London Squawking: The Rise of the Ring-Necked Parakeet

 Who's a pretty boy then? 

Photo by Tim Blackburn / PA

I.

Originally from Africa, the bright green ring-necked parakeet that now thrives in London and SE England, is one invasive species that we can all welcome; for surely everyone loves parrots which make a colourful (if rather noisy) addition to British wildlife.  

Well, probably not everyone, but I don't wish to discuss those who hate parrots here; I would like, rather, to discuss the question of how the tropical birds were introduced into the UK, as this has been a subject of contention and, indeed, urban legend ...


II.

One such legend, for example, traces their origin to a pair released by Jimi Hendrix on Carnaby Street, in the heart of Swinging London, in 1968.

Another slightly less groovy story suggests that the parrots arrived seventeen years earlier, when Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn were in Town to film scenes for The African Queen (1951) and various exotic animals were required on set by director John Huston, some of which - including the parrots - are believed to have escaped.*  

Alas, it seems that neither of the above legends relating to the origins of the UK's parakeets are true; at least not according to a team of academic researchers at Queen Mary University (London) who have looked into the question.

Their work has led them to conclude (rather mundanely) that the booming parakeet population has grown from multiple small-scale releases, some of which were accidental and others due to the intentional actions of nervous pet owners worried by sensational media reports of parrot fever (psittacosis) dating back to the 1930s. 

However they got here, we should be grateful and happy to have the birds (along with the 33 other countries that this avian migrant has made a home in). Those who call for a cull of the parrots due to expanding numbers - and who often express false concerns about their impact on native species - should, in my view, be tarred and feathered. And then shot.  

I would fully endorse what the author Nick Hunt writes here:

"In an age of climate emergency, with mass extinction ripping apart the fabric of the living world, when the dominant narrative of our times is one of loss and disappearance, collapse and diminishment, parakeets tell a different story. These plucky newcomers beat the odds, not only surviving but thriving. In a nature-depleted culture, when city dwellers are supposedly alienated from the environment and anything that is feral or wild, parakeets are the subject of outlandish speculation, the source of mystery, imagination and everyday wonder."**

     

Notes

* Although much of the movie was shot on location in Uganda and the Congo, many scenes were, in fact, filmed at Isleworth Studios, in Middlesex.

** Nick Hunt, 'The great green expansion: how ring-necked parakeets took over London', The Guardian (6 June 2019): click here to read online.

See also: Nick Hunt and Tim Mitchell, The Parakeeting of London, (Paradise Road, 2019). 

The Carolina Parakeet - He's Not Extinct, He's Resting ...

Cornuropsis carolinensis


"This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 
'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 
'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, 
run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible! This is an ex-parrot!"*

I.

Bird lovers the world over were delighted to hear that scientists have managed to sequence the genome of a dead (and, in fact, stuffed) Carolina parakeet; although saddened to have their suspicions confirmed that North America's only native parrot** was driven into the void primarily due to human activity. 

For the genetic evidence suggests that populations were buoyant until the arrival and spread of European settlers. The bird's DNA showed no signs, for example, of the inbreeding that is characteristic of species that have been in decline for many generations, across thousands of years. 

Only when the White Man arrived in the Americas, did this brightly-coloured bird - with its green plumage and distinctive yellow head that was once found inhabiting forests from New England to Colorado - face extinction. Having abruptly disappeared from the wild, the last known specimen in captivity died in the Cincinnati Zoo, in February 1918.     

Quite what happened to the bird, no one knows for sure - though we can be fairly certain that deforestation and hunting played significant roles in its demise. Like other parrots, they liked to congregate in large, noisy flocks which made their slaughter by men with guns easy to accomplish (like shooting fish in a barrel).    

II.

You might think that this, then, would be the end of the story ... That having become extinct, the Carolina parakeet, is no more: that he has ceased to be; gone to meet his maker and joined the bleedin' choir invisible, etc. But you'd be mistaken ...

For like the passenger pigeon, the heather hen, and the dodo, the Carolina parakeet is a candidate for de-extinction or bio-resurrection; i.e., the process of bringing an extinct organism back from the dead, via cloning, genome editing, or selective breeding.

Of course, this has never been done before and presents enormous technical challenges. But just because something is incredibly difficult to do, doesn't make it impossible ...

As well as birds, scienists working in this area are also hoping to bring back a species of giant tortoise, a ground-dwelling frog native to Australia, and a whole list of mammals including the European cave lion, a prehistoric wolf, and - of course - the woolly mammoth.

I have to say, I find all this very exciting to consider in a way that conservation projects, sadly, never are. It's always disconcerting, however, to discover that here - as elsewhere - the Nazis led the way, producing a breed of aggressive supercows in the 1930s, based on a species of extinct wild bull that once roamed the forests of Europe.***

Still, never mind the aurochs - bring back the dead parrots!   

Notes

* The lines quoted (pretty much from ingrained cultural memory) are from the 'Dead Parrot Sketch', written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and performed by Cleese and Michael Palin in S1/E8 of Monty Python's Flying Circus (7 December 1969). Click here for the version of the sketch featured in the Python film And Now for Something Completely Different (1971).

** It's true that the thick-billed parrot once lived in the American Southwest, but I think of this more as a Mexican bird that had extended its range northwards, rather than as a true native of the United States.   

***The cows, bred from wild genes extracted from domestic descendants of the aurochs, were produced by German zoologists Heinz and Lutz Heck, whom the Nazis commissioned to produce a type of Aryan cattle with muscular physiques, deadly horns, and a fighting temperament. How far they succeeded in this is debatable (criticism can certainly be made of their methodology and, physically, the Heck cattle bear little resemblance to aurochs, being shorter and fatter, for example).    

Double Dutch

Malcolm on set whilst filming the video for 'Double Dutch' and me 
receiving a silver disc to mark sales in the UK of more than 250,000 copies

One of the (many) joys of Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is an extensive soundtrack that affords one the opportunity to hear Malcolm McLaren's still remarkably fresh sounding single 'Double Dutch', taken from his debut album, Duck Rock, and released in the summer of '83 when, all over the world, high school girls were taking to the ropes ...
 
I don't know why Scorsese (in collaboration with music supervisor Randall Poster and executive music producer Robbie Robertson) selected this song, but it presumably has some significance to him as it's one of only 16 - out of 60 used in the movie - to feature on The Wolf of Wall Street: Music from the Motion Picture (Virgin Records, 2014).    

For me, it's a track that has a very special resonance and brings back happy memories of a time when I was working at Charisma Records as an assistant in the press office, alongside the very lovely Lee Ellen Newman, and as a sort of intermediary between the label and McLaren's office on Tin Pan Alley, managed by the indomitable Carrolle Payne.

I recall, for example, meeting those dark and lovely skippers from New York who featured in the video for McLaren's single and who are name-checked in the lyrics to the song (Hey Ebo! Ebonettes); I remember also riding around Town in a limo with the Rock Steady Crew who had come to teach Londoners how to breakdance and elevate graffiti into an urban art form (but that - as they say - is another story ...). 

Although there were other songs on Duck Rock I liked more than 'Double Dutch', the latter - co-written and produced by Trevor Horn - was undoubtedly the catchiest and, in reaching the UK chart position of number 3, also McLaren's biggest hit (though - surprisingly - not so in the US).

Whilst primarily about the sport of competitive rope jumping, 'Double Dutch' is also an excellent example - arguably - of McLaren's willingness to cheerfully engage in cultural appropriation and the racial fetishisation of young black girls in order to further his own commercial and artistic ends ... 

Play: Malcolm McLaren, 'Double Dutch', the third single release from Duck Rock (Charisma Records, 1983): click here. Note: this is the 12" version of the song.

Luce Irigaray and Constance Chatterley: Woodland Refugees

Penguin Books (2011)

Illustration by Lucy McLauchlan

I. 

Connie, we are told in one of the early chapters of Lady Chatterley's Lover, was aware of a growing restlessness taking possession of her like a madness: "It twitched her limbs [... and] made her heart beat violently, for no reason."

In order to counter this restlessness, Connie would rush away from the house and from everybody and lie prone in the bracken: "The wood was her one refuge, her sanctuary."

II.

I thought of this when reading Luce Irigaray's claim that nature had saved her life and restored her health on many occasions, and that from early childhood the world of plants (and animals) has been her favourite (and most vital) dwelling place. 

Indeed, I can't think of a more Lawrentian (or, at the very least, Lawrentian-sounding) French feminist than Irigaray, who, like Lawrence, affirms the generative potential of the elements and the importance of living in emotional rhythm with the seasons: "the wheeling of the year, the movement of the sun through solstice and equinox, the coming of the seasons, the going of the seasons". 

That's Lawrence writing, but it could so easily have come from Irigaray's pen. And like the latter, Lawrence is an advocate of sexuate being: "men experience the great rhythm of emotion man-wise, women experience it woman-wise" and often expounds his thinking in terms that seem to blur the distinction between human life and vegetal being:

"We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep blooming in our civilised vase on the table." 

III.

Like Connie, Irigaray also seeks out human companionship in the woods in order to experience what she terms a more complete sharing. I don't know if, for her, that involves a phallic hunting out, but one assumes that it is about meeting another being beyond all shame and the reaching of one's ultimate nakedness.

Irigaray is disappointed that when she confesses her desire to meet a companion in the woods to her friends and colleagues most laugh and wrongly assume she's longing for some kind of caveman, or expressing a naive form of romantic primitivism. Such people, she says, not only exhaust her vitality, but show an underlying ignorance of and contempt for the subtlety of her thinking 

Again, whilst I'm not entirely sure about this, I imagine what she wants is to encounter someone who does for her what Mellors does for Connie, i.e., provide a transformative experience of otherness and an awakening into touch. She writes: "Sexuate desire is [...] an appeal for entering into relations with the other as a source and an embodiment of life different from ours, which calls for a sort of becoming [...]"

IV.

Lawrence famously opens Lady C. with a passage that suggests we are all living among the ruins and that our primary task, therefore, is to go round or "scramble over the obstacles", building "new little habitats". Irigaray also seems to arrive at a similar (essentially tragic though still hopeful) conclusion: 

"Our earth and all the living beings who inhabit on it are henceforth in danger and [...] we, as humans, must find a way to [...] return to our natural belonging and its suitable cultivation for the establishment of another manner of existing and coexisting [...]"  

The key, according to her, is to "open and reopen continuously the possibility of a new growth and horizon for life, for desire, for love, and for culture". She continues:

"Sometimes the vegetal world is our most crucial mediator; sometimes it is a loving and loved human different from us; sometimes past thinkers lead us on the way. However, we must clear up our own path alone, with the help of a star, of a grace, or the fecundity of a meeting with another human who longs to cultivate life, love, and thought through their sharing, and with building a new world in mind."

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 5, 20, 322-23, 

Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being, (Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 86, 97, 99

I'm not the first, of course, to note the similarity (at times) between Lawrence and Irigaray. Sue Reid, for example, has written some interesting work in this area. See her essay 'Enumerating Difference: Lawrence, Freud, Irigaray and the Ethics of Democracy', Études Lawrenciennes, 45 (2014), pp.125-140. Click here to read online.  

For a critique of Luce Irigaray's vegetal idealism, click here.

On Luce Irigaray's Vegetal Idealism

Columbia University Press, 2016

Cover image: Jessica Hines

I.

 

When Luce Irigaray first approached Michael Marder with the idea of co-authoring a book on plant life - or vegetal being, as philosophers like to say - one wonders what he was hoping for ...?

Actually, I know what he was hoping for, as Marder conveniently tells us in the epilogue to his half of the work: he was hoping that he and Irigaray might produce a work that would "open alternative horizons for relating to the vegetal world". 

What he doesn't tell us is whether he feels they succeeded in this - or whether he was as disappointed as I was with her feeble and all too human contribution; one that tells us a lot about her, but very little about the plants of which she speaks (and, arguably, exploits). 

II.

Irigaray writes of her disillusion with the intellectual world and academic establishment which, she says, has treated her unfairly in the past; she speaks also of her desire to see a new order in which plants and people can bloom and her book sales receive the kind of numbers they deserve.     

Following professional and personal difficulties - including a car accident - Irigaray discovered yoga and turned to the healing power of plants which, like her, were often overlooked, objectified, or seriously maltreated: trees, for example, are today nothing but a material resource at the disposal of human beings (what Heidegger calls a standing reserve).

To be fair, following publication of Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Irigaray was expelled from the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis, sacked from her university teaching post, and even snubbed by Simone de Beauvoir, but I'm not sure that these things attract the sympathy of plants - or indeed that they share her sense of being rejected and undervalued.

She likes sitting quietly with them - meeting them in silence - and that's fine. But when she suggests they like sitting quietly with her or exerting eco-therapeutic powers, then I'm more sceptical.

Similarly, a lot of her metaphorical rhetoric seems deeply suspect to me; particularly when framed within the untenable (because naive and idealistic) language of vitalism and nature, with the latter embarrassingly portrayed as something not merely hospitable but positively benign. In Irigaray's imaginary forest, plants peacefully coexist and thus provide a model for mankind of natural belonging in a world without strife or competition.

As Irving Goh notes:

"In this regard, Irigaray ignores or forgets how trees and plants compete with one another for sunlight and water; how parasitic plants feed on and off others for their own benefit; how weeds threaten the well-being or even survival of other plants [...] and how certain plants have features like thorns or bladelike leaves that can pose serious dangers to humans and animals, or how some of them are toxic to humans and animals [...]"
       

In short, all of the violence, cruelty and obscenity of the natural world - that which gives it much of its beauty (and which always shines through our attempts to idealise it) - is simply overlooked by Irigaray. Has she never heard of la vengeance des fleurs?

I don't want to come over all dark ecological, but Irigaray needs to address the question of evil in relation to vegetal being, otherwise she's offering us nothing but a romantic fantasy that is humanistic at the very least, if not just another depressing example of anthropocentric conceit. Her reductive insistence on the innocence of plants not only robs them of complexity - the vegetal world knows nothing of sexuated difference - it ultimately makes them boring.

Again, I can't help wondering what Marder makes of all this; he must have grimaced on more than one occasion as he read through her text - must have asked himself if, in fact, she'd even read his work on plant-thinking. Irigaray is (outrageously) forgetful of the otherness of vegetal being on at least two occasions:

"The first is when she says that 'looking at a tree brings me energy, whereas looking at a manufactured object takes energy away from me' (46-47), forgetting that the very book Through Vegetal Being to which Irigaray contributes is no less a printed, that is, manufactured, object, not to mention that its manufacturing process undoubtedly involved trees at some point. The second instance is when she declares herself a vegetarian (23) without any critical consideration of her consumption of plant life as such, not recognizing, in other words, her violence toward plant life as the latter becomes her primary dietary source. In both cases, I think it difficult for Irigaray to defend 'a sharing without infringing on the life of the other,' especially if 'life of the other' concerns plant life (44-45)."
  
At this point, I can't help but let out a small sigh ... I so wanted to like this work by Irigaray and was prepared to overlook many aspects of her writing that I have, in the past, found irritating. But how can one in good faith turn a blind eye to issues such as these raised by Irving Goh, or to sentences like this:

"It was the vegetal world that ensured mothering care with the environment it arranged around me." 

Notes

Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being, (Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 215 and 21.

Irving Goh, 'Le rejet of Luce Irigaray in Through Vegetal Being', research article in Differences, Vol. 29, Issue 3 (Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 137-154. Lines quoted are on pp. 145 and 146-47. This essay can be read online via academia.edu: click here. 

For a reading of Irigaray's vegetal idealism in relation to D. H. Lawrence's work in Lady Chatterley's Lover, click here.

On Blaming the Victim

Cain and Abel as depicted in the  

Speculum Humanae Salvationis (c. 1360)

Whilst I'm aware of the dangers of victim blaming and of how it can be used to justify, mitigate, or excuse certain forms of discriminatory or criminal behaviour often perpetrated by those who are in a position of power or privilege, I'm afraid I do subscribe to ideas of contributory negligence and unconscious provocation and do think that the victim of a crime is always, in some sense and to some degree, complicit or partially responsible for what happens to them - even when it's a loved one who has just had her i-Phone and purse stolen from her handbag by some charming urban youth from the idyllic borough of Haringey ...

Indeed, I even find the following passage from Women in Love persuasive, if troubling in what it logically entails: 

"'No man,' said Birkin, 'cuts another man's throat unless he wants to cut it, and unless the other man wants it cutting. This is a complete truth. It takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee. And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.'" [33]

Gerald dismisses this as pure nonsense - as, I suspect, would the majority of readers keen to secure a clear distinction between guilt and innocence and who regard all victims from Abel onwards - with the exception perhaps of many rape victims and those who lead unconventional or high risk lifestyles - as beyond reproach (whilst, on the other hand, considering the ideal perpetrator of a crime as an entirely unsympathetic character, lacking in virtue, perhaps even a little monstrous or inhuman, carrying as they do the mark of Cain).

There are also - as indicated - political and philosophical reasons for rejecting what Birkin says here. Adorno, for example, identified the phenomenon of victim blaming as one of the most sinister features of the fascist mindset; i.e., the so-called authoritarian personality that holds any sign of weakness as contemptible. Ask any Nazi even now who's to blame for Auschwitz and they'll answer without hesitation: the Jews (The Jews made us racist! The Jews were asking for it!)

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen ad Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 33. 

See also: T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality, (Harper and Bros., 1950). 

99% is Shit

I remember once being told by a friend that he understood the phrase 99% is shit to mean that the only kind of commitment that counts is total commitment. Anything less than 100% was a sure sign of someone who couldn't be trusted and whose authenticity was in doubt.

It's a perfectly valid interpretation and reveals much about the fanatic mindset of those who took the seriously extreme call to arms issued by the Sex Pistols extremely seriously.

(This was during a time when we were both scornful of so-called plastic or part-time punks; the kind of people who play their records very loud and pogo in front of the bedroom mirror - but only when their mum's gone out.)*

As a matter of fact, however, when Sid Vicious spoke about 99% being shit, he wasn't quite thinking in such terms. Rather, he meant - more brutally - that the vast majority of people, including fans, are worthless. Thus, in the same interview, he would say: 'I’ve no interest in pleasing the general public, I don’t want to, because I think largely they're scum, they make me physically sick.'

Such violent contempt for the masses was, of course, a key feature of much modern art; the avant-garde were, by definition, a revolutionary elite who prided themselves on their own difference and superiority.** 

And the Sex Pistols - at least as conceived by McLaren - belong to this tradition (contra the Clash who even at the time were sneered at for being social workers and who would doubtless echo the cry We are the 99% which became a unifying slogan of the Occupy Movement in the summer of 2011).

As do the Cash Pussies, who released their only single, 99% is Shit, in April 1979, featuring snippets of an audio interview conducted a couple of years prior with the (recently deceased) Sex Pistols bassist.***

Notes

* The lines are from the single 'Part Time Punks', by Television Personalities, (Rough Trade 1980): click here.

** According to John Carey, Modernist art was primarily concerned not only with the exclusion of the masses, but with a denial of their humanity. See The Intellectuals and the Masses (Faber and Faber, 1992). Of course, it should be remembered that Carey's book is itself 99% shit.   

*** Perhaps not surprisingly, the band were conceived by an old art school friend of Malcolm's, Fred Vermorel, and his wife, Judy, and the track was produced by Dave Goodman, famous for his work with the Sex Pistols. 

Play: Cash Pussies, 99% is Shit, (The Label, 1979): click here. 

Kinderpost

Frank Meisler: Kindertransport - The Arrival (2006)

Photo by Stephen Alexander (2019)

I. Opening Remarks

Kindertransport - The Arrival is an outdoor bronze memorial by the Israeli architect and sculptor Frank Meisler, who was himself evacuated from the Free City of Danzig as part of the Kindertransport programme, travelling with a small group of other children to safety in England (his parents, arrested three days after his departure, were eventually murdered at Auschwitz).   

Commisioned by World Jewish Relief and the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), the work was installed on the forecourt of Liverpool Street Station in 2006 and commemorates the 10,000 Jewish children who escaped Nazi persecution and arrived in London during 1938-39.

II. Nazi Pigeons

Pigeons, of course, don't care about any of this; they'll shit on anyone's history. 

It would be mistaken, however, to assume the bird in the above picture is displaying an avian form of anti-Semitism - indeed, the pigeon (or dove) has an important role within Jewish religious mythology and is usually regarded as a symbol of hope (think of Noah and his Ark). The pigeon was also an acceptable sacrifice to God for those who couldn't afford a more expensive offering. 

The Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria may have found the birds a little overly bold and impudent, but, other than that, there's no enmity between them and the children of Israel.    

Having said that, it's true that the Nazis were also fond of pigeons - Heinrich Himmler was not only Reichsführer of the SS but also President of the German National Pigeon Society - and many trained birds were drafted into the Nazi war effort.

Indeed, so concerned were British secret services about the airborne threat posed by Nazi pigeons, that they became the subject of covert operations, with scores of pigeon lofts targeted for destruction in occupied Europe. MI5 even had its own trained force of falcons ready to intercept any Nazi pigeons that strayed into British airspace; they would patrol over the Scilly Isles and the Cornish coast for two hours at a time.

It's possible, therefore, that the pigeon pictured befouling the Jewish memorial is descended from a Nazitaube - though I would have thought this extremely unlikely and not something to be overly worried about; indeed, for me, of more concern, is the ominously glowing presence of the McDonald's logo in the background ...


III. Golden Arches

Instantly recognisable wherever you travel in the world, McDonald's Golden Arches probably shouldn't fill one with a similar sense of horror as that of a Nazi swastika - the stylised letter 'M' doesn't signify mass murder and malevolence - but, for some reason, it does.

Partly, that's due to the fact that even as I gobble down my Sausage and Egg McMuffin, I'm conscious of the true cost and devastating consequences of such deliciousness; for the natural environment and animal welfare, for example. Corporate capitalism isn't simply fascism with a smiley face, but neither is it the unequivocal force for good that its proponents like to claim and California über alles is just as troubling (in some respects) as the prospect of Deutschland über alles.

And partly, it's due to the influence of Jake and Dino Chapman upon my imagination. For everytime I see the Golden Arches, I can't help recalling their post-apocalyptic Nazi-McDonald's hellscapes (which is distracting, to say the least, when trying to reflect upon Meisler's work - even more so than the presence of a pigeon). 

In Memory of Gentleman Jack Sheppard

Jack Sheppard (1702 -1724)

Engraving by George White (1728) 

based on a portrait by James Thornhill (1724)

I.

I have to admit, I have reservations about memoralising the career of a petty criminal; such low-lives, always ducking and diving from the law, are rarely as charming in real life as we like to imagine them. Just ask the woman working at my local supermarket who was spat at and punched in the face last week after challenging a would-be shoplifter ...

Having said that, it would be churlish to deny the popular appeal of Jack Sheppard; a flash young tea leaf and audacious jailbreaker who captured the sympathy and affection of many a Londoner, both before and after his execution at Tyburn, aged 22, in November 1724.


II. 

Sheppard was an East End boy who decided he didn't want to be a carpenter, preferring instead to make his money from skullduggery. It was a fateful choice: Sheppard was arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724 - suggesting he was either very unlucky or pretty fuckin' feckless as a criminal - and although he managed to escape four times, by the end of the year he was swinging from the gallows.

However, his death at such a tender age only helped establish his legend. An autobiographical sketch - thought to have been ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe - sold like hot cakes at his execution and there followed several plays based upon it, much to the annoyance of the authorities who were concerned that impressionable young rascals keen to play Jack the Lad would attempt to copy his behaviour.* 

In some ways, Sheppard makes an unlikely role model. For not only was he useless at evading capture by the law, but he was also physically unimposing; small in size and lightly built, Sheppard had a pale complexion and suffered with a slight stutter.

However, these things were compensated for by a winning smile and a quick wit that made him popular with both sexes in the taverns of Drury Lane, such as the Black Lion, where he met his future partner in crime Joseph 'Blueskin' Blake and the buxom young brass Elizabeth Lyon (aka Edgeworth Bess), who became his regular mistress.   

From being a good, hardworking young man with career aspirations, Sheppard now threw himself enthusiastically into an illicit lifestyle of booze, whores, and criminal activity. Whilst he soon progressed to burglary and highway robbery, his first recorded theft was that of two silver spoons pinched from a tavern in Charing Cross, so hardly the crime of the century.

As indicated, however, it was his talent for breaking out of jail that really captured the popular imagination, including an escape from Newgate Prison where he was awaiting execution having been convicted of theft at the Old Bailey. Sheppard managed to remove an iron bar from his cell window, climb through the small gap, then calmly walk past the guards dressed in the women's clothing that accomplices had previously smuggled in.     

Although he was soon recaptured and returned to the his cell at Newgate, he was now visited by the great and the good who were all keen to see for themselves Gentleman Jack Sheppard. When guards found files and other tools hidden in his cell, he was transferred to what we would now describe as a high security unit, clapped in leg irons, and chained to the floor.

Cheekily informing his gaolers that these measures were not going to hold him, Sheppard even demonstrated how he might use a small nail to get free. He was rewarded for this by being bound with still heavier chains and handcuffed. Sheppard, however, continued to make light of his predicament and, astonishingly, he got away once more - still wearing his leg irons!

This miraculous escape so amazed everyone that the belief grew that Sheppard must have had the assistance of the Devil himself. Whether that's true or not, Sheppard's final stint of freedom was shortlived, if admittedly spent in some style; having broken into a pawnbrokers on Drury Lane, Sheppard helped himself to a black silk suit, several rings, and a wig in order to enjoy a night on the Town, posing as a dandy highwayman with a girl on each arm.

He was arrested, for the final time, on the morning of November 1st, still dressed in his stolen clobber and still very drunk.

III.

This time, the authorities took no chance. Sheppard was kept under constant guard and loaded down with 300lbs of iron weights. A petition, signed by several prominent people, asking that his death sentence be commuted was ignored. Offered the chance to have it reduced by informing on his associates, Sheppard, to his credit, refused to grass.

On November 16th, he was taken to the gallows at Tyburn to be hanged. A joyous procession accompanied him through the streets of London; crowds were said to have numbered 200,000 (one third of the population at that time). Hopes of a daring last minute escape were thwarted when prison guards found and confiscated a pen knife hidden about his person.

After Sheppard's body was cut down, the crowd pressed forward to stop its removal by the authorities. When his badly mauled corpse was finally retrieved, it was buried in the churchyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

And thus ends the (really rather sorry) tale of Jack Sheppard ...

Though, as I say above, his posthumous legend has continued to grow. Sheppard now serves, for example, as a figure of inspiration for the punk fashion entrepreneur Joe Corré and his team at Child of the Jago: click here.

I mention this not because I particularly share Corré's sartorial sense or aesthetic vision - and I certainly don't subscribe to his (and his mother's) eco-political agenda - but for sentimental reasons (i.e., much the same sort of stupidity as those who champion Sheppard as a working-class hero or a potentially revolutionary figure of some kind).   

Notes

* Perhaps the best-known play that was at least partly based on Sheppard's life is John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728); Sheppard was the inspiration for the figure of Macheath.

Love Blinds: The Shocking Case of Jeanne Brécourt

"All is dust and lies. So much the worse for the men who get in my way. 

Men are mere stepping-stones to me. As soon as they begin to fail 
or are played out, I put them scornfully aside."

I.

Love is blind. But when a woman gets into her 30s and sees her looks are starting to fade and hair beginning to whiten, it's only natural that she begins to doubt the veracity of this expression ...


II.

Eugénie Brécourt was born in Paris, in the spring of 1837. She was fated to become one of France's most notorious women; a true femme fatale who broke many hearts and ruined the lives of numerous men, before finaly ending up behind prison bars ...  

Neglected as a child, she was adopted by a nobelwoman who took pity on her. Her parents, however, reclaimed their daughter when she was eleven and immediately put her to work selling gingerbread on the streets. At seventeen, the kindly Baroness found her a job at a silk factory and agreed to once more care for the young woman. She even stumped up a dowry of 12,000 francs when Jeanne decided to marry the local grocer.

Unfortunately, married life didn't suit Jeanne and after a rumoured affair with an army officer, her husband left her and she went missing ... When she reappeared, having apparently tried her hand (and failed) at acting, literature and journalism, it was as a prostitute calling herself Jeanne de la Cour.     

I don't know the secret of her deadly charm, but she obviously had something; one of her lovers committed suicide; another died by taking an overdose of Spanish fly; a third was taken to hospital in suspicious circumstances, where he, too, eventually died.

Brécourt was completely indifferent to their suffering and something of her attitude towards men can be gleaned from the quotation above with which I open this post; it's a libertine philosophy that has a distinctly Sadean feel to it.

To be fair, working as a prostitute had also taken a toll on Jeanne's health too and in 1865 she was obliged to enter an asylum, suffering from hysterical seizures and a loss of speech. Hospital records describe her as being of dark complexion, with very expressive eyes. Although clearly of a nervous disposition and prone to fantasy, she was also said to be agreeable.

After several months, she was discharged though advised by her doctors to spend time resting in the spa town of Vittel, in northeastern France. Here, Jeanne claimed the title of Baroness for herself and nursed a wounded pigeon back to health. She also determined to find a permanent benefactor who would secure her future, having no intention of ending her days destitute, which, alas, was the fate of many a woman in her position.

Enter Rene de la Roche ... 

III.

Roche was a wealthy young man who had the misfortune to meet Jeanne at a ball in Paris, in 1873. He quickly became infatuated by the woman 16 years his senior and by the end of the year they had entered into a fateful relationship ...

Whilst Roche was away on a six month trip to Egypt in 1876, Jeanne went to visit a fellow prostitute with a lover who was blind not only to her moral shortcomings, but who, being visually impaired, incapable also of witnessing the very obvious signs of her physical decline. This got Jeanne thinking and on Roche's return to France she hatched a plan to deprive him of his sight.

Jeanne managed to persuade an old friend from her childhood days to help her, having told him (falsely) that Roche was the son of a man who had done her wrong. As arranged, Nathalis Gaudry carried out the diabolical assault in January 1877, throwing sulphuric acid in the face of the innocent victim.

Roche completely lost the sight of one eye and that of the other was significantly damaged; he was also, of course, terribly disfigured. Just like the injured pigeon, Roche was now made dependent upon Jeanne's loving care and, initially, neither he nor anyone else suspected her role in the matter.

Jeanne undertook the duty of care with every appearance of genuine devotion. Roche was consumed with gratitude for her untiring kindness; thirty nights she spent by his bedside and it was his wish that she alone should nurse him.

Gradually, however, his friends and family became suspicious and increasingly concerned by Brécourt's behaviour; frustrating, for example, their attempts to see or communicate with him. Eventually, the police were alerted and opened an investigation. Despite brazenly informing them that they would never find any evidence against her, they did just that and six months after the attack, both she and Gaudry found themselves standing in the dock.

Brécourt was defended by one of France's top criminal lawyers and her case aroused great public interest. Several famous faces and well-known writers sat in the public gallery to observe and record the proceedings. She was, if you like, the Roxie Hart of her day - although, unlike Roxie, Jeanne wasn't acquitted.

Having been found guilty, she was, rather, sentenced to fifteen years penal service; her accomplice got off with just five years jail time, having pleaded guilty but with mitigating circumstances - namely, being under the spell of a woman who was part-witch, part-seductress. He told his interrogators that he was madly in love with Brécourt and would have done anything she asked: Ses désirs sont des ordres!

What, if anything does this case teach us? I'm not sure. Some might cite it as evidence that the female of the species is more deadly than the male, but that's just a piece of sadomasochistic fantasy, isn't it?

Note: readers interested in this case might also find the following two posts to their tastes: the first in memory of Cora Pearl and the second in memory of Laura Bell: click here and here respectively.