London Urban Legends (28 page)

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 ten 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.

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.