London Urban Legends (22 page)

In his book
London Lore
, Steve Roud talks about his daughter hearing the story in her school in Croydon in January and February 1989 and, from talking to her and her cousins at other schools, finding the myth at those other schools. By doing this, Roud was able to document the scare story as it spread: ‘Many younger ones were in tears, some in hysterics, many refused to come home till their parents came to get them,’ Steve writes. ‘The children talked of nothing else.’

Roud was able to trace the rumour to where it began in Bexley, around 31 January 1989. It spread across south London, reaching Wandsworth, Merton and Sutton by the first week in March. Soon afterward, the story hit Kent and Surrey. He reported that the panic died down quickly, but the story became a standard playground scare story.

The phantom razor hiders and Chelsea Smilers are not the first imaginary gang to disfigure Londoners. ‘The Mohawks’, (also know as the Mohocks or Mowhawks) were a gang who wandered 1712 London. They were rumoured to have tattooed innocent faces, put fish hooks in people’s cheeks and drag them along with a fishing line, and crush the noses, slit the ears and gouge out the eyes of their victims with ‘new invented weapons’. The Mohawks were said to be like a horror-story version of the Bullingdon Club; rich young men who would meet in their clubs, drink to excess then head out, often into St James’s Park, to cause havoc.

Another cruel trick of theirs was to put their sword between a man’s legs and move it to make the poor chap dance, or to surround a man with their swords and one would stab him in his backside. The man would spin round to face his attacker and then another would stab him from behind. The idea was to keep the unfortunate fellow spinning around like a top.

With all of this cruelty on the street it may be surprising to learn there was was only one Mohawk trial. Sir Mark Cole and Viscount Hinchingbrooke are named in most books as the chief Mohawks. The total number of arrests was seven and the names read like a list of society party attendees: Edward Richard Montague, Lord Hinchingbroke; Sir Mark Cole, baronet; Thomas Fanshawe; Thomas Sydenham, gentleman; Captain John Reading; Captain Robert Beard; Robert Squibb of Lincoln’s Inn, gentleman; and Hugh Jones, servant to Sir Mark Cole.

As recorded in
Chambers Book of Days
this aristocratic crew were put on trial for being ‘mohocks’. Their crimes are explained below:

… they had attacked the watch in Devereux Street, slit two persons’ noses, cut a woman in the arm with a penknife so as to disable her for life, rolled a woman in a tub down Snow Hill, misused other women in a barbarous manner by setting them on their heads, and overset several coaches and chairs with short clubs, loaded with lead at both ends, expressly made for the purpose.

The defendants claimed that they themselves were vigilante ‘scourers’ and were out looking for Mohawks. After raiding and wrecking an illegal gambling den, the team heard that the Mohawks were in Devereux Street. On arrival they helped three wounded men, but the nightwatchman John Bouch, an early type of policeman, mistook the rich crime-fighters for Mohawks, attacked them and arrested them.

The jury found them guilty and fined them each three shillings and four pence, which even for the early eighteenth century seems quite cheap for a sadistic night out. It is not clear whether their victims were ever found or if they were invented by the nightwatch, and it doesn’t prove much other than a group of privileged men were convicted for a night’s misconduct. It does not prove that a conspiracy of Mohawks ever existed. With a lot of rumour and little evidence, the doubts about these stories grew. Jonathan Swift thought the Mohawks were the result of mass hysteria, and Daniel Defoe thought they had the ‘air of Grub Street’ about them: Grub Street being the home of London’s cheaper and more sensationalist publishing and writers at the time – an earlier Fleet Street, if you will.

Dashing Blades

After the Mohawk moral panic of 1712 came the appearance of Spring-heeled Jack in 1838. Jack was a dark, iron-clawed, fire-breathing figure who would terrify people, often women, walking at night in London before making his getaway by leaping or bouncing over a wall with the aid of his spring-heeled boots. Jack is now thought of as a ghost or demon, some elemental presence spreading fear across London. He has featured in popular culture several times, from penny dreadfuls to comics to the fiction of Philip Pullman, as a supernatural or super-gadget bearing superhero.

The earliest description of Jack appeared in a letter from a Peckham resident to the Lord Mayor of London, published in
The Times
dated 9 January 1838, describing a dangerous bet laid by an affluent group of men:

The wager has, however, been accepted, and the unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses, two of whom are not likely to recover, but to become burdens to their families. At one house the man rang the bell, and on the servant coming to open the door, this worse than brute stood in no less dreadful figure than a spectre clad most perfectly. The consequence was that the poor girl immediately swooned, and has never from that moment been in her senses. The affair has now been going on for some time, and, strange to say, the papers are still silent on the subject.

To do this, the ‘unmanly villain’ appeared in villages around London (including Peckham) disguised as ‘a ghost, a bear and a devil’, and had already left one woman so afraid she could not bear the sight of men. The Peckham resident thought that news or warning of this campaign had not yet appeared in the papers because those involved, being of higher ranks, had sought to keep the stories out of the press. In 1907, Jack was identified as the Marquess of Waterford, an aristocrat with a reputation for cruelty and practical jokes who would hide in dark places in costume, waiting to frighten people.

The identification with the rich may be twofold: firstly there is the idea that those in the higher echelons of society may have contempt for ordinary people and that they gain sport from tormenting and terrorising them. There is also the lack of capture or publicity about the great danger of Spring-heeled Jack. No Mohawk or Spring-heeled villain has ever been captured and shown to the public. This may be because they do not really exist and so are impossible to capture, but those convinced of their reality had other ideas: the Mohawks and Jack are rich and privileged and so escape arrest and publicity through their power.

The reality may be stranger and more sophisticated. Guising was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and dressing up as a ghost and walking the night, looking to frighten people was an almost common adult pastime. As well as Jack there was the Peckham ghost, Plumstead ghost and others. Mike Dash, in his authoritative
Spring-heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost
, investigated news reports on one of the most famous Spring-heeled Jack cases. As reported in
The Times
on 22 February 1838, Jane Alsop of Bearbinder Lane, Old Ford, answered a late-night ring at the door. She answered and the man at the door said, ‘For God’s sake, bring me a light, for we have caught Spring-heeled Jack in the lane.’ Jane gave the candle to the man, who she thought was a policeman, but instead of running off with it he threw off his heavy cloak, put the candle to his chest and ‘vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flames from his mouth’. Jane saw that the man was wearing a large helmet and that his clothes fitted him very tightly, like a white oilskin. Spring-heeled Jack, as the man was thought to be, darted toward her, catching her by the dress and back of her neck and placed her head under his arm. He began to tear at her dress with his claws and Jane screamed loudly for help. One of her sisters arrived and rescued her.

This account is the heart of the Spring-heeled Jack myth, and the description of the helmet and tight-fitting suit lead researchers in the 1970s to suggest that Jack was an alien running amok in early Victorian London. Mike Dash looked into supplementary accounts of the attack that covered the two investigations the newly formed Metropolitan Police opened to look into it. After a number of interviews, officers Young and Lea concluded that, ‘In her fright the young lady had much mistaken the appearance of her assailant.’ Two men, a bricklayer named Payne and a carpenter called Millbank, were seen walking away from Jane Alsop’s house just after the attack. Millbank was wearing a white hat and a white fustian (heavy woven cloth shooting jacket), which the police thought was Jack’s white oilskin. During the investigation, one James Smith, a wheelwright, described an encounter with Millbank and Payne later that evening on the Coborn Road. Millbank, the one in the shooting jacket, pulled the wheel Smith was carrying on his shoulder, and asked him, ‘What have you got today to Spring Jack?’ Smith replied that he desired Jack to give his wheel back. Smith told the police: ‘I have no doubt but that the man Millbank was the person who so frightened the Misses Alsop.’

The myth of Spring-heeled Jack is of a lone monster, either man or a supernatural entity, scaring and assaulting the people of London. One big part of the myth is that it may have been an insane aristocrat. In a talk at the London Ghosts conference of October 2012, Mike Dash suggested that while the main suspect, the Marquess of Waterford, was known to have dressed in a devil costume at a party, this does not mean countless others were doing the same. It seems sensible to suggest that there was not one individual Spring-heeled Jack; this ghost, bear or devil was either a viral idea taken on by many men or something they did – guising in the city – that gained the label of Jack. Some may have been playing practical jokes, others have a more aggressive air to them, and many may have a blend of both.

Saucy Jack

If Spring-heeled Jack, the Chelsea Smilers and the Mohawks are moral panics, is it possible that another series of actual violent acts have a fictional boogieman attached to them? Is the Jack the Ripper mystery not a mystery at all but a moral panic grown into urban legend and conspiracy theory? I think parallels between the rumours of Mohawks and Spring-heeled Jack and the theories about Jack the Ripper are worth drawing.