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Victorian Strangeness

ramonmercado

ramonmercado

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Victorian strangeness: Grave tale of daughterly love

Magazine Monitor

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Victorian angel on grave

On the weekend of Mothering Sunday, author Jeremy Clay tells the singular story of a dying wish, a dutiful daughter and a mum with two graves - 4,000 miles apart.

Claire Taylor was as good as her word. She'd made her promise, and she was going to stick to it. And so, on a spring day in 1891, she set out from her home in Midwestern America to honour her mum's dying wish. It wasn't a simple undertaking. For a start, there was the matter of an 8,000-mile round journey to Europe and back. And then… well, then there was the contents of her luggage. Dr Taylor was travelling with three ebony cases, each numbered and bearing a single-word inscription in silver-headed nails: Mother. In one, was her mum's heart, in the second, her feet, in the last, her hands. All had been pickled for three years in alcohol.

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Victorian strangeness

A series of bizarre episodes culled from 19th Century newspapers by Jeremy Clay.

Struck blind by lightning in her 60s, the unfortunate Mrs Verge had died of a stomach tumour in 1888 in her daughter's house in the Indiana town of Peru. She was buried without a service in nearby Somerset. It was a one part of a macabre compromise. Mrs Verge was French, and wanted to be laid to rest in Normandy. Knowing that wasn't to be, for reasons left untold in the newspaper reports of the time, she agreed to be buried largely in the US, if her daughter vowed to take a small selection of her anatomical highlights on a return trip across the ocean.

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More from the Magazine

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10 truly bizarre Victorian deaths
Soon after she died, two doctors, the undertakers and what the Miami County Sentinel called "a few curious spectators" gathered at Dr Taylor's home to segment Mrs Verge. It would be three years before Dr Taylor left for New York, on the first leg of her pilgrimage to Normandy, with what the Gloucester Citizen called her "ghastly burden". "But her fame preceded her," said the Citizen, "and the landlord of the hotel in New York refused to admit her unless the boxes were sent to the baggage room and left there."

Dr Taylor agreed and busied herself until her Atlantic crossing. Until it was discovered that Box No. 2, containing the feet, had vanished. "There was a dreadful scene," said the Citizen. The hotel was searched and telegrams were fired off in every direction, but to no avail. It wasn't until several hours later, with Dr Taylor frantic with worry, that a message arrived from Boston, from a traveller who had been staying at the same hotel. "Have among my trunks a small black box marked Mother No. 2. Did I take this with me by mistake?"

"This morning they were returned by express and Mrs Taylor is once more quite happy," noted the Citizen. "She will now sail for England on Wednesday and unless the steamship company make objection to her bringing her three rather gruesome ebony boxes with her, she will within two weeks be able to carry out her mother's wishes and bury the hands feet and heart in the spot indicated."

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Victorian strangeness: The death of a curious monkey
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26872177

American monkeys C.19th drawing

There are many reasons why animal experts might consider it unsuitable to keep a primate as a pet, but an episode from the 19th Century provides a particularly bizarre warning, writes Jeremy Clay.

Rockwell Syrock had a hobby. Jocko rather liked it too.

Together they toured the towns of Victorian North Carolina, whiling away the empty days before the invention of Twitter by joining the crowds of spectators at public executions.

Jocko was a monkey - a cheeky one by all accounts, who was quite a favourite with children for miles around their Goldsboro home. Like his owner, Jocko took a keen interest in the gruesome rituals of capital punishment.

On a summer's day in 1880, the flamboyantly-named Mr Syrock had been cheerfully looking forward to the hanging of a convicted murderer when the state governor thwarted his plans by postponing the execution.

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Victorian strangeness

Victorian angel on grave
A series of bizarre episodes culled from 19th Century newspapers by Jeremy Clay.

Victorian strangeness: Grave tale of daughterly love
Discover more about life in Victorian times
If Mr Syrock was downhearted he made the best of the situation, grabbing the opportunity to take a closer look at the gibbet which was ready and waiting for its indisposed victim.

Jocko, of course, joined him, watching the workings of the scaffold and trap with especially studious eyes.

Back home, the primate scurried off to busy himself in his master's barn. The result of his private endeavours was nothing less than an evolutionary breakthrough. Alas, it was almost instantly annulled by what the Liverpool Echo called "one of the most novel suicides of the century".

Jocko was found dead, suspended by a clothes line to one of the rafters of the building, a victim of his own ghoulish experimentation.

So ended one of the most dismal episodes in 19th Century pet care.

Discover more about what life was like in Victorian times and 10 truly bizarre Victorian deaths.
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A story with a sting in the tail.

Victorian strangeness: The man who was covered in bees

A beekeeper in China made headlines this week by creating a living coat of bees. But as author Jeremy Clay writes, he was beaten to the stunt by more than a century - by a man who wasn't even trying.

If he'd stopped to count his blessings, the anxious man moving gingerly along the streets of central London would have found plenty of reasons to be cheerful.

It was a fine summer's day, for a start. He was strolling through one of the greatest cities on earth. And in an unforgiving age, he had a good job, with a reputable firm.

As it was, he had more pressing matters on his mind. Chiefly, that he was covered in bees. Thousands of them, from his head to his waist, with hundreds more buzzing round his hat.

It happened on a Saturday morning in July 1885, when, for want of anything better to do, a swarm of bees swooped suddenly upon the unfortunate man as he walked down Regent Street.

Startled, no doubt, by this unexpected plot twist in the story of his day, he stayed true to the Victorian stereotype, and tried to continue on his way without needless fuss.

In this aim, he was thwarted. "As may be imagined," wrote the London Standard, "this strange sight in the midst of the crowded streets led to his being followed by a crowd numbering many thousands of persons."

With one swarm following another - and man and insect united in a passable impression of a stick of candy floss - the singular spectacle moved through the main thoroughfares of the West End, stopping the traffic as it passed by.

Who knows how long this arrangement might have continued, but eventually a bystander hit on a solution and advised our hero to take off his coat. "Taking the hint, he slipped off the garment," said the Standard. "The host of bees rose en masse, and the man made off as quickly as possible." Followed just as hastily by the thousands of onlookers.

And the sting in the tale? Surprisingly, there wasn't one, at least not literally. His employers at the cutlery firm Messrs Mappin and Webb wrote a letter to the Standard which concluded: "We are pleased to say that the man is none the worse for this extraordinary visitation."
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http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26975791
 
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Not often a lion leaps through a window in Llandrindod Wells unless its a member of the British Lions but in this case it was a maned one.

Victorian strangeness: The tale of the lion and the spa break
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27036219

Saturday, as you'll surely need no reminding, is International Circus Day. Author Jeremy Clay delves into the Victorian newspaper archives to unearth a tale of a travelling menagerie, an escaped lion, and a Welsh holidaymaker on a spa stay that proved rather less than stress-free.

In the drawing room of a hotel in sedate Llandrindod Wells, Mr TJ Osborne is preparing to head home from a pick-me-up break in the Welsh spa town.

It's a June afternoon. The day is warm. The window is open. A fully-grown African lion leaps in.

In the lively few minutes that follow, Mr Osborne gets a crash-course in lion-taming and later becomes the hero of a pithy write-up in the newspapers. Well, some of them at least. A holidaymaker tackling a lion in Llandrindod may seem to us now - as it must have to Mr Osborne then - a remarkable turn of events, but it doesn't seem to have caught the imagination of many of the news editors of 1889.

Perhaps they'd just grown weary of printing variations on a well-worn theme. In the 19th Century, ferocious beasts roamed the British countryside once more, thanks to the lax security of travelling menageries that criss-crossed the nation in the style of incontinent mice, leaking wherever they went.

In Nottingham, a tiger was found lurking in an orchard. Over the county border in Leicestershire, two elephants cheerfully demolished a back garden in Market Harborough. In Burton, brewery workers at Bass formed a human cordon as an escaped kangaroo boinged through the town. Time and time again in the newspapers of the Victorian age, something alarming is at large in a place nature never intended it to be.

Back at the Bridge Hotel in Llandrindod, Mr Osborne would have needed no persuading of the general newsworthiness of his predicament. His spa-stay serenity already a fast-fading memory, the grocer from Neath had grabbed a chair, and was braced to defend himself as best he could, for as long as he could, "in what appeared to him an inevitable and terribly unequal struggle for life", in the words of the Western Mail.

At that point, the lion's erstwhile keeper and his assistants arrived breathlessly on the scene, after dashing from the site of Wombwell's Menagerie, which was parked up on land by the hotel. "My God sir, don't move an inch," hissed the keeper, "or your doom is sealed".

It was a tall order, given the circumstances, but Mr Osborne obeyed, standing stock-still as the lion paced the room in an evidently agitated mood.

Slowly, carefully - sweatily too, no doubt - the keeper and his staff closed in on the creature. Taking a collective deep breath, they flung a sack over its head and secured it with ropes.

Mr Osborne was saved, out of danger and completely unharmed, if you discount the damage to his nerves. And, as the Western Mail put it: "It is to be feared that this unexpected and exciting meeting with the king of beasts must to some extent neutralise the benefit of his brief respite from the exacting cares of his large business."

Still, at least he wasn't stuck for anything to write on his postcards.
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There might have been more (or rather less) to this story than first meets the eye. Take your measure.

Victorian strangeness: The 3,000-mile drunken escapade

Binge drinking is in decline, according to new research. It was recognised as a problem in Victorian times, as is demonstrated by the 1878 case of a man who drank himself all the way from London to Ohio without noticing, writes Jeremy Clay.

With his skull pounding, John Wren lay in bed, grieving for his poor, dead brain cells. He peered around the unfamiliar room, searching for clues to his surroundings. Nothing. Happily, someone appeared who could help. Wren promptly asked her for a whisky. When refused, he was moved to ask where he was.

Hospital, said the nurse. He guessed the name of one in London, the city he'd been in before alcohol wiped his memory. No, not London, she told him - Cleveland, Ohio.

"Good heavens!" he cried out. "Have I crossed the Atlantic drunk?"

Wren's rather sordid story began seven weeks earlier, at the tail end of 1878, when the teetotaller had been enjoying the convivial company of friends in England.

They persuaded him to have a drink. He declined. They tried again. He accepted. One thing led to another. And another. And another besides.

Wren travelled more than 3,000 miles without noticing. Christmas and New Year passed by in a boozy blur. In the press, they called it "one of the most extraordinary drunken frolics on record".

"Drunk for seven weeks" was the headline in the Edinburgh Evening News. "The voyage of an inebriate", said the Staffordshire Sentinel. "One way to escape sea sickness", offered the Dundee Courier.

"The discomfort attending a long sea voyage has been successfully avoided by an Englishman named Wren, who crossed the Atlantic the other day in a state of drunkenness so complete that he was unconscious of the fact that he had left Liverpool until some time after his arrival in America," the reports began. "So hopeless was his state of intoxication that he was taken to the hospital where he remained for three weeks under medical treatment."

So how and why did a night out in London end up seven weeks later in Cleveland? The answer depends on which papers you read.

According to the British press, he'd sobered up to find he'd emigrated, after his friends put him on a ship with a through ticket to Cleveland.

The American newspapers, more plausibly, said Wren already lived in Ohio, and had been visiting his son in London.

Thus the case was framed in terms of the unerring homing instinct of a drunk.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27161833
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That really does sound like the sort of anti-booze story that the Victorians would cook up.

I don't know if you also got exposed to a series called How We used To Live at school, but one of the few things I recall of it was a tale from a Victorian tavern where a young boy swore that he had seen an inebriate drink so much that when he went to light his pipe from a lamp, blue flames shot from his ears. :lol:
 
Victorian strangeness: The man driven mad by spiders
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A new app developed by a British psychiatrist aims to cure a fear of spiders. Sadly it's arrived more than a century late for poor James Payn. Author Jeremy Clay tells the shuddersome tale of the man trapped in a darkened train teeming with tarantulas.

In hindsight, there were better places to hunker down for a kip. But James Payn wasn't to know that as he clambered into the goods van of a waiting freight train. He was just thankful he'd found somewhere to rest.

What's more, it seemed like he'd hit the hobo equivalent of the jackpot - the carriage was loaded with bananas. James cheerfully helped himself to a few, then drifted off to a contented sleep.

But Payn, a Liverpudlian who had been riding the railroads of America, had Goldilocks' luck when it came to stumbling upon free board and lodging. When he woke, it was to a sensation plucked straight from an arachnophobe's nightmare.

The carriage was dark. The door was sealed. The train was rattling along the track - and something had just crawled over his face. Something large. Something hairy. Something leggy.

With quivering fingers, James struck a match. There was the door. There was the fruit. And there, dotted all around, were a multitude of tarantulas.

As he looked up, one tumbled down on to his head. The moment he'd regained consciousness, James dashed to the door, but couldn't force it open. Another strike of a match revealed yet more spiders, all creeping from their hiding spots in the bunches of bananas.

For hour upon horrible hour, Payn stood pinned by fear to the carriage door, too terrified to move, even as the tarantulas scurried over him.

Eventually, inevitably, he fainted again. This time, when he came to, he found himself in a hospital bed in Portland, Oregon, with an angry mark on his head where he had been bitten.

It wasn't the only lasting damage from his ordeal. "It seems that when the car was opened upon reaching its destination, Payn was found in it, mad," said the Hull Daily Mail in January 1897.

"He is now recovering from an attack of insanity."
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27246823
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The passengers literally went ape.

Victorian Strangeness: The ship taken over by animals

Take one ship. Add a consignment of ferocious beasts in flimsy containers. Send it in to a stormy ocean and stand well back. Author Jeremy Clay tells the extraordinary story of horror on the high seas.

She was so late, they had given her up as lost. Another ship swallowed whole by the ocean on the perilous crossing to America.

Then one day in January 1890, with all hope gone, the British barque Margaret limped in to the harbour at Boston, her captain and crew wearing the haunted expressions of men who would never need to be told that worse things happen at sea.

Their story was a singular mix of Noah's ark and the mutiny on the Bounty. To Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper it was "the most remarkable voyage that has been chronicled outside the realms of fiction for a long time". Captain Sargent, an expert in understatement, simply said it was an experience he didn't wish to repeat.

The Margaret had slipped out of port on the west coast of Africa with a full cargo and a couple of stowaways, who quickly found themselves wishing they'd crept on to a different boat.

In the hold was a consignment of live animals being shipped from Durban to a museum in the States: 400 cockatoos and parrots, 12 snakes, some monkeys, a gorilla, an orangutan and two crocodiles.

Uh-oh.

First to die were the birds, starved when the ship's swarming rats scoffed all the corn that had been provided as feed. The raging storm the Margaret ran in to set in motion the chain of events that accounted for most of the rest of this floating menagerie.

As the ship was tossed about on wind-whipped waves, the snakes and crocodiles broke free of their crates and invaded the crew's quarters, forcing the sailors to seek shelter in the cabin for days on end.

"These reptiles, along with the rats, kept up a continual warfare until the surviving crocodile killed the last snake," said the paper, "and completed the chain of vengeance by being killed by some of the cargo shifting and falling on it".

As the snakes and crocodiles battled for supremacy, the monkeys also broke free and took to the rigging, where all efforts to dislodge or shoo them proved fruitless, until the crashing sea did the job, sweeping most of them away, along with sections of the masts.

The most troublesome passenger of all was the gorilla - 5ft (142cm) tall and understandably dismayed at his changing circumstances.

He'd been secured in a stout wooden box, until he forced off the lid and clambered out.

"Having obtained possession of an iron bar, he commanded all objects within 10 feet of where he was chained," reported the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette. "With this formidable truncheon he threatened to brain every sailor who came within range. The cook one day unwarily approaching heard the bar whistling through the air and ducked, but not in time to save his head, which was half scalped."

Stunned by the blow, the cook was then seized by the gorilla which "would doubtless have throttled him had not a sailor come up with a hatchet and stunned the monster".

When the ship and its weary crew finally docked, the museum staff arrived to collect their cargo. Whatever space they had allocated for their display of African wildlife, it was far too much. All that was left to hand over was the gorilla, three monkeys and four parrots.

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27344976
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Victorian Strangeness: The man who fired a torpedo down a High Street

Europe goes to the polls next week, but election fever sometimes seems in short supply. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. Author Jeremy Clay tells the tale of a 19th Century election rally and the drunken inventor who fired a torpedo down his own High Street.

The man they came to know as "Wild" Cunningham gazed ruefully down the main street of his home town at a scene of devastation. Wrecked buildings. A flattened shop. Debris littered all around. And a smoke trail, like an accusing finger, leading right back to where he stood.

Perhaps, on reflection, he had gone too far.

Patrick Cunningham was an inventor who had built a torpedo for the US Navy. It was 17ft long, and packed with enough explosive to do serious damage to a ship. Or, as it turned out, a High Street.

The damage was done at the tail end of October 1896, on the cusp of the presidential election, as the political hoopla came rolling into the Massachusetts whaling town of New Bedford.

Crowds crammed the streets. The buildings were festooned with thousands of flags. There were bands and parades and tub-thumping speeches. And after it all, a display of fireworks.

Perhaps it was the pyrotechnics that gave Patrick the lightbulb moment he came to regret. The pyrotechnics, or the booze. Possibly a combination of the two.

With the flamboyant stupidity of a man who knew it all, except when to stop, Cunningham hurried to his workshop and loaded the invention that came to be known as the Flying Devil on to a wagon and brought it to a suitably unsuitable spot.

"Placing the torpedo in the middle of the street he lighted it, and the machine at once started down the street at a terrific pace," reported the Worcestershire Chronicle.

Tearing along a foot off the ground, following the haphazard flight path of a drunken wasp, the hissing torpedo rebounded off a tree, veered across the road and smashed sideways into a shop. Some reports say it was a grocery. Some say it was a butcher's shop. Some say it was the market hall. All agree on the upshot. "The building at once collapsed," said the Chronicle. "The torpedo then exploded, shattering several blocks of houses in the vicinity."

The fearsome blast was heard several miles away.

"Fortunately no-one was killed," the paper continued, "but four persons who were in the market place at the time were thrown violently upon a heap of debris, while others were injured by flying pieces of stone and timber."

Later, a chunk of shrapnel weighing 75lb was found in the next street, where it had been flung over the rooftops.

Things looked grim for the soon-to-be-arrested Mr Cunningham, but as he contemplated the chaos he'd created, there was one minor consolation. That invention of his - it worked.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27440191
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Victorian Strangeness: The monks who stole fancy dresses from graves

From the moment he saw her, he was utterly transfixed. But it wasn't love at first sight that sent the widower's heart racing, and nor was it lust. He couldn't care less for the stranger's looks. No, he only had eyes for her frock.

And the longer he stared, the more certain he became. That dress she was wearing. It wasn't just similar to his wife's favourite gown, it was the exact same one.

He'd know that silk dress anywhere; his poor wife had adored it, which is precisely why she'd worn it to the grave a few weeks before.

With distress mixed with disbelief, the still-grieving soldier demanded to know how the peasant woman came to be parading around in a robe which was a) fancier than she could afford and, more pressingly, b) supposed to be six feet under the ground, adorning a corpse.

Her answer uncovered a trail of guilt that led to the lair of a rather unlikely set of criminals.

And so, on an autumn day in 1874, a body of policemen headed purposefully towards the Capuchin monastery in the Sicilian town of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto.

At their head was the local magistrate, and he was eager to speak to three friars who tended the town's cemetery.

They, it soon became clear, were less keen to speak to him, but there was no use protesting their innocence. The incriminating evidence of what British newspapers called their "odious profanation" was quickly nosed out. Half-destroyed coffins. A jumble of clothing. Slippers. Women's hair. The burial booty of the bodies they were meant to safeguard.

It was, according to the Edinburgh Evening News, a "story illustrative of the low morality of the Sicilian priesthood".

"Night after night the three brothers went down into the vaults," explained the paper, "exhumed the dead bodies, and after having stripped them of all they had on, returned with their spoils, including even the coffins, to a secret chamber in the monastery.

"The coffins they converted into tables, which were sold with the other effects through subordinate agents. This horrid traffic had been going on for years."

The monks were convicted and marched off to prison, "amid the curses of the populace", noted the Evening News.

And the dress? The paper never got round to saying what became of that, but there's a good chance it had lost much of its cut-price allure.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27638398
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Victorian Strangeness: The skeletons who fought to the death

Some rather dramatic things happen at the theatre, but here author Jeremy Clay tells the singular story of the fighting skeletons trapped in a sealed chamber.

It had all the ingredients of a hit melodrama. An atmospheric setting. A terrible secret. Murder and mystery galore.

But although this tale seems tailor-made for the stage, it actually played out right above it. Up in the roof, to be more exact.

The timbers of the theatre in the province of Alicante were showing signs of decay back in 1867, so builders were called in and tasked with replacing them. Whatever fee they'd agreed on, it wasn't nearly enough.

When they ripped down the boards in the upper reaches of the playhouse, a narrow passage by the brickwork was revealed. And there, hidden away from view for years, stood a pair of skeletons in the tattered, shredded remains of their clothes.

For the startled workmen it was a nasty surprise, but the unexpected discovery of the bodies was something of a recurring theme in the 19th Century. It was an age of unprecedented construction, and with the ground being churned up like never before, skeletons popped up like ghoulish jack-in-the-boxes. In one particularly lurid case the remains of a postman were found bricked up behind a wall in North Carolina, his bag stuffed with letters half-a-century overdue.

But there was an extra twist to the creepy find in Alicante. When the builders conquered their shock, they took a closer look, and the story took an even darker turn.

The "two ghastly forms", as the Illustrated Police News described them, "were locked together in a last deadly embrace". One of the figures had a large knife buried deep in its chest. The handle was still gripped by the fleshless hand of the other, which had a broken blade in its own neck.

"It was evident from the position of the combatants that a deadly struggle had taken place in which the lives of both men had been sacrificed," said the paper.

So if the corpses fought to the death, how did they come to be sealed behind those wooden boards? Good question, and one that doesn't seem to have unduly troubled the Illustrated Police News.

But there was, at least, a clue to the identity of one of the victims/culprits.

Around 15 years earlier, the paper said, the theatre's carpenter had disappeared without trace. The very chap, in fact, who could have warned the owners they had a bit of looming trouble with the beams in the roof.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27730336
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Victorian Strangeness: The man who hoped to die in a railway crash

Author Jeremy Clay tells the story of the man who rode the trains, hoping for a disaster.

Money. Property. Land. Heirlooms. Whatever the mourners were hoping to inherit when they first gathered for the reading of the will, they were to be sorely disappointed.

Shock. Disbelief. Dismay. Indignation. That's what they got instead. The man they grieved, who had never given them so much as a penny while he breathed, stayed true to the habit of his lifetime.

He'd left everything - the whole kit and caboodle - to his killer. It wasn't a ghastly coincidence, nor the tell-tale sign of murderous greed, but a heartfelt gesture of thanks - appreciation for a job well done.

Mr Railing had had a premonition, an unshakeable sense that he was going to die before his time. Not just that, he was tormented by the idea the end would be violent.

Rather than sit and wait for the Grim Reaper, he decided to actively seek him out. And the most agreeable way of finding him, in that calamity-punctuated age, was to catch the train. Repeatedly.

So that's what he did, according to the reports in the Victorian press. Mr Railing headed this way and that in Britain and the continent, fervently hoping the next arrival at each platform he set foot upon would be the express service to oblivion.

"There was not a station where he was not known," said the Royal Cornwall Gazette in the autumn of 1854. "All the conductors were familiar with him. He had narrowly escaped death several times. Once he was shut up in a car under water; another time he was in the next car to the one that was shattered, and he described with the greatest enthusiasm those terrible accidents, when he saw death so near without being able to obtain it." ...

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The Victorian appetite for grisly horrors really indulged itself to the full in those Illustrated Police News and similar papers. The thing was that they did not rely on contemporary events but would cheerfully (I think that is the right word, or maybe I mean greedily) feature gruesome illustrated versions of events which had happened centuries before! I think one of the walled-up nun stories took place in 1670! Others quite probably did not happen at all. :?
 
Mr Railing sounds more legend than man. I love those kinds of tales, but this one leaves me doubting its veracity!
 
ramonmercado said:
Victorian Strangeness: The man who hoped to die in a railway crash

Author Jeremy Clay tells the story of the man who rode the trains, hoping for a disaster.

Money. Property. Land. Heirlooms. Whatever the mourners were hoping to inherit when they first gathered for the reading of the will, they were to be sorely disappointed.

Shock. Disbelief. Dismay. Indignation. That's what they got instead. The man they grieved, who had never given them so much as a penny while he breathed, stayed true to the habit of his lifetime.

He'd left everything - the whole kit and caboodle - to his killer. It wasn't a ghastly coincidence, nor the tell-tale sign of murderous greed, but a heartfelt gesture of thanks - appreciation for a job well done.

Mr Railing had had a premonition, an unshakeable sense that he was going to die before his time. Not just that, he was tormented by the idea the end would be violent.

Rather than sit and wait for the Grim Reaper, he decided to actively seek him out. And the most agreeable way of finding him, in that calamity-punctuated age, was to catch the train. Repeatedly.

So that's what he did, according to the reports in the Victorian press. Mr Railing headed this way and that in Britain and the continent, fervently hoping the next arrival at each platform he set foot upon would be the express service to oblivion.

"There was not a station where he was not known," said the Royal Cornwall Gazette in the autumn of 1854. "All the conductors were familiar with him. He had narrowly escaped death several times. Once he was shut up in a car under water; another time he was in the next car to the one that was shattered, and he described with the greatest enthusiasm those terrible accidents, when he saw death so near without being able to obtain it." ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27939906
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Now that is, I warrant, complete fiction. The Royal Cornwall Gazette, even if such a thing existed, would not refer to 'conductors', 'cars' and 'railroads' when referring to events in the UK before the mythical Mr. Railing went to the US, and certainly no Victorian UK railway employee would use the terms. Even in those days the odds against being in one accident were long, in three with fatalities pretty much impossible - and, given the nature of fate, especially impossible ( :) ) if you were trying for it.
 
Certainly a curious tale but The Royal Cornwall Gazette certainly existed from 1801 to 1951.

The US terms would probably not have occured in the original story but weird stuff was picked up by foreign papers. It is sometimes easier to find British stories in the online archives of overseas papers when the original sources may not have been digitized or need accessing via the search engine on a site or - horror of horrors - hidden behind a paywall. Searching for the phrases now brings up dozens of echoes of the BBC story. :spinning
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Certainly a curious tale but The Royal Cornwall Gazette certainly existed from 1801 to 1951.

The US terms would probably not have occured in the original story but weird stuff was picked up by foreign papers. It is sometimes easier to find British stories in the online archives of overseas papers when the original sources may not have been digitized or need accessing via the search engine on a site or - horror of horrors - hidden behind a paywall. Searching for the phrases now brings up dozens of echoes of the BBC story. :spinning
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I believe Rynner was one of the founding editors of The Royal Cornwall Gazette.
 
Victorian Strangeness: Strange tale of the 4 July firework disaster

Author Jeremy Clay recounts an extraordinary 19th Century effort at a complicated medical procedure.

He should have known better, even at such a tender age. Stuffing his pocket with firecrackers wasn't a smart idea. Wandering through giddy crowds who were setting off rockets willy-nilly made it worse. But pulling out those firecrackers with a hand holding a lit fuse… well, that was just asking for trouble.

He got it, too. On 4 July 1894, as Montclair in New Jersey celebrated Independence Day, those firecrackers ignited in a riot of red, white and blue flashes.

And at another time, in another place, that may have been where the story of Frederick Griffith came to an abrupt, untimely end, with a few cheerless lines in his local paper detailing his ghastly last moments.

But Freddie's doctor had other ideas.

When Dr Case rushed to the scene, he feared the boy was a goner. But Freddie was made of sterner stuff. And as he clung to life, an ambitious plan began to form in the medic's mind - a skin-grafting venture on an epic scale.

What followed, according to a report in the Gloucester Citizen, was possibly "the strangest contribution made by one set of human beings to another in the whole history of altruism".

Freddie's mum was the first to volunteer. Mrs Griffith - a "handsome, well developed woman," according to one report - offered 100 pinhead-sized pieces of skin from her quivering arm to be grafted on to her 12-year-old son. His dad - the paper neglected to tell its readers about his looks or comment on the wobbliness of his limbs - went next.

And as word spread, the townsfolk of Montclair arrived to make their own donations. Walter Gibson gave 175 pieces of skin; Milton Gibson, 250; John Drake and Frederick Ranney, 300 each. And still more came: Shellman Stewart, Langdon Howes, Murray Sanders, Robert Henning, Albert Wallace. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28166004
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The chances are that he lived out the rest of his life willy-nilly indeed!

Unless someone donated one! :)
 
JamesWhitehead said:
The chances are that he lived out the rest of his life willy-nilly indeed!

Unless someone donated one! :)
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His plight might have pricked someones conscience.
 
Victorian Strangeness: The tragic coffin prank

Author Jeremy Clay tells the singular story of the girl who was frightened to death by a coffin.

At first it was just a shadow. An indistinct shape on the footpath by a chapel on a lonely Lancashire lane at dusk. But as the girls walking home from the factory got nearer, it began to form into something more tangible. Something more creepy.

A coffin, just lying there. It was a sight strange enough to stop them in their tracks. Unnerved, but intrigued, they took a few tentative steps closer. And that's when it happened. A low hollow sound from somewhere nearby broke their jittery hush. And then the coffin shuddered and began to move.

Springing back in alarm, the girls turned and dashed headlong down the road, shrieking and screaming as they ran.

Fifty yards on, they bumped into a lad walking along the lane, who persuaded them to show him what they'd seen. Fortified by back-up, Martha Spencer and Bridget Riley gathered the courage to return to the casket. And there they saw local lummoxes Richard Forshaw and Robert Mawdsley, guffawing as they lifted the coffin to their shoulders and carried it away.

These days, no doubt, this pair of fat-heads would have filmed their prank, uploaded it, and waited expectantly for it to go viral. Back in lo-fi 1858, they had to go down to the pub and brag.

They'd done it for a lark, Forshaw told drinkers at the Rose and Crown in Much Hoole that night. They'd tied a length of string to one of the handles on the coffin. Mawdsley hid behind a hedge until the girls approached, then tugged at the string. Forshaw watched from a ditch, desperately struggling to supress his rib-rattling sniggers. "You're a bonny fellow to frighten children so," one of the regulars admonished him as he finished the tale. And the castigation was about to get far, far worse. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28484148
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I've had a drink at the Rose & Crown in Much Hoole. Cheers for that, I'd never heard of it before.
 
A touch of Verne.

Victorian Strangeness: The great balloon riot of 1864

Europe's largest balloon festival is staged this weekend in Bristol. We trust there'll be no repeat of the scenes in Leicester in 1864. Author Jeremy Clay tells the little-known tale of Britain's balloon riot.

The distinguished gentleman ran for his life - his clothes ripped, his hair dishevelled, a furious mob hot on his heels, baying for blood.

Behind him lay the ripped-up, burning remnants of his livelihood. What with one thing and another, his balloon display hadn't gone quite as well as he'd expected.

It had all started so promisingly, too. A crowd of about 50,000 people had gathered on the racecourse in Leicester that summer's day in 1864 to see the feted aeronaut take to the skies.

Henry Coxwell wasn't just an aviation pioneer, he was something of a celebrity too. Two years earlier, accompanied by the meteorological scientist Dr James Glaisher, he'd soared up to the stratosphere, curious as to what might happen next.

What actually happened next was Dr Glaisher went temporarily blind, then passed out. Coxwell, who had lost all sensation in his gloveless hands, could well have followed suit, had he not saved them both by opening the valve-cord with his teeth.

Such shivering dash and derring-do made him a hero, so when he agreed to appear with his fancy new balloon Britannia at the Order of Forester's fete in Leicester, admirers arrived from as far and wide to see him soar into the skies.

But as the punters gathered, and Coxwell made his pre-flight preparations, there was trouble afoot.

"Early in the afternoon, a gentleman, reported to be a professional man, gave it out that the balloon then present was not my largest and newest balloon but a small one," Coxwell would later write to the Times.

"This was a cruel libel," he added, but the rumour spread all the same. "This Coxwell," they muttered, darkly, "he's taking us for mugs."

As the mood soured, the masses pressed in. With barely any police on duty to control the huge throng, "a perfect sea of clamouring spectators" broke into his enclosure, "everybody demanding an instantaneous ascent".

If he expected better behaviour from the well-to-do Leicester folk who were to accompany him into the air, he was sorely disappointed.

"Those who had paid their money and obtained tickets pounced into the basket in such a rude and unceremonious manner that all operations were stopped and the passengers themselves were preventing their own departure," wrote Coxwell. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28674654
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