Sir William Nettleton IV, once married a monkey called Kevin. He was drunk at the time (Kevin, not Sir William) which was the only reason he agreed to the marriage, which it is believed was never consummated. At least, as far as court records are concerned this Sir William was never arrested for ‘lewd behaviour involving an Monkey’. Though he was excommunicated, and there were rumours about the Vatican ‘visit’ that lead to his expulsion from the mother church that involved a cassock, a mitre and an original sketch of the Mona Lisa called the Mona Leon which the church has been hushing up for four centuries now.

Kevin died shortly after the wedding ceremony, and Sir William arranged a full burial service with the Church of England as well as paying for a stain glass window in St Micheal’s on the Tees that featured an image of Kevin the monkey entering the pearly gates. This in turn inspired American band The Pixies to write their most successful single form the Dolittle album.

Sir William reputedly died shortly after Kevin’s death of a broken heart, and server alcoholism… Sadly of course he will not have joined Kevin in the afterlife as while his monkey went to heaven, as he was excommunicated Sir William almost certainly went to hell, or Stockton on Tees*…

*As a Teesside resident, not a pathetic Tory wanker and currently home secretory, I can say mean things about Stockton on Tees (which actually is quite nice).

The current Willian Nettleton who writes as Will Nett because he thinks it makes him sound cooler, hipper, but mostly to distance himself from the vast array of previous William Nettleton’s in the family line. Most of which have been a tad disreputable, and almost all entirely fictional…

Occasionally he send me guest blog posts, because he can’t be bothered to start his own blog. They are generally entertaining so I make up another distantly related Nettleton and put them out. They tend to be a mix bunch but well received, as Will is a tad elliptic at the best of times but seldom less than engaging. This one is about monkeys and his native Teesside and doesn’t mention Kevin once…

Monkeys by Will Nett

When I was kid my Dad told me that as a boy he had a pet monkey. Given that he grew up in post-war Middlesbrough, this seems unlikely, but he explained how they kept it chained up for the most part in the living room of the house on North Ormesby Road, where it spent its time eating coal and scowling and screeching at my Dad, uncles and aunts while they tried to watch the Jimmy Wheeler Show- ask your parents; or their parents; or their parents. One Bonfire Night it was apparently spooked by some sort of explosion and escaped. Knowing what I know of my Dad’s relationship with his wider family, if I’d have been their pet I’d have took my chances on the streets at the earliest opportunity. I’d forgotten about the absurdity of all this until recently when over the course of several days I encountered various other people who had stories about monkeys kept as pets across the wider Teesside area, though the hospitality does not appear to have extended as far north as Hartlepool for obvious historical reasons. Our monkey-hanging friends notwithstanding, it was perhaps a coastal trend; some cursory research suggests there was once a branch of Boyes department store in Scarborough in the 60s that sold monkeys, one of which held down a weekend summer job as an organ grinder’s mechanical fitter at South Bay. At a party this summer a neighbour pointed out that they had once kept a pet monkey, but didn’t elaborate any further on the matter, and their intoxicated state left me unable to press them for further details.

A few days ago someone visited my office and casually remarked that their father had kept a pet marmoset, probably around the same time of my Dad’s own simian houseguest. Again, no-one could remember what happened to it. Later that night I went to see alt/industrial folkie Frazer Lambert perform. Explaining the origins of his song ‘Chicken Bones in the Teapot’ he told the story of how his grandfather returned from a posting in West Africa with a monkey by the name of ‘Jimmy.’ It lived comfortably in the back yard of Frazer’s grandparents’ house in Stockton- where it once snaffled Frazer’s grandmother’s roast chicken and stashed the ossuary evidence in her best teapot- thus inspiring the song. Jimmy eventually outgrew his new surroundings and took it upon himself to join a passing menagerie. That this story was recounted in a venue called the Brass Monkey is not lost on me.

When Frazer finished his song, I turned to a friend of mine and said “Our Dad had a pet monkey, y’know.”

He thought for a moment, then went onto explain that around thirty years ago he was knocking around our old stamping ground, Spencerbeck, when he noticed a small child waving at him and his mates from the window of a flat near St. Gabriel’s school. As my friend was smoking his customary joint at the time, perhaps his vision was unfocused, but as he drew the attention of his friends to the window, and squinted, he realised that it was indeed a monkey knocking on the glass. Throwing child safety concerns to the early 90s winds, he and his friends, at the instance of the owner, then embarked upon a petting session with the preening primate.

As regular readers will know, I’ve been around a bit- I was approached by a wild cassowary, once- and yet I’ve never seen a domesticated monkey anywhere around my hometown. There are approximately 5,000 primates currently kept as pets in the UK ahead of forthcoming legislation that will rightly or wrongly make it more difficult for people to own monkeys as pets. I would have expected a higher figure when taking into consideration the English obsession with servitude and misguided sense of lording it over their supposed inferiors. No word yet on the legality of monkeys owning humans as pets, but I guess it’s only a matter of time.