James Evans, Fireman; How He Extinguished a Human Torch

Good evening. This is Crime Classics. I am Thomas Highland with another true story of crime. Listen. Going to a fire in 1826, a team of horses pulling the fire into the Norwich Union Boys Firehouse, arriving at a fire. The Norwich Union Boys doing what they best like to do, snuffing out fires in Manchester, England.

There goes one of the Norwich Union boys right into the thick of it, smoke and flame as the densest chopping things the way he was taught to do. The trouble is he was a novice. He hadn't learned to discriminate. Yes sir. Tonight my report to you on James Evans fireman. How he extinguished a human torch. Crime

classics. A series of true crime stories taken from the records and newspapers of every land from every time. Your host each week, Mr. Thomas Highland, connoisseur of crime, student of violence and teller of murders. Now once again, Mr. Thomas Highland.

Civic-minded people called Manchester Cottonopolis, but those who could never forget the Peter Lou Massacre called it the City of Orphans, among other epithets, some in Gaelic. This massacre you'll remember was simply a matter of shooting and riding down and thereby slaughtering some thousand citizens who gathered in a park to protest the corn laws. Mary Warden's mother

and father had the distinction of being trampled to death by the same cavalryman, and on Mary Warden's tenth birthday too. And what happened to Mary Warden is this. She was removed immediately to mother Winnie Penn's Souls Harbor orphanage, where she spent the next six years learning to be a drudge. Then one day...

That one bear, Winnie Pen. Mary Warden. Hi, if that be her name. She's crab for you and cook and earn her keep. Of her dexterity. Tell me that. With a needle her fingers fly like a doolly bird.