Working to Rule
SIR,—It is entirely as it should be for a Cambridge man, like Mr. Johnson, to be a stickler for accuracy. I was writing admittedly from memory of roughly forty years' standing, but 1 do not think that even by his account, I am so far out as to matter. That no fewer than two vitally important rules should have been coolly and fatally dis- obeyed by three people, the driver. the station-master and " an unauthorised person," if not good, or bad, enough, for my critic, will be so, I fancy, for most other people.
The other day it was only one rule that appears to have been dis- obeyed by one person, which is never under any circumstances to act on the assumption of a signal being at "all clear,", unless you are quite explicitly certain that it is so. And that one man's one lapse cost his own, and more than a hundred other, lives.
I speak diffidently and under correction, but I have a very distinct impression that in the case of the Welsh accident it came out that the breach of rule was by no means the first. In the nature of the case— two rules, three people—is it believable that it could have been ? Nento repente. . . .
There is, in short, only one safeguard against a repetition of such horrors as that of Harrow—which is the working to the rule, the whole rule, and nothing but the rule, by every railway employee on every occasion, and, consequently, a rule that is a hundred-per-cent. workable.
I hope and believe that in this at least I shall have Mr. Johnson's nihil obstat.—Yours faithfully,
ESME WINGFIELD-STRATFORD.
The Oaks, Berkhainsted, Berks.
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