Originally published in Pearson's Weekly (C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.) vol.1 #24 (03 Jan 1891).
We go to press with this number before the year 1890 has closed. May it end without any awful fatality such as has, with ghastly persistency, marked the close of almost every year within living memory. True, the closing days of the last three years have been, happily, free from great calamities; but the list previous to 1886 is almost unbroken.
The worst disasters at the end of 1886 were those at Driffield, where ten men were killed by the fall of a cage down the shaft of a coal-pit, and in Lisbon harbour, where a collision between the Sultan, ironclad, and a French steamer resulted in the loss of thirty-five lives.
At the end of December, 1885, the country was shocked by the Mardy colliery accident, in the Rhondda valley, by which seventy-seven men were killed, and the remainder of 900 had a narrow escape.
The year 1884 closed amid the frightful ruin of the earthquakes in Spain, in which more than a thousand persons perished.
On the 27th of December, 1882, forty persons were killed, and fifty injured by the fall of a chimney at Sir H. Ripley's mills at Bradford.
The close of 1881 was signalled by the quadruplicate collision in Canonbury Tunnel.
The Tay bridge calamity sufficiently darkened the last days of 1879.
Thus we may go back year after year upon the gruesome record. For at least three decades there is an almost unbroken series of disasters by sea or land in the last week of the year.
It was on the last day but one of 1876 that the Ashtabula (U.S.A.) railway accident--very similar to the Tay bridge catastrophe--destroyed by shock, drowning, and burning, more than a hundred lives. A day or two before five persons had been killed and thirty injured at Arlesley siding on the Great Northern Railway. The station-master at Arlesley went mad on the spot.
London society was distressed, on Christmas day, 1875, by the news of the drowning of three nieces of the
late Mr. Russell Gurney, as well as the crew, by the upsetting of a dahabeeah on the Nile; while only two days earlier the training-ship Goliath was burned, twenty-one boys perishing out of 480.
Yet more sad was the close of 1874, when the story of the emigrant ship Cospatrick reached these shores. Of 500 souls on board, but five were saved, and they were picked up only a few hours before they must have succumbed. At the same time--on the 24th of December--occurred the Shipton railway accident, with its terrible total of thirty-four dead and seventy injured.
Many people will remember the harrowing story--we do not intend to repeat it--of the sinking of the steam-tug Gipsy Queen in the Tyne, and the drowning of eighteen of the crew, on the 26th of December, 1873.
We pass over the two preceding years with the bare mention of the wreck of the British steamship Germany, entailing the loss of thirty lives, at the entrance of the Garonne, and the traction-engine accident in Glasgow, with its havoc among a crowd of children.
The end of 1870 is memorable in the history of railway disasters. Not only in the last week of the year were eight persons killed at Hatfield, but there had been a series of great fatalities from the end of November; seven persons being killed at Harrow, five at Brockley, without counting the injured. There was also in the fatal last week of 1870 a gunpowder explosion at Birmingham, killing seventeen persons outright, and maiming or blinding more than fifty others.
On Christmas Day, 1869, a whole family of six, the wife and children of a policeman, were burned to death in a street near Burton Crescent. On Boxing night fourteen persons were trampled upon or suffocated in a mad fight for entrance into the pit of the Bristol Theatre. That affair will perhaps be remembered for the fact that those who managed to get into the theatre knew nothing of what had happened; the performance went on to the end before anybody but the manager and the police knew that seventeen dead bodies were laid out in the refreshment room.
A terrible colliery accident near St. Helen's cost twenty-six poor fellows their lives on December 30th, 1868.
Still more fatal was the Merthyr Tydvil explosion at the close of 1865; while to the account of that time also must be put the floundering of the London, with 220 souls, in the Bay of Biscay.
Then we come to the Moestig explosion in 1863, the loss of the Lifeguard off Flamborough Head (fifty-one lives) in 1863, the boiler explosion at Hetton Colliery (twenty-three lives) in 1860, the wreck of the Blervie Castle (fifty-six lives) in 1859, and the crushing of fifteen persons to death at the Victoria Theatre in 1858. All these disasters occurred in the last few days of the year.
Research back to a period beyond the average memory reveals other examples of this strange coincidence. It was on the last day but one of 1808 that His Majesty's ship Anson, with her crew of sixty, perished in Mount's Bay.
It was on December 22, 1810, that the Minotaur, 74 guns, was wrecked on the Hask Bank, with a loss of 360 hands.
It was on the fatal last week of 1811 that the three English men-of-war, St. George, Defence, and Hero stranded on the coast of Jutland, and all the crews, numbering about 2,000 men, with Admiral Reynolds, were drowned, save only eighteen seamen, who, more dead than alive, were washed ashore.
Those who like to be philosophical upon the phenomena of events may make what use they please of this recital. It will be remembered that the end of the year--in these latitudes, at all events--in a period when all the forces of nature are warring against man, a period of cold and storms and depression and fog, resulting in disasters by sea and land, on the railway, and in the mine. It may be said that such accidents as fires and panics in theatres are especially liable to follow upon the peculiar circumstances of the season. But then it happens that the opening of the new year has been singularly free from calamity; yet in January the natural conditions are not appreciably different from those of December. We simply make mention of the greater calamities which have marked the close of the year during the present century.