A Burglar Caught by a Skeleton & Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press (21 page)

Treasure Trove

Paris, Thursday: An old and dilapidated safe was bought at a public auction here yesterday for a few francs. On opening it the purchaser discovered a secret drawer, in which a sum of 3,000 francs in bank notes was concealed. By law the money becomes the property of the purchaser, and cannot be claimed by the vendor of the safe.

The Evening Telegraph
, Dundee, August 25, 1898

An Awkward Change of Name

There are in France two brothers with the surname of Assassin, who recently obtained the necessary permission from the high functionary called the Keeper of the Seals to change their name to one less offensive. After mature reflection, they decided to change their name to Berge.

Now that it is too late to alter it, they have discovered, to their intense annoyance, that their new name happens, by a singular coincidence, to be that of the chief assistant to M. Deibler, the public executioner, who will, in all probability, succeed to M. Deibler’s gruesome business.

The Devon and Exeter Daily Gazette
, October 18, 1895

Extraordinary Coincidences

One of the most singular coincidences ever recorded has just taken place at a village named Martin’s Valley, in Pennsylvania, where three brothers of the name of Truby, all following different trades, met with accidental deaths between 11 o’clock on the night of Friday, August 14, and 11 o’clock on the following morning.

The first killed was John, aged 34, who was a signalman on the railway. He was running to alter a switch, when he fell over something on the line, and broke his neck.

Jason Truby, aged 36, worked in a slate quarry four miles from the village. The recent rains had filled several deep cavities in the quarry with water. Early on Saturday morning Jason went to work. A narrow hemlock board had been laid across one of the pits full of water, and he was walking over it when it tipped with him and threw him into the water. His head came in contact with the edge of the stones, stunning him, and he was drowned before aid could reach him.

Wyman Truby, 38 years old, was a miller. He worked near his mother’s house. About half-past ten o’clock on Saturday morning he was at work in the mill, when the flooring of a grain bin in the room above him gave way, and he was buried beneath hundreds of bushels of wheat. A boy who was in the mill ran out and gave the alarm, and several men hurried in and made efforts to extricate Truby; but the work could not be done in time. When he was taken out he had been dead some time.

The brothers died in ignorance of each other’s death, and the messengers sent to inform their mother, a widow, met at her house. The succession of cruel blows so overwhelmed her that she is not expected to live.

The Edinburgh Evening News
, September 2, 1885

SPORT, HOBBIES
and PASTIMES

Preface

If things had turned out a little differently, the list of sports that Britain gave to the world might have needed a single, significant revision. Scrub out football; replace it with egg hat.

The beautiful game was an ugly duckling at the start of the nineteenth century. ‘It seems to have fallen into disrepute and is but little practised’, wrote Joseph Strutt in
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England
in 1801. Four decades on, the
Boy’s Treasury of Sports, Pastimes and Recreations
could refer to football as a once-popular old English game.

But egg hat, said the
Boy’s Treasury
– now there was a sport. A game of skill, speed and agility that involved a ball, some hats and a taste for casual violence.

The rules were pleasingly simple. You put down your hats and a player threw a ball into one. There was some general darting about. A winner was declared, then everyone gathered round in a mood of post-match bonhomie and pelted the loser with balls at close range.

In his 1869 book
The Business of Pleasure
, the author Edmund Hodgson Yates reflected fondly on the ‘stinging cuts’ inflicted by the game in his childhood, and it’s not hard to see why it appealed to the early Victorians, as it combined athleticism, the open air, a will to win and a blithe disregard for the lot of the loser.

As it turned out, egg hat went the way of earlier British pastimes like bear-baiting and chucking sticks at cockerels. Yet for all the games that didn’t last the course, the 1800s were a staggeringly productive era.

Inspired by the doctrine of muscular Christianity, which held that manliness was next to Godliness, the Victorians embraced sport, laying the foundations for the professional set-ups we know today. They standardised games that once varied like accents across the country. They formalised rules. They set up leagues, built stadiums and made professionals and celebrities of players.

They even revived the Roman tradition of match-day aggro. Punch-ups and pitch invasions became increasingly common at the football. There were brawls at the rugby and the racing too. A wrestling match in Plymouth in 1879 ended with hundreds of fans smashing the venue’s seats. Even the genteel world of cricket wasn’t entirely immune. A match between Surrey and Nottinghamshire at the Oval in 1887 was marred by spectators surging on to the field, where they fought a battle plucked from the imagination of Enid Blyton. Or as
The Graphic
put it: ‘engaged in a Homeric strife among themselves with ginger-beer bottles and pieces of turf.’

Singular Match at Cricket.

Arms Versus Legs

A match, which, for its novel character, attracted an immense number of spectators, was played last week in the cricket-ground of the Railway Tavern, at Reading.

The players on one side consisted of eleven with only one arm each, while, on the other side, each had but one leg – saving a wooden one. One of the umpires had lost both his arms, and the other had ‘not a leg to stand upon.’ A referee was also selected who had neither arms nor legs.

At the commencement of the play the ‘odds’ were in favour of the one-arms; notwithstanding the single-legs had many backers. During the first innings, in consequence of the soft nature of the ground from the late rains, no less than three legs were broken; but these were soon ‘set’ without the aid of a medical man, a neighbouring carpenter skilfully performing the ‘operation.’