Fa Hingit the Monkey? no.4

Ahem - it wasnae me!!!

I have been accused of 'stealing' Hartlepool's monkey legend! :-)

It was all Patrick's fault - he of the comms office. He decided to tell the world about my little paper on the Boddam Monkey song, and our blessed P&J started the rumpus - well, maybe it didn't, but it didna help with the sub-header: How Boddam monkey incident may have been usurped by Hartlepool! You can read the story here

Radio Scotland was tickled by the story and I got to blether to the Newsdrive's Mhairi Stewart about it. Of course, the folk in Glasgow don't know about the Boddam monkey and they probably forgot about The Fisherman and the Monkey, the broadside ballad published in the 1870s after Ned Corvan's version of the song became famous!

All hell broke loose over the Border!! The Poolie fans climbed out of their bunker to have a go back and poor Mark Payne, journalist for the Hartlepool Mail was tasked with hitting back - he claims not to be responsible for the headline: Scots Try To Steal Monkey Legend complete with my fizzog on the page!! (That's the pic above folks, which the Peenj photographer took on the 12 January.) And then I got a phone call from BBC Tees! They wanted to interview me as well! So, I had to get up early to speak to them on the radio, and was stifling the laughter as the reporter seemed so genuinely upset that 'we' north of the border were trying to 'steal' something that he considered 'part of Hartlepool's identity'. It was so sweet! I told him the Boddamers don't want to be known as Monkey Hangers, so they are welcome to rejoice in the handle! I had to laugh at the Scottish Daily Express's editorial the day after the press release, who questioned the wisdom of associating oneself with simian hangings!!

And the Internet is on fire with this - I am now even quoted on Wikipedia as the alternative source of reference!! What a great honour! I just have to hope someone doesn't edit it out! Bloggers, forum peeps from the Poolie Bunker to Mudcat (even more amazing) are debating the story again.

AND then, I found that poor Stuart Drummond, Lord Mayor of Hartlepool has been dragged into the ring - he phoned up the Peenj and defended the Hartlepudlians' ownership of the monkey legend:

“Boddam may well try and claim the legend as their own and I believe there is a village in Devon which also claims an association, but I firmly believe Hartlepool is the original place of the hanging of the monkey and Hartlepudlians take a lot of pride in identifying ourselves as monkey hangers.”

Hee hee hee - could this get any more surreal???

I've said and done all I wanted to about the Monkey - I never had any desire to prove where it came from - I was comparing two versions of a song and the multifarious influences on it, like any good folklorist does. Surely Poolies do not believe in polygenesis, the springing up of a story/legend in many different places independently. We know that's entirely possible. The Boddam/Hartlepool Hanged Monkey is an urban legend, an early one, but certainly something that has no discernable origin - the song has its published versions in Hartlepool (1864) and in Aberdeenshire's Greig-Duncan Folksong Collection (1907) - the story was certainly known before those dates. Those who are sticklers for written sources fail to understand folklore or oral transmission, because they perhaps refuse to accept the validity of stories and oral tradition, which is a shame, they are missing out on so much! Wandering minstrels of the medieval era didn't write down their songs! 'Murdani Mast' aka Murdo Kennedy, a bard from Marbhig on the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides composed all his ballads and songs orally, and he is still living!

Anyway... I'm past caring, but I did not, I reiterate, set out to claim that the Boddam version came first, what I said in the paper was if the date of 1772 could be substantiated... for the wreck of the Annie which is mentioned in one version of the song. David Ferguson who mentions that date in his work on shipwrecks in NE Scotland couldn't substantiate it either and admitted that! It's folklore, it's meant to be fun! I think the people quoted in the papers and the BBC have taken it the right way, with tongues firmly in cheeks, but some folk out in Internet land have gone a bit too far, so can you just... like the man said to the fighting snowflakes... settle!!

;->

anyway - you and I know it was the Peelichers that were responsible!! Just ask Eric Whyte!

But ye winna wyte the Peelichers
for the Peelichers hae nae shame
The Peelichers hung the monkey,
and the Boddamers got the blame, the blame,
the Boddamers got the blame!

And fellow blogger, who is descended from a Boddamer, Pauline Cordiner spoke about this aaaaages ago on her blog and naebody turned a hair...