I’ve been spending a little more time on Katherine Scragg.

(And her name was Katherine not Catherine, despite the newspaper reports to the contrary)

I finally ran to ground a newspaper transcript of her deposition, which I won’t reproduce as it is fairly graphic describing the violence wreaked on Katherine and Grice’s attempts to pull up her dress.

Given that Grice was captured with his flies still undone, there can be little doubt as to his intentions.

However there are two interesting aspects to the deposition.

Like Fanny Elizabeth Bull, the railway company concerned (in this case the London and North Western Railway) provided a solicitor to support Katherine, suggesting that the railway companies often saw it as their duty to assist in a prosecution.

Secondly, there was a Ladies Only compartment on the train but Katherine was not sitting in it – she had been sitting in an ordinary third class compartment with other passengers, who unfortunately had all got off at a prior station leaving Katherine alone.

This did invite some comments along the lines of ‘she were asking for it, warn’t she’, and comments from the chair of the grand jury about women having to take responsibility for their own safety, but these didn’t go anywhere given the brutality of the attack and the fact that she had been sitting in a compartment with other passengers prior to Grice boarding the train – he could just as easily have leapt into a Ladies Only compartment occupied by a single woman.

Without access to the court transcripts, I can’t prove this but there seems to have been a recognition that providing Ladies Only compartments was not a panacea …