Setting the scene
Time: late evening.
Date: 28 June 1869.
Place: Hale Lodge, a large house on Hale Lane, Mill Hill.
Introducing the characters
‘Francis, is Elizabeth with you?’ Cecilia called from the living room to her husband who was taking his coat off in the hall.
‘No’, he replied, ‘I was the only passenger who got off the train, was she supposed to be on it too? It’s the last one this evening’.
‘Well, she asked us for a day off to visit her family in town and wanted to come back as late as possible. I hope nothing’s happened to her’.
The young lady in question was Elizabeth Warburton, in her twenties and employed as a nursery governess to the couple’s young family. Francis Cowley Burnand and his wife Cecilia lived about 10 minutes’ walk from Mill Hill Station. He described their home as ‘prettily situated in a locality innocent of builders’. It was a rural neighbourhood without streetlighting, made up roads or pavements but since 1868, conveniently served by trains on the Midland Railway into London St Pancras. (The station was later renamed Mill Hill Broadway and today the line is run by Thameslink).
The couple waited in case Elizabeth managed to return by some other means, but they eventually locked up and went to bed. Francis was in some pain; he suffered badly from eczema and after dressing the rash, his specialist had advised him to wear his right arm in a sling.
Usually referred to as FC Burnand, he was a comic writer and prolific playwright. His wealthy family expected Francis to follow a conventional career, and he qualified as a barrister and often gave this as his main profession but decided on the theatre. He produced around 200 Victorian burlesques, farces, pantomimes and other stage works, including material for the magazine Punch which he edited for over 25 years. By the end of the 1860s, he was well established in his chosen profession. His wife Cecilia was an actress who retired after their marriage in 1860.
Francis recalled that the next morning the family were told, ‘a young lady had been found, lying insensible, on the line, and had been conveyed to a hospital in London. It never occurred to us that this could be our governess’. But later information left no doubt as to her identity: a ticket to Mill Hill had been found in her pocket, as well as a letter addressed to her at Hale Lodge.
What had happened to Elizabeth?
There were several stations on the Midland line between Kentish Town, where Elizabeth boarded her train, and her destination, Mill Hill. Around 9.30pm, a man discovered the unconscious Elizabeth on the tracks, just a short distance north of Cricklewood Lane. At the time, there was no station between Finchley Road and Hendon.
Before going for help, the man moved Elizabeth off the tracks. This was very fortunate, as a goods train passed over the spot where she had been lying a few minutes later. When Police Constable Crawley 230X arrived at the scene he sent for the Hendon station master, but he was in bed, unwilling to get up and didn’t arrive until 3-4am. Although he immediately ordered a cab to take poor Elizabeth to hospital, that did not turn up until 6am.
In the absence of witnesses and because she remained in a deeply unconscious state, unable to say what had happened, what was called the ‘mysterious Hendon affair’ attracted a great deal of press attention. When it became known a train had arrived at Hendon Station that evening with the door of a second-class carriage wide open, most reports speculated this was the carriage Elizabeth had been travelling in, and that she had fallen or jumped out of the train. Something had happened in Elizabeth’s carriage, said the newspapers, probably a ‘ruffianly assault’. Burnand was reported as saying that he feared Elizabeth had ‘been the victim of some foul treatment’.
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Elizabeth was still in hospital in mid-July, occasionally regaining consciousness. The emphasis in the newspaper reports was still very much on assault; as one put it, ‘the condition in which she was found and the injuries which she had sustained before she fell or was thrust out of the railway carriage, were such as to indicate that a struggle of a very dreadful kind had taken place’. During her few conscious moments, Elizabeth was able to give some information about what had happened. But while one report said doctors felt it unsafe to rely too strongly on what she said, another claimed that Elizabeth had indicated she knew her assailant. ‘In the north of London, a vague rumour has been spreading … The name of a gentleman well-known to the frequenters of our metropolitan theatres has been mentioned as that of the assailant of Elizabeth Warburton’.
The rumour mill gathers pace
No names were mentioned but the description clearly fitted her employer, playwright Francis Burnand. The gossips seized on the fact he’d been on the train and speculation he was the attacker spread rapidly.
Burnand later wrote: ‘I read how the lady had been visited in hospital by a justice of the peace and had been able to answer questions as to how she had fallen on the line. Unfortunately, as she evidently (this was admitted) with difficulty understood the purpose of the interrogations, she was instructed to answer “Yes” or “No” to the questions, which were necessarily all leading ones. …it was gathered a man had entered the carriage while the train was in motion, that he had tried to assault her, that she struggled, and in her struggle turned the handle of the door and fell out on to the line. Did she know the man? Yes, she did.’ Elizabeth went on to name her employer.
Most of his professional colleagues were inclined to treat the matter as a joke but Francis knew he had to clear his name. In mid-July when he was interviewed in London by two detective sergeants assigned to the incident, he was relieved to learn that he was not a suspect. But he had been investigated: the document Elizabeth had signed, naming Francis as her attacker, meant the police took the accusation seriously. They had mounted a watch on his Mill Hill home and monitored his movements: ‘we were bound to keep our eye on you’ they said.
There were several reasons the police had ruled out Francis. One of the points in his favour was the fact his arm was still in a sling. If he had been hurt in a struggle with Elizabeth, the police thought he would have gone to great lengths to hide, not advertise, any injury. To confirm this, at the interview Francis showed the police his arm was covered in eczema dressings.
Francis asked the detective sergeants, ‘Did you think it likely that, travelling as I was in a first-class compartment, I should have incurred the extraordinary risk of creeping along the footboard to the second-class?’
One replied, ‘It wasn’t likely, of course, but queer things do happen, and highly improbable ones too. But that you should have had come out as an acrobat, nipped into a second-class carriage, had this struggle, then got back into your own, and descended at Mill Hill all safe and sound, was what neither me nor my mate credited for one moment’.
What actually happened to Elizabeth
One of the policemen had expressed the view, ‘I think, as the young lady is recovering, when she’s quite come to her senses, she’ll give rather a different version of the affair’. And that’s precisely what happened, although it took a week or two. On Monday 9 August, Elizabeth was well enough to make a full statement to the police. She said her sister had watched her get on the train at Kentish Town. She was alone in the compartment for the entire journey, and no one had attacked her. Elizabeth remembered getting up at one point after Finchley Road, leaning on the carriage door and looking out of the open window. She turned giddy when she felt the door shake, but instead of falling back on her seat, she fell out of the carriage onto the tracks. Medical opinion was that Elizabeth’s injuries could easily be explained by a fall from a train travelling at 25 to 30mph. The door wasn’t properly shut, and by leaning on it, Elizabeth dislodged the half-turned handle, allowing the door to swing open, and she tumbled out.
The press now published the true facts, dismissing the mystery as a ‘common-place railway accident’, but the Daily Telegraph gave a warning to its readers: ‘Moral for the gossiping public: Don’t whisper malicious accusations in the absence of proof’.
Elizabeth was horrified once she learned she had signed depositions accusing her employer, but couldn’t remember doing it. Burnand later described it as ‘quite a sensational, unpleasantly sensational, episode in my generally uneventful career’.
Compensation or not
In September the press carried reports that ‘friends’ of Elizabeth Warburton intended suing the Midland Railway for compensation. Almost certainly, Burnand was behind this, he was still smarting from being considered the prime suspect in the alleged assault.
In February 1870 Elizabeth was in court where she told the judge, ‘She had not been able to do anything since the accident. She had £14 a year and lived with the family’. This was her annual salary from Burnand and she was presumably still at Hale Lodge. Several medical men testified as to her injuries. Dr Handfield Jones said Elizabeth ‘had much fallen away’, losing a stone in weight since he had seen her a week ago; her mental powers were affected while her right arm and leg were not functioning properly. In the opinion of Dr Grosvenor, who had attended her for many months, she would never be the person she was before the accident.
Concerning the railway’s slow response to the accident, the company’s barrister said the Hendon stationmaster was told that a woman, possibly drunk, had wandered onto the line. It took several hours to discover she had been a passenger, and then ‘every possible attention had been paid to her’. So, the barrister argued, the delay in getting Mary to hospital wasn’t the railway’s fault, nor should the Hendon station master be censured. Several railway employees, including the Kentish Town stationmaster, gave evidence that the lock was fine and the door was properly shut. Furthermore, their medical experts claimed Elizabeth’s injuries were not as bad as had been stated and she would make a full recovery. No damages were due unless negligence could be proved, and the ‘mystery’ remained unsolved. The possibility of an assault was again raised, as was Elizabeth’s faulty memory.
In his summing up, the Judge commented on the reliability of Elizabeth’s evidence, that the jury needed to consider the likelihood ‘the fall was so severe she must necessarily have forgotten much of what happened’. But the jury found in Elizabeth’s favour, ‘no doubt considering that the ‘mystery’ consisted in the door having been left unfastened’. She was awarded an astonishing £500 (today worth about £51,000).
However, that was not the end of the affair. In April, an application for a new trial was made, claiming that the damages awarded had been excessive. The callous argument made by the barrister acting for the Midland Railway was that Elizabeth could convert the £500 into an annuity of £25, which was too high, given her £14 a year salary. The Lord Chief Justice rejected the request, praising Elizabeth for giving ‘clear and intelligible’ evidence in February and saying, ‘his view was that in these cases it was not merely a question of money, but of altered health and the altered enjoyment of life’.
Elizabeth was living with her family in Tower Hamlets in the 1871 and 1881 censuses, where despite her compensation, she is shown as a governess and nurse. It looks as if she made a good if not complete recovery and, in his memoirs, Francis said the family had helped Elizabeth find a job once she had recovered. However, by 1901, her £500 award appears to have been used up; even if converted into an annuity, it would have ended. This could explain why the census shows her boarding with her sister Agnes in a lodging house in Aldershot, where both women were working in a school of ballooning. The Balloon Factory, an army training and test centre for experimenting with balloons and airships, had moved there from Chatham in 1890.
Cecilia Burnand died at Hale Lodge on 10 April 1870, aged 28. She received the last rites a few hours before she died, her death certificate recording she was suffering from acute atrophy of the liver.
In 1874, Burnand married Rosina, Cecilia’s sister, the ceremony taking place abroad. At the time English law forbade a widower to marry his dead wife’s sister. Rosina was a widow and had also been an actress. Burnand continued his successful career and became editor of Punch in 1880. Knighted in 1902 for his work on the magazine rather than his theatrical output, Burnand died in Ramsgate in 1917.
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