline operators came up with a cunning scheme to delay the East Coast Mainline services at Kinnaber Junction. The published and scheduled time for the arrival of the West Coast service at the Kinnaber signal-box was shown several minutes in advance of the time that the train would actually arrive. So by the time the East Coast service arrived the Kinnaber signalman, consulting the schedule, had already accepted the approaching West Coast train and set the signals against the East Coast train which often had to stop and watch the West Coast train overtake and go straight through to Aberdeen

In 1855 the fastest journey from London to Aberdeen took 17½ hours. By 1889 this had reduced to 13 hours. The new, bigger, more powerful locomotives could do the whole trip without being changed. This reduction in journey time was achieved even as the trains became both longer and heavier in order to carry greater numbers in greater comfort. 

So violent was the transit of these trains that the men of the line-maintenance crew at Cupar in Fifeshire, where the line describes a long curve, were called out every night after the train had passed to correct the lay of the rails. The centripetal forces generated by the drivers keeping the ever-heavier trains pressing-on around the curve, without slowing as recommended, forced the railway line many inches out of true. 

In July 1896 a West Coast overnight express took the Preston curve too fast and derailed. One person was killed and the train was wrecked. To reassure the public, agreement was reached between the owners of the two services to slow the runs from London to Aberdeen. An informal agreement to stop a race that had never existed.

As the century turned, however, the Race to the North reappeared in a different guise. The two services competed to take the World speed record. As the technology improved the record was passed back and forth between the two competing operators. The risks were understood. Attempts on the record were crewed by volunteers. 

In 1937 the East Coast service operators held the record. London Midland Scottish on the west coast route however were offering the Coronation Scot, London to Glasgow service with a specially developed, streamlined Pacific Class locomotive. Thinking to make an attempt on the record they loaded a special train with members of the press. 

Two miles south of Crewe station the train was clocked at 114 mph. LM&S had it, the world speed record. The train, however, was unable to slow down sufficiently for the series of crossover points at the approach to Crewe station. Miraculously the train stayed upright and on the tracks but the points were destroyed and had to be totally rebuilt. The violence of motion as the decelerating train hit the points at 57mph (the speed limit was 20) scared the living daylights out of everyone on board and London Midland Scottish never made another attempt at the world speed record.

v. The Royal Highlander

At seven o’clock on the evening of Wednesday twenty-fourth October 1928 the Royal Highlander Express, operated by the London Midland & Scottish Railway Company, could be found taking-on passengers at platform 7 of London Euston Station. 

At the time the Royal Highlander service ~ London to Inverness by way of Carlisle, Edinburgh and Aberdeen ~ was the longest through-train service in Great Britain. Passengers could board the train in London and more than five-hundred miles and fourteen hours later disembark in Inverness. The Royal Highlander service could carry more people, in greater comfort, at faster speeds, for longer journeys than any other form of transport available at the time. 

The train that stood at platform 7 that October evening was double-headed, that is it was pulled by two huge locomotives coupled together in tandem. These locomotives were made of cast-iron and solid steel. Fully loaded each locomotive weighed well over 140 tons.

Together the engines pulled twelve coaches. The total weight of the entire set that night was around five hundred and fifty-five tons and the overall length was about eight hundred and thirty feet. Equal to the length of two full-sized soccer pitches laid end to end. 

A locomotive and train taking a bend at speed does not “want” to go around the corner and does its very best to go straight-on. The rails, of course, guide the wheels around the bend. As this locomotive is pulling a train weighing many hundreds of tons at more than sixty miles an hour  the stresses on the rails, the structure of the permanent way, the rolling stock, and all the parts of the locomotive itself are unimaginable. The dimensions of every component in this massive and complex vehicle are necessarily huge and heavy.

To help the train go round the bend the four wheels at the front of the locomotive, each more than one metre in diameter, are mounted on solid steel axles which are themselves mounted on a steel frame known as a bogie. The bogie pivots freely on a single, massive, central, vertical steel column so that the wheels can follow the rails around the bends and reduce the stress of persuading the locomotive and the carriages to follow.

A second set of wheels, the main driving wheels, two of them on each of the locomotive are placed behind the four front wheels. These wheels, more than two metres in diameter, are set on steel axles as thick as a man’s thigh and are powered by steam. 

These driving wheels are coupled together by massive, steel, horizontal beams known as coupling rods. One coupling rod on each side of the locomotive joining and driving the main wheels on that side of the train. These coupling rods were made famous by Buster Keaton in his movie The General. Keaton sits on a coupling rod of the stationery train - the General of the title - and as the train moves off Keaton moves forward while going up and down, neatly demonstrating how the coupling rods worked while getting a laugh. 

Immediately above the rear pair of main wheels is the footplate. A steel platform on which the engine driver and the fireman stand. An open-sided solid steel cab, that gives some shelter to the driver and the fireman is placed over the footplate. 

The back of the cab is open and allows the fireman access to a tender. This large wagon is almost as long as the locomotive itself and carries enough coal and water to feed the firebox and the boiler for the journey. 

The tender is built of steel plate and the axels and wheel assemblies milled from solid steel for it too must negotiate the bends, at speed, while carrying, say, ten tons of coal and more or less twenty tons of water.

The driver stands in the front left-hand corner of the cab from where he can, with his right hand, reach the levers that control the locomotive. From here he can see the track ahead and also see the signals that will manage the train’s journey north. And here he stays for most of the journey doing his best to keep out of the way of the fireman. 

The fireman moves back and forth in the centre of the footplate shovelling the coal from the tender behind into the open door of the firebox that heats the water that produces the steam that drives the locomotive that pulls the train. The driver has seniority, but the two men are a team and like a pair of working horses they must lean into the harness together.

The lead locomotive, engine No.14435, hauling the Royal Highlander out of London Euston on that October evening was a Dunalastair. It had been built in 1897 at the St Rollox Railway Works in Glasgow. The Dunalastairs were far more powerful than the locomotives they replaced. The new design had been commissioned specifically to make double-heading unnecessary. They had much bigger boilers and produced more steam and at a higher pressure. 

However while the Dunalastairs could sustain higher speeds for longer and pull heavier loads up steeper gradients and so make good on the promise of faster journey times they still needed two, coupled, locomotives to keep to the published timetable. So in 1914, only seventeen years after it was first built, engine No. 14435 was rebuilt with the addition of super-heaters which gave it even more power. All to no avail. The Royal Highlander still needed two engines double-headed to keep to the timetable and get to Inverness on time.

The second of the locomotives pulling the Royal Highlander that evening, engine No.1176, was a much newer design, one of seventy-five ordered in 1925 by London Midland Scottish from the Vulcan Foundry at Newton Le Willows near Liverpool.

Now it is seven-thirty in Euston station. The guards on platform No 7 blow their whistles and their flags uncurl with a snap above their heads and the high-pressure steam which has been escaping from a valve as big as a man’s heart on top of the engine boiler is trapped and applied to the pistons. Both locomotives give a series of mighty coughs and the eight big drive wheels, each taller than the men standing on the platform, appear to hunch down, like a Rugby scrum getting set, and slowly the wheels begin to turn and the train starts to roll forward. 

The driver of the pilot engine, the first in line, leans head-and-shoulders from his cab ten feet above the rails and looking back gives a short blast on his steam whistle. The driver of the train engine, second in line, leans from his cab and raises his hand in salute. This train is not taking part in a race, nor is it trying to break a record. It is, nevertheless in a deadly serious commercial competition with the Flying Scotsman on the east coast mainline.

On this night, the Royal Highlander of 24 October 1928 has an appointment at the far end of the line, an appointment set by the owners and management of London Midland Scottish, and race or no race, if it is to keep that appointment, the men who control the locomotives must push their giant machines to their limit.

vi. The Block System

The safety of the passengers and crew of every train running on the network that Wednesday evening depended on a simple traffic-handling system and protocol called the block system.

The entire rail network was divided into sections called blocks. The movements of the traffic in each block was controlled by one or more signalmen in a signal-box at one end of the block. A train approaching a block was offered by the signalman controlling the block in which the train was currently running, to the signalman in the next signal-box along the line. If his section was clear of traffic and obstruction, the second signalman accepted the offer of the train, and both the offering and the accepting  signalmen set their trackside signals to allow the train to leave the current block and enter the next block. 

If for some reason it was not safe for a train to enter the next block - a train in front had broken down or was running late for example - the signalman in the receiving block would not accept the offer of the oncoming train and the signals in both blocks would be set to slow or stop the oncoming train and so prevent it entering the new block and colliding with the obstruction ahead.

Communication between the signalmen in the signal boxes along the line was by telephone and electrically operated bells and status indicators. The life-critical information was transmitted from box to box via the simplest hard-wired electrical circuit that ran beside the tracks from signal box to signal box.

vii. The Boy on the Train

Seven hours after leaving Euston station, at about two o’clock in the morning, three hundred and fifty miles to the north the Royal Highlander pulls into Carlisle Citadel Station and the train crew is changed. The London to Carlisle crew has been on duty for seven or eight hours and the fireman on each train has shovelled six or seven tons of coal, from the inclined floor of the tender into the firebox of the engine. Two new drivers and two new firemen will take the service forward from Carlisle to Inverness.

The new train crews, Carlisle men, clocked on duty at 00:55 that morning only to be told that the Royal Highlander was running late. It was a cold, dark, wet night and the crewmen went to the canteen to keep warm while they waited. On their way to a nice coal fire and a cup of hot tea the four crew-men walked past a freight train getting up steam.

This freight train was the Carlisle to Dundee, down train. Trains running away from the Capital ~ London in this case ~ are said to be on the down line, and those running towards the Capital are on the up line.  This train was a daily, express freight service, that left Carlisle each weekday morning at 1:20am. The train was hauled by locomotive No.14631 sixty-two feet in length and weighing 116¼ tons. Longer and heavier than either of the two locomotives pulling the Highlander. 

The whole goods train is 257 yards in length with a loaded weight of 440½ tons. It is made up of thirty-three goods vans and a six wheeled, twenty-ton, brake van. The brake van weighs twenty tons because it is made of steel and it carries around ten tons of steel ballast. The ballast is thick flat sheets of steel covering the floor of the brake-van to distribute the load evenly and also to set the weight of the ballast as low as possible on the frame. All done to ensure the maximum braking effect when the brakes are applied.

viii. For the Want of a Pin

14631, the freight train locomotive, had been sent for repairs the previous day. On the Tuesday it had been noted that the coupling rod on the left side of the locomotive was over-heating, and the engine had been sent to the workshop at the Kingmoor loco sheds ~ just north of Carlisle Citadel station ~ so that the coupling rods could be taken down and examined on the Wednesday afternoon. 

In the course of his work, Thomas Bell the fitter who did the work on engine number 14631, had to disconnect the driving gear lubricator. The lubricator pumped a measured amount of engine grease into the coupling rod mechanism with every revolution of the wheels. 

On completion of his work on the coupling rod Thomas Bell reconnected the driving gear lubricator using, according to his own account, the same pins, bolts and nuts which he had removed from the assembly in the first place. 

Bell clocked-off work at 4:45pm and locomotive No14631 was put back into service that evening and was immediately listed to pull the freight express to Dundee, leaving Carlisle at 01:20 on Thursday morning.

The freight train left Carlisle five minutes late at 1:25am. The two crews waiting to join the Royal Highlander were still drinking tea in the canteen as the freight train left. The freight train was due at Beattock at 2.31am where, according to practice and the timetable, it would pull onto a siding to let the Royal Highlander overtake.

The goods train had passed the Dinwoodie, down, starter-signal ~ the signal that allowed or prevented north-bound trains entering into the Dinwoodie-Wamphray block ~ when William Oliver the driver of the freight train heard a loud banging on the left side of his engine. He pulled up to see if he could identify the cause of the noise.  The section of track at the point where the freight train had pulled up ran along a ten-foot-high embankment, built of cinder and furnace clinker, that carried the track above the level of the fields on either side. 

William Oliver found that the operating bar of the lubricator pump, which should have been secured to the vertical lever of the lubricator by a small nut and bolt, had broken free at one end and was spinning round and flailing against the side of the locomotive’s boiler. The bolt and nut that secured the operating bar to the vertical lever, which should have been secured by a split pin, had fallen out. 

Thomas Bell the fitter would later insist that the nut and bolt that he removed when he was taking down the coupling rod assembly did not have a split pin and that the bolt was not, in fact, drilled to accommodate such a pin. Bell knew that a split-pin was usually provided to secure the nut and he could easily have drilled a hole and added the necessary pin or got another nut and bolt with a pin attached and simply replaced it. But he didn’t. By his own account he replaced everything exactly as he had found it. 

Now the missing bolt had caused a minor problem. William Oliver the driver of the freight train decided to disconnect the bar, the work of only a few moments, and continue the journey to the Beattock siding where running repairs could be made while the Royal Highlander was allowed to pass by. 

The freight train had come to a halt in the Wamphray block section at 2.45am and the Royal Highlander was not due at Wamphray until 2:59am fourteen minutes later. Furthermore Oliver knew that the signalmen in the Lockerbie Central and Dinwoodie signal boxes could slow or stop the Highlander in its tracks should it be necessary. Oliver asked Chisholm, the freight train fireman, to hold the lamp so that he could see what he was doing and started work on the faulty lubricator pump assembly. 

After a couple of minutes WG Nicholson the freight train guard in the guard’s van at the rear of the goods train, lit his lamp, put on his jacket and climbed down onto the cinder trackside path ~ known as the cess ~ and began to walk forward to the front of the train. Standing orders stated that in the circumstances that Nicholson found himself in the guard should go forward, ascertain the nature of the problem and if necessary, ensure that any trains coming in the opposite direction were warned of any obstruction on their side of the tracks.

Chisholm the freight-train fireman was holding the lamp for driver Oliver to do the running repair. He saw the light of Nicholson’s lamp as he climbed down from the guard’s van onto the cess and later testified that it took Nicholson five or six minutes to walk forward the 247 yards.  It was dark and blustery and Nicholson had to proceed with care in order not to lose his footing and tumble down the ten-foot embankment. 

When Nicholson reached the front of the train, driver Oliver explained what had happened, what he had planned to do and then added that it was proving more difficult to make the temporary repair than he had thought it would. This exchange took a further minute or so.

According to Driver Oliver, Nicholson the guard then said,

I am afraid that The Tourist (the Royal Highlander) won’t be far away. I had better run away and protect the train

If a train was threatened with collision from behind standing orders ordained that the guard must take his lamp, his whistle and a couple of explosive detonators and run three-quarters of a mile in the direction of the oncoming train to place the detonators on the track. The detonators would explode when the wheels of the oncoming train passed over them. The noise of the detonators exploding would be loud enough to warn the train crew of a problem ahead and they would execute an emergency stop. 

As he turned to go, Nicholson the guard checked his watch. It was 2:53am. If it was on time The Royal Highlander was now only five or six minutes behind them. He began to run.

Nicholson would later relate that running and falling and running and falling it took him a couple of minutes to get back to the brake van. He climbed up into the van, got two detonators from the desk draw and climbed back down. 

I was only in my van for a few seconds. As I left the van and climbed down to the track-side I heard the Express. I commenced to run and had got a few paces when I saw its lights. My impression was that the train was then passing through Dinwoodie Station. I knew at any rate that it was not past the starting signal. I was looking for him to pull up at the starting signal. I kept running back and I placed two detonators on the line but I could not clip them on properly and I kept running on waving my red lamp and blowing my whistle but the Express kept on coming and as the lead engine was upon me I got myself up against the wire fence on the cess side. 

At 2:59 on Thursday the 25th October 1928 the Royal Highlander passenger express having only minutes before crossed the border into Scotland and passing through Lockerbie station entered the Dinwoodie-Wamphray block section under full-steam and, travelling at well over sixty miles an hour, ran into the rear of the stationery freight train.

The Highlander was, in effect, a five-hundred and fifty-five-ton missile on rails. The business end of the missile weighing more than two hundred tons was composed of two huge, pressurised boilers full of red-hot coals and hundreds of gallons of boiling water and super-heated steam. Evidence given at the Board of Trade inquiry after what became known as the Dinwoodie Disaster showed that in the dark and given no warning the crews of The Royal Highlander Express had no opportunity to apply the brakes. 

The first thing the lead locomotive of the Royal Highlander encountered at the moment of impact was the six wheeled, twenty ton, steel on steel brake van of the freight train. The pilot engine went straight through the brake van at about floor level. Pieces of steel from the brake-van were found scattered in the fields at the bottom of the cinder embankment on both sides of the line at the point of first impact.

The flat, heavy, sheet-steel ballast, laid on the floor of the brake-van, was perfectly designed, made and positioned to act as a horizontal guillotine. In the first second after impact the leading engine had its bogie and front four wheels completely sliced off by this guillotine. Though it seems impossible the fifteen-inch diameter, solid-steel, vertical centre-shaft that connected the front wheel assembly to the rest of the engine ~ a component that was necessarily massively strong ~ was sheered, chopped in two, by the shape and force of the impact. The shaft and the bogey were found in pieces in the wreckage. 

The brake gear of the lead engine was torn away, the driving axle bent and the coupling rods, those massive steel beams that provided a laugh for Buster Keaton, were broken and bent. The front buffer beam and the main frames of the leading locomotive, the massive steel structure onto which the locomotive was built, were doubled back like a paperclip. The frame on the right-hand side was broken almost in two. 

The collision hardly slowed the Highlander at all. Shorn of wheels, bogies and axels the huge boiler of the lead engine still full of fire, boiling water and super-heated steam was now arrowing through the goods vans that made up the train ahead of the brake-van. 

The second Highlander locomotive, passed under the roof and upper parts of the brake-van and the goods vans ahead of it. The smoke-boxes, chimneys, dome shells and driver’s cabs of both engines, all made of steel, were swept away 

The massive, solid steel, eight-wheel coal tender of the leading engine, caught between the combined weight of its own engine and the goods train ahead and the second locomotive and passenger train pressing on from behind, came apart. 

The bogey and brake gear at the front of the tender were twisted like a corkscrew. The bogie at the rear of the tender was torn in two. The right-hand side of the tender and its wheels were found to the rear of the wreck having been torn bodily away from the tender by the guillotine action of the steel ballast in the goods-train brake-van.

The train engine, the second locomotive in the double-header, was also torn to pieces. The buffer beam and frames over the front bogie were buckled and the bogie itself was twisted and wrecked. The brake gear was torn off by the ballast and wheels of the goods-train brake-van. The left coupling rod was bent and the platform and smoke box on the left-hand side crushed. The driver’s cab, the footplate, and the leading end of the tender of the second locomotive were utterly destroyed ~ the wreckage being tossed aside ~ as the remains of the two locomotives with the train still in tow continued to plough through the goods wagons. 

The goods-train engine and the thirty-three steel and wood goods-trucks, weighing over 400 tons, with the brakes applied were pushed forward over two hundred and twenty yards. As the debris built up in front of the Highlander it began to slow and the second locomotive with less damage and driven hard by the three-hundred tons of the following train pushing from behind climbed-up on the pilot engine like a bull getting up on a cow. 

Now as the lead locomotive began to slow, the train engine over-ran the lead engine, rearing up until it was almost vertical, emptying the red-hot contents of its firebox onto what remained of the engine and the two men who clung to what remained of the footplate. Ten seconds after the first impact the two great locomotives, lit by a cascade of glowing coals, toppled down the cinder embankment, coming to rest on their sides at right angles to the track.

The driver and fireman of the pilot engine, John Cowper and William Reid, were thrown from the train by the impact so violently that one body was hurled like a javelin and "buried up to the waist in the ground." The bodies of the other two railwaymen, driver James Irving and his fireman were buried under the wreck of the train engine, burned almost beyond recognition by the coals from their own firebox. A newspaper reported that when their bodies were recovered James Irving still had "the stem of his pipe between his teeth."

The driver and fireman of the down freight express to Dundee were first upon the scene. The coals scattered from both fireboxes were still burning. Despite having been thrown off the goods train engine and down the embankment Chisholm, the goods train fireman, found that he still clutched driver Oliver’s lamp in his hand. Some lights in the Express train still shone, for miraculously the carriages of The Royal Highlander though derailed were undamaged and upright.

There was just enough light for Chisholm and Oliver to see that there was no hope for the crews of the Royal Highlander. It was 3.05 on Thursday 25 October 1928

ix. On the Down Line Going North

About an hour after the Royal Highlander Express ran into the back of the Carlisle-Dundee goods train there was a knock at the back door of No 8 Caledonian Buildings in Etterby Street, Stanwix.  The Caledonian Buildings were purpose built “railwayman’s cottages”, eight houses each with two rooms upstairs and two rooms down. They had no bathroom but shared a lavatory outside in the yard. They were built by the Caledonian Railway in 1875 for their workers in the railway sheds at Kingmoor or those train crews who regularly had to pick up their locomotives from the Kingmore marshalling yards. Another two blocks of cottages were built in 1891. They were all demolished in the late 1960s. 

The houses were close to both the Kingmoor marshalling yards and to Carlisle Citadel Station the two locations where drivers and firemen might regularly be called to start a shift. It was a privilege to live so close to work and at the heart of a small railway community that provided essential support in the days before the Welfare State.

Just after four in the morning George Graham knocked on the back door of No 8. George and his wife Edith lived nearby. George was working a shift at Kingmoor that night. When the news of the accident began to come-in he had spoken briefly to his foreman and set out to run the two miles to his home. He woke Edith and then, leaving her to get dressed and follow him, he ran round to number eight. He knocked softly and just as Edith arrived, the door was opened by Mary, a short, plump, darked-haired woman of about thirty-five, wearing a long, white cotton nightdress and clutching a yellow and red knitted shawl around her shoulders. 

There was a short, whispered, conversation in the parlour. They did not sit down. The three standing adults filled the tiny room. Mary stood with her back to the hearth. While George spoke she turned away, opened the flue, riddled the fire, and added some coal to the now glowing embers. 

George explained that there had been an accident. There were few details. They knew however that the Royal Highlander was involved and that Robert, Mary’s husband, was a fireman on one of the engines pulling the Highlander that night. George explained that all he knew was there had been an urgent demand to send a train with heavy lifting gear and other emergency equipment down the line to Dinwoodie. 

It was agreed that George would get away back to work and Edith would stay with Mary, to help with the children, the bairns. There were two girls and two boys, Dorothy and Cora, David and Joseph, all under the age of ten, asleep upstairs. Someone would come with news, George promised, just as soon as they had anything to tell. 

Another neighbour arrived as George left and in the confusion Joseph, the eldest boy, who had stood in the dark on the stairs listening to the adults whispering, slipped out of the house and ran down the lane behind the Buildings.

After a hundred yards the boy squeezed through a hole in the fence that the railwaymen had made and slid down the bank to land with a thud on the cess beside the mainline and the other tracks that connected the Kingmoor yards to the rest of the network. 

Running fast, leaping across the tracks, skipping from sleeper to sleeper the boy arrived at the Kingmoor Main signal box no more than thirty minutes after that first, ominously quiet, knock on the yard door. Now the boy knocked just as quietly on the door of the signal-box and spoke briefly to the signalman.  

He sat by the fire in the signalman’s chair for the few minutes it took the signalman to identify and stop a train taking a rescue crew to the site of the accident. The signalman, who knew the boy and his father, took him to the door of the signal box and pointed out the rescue train waiting for him. A man in the crew van jumped down and passed the boy up into the waiting arms of another man inside the van. 

The benches in the van were full so the railwayman who had lifted the boy up into the van made a space on the floor between his feet and gave the boy a boiled sweet from a brown paper bag. No one spoke as they travelled north and the boy kept to himself whatever questions were forming in his mind, a small silent boy among the large silent men, on the down line, going north.

The rescue workers had already started to dig the bodies of the crewmen from among the wreckage of the Royal Highlander when my father arrived at the accident site. And he was still there an hour later, watching in silence, when the mangled and badly burned body of his own father, Robert Little Tibbetts, fireman on the train engine, was lifted from beneath the coal that had spilled from the firebox of engine number 1176. He was not quite eight-and-a-half years old. 

Though he would live a long, remarkable and successful life my father would never be free of that night. Sixty years later, he and I went on a tour of what was left of the sites associated with his life at the time of the accident and the accident itself. Astonishingly, at least to me, the hole in the fence providing a short-cut to Kingmoor was still there. We could only view the location of the accident from a distance but we were close enough to see great patches of golden-yellow flowers ~ Sicilian daisies, Senecio squalidus, Oxford Ragwort ~ which still clothed the embankment just as they had done that night and among which he had stood, a small boy knee deep in flowers, waiting to be called upon to help should he be needed, to lift up his father from the ground where he lay.

**********

x. The Knave of Clubs

A Board of Trade inquiry into the causes of what became known as the Dinwoodie Disaster was convened within twelve hours of the accident. Alan Mount who at the time was an Inspecting Officer for Railways at the Ministry of Transport, was chosen to head the inquiry. Seven months later, in May 1929, Mount would be appointed Chief Inspecting Officer for Railways a post he would hold for twenty years until his retirement in 1949. 

At the time of the inquiry into the Dinwoodie Disaster Mount was in the home straight of the race for the top job and everything that would come with it. We may be forgiven for supposing that he was doing his best not to rock the boat or tread on the toes of anyone who might, at the last minute, challenge or stop his progress 

In October 1928, with nearly ten years in the job, Alan Mount was already the man you turned to, to lead an inquiry into a major railway accident. He shaped and managed the investigation, allocating resources, deciding the lines of inquiry to be followed and who would be called to answer for their actions. He assembled the arguments for and against,  picking and choosing from the sometimes conflicting explanations of what had actually happened. He acted for both the defence and the prosecution and then he was the jury considering the evidence and finally he was the judge, presenting his judgement to the Ministry who would pass sentence if, of course, a sentence was indicated.

On a first reading of Alan Mount’s report we will admire his sparse and muscular prose, his patience and his diligence in pursuit of the truth. Then we will read his report again, and again, and then once more. And when we have finished our close reading, we will rethink our opinion of Alan Mount and call for a re-trial. 

Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alan Henry Lawrence Mount CB. CBE. is a bit of a mystery. There are tens of thousands of words written by him in the public record and these bear witness to the milestones in his professional life. But the man himself and his life outside of railway accident investigation is almost totally unrecorded.

There are eleven photographs of him in the National Portrait Gallery and one short line of biography. The curators at St Martin’s Place know nothing about him. There are porn stars they know more about. Or perhaps they do know and are just not sharing.

Mount was educated at Bradfield College, near Reading, then as now at the top of the B list of British public schools. Today the school’s list of notable alumni makes no mention of Mount among the many Knighted civil-servants the school claims to have set upon their course to greatness. The list does however find space for Tony Hancock “a comedian”. My requests for information from the school have gone unanswered.

Our interest is piqued by this lack of information about a man who achieved so much. We try our best not to read too much into the information we do not have.

Mount was born at Reading in 1881 to Reginald Crook Mount, a Corn Merchant, and his wife Agnes Annie Clark. Reggie Mount must have been both successful and vigorous for he married three times and fathered seven children in a space of nine years. None of which can be done without energy and money. Alan was his first child and the eldest of three brothers.

On 9 January 1892 the Mayor and Mayoress of Reading hosted a fancy-dress party for 240 children at the Reading Town Halls. Master Alan Mount attended in a costume representing the Knave of Clubs while Master Sydney Mount went as the Knave of Diamonds and Master Oscar Mount as the Knave of Hearts. Alan Mount would have been eleven years old. 

If the children were presented to the Mayor and Mayoress in alphabetical order, as the Reading Observer reported the proceedings, the Mount boys would have followed Miss Mary G Morris dressed as a Persian Girl and preceded Miss Marguerite H Martin dressed as Margarita from Faust. If Mary and Marguerite were familiar with The Tarot they would have known that the Knave of Clubs, dealt head up, signifies a good friend and sincere lover, enterprising, skilful and brave. Though also a flatterer and so slightly suspect. 

There is a short biography of Mount in Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History. Much of it may well be correct but most of it cannot be verified and some of it is wrong.  After Bradfield, Grace’s Guide tells us, Mount did three years at Coopers Hill, the Royal Indian Engineering College ~ RIEC ~ a British college of Civil Engineering founded in 1872 and run by the India Office, a Whitehall Department. 

Cooper’s Hill trained civil engineers for service in the Indian Public Works Department. Mount did well there, he was awarded a Fellowship. Then, on October 1st 1902, he was Commissioned into the Royal Engineers. He did two years at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, and after that, one year on secondment to the Midland Railway Company in Derby. Coincidentally the Midland Railway would become London Midland Scottish co-sponsors of The Race to the North and owner operators of The Royal Highlander that came to grief between Whamfrey and Dinwoodie in October 1928.

After six years continuous education and training Mount was not only a highly qualified railway engineer and a trained soldier but he had also built a wide and valuable network of contacts, supporters and friends

xi. The Great Game 

Mount was sent to India in November 1905. Before he departed he married Margaret Sybil Hunt.  He was twenty-five, she was nearly 30. Given the age difference she and her parents must have been quite relieved. Margaret was from a good family. In the circles that she moved in, the oldest son stood first in line for the title, the house and the debts. Second sons by tradition pursued a military life. Third sons either took holy orders or went to the bad. Occasionally, for both the Devil’s and our entertainment some enterprising third sons managed to combine holy orders and going to the bad. 

Alan Mount’s family was in trade. We suppose that Margaret Sybil’s parents would not have considered him a suitable match had it not been for her age. Margaret Sybil, however, must have thought herself lucky. Mount was handsome, vigorous, healthy, an oldest son with a profession and no debts. He was already making his way and though his family had bought their own furniture it was already clear that he was marked for greatness. He was not going to India as a box-wallah hoping to rustle up a fortune, he was an asset and an ornament of the Empire on which the sun never set. 

In 1907, Margaret Sybil presented him with a son, Alan Reginald D’Arcy Mount. We know that she returned to England for the birth. Mount would not have been able to accompany her for he was by then far too busy at work in the very heart of the biggest geopolitical upheaval in the world at that time. Margaret Sybil never returned to India. 

On his arrival in India in 1905 Mount had been sent to the North West Frontier where the Russian Empire and the British Empire faced each other across the mountains of Afghanistan which even then was disputed territory. This face-off and the manoeuvring  that supported it was known as The Great Game.

For more than a hundred years, while the Russians built a huge Empire in Central Asia ~ the Empire that Vladimir Putin would like to re-establish today ~ the Russians worried that  the British would march through the Khyber Pass and help themselves to the rich pickings in Persia and beyond. The British of course already had a vast empire and were worried that the Russians might march through the Khyber Pass and down the road into India to steal The Jewel in the Crown.

The Railways on the North West Frontier were there to serve the military and strategic needs of the two competing empires. The Afghan border was one of the most militarised frontiers in the world. There were no tourists and no one went there unless on military business. It is clear that the military business was staggering in its size and complexity. The numbers tell the story. In 1899 the North Western State Railway had over six-hundred steam locomotives, more than two-thousand coaches and ten-thousand three-hundred and twelve goods wagons. All these were there to service the needs of the British forces coming, going and remaining on “the roof of the world.” 

Heroic feats of engineering were commonplace. One section of the Khyber Pass line, not opened until 1925, from Jamrud to Landi Kotal reached a height of four thousand feet and in a distance of only thirty-two miles included thirty-four tunnels, ninety-two bridges and culverts and a long zig-zag ascending an otherwise insurmountably steep slope between Landi Kotal and Landi Khana.

Now everything was changing. In 1905, just as Mount arrived the railways serving the needs of Empire in the northwest of India were being radically reorganised. Some lines were to be closed, some development projects cancelled. 

On August 31, 1907 Sir Arthur Nicolson, the British Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Russian Emperor, and Alexander Isvolsky, the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs met in St. Petersburg  to sign The Anglo-Russian Convention. The Russian Empire and British Empire henceforth would be allies in opposing the German Empire who had recently struck an alliance of their own with the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The Anglo-Russian Convention recognised that Afghanistan and southern Iran would be in the British sphere of influence. Central Asia and northern Iran were to be in the Russian sphere of influence. Both parties recognized Tibet as a neutral country. The Great Game was over, abandoned in favour of what would soon become known as The Great War. 

Iran ~ the Persia of old ~ sat across the route from anywhere to everywhere of interest in eastern and central Asia and had always been strategically important. Now, with the discovery of apparently inexhaustible oil reserves any self-respecting empire understood that having control of a piece of Iran was not so much desirable but essential. The war that was all too obviously on the way would be fought, for the first time, from mechanised platforms driven by internal-combustion engines. Cars, lorries, tanks, ships, aeroplanes and trains. The diplomatic gunboats that projected the power of Empire  around the world would be powered not by coal but by fuel oil. The more than six hundred steam engines specially built for the North West Frontier made steam with fuel oil not coal.

Mount was a railway engineer, a soldier and a young man at the start of a career. The posting to the North West Frontier at this time in history presented him  with an extraordinary opportunity and he seems to have seized it with both hands. 

xii. The Spy in his pomp.

Mount must have been good at his job. In 1910 he was appointed to design and build the necessary light railways for the great Imperial Durbar, the Delhi Durbar of 1911. George Frederick Ernest Albert, George V.  King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and the Emperor of India, and his wife Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, Mary of Teck, (her friends called her May) the Queen Consort and Empress of India would ride together on Alan Mount’s little railway. 

Alan Mount was subsequently awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind medal for this service but there is no mention of him in the existing lists of those who were awarded the medal.

At the 1911 Durbar it was announced that the capital of India would move from Calcutta (Kolkota) to Delhi. Six months later Mount was appointed Executive Engineer to the Planning Committee for the new capital. He was 31 years old.

Before he could take up his new post, however, he was sent on a tour of inspection looking at railways in Germany, Belgium and France. This was said to be so that he could better advise on the building of railways in India. It is difficult to imagine exactly what a man of Mount’s education, training and experience could have learned from swanning round France, Germany and Belgium that would have been helpful in planning or building the lines and stations that would serve the new Capital City of the sub-continent.

Mount was a soldier and had spent two years at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham and seven years in India much of the time in the front-line on the North West Frontier. His masters must have seen just how useful a knowledgeable and resolute young man with a military training might prove in a world that was less than two years away from the outbreak of the war to end all wars. Alan Mount’s grand tour of Germany, Belgium and France - the countries that were already, in 1912, understood to be the likely theatre of the coming war - looks very like a military intelligence gathering exercise.

MI5 and MI6 had been created only a couple of years before. Overseas intelligence gathering by MI6 began in 1912 the very same year that Mount was sent to Germany. Mount was recalled to India in 1913. The first Army Intelligence Corps was formed in Britain in August 1914 and immediately moved its officers to France. Within a few weeks Alan Mount left India and joined them at GHQ. He was seconded to the Railway Directorate. He was first the Assistant Director of Railway Construction at G.H.Q. France and then, in 1917, made Deputy Chief Construction Engineer for Broad-Gauge Railways reporting to the Director-General of Transportation. He was four times mentioned in dispatches, was awarded a Brevet Majority and the C.B.E., and was given, by the French, the Legion d'Honneur. He was granted the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in July 1922.

Alan Mount’s brief flirtation with Military Intelligence has no bearing on our story. It does however give us an insight into his character and his abilities. 

In 2015 it was possible to find, on the web, two obituaries for Mount published in obscure specialist publications. One clearly relied upon the other. Neither provided any useful information. There were also a handful of identical three-line announcements of his death in regional newspapers. But there are no obituaries, no tributes glowing or otherwise in national newspapers or magazines. This is not to say that there were none at the time but for now we are confronted with a silence so total that it cannot be ignored. Mount served his country man and boy, was Knighted for his efforts and was inscribed in the French Legion d’Honneur. It seems astonishing to us that such a life was so little celebrated at its end.

In 1919 Alan Mount returned to England, was placed on the Army reserve-list and appointed as an Inspecting Officer for Railways at the Ministry of Transport. Ten years later he was promoted to Chief Inspecting Officer and twelve years after that in 1941 he was Knighted. He resigned his post as Chief Inspecting Officer of Railways in 1949. He was sixty-nine years old.

Alan Mount  was made Chief Inspecting Officer in 1929 but he must have been a serious player in the years before that. In 1939 he was Chairman of the Pacific Locomotive Committee which investigated the series of derailments of Indian locomotives which had been supplied by British locomotive manufacturers. His recommendations after the derailment at Potters Bar in 1946 led to the redesigning and rebuilding of the entire station. In 1949 at the age of sixty-nine he was still in the top seat. Thirty years at or close to the top but, as far as we know, he did nothing other than write reports on railway accidents. 

Mount seems hidden in plain sight whereas his family are invisible. We know nothing of his life outside of the Ministry of Transport.  There is no record anywhere of him taking any part in society. No seats on boards of trustees. No charitable work. No memberships of sports clubs as sportsman or supporter. No books or memoirs. No crimes or misdemeanours of record. No fond memories in other people’s memoirs. No spells as treasurer of the Bee Keepers Association or as Chairman of the Board of Governor’s at his old school or his son’s school. For thirty years he is both ubiquitous and totally absent. 

Alan Mount came home in 1919 a year or so short of his fortieth birthday. Before that he had lived a life of adventure. He was an energetic, confident, active, forceful man with technical skills sufficient to warrant appointment as Executive Engineer for the building of a city. We cannot prove but we do not doubt that he had a military intelligence brief between 1912 and 1919 and that for a couple of years he was directed by and reported to an intelligence officer. 

After 1919 Mount was, suddenly, a dull as ditch-water bureaucrat. As far as we know, for thirty years, he went to work each day, then went home climbed into a box and lay unmoving and unnoticed until it was time to go to work again. This sudden change from man of action to model bureaucrat seems unlikely. Furthermore while his work at the ministry was important work and well done, on its own it hardly seems full and proper occupation for such a man. The entire inquiry and report for the Dinwoodie disaster took Mount only seven weeks. What, we wonder, did he do with his “spare” time and energy?

There are just over eight-hundred pages of documents pertaining to Alan Mount in the national archive. They were kept under lock and key until 2016. The one thing that is made clear by these documents is that a lot of influential people pulled  a lot of strings to get Mount into the position of Inspector of Railways that he held in 1928. The documents also show that Mount had been groomed and shortlisted for the top job long before the Dinwoodie disaster. His appointment broke with tradition. His predecessors had been far more senior and distinguished than Mount at the time they were appointed to the top job. Such was the gap between Mount and his predecessors that the Civil Service would not agree to pay him the same pay scale as his immediate predecessor. 

It seems clear that Mount was useful to some influential people. And it follows that making himself useful to these people was what he did when he wasn’t actiively engaged in directing inquiries or writing up reports.

xiii Solomon at the Board of Trade

Mount submitted his report on 14th December 1928 less than two months after the accident. The report includes narrative, evidence, witness statements, argument, and judgement. Thirteen thousand words with a further five pages of appendixes.

“I have the honour to report” he wrote, “for the information of the Ministry of Transport, in accordance with the Order of 25th October the result of my Inquiry into the circumstances of the accident which occurred on that date”. 

The first thing that Alan Mount does is summarily dismiss any idea that the four railwaymen, the Carlisle men, in charge of the Royal Highlander locomotives were in some way responsible for the accident or not fit for the job.

“The evidence of Mr E. L. Booth the District Locomotive Superintendent who was intimately acquainted with them” Mount writes, “shows that they were men of high character with good records and all were fit in every way for duty.”

Mount also examines the actions and performance of the other members of the Royal Highlander crew. The guards and the stewards. All are found to be innocent of wrong-doing and at least satisfactory in the performance of their duties.

Mount then turned his forensic eye upon Colin Bell the fitter at Carlisle, Kingmoor who, charged with the maintenance work on the freight train locomotive, failed to secure the bolt with a split pin.

Mount is obsessed by the missing bolt. Bell is steadfast in his insistence that he reassembled everything using the components he had removed in the first place. But even if this was true, Mount says, Bell should have taken steps to drill a hole and fit it with a split-pin, or replaced the bolt with another already drilled and with a pin attached. 

Mount commissioned a close search for the missing lubricator-arm nut and bolt. Men on hands and knees scrutinised a mile of cinder ballast and the ditches and muddy fields around Dinwoodie. But the bolt could not be found. Mount was not satisfied and made further extensive inquiries. 

“It is to be noted” he writes, “that this particular locomotive was one of a considerable number of this type at Carlisle and this engine was the only one which was not, as Bell has claimed, fitted properly in this respect.” Moreover, Mount says, none of the other examining fitters that he questioned at other stations up and down the line had ever come across an incidence of the bolt in question being supplied or fitted without the retaining split-pin. In short, we understand Mount to say, Colin Bell is lying and found guilty even though, Mount says, his guilt cannot be proved. 

Mount’s obsessive and over meticulous search for the bolt looks very like a piece of misdirection. Bell was “guilty” by his own admission. No proof was necessary. He knew the bolt with split pin was required and should have rectified the problem. He admitted as much. If in doubt, he should have consulted his supervisor. It seems, however, that there was no supervisor or if there was a supervisor there was no requirement in LMS company procedures for a supervisor to sign-off Bell’s work even though, as proved tragically to be the case in this instance, lives depended on it. 

Mount does not question why Bell’s work was not overseen. Instead, astonishingly, he declares there is no alternative but to accept Bell’s evidence at face value and allow that Bell was guilty of nothing more than a minor mis-judgement. 

Any intervention of a supervisor would have presented Bell with an opportunity to report the problem. If he had reported his concern the problem could have been rectified. This, however, would have led to a delay in the return-to-service of the locomotive in question. The promptness with which locomotive No.14631 was returned to service suggests that there were some logistical pressures to do so. 

Mount is making a great fuss over a piece of irrelevant lost evidence and then being inexplicably lenient with Bell. We cannot avoid the suspicion that he is doing so for fear that any deeper inquiry would implicate both the management of the London Midland Scottish railway company ~ the very same company that Mount had spent a year seconded to in 1904 ~ and the Railways Inspectorate, Mount’s own employer. 

In his report, Mount approves the actions of the driver and fireman in stopping the freight train. Mount, however, found the guard of the freight train to be dilatory in execution of his duties and a liar to boot. Nicholson clearly waited for far too long before he climbed down and went forward to ascertain the cause of his train coming to a standstill. He was quick enough to understand the danger once he had gone forward but by then it was too late. He should have carried his explosive charges forward with him. The charges were designed to be placed on the tracks so that any train running over them would detonate them and the noise would be loud enough to alert the train crew to any danger and they would be able to halt the train. The guard should have take the charges forward with him in case he had to place them on the up-line forward of the position of the stationery freight train if there was a need to warn south bound trains. 

If Nicholson had the charges with him, in his jacket pocket he would, Mount says, have saved time in running back to warn the oncoming express. As it was, Nicholson had to collect the charges from his van on the way back from his visit to the front of the train. In the event Nicholson collected the charges on his way back and ran as far as he could towards Dinwoodie station managing to place but not secure the explosive charges on the line in the path of the oncoming express. 

Mount set another group of men to comb the permanent way and the fields on either side for the explosive charge casings. They were nowhere to be found. Nicholson’s explanation that he was unable to clip the charges onto the line is, Mount feels, an after-the-fact attempt to explain why the spent charges could not be found. It seems to Mount almost certain that Nicholson did not have the charges with him when he was running back to warn the oncoming express.

Later in the inquiry two spent explosive charges were discovered more or less where Nicholson said he had placed them. But their heavily rusted condition gives rise to the suspicion that they were charges that had been used elsewhere and on a previous occasion. This in turn gives rise to the suspicion that there is a conspiracy between Nicholson and his colleagues to provide some evidence that supports the idea that he was at least close to being competent and efficient. 

Mount spends some time ruminating on the rusty, spent, explosive-charge casings. They had supposedly been stored in the dry security of the guards-van, desk draw. The whole narrative around the rusty explosive-charge casings seems fabricated. Nevertheless Mount lets it go accepting the assurances of some of Nicholson’s colleagues, that the casings could have rusted to such a degree after only a few hours exposure. Mount was an experienced and highly skilled engineer. He could, furthermore, have called on the most competent minds available in Great Britain to have the likely rate of rusting verified. 

It seems clear that this was another part of the investigation that Mount wanted to gloss over. Standing orders required the guard to be in two places at once. He had to deal with the safety of southbound trains approaching the breakdown site on the up line and he had to secure the safety of his own train from being hit by following trains northbound on the downline. Given the length of the goods train, the dark and stormy night and the narrowness of the cess – the track side path - it was impossible for Nicholson to complete all of the tasks he was required to do even if he had jumped from his van the moment the goods train came to a halt and sprinted like an Olympic athlete up and down the track. 

At the end of his report Mount appends a couple of pages of recommendations. Every single material action undertaken by Nicholson on the night of the accident as laid down in the standing orders is recommended by Mount, in the report, for review and change. Some of the technology likewise is recommended, by Mount, for upgrading. In short if there was a fatal flaw it was a flaw in the standing orders and/or in the provision of communications equipment connecting locomotive and guard’s van. 

Mount finds Nicholson dilatory, confused and mendacious. He is lying, he was most likely dozing in his van when the freight train pulled up. Mount listened to Nicholson’s account of his own performance and then ordered a reconstruction. A few days after the accident Nicholson was brought to the accident site and forced to repeat his actions as he had described them. Running back and forth up and down the cess timed with a stop watch. It was clear that he could not have done what he said he did. Nicholson is lying and conspiring to pervert the course of “justice”. Mount who is investigator, jury and judge, however, does nothing but administer a rebuke. Nicholson’s failure to protect the train was,  Mounts says, a contributing factor to the cause of the accident. 

In fact London Midland Scottish, hand in glove with the Railway Inspectorate were guilty of faulty process design, conflicting standing orders and failure to provide appropriate equipment. 

On the night of the accident, signalman Scott in the Wamphray signal box fell asleep. When signalman Anderson at the Dinwoodie signal box, rang the bell to “offer” the approaching Royal Highlander to Scott, he was asleep. Anderson tried again and then called Scott on the telephone link. Scott woke-up confused and accepted the oncoming Express. Scott was unaware that the goods train had entered his block and then failed to exit it because he had been asleep. Talking to Anderson he tried to bluster his way out of trouble, effectively giving false information up and down the line. If he had admitted at once that he had been asleep and did not know if his block was empty it might have been possible to throw all the signals and stop the Highlander in its tracks.  

The inquiry revealed that Scott, the sleeping signalman, had been suffering from longstanding problems at home. His wife had been ill and bed-bound for ten weeks after the birth of a child. Scott had been doing full shifts, some of them twelve hours long, and then going home and doing almost all the housework including looking after two children under five and a ten-week old baby. When he was on nights his sleep during the day was disturbed by his frail wife waking him up to attend to her needs and those of the family.

Anderson the signalman in the next signal box knew of Scott’s problems and had been aware that Scott was falling asleep at his post from time to time. Anderson did and said nothing in an understandable but misplaced sense of loyalty to Scott. Given the tightness of the Railway community and the way in which their everyday lives were intertwined it is certain that others, including Scott’s immediate superiors knew of his circumstances. But they did nothing.

Having ignored or made light of the contribution to the causes and outcomes of the accident that had been made by the other parties to the tragedy Mount seized on Scott as a convenient and perfectly formed scapegoat. 

Mount reports in detail on Scott’s circumstances, home life and work patterns which had included some periods of twelve-hour shifts and three periods of night-shifts during the ten-week period of his wife’s illness. Mount recognises that Scott’s catastrophic failure on the night of the accident was not a sudden breakdown but a slow accumulation of exhaustion. The proof, if proof is needed, was the report by signalman Anderson that Scott had been caught napping during the weeks prior to the accident. Scott had been occasionally called upon to do twelve hour shifts when the normal shift, agreed with the Union, was eight hours. Nevertheless, Mount says,

(Scott) was certainly not unfit physically for duty and there was no reason to suspect that he was otherwise, this being his fourth night shift during the illness of his wife. 

Mount reasons that as Scott had completed three separate periods of night shifts during the ten-week period prior to the night of the accident it follows that he was fit to undertake yet another. A better example of false reasoning would be difficult to imagine. 

Some fallacies are introduced into an argument to mislead or misdirect and some are included through stupidity or carelessness. Mount was neither stupid nor careless but maintains that there was no reason to suspect that Scott was unfit for duty when in fact there was every reason to suspect that he was unfit.

It is clear that Mount is trying to persuade the reader that London Midland Scottish should be held blameless. In fact Scott was not fit to do the night shifts and the LMS management must have known it. Mount moves on from this strange lapse in his powers of reasoning without drawing breath and, in the very next line in his report, offers up Scott for execution.

I cannot entirely disregard, Mount writes, the extenuating plea that domestic misfortunes may have been a contributory factor in the serious mistake which (Scott) made,but having regard to the course which he promptly pursued, he cannot, in my opinion, be relieved in any way of full responsibility for this accident.

Scott, says Mount, must bear full responsibility for the accident not because he fell asleep but because having woken up and found he did not know the true situation he gave misleading information to conceal his own failure. Alan Mount invites the reader to ignore all the other contributing factors by a number of different individuals and agree that it was Scott’s attempt to conceal his guilt that should be blamed for the accident. Furthermore says Mount as no one else, neither his colleagues nor his employers nor the overseeing authority can be implicated in Scott’s attempt to conceal his guilt, all with the exception of Scott, are to be held blameless.

In this way Mount absolves from responsibility all of the other players directly involved and so prevents the owners and officers of London Midland Scottish and the Railway Inspectorate and the Board of Trade from being summoned to answer difficult and embarrassing questions.

The whole inquiry is a masterpiece of obfuscation and misdirection. London Midland Scottish designed the systems and wrote the standing orders under the supervision of Mount’s colleagues at the Railways Inspectorate. LMS pushed the system they had designed and managed, to its limit and beyond, in the pursuit of commercial success. LMS were careless in designing and managing the maintenance regime allowing the work of Bell the Kingmoor fitter to go-forward un-inspected and in rushing locomotive No 14631 back into the roster for no reason but simple commercial expediency.

The London Midland Scottish management and the Railway Inspectorate including Mount himself were  all relying on the block system and the signalmen who were operating it to slow and stop the Highlander. But the block system had failed many times before and would fail again. The system was not proof against human error.  Alan Mount and the LMS management knew it.

If LMS had been called to explain their failings, they would certainly have implicated both Whitehall and the Government. The government was pressing ahead to rebuild Britain’s industrial strength, whatever the cost, after the first world war. One of the Government’s actions in the early 1920s was to force the merger of a large number of smaller railway companies into four larger companies. LMS was the largest of the four rail operating companies and the second largest company of any sort in Britain. The merger was forced through against the wishes of most of the senior management teams and at a great speed. The result was utter chaos as the new super-companies tried to standardise operating procedures and safety equipment across all the merged companies. In 1928 this chaos was still being sorted out. 

The actions of Nicholson the goods-train guard ~ failure to protect the train ~ was identified by Mount as a contributory factor. Nicholson may well have been slow off the mark and have failed to take the explosive charges with him when he did respond, but as we have seen London Midland Scottish were responsible for his “failure to protect the train”. If there had been a telephone link between the footplate and the guard’s van the guard would not have had to go forward and could have focussed on protecting the train from the oncoming express. The telephone line that connected the signal boxes ran beside the track on the cess side. Phones or phone line connection points beside the track would have allowed the guard to phone the signalmen and sound the alarm.  Mount understood all this but could not point it out without implicating the operating  companies, the regulators and possibly the government. 

In the official record, even today, Scott’s actions – falling asleep and giving false information - are given as the cause of the accident and Nicholson’s actions “failure to protect the train” are cited as a contributing factor. Neither of these judgements are honest or fair. Scott’s and Nicholson’s lives were destroyed. The real culprits were never identified. Alan Mount who engineered this travesty of justice was promoted and a decade later Knighted.

Alan Mount was a lifelong servant of the establishment and the state. The same groups and individuals who worked so hard to have him brought back from India and installed in the Ministry of Transport. And he was the perfect servant of his sponsors. He was capable, self-serving, clever, a practised deceiver, ruthless,  patient and a skilled persuader. 

At the end of his working life Mount took to publicly chastising the Government for not investing enough in the Railways and not planning and delivering the Railway that he, Alan Mount, recommended. There is a hint in the threadbare record  that Mount did not willingly resign his post at sixty-nine ~ a year before he was scheduled to retire ~ but was pushed out for publicly speaking out against the Government. It is tempting to think that this was the reason why the establishment failed and continues to fail to note or celebrate his life and contribution. 

-o0o-

There is a small gravestone in Putney Vale Cemetery, SW London, marking the grave of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alan Mount and his wife Margaret. Sir Alan died in 1955. Margaret his wife survived him by twenty two years.  The inscription recording Mount’s final resting place is barely legible.

The Carlisle men were buried in Stanwix Cemetery on ???? date. The four hearses assembled at the top of Etterby Street where it meets Scotland Road, the north south cardo maximus of the original Roman settlement. It is a mile from there to the cemetery. According to the Cumberland News thirty thousand people lined the route. 

There is a monument in the cemetery 

"Erected to the memory of four gallant men who lost 

their lives in the Dinwoodie railway disaster 

- 25th October 1928 - and were interred in this cemetery".