This week we’re delighted to welcome a guest post to the Railway Work, Life & Death project blog. John Pullin looks at a passenger crash – the Abbots Ripton disaster of 1876 – and how it included a chance connection to an early railway entrepreneur. Our thanks to John for putting this together for us!
We’re always keen to host guest blog posts that relate to the Railway Work, Life & Death project. Feel free to get in touch with us if you’d like to share a blog – there’s more detail on how to do this here.
Friday 21 January 1876. 150 years ago. ‘A terrific snowstorm accompanied by a northeasterly gale swept across a narrow belt of eastern and middle England. All those who experienced it agreed that they had never seen snow fall so thickly or in such large flakes.’ So wrote L.T.C. (Tom) Rolt in his pioneering study of railway accidents and their causes, Red for Danger, first published in 1955. The Abbots Ripton rail disaster on the Great Northern mainline south of Peterborough, in which 13 people died and around 60 were injured, was the direct result of this snowstorm, and under Rolt’s chapter headings, which broadly categorise accidents by their causes, it is examined alongside other railway events ascribed to storm and tempest.
But Abbots Ripton, Rolt acknowledged, deserves commemoration for other reasons too. It exposed deficiencies in the railway infrastructure technology, in that incomplete telegraphic communication between signalboxes meant that a pottering southbound goods train was shunted out of the way of faster passenger traffic at the wrong place. A second technology failure of infrastructure, as ice formed around signalling wires, led signal arms to droop, which gave a false ‘clear’ indication to the following southbound express train from Scotland which ran into the goods train as it was still being shunted into the siding. A third failing, the timetable pressures under which operational staff such as drivers worked, then contributed, as a northbound Leeds express, attempting to maintain its schedule in the face of the weather, ploughed into the wreckage of the two southbound trains which had spilled over both mainline tracks. In the response to these failings, Rolt concluded, Abbots Ripton ‘had a permanent influence on railway practice’.
Perhaps unknown to Rolt, however, the Abbots Ripton accident of 21 January 1876 also had a coincidental connection to an earlier phase of railways and early rail accidents. Some of Red for Danger’s most vivid prose describes, in an introductory chapter on the cavalier attitude to safety taken on the first mainlines, ‘experimental’ trains allowed by railway companies in the 1830s to conduct ‘scientific’ tests on tracks and rolling stock even while rail services were running. The experimenters caused accidents. In one, on the Great Western Railway’s mainline near Shepherd’s Bush in October 1838, a 19-year-old youth assisting Dr Dionysius Lardner in measuring the deflection of rails as a loaded train passed over them was killed. The inquest heard that Dr Lardner, an Irish-born populariser of science with a gift for self-publicity, was not even present when the accident occurred; he told the coroner that the youth had been his pupil for two years and should have known to get out of the way of a moving train.
Rolt appears to have a particular distaste for Dr Lardner: ‘a pompous fraud’, he called him. Chief among Lardner’s offences in Rolt’s eyes was the temerity to question Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s engineering: he claimed that the gradient inside Box Tunnel would lead descending trains to emerge at 120 mph, at which speed passengers would be unable to breathe, and stated also that the GWR’s broad gauge was inefficient because of ‘atmospheric resistance’. That Dr Lardner later did more respected work on the economics of railway operations in the aftermath of the ‘Railway Mania’ of the mid-1840s escaped Rolt’s attention – as did Lardner’s connection to Abbots Ripton.
The link to the accident of 21 January 1876 is through Dr Lardner’s personal life, which was as haphazard as his professional career. In 1820, as a young married man in Dublin, Lardner appears to have fathered a son with his mistress, Anne Boursiquot, herself separated from her husband. The son, Dionysius Lardner Boursiquot, ‘simplified’ his name to ‘Dion Boucicault’ and by the 1840s had achieved precocious prominence on both sides of the Atlantic as an actor and as a playwright of Victorian melodramas and comedies. Boucicault’s private life appears as confused as his father’s, with serial marriages, affairs, a charge of bigamy and suspicion of Fenian sympathies and financial irregularity. In a middle period of theatrical success and marital tranquillity, Boucicault’s second wife – an actress herself, later abandoned for a younger version – produced six children.
And so to Abbots Ripton. The casualty list from the Friday evening accident was produced over the following weekend; victims all came from the southbound Scottish express, several mown down in the second collision while trying to rescue others from the first. Among them was Dion William Boucicault, eldest son of the actor-playwright and grandson of Dr Dionysius Lardner. The 21-year-old Dion William (sometimes recorded as William Dion) was returning to London from visiting friends in Lincolnshire; with other victims, he was buried at Huntingdon cemetery the following Wednesday, 26 January 1876. Dion Boucicault funded an elaborate fountain in front of the county hospital in memory of his son, and his second son, Darley George Boucicault – later also a notable actor-manager – adopted the name ‘Dion Boucicault, Jr’ after his brother.
John Pullin