So there we are.
The rats are in the crypt.
The cats are in the graveyard.
The bats are in my belfry.
18
THE TITANIC:
A CAVALCADE OF GHOSTS
One winter’s night I was working late in Tower House, as I had a deadline to meet. Tower House is a medieval building situated next to the Archaeology Museum in Winkle Street, which used to be the town gaol so is quite a creepy place to be after dark. About 8 p.m., after hearing all sorts of noises which you often did in such an old building, like creaking floors, and falling bits of masonry from the old walls, I set the alarm and prepared to leave. I always used to open the door before I left and look up and down Winkle Street, to make sure the coast was clear, and to my shock I saw a ghost in the doorway of God’s House Tower (the old archaeological museum), long flowing white robe blowing in the wind, and large black eyes. I shut the door and thought my eyes were playing tricks with me, as I had been working hard, but when I very gingerly opened them again I saw the red light of a cigarette tip …
This was written by my friend, Sheila Jemima – she was writing about old Southampton, the area I described in Chapter 6, and it’s an area full of ghosts. The ghost that Sheila saw lit up a cigarette, because she turned out to be one of the town guides, about to take people on a ghost walk; great fun. But maybe Sheila’s brief moment of fear was a real ghostly experience, a true connection with the area – more authentic than the stories about to be told to the punters, as they followed their guide around old Southampton.
And so we march over plague pits, follow the course of twisted men who murdered fallen women, trot around battlefield sites, even put on armour and pretend to fight each other. It is comforting, therefore, to distance ourselves from the horror, to create ‘Horrible Histories’ and re-enactments, and package it for consumption. The ghosts are Halloween masks, and the history is a cherry-picked collection of clichés. And so, we edge forward through the shifting mists of our own ghosts in our villages, our towns, our cities; pick out certain events, certain major occurrences, and adopt them as specific symbols. Southampton chose as its symbol a specific event – the sinking of a ship, built in Belfast, 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.
It is a symbol that has become banal, the familiar picture of the great ship sliding into the water reproduced a million times, even reflected in the architecture of museums. But when that ship went down, she took with her whole sections of Southampton’s population, so it’s hardly surprising that it should create such a powerful memory in the city; though perhaps a bit more surprising that it should rate as the main tourist magnet.
But the event, the sinking, it is the city’s main ghost, and why wouldn’t it be? In 1912 whole streets in Northam, and the adjoining area, Chapel, dockland areas of Southampton, lost their menfolk when the Titanic went down. It is the tendency for writers, though, to trivialise this reality by pegging their obsessive theories to the event. Various conspiracy theories about the sinking include scurrilous stories about an upper-class man dressing as a woman in order to board a lifeboat, nonsense about cursed Egyptian mummies in the hold, and urban legends about the Belfast shipbuilder welded up in the hull. But wouldn’t it be more dignified to remember the stokers, working-class men mostly from Southampton, who kept the fires burning till the last possible moment so electricity could be generated to keep the ship illuminated, or to remember the nurses who took children to safety, or to remember the people who passed the children through the crowd to the lifeboats?
If there are ghosts, and the ghosts are not tied to the Atlantic seabed, won’t those ghosts be swirling through Southampton, up the meandering River Itchen?
There’ll be plenty of other wraiths to join them, for death has always haunted Southampton. There was the complete sacking of the town in 1338, by French, Norman, Italian and Castilian raiders, who included in their number a pirate called Grimaldi, who used his plunder to found the state of Monaco. Then, in 1384, a galley, a death ship, glided into Southampton harbour from Marseilles, carrying the Black Death, the bubonic plague, into England. Of course there were scores of deaths soon after the Titanic disaster – the First World War and the subsequent influenza pandemic – and then the Blitz, the drone of bombers over Southampton, and the bombs raining down on the very inner-city areas that had supplied most of the Titanic’s crew.
So a huge multitude, a cavalcade of ghosts, can go swirling and whirling up the old river, led by the poor young cabin boy, Richard Parker from Itchen Ferry Village, who got eaten by his shipmates whilst adrift in an open boat. And this swirl of spectres congregate in the most haunted place in Southampton: underneath Northam Bridge.
I don’t know if this place looks haunted, I rather think it does. To the tourist trade there is a certain cachet to medieval buildings, or old graveyards, or Tudor pubs – but that feeling of hauntedness comes from us, from our perceptions, not stone, timber or mortar. The present Northam Bridge was completed in 1954, and if you wander underneath it, by the western bank of the River Itchen, you see concrete and graffiti. But to me this place, where you stand and hear the drip drop of condensation into the river, and the Doppler effect of cars passing overhead like aeroplanes, holds the feel of somewhere ancient and significant – of the people paddling up the meandering river in the time of forest and settlement, and of the people drifting down it towards open sea.
And the story of the vanishing hitchhiker is often told of the road above your head, about how a girl hitches a lift from an elderly couple on a dark, wet, winter’s evening, and of how she subsequently disappears, and the couple discover she’d died the previous year. It’s a famous urban legend, but the significance lies in the choice of location – and in Southampton it is always set at Northam Bridge. And as I stand beneath the bridge I can imagine a similar story set there, when the last bridging point of the Itchen was way upriver at Mansbridge, and the ferryman, the Charon of the River Itchen, was transporting souls across to the Hades of Bitterne Manor, and a passenger vanished from his boat.
And spreading down the widening river from Northam Bridge, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are the boatyards, the soap and candle works, the old margarine factory, the cement works, the wharves and hards, the pubs, the rows of terraced houses – the lives and loves, the jealousies and resentments, the joys and pleasures, the highs and lows.
And on the old maps, down by where Shamrock Quay was built at Millstone Point, in between Crabniton and Northam, there was the Hegestone, or Hagstone – possibly an old boundary marker. When my son and I wandered down there, on one cold Sunday morning in the 1980s, to the spot where the Hagstone would have been, we found the head and torso of a tailor’s dummy, with glistening glass eyes.
Ghosts are, I imagine, what you make of them. The loss of the Titanic was a trauma for Southampton – at the same time it carried with it a whole group of circumstances that lead to mythologising. This was the maiden voyage of a great, and ‘unsinkable’, liner – so there is hubris. Then there is Thomas Hardy’s ‘Convergence of the Twain’ – so there is inexorable fate. These are powerful elements of myth – things to make it seem more than a terrible historical accident.
So I’ll leave the last words to the story of a woman who sailed on the Titanic, who survived, but who, every time a new Titanic film came out and they tried to drag her into the circus, made the point that there was a lot more to her life. She was the wonderfully named Mrs Winnifred Quick Van Tongerloo. Originally she was Winnie Quick from Plymouth, who, with her mum, travelled to Southampton and sailed on the Titanic as an eight-year-old girl emigrating to America (she later gained the Van Tongerloo part of her surname through marriage). She lived until 2002, but was never keen on being part of the furore, though demands were made on her after the films A Night to Remember in 1958, and Titanic in 1997. In the 1960s, Winnifred and her husband, Alois, travelled America in their station wagon; they visited every state except Hawaii. In spit
e of her fear of deep water, they once made the overnight crossing from Michigan to Wisconsin on the Ludington ferry. Her husband awoke during the night and found Winnifred was gone. He got up, and eventually found her standing by the railings on deck. A noise had awoken her in the night, and she’d been reminded of the Titanic, all those years ago. She had quietly got out of her bunk, so as not to awaken her husband, and went on deck to face her fears alone. It was a whisper, an old ghost, a part of her life.
And maybe that’s what ghosts are – whispers of memory, thoughts of loss, fragments of lives, dreams, hopes, fears, the scar of trauma, noises in the night.
REFERENCES
Ash et al (ed.), Folklore, ‘Myths and Legends of Britain’ (Readers Digest, 1973)
Beddington, Winifred G. and Christy, Elsa B. (eds), It Happened in Hampshire (Hampshire Federation of Women’s Institutes, Winchester, 1937)
Bell, Karl, ‘Civic Spirits? Ghost Lore and Civic Narratives in Nineteenth Century Portsmouth’ (unpublished article, University of Portsmouth, 2013)
Boase, Wendy, The Folklore of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (B.T. Batsford Ltd, London, 1976)
Brand, John, Observations of Popular Antiquities Chiefly Understanding the Origin of Our Vulgar Country Ceremonies and Superstitions, Vol. II (F.C. & J. Rivington et al, London, 1815)
Elder, Abraham, Tales and Legends of the Isle of Wight (Simpkin, Marshall & Co. 1839)
Gillington, Alice, ‘Wild Daffodils in the Wood’, Country Life, 22 June 1912, pp. 927–28.
Jemima, Sheila (ed.), ‘Chapel and Northam, an oral history of Southampton’s Dockland Communities 1900–1945’ (Southampton City Council, 1991)
Mann, John Edgar, Hampshire Customs, Curiosities and Country Lore (Ensign Publications, Southampton, 1994)
O’Donald Mays, James (ed.), The New Forest Book: An Illustrated Anthology (New Forest Leaves, Burley, 1989)
Thompson, Stith, The Folktale (University of California Press, 1977)
Vesey-Fitzgerald, Brian, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (Robert Hale Ltd, London, 1949)
WEBSITES
Chapter 1
Valley mires, New Forest:
www.newforestlife.com/New_Forest_bog.html
www.newforestexplorersguide.co.uk/wildlife/habitats/valley-mires.html
www.newforestnpa.gov.uk/info/20087/beautiful_landscapes/204/
heathland_and_mires/2
Chapter 3
Song about Clewer’s Hill (near Sandy Lane), by the Bundell Brothers:
www.bundellbros.co.uk/clewershill.mp3
The Waltham Blacks:
www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng169.htm
Chapter 6
Henry Doman’s poems:
www.amazon.com/Songs-Lymington-Henry-Doman/dp/B0068JCYDI
Account of the Groaning Tree by Jude James:
www.newforester.com/news/south-baddesleys-groaning-tree/
Chapter 7
Song, ‘Beware Chalk Pit’ by Graham Penny:
www.foresttracks.co.uk/folk_music_pages/folk_music_
contraband.html
Chapter 17
The Minstead Cat people:
www.paranormaldatabase.com/reports/fairydata.php?pageNum_paradata=6&totalRows_paradata=250
Chapter 18
Mrs Winifred (Quick) Van Tongerloo:
www.titanichistoricalsociety.org/people/winnifred-van-tongerloo3.html
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL O’LEARY has been a professional storyteller since 1994, but he has been a storyteller since he learned to talk. Being a gardener, greenkeeper and teacher were all part of his apprenticeships and now he wanders the country telling stories in schools, prisons, hospitals, care homes, fêtes, festivals, museums, libraries, pubs and cocktail bars. He is the author of Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales, Sussex Folk Tales and Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales for Children, both with The History Press. He lives in Southampton.
COPYRIGHT
First published in 2016
The History Press
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This ebook edition first published in 2016
All rights reserved
© Michael O’Leary, 2016
Illustrations © Ruth O'Leary, 2016
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Hampshire and Isle of Wight Ghost Tales Page 11