A Burglar Caught by a Skeleton & Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press (2 page)

Are the stories all true? Maybe, but the lack of detail in some articles – names, dates, even places – seems altogether too convenient. Geoffrey Crowther, the editor of
The Economist
from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, used to tell his journalists to ‘simplify and exaggerate’. Some of the ones here may have gone a tad further.

Even if the reporters were playing it perfectly straight, there’s always a chance they had got themselves in a horrible muddle. On a Monday in October 1888, a vexed young man strode into London’s Dalston Police Court brandishing a weekly newspaper that had announced a disturbing death. The body of George Culley, of 108 Duncombe Road, Upper Holloway, it said, had been found in the shrubs at the Alexandra Palace, with a bottle of laudanum beside him. The news had been particularly startling to the man in court, as he was George Culley, of 108 Duncombe Road, Upper Holloway, and had merely chanced upon the corpse. You may want to bear that in mind as you read on.

True or not, these are the stories that enthralled and appalled their Victorian readers. Some of them are funny. Some are sad; some desperately so. A few of them are bonkers. Virtually all of them are completely forgotten, even in the very places they played out.

If you’re an author with writer’s block, stuck for a decent plot, they may well prove your salvation. Can I point you to page
38
? And
44
. Oh and
111
and
144
and
159
 …

ANIMALS

Preface

In his room in a hotel in the sedate Welsh resort of Llandrindod Wells, Mr T.J. Osborne is preparing to check out and head home. It’s a June afternoon. The window is open. A fully-grown African lion leaps in.

In the animated 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 papers. Well, some of them at least. A hotel guest tackling a lion in Llandrindod may seem to us now – as it must have to Mr Osborne then – a remarkable turn of events, but the news editors of the day weren’t much impressed.

Perhaps they’d just grown weary of variations on a well-worn theme. In the nineteenth century, ferocious beasts roamed the British countryside once more, thanks to the lax security of travelling shows like Wombwell’s Menagerie 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. Two elephants cheerfully demolished a back garden in Market Harborough. In Burton, brewery workers at Bass formed a human cordon as an escaped kangaroo bounced through the town, its erstwhile keepers giving wheezy chase. Time and time again in the papers of the era, something alarming is at large in a place nature never intended it to be.

The root cause of all this drama was the Victorians’ unquenchable thirst for novelty, which drew exotic creatures from the outposts of the empire to British shores. The UK soon found itself at the centre of a thriving new trade, a livestock exchange that symbolised man’s domination of the animal kingdom, Britain’s domination of the globe and above all, money’s domination of absolutely everything.

If you had £600 to spare in the 1890s, for instance, a man named William Cross could secure you a hippo. He was quite a chap, Mr Cross. Customers from all ranks of society came to his store in Liverpool, reported the
Manchester Weekly Times
, ‘from His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales down to the tender-hearted crossing sweeper desirous of having stuffed a favourite sparrow’.

Bewildered animals by their thousands were shipped to his shop to meet the demand. ‘About 80,000 parrots pass through my hands every year’, he told the paper, adding that he took up to 500 monkeys in one go, flogging off the common Indian ones to organ grinders at 7s 6d a piece. Snakes, baboons, tigers, elephants, sea-lions, buffaloes, rhinos, he’d sold the lot. And for two hundred and fifty quid, you could walk away as the proud owner of a lion, and unwittingly liable for any unexpected damage to a Welsh hotel room.

‘Bull in a China Shop’

The strange sight of a bull in a china shop was actually witnessed yesterday in Ilford, from whence the animal was being driven in company with a herd.

It rushed into the shop kept by Mr Barnes, and got firmly wedged behind the counter – so firmly indeed that both counter and fittings had to be moved in order to extricate the beast. A large crowd assembled, and several police were required to keep order.

Strange to say, no serious damage was done by the bull, but a great deal of china placed outside the shop was broken by the crowd in their eagerness to see the strange and unwelcome customer within.

The Yorkshire Telegraph and Star
, Sheffield, January 19, 1899

An Intoxicated Monkey

An intoxicated monkey caused a lively scene at Reilly’s Hotel, at Coney Island, New York, on Thursday. The monkey is kept in the bar, and is prevented from escaping by a long chain fastened round its waist.

A visitor treated the beast to four cocktails, which made it drunk and bad tempered. It wanted more cocktails, and, being refused, seized a whisky bottle, and, striking the visitor on the head with it, sent him senseless to the floor.

The bar tender tried to seize the animal, but it repulsed him by a blow with another bottle, which broke and cut his head. The monkey then stood at the back of the bar and pelted everyone with bottles and glasses, several persons being wounded.

The proprietor tried to quiet the beast, but received a bottle of Vermouth in the face, and had some of his front teeth knocked out. The monkey smashed all the mirrors and every bottle of liquor it could reach. The police were at last sent for and lassoed it.

The Manchester Evening News
, September 2, 1899

Extraordinary and Startling Appearance of a Runaway Horse at a Tea-Party, at Wragby, Lincolnshire

A scene occurred on Saturday last at Wragby, which we shall find it difficult to describe by mere words; we must, therefore, refer our readers to the front page of this week’s
Police News
. The large engraving gives a faithful representation of the consternation caused by an unlooked-for visitor to a family tea-party.