Odd this day
Yes, it is, of course, the 61st anniversary of the ‘Great Train Robbery’, a subject on which it is difficult to shed new light… unless you’ve read this astoundingly horrid entry in The Dictionary of Disgusting Facts:
Look, I did say “astoundingly horrid”. You were warned. If you should want to read the first paragraph of the Fartleberries entry in that learned* tome, I reproduce it here
Yes, that is genuinely one of the worst things I have ever read, too, but I must sound a note of caution at this point. The book also alleges that a musical was once written about the murders at 10 Rillington Place with the magnificently tasteless title Corpus Christie and included such numbers as Underneath the Floorboards, Thank Evans for Little Girls and There are Femurs at the Bottom of my Garden.
The book, though, is neither footnoted nor indexed, and I have been able to discover nothing about such a show — or, indeed, about another entry, budgerigar casserole — anywhere else.
Extensive searches using various terms about the forensic evidence offered at the trial of the Great Train Robbers have also turned up nothing about excrement or the hairs on one’s fundament. I suspect there may be a clue in the name of the book’s foreword writer.
There are some facts in the book, but quite a lot of it is just nonsense made up to entertain us — and on that basis, I can recommend it highly. You’ll find it on abebooks. (But, obviously, you have been warned about its content. It also introduced me to the word ‘sooterkin’, about which the less said the better.)
Still, given that Ronnie Biggs and friends were, in fact
bungling thugs who were lucky not to be caught before they fled the scene
…perhaps the fartleberries story is no less credible than the myth of criminal masterminds getting one over on the establishment. And, in a world in which Cliff Richard played Heathcliff…
…it seems frankly unjust that there isn’t a 10 Rillington Place musical called Corpus Christie.
