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Yesterday I explained some of the difficulties of becoming, or being, a professional writer and gave an example of how the initial germ of an idea for a book, by no means the hardest part of a project but definitely up there in the top three, can appear from anywhere and develop from a simple pub conversation. With Red Herrings and White Elephants and Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheep the hardest part, after the initial idea, was thinking of the expression or phrase, known as idioms, in the first place. There are possibly over two thousand that have become part of our accepted language (where the words we actually use mean nothing at all in the context of a conversation we are having and yet we instinctively know what they mean, i.e. Straight from the Horse's Mouth). Yet if we sit down and try to come up with a dozen, we will all be struggling after only a few. The best way to do that research was to listen out for them in action, so to speak, and so I spent the following two years with a notebook jotting down every single time I was "Barking up the Wrong Tree", visiting a "Bucket Shop" with a "Chip on my Shoulder" or had learned something "On the Grapevine." In the event I tracked down the source of over a thousand of them covered by those first two books, each one traceable to a single, or series, of real events in our rich history.

And it is with that inquisitive nature and understanding of the need to find fresh, untried approaches to book writing that the seed of Pop Goes the Weasel began to form in my mind about four years ago. One afternoon, I was thumbing through an old book of limericks, rhymes and folk tales, assuming them all to have been written, by writers, for the entertainment of folk from a long left era, and began to read Humpty Dumpty again:

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

I am sure that's how you remember it too, but this time I noticed something that I thought might be important. Why is there no mention of an egg? Come on, admit it - you, like me, always pictured, in your minds eye, Humpty Dumpty as an egg. And all picture book illustrators do the same. So, why then, are there no eggs mentioned? Unless there was a longer version that might reveal the story of a shattered egg at the bottom of a wall somewhere. And that's when I found, in an old dusty library, an even older book with the complete version of Humpty Dumpty:

In sixteen hundred and forty-eight,
When England suffered the pains of state,
The Roundheads laid siege to Colchester town
Where the king's men still fought for the crown.

There One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall,
A gunner of deadliest aim of all.
From St. Mary's Tower his cannon he fired,
Humpty Dumpty was its name.

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Ah haa, so now there might be something in these old rhymes. I knew that in England there was a Civil War raging between Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentarian Forces and the Royalists of King Charles I during the years 1642-1651. So what was significant in 1648 that might turn out to be the real story of Humpty Dumpty? This is what I found:

The real Humpty Dumpty was a powerful cannon used by the Royalist forces during the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651. Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle led the king's men and overpowered the Parliament stronghold of Colchester early in 1648. They grimly held on to it while the Parliamentarians, led by Thomas Fairfax, encircled and besieged the town in what became known as the Siege of Colchester. The supporters of Charles I almost won the day - all thanks to his doughtiest defender, Humpty Dumpty. In pole position, as it were, on top of the church tower of St. Mary-at-the-Walls, One-Eyed Thompson, the gunner, managed to blast away the attacking Roundhead troops with rousing success for eleven whole weeks. That is, until the top of the church tower was eventually blown away, sending Humpty Dumpty crashing to the ground outside the city wall, where it buried itself in deep marshland. The king's cavalry (the horses) and the infantry (the men) hurried to retrieve the cannon in order to repair it, but they couldn't put Humpty together again and without their weapon of mass destruction they were soon overrun by Fairfax and his soldiers.

"Humpty Dumpty" was a piece of propaganda that passed from town to town as the news of the king's defeat spread across England and the Parliamentarian troops slowly returned home, teaching even their youngest children to recite the tale of their victory.

But if the rhyme is entirely military in origin, let's come back to that egg question again. And the answer to that is found in the late nineteenth century in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1871). Sir John Tenniel's iconic illustration shows Alice in deep discussion with Humpty Dumpty as he sits upon a high wall. Tenniel, clearly taken with the idea of the impossibility of Humpty Dumpty's being put back together again once he'd fallen off the wall, has him shaped as an egg with short arms and legs. This is the first known depiction of Humpty as an egg, one that was to become the definitive image.

More tomorrow revealing the research and history behind some of our other favorite rhymes and find out who Little Jack Horner was and if Ring a Ring a Roses really did record The Great Bubonic Plague of 1665.

Albert Jack

September 2009

London

Albert Jack, Pop Goes the Weasel, nursey rhymes, secret meanings