The Nightingale Shore Murder (19 page)

‘No.'

At this point, the Coroner decided to close the proceedings for the day. He invited questions from the jury, but the Foreman assured him they had none. Setting the next hearing for 3 o'clock on 4
^th
February at the Hastings Town Hall, the Coroner reminded the jury that it was important they all attend. A post-mortem had been carried out, he said, by Dr Bernard Spilsbury, and ‘several local gentlemen' had been present. He hoped the jury would be satisfied if Dr Spilsbury and just one local medical gentleman were called. Wicks, the jury Foreman, offered no objection. He again expressed the jurors' sympathy to the deceased's friends, and called the assault ‘a cowardly and dastardly act.'

The Coroner offered the jury the chance to inspect the railway carriage in which Florence had been attacked, if they felt they needed to see it. Again Wicks declined on behalf of his fellow jurors, saying they did not think this was necessary. Capel Rutherford, the railway company solicitor, stepped in to ask if the carriage – which had been kept at Hastings station with its door sealed – could now be moved. But the Coroner was not ready to release the scene of the crime, however inconvenient it was for the Company. He told the solicitor, ‘I think you had better leave it for the moment. You will have notice from the police.'

With that, the first inquest hearing was over. Mabel could leave the hospital for the last time to attend the next morning's Requiem Mass for her friend before the funeral cortege left for London. When the inquest reconvened, it would hear details of the journey, the man who got off at the first stop, Lewes, and what the railway workers found when they joined Florence in her compartment at Polegate Junction.

At a quarter to eight the next morning, a Requiem Mass for Florence was celebrated at Christ Church, St Leonards. As well as Mabel, the congregation included Alderman R W Mitchell JP and Councillor W Meads, representing the town, and Mr W G Kemsley, Secretary of the East Sussex Hospital. Some VAD nurses were present, and Commandant Moyse and Quartermaster Green represented the British Red Cross. Florence's aunt, the 74 year old Baroness Farina from Tonbridge, was not present. There were wreaths on the coffin from the Matron and Staff of the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service, and the Matron and Nursing Staff of the East Sussex Hospital. After the service, the coffin was transferred to a motor hearse, for the journey back to London.

Mabel Rogers travelled back to London by train, and made her way to St. Saviour's Church in Ealing for her friend's funeral. The hearse carrying Florence's coffin arrived shortly before two o'clock in the afternoon. It was taken into the church and placed on a catafalque in front of the high altar, with a Union Jack for a pall, and three lighted candles on either side. More wreaths were brought to the church from St Faith's Nursing Home in Ealing, where Florence's father had died nine years earlier, having been collected there. They were laid at the foot of the catafalque and along the altar rails. Mabel's wreath bore the simple message: ‘With sorrowing love to my dear, kind friend.' Other wreaths came from Commander Orme-Webb of the Royal Navy; the Matron and members of the QAIMNS; and the London Centre of the College of Nurses of the British Committee of the French Red Cross ‘In remembrance of work done in France'. The nurses of Carnforth Lodge, where Florence had been living, sent a wreath of arum lilies and white hyacinths ‘In loving remembrance'; others came from St Faith's Nursing Home and from individual friends.

Every seat in the church was occupied for the funeral service, and many people stood in the aisles. The mourners inside the church included representatives from the British and French Red Cross, the London School of Nursing, the YMCA, the QAs and St Faith's Nursing Home. As well as Mabel Rogers, several members of Florence's family were present – her cousin Harrington Offley Shore from her father's side of the family, now an ordained priest; and Clarence Hobkirk, her cousin from her mother's side, a Brigadier General in the Army. The service was conducted by the Reverend A C Bucknall, the vicar of St Saviour's. The choir sang ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height', and ‘Now the labourer's task is o'er.' And as Florence's coffin was carried from the church, the organ played ‘O Rest in the Lord.'

Outside, large crowds lined the streets for some distance from the church during the funeral service; foot and mounted police had to clear a passage for the procession which took the coffin to the City of Westminster cemetery in Hanwell for interment. The hearse containing the flag-draped coffin was followed by five other cars of mourners, and hundreds of people waited at the cemetery to witness the interment. The cortege passed through the massive wrought iron gates of the cemetery, and Florence's coffin was lowered into a family grave, amongst the trees between the entrance gates and the chapel, alongside her sister.

Florence's brother Offley and his wife Caroline, now living in California, and could not attend the funeral. Offley wrote back to the QAs from his home, the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, to thank them for the letter of condolence he had received:

After Florence's funeral, Mabel returned to Carnforth Lodge and her post as Superintendent of the Hammersmith and Fulham DNA. The shock of the attack, the midnight journey to Hastings, the four long days spent at Florence's bedside, and the roles of first witness at the inquest and chief mourner for her friend of nearly 26 years, must all have taken their toll on her. But she still had final duties to perform. On 27
^th
January, she wrote to thank the Matron in Chief and members of the QAs for the wreath sent to Florence's funeral, and ‘much sympathy shown at her tragic death.' And shortly afterwards, she took the lead in raising funds to create a memorial to her friend. But her actions were not universally appreciated: Mabel's role in the aftermath of Florence's death was the subject of angry letters between Florence's brother Offley Shore and her cousin Clarence Hobkirk.

Offley had never liked Mabel. He believed that she had deliberately tried to isolate Florence from her family. His wife Caroline, according to her own letters, had tried to mediate in the matter:

In spite of Caroline's efforts, Offley's dislike of Mabel, and his anger at her role following Florence's death, was not tempered. On 27
^th
February, he wrote to his cousin, Clarence Hobkirk, who was co-trustee of Florence's estate, and administering it in London. After suggesting how Florence's jewellery, clothing, letters and other belongings should be dispersed among the family, Offley says:

This was followed by another letter on 3
^rd
March:

By May, the tone of his letters was even more furious:

‘Of the mud and muddy' is an interesting phrase: as there is nothing to suggest that there was any basis for a racial slur against Mabel, it may simply indicate Offley's view that Mabel was socially far inferior to the Shore family. A poem by Percy Shelley called ‘England in 1819' starts with the lines:

If Offley knew this poem, maybe he considered Mabel to be ‘the dregs of their dull race'.

The letter continues:

Why Offley should be so angry with Mabel is difficult to fathom. Clearly he resented the implication that Mabel was closer to Florence than her family was; but then, Florence and Mabel had lived together in the Nurses Home for many years, while Offley and Caroline had been living abroad and only occasionally visiting England. Offley blamed Mabel for separating Florence from her family. Yet when Offley and his wife were in London, Florence came down from Sunderland to spend time with them; and when she had leave from the QAs during the War, Caroline's letters show that Florence often spent it with her sister-in-law. The possibility that Mabel was keeping, and using, items that had belonged to Florence seemed to be a major concern for Offley, although in another letter to Clarence, he suggests that some of his sister's belongings are sold or destroyed. Only specific items and letters are identified to be passed on to family members.

Whatever the reason for this bitter feud between family and friend, it could hardly have distracted any of the parties from the most shocking and important question at the time: who had killed Florence?

From the beginning of the investigation, the police had a prime suspect. After all, they had a variation of a ‘locked room' mystery on their hands: two people had been in the compartment when the train left Victoria; one was found alone and fatally injured when the next set of passengers entered the carriage at Polegate Junction. The question was less who had committed the crime, but what his name was, and when and how he had got away from the scene. The Sussex police, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway police, and Scotland Yard, which was also taking an interest, all focused their attention on the man who had joined Florence in her compartment at Victoria.

Mabel Rogers was the only person, apart from Florence, to have seen the man in daylight. She had only had a few moments to observe him, as he had joined the train shortly before departure time, just before Mabel herself got out of the carriage to wave her friend off. Mabel thought he was aged about 28 or 30, of medium height and slight build, clean-shaven, and respectable looking. His hair was medium brown. He had been wearing a brown tweed suit, ‘of rather mixed and light material', with no overcoat – though he might have had one over his arm. He appeared to have no luggage, and no stick or umbrella – perhaps oddly, for a train heading for the coast, with its first stop scheduled for late on a January afternoon.

Since the prime suspect was not in the carriage when the platelayers joined it at Polegate, the police believed that he must have got off the train at its first stop, Lewes, at around half past four. He could not, they believed, have abandoned his journey any earlier. Although the train had slowed down passing through Gatwick and Three Bridges, it was still travelling at 30 miles per hour, too fast to allow anyone to leap out and close the door and raise the window behind them. The guard on the train, Henry Duck, had seen a man alight from the back of the train at Lewes. In fact, his manner of leaving the train had caught the guard's attention.

The platform at Lewes station was short, and the Eastbourne and Hastings train – not yet divided to serve both destinations – was twelve carriages long, with the engine and guard's van. The usual practice was for the front of the train to stop at the platform, then, if any passengers from the back of the train wanted to alight, they would tell the guard, and the train would move up to bring the final two carriages alongside the platform. The passenger leaving the train that Monday afternoon did not wait for this to happen. Instead, he opened the compartment door and stepped out onto the footboard, closing the door behind him before stretching along to the next compartment and then dropping around four feet down to the ground. He turned towards the front of the train and climbed up the ramp onto the platform. As the man walked past him, the guard spoke to him, asking ‘Didn't they tell you at Victoria to get into the front portion of the train?' He received no reply.

Having gained the platform, the passenger had several options. He could have left the station in the normal way through the ticket barrier – providing he had a London to Lewes ticket to show to the station staff, this would not attract any attention. Or, it was suggested at one point, he could have climbed the railings that divided the station from the town: though this theory was soon ridiculed by the Lewes station-master, Mr Marchant, as it would have drawn just the attention the man presumably hoped to avoid. Similarly, Mr Marchant pointed out, if he had tried to exit on the ‘offside' of the train – onto the tracks rather than the platform side – he would have been seen by the signalman in his box immediately opposite the train. Other options were not to leave the station at all, but to rejoin the train in a different carriage to go on to Eastbourne; or to change platforms and join a train going back to London, or to a different destination entirely. Whichever option he chose, the man succeeded in evading attention: none of the station staff, questioned by the police the next day, could remember anything out of the ordinary about a departing passenger. ‘The man who got off at Lewes' remained the chief suspect. The police hoped that either he would come forward himself, or a friend or relative would name him.

Tempting as he was as a suspect, though, there were some inconsistencies in this theory. Henry Duck, the guard, had seen him by the light of his guard's lamp, and had even spoken to him. Yet Duck's description of the man differs from that of Mabel Rogers. Duck saw the man wearing a ‘dark, drab mackintosh' and a cap. He also thought that the man was of ‘athletic build'. And Duck stated that it was not unusual for people to exit the train in that hasty way; this alone did not constitute suspicious behaviour. However much the staff might wish that people would get into the right portion of the train at Victoria, or wait for the train to move up to the platform, the guard testified that they often did not do so.

While the hunt for the man who got off at Lewes continued, the local paper, the Hastings and St Leonards Observer, reported an odd incident that had occurred that same night, at Hayward's Heath railway station on the Brighton line. The train going in the opposite direction to Florence's, from Eastbourne to Victoria, stopped at Hayward's Heath just after nine o'clock. The driver of an engine pulling just a brake van, passing in the southerly direction, saw a man jump onto the line from the train and lie down on the tracks. The engine and van passed over him, but without injuring him – and the young man then jumped up and re-entered the train. Having given everyone a fright, he was spoken to by the Head Porter at the station, and had his name and address taken, but he would not explain himself. He was allowed to proceed on his journey. Whether this incident was related to the attack on Florence, no-one could determine. Was it a failed suicide attempt from someone appalled by his crime and its possible consequences, or just an unrelated stunt? It seems a very odd thing for a man to do on a dark and freezing January night, with no audience, just for fun.

Alongside the search for the missing passenger, the various police forces were also pursuing the question of a motive for the attack. Mabel reported that Florence had been wearing a new fur coat and hat, which could have given the impression that she was well off. However, she had only been carrying three pound notes in cash, which were missing when she was found. Some of the jewellery she had been wearing when she left London, including her gold necklace and diamond ring, was also missing, and presumed to have been taken by the assailant. So it was initially assumed that the most likely motive for the attack was robbery.

Yet the three blows that inflicted the fatal head wounds had been struck with tremendous force, far more than might be required to overpower a small woman in order to steal from her. The day after Florence died, the newspapers were reporting speculation that the motive could have been even uglier. Under the headline ‘Fierce fight in defence of her honour?' the Daily Mirror's special correspondent reported from Hastings, where the compartment that Florence had travelled in was still in a siding at the station with its doors sealed by police tape.

The police urgently needed to find the weapon that had inflicted the blows, to see if that could shed light on the crime, and lead them to the person who had committed it.

As the crime had taken place on a moving train, the field for the search – both for the perpetrator and the weapon – was enormous. It also involved three different police forces. The Sussex police were involved because the crime had been discovered when the train arrived at Bexhill. The Metropolitan Police, in the form of Scotland Yard, were invited in to assist by the Sussex police because of the high profile of the case and the baffling nature of the suspect's disappearance. The Met had no right to take over a murder case, however high-profile, complex or shocking: the principle of local police autonomy was sacrosanct. But they could be called in at the discretion of the local chief constable, if their special expertise was thought more likely to lead to a result. In a circular to Chief Constables in 1906, the Home Office had specifically advised that Scotland Yard should be called in immediately in cases of murders committed on trains passing through several police jurisdictions – largely as a result of the murder of Maria Money in the Merstham Tunnel the previous year.

That Scotland Yard could produce a result where local police had failed was not however guaranteed: a report to Parliament about local cases in which the Met had assisted between 1919 and 1920 showed that a conviction was secured in just over half of cases.

The third police force involved in the Nightingale Shore murder was the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway company's own police. They had their own interests in the incident: the location of the crime scene, on one of their trains, and the potential for damage to their company's reputation. Neither LB&SCR nor its police officers can have been pleased with the Hastings and St Leonards Observer's article about Florence's death, in the 17
^th
January issue, which said in its first paragraph:

Words like ‘lonely passengers', ‘savagely attacked', ‘outrage' and ‘most repulsive kind' were hardly likely to attract custom to the railway.

There had been police specifically employed on the railways since the 1830s. Recognition of the need for railway police is often attributed to the very first fatality on a railway line, in 1830, at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. One of the distinguished guests disobeyed instructions, stepped onto the tracks and was killed by a passing engine. His death, and other problems with controlling the enthusiastic crowd, suggested that some form of official control was needed in this dangerous new area of transport. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway had its own police force in place by the end of that year. They also had ‘station houses' at one mile intervals along the track, from where the police could control the road, deal with obstructions on the track, communicate up and down the line, and assist if any accidents occurred. The station houses became the hubs for both people and goods coming to and from the railway: and they are the reason that police buildings are called ‘stations' today.

The first railway police were principally concerned with looking after signals and stations, rather than preventing or detecting crime. They wore uniforms and hats that were deliberately very similar to those of the Metropolitan Police – which had been formed at almost the same time as the first railway police – and carried truncheons, watches, flags and lamps. Having originally been set up voluntarily by the railway companies, in 1838 an Act of Parliament required the railway companies to employ constables to look after areas around railway workings, where the huge gangs of ‘navigators', or ‘navvies', were said to be frequently out of control, fighting with each other and terrorising the local inhabitants. The constables often had to be assisted by the reading of the Riot Act, and the arrival infantry troops, in their quest to keep order.

Once advances in engineering brought mechanical signals and more efficient communications, the role of the railway police became less about looking after the railway, and more about dealing with crime. Criminals leaving the scene of their crimes by train needed to be caught and returned; trespassers on the railway line had to be removed; and the regular thefts of luggage and freight items from railway goods yards also occupied the police's time. But as the county police forces developed and organised during the 19
^th
century, the privately-employed railway police were more and more restricted in their duties. They began once again to focus on work of importance to the company that employed them rather than policing in the public interest. The talents of railway officers were not entirely over-looked because of their limited sphere of operations, however: the captain of the North Eastern Railway police made the transition to become commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Given that his had been the first police force in the world to use dog patrols (Airedale terriers at the docks in Hull), perhaps he was an innovator and always destined for the top.

In 1920, it was Superintendent J J Jarvis and Detective Sergeant Vickers from the LB&SCR police who worked on the case of the assault on the Brighton line. With colleagues from the other forces, they searched alongside the railway line all the way back to London, looking for a weapon that could have been used to inflict such horrific head wounds. They knew that it had a broad striking surface, and it was very heavy; but there were no other indications of what they were looking for. The train compartments had windows that opened on each side by means of a leather strap, operated from inside the carriage: the weapon could have been thrown out – if it was discarded at all – at any point after the attack. And the train had travelled nearly 60 miles between London's Victoria station and Lewes, passing through at least three significant tunnels, at Merstham, Clayton and Oxley, and over a long viaduct across the North Downs. Their search for a weapon was perhaps more in hope than expectation; and they did not find anything that seemed likely to have been used in the commission of the crime.