The Gorbals Vampire (or, more wigging out about comic books)

1954 was a big year if you didn’t like comic books.

I talked a bit about Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent in this post about superheroes as role models a couple of days ago, but I’ve just come across another story that’s related, all moral panics and urban myths. This one gets weirder though.

See, 1954, in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, the children went hunting vampires.

A terrifying figure with iron teeth was said to be lurking in the area’s Southern Necropolis. It had alread killed two children (or so it was said, although no-one could say exactly who had been the victims…), and now a small army of kids, from teenagers down to four year olds, were patrolling the cemetery with makeshift weapons. Although the group was soon broken up, it would return on subsequent nights until the whole thing died down.

The story seemed to have evolved from a couple of sources; local urban myths and, allegedly American horror comics, and this is where the story crosses over with that of Wertham. EC Comics were one of the major comic books publishers at the time, but rather than the superheroes of DC, they were best known for their horror comics, some of which were pretty gory – while they were basically morality tales, there were an awful lot of entrails involved. Their best known title at the time was Tales from the Crypt, one of the books that caused Dr. Wertham to wig out, although it’s worth noting that, thanks to the politics of the time, one of their most controversial stories, and the last comic published by EC, was Judgement Day. The reason for the controversy? It featured an astronaut who was black…

Anyway, parents soon drew a link between the Gorbals Vampire and horror comics (although apparently the horror comics didn’t feature a character matching the Vampire’s description – there was, however, a World War II comic strip character called Iron Jaw who might fit the bill). This lead to cries for censorship that eventually resulted in the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955, which legislated for the imprisonment or fining of anyone selling a book or comic that may corrupt young people through portraying the commission of crimes, violence, or “incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature”. It was a bit of a waste of time, as it didn’t prosecute anyone until the seventies, and then there were just two convictions.

However, this is where it gets weird. Because the Comics Campaign Council, the group dedicated to banning horror comics, actually turned out to have been dominated by members of the British Communist Party (the story is told in Martin Barker’s A Haunt of Fears, some of which is available at Google Books); and the British Communist Party at the time had a vested interest in countering American cultural influence on the UK. It’s worth noting that the comics criticised by the campaign were often known simply as American comics (it’s interesting to note that, while Glasgow becoming a flashpoint in the campaign to ban US comics, Dundee was publishing the relatively tame Beano and Dandy, via DC Thompson – someone really should write something on Scotland’s influence on the comic industry). Somewhere along the line, comics had found themselves on the frontline of the 1950s culture wars.

Meanwhile the Gorbals Vampire passed into folklore, another case of schoolyard Chinese whispers and hysteria that fed into a much wider moral panic, all against the backdrop of McCarthyism and HUAC. Strange days indeed.

England’s Dreaming #8.5 – Epic Pig on the Wall Fail

Okay, I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot for many reasons, but the latest one was writing about local folklore and forgeting the story from my own home town, which was stupid of me.

See, I’m from the town of Gornal, about 2.5 miles from Dudley. Technically it’s three mini-towns (Lower Gornal, Upper Gornal, Gornal Wood), but no-one knows where the boundaries are, so don’t worry about it. Anyway, Gornal effectively has one major piece of local folklore, a story that locally defined the area for decades. This is the story of the Pig on the Wall.

The legend goes that, in 1875, a parade was held to celebrate Captain Matthew Webb becoming the first man to swim the English Channel. Because Gornal families were said to treat their pets as part of the family, one such family put their pig on the wall to watch the parade go by, and somewhere along the line this got enshrined in Gornal folklore, to the extent that a local pub became known as, you’ve guessed it, the Pig on the Wall (it’s been demolished now, because the world needed another McDonalds).

That’s the story.

However, I learned something terrible tonight.

See, my friend referred me to this story after reading my last post, informing me that, actually…

The Pig on the Wall thing happened in her old town.

Anyone from Gornal might want to look away now, as I feel as though I’m committing an act of treachery, and if I’m found strung up along the Himley Road tomorrow, then at least you’ll know I died for this blog.

See, Captain Webb was from Dawley in Shropshire, and it was that town that held the parade, that town that did the pig thing. A picture taken of the pig became a commemorative postcard, and it was that postcard that got attached to Gornal somehow. It’s all a myth.

I’d say there’s an important point to be made about historic vs folkloric fact, and the malability of local legends, but, frankly, I’m too shocked to make it.

(Although one of the articles I link to suggests that the story only got connected to Gornal around 1970… But I remember my nan telling me the story when I was a kid, so that means the whole thing must have got embedded into Gornal folklore within 15-20 years… Unless I’m reading something wrong.)

But hey, there is a connection for this blog. For Matthew Webb, whose parade caused all this trouble in the first place, tried, and terminally failed, to swim the river beneath Niagara Falls… Which I’ve also visited and blogged about.

Still gutted about the pig though.

England’s Dreaming #8 – The Black Country is Weird

(Before we go any further, just a note for people who live outside of my area – The Black Country is a sub-region of the West Midlands, so called because of the black soot that settled over everything as the result of its industrial heritage – the story goes that Queen Victoria ordered the blinds of her train carriage closed as she passed through the region, although that might just be cobblers – and is nothing to do with its ethnic make-up, as is sometimes assumed. The area consists of Dudley, Sandwell, Wolverhampton and Walsall. It is not a part of Birmingham. It has never been a part of Birmingham. It will NEVER be a part of Birmingham.)

The Black Country is strange.

You might not agree with that; after all, we’re just a normal grouping of towns, full of shops and pubs and churches and houses and schools and canals with shopping trolleys in them. We have pockets of high deprivation next to areas of relative affluence. We have a zoo. We have a castle. That’s fair enough. So far, so normal. But scratch the surface and we have our fair share of oddness.

For a start, there’s the story of Bella in the Wych-Elm. Not Bella AND the Wych-Elm, Bella IN the Wych-Elm. See, in 1943, a group of lads hanging around in Hagley Woods came across the body of a woman in the hollow of a wych-hazel. The body, badly decomposed, was recovered by police who discovered it was missing a hand. They never figured out who she was – World War 2 was considered more important – but the story soon became a local meme; "WHO PUT BELLA IN THE WYCH-ELM?" graffiti started cropping up, mostly in the same writing. Did the author know the name of the victim? Was it a taunt? Was the murder connected with the War? Or black magic? We’ll never find out, but check out this picture of the Wychbury Obelisk – tell me that’s not freaky…

Less creepy is the fact that the anchor for the Titanic was made in Netherton. Apparently, local sarcasm says that it was the only bit of the ship that worked.

Sadly the Black Country can’t lay claim to one of the most outright insane areas of the West Midlands, Cannock Chase. This is ground zero for High Strangeness in the region, giving rise to stories of werewolves, bigfoots/bigfeet, mysterious big cats, mysteriously appearing koi carp, ghosts, UFOs and goodness knows what else. It’s fodder for an episode or six of Doctor Who.

All this is before we get onto Dudley’s ghost stories, or the Stourbridge cat grafitti / cat disappearances, or the Himley Hall connection with the Gunpowder Plot, or the Crooked House, or… Heck, I swear I once saw a llama in a garden in Brierley Hill. There’s probably enough material for something like the Hometown Tales podcast.

So, a challenge – if you’re from the Black Country, tell me any odd stories you know about our region. If you’re not from the Black Country, tell me why your area is a bit crazy. Because some of that stuff is going to become the stories that are freaking out our kids in the future…

England’s Dreaming #7 – Steampunk Sherlock vs Jack the Ripper and Spring Heeled Jack. On Mars.

So over the last couple of weeks I’ve been writing a lot of posts about British folklore, and most of them have been to do with the ancient stuff – King Arthur, fairies, tales lost in the fog of myth and mystery. And then something reminded me that there’s a whole other vein of story to be tapped.

That something was the BBC’s latest retelling of the Sherlock Holmes story, and it’s fantastic. Well written, great cast, deservedly got the ratings. What’s particularly good about it is how successfully it updated the trappings of the characters, who are best known as being shrouded in smog and surrounded by horse-drawn carriages. It helps that some of the original characterisation has contemporary parallels – the modern Doctor Watson just got back from serving in Afghanistan – so did the original.

Because unlike, say, King Arthur, the ‘folklore’ and culture that developed in the Victorian era comes from a world that’s both alien and similar to our own. It’s not really folklore – when we think of the ‘legendary’ aspects of the Victorian era, they tend to be based on published novels (Sherlock Holmes, the science fiction of HG Wells, Dracula) or historic events (Jack the Ripper, the Industrial Revolution). Somehow though they’ve all coalesced into one, an imaginary London that never existed but still has a folkloric vibe of its own. You can’t help thinking that, somehow, Sherlock Holmes should have been involved in the Jack the Ripper investigation.

It’s also modern folklore – the Victorian era is when the modern world began; the Great Exhibition of 1851 was the first expo, and the Industrial Revolution was effectively the driving force behind the world we have today. These technological advances have spawned a mystique all of their own – steampunk is based around the idea that contemporary technology hit its tipping point in the 1800s, with steam-powered cars and brass computers. Suddenly figures like Charles Babbage become not only notable inventors, but modern heroes; this is particularly starting to happen with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter and the ‘Enchantress of Numbers’ – the fact that the first computer ‘programmer’ was a woman makes her a strikingly modern figure and a feminist icon.

This isn’t all that surprising – it seems like an age away to us, and it was, but Sherlock Holmes was interested in the latest crime-fighting techniques (finger printing, forensics), and Jack the Ripper is known as the first modern serial killer – in Alan Moore’s frankly terrifying graphic novel From Hell (don’t bother with the movie), he puts forward the suggestion that the Ripper murders in 1888 gave birth to the 20th century – given how blood-soaked that century ended up, and how the Edwardian era seems to be the calm before the inevitable storm of World War I, it’s hard not to see his point.

(Maybe that’s why the era is so alien and so similar at the same time – it was wiped out by an apocalyptic event that remade the world…)

Even the out-and-out weirdness had that contemporary feel – Spring Heeled Jack was a Victorian bogeyman, a scary figure that belched fire and could leap from the ground to rooftops. In another time he’d be a demon or an elf or something – in the 1830’s he’s wearing a helmet and a manufactured cloak and metallic claws. He may be from the Otherland, but they’ve obviously gone a bit steampunk.

(I swear I once read there was a Spring Heeled Jack sighting very close to where I live. I wish I could track down the reference…)

And then we have Dracula, stalking the streets of London and Whitby, fear of the outsider and issues with sex personified. And the Martians of HG Wells, ambivalance towards imperialism stomping through Woking bringing with them the end of an age. Again, contemporary fears, again figures you feel as though exist in the same world. Alan Moore got good mileage out of this in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but it’s just part of the wider stereotypical Victorian era. It’s probably not folklore in the strictest sense, but maybe, in another hundred years it will be, the creation myth for the 20th/21st centuries.

So basically… Watch Sherlock!

England’s Dreaming #6 – Some Questions and Answers

Question:  So, why did you call the last few posts "England’s Dreaming" when in fact a significant chunk of British folklore originated in Scotland, Wales and Ireland?

Answer:  I didn’t think the Celtic nations would mind.

Q:  Are you insane?

A:  If you’d actually read the posts you’d know the answer to that already.

Q:  Seriously, why did you choose that title?

A:  Because I’ve always liked the phrase and I’d like to celebrate a fine purveyor of dairy products.

Q:  So, is there anything you think you missed over the England’s Dreaming posts?

A:  Robin Hood.

Q:  And the anti-globalisation agenda?

A:  Ooo, good one!

Q:  And you missed the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword" in the Excalibur post, didn’t you?

A:  Yeah, and that could have lead into a discussion of story-telling traditions.

Q:  Do you know anything about story-telling traditions?

A:  Do comics count?

Q:  I’m asking the questions here.

A:  Fair point.

Q:  Are you going to do any more of these posts?

A:  Probably, just need to clear some head space so I can look at Robin Hood, local legends and some obscure stuff that I sort of half know about.

Q:  Like?

A:  Like how Gog and Magog went from being apocalyptic biblical figures to being giants who hang out in Britain. Also black dogs.

Q:  So have you enjoyed writing this stuff?

A:  Yeah. That’s what I like about blogging, the free-wheeling stream-of-consciousness stuff. You don’t get to do that when you’re writing TPS reports.

Q:  So was there anything else you missed?

A:  Um. No.

Q:  Are you sure?

A:  Yes!

Q:  Didn’t Sudge point out that you also missed a reference to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when you were talking about the Holy Grail?

A:  There’s a reason for that. I forgot how to spell Jehovah in Hebrew.

Q:  With an I.

A:  Thank you.