{"id":787,"date":"2017-03-04T12:18:58","date_gmt":"2017-03-04T12:18:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cookywook.co.uk\/blog\/?p=787"},"modified":"2017-03-04T12:18:58","modified_gmt":"2017-03-04T12:18:58","slug":"hartlepool-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cookywook.co.uk\/blog\/hartlepool-story\/","title":{"rendered":"The greatest story ever told (…involving Hartlepool)"},"content":{"rendered":"

What’s the greatest story ever told? No, don’t even start with the life of Christ or something.<\/p>\n

Is it that\u00a0monkey that got left at IKEA? The guy that got a selfie with a plane hijacker? Yesterday, when Rod Stewart apologised for staging a mock beheading? Nope. All wrong.<\/p>\n

The greatest\u00a0story ever told is the one about the monkey\u00a0that became mayor in Hartlepool.\u00a0But it’s even better than that.<\/p>\n

I remember in A Level politics we were studying elections. It was mostly all boring (like all politics am I right lads) but one\u00a0subject was great – how the public can be very dumb and stupid.\u00a0Can’t think of any examples from the last twelve months though.<\/em><\/p>\n

This was way back before the days of Boaty McBoatface and so on. But even then we had Mister Splashy Pants<\/a>\u00a0– a whale with a stupid name picked by an online poll via\u00a0Greenpeace. But the star of this\u00a0show is H’Angus the Monkey.<\/p>\n

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H’Angus is\u00a0the official mascot of Hartlepool United FC (for reasons we’ll get into later). His career started off in the typical football mascot trajectory – appearing at games, getting embroiled in the occasional sexual assault scandal, and so on. So it was no surprise that in 2002, H’Angus decided to run for mayor.<\/p>\n

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Yup, H’Angus the football monkey mascot ran for mayor. And\u00a0he won<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

There’s actually a note made of this in the official Parliament papers<\/a>. These include\u00a0another great fact: in the same elections, someone ran as ‘Robocop’ in Middlesborough and also won.\u00a0Isn’t democracy great?<\/p>\n

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Of course, H’Angus was really just a front for Independent-runner Stuart Drummond. Drummond is no longer the mayor of Hartlepool, though he was\u00a0until the city decided to abolish the post entirely – presumably because they had literally voted in a cartoon monkey.<\/p>\n

But why the monkey anyway? This is where the story gets EVEN BETTER.<\/p>\n

Hartlepudlians are sometimes referred to as ‘monkey hangers’. This is due a local legend that I’ll just steal\u00a0from Wikipedia now:<\/p>\n

According to local folklore, the term originates from an incident in which a monkey was hanged in Hartlepool, England. During the Napoleonic Wars, a French ship of the type chasse mar\u00e9e<\/i> was wrecked off the coast of Hartlepool. The only survivor was a monkey, allegedly wearing a French uniform to provide amusement for the crew. On finding the monkey, some locals decided to hold an impromptu trial on the beach; since the monkey was unable to answer their questions and because they had seen neither a monkey nor a Frenchman before, they concluded that the monkey was in fact a French spy. Being found guilty the animal was duly sentenced to death and hanged on the beach.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Some highlights:<\/p>\n