Coal the conjuror magics up little people and a tiny tree as startled drinkers look on
By Richard Holland
One of the strangest stories I’ve come across recently concerns a sorcerer putting on a show for doubting locals in an English pub. It’s another nugget from F G Lee’s Glimpses in the Twilight (1885) and is believed to have taken place about 1795. Unfortunately, Lee is ignorant as to its location. He states that the story was found ‘preserved in a MS album belonging to Canon Harford, MA of Dean’s Yard, Westminster’ and that they were marked: ‘From the papers of Mr Joseph Beck of Frenchay, my paternal great-uncle C J Harford, M, FSA (AD 1810)’. The letter is signed by one Stephen Penny.
We do know that the conjuror’s name was Coal and that coincidentally or otherwise it took place in a coal mining district. We gather that Mr Beck was himself a collier. I know Frenchay is a district of Bristol (no doubt a village back then): are the coal mines in that area? If so, it’s reasonable to assume the bizarre incident – which seems to belend fairylore with witchcraft – took place there. Here is the narrative:
‘Leaving work one winter evening about ten o’clock, he went to refresh himself at a little public house he pointed out to us with his finger, not far from us. He sat down in company with said Coal and six or seven other persons, amongst whom was the landlord of the house, who had been joking and laughing at Coal about his pretended art of conjuration, telling him he believed nothing of it, and that it was all mere imposition.
‘Upon this Coal told the landlord and company, if they were willing to see a specimen of his art and would sit still and quiet whilst he was performing it, he would soon convince them by causing a tree to grow up before their faces, and men, too, to come and cut it down.
‘Coal, retiring to a corner of the room, with his back towards the company, seemed to take something out of his pocket; but immediately afterwards he and the whole company very distinctly saw by the light of the candle in the room a small tree, an inch or two thick, gradually rise out of the stone floor of the room, to the height as he thinks, of three feet, with branches and leaves, and in all respects like a natural tree; that when it was thus grown up, this informant and all the rest of the company saw two little men, each about one foot high, dressed in short jackets, with caps on their heads, their complexions sunburnt, and bearing their axes, begin to cut it down with great celerity, the chips flying about at every stroke; that the tree seemed to fall with great force, and as soon as this was done, the tree, chips, and little workmen went from their sight they knew not how, leaving all the company in a great consternation, except this informant himself, who says he beheld the whole from beginning to end (which he thinks was about half an hour) without any sensible degree of fear, though at the same time he confessed he wished he had been elsewhere.
‘That he observed one of the little workmen, during the gathering up of the chips, to look about very angrily, and that Coal observing the same also, sad he was sure some one of the company had taken away and concealed some chips of the tree, but whether it was so, this informant could not remember.
‘Coal had the charcter of being a sober serious man, much given to mathematical and other studies, that he died to all appearance of old age, and without anything extraordinary attending his death.’
What were these homunculi Coal had conjured up? Hallucinations? Fairies? Their behaviour regarding the missing wood chips suggests that they had independent thought and one cannot see what demons would care about fragments of a tree. Nature spirits might well be concerned about these remnants remaining in the mortal world. Ah, but my mind is rambling – how can anyone rationalise such a weird yarn?
