Disaster at Moorgate
The train crash in 1975 killed his father. Now Laurence Marks and his writing partner Maurice Gran have dramatised the terrible events for radio
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- Richard Barber
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In 1975, Laurence Marks, then 26, was a jobbing journalist for a news agency. At around 9am on 28 February, the telephone rang. There had been a serious incident at London’s Moorgate Station. Could he find out what was going on?
He discovered that a Northern City Line train had smashed into the end wall of the southern terminus, killing the driver and 42 passengers and injuring a further 74 people – the worst peacetime accident on the London Underground. The 16-metre-long first carriage was crushed to 6.1 metres. The second carriage concertinaed as it collided with the first, with the third riding over the rear of the second.
Marks talked to survivors at Barts Hospital before dictating his copy down the phone to the agency and then headed home. That, he thought, was the end of that. It was just the beginning...
“At four o’clock, my stepmother Eve rang. ‘Had I heard about the Tube crash?’ she asked. ‘I think your dad was on that train.’ I could feel my blood running cold.” Marks continually rang the emergency helpline, to discover no one called Bernard Marks had been admitted to any hospital.
“Then, at 9pm, I had a brainwave. If my stepmother was right, he would have boarded the train at Drayton Park, having left his car in the station car park. It was a bitterly cold, misty night. I drove with my brother-in-law, Alex, into the car park. There was one solitary car… Dad’s red Cortina.
Laurence Marks's Sunday Times article the following year. The Sunday Times
“The next day at 9am, a policeman rang my doorbell. ‘I have to tell you,’ he said, ‘that, at 4.10 this morning, your father’s body was removed from the second carriage of the train.’ Could I come to the City of London mortuary to identify him? When they lifted the sheet, Dad was on his back without any signs of damage. I later learnt he’d died of ‘contusions of the brain to the back of the head’. On impact, he’d been thrown through the double-plated glass carriage window.”
The following Wednesday, the secretary of Harry Evans, legendary editor of The Sunday Times, called. “He’d like to talk to me about what had happened,” Marks recalls. Evans wanted a full investigation into the crash. “Would I be prepared to head it up? I stammered something about being very junior. But Harry thought everyone involved would talk to me, although not necessarily to his reporters.
“Eventually, I produced an article of some 4,000 words, which appeared on 29 February 1976 under the provocative banner headline: ‘Was it suicide?’ ” Now all Marks feels able to say, in the absence of any conclusive evidence, is that both the train and the driver were in full working order…
In the car park there was one solitary car: Dad's red Cortina
Laurence Marks
Despite his investigation, it was only relatively recently that Marks discovered that the last two people to be rescued from the wrecked train – 19-year-old police officer Margaret Liles and Jeffrey Benton, 27, who worked at the Stock Exchange – were trapped together for hours.
“This,” says Maurice Gran, Marks’s long-time writing partner, “was meat and drink to us.” The result is a two-part Radio 4 dramatisation with Margaret played by Lizzy Watts and Jeffrey by Tyger Drew-Honey.
Given the writing duo have been working on programmes for the small screen for four-and-a-half decades – from Shine On, Harvey Moon to Birds of a Feather – why didn’t Marks and Gran pitch their idea to a TV company? “Partly because it’s a complicated, costly process,” says Gran, “and partly because of the huge soundscape offered by radio.”
Maurice Gran and Laurence Marks.
Marks continues, “The way we described it to the BBC, was that we wanted to make a film for radio.” They were told the longest available slot was usually 45 minutes. “That’s when we came up with the idea of two episodes on successive days: one from the point of view of the people trapped inside the train, the other from that of the emergency services working outside.”
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Now Marks and Gran have written a treatment as a stage play and are in talks with a top West End director. “And who knows,” says Gran, “it could yet end up as a three-parter on screen. For the moment, though, we’re very proud of what we’ve captured for radio – where, as all the world knows, the pictures are better.”
Authors
Richard Barber
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