What links the first ever murder on a train in 1864, and this hat?

Thomas Briggs, a city banker was murdered for his gold watch and spectacles on a train heading to Hackney – in fact he was thrown out of the train, and a pool of blood and a hat was found at the scene. No that isn’t the hat I mentioned, it gets more grisly. Women in the carriage next door (this is before trains had connecting carriages or communication cords) heard nothing but had small spots of blood on their dresses blown in probably as he was thrown out of the train… Eventually via the gold chain of the watch being sold to a pawnbroker, a rather strange and cirumstantial evidence of a cabbie called Death (!) and the hat left in the carriage Franz Muller was identified as a suspect (pictured) a german tailor who had fled to America on a boat.

When he was located he had Brigg’s watch on him, and his hat…but to disguise the hat he had cut it down by half and reattached the top. Bizarrely due to the sensationalist press around the trial, although Muller was hanged his hat lived on and became an instant popular hit – worn by the likes of Churchill. Today it seems to mostly live on in dressage but I’m guessing not many know the grisly history of the  ‘Muller cut down’ top hat (although the book just released ’Mr Briggs Hat’ which I must read probably will again popularise this strange tale, and the fact that the circumstances and evidence was far from conclusive in modern terms…) – oh and the introduction in 1868 of the communication ’emergency’ cord which still exists in some form in trains today.