London Underground's Strangest Tales

by Iain Spragg

  The Old Bill were called, Leo was arrested for fraud and he was invited to spend a spell as a guest of Her Majesty as he awaited trial.

  ‘He is one of the most notorious delinquents of modern times,’ raged an article in the London Illustrated News as he awaited his big day in court. ‘He is described as a man of good family and prepossessing address and, indeed, it is essential to the success of the systematic swindler that he should possess pleasing manners and a gracious demeanour. Long experience however has shown that some of the blackest crimes have been perpetrated under the mask of nominal respectability.’

  The plot thickened when investigations into exactly where all the missing cash had gone revealed that Redpath clearly fancied himself as the Underground’s answer to Robin Hood.

  ‘One of the most extraordinary instances of successful swindling, combined with a high moral reputation and a truly benevolent career, is that of Leopold Redpath,’ wrote financial journalist David Evans. ‘Never was money obtained with more wicked subtlety; never was it spent more charitably. A greater rogue, so far as robbery is concerned, it were difficult to find. Nor a more amiable and polished benefactor to the poor and the friendless. It is certain that he spent in acts of high benevolence much of the money that he gained by robbery. With equal readiness he forged a deed or wrote a cheque for a charitable institution.’

  Which was nice but cut absolutely no ice with the judge or jury at his 1857 trial at the Old Bailey, where he was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to transportation to Australia. For life.

  The following year, after the Merry Men failed to ride over the hill and save him, Leo was bundled onto a ship from Plymouth to Fremantle in Western Australia along with 279 fellow convicts, never to darken these shores again. Justice had been done and Pearson got his Metropolitan Line project back on track, despite the massive hole in the books.

  An interesting footnote to the story is what happened next to Redpath. He spent 10 years toiling away at the Swan River Penal Colony but in 1868 received a pardon, meaning he was technically a free man. The only problem was he couldn’t leave Australia, and the next time anything was heard of Leo was 23 years later when his death was recorded at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.

  His death down under wasn’t exactly front-page news back home in Blighty and Redpath’s brief cameo in the story of the London Underground was over.

  THE LONELY STATION WITH A HEAD FOR HEIGHTS

  1867

  One of the most curious and overlooked stations on the London Underground surely has to be Mill Hill East, an old, obscure and unloved outpost of the network that vertigo sufferers are well advised to avoid.

  Opened in 1867 by the Great Northern Railway (GNR), Mill Hill sticks out all on its own on the High Barnet branch of the Northern Line like the last turkey on the shelves on Christmas Eve. When it was built only a single track connecting it to civilisation was laid, but there were big plans in place to add a second when passenger numbers increased. The opening of the line between Finchley Central and High Barnet put paid to all that, however, and Mill Hill was destined to remain a one-track, shuttle-stop terminus that the other busier, more connected stations laughed about behind its back.

  Hapless Mill Hill East does have one tenuous claim to fame, and that’s the fact that trains coming in and out of the station have to travel across the impressive Dollis Brook Viaduct, the highest part of the entire London Underground system above ground.

  Designed by John Fowler and Walter Brydone, the GNR’s chief engineer, this magnificent viaduct comprises 13 arches, each spanning 32 feet to bridge the valley below; at its highest point it stands at an imposing 60 feet tall.

  It may not be the most dramatic claim to fame but when your history is as undistinguished and frankly dull as Mill Hill East, any semblance of notoriety is welcome.

  THE DOORS TO NOWHERE

  1868

  Property in London is always in demand but even the most slippery and determined of the capital’s estate agents would struggle to sell the two imposing town houses at 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens in Bayswater.

  The two properties certainly boast a desirable W2 postcode. They have imposing frontages and fashionable Notting Hill is only a stone’s throw away. The only problem is that behind the impressive five-foot-thick façades there are no actual houses, only a rather large hole in the ground that’s home to a section of the Circle and District Line.

  The fake houses owe their existence to the Underground’s first steam engines. The locomotives needed to vent fumes through condensers at regular intervals to keep the tunnels free of smoke, and as the first District Line engineers navigated their way through Bayswater prior to opening in 1868, they realised they needed an ‘open’ section of track at Leinster Gardens for just this purpose.

  The original owners were bought out and the houses demolished, but remaining residents on the street cried foul and demanded the fake façades were built so the new track and plumes of smoke did not adversely affect the look of the neighbourhood.

  The Metropolitan District Railway, the company behind the District Line, reluctantly agreed and builders set to work on constructing the new frontages complete with 18 blacked-out windows and two doors (with no letter boxes) that lead absolutely nowhere.

  The fake houses, of course, proved irresistible to practical jokers and con artists alike and in the 1930s, a fraudster made a small fortune when he sold tickets for a charity ball at 10 guineas apiece only for the guests to arrive at No. 23 in their finest and discover the party wasn’t all they had hoped for.

  Since then, local wags have delighted in ordering countless takeaways to the fictitious addresses, laughing themselves stupid as yet another bemused delivery driver unsuccessfully attempts to hand over their culinary orders.

  A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

  1868

  The engineers responsible for the first Underground lines and stations faced many challenges but in the early years of the network perhaps none was greater than the problem of keeping commuters at Sloane Square safe and dry.

  One of the stations commissioned to serve the Metropolitan District Railway (a.k.a. the District Line) that opened in 1868, Sloane Square happened to stand squarely in the path of the River Westbourne and it didn’t take a genius to realise a solution was required to ensure the waterway did not regularly flood the new platforms.

  Rising on Hampstead Heath and flowing down through Kilburn, Paddington and Hyde Park before joining the Thames at Chelsea Bridge, the Westbourne isn’t exactly a raging torrent but it could not be damned and the engineers were temporarily stumped.

  It wasn’t practical to build the station above the river because that would result in the building breaking the surface, blocking roads and requiring the demolition of nearby houses and shops. A pumping system to raise and then lower the river above the tracks was dismissed as too expensive and unreliable.

  The only solution was for the Westbourne to run through Sloane Square, and if you look up from the platform today, you will see the original large, angular iron pipe designed by the engineers that still carries the hidden river safely through the station without spilling a single drop of its watery cargo.

  Tragically, Sloane Square was bombed by the Germans during the Blitz in November 1940. The attack claimed the lives of 37 passengers, and injured 79, on a train in the station. It also destroyed the ticket hall, escalators and the glazed roof over the tracks, but miraculously the river-bearing iron pipe survived unscathed.

  TRAVELLING LIGHT

  1873

  People these days are all too ready to complain about draconian modern Health & Safety regulations, but passengers on the first Underground trains would surely have welcomed a little more focus on their wellbeing judging by the risks they had to take to get from A to B.

  The early locomotives were steam engines but the carriages they hauled had to be lit to avoid a total blackout, and the only solution was for gas lamps to be installed so businessmen could pore ov
er the Daily Telegraph or Ye Olde Sudoku on their way to work.

  The coal gas to supply the lights was held in tarpaulin bags strapped to the carriage roofs and it remains one of the miracles of the Underground that not once did this combustible cargo go up courtesy of a stray spark from the tracks just a few metres below.

  The system was later adapted to a pressurised oil gas set-up, which was only marginally less dangerous than its predecessor.

  ‘The gas bags are weighted on the top and, as the weights descend, an indicator at the side of each box points either to E or F to show how near the india-rubber reservoirs are to being either empty or full,’ explained Walter Thornbury in his 1873 book, Old And New London; A Narrative Of Its History, Its People And Its Places.

  ‘The jets in the carriages are supplied by means of a gas-pipe in communication with the bags on the roofs and extending from the back of the vehicles themselves, while along the lower part of each portion of the train runs the “main”, as it were, by which the bags are replenished from the gasometers established at either end of the line.

  ‘The gasholders are kept charged with supplies from the neighbouring gas-works and are so heavily weighted that the elastic bags along the top of the carriages can be filled (by means of “hydrants” and flexible tubes in connection with the gasholders) in the short space of two or three minutes.

  ‘The light thus afforded to the passengers is so bright as to utterly remove all sense of travelling underground and entirely dissipate that nervousness which the semi-obscurity of ordinary oil-lighted railway carriages gives to the sensitive during their transit through the tunnels on other lines.’

  Fortunately passengers were no longer required to dice with death on their daily commute when electric (and less explosive) lighting was introduced in 1890, bringing to an end the Tube’s own answer to Russian Roulette.

  THE GHOST AND THE NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE

  1876

  There are endless stories of ghosts haunting the London Underground but one of the most ‘electrifying’ tales of supernatural activity has to be the strange case of Aldgate and the suspicious spectral old lady who made a shocking appearance in the twentieth century.

  Built on the site of a plague pit that was the final resting place for an estimated thousand victims of the Bubonic Plague in 1665, Aldgate Station was opened in 1876. Almost as soon as the trains began rolling in and out, the stories of spooky shenanigans began. A popular early tale relates to Tube staff being able to hear ghostly footsteps in the tunnels only for the noise to abruptly and mysteriously stop.

  Then an electrician was working at Aldgate one night when he slipped between the tracks, hit the live rail and received a 20,000-volt shock. It could – perhaps should – have killed him, but despite being knocked unconscious by his fall, he survived with minor injuries and made a full recovery.

  Nothing particularly paranormal perhaps until the accident investigators interviewed the man’s colleagues and each of them swore that just before his plunge they had seen the half-transparent ghost of an old woman kneeling down beside the electrician and stroking his hair.

  Whether she was the man’s guardian angel, somehow saving him from a fatal electrocution, or an Angel of Death, malevolently trying to push him through the gap in the tracks, is a matter of opinion.

  THE CIRCLE LINE WARS

  1884

  The modern London Underground is one big happy family these days, all lovingly managed by Transport for London, but back in its early years the network behaved more like an unruly teenager and there were countless times when the operators of the separate, competing lines just didn’t see eye to eye.

  One of the most infamous subterranean spats began in 1884 when the Circle Line was finally completed and the Metropolitan and District Lines were connected for the first time in the Tube’s history. It should have been a cause for celebration – not to mention reduced journey times – but the Circle Line cheerleaders hadn’t reckoned with two rather powerful but extremely petty men who would do their level best to wreck the new development.

  The District Line chairman was James Staats Forbes, his counterpart at the Metropolitan Line was Sir Edward William Watkin, and the pair really weren’t the best of friends. Perhaps Forbes had once stolen Watkin’s lunch money, we just don’t know.

  The two men briefly put their animosity aside when they agreed a deal to coordinate their trains to make the Circle Line a genuinely circular service, but almost as soon as the ink was dry on the agreement, the problems started that would continue for the next four years.

  Watkin got his retaliation in first when he ordered the removal of a number of Forbes’ District Line trains from South Kensington, even though they had every right to be there. Forbes hit back by chaining his precious rolling stock to the buffers, only for Watkin to order three of his most powerful locomotives to attempt to break their bondage.

  Then the feud moved from the tracks and into the ticket offices along the Circle Line.

  After another unseemly bout of name-calling and juvenile finger-pointing, it had been grudgingly agreed that the Metropolitan Line trains would run clockwise and the District Line locomotives anticlockwise on the route.

  It seemed a sensible solution – but the two companies refused to sell each other’s tickets, meaning an unfortunate commuter might be tricked into a 15-stop journey to get to their destination when they could have got there quicker and cheaper if they’d simply headed in the opposite direction with the ‘other’ operator.

  If only the feuding pair could have resolved their differences, passengers might have been spared years of inconvenience.

  SMOKE, BEARDS AND THE WONDER OF ELECTRICITY

  1887

  Everyone was jolly chuffed when the Metropolitan Line opened in 1863. It was, after all, nothing short of an engineering miracle to dig beneath the streets of London to create the Tube’s first tunnels, and as subterranean passengers began whizzing around the capital, the network’s designers and architects gave themselves a well-deserved pat on the back.

  But there was a cloud on the horizon. Or, more accurately, a fug of smoke in the tunnel. While the Underground’s infrastructure was now in place, there was the big problem of the network’s steam trains spewing out steam and smoke. Add in carriages full of commuters puffing away happily on pipes and cigarettes and the early Tube was not exactly a clean-air zone.

  The owners of the Metropolitan Line initially denied there was an issue. In fact, they even tried to claim an Underground journey was actually good for bronchial complaints, an argument that was somewhat undermined when the company broke with Victorian tradition and allowed its drivers to grow big, bushy beards in the hope their facial fuzz would act as an improvised air filter.

  The Underground was getting itself something of a reputation.

  ‘I had my first experience of Hades today and if the real thing is to be like that I shall never again do anything wrong,’ wrote American journalist and newspaper editor R.D. Blumenfeld in his diary in 1887 after his own particularly unpleasant introduction to the Tube. ‘I got into the Underground railway at Baker Street after leaving Archibald Forbes’ house and I wanted to go to Moorgate Street in the City. The compartment in which I sat was filled with passengers who were smoking pipes, as is the British habit, and as the smoke and sulphur from the engine fill the tunnel, all the windows have to be closed.

  ‘The atmosphere was a mixture of sulphur, coal dust and foul fumes from the oil lamp above so that by the time we reached Moorgate Street, I was near dead of asphyxiation and heat. I should think these Underground railways must soon be discontinued for they are a menace to health.’

  The finest minds of a generation strove for the answer and a Board Of Trade Committee was convened to investigate possible solutions. Trains pulled by cables and clockwork trams were ideas that never made it further than the drawing board, while the bosses at the Metropolitan Line simply suggested more openings in the tunnels to allow the noxious buil
d-up to escape. The NIMBYs were having none of that though, arguing that even more unannounced emissions would frighten horses, and – horror of horrors – reduce their property prices.

  The deadlock was finally broken when a bright spark suggested electrifying the trains was the way forward and, after the problem of getting enough voltage to propel the locomotives up some stubborn slopes was solved, the electrification of the network began in earnest in 1905. Smoke-clogged tunnels quickly became nothing more than a bad memory and commuters could concentrate on complaining about ticket prices, the persistent lack of seats and why the England football team was so poor.

  A FRENCH REVOLUTION AT WEMBLEY

  1892

  The French were inspired to start work on their famed Metro system in Paris after casting envious glances across the Channel at the London Underground. Our Gallic cousins were loath to admit it but they thought the Tube was really rather good and so, during the World Fair in 1900, the Metro was finally opened to Parisians and tourists alike.

  But Anglo-Gallic copycat construction in the era was not all one-way traffic and London came close to boasting its very own version of the Eiffel Tower some eight years before Paris unveiled the Metro.

  The ambitious project was the brainchild of Sir Edward William Watkin (the man who had the undignified spat with James Forbes), the chairman of the Metropolitan Railway and a man who had a vision for a vast entertainment complex in northwest London served, of course, by his new Wembley Park Station. The centrepiece of the leisure park was to be ‘Watkin’s Tower’, although history now remembers the project as ‘Watkin’s Folly’.

  In 1890 an architectural competition was held to come up with a suitable design for the tower. Ideas for a £1 million plan inspired by the Leaning Tower of Pisa and a building with a spiral railway climbing up the exterior were rejected, as was a design based on a scale model of the Great Pyramid of Giza and Watkin boldly opted for an Eiffel Tower lookalike.