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  • 2022-09-23 (xsd:date)
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  • Did 79 Die in a Bridge Collapse While Watching a Clown's Stunt? (en)
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  • On Sept. 23, 2022, a curious Reddit post on the r/todayilearned (TIL) subreddit took off like a rocket and quickly made its way to the website's front page. Its title read, TIL that in 1845, 79 people died in a bridge collapse that happened because a large crowd had gathered to watch a clown in a bathtub be pulled up a river by four geese. According to historical records, all of this was true. The Liverpool Echo recounted the old story in 1959. The newspaper headline read, The Goose Ride to Tragedy, and called the incident the maddest publicity stunt of 1845. We also looked to original reporting from Jackson's Oxford Journal, which was published within days of the tragedy. The setting for this story was on the River Bure in Great Yarmouth. The seaside town is on the east coast of England, about a three-hour drive from London. It all happened on a Friday night. On the evening of May 2, 1845, a crowd gathered to see an act known as Mr. Nelson, who was a clown with William Cooke's circus. The stunt, which was promoted on a large flyer, consisted of the clown sitting in a bathtub in the river and being pulled by four geese. One flyer appeared to indicate that Cooke would portray the role of the clown. The idea sounded innocent enough. Unfortunately, as the clown performed the act with the geese, the Yarmouth suspension bridge collapsed under the immense weight of hundreds of people. Some 400 spectators were reported to have fallen into the water. Just as the Reddit post said, 79 people died, with 51 of them being children under the age of 14. We transcribed some of the original reporting from Jackson's Oxford Journal, which was published eight days after the incident on May 10: The original reporting said that the mass-casualty event caused Cooke, the man responsible for the stunt with the clown, bathtub, and geese, to experience a very deep feeling of distress. The story also described perhaps upwards of 94 people were initially believed to have died. That number was later reduced to an official count of 79 deaths. The newspaper article from 1845 also included these eyewitness accounts, which we have transcribed to make them searchable on the internet: Some 114 years later, the Liverpool Echo published a 1959 column that shed more light on the full outcome of the investigation into the disaster. The cause of the tragedy, beyond the immense weight of the hundreds of people who had gathered on the bridge to watch the clown and geese, was found to have been a welding defect: Around 168 years after the deadly accident, BBC.com reported in 2013 that a memorial had been erected to remember the lives that were lost. In sum, it's true that, in 1845, 79 people tragically lost their lives after a bridge collapsed in Great Yarmouth during a gathering to watch a clown in a bathtub be pulled by geese. (en)
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