A Burglar Caught by a Skeleton & Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press
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Authors: Jeremy Clay
Tags: #newspaper reports, #Victorian, #comedy, #horror, #Illustrated Police News
Printed edition published in the UK in 2013 by
Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,
39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP
email:
[email protected]
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Icon Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-184831-620-1 (ePub format)
Author’s text copyright © 2013 Jeremy Clay
Images copyright © 2013 The British Library Board (
The Illustrated Police News
)
The author has asserted his moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Typesetting by Marie Doherty
Contents
SUPERSTITION, BELIEF and the SUPERNATURAL
About the author
Jeremy Clay
is a journalist who has worked in newspapers for twenty years. He lives in Leicester with his family, and a dog with a passing resemblance to Denis Healey.
To Lilia Flynn, who loved history, and her daughter Liz, who couldn’t care less for it, but helped all the same.
INTRODUCTION
On a summer’s evening in 1837, in a room in one of the fanciest addresses in all of London, a teenage girl called Alexandrina sat down with her diary.
‘Up at 6am’, she wrote. ‘Uncle William the Fourth died in the night. That makes me the Queen. Huh! Spent the afternoon with a load of lords talking about royal stuff. Tea. Crown-fitting. Bed. PS Think I’ll call myself Victoria. It’ll look better on pub signs.’
I paraphrase, but you get the picture: June 20, 1837 was quite a to-do for the eighteen-year-old. And what with one thing and another, it’s likely the new Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland never found a spare moment to flick through the papers.
What did she miss that day? Oh, you know. The usual. A pub landlord who drowned himself in 500 gallons of beer. A punch-up between rival teetotallers at a temperance meeting. A parcel of £400 sent between two Cumbrian towns, delivered 35 years late. A chap who, for no readily discernible reason, had embarked on a mission to walk 1,250 miles in 1,000 hours, all along the same small stretch of road. The usual unusual.
Fast-forward 63 years to January 22, 1901, and Queen Victoria found herself otherwise engaged once more, this time with the even more pressing business of dying. Let’s assume she skipped the papers again and never read that a gaggle of girls had been openly sold by auction on the streets of San Francisco or that … well, actually that was pretty much it for striking stories that day. The press, understandably, was rather preoccupied with the fading health of the monarch, which due to the journalistic quirks of the era unfolded in a series of updates in the same editions, popping up again and again from page to page just when you thought it was all done, like a breakfast-time flare-up of last night’s lovers’ tiff.
So: June 20, 1837 and January 22, 1901. Remember those dates, they’re important. Actually, scrub that. They’re not. Forget them. Like a spray of urine from a territorial tom cat, they merely mark the boundaries of our interest.
The Victorian age, as any dog-eared school history textbook will confirm, was a time of tumultuous change, and that was as true for journalism as it was for society as a whole.
From rude beginnings in the days of mud-slinging pamphlets and thunderous broadsides, newspapers had worked themselves into the foundations of British society. Gone was the buccaneering spirit of the freewheeling early days, when the
Leicester Journal
, for instance, for want of anything else to print, serialised the Book of Genesis. In its place came an increasing professionalism; a little less thrillingly unpredictable maybe, but far more reliable.
In the meantime, newspapers were gorging themselves on the fruits of the age of innovation. Railways sped up delivery of papers. Telegraph wires meant news travelled ever faster. The spread of steam presses accelerated the printing process. Gas and eventually electric lighting meant people could read long into the evening rather than just trudging off to bed in the gathering gloom. All this, and the stamp duty that was designed to shackle the press was finally abolished too, alongside taxes on paper and advertising. Cover prices tumbled and readership swelled, as an increasingly literate and politicised nation with a voracious appetite for shock, scandal and sport – plus a mystifyingly high tolerance for dreary reports of ceremonial dinners – provided a ready, hungry market for news.
In these sunny conditions, journalism flourished. In 1837, according to a tally in the bracingly titled
Pigot and Co.’s National Commercial Directory of the Whole of Scotland, and of the Isle of Man with a General Alphabetical List of the Nobility, Gentry and Clergy of Scotland
– breathe here, please – there were 346 titles publishing in Britain and 68 more in Ireland. Names like the
Hue and Cry
and the
Sheffield Iris
may not have stayed the course, but by 1901 the snappier-sounding
Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory
listed 2,488 papers in production.
They’re curious things, Victorian newspapers, and not simply because a queen could be gravely ill on page two of your
Evening Telegraph
and gravely dead by page three.
At first glance, they seem as glum and forbidding as the stereotype of the thin-lipped, hidebound, naked-table-leg-abhorring people they served.
Barring a few honourable exceptions – most notably the skittish, yahooing
Illustrated Police News
– the front page is surrendered to the classifieds. From a hat for your head to shoes for your feet, with elixirs for the taming of fierce flatulence for the regrettable bit between, they advertise everything and anything, including the cold, commercial instincts of the publisher.
Turn over, and things improve, but only marginally. Here, at last, is some news, but it’s the devil’s own job picking it out. There are few illustrations, by and large. Paragraphs run on and on, and then on some more. Columns can be thin or wide, so long as they’re fit to burst. Pages are busier than a grave-digger in a flu pandemic. From the
John O’Groat Journal
to the
Royal Cornwall Gazette
, newspapers look as if they were produced by a man who found the design for the average book of logarithms unduly frivolous. It’s a wonder Reader’s Migraine didn’t join Cobbler’s Femur and Chimney Sweep’s Scrotum in the roll-call of Victorian ailments.
The remedy, you’d think, would be found in headlines; something to break up the page and offer a little breathing room amid the crush. All too often, though, they simply squeeze up on the same line as the intros, like travelling salesmen forced to share the last bed at a B&B. Starved of space to shine, headline-writing is prosaic and functional. There’s no hint of the giddy wordplay that’s the calling card of the modern-day British press. Victorian sub-editors, it seems, could spend the working week blithely adding headings like ‘A Strange Story’ or ‘A Remarkable Tale’ to near enough every article they encountered (although a tip of the hat to whoever came up with the splendidly dismissive ‘More French Insolence’ for a piece in the
Morning Post
in 1839).
If the headlines lack a little zip, some of the journalism they introduce is positively deathly. I have before me an 1890 article from the influential weekly
The Graphic
, on the already pulse-slowing topic of illustrations in early newspapers. The labyrinthine opening sentence – which turns helplessly this way and that, like a lost child at the fair – stretches over a spirit-crushing 28 lines before finally spluttering to a halt after no fewer than 176 words. Even then, the merciless sub-editor can’t quite find it in his heart to begin a new paragraph, and this turgid essay ploughs on with barely a pause. There were several suicides reported in the days that followed. It’s possible at least one of them was a despairing reader of
The Graphic
.
The discouraging design of Victorian newspapers can be explained and forgiven by the limitations of the available technology. But the wayward news sense is rather harder to fathom. It’s not as if Victorian Britain was starved of the kind of stories that had what’s known in the trade as the ‘hey Doris’ factor. Death dominated life. Yet incidences of extraordinary misfortune, the sort that would now send reporters scrambling to the scene, routinely command a cursory few words. They may be a cursory few words told with a barely-disguised relish for grisly detail, but they’re a cursory few words all the same.
Yet with space at a premium, editors still had plenty of column inches to spare for leaden reports of pompous meetings in which little of consequence was discussed or decided. Take the
Lincolnshire Chronicle
of August 21, 1896, for instance. It devotes hundreds and hundreds of words to an update on the visit of the Chinese statesman Li Hongzhang, but the first-ever death in a car accident, which ended the days of the unfortunate Mrs Driscoll of Croydon, is brushed aside in a measly four lines at the foot of an athletics report.
All in all, then, you’d be forgiven for thinking that settling down with the average Victorian newspaper is time that could be more usefully spent watching Belgian paint dry. You’d be wrong. Granted, you need to look a little harder to find your reward, but buried beneath the brambles-thick design, smothered by ornate language, gasping for air amid the drab, overblown stories about clerical commissions, royal toasts and suchlike, Victorian newspapers prove a rich seam of hidden history.
There was a time, not very long ago, when you had three main options if you wanted to mine that seam. You could pitch up at the offices of your local newspaper, if it’s still there, and ask to be directed to the dustiest corner of their archive, then wrestle manfully with hefty old bound volumes of back-issues. You could sit in your nearest records office, whirring steadily through reels of microfilm. Or you could head to north London.
Colindale Avenue, NW9 is an unlikely sort of spot to find treasure, but for more than 100 years it was home to the British Library’s unrivalled collection of British and Irish newspapers.
Here, on a workaday street on the third-to-last stop on the Edgware branch of the Northern Line, 50,000 titles were squirreled away for posterity in nearly 700,000 bound volumes, stretching along 28 miles of shelving. At the time of writing, they’re in the process of being shipped off to a new climate-controlled store in Boston Spa, Yorkshire. Why? As with today’s papers, print has been upstaged by the internet.
The British Newspaper Archive is a grand project on a scale the Victorians themselves would applaud. Millions of pages from the past are being systematically digitised and uploaded to a rapidly-expanding website. Instead of browsing editions one by one, in the faint hope of stumbling across a reference to – hmmm, let’s think – a court report of a bearded woman in an unseemly brawl with a snake-charmer, you can plunge directly in to billions of words of text all at once to see if it ever happened.
For academics and genealogists, it’s a godsend. Many books to come will use the archive to shine new light into neglected nooks and crannies of British history and draw perceptive conclusions. This book is not one of them. It is, instead, a collection of thingamajigs and whatnots from journalism’s odds and sods drawer. An escaped python in Middlesbrough is stoned to death by boys. A woman lives with her husband’s decomposing corpse to keep claiming his pension. A pistol-packing theatre-goer shoots the baddie in a play. A drunken monkey goes berserk in a bar. A man covered in bees moves gingerly through central London. And a bearded lady – yes! – brawls with a snake-charmer. That’s our level. Think of this as a tenner plucked from the back of history’s sofa, if you wish. Or a fiver, at least.