London Urban Legends

by Scott Wood

  Urban Fox Hunts

  As wild foxes were supposedly saved from being hunted in the countryside, their lives in London became more dangerous. The first mention of an urban fox hunt I have found is from gonzo free-sheet Vice in December 2003. Kid A and Kid B of Lambeth were asked why they hunted foxes, aside from the financial gain. Apparently Lambeth council charged £200 to shoot a fox but the street youth ‘only charge a tenner’. ‘Fuck it, I’m street. They shit by the swings anyway,’ said Kid A in a touching mixture of childlike indignation and lack of empathy. Their preferred method was to drug the foxes’ food, wait until the poison affected them and then beat them to death with a bat, or shoot them with a pellet gun.

  It’s not all anger though; Kid A says, ‘I wanna get a fox for a pet anyway. I want to track it back to its lair, get hold of a little cub fox, innit. Take it for walks. Train it to fight.’

  Is it just a story? There is blurry photo of two boys on bikes, one with a fox over his shoulder, complete with black bars across their eyes. This would need to have been faked, but such things are not difficult with a stuffed fox prop.

  BBC London radio DJ and London enthusiast Robert Elms heard the urban fox-hunt story and would occasionally disappear into a reverie of Mod fox hunting conjecture, cruising London in sharp suits on scooters looking for pesky, pestilent foxes to punish. I think radio has a big influence on the dissemination of urban myths; it’s a human voice telling you a story or wondering about a curiosity that is heard by thousands of people. The content of a regular with unscripted and informal dialogue from the presenter and guests is an environment where myths can evolve, and the amount of content makes them difficult to catalogue and reference.

  In August 2010, a video was released on YouTube by a group called the Urban Foxhunters, which shows them hunting down a drugged fox and killing it with a cricket bat. The group, claiming to be from around Victoria Park, hated foxes and saw killing them as a public service, describing it as ‘a bit unpleasant but it has to be done to keep our streets safe. I have kids and I don’t want them being bitten by a diseased vermin scum, what’s wrong with that?’

  One member, Lone Horseman, wrote on the blog: ‘For the record – when we kill these foxes they are dosed up with Xanax, which if you haven’t tried it is a trippy anti-anxiety drug. Trust me these fuckers are dying with a smile on their face.’

  If this sounds like an absurd Chris Morris-style way of baiting the media, that is because it is. It echoes closely with Vice’s 2003 fox hunts in Lambeth, though this could be a coincidence from both parties thinking through the logistics of catching a fox in London. Shortly after, the story appeared right across the British press. Most were appalled by the bludgeoning of a wild animal, ‘diseased vermin scum’ or not. The Metropolitan Police’s wildlife crime unit began to make enquiries, and both the Fox Project and John Bryant, who offers a ‘humane deterrence’ service for wild animals, each put forward a £1,000 reward for the identity of the group. Meanwhile in the Evening Standard, ‘London Diary’ columnist Sebastian Shakespeare made another fox-linked political point and enthused:

  Those urban fox killers are a perfect (or imperfect) example of Cameron’s Big Society in action.

  Dave wants to empower communities to do things for themselves. People power, he calls it, redistributing power from the government to the man and woman on the street. ‘These are the things you do because it’s your passion,’ says the PM. Well, you can’t accuse the fox killers of lacking passion. There is no denying they are performing a public service. It is about time we learned to be big enough not to have small feelings about foxes. They are pests. And as we now know they have changed their habits and started attacking children.

  The ‘Big Society’ was the plan to cover billions of pounds of cuts to local authorities for essential services by getting passionate volunteers to do them for free. So, while an expensive municipal government offers trained council workers removing foxes with snares and rifles, the Big Society produces a vigilante group with cricket bats and prescription drugs battering a poisoned wild animal to death.

  It must be extremely exciting to watch your hoax take on its own life, particularly when it was designed to highlight the media. The urban fox hunting video was produced by film makers Chris Atkins and Johnny Howorth as a response to calls by newspapers and politicians to begin culling urban foxes. These calls were in response to an attack by a fox on nine-month-old twins, Isabella and Lola Koupparis, in their bedroom, near Victoria Park in Hackney. Angry about the attack, one blogger demanded ‘Bring Back Fox Hunting Now’, and the Labour government’s ban on fox hunting was never far from people’s thoughts when discussing the urban fox problem. Atkins and Howorth had already produced the film Starsuckers, which was another shot at British media in which they sold fake stories to newspapers about celebrities. They managed to get unverified and ridiculous stories published, including Guy Ritchie giving himself a black eye whilst drunkenly juggling with cutlery, and a friend of Amy Winehouse punching the late singer in the hair after Winehouse had accidently set it on fire. Both are very easy to check, even via a photograph, but still made it into the newspapers. A blog and Facebook group was set up for the urban fox hunters and a video was released, showing a fox being clubbed to death in Victoria Park. Once leaflets started to be distributed around Hackney seeking the ‘hunters’, and the death threats arrived online, Atkins and Howorth quickly owned up to the Guardian and released a making-of film of the original fox-hunting film, featuring the pair, some friends and a dog called Monty wrapped in fox fur. A stuffed fox was used at the end of the film.

  Contemporary British fox legends seem inextricably linked to hunting and how people see foxes. Some people love foxes, urban and otherwise. Many years ago I shared a verdant garden in New Cross with the tenant of another flat, who had foxes queuing up for their nightly sausages. When she ran out of sausages she would feed them bread and jam. Others think of the fox as a ginger wolf, cunning enough to get into your house, vicious enough to attack your children and fearless enough to not be afraid when captured. The attacks on the Koupparis sisters and the story in February 2013 of a fox biting off one-month-old Denny Dolan’s thumb in Bromley are shocking and terrifying, but extremely rare, considering the number of foxes in London. Whatever the individual attitudes of journalists toward foxes, a newsmaker will write and print a shocking story such as urban fox attacks, and keep the story in people’s minds when foxes do less frightening things such as chewing on a pair of Ugg boots in Putney (January 2013), riding on the Circle line without a ticket (August 2012) and chewing the designer shoes of dancers in the Spiegeltent on the South Bank (September 2012). This will keep tales of fearless and ferocious foxes in the news and provide a space for people who are calling for them to be culled.

  21

  WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

  * * *

  We’re going on a bear hunt.

  Michael Rosen, a former Poet Laureate of Hackney

  * * *

  Big Cat Country

  ‘About 100 soldiers armed with axes and sticks joined more than 100 policemen and dogs today in a big-game hunt for a roaming leopard.’ So began a story in the London Evening News on 17 July 1963 after a lorry driver and motorist saw a leopard in the Shooters Hill area of south-east London. ‘I thought it was a dead dog,’ said lorry driver David Black. ‘When I got up to it, it jumped up and ran off into the wood.’ When investigating this sighting the police were surprised by the beast leaping over the bonnet of their patrol car. Trackers found a clawed tree on the south-eastern side of Shooters Hill, near Welling Way, and paw prints in the mud of a dried stream. A local estate, schoolchildren and people in Woolwich Memorial Hospital, all in the area of Oxleas Wood, were warned not to go into the woods.

  On 23 July, Jim Green was awoken by loud snarling noises, starting near Kidbrooke Park Road and moving along the course of the River Quaggy. A security sergeant from a nearby RAF station also heard the snarls and investigated wi
th a police officer, seeing ‘a big dark animal between 18 and 24 inches high silhouetted against a white cricket screen’ at dawn.

  Police said they did not know of anyone local who kept wild animals, that there was no circus in the area and no one had reported an escaped animal.

  Some urban legends are straight narratives: the ‘Corpse on the Tube’ and the ‘Accidental Theft’ are stories that can be told, retold and remodelled according to their teller. Others are composed of ideas that float in the ether, waiting for an event to bring them all together again. In the case of alien big cats (ABCs) stalking Britain, and making it deep into urban London, the story first requires a witness to see an inexplicably large animal in order for the elements to come together. These folk story threads include a cat escaping from one of Britain’s incontinent circuses, or a big cat that is more used to slinking about the mansion of a multi-millionaire until it escapes or is released by the bored owner. Under all this is the romantic idea that big carnivorous cats, more suited to the wild expanses of Africa and Asia, are living happily and anonymously in the suburbs and Home Counties.

  Between June and August 1994 the Beast of Chiswick was seen twice a week. It was a grey or fawn colour, had a canine body and a kangaroo-like head and lived by tearing open refuse bags and disembowelling pigeons and squirrels. In June 1996 a brown big cat was spotted on a railway embankment in Northolt, prompting Doug Richardson of London Zoo to suggest to the Fortean Times that it was a mountain lion. A similar cat had been seen in Northolt in 1994. Summer 1998 saw the panther-like ‘Beast of Ongar’, and in 1999 an unidentified big cat was chased up a tree by a dog in Bedfords Park, Havering. In 2002 there were several sightings of a panther around the Plumstead, Bexleyheath and Shooters Hill area, including one sighting on Upton Road in Plumstead, prompting Karen Gardiner to say to the local paper News Shopper in October, ‘I feel sorry for it not living in its natural habitat. I’d hate for it to get hurt.’ By the time her husband Steve Gardiner was contacted by the Evening Standard on 24 January 2003, he said, ‘What I remember about its size was that, as it walked away, its nose disappeared from the edge of one door while its back legs and tail were still visible in the other. Now, that’s a big cat.’

  The Gardiners’ CCTV camera did pick up the ‘panther’, but after viewing the footage, Danny Bamping of the British Big Cat Society said that the film showed a ‘blob’, although it was a ‘very large blob indeed’.

  By 2005 the law of diminished returns seemed to demand that London’s ABC encounters get more dramatic. Tony Holder of Sydenham was jumped by a labrador-sized cat in his garden at 2 a.m. Mr Holder had heard his pet cat making strange noises and went out to find it being held down by the beast. The ex-soldier said of the encounter: ‘I could see these huge teeth and the whites of its eyes just inches from my face. It was snarling and growling and I really believed it was trying to do some serious damage. I tried to get it off but I couldn’t move it, it was heavier than me.’

  Perhaps because of his visible wounds (Mr Holder received a scratch on his face and arm and a wound on his finger), this was the first London big cat encounter that prompted a police response for some years. School gates were locked, people were warned not to venture in the local woods, police armed with tasers cordoned off streets and wardens warned dog walkers of the pet-bothering beast as they entered Sydenham Wells Park.

  In December 2009, Roger Fleming was chased through nearby Dulwich Woods with his Staffordshire bull terrier puppy under his arm. There is no report of him contacting the police, but he did get in touch with the News Shopper to tell of his race against a big cat. The News Shopper contacted Neil Arnold of Kent Big Cat Research, who said that Mr Fleming ‘should have stood his ground, maintained eye contact and backed off slowly – but it’s easy to say that. People don’t need to panic because big cats won’t harm them.’

  The response was far less drastic when a panther walked into the living room of Brian Shear, of Nunhead Lane in Zone Two Nunhead, and sat on his sofa – no one panicked at all. Diabetic Mr Shear woke up from a sleep in October 2006 having left his front door open to let in some air after feeling ill, to find that the cat had wandered into his house:

  It had green eyes and was between four to five feet long, nose to tail. This was no pussycat. It didn’t miaow, it growled. I’d been sitting in my armchair when it walked in. I didn’t try to get too close to it because I was concerned it might bite me. I just sat there and talked to it like you would a normal pussy cat. I said, ‘Hello puss, where’ve you been then?’ and it just growled. It seemed quite content and I didn’t feel threatened. I don’t think it would have harmed me. It seemed familiar with humans.

  When a recent unnamed New Cross resident was ‘freaked out’ by seeing a panther early one morning, but the police simply asked her outright if she had been drinking, despite her sighting being in the morning and in clear daylight. She said that she had seen the cat perched over the cover of the bins of her block of flats in Southerngate Way, with its tail hanging down. Neil Arnold commented, perhaps sarcastically, ‘New Cross, not far from the station – I just don’t know why it would be there.’

  There are plenty of witness statements regarding the big cat population of London but very little evidence of their actual existence. Dreams, hoaxes and honest misidentifications are difficult to come by, unless the hoaxer owns up to their jape or the person named in the big cat report decides that they did not actually see, were not attacked or chased by an exotic wild beast.

  One of our Big Cats is Missing

  During the 1960s and ’70s in London, there were certainly some who kept big cats as ‘pets’. The adventures of Christian the lion in Chelsea, bought by John Rendall and Anthony Bourke from Harrods in 1969, were documented on film and in the book A Lion Called Christian, published in 1971. Christian would play football in the side streets of Chelsea and was frequently taken to parties by the duo before they decided that their lion should go to Africa to live wild.

  ‘Christian wasn’t the only wild cat in this world,’ Rendall told the Guardian in an interview published 28 May 2011. ‘His neighbour was a serval cat. There was a chap in Battersea with a puma. John Aspinall had his tigers in Eaton Square and there were cheetahs and cougars roaming around Regent Street.’

  The big cats of swinging London were not all fun and games, however; in January 1975 the RSPCA was called when a man left his puma in the back garden of his estranged wife and family in Acton, with a note saying he had nowhere else to keep it. The family were terrified and it took two hours to remove the animal. Another reckless puma episode took place when a man walked into the Farm House pub in South Harrow with his puma on a lead, a story that was reported in the Daily Mirror on 1 November 1974. Uncomfortable with feasting alongside a puma, punters asked the man to leave but the cat then ran riot in the pub, breaking glasses, destroying the bar and tables and, in proper feline fashion, the upholstery. It took fifteen minutes to get the enraged cat out of the pub and into the man’s car, where the puma began to attack the upholstery. The police were called, who towed the car, cat and all, away and later charged the man with being ‘drunk and incapable’.

  Responding to the Acton incident, MP Peter Templemore feared that ‘sooner or later someone will get killed’ by a loose and barely domesticated big cat. The Dangerous Wild Animals Act became law in 1976, which made keeping a large carnivore, primate, large or venomous reptile or spider illegal without a licence. This registered the animal and allowed the local authority to monitor how the creature was kept. Many believe that with the coming of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, big cat owners chose to release their pets rather than pay to register them. The legends of the urban big cats comes from the exotic pets of the 1960s and 1970s, and the new law that it is thought encouraged owners to fly-tip their problematic pumas and panthers.

  Exotic animals do appear in London; a monitor lizard was believed to have been living in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, next to the Imperial War Museum, for t
en weeks before being rescued by the RSPCA in November 2005. In March 2003, a ‘four-and-a-half-feet long and very frisky’ iguana was found clinging to a tree on Wandsworth common. At first it was thought that Iggy, as RSPCA workers nicknamed the lizard, had escaped and posters were put up around the area. When no one came forward to claim him, it was thought he had been abandoned. During December of 2011, a cold and malnourished lemur was found living on Tooting common.

  The lifespan of a big cat is between twelve and fifteen years in the wild and around twenty in captivity, and probably somewhere between these ages if they are living rough on squirrels and discarded takeaways. If the cats were released after 1976, as some believe, they would have died out by the mid-1990s. The urban myth of ABCs alludes to London’s big cats either escaping from current homes or circuses, or being the descendants of original pumas and panthers released in the ’70s. Having been made homeless, the myth suggests that the cats met in parks, around places like Plumstead or somewhere quiet in Sydenham, to mate. This would have brought about a generation of indigenous and mysterious big cats,which seems improbable. Despite the description of a big-cat infested 1960s London, it seems doubtful to me that there were enough animals to form breeding pairs. Some cryptozoologists date the cat’s ancestry further back in time. In his book Kent Urban Legends, Neil Arnold suggests Victorian menageries provided earlier ABC stock and that London’s cat community may even have its origins in Roman Britain.