London Urban Legends (20 page)

An earlier British folk tale took place in Dorset and was recorded in 1930. A West Lulworth man remembered a story told to him by a 104-year-old resident of the town, who apparently witnessed Napoleon arriving at Lulworth Cove in August 1804. He arrived at the cove with a companion seeking a place to land for an invasion, but was heard to mutter ‘Impossible!’ before ‘folding his maps and returning to his boat’. Emperor Bonaparte personally taking the time out to inspect land sites on enemy territory seems as likely as Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler’s deputy, braving anti-aircraft fire to take a look over London.

Both stories have a possible origin in fiction. Thomas Hardy claimed to have invented Napoleon’s trip to Dorset for a short story in 1882 and was amazed to hear the story repeated back to him by friends. Stories of Göring’s midnight flights over London may have been inspired by a fake news report that Göring, who was an ace fighter pilot during the First World War, had piloted a plane over London on 15 September 1941 escorted by two bombers.

However, I think there may be more happening within these legends than just a misinformed regurgitation of fiction. Mother Teresa is quoted as saying, ‘If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.’ She was thinking of human responses to suffering: people will give more for an individual rather than a group of people. We are interested in times of war. These stories reflect how people think and feel during a war with an invasive force.

With an event the scale of the Second World War, it would be impossible to imagine the thousands of troops involved in the planned attacks on us. To think of their equipment, how it is maintained and who supplies this aggressive organisation, it is far easier to look to the head of the enemy, the very top, and imagine them taking a very close personal interest in our homes, the beaches they could land on, the buildings they could live in. Somehow, this – Adolf Hitler picking his offices and deciding where he would be crowned – is far easier to imagine and respond to than one nation moving against another.

Adults tell fairy tales, to adults, although the maudlinized
and castrated samples in print belie the fact.

Richard Dorson, Folklore and Face

Beware all Lady Drivers

It is just before Christmas 2003 and Antony Clayton was checking his email. He found the following warning sent to him on 17 December with the subject line ‘Danger when Filling Up at Petrol Stations’:

Beware all lady drivers. This is a West End Central Police Crime Prevention information message providing details of local crime and disorder issues. If you have information about any crimes mentioned please contact the Crime Desk at West End Central Police Station on … . We need your help to make Westminster a safer environment.

A woman stopped at a pay at a petrol pump station to get fuel. Once she filled her petrol tank and after paying at the pump and started to leave, the voice of the attendant inside came over the speaker. He told her that something had happened with her card. The lady was confused because the transaction showed complete and approved. She relayed that to him and was getting ready to leave but the attendant, once again, urged her to come in to pay or there would be trouble. She proceeded to go inside and started arguing with attendant about his threat. He told her to calm down and listen carefully. He said that while she was filling her car, a guy slipped into the back seat of her car on the other side and the attendant had already called the police. She became frightened and looked out in time to see her car door open and the guy slip out.

One would hope that warnings from Westminster police would not contain so many typographical errors and banal attempts at drama. The message concludes with a warning:

The report is that the new gang initiation thing is to bring back a woman and her car. One way they are doing this is crawling into the women’s cars while they are filling with petrol or at stores at night-time.

Be extra careful going to and from your car at night. If at all possible do not go alone.

1. ALWAYS lock your car doors, even if you are gone for just a second.

2. Check underneath your car when approaching it and check in the back before getting in.

3. Always be aware of your surroundings and of other individuals in your general vicinity, particularly at night.

Antony Clayton got to the end of the warning and knew just what to do. An author of a number of books on London, including
The Folklore of London
, he submitted the dread message to the
Folklore Society News
(FLS News) and it appeared in Issue 43, June 2004. The legend itself spread, and arrived to a different reader pretending to be an email sent by Harrow Council Civic Centre which concluded: ‘This is a real warning! The alert originated from a London company who had a female employee involved in the above instance.’

In some ways the gang member hiding in a woman’s car has a similar plot to the corpse on the tube urban legend. A woman is travelling alone at night; she is in danger, but is unaware of it until a man distracts her by frightening or annoying her until she learns the truth.

There may be, along with the corpse on the tube, some subconscious concern or disapproval of women travelling alone in the urban night, with all its strange but very real dangers. Women are still thought of as more vulnerable than men, so to be plausible these stories may choose a lone woman as the target of the anonymous nocturnal predator.

This is a legend we share with America. Snopes has collected versions via email in 1999 and 2000, and in 2001 a version very much like the London one appeared, minus the Westminster police contact details but with the warning: ‘
THIS IS TOO SERIOUS ... DO NOT DELETE. PLEASE PASS IT ON
!!’

By 2004 the Dublin version named a gang, the ‘Westies’, who were carrying out these surreptitious attacks, and the message warned that the abducted woman would be taken at knifepoint and gang raped.

The gang initiation aspect is not part of the story yet, but it is easy to see how it became linked. The idea of gang initiation feeds many urban legends, the most popular being the warning to never flash your car headlights back if a strange car flashes them at you. The car has a would-be gang member inside who needs to murder the first driver to flash back at them in order to join. Snopes has a version of the story from 1999, where hidden gang members hamstring a woman and ‘remove a body part’ to gain entry to the gang. The victim is always a woman. In the 1998 version the attacker is a serial killer, still coasting on the 1990s wave of cultural interest in the mind of serial murderers which drew people to films such as
The Silence of the Lambs
. Despite Hannibal Lector still haunting the cinema and television, the fear of criminal gangs was soon to sweep the serial killer out of the popular imagination and out of this urban legend.

Like the male rescuer in the corpse on the tube legend, there is a suggested element of danger from the rescuer, until he speaks to the woman (in the earliest version he speaks to the woman’s husband when she gets home but happily urban legends have moved on since 1967) and tells her of the dangerous stranger in the back of her car. In
The Vanishing Hitchhiker
(1983), Brunvald writes: ‘In more imaginative sets of these legends the person who spots the dangerous man in the back is a gas station attendant who pretends that a ten dollar bill offered by the woman driver is counterfeit. With this ruse he gets her safely away from her car before calling the police.’

As we have seen in the early twenty-first century London version of this urban legend, with its faulty credit card, the story is the same but the props change over time.

Child Abductors through History

Another widely travelled abduction legend made it into the
FLS News
No.37 June 2002 issue. Correspondent Susan Hathaway heard from a work colleague that his wife’s ‘friend’s daughter’s college friend’ was the mother of a child who had gone missing in a John Lewis store near London. Security was alerted and all doors were sealed to ensure the child did not wander out of the building. A few minutes later the child was found emerging from the toilets with a different coloured dress, a new short haircut and a group of strangers herding her. The Mumsnet internet forum has a thread for sharing and disarming scare stories including this child-danger story. Locations for it included an east London Tesco, a Co-op on the Isle of Wight and other shops in Bristol, Tokyo or Gloucester.

An earlier pre-email version had a ten-year-old boy, not the more usual pre-teenage girl, being accosted in a shopping centre toilet by ‘an ethnic gang of youths’ and castrated. Another story has a teenage girl going to the toilet in the restaurant of a large shop only to not return after half an hour. As with the girl with the re-dyed hair, the daughter is found just in time as she is being dragged unconscious out of the loo by two ‘husky women’ – she was being dragged off to be a white slave in the Middle-East.

The version with the castrated boy may have arisen from an earlier generations prejudice against Jewish communities.