10:34am Monday 15th March 2010
By Michael Grundy
250 YEARS AGO:
LAST Tuesday morning, a very puny young woman of this city ate 20 buttered rolls and with them drank a pint of small beer and near a quart of ale, and about two hours after, being seized with another fit of voracity, presently dispatched a quantity of bread and cheese, sufficient for a meal for two hearty ploughmen.
● The wife of a publican near Evesham, having for some time been disordered in her senses and at last became raving, it was thought necessary to send her to a mad house, to which she was conveyed in a postchaise on Sunday last, but she had not been there many hours before she found means to hang herself up in her apartment, and died in the swing before she was discovered.
200 YEARS AGO:
ON Monday an inquest was held at Upton-upon-Severn on the body of Thomas Panting, a young man who on his way home from Upton, through the darkness of the night and the bad state of the bridge which crosses Pool Brook near that town, fell from it and was drowned. Another inquest was taken on Tuesday at Inkberrow on the body of Elizabeth Collins, a child three years-old, who on Saturday, being left alone in a cottage, was so dreadfully burnt as to cause her death the next day. Verdicts: accidental death.
150 YEARS AGO:
AN accident occurred at Broadwas yesterday by which four horses were drowned. It appears that a piece of timber floated down the Teme from the farm of Mr Ward of Doddenham Hall when, in order to secure it, Mr Ward ordered his horses to be taken to the bank with a view to harnessing them to the timber and so dragging it safely to the shore. While the animals were on the bank, the first horse slipped from the earth which had been undermined by the stream. Falling into the water, it dragged the other three horses along with it.
Assistance was procured but it was of no avail as the four horses, chained together, floated down the river to a distance of a mile-and-a-half, when the harness, becoming entangled in a tree, stopped their course, but not until all four were drowned.
100 YEARS AGO:
AN inquest was held at the Guildhall on the body of Lilian Slade, aged one month, the daughter of Beatrice Slade, single woman of 11 Spa Gardens, Carden Street, Worcester. Dr Simmons, who was called in after the child’s death, said she had enteritis due to improper food or lack of it and bad air. She weighed only 6lbs. He had attended the mother near the time of birth and had advised her to go to the workhouse for the delivery, but she had refused. Other witnesses said the child’s home was inexcusably dirty and the grandmother said there were 13 children in the house which had only four rooms. The jury returned a verdict in accordance with the medical evidence.
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