Remembering Mike Horne

On 26 March 2020, the railway industry lost Mike “M A C” Horne, who passed away suddenly from a heart attack.

Mike’s knowledge of the history and operation of the railways (London’s in particular) was almost unmatched. There are few British railway journalists, researchers, writers or enthusiasts who have not, at some point, found themselves grateful for his work. That work included not just books and papers, but his blog and website. Nor was his knowledge limited to the environs of the permanent way. A genuine polymath, his expertise extended to the worlds of English parishes and their development from Saxon, Norman and Mediaeval manors, policing and police badges and, of course, the history of London’s pubs.

Indeed many of us, and those readers who have been to our meetups over the years, will also have been lucky enough to meet him in person in the latter. As anyone who spent such time in his company will have discovered, the only things that eclipsed Mike’s knowledge were his character and his generosity. Mike was a firm believer in the principle that knowledge – particularly railway knowledge – existed to be shared. Not just for its own sake, or so we remembered where we came from, but also to build a better transport future by avoiding the mistakes of the past.

For this reason (and more), the railway community has not just lost one of its wisest minds, but one of its best, and nicest people too.

When we heard about Mike’s sudden passing here at LR Towers, it made us realise that we all had fond stories and memories from our times in his company. What surprised us (although it should never have done so) was just how many stories those we found ourselves discussing the news with had about Mike too.

We had originally planned to run a thorough obituary of Mike here. One that documented his time both working in the industry and as one of the true guardians of its knowledge thoroughly and precisely – that is, in a manner of which he would hopefully have approved.

Two things, however, stayed our hands. The first was, quite simply, a reluctance – or perhaps more precisely a lack of desire – to accept just yet that we have lost him. In the words of William Shakespeare:

My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause until it returns to me.

Julius Caesar, Act 3 Scene 2

The second was similarly emotional, but far happier. This was the sheer number of memories of Mike that landed our collective inboxes as the news spread through the railway world.

And so it is some of those stories that we have decided to share with you instead. Some names you may recognise, some you may not. One thing, however, we all share – memories of Mike. Should you have your own of the man or his work, then do please feel free to share them with us, and the world, too. He was a remarkable man and we will miss him dearly.

The LR Team.

Doug Rose

I first met Mike in early 1981 and it didn’t take long for me to get roped in to one of his projects, along with a few others, and all of whom have become life-long friends.

A year before we met I had published the first edition of my The London Underground: A Diagrammatic History and an early recollection was Mike questioning why I had chosen to use ‘first day of no service’ for closure dates. This was the ‘learned wisdom’ of the time, and I had simply followed what other far better authors than me had done. Who was I to question this?

My answer was not satisfactory to Mike and I then got a (sort of) friendly lecture about the many failings of this principle. I had to concede and had little to counter his arguments. I won’t go into the ins and outs of the many causes of line and station closures here, but changing to ‘last day trains called’ was not going to be as easy as subtracting one day. (There is a fuller exposition, mostly written by Mike, on all subsequent editions.)

Mike had persuaded me that, if I was going  to produce a second edition, I should change the principle. I did, but it would have been impossible without Mike’s help and comprehensive subject knowledge. So great was the change that I felt the need to publish a small format book, available to buyers of the second edition, who wanted to know which one of the several variety of date change applied to each one reverted. To be honest, so great has Mike’s contribution to my publication been, that I doubt I would have seen any of them through without his extensive input.

In early 1982 I was introduced by Mike and a few others, to a project they had been working on for a few years – this was an attempt to record coloured tile patterns at over ninety platforms, from the original Yerkes tubes of 1906/7 – some two million individual tiles had been used. Whilst I cannot claim the project took over my life for 26 years, it came perilously close on occasions and resulted in my book Tiles of the Unexpected: Underground. This is another publication that would never have been completed, and with so much relevant information that brought supporting context and related factual accuracy, without Mike. More than once I asked ‘how on earth do you know that?’.

Mike is well known for his punctilious research in the pursuit of accuracy; it does not need reinforcement from me. What many students of public transport (mainly of London) might not know though is the much wider range of Mike’s interests. This gave him the very unusual ability to make sense of things not apparent from an isolated viewpoint of a one-subject historian.

Working for the Metropolitan Police in its forensic laboratory after leaving school, this was a natural career move as he had a scientific mind that frequently amused his close circle of friends. One example was him explaining to us how he built his own equipment from components so he could work out what the various electronic pulses through the track were doing to enable Victoria Line trains to work automatically from a remote control room. With an adapted tape recorder, headphones and a sensor on the carriage floor, he recorded the pulses late on many evenings. At home he converted these to an audible frequency range to analyse them. The line had just opened and Mike was still at school!

Around the same time he collected hundreds of the new Automatic Fare Collection used tickets, picked up from the floor. He sprinkled iron filings on the numerous variants of ticket types and then spent a long time decoding them. He then wiped the codes and re-encoded them with a modified soldering iron. After much experimentation and with completely inappropriate printing on the front he tried using them. They worked, until one day none of them did. Why? Further extensive experimentation revealed that LT changed the area of code referring to the issue date every two months. That was no obstacle and, with newly encoded dates, the tickets started working again.

I recall asking when he had first taken an interest in science, and this coming from me as a complete ignoramus thinking it could all only be smoke and mirrors. He then told me that he used to go to Tottenham Court Road to buy electronic components and attempted to convert his wardrobe into a Tardis. This is quite a natural thing to think when you are nine years old, but not to actually buy stuff to see if one could make it work. When telling this story and with an air of disappointment, he said he only got as far as making a light come on when he opened the door. Oh how we serious historians wish he had succeeded; there is so much I would like to go back in time to find out what actually happened.

Another of his scientific interests was in telephony. He accumulated a seriously extensive collection of domestic telephones, being interested in how they worked; paradoxically he hated talking on them. I remember many years ago visiting his house and asking what on earth the box of equipment on the floor was. He had built an electronic circuit to see if he could power his home telephones from the mains. This begged the question: why? At the time, a domestic line could make up to six handsets ring simultaneously – Mike had about forty from memory. This still begged the question: why do you want more than six to ring at once? I should have anticipated his answer, which was along the lines of: I just want to see if it can be done.

The equipment he had built sensed an incoming call and separated the ring and speech circuits. He had made this work and told me it was deafening with so many phones going at once – almost like a fire alarm. Thankfully for the rest of us, Mike was not super-human and had not fathomed a way to stop the phones ringing when the call was answered. He had to unplug his box of tricks from the mains.

Quite unrelated to any transport or scientific activities, Mike was a keen historian of almost all matters London – and this formed a significant link with my own. Mike and a few others used to meet most Friday evenings and have conversations that were probably not being acted out on many parallel universes. About four years ago he got me intrigued by a research survey he had been working on for a few by then. His website was gradually being added to with a photographic and textually explanatory index of Civil Parish boundary markers. He was also very interested in local and national government organization and administration and was fearful of these rapidly disappearing historic monuments to history.

The quest was to record all that could be found to survive. I wanted to join in with this but had no subject knowledge. Believe me, it is no simple task to even know where many defunct boundaries were, find out how many and where they had moved, find out how many had survived in a different guise (some more than once), let alone track down where the markers might be. They take so many different forms too.

Mike was of the opinion that only about five percent had survived, some dating from Roman times. Mike did by far the largest share of the foot trudging and almost all the research as we attempted to establish, and then walk every boundary in London. Even deciding where London was was no straightforward matter. He also gave many existing borough councils a hard time, with some success, in getting as many markers protected as possible. We didn’t finish this project but got to the point where it become clear that any further efforts would bring almost no further success. A small pocket of (now) Bexley remains unsurveyed, and a larger proportion of Bromley. Bearing in mind that many possible survivors will be on private land, his assessment was that we had probably found 95 per cent of what still existed that we could get to. We found a few that were on no historic Ordnance Survey maps incidentally.

I am rambling on but, again with no subject knowledge on my behalf, must note his (again) significant interest in police insignia and general organization of our forces past and present. His father, who survives him, was a senior member of the Palestine Police and also wrote its official history. Mike was a Freeman of the City of London too.

On a happier note, I don’t want these few recollections of a long friendship with Mike to make him sound like a humourless boffin – he was far from that with a keen sense of irony, and was always prepared for most eventualities (except his final one sadly).

Many years ago a group of us was in a restaurant in Victoria. Having finished our meals we each had tea or coffee. A while later Mike beckoned a waitress and asked for another cup of tea. She disappeared for an interesting length of time and returned with an expression somewhere between embarrassed and sheepish: ‘I am sorry sir we have run out of tea’. Implacably, Mike asked ‘are you OK for hot water?. With a puzzled look she replied ‘yes’. He then reached into his briefcase on the floor, opened it and took a tea bag out and said ‘will the help?’

I will miss him enormously.

Jonathan Roberts

Personally I went with Mike on many days’ long book, map and report expeditions across England, particularly to Shropshire and Yorkshire and sometimes elsewhere, in the two and a half decades until 2006. We were both active in the London Passenger Transport Research Group (LPTRG) up to 1985. We even went to Islay and bought casks of whisky!

His father was a Met police officer – latterly I think at Hendon as an instructor. He had been a colonial policeman in Palestine during the turbulent immediate post-war period. His parents also lived in Hendon at the time, not far from the North Circular Road/Hendon Way junction. In those days you could cross the circular on foot at the traffic lights, on the way to/from Brent Northern Line station, not like what the area is now. So that would have been Mike’s normal journey to school, changing at Charing Cross, though one suspects numerous peregrinations on the way back, to start to explore the Underground.

There was a naughty late 1960s/early 70s story about R stock trains having occasional failures in the late afternoon heading away from the City, which I am probably not allowed to recount in detail.

Mike then started work at the Met Police (now Home Office) Lab, but then became a station foreman (as a direct recruit) on the Underground – the shift work money was much better than being a Lab technician, and it also ensured Mike was now working within his beloved Underground. Mike was a London Underground Railway Society (LURS) member but not terribly enthused by an over-trusting belief in the ‘official line’, and he always thought there was more to be researched and then published – hence LPTRG in the mid 70s, and latterly Metadyne and publications based on his own copious researches.

He then became a station foreman at Watford Met. Michael Fish, the General Manager, was very observant and sometimes stopped at Watford Met on his way to or from the Baker Street offices, more often in the evening, to talk to Mike about his views or observations on a variety of current operational issues. Mike of course knew his stuff and was able to guide Fishy to some source of information or to suggest some definite improvement… I’m sure that it was he who suggested to our Mike that there was a fast-track route to Area Manager-ship, and guided him on how to go about it.

[Note from Doug Rose: Yes it was. He told Mike there were vacancies on the Area Manager training course and he should apply. Mike replied that there was no point as Area Manager was too many grades above Station Foreman and he would not be accepted. Michael Fish told him to apply – it would be OK. Conclusions may be drawn from this]

His skills were then taken on board by the Corporate changes arising post- Kings Cross fire (when I and other LPTRG colleagues had written a report in 1984/85 about the genuine risk of a major fire arising on the Tube, which had been stimulated by a fire at Oxford Circus in 1984. This got national notice in November 1987) Denis Tunnicliffe had become London Underground (LU) Managing Director after Tony Ridley, and appointed an international consultancy team (where people like Dennis Ciborowski of Chicago come to mind) to assist in understanding and interpreting what would make a real difference in transforming the Underground post-fire. They in turn called in talented and knowledgeable people like Mike. The outputs were major and still have an effect today. So Mike lives on…

He then was subsumed within the new London Underground Development Directorate (DD) under David Bailey. Mike was involved in organisational transformation and also allied with new commercial processes such as tendering and other commercial deals with outside parties. Mike was in charge of letting Commercial Advertising, what to do with the closed Aldwych branch, and Epping-Ongar (a bid from ex-Ford’s managers was one project he reviewed), etc etc.

The DD evening canteen was often the Old Star at the junction of Broadway and Petty France, close to the DD offices which were variously in 55 Broadway, and in 50 Broadway (the latter suitably being former MI6 offices and so the right pedigree for intriguing work!)

At no time was Mike deterred from his passion in historical research and accurate record keeping and indeed large scale record trawling. An inveterate of the National Archives, London Metropolitan Archives etc. He had always wanted to emulate Charles E. Lee (CEL) as being the very best railway historian of his generation. CEL was meticulous, precise and never knowing misusing any fact or context – while bringing to bear an insight into the real reasons and organisational factors behind peculiar and everyday events on the railways.

There is no doubt that Mike succeeded in being the Charles E. Lee of our generation about the Underground. His latest published two-volume books on the District Line are a masterpiece – and an insight into what we have lost by Mike’s untimely death. How many more researches and books were in him? – unquestionably many!

Sir Peter Hendy

He was a great, thoughtful, honest, intelligent man in a world where there are sadly not as many of those as there should be.

Tim Goodwin

I was reminded of another of Mike’s interests that he shared with many of us. Pubs. Once while we were off with “The Londoner” on a pub tour of the Blackfriars area, he told about his time at the City of London School, and more than I could absorb about the history of the area.  

In fact, regardless of the pub, in whatever part of London, Mike’s knowledge of the pub and area history nearly matched his rail expertise. I did suggest when The Londoner retired, that Mike consider taking on the role as he could be entertaining as well as informative. He gave me that trademark, impish smile he had that could deliver any number of messages. Including, “Not going to happen!”.

Pedantic of Purley

I met Mike on four occasions. He was always fascinating to talk to, generally entertaining and full of knowledge. His books always seemed to be completely factually accurate – quite a feat. His research was meticulous and aided by his extensive personal collection of historical data. He was not only knowledgeable on railways – especially the Underground – but also various diverse subjects such as the history of parish churches and of the Metropolitan police force.

Professionally he was a manager on the Underground. On the subject of the Victoria line, and various other items, he was always helpful when one emailed him with queries. He was also extremely supportive of what London Reconnections was doing in reporting what is actually happening with transport in London as opposed to reporting on the TfL or other official approved line.

His death was unexpected as he seemed to be in great health, in good spirits and full of humour. He was due to give a talk on the District line in April before it was cancelled due to coronavirus so certainly did not regard himself as fully retired.

John Liffen

My first encounter with Mike Horne was in print. To be more specific, it was a copy of the London Underground Railway Society’s Underground News, issue no. 166 of October 1975. I wasn’t a member of LURS and the copy was passed to me by a friend, the late Richard Graham. He was giving a talk to the society in December 1975 and thought I might be interested in knowing the details contained in the list of forthcoming events. On an inside page was a lengthy editorial plea for more contributions to LURS’ Underground News (UN). One section in particular made a strong impression on me:

‘Believe nothing that you hear (or read) and only half of what you see’ is an expression eminently suitable to be borne in mind by a recorder of facts. It is completely impractical, of course, but the spirit of the thing is worth noting. Check everything yourself, as far as you can; don’t rely on other people’s efforts. Their notoriety for pitfalls is only exceeded by their neat avoidance of difficult historical problems. In any case (though this may be a grossly unfair generalization), a work’s accuracy seems to be inversely proportional to its published circulation.

LURS Underground News, Issue 166, 1975

When I read this, I thought to myself, I want to meet the person who wrote it. As it happened, I didn’t have to wait long. I began to attend LURS meetings and was introduced to a wider circle of friends, one of whom turned out to be M A C Horne, the editor and author of the item which I’d found so striking.

Mike’s heartfelt plea in UN, an astonishingly mature observation for a 22-year-old, was, I discovered, the philosophy which underpinned his life, coupled with an ability for sustained hard work. I was soon seeing him frequently as part of the large group which met socially in pubs after the meetings. I was also invited to join some of them, Mike included, on long weekends away and other trips exploring the countryside, pubs and bookshops.

Around 1978 I became a subscriber to a periodical called London Passenger Transport (LPT) which combined lengthy and authoritative articles with a distinctive and fresh editorial style. It was two years before a chance conversation with another friend led to an invitation to join the Research Group which published LPT. Only then did I discover that Mike was a leading force in this group.

Over the next few years an alliance gradually turned into a friendship which I count among the most important facets of my life.

The research collaborations begun with LPT continued afterwards as Mike began to write books over his own name. An informal support team emerged whose varied skills provided historical input, read and commented on draft texts, contributed graphic layouts or, in many instances, designed and typeset the whole thing. It was of course a two-way process and Mike was always generous of his time in helping others with their own research and writing.

Alongside this the social side of our group continued, largely in pubs or over dinner somewhere, constantly discussing matters of the moment, what we were researching or writing, or anything else that took our interest – there were so many of these. In all our conversations Mike proved to be a mine of knowledge and (what was more infuriating) usually (but not always!) absolutely right. If you wanted to disagree with Mike’s view, you could, but you needed to be very sure of your ground. If you turned out to be right, though, Mike was gracious in accepting the viewpoint.

It is difficult to believe that Mike is no longer there to give or receive advice, be a friend in time of need, or buy the next round. We’ll miss him.

John Bull

I can vividly remember the first time I met Mike. It was at the original LR Meetup pub in Southwark. I’d sat down next to him and he introduced himself as simply ‘Mike’ and we got chatting (and drinking!) from there. After a winding conversation that seemed to cover a whole range of interesting, and very nerdy, bits of obscure transport history he admitted he had to catch a train and had to leave early.

It was only after I mentioned the conversation to Pedantic, later that evening, that he clued me in to who I’d been talking to. To discover I’d been chatting happily with someone whose books and research I adored, without even knowing, was a bit of a shock! I think I’d even quoted something from one of his own books at him. I remember at the next meetup I had a friendly go at him for it. He just grinned.

Another great memory is an entirely random encounter in central London. I’d been on an electronics haul in Tottenham Court Road (which you could still just about do then!) and popped into a nearby pub for a quick lunchtime pint. There was Mike! It was then – or rather over the sudden and unexpected minor pub crawl we then indulged in – that I discovered we shared an obsession with the history of London’s pubs too. I particularly remember him being very annoyed with me when he discovered I’d been a regular drinker at the Princess Louise in Holborn before it’s full sympathetic restoration after the smoking ban came in.

“Why didn’t you take photos?!” He demanded. I pointed out that the pub looked pretty run down and rubbish back then, not least because the smoke came down to barely six feet off the ground on the average Friday night. Why would I lug a camera down to photograph that?

“It should be obvious!” He replied. “That’s the history that needs to be remembered but people always overlook!”

I’ll miss Mike enormously. He was always at the end of an email. A safety net to accuracy that I hadn’t realised I relied on quite so much until his gently admonishing, but more often encouraging, messages disappeared.

Leon Daniels

Mike owned (or part owned) a London black taxi, which was often his personal transport.

He recounted many stories where he was approached by members of the public thinking it was plying for hire. Mike’s characteristic manner of dealing with others’ comments precisely and literally made many such episodes great stories. As when an exasperated potential customer, after a long debate, said:

“Look are you or are you not going to take me to Stockwell?”

Mike simply replied “No”. None of the questioning from the potential customer had got anywhere near whether this was a real taxi…..

Also to add our many trips to Shropshire in the back of Adrian Nicholes’ Series 1 Land Rover (OAE11) with others.

The Land Rover became famous in many ways. Firstly the local police stopped being worried when they heard of people (us) investigating the Emergency Control Train at Craven Arms, the old traffic signs and road material site, and indeed the yard in Wenlock Edge where we discovered what is now my Dartford-Tunnel Cycle Bus.

“The London boys” were known to be well behaved and non-threatening, although the time we got stuck in the snow on the Long Mynd and had to walk off it in increasing darkness we nearly needed more than Police assistance!

Mike was famously frustrated with the behaviours of clubs and societies and finally it was the internet that gave him the medium where his researches could be floated. Moreover it allowed him to devote his time to the research itself and not to the machinations of committees and conflicting priorities.

Lastly to amplify the Charles E Lee comment – one of his earlier Underground line short histories contained a dedication along the lines “To Charles E Lee, a friend I wish I had known better’. Mike aspired to be the modern day Lee (although without the winged collar) and I would venture that he had achieved that already in his lifetime.

NGH

I remember the last thing he said to me in November about LR:

“Write some more bloody articles, there are a serious common sense and knowledge gaps in transport, government and elsewhere that will continue to grow and you are the one of the few providers able to fill that gap, there is a big danger of losing momentum that will never return.”

He was right, of course. As always.

Chris Jackson

I got to know Mike through the Railway Study Association, which was a great place for meeting senior BR and LT execs when I was just a cub reporter! (Also rising young turks like Mark Hopwood, but that’s an aside).

He was always a great one for the probing questions to speakers, homing in on practical or technical limitations to the ‘grand vision’. I remember in particular his scepticism over SSL/4LM and the headway constraints imposed by the time needed to switch the turnouts at Baker Street junction!

Our best wishes to Mike’s loved ones at this sad time. We do hope you will share some of your own memories of him, and his work, in the comments.