The Flying Scotsman derailment that sent eight Cramlington miners to jail
This year marks the centenary of the General Strike, which lasted from 4-12 May, in support of miners who faced the imposition of a 40 per cent wage cut and harsher working conditions. It is also a century since a spectacular event took place during that strike, the derailment of the Flying Scotsman in Northumberland on its way from Edinburgh to King’s Cross, by a group of miners who became known as the Cramlington Train Wreckers.
This account owes a large debt to details from the Cramlington Train Wreckers website https://www.cramlingtontrainwreckers.co.uk/. A number of young miners from West Cramlington, after being fired up at a union meeting, removed a length of rail, in the mistaken belief that they would derail a coal train, having first chased off some volunteer platelayers, and broken into their hut. According to a Ministry of Transport report published later the same month, the Flying Scotsman’s locomotive and “five leading vehicles” left the rails, ploughed through ballast, and came to rest against a disused signal box. “Fortunately only two passengers were injured. A volunteer fireman on the engine had his wrists scalded."
Eight miners were eventually arrested, although more were involved, and they were jailed with sentences ranging from four to eight years. The Cramlington miners were sent to Maidstone prison in Kent, with a society supporting working-class ‘political’ prisoners providing financial and legal assistance to their destitute families, before they were granted early release in 1929 by the recently elected Labour government.
A fascinating 1970 BBC documentary, Yesterday's Witness: The Cramlington Train Wreckers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVEUUoG421g features moving interviews with the surviving train-wrecking miners, who spoke about those that had turned King’s evidence against them. In 1981 one of the jailed men, William Muckle, published a book titled No Regrets.
Other books include Margaret Hutcherson's Let No Wheels Turn: The Wrecking of the Flying Scotsman, 1926, which inspired a play by Ed Waugh from Wisecrack Productions that toured in 2024 and is being revived later this year on 12 July at Newcastle’s Theatre Royal. There will also be a talk on the Cramlington Train Wreckers and the 1926 General Strike on 27 March in the Beamish Museum 1950s Town.
Footnote: In a curious and tragic coincidence, the same locomotive that was derailed at Cramlington, Merry Hampton, crashed near Goswick in Northumberland in 1947 after failing to slow down for a diversion. On this occasion 28 people were killed.
Greg Freeman