Fairies, Folklore and Forteana GNOMES IN A NEW LIGHT

SIMON YOUNG FILES A NEW REPORT FROM THE INTERFACE OF STRANGE PHENOMENA AND FOLK BELIEF

I’ve recently had the pleasure of revisiting that fortean favourite the Wollaton Gnomes for a Pwca booklet: The Wollaton Gnomes: A Nottingham Fairy Mystery (a collection of sources and expert opinions). FT readers will remember that on 23 September 1979 a group of half a dozen school children in Wollaton Park, Nottingham, ran into some 30 small cars with gnomes in ( FT31:42, 200:34, 321:43-45, 348:23). The gnomes drove around and chased the children and the children then ran from the park and reported the strange event to their parents.

The story quickly found its way into the media and from there it became a staple of fortean compendia. The encounter is exceptionally well documented – we have interviews, reports and retrospectives – and reading the sources side by side it is possible to recreate the events of that distant Sunday night in some detail. One of several points that came out of this rereading is the exact location of the sighting within the park and the light conditions. I have, thanks in large part to Frank Earp (who contributes a chapter), been able to pin down the place where the kids ran into the impossible. It was a clump of dense muddy woodland on the northern margins of the park known as the Swamps: many an adventuring child lost a shoe there in the 1970s. I have also (thanks to Dan Green who also contributes a chapter) thought a lot more about the time of day. I had always imagined the sighting taking place at dusk, an in-between time. But the kids met the gnome drivers about an hour after dusk.

You might want to think about these two facts for a minute. One of Britain’s most important post-war fortean experiences took place in the middle of a wood in the pitch black! (The sky was at least partly overcast and there was little moonlight.) The children (in fact, only three of the half dozen went into the trees) saw the gnomes in great detail: they talked about patches on trousers and white beards with black tips. But how? This lack of light bothered Marjorie Johnson (sometime secretary of the Fairy Investigation Society) and Robin Aldridge (the headmaster who interviewed the children). Marjorie, who dedicated a chapter to Wollaton in Seeing Fairies, suggested that the gnomes had their own luminosity. Perhaps. Robin Aldridge asked the children repeatedly about this lack of light in his interview with the three witnesses. They talked of distant streetlights and one child talked vaguely about a light hanging from a tree within the Swamps. The case is more complicated than this brief outline might suggest. But the lack of light should encourage us to reassess and perhaps to reframe what really happened on that autumn night in 1979.

ONE OF BRITAIN’S MOST IMPORTANT FORTEAN EXPERIENCES TOOK PLACE IN THE PITCH BLACK!