‘Bristol’s urban legends thrive due to an admirably uninhibited approach to facts’

What is it about Bristol and the telling of stories? It was my great pleasure to hang out in Swindon for a few days recently, and I quickly noted that, when it came to events of local interest, the populace tended to recount the facts and nothing more.

Should you ask someone, ‘what happened?’ – a question that round here not infrequently triggers a deluge of colourful narratives – then the Swindonian will furnish you with only a mere sequence of occurrences, including none of the exaggerations and emphases necessary to get some juice out of the situation.

In Swindon they have incidents; in Bristol we have stories.

The people of this town tend to not be encumbered by an excess of reliance upon accurate knowledge. Why should not really knowing anything about something stop you talking about it? I never let it stop me, that’s for sure.

It is this admirably uninhibited approach to the facts that has allowed a healthy stream of supposition to be fed into Bristol’s cannon of urban legends.

Urban legends need to be masticated by many mouths: you need to pass them around and have a little fun with them. Stories are like cheese, and if you’re too scared to let the milk ferment you’ll never get anywhere. Bristolians understand this, and this is why our stories are just so damn good.

In my researches into the urban legends of Bristol I picked up some rare treats, but the greatest pleasure was to hear the blockbusters from many angles. There are hundreds of permutations, variations and perverse re-interpretations of the rollicking tales you know and love.

On the whole I have endeavoured to increase this dense muddle of hearsay that Bristol’s oral culture finds itself in.

However, I am writing here because I find myself moved, somewhat uncharacteristically, to introduce some clarity into one of our most famous legends. In this particular case I think that all the exaggeration and misinformation are actually putting people at grave risk.

The enjoyment of a certain tale has led people to ignore the inconvenient reality submerged within it, and thus they are failing to take the proper precautions to protect themselves.

In most versions of the tale, in February 2004 Mr Jolyon Rea’s bus screeches to a halt on the Bedminster Bridge, the driver leaps out, pointing at the Avon and screaming about a crocodile. Paying no mind to the beeping traffic building behind the bus, Jolyon jumps up and down trying to get everyone to see what he saw.

The story goes that the phantom ‘crocodile’ only grinned at him and slipped below the surface of the muddy water.

But this is not what happened. And to be honest with you, if spinning a good yarn involves besmirching the reputation of an honest man then I’m not interested.

I’m going to tell this story joylessly if I have to. I needn’t emphasise the high emotion of Jolyon’s sighting. I’m sure that you can imagine what it would be like to suddenly apprehend a crocodile in the Avon: surprising.

Exaggeration here would only confuse the issue. Particularly considering the experienced bus driver’s remarkable sanity and restraint in the circumstances.

Following his observations, Jolyon continued his route and reported the siting to the police once it was safe to pull over.

In the years that have followed, in the face of much mockery (including from Bristol and Avon constabulary), Jolyon has continued to calmly assert that he saw a large reptile that day.

He even voluntarily underwent a drugs test to show he wasn’t on the wacky stuff at the time of the siting. But it was already too late: within hours the story had taken leave of reality, and quickly descended into the murky territory of click-bait articles and online bullying.

When it comes to the photographs, I have to say that I myself dismissed them at first because of their extreme similarity to logs.

However, consider this impression from an evolutionary perspective: crocodilians survive by looking like logs and have been practicing looking like logs for over 80 million years. It is hardly surprising that when we look at one, we often think that it looks a lot like a log.

In the summer of 2017, a pair of experienced water engineers were doing some routine work at Chew Valley Reservoir when suddenly they spotted, sunbathing on the concrete bank, what looked like a baby crocodile. A short, panicky scuffle later, and the engineers have trapped the little beasty.

The boffins at the RSPCA soon identified it as a caiman (a close relative of alligators and crocodiles). Of course it doesn’t take an expert to figure out that where there is a baby, there is a mother; and that where there is a mother, there is a father.

Jolyon had been warning us all along, but we had only heard a rather entertaining beast story. The following morning in Bridewell Police Station you can bet that some harassed police chief was shouting at the social media team to delete the force’s jovial tweets relating to the matter.

They didn’t want people pointing out that they had been scoffing while Bristol’s population of man-eating reptiles ballooned.

Had people listened to Mr Rea in the first place then the issue could have been cleared up with a minimum of fuss.

Instead, Bristol’s famously labyrinthine waterways are now crawling with caimans. It’s a mess. And it’s all down to the fact that this city insists on embroidering and exaggerating every story that surfaces until no one believes a word of it.

Wilf Merttens is a storyteller whose book Bristol Urban Legends: The Hotwells Crocodile and Other Stories is published by the History Press. He will be reading from the book and signing copies at Waterstones in Clifton Village on Saturday, June 23.