YORK is a city with a very long history. So it is little surprise that it should also be a city with many forgotten secrets.

Among the more shocking is an event that reputedly took place in Pavement one Saturday in 1839.

In those days, Saturday was auction day in Pavement, writes local historian Paul Chrystal in his new book Secret York. And, according to W Camidge’s Ye Olde Street of Pavement, from which Paul quotes, among the “possessions” up for sale on this particular Saturday was...a wife.

“Not least interesting was the sale (in 1839) of a woman,” Camidge wrote in 1893. “She had left her husband through his drunken habits and ill treatment, and in one of his mad freaks he had brought her into the Market Place...with a halter round her neck.

“She was mounted on a table beside the auctioneer, who descanted on her virtues and spoke of her as a clean, industrious, quiet and careful woman, attractive in appearance and well mannered.”

She was sold, Paul notes, for the princely sum of 7s 6d (halter included) – and proceeded to live with the man who had bought her near Pavement.

“Twenty years later, her husband died and she married said purchaser; she herself died in the 1880s at a great age, respectable and respected.”

It is nice that the story had a happy ending, but we hope no latter-day readers will get any ideas...

York Press: Girls from St Stephen's Orphanage, Trinity Street, on a day out to Filey in July 1919

Among other stories Paul unearths in his book is that of the York Lunatic Asylum – later to be renamed Bootham Park Hospital.

In 1814, Paul writes, part of the asylum burned down, with the tragic loss of four patients and all the patient records. That was perhaps a little convenient, he notes, since “the fire coincided with allegations of mismanagement.”

In that same year – 200 years ago today – a magistrate visited the asylum and reported that it was ‘in a shocking state... a number of secret cells in a state of filth horrible beyond description’. The floor, the magistrate added, was covered with ‘straw perfectly soaked with urine and excrement.”

Not all the secrets Paul has unearthed for his book are quite so lurid. He tells the story, for example, of Blind Tom, the ‘inexplicable phenomenon’.

It is a story that beings shockingly enough. Tom was an ex-slave who, as a baby, was a ‘make weight’ thrown into the deal when his mother was bought by a tobacco planter. He was described at the time as a ‘lump of black flesh born blind, and with the vacant grin of idiocy.’

From such humble beginnings, however, he went on to have an extraordinary career as a pianist, who had considerable success on the novelty and trick circuit. A protégé and ‘valued friend’ of Charles Dickens, his most confusing feat, Paul records, was “to play one air with his left hand, another with his right in a different key, whilst he sang a third tune in a different key again.”

In 1866, having wowed London audiences, he made an appearance in York, an event that was heralded in the aptly-named York Herald newspaper of October 20 that year with the headline: ‘Blind Tom is Coming! Blind Tom, The Inexplicable Phenomenon!’ As well as a wealth of such stories, Paul’s book is also richly illustrated with old photographs. A good many come from his own collection - but others are from The Press, where Paul spent some time rummaging through our archives.

Among the more striking pictures in the book is an image of estate workers sweeping the streets of New Earswick in ‘about 1910’; a photograph of an early removal van - pulled by a steam-powered engine - bearing the name ‘James Bowman & Son, Monk Bar’ on the side; and an extraordinary picture of a mobile ‘gas shop’ in 1929.

York Press:
 A James Bowman removals wagon

It shows a York Gas Company truck pulling behind it a large van mounted on small wheels. ‘The York Gas Company Travelling Showroom’, says the lettering on the van.

Paul has also dug out, amongst many others, a wonderful photograph of the old Forsselius garage on Blossom Street in the 1920s; a picture of girls from the St Stephen’s Orphanage in Trinity Lane on an outing to Filey in July 1919; and a view of Museum Street in 1955, crammed with cycles, buses and taxis. “Be careful what you wish for,” he notes wryly in the caption.

Secret York by Paul Chrystal is published by Amberley priced £14.99. It is available from bookshops, the Amberley website (www.amberleybooks.com) and Amazon