Well, they got rid of the head, but did they get rid of the ghost? No – it just got worse. I’ll tell you what it looked like. It was very tall – 7ft tall – because all that dangling on a rope had stretched Jack. It had long, green hair like seaweed, round staring yellow eyes, and a mouth like the mouth of a blob fish – and if you don’t know what a blob fish looks like, I assure you, you don’t want to know. As for the ghost’s feet – this may be the worst part – they dangled 2ft off the ground.
‘Get the vicar in, he’ll exorcise the bloody ghost!’ screamed the landlord’s wife. So, along came the vicar from the Garrison Church – at that time they hadn’t quite finished building St Anne’s Church in the docks. In went the vicar with bell, book and candle – but a few minutes later he was out again, running screaming up Commercial Road with his hair standing on end. He may only have had two strands of hair, but they were vertical!
‘Get the vicar’s boss in!’ bellowed the landlord’s wife, ‘get the bishop.’ So the bishop came down from Winchester, because at that time there wasn’t a Bishop of Portsmouth. (The Roman Catholic Church had a cardinal in Rome with responsibility for the evangelisation of Portsmouth, but, given that he was called Hyacinthe-Sigismond, he never dared set foot there.) Next minute, though, the bishop had picked up his skirts and fled up Commercial Road.
‘Get the bishop’s boss – the Archbishop of Canterbubble!’ screeched the good lady – but he wouldn’t come anywhere near Pompey, and I shouldn’t imagine that he’d have been able to shift the ghost either.
Well, they were in despair now – but then the landlord’s wife remembered old Jeremiah. Now, Jeremiah had been at sea for years, and it was said that he had a way with ghosts, on account of some terrifying cult he had encountered in Java. Leastways, he was afraid of nothing.
‘I’m desperate, I’ll try anything,’ said the landlord, and went down to the quayside where he encountered old Jeremiah, with his tarry pigtail and tarpaulin hat, sitting on a capstan and smoking his old clay pipe.
‘Can you deal with ghosts?’ asked the landlord.
‘What’s it to you then?’ growled Jeremiah, who wasn’t the most affable man.
‘I’m the landlord of the London Tavern…’
‘Aye – you have the ghost of Jack the Painter. You’ll want him shifted. I can see you right if you see me right,’ said Jeremiah, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together.
Well, after a lot of bargaining they came to an agreement – and Jeremiah promised he’d come to the London Tavern that night, provided he was also supplied with one bottle of beer, seven pots of beer, three noggins of gin and peppermint, eight pints of porter, a quart of rum, a loaf of bread, a pot of oysters, a pot of shrimps and an apple.
That night, Jeremiah rolled up to the London Tavern, and upstairs they went to The Library. ‘Here’s the key,’ said the landlord, and off he went as fast as he could.
Well, old Jeremiah locked the door and pocketed the key. He sat himself down, drank the bottle of beer, ate the oysters, shrimps and bread, had a little bit more beer, drank the gin and a few drops of rum, and then had the apple and porter for pudding. After this, what with the crackling of the fire and the tick-tock-ticking of the grandfather clock, he drifted off to sleep. He woke up when the grandfather clock stuck thirteen.
When a clock strikes thirteen, you know something’s wrong. If a church clock strikes thirteen, the bodies pop their heads out of their graves; if a ship’s bell sounds thirteen times – indeed, any more than eight times – the ghosts of dead sailors are liable to clamber aboard. When the grandfather clock in The Library of the London Tavern struck thirteen times, everything went icy cold, and the fire flickered and went out. Jeremiah opened one bleary eye and regarded the hideous apparition hovering in front of him. It screamed and howled in a most terrible manner.
‘Silence there, shipmate, or I’ll have you overboard,’ said Jeremiah.
The surprised apparition shrieked at him again.
‘What do you want, you bloody noisy lubber?’ said Jeremiah, opening the other bleary eye.
‘I want ye to run away,’ screeched Jack.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know!’ howled the ghost, ‘I’m a ghost, that’s what I do.’
‘I ain’t running from no ugly ghost,’ said Jeremiah, taking a swig of porter, and belching. ‘Anyhow, how did you get in here? You’re over a fathom tall and twice as ugly; I locked the door and I have the key in my breeches pocket. How’d ye get in?’
‘I CAME THROUGH THE KEYHOLE!’ screamed the ghost triumphantly, as if this was proof of its spectral credentials.
‘No, ye never.’
‘I DID, I DID, I DID!’ screamed the ghost, bouncing all around the room, its green hair sticking out in all directions.
‘I’d as soon believe ye could come through the keyhole, as believe ye could get into this bottle,’ said Jeremiah slyly, holding up the beer bottle.
‘Easy,’ said the ghost, and, taking a deep breath, he got smaller and smaller and smaller and – POP – in with him into the bottle. Jeremiah, of course, shoved the cork back into the bottle, took a swig of rum from another bottle, and went back to sleep.
‘Let me out, let me out!’ called the ghost from the bottle, but Jeremiah was already snoring.
Well, in the morning, Jeremiah took the bottle down to the quayside and lobbed it into the briny. Now, some say it floated across to the Isle of Wight, and that is why Carisbrooke Castle is haunted, though how it could float upstream along the River Medina defeats me. Others say it floated way out to sea and was picked up many years later by one of the crew of the Titanic, but I reckon that’s just one of those stories.
I know what happened to Jeremiah, though. The landlord was so grateful to him for getting rid of the terrible ghost that he gave him free drinks for the rest of his life. It is said that nowadays, should you go into the Ship Anson pub, built on the site of the old London Tavern, you might see another ghost. But it makes no noise, and causes no disturbance. It’s just the ghost of old Jeremiah, sitting in the snug, having a drink and smoking his old clay pipe.
COMMANDER CRABB
The folklore of Portsmouth – probably because of Portsmouth’s association with Nelson and the Napoleonic Wars, and because of the presence of HMS Victory – is often associated with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, as with Southampton, the folklore doesn’t just stretch back into the past; it also lives and breathes and grows.
Given that Portsmouth is a naval city, built on an island, it is hardly surprising that the stories drip with salt water. Sometimes, at night, a trail of salt water can be seen connecting two Pompey hostelries: the Keppel’s Head Hotel, near the dockyard, and the Sally Port Inn in Spice Island. Should it be the early hours of the morning, and should a sudden chill have descended, and should you suddenly be enveloped by the smell of the sea, and should you listen carefully, you might hear the flap, flap, flap of fins. You may think, after you’ve stopped running, that it is some sea monster looking for a nice dinner, flapping along and staring through goggly eyes. Of course, it does have fins and goggles – not because it’s a sea monster, but because it’s the ghost of the diver, Commander ‘Buster’ Crabb.
In April 1956, Crabb disappeared in Portsmouth Docks, whilst diving under the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze. This cruiser had brought Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin on a diplomatic mission to Britain. Crabb’s body wasn’t found till June 1957, floating off Pilsey Island in Chichester Harbour, minus its head and hands.
Commander Crabb had been recruited by MI6 to investigate the Soviet cruiser, and theories abound as to how he met his end. It could have been Eduard Koltsov, a Soviet frogman, who cut his throat during an underwater battle. He could have been shot by a Soviet sniper. Wilder conspiracy theories have arisen to say that Crabb was thwarting an attempt by white Russians to blow up the ship, or that he was trying to blow up the ship, or that he had defected to the USSR and that the body
found at Pilsey Island wasn’t his – or even that MI5 had discovered that he was about to defect and sent another frogman to kill him. Whatever the truth may be, there is such an aura of Cold War mystery over his death, that the incident has morphed into folklore, and his ghost has joined the legions that haunt old Pompey.
Both the Keppel’s Head (heads seem to abound in the Portsmouth stories) and the Sally Port have claimed the ghost of Commander Crabb, and it isn’t known which hotel he stayed at on the night before he disappeared because, strangely, the relevant page has been torn out of the registers of both hotels. Perhaps he stayed in one, and ate in the other. There are some lovely stories, though, suggesting that he was staying in the one, but visiting a certain lady in the other; and some of those stories suggest that there is a great camaraderie of divers throughout the world, and that the lady in question was the wife of a Russian diver on board the Ordzhonikidze. This is certainly entirely fictitious, but what a wonderful story it would be: Cold War intrigue, love, sex, betrayal – both political and sexual – but then aren’t these the elements that make folk stories? Folk stories in books are often presented as being only about fairies and bucolic country scenes, but that’s not the way folk told them to folk!
Should you talk to anyone who has meandered, in a rather disoriented condition, through the streets of old Portsmouth in the early hours of the morning (and I certainly know one), they will tell you that there is a flippered phantom that flap, flap, flaps between the Keppel’s Head and the Sally Port, and they will tell you about the smell of the sea.
And imagine – down in the murky depths of Portsmouth Harbour, the place from which the Mary Rose was lifted, the muddy seabed littered with Tudor artefacts, bits and pieces from Napoleonic times, shards and fragments of British history. Imagine the spectres of all those dead sailors, those who went to sea and never came back, the Spithead mutineers, the men and women of Pompey, those hardened women who survived Spice Island, and those who didn’t. Imagine the ghosts of a procession of dead mariners, festooned with seaweed – and imagine Commander Crabb fighting a battle with an unknown assailant, getting his throat cut beneath the looming hull of the Ordzhonikidze.
Five
THE MEON VALLEY
If we travel north of Portsmouth, and just a little to the east, we come to the Meon Valley, which is named after the Meon Warra, a Jutish tribe that rowed up the river in the sixth century. Whilst the New Forest is famous nationally, the Meon Valley isn’t so well known, but it really is one of the beauties of Hampshire, and is an area rich in folklore. As Hampshire wasn’t a county that had an enthusiastic and dedicated Victorian folk story collector, like William Bottrell in Cornwall, these stories have to be found in fragments – and in the telling of these fragments, we see what happens with the unconscious process of story building. (It is worth noting that there were two enthusiastic folk song collectors active in Edwardian Hampshire: Henry Hammond and George B. Gardiner.) I heard fragments of stories in the 1970s, particularly from a bunch of venerable Hampshire squeeze box players who used to make merry in Sam’s Hotel in Shedfield (now called Samuel’s Rest), and these fragments suggested a rich folklore.
The River Meon rises just south of the village of East Meon, a village with a dramatic chalk escarpment rising to the sky behind a beautiful Norman church. The river flows north-east round a ridge for a while, before deciding to flow southwards from Warnford. It reaches the Solent at the lovely little harbour of Hill Head, which, with the marshes of Titchfield Haven, is an oasis in the dystopia described in Chapter Three. The seventeenth-century writer and fisherman, Izaak Walton, wrote, in The Compleat Angler, that the River Meon was the best river in England for trout. The Meon Valley itself fades away as the river approaches Wickham, so we’ll start our tour at Wickham, and travel northwards. We’ll begin with a punch-up and an old bruiser called Sixpenny Moses.
SIXPENNY MOSES AND TANGLEFOOT TOOP
Sixpenny Moses was a prize fighter, with a preference for sixpenny beer – the price of a gallon of ale in the 1860s. He came from West End, a village in between Southampton and Hedge End, and would travel the villages of Hampshire looking for a rumble, with bets being cast. He would fight fist-a-cuffs with his adversary, on the side of a ditch, each attempting to knock the other into the ditch. A law had been passed which banned bare-knuckle boxing, but oft times the local ‘bobby’ would watch, take a bet himself, and only intervene if things got really nasty.
Now, every May there is a horse fair in Wickham, and it attracts gypsies and travellers from far afield. At that time there was a great Romany prize fighter known as Tanglefoot Toop. Toop was considered to be a bit flash, and grizzled old Sixpenny Moses arrived at Wickham Fair intent on giving the flash traveller a good thumping.
They were soon opposite each other, Sixpenny lashing out with his enormous fists at the much more slender and agile Toop. The fight entered folklore because the local country people insisted that Toop used a dark, Romany spell that entangled the legs of poor Sixpenny Moses and caused him to tumble into the ditch all unawares, and that Toop’s victory was therefore most unfair. However, stolid Hampshire countrymen, nicknamed Hampshire Hogs, don’t like to lose – especially to someone with a rather quick and fluid way about them – and it’s possible that Tanglefoot was just too quick, and Sixpenny swung so hard at an empty space that he took a tumble into the waiting ditch. As Sixpenny floundered around in the brackish water at the bottom, Tanglefoot was heard to say, ‘Let God part those waters for you, Moses,’ before being carried away, shoulder high, by a crowd of cheering travellers. This didn’t endear him to those sullen Hampshire Hogs.
The Wickham Horse Fair is still held every year, and the quiet and prosperous village of Wickham is transformed for a day every May – jaunting carts and horses galloping up and down the street, beer being drunk, bargaining taking place. In 2009, there was the beginning of a bare-knuckle fight at Wickham Fair – not a run-of-the-mill punch-up outside a pub, but a prearranged fight. It was soon broken up by the police.
A lot of folk tut-tutted about the travellers, and the Daily Mail described it as a ‘barbaric scene’. I have been told, though, that you can sustain a lot more damage from being smashed in the head by a large, modern, boxing glove, than by a bare fist. If we need to disapprove, maybe we should look at the televised, big business version, rather than a prearranged grudge match at Wickham Fair. Mind you, I bet there was a fair few quid going on it!
ST WILFRID
Wilfrid came to the Meon Valley in 681 and his name has been in the Meon Valley stories ever since. There is a pilgrimage trail dedicated to St Wilfrid that connects the beautiful churches of the Meon Valley, and it’s a wonderful way to explore the course of the river. A lot of the walk is along the course of the now disused Meon Valley railway, which provides a great path. Walking along the A32 is definitely not recommended; the traffic travels very fast and there is little room for the pedestrian – it is a very dangerous road for walkers.
The Venerable Bede tells us that before the arrival of St Wilfrid, the inhabitants of the Meon Valley were ‘ignorant of the name and faith of God’. In this godless state they were hit by a terrible famine and often ‘forty or fifty, being spent with want, would go together to some cliff, or to the seashore, and there, hand-in-hand, miserably perish by the fall or be swallowed by the waves’. The river was teeming with fish, but somehow the poor, ignorant heathens of the Meon Valley were only able to catch eels. Wilfrid cast his nets, immediately caught 300 fish, and the thankful Meon Warra converted to Christianity forthwith.
It is, of course, interesting how propaganda works, and the propaganda surrounding St Wilfrid seems not to baulk at this rather sacrilegious comparison to Jesus himself. Wilfrid was actually a very able, scheming, politician and power broker. He came from Northumbria and, when he was a boy, he had studied at that centre of Celtic Christianity, Lindisfarne, after which he travelled to Rome. On his travels, he had been seduced by the luxury and power of the Roman C
hurch, and so in England he became its power broker. At the Council of Whitby in 664, it was Wilfrid who championed the cause of the Roman Church against the Celtic Church, and it was Wilfrid who won the case for Rome, and the idea that Christianity was a set of beliefs to be imposed by authority, rather than something that lived within the people. It was during four or five years of a fascinating and turbulent life that Wilfrid visited the heathen, Saxon and Jutish south of England. He set up a church in Selsey, which was the base for his forays up the Meon.
The churches along the Meon are all beautiful, but, to my mind, one church is the loveliest, though it is by no means the finest. That is a church with no saint’s name attached – it is known only as Corhampton Church. The leaflet describing the Meon Valley pilgrimage says: ‘Many think that the church ought to be called St Wilfrid’s because of the bishop’s strong association with the site’. I can only write, ‘thank God it isn’t’, because Corhampton Church has a feel to it which is the very antithesis of that politically astute, powerful politician, Wilfrid. The place seems genuinely holy.
The church is built upon a mound within a circular enclosure, a mound that suggests the place was holy before the arrival of Christianity. The church itself is pre-Norman conquest and very simple – simple, unfussy and spare. Outside the church is a yew tree that may be more ancient than the church itself, and inside, in 1968, some twelfth-century wall paintings were uncovered. In medieval times, the walls of a church would have been emblazoned with pictorial storytelling. The Bible was a closed book (pardon the pun) for most people: firstly, because most people couldn’t read, and secondly, because it was in Latin – the language of the ruling class. Inside the church was another ‘bible’, sometimes known as ‘The Poor Man’s Bible’, though undoubtedly it referred to women as well! This was a colourful array of pictures covering the walls, telling stories; they were whitewashed over during the Reformation. These stories were biblical, but were also intensely local – so the religious storytelling of the people must have been very tied up with their own myths and legends, and their own landscape. Inside Corhampton Church, the stories seem to be about a saint other than St Wilfrid, a much more appealing saint called St Swithun. This could be the cue to tell some of those stories, but they are so much associated with Winchester that I’ll leave them for the next chapter. Instead, we’ll take a little walk behind the church, past the Punch Bowl, across Beacon Hill Lane, through Corhampton Forest and onto Sailor’s Lane. Now we’ll take the Wayfarer’s Walk from Sailor’s Lane, and we’ll find ourselves entering Betty Mundy’s Bottom, which is a wooded valley heading up to Preshaw Down.
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales Page 7