the Punch & Judy Man

In issue 4 of Ernest Journal, Duncan Haskell unravels the history of the ultimate anti-hero Mr Punch – con-artist, wife-batterer and murderer. To illustrate the feature, we enlisted the help of Punch and Judy performer David Wilde, who brought along his collection of props and puppets, including the long-lost originals from Tony Hancock's The Punch and Judy Man.

Photo: Hanson Leatherby

So you’re a Punch and Judy professor – how did you first get into working with puppets?

I first came across Punch and Judy when I was six years old. I was on holiday, walking along the promenade when I saw a huge crowd of children and adults looking at this small, lovely looking tent on the sand. I asked my mum what it was and she told me she thought it was a Punch and Judy show – she’d never seen one before. Well I made sure I was in the audience for the next show and I think every day for the rest of my holiday I was sitting on that beach shouting along with every one else. My grandfather bought me a small set of Pelham Puppets for Christmas from Hamleys and I’ve never looked back.

What makes a good Punch and Judy show?

When you watch a good Punch and Judy show, you should get a feeling of wonder and a sense of excitement as to what will happen next. A well performed show can grab an audience and fill them with laughter. This is what I encourage people to do if they think they have what it takes to perform the show properly – for it not to be run of the mill. Last year a few of my colleagues and I set up the Punch and Judy Club. Our aim is to try to keep standards up and encourage others to aim for excellence in their shows.

Why do you think the characters still have such an appeal today? 

Puppets will always have an appeal. They move, they’re bright and colourful and, if well manipulated, they're completely absorbing. Just look at the success of the Muppets and other puppet characters that have entertained us all throughout childhood and into adulthood.

How has Punch's story evolved over the years?

The story of Punch has always evolved. Characters have changed to reflect the times. Any tradition has to evolve over time to keep people interested, but the core story is still the thing that everyone wants to see. A few years ago, during the Jubilee year, I started to sense a resurgence of interest in traditional entertainment. People wanted the proper old show, and no gimmicks.

Photo: Hanson Leatherby

As part of the shoot for issue 4, we had the pleasure of photographing the puppets in Tony Hancock’s The Punch and Judy Man. How did you come to own these?

The Hancock puppets have always been a favourite of mine. My grandfather spent 10 years searching for them so they hold a special place for me on two counts – as well as being a huge Hancock fan, I'm also hugely intrigued by my grandfather's search for them.

As a small boy, I remember my grandfather searching for information on the puppets used in Hancock’s film. Once I became a Punch professor, I took up the case and, after many dead ends, came across the family who owned the clown and the crocodile and they gave us the puppets. Years later, Punch, Judy and the policeman appeared on the Antiques Roadshow. You can imagine my reaction. After frantic phone calls, I managed to get hold of the guy who owned them in the Netherlands. He had already been contacted by another buyer but he agreed to sell them to us after he saw the immense body of information my grandfather had accumulated while searching for them!

Recently I met a gentleman who went down to Bognor when he was 13 to see Tony Hancock on the set of The Punch and Judy Man. He took his own Mr Punch with him and had a picture taken for the local paper. Luckily, he let me buy his Mr Punch so it adds to the Hancock story.

Photo: Hanson Leatherby

Do you have any other favourite items in your collection?

The Booth puppets, which were also photographed for shoot, are my other pride and joy. There aren’t many survivors from the Victorian period but I have managed to piece them back together over the course of time. From my experience of collecting, I’ve found that if you wish for something hard enough, one day it passes right in front of your eyes and can be yours to enjoy and look after – until, of course, it’s passed on to the next person.

Find out more about David Wilde and his performances and puppet collection at londonpunch.co.uk. Read more about the social history of Punch and Judy, illustrated with images of David Wilde's collection, in issue 4 of Ernest Journal – on sale in our online store or one of your local stockists.

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The Frontier Man

The highly anticipated and Oscar-nominated movie The Revenant hits UK cinemas today. Mark Blackmore provides a little insight into the man behind the story – Hugh Glass: pirate, trapper, tribesman, mountain man, and one of history’s most obdurate, durable and vengeful men

Illustration: Jes Hunt

Details on Hugh Glass’s early life are sketchy, but the best guess seems to be that he was born in Philadelphia to Irish immigrant parents in 1783. He grew up to be a seaman, which was working out unremarkably enough until he was captured by pirates in 1816. Choosing a life of piracy over a quick walk off a plank, Glass remained with the pirate crew until 1818, when he seized an opportunity to jump overboard and swim two miles to shore.

Though Glass quickly gained a companion and moved north, living off the land, they were both captured by Pawnee Indians. Glass watched as the Pawnee hung his companion upside down, pushed hundreds of pine needles into his skin and set him alight. As he was about to meet the same fate, Glass saved himself by offering the Pawnee some vermilion, a highly-valued scarlet pigment that he happened to have in his pocket. So delighted were the Pawnee with this gift that Glass was spared and adopted into the tribe, taking a Pawnee wife and winning a valuable Hawken rifle in a skirmish with local rivals.

This state of affairs lasted until 1821, when Glass visited St Louis as part of a Pawnee delegation meeting with US authorities. He decided to stay, joined the fledgling Rocky Mountain Fur Company as a trapper, and in 1823 took part in an expedition up the Missouri River, headed by Andrew Henry and under the larger command of General William Ashley.

A grizzly encounter

Things started off badly, before quickly getting worse. First, Ashley’s men got involved in a skirmish with the Sioux and the Arikara, during which one trapper was killed and Glass was shot in the leg. Moving on, Andrew Henry took 14 men, including Glass, further upriver. It was at this point that Glass, while foraging for berries, stepped into a cleared area that he recognised as the nest of a mother grizzly bear. 

The bear was present with her cubs, and immediately charged. Glass managed one shot with his Hawken rifle before she was on him, and he underwent the unenviable experience of witnessing her tossing pieces of his flesh to her cubs, who soon joined the attack.

Brought running by the noise, the other men arrived and shot the bears. Glass was unconscious, his leg broken, his back ripped open to the ribs and the rest of his body a mess of claw and bite wounds. Henry offered money for volunteers to stay with Glass until he died and then dig his grave before catching up with the main party, and two men, Fitzgerald and Bridger, stayed.

Left for dead

However, after a couple of days, Hugh Glass was mulishly refusing to die, and his minders were becoming frantic with fear of being discovered by one of the many roaming Arikara war bands. They decided that since Glass would surely soon give up the ghost, it could do no harm to take his rifle and other equipment, telling the others that Glass had died when they caught up. When Glass awoke some time later, he found himself mutilated, gangrenous, crippled, without weapons or equipment, in the middle of hostile Indian territory and some 200 miles from the nearest place of safety, Fort Kiowa on the Missouri River.

After lying on a rotting log to allow maggots to eat his infected flesh, Glass began to crawl towards the Cheyenne River, living on roots, insects, berries and discarded carcasses, for the next six weeks. There he built a raft, encountered friendly Indians who gave him weapons and sewed a bear hide onto his exposed back, and continued on to Fort Kiowa.

A lengthy recuperation followed, and a determination grew to kill Fitzgerald and Bridger, the men who had deserted him and left him for dead...

To learn more about Glass's extraordinary tale, read the full feature in print issue 3 of Ernest Journal, or you can watch Leonardo DiCaprio's portrayal in The Revenant, out in cinemas today. 

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Ghost stations on the Piccadilly Line

They once bustled with the to and fro of passengers and provided shelter during our darkest hours in the Second World War, but now they lie empty and dormant beneath our heaving capital. Duncan JD Smith shines a light into abandoned tube stations on the Piccadilly Line

Aldwych Station/Photo © Stewart Macfarlane

The London Transport Museum on Covent Garden Piazza (WC2) illustrates well the complexity of the capital’s transport infrastructure. While the horse-drawn trams and motorised buses are interesting, it’s the material relating to the London Underground that really fascinates. Pride of place goes to a wooden railway carriage used on the Metropolitan line between Paddington and Farringdon, the world’s first underground passenger railway, which opened in 1863. Since then the Tube has expanded dramatically and helped transform London from a congested Victorian city into the massive conurbation it is today.

An intriguing facet of the Tube is its ghost stations of which there are more than 40. While some closed due to lack of customers others were abandoned when rival companies merged or else were reworked to increase capacity. A handful of them are located conveniently on the Piccadilly line, which opened in 1906, and it makes for quite an adventure finding them.

First stop is Brompton Road (SW3), which closed in 1934 because of its proximity to the busier stations at South Kensington and Knightsbridge. As early as 1909 some services were already passing through without stopping. During the Second World War the station served as the Royal Artillery’s anti-aircraft control centre for London. Although the platforms are no longer visible from passing trains, part of the façade still survives on Cottage Place, with its distinctive arches and maroon tiling designed by architect Leslie Green (1875–1908).

Next stop is the former ticket hall at Hyde Park Corner (SW7), which closed in 1932 when it was replaced by a new sub-surface ticket hall with the same name and its escalators replaced by lifts. At street level the redundant Leslie Green façade is now part of a hotel.

Like Brompton Road, Down Street (W1) was another station that proved unpopular, this time because of its proximity to Hyde Park Corner and Dover Street (today Green Park). It too closed in 1932 and again a Leslie Green façade survives above ground. Below ground a change in tunnel surface from cast iron segments to brickwork on the right-hand side denotes where the platforms have been walled off. Behind them was an air raid shelter used in 1940 by Winston Churchill before his Cabinet War Rooms were ready.

The next station, Dover Street, was rendered obsolete when escalators and a new sub-surface ticket hall were installed in 1933, at which time the station was renamed Green Park.

The most atmospheric ghost station on the Piccadilly line is undoubtedly Aldwych (WC2) at the corner of the Strand and Surrey Street. Originally intended to be the southern terminus for one of the companies that merged to form the Piccadilly line, Aldwych instead became the terminus of a short branch line to serve occupants of the newly-built Aldwych crescent. Opening as Strand station in 1907 (the station façade still bears this name) it provided a shuttle service up to Holborn but by 1918 had been renamed and its service curtailed since it was invariably quicker to walk up to Holborn than wait for the train. During the Second World War it provided shelter for 1500 people together with the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles. The station closed completely in 1994 after the cost of replacing its antiquated lifts was deemed uneconomic. Since then the mothballed station, with its old-fashioned ticket office, wood-panelled lifts, original tiling and peeling posters, has proved a popular film location.

Aldwych Station/Photo © Stewart Macfarlane

London once had three other underground railways. Of the London Pneumatic Despatch Railway, which carried light freight out of Euston Station between 1863 and 1874, only a solitary vehicle survives in the collection of the Museum of London at 150 London Wall (EC2). Of London’s tram network, which criss-crossed the city until the early 1950s, the abandoned Kingsway tunnel of 1906 remains, with entrances at the bottom end of Southampton Row (WC2) and beneath Waterloo Bridge. Nothing is currently visible of the driverless narrow gauge Mail Rail that from 1927 to 2003 transported millions of letters daily for the Post Office between Paddington and Whitechapel. Plans are afoot, however, to open parts of the mothballed system to visitors.

Guided tours of Aldwych Station (at the corner of the Strand and Surrey Street, WC2R 1LS) are provided occasionally by the London Transport Museum, although plans to sell off London’s ghost stations might one day make it more accessible. Getting there: Circle, District lines to Temple

This article is adapted from Duncan JD Smith’s new book Only in London: A Guide to Unique Locations, Hidden Corners and Unusual Objects, published by The Urban Explorer. Existing titles in the “Only In” series cover Berlin, Budapest, Cologne, Hamburg, Munich, Paris, Prague, Vienna and Zurich. Find out more at onlyinguides.com and duncanjdsmith.com.

Issue four is available to pre-order now!

We're almost there folks! Issue four of Ernest Journal explores the rather eclectic themes of sound, subversion and polar exploration. Read on for more about what's in store – then please pre-order your copy so we can post it out to you fresh from the printers, while it's still warm and inky...

24-page guide to Greenland

Seek out ancient Norse settlements; sail among icebergs while exploring the cultural impact of the great Ice Sheet and delve into Inuit folklore in South Greenland.

Curious histories

Listen to mysterious transmissions on short wave radio; delve into the darker side of tintype photography; investigate an anomaly in the North Sea – a micro-nation owned by a tenacious band of radio buccaneers; and read about Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, whose week-long symphony would bring about the end of the world.

Spaces

Step into the unconventional home of wallpaper designer Adam Calkin and enter the bizarre and wonderful world of sound design.

Slow adventure

Investigate the psychology of polar exploration; discover the secrets of Schiehallion, the Scottish mountain that helped us weigh the world; and explore the evolution of travel writing from the 'unsentimental journey', through Victorian authors and the Beats to situationism and psychogeography.

Workmanship

Forage for the raw ingredients needed to blow your own glass; meet an automaton inventor and discover the obsessions and frustrations of model boat makers.

Timeless style

Wear woollens inspired by the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration; discover the origins of the trench coat, from the front line to the silver screen; and forage for ingredients to create your own wild dyes.

Wild food

Venture into the marshes of northern Norway in search of elusive cloudberries and master the art of wild meat butchery.

All subscriptions and pre-orders will be delivered at the end of November

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Pickled toads and dodo bones

London’s Natural History Museum is considered one of the world’s greatest repositories of objects pertaining to the natural world – but it’s not the capital’s only such collection. Although tiny by comparison, the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London offers its own unique take on natural curiosities

© UCL Grant Museum of Zoology/Matt Clayton

The Grant Museum was established in 1828 by Scotsman Robert Edmond Grant (1793–1874), one of the foremost biologists of his time. A year earlier he had been made the first Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the newly-founded London University – now University College London (UCL) – where he quickly identified the need for a teaching collection of zoological specimens. This formed the basis for what would become the museum and on his death Grant bequeathed his own personal collection of specimens to it. Since then, further donations have been made by other universities, hospitals and even London Zoo.

In 2011, the museum was moved from the Darwin Building on the UCL campus (Grant influenced the young Charles Darwin, who once occupied a house on the site) to new premises in the Rockefeller Building at 21 University Street in Bloomsbury (WC1E 6DE). The entrance to the museum today is suitably adorned with the skeletons of a walrus, a baboon and a giant iguanodon beyond which can be found over 60,000 zoological specimens, many preserved in glass vials and jars. As such the museum is probably not for the squeamish.

To the untrained eye, the exhibits might at first appear disorganised but on closer inspection you will notice they are carefully categorised into evolutionary groups. The entire animal kingdom is represented here from jars of humble earthworms and pickled toads to monkey skeletons and huge elephant skulls. The curled up skeleton of a 250-kilo anaconda is particularly memorable!

© UCL Grant Museum of Zoology/Matt Clayton

Among the exhibits are some real oddities. Take for example the enormous skull of a Giant Deer (Megaloceros giganteus), which was discovered unexpectedly in an Irish hotel. Once a denizen of Europe and Asia, the Giant Deer’s last refuge 10,000 years ago was Ireland, giving rise to the misleading name of Irish Elk. Then there is a skeleton of the extinct Quagga, a partially-striped sub-species of Plains Zebra hunted to extinction during the 1870s. It had long been in the museum but was only identified in 1981. The box of Dodo bones, an extinct flightless bird so famous it has entered modern English parlance (hence “dead as a Dodo”), was stored away for a century before being rediscovered in 2011. And don’t overlook the fossilised remains of Rhamphorhynchus. This Jurassic-era pterosaur was assumed to be a plaster cast until it turned out to be the real thing. Definitely a cast but no less interesting for that is an example of Archaeopteryx, believed by some to represent the missing link between saurian reptiles and birds.

Sometimes perceived as an essentially Victorian collection, the Grant Museum of Zoology is frequented today not only by university students but also schoolchildren, artists and other curious visitors. Accordingly the museum’s innovative temporary displays are designed to be of interest to a non-professional audience. As a nod to modernity visitors are encouraged to share their opinions of the museum on iPads positioned alongside the exhibits.

Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy (WC1E 6DE), University College London, Rockefeller Building, 21 University Street, Mon–Sat 1–5pm

Getting there: Circle, Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan lines to Euston Square; Northern line to Goodge Street; Northern, Victoria lines to Warren Street

This feature is adapted from Duncan JD Smith’s new book Only in London: A Guide to Unique Locations, Hidden Corners and Unusual Objects, published by The Urban Explorer. Existing titles in the Only In series cover Berlin, Budapest, Cologne, Hamburg, Munich, Paris, Prague, Vienna and Zurich. Find out more at onlyinguides.com and duncanjdsmith.com