Dear Mister Thoms

Le Parc de Montsouris

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Jean-Bruno Renard | Dear Mr. Thoms # 36, 1994

Below are extracts from (A) a book by Dominique Camus (1992) and (B) a book by Jacques Hillairet (1956). Both relate the anecdote. Hillairet seems the more skeptical (“It is said”).

A. Parc Montsouris. The creation of this park is due to a wish of Napoleon III and of Haussmann to establish a large gree space in a popular quarter. Haussmann cose this waste ground, full of stone quarries and windmills, and, between 1865 and 1869, 16 hectares were laid out in the English style much in vogue during the Second Empire. Alphand, who designed the park… created an undulating garden with paths twisting and meandering around cascades, and a large artificial lake. The park was inaugurated by the Emperor in 1869 and the lake, which was to an extent the jewel of the park, was filled with water for the big day but – by accident or through defective workmanship – it emptied suddenly. The engineer who had conceived it, not being able to bear this indignity, committed suicide like Vatel at Chantilly, who could not get over spoiling the king’s lunch because of the delayed arrival of the fish.
(Camus, Dominque, Paris. Paris: Arthaud, 1992, p 571)

B, Le parc de Montsouris. The park of 16 hectares, the largest in Paris after the one at Buttes-Chaumont, is the work of Alphand, it was completed in 1878… It contains an artificial lake almost a hectare in size, the digging of which began in 1869. On the day the park was inaugurated, this lake emptied, it is said, because of a construction fault; its originator committed suicide.

Footnotes

Sandy Hobbs

The Story Spreads: A further and recent example of the story in tourist literature is to be found in this entry on the Parc Montsouris in the Berkeley Guide France written by students from the University of California (New York: Fodor, 1994, page 93):

“…Just so you know, the pond magically emptied on the park’s opening day, and the designing engineer consequently committed suicide.”

Vatel’s Suicide: From the entry on Vatel in Larousse Gastronomique (London: Mandarin, 1990, pp 1352-1353):

“In April 1671 the Prince of Conde entrusted with the task of organizing a fete in honour of Louis XIV, with 3000 guests. The celebrations began on a Thursday evening; in the course of the supper following a hunting party, several tables lacked roast meat because a number of unexpected guests turned up. Later, the planned fireworks display was spoiled by the cloudy sky. These incidents, which were recounted by Madame de Sevgne in a letter of 26 April, persuaded Vatel that his hnour was lost. Learning at dawn that only two loads of fresh fish ordered for the meals of the day had arrived, he gave way to despair: declaring ‘I shall not survive the disgrace,’ he shut himself in his room and ran his sword through his body, at the very moment when the fish carts were entering the castle gates.”

This particular suicide story may have a solid foundation in history, but the irony of the arrival of the fish carts surely has the flavor of legend about it.

The Engineer’s Blunder

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Sandy Hobbs | Dear Mr Thoms # 35, 1994

Stories about architects or sculptors who commit suicide when they discover an error in their work are widespread and have been discussed on a number of occasions by writers interested in contemporary legend (e.g. Degh and Vazsonyi, 1978, McCulloch, 1987, Hobbs, 1992, Simpson, 1992).

One of the cases I mentioned in my article in Foaftale News concerns the Parc Montsouris in Paris. I quoted three contemporary guidebooks which all told essentially the same story. On the day the Parc opened, the artificial lake suddenly dried out and the engineer who designed it committed suicide.

I have since discovered that the Blue Guide: Paris and Versailles (Robertson, 1992, pp 85-86) also caries the story. No doubt other guidebooks do likewise. However, there is a limit to what I am willing to spend on guides to Paris. I bought the Blue Guide in a fire sale!

I must also be said that not all books for tourists tell this story. One which does not is A Traveller’s History of Paris (Cole, 1994). The author describes the Parc Montsouris (pp. 282-283) and discusses its planning and building. Unlike the guides which carry the suicide story, Cole mentions the name of the engineer responsible for the work, Adolph Alphand.

Reading this, I thought I might be able to make some progress in checking out the accuracy of this particular suicide story. However, I have discovered a problem. The works I consulted mention an architect-engineer called Alphand, Lavedan’s French Architecture (1979) and Le Petit Robert 2 (Rey, 1987). However, they both refer to him as Jean-Charles Alphand. The same person? Probably, since Le Petit Robert attributes the Parc Montsouris to him. If he is indeed the engineer in question, he appears to have taken a long time to decide to commit suicide. The same source gives is death as 1891. The Parc Montsouris opened in 1878.

References:

Cole, Robert. A Trveller’s istory of Paris. Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush Pressm 1994.
Degh, Linda and Vazsonyi, “The Crack on the Red Goblet or Truth and Modern Legend, in Folklore in the Modern World, (Ed. Richard Dorson), pp 253-272. The Hague: Mouton.
Hobbs, Sandy, “Errors, Suicides, and Tourism” Foaftale News 27, 1992, 2-4.
Lavedan, Pierre. French Architeture, (Revised Edition). London: Scholar Press, 1979.
McCulloch, Gordon. “Suicidal Sculptors: Scottish Versions of a Migratory Legend”, in Perspectives on Contemporary Legend Volume II (Ed. Gillian Bennett, Paul Smith and J.D.A. Widdowson), pp 109-116. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987.
Rey, Alain (Ed.). Le Petit Robert 2: Dictionnaire Universel des Noms Propres (Revised Edition). Paris: Le Robert, 1987.
Robertson, Ian. Blue Guide: Paris and Versailles (Eighth Edition). London: A & C Black, 1992.
Simpson, Jacqueline, “More Suicidal and Homicidal Architects”, Foaftale News 28, 1992, 5-6.

Footnote

Gillian Bennett

Five texts should be added to the growing bibliography of the “Architect’s/Engineer’s Blunder”. None of these appear to be cited in FOAFtale News 27 (September 1992) 2-4; 28 (December 1992) 5-6.

The first, perhaps most obvious, one is Mick Goss’s article in The Unknown, which covers some of the same ground as Gordon McCulloch’s paper; there’s also a mention of the story n Nigel Pennick’s article about walled up trains in the London underground. Finally, there are two articles in Folklore in the early decades of this century, in which the author discusses variants where a jealous master builder either kills the pupil who outshines him or commits suicide(motif W181.2.1). The note by Rose is a follow-up to Crooke’s articles: Rose suggests that the story originated in foundation sacrifices (an outdated theory, perhaps, but worth mentioning!). Here are the citations:

Crooke, W. “Prentice Pillars: The Architect and His Pupil”, Folk-Lore 29 (1918): 219-25.

Crooke, W. “Prentice Pillars: The Architect and His Pupil”, Folk-Lore 31 (1920): 323-24.

Goss, Michael, “Legends For O
ur Time 1: The Architect’s Blunder”, The Unknown (July 1987): 10-16.

Pennick, Nigel. “Urban Folklore of the London Underground”, Folklore Frontiers 6 (1987): 8-11.

Rose, H. A. “Prentice Pillars”, Folk-Lore 34 (1923): 381.

Hanging the Monkey

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Sandy Hobbs | Dear Mister Thoms # 33, 1994

In his book Who Hung The Monkey?, Paul Screeton notes that the story of a monkey being hanged is linked to four places in Britain, Boddam (North East Scotland), Hartlepool (North East England) and Mevagissey (South West England), and possibly an unnamed village in Derbyshire (Note 1). Scottish Memories, a recently started monthly popular magazine, adds a further location, Greenock in the West of Scotland.

A short unsigned article, in the June 1993 issue, entitled “Just fancy that…”, dates the event as occurring in 1760. Unlike the stories set in some other places, no shipwreck is involved. A wily native of Port Glasgow hoaxed a gullible citizen of nearby Greenock by telling him that a French spy has swum ashore and is hiding. A posse of Greenock inhabitants catch, try and hang a monkey, believing it to be the French spy. The article also mentions a successful trick later played on Port Glasgow by a Greenock citizen posing as an expert campanologist. On his advice, the Portonians, to clean a bell which was not ringing true, boiled water in it over a fire. The bell cracked and never rang again. (This mirrors the joke and counter-joke associated with other versions of the story, for example the following cited by Drummond, 1982:

Peterhead man: Aye, aye, man! Are ye looking for a monkey?

Boddam fisherman: Foo, fit’s wrang. Hae ye lost yer brither?)

The article in Scottish Memories gave rise to a variety of spin offs, in The Guardian, The Mail of Hartlepool and Scottish Memories itself. The role of the Hartlepool Mail was crucial to this for a reason which can be discerned in the title of the piece it ran, “Hands off our monkey!” (Hickey, 1993). The article is short on evidence and long on assertiveness; for example: “We all know who hung the monkey” said a spokesman for Hartlepool Borough Council. “And it wasn’t the Scots!”

The response by Scottish Memories is hardly impressive if one is interested in quality of argument. The only historical evidence offered is that a French naval squadron was in the area in 1760. Otherwise we have to rely on the fact that “many local folk recall the story being passed down the generations”. One example quoted is of someone hearing it from her father who heard it from his father. Since the informant’s father was born in 1910, the grandfather was presumably born in the second half of the nineteenth century, about a century short of the supposed date of the hanging. Showing a little more balance of judgement, Scottish Memories also quoted Lesley Couperwhite, a local librarian, who pointed out that the story was told “about a number of places from Aberdeen to Cornwall”. (Actually, Boddam is north of Aberdeen, and there is a version from slightly further north than that.)

When Maeve Kennedy, Diarist of The Guardian newspaper picked up on this controversy (8 July 1993) she asked for, and got “more monkeys please”. Only a few of the monkey items she subsequently published concerned monkey hanging, however. On 14 July, she reported the hanging of a monkey, escaped from a circus, in the Cotswold village of Ruardean. On 27 July, she cited Derek Froome on both Megavissey and Boddam. Although she ran items in her Diary until 13 August, no other sites of monkey-hanging were mentioned (although stories involving killing monkeys by other means do mention other places). Paul Screeton reproduces in Folklore Frontiers, No.20, an article from The Journal (Newcastle) in which is added an unidentified fishing port in Dorset. A further location is mentioned by Healey and Galvill in their Urban Myths (pp 87-88). Although they focus upon the Hartlepool story, they state that some natives of Kent claim it happened in that county. (When they later dealt with the Hartlepool story in their Urban Myths feature in The Guardian, they did not mention the Kent version.)

Although these various texts together provide quite a long list of towns or villages (Boddam, Greenock, Hartlepool, Magavissey, Ruardean) and counties (Derbyshire, Dorset, Kent) with which the monkey hanging story has been linked, with respect to documentation we appear to be still in the position that Screeton found himself in when writing his book. Hartlepool and Boddam seem at present to have the most substantial links with the story, though of course researchers with access to local sources might come up with more substantial material on the other locations.

Screeton tends to favour Hartlepool as the more likely “original” and it should be stressed that this can not be seen as simply the local patriotism of a native. As a native of Aberdeenshire, I might be expected to favour Boddam, but I must declare myself an agnostic on the issue. I am not persuaded by James Drummond’s 1982 article arguing for a Boddam origin because of his lack of documentation. Those interested in the question should read Screeton’s book. Here I would like to deal with a couple of points from a slightly different perspective from Screeton’s.

The Boddam story might appear to have three pieces of circumstantial evidence favouring it (see Neish, 1950, Graham, 1965). First, we are told the name of the ship the monkey was on, the Anna. Secondly, we are given a date, 1772. Thirdly, we are provided with a distinctive motive for the hanging. Let us start with the last of these. In most of the monkey hanging stories, the hanging comes about because of the stupidity or ignorance of the people who mistake the monkey for a French spy. In some of the Boddam texts, there is what might be thought a somewhat more “rational” explanation. The status of an abandoned ship with livestock on board is different in Scots law from that of a ship without livestock. A case in 1674 had established that a ship with an ox on board could not be deemed a “wreck”. Killing the monkey could be interpreted as an attempt to improve the Boddamers’ legal claim to the ship. Whilst not exactly admirable behaviour, this casts the executioners as something different from the bumkins implied in other texts. But does this make the story more plausible? I would suggest that in isolation it does not, since the explanation could easily have been added to the story in transmission. If the explanation were linked to an authenticated incident, however, that might make the case for Boddam rather stronger. However, that is not the case. In a recent study of shipwrecks in the area, which aims at being comprehensive, Ferguson (1992) found no evidence of a shipwreck at Boddam (or elsewhere on that coast) involving a ship called the Anna or the year 1772. The incident appears in Ferguson’s book solely on the basis of the legend.

Screeton gives considerable prominence to the song by Ned Corvan “Who hung the monkey?” which first appeared in print in 1862 and which he plausibly links to the Hartlepool story. He notes the fact that a similar song is linked to the Boddam story. Drummond suggested that Corvan adapted an earlier song about Boddam. This is purely speculative, however, since no earlier “Boddam” text exists. Both the Boddam and Hartlepool versions are sung to the tune usually called “The Tinker’s Wedding”. Corvan’s chorus has a final line:

The fishermen hung the monkey O!

Screeton refers to Corvan as having put Hartlepudlians “on the map”, which may well be true, but it should be noted that Hartlepool as such is not mentioned in the text Screeton quotes. In contrast, Screeton quotes as the last line of the chorus of the Boddam version:

The Boddamers hanged the monkey o’.

Is this then evidence that the song is “really” about Boddam? Alison (1976) prints three verses with a chorus which ends:

the Boddamers hanged the monkey-o.

However, the provenance of this version gos back no earlier than 1974 (Note 2). Cuthbert Graham writing in 1965 quotes a four-line verse ending:

And the Boddamers hanged the monkey O!

However, Neish (1950), on whom Graham seems largely have drawn for the story and song, does not quote that line. Searching for an earlier Boddam text, I found a single verse and chorus in the Greig-Duncan Folk-Song Collection (Shuldham-Shaw and Lyle, 1981). Here, the chorus ends:

The fishermen hanged the monkey O.

Not only is Boddam not mentioned, but the accompanying note from the Greig manuscript, dated August 1907, reads:

Cullen fisherman who sang it told of ship running ashore off Banffshire. All the crew were drowned. A monkey was saved. Fishermen, unable to place the creature, hanged it.
Here then is a much earlier text from the North East of Scotland which not only does not mention Boddam but places the incident in the neighbouring county and attributes the hanging to the ignorance of the finders.

Let me end by stating a simple goal. For each supposed location of the monkey hanging story, let us try to discover the earliest known text in which the incident is explictly stated to have involved inhabitants of that particular place. This will not in itself establish the “original” version (if there is such a thing). But it might but the discussion on a slightly firmer footing.

Notes

  1. The qualification “possibly” seems appropriate, since Screeton actually refers to an “ape” being “tried, sentenced and executed”. This seems to me pretty close to stories about monkeys being hanged.
  2. Alison acknowledges as his source a BBC broadcast in 1974 or 1975.

References

Alison, James N. (Ed.), Poetry of Northeast Scotland. London: Heinemann Educational, 1976.
Drummond, James, The Tale of a Monkey, Scots Magazine, October 1982, pp 62-70.
Ferguson, David M., Shipwrecks of North East Scotland 1444-1990. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1991; Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1992.
Graham, Cuthbert, The Blossoming of Boddam, The Press and Journal, 10 April 1965 (Cutting in Aberdeen Public Library Local Collection).
Healey, Phil and Glanvill, Rick, Urban Myths. London: Virgin, 1992.
Healey and Glanvill, Urban Myths 39: Monkey business, The Guardian, 12 June 1993, Weekend Section, p 75.
Hickey, Phillip, Hands off our Monkey! The Mail, 2 July 1993; reprinted in Folklore Frontiers, No. 19, 1993.
Neish, Robert, Old Peterhead. Peterhead: P. Scrogie, 1950.
Screeton, Paul, Who Hung The Monkey? A Hartlepool Legend. Hartlepool: Printability Publishing, 1991.
Screeton, Paul, Monkey Hanging Scam, Folklore Frontiers, No. 20, 1993.
Shuldham-Shaw, Patrick, and Lyle, Emily B. (Eds.) The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection, Volume 1. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1981.

A Note About “The Vanishing Hitchhiker”

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Bill Ellis | Dear Mister Thom # 35, 1994

Bill Ellis has written to suggest that maybe the earliest clear reference to the “Vanishing Hitchhiker” plot line can be found in William Henderson’s Folklore of the Northern Counties of England (1866) The story pp 273-4 of the American edition of 1973 (Ottowa: Rowman and Littlefield) has the “hopeless pilgrimage” motif common in “Vanishing Hitchhiker” stories but unusual in a ghost story of the period. Here is the story:

“On St Thomas’s eve and day, too, have carriers and waggoners been most alarmed by the ghost of the murdered woman, who was wont to haunt the path or lane between Cradle Well and Neville’s Cross. With her child dangling at her side, she used to join parties coming or going out of Durham in carriers’ carts or wagons, would enter the vehicles and there seat herself, but always disappearing when they reached the limit of her hopeless pilgrimage.”

Bizarre Tales of a Mysterious Hitchhiker

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Bill Ellis | Dear Mister Thom # 34, 1994

FRACKVILLE – If someone walked up to you and told you a story about an experience they had or about which they heard concerning a hitchhiker who foretold “The end is near” and disappeared from “inside” a vehicle, what would you think?

Like most people, you would probably doubt the report or maybe turn the TV set to the popular “Unsolved Mysteries” show and try to summon its host, Robert Stack, to unravel the bizarre event.

Editorial sceptics

Such a story was brought to the attention of the Evening Herald recently and the reactions of editorial department personnel were predictable “Yeah, right”.

A check with state police, however, revealed troopers had received several calls relating to the hitchhiker incident.

Sgt. Barry Reed, station commander at Frackville, confirmed receiving three or four calls about the mysterious vanishing hitchhiker, from reliable and credible individuals who all shared the same experience.

The “hitchhiker” was described as a tall, thin man with long dark hair and wearing a long dark coat. He was picked up on Route61 near Frackville’s southern end on Monday, Jan 31, between 6 and 7 a.m.

Several stories

However, contrary to the “unofficial” reports, state troopers said they received no reports about the “hitchhiker” in conversation about the weather, the turbulence of society or the Angel Gabriel “tooting his horn for the second time”.

However, troopers did say reports made to them concerned the hitchhiker having said ‘I am here to tell you the end is near,’ before vanishing into thin air.

Some reports relayed to the Evening Herald alleged the mysterious hitchhiker warned, ‘Jesus is coming! Jesus is coming’ and then disappeared.

Sgy. Reed recalled that while he was stationed in Lancaster County about 10 years ago, a similar ‘hitchhiker tale was circulated.

Think it was a hoax

In reference to the Lancaster County incidents and the Schuykill County reports, Sgt. Reed said, ‘I believe it is a hoax. But the people are reliable.’

Sgt. Reed said he travels ‘up and down’ the Frackville grade to Saint Clair daily and never noticed anything.

‘Even people who never pick up hitchhikers pick them up,’ said Sgt. Reed, who particularly pointed to a case involving a Frackville woman who apparently had never before stopped for a hitchhiker.

Motorists tend to feel sorry for hitchhikers, especially during the cold winter weather, and subsequently act contrary to their beliefs by picking them up.

Sgt. Reed said, ‘In at least one of the reports, I regarded the person as the most reliable.’
No calls elsewhere

A check with the Hazelton and Schuyhill Haven state police revealed there were no calls about the mystical man.

Sgt. Reed offered this advice to motorists, ‘Don’t pick up any hitchhikers. That’s always good advice.’

Story by Rosanne M. Hall, Evening Herald (Shenandoah, PA), 4 February 1994.

Haunted by a Song

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Mark Moravec | Dear Mister Thom # 30, 1993

Mark has found the clipping below which recounts an English “Vanishing Hitchhiker” story. He asks whether any reader has heard the specific legend mentioned. The item comes from New Idea, a popular Australian women’s magazine. It is also, he observes, “an example of the exploitation of contemporary legend storylines by popular culture, this time as the basis for a song”.

If any DMT reader with access to local newspapers in the South East would like to check whether the story rally did form the basis for a court case in Southend, we would dearly love to hear from you.

“Haunted by a Song

Several times over the past few years rock star and actor Jon English has made the big decision to drop the ghost song She Was Real! From his concert performance.

But for some inexplicable reason, at the last minute before he steps on stage, he always changes his mind.

It’s now 10 years since Jon wrote and first performed She Was Real! Which tells the eerie story of a ghostly sighting of Susie, a teenage girl who had been killed in a traffic accident. And he still can’t bring himself to put the song to rest permanently.

‘Susie’s ghost is just hanging around and haunting me’, Jon lightheartedly confesses wit a hint of nervousness. ‘I could have killed her off from my concerts long ago, but here we are 10 years since I wrote the song and she still won’t go home. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever get rid of her.’

She was real! Is based on an 1982 court case in Southend, England, where Jon’s family lived. A young motorcyclist had faced the court charged with causing malicious mischief, and in his defence he said he’d been riding his motorcycle around midnight in Southend when he was hailed by a girl hitchhiker of about 18.

They stopped to have coffee at a café, and she told him her name was Susie. She told the motorcyclist where she lived so he could drop her off.

When they came to the Cheltenham Road roundabout the bike went over a bump and the young man thought he heard a thud from behind. He looked around and the girl was not there.

He rode to the nearest police station to report the accident. The police returned to the roundabout with him and after a lengthy search there was no sign of the missing girl. So the police went to the address the motorcyclist gave them. A middle-aged woman gave them the astonishing information that her daughter Susan had died in 1970 in a motorcycle crash at the Cheltenham Road roundabout.

Police tracked down the motorcyclist and, although he stuck to his story, he was arrested for the trouble he had caused.

‘The guy was so convincing in court, they let him off’, says Jon.

‘It’s a story that fascinated me so much I just had to write a song about it’, he says.

‘She just won’t disappear, Creepy, isn’t it?’

Story: Alan Veitch”

The Phantom Meaning-Giver Strikes Again

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Gillian Bennett | Dear Mister Thom # 23, 1991

In an article, “modern-day folk tales too strange to be true”, in the Sacramento Bee (31 May 1991), the writer, Katherine Bishop, goes on a quest for urban legends and finds Jan Brunvand and Alan Dundes. Brunvand keeps to description, but Dundes engages in some pretty fancy interpretation when asked to comment on thefamiliar legend of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker”.

“Dr Alan Dundes” says Bishop, “a professor of anthropology at the University of Caifornia, Berkeley, said the story was widespread and the the driver was always a man and the hitchhiker was always female.

“Instead of viewing the events in the ale from the point of view of the driver, he said, thetale should be told from the point of view of the young woman, since it is usually told by adolescent girls to one another.

“It is a cautionary tale” he said, warning girls that if they allow themselves to be “picked up” – an idea loaded with sexual innuendo and threat – their punishment will be that they can ever go home again.”

There is only one thing wrong with this statement – it is ridiculous.

Unfortunately it is typical of the sort of things that modern legend scholars are coming up with these days – no better, no worse. Grated, if a journalist called me up while I was having my lunch and asked me to say something interesting about ”The Vanishing Hitchhiker”, I probably would say something silly too. But many respected academics are making similar statements in respectable professional journals too, so these sorts of interpretations can’t all be blamed on the importunateness of the press.

The trouble is that meaning is thought to reside in the plot or the content of the story, not in the minds of the tellers and hearers who share it. In effect, therefore, these meanings actually reside in the mind of the commentator him/herself.

In fact, the stories can be fitted into almost any preconceived intellectual formula. Max Muller would have seen that “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” was plainly the remnant of a moon myth. Its central character is a pale virgin who walks the night, disappears at regular times ad places, only to reappear once more at the spot where she was first seen. Obviously the vanishing hitchhiker is the vanishing moon. Even the car can be fitted in to the scheme: it is dark, it is enclosed and secret, it swallows her up – it is plainly the night.

Frazer would have seen it as a very interesting and important vegetation myth. With the aid of comparative data from the Bonka-Bonka tribe of the Upper Limpopo Valley, he would have shown that it is the last remnant of a goddess cult. And very exciting it would have been, for usually the vegetation God who dies and is revived again is a male, but here the hitchhiker who dies and reappears and dies again is a female.

Nowadays the fashion is for psychoanalytic-symbolic approaches, allied to a functionalist orientation which demands that modern legends are dire social warnings. Hence, the Dundes interpretation of the legend as a sexual cautionary tale. However, even given this framework, it doesn’t make sense to say that the story warns girls that if they get picked up by men they’ll never go home again. In these stories, the girl is already dead before she takes the ride. If anything, it would go to prove the reverse – that her only, last chance of life is to be picked up (what’s more it would actually accord with many girls’ opinions).

So, personally, if we have to have a modern “psychological” explanation of the story, I prefer te interpretation which my friend Professor Toni Baloni, a keen student of modern folklore, proposes.

“The Vanishing Hitchhiker”, she wrote only recently, “is best understood as a poignant story about an unwanted pregnancy and the consequent stillbirth. The car in which the passenger travels is obviously the womb – an enclosed space in which the stranger travels for a short time, lulled by the drone and vibration of the body’s engine, the parent heart. The hitchhiker – unnamed, unknown, mysterious – is an unborn child. This much is quite clear and allows us to reconstruct the rest of the allegory.

The hitchhiker flags down the driver and imposes herself unexpectedly on him (we can see here the monstrous effect of out paternalistic society, where even the procreative function is linguistically and metaphorically attributed to the male) – so plainly this is not a planned pregnancy. The hitchhiker appears out of nowhere with no past: it appears then that the woman does not know who the father is.

But there the child is, to be carried, silently and passively, to her destination. Alas! The pregnancy doe not continue to full term: the “hitchhiker” disappears from the “car” in mid-journey. Very little is left to mark her short passage of life – a pool of water on the floor (waters of life? Amniotic fluid?), a marker on te grave, maybe a picture. She never arrives at her destination. All that is left of her is grief.

Plainly this is a cautionary tale put out by the London Rubber Company.”

Built on Seven Hills 3

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Sandy Hobbs | Dear Mr. Thoms # 36, 1994

In DMT 25 and 33, we noted that a number of cases where towns were said, like Rome, to be built on seven hills. One of the was Aberdeen, Scotland, for which we can now provide a recent text. In 1994, the city of Aberdeen has been commemorating the two hundred anniversary of thelaying out of its main street, Union Street. A publicity brochure, News 200, carries the following passage:

“St Katherine’s Hill is variously claimed as one of the three hills of Aberdeen (for the three towers on the City Arms) and the seven hills of the city making Aberdeen the equivalent of Rome”.

To Aberdeen, Bath, Glasgow, Lisbon , Plovdiv and Sheffield can be added Edinburgh. The AA Touring Guide to Britain (1979), pp 218-219 has as Tour 100, “The City on Seven Hills”: “Seven hilltops guarded by a massive castle carry Edinburgh, the Athens of the North”.

After the comparison with Athens, the authors presumably thought it better not to add a comparison with Rome. However, they do add something which casts some doubt on the “seven hills” image:

“Until 200 years ago the great centre of culture and learning was little more than a cluster of houses along the Royal Mile, a cobbled slope that follows a windy ridge from Castle Hill to the Palace of Holyrood.”

Built on Seven Hills 2

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Sandy Hobbs | Dear Mister Thoms # 33, 1994

IN DMT 25, it was noted that a number of towns are said, like Rome, to be built on seven hills: Aberdeen, Glasgow, Sheffield and Plovdiv (Bulgaria). To the can be added:

Bath: Marion Bowman informs us that she became aware of this claim when a Japanese student asked for help in identifying the seven hills mentioned in the guide book. Marion suggests that it would be more accurate to describe Bath as built in a hollow.

Lisbon: A travel guide in The Observer newspaper Life section, 2 January 1884, pp 24-28, states that “Lisbon not only claims the statutory seven hills, but covers them with patterned and lumpy cobbles”. Reading this prompted me to check a copy of the Michelin tourist guide Portugal (Fifth Edition, Harrow, 1989) . There, on page 83, one finds that Lisbon is said to be built on seven low hills”.

Built on Seven Hills 1

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Sandy Hobbs | Dear Mister Thoms # 25, 1993

What do Sheffield, England, and Plovdiv, Bulgaria have in common? Consider the following: “Legend has it that Sheffield is built on seven hills…” (Richard Burns, “Sheffield the city of craft and graft”, The Guardian, 16 October 1991, page 21).

This caught my eye, not just because of the word “legend” but because I recalled being told that Aberdeen was built on seven hills. David Cornwell informs me that he has been told the same of Glasgow, Browsing in the Dictionnaire Universel des Noms Propres (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1987), I discovered that Plovdiv was described as “construite sur sept collines”.

One of the problems with such a claim is that, if a town is built in a hilly area, and if it expands over the years as most towns presumably do, then many towns at some stage may be said to be built on seven hills. The reason for the claim is presumably to equate the town concerned with Rome, but how valid is the claim for Rome itself.

I would be interested to hear of other cases where towns have this claim made for them.