A Grim Almanac of Birmingham

Book excerpt: Discover 366 gruesome tales from Birmingham's past. With appalling accidents, frightful crimes and extraordinary deaths, there's something to surprise even the most hardened reader. Featured here is the man who deliberately swallowed his wooden walking stick, a nineteenth-century horsemeat scandal, a drunken dispute that led to a man being stabbed in the eye with a table fork, and the lightning storm which hit a fog-signalling factory, setting off 43,000 explosions. True accounts of fires, catastrophes, murders, executions and a variety of nasty goings-on in the Birmingham of yesteryear await you within.