Two old acquaintances meet on Vauxhall Bridge on a damp and foggy night in November. For one of them, the encounter seems an eerie echo of a strange mystery surrounding his father, who was last seen on Vauxhall Bridge exactly 15 years earlier...
Narrated/performed by Simon Stanhope, aka Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, there are a few ways you can support me:
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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:07 The Story begins
00:40:27 Credits, thanks and further listening
Bernard Capes (1854-1918) was born in London to a large family, one of eleven children (including an elder sister, Harriet Capes, who was a noted author of children's books). He began his writing career as a journalist and made countless contributions to popular magazines of the era, including the Illustrated London News, Pall Mall Magazine, The Idler, Cornhill Magazine, and Blackwood's. In 1889 he succeeded Clement Scott as editor of 'The Theatre', the leading magazine of the day for reviews and theatrical news, as well as sketches and stories.
In the course of his career Capes published more than forty volumes of fiction, including romances and mysteries, as well as poetry and historical novels. After giving up journalism to become a full time author, his work rate was prodigious: he typically produced three or four novels a year in his heyday in the late 1890s/early 1900s. Alongside his longer fiction, he also penned a great number of short stories for magazines and periodicals. He's probably best remembered today for his ghost stories, thanks in great part to Hugh Lamb, who rescued them from obscurity in the 1970s and included several of them in his anthologies. Capes died on 2 November 1918 at the age of 64, a victim of the global influenza pandemic which began that year.
'The Corner House' first appeared in a periodical entitled 'Short Stories' in November 1909, and was shortly after reprinted in The London Magazine (January 1910). It was subsequently published in book form as part of Capes's collection 'Bag and Baggage' in 1913.
A historical note: the "dynamiters" mentioned in this story may refer to the Fenian bombing campaign which took place in London between 1881 and 1885, led by Irish republicans fighting for an independent Irish state. This period saw a great number of dynamite attacks on targets such as London Bridge and government and military buildings, and led to the establishment of the secret police unit known as the Special Branch.
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2022.