by Scott Wood
One cat has been captured in the last few years, like our south London lemur and reptiles (See here). On 4 May 2001, Carol Montague was cleaning the house of Alan and Charlotte Newman on Holcroft Avenue in Cricklewood. She looked out of the window to see a large cat, four times bigger than a domestic cat, sitting on the garden fence. Charlotte Newman then came home, saw the cat and locked her Staffordshire bull terrier in the house. At first the police laughed at the report but when two officers arrived later, they confirmed that the animal was not a domestic cat and contacted the RSPCA. The police finally took things more seriously and ten police cars arrived, including one armed response unit. Ray Charter, head zookeeper at London Zoo, identified the cat as a European lynx, an endangered animal, of which there were around 7,000 in 2001. After four hours a senior vet from the London Zoological Society arrived with a tranquiliser gun, just in time for the lynx to make a run for it. She was chased across playing fields and tennis courts and two hours later was cornered in the stairwell of a block of flats on Farm Avenue. She was tranquilised and taken to London Zoo to recuperate.
At the zoo she was nursed back to health, having been found very underweight and with a fracture in her left hind foot, before being sent to Zoo d’Amnéville in France to take part in the European lynx breeding programme. Happily, European lynx numbers are now at 8,000 in Europe, not counting Russia.
No licences had been obtained for lynx ownership for the area and no zoo, circus or anyone else reported a lynx missing.
Catching a misidentification of an urban big cat is a lot harder than catching an actual one. Echoing the August 2012 story of the Essex lion, on 11 March 1994 there were eight reports of a lioness prowling the area around Winchmore Hill. The first report came from a Mrs Lia Bastock, who spotted an animal with ‘short golden hair and big padded paws’ in Firs Lane strolling along a canal towpath. A 2.5ft-tall cat was reported slinking through local back gardens. The regular carnival arrived, namely a police helicopter along with thirty policemen combing the area and using megaphones to warn people to keep children and pets indoors. London Zoo, as ever, provided a marksman to tranquilise the beast. The cat was captured on camera sunning itself on a garden shed, and Doug Richardson of London Zoo identified the creature as a domestic cat before it was then identified as a ginger tom called Bilbo, owned by Carmel Jarvis. Carmel’s cat may not have been the only one after the limelight: the Enfield Advertiser on 16 March 1994 revealed the cat to be Zoe Reid’s pet, Twiggy.
The main story to be told about London’s phantom cats is in popular mythology and sensational newspaper stories. ABCs are a nationwide phenomenon, not just a London one. Whatever the truth of the mystery of big cat sightings is, the myth is what we carry within ourselves. It is the myth we get close to whenever something strange is seen, and the answer will only come with hard evidence from the outside world.
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt
On 27 December 1981, four boys from Lower Clapton took their dogs out for a walk across Hackney Marshes. Past Millfields Road, near the football pitches, the boys encountered ‘a giant great growling hairy thing’ – they met a bear in Hackney.
‘We were near the football pitches at about five o’clock in the evening when we saw it,’ said Darren Willoughby, aged 12. ‘It was very close to us, standing on its hind legs and about seven feet tall.’
Once the press began to interview the boys, the stories began to expand. Before meeting the Hackney Bear, the boys had noticed unusual footprints in the snow, which one boy identified as bear tracks.
Following the tracks, the boys met a middle-aged couple walking their own dog and asked them if they’d seen a bear. ‘Yes,’ the couple replied, ‘it’s up there.’ The couple told the boys to get away, they were near a bear after all, and to further add to the dream-like quality of events, started to throw snowballs at the boys to drive them away. This did not stop them, of course, and Tommy Murray (variously reported as 12 or 13) heard the bear growling, shone his torch on it and saw its profile standing upright in the dark. Tommy’s dog, Lassie, did not want to go near it, and neither did they. The boys ran.
The police were impressed with the sincerity of the boys’ fear and so launched a hunt across Hackney Marshes and along the banks of the River Lea to find the bear. Inspector Pat Curtis said, ‘We do not believe this to be a hoax – we are taking no chances.’
The public were warned to keep off the marshes and not to join in with the police operation. Between fifty and 100 police officers, a police helicopter shining a searchlight over the dark ground, between fourteen and twenty dog handlers, and police marksmen armed with shotguns and handguns spent two cold days searching 8 miles of marshes and waste ground. Four RSPCA workers were concerned enough for the welfare of the bear to bring tranquiliser guns so that it could be subdued rather than assassinated, but it was clear the police were not prepared to take the risk. The Hackney Bear was ‘a dangerous animal that can run faster than most men, swim and can climb trees,’ Chief Inspector Platten told the press at the time. ‘It will be shot dead if spotted.’
On 28 December the police searchers found footprints in the receding snow. Two sets on either side of the Lea and one on an island in the river. RSPCA inspector Derek Knight said, ‘If it is a hoax it’s an elaborate one. The footprints certainly look like a bear’s.’ Elsewhere he said, ‘Perhaps not a fully grown one, maybe two or four hundredweight. But undoubtedly such a bear would be capable of killing a person.’
London Zoo director Colin Rawlings had a different view, suggesting that the bear could turn nasty ‘if bothered by a dog’ and that if it was a captive bear that had escaped, it would head towards people and their homes to scavenge for food rather than stay out in the wilds of Hackney. It could have hideouts, making it hard to spot.
When a shed on a local allotment had been forced open and Tommy Murray showed police the claw marks he had found on a tree, Murray told a journalist that he was ‘very surprised it has not materialised’.
The Bear Truth?
The potential claw marks and shed-burglary were the last possible signs of the bear on the marshes and were not enough to continue the search. With disappointment looming, things began to look different. The footprints in the melting snow did not look much like bear prints. Despite a group of children telling police they had seen the bear, by the evening of 29 December police called off the search and declared Hackney Marshes safe for the public. This was not, however, the end of the story.
The next day, the Sun newspaper received a call from the ‘Hackney bear’, or at least a man named Ron who claimed to be the hoaxer behind the bear scare. Ron was inspired by an earlier bear mystery when two skinned and decapitated carcasses were found in the River Lea near Clapton on 5 December 1981, twenty-two days before the boys’ sighting. A jogger had spotted two ‘bodies’ in the canal and at first it was thought that they were human and the victims of recent ‘East End underworld’ violence.
Once the bodies were identified as brown bears, a circus that had been near the river two weeks earlier was contacted but was ruled out of any enquiry. These were not the first animal bodies to appear in the Lea; others had included a puma carcass, and it was assumed that an unethical taxidermist was fly-tipping his corpses.
Their heads full of thoughts of Hackney bears, Ron and three friends dreamt up a jape whilst in the pub. They had a bear suit from a fancy dress party, so they drove out to the marshes to leave paw prints and pretend to be a bear on the loose. What Ron had not counted on was frightening the young boys enough into going to the police. ‘It was only those kids who were scared,’ said a nervous Ron, ‘we didn’t realise they would take off like that.’
The police had already looked into a fancy dress party at Flamingo Disco on Hackney Marshes on Boxing Day, the day before the first sighting. They were very interested in Ron’s confession, scowling ‘this has been a very expensive operation’. No doubt they were also embarrassed about the time spent shivering on the marshes whilst s
earching for a dangerous urban ursine entity. Being dressed up as a bear in public is not a crime as far as I know, and I am still not sure whether Ron wasted police time or whether they managed to do that themselves. There was still doubt whether Ron was telling the truth about the whole caper. A local fancy dress hire shop pointed out that bear costumes do not come with bear feet, so an outfit on its own could not leave the tracks Ron had claimed to. Perhaps he and his friends had only got as far as an idea in the pub and a telephone. Michael Goss, in his thoroughly researched article in The Unknown, in December 1987 to January 1988, suggests that it was the boys themselves, young and perhaps fantasy prone, who dreamt up their bear encounter. No one else came forward to say they saw the bear and the only other evidence were suspicious scratches and paw prints.
The Ron revelation, however real, was the last thing heard about the Hackney bear for a long time. Decades later, on 17 May 2012, the Hackney Citizen reported a sighting of the Beast of Hackney Marshes. On the May Day bank holiday weekend, student Helen Murray was strolling through woodland near Old River Lea, a channel of the River Lea, when something large and shaggy stopped her in her tracks. She grabbed her mobile phone to dial 999 and managed to get two photographs of the creature as it moved through the undergrowth away from her. One image was of its hind quarters disappearing behind a tree, the other shows what looks like a head hunched down low from square shoulders. The two photographs show the hairy lump in the undergrowth but neither communicates movement too well.
‘The “Beast of Hackney Marshes” Mystery – Pictures’ trumpeted the Hackney Gazette, telling the story of Helen Murray’s encounter, bringing newer readers up to date with the Hackney bear story and appealing for explanations. In keeping with the tradition of Ron owning up to being the Hackney bear, and two different domestic cats claiming to be the lion in Winchmore Hill, a dog owner did come forward claiming his pet was the Beast of Hackney Marshes. The dog was a Newfoundland named Willow, a huge, dark, hairy creature owned by Nicole and Paul Winter-Hart, who said they regularly walk her along Hackney Marshes. Paul was previously famous for being in the Brit Pop band Kula Shaker.
‘I knew it was her immediately,’ said Nicole. ‘It’s funny because our friends call her “The Beast” and now she’s “The Beast of Hackney Marshes”!’
Helen Murray was not convinced by this explanation. While she was quick to say she thought Willow was cute, ‘I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a dog as it was far too big. And its build wasn’t dog-like.’
The explanations for the Hackney bear are many and have become part of its myth.
22
FOLKLORE AND FAKELORE
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‘The trouble with fiction’, said John Rivers, ‘is that
it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.’
Aldous Huxley, The Genius And The Goddess
* * *
TOWARD THE END of 2012, videos of wolves in London appeared on YouTube. I came across one, via the Centre for Fortean Zoology, called ‘Wolves in Hackney????’ It had been uploaded on 17 November 2011 and was a convincing piece of footage of a wolf sighted wandering up Urswick Street in Hackney. It is apparently filmed by a couple hanging out of an upstairs window filming fireworks when one of them looks down and sees the wolf on the street. He shouts ‘Oi!’ at it while his friend or girlfriend shushes him, but the wolf is off and runs sleekly along the street and into the night.
Other videos appeared, including a man who had seen the remains of a dog smeared across Clapham Cfommon, and one of a couple of women singing and dancing in a living room when something big crashes over their patio. On a fourth video, a group of friends recording a birthday message to a distant friend are disturbed by a wolf in the street. They looked real; the animals intruded on films that looked natural and the creatures in the films were clearly wolves.
It was a thought that was more exciting than it was unlikely, and I shared the first wolf film I saw across Facebook and Twitter. A wise friend quickly let me know that all of the footage showing wolves marauding across London was part of a series of YouTube films to promote a brand of vodka.
This seemed like rather a convoluted way of selling alcohol. The spoof footage was seeded across the internet, people commented and then there was a reveal letting the viewer know that the films and the story attached were created to promote Eristoff Vodka. Travelling Russian show-people Davok (an anagram even I can work out) presented a ‘Circus Freakout’ in Victoria Park from 1–3 December 2011 with an act called ‘Wolves of Vale’. A Davok van crawled through East London with banging beasts within it. Then the shows suffered a set back: ‘Wolves of Vale’ was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. Next, videos appeared on YouTube of Londoners encountering wolves or the carnage left behind by wolves. The story being told is clear: Russian wolves were loose in London. The idea presumably must have been to make the wolves a talking point and then reveal the story in a way that would encourage interested parties to toast the cleverly done spoof with a cup of the vodka they were selling. The main wolf theatre, circus vans with howls, posters and listings would only really have interested anyone in the Hackney area. The Urswick Road video, as of 18 June 2013, has had 28,741 views, about 4,106 views a month, which is better than some ‘actual’ cryptozoological videos such as ‘Wild Black Panther Cat Caught On Video In UK’ (which averaged 962 views a month). How effective the wolves were for Eristoff sales is hard to gauge, but the vodka did drop 11 places in the May 2013 edition of ‘The Power 100’ list of spirits.
I emailed Us Ltd, the creative communications agency behind the campaign, to ask them what they were thinking, and whether they had been inspired by cryptozoolology in an attempt to create a buzz.
Jo Tanner of Us Ltd first responded by saying: ‘Great. Love to help! Do we get paid? Royalties?’
I explained how writing local history books works to Jo and suggested the creative team would enjoy talking about their creative process. He responded: ‘The idea was put together by a team of people and obviously developed as we went along.’
The thinking behind the wolves campaign was aimed at young people who are often beyond the reach of conventional advertising. ‘“Traditional-advertising-averse” young target audience,’ as Jo put it. The wolves were there to suggest drinking Eristoff vodka to the ‘young’ people who are interested in ‘Twilight-type stuff’. The brand values of Eristoff vodka were described as ‘dark and mysterious’, and their logo is a wolf. I had already suggested that out-of-place animals and vodka are not an intuitive connection, to which Jo pointed out, ‘Well they are when you realise that there’s a wolf in the brand’s logo based on its roots being Georgian.’
The Thames Angel
While on her way to meet a friend along the South Bank in May 2006, Jemima Waterhouse, a 16-year-old student from Sheen, saw an angel. ‘I felt a sense of calm spreading over me. It was comforting and familiar – a kind of peace that lasted for a while after. It is really hard to put into words, but I guess you could describe it as peace of mind.’
She took a photograph which appeared in the South London Press on 15 September 2006, who described the angel as having some sort of celebrity and gathering a fanbase:
Eerily so far this year four people claim to have seen the angel near the London Eye and an internet cult is growing … These sightings have prompted much online chat about the so-called Angel of the Thames. Already angel walks are being offered along the waterside and Angel T-shirts are available. One angel obsessive – who meets up with other people who have spotted the ghostly figure to share their experiences – thinks it must date back to the fire.
That’s the Great Fire of London, which was apparently one of the angel’s earliest recorded sightings. Three websites devoted to the Thames Angel appeared in the wake of the article. The Angel of the Thames: Have You Seen the Angel website repeated Jemima’s story and wanted to collect more. The Friends of the Thames Angel blog styled itself as the official Thames Angel fan club, c
omplete with parties and a pug dog dressed up as an angel. Thames Angel: A History of the Angel of Promise is all swirly fonts, walking guides in period costume and historical events with a Thames Angel link to them. All three sites pass on the same information in the same way: that the River Thames has a resident angel that appears in times of great strife, or to please or beguile tourists.
Photographs showing a wispy, white-winged figure amongst or behind a group of tourists are placed alongside augmented etchings of a more traditional angel to illustrate a timeline that begins in 1667. There are a lot of images, and in the photographs the angel looks almost the same in all of them.
London’s history, from the Great Plague to the Blitz, is alluded to, and the angel is said to have made an appearance during the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. The most convincing piece of ‘evidence’ was footage of singer and television presenter David Grant filming on the Thames being distracted by the angel. ‘Did you see that?’ he asks. ‘Did you see it ‘cos I thought it looked like ... this is ridiculous, but I think it looked like an angel.’ In another piece of footage a reporter from Slovakian Television hassled David Grant to find out what he knew but, the website suggests, he has been ‘got to’ and did not wish to talk. There is now a conspiracy to prevent people talking about the Thames Angel.
