Bartholomew Steere and the North Oxfordshire Uprising, 1596

The prize for the least successful revolution to take place on British soil must surely go to the North Oxfordshire Uprising of 1596. A pre-requisite of a revolution must be that large numbers of people gather and makes demands for a better way of life – so ten men and a dog has to register as something of a failure.


Bartholomew Steere – would-be revolutionary

Bartholomew Steere was a young man who hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps as a tenant farmer in north Oxfordshire. As a way of life it was not particularly luxurious – farmers earned a meagre living at the best of times and were subject to all sorts of privations if things went wrong – but in most years a farmer could get by and keep his family fed.

However, change was afoot in the 16th century as landowners saw more profit in enclosing their fields and turning them into pastures for sheep than they could get from collecting rents from peasant farmers.

Bartholomew was determined to do something about it, so he canvassed opinion among other young men in the area. Before long he came up with a plan for a new “Peasants’ Revolt” that would be bound to make the landlords sit up and take notice.


The North Oxfordshire Uprising

Bartholomew put the word out that a revolt would take place and he asked people to gather on a named day at Enslow Hill, near the village of Bletchingdon (the hill has all but disappeared in more recent times, thanks to extensive quarrying). As evening fell the first of the revolutionaries climbed the hill, these being Bartholomew and nine others, one of whom brought his dog.

They confidently expected hundreds more people to turn up during the night, so they lit a fire, bedded down under the stars at the top of the hill, and waited for first light so that the gathered hordes could then march to confront their oppressors.

However, when dawn broke it became apparent that not a single extra person had joined them. They had no option but to put out the fire, descend the hill and go home. The revolution was well and truly over.


An unfortunate sequel

The whole affair might well have been forgotten about were it not that word reached a local vicar that a rebellion had been planned. He passed the news on, and when it reached the ears of the landowners they suddenly got the notion that the countryside was awash with violent revolutionaries. The result was little short of panic, although the ten men on the hill (and the dog) had long since given up any plans they might have had and were back working on their farms.

The government in London eventually got wind of the incident and issued arrest warrants for the four ringleaders, including Bartholomew Steere. Orders were given for how these dangerous criminals were to be treated on their journey to London for trial – being bound and gagged so that they couldn’t get word out to other revolutionaries who would attempt a rescue. Needless to say, nothing of the sort took place.

It all ended badly for Bartholomew and his companions. He and one of the others under arrest died from the tortures they were subjected to and the other two were taken back to Enslow Hill where they were hanged, drawn and quartered.

It has to be assumed that the reason why the Uprising never happened is that most of the would-be revolutionaries, who stayed at home rather than climb Enslow Hill, knew full well what the outcome would be. Any attempt to question the status quo, especially if violence was threatened, was regarded as treason against the state, and the punishments inflicted by the government were indeed in line with that interpretation.

One has therefore to conclude that Bartholomew Steere, although well-meaning, was extremely foolish to do what he did, although one might also conclude that, with a little more investigation into the circumstances, the government could have afforded to be more lenient towards a group of young men who were never going to pose a serious threat to public order.

As it was, the threatened enclosure of the common fields of north Oxfordshire did go ahead, with those of Bletchingdon being among the first to be affected. As Bartholomew Steere had feared, the old ways of rural living came to an end, accompanied by a great deal of suffering for those tenant farmers who could not adapt to the new regime. The fact remains that there was absolutely nothing that he and his fellows could have done about it.

© John Welford

Changes made to the Bayeux Tapestry

“Every schoolchild knows” – every British schoolchild that is – that King Harold II died at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when an arrow struck him in the eye and penetrated into his brain. The evidence for this is plain to see in the dramatic “comic strip” that is the Bayeux Tapestry. However, the truth may not be as clear-cut as the scene displayed in that remarkable artefact.

The Bayeux Tapestry is about 70 metres (230 feet) long and half a metre (1.6 feet) wide. It is not actually a tapestry (which is woven) but a piece of embroidery, with all the scenes and text having been stitched in wool yarn on to a linen cloth that was left bare in many places.

It is now generally believed that the Tapestry was the work of English embroiders in the 1070s. They worked at Canterbury under the direction of Odo, the Norman Bishop of Bayeux, who wanted to display the Tapestry in his cathedral. It therefore tells the whole story of Duke William’s claim to the English throne, the invasion, and the Battle of Hastings. Odo’s own participation in the battle was to be carefully “spun” to show that he was essential to the eventual victory but did not actually do any fighting, which would be unbecoming for a bishop. The truth of this claim is disputed!

The Tapestry that can be seen today in Bayeux shows the death of Harold from an arrow in the eye quite clearly, but the question arises as to whether this was always the case. It would appear that the ladies of Canterbury had a certain amount of leeway in how they depicted certain events and often portrayed scenes from an English rather than a Norman perspective. As long as Odo was portrayed as he wanted, he was not too bothered about the details, so the embroiderers may have got away with quite a bit of sly propaganda of their own.


Changes to the Tapestry

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Tapestry was altered in several respects at various times during its long history. It is not surprising that a work of this kind would have needed restoration from time to time, but it certainly looks as though opportunities were taken to make changes that were more substantial than just replacing worn-out threads.

The finger of suspicion for the death of Harold scene points to restorers in the 19th century, because reproductions of the scene that were made at earlier times do not look the same as they do now.

A full-scale tracing was made in 1729. This shows Harold holding a spear, either because he is about to throw it or because he has just been struck by it. A set of facsimiles was made in 1819, but these show the spear as an arrow heading for Harold. By the time that a photograph was taken in 1872, the arrow is in Harold’s eye.


Why would anyone have wanted to make these changes?

Harold’s death now looks to have been clean and clinical – almost accidental, one might say. If the 1729 version was the original, it shows Harold fighting for his life in hand-to-hand combat. He is therefore a brave fighter and not the victim of a stray arrow, which might happen to anyone at some distance from the main event. The emphasis has therefore shifted from an English viewpoint to a Norman one.

There is, however, another possibility, which is that the original spear was so worn out by the time it was restored in the early 19th century that it was not clear that a spear had been intended at all. 

The restorers might have genuinely thought that the image was of an arrow, or they might simply have gone for the lazy option of replacing many stitches with a few.


How did Harold really die?

It is always possible that Harold did die from an arrow. This was stated in a chronicle written in 1080. However, there is a far more reliable account that dates from 1067 which is the “Song of the Battle of Hastings” written by Guy, the Bishop of Amiens.

According to Guy, Harold was hacked to death by a group of four knights who were acting on Duke William’s orders but who went much further than William wanted. Harold was struck in the chest (the spear in the original Tapestry image?) then beheaded, disembowelled, and had his genitals cut off. He was therefore treated with great dishonour, which even a general as vicious as William would not have countenanced as being the right way to despatch someone of royal blood.

Evidence for this account comes from the fact that Harold’s widow was the only person who could identify his mutilated remains after the battle. It was also reported that Duke William was so horrified that he demoted the knights in question and sent them home in disgrace.

It does not sound likely that the English embroiderers would have been allowed to portray the full horror of Harold’s death – had it been as reported – and they might not have wished to do so even if they could. However, even the sanitised version that they showed appears to be missing from the Bayeux Tapestry as it appears today.

The story of the arrow in the eye therefore continues to be what “every schoolchild knows”, despite the very flimsy evidence on which it is based.

© John Welford

The discovery of DNA's double helix, 1953

25^th April 1953 is a date that should be commemorated worldwide, because it was on this day that the journal Nature published an article that would have far-reaching consequences.

The article was by two scientists from Cambridge University, James Watson and Francis Crick, and it announced their discovery of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, which is better known by its initials as DNA. The discovery solved a problem that had puzzled scientists ever since Charles Darwin had published “The Origin of Species”, namely what the mechanism was by which living things were able to pass on their characteristics to the next generation, and what could cause changes to happen that would lead to the evolution of new species.

Crick and Watson

Francis Crick (1916-2004) and James Watson (born 1928) met at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University in 1951, where they became close friends as well as professional colleagues. Their work depended to a large extent on work done by others, notably Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling and Maurice Wilkins. Of these, Franklin would have had most cause to be aggrieved at the lack of recognition given to her work, especially as it proved to be essential to the work of Crick and Watson.

The Double Helix

What Crick and Watson did was not to discover DNA as such – its existence was already well established – but to visualise how the molecule was constructed.  They were able to build a model that demonstrated the molecule as a “double helix”, or a long ladder-like structure in which the rungs comprise pairs of four possible bases – guanine, adenine, cytosine and thymine.

The order in which the pairs of bases are arranged forms a chemical code that instructs the cell to make a particular amino acid. Because the basic units are so simple, and because every strand of DNA contains the code for the entire organism, the full DNA strand is immensely long. If fully unravelled, the DNA in each cell would extend to more than two metres. All the DNA in a human body would stretch to 200 billion kilometres!

The double helix provides the clue to how DNA works. The “ladder” is able to split apart so that portions of DNA can act as templates for the assembly of new DNA, or strands of RNA (ribonucleic acid) can act as messengers in the building of new proteins.

DNA and evolution

Crick and Watson’s discovery paved the way for understanding how evolution works by providing the mechanism by which “errors” can be introduced into new generations of an organism. The splitting and re-assembly of DNA strands is not always perfect, which means that the chemical code can be distorted and new characteristics introduced that may or not be beneficial to the new individual.  When beneficial changes happen, these are likely to be passed on to future generations, which will therefore differ in some respect from what went before. Given enough time, and enough such DNA errors, new species can evolve.

Amazingly enough, there are still people in the world who refuse to believe the evidence that has been presented for all to see, and prefer to ascribe the variety of life on Earth to divine creation. These people would probably claim that black was white if the Bible said so!

© John Welford

Attitutes towards the British Empire

Every year, in September, the series of Promenade Concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall reaches its last night and Britain suddenly rediscovers its patriotism. These days, we Brits are not much given to flag waving, but on the Last Night of the Proms (which is now extended to simultaneous events around the country and is broadcast live on TV and radio) there are flags a-plenty and enthusiastic renditions of patriotic songs including these lines from “Land of Hope and Glory”:

“Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set / God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet”.

Anyone from overseas who saw the crowds of mainly young people belting out these lines to the music of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March No 1” might imagine that the British people continue to be imperialist and jingoistic, nostalgically longing for the revival of Empire and seeking world domination once more. However, nobody should take these celebrations too seriously, because today’s Brits have a very different world-view from that of their great-grandparents who were around when those words were written back in 1902.


The red map

The British Empire was at its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was when maps of the world showed the largest proportion of the world’s territories coloured red. To the top left was Canada, to the bottom right, Australia. Other large red blocks included India and huge swathes of Africa. Island chains strung across the Pacific ensured that this was truly an empire “on which the sun never set”. At the centre of the map was the relatively tiny island of Great Britain, from which this whole enterprise was run. It is hardly to be wondered that the vast majority of the British people once took enormous pride in being the most powerful country in the world.

An important element of this pride, and one that is often forgotten, is that the Victorians regarded the Empire not only as proof of their superiority but as something that it was their sacred duty to maintain and extend. In 1893, Lord Rosebery, who was Foreign Secretary and would become Prime Minister, said in a speech that:

“We have to consider what countries must be developed … and we have to remember that it is part of our heritage to take care that the world, as far as it can be moulded by us, shall receive an English-speaking complexion and not that of other nations. [We must not] decline to take our share in a partition of the world, which we have not forced, but which has been forced on us.”

In terms of Africa and India, Britain was shouldering the “white man’s burden” of rescuing benighted peoples from the despair of being primitive, savage, un-Christian, and black-skinned. Seen from a modern perspective, this attitude was deeply racist, patronising and indeed hypocritical, in that the purpose of Empire was to receive as well as give.


Pros and cons of Empire

However, many British people at the time would not have regarded the Empire as being anything other than a force for good. They genuinely believed that their Christian religion required them to make converts of all the races of the world, and also that the white races were inherently superior to the black ones. (It is probably worth bearing in mind that there are still plenty of people around who think the same way.) Through the Empire, the Victorians and Edwardians were able to put these beliefs into practice. Their God, together with their finely-tuned Protestant work ethic, required them to serve, and the Empire gave them the opportunity to do so.

The Empire therefore affected the British people in very practical ways. Many thousands of Brits from the higher strata of society went out to remote parts of the world as colonial civil servants, military leaders, engineers, teachers, missionaries, doctors and merchants. Novels such as E. M. Forster’s “A Passage to India”, and the stories of Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling, give very vivid portrayals of the lives these people led. There was also plenty of work for people from the lower classes, most notably as the foot soldiers who fought a long series of colonial wars right through the reign of Queen Victoria. Most of these people came home after a few years of service, but others settled permanently in the colonies, such as the owners of vast agricultural estates in Africa and tea plantations in India.

On the home front, many thousands of British people owed their livelihood to the Empire. The city of Birmingham became known as the “workshop of the world” for its manufacture of machinery and other goods that were exported largely to the colonies. New industries sprang up to process the raw materials and foodstuffs that were imported, such as rubber from Malaya and tea from India. Thousands of sailors, dockers and merchants made the import/export trade possible, and thousands more built the ships that carried the goods.

However, the British Empire was always a two-edged sword. Along with the benefits of Empire there were many reasons why Britain now looks back on it with shame as well as pride. It cannot be denied that massive injustices were done in the name of the Empire, and millions died in military actions, acts of genocide, and epidemics introduced to populations that had no defence to Western diseases. In the later Empire, the British governed without slavery, but servitude took its place, often harshly imposed. That said, British rule tended to be less brutal than that of some other colonial powers, most notably Belgium in the Congo.


The morality of Empire

This leaves aside the moral dimension of colonialism. Setting out to populate an empty land and wrest a living from a place that had never previously supported human life is one thing, but is it justifiable to, in effect, steal someone else’s country, maybe fighting the native people and killing many of them in the process? If you then impose your rule on the natives, insist on them adopting your religion and culture, and make them subservient to a monarch thousands of miles away, how can that possibly be justified?

In many cases, that is precisely what the builders of the British Empire did, and this process had an effect on the people back home as well as those in the new colonies. When you, as a nation, consider yourselves to be superior to other peoples, and to be citizens of the greatest nation on earth, you begin to think not only that you can do no wrong, but that you are a better human being than the colonized natives, who become seen as a sub-species of humanity who deserve the oppression that you are meting out to them. You begin to believe that these people can be enslaved because that is, after all, how they would treat each other, and that it is God’s will that you do so. In time, you, as the superior human, will become corrupted as your immoral acts and attitudes turn into moral ones in your own eyes.


Multicultural Britain

Today’s Brits look back at the days of Empire with mixed emotions. Apart from the fake patriotism mentioned at the beginning of this article, there is still a certain amount of pride in some quarters, but shame in others. The consequences of Empire are still with us today, in the form of the millions of our citizens whose parents or grandparents reversed the process and settled in Britain, mainly for economic reasons. Many of our cities have large non-white populations, and some will soon have a majority of their population who are not genetically native.

Multiculturalism has led to tensions and problems, and even riots at times. Most “natives” are happy to live in a rainbow nation, and to eat Indian takeaways and take part in the festivals that the immigrants have brought with them. However, others find this difficult, and there is therefore a considerable amount of racial prejudice that has led to race-hate crimes and accusations of “institutional racism” on the part of the Police and other organizations. Political parties that are racist, whether they admit it or not, enjoy periods of considerable support (although this is by no means the case at all times). Had the British Empire never existed, it is highly unlikely that Britain would be a multicultural nation today.


The Commonwealth

Although the British Empire as such has long gone, the Commonwealth that succeeded it is still in existence, presided over by Queen Elizabeth II. It still has some influence on world affairs but, apart from the spectacle of the four-yearly Commonwealth Games, it has little impact on the life of the average Briton. There is still a handful of colonies left, such as Pitcairn Island and St Helena, and we have even fought a colonial war in living memory, to defend the Falkland Islands against Argentina in 1982. However, apart from these occasional reminders of Empire, the effect of the British Empire on today’s British people is indirect. The same could hardly be said of past generations.

© John Welford

The Battle of Loos, 1915

Many battles are exercises in futility that cost the lives of thousands of men due to the incompetence of their commanders. This was certainly true of the Battle of Loos, fought in September 1915 during the First World War.

The battle was fought as part of the British Army’s support of France against Germany in a mining district of north-eastern France (the Loos in question is Loos-en-Gohelle, near Lens). The men in charge of the British troops were Field Marshal John French and General Douglas Haig, who did not always see eye to eye (Haig often complained about French’s character and tactics). In turn, the two commanders distrusted the Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, General Joffre.

Lack of artillery governed the decision to begin the offensive by releasing poisonous chlorine gas towards the German positions, but this tactic failed due to the lack of wind. The cloud of gas therefore hovered over no-man’s-land and the British advance, when it happened, was hampered by lack of visibility caused by this self-inflicted hazard.

As the first day of the battle continued, General Haig became convinced that he would need to call up reserve troops, and he therefore asked Field Marshal French to release the recently-formed XI Corps, which was under the command of General Richard Haking. This corps included two divisions, the 21^st and 24^th, which comprised recent recruits from England who therefore had no experience of service in the field. French thought that using these troops was a mistake, but Haig made the extraordinary claim that “with the enthusiasm of ignorance they would tear their way through the German line”. He also assured Haking that the troops would not be used unless and until German morale had already been crushed and they were in retreat.

The two divisions were force-marched to the front during the day and into the night, in the pouring rain and without food. The march took 18 hours to complete, after which the men were assembled in the positions from which they would be ordered to mount their attack. After only a few hours rest they advanced “over the top” the next morning in close formation – ten ranks of up a thousand men in breadth. Their officers had no maps and very little idea of the terrain they had to cross. They did not know that the Germans were far from being crushed or in retreat, and that they were in fact protected by barbed wire barricades and armed with heavy machine guns fired from parapets that gave them an excellent view of their targets.

The result was utter carnage as the Germans simply mowed down the British troops as they advanced towards the barbed wire, which was 19 feet thick and four feet high. The surviving British troops could do nothing when they reached the wire because they only had clippers that were little better than what they might have used back home to prune roses.

The final tally of British casualties that day was 385 officers and 7,861 men, whereas the German losses were absolutely zero. The battle continued for a few days more with fresh assaults, but the damage had already been done and there was no way by which the British could make any advance.

The callousness and cynicism of the British commanders, particularly General Haig, is difficult to comprehend. Unfortunately he seems to have learned little from the debacle at Loos and would only continue to apply reckless tactics in future battles, notably the Somme and Passchendaele.

© John Welford

The Navigation Act of 1651

Empires of the Ancient and Early Medieval world were primarily continental in nature, in that a powerful nation pushed its borders ever wider by conquering its neighbours. However, from the mid-16^th century onwards, as European explorers discovered lands across the sea that offered massive opportunities for trade or plunder, empires became trans-oceanic and intensely competitive, so that nations such as Britain, Holland, Spain and France found themselves in conflict over pieces of land across the world, as well as the sea routes that were essential for their trade and defence.

Trade protection

Measures to protect the rights of English sailors and traders go back to the reign of Edward III in the 14^th century, and the development of overseas colonies made such laws essential for ensuring that only English ships could carry goods to and from these overseas territories. Without such laws there was always the possibility that the colonists would trade directly with other European countries, and the home country would lose the goods and revenue that it came to expect from its burgeoning empire.

By the second half of the 17^th century England’s chief colonial rival was the Netherlands, and the succession of Navigation Acts that began in 1651 was designed to create a closed market that excluded the Dutch, through establishing a monopoly of the colonial trade in raw materials for English ships, at the Netherlands’ expense.

The Navigation Act of 1651 stipulated that goods could only be carried to English territories (i.e. England itself and its colonies) by English ships, or by ships that belonged to the country that had produced the goods. It was designed with the Dutch in mind, because of the extensive shipping business carried out by the Dutch in carrying other nations’ goods. There was also a clause that prevented Dutch fishermen from landing and selling catches in English or colonial ports.

The Act had the desired effect in that it severely damaged Dutch interests, and it was the cause of a series of Anglo-Dutch wars that continued into the reign of Charles II. It is noteworthy that Cromwell’s Navigation Act was one of very few that were not repealed after the fall of the Commonwealth. Indeed, other Acts were to follow that continued and extended the protectionist theme, for example by adding a ban on exports in non-English ships.

Political overtones

The 1651 Act also had a political purpose in that most of the English colonies were loyal to the Stuart monarchy that had ended with the execution of Charles I in 1649. Cromwell’s government could keep Ireland within the empire by military means, but this was not so easy when the potential rebels were on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The Navigation Act therefore established an invisible but effective fetter that tied the colonies to the home country.

Greek to Roman colonisation

One effect of the Act (and its successors) was that the nature of English colonialism changed from a “Greek” to a “Roman” model. In the ancient world, several colonies were established around the Mediterranean by Greek settlers who set up independent city-states like those on the Greek mainland. Among these was Syracuse in Sicily, the home of Archimedes. These colonies acknowledged their origins, and were proud of their Greek culture, but saw no obligation of obedience to the city-state which had sent them out. On the other hand, Roman colonies, founded by conquest, were expected to be subservient to the Roman Emperor, and any attempts to deviate from imperial policy were ruthlessly suppressed.

England’s early colonies had followed the Greek model, in contrast to those of other European countries, most noticeably Spain. Spanish colonies were under the direct rule of the King of Spain, but no such institutional framework had governed England’s colonies, which enjoyed a considerable amount of freedom to develop in ways that best suited them. The imposition of a more Roman model that dictated who the colonists could trade with, by what means, and with the consequence of import and export duties being levelled on the goods that were traded within an imposed trade monopoly, inevitably cause resentments that were to build over the succeeding decades and lead eventually, in the North American colonies, to revolution.

The irony is that, without the Navigation Acts, it is quite possible that the early colonies, most notably those in North America, could have broken away as early as the 1650s. As it was, the spark for eventual independence was probably struck by Oliver Cromwell, whose Puritan religious persuasion had in fact a great deal in common with that of many of the colonists. Cromwell’s attempt to keep the colonies loyal by economic force clearly worked in the short term, as it took another 125 years for the fuse lit in 1651 to reach the powder keg.

© John Welford

The Salisbury rail crash, 1906

The fatal rail accident that occurred at Salisbury, Wiltshire, on 30^th June 1906 had an obvious cause, namely excessive speed leading to a catastrophic derailment, but the mystery as to why the train was going so fast is unlikely ever to be solved.

Salisbury is on the line, then belonging to the London and South Western Railway, that runs from London Waterloo to Exeter and Plymouth. The train in question was a night boat express from Plymouth that was planned to run with only one stop, that being at Templecombe in Somerset to change engines. The train only had five carriages and 48 passengers, who had landed at Plymouth on the liner “New York”.

The engine that was coupled to the train at Templecombe was an express engine under the charge of Driver Robins and Fireman Gadd. The driver was highly experienced and knew the line well. With a powerful engine and a light load it was clearly going to be possible to make a fast run, but Driver Robins was well aware that drivers who arrived too early at their destination were likely to be disciplined. He even said as much to two other railwaymen at Templecombe before he set off.

However, the train was some four minutes behind schedule when it reached Dinton, about two-thirds of the way to Salisbury. It was at this point that Driver Robins started to pile on the speed, averaging 70 miles an hour over the next six miles.

Although the line contains many straight stretches and fast curves, this does not apply through Salisbury itself. The line bends sufficiently sharply for 30 mph restrictions to apply on both sides of the station. However, the signalman in the Salisbury West box was horrified to see the express hurtle past with the whistle screaming.

The train managed to hold the less severe west curve but, having roared through the station, had no hope of staying on the track on the much sharper east curve. The train jumped the rails and ploughed into a milk train that happened to be passing on the other line.

The force of the impact was catastrophic, with the result that half the passengers on the boat train, plus both enginemen, were killed, as were the guard of the milk train and the fireman of a light locomotive that was standing on a passing loop. The track was ripped up for 40 yards and a trench gouged in the track bed to a depth of three and a half feet.

The crash was estimated to have happened at 1.57 a.m., which meant that the average speed of the train since passing Dinton must have been 72 mph.

The question that arose, not surprisingly, was what did Driver Robins think he was doing? He knew about the speed restriction through Salisbury, so why had he ignored it by attempting to pass through the station at more than double the permitted speed? The engine was remarkably unscathed by the crash, and there was no evidence that the regulator had stuck open – indeed, it was actually closed.

One possibility might be that the regulator had indeed stuck open, and that was why Robins had blown the whistle for several hundred yards to the west of the station. Perhaps he had been able to free the regulator just before the crash but had had no time to apply the brake.

There was some speculation at the time that Driver Robins had taken a bet to break a speed record for the journey, or had been tipped by the passengers to make a fast run, but no evidence was found to substantiate this. As noted above, Driver Robins knew all about the consequences of arriving early at Waterloo, so why would he deliberately risk a reprimand and loss of pay by breaking the rule?

As mentioned earlier, this was an accident the cause of which was always going to be difficult to find, given that the people who might have supplied the answer were dead. Any guesses as to the cause, such as the one suggested above, or a sudden medical emergency, will have to stay as guesses.

After the crash the speed limit for trains leaving Salisbury station was reduced to 15 mph. This limit is still in force, as shown in the accompanying photo.

© John Welford