On another occasion Gigi had an epileptic attack in our place in Oakley Square. I was on late shift, so I made him as comfortable as I could before leaving, then took the tube to Leicester Square. No sooner had I stepped onto the platform than a woman rushed up to me, saying a man seemed to be having a fit. At the end of the platform a man was going through the same motions as Gigi had earlier. I settled him as best I could, then called for medical personnel. I waited for them to arrive, then made my way to the station room to clock in, only to find all the staff gathered around someone lying on the ground. Guess what, one of the staff was also having an epileptic attach!

An attractive red-haired girl who stood on one of the platforms around 2:00 PM every day reminded me of someone Terry Conlan and myself had met the year before in Wexford. We had driven down there in my mini, and picked up a French guy and a red-haired Belfast woman on the way to Enniscorty. Terry wanted to get his hair cut, and we told the couple we would meet them afterwards and give them a lift further, but when we went to the appointed meeting-place they didn't turn up. Anyway, after a couple of days of watching her on the platform, I approached her and asked her if she had been in Wexford the previous year. It turned out she was the same one! She was now studying in London. We had a brief chat every time I was on duty on the platform after that. She was Jewish, despite her Irish colleen appearance.

One day I was called into the stationmaster's office to be confronted with an agitated woman holding a large manilla envelope. She handed it to me and said she had found it on a seat, and when she saw that it was full of notes became frightened and had approached the stationmaster, who just happened to be walking by at the time. We emptied the envelope onto the desk-there was exactly £1,234 there. As we were counting it the phone rang. It was the stationmaster from Piccadilly station, one the next station, who said he had someone in his office who had left a large sum of money on a train. I packed the money back in the envelope and took it to its greatful owner, who turned out to be an Irish architect.

The Moorgate Disaster

The Moorgate disaster happened during my time with London Transport. A train travelling downhill into Moorgate (the last station on this short line) sped through the station and crashed into the wall at the end, killing the driver and thirty-four passengers. As rescue workers prepared a long fight to bring all the injured out of the mangle of compressed carriages, a full-scale investigation was set up into the Moorgate tube disaster, the worst-ever on the London Underground.

There was a lot of speculation on what caused the crash. The key question is why the driver, Leslie Newson, aged 56, accelerated into the blind tunnel when his 8.37am commuter train from Drayton Park should have been braking. It sped past platform nine at twice the usual speed of 15mph and then ran out of track.

The first three of the six coaches telescoped at the end of the 80-yard tunnel after crashing through sand piles and over the buffers. Many of the dead had been found beneath the first carriage; the first fifteen feet had been compacted down to two feet and is embedded in the end wall.

All that day teams of doctors, fireman and nurses wrestled with the wreckage, in dust and withering heat, attemping to reach those still alive. A teenage policewoman was carried out after twelve hours. One of her feet had been pinned down by the tangle of metal and had to be amputated at the scene.

The driver was elderly, so heart attack or something similar was assumed. The trains are fitted with a "dead-man's hand", which has to be held in position manually all the time, so that if a driver has a heart attack, for example, and released this, the train would brake automatically. The British tabloids made several outrageous claims, including that the dead-man's hand was held in place with some object, that traces of whiskey were found in the driver's flask, that the guard (a 21-year-old whom I had met on at least one occasion) was negligent, and so on. The trade unions were up in arms about these slanders, as they called them.