Elephant And A Squashed Bentley (20 August 1976)
As we are now into what we used to call the “silly season” I will content myself this week with telling a tale or two.
The first concerns a dog named Towzer. He belonged to Mr Alfred Duffield, who with his brother Frank used to keep a men’s outfitting shop in Aylesbury Street, Fenny Stratford.
One morning in early 1946 they were sitting in the shop – apparently they saw no point in standing around when they could be sitting around – when a woman looked in at the door and beckoned Alf.
“There’s been a dog been killed down by the Swan and it looks like yours,” she told him.
So Alf walked down to the dog and returned to the shop a few minutes later with a scrap of dog’s collar dangling from one finger.
“It looks like Towzer,” he told Frank. “but I’m not altogether sure about the collar. You go and have a look at him.”
So Frank also then walked down to the dog, returning a minute or two later.
“I’m afraid it really does look like Towzer,” he said sorrowfully.
Whereupon Alf went across to the church. No, not to see the vicar, but to borrow the church wheelbarrow from Mr Codman, the verger. Together, Mr Codman and Alf put the dog in the barrow and in due course it was buried decently in the garden at the back of the shop.
When Alf told his little daughter the sad news there were lots of tears.
Then he went to tell Mrs Dickens, his wife’s mother, who lived in Windsor Street at the other end of Fenny. Going along the passage to the back door, he heard a voice say: “Here comes your master.” And there, looking through the kitchen window and giving his usual excited greeting, was Towzer.
They had buried the wrong dog!
I have forgotten – even if I ever knew – whose dog it was that had met such an unfortunate end, but had been buried so decently, so I shall have to do like the tv plays and leave the end of the tale hanging in the air. . .
Tale No 2 concerns a member of the now-defunct Buckinghamshire Standing Joint Committee. It controlled the county police and was swallowed by a wider-based committee of the same sort when the county police was swallowed by the Thames Valley police.
Now it so happened that very late one night two Bucks motor patrol policemen noticed a Bentley car being driven very erratically northwards. They also noticed that the car’s fore end had been damaged.
They stopped the car. Breathalysers had not then come into use. Drivers suspected of being under the influence were often hauled off to the police station. There they were ordered to walk along a straight white line and/or repeat some such tongue twister as “The Leith police dismisseth us,” which most men could not say if they were stark staring sober, let alone if they were mildly drunk.
So they questioned this driver on the spot and his explanation was: “I was just coming back from the Lord Mayor’s banquet and an elephant sat on my radiator!”
Was a less-likely story ever told to a couple of long-suffering law enforcement officers? You can imagine them winking at each other and simultaneously thinking: “Oh yeah – a pink one I suppose?”
However, either because they knew the driver to be a kind of boss of theirs, or because he seemed quite normal in every other respect, they reported the affair to HQ and stayed with the Bentley until another patrol car ascertained that there really had been a circus on the move that night.
It then transpired that the Bentley’s driver had been to the banquet and that after a splendid meal but only one glass of wine, he was driving home when he came up behind the circus.
By an unfortunate chance, the front of the Bentley touched the hind leg of the rear elephant of a string of three. Whereupon the elephant promptly sat down on the front of the car – exactly as it had been taught to sit when touched in that particular spot.
For its own sake, care had to be taken in removing the elephant and it was not until 90 minutes later that the driver was able to continue on his now erratic way home!
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