Cefn Coed Viaduct

The third largest in Wales, Cefn Coed Viaduct was built to carry the Brecon & Merthyr Railway over the River Taff near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. Designed by Alexander Sutherland and Henry Conybeare, it consists of fifteen arches, each one with a span of almost forty feet, and is 257 yards long with a maximum height of 115 feet. Described as a graceful and majestic structure, it has an impressive and elegant curve.

The designs were prepared by Alexander Sutherland and Thomas Savin and John Ward, managers of the railway company took responsibility for the build. However, they soon hit problems when the company, which had been paying a guaranteed five per cent dividend to shareholders, ran into financial problems. Sutherland stepped in to save the day, choosing an alternative route for the section.

The revised route avoided Cyfartha Castle, the property of local ironmaster, Robert Crawshay, by going down the west side of the valley, increasing the engineering complexity of the project but earning the gratitude of the influential landowner. It is alleged that a sizeable bribe eased the pain of the redesign.

A further problem hit the project when, in February 1866, stonemasons went on strike. The intention had been to build the viaduct out of limestone, like the nearby Pontsarn, which Savin, Ward, and Sutherland had also built. Instead, the company was forced to buy 800,000 bricks and employ bricklayers which is why bricks line the underneath of the arches while the rest of the structure is made of stone.

Eventually, on October 29, 1866, Mrs Sutherland was able to lay the final stone and the viaduct was declared open. It had cost £25,000 to build and was used until the line was closed to passengers in 1961 and the last goods train trundelled over it on August 1, 1966. It has since been renovated and now forms part of the Taff Trail walking and cycling route.

Eight To Nine

A review of Eight to Nine by R A J Walling – 240321

The curiously titled sixth novel in Robert Walling’s Philip Tolefree series, also known as The Bachelor Flat Mystery, originally published in 1934, is another story where the movements of suspects at a particular time hold the keys to the mystery. The hour in question is between eight and nine, when housekeeper Mrs Pilling is off duty at Elford Mansions, hence the title, and seasoned readers of the detective fiction genre will soon realise that the empirical evidence of time is not necessarily to be trusted.

The story also centres around a femme fatale, an actress by the name of Millicent Vane, a woman with a past and to whom several rich and eligible bachelors are attracted like bees to a honeypot. One such is Bill Chance, son of Lord Greenwood, and the worried nobleman engages Tolefree, insurance broker and amateur sleuth, to dig around and find if there is any scandal attached to the woman. Curiously, we never meet Miss vane. Despite his distaste for the task, Tolefree accepts the brief and accompanied by his faithful Watson, a ship broker by the name of Farrar, begins his investigations.

Acting on a hunch to visit rich playboy, Howard Klick, at Elworth mansions, Tolefree finds that the comedic Mrs Pilling has fainted and that there is a body of a murdered man in the flat occupied by North. Despite the assumption that the murdered man is North, Tolefree discovers, courtesy of a feather and an Australian penny, that the victim is Australian and that he is Pendleton, the husband of Miss Vane whom, when he was imprisoned for fraud down under, she left to come to England and seek her fame and fortune. Understandably, Pendleton was a bit miffed and when he was released sought his revenge.

The police investigation is led by Pierce and while he and Tolefree have perfectly amiable relations, they approach the case from radically different angles, coming up with two different culprits. Tolefree engages in a masterful piece of filibustering to prevent Pierce making a fol of himself and incurring the wrath of his fierce Scottish boss.

It is a tale of timetables and alibis with a reasonable number of red herrings and witnesses whose accounts are not entirely reliable. One credible suspect is summarily dismissed because he sailed from Australia to London in the Orlando second class and second and first class passengers never mix.     

After much toing and froing, including a nighttime expedition to the wilds of the Fens, much to the discomfort of Farrar who had to tail a car at a speed above which he was comfortable driving at, Tolefree concludes that the culprit is someone who sailed on the Orlando at the time Miss Vane did, lives in Elford Mansions, maintained a flat for Miss Vane in Kilburn, and who had a rendezvous with Pendleton on the Thursday night in question.

These criteria together with the disappearance of the feather and Aussie penny from the scene of the crime seals the identity of the culprit. In Poirot style he lays out his findings before Lord Greenwood and an assembled group of suspects, demonstrating that Pendleton’s death was committed in self-defence rather than a premeditated act of murder.

It is a complex plot and the story is well told in an engaging style, Walling uses short burst of staccato-like sentences to inject some urgency into the narrative. I could not help thinking, though, that a chat with Miss Vane would have saved a lot of time.

Waterloo Station Clock

Where do you meet on a crowded railway concourse? The obvious place is under the station clock as it is usually centrally positioned so that it is visible from each of the exits from the platforms.

One of the most iconic meeting places is under the railway clock at Waterloo station, famously the meeting place for Laura and Alec in Noel Coward’s 1946 film Brief Encounter, although the scenes were shot at Carnforth station, and of Del Boy and his future wife, Raquel in the Only Fools and Horses Christmas special in 1988, Dates. Curiously, despite its iconic status, whenever I have arranged to meet someone there, there has been hardly anyone else staring anxiously and vacuously into the distance.

Manufactured by Gents of Leicester, on its installation it was described by the Daily Mirror in its edition of November 19, 1919 as a “two ton clock…of novel construction”. What was unusual about it was that it used within its mechanism an electric “synchronome”, which ensured that each of its four faces told the same time. It also had twenty-four hour faces, well before British Rail adopted the twenty-four hour clock as standard in 1964.

Waterloo’s clock was originally positioned in front of the taxi rank between platforms 11 and 12, platform 11 being the terminus for the Ocean Liner Expresses, and the Bournemouth Belle. When the Windsor train shed was demolished to make way for the International platforms, two new platforms, 12 and 13, were opened and the original platform 12 was redesignated 14.

It did not take long for the clock to be established as a meeting place. Londonist in their blog notes that in 1924 a short story syndicated in the press featured a meeting under the clock, another from 1927 spoke of an “under the clock” tradition for meeting at Waterloo a rendezvous that formed the basis for a romantic liaison in a 1935 short story.

Next time you are at the station, see just how many people are waiting under it. It might just lead to an exciting adventure!

Shroud Of Darkness

A review of Shroud of Darkness by E C R Lorac – 240318

The fortieth in Lorac’s long-running Robert Macdonald series, originally published in 1954, is as much a thriller as a murder mystery with a tale that involves the settling of scores that have lingered on from the Second World War. Sarah Dillon is travelling by train from Exeter to Paddington and is enjoying the company of a young man, Richard, who seems to become more distracted and agitated, especially when the train, whose progress is impeded by a thick pea-souper makes an unscheduled stop at Reading and two men, one a seemingly respectable middle-aged businessman and the other a bit of a thug, join them in the carriage.

To her surprise, Richard leaves the train abruptly as soon as it reaches its destination but is seriously injured in an attack. Who was Richard, why was he attacked, and by whom? At the same time there is an old case running, reopened for the third time, the discovery of what happened to an American, Darcourt, who disappeared in 1941. Inevitably, the two cases are intertwined.

Lorac has chosen her title well. The Shroud of Darkness not only describes the thick fogs that enveloped the country, especially London, in the early 1950s, making conditions ideal for miscreants to go about their work and especially difficult for those tasked with apprehending them, but also the fog that has descended over Richard’s mind, struggling to piece together what really happened on a traumatic night in 1941 when his life was transformed dramatically.

Shrouds, of course, lift and the book focuses on unravelling and explaining what happened that forced him to flee the Plymouth blitz with his clothes on fire and be taken up and adopted by a kindly but austere farming family in the wilds of Dartmoor. With her fine descriptive ability and her enhanced sense of place, Lorac brings the Plymouth blitz and the remote way of life on the Devon moors to life.

There are a couple of murders along the way but these are incidental to the plot, more red herrings and collateral damage than germane to the unmasking of Richard’s attacker and the unravelling of his backstory. Potential suspects come and go, a jealous brother-in-law, a gang who operate around the Reading area, Richard’s best friend, some unsavoury characters who hang out at the Whistling Pig, but it is pretty clear that there are only two realistic contenders and, frankly, while Lorac tries to cloud the reader’s assessment of one, the other was always the favourite.

That said, the whodunit is not really the focus of a book that shines a light on some of the murkier aspects of clandestine warfare and the role of sleepers and intelligence gatherers on the ground. We tend to think that this was the specialty of the Allies but the roundups of Germans and other nationals at the outset of the war shows that the concerns that German spies were operating in England undercover leading seemingly innocuous lives was very real. It is interesting to think that even in the mid-50s Lorac saw that as a subject upon which to build a story.

One fascinating feature of the book, at least to fans of Golden Age Detective Fiction, is the name checks that Lorac gives to her contemporary writers. On the train Sarah and Richard exchange books, she receiving a Josephine Tey for a Ngaio Marsh, getting the better end of the bargain. A homophone of the Tey title, The Franchise Affair, provides Macdonald with the final piece of the jigsaw.

Macdonald is an empathetic investigator with an approach that quickly wins the confidence of those he speaks to, but is not averse to overhearing conversations and a bit of action. The denouement played out on a ferry to Dunkirk makes for a dramatic ending to what is an impressive story and a welcome variation to the tried and tested murder mystery.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

A game of rock, paper, scissors (RPS) is an acknowledged way of settling a friendly dispute, often seen as a more sophisticated alternative to tossing a coin. It appears a deceptively simple game, two players facing each other and simultaneously making one of three hand gestures, a closed fist representing “rock”, a flat hand “paper” and a fist with the index and middle fingers extended “scissors”. The player selecting rock will win if their opponent has chosen scissors but will lose to paper. Scissors will beat paper and if the players make the same selection, the game will be drawn.

Citing a reference in a 16^th century book by Xie Zhaozhi, the World Rock Paper Scissors Association trace RPS’s origins to a game called shoushiling or “hand command” played during the Chinese Han Dynasty (206BC to 220AD). By the 17^th century, a version of the game called mushi-ken had reached Japan where the thumb represented a frog, the little finger a slug, and the index finger a snake. The slug triumphed over the frog but lost to the snake while the frog beat the snake.

The direct forerunner of RPS is Janken, a Japanese game, which used the now familiar rock, paper, and scissors gestures and grew increasingly popular in the 19^th century. In a Malaysian version a bird replaced scissors and water paper with water beating rock as it makes it sink, a bird overcoming water which it drinks and a rock crushing the bird. In Indonesia a variant uses an elephant, indicated by a slightly raised thumb, and a human and an ant, signified by outstretched index and little fingers respectively. The ant frightens the elephant but is crushed by the human who, in turn, loses to the elephant.

It was not until the early 20^th century that the game reached the West, a letter in The Times in 1924 describing a game of “zhot” which resembled what we know as RPS, claiming it to be of Mediterranean origin. This misconception was soon rectified by another correspondent who identified it as Jan-ken-pon, a game which they had seen played throughout Japan. This exchange suggests that RPS was relatively unknown at the time in Britain, at least to readers of “The Thunderer”.

The French children’s magazine, La Vie au patronage, described the game in 1927, calling it a “jeu japanois” while in America the 1933 edition of Compton’s Pictured Encyclopaedia noted that what it transcribed as John Kem Po was a common method of settling disputes amongst Japanese children. “This is such a good way of deciding an argument” it proclaimed “that American boys and girls might like to practice (sic) it too”.

But is it just a random game of chance or are there strategies that can be deployed that increase the potential of success? We will find out next week.