92 AUGUST Shelford Tommy
#92 AUGUST Shelford Tommy Nottingham has always boasted its fair share of characters, legends and eccentrics. People like Benjamin Mayo, and more recent contenders like Frank Robinson, affectionately known as Xylophone Man, will go down in local history... But there’s one from the eighteenth century who, “to his extraordinary powers, a servant girl was although quite a local celebrity in his day, is in the kitchen, about to dress some fish; not long generally forgotten in 2017. taken from the river but apparently dead. When she was about to cut off the head of one of them, His real name was James Burne, though he Tommy, at the instant she laid her knife on the was nicknamed “Shelford Tommy.” In 1931, J fish’s neck, uttered, in a plaintive voice, ‘Don’t cut Holland Walker described Tommy as “an itinerant my head off.’ ventriloquist [who] earned a precarious existence by giving exhibitions of his capabilities with an “The girl, upon this, being much alarmed, and ill-made ventriloquial dummy.” knowing not whence the voice proceeded, hastily drew the knife from the little fish and stood for Tommy was recorded as “carrying in his pocket, some time in motionless amazement. At length, an ill-shaped doll, with a broad face, which he however, recovering herself, and not seeing the apparently exhibited at public-houses, on fair fish stir, had courage to proceed to her business, days, race days and market days.” The gazing and took up the knife a second time, to sever the crowd would gather round to see this wooden head of the fish from the body.
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