A group of unkempt youngsters, whose arrival at the scene had been heralded by the rusty screech of BMX brakes, dismounted their machines and began flinging the remnants of Happy Meals into the lifeless pool.
“Not the toy, Carl!” one shouted.
A portly angler seated on an unsteady folding chair – a man I’d seen, half-an-hour previously, skewer a breaded KFC chicken leg on his hook – cast a dagger’s glimpse at the loud group and grimaced.
This was a genuinely surreal minute in time, a scene that for downright “out there” weirdness has actually not been matched in a journalistic profession pushing a near half-century.
Steadily the crowd grew, boosted by reporters and professional photographers with long lenses, till a thin ribbon of mankind collected around modest Roman Way Pool, a location that just partially gravitated from the label of pond. The tabloid press romantically called it a lake. One paper explained it as a tank.
They came in search of the Cannock Crocodile, a beast repeatedly spotted in the dank waters during the summer months of 2003. Those waters were actually in Churchbridge, a small community nudging the former Staffordshire pit town, but national papers had played fast-and-lose with geography from this bizarre story’s infancy.
One red-top headlined its short article “Crocodile Dudley”. The BBC, no less, described the event as “Cannock’s own Loch Ness”.
Exactly twenty years ago today, the tale genuinely ignited, trotted out in tabloids, on television and radio.
We all rejected reasoning. The media, en masse, snubbed the spoilers provided by such sixty-four-thousand-dollar questions as: How has a complete grown crocodile endured our winter seasons? Why wasn’t it identified prior to? Why has it not been seen and photographed basking on the pond/pool/lake/tank? What does it consume?
Unthinking animal owners free turtles and terrapins into natural watercourse, however what type of homeowner drops a near 7 foot crocodile? I did contemplate that, however chose not to let such issues suppress a bloody good yarn.
For me, the enjoyment and anticipation drained pipes some 2 hours into my 5 hour “croc watch” vigil, syphoned, to a big degree, by an excitable, squealing blonde at water’s edge called Mandy.
“Something’s poked it’s head above the water!” Mandy screeched. As a boy tossed a handful of french fries at the things, she pleaded: “Don’t hurt it.”
I trained field glasses on the area pin-pointed by Mandy’s finger, sighed and testily notified fellow observers: “It’s a shopping trolley.”
Unsurprisingly, nobody got the “money shot”, an unique image of the animal, though numerous had actually seen it or their mate Dave swore he’d seen it or their neighbour had actually seen “something strange, something he can’t explain and he’s been going there for donkey’s years”.
Yet such was the scale of croc fever, regional authorities, accompanied by an RSPCA inspector and gator professional, trawled the swimming pool.
They might have discovered a shopping trolley, however definitely no killer tropical monster.
And locals were advised to stop tossing bait. The expansion of half-eaten doner kebabs were posturing a risk to the vulnerable eco system.
The story – and I was all over it like a livid rash from the beginning – was stimulated by a papa who took his kids to feed swans at the area. Something huge and ominous emerged to stuff on the chopped bread.
He gotten in touch with emergency situation services and, in an odd aside to an exceptionally odd legend, informed me he was asked to explain the crocodile by an imperturbable authorities call handler. Maybe officers wished to guarantee they snared the ideal one. “Scaly, thrashing tail, looked a bit like a log at first…”
“Big teeth, huge mouth?” I asked the eye-witness.
“Yeah, you’ve got it,” he responded excitedly. “Have you seen it, too?”
Plunged into a press feeding craze, the dad provided his variation of occasions to the nationals: “We were there looking at the two swans and their baby cygnets.
“There was a commotion in the water and lots of turbulence. As the creature went past, I saw it had a flat head, five-foot long body and two-foot tail.
“It was not smooth and moving in a snaking action. My initial reaction was it was a crocodile or alligator.” He asked not to be called, however the declaration started a cause and effect of comparable claims.
Linda Charteras, from close-by Cheslyn Hay, said: “I saw the creature first. A large pool of dirt came up. It looked as though it was after one of the cygnets.”
Such was the storm of stories, the Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) – “a professional and scientific organisation dedicated to cryptozoology, the study of unknown animals and allied disciplines” – sent a big team from Exeter to sonar-sweep the swimming pool.
Its “intense”, two-day study, stopped working to discover the monster, although a location of flattened reeds was discovered, however the subsequent functional file consists of invaluable eye-witness accounts. “Even as we struggled to get our trusty dinghy inflated and onto the water, the first set of eyewitnesses arrived. They were a motley gaggle of teenage boys.
“They told us that they had also had an encounter with a scaly creature in Roman View Pond. We interviewed them:
“CFZ: I gather that you’ve actually seen this animal and fed it. Could you please tell us exactly what happened?
“Lads: We came down just after the RSPCA had been here. We saw what looked like the animal in the water and so Elliot went and got some chicken and we lobbed it into the water to feed it. Some of it went too far away. But then we threw one piece and it landed just next to it and there was a massive splash and we could see both the head and the tail. We actually thought that we had seen two of the animals in the water but then remembered that there is at least one massive pike in here and that the other animal was a fish.
“CFZ: And what did this animal look like?
“Lads: It was dark and about five-feet long including the tail.
“CFZ: Did you see scales or ridges on the tail or anything like that?
“Lads: We didn’t see its tail properly but there did seem to be a few spikes.”
The CFZ team did leave certain they had solved the mystery. The croc had been dumped by unscrupulous members of the exotic pet trade.
The dossier added: “Only a couple of days before we arrived the Wolverhampton Express & Star had carried a story about a large common snapping turtle which had been captured in a local brook.
“Having inspected the brook in question, and furthermore knowing that when snapping turtles achieve the size of the specimen fished out of this tiny brook in Staffordshire they are very sedentary creatures who on the whole sit on the bottom of a stream waiting for something to swim into the open mouths, I feel that it is likely the turtle was dumped into the stream in question within the last few weeks.”
That’s the smoking cigarettes weapon, the undeniable proof we were all looking for. From the start, the RSPCA examined with an established, and even jaundiced frame of mind. Representatives didn’t actually anticipate to discover a crocodile and they were proper.
And the animal charity had a theory over what triggered the croc turmoil. The animal was, it thought, a shoal of carp. The big fish frequently take a trip through water semi-submerged, offering the impression of something much larger moving at speed through water.
And when carp mass, they can surge significantly. An observer might error that for something big and mad.
I left Roman Way Pool persuaded it did not harbour a crocodile, yet, evaluating by the food litter drifting on its surface area, sure another killer hid in the dirty waters. Salmonella germs.
