The kid stays in the picture

[webofevil]

Alongside a story in its sports pages a couple of weeks ago, the Sunday Times ran a photo of a rugby scrum. The oddity that it contains is barely visible in the small version that it ran online and could easily have gone unnoticed:

However, the same image in the print edition was much bigger, allowing keen-eyed readers to spot this:

Is that a child? Who photoshopped a child in there? Was it to spare the blushes of Sunday Times readers because of a rogue cock adrift in the scrum? Was the picture editor hoping one day to sell the image on eBay for a vastly inflated price because it’s “haunted”? Or is the Sunday Times running some kind of competition, in which case what do we win?

Comments

[ruudboy.livejournal.com]

I think the child its real. If you look above its head in the big picture, there's a white horizontal bit that looks like the top of an advertising hoarding, and the child is a ballperson crouching down. The interesting thing is that the white stripe isn't in the small picture, even though the child still is.

[uniquefergus.livejournal.com]

There used to be a large Victorian workhouse on that same site run by an especially cruel man named Josiah Dudderton. Dudderton used to punish naughty children by locking them in the scullery without food, until one day he put a young boy in there and as he turned the key in the lock he had a stroke and was unable to move or talk for the rest of his life. The boy starved to death in that room and it all happened EXACTLY 100 YEARS AGO TODAY!

Or rather, 100 years ago from when the picture was taken, I should say.

Oh hang on...100 years ago isn't Victorian is it? Edwardian then, at a stretch.

Actually, it's probably a picture on the hoarding. Sorry.