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The Convocation of the Clergy for the Province of Canterbury was I formally prorogued on Saturday last, to Friday the 28th October, by Dr. Twin, the special commissioner of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
At a Court of Directors in the East India House, on Wednesday, the appointment of Mr. James Thomason, at present Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces, as Governor of Madras, and of Lord Elplun- stone as Governor of Bombay, was formally made.
The School of Design, with all its apparatus, is now removed from Somerset House to Marlborough House, there to form part of the Central School of the Department of Science and Art. The elementary instruc- tion formerly given at Somerset House will now be afforded in the dis- trict schools.
There was a grand Teetotal fête at the Surrey Zoological Gardens on Monday. The Teetotallers mustered in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and went thence in procession, headed by-the juvenile professors and accompanied by music, to the gardens.
The medical officer of the City Court of Sewers has reported to that body upon the state of nuisances connected with the altered system of slaughtering in Newgate Market. From this we learn, that the slaughterers who have been driven out of their cellar slaughterhouses in the City, have become sharers in the registered slaughterhouses in New- gate Market ;.eso that these have assumed the character of public slaughter- houses... There are twenty such places, and no fewer than 141,800 ani- a-dis are annually slaughtered there. This is a great nuisance to Pater- noster Row. The medical officer recommends new regulations with a view to prevent the use of slaughterhouses except by their owners, and to put an end to the removal of offal at any hour of the day. Asa justification of any strictness, the Court is referred to the fact that Asiatic cholera has broken out at Newcastle in an epidemic form. At a meeting of the Court on Wednesday, this report was referred to the Com- mittee for General Purposes, with the view of carrying out its recom- mendations.
The Holborn Board of Guardians have found that the provisions of the Nuisances-Removal and Diseases-Prevention Act are inadequate to sup- press all the nuisances brought under their notice. They have applied, therefore, to the Poor-law Board for direction ; and have received the following reply, signed " Courtenay, Secretary." "I am directed to state, that the Board have had the subject of the re- presentations made to them under their consideration ; and are of opinion that the Guardians have no power or authority which will enable them to remedy the evils referred to, except as arising under the statute 2d and 3d of Victoria, c. 71, s. 41, or the Nuisances-Removal Acts, 11th and 12th Vic- toria, c. 123, and 12th and 13th Victoria, c. 111. The first of these statutes gives a remedy against the occupiers of any house which is duly certified to be in such a filthy and unwholesome condition that the health of the im- mediate neighbourhood is thereby affected or endangered : but, in eases where the occupiers of the premises are very poor, the remedy would pro- bably be of very little avail to the Guardians. If, however, complaints are made to the Guardians by two or more householders, or certificates laid before them by the medical or relieving-officers as to the filthy and un- wholesome condition of the premises, in conformity with the provisions of the two latter statutes, which admit of proceedings being taken against the owners as well as the occupiers, the Board see no reason why a remedy may not be obtained, so far as to place the premises in a good state, by abating the nuisances referred to."
The ratepayers of the parish of Lambeth, assembled in Vestry, have resolved to purchase thirty acres of land at Wandsworth to form a paro- chial cemetery ; they are to pay 8001. an acre for it.
The "strong" shoemakers have struck for an advance of 10 per cent. Shops have been watched by "piquetsr to intercept any supply of labour at the ohbjeRWSpAID It is Police are again agitated on the wages questi. cid constables having obtained an ad- vance.f4 An
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ling fatally—unusually brutal even in Shepherd's Bush. The husband of the waseharged with the crime in the Ham-
mersmith Court, on Monday. From the evideace it would appear, that Hays, his wife, and two men famed Taylor abi e, were in Shepherd's Bush live and twelve o' last Saturday 'ea Hays had left t;iefeentoe , but he allowed hernsi some money weekly, and to obtain this she was following him. He replied to her demand with blows. Taylor sew Hays beat his wife with his fists, and when she sought refuge behindTaylor, that person told her to get from behind him, lest her husband might think he was harbouring bar. Mrs. Hays ran through the market, her brutal husband running after and kicking at her, and loudly threatening that he would "do for her" that night. Here we lose sight of the brute and his victim for a moment. But Serie, a Policeman, deposed, that about one o'clock, be heard a noise which seemed to come from the ground newly dug out for the foundations of some houses, close by the market. He went to the spot, and found Hays standing there, pale, trem- bling, and much stupified. Berle ordered him to move on : at first he would not move, but stood there sighing and shivering. At length he went away. [The body of his wife, concealed from Serie by the fog, lay close by.] Next morning, soon after six, a Policeman, directed by some women to the spot, found Mrs. Hays lying in a hole, apparently lifeless. On being turned over she managed to open one of her eyes—that waa all. She was taken to the station in Brook Green ; thence, later, to the house of her brother-in- law, where she died. She had been kicked and beaten very much. Hays was remanded for a week.
An inquest was held on the body of Mrs. Hays, on Wednesday ; the evi- dence given in the Police Court was repeated; and the inquest was adjourned. The two men, George and Taylor, who did not protect Mrs. Hays from her husband, gave as an excuse that they feared the hundred Irish within a stone's-throw. Mr. Brent, the Coroner, warmly expressed himself on the subject.
A man has been robbed at night, near Smithfield, by two women ; who accosted him, hustled him, knocked him down, kicked him, and rifled his pockets, leaving him insensible. These savage highwaywomen have been captured, examined before Alderman Wire, and committed for trial.
Two men, Lee and Buck, have been committed by the Worship Street Ma- gistrate on a charge of burglary and assault. Mrs. Bastable was alone in a house at Hackney ; being unwell, she had laid down on her bed in the afternoon ; she was roused by two men entering the room. They fled, but she seized both of them in the passage ; they struck her, got outside, and made off ; but Mrs. Beatable pursued and raised an alarm : she herself seized Lee, and Buck was stopped by other persons. Altogether, Mrs. Beatable ex- hibited extraordinary courage and endurance.
Mr. James Taylor, an elderly man, owner of a good many houses at Hack- ney, has been sent to prison for six weeks, by the Worship Street Magistrate, for assaulting Mrs. Manning. He owed some money to her husband ; she asked him for it in the streets : he had been drinking—his "custom of an afternoon —and he replied by striking her on the head with a thick stick, inflicting a severe wound, and rendering her senseless for a time. He was disagreeably surprised when he heard that he was not to escape with a fine.
Charles Wheeler has been sent to prison by Sir Peter Laurie for a petty robbery which might have produced fatal consequences—stealing a portion of a gas-pipe from a public-house taproom. The landlord found the room full of gas : fortunately, no one entered with a light. Many publicans have suffered from similar depredations, but they could not recognize Wheeler as the thief.
An inquest has been held at the workhouse of St. George the Martyr, Southwark, on John Ilickie, a man who died from Asiatic cholera. Hiaie lived in a place near Friar Street, Blaekfriars Road; a district notorious for its trade nuisances—premises occupied by bone-boilers or catgut-makers, and knackers' yards. The air is fetid with the odours arising from the collected tons of bones, or from operations upon them. Numbers of poor persons live in streets and alleys of a miserable kind, where the drainage 18 deficient or wanting altogether. Riche lived in a small house under an extensive bone- warehouse, and above and around him were all the elements for generating disease. An officer from the Queen's Bench Prison complained of the suf- ferings of the prisoners from the foul smells proceeding from the Friar Street district. The Jury returned this verdict—" That the deceased died from Asiatic cholera, induced by the unwholesome trades carried on in the neigh- bourhood; that it is the opinion of the Jury that the Board of Guardians ought to be invested with the authority they formerly held under the Board of Health in such matters, and that that power should be continuous."
A Guardian said, that on the previous evening a special meeting of the Board of Guardians had been held, when it was determined to use all means in their power to obtain a remedy for these evils. The following resolution had been adopted—" That the relieving-officers shall get all the information they can by house-to-house visitation, that the Board may make a strong appeal to the Board of Health for powers to suppress these nuisances."
An inquest has been held at Guy's Hospital on William Termer, a fireman in the service of the Brighton Railway Company, who suffered by a collision near New Cross on the 27th August. It appears that he was on an engine attached to a coal-train which was proceeding along the branch from Dept- ford Wharf to New Cross—a line used merely for coal and luggage. By some error or mismanagement, a danger-signal was not exhibited at New Crow, though the branch was obstructed by a train of empty carriages, When the driver of the coal-train was warned by a man, there was not that to stop the train ; Beardman, the driver, told Jenner to leap off, and he leaped off' himself; but Jenner remained on the engine, and his leg and thigh were fractured. From the evidence it seemed probable that a man had turned off a danger-signal under a misapprehension ; this man was a locum-tenens for the ordinary signal-man, who was busy with an engine, he having incompatible duties to perform. The Tin-v pronounced the death "Accidental," but blamed the Company for the defective arrangements. It was stated that the Company had now ordered that a signal-man should be specially appointed to attend to the signal on the branch line.
The inquest on the sufferers by the fall of the house in the Strand com- menced on Saturday. Mr. George Rowe, the clerk of the works, died in the hospital early on that morning. Surgeons described the appearance of the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and George Dunne the shopman ; the bruises and abrasions were trifling, and death had evidently resulted from suffocation. Policeman Goodsell witnessed the fall of the building from the opposite side of the Strand : he was looking at the house, heard a crack, and in half a minute the house was a heap of ruins.
Eliza Stanhouse, a girl of eighteen, servant to Mr. Thompson, detailed her own narrow escape from death. "I was in the kitchen of the house at the time. I heard a slight crack. It seemed to proceed from just where I was standing, close by the pavement. I at once threw myself down into the vault in front, which goes down under the street by four steps from the kitchen. I felt considerably alarmed when I heard the crack, because we had been saying for the last three or four days_ that the house was not safe. So, when I heard the crack, I thought directly, That is the house going' ; and I threw myself down ititti; the vault. As soon es Vrecovered and got upon my feet, I heard a nOhge like thunder. It waslielefeetiv dark, and I could see nothing. None of the ruins fell upon me, but they blocked up the entrance to the vault, and made the place completely dark. I was about an, hour and a half' in the vault altogether before I was got out. After I had been in about half an hour, the rubbish was removed from the top of the grating in the street, and I assuaged to makemyself heard. But before that, anould say that I had put the gas out, because a beam had fallen down and had broken the gas-pipe, and I was being suffocated with the escape of gua and the rubbish, I got upon a box, and, as I knew the position of the meter, I reached it and turned off the gas. About an hour after that I made some one hear me, and the people called down to me." A few minutes before the house fell, she saw Mrs. Thompson in the back- parlour, dressing ; Mr. Thompson was in the back-shop; and Dunne was cleaning a fanlight over the door. She said they had thought the house to be in a dangerous state, especially since the preceding Tuesday—" everybody who Caine into the house said it was not safe," Shrimp/in, a carpenter, described how the wall of the house was shored np. The wall was fifty feet high; some of the shores touched it at thirty feet, others at thirty-six feet. The wall was "tender "—old, with little strength in the mortar. He was at work under the wall ; Mr. Rowe was hard by ; they heard a crack, and saw the wall falling out about twelve feet from the top. Witness and Mr. Rowe ran from the wall, but Mr. Rowe Stumbled and fell. In one or two places a trench had been dug below the foundation of the house. On Tuesday part of a low wall at the rear had fallen, but it was not connected with Use house itself. He didn't know that the holes weakened the house, but "they wouldn't do it no good" : Mr. Rowe directed the excavations to be made. Three days before, the wall of No. 184 was tried with a plumb-line : it was only An inch or two out of the upright; and Mr. Rowe, who was a man of great experience, said there wail no danger. Mr. Bush, a builder who had been consulted by Mr. Thompson about taking clown the party-wall, believed that the house had not been sufficiently supported, both inside and out. He thought the cause of the accident had been the giving way of the floors and the lower part of the wall failing and bulging out ; which it would do on account of the shores resting only against the upper part. Had there been shores under the timber joists below, he did not think the accident would have happened. As it was, for want of support the wall bulged out below the point where the raking shores sup- ported it, and came down, and of course the upper part followed it. Mr. Henderson, a photographic Artist who occupied a portion of the upper part of the house, deposed that he had removed his property and had ceased to Bleep in the place for three months past, because he believed it insecure. Persons had complained of the strange vibration in the house. On Tuesday he noticed a large crack in the angle formed by the front and the party wall : Mr. Thompson said there was no danger.
The inquiry was adjourned till next Monday, apparently that surveyors unconnected with the building operations in the Strand might examine into the causes of the accident.
Since the disaster in the Strand the district surveyors have been on the qui vive, and not without cause. It has been deemed necessary to shore up houses in St. Martin's Court, Ludgate Hill, in Fleet Street, and in Long Acre. Holywell Street has been closed to vehicles ; the extra traffic last week seems to have gone far to shake down some of the crazy houses.
About one o'clock last Saturday morning, a .fire broke out at hiillwall, Poplar, which consumed property valued at upwards of 100,0001. It origi- nated in the iron steam-ship manufactory of Messrs. J. Scott Russell and Co.; and a large portion of the buildings in the yards was swept away. Stacks of timber were consumed; and two large ahms, one just ready to be launched, were damaged. From Russell's yard the flames extended to the steam-engine factory of Messrs. Napier, and a very extensive timber-building was burnt : the firemen then arrested the havoc. One side of Russell's yard escaped, and thus the large body of workmen will not be thrown entirely idle. Messrs. Russell and Co. were insured in the Sun, Atlas, Globe, Phcenix, and West of England offices, for 90,000/. From the way in which the Isle of Dogs extends Southwards, the firemen were at first at fault, and hastened to Deptford ; whence they had to return to London Bridge to cross the river. A floating engine worked by steam was brought into operation at this fire : it threw immense volumes of water, and was of great service. Unfortunately, this engine is not navigated by steam, and a considerable time elapsed before it reaehed the ground. Messrs. Russell and Co.'s premises contained very costly machines, and patterns and models the results of many years of thought, skill, and labour ; these the fire swept away or rendered valueless.