The Sun.
London, England, 1864-03-14 00:00:00

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THE SUN, LONDON, MONDAY EVENING, MARCH 14, 1864.

MK SHERIDAN LE FANU'S NEW NOVEL,
At all Libraries,

WYLDER'S HAN P.
By the Author of " The House by the Churchyard,"
From tne Athenzeum.—" Wylder's Hand' Is a remarkable
novel, and we recommend our readers to get it for them-
selves."

streams divide are separated by a rushing torrent
of water, which had not subsided even on Satur-
day. Turning towards Sheffield and commencing
a brief exploration of the ruins showed that the
tidings of disaster failed to represent the full ex-
tent of the dreadful catastrophe. Whole families
were swept away with their dwellings, and not a
trace remained of the thriving and industrious arti-
sans who sought their beds on Friday night, uncon-
scious of the dreadful fate that has so suddenly be-
fallen them.
A forge upon a headland near the junction of the two
streams was swept away with all its heavy machinery, and
two men who were working at the hammers were among
the first victims. The volume of water there scents to have
entirely swept away one row of cottages, end destroyed the
back wall of another row, leaving only the front wall and
some portions of the flooring in a precarious state. Among
the first of the houses that fell was the Stag public-house
kept by a person named Armitage. The family numbered
11 persons, and they are all drowned. On the headland
above named was a farm house inhabited by a family named
Trickett. The house was swept away with all its occupants,
who are stated to have numbered 10 or 11 persons. The farm
premises with 14 mulch cows were carried away by the flood.
Not a vestige of the homestead remains. Near to the house
lived a Mr. Price, a shopkeeper, whose household, including
his son and daughter-in-law, numbered six persons, all of
whom are drowned. It is said that in this row of houses
there was a woman who had been but two days confined.
The infant was washed out of her arms and the mother was
found dead in the road among part of the ruins. In one of
the detached houses near this row lived a family named
Spooner. With them lived an old man, 74 years of age,
named William Wostenholm, the father of Mrs. Spooner.
There were ten in the family, and not one of them sur.
vives. Near the spot on Saturday was a little boy, a grand-
son of Wostenholm, who was weeping bitterly and seeking
in vain to discover even a vestige of the house where his
relatives had lived. The next row of houses, called Bower's
buildings, are very strongly built, and, though they are
greatly injured, they have been saved from utter destruc-
tion. But the condition of the walls of many of the houses
testifies to the force with which the water dashed past. In
some instances the inmates, who were, of course, in bed,
were compelled to remain in the upper rooms for several
hours before they could be released. One of the houses
destroyed was occupied by a man named Cropper and his
wife and two children. They were all drowned, and their
bodies swept away. Near to their house was one occupied
by an old man and his grandson. The old man saved him-
self by escaping to the garret, but his grandson was jammed
by some of the furniture in a corner of the stairs, and was
drowned almost within reach of his relative. William
Watson lived in one of the same row of houses with his
wife and two children. The flood demolished their house
and carried them out, but Watson, as he was being whirled
along on the surface of the torrent, grasped a broken win-
dow-frame in one of the partially submerged houses, and
was saved, but his wife and children are lost. A publichouse
kept by Georgeßisby was partially demolished, only one of
the bedrooms and back kitchen remaining. Bisby, his wife,
and four children are gone. Next are a row of houses called
the " brick row." Down both front and back of these houses
the flood had raged in all its fury. The mud upon the
houses showed that the waters had risen from 16 to 18 feet
above the roadway. The first house of the row was tenanted
by a man named Dyson, his wife and children, and one or
two relatives. They were ten in number, but only one of
them is saved. The survivor is Dyson's brother, and he
escaped in a very remarkable manner. He was sleeping in
the top bedroom, and being awakened by the rush of the
water, and finding escape into the road cut off, he smashed
a portion of the lath and plaster partition, made his way to
the joists beneath the roof, and then broke through the
slates and got upon the roof, where he remained till assis-
tance could be given to him. In the back of the last house
of this row two children named Atkinson were swept out of
their bedroom along with the bed on which they were lying
and were drowned. In the next two houses resided two

Richard Bentley, New Burlington-street,

families named Turner and one named Taplin. The uncer-
tain statements of the surviving neighbours fix the number
in each house at seven and eight, but not a trace of them or
their houses is left. The Hillsborough Inn had a narrow
escape from total demolition. The Shakepere Inn across
the road suffered to a similar extent. The passages were
several feet deep in mud, and at the parlour door, roughly
stretched upon a wooden bier, was the naked corpse of a
man which had been dug out of the mud and rubbish op-
posite the house. In a stable attached to the Yew Tree'

Inn were six corpses—three women and three men. They
were laid upon stretchers just as they had been dug out of
the mud or dragged from out of the hedges, cr beneath

trunks of great trees or beams of timber that had been
whirled down the current. In the bed which one branch
of the current had made for itself behind the Hillsborough
Inn we saw the bodies of a man and a woman whom there
had not been time to get out. The body of the man was
partially buried, and the woman was laid beneath the bank.
She had on her drawers and one stocking. She had clung
with convulsive tenacity to a piece of plank, but it had
proved insufficient to save her.
Leaving Hillsborough, and turning down towards Owler •
ton, the destruction appeared to be on a equally awful scale.
A number of oottage houses were completely washed away,
and a thick deposit of mud concealed the well •kept gardens
that had been the pride of the cottagers. Almost every
house that remained in a habitable condition was used as a
dead house. At every turning were to be met parties of
policemen and volunteers, bearing each a ghastly burden
In the publichouse kept by Mr. Holland were five dead
bodies. In the Victoria, further on the 0 wlerton road,
there were four, which during our brief stay there were
increased to seven. In a stable attached to a beerhouse
were two bodies; in another stable, upon heaps of straw,
three mangled forms were laid out. On the road side be-
yond the Victoria were one or two bodies, which would be
" dug out" when the labourers had time to attend to them.
In the stream there we saw the mangled body of a girl about
10 years old, which had been apparently cut in two by a
heavy piece of timber with machinery attached to it. Close
by the searchers discovered the mangled body of a man in
a muddy pool. It was removed to one of the inns. In the
same street, at one and the same moment, we met three
parties of bearers, each carrying a dead body.
On the Sheffield side of the stream seven or eight bodies
were recovered, and were taken to the Queen's Hotel, They
are not yet identified. The force of the current may be
estimated by the fact that the massive wall bounding the
barracks on the lower side was swept away. The flood
invaded the quarters of the sergeants. and two of the infant
children of Paymaster Sergeant Foulds were drowned in
their bed. The sentry at the gate had the narrowest pos-
sible escape, the flood coming upon him with lightning
suddenness.
At Neepsend, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph says :
" One part of a large factory has been cut away as clean
as if it had been sawn down close by the partition wall. A
little further on is a row of houses with their fronts removed,
and the honeycombed arrangements of the rooms fully ex•
posed to view. Near these transverse sections or interiors of
houses are numerous gardens, in which there is now no sign
of vegetation, but a tangle of torn shtubs and the ruffled
and tangled appearance of these gardens is as odd as that of
the unswept floor of a hair seating manufactory. Near the
ditches and corners of these gardens men knee deep in mud
are looking anxiously about for the forms of women, and
men, and children, and lost property. The neighbourhood is
of red brick, and the height of the dark water mark on these
houses argues not only a fearful destruction of property,
but a not less fearful destruction of life. The flood has come
upon this low-lying neighbourhood like a thief in the night,
and the water mark allows that some of the houses have been
submerged nearly to the roof, some have been filled up to
the level of the second storey, and in others which stand a
little higher the water mark is about shoulder height."
In the town of Sheffield itself the destruction of property
as been almost greater than in the valley, but there, fcr-
tunately, it has been attended with comparatively little loss
of life. The Sheffield Telegraph states that--
" In the town the first alarm was given at about a quarter
past 12. The sharp hiss as of escaping steam, the sound as
of a mighty rush of water, made people rush towards the
river, when it was found that the Don was in an extraordi-
nary flood, and that some dreadful calamity had occurred.
At 2 o'clock the height and force of the current had greatly
abated. There was still a great volume of water, and the
roar with which it went along was like that of an express
train in a cutting. On Lady's bridge a great number of
people were standing looking over the parapets on the fear-
ful heaps of timber mixed with straw and other debris which
the flood had piled up against the masonwork of the bridge.
The immense quantity of rafters, flooring, joists, planks, and
miscellaneous articles heaped to within a few feet of the top
of the bridge told a portentous story of buildings destroyed,
and melancholy were the forebodings of those who looked on
the ruin. There seemed wood enough to build a village. But
bad as were the fears of those who looked on the evidences
of disaster, none knew how dreadful was the reality, and
the majority had not the most distant idea of the loss of life
that had occurred. At the police station was a little crowd
of poor ill-dressed people who had been flooded out of their
dwellings, and who were glad to spend the night crouching
round the fire ; and in the streets were several people mov-
ing about hastily with torches which they had improvised.
But as yet, beyond the sight of wet people and wet streets,
and beyond the roar of the river, and those ominous, but as
yet unexplained, heaps of timber about the bridge, there
was nothing known among the crowd of the loss of life, and
the spectators fondly hoped that the mass of wood might
prove to be nothing but the contractor's plant, increased by
rubbish swept from the banks of the river."
In the darkness ono could only guess, from the fearful
rumours that canto from the lower part of the town, what
the scene Illere would he at daylight. The wailing of Sa-

.1.................

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PRICE ...... ...4cl.
STAMPED ....sd.

turday fully realised the worst fears of the night. The
wooden bridge at Hillfoot had disappeared—completely
carried away by the first rush of water, and with a noise
that startled the sleepers around, who sprang from their
beds with alarm. The view from their windows did not
tend to reassure them, for the flood was all around, builicg
and seething along, filling the houses, rushing up the stairs,
floating the beds and furniture. The screams and cries for
help are described tee heal trendiug. Just below the bridge,
by the weir, stood a small house, occupied by James Shar-
man and his wife, who attended to the shuttle of the goit
that supplies Messrs. Butcher's works at Philadelphia. The
inmates were Sharman, his wife, and a daughter-in-law,
with several children. The watchmen aroused them when
the water began to rise, and they hastily left their dwelling.
Scarcely had they been out of the house a minute when the
current carried it away, and now not a vestige of the place
remains except the foundation. The bridge over the
gait went along with the house. At Philadelphia
corn-mills, which stands close to the water's edge, a
number of horses were drowned in their stables, pigs
in their sties, and fowls on their roost. We have not
heard that any life was lost at this point. Crossing
to Bacon Island, a low-lying piece of ground between the
goit and the river, the only access to which is now the nar-
row plank of the shuttle free :e, we came at once into what
had evidently been the very heart of the flood in this part
of the valley. Gardens were covered deep in slime. Trees,
hedges, and walls were levelled with the ground, A man
and his wife, named Wright, lived in a block of houses here,
with their child, and another child that was staying with
them. On Friday Wright went to a funeral, and the
neighbours did not know whether he had returned, but
both he and his wife and one child are missing. One little
thing was found in its bed after the water had sufficiently
subdued to enable men to get about, but the other members
of the household, perhaps aroused and attempting to escape,
have been carried away. In the block of houses, forming
an irregular square, of which Wright's formed a part,
every one is damaged to a greater or less extent." The
flood rose to the chambers and floated the inmates in their
beds. The lower apartments are filled with broken furni-
ture and mud. The doors and windows are broken in by
the flood, and by the trees and wood that it carried along
with it. Of course all the houses and works along the river
side have been flooded, and damage to a fearful extent has
been done. In Messrs. Butcher's works at Philadelphia the
body of a woman, perfectly naked, was found, and it was
believed that a whole family living near Neepsend-bridge
had been washed away. In Ebenezer-street the body of a
man, rather under the middle height, with a moustache, was
fund and conveyed to a house in Bowling-green-street. At
Kelham rolling-mill the men were compelled to escape by
the roof, and in so doing managed by some means to set it
on fire. When the flood had reached its height the water
rapidly subsided, leaving the marks of its presence in the
streets, which were in many places knee-deep in mud. Almost
before they were passable persons sallied from their houses,
and the evil news spread quickly. The streets of the town
were thronged with persons hurrying to different parts,
anxious to inquire into the fate of friends dwelling near
the level of the river. While the darkness lasted little
could be learnt from observation, but voices were heard
shouting greetings over the wastes of mud and water, and
eagerly inquiring how others had fared in the calamity.
One had heard the first rush, and sprang out of bed to see
the street filled with water. Another had been sleeping on
the ground floor and heard a rush of water, He awoke his
companion, who thought it rained hard. No, it could not
be rain, the rush was too great for that. The bed moved—
it was wet—he put out his foot, and found himself up
to the knees in cold water. Such incidents might be mul-
tiplied indefinitely. It needs only to be known that at the
dead of the night a great dark flood flowed through a
densely populated part of the town, rousing the sleepers
from their beds, and only to frequently drowning them
like rats in a hole. The horrors of Friday night are
known in the hearts of thousands, but can never be told.
The destruction of property all over the low-lying neigh-
bourhood round the
.Midland station has been enormous.
This portion of the town was for a time completely in-
undated. All the large manufacturers aro believed to
have suffered great loss, and the small householders are
mostly ruined. The loss of property is bad enough, but
the loss of life is the chief cause of regret here. Aroused
from their sleep in the dead of night, the poor people,
perhaps only half awake, seem to have made their way at
once into the streets, and were swept away instantly.
Several bodies recovered were partially dressed, while
others were entirely naked, their clothing having been
literally torn from their bodies by the violence of the stream.
Carried away by the furious current, several bodies have
been found in most extraordinary places—two having been
washed among the carriages in the Midland station.
The cast-iron bridge leading from the Crofts to Nursery-
street has been entirely demolished, not a vestige remaining.
The extreme force of the current at this point may be judged
from the fact that before reaching the iron bridge the cur-
rent would have been considerably weakened by first com-
ing in contact with the Corporation-bridge. But in spite
of everything buttresses, railing, and pavement have all
been swept away like mere timber, and carried to an enor-
mous distance down the river. The water dashed over the
wall on the Nursery-street side, actually tearing along with
it the stout iron railings and the stones in which they were
set. Large masses were driven across the street, a distance
of eight yards, while others were broken into flag-
meats and several gas-lamps thrown down. The
buildings on the opposite side of the street were consi-
derably damaged, and will require rebuilding in some
instances. The entire front of the Manchester Rail-
way Hotel was broken in. Several low buildings on the
water's edge, near the nursery corn mill, were swept entirely
away, and a number of horses, pigs, &c., with them. At
the corn mill the damage to the building was not large, but
the stock of grain and flour was much injured, if not ren-
dered entirely worthless. The horses were confined in a
stable in the yard, and the water rose to the height
of more than 6ft., but the stable being lofty the horses were
able to swim and were thus saved. All the houses in
Nursery-street were submerged five or six feet in water,
and the alarm of the inmates rose to a state of
frenzy when escape front their pitiable position seemed im-
possible. The buildings on both sides of the river, between
the corn mill and Lady's-bridge, have suffered greatly, and
all employment must be suspended for many days. The
inhabitants of this neighbourhood wore, however, more
easily able to extricate themselves than tho residents of
some of the narrow streets with which the Nursery abounds.
Stanley-street, Johnson-street, and Andrew-street were
less fortunate, and formed channels for broad streams of
water until daybreak on Saturday.

The walls surrounding Trinity Church were completely
destroyed, as were also those of Bethesda Chapoi, S tanley-
street. The school room of the latter, which forms the
basement story, was flooded to a considerable depth, and
the fittings much d tmaged.

The Attercliffe meadows on either side of the river are all
under water, and immense quantities of wreck have been
secured. The woi ks in course of erection by Messrs. Nay-
lor and Vickers, near the Brightside station, have sustained
serious damage, the chimney bases, &c., already erected,
having been washed down. The new wall skirting the
South Yorkshire line has been partly destroyed. The
bridge over this part of the river has stood, and an im-
mense mass of furniture and wreck has been stopped by it.
It is impossible now oven to approximate the value of the
property destroyed. No one seems for a moment to think
of this in the presence of the fearful loss of life, the full ex-
tent of which is not likely to be known for some days to
come. As is nearly always the case in these great public
calamities, it is the poorest districts of the town only which
have suffered. No accurate return can yet be made of the
injuries which the workshops and forges of the great ma-
nufacturers in this part of the town have sustained, but
from the enormous solidity of all their plant little more
than temporary inconvenience is likely to have been occa-
sioned by the water.

In the bread thoroughfare called the Wicker immense
damage has been done to the tradespeople. Rushing with
terrific force through Mr. White's slate. yard, close b 3
Lady's-bridge, the water carried everything before it, strew-
ing the carcasses of animals, pieces of machinery, and large
trees on every hand. Gradually the flood increased, and
within an hour of its first breaking through the river's brink
the houses and shops wero inundated to the depth of several
feet. The shutters of many of the shops wero torn down,
and the contents of the windows washed in all directions.
Many shops were at least 3ft deep in w ater, though standing
at a much greater elevation from the causeway than others
of less recent construction. The loss sustained by the
tradesmen in this neighbourhood will be very great, as
many of them had large stocks of goods in their cellars.
Several people aro missing in this neighbourhood ; four
bodios had been recovered by 5 o'clock on Saturday morning,
and convoyed to the Bull and Oak, but they have not been
identifie

DONCASTER, Saturday Evening.
'rho inundation
throughout
t h; ea entirena
not e
v e n valley
the
o f
greatthe
of damage as this has been.
The Don, owing
flood river
o fDon
1857 ha
w s a
s been
so unprecedented
Prolific
to late heavy rains, was unusually high,
and the additional water thrown into it by the Sheffield
calamity has thrown hundreds upon hundreds of acres un-
der water, and inflicted incalculable injury on the growing
crops..lnformation of the disaster was early telegraphed to
this town, and by the direction of Mr, Superintendent Gre-
gory, of the borough police force, intimation was at once
given to the inhabitantsof Marshgate, a district of Doncas-
ter contiguous to the Don, and in flood times under water.
Speedy steps to insure safety was taken, but at no time did
the water rise so high ;as to place human life in jeopardy.
About eight o'clock the water had risen so quickly that
Crimpsall, behind the Great Northern Railway sta-
tion, was covered, and with high water at Keadby at 10
o'clock It was feared that the water would spread, to the