The Greater Irish Rattlesnake? October 14, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
Irish children are brought up with the attractive lie that St Patrick drove all snakes from the country when he arrived in Ireland in the fifth century. Certainly there are no indigenous snakes in Ireland, but over the years small snake populations have been established; not least in the Irish boom when snakes became prestige pets (that were then let go when the boom deflated in 2008). Then, of course, there are the rattlesnakes of Blarney Castle… Tenth of September 1903 a letter was sent from or at least with the notepaper of the Midland Hotel in Manchester to The Times, which published the letter. The letter was signed by one C. R. Warwick. It read simply:
As a matter of record I only beg to state that I arrived from America on the Celtic about ten days ago and landed at Queenstown, Ireland, and went to Cork. At Blarney Castle I liberated fourteen fairly good sized rattlesnakes (one with six and two with four rattles—balance quite young). Time will tell if St. Patrick’s edict is a myth or not, Yours for Science, C. R. WARWICK.
The Times was absolutely outraged and blustered that the local authorities in Ireland would have to deal with this ‘dastardly act’: The Times is probably today, as it was then, the UK’s best paper but it has never had much of a sense of humour. Investigation showed that no C. R. Warwick had stayed at the Midland Hotel, but, then, the letter shows a clear understanding of the gravity of what he had claimed to have done and one can hardly expect CRW to be his real name. (No obvious anagram). Late Victorian and Edwardian England marked the high tide mark of interest in invasive populations and readers will have had an excellent understanding of the dangers of intrusive geni.
The papers that picked up the story were rather more relaxed than The Times had been. One noted that the very fact that the rattlesnakes were released at Blarney Castle suggests that C.R.Warwick was a joker. The story then withered and if there were any Irish crofters, English tourists or patriotic Sinn Feiners terrified by the sound of a rattle from the bushes in the years to come, then the media made nothing of it… Yet perhaps even now, up a forgotten rill a tribe of the rattlers are still dreaming of desert lands across the Atlantic: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
