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Gnomes In Little Red Cars? (Wollaton Park Gnomes; 1979)

Some interesting thoughts and theories.

As a child of the 70s/early-80s we had to use our imaginations a lot as there was little in the way of entertainment during the day. So we would go down to our local woods and make camps, explore on our push bikes, have play fights and endless kick abouts with a football and a single goal without a net. We often imagined 'enemies' who would be coming to attack our camp and were obsessed with the science-fiction of the time (Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars; Blakes 7 and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the early 80s, etc..) The final moon landing had been less than a decade ago and we still imagined that in our lifetimes we might send humans to explore the other planets.

Personally, I feel there must have been gangs of young children everywhere that at one time or another found themselves running away from imagined foes that originated from local legends and the TV and many a long-since forgotten tall tale may have been told of their adventures 'down the woods'. So we owe it to the headmaster Mr Aldridge for taping the interviews and going on the record with the local media for keeping the Wollaton gnomes story alive, even more so given the silence of the witnesses ever since. That he took their experience so seriously suggests to me they had a real encounter with 'something' beyond their comprehension or a freak weather event, for example a whirlwind that sent debris flying around their heads. That there was already a local legend of the little people in the park would have given the children an explanation for their experience regardless of how preposterous it might sound to adult ears.

Agree with all of this. I think the echoes of familiar childhood experiences means the case has a certain nostalgic aura to it, which explains some of its appeal to researchers.

Thinking again about the idea of a rag-related activity being the stimulus, I'm actually now not sure that students would have owned up. Students at a lot of universities aren't particularly well embedded in the local community so may not have read the local paper, or otherwise heard the story.

By way of a further check I did see where Nottingham Uni's campus is located in the city: turns out that it pretty much borders Wollaton Park to the south.
 
Nottingham Uni's campus is located in the city: turns out that it pretty much borders Wollaton Park to the south.
Almost anything goes on, within the borders of a campus: and absolutely-anything can (and does) take place, just outside its borders. This proximity is very interesting.

This slightly-satirical summary is interesting (see https://johnknifton.com/tag/wollaton-hall/ ) including as it does some useful OS map overlays to compliment earlier location offerings upthread from @EnolaGaia & @maximus otter.

I had a sudden impression from the slightly-different outline sketch of the 'cars' that John Knifton includes:
drawing.png


I'm getting a stronger idea of this representing a late Victorian / Edwardian tricycle wicker or coachworked bath-chair.....or perhaps a cycle rickshaw
medium_1979_0811_0003.jpg
 
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Almost anything goes on, within the borders of a campus: and absolutely-anything can (and does) take place, just outside its borders. This proximity is very interesting.

This slightly-satirical summary is interesting (see https://johnknifton.com/tag/wollaton-hall/ ) including as it does some useful OS map overlays to compliment earlier location offerings upthread from @EnolaGaia & @maximus otter.

I had a sudden impression from the slightly-different outline sketch of the 'cars' that John Knifton includes:
View attachment 53298

I'm getting a stronger impression of this representing a late Victorian / Edwardian tricycle wicker or coachworked bath chair.....or perhaps a cycle rickshaw
View attachment 53299
When I was young, I'd regularly see an old lady bombing along the road in a petrol-driven version of that. It looked pretty old.
Wonder if it was one of those?
It was like an armchair on 3 wheels, with a tiller at the front, painted all black.
 
One thing I'd say is that a definite point of agreement among the three interviewed witnesses is that there were sixty gnomes and thirty cars, two in each car. I don't believe the numbers themselves for a second but this does suggest a two seater arrangement, which is what implies golf buggies for me.

Having said all that, AE's drawing shows only a single gnome, so...another thing I'd thought is that maybe if we were thinking of some students building up to the rag week 'parade' in Noddy-themed costumes, they might have had some of those fancy dress 'vehicles' that hang off the shoulders? This would explain how they could jump over obstacles, though you'd think the kids would have noticed legs coming through the bottom of the cars.
 
I keep thinking about the car aspect and why the kids came up with it.

Gnomes don't usually drive cars (though in the books of "BB", if anyone remembers those from their childhood, they do drive trains and sail boats).

086980e3091d7089ed95e4fe452759dc--public-transport-the-forest.jpg


Cars for me comes back to "Noddy" and implies one of three things -

- The children were inspired by the example of Noddy to imagine they were seeing gnomes driving cars
- The children saw something car like (eg golf carts) and were inspired by the example of Noddy, and perhaps local stories, to imagine the people driving them were gnomes; or
- They saw some people (eg students) dressed specifically as gnomes, and the latter being inspired by Noddy thought that a car was an integral part of the whole fancy dress effort

I think the last one has a certain logic. Students in 1979 would have been born in 1960 or so and would therefore have been much more of the 'Noddy' generation than the witnesses.

So - golf course employees plus a playground tradition, or students working up to the rag parade. Both explain both the gnomes and their cars. Take your pick!
 
... So - golf course employees plus a playground tradition, or students working up to the rag parade. Both explain both the gnomes and their cars. Take your pick!

Still, there's one consistent factor in the children's stories that would need an explanation. If the figures the children saw were adults or college-age students, how did the children get the impression the figures were only about half their own size?
 
Still, there's one consistent factor in the children's stories that would need an explanation. If the figures the children saw were adults or college-age students, how did the children get the impression the figures were only about half their own size?

I have to say I can't think of anything for that one beyond the 'contagious excitement' factor mentioned elsewhere in the thread, or perhaps an unselfconscious attempt to rationalise the experience into something consistent (we saw gnomes; therefore the gnomes must have been gnome sized)
 
Still, there's one consistent factor in the children's stories that would need an explanation. If the figures the children saw were adults or college-age students, how did the children get the impression the figures were only about half their own size?
I don't want to go all Father Ted, but could the 'gnomes' have been further away from the children than they realised?
 
I don't want to go all Father Ted, but could the 'gnomes' have been further away from the children than they realised?

Yes - that's certainly possible. An additional issue is the ambient lighting. The sighting(s) occurred after dusk, so the only available lighting would have been street lights or other lighting within the park grounds or around the park's periphery.

Some versions of the story claim: (a) the little cars had illuminated lights or lighting and / or (b) the gnomes were mysteriously visible in the dark (e.g., as if they glowed).
 
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Yes - that's certainly possible. An additional issue is the ambient lighting. The sighting(s) occurred after dusk, so the only available lighting would have been street lights or other lighting within the park grounds or around the park's periphery.

Some versions of the story claim: (a) the little cars had illuminated lights or lighting and / or (b) the gnomes were mysteriously visible in the dark (e.g., as if they glowed).

Yes the whole lighting thing is one of the thorniest problems here. If the chronology was correct, it was fully dark.

The headteacher, based on the apparent location of the "swamps", thought there would be streetlights in a nearby road; one interviewee (Andrew P) said that there was an "ordinary light" in a tree, whatever that means. The other two said there were lights on the car, but one said the lights were off. The idea that the gnomes 'glowed' seems to partly be based on interviewee PO's comment that they "showed up" in the dark and partly to comments made by Marjorie Johnson at the time. Personally I think if the 'gnomes' had actually glowed the children would have explicitly said so, but it remains a possibility.

There is of course also the evidence of earlier local newspaper reports, at least some of which Frank Earp has said make more of the 'lights in trees' aspect. The newspaper article in this thread seems to be based on the tape recorded interviews but some of the others are apparently independent sources, of sorts.
 
Another thing that starts to push me towards the 'student japes' theory is one detail of the gnomes' costume. It's explicitly said by one witness:

"Well, they didn’t wear trousers – well they did, but they was like tights. It was yellow, last night they had a blue top on".

Why 'like tights', particularly? Noddy and Big Ears wear shorts and striped sort-of breeches, respectively. Another witness said that "some of the trousers were ripped and got yellow patches on 'em". Old trousers, and coloured tights rather than trousers? This sounds like a costume assembled on a budget - such as by a student.
 
Another thing that starts to push me towards the 'student japes' theory is one detail of the gnomes' costume. It's explicitly said by one witness:

"Well, they didn’t wear trousers – well they did, but they was like tights. It was yellow, last night they had a blue top on".

Why 'like tights', particularly? Noddy and Big Ears wear shorts and striped sort-of breeches, respectively. Another witness said that "some of the trousers were ripped and got yellow patches on 'em". Old trousers, and coloured tights rather than trousers? This sounds like a costume assembled on a budget - such as by a student.
Good point. This might be a long shot, but also made me immediately think of the jester from ‘Rentaghost’ which I’m pretty certain was on children‘s tv that year. Perhaps a rag week student dressed as the jester? There are some definite parallels
 
One thing I like about this case is, whether invented or not, it's led to grown adults considering what trousers Noddy wore over 40 years later. That's the mark of an inspiring tale.

I'm also very pleased by the fact that the case seems to have fallen into the hands of a fairy researcher early on, otherwise who knows? We might have ended up with little grey entities, rather than Little Grey Men.
 
Another thing that starts to push me towards the 'student japes' theory is one detail of the gnomes' costume. It's explicitly said by one witness:

"Well, they didn’t wear trousers – well they did, but they was like tights. It was yellow, last night they had a blue top on".

Why 'like tights', particularly? Noddy and Big Ears wear shorts and striped sort-of breeches, respectively. Another witness said that "some of the trousers were ripped and got yellow patches on 'em". Old trousers, and coloured tights rather than trousers? This sounds like a costume assembled on a budget - such as by a student.
Also: they describe a black beard but every classic image of a gnome I can find has a white beard. Of course beards weee very ‘in’ back in 1979 even amongst students
 
Some interesting thoughts and theories.

As a child of the 70s/early-80s we had to use our imaginations a lot as there was little in the way of entertainment during the day. So we would go down to our local woods and make camps, explore on our push bikes, have play fights and endless kick abouts with a football and a single goal without a net. We often imagined 'enemies' who would be coming to attack our camp and were obsessed with the science-fiction of the time (Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars; Blakes 7 and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the early 80s, etc..) The final moon landing had been less than a decade ago and we still imagined that in our lifetimes we might send humans to explore the other planets.

Personally, I feel there must have been gangs of young children everywhere that at one time or another found themselves running away from imagined foes that originated from local legends and the TV and many a long-since forgotten tall tale may have been told of their adventures 'down the woods'. So we owe it to the headmaster Mr Aldridge for taping the interviews and going on the record with the local media for keeping the Wollaton gnomes story alive, even more so given the silence of the witnesses ever since. That he took their experience so seriously suggests to me they had a real encounter with 'something' beyond their comprehension or a freak weather event, for example a whirlwind that sent debris flying around their heads. That there was already a local legend of the little people in the park would have given the children an explanation for their experience regardless of how preposterous it might sound to adult ears.
This wasn't limited to the late 70s/early 80s. I was a child of the 60s, and can confirm that our school dustbins were Daleks, and we all fought to be the Doctor, and then later Ace of Wands and the Tomorrow People featured large in our school storytelling. Children have always had their imaginations sparked, whether by books or TV or films, and then run with the ideas they've seen (or read, or been told).
 
Also: they describe a black beard but every classic image of a gnome I can find has a white beard. Of course beards weee very ‘in’ back in 1979 even amongst students

AP, who gives in some respects the most detailed description of the whole event, says a black beard (and different coloured cars, oddly). The other two said white beards with a bit of red at the end - rather distinctive and strange, as this neither conforms to fictional gnomes nor to how real life beards generally go white. Maybe one was copying the other's description, maybe that's really what they thought they saw?
 
I'd always thought of this one as fundamentally unsolvable, but it occurs to me that if anyone was about who was involved with rag week in 1979, and might remember whether there were a group of participants who'd dressed up as gnomes, or some similar type of character, there might be an outside chance of explaining it.
 
I'd always thought of this one as fundamentally unsolvable, but it occurs to me that if anyone was about who was involved with rag week in 1979, and might remember whether there were a group of participants who'd dressed up as gnomes, or some similar type of character, there might be an outside chance of explaining it.
This is what makes me think it wasn't down to rag week. It was in the local newspaper and surely, if there had been groups of people around dressed as gnomes, someone would have popped up to say so? The entire community couldn't have been unaware of the likelihood of the kids having just seen some students dressed up.
 
This is what makes me think it wasn't down to rag week. It was in the local newspaper and surely, if there had been groups of people around dressed as gnomes, someone would have popped up to say so? The entire community couldn't have been unaware of the likelihood of the kids having just seen some students dressed up.

This is exactly what I initially thought, but on reflection considered how poorly integrated some students are into their local communities (probably more so in the days when numbers were smaller and more people lived in halls). There's a possibility that it could have passed unnoticed.

On balance the idea of it being triggered by golf course employees is more plausible in this sense, as there would be an obvious motive to keep quiet. Students in costume are perhaps a better match for what was actually reported. Neither really explains everything.
 
This is exactly what I initially thought, but on reflection considered how poorly integrated some students are into their local communities (probably more so in the days when numbers were smaller and more people lived in halls). There's a possibility that it could have passed unnoticed.

On balance the idea of it being triggered by golf course employees is more plausible in this sense, as there would be an obvious motive to keep quiet. Students in costume are perhaps a better match for what was actually reported. Neither really explains everything.
I remember Rag Week when I grew up (60's and 70's) in Exeter, there were students EVERYWHERE collecting money (which was, after all, what it was all about) in costume on the streets, or performing various 'amusing' stunts. It was the main staple of our local paper, and although some people may have missed it, I suspect that you'd have to really struggle not to have read or seen something about it on local TV or media. And, in this case, it would only have needed one person reading the article to have put two and two together. Even a student!

I agree that the golf course employees piddling about with the carts is a better match (it was night, etc), and less likely to own up - although I can think of several anonymous ways that someone could have instantly nixed the children's story.

Of course, anyone involved may have decided to keep quiet so as not to make the children look stupid - 'ha ha, kids thought they saw gnomes when really it was Pete and Dave pissed up and mucking about'...
 
Anyone read the Fairies column in FT 417? It points out the Wollaton incident took place an hour after dusk - so basically it was pitch black in the location the gnomes were supposed to have been seen. This places a huge doubt over its truth.
 
Anyone read the Fairies column in FT 417? It points out the Wollaton incident took place an hour after dusk - so basically it was pitch black in the location the gnomes were supposed to have been seen. This places a huge doubt over its truth.
I believe it was even later than that.
 
Anyone read the Fairies column in FT 417? It points out the Wollaton incident took place an hour after dusk - so basically it was pitch black in the location the gnomes were supposed to have been seen. This places a huge doubt over its truth.
Worth keeping in the balance are the amount of apparitions that have been seen in pitch darkness, with adult witnesses unable to explain why they were able to see what they saw. I'm not arguing one way or the other, just bear in mind that the normal rules don't apply with the paranormal.
 
Worth keeping in the balance are the amount of apparitions that have been seen in pitch darkness, with adult witnesses unable to explain why they were able to see what they saw. I'm not arguing one way or the other, just bear in mind that the normal rules don't apply with the paranormal.

No, but you must admit it's pretty dodgy with multiple "witnesses" (actually only three, it turns out).
 
No, but you must admit it's pretty dodgy with multiple "witnesses" (actually only three, it turns out).
Dodgy, yes... but so are all high strangeness cases (otherwise we wouldn't call them "high strangeness").
 
Dodgy, yes... but so are all high strangeness cases (otherwise we wouldn't call them "high strangeness").

Don't get me wrong, it's a great case, but the new analysis detailed in the FT column pours a lot of cold water on it. Maybe there will be a rebuttal next issue?
 
Anyone read the Fairies column in FT 417? It points out the Wollaton incident took place an hour after dusk - so basically it was pitch black in the location the gnomes were supposed to have been seen. This places a huge doubt over its truth.

That's correct, but in fairness the headmaster interviewing the kids did sort of pick up on the issue of the light levels at the time - though I'm not saying that the kids' responses to his questioning on this point were especially convincing.
 
http://magoniamagazine.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-case-of-liverpool-leprechauns.html

I've just been reading this article, printed in Magonia in the 1980s, which talks about a case in 1964 where hundreds of children ended up rampaging through Liverpool parks looking for leprechauns (some of whom actually claimed to have seen leprechauns). Scale aside, I think there are a few interesting parallels. The possible partial solution, in the 'confession' given by Mr Jones in 1982, also points towards how - maybe - children could misperceive a quite normally sized person as a gnome, or leprechaun.

Realising that his short stature, emphasised by the height of his grandfather’s weeds, and his extraordinary clothing, gave the children this impression, he decided to capitalise on their deluded perception. So he claims that: “I bounded into view, babbling made-up words, I jumped up and down, picked up turfs and threw them at the children.” Not surprisingly the children ran away in a ‘blind panic’
 
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