Travel and tourism go hand in hand – but they also go hand in hand with crime. In the 18th century, those travelling to places via carriage risked being stopped by one of the nation’s many highwaymen, having their valuables stolen while they were on rough lanes miles away from civilisation in some cases, and with no regular police forces to report the offences to. Once the rail network was established in the 19th century, thieves and other criminals had a new way of committing crime. Although more serious crimes were rare – the first murder on a railway in Britain took place in 1864, shocking press and public alike – the rail network easily gave individuals the opportunity to commit crimes such as theft. Some of these people simply took advantage of travelling by train themselves, being tempted by the goods of other passengers. Others were locals who targeted train stations; but some were employed by the rail companies themselves.

In 1906, two men – Charles Henry Thorpe and Thomas Henry Parrott – appeared in court in Exeter charged with stealing train tickets. Both men worked for the Great Western Railway. It was found that they had stolen the return halves of tourist tickets, collecting them from the train and selling them on for small amounts of money. In this case, the two had sold the tickets to George Clarke Clements and Alfred Costa, who were duly charged with receiving stolen goods. Both Thorpe and Parrott pleaded guilty; Parrott, who was of previously good character, was sentenced to six months in jail; Thorpe, who presumably wasn’t of good character, was sent down for nine months.

A similar offence was committed in 1922, when William Tweedie admitted having stolen the return half of two first class return tickets from the ticket collectors’ office at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. An investigation had been under way for some time previous, due to suspicion that railway officials were retaining these return portions of tickets and selling them to the public for reuse. Tweedie ruined a long-term career by his greed; he was 60 at the time, and had worked for the North Britain Railway for 35 years. Perhaps because of this long service, he was not jailed straight away like Parrott and Thorpe; instead, he was ordered to pay a fine of £5 with the alternative of 30 days inside (the reduction in punishment since 1906 shows how attitudes had changed, with such thefts being now regarded as fairly trivial and not worthy of a significant jail sentence).

Stealing from the railways was an action committed by various types of people, of all ages. In the case of the theft of three rail tickets from the Great Eastern Railway at Trowse, Norfolk, in 1904, the thieves were three male hawkers, all in their early twenties. They had bought tickets from Thorpe to Trowse, but didn’t get on their train – instead, after it had left, they returned to the ticket office, claimed they had lost their tickets, and got a refund, stealing another three tickets valid from Trowse to Sleaford. The next day, they caught a train to Sleaford, using the mix of bought and stolen tickets, but when an inspector checked the tickets at Ely, where they got off, he told them they were out of date, and the men were arrested.

In this case, it’s clear that such thefts were regarded very seriously by the railway companies and police alike. The Trowse ticket agent had notified police of the stolen tickets, and staff at Ely and Sleaford had been notified by telegraph that travellers with stolen tickets might be on the train. The ticket collector at Ely had therefore been put on the exit of his station to check the tickets, whereas normally he would not have been there but in the office. All three men admitted that one of them, William Emms, had stolen the tickets – he argued that he had spoken to a lawyer who said that ‘as the company had accepted payment from Trowse to Ely, they had compromised the theft and could not proceed against them’. However, the jury at their trial found otherwise, and a guilty verdict was reached. All three had a reputation, with ‘constant complaints’ made about them to police; William also admitted to taking the tickets in a ‘drunken freak’. The men were fined £2 each, or to go to prison for one month with hard labour.

The Tube
By the 1930s, the Tube system in London was similarly being targeted by thieves. In 1938, it was reported in the press that an organised gang was believed to be at work, stealing from ticket machines in Tube stations. The gang was using metal discs, the same size as a shilling piece, to get both twopenny Tube tickets and change from the machines. During a single weekend, 200 discs were found in various machines.

A less organised crime took place on London’s trams in 1903. Two middle aged labourers – Thomas Rockell from Kensington, and Henry Benstead of Hammersmith – were charged with refusing to pay their tram fares, and Rockell additionally with the theft of 100 tram tickets. They had boarded a tram at Hounslow, paying a twopenny fare each, which would get them as far as Turnham Green. However, they remained on board beyond this point, and when the conductor asked them for an additional penny each, they refused, and managed to steal a bundle of tickets from him as well. Rockell’s defence was rather weak; he claimed to have paid sixpence at Hounslow for two full fares, and said the conductor had dropped the bundle of tickets and he had simply picked them up.

All sorts of transport could be targeted: trains, Tubes, trams and buses. In 1942, it was found that a large number of bus tickets had been stolen from a bus travelling from West Hartlepool to Port Clarence. It emerged that five boys – aged between nine and 16 – had stolen them while on board. However, in this case, it was more a case of high spirits than explicit criminal intent, for the boys had taken them for a laugh, sharing them between them and then throwing them away. They had got the nine-year-old boy to steal the tickets – numbering 360 in total – from the conductress’s box, but he later owned up. Most of the tickets were recovered, and so the magistrates in this case simply made the boys each pay three shillings in costs, and then dismissed the case.

Of course, public transport could act just like any other location, in that it was somewhere else where a person’s property could be stolen. The thief could even be a transport employee, as was the case in 1949, when a 28-year-old bus conductor in East Yorkshire saw that one of his passengers had dropped her purse, and promptly took it himself. The man, Patrick O’Neill, tried blaming local soldiers who may have been on the bus, but when told there had been witnesses, he confessed. He was fined £2 and lost his job, unsurprisingly. Seven years earlier, a 21-year-old bus conductress in Newcastle had stolen a customer’s purse containing money, a key and some train tickets – it was heard that this, her first offence, ‘seemed to have been the result of sudden temptation after two and a half years’ unblemished service with the bus company’. In this earlier case, the magistrates said they would treat the woman very leniently not only because it was her first offence, but also because ‘she was a girl of respectability and standing’; then, as now, arguably, those from higher up the class system were often treated differently to those from poorer, lower or less ‘respectable’ backgrounds.

When the train, the tram and the mechanised bus were invented, they heralded modernity, glamour, the ability to travel to places quicker and easier. Yet to some, they also provided the opportunity to steal. There is little glamour in appearing before the magistrate as you await sentencing, but that has never deterred thieves from thieving. But just remember, that no types of theft are as glamorous as the perpetrator might think. As one magistrate in East Ham told a stowaway to Gibraltar in 1928, ‘Stealing a voyage is no more romantic than stealing an overcoat.’