No Such Thing As A Fish - 338: No Such Thing As Carthaginian YouTube

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

Dan, James, Andy and Jenny Ryan discuss criminal times, baffling crimes and spurious rhymes. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, James here. Now before we start this week's show, just a couple of bits of business. First of all, this episode was recorded while Anna was still away, and so her place has been taken by one of my oldest friends, the absolute genius that is Jenny Ryan. Now if you're a fan of quiz shows, you would know her as the vixen of the chase. If you're a fan of singing talent shows, you might remember her from Celebrity X Factor last year where she got to the final. If you're a fan of podcasts, which I know you are, you might know her from Fingers on Buzzers, the brilliant quiz-based podcast that Jenny does with comedian Lucy Porter. And actually, if you go into the back catalogue of Fingers on Buzzers, you might find an old episode with myself

and Anna Tyshinsky on, if you are missing her so much that you really need to hear her dulcet tones. Okay, on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and special guest Jenny Ryan. And once again, we have gathered round our microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Jenny. Here we go, trigger warning for grossness. One theory of the origin of the nursery rhyme,

Pussycat, Pussycat, is that it's a reference to Queen Anne's poor personal hygiene and an accumulation of grime that once fell out of her skirt during a service at St Paul's Cathedral. Wow, okay. Where to start with that one? Okay, well, let's start with the actual nursery rhyme, because not everyone might know it, right? So how's it go? Andy, why don't you regale us with that? Oh, it's Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been? I've been up to London to look at the Queen, followed by loads more lines. Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you do there? I've chased a little mouse under her chair. Oh, that's actually the important bit now, I think. That is the important bit, yeah. So it's thought that little mouse is a mouse-shaped deposit of

all sorts of things that might accumulate in a time when nobody really had a bath or washed their neathers. So supposedly, this particular lump was known as a suttikin, although that may be a more modern name for them, because they resembled little mice and people would have to go and sweep them up off the streets. Wait, hang on. Are you saying that the TV series Suttie and Sweep has anything to do with this? No. Okay, great. Well, my childhood is intact. I will, I'll link them up somehow, right? So the word suttikins does exist. It was, it comes from the Dutch. It was kind of a joke about Dutch women, supposedly, they would put heaters up their dresses to keep warm. And some people thought that by doing so, they were breeding a small

animal up there and that the animal would kind of drop out and they would find this thing. And the word came from the word sutt is similar to the word sutt, as in the stuff you get in of chimney. And of course, Suttie and Sweep is a pun on the fact that chimney sweeps would also find sutt. So they are linked in a way, Andy, if that's what you mean. Oh, great. Okay, no, my childhood is ruined. Yeah, brilliant. What kind of person was running so low on inspiration for nursery rhymes that when they saw a mess shaped mouse fall out of the Queens, that they thought this is perfect for kids? Well, I think what we should say is the most explanations for nursery rhymes are speculative at best. And there was a couple called Iona and Peter Opie, who wrote

the Oxford Dictionary of nursery rhymes. And they basically came to the conclusion that all of these things that people think probably not true. And also that they might just be kind of nice words that kind of sound like a good poem, and there might not be any reasoning behind them all. So whether that's true or whether it's not, I don't know. But the other thing is that Queen Anne had quite a lot of enemies, right? So it's possible that if this is true, this origin, that it was people trying to say bad things about her and you know, oh yeah, it was basically gossip, wasn't it? The nursery rhymes you've had a way of spreading anything is to make it into a little folk song and get it spreading around the streets of London.

Weirdly, this is not the only nursery rhyme that Queen Anne is supposedly involved with. Really? Yeah, there's another one. Okay, so do you remember the Warming Pan baby? No. So Anne, when she wasn't Queen yet, she was in line to the throne and so was her older sister, Mary. And their dad was James II, who was King. And in 1688, James II had a son, a baby boy, with his new wife, which displaced Mary and Anne from the line of succession. So they were kind of lowered down the rung now. And Anne was furious about this. She refused to attend the birth. And there was a rumour spread that the baby had not been born alive. It had been a miscarriage. And actually, a live baby had been smuggled into the bedroom in a Warming Pan,

which were these big sort of brass pans that you would put hot coals into warm up the bed. Right, that's the story. It's also untrue. But we might get the nursery rhyme, rocker by baby, from that child. Really? Yeah. And what's the explanation behind it? It's incredibly furious. Okay. That thing about how you thought that someone might swap the baby, isn't that why, and I'm going to get this wrong, but isn't the home secretary supposed to be at every birth? Yes, every royal birth, not every birth. It might not be the home secretary. No, it is. It is. It is the home secretary, yeah. Who's the current home secretary? Pretty Patel. Oh, man. Imagine if she had to go around to every single birth in the country.

But she would be saying, get back in there. Get back in there. Don't want you. Don't want you. Go on. Back up, you go. I love that idea that you would sort of shame people in history via children telling rhymes. We don't do that so much these days. That would be an incredible satirical kids programme where it's just us shaming politicians and so on with new songs that we put out. There was a nursery rhyme when I was a kid, which was called Maggie Thatcher's Sticker in the Bin. So in a way, it still does continue that there will be. They'll probably sing Boris Johnson's Sticker in the Bin now. It'll be any Prime Minister. Maggie Thatcher. Maggie Thatcher's Sticker in the Bin. Put the lid on, sell her, tape her in. That's it. And I

remember when she actually resigned as Prime Minister, they came in and told us in the classroom, and we all sang it. Really? Wow. We think we're about eight. We had also Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher, kind of a little rhyme about that, didn't we? Yeah. Hey, just very quickly for international listeners, and I included myself slightly in this because I'm not O'Faye with the British monarchy's history, but Queen Anne was a queen from her birthday, it was 1665 to 1714. And there's not really been much about her. She's not one of the more popular people for pop culture, except for the fact that she had the movie The Favourite, which was a fairly recent one, which Olivia Coleman won the Oscar for the portrayal of

her. But outside of that, she kind of slips through the cracks a bit in terms of people's knowledge about her. And the only stuff that really comes through is all this quite shaming sort of information about her people attacking her for her looks and her hygiene and all the accounts of her body size and so on. It was claimed that when she passed away, 14 men had to carry her for her burial. And I don't know if this stuff is true. I don't know if this is part of the shaming of her, but that's kind of what we know about it. It's 100% true that she did have health problems and that she was definitely a large lady. She had a lot of gout. She really struggled with that. But there was definitely also a lot of... She had a lot of enemies. For instance, this thing

at St. Paul's Cathedral, it was a Thanksgiving ceremony after the war. They just finished a war with either France or Spain or something like that. Spanish succession, wasn't it? Spanish succession. Yeah, I trust you to know that, Jen. I'll probably just throw out some half-remembered facts and then you can just fill in the gaps today, maybe. But they built stands along the side of the strand and they had 4,000 children singing patriotic songs while they walked down to St. Paul's Cathedral. But a lot of people weren't really happy with it because they thought that Queen Anne was secretly trying to get the Jacobites back onto the English throne and that she was kind of slightly sympathetic to the Catholics. And so, I mean, it was a real kind of time where the monarchy was losing a lot

of its power and Parliament was kind of coming in. I think that's why we don't hear much about her. It got called the age of party. Wow, that sounds cool. Well, yeah, it was, unfortunately, it was the age of the Whigs and the Tories as opposed to everyone having a good time. I was thinking it was Gatsby style. Poor time travellers who read that said, let's go there. Everybody stank and there were no parties. Nursery rhymes. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. There always seems to be, James has mentioned there's a lot of debunked stories about the origins of nursery rhymes. And I'm sure that some of them have been retconned into the nursery rhymes themselves. I mean, there's the Grand Old Duke of York is clearly about a failed military campaign, but there is about a dozen different

ideas of who it's talking about. Who's the current Duke of York? Oh, I don't remember. Anyway, Pop Goes the Weasel. I really like that one. Pop Goes the Weasel. That one actually is about Prince Andrew. Yeah. No one really knows what it means, what Pop Goes the Weasel is. There's a lot of copy rhyming slang in there though and references to the city road and the eagle on the city road, which is actually still there, the pop. It is and it has like a side on the side of the building, doesn't it, with the nursery rhyme on it. But yeah, so Weasel could be your Weasel and Stoat, your throat. So it's like, get it down your Weasel, mate, when you give someone a pint of beer. Get it down your Weasel. Or your Weasel could be a coat. So there's an idea that it's

about putting your coat into the pawn shop to pay off all your debts. And anytime a new expense comes in, Pop Goes the Weasel, there goes your coat again. So yeah, it's a really good cockney knees up. But what I really like about it is in the 1850s, it was like a dance craze, Pop Goes the Weasel. So if you were a time traveler and you wanted to find a real good party, then you want to go to 1850s London because you're going to know the dance. You're going to absolutely smash it. You can go into your music hall and you just dance around. And then at the end of it, everyone shouts out Pop Goes the Weasel. And that's kind of the big sort of ending of every verse. And it was absolutely massive. The baby shark of its day. So adults are doing this. Adults are doing it. Yeah,

it was, there was an advertisement in the Bath Chronicle in 1853 that offered instruction to the highly fashionable dance of Pop Goes the Weasel. So people would, you could pay people to teach you how to do the Pop Goes the Weasel dance. And even then no one really knew what it meant. It was just like a nonsense phrase, really. But yeah, it's just, well, it's like us loving the Macarena. I don't know what the hell that means. But it's, you know, a dancer. I haven't dedicated myself to understanding the lyrics. I think it's about a lady called Macarena. It's about a lady whose husband has gone away and she's courting all the other local boys because a husband or a boyfriend isn't there anymore. 500 years from now, people will be saying,

actually, the Macarena is about. Actually, it's about Brexit. I love, do you guys remember the one that goes, do your ears hang low? Do they were able to and throw that kids song? We said, can you tie them in a bow? I think. Yeah, can you tie them in a bow? And actually, I think it was, do your boobs hang low? Do your ears hang low? Well, I think it's do your balls hang low. Do your balls and do your boobs are the sort of the rude versions of it. But the assumption is, is that it was the kids song, do your ears hang low? And then when you got sort of rude kids at school going, have you heard this version? You would sing it. Anyway, it turns out that the original versions were do your balls hang low

and do your boobs hang low. And then it got sort of turned into a more presentable for kids. Do your ears hang low? So it was sung in wartime during World War One on the Western front. They would be singing it in the trenches. Do your balls hang low? It's just the sailor's hornpipe. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Do your balls hang low? Can you swing them to and fro? Can you tie them in a knock? Can you tie them in a bow? Can you tuck them to the ceiling with that free and easy feeling? Anyway, it goes. That's amazing. It's true. I've never heard that version. I don't think. That's the only one. I learned that one as a child. Yeah.

These things just stay with you, don't they? Along with, you know, Margaret Thatcher, she's our hero. We went to very different schools. Gave everyone in the classroom a black armband when she resigned. Have you heard of telltale tit? This is a really short one. Telltale tit, your tongue shall be slit and all the dogs in the town shall have a little bit. Yeah. So I'd never heard that before. It's very common in Bolton, I can say. Yeah. Oh, the dogs in Bolton will have a little bit.

But I just think that's amazing. It's because it's basically a children's equivalent of saying snitches get stitches. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. Your tongue will split and all the little doggies will have a little bit. That's what you used to say. It's terrifying. Do you guys know Pissabed? No. Guys, Pissabed, Pissabed, Barley, but your bum is so heavy, you can't get up.

And this was published in the very first nursery rhyme song book that was printed in Britain in 1744. It's the first time that Ba Ba Blacksheep was ever printed in a nursery rhyme book. So it was called Tommy Thumb's Pretty Songbook. And we thought there was only one copy that was left, which was held, I think, in the British Library. But one went up for auction a few years ago. So there might be a couple more out there. But it had 40 nursery rhymes in it. And all the classics, Ba Ba Blacksheep, Hickory Dickory Dock, London Bridge is Falling Down, Mary Mary's Quite Contrary, Sing a Song of Sixpence, and then Pissabed. Tommy Thumb's Pretty Songbook. They were actually all about Pretty Patel, weren't they?

That was... That's where that name came from. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1862, there was a special cravat invented to stop people strangling you in the street. So if I went to strangle you, Andy, with this, my hands go for your neck. Is it that the cravat is so full of folds and so on, I can never actually find your neck? How's it work? It's a real pencil neck, yeah. No, it's got spikes on the inside. So you could go for the neck, but you get a pretty naughty... On the inside? Oh, sorry. The spikes are on the outside. All right, OK. Concealed by a layer of cloth. Don't put that on the wrong way round.

No, you're right. You're right. You're right. Sorry, they're on the outside, but they're cleverly concealed by the ruffles at the front of the cravat. And so, Dan, as soon as you probably try and put your thumbs around my windpipe, nice try, mate. You're going to get a spiky thumb. I also read that some of them had razor blades sewn into the folds as well. Yeah, pretty intense items of clothing, and these were designed to fight the menace of grottings, because there was a panic. In fact, there were two panics in the mid-19th century about grottings, one in 1856, and then it sort of flared up again in 1862. And there was this massive panic about actually a relatively small crime wave of people being mugged,

and the method of mugging was someone would grab someone around the throat, and then their accomplice would rob them. Yeah, I should just say, a grotting, to me, is like you get some cheese wire or something in a movie. They would get some wire and they would put it around your throat, but this was actually more like putting someone in a sleeper hold and like a wrestling move, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it could definitely, it could hurt you very badly. It could absolutely. It could kill you as well. I don't think very many people at all were actually killed by this, but it led to a change in the law. The parliament passed the 1863 Garotters Act, and yeah, this was a big panic. There is an argument that not only did not

many people die of this, no people died of it, and it was completely made up. There is, yeah. Absolutely. So there's an argument that it was completely made up by newspapers. So there was an MP who got mugged, he was called Hugh Pilkington, and he had his pocket watch stolen, and they said that he was garotted when they stole his watch, but actually, it seems like he wasn't really. And then basically, newspapers started calling any minor incident, they said, oh, this was a garotting. And then some of the magistrates would say that it was a garotting, even though it wasn't, because they knew that the person would get more time or a stronger punishment for it. And then after the 1863 Act, there was no more garottings. But the argument

among historians, a lot of them, is that there were never any in the first place. It's very much what's it in The Simpsons, where it's like this rock scares away tigers or whatever it is. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there were descriptions of how it works. So it would be a three-person gang, which consisted of a front stall, a back stall, and the nasty man. Okay, so. Attack yourself. I think the front stall distracts you. He stops you and says, oh, excuse me at the time. And then the back stall is the lookout, who's making sure there are no police coming along. And the nasty man is the one who actually does the garotting. Yeah, I could have worked that out. Oh, okay.

There was another thing you could buy in 1858, a guy called Henry Boll invented a pistol one on your back, which would discharge into a criminal's crotch. I suppose that would go for the backman, would it? Yeah, that would be to take the back stall. Yeah. Well, no, the grotto is going around you with the sinkhole, right? Oh, good point. So that's for the nasty man. Yeah, that's nasty, man. Wow. I think I can't believe this was a real thing. Did that work? Did anyone? I'm not sure any of this stuff was. No, this is a real thing. It was real. Sorry. It was real, but I don't think everyone was wearing them, you know, it was kind of. Wow. Imagine that you're going out just to the local pub, you're wearing spikes around your neck, you've got a pistol

facing backwards. I mean, Jesus, what a look. This gun sounds amazing because it looks just like a little belt pack, doesn't it? And you, but the thing is, obviously you had guns weren't that advanced yet. So apparently you had to reach back to cock the hammer of the gun, and then you had to kind of pull a ripcord at your waistline, which would actually fire the gun and fire a lead ball into your attackers. It would be recoil, like normally recoil goes in one direction, but if it's firing there, you would just be kind of thrusting your crotch forward, wouldn't you? Like whenever you fired this gun. Yeah, you would get blasted into the front stall. So you're a kind of human cannonball. The nasty man's nowhere to be seen.

It's so amazing. The Henry Ball Belt Pistol. I love it. Oh, you could just hire some bodyguards to walk you to and from the pub, like the Bayswater Brothers who advertised. The Bayswater Brothers whose height is respected with six feet four inches and six feet 11, and the United Breadth of Whose Shoulders extends to as much as three yards, one foot, five inches. Give respectfully notice to the gentry and public of Paddington, Kensington, Stoke Newington, Chelsea, Eaton Square and Sheppard's Bush, that they will be most happy upon all social and Chovier expeditions to escort elderly or nervous persons in the streets after dark. Wow, they sound great. So they they'd served several months in the police force,

and they would they would go through any neighbourhood, even the worst grotting districts well known. Yeah, but they don't go south of the river, do they? Typical. It's just like cabbies all over again. No, grotting south of the river. Wow. Some more kind of panics. Oh, yeah, because I'm saying I'm saying that this grotting wasn't really a thing. It might have been a thing, but that's the kind of angle. There's definitely a way smaller thing than the 1863 Grotters Act would suggest. In 1954, a load of people in Seattle were really worried because there were loads of holes in the windscreens and everyone was going out looking at their car and they found little holes and they didn't know what had happened. They thought it was vandals. They thought it might have

been fallout from nuclear tests that were happening, to be honest, not that close to Seattle, but they thought maybe it was that. And then a load of scientists were brought in and they looked at what had happened and it turned out that these pits were there all along, but it was just happened that in that year, 1954, someone noticed it and then everyone else went, oh my god, I've got that as well. Oh my god, I've got that as well. That's very funny. That's so weird. Yeah, in 1788, you have the London Monster, who was a guy who went around basically stabbing ladies in the skirt area, ripping their clothes. Sometimes you'd be presenting them with flowers and there'd be something sharp concealed within them. Oh no. Yeah, it was a disgrace, but it probably didn't

happen. Oh, okay, wrong question. There were up to 50 women reported to the police that they've been attacked and it was like approving that some of these women had inflicted winds themselves, you know, they were just scratched or they just ripped the dress, but somebody did get convicted, a woman was attacked in the January, I think of 1790 and she saw a guy in the park six months later, got a boyfriend to follow him home. It was this ex-ballet dancer who now made artificial flowers, this Welsh guy, who got up before the beak and they found out that the worst offence they could charge him with was actually damaging clothes. Apparently they're damaging clothes under the law at the time because they were expensive foreign

clothes, came with a harsher penalty than actually injuring these women attempting murder and stabbing. So eventually this guy got six years, but mysteriously there were no attacks after that, even though he probably wasn't the attacker. But during a two-year period, women started wearing copper pans under their petticoats as a form of self-defence against the London monster. So there is a James Gilray engraving of the monster attacking a woman in a pulsa piscar and there's just a pan there, so he's disappointed. Yeah, well you would be. Did you say this was 1788 that this was happening? 1788 it started, yeah, to 1790. I didn't think there were people making artificial flowers in the 1780s.

Yeah, they'd be made of silk, I would guess, rather than I just sort of assumed that they were a thing from the 70s onwards, like kind of like plastic or I can't believe that. Is that what you got out of that story, Andy? In the earliest, earliest days of this podcast, I mentioned a fact about the precursor to the London monster, which was a man who used to go around London and he would slap women on the bum and then he'd run off and as he ran off he would yell, Spanko! I think he was called whipping Tom or something like that. Can I just say with that, I think in that case, if you had a copper pan in your petticoats,

then it would have the opposite effect because it would make a really nice resonant sound if you spanked someone and they had like a copper pot there, wouldn't it? That's true. Like playing the timpani. That would be like the J. Arthur rank symbol at the beginning of films, wouldn't it? It's the Spanko running on, hitting a petticoat and running off. So was he caught? Dan, was he caught? Do we know? Do we know who the real Spanko was? Oh, Spanko? No, I don't know anything. That's an old memory as Jenny was talking about the London monster. He was a precursor, but yeah, amazing character, the London monster,

and huge panic off the back of that. Oh yeah, if James Gilray is doing engravings of you, then you know you've made it. Yeah. I don't know James Gilray. Was he Mr. Engraver back then? Oh, he was Mr. You know, your political cartoons. Those are all, those are all him. You know, he's the Steve Bell of his day. I didn't know who was either, but I thought by keeping quiet, people would assume that I did. You've definitely, definitely 100% seen his work. Okay. Yeah.

There are all the really big complicated drawings where people have to be labelled quite precisely. So, you know, there's a brilliant engraving. I'm just making this up now, but you know, there'll be a monkey in a hot air balloon, but the monkey has to be labelled Britain's response to the air train. And the balloon is labelled European integration after the 1763 act of, like, oh, I, I don't get this. But back in the day, people have one glanced at it like, yeah, I've got it. Brilliant. Marius. Yeah.

The monster genius. Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that for 24 years, any ship travelling between Wellington and Nelson in New Zealand would be guided through the most dangerous section by a dolphin called Pelerus Jack. I should have done that in a pirate voice, shouldn't I? Would be guided through the most dangerous section by a dolphin called Pelerus Jack. Was that better? No. I couldn't, I couldn't tell the difference.

So, James, what on earth is this? This is a fact. Okay. Perhaps. So, at the north end of New Zealand, South Island, there's a little stretch of water. It's really, really perilous. It's called the French Pass. And there are loads of really bad currents and high waves, and it could be really difficult to get through. And at the turn of the 20th century, any boat that was going through there

would always have this dolphin alongside it. Now, whether the dolphin was deliberately helping the humans across, or whether it was just being a dolphin and kind of swimming in the wake of a boat like dolphins often do, we don't know. Well, we do know, because it didn't even know it was a dolphin. It was just a go. But what is true? But it was there. It was there, right? It was there, and people believed that that's what was happening. So, people were writing at the time, there's articles from 1905, 1906, where people said they were on this boat and the dolphin was acting as a pilot for the ships, and that it would take them deliberately into the areas where

the water was deeper, because it knew there would be less chance of the boat being smashed on the rocks. And then, some people didn't like the dolphin being there, and some people shot at it. On one particular time, when someone shot this dolphin, there was a law that came up that said you are specifically not allowed to shoot this particular dolphin in New Zealand. And it was the first sea creature to be protected by law anywhere in the world. I mean, between this and the 1863 Garotta's Act, it does feel like legislators had a lot more time on their hands back in the day. But so, the story goes that the boat, the ship that shot at Jack was called the SS Penguin, and the story goes that he disappeared and he came back later,

but five years later, the SS Penguin struck rocks and sank, and 75 passengers perished. As the story goes, it's because Jack, when he saw the SS Penguin coming, would ignore it. He knew that that was the boat that shot him, and so, maybe without his help, that's what led to it being slammed into the rocks. It's a great story. I love it. Pellaris is a really weird name, because I thought when you said that the French past, this strait of water was very perilous. I thought, oh, maybe it's a burden of that. I don't think it is. It's a ship's instrument or something? There was a ship called the HMS Perylis, and there's a Pellaris, sorry, and it kind of went

around that area of New Zealand and Australia, so there's a Pellaris island as well, and a few different things named after Pellaris, which was this discovery ship. Okay. But Pellaris was also the name of Hannibal's pilot, so that may be where it comes from. Hannibal. Hannibal Lecter. Yeah, Hannibal Lecter needed a pilot to take him out to eat. You've got to have a private pilot. You're a busy man. These livers aren't going to cook themselves.

Do you mean Hannibal as in the? Hannibal as the elephant dude. The elephant dude. Carthaginian general. Elephant dude. Now sounds like we're talking about the elephant man, who was a different person to Hannibal. That elephant dude would definitely be the name of Hannibal's YouTube channel, wouldn't he? We're going to try and take some elephants and invade Rome next week. It's going to be

completely crazy. Hit like and subscribe to see if it works. But yeah, there was when I sent this fact round, Andy, you found an article that said that perhaps it wasn't real and that the fact that the people thought that Dolphin was guiding people was invented quite a few years later. But I found an article from April 1905 where there was a guy called Mr. Generous Hayes who said that. No, not. Definitely not made up. What date in April, James?

It was the 29th of April, but this story had come all the way from Australia, so it could definitely take 28 days to get to the central Somerset Gazette, which is where I read it. But he said that Jack acts as a most effective pilot, escorting all kinds of vessels in and out of the French Pass. Yeah, and he was sort of globally famous. There's stories of Mark Twain specifically going on that route to see him. And another English author called Frank T. Bullen as well. Both had written about it. So yeah, I think the contentious thing is, was he piloting them or was he just having fun? But there's photos and so on.

I must say, every time I read that, I read that in a few places and I always said, well-known figures such as Mark Twain and English author Frank T. Bullen. And I always thought, one of those I have heard of for sure. I saw, when I saw New Zealand, I obviously got in touch with my friend who's an expat kiwi, Amy, and I messaged her and I said, have you heard of Pellarist Jack? And she went, Oh my God, I love him. He's a celebrity dolphin in New Zealand. And I was like, a celebrity dolphin. And there's more than one celebrity dolphin in New Zealand. It's a thing. And they all have statues. So there's Oppo who was famous in New Zealand during

the summer of 1955 to 56, because he played with children. And very soon after, it becomes stranded and died. So his name, his full name was Opponi Jack. Oppononi Jack, a name that's Pellarist Jack himself because he's the archetype of celebrity dolphins in New Zealand, obviously. And then Mokko came round in 2006 to do a similar kind of thing. Neither of them was that useful. They weren't guiding. They were just kind of into humans. So became quite famous. Oh no. Mokko was a guide on one famous occasion because, again, another kiwi dolphin. In 2008, there were two pygmy sperm whales who were trapped. I think they were trapped between the beach and a sand bank that was built up. They didn't know

what to do. And the authorities were saying, well, should we kill them? Because otherwise, they can really suffer and they might die. And Mokko the dolphin led them out through a narrow channel at the end of the sand bank that they were in. So there was a bit of water that was just deep enough to get these whales through. So obviously it became a huge celebrity. And then it all went to his head. And he started sexually assaulting swimmers. And I know it is, you know, celebrity excess. He started making what was called amorous advances to women in the water. And also just being a bit of a thug, he started tipping over water skiers. And I can't believe this, but apparently stealing surfers surfboards.

Now, I don't know. I can't envisage how a dolphin does that. Why do you need to? You're already quite efficient in the water. I mean, for a dolphin, a surfboard might be like a hoverboard for a human. Like he might, if, can you imagine if you're a dolphin and one of your mates comes along and he's just kind of lying on a surfboard. That guy is cool. Okay. So James is trying to justify Mokko's crime wave. You Moko apologist. But he still has a statue though. They are upcoming statues. Yeah. Got to commemorate your local celebrity dolphin. That didn't get pulled down in the whole. You might be reevaluating.

Yeah. You know who also seems to be into New Zealand dolphins is the Scottish. So it is, it's just a very curious thing, but perilous, perilous Jack was turned into a song and a dance in Scotland. And so there's, there's a song that goes, and I don't know the music to it, but a famous fish, there used to be called Pellerous Jack. He'd always swim far out to sea when a ship came back and this got turned into a dance, which you could do. And there's a, there's a move called the dolphin hay, which I guess is a bit like the pop goes the weasel. It's sort of like a, it's a, it's a dolphin move. So that was turned into a dance and there's a full dance routine about Pellerous Jack, but also Oppo, who we were talking about in 1994 was also

turned into us into a Scottish dance as well. Yeah. So you can, if you go to Scotland, likely there are people who know two New Zealand dolphin dances. Well, Dan, I've got some ends with the Scottish country dancing community. Oh yeah. And I can confirm there's no shortage of things they've named dances after. There are so many hundreds of dances. Really? And they just going through Wikipedia on random pages and going, okay, well, I'm going to do this after George Washington High School in Milwaukee. It is amazing the number of things they have done so now after. I think it must be an extension of the nursery rhyme thing. So Scottish country dancing has taken up the mantle. Have you ever done any Scottish country dancing? What, me? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

I've done a bit. Yeah. It's, it's great. It's really, really fun. Do you know the dolphin hay? I don't know the dolphin hay. No. I'm not off the top of your head. There are thousands of dances done. It's not entry level anyway. No, absolutely not. That's a dashing white sergeant is the first thing you learn. I think you have to be pretty, you have to be balls deep before you learn the dolphin hay off by heart. Did you, did you do country dancing at school? No, I didn't. Jenny, did you? I remember a couple of sessions of it when they didn't have a PE teacher. It was raining. And so a teacher who happens to know some country dancing. Oh, okay. So you didn't have a dance instructor who'd been kept in a cupboard for years until the PE teacher fell

ill. Because when I was at primary school, so Jenny and I went to the same secondary school, but when I was at primary school, we did country dancing every week. Was it English country dancing you were doing? It's like Morris dancing, I guess. It's like all I remember is that you had to doatsy dough your partner. Yeah, that's all I remember. Yeah. All I remember is doatsy dough. There is one dance that's an English country dance. And that's English country dancing is a bit rarer for whatever reason. There are still loads of dances, but they just don't get done so much because they're all from, you know, Jane Austen's time. But there's one which is called Mr. Beveridge's maggot is my favorite name of a dance. And what happens at the end of that?

I don't know. I don't know if this was named after an actual maggot that was like a celebrity maggot in British theater, which saved a carriage from crashing or whatever. I don't know what to go from there. Dolphins? Let's talk about dolphins. Yeah. Yes. One thing that dolphins do, which I didn't know, is that they can wear gloves over their noses. Okay. This is amazing. Andy, yeah. Is this a real glove over a nose or is this an analogy for a glove over a nose? Because Sarah Pascoe called us out last week if you remember about this ladybird bought a hat. Oh, no. It's never an actual hat. Oh, my God. I've fallen right into the Pascoe ladybird hat trap because, no, it's not a glove. It's

not a glove. Obviously, it's not a glove. What is it? So, you know, marine sponges, they're animals technically, aren't they? The sponges are very simple animals. They kind of pick up these sponges and they press them onto the end of their snouts. And then when they're foraging, they're using their snout and they are probing for prey, sometimes under the surface of the sea, but there can be sharp things there. And so these sponges on their noses act as a kind of bit of protective equipment, if you like, to stop them hurting themselves when they're jamming around there. And they particularly pick conical sponges because they can jam them more easily onto the end of their noses. They're nice.

Yeah. I think glove is acceptable for that because that's basically their hand and they're putting something over their hands so they can go rippling about in things. So, yeah. I'll accept it. I'm not going to Pascoe you on this. I don't know. If James hadn't called Andy out just then, I would be at parties going, you know, they wear marigolds on their face. So, dolphins can talk to each other on the telephone. Jesus Christ. Okay. I think we all want to Pascoe you on this one. Well, there was an aquarium in Hawaii where they had the mother in a separate tank to a two-year-old calf dolphin and they organized an audio link between the two tanks and got them chatting

to each other. And the calls and responses were in line with the kind of calls and responses you would hear in the wild, even though they couldn't see each other. And they don't know what they said. We've spoken about the dolphin dictionary that they're working on at the moment, scientists, but we do know that they were call and responses that were happening. And it's sort of, they think the conversation was like, hey, what's your name? Oh, my name's this. Oh, great. There's lots of fish here. Oh, that's good to know. Yeah. So, they can chat over the phone. Okay. Actually, again, sounded unreasonable, but I think that's completely legit. They can chat over the phone. They just, they can't dial and they can't, you know. They'd have to take the

glove off to dial, obviously. So, also dolphins can attack enemies of the Soviet Union. Because that's the thing, isn't it? Dolphins, they are trained in various armies. The Americans have done it and the Soviets did it. Their first use of dolphins by the Navy was in 1970 in Vietnam, where they were put on guard duty for the Americans. Was that river dolphins or was it seagoing dolphins? That's a really good point. I don't know about that. It's actually the least relevant part of the most amazing fact I've ever heard, obviously. I mean, dolphins fought in Nam is a more interesting background whether they were river or ocean dolphins. But you do get river dolphins in Vietnam. What do you do?

I suspect there'd be river dolphins there because it was, you know, it's the Mekong Delta and all that. So, I'm guessing there would be guarding certain entry and exit points. Fingers, Andy. You always ask the questions that the people at home are all thinking. And the Soviet Union, they use their dolphin guards. They would carry a titanium clump on their nose, which was about the size of a ping-pong ball, and they would attach it to a diver that they found. And the little kind of thing would report back and tell you where that person is, so you'd be able to find them. And if they couldn't find them, eventually, the ping-pong ball thing would inject a high-pressure charge of CO2 into the diver's body. Oh, so this is an enemy diver,

is it? Well, like a US diver or whatever. That's the idea, yeah. To tag them, and they're God. And again, I don't know exactly what species of dolphin it was. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show. That is my fact. My fact this week is that the Arthakonin Doyle estate is currently suing Netflix for showing Sherlock Holmes as having feelings and respecting women. So this is really interesting. So Netflix is making a movie called Enola Holmes, and it is the story of the teenage sister of Sherlock Holmes, and Sherlock Holmes appears as a character in it. And in the show, they show him as having sort of not sociopath qualities that we know Sherlock to have, but to be warmer and gentler.

And the Conan Doyle estate is claiming they are unable to represent him like that, because yes, even though Sherlock does have those feelings, he did eventually sort of respect women and become a nicer character. He only became that in the last 10 stories that were written by Conan Doyle, and it just so happens that those 10 stories are the only stories that are still in copyright and belong to the Conan Doyle estate. So anyone who wants to use the ad of copyright has to use the more mean, misogynistic Holmes, and they're fine. But if you want to show him being a nice guy, you're going to be sued. Wow. There's a few other things that you're not allowed to, or if you do show Sherlock having these characteristics, then you have to pay them, pay the family. So if you

show Holmes and Watson having a genuine friendship, that's in copyright. If you show his love of nature, that is. And if you ever show him liking dogs, that's in copyright. So if you ever make it, I'm just going to say this to everyone out there, if you're making your own version of Sherlock Holmes, make sure that he doesn't like dogs whenever you do. Yeah. I guess the hand of the basketballs is out of copyright, in which he doesn't like dogs. No, that's quite right. And the thing is, if you are going to make something where he does like dogs and respects women, all you need to do actually is wait two or three more years, because that is we're in the final years of them owning this copyright. I think that's why they're trying to rake in as much money

as possible, because they're about to lose it entirely. But these stories obviously have, you know, he wrote them over a lifetime. So there's a bit of spread on when the copyright ends. And the final batch, these final 10 were written after he returned from World War One, and he lost his brother in the war, he lost his eldest son, and he came back and he was a different man. And he thought, I want to reflect that in Sherlock. And so that's why there was this sudden change in the attitude of Sherlock. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I got deep into the legalese of all this, because, you know, that's my background. So there's actually an in-fight between the Conan Doyle estate limited and Arthur Conan Doyle's literary estates, both of whom claim to

have the copyright of those stories. And it's actually the Conan Doyle estate limited is the litigious one of those two. And so they are described by the literary estate as copyright trolls, which is a whole new tale. So tracing it back, the way that the story is told by the literary estate is that all the rights were sold after Conan Doyle's death because he's the three inheriting children. So it's two daughters and the widow of his son had, they couldn't agree on anything. So they all sold to the widow. And from then on, she, you know, she went bankrupt and the rights were acquired by someone else who's acquired by someone else. And so that they traced that route back in 2000-ish, when EU copyright law started to indicate that there wasn't much money left

to be squeezed out in Europe of the literary copyright. That's when Conan Doyle estate limited, which is some descendants of Conan Doyle himself decided to put the squeeze on some of the studios who are interested in his work. So they basically, they went and threatened Warner Brothers when they made the Robert Downey Jr. versions. And because, you know, in those films, you know, he's got a romance with Irene Adler. There's all that sort of stuff that would come under these sort of stipulations. And the... I think it would be fair to threaten those filmmakers, actually, of the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes. The people you want to threaten are the people who made Holmes and Watson. What? Oh, sorry. This is Dan's favourite film, The Will Seryl or Sherlock Holmes. It's so good.

Yeah, but nowhere in Holmes is he bloody hilarious. I think. There you go. So that's actually more of a divergence from the original text. And I'm guessing that that studio paid them off. Do you know the, obviously, the very famous quote, Elementary My Dear Watson, it never, never said in any of the written work of Conan Doyle's. So it's a line that came much later. But there's someone who runs a site called Quote Investigator, who's written a fantastic article about trying to find the very first instances where we use elementary my dear Watson. And the oldest that he could find was 1901, The Northampton Mercury. They published a short parody featuring the characters Shylock Holmes and Pottson. And it is in that that the line

Elementary My Dear Pottson is set. Wow. Then in 1902, there was a piece that was written about Dr. Joseph Bell. Now, Dr. Joseph Bell is someone who it is claimed was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. He was a doctor who could walk around and look at you on site and pick out what was wrong with you by just simply staring at you, which is a thing that Sherlock is famous for doing. And in this article, the person writing it says, as the remarkable man would say, it is the merest elementary knowledge of my dear Watson. So that's the second closest that we get to it. Yeah. But yeah, no one can find it in the actual canon itself of official Sherlock writings. I think if it was there, people would have found it, right? Because people do

take these books very seriously. You're right. And they're all digital now. There's a search to it. I've got a just a recommendation of an extraordinary real life story to do with Sherlock and Conan Doyle is worth reading. So it's written by a guy called David Gran. And the story it was published in The New Yorker, and it was called Mysterious Circumstances. So basically, one of the leading Sherlock Holmes experts in the world living in Britain was found dead in his room in his house with no break in. No one could work out how anyone got out because but there was just one body in there. So this turned in itself into a Sherlock Holmes style mystery. How did the leading expert of Sherlock Holmes die? It was a guy called Richard

Lancelin Green. He was the son of Roger Lancelin Green, who wrote the King Arthur Fables in their modern version with the most famous version that we would all know. And yeah, so it's extraordinary. He was found death by Garotting, by the way. Oh, hello. Did he say the year then? No. Well, he wrote about it in 2004, and it wasn't much long before that that this story happened. Did he have one of those guns that shoots people in the crotch? Because then I'm just kind of trying to channel my inner Sherlock Holmes here. Yeah, I mean, I know the answer to the story, but it's not that. But that doctor, what was he called? Dr Bell. Bell. Yeah, he could tell just by looking at you if you'd been shot in the crotch. This man is a Garotter. He's a nasty man.

Sorry, David. Carry on. No, no, I think that's all that I'd like to give in terms of details. It's an extraordinary mystery. Sorry. Sherlock expert found Garotterd. Yeah, in a locked room mystery, and he's the only person in the room, no one knows who killed him. There was a big paranoia on his part in the lead up to his death about people wanting to kill him that he told everyone about. It's a big mystery, and the story does resolve. So I highly recommend reading it in mysterious circles. Oh, you're not going to tell us? No, no, it's honestly, it's that's what I was saying is this is just a you need to read it. It would be horrible to ruin the brilliance of this writing. No spoilers. Yeah. So have you told people how to get hold of this?

How to find it? Yeah, the New Yorker, mysterious circumstances, it's called by David Gran, or in the book, the devil versus Sherlock Holmes. But once we stop recording, you'll just tell us what happened, right? Because yes, absolutely. It was a self, he put his cravat on the wrong way around. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shrybeland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Jenny. At Jen Lyon. Yep. Or you can go to our group account at no such thing or our website. No such thing as a fish.com. We have everything up there from our

previous episodes to bits of merchandise that we released. Also do make sure to check out Fingers on Buzzers. It's Jenny's brilliant podcast. James, you were on it not too long ago, I believe. Anna and I were on it. Yeah, talking about quizzes. Great guests. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's two others that would have been really good, but you know, that's cool. If you want to check it out, it's available in all the places you get your podcasts. So do listen to that and listen to us again next week when we will be back with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.