LONDON’S SEWER PIGS
Today, some 19th-century cockney forteana. In the 1800s, workers in London’s vast sewer system came across all kinds of animals. There were encounters with rats (of course), dogs, horses (!), a hedgehog, and even a seal. However, the strangest subterranean encounters involved pigs, massive, murderous pigs that, it was claimed, stalked nether London (see Michael Goss, “Going Underground”, FT105:24-26).
We are inclined to see pigs today – post Charlotte’s Web and Babe – as cute porkers, deserving of apple cores and nose-scratches. But the Victorians knew better.
When a pig appeared in their newspapers it was typically because said pig had savaged a child. Understandably, those who patrolled the sewers would have been terrified to hear a grunt in the darkness behind them. How do we know about London’s sewer swine? They were recorded by Henry Mayhew in 1851. Mayhew, an early social commentator, had interviewed a series of individuals who worked in the sewers and he sceptically wrote about these porcine beasts. “The story runs, that a sow in young, by some accident got down the sewer through an opening, and wandering away from the spot, littered and reared her offspring in the drain, feeding on the offal and garbage washed into it constantly. Here it is alleged, the breed multiplied
exceedingly, and have become almost as ferocious as they are numerous.”
Is this an urban legend from subterranean London, a worthy predecessor of the New York alligators ( FT151:17, 155:52, 301:09, 303:16, 331:23)? Or had Mayhew, usually a hard-headed man, been taken in by one of his informants? On the basis of some new bits and pieces of evidence I’d assume that this is a bona fide urban legend. In 1859 the Daily Telegraph described, in an editorial aside, “a monstrous breed of black swine” in the sewers below Hampstead (of all places). The Telegraph may have embroidered Mayhew’s words, but two other sources seem to be independent of him. In 1871, London author Richard Rowe quoted a sewer worker: “They do says there’s wild pigs almost as big as bears in some shores [sewers].” Then, in 1883, one Vernon Morwood described how 30 years before – at about the time that Mayhew was writing – a man had found a pig in the London sewers and, with much struggling, had got it above ground. The pig “was exhibited, during six months, in a show by his captor, who charged so much admission for a sight of this sewerprodigy, by which he made a great amount of money”. Morwood writes as if this was just another pig that had strayed into the sewers and had been rescued by the man. My suspicion is that it was exhibited as one of the fearful sewer pigs. Otherwise why would folk have paid to see it?
“THEY MULTIPLIED EXCEEDINGLY, AND HAVE BECOME ALMOSTAS FEROCIOUSAS THEY ARE NUMEROUS”