Fossil remains of an "Oliphant" in the 16th-century St Lawrence Jewry church, City of London?

Could there have been the fossil remains of a prehistoric mammoth or elephant, such as the "straight-tusked elephant" Elephas antiquus, on show at the City of London's St Lawrence Jewry church in the 16th century?

I was at the Guildhall Library recently and they had a copy of John Stow’s A Survey of London open at the St Lawrence Jewry entry. (1595, 2nd edition 1603. Photo above - out of copyright.)



The historian John Stow was born 1525, so his account of what "I myself have seen in this churche some 60+ years since" is feasible, he would have been 10 years old at the time he says he saw the fossil bones.

60 years earlier, when Stow visited as a ten-year-old, the church had “the shank bone of a man (as it is taken) and also a tooth of a very great bignesse hanged up for shew (show) in chaines of Iron upon a pillar of stone, the tooth being about the bignesse of a man’s fist is long since conveyed from thence: the thighe or shanke bone of 25 inches (62.5 cm) in length by the rule remaineth yet fastened to a post.” (Thanks to Tim Holt Wilson for help deciphering the Gothic typeface from that era.)

A marginal note adds:
“The tooth of some monstrous fish, I take it. A shank bone of 25 inches long, of a man as is said, but might be of an Oliphant." (Photo below, out of copyright.)

A "shank bone" (thigh bone or femur) of a tall human, the longest bone in the human body, could be 25 inches long, but it's rare. The leg bones of a Proboscidean (elephant, mammoth or mastodon) resemble that of a scaled-up human, so Stow's speculation that it's a bone from an "Oliphant" is reasonable. The "tooth of a very great bigness" sounds like a massive molar of an elephant or mammoth, or a fragment of such a molar.



It's a good educated guess by Stow, especially given the scarcity of published works at the time that would have described elephant skeletons. Stow's identificaton is also ahead of its time. Half a century later, a correspondent from Suffolk described a likely fossil Proboscidean skeleton as "the Body of a Mighty giant", while Cotton Mather in colonial Massachusetts - a century after Stow was writing - was shown teeth and bones from an elephant or mastodon from upstate New York and interpreted these as the remains of the Nephilim - "fallen angels" from the Old Testament.

St Lawrence Jewry church, which takes its name from the nearby neighbourhood where Jews once settled, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. Before that, the church had likely had a clear-out of "superstitious" artefacts in thr Reformation, whose peak was in the 1540s. This may explain why some of the artefacts Stow had seen there as a child had been "long since conveyed from thence." The iconoclasts of the Reformation, though, had as their target anything that looked Catholic rather than anything prehistoric. The bones of a giant, "monstrous fish" or "Oliphant" don't seem to have been passed off as a saint's, so they were safe from the Reformation's iconoclasts but not from the Great Fire.

See a detailed invesigation into the "the Body of a Mighty giant" unearthed at Brockford Bridge, Suffolk in 1652, co-authored with Tim Holt Wilson, here.

Black government wagons in The War of the Worlds

This article appeared in Fortean Times, FT

EVER SINCE Albert K. Bender first described his own and other ufologists' encounters with "Men In Black" (MIBs) from 1952 onwards (first documented in Gray Barker's 1956 They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers,) the MIBs have reportedly driven around in shiny, new black cars – often Cadillacs – in their efforts to intimidate and silence UFO witnesses.

The cars the Men In Black arrive in are even said to smell new. Investigators report their attempts to trace such vehicles from their licence plates reveal no such registration exists. These strange black vehicles were hard-wired in MIB mythology from the beginning. Much has been written about how sci-fi imagery prefigures tropes within ufology, while Jenny Randles (FT 447;29) has written recently on how secret experimental military tech and Cold War anxieties affected the UFO phenomenon. I have spotted a turn-of-the twentieth century precursor to the shiny, new black cars used to convey the MIBs, from the dawn of science fiction when the genre was still known as "scientific romance."

There's a scene in Book 1 Chapter 12 of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (TWotW, 1895-1897) – a chapter entitled "What I saw of the destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton." The narrator witnesses "Three or four black government wagons, with crosses in white circles, and an old omnibus, among other vehicles, were being loaded in the village street."

Could the "black government wagons" – noticeable and identifiable, needing no further explanation to the readers of 1897 – have wormed their way into the collective sub-conscious to give rise to MIB lore? And what could the "black government wagons" have been, at a time when "government" was much smaller than it is now.

Illustration by Warren Globe from the original edition of The War of the Worlds, serialised in Pearson magazine. Out of copyright.
Horse-drawn black police wagons to haul away detainees were a thing as early as the 1860s, with engravings from the Illustrated Police News and other publications showing Fenians attempting to hijack such vehicles and rescue condemned prisoners. But such incidents were three decades before TWotW, first serialised in 1897 by Pearson magazine before publication as a book soon after, with the action taking place starting on a then near-future New Year's Eve 1899. Surviving photos or illustrations of dark-coloured police wagons in the late 1890s seem rare.

And anyway, they were black government wagons, not police wagons in TWotW. They don't seem to have been ambulances either – surely had they been ambulances they would have been described as having red crosses on them. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Niell, in their 2003 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II graphic novel retelling of TWotW portray the Extraordinary Gentlemen themselves emerging from a sinister, shiny, hearse-like black carriage bearing "VR" initials and a crown. An equally glossy black two-door Hanson cab bedecked with a Masonic compasses and set square logo conveys devious spymaster Campion Bond.

In those days, "government" basically meant military, foreign policy or espionage. New and suitably sinister government agencies then forming could have deployed Wells's black government wagons. The Special Irish Branch of the Metropolitan Police, set up in 1883 to combat the "Fenian menace", was at the time of TWotW

Invasion paranoia was in the air too. Wells parodied a rich vein of "invasion literature", kicked off in 1871 by George Tomkyns Chesney's bestseller The Battle of Dorking, in which Germans invade England' south coast. Some 60 "invasion literature" works followed, although by the time TWotW appeared, the invader was more likely French or Russian.

The better-known illustrations from TWofW, for the 1906 edition by Henrique Alvim Correa. He contacted Wells to tell him he thought he could better illustrations than Globe's.

Could the black government wagons have been steam wagons? The Thornycroft Steam Carriage had been in production since 1895, with Chiswick Council using one as a dust cart. Meanwhile, the Foden Steam Vehicle – a traction engine with a space like a flat-bed truck at the back – was used in Army trials at the end of the 19th century. Contemporary monochrome photos show the Steam Vehicle in a dark colour. Foden's Steam Lorry made its appearance in 1900, with War Office trials of the vehicle the following year, it also appeared in a dark colour in contemporary photos. The Lancashire Steam Motor Company (later Leyland) was already turning out steam vans by then, while the Automotor and Horseless Vehicle Journal had been circulating since 1896.

That dark coloured paint job for contemporary "government wagons" though, could have been khaki. The militia and yoemanry units massacred by Martian heat rays in TwotW would have been the last British army units to go to war wearing redcoats. Khaki uniforms had already made their appearance on the battlefield for regular units fightings in the Boer War in 1900. Steam lorries still in use at the outbreak of World War One, with "WD Roads" stencilled on the side, are known to have been painted in khaki. In any event, it’s intriguing to find the shiny black vehicles conveying the Men in Black prefigured over a half century earlier, with fictional "black government wagons" deployed in response to the equally fictional incursions of extraterrestrials.

A World War One era steam lorry painted in khaki with "WD" (War Department) stencilled on the side. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

©️ Matt Salusbury 2024