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.