The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Suspecting them of an extortion plan, so before witnesses, including PC Michael McCormac, Cocky began to sort through his supply of cats’ meat in order to prove the Rabinowitzes wrong.

To his shocked astonishment, he discovered several items of what could only be human remains, but of such tiny proportions, they were immediately called “Lilliputian,” by one of his witnesses, a Dr. Jelinek, Bohemian music teacher, originally of Prague, who would later give his part of the story in German to his sister. Upon informing the police, the witnesses were sworn to secrecy and made to sign Her Majesty’s Official Secrets Act, but this did not stop the disgusted Cocky Cohen from taking the case to a young consulting detective who had recently set up practise in Norfolk Street, London E.

Seaton Begg (not yet knighted) would become famous under another name when his adventures were sensationalised and written up for a popular weekly, but in those days, he was scarcely a household name. He worked at that time with a gigantic creature of no known breed, whom he had raised and trained and named “Griff,” or sometimes “Man-Tracker.” An invaluable asset. Begg eagerly undertook to investigate the case, and within hours, Griff had found the source of the butcher’s meat. A Battersea slaughterhouse advertised as The Metropolitan Meat Supply Co., which supplied sausages, animal food, fertilizer, and pie-filling to the trade, the firm seemed conscientious as far as its sanitary arrangements were concerned, and had passed its recent inspection with colours flying. When he confronted them, Begg himself considered their professional ethics beyond reproach.

An unfortunate participant in an ill-fated conversion

With the help of his strange, unhuman assistant, Griff, Begg next discovered that Metropolitan Meat was being used by a corrupt entrepreneur known as Moses Monk to get rid of unwanted flesh. Aided by an accomplice on the premises, he introduced the meat into MMP’s supply. Monk made most of his money by working as a “waste-disposal merchant,” employed by unscrupulous merchants to get rid of organic material local councils refused to handle. However, Monk had a rather grislier arrangement with the Brookgate undertakers Ecker and Ecker to dispose of what they termed their “overspill”—paupers who had died without relatives in surrounding London boroughs. The council paid the Eckers by the corpse, supposedly buried in consecrated ground in simple lead coffins. It was far more profitable to let Monk handle the business, no questions asked, and sell the spare plots to grieving relatives. Yet this still did not explain the tiny “fairy” body parts discovered in Bermondsey. Under threat from young Begg and his strange assistant, Griff, Monk eventually confessed.

Of course, it was completely against the law to mix human remains with meat sold for consumption by animals, so Begg was at least responsible for bringing that filthy practise to an end.

The central mystery remained. Who were the “Lilliputians” and why was the government covering up their existence? Once again, Begg decided to put Griff the Man-Tracker on the case. Here is a description of Griff from the original fictionalised report in Union Jack no. 356, quoted on the Blakiana Web site:

Can it be a man—this strange, repulsive creature so stealthily stealing along? Surely no human being was ever so repulsively formed as this? Yet it is garbed as a man!

A bowler hat, long, loosely fitting black overcoat, baggy trousers, tan-coloured spats, and great, ill-shaped boots. But the face! How can we possibly describe it—or, rather, the little that can be seen of it? The bowler hat is full large for the head, and is drawn down over the forehead and skull, and rests upon large, outstanding, and hair-covered ears. Great blue spectacles, of double lens, cover the eyes and some portion of the visage. The nose is very flat, and of great width of nostrils. The unusual sight of a “respirator” can be seen well covering up the mouth. A great and light-coloured muffler also is so arranged that chin and jaws are both concealed; but what little of the face that can be detected is covered to the cheekbones with short and stiff-looking hair of a dull-brownish colour.

There is something strangely inhuman in the general expression, while the small, round eyes peer through the deep blue glasses like two brilliant sparks of fire.

Of wonderful breadth of shoulder, girth of chest, and length of arm, this is an individual who must be endowed with prodigious strength. A crooked back and bowed legs greatly add to the general grotesque hideousness of the figure as a whole.