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INTRODUCTION
The title words were spoken by the Reverend Percy Fletcher
Boughey in Soham church on Sunday 4th June 1944 in preface to his
tribute to the four brave railwaymen who, two days earlier, had
saved the town of Soham from virtual destruction. Two had died,
one lay critically injured and the fourth damaged in hospital
after an otherwise successful and totally selfless attempt to
save hundreds of lives. This was not the address planned by the
vicar for his 'Salute the Soldier Week' service but another
hastily prepared for a congregation waiting to give thanks for
their deliverance. The wounded town was still in shock but its
foundations were largely intact and the people were there to
mourn the dead heroes and celebrate their own survival.
THE SAVING OF SOHAM
The summer had been warm and dry in Britain and its people
after, nearly five years of war, were waiting for D-Day - the
beginning of the end. All knew the landings in Europe were
imminent and that the first list of casualties would follow all
too soon. It was no time for crises on the home front to claim
the front pages - and they seldom did with so much coming from
the theatres of war, good or bad. The threats from the air had
extended to doodlebugs, chugging over like motorcycles with
flaming tails until they cut out to blast holes anywhere, and V-2
rockets diving on London, leaving huge craters and many
casualties. The crisis that occurred in the small hours of
Friday June 2nd 1944 in 'a market town in Cambridgeshire' could
claim but passing interest in the national press at this time.
Not so for the people of Soham, that market town disguised
at a time of geographical censorship, although they were soon to
be reassured that but for acts of courage and self-sacrifice
outstanding even in wartime their troubles would have been far
worse.
London, on the very day of the Soham incident, was appointed
the World's News Centre when the allied forces invaded and it was
reported too that the United States Air Force had dropped 63,000
tons of bombs on Germany, the occupied countries and The Balkans
in May and was stepping up the intensity all the time. On the
previous Tuesday, May 30th, the American Cemetery at Madingley
near Cambridge was dedicated with due ceremony and all knew there
were many more spaces to be filled there before the war was over.
Like most of my generation I was in uniform and while not
far away it was some time before I knew the precise location of
the Soham incident. In the meantime I might not have been unduly
held by such headlines as 'THREE MEN SAVE A TOWN,' 'HE DIED LIKE
A SOLDIER TO SAVE AN ENGLISH VILLAGE' and 'HERO SAVED TOWN FROM
DISASTER.' I might have guessed sooner from the indecision of the
national press on whether Soham was a town or a village! It was
a long time after, following two years abroad, when the full
story of that grim night was put before me, a story summarised
many times since with freedom of interpretation, but which I now
unfold from the beginning.
On May 31st 1944 a consignment of bombs and components for
the United States Air Force was taken off ship and on to
sixty-one railway wagons at Immingham on the Humber, destined for
Whitc Colne in Essex. This long train left Immingham Sidings at
2. 55 a. m. On June 1st, travelling so slowly that it took seven
hours to cover the eighty-nine miles to March in Cambridgeshire.
It arrived at March Yard, which was subsiduary to the nearby
marshalling yard at Whitemoor (where today stands the high
security prison), where the wagons were, as always, carefully
inspected. The ten leading wagons were then detached to be worked
forward by convenient services later, leaving the fifty-one
wagons and the guard's van in Number One Siding Coal Yard. These
remained in the yard for fourteen-and-a-half hours unaltered in
formation until they left at 12.15 a.m. On Friday June 2nd as the
delayed 11.40 p.m. (June Ist) train from Whitemoor to White
Colne.
Forty-four of those wagons were laden with 250-pound and
500-pound bombs, unfused, amounting to approximately four hundred
tons in all and another six with detonators and primers, fuses,
wire release gear and bomb tail fins, all firmly stacked under
tarpaulin sheets of low combustibility with the care that had
prevented any major crisis in the transportation of weaponry on
British railways throughout the war, one wagon remained empty.
This train was about 390 yards long and there were no
gradients between March and Soham to unsettle such loads. For
the four-and-three-quarter miles from Ely Dock Junction to Soham
the line was, and is, single, while from Soham it was, and
remains, double. The train stopped at Ely twice where observers
saw nothing unusual aboard. All the Soham signals were clear for
the train's approach when it was moving at between fifteen and
twenty miles per hour with the engine steaming lightly along the
level line. Then, a few yards beyond the Up signal, the driver,
Benjamin Gimbert, noticed some steam issuing from the left-hand
injector and looked out of his cab window. Although he could see
but nine to twelve inches, into the left-hand rear corner of the
first wagon above the rear of his tender Ben saw flames rising
some eighteen inches from the bottom.
The flames were spreading rapidly as if taking hold,
unaccountably, of inflammable material. He sounded his whistle
to alert the guard and stopped the train gently, taking about
three minutes, for any jolt could have proved disastrous. Having
stopped some ninety yards short of the station platform ramps he
urged his fireman, James Nightall, to get down to uncouple the
burning wagon from the rest, advising him to take a coal hammer
in case the coupling was already too hot to handle. Jim leapt to
the task, released the coupling and climbed back on the footplate
within a minute and Ben sped the engine and its fireball away,
aiming to get it into the open country. 140 yards forward into
the station, now illuminated by the burning wagon, he slowed down
to shout to the signalman, Frank 'Sailor' Bridges: 'Sailor - have
you anything between here and Fordham! Where's the mail!' But
Frank was ahead of him, having not received the mail train and
having requested another engine to tow the detached wagons away.
Ben had crossed to the fireman's side to talk to Frank who was
waiting on that offside platform with a full fire bucket hoping,
forlornly, to douse the flames, putting his life at risk like the
others to avert disaster.
He had no moment to answer or act. The earth shattered in
one enormous blast, smashing him to the floor mortally wounded.
less than seven minutes had elapsed since Ben saw the fire. At
approximately 1.43 a.m. Forty-four general purpose bombs each
weighing five hundred pounds, in total containing 5.14 tons of
explosive content, went up as one, reducing the station to
rubble, killing Jim Nightall outright, blasting Ben Gimbert some
two hundred yards away.
The first miracle of this night was the courage these
railwaymen found to face such responsibilities, the second was
the survival of Ben Gimbert to tell the tale. He landed on grass
near the Station Hotel and crawled his way to the doorstep of
Horace Taylor's shop at the bottom of Station Road. He was then
found by Railway Ganger Reed staggering about wanting to know if
his mates and the rest of the train were safe. Jim's fate was
not known at that moment but Ben at first refused to go to
hospital until he knew. Red Cross women were in charge of the
ambulance when it came and to spare them Ben, who weighed
eighteen-and-a-half stones, refused to be carried on or off.
Critically injured, he was kept in ignorance of Jim's death until
an innocent visitor to his hospital bedside offered his
condolences and thus set back the big man's recovery quite a bit.
There was a fourth hero in Herbert Clarke of Ipswich, the
guard, who had suspected problems when the train slackened speed
when his van was a train's length away from the distant signal.
He saw the fire in the front wagon and helped his driver slow
down with a light application of his van brake. When stationary
the train is the responsibility of the guard and Herbert,
recognizing the intention of Jim Nightall, got down and rushed
forward to help him. The engine and its leading wagon moved away
as he was still going forward. Then the blast hurled him back
along the track some eighty feet and left him concussed. He
gradually recovered enough to re-light the extinguished van lamps
and then he walked back dazedly to the front of the train to
ascertain the damage. Herbert was 59 and in deep shock but he
gathered detonators to put down on the rails along the
two-and-a-quarter miles back to Barway Junction, arriving at
about 3.30 a.m. utterly spent, where he was helped into the box
by Signalman Cyril King. Herbert was not to know Frank Bridges
had got his messages through before the blast destroyed all
communications.
Indeed, judging by his quick reactions, Frank may have seen
the fire before Ben, for he had aroused Sub-Ganger Will Fuller,
who was living in Mount Pleasant Cottage a hundred yards from thc
station, soon enough to enable Fuller to notice the fire the
moment the train pulled up about 230 yards away. Fuller was then
pulling on his clothes by the bedroom window as he heard the
uncoupling, then he saw the burning wagon moving forward until it
was obscured by the station buildings. In moments the explosion
shattered Fuller's cottage and buried him and his wife and
daughter in the debris. It was Fuller later who gave evidence of
seeing blue flames among the yellow rising from the wagon and of
detecting a smell like burning gas. The possibility of this
deriving from the residue of the wagon's previous load of bulk
sulphur was studied at the inquiry.
It even seemed possible that Frank Bridges had been notified
of the fire in the wagon by the Barway signalman, Cyril King, but
King later avowed he saw nothing to disturb him on the train, saw
no sparks coming from the engine and caught no smell of burning
beyond the normal as the train slowly passed his signal box at
about 1.31 a.m. He saw one of the engine men exchange tokens
using the lineside apparatus, watched the tail light of the train
moving away and signalled 'Train out of junction' back to Ely
Dock Junction. When the train was about three-quarters-of-a-mile
away he saw a pink glow that he took to come from the firebox,
then saw the train obscured by the bend and soon after heard the
explosion.
Five others followed Ben and Frank to hospital with severe
injuries including the station master, Harry Oliver, who had been
found pinned under his bed badly concussed after the house had
tumbled about him and his wife, his nineteen-year-old daughter
Pat and his ten-year-old son Dick, who escaped with minor
injuries. Mrs Oliver wandered away seeking shelter and was taken
in, but there was no room for her daughter who had to go
elsewhere. Mrs Oliver suffered from shattered nerves for a long
time after this night.
The streets of Soham were littered with glass, shop goods
were blown into the streets and the station was replaced by a
crater fifteen feet deep and sixty-six feet across. Only a
buffer and a socket casting were left of the wagon, the rest
being driven downwards, there to stay so that the lines could be
restored quickly at that time of acute national emergency. The
tender was a twisted mass still attached to the engine which was
wholly derailed yet received no serious structural damage other
than to the cab, its light platework, boiler and cylinder
lagging. The larger part of the train disconnected by Jim
Nightall lethal in its content, was hit by no worse than minor
splinters and thus the town of Sohain was saved from utter
destruction by human courage beyond praise. So many of those who
recalled the night for me would have been killed or badly maimed
but for the self-sacrifice of those men.
Part 2 of 'But For Such Men As These'...
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