A Grim Almanac of Hampshire is a day-by-day catalogue of 365 ghastly tales from the city There are murders and manslaughters, including the case of Thomas Buller, who was killed in 1875 by a man who was married only that morning, and Sarah Skinner, who was thrown out of a window in 1847. There are bizarre deaths, such as the mother who mistakenly fed her child rat poison instead of teething powders, and the deaths of a man and his wife from a gas leak, both of which occurred in 1861. There is an assortment of disasters which include devastating fires, such as the destruction of the Merchant Venturer College in 1907 and the fire in a city hat shop in 1876, which claimed the lives of the proprietor and two of his children, not to mention mining disasters, rail crashes, explosions, shipwrecks, cases of cruelty and neglect and a plethora of uncanny accidents. Generously illustrated, this chronicle is an entertaining and readable record of Bristol’s grim past. Read on … if you dare! Among the gruesome tales included here are the sinking in 1545 of the, King Henry VIII’s flagship, in the Solent, with the loss of almost 700 men; the delivery of a foul-smelling basket to a servant in Winchester in 1825, which on investigation was found to contain the body of a stillborn baby; the story of Dame Alice Lisle, allegedly the victim of a miscarriage of justice when executed in 1685, and whose ghost is said to haunt the lanes around her home at Ringwood; Percy Brading, who killed himself on the day of his father’s funeral at Newport in 1935; and of the double murder of Lydia and Norma Leakey in the New Forest in 1956. All these, plus tales of executions, disasters, suicides, explosions, and accidents by land, sea and air, and much more, are here and if you have the stomach for it, then read on …
