Under the Clock

Recently I read Robert Fraser’s biography of the poet David Gascoyne. It isn’t a terribly satisfactory book, for reasons related to Surrealism and poetry rather than to folklore. Fraser’s other work, however, is directly connected to folklore – he has written extensively on James Frazer and The Golden Bough, and one of my more interesting discoveries in the Gascoyne book was that Enitharmon, Gascoyne’s later publisher, was founded by Alan Clodd, grandson of the hugely important Folklore Society President Edward Clodd – so I might well find myself coming back to him. (I have tried to avoid J.G. Frazer as far as possible but he keeps cropping up: he might ultimately prove to be unavoidable).

What did catch my attention as a folklorist was a passing reference in Chapter 29, dealing with Gascoyne’s period of hospitalisation in Whitecroft Hospital, also known as the Isle of Wight Mental Hospital or the Isle of Wight County Asylum. Construction on Whitecroft began in 1894. Like other mental hospitals of the period its outbuildings centred on a clock-/watchtower. The phrase that caught my attention was Fraser’s comment that ‘The local expression for admission to this monument to Victorian philanthropy, or for simply losing one’s mind, was to go “under the clock”’ (p.352).

Fraser cites no source for this statement, and it sounds (particularly given the tenor of the rest of the book) like an unattributed reference from a local history pamphlet. The hospital closed in 1992, and I wondered how far (if at all) the phrase remained in current usage. I’ve noted previously how older usages hang on (and die out), and I was curious about this one.

A brief and unsystematic look online revealed that the phrase is still in use locally on the Isle of Wight, but how widespread that is remains to be seen. One reason I was interested was because I was in the process of moving to the Island myself: as if I hadn’t had enough going on in my life lately I was moving house. This may also have triggered my interest in the phrase (and concept) of being ‘under the clock’. We arrived about a month ago, and I am slowly beginning to get my eye and ear in. I’m hoping that the move will see me easing gently back into fieldwork after the disruptions of the last two years.

One other area of interest has already begun to make itself apparent. Whitecroft Hospital has now been converted into accommodation, with Fraser noting tartly that the developers’ ‘glossy introductory brochure makes no references to its original function as a mental institution’. Maybe not, but one should never underestimate the capacity to generate legends of place, particularly around former hospital sites.

A 2014 tourist article by Jo Macaulay noted Whitecroft as ‘another huge haunted site’, where ‘former inmates are thought to inhabit its walls, screaming in mental or physical pain’. She remarked that ‘Perhaps unsurprisingly the flats are not selling particularly well and the development has had a few starts and stops in the past ten years’.

Of course one might expect a proliferation of such stories around defunct hospital sites, and there is evident enthusiasm for them across the Island. The site of the former Chest Hospital (now the car park for Ventnor Botanic Garden) is another site regularly identified as haunted. Macaulay, in passing, also manages to highlight how local publications become part of legend negotiation. Pointing to local author Gay Baldwin’s series of books on the Island’s ghosts, begun in the 1970s, Macaulay writes that ‘Everyone knew the old stories that had been passed down by oral tradition, but nobody laid claim to having seen a ghost in print until Gay started to prompt them. But once the gates were open, stories began to flood in …’ Macaulay used Baldwin’s books as the basis for her own tourist piece.

It began as a moment of curiosity and minor irritation at an unsourced comment. That's how research starts.

Dr Buck Ruxton

The last of my classes at the City Lit folklore summer school on Saturday dealt with contemporary folklore. I was highly delighted when one of the students, Carol, started thinking about the new development of songs.

It occurred to her, she said, because her grandmother had been treated by Dr Buck Ruxton. Ruxton, an Indian-born GP in Manchester, murdered his wife and housemaid in 1935. He was subsequently arrested and executed for the murders.

The case was extremely high profile. As with the Maria Marten Red Barn murder of the previous century there seems to have been a theatrical dramatisation of the crime. As also happened with the Red Barn murder, Ruxton's crime also prompted a folkloric response. Across the country we find records of people singing, to the tune Red Sails in the Sunset:

Red stains on the carpet,
Red stains on the knife
Oh Dr Buck Ruxton
You murdered your wife.

I was pleased to find someone who remembered the song from within her family, but even better was the family legend that accompanied it. According to family legend, Ruxton treated Carol's grandmother on the very day that he had dismembered the corpses of his victims. He arrived at the patient's bedside, it was reported, with a cut on his hand, which he claimed he had done on a tin can.

It's a wonderful story. I have some doubts about its veracity, because there are many records of earlier criminals being used to scare children (Jack the Ripper turns up as an East London bogeyman in the early part of the 20th century, for example). Whether true or not, it's exactly how folklore tradition works with details of crimes. Perhaps the most satisfying part of the event in class was that a younger student didn't recognise the name, so Carol got to relate the whole story to her. Folklore in action!

Rats and Ghosts (again)

I'm looking forward to a couple of events this week. On Thursday I'll be at Treadwell's bookshop talking about London's Strange World of Rats. I'll be going over my continuing exploration of the folklore about rats, and admitting to another room full of strangers that yes, I really am obsessed by the topic. Then on Saturday I'm at the London Fortean Society's London Ghost Conference, talking about ghosts in London's hospitals and theatres. A year after finishing my PhD I finally feel able to talk about ghosts again, and I'm looking forward to the company of some good speakers.

It was fitting then that I prepared by hearing an East Anglian man talking about both rats and ghosts last weekend. John, from the Cambridgeshire Fens, heard about my researches with interest, and chipped in with two stories of his own.

He had been told about rats by a friend who worked in a chicken farm. The rats would come into the pens to steal eggs. One rat would clasp an egg between all four legs, then roll over onto its back and be dragged out into the yard, where the rats could safely break the egg and eat it.

In this story you see the idea of rats as intelligent and cooperative animals. (Both John and the other listeners commented on how far this proved the intelligence of the animals). I've written about this kind of idea before, and there is a link in that piece to a Walter Potter tableau of rats stealing eggs. A writer on Potter's taxidermy described this familiar story as 'an evergreen topic of folklore in the countryside', so it was very nice to hear it directly in oral testimony.

John also filled in the background to my friend's house, which is reportedly 'the most haunted house' in Soham. Well, John explained, there used to be a monastery on the other side of the road. One of the monks had had an affair, and the girl had become pregnant. When her time was due the monks tied her legs together in the house to prevent her being able to give birth. She and the child had died, and it is their ghosts that haunt the property. John and the resident of the house both indicated which room was affected, and I was told that several residents had been unable to stay there.

Again, this is a hugely familiar motif that turns up in legends across the country. In many cases (although not apparently in this telling) the woman was a nun, thus doubly compounding the errors committed. The motif turns up frequently in connection with legends of secret tunnels allegedly connecting monasteries with convents. John's account had a particularly lurid ring, but it fitted perfectly with the legend. It would be interesting to hear how it fits with other local accounts, so I'm looking forward to accounts from a forthcoming ghost walk in the village.

St Swithin's Day

It being St Swithin's Day today, I thought I'd reprint the following local ghost legend from Gilmer County, West Virginia:

Annie Reaser had come to help with the house-work, as a member of the family. Our flattering attention to her store of folklore brought out the tale of a ghost who caused forty days rain because he did not like his resting place.
'He was a good man' said Annie 'And he liked the church so well that he never missed a meeting day, and he was there for evening prayer meeting, in time to light the candles and hand the hymn books around.
'When his time came to die, seeing he was a lone man with no row of family graves in the churchyard, the deacons thought of letting him lie close to the church he had served so long.
'So they laid him right near, but a little too close, for when a rain came, the drip from the eaves of the church fell right down on the new-made grave. Careless like, too, they forgot to bury his measuring rod alongside his coffin.
'Soon, strange tales were told about folks hearing a clatter at the back of the church, and some said the measuring rod was never laid twice in the same place. But the noise stopped when anybody went to look, and few did that, for it rained and rained all that spring, and no one could put in crops, nor a garden either.
'Week after week, that rapping agin the church walls kept time to the hymn-tunes the folks sang, and the rain beat on the roof like drums. At last, one late spring Sunday, the deacons and elders had a meeting, after the preaching, and all agreed something must be done. Next morning, they came with spades and shovels, and picked out a place at the far end of the churchyard.
'No sooner was the first spadeful of ground dug up, than the sun shone through the mist, and the sky cleared off. So they laid the old man alongside his friends - and his measuring rod, they buried that too. They read the burial service over him once more, for good measure, and there he lies, quiet and peaceful, till the Judgement day. But you watch and see - if there comes a hard rain on the fifteenth of July (they say that was his birthday), it'll still rain every day for forty days.''
(Blanche Whiting Keysner, 'The Measuring Rod', Keystone Folklore Quarterly, 1.2 (1956), 14-16)

Blanche Whiting Keysner, who recalled Annie Reaser's tale, noted that this was a migratory version of St Swithin's story, although his name had been lost along the way. According to the local English tale, rain on St Swithin's Day will be followed by 40 days of rain as the saint's burial was delayed for 40 days by bad weather. Here that motif survives, but it doesn't really make sense in the context so it's expanded by the slightly confusing detail about rain on the coffin, and augmented with another local tradition about burying the measuring rod.

I came across the article because Indiana University is making freely available online some journal holdings that are not so easily found (certainly in British libraries). These will migrate eventually to Google Books, but at the moment they're hosted on the HathiTrust Digital Library. They include: Keystone Folklore; Keystone Folklore Quarterly; Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review; and Folklore Historian.

HathiTrust has some other holdings of interest for folklorists. I suspect I'll be spending some time with them over the next few days - after all, it has just started raining.