A train driver who was sacked for leaving tarantula remains and a snakeskin in a colleague’s pigeonhole has been awarded £22,000 and told he should have his job back.
An employment tribunal ruled that Jonathan Richardson’s workplace antics were humorous pranks that were conducted without the intention of causing distress.
The 48-year-old driver for West Midlands Trains acknowledged that he left the tarantula remains after a female colleague said that spiders made her “squeamish”.
He told the tribunal that he had been attempting to elicit “momentary shock” followed by “light-hearted relief” from the woman and had not anticipated that she would be so distressed by the incident.
The tribunal exonerated Richardson even after hearing that he performed a subsequent prank with a snakeskin despite his colleague having threatened to report him to railway bosses after the spider joke.
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Richardson was ultimately sacked for gross misconduct after rail bosses concluded he was guilty of bullying.
But a tribunal judge sitting at Watford has now ruled that the pranks were merely “childish” and “largely harmless” rather than “abusive”.
As a result, Richardson was wrongfully dismissed and the train company must now pay him £22,571 in damages in addition to a weekly sum of £704 until the driver is reinstated in his job.
During the proceedings, the tribunal was told that Richardson had been driving trains for more than 20 years and started at Midland in 2018.
In 2022, Richardson had a conversation in the mess room at work with a female colleague, who was referred to at the hearing only as “Driver A”.
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During their conversation it emerged that Richardson occasionally looked after a friend’s pet spider and snake.
Driver A indicated a “dislike of, or squeamishness” regarding “creepy crawlies”, noted the tribunal in its report.
Her comment was said to have “planted a seed” in Richardson’s mind and he ultimately played a joke on his colleague that involved the exoskeleton — a hard exterior that is periodically shed — of a tarantula.
The tribunal heard that Richardson raised the prank when he next met Driver A and she called him a “f****** twat” — and he responded by suggesting that he might do something similar with a snakeskin. Driver A said she would report him to the railway’s management.
Richardson on a later occasion put a shed snakeskin in Driver A’s pigeonhole at work. Driver A raised a complaint, which resulted in Richardson’s dismissal.
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Regardless of her reaction, Richardson maintained that he believed the tone of their interaction had been “jokey” and “playful” — he added that he had not understood Driver A’s “genuine upset”.
Ruling in favour of Richardson’s claim for wrongful sacking, Matthew Hunt, the judge, said that all those involved “appreciated what a prank was. Its purpose is to elicit a short-lived reaction of shock or surprise, followed by some sort of feeling of relief and good humour.”
The judge went on to compare Richardson’s prank with “planting the sort of rubber spider that is no doubt still available in any toy shop on someone’s shoulder”.
Hunt added that he did not intend to “trivialise Driver A’s upset and fully appreciate that in this case the exoskeleton was genuine and well capable of causing greater shock. I simply wish to demonstrate that a prank is a common and well-understood phenomenon”.
In this case, said the judge, the railway company had adopted the position that the pranks were intended or capable of causing a “lasting state of considerable shock” that could “lead to catastrophic accident or significant business interruption”.
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But Hunt ruled that while Richardson’s prank was “plainly very ill-judged”, it was “extremely unlikely in reality to have led to such serious impacts”.
