A Burglar Caught by a Skeleton & Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press (19 page)

Preface

They buried the Truby boys in one grave. Three brothers, side by side in the Pennsylvanian dirt.

They’d died within twelve hours of each other; three lives snuffed out in three separate accidents that brought three separate messengers to their bewildered mother’s door.

Railwayman John was the first to go, breaking his neck on a summer’s night in 1885 when he tripped while running to change the points on the track. Before word of his death reached home, his brother Jason stumbled into a quarry pit filled with rainwater, striking his head as he fell. The news arrived in their village just as the body of their older brother Wyman was being carried out from the mill where he worked. He’d suffocated in a grain silo.

Just when you think this desolate story couldn’t get much worse, the newspaper report turns to the widowed Mrs Truby, concluding with one of the most cheerless closing sentences of the century: ‘The succession of cruel blows so overwhelmed her that she is not expected to live.’

Coincidence was a recurring theme in the work of many of the nineteenth century’s greatest authors, and a regular motif in newspapers of the era too. At a time when science was hacking away at the old certainties, the Victorians liked to savour life’s surprises.

And some of them liked it to an irksome extent. An article in the
New Monthly Magazine
in 1852 tore into the types who saw parallels wherever they looked. ‘The life of the coincidentalist is a perpetual succession of wonders, though nothing after all is new to him. If you mention to him some casual circumstances, too trivial for remembrance beyond the moment of its occurrence, he receives it like an old acquaintance. He finds a subject for comparison in everything and nothing happens that is not extraordinary, surprising or remarkable.’

There must have been a fair few of them working in journalism. A search for the phrase ‘singular coincidence’ in the British Newspaper Archive throws up more than 10,000 articles.

Extraordinary Occurrence

An extraordinary coincidence is reported as having occurred in Dublin Bay. The other morning two Ringsend fishermen, named James Hodgens and George Roden, were fishing in a trawler about six miles east of Howth when, on drawing in the net, they were horrified to find that it contained the body of a man.

On the remains being pulled into the trawler the features were examined and one of the men, Roden, discovered the body to be that of his own brother, who was also a fisherman, and who was drowned in the bay on the 14th December, 1890.

The Star
, Guernsey, December 8, 1891

Father and Son Killed by Mare and Foal

About twelve months ago a groom in the employ of a gentleman at Dyserth, near Rhyl, was kicked to death by a mare belonging to his employer, who at once, of course, got rid of the brute.

The employer took the deceased’s son into his service in a similar capacity, and now the news has come to hand that the son has himself been kicked to death by the foal of the mare that kicked his father to death.

The Citizen
, Gloucester, March 29, 1895

Death Under Remarkable Circumstances

A man named Robert Hill met with a shocking death under peculiar circumstances at Rochester on Wednesday night. He was a night man under the Corporation and a year ago was principal witness as to the death of a fellow-workman, who drank carbolic acid in mistake for cold tea while at work, and died in consequence.

Notwithstanding this warning, Hill himself on Thursday morning swallowed a dose of the acid in mistake for whiskey, and died in great agony. He was a married man and about 35 years old.

The York Herald
, September 28, 1889

The Extraordinary Fog.

Three Men Killed Near Glasgow

Information reached Glasgow last evening that during the fog yesterday morning while Patrick Murtha, 26, and James Leary, 37, were laying fog signals on the Helensburgh branch of the North British Railway they were overtaken by a train from Helensburgh and cut to pieces.

Shortly afterwards their remains were found by Patrick Reilly, surfaceman, who returned to Maryhill to give information of the occurrence. He afterwards walked back along the line, and on stepping out of the way of a mineral train was killed by a passenger train.

The Aberdeen Journal
, January 14, 1888

An Incredible Piece of Luck

It would be difficult to find in the pages of fiction anything to equal the following prosaic fact, which has just happened in Scotland.

A Captain Heathcote rents a moor from year to year. Last year while out shooting he lost a diamond ring. This year he was reminded of it by the anniversary of his loss, and sitting by the fire and taking up a piece of peat to put on, he had scarcely uttered the words, ‘It is a year today since I lost my diamond ring,’ than his companion was surprised to hear the words quickly followed by ‘And here it is.’

The peat had been cut from the very moor where the loss had occurred, and hence its recovery. No other account of extraordinary recovery of diamonds could equal that, unless, perhaps, that of a lady who dropped a diamond into a pond and found it some months after on the leaf of a water-lily which had borne it upwards in its growth.

The Evening Telegraph
, Dundee, September 8, 1894