Legend and life: "the boyfriend's death" and "the mad axeman."

Folklore, Annual, 1998 by Michael Wilson

Notes

This is a revised version of a paper first delivered at the International Contemporary Legend Conference at University of Bath in July 1996. It also forms part of a chapter in the author's book Performance and Practice: Oral Narrative Traditions Among Teenagers in Britain and Ireland, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997. Permission from the publishers is gratefully acknowledged.

(1) The prison at Princetown was first built to house French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars. It was later transferred to civilian use. However, its bleak, inhospitable surroundings and its forbidding architecture have earned it a stark reputation. Many stories exist of escapees who have returned after a couple of days on the run, begging to be let back in after getting lost in the wilderness of the Moor.

(2) In his book The Profession of Violence (1984), John Pearson hyphenates the term "Axe-Man" when referring to Mitchell. On the other hand the press reports were inconsistent, sometimes inserting a hyphen, sometimes not. For the sake of clarity I have followed Pearson's example of using a hyphen ("Axe-Man") when referring directly to Mitchell, and omitted it ("Axeman") when referring to the character in or the title of the contemporary legend. The only exceptions to this are in cases when I am quoting directly from the press. These are, of course, always references to Frank Mitchell.

(3) In the days immediately following Mitchell's escape a number of prisoners in different jails around the country also made a bid for freedom. Prisons at Wandsworth, Birmingham and Eccleshall all experienced escapes, and on Boxing Day there was a further escape from Dartmoor when five prisoners went on the run. Whether or not these were copycat escapes, the result was to increase the level of anxiety amongst the general public and to keep the Mitchell affair in the public eye.

(4) Rampton and Broadmoor are top-security hospitals for the criminally insane.

(5) Mitchell's dehumanisation is interesting in terms of there being a tradition on Dartmoor of a non-human, beastly threat. This is most commonly exemplified in the "Black Dog" tradition, and is evident today in the sightings of large cats and the "Dartmoor (sometimes Exmoor or Bodmin) Beast" sightings. Indeed, one variant I collected myself unequivocally calls the story "The Exmoor Beast." It is almost as if the dehumanisation of Mitchell was part of the process of making him folklorically acceptable.

(6) my experience, it is also possible for a storyteller to increase the believability of a story by undermining their own authority as a storyteller, leaving out many specific details. The subtext here is that the storyteller cannot know intimate details of a true event at which she was not present. In order for the story to be believable, the storyteller must also be believable, and be realistic about the knowledge they claim to have of a supposed happening.

(7) The same is true of American versions of the story--see, for example, Mark Glazer's interesting analysis, "The Cultural Adaptation of a Rumour Legend: `The Boyfriend's Death' in South Texas" (Glazer 1987). His analysis is based upon collections made amongst Mexican-American communities, and he identifies two major types of the story currently in circulation. Type A stories are similar to most of the published American texts, in that the couple are not married and the identity of the murderer is not known. Furthermore, the boyfriend is left hanging (sometimes inverted) from a tree. In Type B stories, on the other hand, the couple are often engaged or married. Sometimes it is even a family that is involved. The murderer is also always identified at the end of the story, and the manner of death is decapitation rather than hanging. These conform more closely to the variants that I have collected in Britain and Ireland. In his American example of Type B, the sexual element is so reduced that Glazer is led to conclude that the story is essentially warning a man to pay "proper attention to his car" (Glazer 1987, 107). It is also interesting that, though he is able to trace the Type A story back to 1949, his earliest text of the Type B variant is 1971-a little later than the story began to rise in popularity in Britain.