We haven’t lived. Yes, we’ve enjoyed the finest entertainment that Liverpool has to offer in our lifetimes – the Beatles, Ken Dodd, two great football clubs – but none of them can hold a candle to Mickey the chimp. Or hold a Benson and Hedges, rather.
As parents rack their brains to fill the long school holidays, what they might give for the diversions of a century or so ago when Mickey the smoking chimpanzee was the toast of Liverpool Zoological Gardens.
He was a hairier Noel Coward. Much hairier. He was billed as “the world’s cleverest chimp”
In the thirties, crowds enjoyed the gooseflesh-making sensation of gawping at Mickey as he looked back at them through the fumes of his gasper. He was a hairier Noel Coward. Much hairier. He was billed as “the world’s cleverest chimp”. He would purse his lips expectantly with a cigarette between them while his keeper lit it from his own.
But he wasn’t an idle libertine. Fifteen stone of muscle, Mickey also proved himself a useful footballer, controlling the ball and belting it at visitors. Best of all, he excited a frisson of pleasurable danger, frequently eluding his keepers and bunking off into town.
He was dubbed Liverpool’s King Kong. In the best Scouse tradition, he would enjoy a night out wearing next to nothing. On one famous excursion, his handlers thought they had him cornered only for Mickey to toss his fag away and plant a kiss on a woman who had hailed him by name, before sauntering off with his arm around her waist.
Mickey outshone the attractions of two other zoos then in business in Liverpool. This was the high watermark of our unschooled fascination with the animal kingdom, before Sir David Attenborough and Chris Packham put us wise on our obligations to our fellow species.
I’ve been on a quest to find the celebrated chimp. Of course he passed away long ago, and in distressing circumstances, too. He sprang himself from the zoo once too often. Events took a dark turn after he bounded into a school playground one day and knocked a teacher out cold – and they thought they had it hard keeping order in Adolescence. Mickey also bit a couple of children.
On his tail was a scratch posse including 15 armed policemen and a lion tamer. As one local historian said, he didn’t have the puff to run away because of all the cigarettes. In an echo of the legend of Kong, Mickey climbed a chimneypot before he was felled by an army marksman. It was March 1938. The zoo shut down not long afterwards. Remorse swept the ape’s adoptive home. Mickey was lovingly stuffed and put on display at Lewis’s department store in the city centre until that was levelled in the Blitz. No one seems to know what happened to him after that. The scent of Mickey, unforgettably gamy as it might have been, was lost on the salty Mersey air…
I’m a southerner, as soft as they come, but my grandparents ran a B&B in New Brighton, pearl of the Mersey riviera, and I grew up knowing the resort as a place of exotic enchantments.
I spent happy holidays there as pot boy and bellhop. My jobs included banging the brass gong for dinner, summoning our guests who were turns in variety shows at the Floral Pavilion theatre on the prom. (Doddy played there many times and the Fab Four once opened for Little Richard).
In the days when New Brighton was bidding to emulate its raffish southern namesake, amusement arcades and joke shops lined Victoria Road, fruit machine calling to electric hand buzzer like Bertie Wooster’s great aunts.
He was dubbed Liverpool’s King Kong
There was a magnificent art deco lido and a tower to rival the one up the coast at Blackpool – until it burned down. There was the legend of Higgledy the octopus, said to have been kept in the flooded basement of a house in New Brighton. It seemed entirely natural that a chimp with a sixty-a-day habit had once walked the streets a short distance away by Mersey ferry.
Mickey enjoyed something of an afterlife in popular culture. Beatles fans thought that John Lennon’s song “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and my Monkey” (1968) was a veiled reference to Mickey, although musicologists link it to Lennon’s experiences with heroin instead.
The flamboyant jazz groaner George Melly, who was born in Toxteth, wrote about Mickey in his memoir Scouse Mouse. Melly claimed to have seen the mummified Mickey after the war at Sudley Hall, a manor house close to the site of the old zoological gardens and now part of Liverpool Museums.
In our enlightened age, one can’t assume that a raddled old monkey with a couple of bullet holes will be deemed a suitable exhibit for everybody. But I hoped Mickey might still be on the premises, mouldering in a basement or outhouse. I contacted the curators.
“Over the years, I have looked at every record we have relating to Sudley and can confirm that there is no mention in any of our documentation about the house to indicate that we ever had Mickey the chimp there, alive or dead, either in the basement or anywhere else,” a spokeswoman told me.
Melly was the cousin of a woman called Emma Holt, the daughter of a Victorian merchant and ship owner, who lived at Sudley Hall. The spokeswoman continued, “Melly visited Sudley as a child in the 1930s. He describes his visits in some detail in the book, just after he describes seeing Mickey at the nearby Mossley Hill Zoo – so perhaps that’s where the connection was made with our venue.”
Another source told me that Sudley was “stripped of many of its original items” in the years immediately after the war, when it was overseen by the city corporation. “It may be that the object was removed at this point if it was on-site, and never entered into Liverpool County Museums’ collection in 1974.”
All is not lost. We don’t know that Mickey (“the object”) ended up in a skip. I hope that an alderman took him home and that he’s still there, a morbidly anachronistic conversation piece like a tiger skin rug or an umbrella stand made from an elephant’s foot. I hope there’s a Woodbine in Mickey’s paw.
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