Stranger Seas: The Sea Serpent Paradox

March 13, 2016 greydogtales 3 Comments

Are you plagued by writhing monstrosities which encircle your corvette and try to drag you down into the depths? Is your frigate scarred and battered from too many encounters with aquatic horrors of unfeasible size? Then you need the greydogtales guide to sea serpents.

In less nautical news, we are currently peddling our story A Persistence of Geraniums for publication, and will have a jolly good anthology announcement next week. Listeners are pressing for another Mr Dry tale, concerning the Edwardian assassin, and next month may have to see another chapter of Sandra’s First Pony, our popular Enid Blyton/H P Lovecraft crossover series. We also have some great interviews in the pipeline, covering weird art, talented authors and yes, lurchers. Speaking of which, Django is upside down as usual, and we have work to do…

####

Sea serpents. As promised, author Matt Willis is here to explain all. Last episode, we interviewed Matt on the subject of his novel Daedalus and the Deep, and on his writing in general (sea serpents, saltwater and ship’s biscuits). Today he revisits some of the topics raised back then in more depth. This is an educational channel, you know, not just fun. And we love mythological beasts, especially when they might almost be real…

The Sea Serpent Paradox

by Matt Willis

It’s called the Fermi Paradox, and it goes something like ‘if they existed, we’d have proof by now’. Properly the Fermi Paradox refers to intelligent alien life elsewhere in the universe, but it could equally well apply to sea serpents.

Sea serpents. A particular form of sea monster – perhaps even the archetypal sea monster alongside the tentacled kraken. Huge, snake or eel-like, possibly humped, or else loops of its body protrude above the surface, and dangerous to mariners in unknown waters. The sea serpent is the sea’s equivalent of the alien visitor – there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence to their existence, and almost no evidence of any other kind.

That wasn’t always felt to be the case. “That there is such a creature, however, there can be little doubt, as his appearance has been so often alluded to,” wrote Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion of July 1852. It seemed that proof of the existence of the giant sea serpent must have been round the corner. Strange, then, that some 160 years later, the very notion that giant sea serpents exist or have ever existed seems unlikely, if not ludicrous.

The incident that triggered Gleason’s to state with confidence that the sea serpent must be real was what is now one of the better-known cases, the incident that inspired my novel ‘Daedalus and the Deep’. On 6 August 1848, Midshipman Sartoris of the Royal Navy corvette HMS Daedalus alerted the officers on the ship’s quarterdeck to an unusual sight. The captain, first lieutenant and sailing master were all present to see the approach from the ship’s beam of a large creature of a kind none had observed before. Captain Peter M’Quhae, in command of the vessel, described the encounter in his official report to the Admiralty:

“It was discovered to be an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea; and as nearly as we could approximate by comparing it with the length of what our maintopsail-yard would show in the water, there was at the very least sixty feet of the animal a fleur d’eau no portion of which was, to our perception, used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter that had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognised the features with the naked eye.”

SeaSerpentDetail01 — london illustrated news

Reports of sea serpents all over the world were not exactly uncommon prior to that. There are plenty of recorded sightings going back to the 11th century and evidence that the creature was a familiar concept long before that. In Norse mythology, Jörmungandr was a giant sea serpent that grew so large it encircled the Earth. While notable events, recorded sightings of giant sea serpents seem to have been in evidence every few years, and on occasion much more frequently.

Unlike stories of visitors from other planets (often involving abduction), which didn’t really get going until the 1960s, sea serpent sightings began to tail off dramatically at the end of the 19th century, so much so that the phenomenon was noticeably rarer by the 1920s. Writing in 1925, in his book ‘Animals of Land and Sea’, Austin Clark of the Smithsonian Institution wrote: ‘“In the last 20 years we have heard less and less about the sea serpent.” Clark attributed this to the size of ships increasing and steam ships replacing sailing vessels. The “vantage point” for making observations therefore moved “from the low and insecure wave-washed deck of a small sailing boat to the high, comfortable, secure, and relatively dry deck of a much larger steamer.” This shift in perspective “removed the element of fear and hence dulled the imagination so that sailors are now able to study calmly and report correctly what they see.”

Problem solved then.

Unfortunately, for a scientist, Clark appears to have conveniently failed to consider any number of other factors that might influence the relative visibility of sea serpents. The noise of the steam engines and vibration from the ships’ screws causing the creatures to stay away, for example, or an increase in the mechanisation of whaling reducing a potential food source. Correlation does not imply causation, and to make such a broad assumption was strikingly bad practice for a scientist. But then ‘science’ has expended a great deal of time and energy on a ‘nothing to see here, move along’ approach when it comes to sea serpents.

The entry on sea serpents from the 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica lists a string of ‘likely’ phenomena mistaken for sea serpents. These include: A school of porpoises; a flight of sea-fowl; a large mass of seaweed; a pair of basking sharks; ribbonfish/oarfish; giant squid; a whale, and a sea-lion. The encyclopaedia concludes that “with very few exceptions, all the so-called ‘sea serpents’ can be explained by reference to some well-known animal or other natural object.”

Many of the ‘rational’ explanations subsequently offered rely on substantial mistakes in interpretation, over-excitement or difficulties with observation such as distance or poor light. It is hard to see how, assuming the phenomenon sighted behaved as the Daedalus’s officers described, it could possibly have been a piece of seaweed, or indeed a whale or elephant seal, let alone an upturned canoe

The Daedalus Disputes

The Daedalus Sea Serpent report was met with a mixture of public fascination and scientific dismissal. Perhaps M’Quhae and the Daedalus’s officers didn’t appreciate the storm their story would create, but the media seized upon the sighting. The first public report of the sea serpent was in the Times of 10 October, six days after the corvette’s return. The London Illustrated News hailed “a new attestation to the existence of the Great Sea Serpent”.

The same newspaper later published comments by the biologist Sir Richard Owen, who claimed that the most likely explanation for the sighting was that it was an elephant seal swimming in open water. Owen suggested that what the officers had thought to be the creature’s tail was the long eddy which typically trailed behind an elephant seal.

Captain M’Quhae immediately and angrily rejected Owen’s claims, but the story was already causing embarrassment to the Admiralty. Questions arose in Parliament about how a Royal Navy captain could have allowed the report to be printed. Undeterred, M’Quhae collaborated with an illustrator to produce a series of engravings of the encounter, and these appeared alongside a copy of M’Quhae’s report to the Admiralty in the Illustrated London News of 28 October. In addition to three images portraying the Daedalus sea-serpent, the paper reproduced an anatomical drawing of the “American Sea Serpent, Scolioph Atlanticus” and a copy of a woodcut representing a 1740 sighting off Norway.

It’s hard to imagine that men such as the officers of the Daedalus would have opened themselves up to the risk of career damage and social ridicule lightly. Indeed, they had every right to expect that their account would be evaluated methodically. Observation and recording of natural phenomena by ‘reliable witnesses’ was an important part of science in the early 19th century.

And conditions for observation were good. It’s often assumed that sightings of sea serpents result from poor visibility, distance, bad light etc – and yet a surprising proportion of ‘marine cryptid’ sightings are made in good conditions. The 1,000-ton, 150ft ocean-going Daedalus could not be described as a ‘wave-washed… small sailing boat’, and its officers and crew would no doubt have protested strongly at Clark’s suggestion that they were so permanently terrified as to be unable to interpret what they saw around them accurately.

The immediate attempts in some quarters to dismiss the sighting out of hand may nevertheless seem surprising. Owen, for example, seems to have reached for ‘rational’ explanations without considering for a moment that the sighting was indeed of a giant sea serpent. Owen, who coined the term ‘dinosaur’, was no stranger to fantastic creatures. His suggestion that professional sailors who had spent a career at sea (M’Quhae gained his commission as lieutenant during the Napoleonic wars, more than three decades previously) would not recognise an elephant seal borders on the insulting. His immediate leap to find alternative explanations is indicative of an attitude that was already becoming entrenched – that sea serpents were not to be taken seriously by scientists.

Yet there had been no shortage of reported sightings of sea serpents over the previous two centuries. In the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts a sea serpent was frequently reported in the bay from the mid-17th century, culminating in 18 sightings in 1817. The 12 months following the Daedalus sighting produced two potential confirmations – later in 1848 an American brig reported a similar creature in almost exactly the same place (between St Helena and the Cape of Good Hope), and the following year a Royal Navy sloop made another strikingly similar sighting in the North Atlantic.

On the other hand, errors and hoaxes were rife. sea serpents in the recent past. The ‘sea serpent fever’ in New England generated by the numerous Gloucester sightings had led to one example. In fact, the very anatomical drawing of ‘Scolioph Atlanticus’ attached to the Daedalus story had originated in a bizarre mistake by a member of the New England Linnaean Society in 1817. The over-enthusiastic discoverer had found a deformed terrestrial snake on a beach, and took it to be the juvenile form of the sea serpent often seen in the bay. The error was quickly discovered, but was apparently still pervasive thirty years later.

Dr Koch’s Concoctions

Worse, three years before the Daedalus sighting, showman ‘Dr’ Albert Koch had paraded an egregiously fraudulent ‘sea serpent’ before a credulous public. Koch had earlier jumped on a bandwagon created by fossil skeletons discovered and displayed by respectable naturalists with the ‘Missourium’, a fake cobbled together from mastodon remains. This ‘creature’ sold (to the British Museum, no less), Koch turned to the fashionable sea serpent for his next showpiece. The prehistoric whale Basilosaurus had been discovered (and identified as a whale by Sir Richard Owen) in 1835, and was thought at the time to be of distinctly serpentine appearance. In 1845, Koch assembled parts of at least six skeletons as well as pieces of other whale skeletons and even Ammonite shells. The result was the 114-foot “Hydrarchos – or Leviathan of the Antediluvian World!” according to Koch’s promotional material.

koch's assembled beast — koch’s assembled beast

Contemporary naturalists, including Owen, were infuriated by Koch’s adulation by public and press. However vehemently they pointed out that Koch’s skeletons were fakes, the crowds kept on going to see them – in fact, the controversy probably boosted visits to Koch’s exhibits.

In the light of foolish errors like ‘Scolioph Atlanticus,’ and outright scams like Hydrarchos, that sea serpent sightings weren’t taken seriously by naturalists. By 1848, the sea serpent had already fallen into the domain of the pseudo-scientific. In another century, the giant sea serpent would become the poster-child for the new pseudo-science of cryptozoology, but this process had begun much earlier.

The decline of sea serpent sightings could be down to all kinds of things. Perhaps we are that much more sensible and less credulous now, than the crowds that flocked to see Hydrarchos, or the sailors who saw mermaids’ mirrors in the fins of manatees. Perhaps the sea serpents have all gone, deafened by ships’ engines, driven crazy by sonar and starved of food by overfishing and whaling-to-extinction. Perhaps we don’t see them anymore because they’re all gone. Or nearly all gone.

Serpents and Fiction

In fiction, however, particularly in the fantasy genre, the sea serpent retained its appeal throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. In CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, the ship Dawn Treader is encounters a sea serpent that makes the characteristic attack of looping its body around the ship’s hull and attempting to crush it.

Robin Hobb’s ‘Liveship Traders’ books present sea serpents as the larval form of dragons. In Naomi Novik’s ‘Temeraire’ series, sea serpents exist in the 19th century along with dragons and Bunyips. Perhaps the best, eeriest and most affecting bit of sea serpent literature I have come across, though, is Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Fog Horn’:

“And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-coloured, with immense eyes, and then a neck And then-not a body-but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water on a slender and beautiful neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet”.

“The Fog Horn blew.

“And the monster answered.

“A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.”

Bradbury understands that if such a creature exists, it must be lonely as hell.

47621_lgjamesbingham — james bingham, for bradbury’s story

####

Our thanks again to Matt, whose novel can be found on the right-hand sidebar. More Stranger Seas later this month.

See? Now you have loads to talk about at parties. We look forward to seeing you in a few days, and don’t forget, if you subscribe to greydogtales (bottom left-ish), you’ll, er, you’ll have subscribed. Maybe there should be a prize, or something? We don’t know. We’ll get back to you on that one…

Share this article with friends - or enemies...

Sea Serpents, Saltwater and Ship’s Biscuits

March 11, 2016 greydogtales 2 Comments

The voyage so far: Matt Willis, author of Daedalus and the Deep, has been ushered into the presence of the commander of HMS Longdog. The commander, who has outlived five ship’s surgeons and is quite insane, assumes that Mr Willis is the sailing master and insists on taking the ship closer to the rocks, despite a lee shore…

A quick note for recent visitors

As we have a number of new listeners aboard, we should explain that greydogtales is the highest-rated website dedicated to lurchers, weird fiction and art in the world! Clearly, no-one else was deranged enough to attempt such a thing. But we do have a large following of enthusiasts from Australia to Argentina, Los Angeles to Leamington Spa. So you are part of history now, at least.

Lurchers and longdogs crop up here on a regular basis, but in between you will find regular features and interviews covering weird modern fiction, classic supernatural tales and fantastic art. Plus occult detectives, cool comics, strange audio links and so on. And occasionally we talk about the commander’s own writing.

Dog-oriented people who consider themselves adventurous may also wish to check out the starring role of Bottles the Lurcher in one of our exciting free Sandra’s First Pony stories. It’s not that frightening, it’s just not normal, so we did warn you. Click here if you dare: something annoying this way comes

Interview with Matt Willis

Time to get cracking. Matt Willis’s exciting nautical fantasy, Daedalus and the Deep, is our excuse today, and he has kindly joined us to talk about his work. This is, in a way, a Part One, because we also have a new article from him, The Sea Serpent Paradox, coming up in a couple of days. Here’s the interview first, to set the scene…

greydog: Welcome to greydogtales, Matt. Of all our contributors to Stranger Seas so far, you are probably the most qualified so far to talk about the theme in real life. Maybe you could set the scene by saying a bit about your maritime background.

matt: Hello! I come from a small village near the sea in Essex, a few miles from Harwich, which is a very old sea port on the East Coast. My grandparents’ house looked down on the port and I used to spend hours watching the ships coming and going. Later I joined the Sea Scouts there and sailed racing dinghies in the bay, having a lot of fun and not much success.

greydog: Does your familiarity with the sea make nautical fantasy and horror have less impact, or do you still get that shiver down the spine?

matt: I don’t know about less impact – perhaps more if anything, as if you’ve lived near the sea and spent some time on it, you get a sense of how eerie and scary it can be. I remember sailing on a completely fog-bound estuary, suddenly realising I had very little sense of which direction the shore was in. The only sounds were the lap of the waves and a dredger scooping out the channel. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a dredger but they make the most unearthly moaning, screeching sound.

It put me in mind of the Ray Bradbury story ‘The Fog Horn’, where an ancient sea beast is awakened by a lighthouse foghorn, which is a very atmospheric and tense tale. It’s a cliché that the sea has moods, but it’s true. Even when it’s calm, there’s a latent power there, and who knows what’s over the horizon? That ‘blank’ can really feed the imagination, and not always in a healthy way.

greydog: We mentioned The Foghorn in our post on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms not long ago (seven things that shaped a childhood). Now, we thoroughly enjoyed Daedalus and Deep, your first novel. It’s an unusual book. Enthusiasts of C S Forester and Patrick O’Brian could read it purely as a rousing naval adventure. Given the level of detail, this must have taken a lot of research into historical procedures.

matt: Thank you! It was very much written as a ‘straight’ nautical historical novel, and I approached it in exactly the same way I would have done without any fantastical elements. I’ve read some fantasy novels with nautical elements, and for me they didn’t necessarily satisfy the sea-dog in me. Readers of nautical fiction are notoriously hard to please, and I wanted that audience to be able to read my book without wincing. It did take a fair bit of research, but this period, the Navy and sailing ships generally have always fascinated me so I had a fair bit of basic knowledge to start with, which helped a lot. Much of it was book research, but I also made sure to visit some contemporary preserved ships, just to get a feel for the environment. I did want it to be readable for people who weren’t hardcore Forester/O’Brian fans as well though, and I hope it works as a story for those readers too.

greydog: But Daedalus is also a fantasy novel, which takes the less-travelled route of combining the fantastical with the real British navy of the time. What brought up the idea of combining the two genres?

matt: I started with the story, which was the ‘real’ sea serpent sighting reported by Daedalus in 1848. That rather dictated the way the book turned out, rather than deciding that I wanted to write a book that combined historical-fiction and fantasy elements. That said, I probably could have made it less ‘crossover’ by not giving the sea serpent a POV in the book. I couldn’t resist that though, and the first ‘voice’ that came to me in the writing was that of the sea serpent.

greydog: And the sea serpent is a major element of the book, which is as much as we can say without giving too much away. As the tale progresses, a number of texts are referred to by the ship’s officers. Are these all genuine references, or a mixture of history and your own creations?

matt: Most of the tales and research that the crew uncovers are based on real stories. When I was researching the sea serpent aspects, it surprised me how closely some of the historical sightings matched the description given by HMS Daedalus’ officers, so I decided to make that an element of the book. One thing that cropped up when I was looking into the real history was that reports of sea serpent sightings fell dramatically when steam power started to supplant sail.

greydog: We also liked the feel of a navy on the edge of change, with the advent of new technologies, and your own thesis concerned science and the late 19th/early 20th century novel. Have you ever considered going full-tilt at this and writing nautical steam-punk?

matt: I’d love to do something like that. I’m a bit of a fan of China Miéville’s ‘Bas-Lag’ novels which have a wonderful steampunk feel, particularly The Scar, which is heavily nautical. I don’t know how I’d get into that world, but one day a story might present itself to me that suits that kind of treatment. A friend of mine, William Angelo, is writing a wonderful piece at the moment, set in an alternative Edwardian world where a lot of 20th century scientific advances were made some time earlier, following a nationalist revolution. His world-building is amazing, and very inspirational. I’m also tempted by diesel-punk, as I love zeppelins – there’s a big affiliation between airships and navies as well, and development of rigid airships tended to be driven by naval requirements rather than land-based armies. Maybe a sort of alternative late 19th century war at sea and in the air… Watch this space, I suppose!

greydog: That sounds a damned fine idea. You have a number of irons in the galley fire, including your novel, short stories, naval air history and motorsport journalism. Which is closest to your heart?

matt: Non-fiction writing is ruled by my head, fiction by my heart. I love writing non-fiction history, but fiction allows me to actually imagine myself into those times. I’ve been writing a book about the P-51 Mustang for several years, and still haven’t finished it, but that inspired an historical novel about an attack pilot and a war correspondent in Italy in 1943. When my heart takes over, it’s fiction all the way, but the different forms of writing aren’t completely divorced. They use similar muscles.

greydog: Tell us something about the collection A Seeming Glass, and the Random Writers. We’d not come across them before.

matt: The Random Writers are exactly like The Avengers, and I’m very much in the Thor role. Actually, we’re more like a bunch of people who find creating weird and wonderful fictional worlds preferable to real life, and we encourage each other. Originally the group was set up through the Writers’ Workshop ‘Word Cloud’ by J A Ironside, mainly for like-minded writers to share ideas, critique each other’s work and generally for moral support. A couple of years ago now I noticed that several short stories people had brought to the group had similar themes and suggested we do an anthology. That idea was seized upon, and the first anthology, A Seeming Glass, came out in 2014. The idea behind that was to take a familiar story and do something unfamiliar with it. We enjoyed doing it, and it seemed to go down pretty well, so we did a second one, Something Rich And Strange: The Past Is Prologue, and that came out just before Christmas. The theme of the second one was ‘what happened after The End?’ in existing stories.

greydog: We always like to find out what authors read in their own field. Which fantasy, weird and/or nautical writers do you most admire?

matt: In fantasy, I particularly love Joe Abercrombie and Jen Williams at the moment. Both are very different writers but manage to produce well-paced fantasy that’s convincing and gritty, but can be humorous and make you smile too. I love everything Stephen Baxter does, and I’d have to say the way he can blend historical fiction seamlessly with SF/F is a big inspiration to my own writing. In nautical circles, Alaric Bond’s Fighting Sail series is my favourite current work – Alaric takes a slightly different approach to the traditional one, by having a range of voices in each of his novels from people from lower deck to Captain, and sometimes on both sides too. I’m also a long-time fan of Richard Woodman, who lives near where I grew up and has written many fantastic nautical novels. He’s very well known in the area, but deserves to be placed alongside the greats of the genre in my view.

greydog: We know Woodman’s work – there are indeed some very good novels by him. So, to the future – we believe that you have plans for a follow-up to Daedalus. Are you taking characters from the first book forward, or will you be heading in an entirely new direction?

matt: I do have plans for a sequel to Daedalus, which is all somewhat stalled because of some issues that I won’t go into here. The idea was to take some of the characters from that book forward a few years later, with a similar treatment of real but weird and unexplained events. However, that might now not happen for various reasons. I am thinking of going back to that world in a different way, however, possibly with a radically different approach.

greydog: Finally, as you’re our only interviewee ever to write about aviation, we’re going to end completely off-topic and mention the English Electric Lightning. With its striking profile and astonishing climb rate, this was the iconic plane of our youth – posters in comics annuals, a print on the wall at home, etc. Any views?

matt: I agree – the Lightning was everything a fighter should be. Power, presence and charisma. It’s one of my eternal regrets that I never saw one display. Around the time I started going to airshows, I probably could just have caught one before they retired, but I was far too interested in WW2 warbirds at the time. There are a couple at Bruntingthorpe that do fast taxi runs with the afterburners lit, so that might be a consolation one of these days. There was just something so unique about it. Ah well. I did see a Buccaneer display at Duxford, and the Vulcan at Southend back in 1990 – and spent much of the last eight years chasing the Vulcan round the country. I keep hoping one of the countries that still operates MiG 21s will bring one to the UK, as that would at least be the Lightning’s on-paper adversary and contemporary.

Images of the English Electric Lightning, supplied by BAE Systems Military Air and Information (MAI). — English Electric Lightning, supplied by BAE Systems Military Air and Information (MAI).

greydog: Thank you very much, Matt Willis.

Amazon author page: matthew willis

Website: http://airandseastories.com

Twitter: @navalairhistory, @Random_Lands

Facebook: www.facebook.com/daedalusandthedeep

A link to pick up Daedalus and the Deep can be found on the right-hand side bar. As we mentioned above, Matt has gone beyond the call of duty and also written an excellent article on the subject of sea serpents for greydogtales, so call back soon.

####

On an unrelated topic, we featured the fun anthology Spawn of the Ripper not long ago (spawn of the ripper: the true story), and crept warily through some of the classic horror films which inspired the collection. We can now add that according to Rick Leider, one of the authors, his story Nightwork was inspired by the earlier film The Ghoul (1933), starring Boris Karloff and Cedric Hardwicke.

In accordance with our trivia obsession, we should point out that you must always keep an eye on the vicar in films like this. Here the vicar is played by none other than Sir Ralph Richardson. This was Richardson’s first credited film role, and is rather fitting. His mother was a devout Roman Catholic and wanted him to enter the priesthood. As a teenager, Richardson was sent to a Xavieran college for trainee priests, but ran away to become an actor. Well, eventually. Three years later, Richardson would work with Cedric Hardwicke again in Things to Come, the wonderful Korda adaptation of the H G Wells story.

We’re done. Remember , stay on this wavelength, and Do Not Go Outside – except to walk the lurcher…

Share this article with friends - or enemies...

Lurchers for Beginners: Training Your Human

March 8, 2016 greydogtales 9 Comments

You are a lurcher. This means you are a member of a proud and noble race. You can ignore those other dogs with their certificates and their so-called pedigrees. They could only afford one set of genes, and now their ears are wonky and fall off, or they need zimmer frames because of their inbred hip problems. You come from at least two lines of genetic goodness, carefully blended to make you the handsome, superior creature that you are today.

You are the elite, fast as a cheetah (whatever that is), and with the sleek lines that every other dog desires. You can leap tall buildings, outrun trains and curl up into shapes that even balloon animals can’t achieve. Your eyesight matches the resolution of the finest binoculars, and your long nose is a wonder in its own right. The rest of you is pretty cool as well, but let’s not sound too self-satisfied.

As a lurcher you have responsibilities, and one of those is training your human. It’s not easy, but if you want to get the best out of them and give them a good, rewarding life, it is essential. So here is Part One of the Lurchers for Beginners guide to the subject.

Introduction

Firstly, humans can be trained. Ignore what some of the other dogs say. Humans are moderately intelligent, and can be loyal, affectionate companions if treated properly. But we’re not saying it’s all fun and games. A badly trained human is disobedient, wilful and no use to anyone.

In this first article we’re going to look at some of the main problem areas you might need to consider:

1. Social and Interpersonal Skills

1.1 Some humans are solitary; some like to live in packs. If it makes them happy, let them. It’s hard to see what they get out of it sometimes, and they do snap at each other, though there’s usually no lasting harm. Experienced human-trainers say that there may even be some benefits, but do watch out for them paying more attention to each other than to you.

passengers-1150043_960_720 — humans in a pack (lurcher-eye view)

1.2 When you’re walking them, they meet other humans and then stand there for ages, making pointless noises to each other, even when you require attention. Once back from their walk, they stare at pictures on shiny boxes for hours until you physically get in the way and point out that you were calling them. Both behaviours show a lack of social skills and need addressing.

1.3 Do not rely on humans to guard your home. Some of them will let anyone in, and make little effort to sniff bottoms, check the stranger’s posture and obvious things like that. They have little idea of which species should and shouldn’t be in what is, after all, your home, not theirs.

1.4 Humans do have a basic language, although it isn’t suitable to convey the nuances that a lurcher might achieve. Be aware that your human(s) will not understand a lot of what you say to them, and try to make allowances. For example, a complex series of barks which make it clear there’s a squirrel ten point seven five metres up that third elm tree from the left, the tree is yours, and the human should go do something about it, will be lost on them. Keep it simple.

2. Behaviour in the Home

2.1 Humans steal food. It’s in their nature. On a regular basis they go into the cold box in the corner and take things you were planning to eat. If there’s a plate of something interesting on the table, they gobble down most of it themselves before you have a chance to get in there. Do not leave bones, sausages or other choice items unattended. You’re only asking for trouble.

2.2 They will go on the furniture, despite being told not to. This is particularly annoying. Some days it seems like everywhere you go, there’s a human lolling on the comfy chair, the sofa and so on. They take up a lot of space, and are quite stubborn about moving. A startled human can be quite hostile, so be careful.

2.3 They insist on sleeping on the bed with you. This is a habit which is very hard to break. You settle down for a good night’s doze, and then a human pushes and shoves their way in next to you, or grabs all the covers and makes moaning noises about something. Sometimes they get so territorial that they push you out altogether.

sleeping-1159279_960_720 — a badly-trained human

2.4 Humans are essentially lazy, and need exercising frequently. If you do not do this, they get fat and take up even more room when they manage to get on the sofa.

2.5 The one thing you can say in favour of humans at home is that they are toilet-trained. They choose one place in which to do their business, usually a small room upstairs, and stick to it. For some reason this room is full of tissue paper. We have no idea what that’s about.

3. Outside the Home

3.1 Let’s be clear about this one. Human recall is poor. There are times when you can bark or whine yourself hoarse before they come back to you and pay attention to the dead rat, fox droppings or mud-hole that you’ve found.

3.2 Humans are slow. It is possible to have some of the younger ones trained to run with you, but in general they will lag behind, make odd noises and wander off in the wrong direction. Remember that they are not able to cool down through use of their tongues, and will gradually end up soaked in their own sweat. Unpleasant but true.

at this distance, a human will have no idea where you are!

3.3 Their eyesight is also poor. It only takes a bush or a small tree to be in the way before they have completely lost sight of you. Even if you are a mere mile or two away, they will have no idea where you are. At this point they will make strange yelping noises and shout a lot, apparently in distress.

3.4 They insist on investigating poo. And then they pick it up! What can we say? There seems no way to train most of them out of this. Instead of leaving poo where it is, to break down naturally or to leave an obvious signal for other dogs, humans collect the stuff like pack-rats and fill their pockets with it. There is no known explanation for such behaviour. It is unhygienic, but you may have to leave them to it.

In Conclusion

What can you, as a responsible lurcher, do about all of this? In Part Two, in a week or so, we will suggest some training tactics.

Remember, though, that no human is fully trainable. There will always be moments when they revert to their natural animal state and do something naughty.

chilli3 — a lurcher today, appalled at her responsibilities

Be patient; be kind. Try to take the long view, and look at the affection and companionship which a well-trained human can provide over many years. It’s worth it.

Next time on greydogtales: More Strangers Seas. Our nautical weird theme continues…

Share this article with friends - or enemies...

Spawn of the Ripper: The True Story (PG)

March 6, 2016 greydogtales 2 Comments

Hurray! We’re going to the cinema, and sharing lots of things you never knew about those classic British horror movies of the sixties and seventies. Even better, we’re having fun with April Moon Book’s new anthology Spawn of the Ripper, a great collection of stories inspired by… a psychopathic frog? No, you guessed – classic horror movies of the sixties and seventies.

A few weeks ago we interviewed Neil Baker of April Moon Books, and to be honest we hadn’t expected to be back in Canada-land so quickly (see once in an april moon) Then we found out that Spawn of the Ripper was launching, and we had to be in on it, for we at greydogtales are unrepentant fans of those wonderful films like The Reptile, Twins of Evil and Dracula Prince of Darkness. We can’t include Django or Chilli, of course. They’re too young to watch such terrors.

So we thought we’d look at a few of the films behind the April Moon anthology, and give you the low-down on the book at the same time. As Neil has produced suitably cheesy poster illos for the stories, we have the added pleasure of including some of those and some posters from the original films. We do like pictures – they distract our listeners from any mistakes in the articles.

Spawn of the Ripper itself is fresh off the press, and Neil describes it as “my love letter to the men and women before and behind the cameras at Bray and Shepperton, who created some of the most beautiful horror on film.”

What are these strange and wonderful films? We brush briefly past their content to provide you with the trivia you either already knew or will soon wish you didn’t (and yes, we’re bound to have got something wrong – that’s how trivia work)…

From the book – “‘Spawn of the Ripper’ by Glynn Barrass and Martha Bacon is inspired by Hands of the Ripper while Christine Morgan’s ‘Immacula: Blood Communion’ is a darkly humorous take on the classic vampire tale.

“‘The Fates of Dr. Fell’ by Josh Reynolds channels the glorious portmanteau Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors while Ben Stewart’s ‘The Avenger Cometh’ and John Hunt’s ‘The Tablet’ owe more than a little to one of my favorite films, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter.”

Hands of the Ripper is from 1971. As a child, Jack the Ripper’s daughter witnesses him kill her mother. As a young woman she unconsciously carries on the murderous reign of her father. A psychiatrist tries to cure her, but all does not go well.

Trivialtales: Whilst it stars Eric Porter of Forsyte Saga fame, it is more remarkable in that Lynda Baron, who plays Long Liz (a real-life Ripper victim), is also Nurse Gladys Emmanuel in the BBC series Open All Hours. She is still playing this role even today, forty years after Open All Hours began. And she’s been in Doctor Who alongside both William Hartnell in 1966 and Matt Smith in 2011. Impressive or what?

Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, from 1965, stars Peter Cushing as Dr Terror, aka Dr W R Shreck. This is one of those lovely multiple story films. An architect returns to his ancestoral home to find a werewolf out for revenge; a doctor discovers his new wife is a vampire; a huge plant takes over a house; a musician gets involved with voodoo; an art critic is pursued by a disembodied hand.

Trivialtales: The film was a deliberate attempt by writer Milton Subotsky to repeat the success of Dead of Night from 1945. Subotsky rose to fame producing Rock, Rock, Rock in 1956, a film about a girl getting ready for the prom, starring Chuck Berry, The Flamingos and other rock and roll stars. Subotsky wrote most of the songs, and the soundtrack album is often cited as Chuck Berry’s first album.

Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter – 1974. A village is stricken with premature ageing and sudden mysterious deaths. Dr. Marcus calls in his army friend, Captain Kronos, to help. Kronos and his companion, the hunchback Hieronymus Grost, are professional vampire hunters. Grost explains to the initially sceptical Marcus that the dead women are victims of a vampire who drains not blood but youth, and that there are “as many species of vampire as there are beasts of prey.”

Trivialtales: The film’s score is by Laurie Johnson. From the 1960s to the 1980s, he composed over fifty themes and scores, including the themes used on iconic UK TV series such as The Avengers, Jason King, The New Avengers and The Professionals. Many of Johnson’s works have since become stock music for series such as SpongeBob, Squarepants.

From the book – “Amy Braun’s ‘The Maker of Monsters’ has shades of Vampire Circus about it, while ‘Blood Red Dahlias’ by Jonathan Cromack echoes the psychological horror of Asylum. The nefarious carryings on of Baron Frankenstein are well represented by the stories ‘The Brain of Evil’ by D.J. Tyrer, ‘Scourge of the Flesh Devils’ by Coy Hall and ‘The Private Ambitions of Arthur Hemming’ by Pete Mesling, and the seedy underbelly of society mixed with black magic is represented by R. Allen Leider’s ‘Nightwork’.”

Vampire Circus is a 1972 release – a travelling circus called the Circus of the Night appears mysteriously at a village ravaged by plague. Are this appearance and what happens next connected to the vampire killings of many years before. Well, yes. What did you expect?

Trivialtales: Three of the cast – Adrienne Corri, Laurence Payne and Lalla Ward – came together again in the 1980 season of Dr Who with Tom Baker as the Doctor. And David Prowse, who later played (the body of) Darth Vader in the first Star Wars trilogy, appears in a silent role as the circus strongman in Vampire Circus. Did you know that he also played the minotaur in the Dr Who story The Time Monster, with Jon Pertwee as the Doctor this time?

Asylum, also 1972, concerns the arrival of a certain Dr Martin at a secluded asylum “for the incurably insane”, to be interviewed for a job by the strange, wheelchair-bound Dr. Lionel Rutherford. Rutherford wants to see if Martin is right for the position of chief doctor. Rather than have a look at his CV, Rutherford tells him to interview the inmates and work out which one is Dr Starr, the former head of the asylum.

Trivialtales: The film was scripted by Robert Bloch, who adapted four of his own short stories for the screenplay. Barry Morse, who plays inmate Bruno in the film, was later to take the lead role in Space: 1999, and was born Herbert Morse. Herbert Lom, on the other hand, who plays Byron, was born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru in Prague. And not Barry Schluderpacheru, as you must have expected. Disappointing.

From the book – “Patrick Loveland’s ‘The Five Crystal Dragons’ is an obvious and thrilling take on The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires and ‘The Blood-Soaked Sand’ by Aaron Smith is a ripping yarn full of derring-do and monsters in Egyptian temples. Finally we have John McCallum Swain’s entertaining ‘The Wolf Who Never Was’ which purports to tell the true story behind the making of The Curse of the Werewolf and Oliver Reed’s legendary drinking.”

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, 1974, was the ninth and final film in the Hammer Dracula series. It was released in North America in an edited version as The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula, and alternatively known as The Seven Brothers and Their One Sister Meet Dracula. An old monk summons Dracula from his tomb to tell him that a Chinese cult, the Golden Vampires, is losing its power, and Dracula is needed to restore their former glory. The Count possesses the monk’s body and heads for China, as you would. High oriental jinks ensue.

Trivialtales: This is the only Hammer “Dracula” film not to feature Count Dracula’s name in the title of the film, and the only one where Dracula was not played by Christopher Lee. This was also the last time Peter Cushing would play Van Helsing. The film is notable for the use of the Chinese vampire, the jiangshi. If you’re used to Western vampires swirling and striding around in Gothic manner, the Chinese ones take a little adjustment. They hop. They hop a lot, arms outstretched as tradition demands. So there.

Curse of the Werewolf, 1961. It’s a bit of a tragic tale. A young woman refuses a nobleman’s advances, is thrown in jail and raped by a mad beggar while in there. When the girl escapes, she is taken in by a scholar and his wife, but she dies after giving birth to a baby on Christmas Day. The boy, Leon, is cursed by the evil circumstances of his conception and by his Christmas Day birth. An early hunting incident gives him a taste for blood, which he struggles to overcome. Dot dot dot.

Trivialtales: This was Oliver Reed’s first credited film appearance, and the only werewolf film made by Hammer. But wait… the film also includes Peter Sallis, as Don Enrique. Gosh.

Peter Sallis is famed for his role in Last of the Summer Wine (he appeared in all of the 295 episodes from 1973 to 2010), and was the voice of Wallace in Wallace and Gromit. In both cases, despite being born in London, he was forced at gunpoint to use a Northern accent.

Not only that, but we should mention the 2005 Wallace and Grommit film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, in which Sallis played opposite such luminaries as Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham-Carter – and Mark Gatiss! Yes, 44 years after working with Oliver Reed, Sallis finally became the werebeast himself.

Extra trivialtales: This echoes the myth of the kallikantzaros, in some cultures a demonic creature, in others a cursed child born between December 25 and January 6, which are known as the ‘unbaptised’ days in Serbian folklore. These children were at risk each Christmas of turning into dakr and twisted things. It was one element of that wonderful book by Roger Zelazny, This Immortal, originally serialised as And Call Me Conrad. You should read it. And Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead, which we covered here: the isle of the dead

With reference to Aaron Smith’s story in the anthology, we have an excuse to mention Valerie Leon, famed for her dual role as Margaret and the ancient Egyptian Queen Tera in Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb. Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb was made in 1971, and based on Bram Stoker’s novel Jewel of the Seven Stars (The Awakening, another version of Stoker’s tale, was made in 1980 but wasn’t as good as this one).

Trivialtales: This would have been a Peter Cushing film but Cushing had to pull out because his wife was ill. Five foot eleven inches tall, Valerie appeared with both Roger Moore and Sean Connery in Bond films, did seven Carry On movies and loads of TV work. She was also famous at the time as the Hai Karate advert girl.

There you are. An entire article which is of no use except to fill your mind with pointless oddities. We do love that. In summary, Spawn of the Ripper is great fun and well worth a look.

####

We give a special last nod to Joshua M Reynolds, whose story The Fates of Dr Fell was particularly enjoyable, with a wry twist on the old portmanteau films we used to love. We laughed; we cried. Apart from the crying.

Sadly, Josh still insists on producing his St Cyprian tales, with Charles St Cyprian as the successor and inheritor to the Cheyne Walk domain of Thomas Carnacki. Josh is thus the major competition to Tales of the Last Edwardian, in that he too writes after the loss of Carnacki. We may yet have to instruct our own Mr Dry, the infamous Deptford Assassin, to pay him a warning visit…

Next week on greydogtales – something lurchery, we hope, and a super interview with fantasy author and nauticalist Matt Willis as part of the astounding Stranger Seas series (yes, we’re easily astounded here).

Share this article with friends - or enemies...

The Sea Serpent Paradox

by Matt Willis

The Daedalus Disputes

Dr Koch’s Concoctions

Serpents and Fiction

A quick note for recent visitors

Interview with Matt Willis

Introduction

1. Social and Interpersonal Skills

2. Behaviour in the Home

3. Outside the Home

In Conclusion

Literature, lurchers and life