London Urban Legends (21 page)

The popularity and worldwide dispersal of urban legends involving crime and criminals is easy to imagine. Newspapers in North Wales, Leinster, Shropshire and Plymouth have published denials that child-snatchers are operating in shop toilets in their area. Each story contains a warning about a criminal practice, or the consequence of one moment of a lowered guard.

A Whitechapel Beau: one who dresses with a
needle and thread and undresses with a knife.

Attribute

Hidden Blades

Back in September 2010 I took part in an artist’s workshop on myth making. I took along a clipping about the dangers of hidden razor blades to illustrate a London version of a popular myth. Two of the group of eight said, ‘Oh, you mean like the hidden razor blades in the water slide at Crystal Palace swimming pool?’ They were more than happy to join in this violent idea of child-slicing with a broader tradition and share their stories. I came away with an addition to an urban myth and the thought that this sort of thing is probably quite normal for an artist’s workshop on myth making, taking place in an abandoned shop at the top of the Elephant and Castle shopping centre.

In his book
Urban Legends Uncovered
Mark Barber told the same rumour about a nearby waterslide in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. A Surrey chap himself, Barber told of a popular slide called ‘The Black Hole’ that children slid down in complete darkness. In 1985 a rumour persisted that ‘gangs of youths’ were stopping halfway down the slide and planting razorblades stuck down with chewing gum (for an extra unhygienic twist). A 13-year-old girl received serious injuries on her back and legs from using the slide. The popularity of ‘The Black Hole’ declined, and after a while the park, Barber reports, closed down.

A friend who grew up in south-west London remembered the same rumours being attached to a waterslide in Richmond. Again, it was chewing gum that held the blades in place. A strange message on an email list dedicated to lidos claimed that the ‘Wild Waters’ flume in Richmond Park was closed due to hidden blades injuring sliders and that a ghost known as ‘The Phantom Slider of Richmond’ haunted it, describing it as ‘the most famous flume haunting in the UK’. I am not sure how serious the message on the lido list is. It does pick up the razor-hysteria which has spread far enough across the world that in America, where this legend is repeated, it is told that waterslides in England are banned because they bristled with hidden blades. American readers: this is not true.

In 2008, a 16-year-old worker in a McDonald’s in New Plymouth, New Zealand, was cut by a broken pen whilst cleaning a children’s play tunnel. The hidden-blade myth was well known enough that the blame was first put on a razor hidden there by persons unknown and with malicious intent to wound a child.

There’s a similarity here to the ubiquitous urban legend of the razor blade hidden in the Halloween apple given to the trick or treating child. This legend transcends location, but is more popular in America. However, I’ve heard this repeated throughout my life, especially growing up during the 1970s and ’80s. In his column ‘Halloween Sadists’, reprinted in
Curses! Broiled Again!
, Jan Harold Brunvand looked up the evidence for children being injured as a result of razor blades, syringes and poison hidden in their Halloween booty, and found none at all.

Cut by Tart Cards

It’s not only children who are in danger of getting hurt when out enjoying themselves. There are urban myths of bloody razor blades hidden in the coin return of vending machines and syringes hidden in cinema seats and variations of both. When two women were attacked at a bus stop in Haringey – one on 18 November 2011 and the other on 23 November – by a man with a needle, their first fear was that they had contracted HIV from the assault. At the time of writing neither the attacker has been caught nor has the women’s diagnosis, as far as I can find, been made public.

This leads to the story I told the artists in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre. I have a clipping from the now-defunct
London Lite
newspaper of a police warning issued in north London, of razor blades hidden behind prostitute cards in King’s Cross and Euston. The also defunct
News of the World
printed similar stories of cards with blades in Westminster. ‘Tart cards’, as they are known, are a familiar part of the central London landscape, and range from a quick description of the prostitute or specific services available written on a blank card in felt-tip to, thanks to cheap digital printing, full colour erotic images and a phone number. I’ve heard a rumour that one can track changes in the cards in different parts of London: regular sex in the West End and around the train stations, bondage and domination in the legal quarter of Lincolns Inn and things getting kinkier the further into the City of London one goes, the story being that the more affluent and high-powered one is, the more perverted one becomes.

The warning about the ‘sex card booby trap’ came from PC Dylan Belt of Camden Police. Gangsters were protecting their ‘corner of the lucrative sex trade’ by hiding traps behind their cards to prevent cleaners and rival gangs from removing them, and members of the public who may be interested in taking a card or two were warned against it. PC Belt is quoted as saying: ‘We send the cleaners in and they find cards that have been booby-trapped. It could be with razor blades and they also use an irritant which burns the skin.’

An unnamed spokesman for British Telecom said, ‘We will do everything we can to protect people using phone boxes,’ which is what you would expect a spokesman to say whatever the danger.

There’s a temptation here to read a broader narrative within this phenomena. The forbidden fruit of the apple comes at us all the way from Genesis to Snow White to anonymous villains punishing children for their greed at Halloween and accepting gifts from strangers. I think it is worth noting that in almost every instance of scarring waterslides, HIV-laced syringes and maiming tart cards the victim is not doing something entirely virtuous. They are not all procuring prostitutes, but they are all engaged in something fun, even the innocent use of a vending machine or waterslide. Leisure, it seems, and particularly when it involves sliding down a wet surface or an enthusiastic bite into an ill-gotten apple, has its dangers. In the stiffly moral world of urban myths no one is ever harmed after committing a selfless act.

The Chelsea Smilers and Friends

Another urban myth that flourished in the 1980s in south London was that of the ‘Chelsea Smilers’. The Smilers were a group of Chelsea football fans travelling London in a van with a smiley face painted on the side. They would stop schoolchildren and ask them questions about Chelsea football club. If the children got the questions wrong – perhaps they didn’t support Chelsea or, worse, didn’t like football – the gang would slice the corners of their mouth. They would then hit the child hard enough to make them scream, which would widen their wounds into a ‘smile’. The thug’s weapon of choice was a razor blade, knife or the edge of a credit card or phone card. Salt or vinegar was put onto the wounds to make the pain worse. A story of the Smilers’ brutality always ended with a warning: the Chelsea Smilers were at another school yesterday, but they were coming to the child’s school today.