Talbot Mundy

Talbot Mundy. What a name!  Better than Port Talbot, though others may disagree. I first came across Talbot Mundy on my dad’s bookshelves and read it as a child, my first introduction to the First World War, the vastness and glamour of the British Empire. 

 Don’t judge a book by its cover or in this case a lack of one. 

 

The tale, told through the eyes of Hira Singh, is a fictionalised account of an essentially true story. A Sikh regiment fought alongside the British army in the trenches of France and were captured by the Germans. Convinced of their potential value in stirring up discontent and rebellion, the Germans shipped them to the Middle East. The regiment, though, remained loyal to the British, and after many adventures escaped, trekked across Central Asia, and returned intact to British India.

To a child, the book opened up strange, vivid new worlds; and the name, Talbot Mundy remained fixed in the back of my mind.  I dug out the book from where it had been hiding and for the first time wondered about the man himself: Talbot Mundy.

For a start, it wasn’t his real name. William Lancaster Gribbon was born in 1879 and died in 1940 and for much of his life was an amoral drifter, leaving school with no qualifications. For scoundrels and adventurers, for those without purpose, the British empire proved something of a boon, and in his early years he found clerical employment in India before dabbling in journalism and then moving to East Africa, where he became an ivory poacher, and then town clerk in the frontier town of Kisumu. By this time, he was married, the first of five wives, but after a series of sexual adventures with local women he lost both wife and job. Undeterred, he seduced a married woman in Nairobi and later married her, using the name ‘Talbot Mundy’ for the first time.

In 1909, he made the most important move of his life taking his new wife to New York. There they found lodgings in the lower east side, where he took a series of menial jobs before a vicious mugging hospitalised him. Out of work and with heavy hospital bills, Mundy had reached rock bottom, when his luck changed. 

Jeff Hanley, an American journalist, mesmerised by Mundy’s tales of Africa and the Far East, persuaded him to write.  He even lent him a typewriter. Talbot Mundy had found his vocation: pulp fiction.

Getting up between 3- 4 am, Mundy worked seven hours a day, six days a week, producing over a lifetime 47 novels, 130 novelettes and short stories, 23 articles and a non-fiction book. 

He also influenced some of the big names in pulp and fantasy fiction: Robert E Howard, Fritz Lieber, Andre Norton, L Sprague de Camp and Marion Zimmer Bradley. And to think, for all this time I had him down as an old Victorian fuddy-duddy with a walrus moustache, a champion of traditional values. 

Magical bushes and trees

Looking back, I was deprived as a child—at least in terms of folk lore. I knew the basic stuff, like not passing salt to someone, or the occasional necessity to throw some over your left shoulder. I was wary about walking under ladders, and always wished a single magpie a whispered ‘good morning.’ But that was it. I knew nothing about the magical power of bushes and trees. The only ‘nature walk’ we did at St Bonaventure's was walking up Cedar Road and picking up sycamore keys. 

But now I’m surrounded by magic, or so I’m led to believe. The borderlands are awash with bushes and trees steeped in the supernatural. 

Eeno11 - Own work

The rowan or mountain ash is regarded as a potent weapon against witchcraft, perhaps because as folklore has it, the rowan ‘…is the tree on which the devil hanged his mother.’ Whatever the theological implications of that particular nugget, locals used to plant a rowan near their houses to prevent the ‘evil eye.’ Others would adorn their stables with rowan on May Day. There it would hang until the following May Day, protecting their horses from unimaginable horrors.

The spotted laurel is more theologically inclined, its spots deriving from drops of  the Virgin Mary’s milk, as she fed the baby Jesus. 

Perhaps the most significant bush is the Holy Thorn, several cuttings of which were taken from the original at Glastonbury. These supposedly bloom at midnight on Twelfth Night.  As late as 1908 one such cutting at Wormesley was visited by up to forty people who were treated to cake and ale as they witnessed the event by candlelight. 

Rosemary too is significant. Like the Holy Thorn, it is also reputed to blossom at midnight on Twelfth Night—or so the locals of Orcop and Garway believed. They regularly stayed up to see it, no doubt with cake and ale. 

 I have mixed feelings about rosemary. A common belief is that the plant only flourishes ‘where the missus is master.’ I keep my rosemary well-trimmed but to little avail. 

By Sb2s3 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44184869

The willow is more ambiguous. It will bring good luck when brought into the house on May Day and protects against the evil eye if presented to you by a friend. On the other hand, if a young animal or child is struck by a willow rod, it will never grow thereon. Useful tips for a future English cricket coach perhaps.

To be honest, I never knew vegetation could be so temperamental. A walnut tree in the garden of Porch House in Eardisland fell to pieces during the night. The tree itself was strong and healthy. There was no storm. It just apparently decided that its time was up—as was that of the mistress of the house who died shortly after. 

When Charles I was executed, it was noticed by the peasantry of Herefordshire that the ash trees had no keys that year in sympathy for the death of a king. In like manner,  lilac and laburnum mourn the death of a neighbouring tree by refusing to blossom the following year. Ivy, too, makes its voice heard. Should it suddenly wither and die on the walls of a house, someone in there will surely die. For someone who rips off dead ivy from my walls—having first cut off their roots—I’m clearly living on borrowed time.

All this I could have learned in my Liverpool school and yet never did. I can though draw a passably good sycamore key. 

The green end of goose dunge steeped in beer

 I am a great believer in the seventeenth century school of medicine ever since reading a common remedy for asthma. It involved placing a young frog in fine muslin and squeezing it down your throat. A fine thread allowed the luckless frog to be pulled up again. Confronted with a dangling piece of glistening slime—one that wriggled—and the exhortation to open my mouth, I don’t doubt for an instance my asthma would be instantly cured. And I would vehemently deny any trace of jaundice if offered ‘the green end of goose dunge steeped in beere.’ The savings for the National Health would be considerable. 

Monmouthshire and Herefordshire are a rich source of old folk remedies guaranteed to cure most illnesses. In the unlikely occurrence of suffering a bite from a mad dog, you would carefully inscribe the following words on a piece of cheese:

Fuary, gary, nary.

Gary,nary fuary

Nary, fuary, gary

And pop it into the mouth of said dog.

A Thomas Whittington of Walford suffered from an abscess in the arm, one that refused to heal. It was a gypsy woman who sorted him out. A fairly simple remedy demanding only that he wore the leg of a toad in a silk bag around his neck until the abscess healed. Whittington overcame what scruples he had, and on finding a toad, cut off its left leg, consoling himself with the thought that the unfortunate amphibian would still be able to hop, albeit with less aplomb. Lacking a silk bag, made do with a handkerchief. In three weeks, his abscess was cured. 

A more wholesome remedy was Good Friday Bread. The bread was kept and crumbled or powdered for use when the need arose. Good Friday Bread never went mouldy and cured a whole range of illnesses, it is said. 

Mistletoe tea cured fits, but only if it had been grown on a Hawthorne tree. A roasted mouse also cured fits though it had to be secreted in food, so the patient (mercifully) had no idea what he/she was eating. 

Hair loss due to illness? No problem. A cap of ivy leaves will do the trick.

Headaches in an age before Ibuprofen? Again, no problem. A noose from the neck of a hanged man will make the headache go away.

Even woodlice have their uses—sewn up alive in a small black bag and tied around a baby’s neck is guaranteed to ease teething.

These beliefs were common and many recorded in the C19th. So please, if any of you out there are suffering from thrush, toothache, whooping cough or warts, please let me know. I have the cure. And if you are wary of vaccinations so too was a man in rural Herefordshire who recently refused to have his child vaccinated in ‘the dog days’ for fear of the child going mad. 

Dog days. I’d heard the term before and vaguely associated it with summer, beyond that nothing. For those who follow the ancient ways: 

"dog days’ lie in-between July 3^rd and August 11^th when the dog star Sirius rises with the sun. It is a time when dogs are prone to go mad " (so have your cheese handy) and when "all liquids are poisonous, when bathing, swimming, or even drinking water can be dangerous, and a time when no sore or wound will heal properly.” 

Closing hospitals during those six weeks would not only save lives but save the NHS millions. You heard it here first. 

 

In Honour of Fred Bailey

A letter to the Telegraph alerted me to the existence of Fred Bailey. To quote:

“He was an astonishing chap. He was recruited at the end of World War I to go to Turkestan to find out what were the Bolsheviks up to and to keep a keen eye on Indian nationalists. Tashkent was in the hands of the Bolsheviks who then decided to capture Samarkand. Bailey advised the Emir to cut the Bolshevik lines of communication by sabotaging the railway. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks withdrew and put out a contract on Bailey. 15 assassins were sent to Samarkand. All 15 were captured and executed. The 16^th man the Bolsheviks sent out to kill Fred Bailey was Fred Bailey himself, masquerading as an Austrian POW (and recruited by the Cheka). He eventually escaped Samarkand disguised as a Turkman."

 

I love imperial history, warts and all. Thus inspired I set out to find more about this splendid fellow and got more than I bargained for—in short, two Frederick Baileys—an irresistible BOGOF offer. 

The original Frederick Marshman Bailey was born in 1882 and died in 1967. Those two dates conjure up so many images, the man himself one of the last great players in the ‘Great Game’ surviving long enough to witness ‘Flower Power’ —(Not something that would interest him, I imagine, though he does give his name to the Himalayan Blue Poppy)—and almost long enough to see men walking on the moon.

 

His life reads like a boy’s own adventure book, a lieutenant in the Royal Bengal Lancers, transferring later to the 32^ndSikh Pioneers, he taught himself Tibetan and became fluent. In between wars, Frederick Bailey become a noted explorer, spy, botanist and zoologist. 

There is a magic to old maps that google earth can't replicate

Bailey explored obscure regions of China and Tibet, rejoining the military when World War I broke out. There, he was wounded, once on the Western Front, and twice more in the Gallipoli campaign. 

The escapade that made his name (apart from the Blue Poppy) took place in 1918, when he was sent to Tashkent to spy on the Bolshevik intentions with regard to India. The British had reason to be suspicious. Indian nationalists were planning a joint Russo-German invasion of India via Afghanistan. And it was here that Fred Bailey survived 16 assassins—the last one being himself.

But what are the odds of their being a second and equally resourceful warrior called Frederick Bailey?

This Fred Bailey died in 2023 aged 99, the last of a generation that will soon be forgotten but no doubt be reinterpreted in Hollywood movies and with more photogenic actors.

 During World War II he was recruited to the SOE, and joined one of their three man teams parachuted into occupied France to support the Resistance. He was a fast and gifted radio operator and learnt to encode and decode messages at high speed; later he trained in weaponry, sabotage and unarmed combat.

As the war in Europe neared its end he volunteered for similar activity in the far East where fighting with Japan continued. In the jungles of Burma, Bailey’s team indulged in guerrilla warfare reporting on Japanese positions, ambushing, harassing. and  subsisting on a handful of rice a day. He returned to England in November 1946 and went back to his job with the Colne Valley Water Company. 

That last sentence holds me. The contrast between danger and glamour and the mundane. His heroism was not forgotten, at least not by the French. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and appointed to the Legion d’honneur by the French Government. 

The photos speak volumes

What is it with a name? Were the two  even related separated as they were by class? But then heroism is class in itself. Would it make things easier for MI6 and the CIA to restrict their recruitment to Fred Baileys; perhaps re-name their operatives: Fred Bailey. There could be movie franchise—'the name's Bailey. Fred Bailey.'

A Playful Landscape

 

The borderland separating England and Wales are steeped in legends, all of which I firmly believe. A case in point is the story of the predatory marsh. The geological background may or may not add weight to the story. Shobden Marsh, along with the rivers Lugg, Arrow, and Teme are largely a result of glaciation and the carving of the landscape as the icesheets retreated. For much of prehistory and up to the early middle ages the entire area was forest and marsh. This then is the background to the mysterious disappearance of ‘Old Pembridge.’

One night, the entire village was swallowed up by Shobden Marsh, and we know it is true because of a nameless fiddler possessing a pair of fine gloves: white and tied with red ribbons. 

There was a dance at Pembridge that night, and the fiddler from the neighbouring village of Eardisland provided the music. 

Eardisland

On reaching home, he realised he’d left behind his magnificent gloves and so, no doubt muttering under his breath, set off to retrieve them. He never did. Nor did he find ‘Old Pembridge.’ Where it stood was marshland glistening in moonlight.  

The marshes have since been drained, but neither  old Pembridge nor the fine white gloves adorned with red ribbons were ever found. Never mind, we have 'new' Pembridge.

There is apparently a well in the vicinity. It is said that if you drop a stone into it, you might hear it strike against the top of the old church steeple. I believe that too.

Close by is the magical village of Much Marcle whose only claim to fame is ‘The Wonder’ and the fact that the serial killer Fred West was born there. Three of his victims are buried nearby: his nanny Annie McFall and their unborn child (1967) and his first wife, Rena (1971)

But back to ‘The Wonder,’ equally traumatic but far less sordid or evil.

 

On the 17^th February, 1575 the earth moved, or strictly speaking, Marcle Hill moved. In a great roar it swallowed the chapel at Kinneston, destroying hedges, livestock, and trees. On the 19^th of February it reached its present position, where for the moment it seems content. 

The incident was recorded by the great antiquarian, William Camden (1551-1623) in his own unique and wonderful style:

‘Near the conflux of the Lugg and the Wye, eastwards, a hill which they called Marcley Hill in the year 1575 roused itself and, as it were, out of sleep, and for three days together, shoving its prodigious body forwards with a horrible roaring noise and overturning all that stood in its way, advanced itself, to the astonishment of all beholders . . .’ Some wonderful phrases there ‘roused itself’ ‘shoving its prodigious body’. One can only weep for the state of our language today. Nevertheless, I live in a playful landscape, and that is some compensation.