With each passing year, memories begin to fade of some of Kent’s darkest moments. While the likes of the Herald of Free Enterprise tragedy or the IRA bombing in Deal remain frequently referenced, there are an increasing number of people unaware of some o

On June 9, 1865, passengers who had just crossed the Channel by ferry boarded the daily boat train which would whisk them from Folkestone to London. On board that fateful service was an author of global renown - Charles Dickens.

Travelling back from a visit to Paris, what would occur that day would change him forever and, according to his son, hasten his death.

After travelling through Headcorn at 50mph, a red flag alerted the driver to stop. Up ahead a stretch of track crossing the Beult viaduct had been removed for engineering works. Despite slamming on the brakes the train could slow only to 15mph before it derailed, spewing carriages onto a dry river bed.

The driver had not been notified of the works and the warning flag waved too close to the site. Ten people were killed and 40 people injured. Dickens, who had been travelling with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, was in a carriage which did not derail but hung over the bridge. Relatively unharmed he helped other passengers, filling his top hat with water to try and aid and comfort the injured.

He later wrote in a letter: “The scene was so affecting when I helped in getting out the wounded and dead, that for a little while afterwards I felt shaken by the remembrance of it.”

Dickens’ son Henry would later say his father “may be said never to have altogether recovered” from the incident. He died five years to the day to the disaster after suffering a stroke, aged 58, at his Gad’s Hill Place home in Higham.

A drawing of the scene of the Staplehurst rail crash

Charles Dickens, pictured with his family at his Gad’s Hill Place home