A Burglar Caught by a Skeleton & Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press (42 page)

As one of them was much younger than the other he agreed to carry a pound of earth for every year by which his competitor was his senior. Since their respective ages were twenty-six and forty-two, the younger man had to carry 16 pounds of earth.

After the fast agreed upon they drank their 17 glasses (about 6¼ English pints each), and set out on the journey. They had not gone far when the elder of the two fell and the younger lay down.

On being carried to a bed in a neighbouring house, the man who had fallen shortly after died; while he with the weight has escaped death only by the skin of his teeth.

Both men were Frenchmen, and the incident shows that, in other countries besides England, mad bets are made.

The Manchester Evening News
, June 3, 1879

A Strange Wager

Vienna, Wednesday night. A curious wager is at present occupying the attention of such widely separated classes as our young noblemen and the Association of Hotel and Restaurant Waiters in the capital.

Several of the younger scions of the highest Austrian aristocracy, who were accustomed to dine in an old hotel of high repute in the Karnthner Strasse, took exception to the practice of the waiters, most of whom had seen twenty or thirty years service, in dressing their moustaches in just the same fashion as the ‘noble swells’ they had to serve.

One of the high-born customers accordingly laid a wager with some of his friends, which was immediately accepted, that within a given time the objectionable adornment should disappear from the upper lips of the waiters in all the fashionable hotels and restaurants in Vienna, otherwise the proposer himself was to shave off his own embellishment for a given period.

In order to effect his purpose, the latter commenced by trying to persuade the hotel keeper in the Karnthner Strasse to forbid all his servants wearing moustaches, on penalty of losing his aristocratic customers.

In this case he succeeded, but the waiters, who were mostly married men, one after another gave notice to leave their places. They were at once replaced by younger men, who, for a consideration, submitted to the imposed humiliation.

The same thing happened in a number of other hotels and restaurants, and the wager was nearly won by the layer when the proprietor of the Hotel Imperial, the first hotel in Vienna, flatly refused to comply with the whim of the Vienna
jeunesse dorée
, whom he told outright that if they deserted his house he should readily find better customers.

The case was also taken up ‘as a matter of right and honour,’ by the Association of Waiters, which threatened to expel from the Society any member degrading himself by humouring aristocratic caprice in this matter.

Thus the matter stands at the present moment. The bet appears likely to be lost, and then will come the triumph of the waiters, who expect soon to have the satisfaction of seeing their would-be dictator instead of themselves going about with shaven lips.

The Nottingham Evening Post
, October 16, 1890

Peculiar Bets

Peculiar bets on the outcome of the Presidential election are causing considerable amusement in the Western States.

If Mr McKinley is elected, Henry Winsted, of Kinkley Junction, Indiana, is to engage in a butting match with a full grown ram; while should Mr Bryan be the victor, John Burns, of the same town, will drink three pints of hard cider while standing on his head in a barrel.

Arthur Williams, of Burr Oak, Michigan, has agreed to support the mother-in-law of his neighbour, George Stebbens, if the Democrats win, while if they lose Mr Stebbens will twist the tail of a vicious mule owned by Williams once a day for three weeks.

The strangest bet of all has been made by George Wren, of Deepwells, Wisconsin, and Samuel Carpenter, of a neighbouring town. If the former, who is an ardent Bryanite, loses, he is to wear all his clothes backward during the next four years, and if he wins, the other man is to walk backwards during Mr Bryan’s incumbency of office, and is to eat crow pie every day for breakfast.

The Star
, Guernsey, August 30, 1900

ACCIDENTS and DISASTERS

Preface

The memorial is a study in anguish. A grieving mother, carved from marble, tips back her head in distress, the body of a lifeless child draped across her arm. It stands encased in glass in Sunderland’s Mowbray Park, just across the road from the scene of one of the most harrowing episodes in the disaster-strewn span of nineteenth-century Britain.

Victorian society never seemed far from catastrophe. In 1878, more than 650 people died on a pleasure trip down the Thames when the SS 
Princess Alice
was split in two by the collier
Bywell Castle.
A year later, the storm-lashed Tay Bridge collapsed, taking the train from Wormit to Dundee too. Fishing fleets from the Moray Firth and Eyemouth were lost at sea. Warships and passenger liners sank. A burst dam sent a wall of water cascading through Sheffield. Calamitous military adventures befell in Afghanistan, the Crimea and South Africa. There were explosions and collapses at mines in Lanarkshire, Glamorgan, Northumberland, Yorkshire, Leicestershire and more.

Yet there was nothing quite like the Victoria Hall tragedy, a disaster that claimed almost twice as many lives as at Hillsborough football stadium – all of them children – but has slipped from the collective memory.

The kids had come to see the Fays, a pair of travelling entertainers who promised the ‘greatest treat for children ever given’: conjuring, talking waxworks, living marionettes and ‘the great ghost illusion’.

‘Every child entering the room will stand a chance of receiving a handsome present of books, toys etc’ said the handbill they’d given out at schools.

The show started at three o’clock that Saturday afternoon in June 1883, and drew to a close two hours later as the Fays performed their finale, during which they threw toys into the pit below the stage.

‘This way for the prizes’, called a voice, and the boys and girls in the gallery above, fearing they’d miss out, stampeded for the stairs. The staircase led down to a door that opened inwards and was bolted ajar, leaving a gap just big enough for a child to squeeze slowly through.

Within minutes, a crush had built up. A coachman called Fred Bonner, hearing the cries from the hall, dashed in and began pulling children through the gap, then took an axe to the door in desperation. The heavy iron bolt holding it shut was found later to have bent by an inch.

In all, 183 children died that afternoon. Thirty of them came from one Sunday school class, reported the
Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette
on the following Monday. ‘In one house in the west end, there are four children lying dead. Two of them are laid out upon a little table and the others are laid upon a piano. We also learn that a suffering father was carrying a dead child in each arm from the Victoria Hall when his wife met him, and utterly unnerved, he fell to the ground with his melancholy burden.’

The bodies were laid out in a theatre that had turned into a morgue. ‘A man and his wife rushed in,’ said the
Echo
, ‘the man eagerly scanned the faces of the dead, and without betraying any emotion, said with his finger pointed and with face blanched, “That’s one,” and passing on two or three yards, still pointing, “That’s another;” and still walking on, pointing to the last child in the row, he uttered, “Good God! All my family gone!” and staggering back he cried out “Give me water, give me water.”’