The Great Thorpe Railway Disaster 1874

With all the pace of a great movie, author Phyllida Scrivens, whisks us straight back to the eve of the disaster – to the time of those calm moments when all was still well – setting the scene of chatter and minor annoyances encountered at the end of an ordinary day. Yet a set of circumstances had been set in motion that were going to lead to calamitous consequences. With an ease that belies the enormous hard work that she must have put in to her research, she paints evocative vignettes of the lives of those involved, telling us where they lived, worked, worshipped, who they married, or didn’t, and more. Weaving in to her account, the author tells us of the unseasonably bad rainfall for an early September evening, the busy, distracted railway staff ... the telegram that was inadvertently sent, and the other that arrived too late. By the time of the head-on collision – between the mail and the express trains, on the single track line between Yarmouth and Norwich – darkness has fallen and it was still raining. She tells of the villagers who came out, lanterns in hand, to help, of the bedsheets torn up for improvised bandages, the pub requistioned for surgery and mortuary. The first newspaper to break the story was the Eastern Daily Press, which saw its circulation increase ten-fold that day. How many had died? Who was to blame? This was a story that gripped the nation then and is hard to put down almost 150 years later. Skilfully researched and told.

• Published by Pen & Sword (hardback). ISBN 1526764024. HT