By Michael Bloor
(first published in Literally Stories, 16/7/23)
Derby in the English Midlands, where I was born and raised, is an industrial city, famous in the past for its locomotives, and in the present for Rolls Royce aero engines. In my lifetime, an awful lot of its old buildings have been knocked down, even the ancient church of St Alkmund’s, swept away with it’s graveyard to make room for the new inner ring road. But it still has a lot of old pubs: The Dolphin Inn, for example, dates back to 1580. So the fact that The Noah’s Ark pub is two hundred years old is hardly noteworthy. What is pretty interesting though, is how it got its title. It’s not named after ‘the illustrious first navigator,’ as one Victorian local historian phrased it. It’s named after a locally famous character called Noah Bullock who had a house on that site, back in the seventeenth century.
Now, it’s not an uncommon quirk to have an interest in, and to identify with, a particular historical character. Mrs Thatcher famously identified with Winston Churchill’s belligerent persona, even to the extent of driving a tank on one ludicrous occasion. The Argentinian writer, Jorge Borges, has cited the curious example of the fascination of Edward Fitzgerald, a wealthy Edwardian dilettante, for Omar Khayyam, the twelth-century Persian polymath and poet. Borges describes Fitzgerald’s translation of Khayyam’s Rubaiyyat as ‘a mysterious collaboration’ that produced an enduring, outstanding, joint contribution to English literature.*
Old Noah Bullock also had a quirky association with an historical figure: his identification was with the Biblical Noah and, for a time at least, that historical association proved to be pretty productive, even lucrative. The Book of Genesis tells us that Noah had three sons. As also did Noah Bullock. When Mr Bullock named his boys after those three sons in the Bible – Sham, Ham and Japheth – the Derby townfolk regarded that as a pardonable eccentricity. However, when he started to build an ark in the back garden, this created comcern and even alarm. The garden backed onto the River Derwent and Noah eventually launched and moored the ark there. People gave him a wide berth, no pun intended.
At some point, the Recorder (the legal officer for the town), Sir Simon Degge, had a tip-off that Bullock was taking advantage of his new social isolation to practice as a forger, clipping the edges off coins and forging new coinage from the accumulated clippings. Degge summoned Noah to appear before him and confronted him with the charge. Apparently, Bullock freely admitted it, and further claimed that his new coins were every bit as good as those from the Royal Mint.
Back then, forgery was a capital offence. But, for some reason, Degge let him off with a warning and superintended the destruction both of Noah’s coining equipment and his ark. One would like to believe that the recorder was motivated by admiration.
*Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald’, pp. 76-79, in Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology, London: Picador, 1972.