London Urban Legends (29 page)

The main story to be told about London’s phantom cats is in popular mythology and sensational newspaper stories. ABCs are a nationwide phenomenon, not just a London one. Whatever the truth of the mystery of big cat sightings is, the myth is what we carry within ourselves. It is the myth we get close to whenever something strange is seen, and the answer will only come with hard evidence from the outside world.

We’re Going on a Bear Hunt

On 27 December 1981, four boys from Lower Clapton took their dogs out for a walk across Hackney Marshes. Past Millfields Road, near the football pitches, the boys encountered ‘a giant great growling hairy thing’ – they met a bear in Hackney.

‘We were near the football pitches at about five o’clock in the evening when we saw it,’ said Darren Willoughby, aged 12. ‘It was very close to us, standing on its hind legs and about seven feet tall.’

Once the press began to interview the boys, the stories began to expand. Before meeting the Hackney Bear, the boys had noticed unusual footprints in the snow, which one boy identified as bear tracks.

Following the tracks, the boys met a middle-aged couple walking their own dog and asked them if they’d seen a bear. ‘Yes,’ the couple replied, ‘it’s up there.’ The couple told the boys to get away, they were near a bear after all, and to further add to the dream-like quality of events, started to throw snowballs at the boys to drive them away. This did not stop them, of course, and Tommy Murray (variously reported as 12 or 13) heard the bear growling, shone his torch on it and saw its profile standing upright in the dark. Tommy’s dog, Lassie, did not want to go near it, and neither did they. The boys ran.

The police were impressed with the sincerity of the boys’ fear and so launched a hunt across Hackney Marshes and along the banks of the River Lea to find the bear. Inspector Pat Curtis said, ‘We do not believe this to be a hoax – we are taking no chances.’

The public were warned to keep off the marshes and not to join in with the police operation. Between fifty and 100 police officers, a police helicopter shining a searchlight over the dark ground, between fourteen and twenty dog handlers, and police marksmen armed with shotguns and handguns spent two cold days searching 8 miles of marshes and waste ground. Four RSPCA workers were concerned enough for the welfare of the bear to bring tranquiliser guns so that it could be subdued rather than assassinated, but it was clear the police were not prepared to take the risk. The Hackney Bear was ‘a dangerous animal that can run faster than most men, swim and can climb trees,’ Chief Inspector Platten told the press at the time. ‘It will be shot dead if spotted.’

On 28 December the police searchers found footprints in the receding snow. Two sets on either side of the Lea and one on an island in the river. RSPCA inspector Derek Knight said, ‘If it is a hoax it’s an elaborate one. The footprints certainly look like a bear’s.’ Elsewhere he said, ‘Perhaps not a fully grown one, maybe two or four hundredweight. But undoubtedly such a bear would be capable of killing a person.’

London Zoo director Colin Rawlings had a different view, suggesting that the bear could turn nasty ‘if bothered by a dog’ and that if it was a captive bear that had escaped, it would head towards people and their homes to scavenge for food rather than stay out in the wilds of Hackney. It could have hideouts, making it hard to spot.

When a shed on a local allotment had been forced open and Tommy Murray showed police the claw marks he had found on a tree, Murray told a journalist that he was ‘very surprised it has not materialised’.

The Bear Truth?

The potential claw marks and shed-burglary were the last possible signs of the bear on the marshes and were not enough to continue the search. With disappointment looming, things began to look different. The footprints in the melting snow did not look much like bear prints. Despite a group of children telling police they had seen the bear, by the evening of 29 December police called off the search and declared Hackney Marshes safe for the public. This was not, however, the end of the story.

The next day, the
Sun
newspaper received a call from the ‘Hackney bear’, or at least a man named Ron who claimed to be the hoaxer behind the bear scare. Ron was inspired by an earlier bear mystery when two skinned and decapitated carcasses were found in the River Lea near Clapton on 5 December 1981, twenty-two days before the boys’ sighting. A jogger had spotted two ‘bodies’ in the canal and at first it was thought that they were human and the victims of recent ‘East End underworld’ violence.

Once the bodies were identified as brown bears, a circus that had been near the river two weeks earlier was contacted but was ruled out of any enquiry. These were not the first animal bodies to appear in the Lea; others had included a puma carcass, and it was assumed that an unethical taxidermist was fly-tipping his corpses.

Their heads full of thoughts of Hackney bears, Ron and three friends dreamt up a jape whilst in the pub. They had a bear suit from a fancy dress party, so they drove out to the marshes to leave paw prints and pretend to be a bear on the loose. What Ron had not counted on was frightening the young boys enough into going to the police. ‘It was only those kids who were scared,’ said a nervous Ron, ‘we didn’t realise they would take off like that.’

The police had already looked into a fancy dress party at Flamingo Disco on Hackney Marshes on Boxing Day, the day before the first sighting. They were very interested in Ron’s confession, scowling ‘this has been a very expensive operation’. No doubt they were also embarrassed about the time spent shivering on the marshes whilst searching for a dangerous urban ursine entity. Being dressed up as a bear in public is not a crime as far as I know, and I am still not sure whether Ron wasted police time or whether they managed to do that themselves. There was still doubt whether Ron was telling the truth about the whole caper. A local fancy dress hire shop pointed out that bear costumes do not come with bear feet, so an outfit on its own could not leave the tracks Ron had claimed to. Perhaps he and his friends had only got as far as an idea in the pub and a telephone. Michael Goss, in his thoroughly researched article in
The Unknown
, in December 1987 to January 1988, suggests that it was the boys themselves, young and perhaps fantasy prone, who dreamt up their bear encounter. No one else came forward to say they saw the bear and the only other evidence were suspicious scratches and paw prints.

The Ron revelation, however real, was the last thing heard about the Hackney bear for a long time. Decades later, on 17 May 2012, the
Hackney Citizen
reported a sighting of the Beast of Hackney Marshes. On the May Day bank holiday weekend, student Helen Murray was strolling through woodland near Old River Lea, a channel of the River Lea, when something large and shaggy stopped her in her tracks. She grabbed her mobile phone to dial 999 and managed to get two photographs of the creature as it moved through the undergrowth away from her. One image was of its hind quarters disappearing behind a tree, the other shows what looks like a head hunched down low from square shoulders. The two photographs show the hairy lump in the undergrowth but neither communicates movement too well.

‘The “Beast of Hackney Marshes” Mystery – Pictures’ trumpeted the
Hackney Gazette
, telling the story of Helen Murray’s encounter, bringing newer readers up to date with the Hackney bear story and appealing for explanations. In keeping with the tradition of Ron owning up to being the Hackney bear, and two different domestic cats claiming to be the lion in Winchmore Hill, a dog owner did come forward claiming his pet was the Beast of Hackney Marshes. The dog was a Newfoundland named Willow, a huge, dark, hairy creature owned by Nicole and Paul Winter-Hart, who said they regularly walk her along Hackney Marshes. Paul was previously famous for being in the Brit Pop band Kula Shaker.

‘I knew it was her immediately,’ said Nicole. ‘It’s funny because our friends call her “The Beast” and now she’s “The Beast of Hackney Marshes”!’

Helen Murray was not convinced by this explanation. While she was quick to say she thought Willow was cute, ‘I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a dog as it was far too big. And its build wasn’t dog-like.’

The explanations for the Hackney bear are many and have become part of its myth.

‘The trouble with fiction’, said John Rivers, ‘is that
it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.’

Aldous Huxley, The Genius And The Goddess

T
OWARD THE END
of 2012, videos of wolves in London appeared on YouTube. I came across one, via the Centre for Fortean Zoology, called ‘Wolves in Hackney????’ It had been uploaded on 17 November 2011 and was a convincing piece of footage of a wolf sighted wandering up Urswick Street in Hackney. It is apparently filmed by a couple hanging out of an upstairs window filming fireworks when one of them looks down and sees the wolf on the street. He shouts ‘Oi!’ at it while his friend or girlfriend shushes him, but the wolf is off and runs sleekly along the street and into the night.

Other videos appeared, including a man who had seen the remains of a dog smeared across Clapham Cfommon, and one of a couple of women singing and dancing in a living room when something big crashes over their patio. On a fourth video, a group of friends recording a birthday message to a distant friend are disturbed by a wolf in the street. They looked real; the animals intruded on films that looked natural and the creatures in the films were clearly wolves.