London Urban Legends (26 page)

Spontaneous Snakes

A little-known fact about London is that it often sprouts spontaneous snakes. Rodney Dale, in
The Tumour in the Whale
, tells the tale of a man finding a sleeping snake while strolling through Regents Park. Presuming it had slithered out of nearby London Zoo, the snake keeper was called while other staff members watched over the serpent. Once captured and checked over, the snake was found not to be an escapee. More snakes were found: a London & North Western van driver found a boa constrictor in his van and the son of an MP found a huge snake in a room in his father’s London house.

More recently, in 2002, the New Grapes Church band were returning from playing at a wedding in Westminster to their church on John Wilson Street in Woolwich, when they found a 6ft python in their van. The previous people that had hired the van had managed to leave their snake behind.

There was no such simple explanation for the snake recorded by Charles Fort in his 1931 book
Lo!
A snake appeared on Gower Street, Bloomsbury, in 1920 in the garden of a Dr Michie. And what was the explanation for the rogue reptile? It was a
naja haje
, an Egyptian cobra, which, therefore, must have been kept by a foreign student staying on Gower Street: ‘The oriental snake had escaped from an oriental student.’ Fort saw through this though, stating: ‘I don’t see that oriental students having oriental snakes is any more likely than American students should have American snakes: but there is an association here that will impress some persons.’

The Penguin Entertained

A penguin popped out of a duffle bag when a boy sat down to his tea after a visit to the zoo. His mother telephoned the zoo, but after a count the zoo keepers found, like the snakes at London Zoo, that they had a full complement. There’s a joke about a penguin; the earliest version I’ve found is in
The Tumour in the Whale
. A man walking up St John’s Wood Road was approached by a penguin. The man found a policeman, asked him what to do with the bird, and was told, ‘Take him to the zoo if I were you, Sir.’ The next day the policeman saw man and penguin walking again. ‘I thought I said you should take the penguin to the zoo,’ the policeman said. ‘I did,’ replied the man, ‘and this afternoon we’re going to the pictures.’

There is something about a penguin abroad that appeals to people. It may just be down to them being cute yet awkward birds that walk about on two legs. How long had the penguin wandered north London before approaching the young man for a date at the zoo? People do steal penguins from zoos: in 2012 two drunk Welsh tourists stole Dirk the Penguin from Seaworld on Queensland’s Gold Coast, and a penguin was taken from Dublin Zoo in summer 2010 and found wandering the streets a few hours later. The question to ask here is which came first, the urban myth or the penguin theft?

Although Fox hunting has developed its own special lore and language, the Fox has entered rather little into British Folklore.

Stefan Buczacki, Fauna Britannica

Urban Foxes Abound!

There is a reversal to the trend of out-of-place animals invading London story, and that’s urban animals invading the greener and more pleasant British countryside. So rather than an urban legend about London, these stories are about how London is seen in other parts of the United Kingdom. In October 2004 the conservative MP for Lichfield, Michael Fabricant, tabled a parliamentary question for the then environment secretary, Margaret Beckett, about the dumping of urban foxes. He had learned of this while visiting Snowdonia. ‘With the growing problem of increasing numbers of foxes in our towns and cities, it seems that do-gooders are now transporting live urban foxes from the West Midlands and other conurbations and releasing them into rural Wales where it is thought they will do no harm,’ said Fabricant in a 10 October 2004 press release (which is still on his website at the time of writing). ‘Instead, they are savaging sheep, poultry, and pets in hill farming country.’

His views on foxes were backed by Nick Smyth of Llwyngwril near Dolgellau, in a letter to the
Dysynni and Cambrian News
:

A van in a motorway car park was found by acquaintances of ours to be full of urban foxes. When questioned, the driver stated that the animals were being taken to a remote part of the country, where no one lived and no one, in London presumably, had ever heard of, where he said they would do no harm …

Smyth goes on to say that worse still, ‘the driver could not pronounce the name of our village.’ Smyth reported that farmers had shot more foxes than usual in the past three months, having dispatched 118. ‘Somehow the ignorance of these town-dwellers and misguided do-gooders has got to be dispelled,’ Mr Smyth muttered.

The supposed ignorant townies and do-gooders were the real issue with these migrant foxes. Rumours of urban fox dumping began over ten years earlier with the Farmers Union of Wales (FUW) issuing a press release entitled ‘RSPCA accused of Mass Fox Releases’. It claimed that a farmer helping a lorry out of a ditch discovered a strange cargo. It carried forty-seven urban foxes, which were being transported by the RSPCA from Birmingham to their new pastoral Welsh home. The foolishness of this was outlined by Kim Brake of the FUW as these ‘townie’ foxes have ‘little hope of surviving; and [it is] unfair to farmers who have to pick up the bill in slaughtered lambs.’

Hunt supporters in Cumbria claimed their local fox population had suddenly doubled, and that the new foxes looked and acted differently to the indigenous Lakeland foxes. Ted Bland, a hunt supporter with Lunesdale Foxhounds in Lancashire, claimed to have seen four foxes released from a van, whilst other reports claimed that vans carrying seventy foxes and lorries with up to 200 were heading out of the cities and into farmland ready to unload what was presumably drugged urban foxes.

The stories continued. A broken-down lorry carried ninety-seven urban foxes into Wales, with the men being paid £5 per fox to get them out of the cities. In West Somerset a blue van with no number plates was sighted doing a night-time fox deposit. Possible London foxes were described in Tendring, Essex, as ‘not even scared of headlights’. Henry Gibbon said, ‘The other day one fox looked down the barrel of my gun as if to say good morning.’ These were hardened urban foxes.

From the cities themselves came doubt and enquiry about these fox-ferrying stories. Wild fox welfare charity the Fox Project ridiculed them, and the League Against Cruel Sports investigated, contacting almost every animal shelter in the UK and making extensive enquiries with local authorities: all denied dumping foxes. The BBC’s rural news and magazine programme
Countryfile
put its money where its mouth was by offering a £1,000 reward for information that led to the identification of any animal welfare groups involved in fox smuggling. Not a penny of licence fee money has been paid out.

Why were fox hunters and their followers getting angry about not-so-fresh foxes being delivered to their land to be hunted? The claim was that it swelled the local fox population to levels dangerous to other wildlife, with more hungry, city foxes spreading mange amongst the rural ones, and that the urban foxes, suddenly finding themselves in an unpolluted and open environment, were lost, confused and prone to a swift and painful demise. And not only by hunting dogs.