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• Mongooses of Empire

  The setting is ‘Clouds,’ Lady Idina Sackville’s house on Mount Kipipiri above the Rift Valley in Kenya.   

  Lady Idina’s unconventional and pleasure-seeking behaviour – and indeed that of the entire ‘Happy Valley set’ (the aristocratic colonial elite who lived in Kenya between the wars) were the subject of much gossip, following the murder of her husband Joss Hay:

  Other pets included two mongeese, who lived in the woodpiles on each side of the large fireplace in the sitting room and were vicious to the household cats and dogs. Ann remembered that she and Tom gave them ping-pong balls which the mongeese rolled along their stomachs before flicking them against the wall, thinking they were eggs that would smash. One night, Idina, Ann and Tom gave the mongeese some beer in a saucer, which they loved – too much – and “were soon rolling around in front of the fire – the three of us were in stitches watching them attempt to stand! It was the only time we were able to touch them.”

  From: The Bolter: Idina Sackville – the Woman who Scandalized 1920s Society and became White Mischief’s Infamous Seductress. London: Virago Press, 2008 (p.265)

  Note how these mongooses are here described as playing merrily with ping-pong balls, much as Gef himself amused himself for hours with a little rubber ball (later psychometrized by Nandor Fodor’s medium, Mrs Vincent). However, there is no record of Gef ever having succumbed to drink, despite visits to the Peel Castle pub.

  (Idina Sackville was to become the subject of several books and films – White Mischief by James Fox, later a film; Frances Osborne’s The Bolter, a biography. Characters based on Lady Idina also appeared novels by Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh).

  

  Settlement, colonial appointments or military deployment in other countries (those of Africa, the Caribbean, or of the Indian subcontinent) – as a result of the British Empire – brought Britons into contact with mongooses, and they would sometimes bring these useful and interesting animals back with them to England. Thus, the Mitford sisters’ father David, sent to Ceylon as a tea planter and later having fought in southern Africa in the Boer War, is later recorded as having relieved the boredom of an office job (working on the publication of The Lady magazine) by bringing a mongoose with him to work and setting it to hunt rats in the building’s cellar. (A thinly-disguised account of this episode appears in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate).

  Similarly, novelist Arthur Calder-Marshall writes in his memoir The Magic of My Youth (London: Cardinal, 1990; first published, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1951), of visiting his beloved but eccentric aunt Helen:

  She opened a door into a large room. There was a noise of scuffling, and something long and thin and brown streaked past, pursued by something equally long and thin and brown. “You like mongooses, don’t you?” she asked, or rather stated, because she waited for no answer.

  The only mongoose I had met previously had bit me deeply in the finger, and my opinion was that the sooner all mongooses were exported to places plagued with snakes and rats, the happier the world would be; an opinion which my experience with Auntie Helen’s pair did nothing to modify. (The Magic of My Youth, p.68-69)

  

  The above is all to suggest that – whilst unusual – a mongoose in Great Britain in the 1930s would not have been such a completely outlandish and unheard-of sight as might first be thought; indeed, not as unusual as a mongoose would be today in the U.K. of the 21^st century, outside of zoos, safari parks and insurance adverts.

• Of the Crowley and the Mongoose Cases (Christopher Josiffe)

  From a Spectator book review (New Bats in Old Belfries by Maurice Bowra. Robert Dugdale, 2005):

  Mr Justice Rigby Swift:

  

  “In 1920, at 46, Swift became the youngest High Court judge. In most respects he was liberal and jovial. […] He made passable jokes and had particular fun summing up the ‘Mongoose Case’ in 1937. That was an action for slander: Sir Cecil Levita, a former chairman of the London County Council, had suggested to a friend at the Carlton Club that Richard Lambert, editor of the Listener, was unfit for that post. Levita alleged that Lambert had been bamboozled by a Manx farmer who claimed to be in touch with a ghostly mongoose which was 86 years old, could say nursery rhymes and had a working knowledge of Russian, Manx, Hebrew, Welsh, Hindustani and Arabic. (Lambert received £7,500 damages and kept his job.)”

   

  Mr Justice Darling:

  “Swift was not as irrepressibly jokey as Mr Justice Darling, whom Max Beerbohm caricatured donning a black cap hung with bells. He had deep religious convictions. In 1934 the black-magician Aleister Crowley appeared before him, suing the painter Nina Hamnett and her publisher, Constable, for what she had said about him in her book Laughing Torso. Hamnett had claimed that in Crowley’s ‘temple’ on Sicily a baby had mysteriously disappeared […]”

  

  Aleister Crowley is also directly linked to mongooses by virtue of his well-known joke (also claimed as a perfect allegorical illustration of his theory of Magick):

  “There is the story of the American in the train who saw another American carrying a basket of unusual shape. His curiosity mastered him, and he leant across and said: “Say, stranger, what you got in that bag?” The other, lantern-jawed and taciturn, replied: “Mongoose … “

  To read the rest, go to Three American Jokes / II / The Mongoose Basket

• Mr Magoo of Duluth Zoo, and other zoo mongooses in the news

  If it was fame Gef sought, then it was an inspired choice of his to swap identities from weasel to mongoose. Perhaps on account of its faintly comical name, and also as a result of the well-known literary character of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, a mongoose was sometimes the subject of a light or comedic news item in the mid-twentieth century press.

  Thus, Victor Thompson’s regular ‘Animals Are Funny’ column for the Sunday Pictorial (18 August 1935) chose to focus on Monty, one of a dozen mongooses resident at London Zoo. The story, headed ‘Monty The Kleptomaniac: Took To Crime After Giving Broadcasts’ hints at Monty’s possessing one or two Gef-like characteristics, namely, a love of attention, “he is one of the most popular exhibits” at the Zoo, on account of his being a “a natural comic. He greets nearly all visitors with shrill squeals of delight, and as soon he has attracted a big enough crowd he goes into a kind of can-can dance.”

  Another similarity to Gef was Monty’s propensity for stealing small objects, such as a lady visitor’s earring, fountain pens, handkerchiefs, gloves and bags of sweets. Thompson states that “all mongooses are greatly attracted by bright things […] which they hoard with a jackdaw’s enthusiasm” – reminiscent of Gef, returning to Doarlish Cashen from his travels around the Island, bearing trophies such as a paintbrush, a pair of pincers, some gloves.

  Monty’s ‘broadcasts’ refer to his appearance on a BBC radio broadcast from the Zoo, which was, of course, Price and Morrison’s dream – to be able to get recording equipment in place at Doarlish Cashen, and put Gef on the radio. Monty’s mischievousness adds another point of comparison with Gef: “He began to interfere with his keeper’s cage-cleaning by snatching dusters and upsetting pails.”

  This piece was published one month prior to Price’s ‘The Talking Mongoose’ article for the Listener (11 September 1935). But renewed interest in mongooses generated by the latter was perhaps responsible for Thompson’s follow-up ‘Animals Are Funny’ piece in the Sunday Pictorial, another mongoose-interest story, this time headed: ‘Jealousy Among The Mongoose: All Those At The Zoo Seem To Hate Each Other’ (16 February 1936), in which we learn that the star of 1935, Monty, was in fact a female mongoose, Montie. Thompson now focussed his attention upon George, a definite male mongoose. George enjoyed running on a treadmill inside his cage, left by its previous occupants – squirrels –  and ogling female mongooses, including Montie. He apparently had a party trick of hiding behind peoples’ ties and refusing to move (see photo below left).

  George had also starred in a Daily Mirror article the previous year, (28 November 1935), written by the Mirror’s ‘Zoo Correspondent’, who praises George’s lightning-speed reactions “Where he springs from the keeper never knows […] For George has to move fast. For generations it has been the business of George’s family to kill snakes, and when you’re tackling an angry cobra you either move quicker than the snake or never move any more.”

  Another mongoose in the media, Mr Magoo, whose plight became a cause celebre in the Mid-West of the USA in the early 1960s again shows the enduring appeal of these little animals. Mr Magoo was a popular attraction at Duluth Zoo in Minnesota. He was noted for drinking tea, and, like Gef, “eats a little meat and vegetables and drinks a little milk. Its favorite is warm tea with sugar…” as the Zoo’s director, Lloyd Hackl (see photo below left, with typewriter and mongoose) explained. “It has the coloring of a squirrel, but with yellowish-brown eyes and the reddish cheeks and a throat all mongooses have in common.” (Duluth News-Tribune 13 November 1962)

  

  Magoo had been donated to the Zoo by a foreign sailor whose ship had docked at India, and he quickly became a favourite amongst the public. Unfortunately, in 1962, Magoo came to the attention of the US Customs, who declared that – under a 1909 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulation, which barred the importation of mongooses – Magoo must be killed. Duluth’s Harry Nash, head of the city’s recreation department, appealed for clemency, writing to the Fish and Wildlife Service and explaining that Magoo was “very popular with adults and children and is clean, healthy and well-mannered.”

  To learn what happened next, read: DULUTH MOBILIZES TO SAVE NEW PET / News-Tribune / Duluth mobilized Friday night to save its pet mongoose from the federal executioner and also Mr. Magoo The Mongoose, Part 2

• Magic Realist Mongoose

  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a 2007 novel by Dominican-American author Junot Díaz, contains elements of magic realism, not least for its repeated motif of the appearance of supernatural and mysterious mongooses. 

  Set in New Jersey, the novel is centred on the character of Oscar De León, an overweight Dominican schoolboy whose inner life is dominated by fantasy and science fiction novels, girls, and fukú, a family curse that Oscar believes has beset his own family for generations.

  Mongooses are portrayed as benevolent, acting as helpers and guardians.

  “The mongoose plays a critical role in saving the lives of two people: Oscar and Belicia [his mother]”

  They represent zafa, a form of protective magic acting in opposition to the fukú curse. Like the de Leon family in New Jersey, the mongoose is an immigrant, an outsider, having been imported to the Dominican Republic in order to protect the precious sugar cane fields from the ravages of rats.

  

  In one episode, Oscar’s mother becomes lost in a cane field and is rescued by a mongoose, a “creature that would have been an amiable mongoose if not for its golden lion eyes and the absolute black of its pelt.” [1] By singing to her (Gef also liked to sing!), the supernatural mongoose guided her out of the maze-like cane field, and later prevents a bus from hitting her and causing grievous injury.

  Oscar, too, has his own experience of a golden mongoose, described as having “Gold-limned eyes that reached through you, not so much in judgment or reproach but for something far scarier.” [2]

  This mongoose appears to him suddenly at a time of great crisis in his life (he is about to kill himself by jumping off the New Brunswick train bridge), and then it disappears (“Vanished!”). Like the debate as to Gef’s true nature, Díaz’s novel doesn’t make explicit whether these mongooses are flesh-and-blood, corporeal animals, supernatural entities, or figments of his characters’ imagination. It’s not clear whether Oscar’s mother’s encounter with the helpful mongoose in the cane field “was a figment of Beli’s wracked imagination or something else altogether.” [3]

  Like Gef, Junot Díaz’s mongooses are the helpers and protectors of ordinary people: “an enemy of kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies… an ally of Man.” [4] In Díaz’s novel, the de Leon family are at odds with the dictatorship of Trujillo, and the mongoose offers help to the lowly as against the mighty and powerful. 

  One may recall Gef’s rabbit-catching exploits on behalf of the impoverished Irvings; his keeping the farm outbuildings free from rats and mice; and his role as Voirrey’s defender when she was mocked and tormented by school bullies.

  In an interview, author Junot Díaz is asked,
  “What does the mongoose means to you and in relation to Dominican Republic history?”

  He explains:

  The mongoose is funny because he’s my favorite character. He is the only real character. In the Díaz family cosmology, he’s the only real character in the whole book. There’s a story my mom tells about encountering a mongoose. […] That character comes out of a childhood in the Dominican Republic being exposed to mongoose. And you see them and as a kid [but] you’ve never seen anything like it. They are extremely fast, extremely social, and clever.

  And then of course you discover that they are immigrants to the island. There was something that pulled me about the image of another transplant – who is a really wild little trickster. In “Oscar,” there is the actual footnote on the mongoose, where the narrator says that these could also be aliens.

  I couldn’t explain it while I was writing it, but there was something about this family’s history that provoked an assistant from this mongoose character. It is almost as if because their life was so shitty, they are able to gain this luminous intervention from what might be an alien.

  Footnotes:
  [1] Díaz, Junot (2007). The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books(p.149)

  [2] Ibid. (p.190)

  [3] Ibid. (p.149)

  [4] Ibid. (p.151)

• Culture clash! (Christopher Josiffe)

  

  What happened when centuries-old Manx folklore met mid-20th modernity?

  The parish of Patrick in the west of the Isle of Man has been described as “the last bastion of Manx culture”; indeed, the last people to have spoken Manx as their native language were Patrick natives.

  Extensively rural, with farming an important source of livelihood, Patrick has managed to retain some of the unique and ancient Manx identity that has to some extent been lost in the more urbanized east of the Island.

  One aspect of Patrick’s enduring tradition and links to the Island’s rural and pre-Enlightenment past is the sizeable number of ghost, fairy, monster and haunted house stories situated in the parish.

  Peel Castle is famous for its Moddhey Dhoo, cousin to Black Shuck, the Barghest, the Gytrash, and the various other iterations of oversized black dogs with glowing red eyes that are recorded in numerous parts of Britain. Despite its terrifying reputation (black dog apparitions sometimes being regarded as harbingers of an impending death), one account of the Peel Castle’s Moddhey Dhoo sounds quite harmless and domesticated:

  “One legend of the Moddey Dhoo is based in the reign of King Charles II (1660-1685)…[It] would appear each night and sit by the fire in the guardroom.”
  Glen Maye, a lush, fertile beauty spot and tourist destination since Victorian times is rich in flowers, ferns, moss and wild garlic.

  

  The glen leads from the Waterfall Inn (where Price and Lambert stayed during their 1935 visit to Doarlish Cashen) down to the sea. Along the way, two waterfalls and their attendant pools may be viewed from the vantage point of a bridge.

  

  But a sinister tale is associated with Glen Maye, it being reputedly the home of a buggane, a Manx legendary creature that can adopt various forms – sometimes that of a human, at other times a huge, hairy monster with tusks, claws and red, fiery eyes. Another of its forms is associated with water, appropriately for the glen’s waterfalls and coastal location, and in this the Glen Maye Buggane resembles the Cabbyl-Ushtey or water horse (sometimes known as a Glashtin), a dangerous creature that also appears in Irish and Scottish folklore.

  

  A variant on mermaid or merman legends is located off the coast of the Niarbyl, narrow rocky outcrop just down the road from Dalby that extends into the sea. Basking sharks and seals are often seen here (myself and my partner saw both when we visited), but the tale speaks of an old man with long white hair whose small boat was somehow attached to his body as if the two were one. So melodious was his voice that locals would gather on the shore to hear him sing, in particular ‘Arrane Ghelby,’ ‘the Dalby Song.’ 

  Another story associated with the sea is that of the little ghost child of Eary Cushlinn farm, who could be heard wailing and crying by sailors, fishing off the coast of nearby Lag-ny-Keeilley. It turned out that the child had died there unbaptized and, as a result, haunted the farm. (Incidentally, Eary Cushlin has a pivotal role in the Gef story – buy the book to learn more!).

  The phynnodderree, another of the Isle of Man’s legendary creatures, is, in my opinion, of great relevance to the Gef story. I explain why I believe this to be so in my Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Clever Talking Mongoose book, so will not go into great detail here. Suffice to say, however, that the phynnodderree is the Manx equivalent of those household fairies known on the mainland as Hobs, Hobgoblins or Brownies. In Manx folklore, there is more than one phynnodderree legend associated with the area around Doarlish Cashen.

  All this is to illustrate that the story of the Dalby Spook a.k.a. Gef the Talking Mongoose did not happen in isolation, Rather, the area in which Gef manifested was and still is one that is rich in folklore and legend, and a mysterious creature with seemingly magical powers would have been quite in keeping with earlier tales.

  Admittedly, the 1930s period was one in which modern technology was starting to make an impact on the area; cars, telephones and radios began to appear. The Manx language was on the way out. In this respect (and given the Irvings’ status as outsiders, James Irving in particular being a formerly affluent, middle-class urbanite from the cosmopolitan city of Liverpool), the Gef case may be seen as a collision between modernity and a traditional rural lifestyle and beliefs.

  It is in this light that I believe Gef’s references to technology and scientific discovery (his magic phones, his rectophone, his boasts that he could split the atom or that he was “the eight dimension”) should be considered – a mongoose of modernity, but perhaps a manifestation in contemporary form of one of the Island’s folkloric creatures.

  And the area continues to be associated with the paranormal.

  A contemporary Peel supernatural manifestation – cited on the Paranormal Database  – is the appearance several alleged ghosts (an adult male together with ghost children, reportedly dressed in Victorian clothing). The sightings are recorded as having taken place between 2003 and 2007 in an un-named Peel bed-and-breakfast house. Locked doors are reported to have been found open, and keys and other small objects are said to have vanished and then reappeared after a few days.

  Gef – or one of his cousins – perhaps still lives? Indeed, there have been other reports of Gef’s continuing presence into the 21st century…but I shall save these for another post…

• Evidence of Gef since ancient times ?

  Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, we may speculate that Gef has always been with us. Certainly, he spoke of having been present in the Doarlish Cashen years before the Irvings moved in; it was only their presence, he told them, that had given him the ability to talk.

  At left is a photograph (courtesy Paolo Sammut) taken at the Met, N.Y.C., of an ancient Egyptian mongoose deity revered in ancient Egypt. Mention might also be made of Ninkililm, the Lady of the Mongooses from Sumer and Babylon.

  A recent (July 2016) exhibition at the British Museum, highlighting sunken antiquities found at the sea bed off the coast of Egypt, features a bronze mongoose mummy case. (thanks to Clive Harper for this information)

  And appropriately enough, given his self-claimed origins at Delhi, Gef appears to have had a presence in the Indian subcontinent many centuries previously. The photograph below was taken by Chris Hill during a visit to Tamil Nadu some time in 2011. This temple at Kanchipuram appears to bear the sculpted image of an angry Gef on its roof. Perhaps looking for his rubber ball, or his grubbo?

  

• An old (pre-nineteenth-century) map of the parish of Patrick… (Maryellen Robison Hinrichs)

  …showing the presence of Doarlish Cashen situated beside what appears to be a well-defined path or road; although there was no such road by the Irvings’ time, merely a path, in centuries past it is believed that an ancient road ran from the Port Erin in the south up to Peel in the north. This was known as the old Sound Road. If Doarlish Cashen had been constructed beside this important roadway, this would suggest the farm had been constructed several hundreds of years prior to the accepted date of the mid-nineteenth century. Certainly, its comparative size (two stories) might suggest it was home to someone important, and the medieval well on the farm indicates the site had been inhabited for several hundred years.

  An archaeological dig in the early 1970s discovered evidence of a meagre Norse farmstead in the Doarlish Cashen fields; not affluent people, on account of the poor quality soil, it appears these Norse farmers would have struggled to survive just as the Irvings did, some 900 years later.

• Chinese mongoose and weasel folklore

  

  “Coming down to present-day China, it is no surprise to any one to find that nearly all the different types of parapsychical and paraphysical phenomena as known in both Europe and America are also quite prevalent in China. We have such phenomena as telekinesis, raps, poltergeists, psychography, independent voices, levitation, psychic photography, materialization, automatic writing, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, premonition, apparitions, and haunted houses. Strange to say, the phenomena of apports and psychometry have not come to my notice. Instead of crystal gazing, we have water gazing. Mediums there are, but most of them as in America and Europe are professionals, practising on the credulity of the common people.

  Mention may be made of the so-called mongoose-haunted houses, so prevalent in North China. These mysterious animals have never been actually seen by any people although occasionally they may be discerned in the flash of a moment, Naturally, people attribute to them all sorts of supernatural intelligence, which, I may say, can be paralleled with those of the mongoose of the Isle of Man.”

  (from ‘On Some Paranormal Phenomena in China’ by Chung Yu Wang; Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol. 35, no.1, January 1941, p.11)

  In addition, Chinese Black Magic: An Expose (1995) by Dr Ong Hean-Tatt refers to female Taoist witches called Tao Nai-nai, who communicate with weasel or fox demons (p.27). They are known as Hwang Ku-niang (Weasel Dame) or Hu Ku-niang (Fox Dame). The quoted source is Henry Dore, Researches into Chinese Superstitions (1917, republished 1966).

  According to V.R. Burkhardt’s Chinese Creeds and Customs (1982), the weasel is regarded as being one of the Five Animals who cause “turbulent insanity and great disturbances,” but is also one of the Five Seers, who must be treated with respect.

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