10 - Viva Lewes

INSIDE LEFT
ENGINE TROUBLE
In the Sussex Express, Tuesday 30th September 1879, the headline read: ‘Alarming explosion at Lewes Railway
Station’. On the previous Saturday, the fast London to Hastings train had stopped at Lewes at just past
3pm. It was running ten minutes late. As passengers, including local MP William Christie, climbed aboard
the busy carriages, guard Alec Fraser was talking to the platform inspector, Mr Hayden. The 31-year-old
driver, William Rookwood, had just bought a bun from the basket of the refreshment vending lad called
Funnell. The whistle blew but suddenly there were signs that something wasn’t right. The Express reports ‘a
blinding rush of steam, clouds of dense black smoke, a dull sullen deafening sound not unlike the discharge
of an immense piece of ordnance’. The engine, number 174, had burst and was ‘wrecked’. The door to the
smoke box had been blown away, and the wheels twisted off the rail. The stoker lay across the tracks on the
London down platform. Worst of all, on top of a carriage behind the front guard’s brake lay an ‘indistinguishable
mass’. This was the driver, ‘frightfully mutilated’. A ladder was found and a medically trained passenger
climbed up to discover Rookwood barely alive. Brandy was administered, but he died. The traumatised stoker
was taken to the In�rmary with multiple injuries including a fractured skull.
The shocked refreshment boy was covered in black soot, his basket full of pebbles from the track and glass
from broken lemonade and spirit bottles. The Sussex Express reports that a large number of passengers,
‘especially the female portion’ were severely alarmed.
How had this tragedy occurred? Tom Reeves was told by Norman Cousins after a talk he gave that the safety
valve had been tampered with, set for 140psi instead of 120psi, and that there was some speculation that it
might have been an attempt on the life of the MP. But no de�nitive conclusion was reached as to how it happened.
Thanks to Edward Reeves photographic studio (473274).
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