GUEST BLOGGER NEIL ARNOLD: Mr Davy's monster

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Neil Arnold to the CFZ bloggo. I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...

Being the CFZ Representative for Greater London (as well as Kent) is a great excuse to swing by the fashion boutiques and swanky bars of the capital. Of course, it also entails seeking new information of monsters and other strange creatures that the city has harboured.

One such tale, which I’d like to share with readers, is that pertaining to Mr Davy, a London naturalist who in 1878, worked at the London Aquarium. Imagine the horror on the faces of the locals, however, when Mr Davy paraded his new ‘pet’, a strange monstrosity which emitted horrible screeching noises. The ‘animal’, which Mr Davy casually took a stroll with, attracted the attention of many who described the abomination as reaching two-feet in length, and standing two-feet at the shoulder. At the time, it claimed that no anatomist could identify the beast, for its body was covered in wiry hairs, and although its head and tail resembled that of a boar, it seemed bereft of an abdomen, its back legs seemingly situated right behind its forelegs!

Such was the appeal, through its hideous features no doubt, of this creature, that crowds flocked to view it. Mr Davy seemed completely unaware that his pet had caused such a fuss, but when the crowds buzzed about him, he made a swift exit, running, with beast in tow, into the bowels of the London Underground.

The unintentional exhibit was described as a ‘living cube’ by those two felt fortunate to see it, although many were repelled by its ghastly form. Mr Davy decided that to elude pursuers he would have to travel on the Underground, in a secret compartment to avoid passengers fleeing for their lives, whilst others in their morbid curiosity would have surely flocked to the animal, causing great consternation on the railway tracks.

According to legend, Mr Davy told an acquaintance that he’d observed the creature whilst in the south of France. Local peasants owned the beast, which Mr Davy purchased from them, but because of the language differences he learned nothing about the creature. When a friend at the Aquarium looked at the beast, he could only surmise that it had been some weird dog-boar hybrid.

Mr Davy’s pet stopped traffic, and jammed streets. His own landlord did not find such a beast as riveting as the passers by, and cowered in his room, afraid of the unimaginable creature. On October 5th 1878, Land and Water magazine editor, Mr Frank Buckland, could only describe the animal as a “demon”, a satanic manifestation with the characteristics of a gargoyle. Naturalist Thomas Wilmington, wrote, in the following issue that the beast must be some kind of deformed hyena and that the idea of a hybrid was, “…utterly untenable”.

And there the legend ends, no-one knows what became of Mr Davy’s demon, or as to why peasants in southern France had obtained such a beast, although if we go back a century to 1764 to the former province of Gevaudan, in south-central France, then we are met by a legend more savage, but resembling a hyena, which slaughtered many innocent townsfolk.

Had Mr Davy simply purchased an unknown species and paraded it about town? Maybe his pet was nothing more than a freak of nature, sold to him by locals keen to earn a crust? Or was the strange tale simply a hoax, manifested by journals eager to please and intrigue their readers with fanciful frights and eerie anomalies?