Rew up to be Good Queen Bess

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everyone who remembered him was certain that he was either completely lame, or only capable of walking a few yards. Besides, he would not have got very far in only a nightshirt and coat … would he?

It was also remembered that shortly after his disappearance a huge thunderstorm broke over the town. The thunderstorm is significant because it became part of the later yarns about Parfitt.

The obvious conclusion was that he was abducted, killed and his body buried or otherwise disposed of. But why?

Maskell’s witnesses disagreed on details, but all were of the view that Parfitt was harmless. He did not drink and had no enemies. He had no pension or money. He and his sister depended on outdoor relief from the parish, and had nothing worth stealing. Or did he?

Where things got interesting was the mystery of Parfitt’s past. Some said he’d always been a Shepton Mallet tailor, but others claimed he had had some adventures in the past. That he had been a soldier serving in North America and had even travelled to Africa as part of the crew of a slaving ship.

In the 19th century, long after the disappearance, various embellished accounts started to appear. By the mid-20th century a much more lurid version had emerged which – with many variations – would appear in countless newspaper articles and histories of Shepton Mallet.

The oldest tales, dismissed by most as mere superstitious nonsense, was that the locals believed that Parfitt had been a wicked man in his younger days, and the Devil himself had visited Shepton Mallet to come and claim him. Hence the mighty thunderstorm that day.

The Maskell/Butler investigations didn’t find anyone who seriously believed that, though some said other townsfolk thought it.

The more popular version, as related from the 1890s onwards, was that Parfitt had indeed been involved in wickedness. Some claim he had been a slaver, and had become acquainted with various “pagan” rites in Africa or the West Indies.

More popular, though, was the claim that he had been a pirate. He had done all manner of terrible things in his seafaring days. He had murdered, tortured and stolen and in later life had his money stashed away safely in a bank in Bristol which he visited once a month to draw out large sums.

Or, in another version, he regularly travelled to Bristol to collect money from other ex-pirates whom he was blackmailing by threatening to tell the authorities about their crimes.

So he was abducted and murdered either for his loot, or by former shipmates who wanted to shut him up. Or possibly by people who thought that he knew of some fabulous stash of hidden pirate treasure somewhere.

(Let us discount here the other story, as espoused by some UFO enthusiasts, that he was in fact abducted by aliens.)

If you Google him, you’ll find the internet age has opted for the sensational versions. But the depositions from the early 19th century tell of an altogether different and less interesting man. The best we can guess for now is that he hobbled off and took his own life somewhere where the body was never found. Or that he was murdered by someone with a grudge against him.

As that 1799 poem has it:

To tell his fate, I’ve no pretence ;Conjecture none I make ;But if the D---l Took him hence, He made a great mistake.

The story goes like this: When Princess Elizabeth was little she was taken from London to escape an outbreak of plague to the village of Bisley in Gloucestershire. The child

Queen Elizabeth I. Not a woman at all, but a bloke from Gloucestershire.

died of some cause unknown, but then lots of children died young back then.

When her guardians, Katherine Ashley and Thomas Parry, learned that her dad, King Henry VIII, was on the way to see his daughter they panicked, fearing he’d have them executed. So they got a gingerhaired village boy (there were no girls who looked remotely like the princess) and dressed him in girls’ clothes.

Henry, who didn’t see his daughter often, was taken in. And so (the story goes) the deception continued all the way to “the Bisley Boy” becoming your actual Queen Elizabeth I, a queen who, by the way, never married and never had any obvious lovers.

Embellishments include the discovery – allegedly! – at Overcourt House in the village of a grave found to contain the remains of a nine-year-old girl dressed in rich Tudor-era clothing.

The story remained a tradition in the village, but was spread more widely by writer Bram Stoker of Dracula fame when he visited the village in the late 1800s and was intrigued to find the May Queen they chose each year was always a boy in an Elizabethan dress.

Weston-super-Mare was home in late Victorian times to one of the

“temples” of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society interested in the paranormal, magic, astrology etc.

Though founded by three Freemasons, the Golden Dawn’s most (in)famous member was Aleister Crowley, who enjoyed playing up his media image as a Satan-worshipper, though he wasn’t really (the problem was that it would mean accepting the Christian idea that Satan existed at all, and he definitely wasn’t a Christian).

Weston’s Temple of Osiris, founded in the 1880s, was really more about studying ancient religions and alchemy, and – as with so many small town clubs and societies – members falling out with one another in bitter faction fights.

This curious heritage has led to all sorts of strange Weston tales; one being that Crowley himself placed a unique curse on the town – that anyone born there would never be able to leave.

There’s also a story which BT would absolutely love to confirm; that Golden Dawn members bought a series of properties in the town which, when linked by lines on a map, would form a pentagram! appearing in the room in the same strange, and stupendous postures.

“Towards night their fits always left them, and they slept undisturbed most part of the night, but instantly upon their awaking, their Fits returned, and tormented them more or less, with very little Intervals all the day.

“One of the Daughters three days following, in the height of her Fit repeated in a solemn majestick sort of manner the same form of speech; which was a praedicting her own death to be in some few days, and the happy state she was entring into, as also several things which should speedily befal her Father, and Family; but nothing of it ever came to pass. Another of them vomited pins.”

Prayers from the local clergy did no good, nor did the ministrations of the “ablest doctors in the city”.

They then recovered, had no more fits, and seemed none the worse for their experiences.

Weston-super-Mare, about 1904. Hotbed of Satanism, apparently. Right, Aleister Crowley

Print from about 1830 showing people drawing water from the conduit beneath

In about 1916 or 1917; note the public drinking fountains, and the drinking troughs at the bottom for animals; inset below, Bristol Post humour, May 1985. We have no idea what this picture was about. when it was damaged by falling The present matt grey paint scaffolding after a gale. was sprayed on in 1987.

An 1825 watercolour by artist It has been suggested that the George Delamotte (1788-1861) cast lead dolphins on either side of when the statue stood in Church the entrance to Edward Colston’s Lane shows it was originally school “Colston’s Hospital”, at the painted. Tudor mansion The Great

Neptune’s naked body House (now site of the is shown as flesh-coloured Colston Hall/Bristol with his beard, Beacon) may have hair and drapery come from John being grey and the Randall’s fish is a dark colour foundry. This has with a gilded led to a theory mouth and tail. that the nowreviled His crown is also philanthropist gilded. and slave

In 1808 the future trader, whose Poet Laureate Robert emblem was a dolphin, Southey (1774-1843), who may have been was born in Wine Street in Bristol responsible for the Temple and married at St Mary Redcliffe, conduit and the Neptune statue. humorously described the Colston’s School opened in 1710 statue as if he were a visitor to the for “100 poor boys” and continued city: “I saw something like a public until 1861 when it moved to the fountain, with a painted statue of present Colston’s Boys School site Neptune above it which is as little in Stapleton. Colston died in 1721, creditable to the decency of the the year the Neptune statue was magistrates as to the state of the being made, and the provision of arts in the city”. fountains and water conduits was

In the late 19th century the statue often the result of charity, but there was given a bronze finish and this is no documentary evidence to was repeated at the 1982 restoration. connect Colston with the statue.

In his new situation at the Quay Head, year unknown, but probably 1950s