Category Archives: Humour

by jfwknifton | January 9, 2016 · 3:13 pm

“Go straight to Hell ! Do not pass Go ! ” Part One

Having explored the history of the High School for more than twenty five years, I have always thought that the school’s beginnings are shrouded in mystery. For me, the High School has always been very like the Soviet Union:

“a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”

What do we know about the founder of the school, Dame Agnes Mellers, for example? What was she like as a person? There are a very few illustrations which are thought to be her. This is the school’s charter:

And here is a close-up of Dame Agnes and King Henry VIII:

This is the charter changed into a line drawing:

For me, there have always seemed to have been two enormously important motivating forces in her character. The first was her staunch religious faith as a Roman Catholic with a sincere love of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. Dame Agnes seems in many ways to have been an uncomplicated soul, who viewed the world in a simple direct way. She tried to be a good person, with the sincere belief that we should all try to make things better rather than worse, that we should do good things rather than evil and that we should always strive to be on the side of the Angels.

The second motivation for her was the love she had for her husband, Richard, which seems as sincere and unswerving as her love for the Church. Richard was, as his name suggests, a rich man. He was at one time or another, Sheriff of Nottingham (1472-1473), Chamberlain (1484-1485) and Royal Commissioner and Mayor of Nottingham (1499-1500 and again in 1506). In 1499, he is known to have given twenty shillings to help repair the Hethbeth Bridge, as Trent Bridge’s predecessor was called. Here is one of the last photographs ever taken of the old bridge before it was superseded by the present Trent Bridge. You can certainly see why it was easier for the river to freeze up in those days:

This is all that remains of the Hethbeth Bridge nowadays:

It is in the middle of a road island to the south of Trent Bridge. If you decide to take a look at it, be very careful of the traffic and use the proper crossings. Look for the (camouflaged) orange arrow in the centre of the (red) road junction:

Richard Mellers was a brazier, and probably a potter, and he had certainly dealt in metal pots and dishes. Most important of all, he owned the largest church bell-foundry in the region. The site of his premises has long disappeared, but its exact location is still known today.

From 1888 onwards, just a very few yards north of the city centre, steps began to clear away:

“a curious V-shaped slice of slum property…a most unhygienic and immoral neighbourhood and nothing good could be said for it”.

This slum clearance took a number of years, and resulted in the formation of King Street and Queen Street, the latter being opened on June 22nd, 1892.

During this time, it was inevitable that, along with all the slums and all the undesirable features, a few other more reputable premises were destined to disappear. Among these was Richard Mellers’ Bell Foundry, which is known to have stood more or less exactly on the site of the present day Queen Street Post Office. The orange arrow points to the general area, and the letters PO stand for the purple edged Post Office:

Perhaps it was working so close to such an “immoral neighbourhood” that deflected Richard away from the straight and narrow. He had, for example, already paid out £20 to be the Mayor of Nottingham for twelve months. There wasn’t really much of the democratic process involved here, or indeed, much evidence of any genuine interest in the workings of democracy. That payment of £20, a rather sizeable sum of money by modern standards, may well have been the reason that, in the very same year, Richard had been so keen to do a good deed by paying for the upkeep of the ever ailing Hethbeth Bridge.

Richard was certainly widely known as a fairly unscrupulous businessman. During his lifetime, in his efforts to acquire great personal wealth, he certainly seems to have cheated many of his bell buying customers. In 1507, for example, we know that Richard had received a pardon for having committed offenses against the statutes of weights and measures. This charge is believed to have related to problems with the purity of his bells and the metal they contained. The pardon would only have been granted because of his previous position as Mayor of Nottingham. A less prestigious person would have been in very, very, serious trouble. These bells, though, are all 100% the real peal:

To be continued……………………….

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Filed under Criminology, History, Humour, Nottingham, The High School

Tagged as Catholic Church, Dame Agnes Mellers, Dr.Gow, Duke of Portland, Edward VI, Elizabeth I, F. J. Snell, Founder’s Day, Heaven, Hell, Hethbeth Bridge, High School, King Street, Mayor of Nottingham, Mr.Reynolds, Nottingham, nun, public school, Queen Mary, Queen Street, Richard Mellers, Roman Catholic, Sammy Corner, Sheriff of Nottingham, St.Mary’s Church, Trent Bridge, vowess

by jfwknifton | January 5, 2016 · 11:01 am

When the mighty Trent turned into a tiny stream…

In a couple of previous articles, I have mentioned two different extremes of weather at Trent Bridge, namely freezing ice and snow and then, quite frequently straight afterwards, horrific floods, when a sudden melt of huge snowdrifts overfills the river. Such a sequence of events may raise the water level by twelve or fifteen feet above normal and increase the rate of flow to a situation when 45,000 cubic feet of floodwater go past the bridge every second, as opposed to the more normal figure of 3,000. What I have not mentioned so far though, is a complete lack of rainfall and the consequent drought.

Almost a thousand years ago, in 1101, Nottingham experienced a terrifying earthquake. Here are some people in 1100. Can you spot Robin Hood? (He is wearing a cunning, yet comfortable disguise in his traditional Lincoln Green.)

Bizarrely, once the earthquake had stopped, the River Trent dried up and then ceased to flow for several hours, presumably as it drained into, and then eventually filled up, a huge crack or cavern in the ground that the earthquake had created somewhere upstream from Nottingham. Once that was done, the waters returned to normal. Another source gives the date of this amazing event as 1110 and says that the River Trent was dry at Nottingham for 24 hours. Strictly speaking, though, that is not a genuine bona fide drought.

Two hundred years or so later though, in 1354, the weather was extremely dry in the whole of England:

“This year, the country was affected with a great drought, in which Nottinghamshire, from its peculiar geographical position, suffered extremely; in both Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire no rain had fallen from the latter end of March until the close of July.”

It is difficult to believe that this prolonged lack of rain would not have affected the amount of water flowing under Hethbeth Bridge. Here are some people in 1354. It looks like the start of a football match to me:

The four years of 1538-1541 produced extreme drought throughout the whole country, with three successive fine and hot summers from 1538-1540. In the latter year, cherries could be picked and eaten by the beginning of June. Grapes were ripe by early July. Both 1540 and 1541 were exceptionally dry years overall, and in both summers, the River Thames was so low that sea water backed up above London Bridge. It would be interesting to know what effect such amazingly hot and dry weather must have had on the River Trent. Here are some people of this period, waiting for a shower of rain, but looking a little worried that global warming has perhaps started five hundred years too early. I wouldn’t have liked the hat with the feather:

That dry summer of 1540 was the warmest until 2003, and countries in Western Europe christened it the ‘Big Sun Year’. Very high temperatures prevailed from Germany to the Netherlands and no rain fell in Rome for at least nine months. Many people died of heat stroke and heart failure. Reportedly the waters of the River Rhine were so low that the river could be crossed on horseback. People could walk across the River Seine in Paris without getting their feet wet. In England during these four years:

“rivers and streams were drying out in parts. A remarkable series of droughts, with a burning sun during the summer”.

In 1541:

“At Nottingham a remarkable drought; almost all the small rivers dried up, and the River Trent diminished to a straggling brook. Many cattle died for want of water, especially in the county of Nottinghamshire, and many thousands of persons died from grievous diarrhoea and dysentery.”

“Trent a straggling brook”

I could not find any pictures of the Trent as a “straggling brook”, but this is close. And no, the hot weather did not attract any elephants to Nottingham:

Forty years later, in 1581 the River Trent apparently “dried up completely” but further details of this event are not very much in evidence, beyond the rather strange date when it was supposed to have occurred, supposedly December 21st. Perhaps a build up of ice higher upstream brought the river’s flow to a stop.

Ten years later, in 1591,

“A severe drought destroyed practically all the crops and vegetation in the areas around Nottingham. The rivers Trent and Erewash, plus other rivers, were almost without water.”

People actually remarked how like Texas the landscape had become:

There was another “uncommon drought in Nottinghamshire” in the spring of 1592. In the summer there were strong westerly winds to dry the land even further, and hardly any rain fell.

“The Trent and other rivers were almost without water. In summer, the Thames was so shallow that horsemen could ride across near London Bridge & the River Trent was also said to be almost dry.”

This is the old London Bridge of this period:

After this, there is then a hiatus of some three or four hundred years until the twentieth century. I have been unable to trace any other noticeably dry periods during this intervening time. The next striking piece of dry weather comes in the mid-1970s, with an absolutely scorching summer in 1975. This initial heat and drought was followed by a very dry winter, and then the unforgettable drought conditions of the summer of 1976. These periods of extreme weather saw the River Trent during the end of the month of August 1976 at its very lowest level in modern times. Indeed, this summer produced what was called the Great European Drought with the lowest soil moisture readings in London since 1698.

Unfortunately nobody in Nottingham seems to have thought of preserving this amazing weather with their camera. Instead, I will just show you one or two typical scenes. Here is an unknown reservoir which should have been a vast lake. Flap those flares:

Here is a reservoir at Huddersfield in Yorkshire:

Here is a lock on what should have been a brim full canal:

This is the River Thames at Kew near London. The River Trent at Nottingham would presumably have been comparable:

And finally, here is Walton Reservoir in Surrey, being monitored by the least appropriately dressed man in 1976:

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Filed under History, Humour, Nottingham, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Derbyshire, drought, earthquake, Erewash, Hethbeth Bridge, London Bridge, Nottinghamshire, River Rhine, Seine, Trent Bridge

by jfwknifton | November 26, 2015 · 7:12 pm

The very first football season of them all 1888-1889 (Part 2)

In my previous article about the involvement of the High School’s ex-pupils in the newly invented Football League. I spoke in some detail about the career of Arthur Frederick Shaw, who played twice for Notts County in that inaugural season of 1888-1889, before going on to make two more League appearances the following season. He then continued his career in the Second Division with firstly Nottingham Forest and then Loughborough. Here is the Notts County kit that he would have worn during that first season:

When Arthur Shaw made his first appearance in the Football League on December 8th 1888, at home to Aston Villa, a narrow 2-4 defeat for the Magpies in front of 2,000 spectators, he was the inside right (No 8). In the same team, playing at left full back (No 3) was the splendidly named Herbert Durrant Snook, a fellow ex-pupil of the High School.

Born on December 23rd 1867, Herbert Snook entered the High School on September 11th 1876. He left at Christmas in 1882. Herbert was one of four brothers, the sons of James Snook, a wholesale merchant and draper. The family lived initially in Elm Avenue, Nottingham, before their fortunes improved dramatically and they moved to Penrhyn House, in Clumber Road, The Park, Nottingham:

The other three Snooks at the High School were James Brasher Snook, Frederick William Snook and Percy Walter Snook. All three played for Notts County in various F.A.Cup ties and friendlies, but never in the Football League.

In that first season of League Football, Herbert also played in three F.A.Cup ties. These were all home games, against Eckington (4-1), Beeston St.John’s (4-2) and Derby Midland (2-1). Herbert played as a right full back (No 2) against Beeston St.John’s, but as a left full back in the two other games. The Cup Ties against Eckington and Beeston St.John’s were both contested by Notts County’s reserve side. On the same day, the First Team played Football League fixtures against Blackburn Rovers (3-3, 4,000 spectators) and Burnley (6-1, 5,000 spectators), both games taking place immediately after the Cup games. The crowd against Beeston St.John’s and Burnley must have gone home happy. It isn’t often that County win two successive games and score ten goals doing it. Here is Notts County’s Meadow Lane. It is the football stadium in the top right. Nottingham Forest’s City Ground is towards the bottom of the picture, on the southern side of the River Trent:

Herbert’s brother, Frederick William, played against Eckington and Beeston St.John’s, at centre forward (No 9) in the first game, and as inside right ((No 8) in the second. A third Old Nottinghamian to play was Henry Harold Brown who was at the High School from 1874-1878. He appeared as outside left (No 11) in both games and scored a brace of goals against Beeston St.John’s. His brother, Gilbert Noel Brown, yet another ex-pupil of the High School, played as centre forward (No 9) in this game.

In 1890, Herbert Snook was one of the earliest shareholders in the newly formed “Notts Incorporated Football Club”, although during the 1888-1889 season he had played in two friendlies for Nottingham Forest, the first against Stoke City (1-2), the annual Shrove Tuesday match. Here is the Stoke City kit:

The second game was against his old team, Notts County (2-5). In excess of 5,000 spectators watched the match. On March 12th 1891, Herbert appeared for the Old Boys in their 3-1 victory over the High School First XI at the Gregory Ground, the home of both the High School footballers and of Nottingham Forest.

Herbert was to spend most of his life living at “The Cedars”, Derby Road, Lenton, Nottingham. He was keen on tennis, and in partnership with Gilbert Noel Brown, held the county men’s doubles championship for many years. Herbert was well known in political circles as a liberal, and worked in the old established family business of James Snook and Company Ltd., who were wholesalers and clothing manufacturers in Houndsgate, Nottingham. In actual fact, Herbert was still working until well into his eightieth year, after forty years as chairman and managing director, and a grand total of sixty two years in the company. Immediately after Herbert’s retirement, the business was taken over by a Birmingham firm. Herbert died on October 13th 1947, at the age of seventy nine, after an illness lasting some months. He was buried in the family vault in the Church Cemetery on Mansfield Road. Here is the Church Cemetery, a Victorian masterpiece. It has a permanent staff of eight vampires:

Playing at right half (No 4) on December 8th 1888, against Aston Villa, alongside Arthur Shaw and Herbert Snook, was a third ex-High School pupil, namely G.H.Brown. Strangely, there are two likely candidates of this name in the Victorian school registers at the High School.

The first possibility is George Henry Brown, the son of Samuel Brown, a fish and game dealer of 96, Sherwood Street, Nottingham. He would have been nineteen years of age when the match against Aston Villa took place. A better fit though, would be George Hutchinson Brown, the twenty one year old son of George Wilkinson Brown, a grocer and chandler of firstly 14, Colville Terrace, and then 62, Addison Street, Nottingham. We will probably never know the answer to this enigma, unless Notts County have a dusty box full of players’ contracts from this era, hidden away somewhere, perhaps among the cobwebs of their trophy room.

George Hutchinson Brown was to wear his admittedly un-numbered shirt as a right half (No 4) for most of that historic first season. He played 19 times out of a possible 22 games. He had the honour of playing in County’s first ever League game, a 1-2 defeat away to Everton at Goodison Park, and also in their first ever home game, a 3-3 draw with Blackburn Rovers. Here is the Blackburn Rovers’ strip, very similar to the present day:

Notts County’s first ever league victory came in their fifth game of the season, and was a 3-1 home win over Everton. George Hutchinson Brown was again the team’s right half. Here is the Everton kit:

George also played in County’s first ever away win in the League. This was a long, long, wait, until Match 18 out of 22, a 2-1 win over Accrington on January 26th 1889, County’s only victory away from home in the whole season. Here are the Accrington colours:

George Brown’s solitary goal came in a narrow 2-5 away defeat against Blackburn Rovers at Ewood Park, in front of 4,000 spectators, on December 15th 1888. One particularly exciting game must have been the last one of the season, another narrow defeat at home, this time by 3-5 against Derby County. The Rams wore this unusual kit:

George had played in friendlies for County in both the 1886-1887 and the 1887-1888 seasons. He made 28 appearances and scored one goal, against the Sheffield Club. Interesting results came against Scottish club, Hibernian (0-6), Aston Villa (8-2), Corinthians (1-4), Nottingham Forest (0-0, 12 000 spectators) and the disastrous Notts Rangers match (0-8). Here are the Hibernian colours of the era:

George played in five F.A.Cup ties for County, against Nottingham Forest (1-2), playing as a centre half (No 5), Derby Midland (2-1), Old Brightonians (2-0), and Sheffield Wednesday (2-3). Best of all, he played as a left full back (No 3) in the El Classico of the Victorian era, Notts County 13 Basford Rovers 0. Here is Meadow Lane from the spectators’ point of view, seconds after the end of the game:

At the end of the 1888-1889 season George left County for ever, and moved to Forest, where he was to play seven games in the Football Alliance, and a number of friendlies. Interesting results included games against Bootle (2-2), Grimsby Town (0-4), Long Eaton Rangers (3-5). Clapton (0-1), Walsall Town Swifts (0-1) and Everton (0-7).

A fourth Old Nottinghamian to play in County’s first season in the Football League was Harry Jackson, who was born on April 23rd 1864. His father, Charles J.Jackson, managed what the School Register rather grandly listed as a “Piscatorial Dépôt”, (probably a fishmongers, or even a fish and chip shop) and the family lived at 23, Carrington Street. Harry played on five occasions; as an outside left at Stoke (0-3), as a centre forward at Burnley (0-1) and Wolverhampton Wanderers (1-2, 1 goal), an inside left at Bolton Wanderers, (3-7, 1 goal), and an inside right at home to Derby County (3-5).

Here is the Burnley kit;

And here is the Wolverhampton Wanderers’ strip:

Here are the Bolton Wanderers’ colours. Very little has changed here:

In his career with County, Harry also played in 21 F.A.Cup ties, and scored 19 goals. In other games for County, all of which would have been friendlies, he made 101 appearances, and scored 85 goals. This gave Harry Jackson an overall career total of 104 goals in 122 games for Notts County, both totals and a strike rate which are only exceeded by those of Harry Cursham himself:

A fifth Old Nottinghamian in that same inaugural season of 1888-1889 was Edwin Silvester Wardle. Edwin was born on January 11th 1870 and the family lived at Magdala House in Mapperley Road. He attended the High School from 1881-1883. He made two appearances in the League for County, the first as an outside left (No 11) at Goodison Park, Everton, in the very first match of the season (1-2), County’s début in the Football League. Strangely, he then appeared as an outside right in the very last fixture of the campaign, the 3-5 home defeat to Derby County. Prior to this, he had played in six friendlies, scoring three goals, two against Aston Villa (3-3) and one against Halliwell (1-4). He also appeared in four F.A.Cup ties, scoring one goal against Staveley (3-1).

Another particularly disappointed Old Nottinghamian, the sixth to play in that first season of 1888-1889, must have been John Alfred Brown, who made just one appearance for County, as an outside left (No 11) in a game at Villa Park against Aston Villa. County lost narrowly by nine goals to one, watched by an entranced crowd of some 4,000 spectators.

John Alfred Brown was born on March 20th 1866. Along with his elder brother, he entered the High School on August 10th 1874, at the age of eight, although the date when he left the High School remains unknown. He made his first appearances for County towards the end of the 1883-1884 season, when, after the New Year, he played as an inside left in away friendly games at Walsall Swifts (1-2), and Sheffield Attercliffe (0-2). Overall, he played in 34 friendlies between 1884-1888 and he scored a healthy total of 14 goals. Interesting games and scores in 1884-1885 included his two goals in a 5-0 defeat of Wednesbury Old Athletic, and another goal against Hendon in an 8-2 victory. There were also games against Blackburn Olympic (1-1 and 0-3), Preston North End (1-2), Sheffield Wednesday (1-0), the Sheffield Club (3-0), Blackburn Rovers (0-2), Notts Rangers (2-1) and Derby County (0-2). Here are the Blackburn Olympic colours:

For the most part, John was an outside left, although he also played at inside left, and inside right. In 1885-1886, he appeared in home games against Bolton Wanderers (3-3) and Great Lever (1-3), and in away games against Queen’s Park (1-5), the Sheffield Club (6-1) and Wellingborough Grammar School (8-3). He scored a goal at Sheffield, although three of the scorers at Wellingborough remain unknown. Two games were at inside left, with one at outside left, and two at centre forward. The following season of 1886-1887, he played at the Sheffield Club (4-1) and Wolverhampton Wanderers (0-2). He also appeared against Preston North End, a game which County were narrow losers by 0-14. Here is the Preston strip:

Capture 2 top y
John’s most successful season was 1887-1888 with 10 goals in 14 appearances. These included Walsall Town (0-4), West Bromwich Albion (1-5), Nottingham Forest (1-0), Preston North End (2-5), Everton (1-3). He played in home fixtures against Leek (8-1), Aston Villa (8-2), Preston North End (2-3), Grimsby Town (4-0), and Corinthians (1-4). A substantial veil might be drawn over Mitchell St.George’s (0-10).

John scored four times against Leek and Aston Villa, with single goals in each game against Preston North End. All of his games were as an inside left.

By the way, the illustrations of old football kits came from the best ever website for the soccer nerd and all the boys who had more than twenty different Subbuteo teams. New Brighton Tower 1898? Oh, yes.

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Filed under Derby County, Football, History, Humour, Nottingham, The High School

Tagged as Aston Villa, Beeston St.John’s, Blackburn Rovers, Bootle, Burnley, Clapton, Corinthians, Derby County, Derby Midland, Eckington, Everton, F.A.Cup, Football League, Goodison Park, Gregory Ground, Grimsby Town, Harry Cursham, Hibernian, Long Eaton Rangers, Loughborough, Nottingham Forest, Notts County, Notts Rangers, Shrove Tuesday, Stoke, Walsall Town Swifts

by jfwknifton | November 12, 2015 · 1:13 pm

A strange and worrying zoo in France

I have now written quite a few articles about the various Beasts of France, beginning with the most famous, the Beast of Gévaudan, which flourished from 1764-1767:

And then it was the Beast of Benais, followed by the Beast of Noth, not forgetting the Beast of the Cévennes, the Beast of Primarette, the Beast of Orléans, the Beast of Lyonnais, the Beast of Sarlat, the Beast of Auxerre, the Beast of Cinglais, the Beast of Gâtinais, the list just goes on and on. Some of them were really quite peculiar creatures, even by the contemporary standards of Beastliness:

Not all French monsters are wolf-types, however. Here are just a few of the inmates of what the original website called “Un Zoo étrange et inquiétant en France”, “a strange and worrying zoo in France”.

The first animal is a snake, which used to live in the Forest of Fontainebleau, just to the south west of Paris:

It was seen, and duly killed, by the King (Quite right too!). According to legend, it was 18 feet long, with a weight of some 160 kilos (around 350 pounds):

This monster was venomous and used to hide in a great pile of rocks which offered him protection as no group of attackers was able to approach the creature simultaneously. Only one adversary at a time could reach him.

One day, King Francis the First or le Roi François Premier, was out hunting in the area. This king was a contemporary of King Henry VIII, at the start of the sixteenth century:

The King and His Royal Nose decided to put an end to this creature which had sown terror and desolation throughout the land.( Well, it was a very big pile of rocks).

The king had commissioned a suit of armour covered with razor blades. When the snake tried to coil itself around him, the razor blades, quite literally, cut the monster to pieces. “Scratch one constrictor!” as they say.

What other animals are in the “strange and worrying zoo”?

Well, back in 1965:

“In the Toulouse area, flocks of sheep belonging to Trappist monks at the Abbey of St. Mary of the Desert, and also those belonging to the Count of Orgeix, suffered extensive depredations from a mysterious animal. Three students from the area of Cadours who were driving around one night in the car, saw two animals which were larger than a dog or a wolf. They had light beige fur. These strange creatures were like enormous mastiffs, with huge, round, bulging eyes. The four footed killers then disappeared from the area as mysteriously as they had appeared.”

One year later, in May,

“In the region of Pignans (in the département of Var), a tenant farmer, Monsieur Baptistin, asleep in his small house, which was located some two kilometres from the village, was awakened by furious barking from his dog. He got out of bed, switched on the light and saw the silhouette of a huge animal which was disappearing into the darkness:

The next morning, he discovered near the water trough animal tracks of a startling size:

The authorities were alerted. The Forestry Services photographed the tracks and made a cast, but nobody was able to ascertain what kind of animal they belonged to.

For several weeks, the locals no longer dared to go out at night. The more daring people who did venture out never failed to take a reliable rifle with them.”

(Actually, it wasn’t Bigfoot, or at least I don’t think it was. It’s just that the details of this story are so vague that it is actually possible to interpret the events as being “Grand-Pied” himself, rather than some, presumably, fairly run-of-the-mill Alien Big Cat.)

In mid-August of 1966, a monster was seen haunting the area around Draguignan near the road to Grasse , a region where many UFOs had been seen, both in flight and on the ground:

“A former member of the armed forces, Monsieur Paul G… , found himself one morning around seven o’clock face to face with an unknown creature. The animal had its mouth open. It had a pointed snout, which was rather long, and triangular teeth. Under its neck, it had a goitre which gave it a frightening appearance. The ears were short, like those of a dog, but they were very pointed. The body was very long and covered with grey fur. The animal had a long tail, at least 40 centimetres (16 inches) in length.”

Interestingly, the town of Draguignan has a name and a coat of arms which are both redolent of another species of legendary animal. The town was founded around 400AD after Saint Hermentaire, the Bishop of Antibes, had overcome a dragon in single combat. Exactly how he managed this does not seem to have been recorded, but here is the coat of arms:

It was definitely not a friendly dragon:

In 1967, the presence of a number of monsters was reported throughout the whole of France. In the Creuse region in particular, between Royère and Chavanat:

…a feline of unknown species was flushed in the hamlet of Cloux Valleret by a farmer named Monsieur Simo:

A week earlier, farmers in the Vosges area had already stalked an animal of indeterminate species which looked rather like a wolf:

All that was easily topped though, by a report from Italy:

“In June 1970, in Meldola, about ten kilometres from Forli, a farmer claimed to have encountered some kind of dragon, six to seven metres long, with a body some 15 inches in diameter.

The Italian police organized a hunt which did not turn up anything. The monster appeared once or twice more and then disappeared forever.”

Back to France, in 1972:

“In the area around Vigan in Hérault, some medical students, out hunting in a snow covered area, discovered the footprints of an unknown animal:

They followed the tracks for several kilometres. Suddenly they disappeared just in front of a rock which was projecting up out of the ground. The beast seemed to have reared up on his back end and then been recovered by his masters on board a flying machine.”

Don’t think though, that the French are especially weak minded and that this is why they continually report crazy sightings of weird animals. In this area, the British, quite rightly, are streets ahead of their nearest and dearest neighbours. But first of all, let’s just forget our many, many, ferocious Black Dogs such as Shuck and his like:

Forget the werewolves seen more than once at Alconbury USAAF Air Base:

Forget the sightings of Bigfoot in Cannock Chase and Sherwood Forest (an “eight-foot, hairy man beast with red glowing eyes” seen in late 2002) (allegedly):

Just on cats alone we are well in front. The most famous cat of all, of course, is the Beast of Bodmin:

But don’t forget his less famous sidekick, the Beast of Exmoor. And before that Gruesome Twosome, it was the Surrey Puma. And don’t ever forget the heyday of the Nottingham Lion.

But look at this list, put together originally by George M. Eberhart.

Don’t just skip through it. Select your top three:

“The Ashley Leopard, the Ayrshire Puma, the Beast of Ballymena, the Beast of Barnet, the Basingstoke Beast, the Beast of Beacon Hill, the Bennachie Beast, the Beast of Bin, the Blagdon Beast, the Beast of Bont, the Broadoak Beast, the Beast of Broomhill, the Beast of Bucks, the Carsington Beast, the Beast of Chiswick, the Essex Beast, the Inkberrow Beast, the Beast of Margam, the Beast of Milton, the Beast of Otmoor, the Shropshire Border Beast, the Beast of Tonmawr, the Beast of Tweseldown (sic), the Black Beast of Gloucestershire, the Black Beast of Moray, the Brechfa Beast, the Cadmore Cat, the Chiltern Cougar, the Crondall Cougar, the Durham Puma, the Eccles Cheetah, the Fen Tiger, the Highland Puma, the Lindsey Leopard, the Mendips Monster, the M25 Monster, the Munstead Monster, the Norfolk Grinder, the Pink Panther of Derbyshire, the Penistone Panther, the Penwith Cougar, the Beast of Powis, the Rosshire Lioness, the Terror of Tedburn, the Tilford Lynx and, last but not least, the Wolds Wild Cat.”

For me it’s, in third place, the Norfolk Grinder. Second is the Penistone Panther, but my own winner is…….. the Eccles Cheetah!!

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Humour, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Auxerre, Beast of Bodmin, Beast of Exmoor, Benais, Bigfoot, Black Dogs, Cannock Chase, Cévennes, Cinglais, Draguignan, Eccles Cheetah, Fontainebleau, Francis I, Francis the First, Gatinais, Gévaudan, Hérault, Hermentaire, Lyonnais, Meldola, monsters, Norfolk Grinder, Noth, Nottingham Lion, Orléans, Penistone Panther, Primarette, Sherwood Forest, Shuck, Surrey Puma, Trappist, UFO, Vosges, wolf

by jfwknifton | October 21, 2015 · 12:52 pm

The Nottinghamshire UFO flap of July 1967

I have already mentioned in a previous article, the wonderfully titled “A Werewolf in Cambridgeshire. Run away!!” that I had received “Haunted Skies Volume One” by John Hanson and Dawn Holloway as a Christmas present in 2013.

The following year, for Christmas 2014, I was lucky enough to be given Volumes 2-6, which covered the history of British UFOs from 1960-1977. And I have read the lot! It has taken me until April 2015, but I have, more or less, made it. I now sit eagerly at home awaiting the arrival of the last four volumes in the series, which I ordered last Sunday. These will complete the full set.

The ten volumes are an absolute tour de force and a total labour of love which will become a modern classic. If anything, the books have become better and better as the volumes have gone by. I would urge you strongly to have a look at the two authors’ pages on Amazon, if you find this topic at all interesting.
When a number of UFOs are sighted in a particular locality over a fairly short period of time, this is known as a “flap”. Over the years, around the world, there have been more flaps than you could shake a little green man at. In 1967, there was one in Nottingham.

It started, perhaps, on February 13, 1967 in Radford, an area of mainly Victorian terraced houses a very short distance to the north west of the city centre. Look for the orange arrow, near the “O” of Nottingham:

It was ten minutes to nine in the evening and Frank Earp and Gerald Montague were hard at it on their allotment. It must have been almost totally dark, dark enough, at least, to see a diamond shaped object motionless in the night sky. It had a red light underneath and suddenly changed shape before flying off at fantastic speed. This. hopefully, is similar to what Frank and Gerald saw:

Five months later, on July 2nd 1967, reports came in of a bright light with three prongs, motionless in the sky over Knighton Park in nearby Leicester, only 28 miles away from the “Queen of the Midlands”.
The main highlight of the Nottingham Flap came three days later during the evening of Wednesday, July 5th 1967. An absolutely classic flying saucer was seen by a very large number of witnesses. It was motionless over the Clifton Estate, just above the horizon.

Clifton Estate is to the south west of the city centre. For the most part, Clifton is a council estate built from 1952 onwards, largely to rehouse the slum areas of the Meadows where, as late as the mid-sixties, barefooted children were by no means unusual. At one time Clifton was the largest council estate in Europe. Look for the orange arrow:

Eventually, that balmy summer’s evening, somebody called the police, possibly for the protection of any little green men that might emerge from their spacecraft. By now, well in excess of a hundred would-be ufologists were eagerly awaiting developments on the rising ground near to the local Fairham Comprehensive School:

If my memory serves me well, this was a very large all boys’ school, which has now been closed down:

Years later, an old boys’ reunion got a little out of hand:

When they eventually arrived at the UFO landing site, the boys in blue, of course, did not see any UFOs and told the locals that they were the hapless victims of an optical illusion. Mrs Marjorie Cowdell, however, would have none of it. She insisted to the Fighters of Crime that she had seen a flying saucer “swim” down to the ground.

This was big enough news that a host of reporters were sent to investigate by the national press (in actual fact, the Daily Sketch, which has now, alas, gone exactly the same way as Fairham Comprehensive School).

Here is the story, which appeared in this most intellectual of red top tabloids (presumably the reason it folded) on Thursday, July 6th, 1967:

“100 SAY WE SAW A FLYING SAUCER LAND

More than 100 people claimed yesterday that they saw a flying saucer land.
They were “spotting” on high ground near Fairham Comprehensive School in Clifton, Nottingham.
Housewives rushed from their homes when it was reported that a flying saucer about 30 feet in diameter had come down. Many people said that the object was disk shaped and silvery.
Police searched the area but found no trace of anything having landed. A spokesman said, “It must have been an optical illusion caused by sunlight and a cloud of dust.”

Mrs Marjorie Cowdell of High Bank, Clifton said, “I don’t care what the police say. I saw a flying saucer swoop to the ground.”

The stream, almost a flood, of “Close Encounters of the First Kind” continued, this time at Wellow, near Ollerton, some twenty miles to the north of Nottingham. On Saturday, July 8, 1967, schoolteacher Bernard Day and his wife, from Newark-on-Trent, were driving along just after nine o’clock in the evening. Suddenly they saw, according to the Nottingham Evening Post, what looked like:

“A child’s top, spinning in the night sky, from one side to an upright position, for over forty minutes, surrounded by bright light. I fetched Police Constable E.Holmes, from Welland Police Station, who had a look through binoculars and said, “I wouldn’t even be able to guess its identity. I’ll have to inform Inspector R. Street. He will make some enquiries.”

What was presumably the same incident is featured on a rather interesting website I found. No exact details are given, but it would seem to be the same series of events. It reads:

“July 1967. 2110 hours. Saturday. Location – Nottingham, Nottinghamshire. A member of the public, teacher Mr Doy, reported seeing a UFO over a local school and a PC HOLMES attended the school and confirmed the object in the sky. He then reported the sighting to his duty officer, Inspector R .Street.

PC HOLMES stated that the object was a bright light spinning on its own axis in a stationary position above the school. The police could not offer any explanation for the UFO.

UFO CLASSIFICATION – NL (NOCTURNAL LIGHT).

On Duty sighting. 1 Officer.”

I’m not entirely satisfied with a policeman called R. Street and what about PC Holmes? Surely all of his mates must have called him Sherlock?

Whatever the case, the Nottingham Roswell Saga went on. On Monday, July 10th, only four days later, a bright white triangle was seen over Radcliffe-on-Trent at half past eight in the morning:

Radcliffe-on-Trent is to the east of the city, a mere two or three miles away from the very centre. Look for the orange arrow:

Interestingly, the locations of all three sightings are visible on this map. The orange arrow points to Radcliffe-on-Trent and Clifton is in the bottom left of the map. Radford is below the big, black N-O of Nottingham.

The very final case I can find comes from Newark-on-Trent (just over twenty two miles from Nottingham). It was August 10th and around 10:15 in the late evening. For some unknown reason, Dave Robinson was taking a stroll with his girlfriend in what must have been almost pitch black woodland at Stapleford Woods. Look for the orange arrow:

The two young lovers had just reached a clearing at the edge of the woods when the young lady noticed two lights in the sky. They were possibly round, possibly oval, and yellow in colour, resembling paper. Some six feet and five feet across respectively, they were motionless over a line of trees around half a mile in the distance. I managed to find these likely contenders on the Internet:

After the event, William Blythe of Mansfield interviewed them. Let Dave take up the story:

“Within minutes they disappeared, replaced by a flashing red light, which moved to our right, climbing up and over some trees. Five minutes later we saw the lights again in the sky, now on our right, coming towards us, about a quarter of a mile away.

My curiosity aroused, I drove slowly towards the lights, losing sight of them as I drove around the bend. When I reached the spot where I had seen them, I flashed my headlights and this craft appeared over the trees. Astonished, I stopped the car and listened. Still no sound.

We watched the craft with amazement, as it hovered 20 feet away from us at about the same height off the ground, allowing us to see it had a curved bottom and top, with three squared windows, spilling orange light, and a brilliant light projecting downwards from the top.

As it moved overhead, I became frightened and drove away, fearing what
was going to happen next.”

And that’s it. This was quite impressive by the standards of the middle 1960s, especially when compared to nowadays, when 84% of all programmes on Satellite TV are devoted to aliens, UFOs and government cover ups. If you find this topic of any interest, don’t forget the “Haunted Skies” books by John Hanson and Dawn Holloway. They really are worth a look. This is the edition which set me off on the trail of the Nottingham Flap and Mrs Marjorie Cowdell:

Next time there will be a host of Internet sites to look at when I try to track down the UFO that crashed just south of Mansfield. That was a very, very, brave thing to do!

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Filed under History, Humour, Literature, Nottingham, Science

Tagged as Clifton, Clifton Estate, Close Encounters, Fairham, Fairham Comprehensive School, Knighton Park, Leicester, Mansfield, Marjorie Cowdell, Newark-on-Trent, Nottingham Flap, Ollerton, Radcliffe-on-Trent, Radford, Roswell, Stapleford Woods, Wellow

by jfwknifton | September 18, 2015 · 9:09 am

Notts £100 million striker (1877-1891) (first half)

Harry Cursham has scored more goals in the F.A Cup competition than any other soccer player in history.

Harry was born at Wilford Grange near Nottingham on November 27th 1859, one of the five sons of William George Cursham, a solicitor. He entered the High School at the age of nine on January 18th 1869, on the same day as his brother, Charles. Harry had three brothers in total. Like him, they all attended the High School. They were Arthur William Cursham, (born 1853), Charles Lambert Cursham, (born 1858), and William Cursham (born 1862). Here is the High School of Harry’s day:

During his school career Harry played for the High School First Team, but only a very few editions of the school magazine, “The Forester”, have survived from this period. Unfortunately, the very few match reports are not particularly detailed, and there is no mention of Harry as a footballer.

Harry does appear as an athlete. He won a 100 yards’ race for boys under eleven at the Annual Athletic Sports in September 1870. This major event in the social calendar of Victorian Nottingham took place at Trent Bridge, with the crowd entertained throughout the two days by the regimental band of the Robin Hood Rifles. “Cursham ii” won “a capital race” for second place, narrowly beating Brewill, “who ran remarkably well for so small a boy” by about two yards. It was only after the end of the race that the apparently easy winner, Anderson, was disqualified for being over age, thus leaving Harry in first place.

After leaving in 1875, Harry transferred to Repton School as a boarder. He remained there until Christmas 1876, and represented the school at both football and cricket. Harry returned to Nottingham in 1877 and joined Notts County for the 1877-1878 season. Both he, and his brother, Arthur, soon became very great favourites with the crowd. Harry was too young to have worn Notts’ wonderful “convict kit”:

On November 3rd 1877, “…these splendidly built players…”, Harry and elder brother, Charles, played for County in their first ever F.A.Cup tie, against the Sheffield Club, for whom Arthur Cursham made an appearance. Arthur, of course, was normally a Notts County player. The match took place at Trent Bridge, and was drawn 1-1. Arthur scored for Sheffield, and Charles for Notts County. The County team included at least four Old Nottinghamians, namely Harry Cursham, Charles Cursham, Thomas Oliver, George Seals, and, possibly, Henry Jessop as a fifth.

In the replay, Arthur scored twice for Sheffield, and County lost 0-3, but Harry was seen as a promising débutant during the season, appearing in the prestigious friendly against Scottish club, Queen’s Park, at Hampden.

Harry soon became a high scoring forward, and scored well in excess of 200 goals in thirteen seasons. “The Football Annual” described him as…

“…one of the best forwards of the day, plays brilliantly on either wing but is particularly effective on the left.”

Elsewhere, he is described as having been:

“…at home on either wing or in the centre, and had good dribbling skills.”

In the 1880s, a third source said that Harry was

“…the most versatile player Notts had during that period, for he was at home anywhere, and was an indispensable member of the English eleven.”

Here is our hero:

On November 16th 1878, Harry played for Notts County in their First Round F.A.Cup tie against Nottingham Forest at Beeston Cricket Ground, Nottingham Forest having waived their right to host the game. The fact that the Forest Recreation Ground was public land meant that it was impossible to charge admission money. Forest won 3-1, in front of a crowd of some 500 spectators, with goals from Turner, Goodyer and Smith. The attendance was the highest ever recorded for a football match in Nottingham. Special excursion trains were used to take them out of the City.

On November 11th 1880, Harry returned to the High School, and appeared on the Forest for the School First XI against the Bank. The match took place on a “merit half-holiday”, and the High School fielded six Old Boys, including Harry and Charles Cursham. The Bank’s team was formidable, with several “players of no small note in the local football world”. The game was fast and even, but the the High School’s players were on top form. They ran out the eventual winners by 4-1.

By now Harry had already played for England on one occasion, against Wales at Wrexham on March 15th 1880. As far as I can trace, this game against the Bank is the only occasion on which a current England international represented the High School in any sport.

In the 1881-1882 season, Harry played in the F.A.Cup tie between Notts County and Wednesbury Strollers, a game controversially refereed by Leonard Lindley, the brother of Tinsley Lindley. The visitors led by 2-0 at the interval, but an own goal, and two each from Arthur and Harry Cursham looked to have given Notts a 5-3 victory. Wednesbury were not happy though, with the fact that they had two hotly contested goals awarded against them, by a referee from the same town as their opponents. He was also a personal friend of the Notts County players. Wednesbury Strollers protested to the F.A., who ordered the first ever replay, on a neutral ground, with a neutral referee. This idea of a neutral referee was one which was soon to become fundamental to cup competitions, not just in England, but the whole world over.

The replay took place at Derby and the result was Notts County 11 Wednesbury Strollers 1. Official records state that Harry scored six goals, but he himself claimed throughout his life that he had got nine, explaining that the referee had confused him with his two brothers, Arthur and Charles. Nine goals in a single game would, over a century later, still remain a record for the F.A.Cup. This total was equalled by Ted MacDougall for Bournemouth against Margate in the First Round on Nov 20th 1971, but it has never been beaten:

By now, Harry was centre forward for County, and he continued his remarkable goal scoring feats. In the F.A.Cup in 1882-1883, County defeated the Sheffield Club by 6-1, before beating Phoenix Bessemer of Rotherham by 4-1, and Sheffield Wednesday by the same score. They were then drawn against Aston Villa, with Notts County hanging on grimly to a 4-3 winning margin, Harry having grabbed a hat-trick. Villa protested, however, that in the dying minutes, Harry had fisted out what would have been an equalising goal. Harry appeared before the F.A. to discuss the “long-arm incident”. He explained that the goalkeeper had been hidden behind him, and that it must have been his hand that had knocked away the ball. Obviously, the F.A. were not used to dealing with High School boys, and their far-fetched excuses, and Harry was believed.

Here is the team photo for the semi-final. At least three of the players were surprise choices, and were pasted into the photograph later on:

(back row) Arthur Ashwell (Umpire), Johnny Dixon, Herbert Emmitt, Billy Gunn, Harry Moore, Alf Dobson (second row) Mordecai Sherwin, Arthur Cursham, Stuart Macrae (front row) Charley Dobson, Harry Cursham, H.Chapman (his first name remains apparently unknown. Surely not Herbert?)

Arthur Ashwell, Arthur Cursham , Johnny Dixon and Harry were all ex-High School boys. In those days, the goalkeeper could be pushed physically into the net, so it paid him to maintain a healthy pie intake. Mordecai Sherwin (16 stone) though, had a long way to go to keep up with 22-stone Fatty Foulke in this Sheffield United team of 1901:

In the semi-final, Harry scored, but Notts County lost 1-2 against the Old Etonians, who included Lord Kinnaird, and Percy de Paravicini:

In 1883-1884, Harry scored a hat trick against Sheffield Heeley in the first round and then grabbed the winner in a fifth round tie against “The Swifts”. Along with Old Nottinghamian, John Dixon, Harry appeared in the semi-final against Blackburn Rovers but Notts County lost by the only goal of the game, as their goalkeeper, sixteen stone Mordecai Sherwin, was easily barged into the back of the net.

This is Notts’ oldest programme, against the Sheffield Club at Trent Bridge on January 3rd 1885, watched by 5,000 spectators:

The Old Nottinghamians in the team were Frederick Snook, Harry Jackson, Johnny Dixon and Harry Cursham. The game ended in a 5-0 victory, with County’s goals coming from Dobson, Gunn, Harry Jackson, Harry Cursham and Marshall.

On October 24th 1885, Harry scored four goals in County’s record F.A.Cup victory, a 15-0 rout of Rotherham Town in the First Round at Trent Bridge. Later that year, Harry Cursham appeared in a Sixth Round F.A.Cup tie against the previous season’s beaten finalists, Queen’s Park of Glasgow. The match was played at Trent Bridge before 17,000 spectators, many people having arrived by carriage from early morning onwards. By the end of normal time the game was poised evenly at 2-2, but the Scottish captain refused to play extra time, because he claimed that the crowd had encroached onto the playing surface and delayed the end of the match. County duly kicked off, unopposed, and kicked the ball into the empty net. The F.A., however, ordered a replay at Derby, where Queen’s Park grabbed the winner in the second half. They duly went on to the final, where they lost to Blackburn Rovers.

Harry Cursham’s overall total in the F.A.Cup remains the all time goal scoring record. In his career, he managed an official 49 goals, or an unofficial 52 goals, both of which totals have only ever been approached by the peerless Denis Law (41):

and the man who said that playing for Juventus was just like living in a foreign country, Ian Rush (42).

In addition, many readers may feel that the two goals he scored in the original, void, game against Wednesbury Strollers should be incorporated in the overall total, giving Harry a record 54 goals in the F.A.Cup. Harry’s full F.A.Cup scoring record was…

Nov  3rd 1877         Notts County v Sheffield                                     1-1               (1)
Nov  4th 1880         Notts County v Derbyshire F.C                        4-4              (2)
Nov 27th 1880       Notts County v Derbyshire F.C                       4-2              (2)
Nov 24th 1881      Notts County v Wednesbury Strollers              5-2              (2)
Dec 10th 1881        Notts County v Wednesbury Strollers             11-1              (6/9)
Jan   14th 1882       Notts County v Aston Villa                                   1-4              (1)
Nov  4th 1882         Notts County v Sheffield Club                             6-1              (2)
Dec 27th 1882        Notts County v Phoenix Bessemer                     4-1               (1)
Feb 12th 1883        Notts County v Sheffield Wednesday               4-1               (1)
Mar 3rd 1883          Notts County v Aston Villa                                  4-3              (3)
Mar 17th 1883        Notts County v Old Etonians                               1-2               (1)
Nov 10th 1883        Notts County v Sheffield Heeley                        3-1               (3)
Dec 15th 1883         Notts County v Grantham                                   4-0               (2)
Feb 9th 1884        Notts County v Swifts                                           1-1               (1)
Feb 14th 1884         Notts County v Swifts                                           1-0               (1)
Dec 6th 1884          Notts County v Staveley                                       2-0               (1)
Jan 3rd 1885           Notts County v Sheffield Club                             5-0               (1)
Feb 21st 1885          Notts County v Queens’ Park                              2-2               (1)
Oct 24th 1885         Notts County v Rotherham Town                     15-0               (4)
Nov 21st 1885         Notts County v Sheffield Club                             8-0               (1)
Dec 12th 1885        Notts County v Notts Rangers                              3-0               (3)
Oct 30th 1886       Notts County v Basford Rovers                          13-0              (1)
Nov 13th 1886        Notts County v Notts Rangers                             3-3               (1)
Nov 20th 1886       Notts County v Notts Rangers                            5-0               (3)
Dec 11th 1886         Notts County v Staveley                                         3-0               (1)
Jan 29th 1887        Notts County v Great Marlow                               5-2               (3)
Feb 19th 1887         Notts County v West Bromwich Albion             1-4               (1)
Dec 8th 1888         Notts County v Staveley                                         3-1               (1)

Fittingly, Harry scored in his last ever F.A.Cup game as Notts County’s centre forward:

Feb 28th 1891 Notts County v Sunderland 3-3 (1)
Semi-final tie, played at Bramall Lane

This gave Harry an unprecedented career total of 52 goals in 44 F.A.Cup ties (or 54 in 45, if the first game against Wednesbury Strollers is incorporated in the totals.).

There has, of course, been criticism of the strength of the opposition against which Harry scored his F.A.Cup goals. It is worth mentioning, however, that, as an amateur, he may have chosen not to play in some cup ties where he would surely have scored even more goals…

1887-1888              Notts County v Lincoln Ramblers                        9-0
1888-1889              Notts County v Eckington                                      4-1
1888-1889              Notts County v Beeston St.John’s                        4-2
1888-1889              Notts County v Old Brightonians                         2-0

The F.A.Cup Ties against Eckington and Beeston St.John’s were both contested by Notts County’s reserve side. Harry may well have considered it beneath his dignity to play in these games, even though at this time he was by no means a regular First Team player. Harry also missed the Fourth Round of the F.A.Cup in 1884-1885. This was a 4-1 away win over Walsall Swifts, which took place in front of 5,000 spectators on January 4th 1885. Harry was unfortunately away on honeymoon, having got married in Wilford Church on January 20th. His team mates presented him with a silver plate to mark the occasion:

Harry’s last appearance for County in the F.A.Cup is linked extremely closely with his last appearance in the Football League on February 10th 1891, playing as a right full back, in a 4-0 home victory over Burnley. Harry had not appeared in the First Team for over two years, but the regular right back, Tom McLean, was injured, and the Team Management Committee decided to recall Harry.

The reason for this unexpected decision is that County had reached the Sixth Round of the F.A.Cup and had been drawn at home to Stoke. If Tom McLean was still injured, then Harry would be the ideal replacement. He was an older player, experienced with big games and large crowds.

In actual fact, Tom McLean was to return for the Stoke game, which County won by a single goal. McLean’s injury, however, must have flared up again, as Harry returned to the First Team for his last ever appearance in the F.A.Cup, on February 28th 1891, when he played as a right full back in the semi-final tie against Sunderland. The game was at Bramall Lane, and ended 3-3. Fittingly, some 25,000 spectators watched Harry play for the last time. By now, their kit was the familiar:

For the replay, Harry was again replaced by Tom McLean. Tom’s injury cannot have healed properly, however, since he did not get into the team for the Final.

Neither did Harry, who was replaced by Alex “Sandy” Ferguson, a Scotsman from Rangers, who had played only twice previously. County’s only fixture before the Final was a League game against Blackburn Rovers, who would be County’s opponents in the Final. Notts won this League game with great ease, by 7-1. They then chose to keep the same side for the F.A.Cup Final at the Kennington Oval, and were never even remotely in the game. Blackburn won 3-1 with consummate ease:

Perhaps the Team Management Committee wished that they had kept faith with Harry, who was surely the man for the big occasion. What a way it would have been to finish off his glorious career, winning the F.A.Cup for the first time ever. It was not until 1894 that Notts County finally won the F.A.Cup. And by one of life’s incredible ironies, it was on the day of the Final against Bolton Wanderers that the Nottingham Football News was able to announce the tragically premature death of Alex “Sandy” Ferguson, who had by now moved on to Newark Town.

By the way, the illustrations of the two football kits come from the best ever website for the soccer nerd and all the boys who had more than twenty different Subbuteo teams. New Brighton Tower 1898? Oh, yes.

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Filed under Football, History, Humour, Nottingham, The High School

Tagged as Arthur Cursham, Aston Villa, Beeston, Blackburn Rovers, Bournemouth, Bramall Lane, Burnley, Denis Law, F.A.Cup, Glasgow, Hampden, Ian Rush, Kennington Oval, Lord Kinnaird, Old Etonians, Old Nottinghamians, Percy de Paravicini, Queen’s Park, Repton, Robin Hood Rifles, Stoke City, Ted MacDougall, The Forest, Tinsley Lindley, Trent Bridge, Wednesbury Strollers, Wilford, Wrexham

by jfwknifton | September 12, 2015 · 8:32 am

The Beast of Ennerdale: Part three

This is the third instalment of the story of the Beast of Ennerdale, a strange creature that rampaged across the Lake District in north western England in 1810. In five months, it killed almost 300 sheep, often just eating their soft organs and then lapping up their blood. The story of its ravages is told in the first two parts of this series:

Nowadays, we have almost an almost unbelievable ability to make contact with each other instantly right across the globe. Furthermore, we have immediate instant access to unbelievable amounts of knowledge and information.
Until very recently though, that was just not the case. There was no television. No radio. No access to books. Most people were illiterate, especially in the countryside. Nobody knew very much at all about natural history outside their own country. Contrast our situation with life outside London in 1198. Richard the Lionheart was the English king then, and he was the proud owner of his very own private zoo in the Tower of London. Richard had been on the Crusades and he must have known a little bit about some of the wildlife in the Middle East. Perhaps that was the reason that he had a pet crocodile in his collection of animals:

One day, the animal escaped. It somehow made its way to the marshes of north Essex. The reaction of the locals, of course, was that a dragon had come to visit them:

And what would the shepherds of the Lake District made of a giraffe? The very first one ever to be seen in England had only arrived on August 11, 1827, less than 200 years ago, and well after the début of the Beast of Ennerdale:

During the period of the Beast of Ennerdale, the whole country was visited by many travelling zoos. The cages were transported on wagons which were pulled around the countryside by horses. Conditions, of course, were appalling. The cages were cramped and the horses that pulled the wagons were grossly overworked. No animal rights in those days. The Church taught that animals had no souls, so what you did to them was simply irrelevant. Work them until they drop and then leave them to die. And then you can eat them.
The most famous of these travelling zoos was Wombwell’s Travelling Menagerie, which had a total of fifteen wagons and a large number of exotic animals. Wombwell bought them directly from ships as they arrived in England. They included elephants, giraffes, a gorilla, a hyena, a kangaroo, several leopards, a number of lions, llamas, monkeys, ocelots, onagers (what?), ostriches, panthers, various snakes, tigers, wildcats and zebras:

Wombwell had a number of snow leopards and his rhino was publicised as “the real unicorn of scripture”. Other faulty labelling is actually known to have cost him money. What he exhibited as a chimpanzee is now thought to have been the first ever Gorilla to be seen in Western Europe.
Here is a link to the story of George Wombwell told by Wikipedia. It really is worth a look, with some really funny anecdotes on offer:

All of these menageries were rather careless with their animals and escapes were not infrequent. In 1835, for example, a lion and a tigress escaped together and four people were killed. And that is what takes us back to the Beast of Ennerdale.
Apparently a number of the different travelling menageries had creatures which were exhibited as “tiger wolves”. Nowadays these animals are thought to have been thylacines, the so called “Tasmanian Tiger” or “Tasmanian Wolf”.

Here is a brief film, thanks to the Thylacine Museum:

The Museum also has a video where the extremely talented animal is apparently playing a piano, harpsichord type of thing:

So that is it! Mystery solved! The Beast of Ennerdale was an escaped Thylacine.

Nowadays, the Thylacine is extinct, of course. The last known specimen, “Benjamin”, died in captivity in Hobart Zoo on September 7th 1936:

The Thylacine had dark stripes over its back and could be up to eight or nine feet in length:

It was a marsupial which looked vaguely like a wolf and it ate flesh. It preferred the softer flesh to tougher meat such as the muscles.
The Thylacine was an apex predator and it was mainly nocturnal. Its behaviour was just like the Beast of Ennerdale because it retreated to the hills and woodlands in the daytime, avoiding contact with humans. It spent the daylight hours in caves or hollow tree trunks, sleeping on twigs or plant stalks. At night, it hunted the open heathland:

Supposedly, back in the wilds of Tasmania, it happily preyed upon farmers’ sheep and poultry and apparently liked to drink the blood of its prey.
And with that information, I really thought that I had found a solution for the identity of the Beast of Ennerdale. I really did. I really, really did:

A second level of internet research, though, shows that more or less all of the answers which have been suggested by the many websites which discuss the Beast of Ennerdale are most probably entirely wrong. The explanation of an escaped Thylacine is a very neat one, but modern science just dismisses it totally and completely.
Firstly, the blood drinking story seems to have originated merely from a single account heard at second-hand by Geoffrey Smith (1881–1916) in a shepherd’s hut in Tasmania. Not exactly a proven piece of Thylacine behaviour, certainly not enough to identify this creature’s presence in Ennerdale.
And killing and/or eating sheep? Well not really, apparently. Modern studies have now shown that the creature had the jaws of a wimp, not a wolf. It couldn’t have dealt with a dead sheep. Advanced computer modelling in 2011 showed that its prey size limit would have been in the region of only five kilos, animals such as the tiny possum:

And here is a link to a second study from 2012, “Tasmanian tiger was no sheep killer”. These are not just amateurs’ guesses picked out of the air, of course. These are both scientific papers, published for the judgement of the zoological world. They would not have been published in reputable journals if they were not serious research carried out by serious scientists.
Instead, the Thylacine is seen nowadays as having been just a scapegoat for the widespread mismanagement of sheep farms in Tasmania. Furthermore, the killing of sheep was far more probably carried out by the European dogs which had first reached Tasmania in 1798 with the arrival of the explorer George Bass and a number of seal hunters:

These men’s sled dogs interbred and their offspring subsequently dispersed into the temperate rain forest of the island. Some dogs were befriended by the aborigines but the majority just went wild.

During the period when Europeans were first coming across the Thylacine, therefore, there was already a population of feral dogs in Tasmania. They are far more likely to have been the animals responsible for the killings of sheep on the island, rather than the Thylacine. It was just easier for Europeans to blame a weird new animal than “man’s best friend”.
And what about the time schedule? How could a Thylacine have reached Cumberland for May 1810? At this time, the very best ships took a minimum of three months to reach Australia and a further three months to return to England:

The first thylacine had been seen by the French on May 13th 1792. They would not have told the English because, surprise, surprise, the two nations were at war with one another. More than ten years later, the Lieutenant Governor of Tasmania sent the first full description of the animal for publication in the Sydney Gazette of April 21st 1805:

At that time, it was not a particularly familiar animal to the European people on the island. In June 1805, five convicts escaped from the only recently established penal colony. The establishment’s pastor, Robert Knopwood, wrote in his journal on June 18th 1805, shortly after the convicts had been recaptured:

“Am engaged all the morn, upon business examining the 5 prisoners that went into the bush. They informed me that on 2 May when they were in the wood they see a large tyger that the dog they had with them went nearly up to it and when the tyger see the men which were about 100 yards away from it, it went away I make no doubt but here are many wild animals which we have not yet seen”

At this point, in 1805, no Thylacine had been captured. It had only been briefly glimpsed at a hundred yards’ range. Tasmania was the size of Ireland and more or less completely covered in forest, with only one small settlement of convicts. How on earth could a Thylacine have reached Ennerdale by 1810? Just look at the timetable:

“Captured in Tasmania, in 1806 at the earliest—shipped to Sydney—sent to England—didn’t die on the three month journey—bought by a zoo keeper in London—taken by horse drawn cart to the north (three or four weeks?)—escaped—seen in Cumberland, doing things we now know a Thylacine could not do”

Not very likely is it?
Anyway, here is a nice longer film of a Thylacine from LINCTasmania. It dates from 1964 and is a wonderful period piece, well worth watching, just for the accents and the product placement :

And finally, here are two videos about the Thylacine from my hero, MK Davis, the man who has been called “The Hippy from Mississippi”. He is a photographic analyst and is well worth your time. The first film is an analysis of a modern home movie, purporting to show an animal which may be a living, surviving Thylacine:

The second film from MK shows his thoughts on where Thylacines may survive nowadays:

And the Beast of Ennerdale? Well, the locals at the time thought it was a feral dog, and they may well have been right:

“No one knew to whom the dog had belonged, or whence he came ; but being of a mongrel breed, and excessively shy, it was conjectured he had escaped from the chain of some gipsy troop. He was a smooth-haired dog, of a tawny mouse colour, with dark streaks, in tiger fashion, over his hide ; and appeared to be a cross between mastiff and greyhound. Strongly built and of good speed, being both well fed and well exercised, his endurance was very great.”

On the other hand, unlike most dogs that I know, the Beast was never heard to bark, growl or howl. And why would you go to the considerable expense of stuffing the corpse and displaying it in Hutton’s Museum in Keswick if it were just “a cross between mastiff and greyhound”. Perhaps the Beast of Ennerdale was the Beast of Gévaudan on his holidays.

“C’était comme un chien, mais ce n’était pas un chien”…

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Humour, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Australia, Beast of Gévaudan, Cumberland, Ennerdale, George Wombwell, Hobart Zoo, Lake District, MK Davis, Richard the Lionheart, Tasmania, Thylacine, Tower of London, unicorn, Wombwell's Travelling Menagerie

by jfwknifton | September 10, 2015 · 8:25 am

The Beast of Ennerdale: Part Two

Last time I introduced you all to the Beast of Ennerdale, an unknown creature that rampaged over the Lake District in north western England in 1810. Here is Ennerdale:

The original source for the tale was a book called “Cumbriana; or, Fragments of Cumbrian life” by William Dickinson. It was published in 1876, more than sixty years after the events it portrayed. Here, a typical chase after the Monster is described:

“One Saturday night a great number of men was dispersed over the high fells, watching with guns and hounds, but the animal avoided them and took his supper on a distant mountain ; and the men not meeting with him, came down about eleven o’clock on Sunday morning and separated about Swinside Lane End:

In a few minutes after, Willy Lamb gave the “view halloo.” He had started the beast in crossing the wooded stream, and away went the dog with the hounds in full cry after him. The hunt passed Ennerdale Church during service ; and the male part of the congregation, liking the cry of the hounds better than the sermon, ran out and followed. It has been said the Reverend Mr Ponsonby could not resist, and himself went in pursuit as far as he was able. This run ended at Fitz Mill, near Cockermouth, in a storm which the wearied men and dogs had to encounter in a twelve-miles return.”

The Beast’s identity was still a matter of considerable debate for the locals:

Some thought it was a lion. Some thought it was a tiger. Some thought it was a wolf. One wealthier farmworker, who had recently been to France for his holidays, said that it was “Like a wolf but not a wolf”.

And exactly as had been the case in France, many of the local peasants thought it was a werewolf, although the one who had been to France for his holidays, said it was “un loup-garou” or even “un rougarou”. Proof of the supernatural qualities of this Beast came in the fact that it drank blood:

Just as a piece of information, there were no wolves in the Lake District at this time, and had not been for, probably, the best part of 400 years. The most recent record of wolves in England came, most fittingly, from Nottinghamshire where, in the reign of Henry VI (1422-1460), Robert Plumpton, who owned land in Nottingham itself, was given the job of “chasing wolves in Sherwood Forest”. By 1500, wolves were totally exterminated in England.

Whatever the Beast of Ennerdale was, the locals came up with a cunning plan to catch it. Somebody thought of putting together all the best hunting dogs into an élite pack, a Special Forces Unit which would hunt down the Sheep Slayer once and for all:

There was a pursuit which lasted several days. Finally, the poor monster was flushed from cover. It fled, but the hounds caught it. The plan now went pear shaped though, as the Beast took on all of the Special Forces dogs at once in a ferocious combat. Several of these ninja sheep dogs were killed outright in a matter of minutes. All the survivors then suddenly changed their minds and headed off home, to the safety of their nice safe kennels. Obviously, whatever the Beast was, “dog” could pretty well be crossed off the list.
And just as was the case in distant Gévaudan, there were the hard luck stories. William Jackson who lived in the middle of wild and lonely mountains at Swinside, had his musket loaded and ready, as he left his wild and lonely farm. Here it is, as it looks today:

The Beast was watching him, just thirty yards away. William took careful aim, pulled the trigger and the fifty years old relic of a rifle failed to fire. The Beast, of course, made his escape easily.
On another occasion, a group of men, armed to the teeth, along with their pack of hounds, had the Beast surrounded in a small wood and totally at their mercy. It charged out and the weakest link in the human chain duly lost his nerve, dived out of the way and the chance was lost.

Interestingly enough, an incident very similar to this happened with the Beast of Gévaudan and with at least one of the other French creatures. The Beast of Ennerdale, though, continued onwards and knocked over an old chap called Jack Wilson. Jack was collecting wood for his fire but was completely unaware of the Beast’s presence, because he was totally deaf.
The guilty nerve loser was probably Will Rothery who is actually named in another very similar version of the tale. Will explained that he failed to take his easy shot at the animal because he was so surprised by its huge size and unexpected appearance. I would expect Mr Rothery’s fellow hunters might have had something to say about that. Later, Will Rothery was to testify that he thought the animal was some kind of lion.

Meanwhile, in Cumberland, the slayings continued. Sheep continued to die in large numbers:

Great was the disappointment, therefore, when, one fine morning in July, an enormous army of more than 200 armed men, with their hounds, found themselves scouring Kinniside Fell after the Beast had been seen moving away towards Hopehead. The contour lines show how steep the sides of the valley were. Look for the orange arrow:

The huge pursuit went on, along the tops of the mountains between Wasdale and Ennerdale. And then it was the wild slopes of Stockdale Moor and then, finally, a cornfield near Calder Bridge.
But the enormous, and prolonged hunt was in vain. After they had waited for hours, not a single Beast was found hiding in the corn. Somehow, it had slipped away.

And then there was another wasted, breathless chase through Drigg and out to Seascale, right on the coast of the Irish Sea itself. Overall, the Beast took its admirers on many tourist trips around the fringes of the Lake District. Kinniside. Lamplugh. Through the icy waters of the Marron. Out to Little Clifton and then to sunny Workington. Or perhaps they would have preferred Seaton or the Fitz Mill at Cockermouth. Maybe Irton or Dent Hill or Egremont or even St. Bees. Here is the wonderfully named Cockermouth. The orange arrow indicates the Fitz Mill :

And still nobody knew what the Beast was. Hundreds of people, noblemen, farmworkers and professional hunters had all seen it. And it remained an enormous puzzle. Meanwhile the death toll mounted. And still they were haunted by the worry that it might one day change from drinking sheep’s blood to killing children.
The longer it went on, the more gloom and despondency the locals felt. As autumn approached, they all made the conscious decision to accept the losses of sheep temporarily, but above all to make sure that the harvest was gathered in. All the hunts were abandoned for the moment, as gathering in the harvest continued apace:

By September, the hunters were back, combing the hillsides and fields for the Beast. Now the writing was on the wall. No animal, however secretive and cunning, could continue for ever to elude so many hundreds of pursuers:

A significant chance event occurred on September 12th, when the Beast was seen by Jonathan Patrickson to go into a cornfield. The tale is told by William Dickinson in his “Cumbriana; or, Fragments of Cumbrian life”. It starts with some traditional Lake District Gibberish:

Jonathan quietly said, ” Aa’l let ta lig theer a bit, me lad, but aa’l want to see tha just noo.”

Away went the old man, and, without the usual noise, soon raised men enough to surround the field. As some in their haste came unprovided with guns, a halt was whispered round to wait until more guns were brought and the hounds collected. When a good muster of guns and men with dogs were got together, the wild dog was disturbed out of the corn ; and only the old man who had seen him go into the field was lucky enough to get a shot at him, and to wound him in the hind quarters:

This took a little off his speed, and enabled the hounds to keep well up to him, but none dared or did engage him. And, though partly disabled, he kept long on his legs and was often headed and turned by the numerous parties of pursuers, several of whom met him in his circuitous route from the upper side of Kinniside, by Eskat, Arlecdon, and Asby, by Rowrah and Stockhow Hall, to the river Ehen. Here is Arlecdon and Rowrah, indicated by the orange arrow:

Each of these parties he fled from, and turned in a new direction till he got wearied. He was quietly taking a cold bath in the river, with the exhausted hounds as quietly looking on, when John Steel came up with his gun laden with small bullets, but dared not shoot, lest he should injure some of the hounds. When the dog caught sight of him it made off to Eskat Woods, with the hounds and John on its track, and after a few turnings in the wood, amid the greatest excitement of dogs and men, a fair chance was offered, and the fatal discharge was made by John Steel:

The destroyer fell to rise no more, and the marksman received his well-earned reward of ten pounds, with the hearty congratulations of all assembled.

After many a kick at the dead brute, the carcase was carried in triumph to the inns at Ennerdale Bridge; and the cheering and rejoicing there were so great that it was many days before the shepherd inhabitants of the vale settled to their usual pursuits.”

What was left of the mystery animal was taken triumphantly then to the various public houses at Ennerdale Bridge. On the map, the orange arrow indicates “PH” which means public house:

The locals, thirsty from the rejoicing and the cheering, clearly made serious attempts to drink the place dry:

Not cans, though. They were not invented until 1935. Stick to bottled beer. Foreign, if they stock it:

The people who were still sober enough then weighed the animal (eight stone or 51 kilos: a big wolf is 100 kilos). They put it on a cart and paraded it around. It finished up in Hutton’s Museum, at Keswick where the resident taxidermist stuffed what remained of the animal after the Special Forces hunting dogs had all had a free bite each. It was given a collar round its neck, stating that the wearer had been the destroyer of nearly three hundred sheep and lambs in the five months of his Ennerdale campaign.

When the Museum closed in 1876, the Beast, though, was lost, and that was that. Another tale says that the curator of the Museum just decided one day that it was too tatty and too moth-eaten to be kept and the strange stripey Beast was simply thrown in the dustbin:

Whatever the truth, the Beast was still unidentified. So what was it? Just a dog?
Well…have a think, and I’ll tell you the extremely cunning theory in my next article.
Meanwhile, let’s finish with the Official Song of the Beast of Ennerdale. Unfortunately, perhaps, it has many, many verses, but this is the catchy chorus, sung to the tune of “D’Ye Ken John Peel”:

It was big,
It was strong,
It was eight feet long.
It could leap,
It could bound,
It could outrun any hound.

It had stripes and a tail, and it gave out such a wail,
And you’d find dead sheep in the morning.

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Humour, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Beast of Ennerdale, Beast of Gévaudan, Cockermouth, Cumberland, Ennerdale, Ennerdale Bridge, Keswick, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, Sherwood Forest, the Lake District, wolves, Workington

by jfwknifton | September 8, 2015 · 8:58 am

The Beast of Ennerdale: Part One

When I was researching the Beast of Gevaudan, and his many, many friends, both in France, Italy and a number of other countries, I was amazed to find “England” in one of the lists. I couldn’t believe it! An out of control animal rampaging in our well-ordered and generally wonderful country? A piece of slander by a lying, jealous foreigner, surely!

Well, apparently, no. The whole unfortunate business has been kept very quiet, of course, but in 1810, a mystery creature certainly did rampage across the wild countryside of the Lake District in north western England. Here is that beautiful area. Look for the orange arrow:

The parallels with the Beast of Gévaudan were striking, the only difference being that the English victims were not pretty young shepherdesses or even little boys, but the sheep themselves.
The animal was dubbed at the time “The Girt Dog of Ennerdale”. To me, though, this is a singularly inappropriate name, certainly from the point of view of anyone who wants to attract tourists, rather as they do with the Loch Ness Monster.

“Where is Ennerdale?” you can hear all the tourists asking. “What does ‘Girt’ mean?” and “What is so special about a dog?”
The saga of “The Beast of the Lake District” or, a more striking name perhaps, “The Beast of Ennerdale”, began in spring, or more precisely May, of 1810, when the body of a half consumed sheep was found on the bleak hillside above the lake called Ennerdale Water. On May 10th, Mr Mossop, who lived at Thornholme, to the south of Ennerdale Water on the way to Calderbridge, had a brief glimpse of an unknown animal far away, up on the mountainside. The orange arrow indicates his farm at Thornholme:

Soon after this, an increasing number of sheep began to be attacked. Every night, at least one sheep would be killed.

Clearly, a monster was at large in the county, known at this time as Cumberland. At first the locals walked the hills, trying to find the animal. They had no success, which was not really surprising, given the extent of the hills, and in some cases, the extent of the forests in the valleys between them. One or two of the men had fleeting glimpses of the Beast, which always seemed to emerge just as night was falling. All they could make out was the animal’s size, which was extremely large. In the local dialect, “girt”, or “gurt” meant “great”, so the Beast was christened “The Girt Dog of Ennerdale”. This is Ennerdale. It is very wild country by English standards:

The ferocious Beast killed large numbers of sheep, far beyond what it would have needed for food. Furthermore, it killed its victims in a very unusual way: the corpses of the sheep had their internal organs consumed or even removed, and their blood was apparently drained from their bodies. This was no ordinary dog, feral or otherwise. It was not a fox either. No canid drinks the blood of its prey, and this planted a seed in the minds of a superstitious local population.
Indeed, if these 19th century farmworkers had had wider access to satellite television, I am sure that the spectre of cattle mutilation and UFOs would have raised their ugly heads:

As the situation worsened, more and more men had to leave their ordinary work and their farms, take their dogs, and begin to comb the hills and woods in an effort to find and kill the monster.

Without any success whatsoever. The Beast of Ennerdale was just as elusive and cunning as the Beast of Gévaudan. It did not, on any occasion, stay in an area long enough to attack the same flock of sheep on two successive nights. Its self-secreting powers, the ways it could avoid capture and above all, its propensity for drinking blood soon had the superstitious locals believing that the animal was supernatural. It was soon christened, if that is the word, “The Vampire Dog of Ennerdale”:

Just like the Beast of Gévaudan, it seemed to have a power over ordinary dogs who normally would have been reasonably courageous. Instead, the locals’ dogs would shrink away when asked to follow the Beast’s trail and, as dogs apparently do with Bigfoot, they often just refused to track. The dogs were clearly scared stiff of something that they could understand, but their human owners could not.

Sometimes, when the dogs were a little more positive and were actually pursuing the Beast, it would occasionally let just one catch up and then seize it and crush its forelegs in its powerful teeth. None of the other dogs would then go near it. The Beast was so fleet of foot that it usually only had one dog to deal with at any one time, as all the pursuing dogs would be chasing it at different speeds.
The death toll of sheep continued to mount by the day. Eventually, as a minimum, the unknown killer was slaughtering half a dozen sheep every night. Occasionally the total would mount to eight or ten. This only added to the villagers’ superstitions, of course:

The Beast clearly took sadistic pleasure in ripping sheep to pieces, often to leave them uneaten. On occasion, he would even leave them alive. One of a particular farmer’s favourite rams was watched by the dawn’s first light as the Beast attacked it. The latter ripped out and ate great lumps of best quality mutton from the poor animal’s rear quarters. The crippled victim was then left in the field, unable to fight back, unable even to walk, as its hind legs were paralysed. Another sheep suffered even worse. The shepherd drove the Beast off as it was feasting and then found that the mutton had been stripped off the ribs behind the shoulder to leave visible the poor animal’s still beating heart.

Soon a prominent local, John Russell, put up a £10 reward for what he thought was a huge dog, “Dead or alive” as they say. An even better offer was free beer for the people who kept watch for the Beast. Mr Russell, of course, owned his very own brewery in Whitehaven. He also had a direct interest in the Beast as he was the owner of 3,000 acres of sheep farming land in Ennerdale. Here is a general map of the valley:

The offer for the combatants of free food and especially, alcoholic drink, was taken up by other wealthy sheep farmers who provided as much as £12 for refreshments. Others showed their willingness to provide free meals for all Beasthunters over a certain fixed period of time at a certain location, such as their farm or large house.
Nothing succeeded. And then, just as with the Beast of Gévaudan, a feeling of panic began to sweep the area. Parents would keep their children indoors all day long, too scared to let them go out and play.
The Beast seemed just so calculating and so shrewd. Cleverer than a mere animal. Cleverer than a fox. No traps ever came close to catching it. It was wary and watchful:

People thought that it spent the day high up in its look-out place, watching the scared natives far below in the valley make huge but vain efforts to catch it. The animal’s senses of sight, hearing, and scent, were so acute that it was a rare event indeed, for anybody to come upon it unawares during daylight hours. When it was accidentally approached in daytime, surprisingly perhaps, the animal never did anything vicious towards humans, and always took to its heels. The Beast never uttered the slightest sound, not a single bark, growl or howl.

As happened with its French counterpart in Gévaudan, the dead sheep were all poisoned and left out on the hillside. The Beast was no more attracted to these carcasses than it was to the many traps which were optimistically set to catch it.
One of the more subtle sheepfarmers even tried leaving out a dog on heat to attract the Beast within musket shot, but he had no success with this cunning plan:

The male dogs, of course, as soon as they caught the distant scent of the Beast, still continued with their policy of cowering and whimpering. They refused absolutely to follow this strange, ferocious animal.
As the weeks went by and the summer drew towards its close, the Beast was beginning to have a very negative effect. While the men were all off chasing it, the poor cows often had to wait to be milked. Horses too were not looked after properly and often went hungry. Fields were neglected. Years before computer games, the poor little children were confined to their homes as their parents were too frightened to let them out of their sight. And all this neglect had its impact on the womenfolk of the area who tried (I almost wrote ‘manfully’) to make up for their absent husbands and servants.
Finally, a shepherd out on the hillside, watching his flocks not by night but in the cold grey light of the early morning, caught a clear sight of the monster. In actual fact, his description was not desperately helpful, but to anybody who had ever heard of the Beast of Gévaudan, it had some strangely familiar elements:

Firstly, the Beast of Ennerdale was pale brown or sandy coloured. It was well built and solid. And it was very large. Its jaws seemed unusually large and wide and it had dark stripes on its back. It was a strange mixture of the features of both a very big dog and a very big cat. It was really quick, and, as they found out later, it possessed enormous stamina. The Beast was not like anything the scared shepherd had ever seen before.
After this, the Beast seemed to be spotted more frequently. Shepherds and the bravest of their sheepdogs would chase after it up the hillside. Occasionally a group of some fifty or so locals would assemble, seemingly at the drop of a tricorn hat, to set off following their various hunting hounds, racing across the mountainside.
That princely reward of £10 plus free beer for everybody who kept watch for the Beast attracted scores, if not hundreds of professional hunters to the land around Ennerdale Water. Beer, money and undying fame! What was there not to like?

The would-be hunters, of course, had no success whatsoever. The phrase “Wild Goose Chase” might have been invented for their efforts. At one point there were more than a hundred men and several hundreds of their dogs racing back and forth across the desolate hills. Useless. The killing and the blood sucking and the soft organ eating all continued as before. By the end of the summer, more than 300 sheep had been killed.

Next time: “Chapter Two: This isn’t going to end well”.

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Humour, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Beast of Gévaudan, Bigfoot, Ennerdale, Ennerdale Water, Girt Dog of Ennerdale, Lake District

by jfwknifton | July 6, 2015 · 8:02 am

You have three minutes to learn to swim

In a previous blogpost I spoke about the Great Storm of 1703. Just under a hundred years previously, in 1607, there had been a huge, spectacular, surging flood in the West Country, centred on the Bristol Channel and the Severn Estuary. Much damage was done, in particular to the area near the orange arrow:

The floodwaters which struck on January 30th were in no way the result of a long period of continuous rain, such as has been the case in the recent years of our own century. Indeed contemporary writers stated that:

“The winter was extremely warm and very much drying….even smaller brooks remained ice free. Already in February the sowing was performed, in the same time violets are to have flowered.”

It is always possible, of course, that this long ago catastrophe was the result of a sudden surge, caused by high tides and very strong winds, as has happened several times in Norfolk and Suffolk in the last two hundred years. Some meteorologists, though, have looked beyond this.

Contemporary scientists such as Professor Simon Hazlitt, and Australian geologist Ted Bryant therefore,postulated in their research paper in 2002 that the flooding was caused by a tsunami. Their evidence, other than presumably the immense volumes of water involved in the incident, are that various deposits of sand, pebbles and shells, scattered around the Severn Estuary, are compatible with having been brought from the open ocean.

Their explanation for this melodramatic event was an undersea landslide, or perhaps ocean slide, on the sea floor between Cornwall and Ireland. Alternatively, there may have been some kind of earthquake, caused by fault lines in the sea somewhere to the southwest of the area.

Whatever the reason, the results were catastrophic. Water swept five miles inland around Bristol and all along the coast of South Wales from Pembrokeshire to Glamorgan and Monmouthshire. In the Somerset Levels, still the victims of flooding nowadays, some four hundred years later, the waters came as far as forty miles inland. Did they recreate the ancient Glastonbury when the waters turned the Tor into the legendary Avalon?

Certainly though, at Frampton on Severn in Gloucestershire, the flood covered the entire village so that only the spire of the church of St Mary the Virgin emerged from the water. There are some lovely details in this contemporary illustration:

At Burnham on Sea in Somerset, the sea wall was washed away and so were thirty villages in the immediate vicinity. In Huntspill, almost thirty people drowned, with a similar number perishing at Brean which was “swallowed up”. Here, seven out of the nine houses were destroyed: these were typical totals repeated in villages and small towns over the entire area, resulting ultimately in a death toll of at least two thousand people, and that in a fairly sparsely populated agricultural region. Other villages which were devastated included Berrow, Mark, Lympsham, and both South and East Brent were badly affected. Houses and villages were swept away, and overall, an estimated 200 square miles (51,800 ha) of farmland was inundated. Livestock was destroyed. For ten days the Church of All Saints at Kingston Seymour, near Weston-super-Mare, (look for the orange arrow) was filled with water to a depth of five feet (1.5 m):

A chiselled mark remains showing that the maximum height of the water was more than 25 feet (7.74 metres) above sea level. The church has a commemorative plaque:

“An inundation of the sea water by overflowing and breaking down the Sea banks; happened in this Parish of Kingstone-Seamore, and many others adjoining; by reason whereof many Persons were drown’d and much Cattle and Goods, were lost: the water in the Church was five feet high and the greatest part lay on the ground about ten days. WILLIAM BOWER”

This plaque in the local St Mary’s church records the disaster at Goldcliff near Newport on the Welsh side of the Severn Estuary:

Initially, on the day, all was going well:

“for about nine of the morning, the same being most fayrely and brightly spred, many of the inhabitants of these countreys prepared themselves to their affayres”

Then the sea retreated away from the shore; in contemporary terms, it was “driven back”. This is apparently a classic sign of trouble ahead, tsunami imminent, and sure enough:

“mighty hilles of water tombling over one another in such sort as if the greatest mountains in the world had overwhelmed the lowe villages or marshy grounds. Sometimes it dazzled many of the spectators that they imagined it had bin some fogge or mist coming with great swiftness towards them and with such a smoke as if mountains were all on fire, and to the view of some it seemed as if myriads of thousands of arrows had been shot forth all at one time.”

And there was no escape just by running away:

“(the water)is ‘affirmed to have runne …. with a swiftness so incredible, as that no gray-hounde could have escaped by running before them’.

For me, though, insofar as these events in 1607 are relatively soon after the appearance of the new King James Bible, I personally agree with the sentiments expressed in a contemporary pamphlet which was called:

“God’s warning to the people of England by the great overflowing of the waters”

The familiar contemporary illustration quoted above also came from a pamphlet of the time:

Throughout the area, there were certainly some narrow escapes. Here are four contemporary accounts:

“a maide child, not passing the age of foure years: it is reported that the mother thereof, perceiving the waters to breake so fast into her house, and not being able to escape with it, and having no clothes on, set it upon a beame in the house, to save it from being drowned. And the waters rushing in a pace, a little chicken flew up, it being found in the bosome of it, when helpe came and by the heate thereof preserved the childe’s life”.

“Another little childe is affirmed to have been cast uppon land in a cradle, in which was nothing but a catte the which was discerned as it came floating to the shoare, to leape still from one side of the cradle unto the other, even as if she had been appointed steresman to preserve the small barke from the waves furie”

“A certain man and woman having taken a tree for their succour, espying nothing but death before their eyes, at last among other things which were carried along, they perceived a certain tubbe of great bignesse to come nearer and nearer unto them, until it rested upon that tree wherein they were, committed themselves, and were carried safe until they were cast upon the drie shore”.

“more than did, had perished for want of food, and extreme cold, had not the Rt. Honble. Lord Herbert …. sent out boats to relieve the distresse …. himself going to such houses as he could minister to their provision of meate and other necessaries”.

Nowadays, of course, this just could not happen. We keep a tight control of the weather:

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Perhaps, though, the builders of medieval churches knew a little bit more than us:

Having said that, have no fear. Should a flood, or indeed, a tsunami, ever arrive, we will be helped by an army of graduates from the University of the Bleedin’ Obvious: