The Shooting of a Station Master
In the 1800s, the job of a stationmaster was hard work, but was rewarded with social respect and a stationhouse to live in, so they wouldn’t have to walk or cycle for miles to and from work each morning. But their proximity to the railway and the responsibility of the role meant they worked long hours and rarely enjoyed time off, their minds a network of train routes and memorised timetables, and their days measured by the rhythmic clacking and chugging of the trains coming and going from the station.
58-year-old Edward Adolphus Walshe was one such stationmaster, who managed the Dover Priory station of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, known as the LCDR. The station, which opened in 1861, had been built on land belonging to the Archbishop of Canterbury and still exists today. Edward Walshe had been married to his wife Hannah for nearly 30 years, and they had one grown-up daughter. He was known to be even-tempered and fair when dealing with his staff but had high standards and ran a tight ship. But recently, Walshe’s patience had been tested by carriage cleaner and railway porter Thomas Wells, who had been working at Dover Priory station for 18 months.
Thomas Wells was 19 years old and the eldest son of a fish salesman. He spent much of his spare time – and even some of his working hours – engrossed in crime novels, penny fiction, and the Illustrated Police News, gawping at the sensational descriptions of robberies, assaults, and ghastly murders. Some were real, like the tales of highwaymen and the wild boys of London, a group of juvenile criminals who terrorised the streets of the capital, while others were imagined, like Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. Little did Thomas Wells know that his own actions would soon be immortalised in one of his favourite true crime publications…
Thomas Wells had been heard more than once referring to stationmaster Edward Walshe as ‘the old bastard’. Walshe kept a close eye on young Wells, frequently picking up on his shoddy conduct. Aware of his tenuous position, Wells had once told a colleague that if Mr Walshe ever fired him, he would have his revenge. But his idleness was the least of it – he had recently been seen firing a pistol while on duty. Due to the seriousness of shooting a weapon on railway premises, Walshe had reported the matter to his own superior, the senior superintendent at Dover, Harry Cox. At 11:00 a.m. on Saturday 2 May 1868, Henry Cox personally admonished Thomas Wells, who flatly denied shooting the gun. Cox advised the bothersome employee to apologise to Walshe, telling him that if he did so, no further action would be taken, but if he refused to make amends, the matter would be escalated to the district superintendent. Cox gave Wells 10 minutes to think it over, then joined Walshe in his office, sitting down next to him at his desk.
Exactly 10 minutes later, Thomas Wells walked into Walshe’s office as agreed, but when Cox asked him if he had anything to say, fully expecting a heartfelt apology, the 19-year-old remained silent and surly, walking out again without saying a word. Three minutes later, he returned. By this time, both men had stood up to inspect a railway timetable. Walshe was facing the door and jumped back in surprise when Wells burst back into the room, brandishing a rifle. He spoke not a word as he lifted the weapon and, with an air of undisturbed calmness, shot Walshe in the face, killing him instantly. The bullet flew right through his head, lodging in the mantelpiece behind, still carrying blood, hair, and skin from the victim’s scalp. As if entirely unaware of the gravity of his actions, Wells simply walked away. Cox was stunned by the sudden merciless attack, and it was a few moments before he was able to find his voice and call for assistance. Two railway labourers came running into the office to assist, and called the police and a doctor, although it was tragically too late for the medic to be of any help. When the police arrived, they found Wells hiding in an empty carriage but were greeted not with the violent fury they expected, but with quiet compliance. Wells handed over the rifle willingly and walked to the police station in silence, not even attempting to claim innocence. When his mother heard of his arrest, she collapsed and was cared for by relatives. Wells’ brother, two sisters, and girlfriend, visited him while awaiting trial, but were surprised to find that he seemed more interested in getting something to eat than mourning the life he had taken or fretting over the consequences.
The magistrates court was crowded with people who knew and respected the murdered stationmaster. When Thomas Wells was escorted into the room in handcuffs, he looked around as if scanning for faces he might know. An insanity defence was presented, as it transpired that Wells had fallen off a train a few weeks before the murder and had landed on his head. His family testified that he shouted and swore at the slightest provocation and had once thrown his mother out of her bed in the middle of the night. But as no medical advice had been sought after his accident, and nobody else other than his family thought there was anything wrong with him, the defence plea was ignored, and he was found guilty and sentenced to hang. On Thursday 6 August, the murderous railway porter’s family came to his cell at Maidstone Gaol to say their final farewells, their sobs of grief contrasting strangely with Wells’ placid demeanour. Before his execution, he wrote a letter to the stationmaster’s wife, Hannah, asking for forgiveness. On the evening of Wednesday 12 August, Wells was marched to the condemned cell which lay just behind the scaffold, the cell door just six paces away from the drop; a nightmarish apparition which remained out of sight to the prisoner until the last moment, but which haunted their dreams and waking moments in their final days.
At 5:00 a.m. on Thursday 13 August 1868, Wells dressed in his railway porter’s uniform and received a visit from the prison chaplain, who administered the Holy Sacrament. At 10:30 a.m. he was led out onto the scaffold. His final words were two lines from a simple hymn he had learnt while in prison, which were ignominiously muffled as the cap was drawn over his head. A moment later, executioners Calcraft and Smith drew the bolt to end the short but eventful life of 19-year-old Thomas Wells, although due to a miscalculation on the length of the rope, the convict struggled for two full minutes, his chest heaving fiercely and his hands visibly twitching, before he finally fell still. A black flag was raised to indicate that the execution had taken place, and the body was suspended for one hour as per official protocol before being cut down. Within 24 hours, a coroner’s inquest was carried out to formally confirm the death, and a certificate of execution was posted on the gates of the jail.
Wells is remembered as the first person to be executed in private inside a prison, as under the new Capital Punishment Act, public executions were no longer held in front of a crowd. After the hanging, the Home Office recommended that all future executions should take place on a Monday at 8:00 in the morning, on the Monday immediately following the third Sunday after the prisoner was condemned. As well as the black flag, the new rules required the bell of the prison or local parish church to be tolled, to mark the perpetrator’s passing.
Wells was buried in the Maidstone prison cemetery, and was soon joined by Alexander Arthur McKie who, coincidentally, was also 19 years old and charged with murder, after a brutal attack on his employer Mrs Grossmith in Artillery Passage, London – a case I covered in a previous Penny Dreadfuls episode. I’ll leave the link in the description.
As a footnote to the shooting of stationmaster Walshe, some members of the public speculated that Thomas Wells had been influenced by the graphic Illustrated Police News, a copy of which was found in his pocket after he was arrested. Whether reading stories of murder and mayhem encouraged the young man to commit the crime, or whether he was always destined to become a killer, is something we will never know.
Sources:
Dover Express – Friday 08 May 1868
Sun (London) – Saturday 08 August 1868
London Evening Standard – Friday 14 August 1868
Bondeson, Jan; “Victorian Murders”, 2017, Amberley Publishing
Sculthorpe, Sally, “100 years of Station Master memories”, 2013, The Railway Museum, https://blog.railwaymuseum.org.uk/100-years-of-station-master-memories/