What exactly is Davy Jone's locker ?

byTimMannion

115 followers

4 years ago

Did you know " Davy Jones " as of Davey Jones'Locker fame is often supposed to be of the well-known contortionist and ascetic Dai Llewellyn Jones, who made a name for himself in Theaters, illicit bear-pits and secretive cock fighting dens of the Scottish Lowlands in the late eighteenth century.

He reputedly had a Houdini-like facility to dislocate his limbs painlessly and clamber into or out of small spaces.

A terrifyingly thin man with a prickly ginger beard and a birthmark in the shape of the boot of Italy over his oesophagus, he was naturally shy, and having grown up in a carpenters shop he felt most comfortable sleeping folded ( rather than curled ) up in a chest drawer.

His highly popular act involved his assistant Fortescue ( a Syphilitic rogue grotesquely made up as a grinning minstrel ) opening and shutting drawers in a large chest as Jones appeared or disappeared with apparent impossibility-his grinning mug emerging from the bottom drawer, his left foot from the top one.

The act made his name famous although it was never deemed apt for any large arena than the local flea- pits, and his Fortesque's reward( which they shared equally ) never escalated above the brief shower of pennies that came down from the crowd as they waited for the baited bear to come in.

By his early forties, his joints tired with the effort and starting to suffer the effects of syphilis he may have caught from the now dead Fortesque (Neither ever married ), the paper trail of Jones's appearances dries up in the Dundee area. He had taken to performing cheap and very uncomfortable spectaculars for which he received poor financial returns- encasing himself in ice for tree days, hanging by his nipples from the Firth of Forth Bridge - until in desperation he announced he would be publicly chained into a locker a thrown in to the bay, .

On an icy winter's day, a sparce crowd gathered to watch this happen, and when the box hit the water they let out a weak cheer.when the bubbles had cleared and half an hour had passed, the sharp North Sea wind began to bite and their hope of a spectacle fading, the group drifted away.

James Boswell passed through the city a week later and heard the story from a desultory lonely drinker in the corner of a tavern.Enquirering in horror why no one had tried to save the doomed contortionist, he writes that the drinker stared at him, blinked,punched him in the face, and returned to his pint of whiskey.

Here endeth today's lesson....Keep em reading till the end...just make it half interesting