The attack on Swedish housewife Mrs Meike Dalal on Thursday, September 7th 1961

[Sherlock Houses]

Attached is GE image of the Shell Service Station where the Old Station Inn stood.
Directly opposite the Shell Station is the old pub that is mentioned in one of Peter Alphon's confessions [on page 318 of Paul Foot's book, point 3].

[Sherlock Houses]

Old Station Inn to Dorney Cornfield

The attached map gives you a rough idea of how far the Old Station Inn [top left hand corner] was from the Cornfield at Dorney Reach [lower right hand corner]. Excuse the size of the attachment.

[Spitfire]

It looks like there is some confusion as to where the Old Station Inn stood.

Graham has it close to where Taplow Station now stand and a distance away from the Bath Road whereas Sherlock Houses has it on the Bath Road where the Shell Petrol Station is.

I read recently on a site which I can no longer find which described the Old Station Inn as being the site of the car park being used by the Sytner dealership and directly opposite Sytner's main buildings on the Bath Road. This would place the site next to the Shell garage.

[Sherlock Houses]

Old Station Inn/Shell Petrol Station comparison photos

The wooden fence in both photos looks similar but might not be the same. The car dealership is to the right of the Shell Garage.

Directly opposite the Shell Garage is the Dumb Bell/Harvester pub. Peter Alphon said in a confession that he "stopped at pub opposite Old Station Inn".

[Natalie Severn]

Thanks everybody for some very interesting posts. I am still not convinced that Graham/ Moste are right and Colin Burden was wrong in his belief that he and his colleague could see corner of what was a very long cornfield stretching right down to the river .The Old Station Inn appears itself to have been built on a slope . In the photos SH has posted he foliage does not match and the trees are a mixture of coniferous and deciduous several of which would have of course grown in 50 years but not that much.Certainly some trees would have been cut down to make way for the shell garage though the trees look thicker behind the garage than behind the pub---so maybe not so many had been cut down and there are laws protecting certain trees.
One last point: the Old Station Inn stood adjacent to the old station not the new one ....it was almost a part of it.

[Natalie Severn]

Old Station Inn-

The slope is visible here

[Natalie Severn]

Map and route from Shell garage, Taplow to Dorney Reach

Also from Google earth: we also need to know *the topography* -eg the Cornfield stretched extensively downwards to the river --and also how much above ground level the embankment was -or whether in fact it lies flat with the ground as it does here in much of the North Wales coast where its lies next to the River Dee and later the Irish Sea .I haven't been able to get the google earth key to the topography yet.[the grey road on right of the marked route on the map on the left is Marsh Lane]-the River Thames is on the left of the marked route on the map up until it reaches Dorney Reach cornfield and usually the whole slope of the land towards the River Thames is very markedly downwards formed by glacial slippage in the ice age as it is for example in West London.There is also the Jubilee River on right of Marsh Lane adding to the slide downwards of land from the Old Station Inn /Shell Garage . Clearly this was all downward sloping Marsh Land-hence Marsh Lane.

[Natalie Severn]

It would be so helpful if somebody could trace where the exact location of the Old Station Inn was.Has anybody got access to an old map of the area?

[Graham]

I e-mailed the Hitcham and Taplow Society regarding the Old Station Inn's exact location, and this is the reply I received:

The Old Station Inn was set back from the Bath Road (A4) immediately south-east of its junction with Berry Hill, which runs northwards uphill from this point.

The original beerhouse there - The Tin Shanty - was built for the refreshment of workers building the railway in the 1830s. By the 1850s, it had been replaced by a pub which by 1872 - when the original station was succeeded by another a little to the east - had become known as The Old Station Inn which was itself replaced in the 1930s by another of the same name which eventually became the headquarters of a car sales company before being replaced in 2001 by a new car showroom.

I was certainly not aware that the Inn replaced an earlier building. However, I was fairly certain that Sytner's car-showroom is built on the site.

Hope this is of interest.

Graham

[Sherlock Houses]

It would be so helpful if somebody could trace where the exact location of the Old Station Inn was.Has anybody got access to an old map of the area?

The attached article, Norma, copied from this website

http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC4E2BY_really-sidetracked-maidenhead-riverside?guid=b8d2463d-15ad-4077-ae69-749dd2c4bbee

is very informative and helps to clarify any uncertainty about the location of the Old Station Inn [2nd to last paragraph]

[moste]

Hi Graham, I didn't think the historical facts of the geography of this case would have tickled peoples fancy as much as they have, I for one am a sucker for this kind of thing I must admit. S.Hs post 195 shows the Brunel bridge over the A4, and standing where this shot was taken the old station inn would have been immediately on your right .If you can make out the side road on the left just before entering the bridge, this is 'Approach road' and takes you in a 1\4 mile approx. to the location you show of the newer location of Taplow station on your uploaded map,

[NickB]

The entrance to the cornfield where the incident started was at the extreme bottom right of the field on the map, at the junction of Court Lane and Mash Lane.

This was reported by poster ‘Steve’ after visiting and talking to locals, and is confirmed by the photos of Valerie’s return to the scene.

[moste]

Hi SH. This is a much clearer image than the one I uploaded. I, like Graham didn't realise there had been a previous watering hole to the one demolished in the 1990s. Good work on finding this interesting article. Not mentioned here though is the fact that, Taplows original station namely, Maidenhead Riverside, was the Great Westerns terminal from Paddington, any further travel west would have required coach and horses until the Bridge over the Thames into Maidenhead was built later.
P.S. How do you upload from google earth to the casebook site, Admin ask for an Url and the google camera shots don't have one?

[Sherlock Houses]

P.S. How do you upload from google earth to the casebook site, Admin ask for an Url and the google camera shots don't have one?

Hi Moste,

On Google Earth click on 'File' in the top left corner.
To the right of 'Save' you will see 'Save Image'. Click on this and a new window opens where you can save the GE image to any folder you choose on your laptop/PC.

You can then upload it onto the Casebook site by scrolling down the page a little [in your reply post] until you see the "Manage Attachments" tab. Click on this. A small window opens.
You then click on one of the 5 Browse tabs [instead of 'Upload file from a URL' ] to locate the folder on your computer where you saved the GE image.
Now click on the 'Upload' tab opposite the last 'Browse' tab.
The GE image is now attached to your reply post.

Hope this helps.

[Graham]

The arrow on the attached map shows the site of the Sytner showroom, via feeding its post-code into Streetmap. Therefore the Old Station Inn was definitely behind the embankment.

Like you, Moste, I also go for the historical and geographical details of this case. I've been to Deadman's Hill numerous times (I had a customer in Bedford) and although the actual lay-by is long gone (under the north-bound carriageway of the A6, which in 1961 wasn't dualled), there is still a definite atmos there. Steve, who was also a rep, did what could be called the full "A6 Tour", and posted some great photos. I'm not sure if all his pix survived the crash, though. My dad, incidentally, was born about 75 yards from Bedford Prison, but the street is now no longer there.

Graham

The map didn't fully upload!!! I said it's all a bit hit and miss!!!