Ken Campbell

[rob237 89]

From Ken Campbell's Obituary:

"...At Nottingham Playhouse, Richard Eyre commissioned two plays on local historical subjects – Bendigo (1974), a portrait of a 19th-century prize-fighter whose training regime included wandering into pubs and spitting into people's drinks to provoke them into trying to hit him, and Walking Like Geoffrey, (1975), about an entire village that feigned madness to avoid taxation..."

Vaguely aware of Bendigo's spitting habits in pubs, but can anyone elaborate on the "entire village that feigned madness to avoid taxation"?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituari...ows-917169.html

Cheers

Robt P.

[mick2me 3,033]

The Village was Gotham.

And we were taught at school it was to avoid a Castle being built nearby.

The 'Cuckoo Bush' at Gotham is an example.

A cuckoo built a nest in a bush and they built a small fence around it to prevent it escaping.

A small enclosure is there to this day.

Another The Loonies were seen dangling a villager by his legs from a bridge to grab the 'Large Cheese'

that they could see in the water. The Cheese was a reflection of the moon.

I'm off to work but you could search, The Mad men of Gotham?

[bamber 128]

And not only but also ...

"Gotham" was first used in reference to Manhattan by Washington Irving in the early 19th century. The word itself is English in origin and dates from the Middle Ages. Gotham, or "Gotam", was the name of a real and often-ridiculed town in England, whose residents had a reputation for madness.

A variant on this story was that Gothamites were not truly mad but simply "wise enough to play the fool" -- in a variety of ways they merely acted silly to gain their ends. "It was doubtless this more beguiling-if tricksterish-sense of Gotham that Manhattanistes assumed as an acceptable nickname," writes Mike Wallace in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.

[Beefsteak 305]

A nickname for Gothamites was Moonrakers as they were seen trying to rake in the moons reflection as they thought it was also silver!!

And as anybody knows that Cookoos don't build nests!! so they thought it was a rarity

[mick2me 3,033]

Tell me no more of Gotham fools,

Or of their eels in little pools,

Which they were told were drowning;

Nor of their carts drawn up on high,

When King John's men were standing by,

To keep a wood from browning.

"Nor of their cheese shoved down the hill,

Nor of a cuckoo sitting still,

While it they hedged round;

Such tales of them have long been told,

By prating boobies, young and old,

In drunken circles crowned.

"The fools are those who thither go

To see the cuckoo bush, I trow,

The wood, the barn, and pools;

For such are seen both here and there,

And passed by without a sneer

By all but errant fools"