when-history-hit-the-headlines.com
When History hit the headlines
The greatest stories ever told brought back from the dead
'The newspapers of days gone by are as crammed full of sparkling treasures as the greatest archaeological dig’…
Britain’s oldest man ever killed by London’s fetid smog:
Dragged from a remote Shropshire village to the roaring capital for a royal audience, 152-year-old Thomas Parr arrived in London as a living miracle — a frail, one-toothed farm labourer paraded before King Charles I after astonishing the Earl of Arundel with claims he had lived since the reign of Edward IV. But the sensational visit would end in tragedy: the man said to be Britain’s oldest ever citizen soon sickened in the capital’s poisoned air, fuelling the lurid claim that London itself finally finished off the oldest man in the kingdom.
London’s worst ever earthquake shakes city with a roar ‘like a cannon’:
London is a city more readily associated with fog, fire and flood than with the violent convulsions of the earth beneath its feet. Yet on rare and terrifying occasions, the capital's inhabitants have been forced to confront a danger more often imagined in distant lands than beneath its own streets. In the spring of 1750, as frightened citizens spilled from their homes and church bells clanged overhead, the ground beneath London was said to shudder with such force that buildings reeled, chimneys crashed down and the sound of the shock rolled through the city like artillery fire. For a population already prone to superstition and fear, it was not merely a tremor, but an omen - a moment when the seemingly solid foundations of the metropolis gave way to panic, prophecy and dread.
