Video: An amazing profession: Her Royal Majesty's Pied Piper
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
An integral attribute of big cities are rats, vile gray animals scurrying everywhere, stealing supplies and spreading infection. Usually they were fought with the help of cats. In addition to them, special people were also engaged in the destruction of rodents. And the most famous of them is Jack Black, Queen Victoria's fearless rat-catcher.
Unlike modern extermination of pests with the help of chemicals and poisons, Black dealt with them with his bare hands, removing wriggling, squeaking creatures from houses and sewers. A lover of rats, he had a lot of experience and collected them in armfuls. Black kept the captured tailed beasts in a special dome-shaped cage, which he carried instead of a suitcase.
Jack Black turned out to be a virtuoso showman. He demonstrated his professional skills to the crowd gathered on the streets of London. Cages full of rats, all kinds of traps and bags of poisons were laid out on a makeshift platform. Black thrust his hand into the rat cage and took out as many of them as he could hold. This caused exclamations of surprise and disgust in the crowd. Then Black let go of the rats, and they ran up his arms. The assembled people saw how the tailed beasts sat on Jack Black's shoulders and cleaned their faces, or climbed on their hind legs and sniffed his ears and cheeks.
Jack Black's abilities rivaled only his taste for fashion. He wore a high top hat, red vest, green coat and white leather leggings, gnawed by the objects of his hunt. Over his shoulder he wore a leather sling decorated with a crown with the letters "V. R." (Victoria Regina, or Queen Victoria) and two metal rats on either side. As claimed by Jack Black in his flyers, Queen Victoria herself had promoted him to the title of "Her Majesty the Destroyer of rats and moths."
Of course, rodent trapping was not limited to a glamorous costume. In one interview, he told a journalist how a rat bit him on the finger. The infection started and everything looked very bad. But the rat-catcher saved himself by pulling out the broken fangs with tweezers.
Jack remembered another incident by pulling 300 rodents out of one hole in the wall. The usual cage was not enough, I had to carry the animals literally in the mouth, in the hands, under the arms and in the pockets.
Through fearless exploits like this, Jack Black secured the position of Queen Victoria's chief rat-catcher.
In addition to killing pests, Jack Black also bred decorative rats. He kept the colored or spotted animals that came across to him and carried out their selection. Decorative rats in Victorian times were as popular as birds. Young ladies kept them in golden cages for fun. Even Queen Victoria had one or two rats.
Also, the work of rat catchers at the British court has long been performed by cats. This tradition has survived to this day and now lives in the residence of the Prime Minister Larry, the laziest cat in the British government.
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