London Urban Legends

by Scott Wood

  As well as Jan Bondeson, in 1986 Peter Turnbull published his book The Killer Who Never Was, putting forward the no-Ripper hypothesis. Ripperologist and tour guide John G. Bennett published Jack the Ripper: The Making of the Myth in 2011 which, while not denying the single-killer hypothesis, did much to disembowel the countless scabbed-over theories about the original murders. Retired murder-squad detective Trevor Marriott brought his experience into investigating the Jack the Ripper killings and concluded that there was no Jack. If the evocative name Jack the Ripper had not been attached to the Whitechapel killings, the theory would have been forgotten a long time ago. He decided that at least two of the women ‘were killed by the same hand’ and the others, if they were related at all, were copycat killings. ‘The urban myth was created by an overzealous newspaper reporter sending a mysterious letter signed Jack the Ripper. The police certainly never believed in a killer known as Jack the Ripper.’

  These theories are a little way from the Mohawks’ dangerous rakes, but nearer the fantastical attacks of Spring-heeled Jack. It is the idea of a rich and debauched individual committing murder and mutilation and escaping justice because of their privilege, that all of these blade-wielding figures, fact or fiction, share. The actual, certain evidence for the Whitechapel killings is the bodies of the victims. The theories and the name Jack the Ripper came in the hysteria afterwards, a hysteria that still bends thought. There may have been one murderer, or each killing could have had its own sad story, but the idea of a Victorian killer named Jack the Ripper has such gravity to it that people cannot resist its pull.

  18

  THE ACCIDENTAL THEFT

  * * *

  Our old cat died last night

  Me wife says to bury it out of sight

  But we didn’t have a garden;

  We was livin’ in a flat

  So what was I to do with the body of a cat,

  Then a big brown paper bag I spied

  I put our old dead kittycat inside.

  And now I’m off down the street with the body in the bag,

  The body in the bag, ta ra ra.

  ‘The Body in the Bag’ by Charles O’Hegarty

  * * *

  JAN HAROLD BRUNVAND often mutters in his books that one should ‘never trust a dead cat story’. So consider yourself warned while I tell you the tale of the single ‘lady scholar’ working at the British Museum who fended off loneliness by sharing her lodgings with a cat. This is a story Brunvand collected for his 1983 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker, which may be why a ‘lady scholar’ isn’t just a scholar. She smuggled the cat into her room, bribed the maid to keep quiet and lived with the cat over winter. In time, though, the cat died and with no garden in which to bury the cat, our scholar neatly and secretly parcelled the cat up to put into the building’s incinerator. She was interrupted by the establishment’s proprietor and thought, ‘this will never do’, and so headed off to the British Library. (This would have been when the library was within the British Museum.) She saw a good place along the way to get rid of the cat – a culvert – but this time a policeman came round the corner just when she was about to do the deed.

  Some days you just can’t get rid of a dead cat, so she took the parcel to the museum and, at lunchtime, was stopped by the guard letting her know that she had forgotten her package. ‘This is getting funny,’ she thought to herself. She had failed to leave her dead pet on the bus and on the tube, so in desperation rang her friend who told her to come to her, as there was a local pet cemetery in which she could inter the cat.

  When she arrived, perhaps filled with guilt at the way she had tried to abandon the cat’s remains, she opened the parcel to have one last look at the cat and found … a leg of mutton.

  The first part of this legend makes it into Mark Barber’s book Urban Legends Uncovered, albeit in a dishevelled state, with a ‘young lady’ who worked at the British Museum living in a one-bedroom flat with her beloved cat. Not wanting to bin it and with nowhere to bury the cat she set out to inter it in the nearest pet cemetery, which was 10 miles away. She put the cat in a box and the box into a large carrier bag. On the way to this distant animal graveyard she popped into a clothes shop that she did not visit very often, due to it being so far out of central London. While in the shop and looking at a couple of dresses, she put her bag down for a second and when she reached for it again, the bag was gone.

  Then there was a disturbance outside the shop: a woman had fainted on the street. Our bereaved cat owner saw that the unconscious woman had her missing bag clutched to her chest, with the head of her dead cat poking out of the top of it. The passed-out woman was a known shoplifter who had been operating in the area for months.

  This second version of the dead cat story is as classic an urban myth as babies in microwaves and hairy handed hitchhikers. Its purpose is clear as a revenge fantasy for those who have been robbed, and versions of it appear all over the western world. Whilst dead cats are very popular, often it is a bag of collected dog excrement that is snatched in a park, or a urine sample in a whisky bottle stolen by a thirsty thief. It is a stray old alley cat of a story that crops up, occasionally mangy and reeking, to the party. It is easy to understand the ubiquity of this story, as everyone wishes ill on the person who has snatched their bag or picked their pocket. Some years ago my wife had her bag snatched on Whitechapel High Street while on the way home from a gig. She had been to her dance class before that and the bag contained only her worn dance kit. A few days later, a friend imagined the thief getting back to his crime den with nothing but a used women’s dance outfit and his boss making him wear the worthless costume and dance on a table for him as a punishment.

  Managing to swap a dead cat for a tasty piece of dead sheep is a different outcome, and has the cat-carrier inadvertently becoming the thief themselves. The constant attempts to dispose of the package end with something far more valuable than a departed pet for one and, presumably, a frustrated roast dinner elsewhere in London for the other.

  The mistaken theft crops up a lot in British folklore. A chestnut of a tale that is as common as the dead cat tale is the story of the valuable thing left on the mantelpiece (not the most inspiring title for an urban myth, but please bear with me).

  One version of this tale starts with Peter, who is on a business trip in London, discovering that his gold watch is missing while he is travelling back to his hotel on the last tube train.

  On the platform is a young man grinning at him and Peter decides that this man must be the thief. He leaps up from his seat and grabs the young man by the lapels of his suit, only for the tube doors to close in front of him, tearing the man’s suit lapels off.

  Back at his hotel room Peter phones the police to report the theft and then phones his wife to let her know his gold watch is gone. His wife says, ‘I’m glad you rang. Did you know you’d left your watch behind on the dresser this morning?’

  Other versions have the ‘robbed’ man wrestling his wallet from the thief, only to find it at home, or the more genteel version with an elderly lady going into town by train with £5. She dozes off during the journey and when she wakes, there is another sleeping woman in the carriage. She then goes into her bag to check her shopping list, finds her £5 is missing and, on impulse, checks the bag of the sleeping woman. There, at the top of the bag, is the £5 note. She removes it quietly and decides not to confront the woman or report her, so leaves her sleeping in the train compartment. With her shopping done, her husband meets her at the station and asks, ‘However did you get all that stuff? You left your £5 note on the mantelpiece.’

  Both dead cat stories, the accidental theft and the bag-snatcher, are intertwined. In another version the dead cat is taken while the woman has lunch with a friend. The thief faints in the toilets whilst checking her ill-gotten gains and the cat owner finds the theft and the cat package she was trying to lose. As the thief is stretchered away the woman passes the repackaged cat to the paramedics with the words, ‘I think this is
hers.’

  The trope of wandering London looking for a place to leave a dead cat because you do not have a garden is older than this urban legend. It was recalled by Eric Winter in a musical song he recorded in the journal Sing on 5 July 1960. The song ‘The Body in the Bag’ by Charles O’Hegarty is a cockney music-hall song about a frustrated man who is trying to leave a cat somewhere. The lyrics mirror the troubles of our British Museum lady scholar:

  I went off down the street to have a whisky neat

  And carefully laid my dead cat underneath my seat.

  Then I got down on my hands and knees;

  Went halfway through the town,

  When the barman stops me,

  ‘Here’s your parcel Mr. Brown,’

  So I had to thank the silly fool

  And give him half a crown

  For bringing me the body in the bag.

  Having failed all day to get rid of the cat, Mr Brown hears a noise in the bag:

  All at once from in the bag

  There came a plaintive meow

  Say Puss, ‘I’m dead no longer,

  You needn’t bother now.

  You’ve often heard it said

  That a cat has got nine lives,

  Well, I’m a married Tabby,

  One of Tommy’s wives

  And our families they usually come

  In threes, and fours, and fives.’

  But there were seven little bodies in the bag!

  Another accidental theft is the urban legend about two travellers and a packet of biscuits. Printed versions appeared around 1972/74 and the legends appeared in Folklore from the summer of 1975. A traveller buys a cup of tea and a packet of biscuits in a Joe Lyons corner house, opposite Liverpool Street station (or in a buffet car or station café), and sits down to enjoy them. Also sitting at the table is an African (or Pakistani or West Indian) man, who helps himself to one of the biscuits. Shaken by the effrontery of this, our traveller takes another. The uninvited biscuit-eater takes another and this continues until they are down to the last biscuit. Here the African (West Indian or Pakistani) man breaks the biscuit in two and hands the traveller half. Our traveller loses his temper at this point and hurls abuse at the man. It is only then that he (or sometimes she) realises that his own packet of biscuits is lying unopened on his suitcase, and that he had been helping himself to the other fellow’s biscuits.

  This story made it as far as Paul Smith’s The Book of Nastier Legends published in 1986, where the setting was a café in Southampton, biscuits became the fingers of a Kit-Kat bar and the patient and sharing individual changed from an ethnic minority and possible recent immigrant to an ‘outrageously dressed’ punk. The message of the story is the same as with the tea house: don’t judge people by how they look and, as with all of these stories, double check before confronting someone and do not be so suspicious. Also, take better care of your cat, be it dead or alive.

  19

  CONCRETE JUNGLE

  * * *

  If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and

  shook it you would be amazed at the animals that would fall out.

  It would pour more than cats and dogs, I tell you.

  Yann Martel, Life of PI

  * * *

  Rat Land

  In London you are never more than a certain distance away from a rat. This is an almost universal indicator of urban filth, London’s hidden dangers and the fear and loathing a lot of us have for rats. Each time the idea of rat proximity is repeated the distance varies. A quick Google suggests 6ft, 7ft, 10ft or a metric 5m or 18m. Why do we even think it’s possible to have an average distance from a rat? Do London rats outnumber London human beings? This idea seems to come from the 1909 book The Rat Problem by W.R. Boelter who undertook his research by asking country folk whether they thought it was reasonable to say that there was one rat per acre of land. Boelter made an estimated guess at 40 million rats, as there were 40 million acres of cultivated land in Britain at the time. There were also around 40 million people in Britain at the time. Since then, it only seems right to think that the rat population has increased more quickly than the human population, rats must breed like rats after all, and so now they must outnumber us, particularly in our grimy cities.

  Luckily, Dr Dave Cowan, leader of the wildlife programme at the Food and Environment Research Agency, has tried to work out the actual person:rat ratio of Britain – both town and country – in a more scientific way. Counting cities, sewers and farms (farms are the most popular rat territories), Dr Cowan calculated that there are 10.2 million rats in Britain. The UK has 60 million human inhabitants, so people outnumber rats by six to one. As for approximate distance from a rat in an urban area you would be, at most, never more than 164ft (50m) away from a rat. Although you may, of course, be much nearer.

  Parakeet Superstars

  Unlike the pigs living in London’s sewers or the big cats roaming its suburbs, the parakeets of London are not an urban legend in themselves. They have been reported across London, from Twickenham to Boreham Wood to Hither Green. My own visits to open spaces in London, from Kensal Green cemetery to Manor House Gardens in Lee, have been cut through by a flash of green and a sharp parakeet squawk. Ring-necked parakeets cover south and west London, while the Monk Parakeet has colonies in north London. One encounter with the ring-necked variety in February 2011 in Richmond Park was like a Mardi Gras version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds; the old oak trees were thick with their bright feathers and delirious parakeet chatter.

  How they arrived in London is another story, or rather stories. I first encountered the legend of west London’s parakeets in a copy of Time Out from June 2005, which claimed they are all descended from a pair that escaped from Jimi Hendrix’s flat in Notting Hill. The two birds were like the guitarist himself: exotic and flamboyant in a cold grey London. On escaping, they went to found a nation of parakeets in London and provide a high-pitched, alien soundtrack to the coo of London’s pigeons and chattering of sparrows. In a south London special of the Evening Standard’s ES Magazine in 2012, the parakeets were released by Hendrix, rather than escaping, and Surrey Life magazine in December 2011 imagined Hendrix playing ‘Little Wing’ as they sailed from the window and into Notting Hill.

  In its ‘Myth Busters’ column, the Fortean Times, in January 2010, describes a version that is just that little bit more dramatic, as the parakeets are accidentally released from Hendrix’s flat following his death. From medieval to Victorian art, the human soul can be depicted as a dove departing through the window at the moment of death. Perhaps Hendrix’s soul couldn’t be anything as tame as a single, cooing dove.

  Another story tells of the parakeets being the descendants of film stars rather than the pets of a pop star. The same Time Out article repeated the story that the parakeets are descended from some birds that escaped Shepperton Studios during the filming of the 1951 film The African Queen. A friend offered me another version in 2012, by suggesting the parakeets were related to a different African queen, having flown from the set of the 1963 film Antony and Cleopatra.

  Yet another account describes a mass escape during the great storm of 1987, when an aviary was damaged in Northdown Park in Kent. If that is not dramatic enough, how about the parakeets being freed from quarantine at Heathrow airport by a storm? Or that a plane fuselage crashed landed on an aviary near Heathrow airport, or that the birds flew to freedom when the tanker that carried them ran aground or capsized? In many urban myths the parakeets of London do not arrive gradually; the story has to be ‘disaster!’ followed by an ‘instant parakeet hoard!’

  Another celebrity version of the parakeet origin myth is that they were escapees from the aviaries of King Manuel II, Manuel the Unfortunate (the Portuguese king who ascended to the throne after the assassination of his father and brother and had to flee on 6 October 1910 during Portugal’s republican revolution). Manuel landed in Fulwell Park, Twickenham, for his exile where, it has been said, he attempt
ed to recreate Portuguese life, including building an insecure cage for some parakeets. I have not been able to discover whether this story pre-dates the Hendrix one or if they are related. In any case, the parakeets are in London and any slightly exotic figure could be linked to their origins.

  The story of the parakeets escaping Shepperton Studios is undone a little when it is pointed out that The African Queen was not filmed there but at Isleworth Studios. Isleworth may be quite near to Shepperton (as the parakeet flies), but no parakeets were imported for the making of the film. Britain has had a long history with these birds. In its factsheet on feral parakeets, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs states: ‘There is a long history of occurrence in GB, with a first record of breeding in Norfolk in 1855. However the present naturalised population dates only from 1969.’

  A 1999 census of parakeets, which includes London, describes the birds as ‘successfully breeding in the wild in the south east of England since 1969’, suggesting there may be a Hendrix link (Hendrix died in 1970). It depends on how long it took the parakeets to get productive before anyone noticed. The census describes the origin of the birds as numerous escapes leading to ‘many feral populations’. Although it is a great story to imagine that one famous parakeet owner is the daddy to the birds all around us, there are, of course, hundreds of anonymous parakeet owners who may have lost or released their pets. The book Parrots, by Cyril H. Rogers, says of the Ring-necked parakeet that they are ‘probably the most common of all the “Polly Parrots”’, so it is perhaps no surprise that enough have escaped to form a breeding population across south London. And no matter how virile the parakeets of Jimi Hendrix may have been, they surely haven’t populated all of London with birds.