The Quintinshill Conspiracy

The Shocking True Story Behind Britain's Worst Rail Disaster

Jack Richards, Adrian Searle

• Publisher: Wharncliffe Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781473831803
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Rail Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

It was the railway's Titanic. A horrific crash involving five trains in which 230 died and 246 were injured, it remains the worst disaster in the long history of Britain's rail network.The location was the isolated signal box at Quintinshill, on the Anglo-Scottish border near Gretna; the date, 22 May 1915. Amongst the dead and injured were women and children but most of the casualties were Scottish soldiers on their way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign. Territorials setting off for war on a distant battlefield were to die, not in battle, but on home soil victims, it was said, of serious incompetence and a shoddy regard for procedure in the signal box, resulting in two signalmen being sent to prison. Startling new evidence reveals that the failures which led to the disaster were far more complex and wide-reaching than signalling negligence. Using previously undisclosed documents, the authors have been able to access official records from the time and have uncovered ahighly shocking and controversial truth behind what actually happened at Quintinshill and the extraordinary attempts to hide the truth.As featured in Dumfries & Galloway Life magazine, January 2014.

Chapter 1

A Country in Crisis. A Disaster too Far?

‘British soldiers died last week on Aubers Ridge because the British Army is short of shells.’

Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief, British Expeditionary Force, 14 May 1915

To understand the truth behind the worst disaster in the history of Britain’s railways, to peel away the whitewash obscuring the complex realities that underpin the story of this appalling tragedy, it is essential to seek out the bigger picture. The real story of Quintinshill’s tragedy is as multi-tracked as the stretch of railway line on which it occurred in May 1915.

Previous attempts to chronicle the accident at the isolated West Coast Main Line signal box have essentially been targeted at railway enthusiasts. It was, after all, a railway cause célèbre. But this is not merely a tragic story about trains. There is a great deal more to it than that – Quintinshill was a momentous event for Britain in a period of wartime crisis.¹

It was all so different in August 1914 when war was declared against Germany. Large crowds on both sides of the Channel had cheered as the British Expeditionary Force set off to join its French allies to teach the upstart Kaiser Wilhelm a lesson he wouldn’t forget and chase his army, which surely would be comfortably defeated, back to Berlin to lick its wounds. It would be a glamorous, fast-moving continental campaign of cavalry charges en route to certain victory – it would all be over by Christmas.

It didn’t turn out like that, of course. This was destined to be a wholly different kind of war in which mechanised armies would fight themselves into a bloody stalemate. After the initial battles of 1914 both sides held an entrenched 400 mile line that stretched from the Belgian coast, through the flat lands of industrial Artois, the wide expanses of the Somme and Champagne, then into the high Vosges and all the way to the Swiss border.

Winston Churchill, appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, had enthusiastically pursued a plan for the Royal Navy to spearhead an invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula in the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey). The plan was to force open the Dardenelles strait and a secure sea route to Russia, thus relieving pressure on the Czar’s forces and helping to break the deadlock in the war.

Launched on 24 April 1915, the campaign quickly faltered and developed into a further deadly stalemate – regarded in retrospect as a disastrous failure – which, among other consequences, saw Churchill’s removal from office. On 7 May, two weeks after the ill-fated attack on Gallipoli, the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania, commandeered by the Admiralty as an armed merchant cruiser, was torpedoed by a German U-boat eleven miles off the Old Head of Kinsale lighthouse on the southern Irish coast en route from New York to Liverpool. The ‘Lucy’ sank with the loss of 1,198 lives.

Then, on 9 May, British forces suffered unmitigated disaster, with heavy casualties and no tactical gain whatsoever, at the Battle of Aubers Ridge, south of Armentières in France. Five days later, exasperated at the lack of available ammunition, the BEF’s Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, with support from The Times newspaper, launched a fierce attack on the War Office.

‘British soldiers died last week on Aubers Ridge because the British Army is short of shells,’ he declared bitterly. Political crisis immediately ensued. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s Liberal administration was in big trouble.

In the midst of these shattering events, on the sunlit Saturday morning of 22 May just north of Gretna on the Anglo-Scottish border, a train carrying nearly 500 Scottish territorial soldiers bound for the Gallipoli beaches via Liverpool collided head-on at high speed with a stationary local passenger train at Quintinshill on the Caledonian Railway’s main line. A minute later a Glasgow-bound express from London ploughed into the wreckage.

The result was carnage. The country was appalled when news filtered through that 230 had died in terrible circumstances and another 247 had been injured, many of them seriously. It was yet another numbing event in a month of disasters. Three days later, on 25 May, the schism which had developed within Asquith’s Cabinet over the ‘shell crisis’ in the wake of Aubers Ridge and other issues of wartime leadership forced him into unwanted coalition with the Conservative opposition. Political meltdown gripped the nation.²

Was Quintinshill one disaster too many for the Government? When, a week after the tragedy, disturbing evidence emerged about one of the signalmen involved – as a consequence of his arrest on a charge of culpable homicide – was a decision reached at the highest level to take all measures necessary to ‘bury’ the story, or at least the apparently unwelcome truth which lay behind it? Was there a conspiracy to keep it buried? Was there a rush to judgment as a result of this? Research carried out for this book points firmly to the conclusion that, in all respects, there was.

The wider issues are many and profound. Yet trains are, of course, at the heart of the story and, in setting the wider context, it would clearly be absurd to ignore the backdrop of the Edwardian railway. While the accident actually happened five years after the accession to the throne of King George V, the British railway system was very much the product of the preceding Edwardian era and, indeed, of Edwardian society as a whole.

The enormous power held and exerted by major industrial concerns was particularly evident in the railway and shipping sectors, their tentacles spreading far and wide into the political and economic fabric of the nation.

As a counterweight to this the trade union movement had gained influential power in the late nineteenth century, leading to the formation in 1910 of the Labour Party which quickly established itself as a political force.

By the close of the Edwardian era in 1910, trade unionism in the railway industry was becoming better organised. Rail workers declared a national strike over wages and conditions in 1911 at the height of what became known as ‘The Great Unrest’. Two years later the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) was formed, the result of an amalgamation of three smaller unions. The men who enjoyed the prestige of working on the locomotive footplate, the drivers and firemen, had their own, well established, union in the form of the splendidly titled Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen – ASLEF for short – formed in 1880.

Probably no one alive today can remember what has been called the ‘golden age of railways’. Express passenger trains in Edwardian Britain during the first decade of the twentieth century had reached a splendour unequalled anywhere else in the world. These were not the trains that many today would immediately link with the age of the steam railway. The modern mind more easily focuses on the gleaming trains hauled by world-famous locomotives such as Flying Scotsman and the streamlined record-breaker Mallard. Both these iconic engines were products of later eras.

Neither would a visit to one of Britain’s magnificent heritage railways provide more than a glimpse of the true glory of train travel before 1914. With some notable exceptions, the locomotives and coaches that epitomised the railway traveller’s experience during this long-vanished period – specifically for those using the cross-border West Coast Main Line – are represented only among the collections of the National Railway Museum in York and Glasgow’s Riverbank Museum. They serve as evocative preserved fragments from a huge, proud and essential industry.

Together with trans-oceanic shipping, the mighty internal rail network functioned as the heart and arteries of Britain’s mobile Edwardian age. Railways and shipping were pivotal to the early twentieth century economies of the industrialised world. Nowhere was this more true than in Britain. Without its ability to rely on these two forms of transport, both at home and abroad, the country could never have sustained its envied global empire.

Hard as it is to imagine today, just about everything – people and freight – travelling anywhere other than short distances overland went by train. It was a massive operation. In the pre-war eras of Edward VII and George V specialised railway vans and wagons were designed and provided for just about every conceivable purpose, even for touring theatre companies and circuses!

The railways continued to dominate internal transport as the major powers of Europe plunged into war on an unprecedented industrial scale in 1914. It was a war that none of the participant nations could have hoped to prosecute without the ability of their railways to supply them. Britain’s extraordinarily complex rail network was absolutely vital to the war effort.

As an island nation, separated by sea and considerable landmass from the battlefields, Britain had different considerations to the other powers when it came to planning how best to use rail in wartime. On the continent railways were at the heart of battleground strategy itself. Long before the war Germany in particular had adopted a military policy utterly dependent on the quick deployment of rail-borne supply lines to battle zones.

German rail expansion, especially near the western border with France, had seen extravagant facilities provided which far exceeded peacetime levels. During a prolonged pre-war period, military considerations were paramount in the considerable development of the newly-unified nation’s railways.

‘As the new century dawned, Germany’s military plans became more and more sophisticated, and at their core was the notion of a rapid mobilisation through the railways,’ writes Christian Wolmar in his enthralling book, Engines of War. This comprehensive account of the role played by railways in deciding the outcome of major international conflicts reminds us that, since 1899, the use of rail as the centrepiece of German military intentions and strategy had been enshrined in what was effectively an annually revised blueprint for war. Colloquially referred to as the Schlieffen Plan, it was devised by chief-of-staff, Alfred von Schlieffen.³

Only by using the railways to their fullest possible extent, the plan made clear, could Germany successfully wage a war on two fronts, as it correctly anticipated having to do. The ability to supply men and materials speedily to the front line by rail would knock out the threat from France in the west in time to deal with the slower to mobilise Russians in the east.

That, at least, was the theory. It did not, of course, work out that way – ‘an elaborate fantasy’, says Wolmar – because of the errors of military strategy and the false political assumptions upon which the plan was based. Yet the Schlieffen Plan serves as a major reminder of the unchallenged status of rail as the period’s main means of overland transport.

In Britain, too, the importance of the internal rail network in military planning was primarily its ability to get soldiers and their equipment mobilised quickly for action. However, the specific objectives were different to those of the enemy-in-waiting. The essential task for Britain’s railways was to transport men, armaments and the other paraphernalia of warfare to the ports for transhipment to the continent – an operation which, up to a point at least, had been usefully rehearsed with the transfer of thousands of British troops and equipment from rail to ship through the port of Southampton during the Boer Wars at the close of the nineteenth century.

In general terms, aided as it was by the creation in 1914 of a national Railway Executive Committee to oversee wartime operation, mobilisation by rail in Britain can be said to have worked well. But the demands were intolerably heavy, both on the capacity of the track and the availability of rolling stock, a twin burden which could have been, should have been, but was not, alleviated by any appreciable reduction in the normal train timetable. It was thus very far from being a flawless operation.

Within a year of the war’s outbreak in 1914, this dependency on the trains of myriad private companies, the need to utilise from them whatever stock happened to be lying around, sometimes with scant regard for its suitability for a specific task, would have a direct impact on the events which culminated so tragically at Quintinshill on that sunny morning in May.

However, what happened there and during the course of the disturbing events which followed the disaster cannot be properly considered on so narrow a front. There were other factors at play and to understand these it is necessary to delve more deeply into the structure and character of Britain’s early twentieth century railway system – and of British society as a whole.

The trains themselves reflected the class structure. In the main there were three classes of travel: first, second and third. The treatment of third class travellers was more often than not disgraceful – uncomfortable and dirty.

The history of the conveyance of the ‘lower orders’ by Britain’s railways is a disreputable one. More than seventy years before Quintinshill an accident on the Great Western in 1841 had resulted in the deaths of many working class passengers travelling in open trucks on a freight train – normal procedure at the time. This resulted three years later in the passing of an Act of Parliament to provide better accommodation for third class ticket holders.

The railway companies grudgingly complied with the minimum standards required by the new law. Their ‘Parliamentary trains’, known throughout the industry as ‘Parlys’, were awful and generally ran at times when only a hardy, or desperate, few would contemplate travelling. This sorry state of affairs was destined to linger long. It was still in place when W.S. Gilbert penned his famous libretto half a century later for The Mikado. Five of his lines neatly summarise the upper class view of these dismal trains:

The idiot who, in railway carriages,

Scribbles on window-panes,

We only suffer

To ride o...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Maps & Diagrams
• Chapter 1 A Country in Crisis. A Disaster too Far?
• Chapter 2 A Crash of Overwhelming Magnitude
• Chapter 3 Fire and Rescue
• Chapter 4 The Days after Disaster
• Chapter 5 The Signalman who Forgot
• Chapter 6 The Arrest of James Tinsley
• Chapter 7 Colonel Druitt’s Incomplete Inquiry
• Chapter 8 Doubts and Determination in Dumfries
• Chapter 9 Whitewash: The Secret Inquiry
• Chapter 10 The Coroner’s Triple Indictment
• Chapter 11 Collusion and Conviction
• Chapter 12 Inquisition and Soul-searching
• Chapter 13 The Fight for Justice
• Chapter 14 The Final Analysis
• Chapter 15 Truths, Myths, Legends and Memorials
• Appendix I Quintinshill’s Death Toll
• Appendix II Signalling Operations, 22 May 1915
• Acknowledgments & Bibliography
• Notes