The Rat-Pit

Product Information

The Great Push: An Episode in the Great War (London: Herbert Jenkins 1916; Edinburgh: Birlinn 2000) My friends in the Kingsway area were Robert Brown, Pat (ricia) and Peter Sullivan, the Janketer brothers et al.

But most of all, in an arena where a frightened rat could scratch out a dog’s eye, they were courageous and lightning fast. The officials included a referee and a timekeeper, while the rules for the matches varied from pit to pit. One variation was a weight handicap for each dog, so that the competing animal had to kill as many rats as it weighed within a specific time ? a killing rate of five seconds per rat was considered excellent. One of the terriers, named Tiny, was even known to have killed 200 rats in an hour in an exhibition match in the capital. From the Gauntlet of Shar Waypoint, go down the stairs on the north, continue to walk along the hallway, and then descend on the right. Climb down to reach the feet of the Giant Shar Statue. During the First World War, MacGill served with the London Irish Rifles (1/18th Battalion, The London Regiment) and was wounded at the Battle of Loos on 28 October 1915. [2] He was recruited into military intelligence, and wrote for MI 7b between 1916 and the Armistice in 1918. [3]The Rat Hunters of New York – Roads & Kingdoms". Roads & Kingdoms. 23 October 2013 . Retrieved 20 February 2015.

One reason for Mayhew's reluctance to explicitly or, at least, consistently, condemn the pastimes of street folk relates to the wider context of his social investigation. Mayhew knew he was recording a dying working-class pastime. ‘Social and economic pressures of a new intensity’, as Richard Maxwell has observed, ‘were threatening the street folk’; incomes had declined and many of their principle occupations seemed to be disappearing. 32 As Mayhew scholars have observed, while Mayhew's attitude towards the ‘modernization’ process is difficult to evaluate, his text suggests an overriding sympathy with rat-catchers rather than the animals they worked with. This compassion is revealed in his description of the pit proprietor, Jimmy Shaw, who, according to Mayhew, interviewed ‘in a readiness and a courtesy of manner such as I have not often met with during my researches’. Shaw explained to Mayhew that ratting created a lively trade across the country, providing employment for the ‘barn-door labouring poor’, the ‘most ignorant’ of people. Shaw defended his role economically: as he explained, ‘I have some twenty families depending upon me’. Proponents of ratting like Shaw argued that farmers were not doing enough to stamp out this pernicious threat to corn, casting rat-pits as a necessary evil to keep the nation's food supply safe from the constant threat of furry marauders and holding starvation at bay. In presenting the rat-catcher story in this way, Mayhew highlighted a multi-layered ‘welfare’ narrative that did not necessarily run against compassion for nonhuman animals but, rather, indicated the complex nexus of human–animal dependency, need and compassion that rat pits supported.Warrington St in 1990, practically non-existent in the picture with factory units in place of the previous slums. The Ship Inn was still a busy pub, but over the following twenty years, ( the ship at one time had 13 dart teams Guinness book of records) as the adjoining businesses became vacant and the area more derelict, plans were made for the regeneration of the area close to the Soar (long overdue).. Photo credit: Mark Shirley circa 2012. a b c Phil Drabble (1948). "Staffords and baiting sports". In Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald (ed.). The book of the dog. Los Angeles: Borden Publishing.