Unfortunately, there was a communication breakdown with the local newspaper, and the gig wasn’t advertised; so only four people turned up as audience. The five-bob fee was quickly dropped, and free entry offered; so finally The Beatles went on in front of an audience of eighteen. This event signalled the end of the career of Leach as The Beatles’ manager, and the beginning of Epstein’s managership.
It is said that an Aldershot resident complained about the noise; not just the noise of the music, but the noise of The Beatles playing football with bingo balls. This meant that when the Fab Four left the hall at I a.m., the Aldershot police ordered them to leave town and to never darken Aldershot’s doors again. I don’t believe this for a minute, but it makes a good conclusion to the story!
Nine
THE ISLE OF WIGHT
The Isle of Wight is different. There have been times when I’ve been booked to tell stories in a school in Cowes, and I’ve driven the short distance down to the ferry terminal in Southampton, then the short distance to the school, and the temperature gauge in the car hasn’t had time to reach its normal level. Yet I have left the mainland and am in another place. It feels different, the light is different and life is a little bit slower. I should certainly have gone by bike!
The stories are different too, though they do connect to stories just across the Solent. There are stories of saints sailing in on millstones and miracles at holy wells; often stories that are more similar to Cornish or Breton stories, than mainland Hampshire ones.
CORK HEADS
Islanders are known as Cork Heads. Those searching for some sort of pretentious superiority will say, ‘No, they are called “caulk heads”, and they are called this because of a past industry in Carisbrooke, where people caulked up boats, which is sealing up the planking with oakum.’ This is nonsense. They are called Cork Heads because they have corky heads. Most of the Island nowadays is occupied by ‘overlanders’, or ‘overners’ – people from the mainland; usually, it would seem, from London, Lancashire and Yorkshire, and we can’t blame those people for wanting to escape. Cork Heads, however, are those who can claim to have generations of Islanders behind them. If there is a boat out at sea, and on board that boat there are Cork Heads and overners, and along comes a terrible storm, and the boat is sunk – well, the overners will plummet down to Davy Jones’ Locker, but the Cork Heads will remain on the surface, bobbing about with their corky heads until the lifeboat comes along and pulls them out.
HOW THE ISLAND GOT ITS NAME
In Hampshire and East Dorset, the Isle of Wight is simply known as ‘the Island’, occasionally being called ‘the Isle of Widget’, with the same sort of humour that gives us ‘Cork Head’. The Romans called it Vectis; the name ‘Wight’ comes from the Jutes.
In 534, Cerdic and his son Cynric conquered the island, and Cerdic gave it to his nephews, Stuf and Whitgar. It was actually Stuf who ruled the island, but they thought that the Isle of Stuf didn’t sound too good, so they named it after Whitgar. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.
THE STORY OF ST ARWALD
The last Jutish king of the Isle of Wight was Arwald, and he’s now a saint. The Island remained pagan after most of the mainland converted to Christianity, and this story concerns the enforced conversion of the Island to Christianity. I wonder, though, if what was really taking place was a change from Celtic Christianity to Roman Christianity after the Synod of Whitby.
King Caedwalla was an Anglo-Saxon king in Wessex, and he invaded the Isle of Wight with such ruthless slaughter that it has been suggested that a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing was being carried out against the Jutes. King Arwald of Wight was killed in the battle, but his two younger brothers escaped across the water to Ytene, later to be called the New Forest. They hid deep in the forest – maybe even at Canterton Glen – but the dark, suspicious inhabitants of Ytene were from a time before the Jutes. Jutes and Saxons – it was all the same to them.
So, for gold, Arwald’s brothers were betrayed to Caedwalla and taken to Stoneham, just north of Southampton. At Stoneham they were put to the sword, but not before they had been converted to Roman Christianity. Their names were lost, but collectively the church remembered them as St Arwald. It seems a strange way to get a sainthood.
And what of that other saint, St Wilfrid, who we heard about converting the Meon Valley? Caedwalla gave him a quarter of the Island. A fine pair of warlords, those two.
STORIES OF ST BONIFACE
Boniface was another saint. He was born in Devon, but joined the monastery at Nutscelle, which was somewhere on the River Itchen, north of Southampton. His eyes were fixed on missionary work in Germany, so he thought he would get a bit of practice by going to the Isle of Wight.
He climbed onto a millstone, and sailed down the River Itchen and out into Southampton Water, the great channel that connects Southampton to the Solent. The millstone then traversed the Solent, sailed round the Island, and pitched Boniface ashore at what is now called Bonchurch, a name that means Boniface’s Church. He climbed to a vantage point, now called the Pulpit Rock, and preached to the fishermen. They converted forthwith.
The Finite Mind
Even a great saint could have doubts about his faith, though. One day, Boniface was walking the shoreline, tormented by doubts, and praying for a sign. There was no clap of thunder, no bolt of lightning; instead, he saw, ahead of him, a little boy digging a hole in the sand. As Boniface watched, the boy took a shell to the sea, filled it with water, and poured the water into the hole – whereupon it sank into the sand. The boy repeated the operation several times, and then threw a tantrum! He hurled the shell at the ground and burst into angry, frustrated tears.
‘Why are you crying, little cork head?’ asked the kindly Boniface.
‘I wanted to empty the sea into the hole, but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!’ howled the boy.
Boniface was enlightened. ‘My mind is finite. How can I fit the infinite into that which is finite?’ and his faith was confirmed. This could also explain why it is so difficult to comprehend quantum theory.
Bonny's Well
Behind Bonchurch there is a steep hill, and on the top is Boniface Down. It is a feature of downs that they are always up; you never go down to a down. On the slope of the hill, somewhere, is a well, known as St Boniface’s Well – or, more popularly, Bonny’s Well. This was discovered by a lost bishop, with the aid of the saint.
One winter’s night, a bishop was riding across Boniface Down, when one of those cold, clammy sea mists came rolling in from the Channel.
The mist from the Channel rose woolly and chill,
And it clung like a pall to the face of the hill,
Blotting out landscape and headland and bay
And through this good Dobbin was picking his way.
While the bishop, a prey to excusable fears.
Could scarce see a fathom in front of his ears —
…wrote Percy G. Stone, a Victorian lover of the Isle of Wight. The bishop then found, to his horror, that his trusty steed, with legs splayed, was slowly sliding down the edge of the hill. Soon they would both be tumbling off a cliff. The horse’s downward slide stopped, however, when its hooves entered a damp indentation in the ground. It was Bonny’s Well. The bishop immediately dedicated it to St Boniface.
Now, if you can find the well, it will grant you a wish. This will only be possible, however, if you never look behind you as you ascend the 800ft up the down. This is hard, because the climb is strenuous and the view is magnificent. Ships used to lower their topsails as a sign of respect as they passed Bonny’s Well, and, on every St Boniface Day, 5 June, the well used to be dressed with flowers. This must always have been a sacred site.
Nowadays it is hard to find the well, but surely this is a good thing? Shouldn’t the search be part of the process of a visit to the well, just as the effort to a pilgrimage is as essential as the arrival?
Boniface may, or may not, have really been to the Isle of Wi
ght. It is not at all unlikely; he spent his early adult life in Hampshire. The story of his life, however, seems mainly to be a story of missionary work in Germany, where he is known as Bishop Boniface of Mainz. It may be that Wilfrid studied under Boniface in Germany – which rather suggests that the Isle of Wight Boniface is a figure of legend, possibly carrying older legends, rather than an historical figure. Interestingly, the German legends connect him to pagan symbols and stories; he is said to have chopped down Yggdrasil, the great tree of Thor, and he is sometimes said to be the originator of the Christmas Tree. It would seem that on the Isle of Wight he plays a similar role; he has become attached to pre-Christian traditions. Certainly his stories, like those of St Swithun, are homely and gentle.
THE MYSTERIOUS HERMIT OF THE CRYSTAL WELL
Close to Boniface Down is Ventnor, and close to Ventnor is St Lawrence, which is now a suburb of Ventnor. In Wayland’s Guide: Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Dockyard, which dates from approximately 1885, we are told that near the tiny twelfth-century church of St Lawrence (now known as St Lawrence Old Church) there is a crystal well, and in this book I read the strangest fragment of a story. I read that there was a mysterious hermit …
…through whose influence it is said a Pilgrim, in a grey cowl, who had visited the holy land, was assassinated – thus fulfilling the prophesy.
When sainted blood in the burn shall well,
It shall light a flame so hot and snell,
Shall fire the burg from lock to fell
Nor sheeling bide its place to tell,
And Culvert’s Nass shall ring its knell.
According to the legend, the prophesy was culminated by the burning of a town, which, it is said, stood on the site now occupied by Woolverton Wood.
This was such a tantalising fragment that I really wanted to know more, and it stuck in my mind for a long time. Then I came across Abraham Elder’s 1839 book, Tales and Legends of the Isle of Wight: With the Adventures of the Author in Search of Them, and there was the story – and it was another story of the hollow hills. Abraham Elder seems a little roguish, so may well have made it up, but he may also have based his personal rendering of the story on local legend.
Elder tells us that there was a hermit who lived near Culvert’s Nass Cliff. He had arrived recently, and was making rather a good living from the local people – selling cures, herbs, and spells. Then things in the area started to go wrong: cattle took ill, the sheep died and the people came to the hermit for help.
‘There is a wicked wizard nearby,’ whispered the hermit, squinting this way and that when he spoke, ‘and he wears a grey cowl. He poisons the wells, and casts evil curses; finish him, and you finish the evil that afflicts us.’
Then, who should come to the crystal well, but a man with a grey cowl, and the villagers cast stones at him; he died with his blood dripping into the well. When they lifted his cowl they found, to their horror, that he was a good old hermit who had lived there many years before, and who had left on a pilgrimage to the holy land.
Their new hermit came by and laughed. The villagers, in their fear and guilt, didn’t know what to do, but one villager, Edgar, followed the hermit to Culvert’s Nass Cliff, where the hermit struck the ground with his staff. The ground opened up and the hermit descended into the hollow hill, closely followed by Edgar. Inside the hill was a magnificent hall, and there were imps and sprites, and bogles and boggarts – and beautiful little green ladies who insisted that Edgar dance with them. The hermit capered around in the middle of the melee, and Edgar soon saw that he had horns and a pointy tail. Then they all sat down to the feast, at which point Edgar did what he always did before eating: he said grace. There was a bang and a crash, and a smell of brimstone, and Edgar found himself sitting alone on the top of the cliff, with a mist creeping in from the sea, and the sound of the waves on the rocks. When Edgar returned home, there had been a French raid on the village, and Woolverton had been burnt to the ground; not a soul was to be found alive.
It may be that in the Wayland’s Guide version of the story, the locations have become a little confused. There was a Woolverton Manor at Ventnor, but Woolverton Wood and Culver Cliff are a little further north-east up the coast, in between Sandown and Bembridge. It is interesting that the whole area around the Bembridge Foreland was once a separate island called Bembridge Isle, and the area is still largely separated from the rest of the Isle of Wight by the River Yar. Bembridge Isle has its own saint, the mysterious St Urien – but then, the whole south coast of the Island was once full of saints and hermits.
Wayland’s Guide, with its Ventnor location for the story, goes on to tell us that if we walk back to Ventnor from St Lawrence’s Church, we might want to look at the Dripping Well: ‘it is continually dripping, and in other times the monks used to come to drink of this water, which is supposed to possess some curative properties.’
Stories ask us to explore – to put our boots on and search.
THE GIANT OF BLACKGANG CHINE
Another hermit on the south coast of the Island got rid of the giant of Blackgang Chine.
Blackgang Chine is generally known for its amusement park, and an unfortunate habit of guidebooks to the more pastoral delights of the Island is to take a rather snobbish swipe at it. I love the place, and it should not only be part of everyone’s childhood, but also their young parenthood and grandparenthood! It was one of the original theme parks, and none the worse for that: innocent and unsophisticated.
However, should you go past the amusement park, you would, not so very long ago, have gone down the chine. A chine is a steep valley, created by a stream that has cut a channel through the soft rock as it flows to the sea; it’s a word used only on the Isle of Wight, and that East Dorset area around Bournemouth that used to be part of Hampshire. Blackgang Chine, like most chines, was beautiful – but it could also feel very desolate. That desolation has now overwhelmed it; it has been destroyed by a series of landslides, one of which, in 1994, took a large slab of the amusement park with it.
Once upon a time, Blackgang Chine had two occupants: a flesh-eating giant and a hermit. (In Abraham Elder’s book there is a poem about this legend, and it is filled with as many goblins, pixies, floating skulls and dancing skeletons as Blackgang Chine amusement park; wonderful stuff.) A flesh-eating giant and a hermit cannot co-exist in the same chine – especially as the hermit wished to protect people, whilst the giant gloried in eating them. The brave saint descended the chine to the giant’s lair, and, stamping his staff of mountain ash on the ground, he made the sign of the cross and cursed the giant and all his wicked ways. One of those mists came swirling up the chine and enveloped them both; when it was gone, the valley was desolate and the little stream was blood red. It still was when I wandered down there in the 1990s, but now it’s all gone.
Every so often the earth moves, and another piece of land slides into the sea. It is as if the giant is trying to escape from his underground imprisonment.
THE PIED PIPER OF FRANCHEVILLE
Legends that are attached to different places often get transposed to another location; and there are several legends on the Isle of Wight that are also to be found in other places. The Island absorbs stories, so naturally tales are placed there, but any proper Cork Head will tell you that all the stories originated on the Isle of Wight and were pinched by foreigners. Maybe this is the case with the Pied Piper of Francheville. The story is pretty much the same as the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which was popularised by Robert Browning in 1842, but W.H. Auden speculated that the Isle of Wight story really was the original.
Francheville, which means Freetown, is now called Newtown, and should you go there nowadays you won’t see many buildings, but you will see a strange sight – a town hall standing all alone. This tells us that the town, on the flat, central north coast of the Island, was once busy and prosperous.
Once upon a time, Francheville was a thriving seaport, with ships at the quayside, a busy marketplace, and streets with na
mes that reflected this mercantile prosperity: Gold Street and Silver Street. But then came the rats. Francheville, with its granaries and food stores, was just right for rats, and this was a real horde of the biggest, meanest, nastiest rats, led by the king of the rats himself. Cats and dogs were brought in to deal with the rat infestation, but they were torn to pieces; where once there was a dog, there was just a pink, wriggling mass of rats’ tails and the sound of tearing flesh – horrible – horrible.
The mayor and corporation were desperate for help and so offered a reward of £50 for anyone who could rid the town of the rats. This was the fourteenth century and so £50 was a huge sum of money. And who should arrive at the town? Well, we know, and the reason we know is because we’ve made a German legend more famous than our own. The piper walked through the town, squeezing the dudelsack of his bagpipes, and his piping was soon accompanied by the squeaking and gibbering of thousands of rats, as they emerged from granaries and hay stacks, shops and kitchens, barns and barrels. This army of rats followed the piper down to the quayside, where he climbed into a rowing boat, and, with the rats swimming behind him, he rowed out to the mud flats. There he resumed his piping whilst the rats clambered onto the mud flats and stuck fast. The piper sat back in the boat and watched as the tide came in and drowned the lot of them. They must have looked a horrible sight when the tide went back out – perhaps that’s where the phrase ‘you look like a drowned rat’ comes from.
Now the mayor started to think what a huge sum of money £50 was, and whether the town could really afford it. If only he’d offered £20; that was still a substantial sum, and surely the piper would have done the job for that. So then the mayor offered the piper £20, and there was an argument. The mayor lost his temper, and said, ‘£20 it is, take it or leave it.’
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales Page 14