Anyone who travels regularly on London’s underground and overground railway system will have seen people risking injuring themselves and others by rushing to catch trains just before the doors close. People get shoved, bumped into, pushed aside and generally manhandled as impatient commuters attempt to barrel their way through crowds or squeeze onto carriage as the closing ‘beeps’ sound to announce ‘this rain is now ready to depart, mind the closing doors’.

Sometimes the late arrival gets stuck in the doors, which open and close again while the assembled passengers glare at them. On more than one occasion I’ve heard the driver (often with heavy sarcasm) offer a few words of advice for the future to whomsoever has just boarded his or her train.

We’ve all done it and we’ve all seen it done.

George Sorrell was tired and his wife was unwell. In fact she was ‘dangerously ill’ and after a very long day at work for the General Omnibus Company (14 hours in fact) all George wanted to do was get home to her. So when he arrived at Swiss Cottage station late one evening and saw a train departing he ran to catch it.

The doors then were manual and swung open so he reached up and grabbed the handle and hauled himself aboard. However, the train was moving and he got stuck half in and half out. This was perilous because in a matter of seconds the train would enter a tunnel and the bus employee risked being thrown from the carriage and mangled under its wheels.

Fortunately for him a signalman had noticed him and the danger he was in – apparently it had been become all too common for commuters to risk life and limb in this way – and rushed out of his box and pushed Sorrell bodily into the compartment and safety.

At the next station Sorrell was reprimanded by the guard and asked for his name and address. George gave a false address in Chelsea but the company were persistent and eventually traced him. He was summoned to appear at Marylebone Police court in September 1873 where the charge against him – that ‘of entering a train in motion’  – was heard by Mr Mansfield, the sitting police magistrate.

Mr Gooden, the chief inspector leading the case, explained that incidents of this type were becoming commonplace and so the railway company had decided to prosecute each and every one, in an attempt to deter passengers from carrying on with this dangerous behaviour.

The magistrate listened to Sorrell’s excuse but agreed with the railway that this needed to be stopped before anyone was killed. He also noted that the defendant had put the company to considerable expense and trouble by lying about where he lived. So he fined him 10s with an additional 2s costs and sent him on his way with a flea in his ear.

[from The Standard, Monday, September 08, 1873]

PS. Swiss Cottage underground station had opened just 5 years before George Sorrell had his brush with death. It was the norton terminus for the Metropolitan and St John’s Wood Railway so Sorrel would have realised that his ride into central London was disappearing fast. A new station opened in 1939 so the one he used closed in 1940 and the old station building was demolished 20 years later.