Charles Pearson

The phenomenal growth of London in the 19^th century brought with it many problems, not least the ever present issue of traffic congestion. Charles Pearson, solicitor to the City of London, was one man who exercised his mind on the problem, issuing a pamphlet in 1845 entitled “Trains in Drains”, proposing a railway running underground from King’s Cross to Holborn, powered by air pressure.

It was such an ambitious and unusual proposal, stretching the technology of the time to its very limits, that it met with predictable opposition and scorn. The Times called it “an insult to common sense” while a Dr Cumming declared: “Why not build an overhead Railway?…It’s better to wait for the Devil than to make roads down into Hell”. For Sir Joseph Caxton, the problem was the concept of going underground. “People, I find”, he observed, “will never much go above the ground, and they will never go underground; they always like to keep as much as possible in the ordinary course in which they have been going”.

Undaunted, in 1846 Pearson presented a plan to Parliament for a line running longitudinally from King’s Cross to Blackfriars Bridge with a central hub at Farringdon which would replace all the other termini for trains entering and leaving London. A version of his proposal appeared in the edition of May 23, 1846, the Illustrated London News, showing two underground tunnels feeding a huge terminus at Farringdon with space to serve up to four railway companies and with goods stations just outside the main passenger station. The trains would be powered by air pressure.

Parliament rejected Pearson’s proposals, but by 1852 he had raised enough money to form the City Terminus Company to bring his dreams to fruition. Around the same time the Metropolitan Railway Company was formed with plans to connect Paddington to King’s Cross. Both companies presented their bills to Parliament, Pearson’s proposals once more rejected but the Metropolitan line given the go ahead. Pearson did get legislative approval in 1854 for a shorter line which ran to St Paul’s cathedral rather than Blackfriars Bridge.

Financial difficulties beset the Metropolitan Railway Company’s progress, forcing them to abandon any plans to go any further south than Farringdon. Still beset by financial difficulties they found a knight in shining armour from an unexpected quarter, Charles Pearson, who raised enough money to allow the Metropolitan Line to be completed and opened to the public on January 10, 1863. Pearson, though, never saw his dream of an underground railway in action, dying of dropsy in 1862.

The concept of an underground system took off with other lines built but the intrinsic problem of traffic congestion was never solved. In 1895 the enterprising The Picture Magazine published a puzzle entitled The Labyrinth of London which invited the reader “to enter by the Waterloo Road, and his object is to reach St Paul’s Church without passing any of the barriers which are placed across those Streets supposed to be under Repair”. Time or a reissue, methinks.

They Can’t Hang Me

A review of They Can’t Hang Me by James Ronald – 240527

One of the finds for me in 2024, thanks to a wonderful series of reissues from Moonstone Press, is James Ronald and They Can’t Hang Me, the main course of the fourth collection of his works, originally published in 1938, is the best yet. The premise is that a former newspaper magnate, Lucius Marplay, believes that he was cheated out of his newspaper, the London Evening Echo, by four of his subordinates. Having suffered a nervous breakdown and been held in an asylum for twenty years on the grounds of suffering from homicidal delusions, Lucius has sworn to kill each of the four former employees, reasoning that if the authorities believe him to be insane they would not be able to hang him if he committed murder.

By the third chapter Lucius has managed to escape from the asylum in an masterly and ingenious way and makes his way to Fleet Street, pawning his psychiatrist’s overcoat for funds and to buy a rubber cosh, to wreak his reign of terror. Three of the gang of four are murdered, two of which are carried out despite a heavy police presence in an impossible murder style, and each are presaged by a death notice that appears in the mock ups for the next edition of the Echo. How has Marplay been able to pull off the murders and to insert the notices in the paper without anyone seeing him, except for a glimpse before the first murder, and despite the constant surveillance of the police, led by Superintendent Wrenn, or is there another explanation?

One of the book’s strengths is Ronald’s ability to create and describe convincingly the atmosphere within the newspaper office as the gang of four become increasingly more alarmed about their safety. Each respond to the crisis in their own different way, each believing that they will become the victims of an almost supernatural power, something that neither bricks nor the best efforts of the Yard can stop from wreaking its vengeance. It is powerful stuff.

There are some wonderful characters including Marplay’s daughter, Joan, and her maiden aunt guardian, the formidable Agatha Trimm. At the start of the book Joan learns about her father’s fate and is determined to find him and salvage his reputation. To do so she embarks upon a desperate course that almost leads to her downfall and is helped by the paper’s gossip columnist, the suave Lord Noel Stretton, an opportunity for Ronald to introduce a bit of romantic interest.

However, the stand-out characters are Flinders, once the star of Fleet Street and now an alcoholic wreck who is eventually killed because of what he knows, and an investigator with a dodgy Scottish accent, Alastair MacNab, who burst on to the scene and is rather more than he lets on to be. These are vibrant character creations and allow Ronald to lighten the tone of the book while keeping the plot moving at pace.

The story is not fairly clued, important pieces of information just being dropped into the narrative not least the tontine nature of the agreement between the four owners of the Echo, but this is much more of a psychological thriller than a conventional murder mystery. The attitude of one of the gang of four to their impending doom suggested to me that there was more going on than met the eye and so the major twist at the end was not so unexpected but nevertheless made for a dramatic ending.

It is fair to say that Superintendent Wrenn made a hash of the case, being too trusting of what he was told, missing signs of Marplay’s initial whereabouts which Joan easily picked up, and suffering the indignity of having two people murdered right in front of his eyes. No wonder he considered his position. However, there was no master sleuth to highlight the police’s inadequacies, events rolling on to their natural conclusion until Wrenn twigged what was really behind the murders.

Structurally, the book exhibits a nice piece of ring composition, something I am always a sucker for, opening and ending with two old buffers sitting in deck chairs discussing the affairs of Lucius Marplay. This is a great book, not without its imperfections, but written with such great vim and brio that you are carried along with it all and are desperate to see how it all ends.

As an added bonus, the Moonstone Press reissue includes three of Ronald’s short stories. I am already looking forward to volume five.

A Silent Killer?

While the pressure to change from petrol or diesel cars to hybrid or electric vehicles continue apace, a fascinating piece of research featured in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health provides another factor to piece into the decision-making process. Data from 32 billion miles of battery-powered car travel and 3 trillion mils of petrol and diesel vehicle trips in the UK suggest that mile-for-mile electric and hybrid vehicles are twice as likely to hit pedestrians as fossil-powered vehicles and three times more likely in urban settings.

Of course, the question is why. Electric vehicles are quieter so more difficult to hear, although since 2019 new models are required to have an acoustic vehicle alerting system that emits a sound when driven slowly, have faster acceleration and, as they are heavier, have longer stopping times. Perhaps driving an electric vehicle promotes a sense of well-being and oneness with the world that means the driver is oblivious to what is going on around them.

Makes you think.

The Port Of London Murders

A review of The Port of London Murders by Josephine Bell – 240525

Apart from a couple of short stories, this is the first novel of Josephine Bell’s that I have read, a lamentable admission as she wrote over sixty. Originally published in 1938 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, The Port of London Murders is as far removed from the cosy country house murder and, indeed, from a classic murder mystery as you can imagine. It is, however, a cleverly constructed story and one that sheds a light on the social conditions of the time.

Bell practised as a doctor in the Greenwich area and draws upon her first-hand experience of the social conditions in which the riparian poor lived. Many of the men folk were either reliant upon casual labour or were unemployed and lived in housing that was little more than slums, even at the time scheduled for demolition, a process that the Germans completed with their usual ruthless efficiency. Mists and impenetrable fogs caused havoc with the residents’ health with asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis, rheumatism and the like rife. Most of Bell’s characters do not live in a gilded cage. This is grimy, real life and her descriptions of their hand to mouth existence gives the book a social edge that is often missing from crime fiction of the era.

The book starts off with a seemingly disconnected series of events and an almost overwhelming  raft of characters and at first it is difficult to discern where the story is going to go or whether we should sympathise with or despise any of them that we meet. However, Bell’s skill lies in her ability to moulkd these disparate strands into a coherent whole and we soon realise that the nexus point is the activities of a criminal gang. We know their identities, there is no mystery there, but the focus is more on how they operate and the consequences of getting entwined with them. It is another piece of crime fiction where a group of street-smart and inquisitive small boys play an integral part in discovering what is really going on.

We have a suicide of a drug-addled woman that might not be a suicide, the mysterious disappearance of Detective Sergeant Chandler who was hot on the trail of the gang and about to give evidence at the inquest, pink nightdresses that sell for a high price in a shop called Lulu, an accident involving a couple of barges which results in some cargo going overboard, packing cases with hidden drawers, a spot of blackmail, drugs and desperadoes. As the chief culprit realizes that some that they had trusted had given them away and the noose is tightening around their neck, the body count increases.

The culprit might have eventually have eluded the hangman’s noose but the manner of their end in a thrilling finale is probably more horrific. Amongst the death and grime, there is one area of shining light, Bell finding time to develop an engaging love story that results in the beau appearing deus ex machina-like and saving his beloved in her moment of extreme peril. There is only one way that sub plot is going to end!

There is much to admire in what is a clever and unconventional book. To my mind there were echoes of the opening of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend which first opened my eyes to the sub-culture that existed on the banks of the Thames and Bell even takes time to corral into the investigations Christopher Bush’s Detective Norris, although operating with a higher rank, and Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector Mitchell. If you look hard enough, there are wonderful gems to find, just as there is in the mud of the Thames at low tide. Highly recommended.

Postcard Smut

The assault on saucy seaside postcards, spearheaded by the Director of Public Prosecutions and implemented by the police, began in earnest in the early 1950s. In Blackpool, acting upon information received, a plain clothes officer would visit a shop, pick up the offending postcard, ask the shopkeeper whether they would sell it to their daughter, invariably receiving the response “No”, and then a prosecution would follow. Once the word got out, other shopkeepers would withdraw their stock of those postcards from sale. In 1953 32,603 postcards were seized under the Obscene Publications Act (1857).

In most major seaside resorts Watch Committees, self-appointed and made up of local worthies, were set up to vet and deal with reports of “obscene” cards in their area, ostensibly to reassure shopkeepers that if a certain design passed muster, they would be immune from prosecution. However, there was no national standard as to what was deemed to be offensive, although jokes about wind and other forms of toilet humour seemed high on the list, and so a postcard that was deemed to be acceptable in one resort could be banned in another. The general air of uncertainty led to the wholesale withdrawal of such postcards from sale.

However, the moral crusaders were not done and had the “King of the Saucy Postcard” and his publishers, Bamforth, firmly in their sights, finally bringing a charge of breaching the Act against him in July 1954. Donald McGill’s defence posed the not unreasonable question: “are the cards capable of corrupting the minds and morals into the hands they come?” Surprisingly, McGill insisted that he was simply naive, claiming that “I would desire to point out that in quite a number of the cards in question I had no intention of “double meaning” and, in fact, a “double meaning” was in some cases later pointed out to me”.

McGill was found guilty, fined £50 with £25 costs, and four of his offending postcards were banned immediately and his publishers were prevented from reissuing seventeen others. The verdict sent shock waves through the postcard industry, retailers cancelling orders and withdrawing stock and some smaller publishers going into bankruptcy.

In 1957 McGill was invited to give evidence to a House Select Committee, which was considering amending the Obscene Publication Act. He argued that a national censorship system would not work due to the vagaries of individual taste. The subsequent amendment in the law led to the waning of the powers of Watch Committees and gave the green light for saucy postcards to make a return.

McGill, though, hardly benefited from the renaissance, dying in 1962 having prepared all his designs for the 1963 season. He left an estate of just £735 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Streatham Park cemetery. His last designs were published in 1968.

The final nail in the coffin of saucy postcard industry was a change in public taste. By any stretch of the imagination their subject matter was sexist, sometimes racist, certainly politically incorrect, occasionally racist or xenophobic, as out of fashion as the humour of Benny Hill, the televisual manifestation of the saucy postcard. There was no place for them in the 21^st century moral spectrum.

Despite that, McGill’s original colour-washed drawings now sell for several thousand pounds a time and examples of his postcards are soughtafter. His work was displayed at the Tate Britain exhibition, Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, in the summer of 2010, and there is a museum dedicated to his work in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. That would have brought a smile to the face of the former naval draughtsman who got into the postcard industry thanks to a get-well card he designed for a relative.