In my continued quest to educate and entertain, I’m bringing you the story of the Hartlepool Monkey Incident. Hartlepool, for those who don’t know, is a mid-sized coastal town located in Northumbria, north-east England.
The basic story, which may or may not be true, goes like this:
During the Napoleonic wars, a French warship foundered near Hartlepool and was found by local fishermen. The only survivor of the wreck was a monkey dressed in French naval officers gear, something relatively common at the time.
The good people of Hartlepool, never having seen either a monkey or a Frenchman, presumed them to be one in the same. Some satirical cartoons of the time pictured the French as monkey-like creatures with tails and claws, so perhaps the locals could be forgiven for deciding that the monkey, in its uniform, must be a Frenchman. As Britain was at war with France, they held a drum-head trial of the monkey, accusing it of being a spy and promptly hung it by the neck until dead, dead, dead.
I say it may or may not be true, because there is little evidence one way or the other that the event occurred. There are also slightly different retellings out there. One version has the fishermen who found the wreck hanging the monkey because Admiralty law prevents salvage if there is even one survivor in a ship wreck.
There could even be a darker side to the tale – maybe they didn’t actually hang a ‘monkey’ but a small boy or ‘powder-monkey’. Small boys were employed on warships of this time to prime the canons with gunpowder and were known as ‘powder-monkeys’.
Originally, being called a Monkey hanger was considered an insult. Recently though, the Hartlepudlians have leaned into the Monkey Hanging thing. Now, most of the local sports teams have some sort of reference to either the Monkey, commonly known as H’Angus, or the hanging itself.
In fact, the man who wore the H’Angus costume for Hartlepool United, Stuart Drummond, stood for the post of mayor in 2002 as H’Angus the monkey, and campaigned on a platform which included free bananas for schoolchildren. To widespread surprise, he won, getting 7,400 votes with a 52% share of the vote and a turnout of 30%. He was re-elected by a landslide in 2005, receiving 16,912 votes on a turnout of 51% – 10,000 votes more than his nearest rival, the Labour Party candidate.