Scarborough - Monkey Island
A sailor once returned home to Scarborough with a monkey from abroad. The creature escaped and ran onto a grassy bank known in the North Bay. Ever since then this oddly shaped mud bank became known as Monkey island. This story was told to Roy Barker by an old timer in the 1930's.
Nowadays Monkey Island is forgotten. Its almost a place of mythology. It is reffered to by some old timers. It was apparently an island on the North Bay.
Monkey Island seems to have been one side of the river bank for Scalby Beck. Yet through time it has been eroded away. It was made of clay and was basically a mud bank which stuck out into the sea. Over time it was eroded away.
It was quite extensive. During the 1800'2 the Scalby Mills pub was almost completely hidden from the sea.
As proof the 1777 Scalby enclosure award map show that Scalby Beck entered the North Sea much further south than it does now. The grassy bank was then known as Flather Pickers Leas. Flither girls would collect limpets and mussels as bait for the fishermen.
In the early nineteen hundreds it was described as big enough to play football on it. It had a bit of a slope. Men alive then said that in their own youth it was big enough and flat enough to play cricket on. Don Pickard says that old timers reckoned that you could ahve had 10,000 people on it.
In the war there was a machine gun bunker added on it's outer most edge. These were erected all along the coast as defences against a possible German invasion. The whole of the North bay was covered with barbed wire and was watched over by guards. Indeed a woman was shot dead in September 1940 ater failing to answer a sentry. The machine gun bunker was finally blown up in 1964.
In the Great War Soldiers also practised throwing hand grenades onto an imaginary enemy below. The Island was then 50 foot high!
It reached it final demise in the 1960's as it was levelled off by the Council. It became a carpark and was protected by sea defences. It was in the position now occupied by the Sea Life Centre.
Looking at photos the biggest change is in how the coast is now protrected in the North Bay. You can walk along the promenade all the way to Scalby Mills. Back in the days of Monkey Island young boys and girls would walk along the beach near Scalby Mills on the sands and rocks. They would investigate the rock pools and grassy banks. They would take home crabs and shrimps to their mothers in buckets and mussels in their caps. It was an adventure play ground for the young. The real monkeys of monkeys island were the mischievous boys who used it as an adventure playground.
It seems likely that another Monkey Island could be formed sometime in the future. If you look at the passage of Scalby Beck you will notice that it turns right about 100 yards before it flows into the sea. Where it turns right you will notice that the cliff path is very narrow. It is just a few feet wide at that point. Given hundreds of years of erosion it will erode away the path and eventually the whole grass bank will be cut off. Then over years that new island will erode away. That will be both from the sea and through normal erosion (rain washing away lose soil).
You would think that Scarborough had the best monkey story on the North East Coast due to Monkey Island. But Scarborough has nothing on Hartlepool. Here a ship was wrecked during the Napoleonic wars. The only survivor was monkey in French clothes. The monkey failed to answer the questions of locals so they hanged as a spy (just to be on the safe side). After all they had never seen any Frenchmen and presumably never seen a monkey. Hartlepool has been infamous for this ever since and a man was even elected mayor (on a free bananas ticket) in 2002 dressed in a monkey suit.
OTHER ARTICLES
• Coastal erosion in the 19th Century around the North Bay and Scarborough Castle area
• A sea shanty about a storm on the Scarborough coast
• The Home Guard and coastal defences in WW2 Scarborough
• Tunny fishing in Scarborough in the 1930's
• The national RNLI and the Scarborough lifeboat of 1861.
• Tommy Rowley - stories about loss of life at sea
• Trawling During WW2 around scarborough and the North - East coast
• Scarboroughs Fishermen versus Firemen Football match on Boxing Day
• The 200 year history of scarboroughs RNLI
• Filey and the gales of 1860,1867,1869 AND 1880
• Shipbuilding at Scarborough - the wooden barques and schooners
• Primitive Methodism amongst the Scarborough Filey and Flamborough fishing communities
• The U-Boat campaign in the First World War
• Watching for ships by the harbour walls in Scarborough
• The Yorkshire smuggler - the smuggling of contraband
• Harwood Brierleys description of Scarborough harbour at the opening of the 20th century
• The early years of the Scarborough Lifeboat
• Flither lasses hunting for bait
• Sustainable fishing - quotas and a way of life
HOW TO HELP THIS WEBSITE: Google rates pages posted on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites very highly. So if you have found this site useful please post it using the buttons below.
Tweet