MACHEN AND THE MANIKIN OF THE MINE
THEO PAIJMANS finds Arthur Machen assessing news reports about the Little People from the Forest of Dean
Arthur Machen (1863-1947) wrote supernatural tales considered by many to be among the finest of the genre. He explored the occult but remained independent of the esoteric fads and fancies of the times, and in the end no order could claim him. Machen also had a keen eye for the fortean snippets in the dailies, and through him we learn of a very strange case of small humanoids seen around a British mine in Gloucestershire in 1926.
At the time these incidents became briefly known as ‘the manikin of the mine’ or ‘the little man of the Collerie’. Those familiar with Machen’s writings may recall the opening lines of The Great Return (1915): “There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the newspaper.” Fast forward about a decade to 1926, and these words seem prophetic. That year, Machen discussed a number of strange accounts from the dailies that had come to his attention in The Graphic, an illustrated weekly published in London. One subject was witchcraft, which he considered a ‘survival’: “Survivals are always interesting. There was a prosecution for witchcraft somewhere down in the country a week or two ago. The pig was ill, or the cream refused to turn into butter, or the victim was attacked by shooting pains: whatever it was, the suit was brought and the wizard and the witch appeared before the court. The bench dismissed the case, and no more was said, though, to the best of my belief, the prosecutor might himself have been prosecuted…” 1 Even in his lifetime, Machen noted, there were people who still believed in witchcraft and the ability of one person to injure another by, what he called “the exercise of a malignant will”. But there was
“This was the business of the Little People in the Forest of Dean, down in Gloucestershire... Two specimens of the Little People had been observed...”
another, much weirder report in the dailies that attracted his attention. This concerned sightings of some very small humanoids. “This was the business of the Little People in the Forest of Dean, down in Gloucestershire… Two specimens of the Little People had been observed, one in the spring, another quite recently. There were, perhaps, six or seven witnesses to the facts,” Machen observed. 2
The location of these puzzling events was the New Hawkins Colliery, an ancient mine in Gloucestershire. According to a Forest of Dean correspondent from the Western Mail, never before had such an “extraordinary thing” been found during mining operations as what had recently come to light at Poolway Coal Level, the property of one Mr Amos Brown of Wynolls Hill. The Level ran back for a distance of some 500 yards, with miners working in an old pit known as
“the New Hawkins Colliery” that had been closed for a number of years. “The miners were engaged on a solid piece of coal 5ft 6in [1.7m] thick, when Leslie Jones apparently knocked a fossil with his shovel, and was startled by a movement. The creature swerved round, and Jones threw it on top of the coal bank with his shovel.” With the help of a co-worker and Mr Brown, they examined the tiny humanoid: “They found that the body resembled that of a human being, and measured about 14in [36cm] in length. It had a round head about the size of that of a peacock; looked quite human; had two eyes, eyebrows, and eyelashes; little round ears; a flat nose; mouth with a full set of white teeth, and a tongue rounded off like a human being’s tongue. It had about a fourth of an inch [6mm] of soft brown hair on its head, and the skin of its face was the colour of that of a half-caste. It had a short neck and no arms,
nor could it be found that it ever had any, though it had shoulders. The trunk was about six inches [15cm] in length and 19in [48cm] in circumference and was covered with hair like a being of prehistoric age. It had legs almost four–five inches [10-13cm] long and they resembled those of a human being. It was perfectly joined at the knees and ankles. The feet were about three-quarters of an inch [19mm] in length, each having five toes with toenails. Jones stated that blood came from where the shovel struck the creature, which lived for nearly an hour. It made no noise whatever, and life was only distinguished by the slight movement of the body.”3
The mysterious creature was left where they had found it. When they searched for it the following morning it had disappeared. “Naturally, many discredited such a story; but Mr Ames Brown, a well-known colliery proprietor, even today, as well as the workmen, are firmly convinced that the creature was a member of a sub-human, subterranean tribe. 4 In support of their story, another sighting of a tiny humanoid surfaced, as told by Mrs T Gwilliam and her family at Eastbourne House: “The family were alarmed by a movement coming from a scuttle of coal, and then from the coal emerged a terrifying looking creature. The daughter screamed, and one member of the family hurled the scuttle and its contents through the front door on to the drive leading to the house. Mrs. Gwilliam said that when the ‘thing’ posed itself on the coal scuttle it looked exactly like a little collier. She was unable to give a detailed description of the creature; but, she said,
she noticed it has legs and arms and a little round head. The most striking feature was its eyes. Its body was well proportioned with shapely hips. Mrs Gwilliam rejected the suggestion that it might have been a frog, toad, or lizard. ‘I am certain it is an offspring of the creature which was found in Mr. Brown’s Level’, she declared. The other members of the family were of the same opinion.” 5
In their time, Machen’s stories displayed the peculiar ability to now and then creep out of their publications to settle into the popular mind and change reality. Even now, discussions still rage about how far his The Bowmen, published in 1914, 6 gave rise to the legend of the Angels of Mons, the widely held belief that angelic beings had intervened on behalf of the British troops in Belgium in the second year of the Great War. Machen brushed his short story aside as “an indifferent work”, yet he spent the rest of his life arguing it was the origin of the Angels of Mons legend.7 But exactly how this had come about he had no clue: “This affair of the Bowmen has been such an odd one from the first to the last, so many queer complications have entered into it, there have been so many and so divers currents and cross-currents of rumour and speculation concerning it, that I honestly do not know where to begin…” 8 On previous occasions Machen had written about the Little People as well. Just the year before the manikin in the mine case broke, Machen told his readers in The Graphic about the Asiki, the Little People of the French Congo. 9 And in 1932 Machen revisited the topic by retelling the very strange nearkidnapping of an eight-year-old girl by the Little People. 10
With regard to the survival of ancient convictions that Machen mentioned, in 1926 the belief in Little People was still strong, as was evident in opinions concerning what the tiny manikins of the mine might be. “Coleford, the scene of these strange appearances, holds various theories as to the Little People,” Machen explained. “Some hold that they are fairies, others that they are descendants of a dwarfish race, which, they say, lived long ago in the Forest, and was forced to go underground. And there are some who think that they are animals of some unknown and unconjectured genus, who, as it would seem, inhabit the coalmines.
“The most interesting suggestion of the three is the identification of the little brown beings with the pre-Celtic inhabitants of the country, the underground dwellers who originated the Irish fancies about fairy raths. There was such a race of short, dark people, who did, in fact, live subterraneously, and survived far into the Celtic age. But the people of this race must have been about four feet [1.2m] – not 14 inches [36cm] – high.” 11
The local workmen harboured no doubts about the reality of their extraordinary find. After all, they had seen the frightening creature with their own eyes. “You can tell the people from me,” Brown told a reporter, “that it is only too true, and, what is more, I did not like the look of him. We were all a bit nervous at the time, for it looked an ugly little brute. I could not rest overnight, and on the following morning when I decided to preserve it, I found it had gone. In my experience I have seen many fossils of different animals, but have never seen a thing like that. It was more like a human being than I have ever seen before.”
An unnamed authority that the newspaper produced thought otherwise. Only identified as “one of the most distinguished naturalists in Wales today” by the Western Mail, he offered a plausible explanation: “The answer is – a bat… A bat, hibernating through the cold months, seeks a cave or crevice, and there hangs with head downwards, with its wings so tightly pressed behind it that, looking at it from the front or above as it fell on its back, they could not be seen, and would give the effect of an armless trunk with well-marked shoulders. Shaken from its perch in a rocky crevice it would fall and, only partly awakened a month at least too early, would lie almost without movement, and with no effort at escape. The miners of the New Hawkins Colliery may rest assured that if the ‘little man of Poolway’ gave them a shock, they gave him a much more severe one.” 12 Machen must have read this rebuttal, but for reasons of his own that are now unfathomable, he remains quite opaque as to the conclusion. He writes: “As to the ‘facts’ of the Coleford case, I say nothing. But I think that there must be a mistake somewhere.” 13
An ambiguous final verdict that one might approach from either direction.