This misadventure, another suicide comes from the Wakefield and West Riding Herald of 15th November 1902.
Fanny Beck obviously didn’t like life that much in Leicester as as school mistress and took a multitude of poisonous substances including phosphorus and match heads, which would have contained phosphorus given that the sale of those containing the substance was still legal at this time.
Locked up in an asylum after downing the cocktail, she died just a couple of days later. Times were obviously much harder than today yet the obtainable ease of being able to buy this chemical cheaply sadly offered a way out for many who could not cope.
It would take another 61 years before rat poison containing P4 was banned in the UK.
