Inside Croydon

CROYDON CHRONICLES: There are times when life, and death, can be stranger than fiction. Archive research by DAVID MORGAN suggests that a ‘Verne-esque’ sci-fi writer died in Croydon 25 years earlier than previously recorded

Documents have come to light which show that a prominent science fiction writer of the Victorian era, a contemporary of HG Wells, who had his books compared to Jules Verne,  died in Croydon in 1905, more than 25 years earlier than suggested in other published accounts, including Wikipedia.

Newspaper reports from 1905 of the inquest into the death of John Munro, and a death certificate, confirm that the electrical engineer and author had died in his home on St John’s Grove, Croydon, in June 1905.

Only now can the real story of how John Munro died be told.

John Munro was a professor of mechanical engineering at Bristol who had written expert papers and books on electricity – which was quite the sensation in the later years of the 19th Century.

He used his scientific mind and considerable imagination to write a series of science fiction stories, too, tapping into another popular genre of the age. Munro’s books – Sun-Rise in the Moon, A Message from Mars and A Trip to Venus – were even described by their publishers as “Verne-esque”, comparing him to the great French author of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Continue reading →