As sung by the Gaugers on Awa wi the Rovin Sailor.
There was a ship cam roon the coast
An aa the men on her was lost
Except for the monkey that climbit the post
An the Boddamers hinged the monkey-o.
Chorus:
Durrum a doo, etc.
An the Boddamers hinged the monkey-o.
A Boddamer up tae the monkey goes,
Says, “Tak im awa,” an awa he goes,
But the monkey jumped up an he bit aff his nose
An the Boddamers hinged the monkey-o.
Noo the funeral was a grand affair
An aa the Boddam folk was there.
It minded me o the Glesca Fair
Fan the Boddamers hinged the monkey-o.
Noo aa the folk fae Peterheid
Cam oot expectin tae get a feed,
But they juist got monkey pottit heid
Fan the Boddamers hinged the monkey-o.
The explanation usually given, for instance in the Aberdeen magazine The Leopard, is that the ship was a French man o’ war during the Napoleonic Wars, and the monkey was wearing a suit of clothes, and so was taken for a Frenchman. An alternative explanation is offered by Caroline Seawright, a contributor to a BBC discussion forum: she suggests that the hanging had something to do with salvage law.
The same thought occurred to me when I read Bella Bathurst’s The Wreckers. Her account of the law in medieval times isn’t entirely clear – her main concern is to find evidence for deliberate wrecking (such as mentions of false lights), but it seems that wrecks regarded as derelict, i.e. abandoned without hope of recovery, were treated (in practice certainly) as fair game (p.10).
By an English charter of 1236, “if any man or beast escaped alive from a ship, then that ship could not ... be considered a wreck.” The intention was “to ensure that wreckers did not seize and destroy ships which could have been refloated,” but, “in practice it became a permit to murder. ... ... The ‘man or beast’ ruling persisted for many centuries in different forms, and it was not until 1771 that it was finally and explicitly repealed. Even then, its effects lingered on in the common lore of the land” (p.11).
I spent a little time when I first read Bathurst trying to find out whether the law in Scotland was the same as in England prior to the 18th century, but legal history is too technical a field for casual enquiry. And I didn’t realise then that the song has English roots. It has become associated with Hartlepool as well as with Boddam, but it appears that the original, ‘The Fishermen Hung the Monkey, O!’ was written by Edward Corvan from Tyneside.
A contributor to the excellent Mudcat forum (scroll down to 19 Jun 03 - 03:37 PM) quotes from Keith Gregson’s book Corvan - A Victorian Entertainer And His Songs. It seems that Corvan was building on an existing myth of a monkey taken for a French spy.
