Thrice Mayor

by John Dryden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The plaque went up on a Tuesday in June, on the new public conveniences in Sheep Street, and it went up in the wrong place. It ought to have been fixed outside, beside the door, where a plaque is read by people on their way to somewhere else. But the man from the sign-makers in Louth had been given a drawing that showed it on the lobby wall, and the lobby wall, once the partition was in, turned out to be the inside wall of the gentlemen's, so that the plaque was fixed at a height of about five feet, directly above the second of three urinals. It was a handsome thing, I am told: brushed brass, eight inches by six, the town's crest at the head of it, and beneath the crest, in the capitals the sign-makers called Trajan,

THESE FACILITIES WERE OPENED BY
COUNCILLOR GRAHAM DOWSE
TOWN MAYOR OF MARKET OLLERBY
14th JUNE 2025

It would have cost eighty-five pounds to move. When the matter was raised at the July meeting of the town council, the Mayor said that he would not spend eighty-five pounds of public money on a thing that concerned nobody but himself. The clerk minuted it, the Ollerby Advertiser printed the minute, and it was the first thing in his three terms of office that the whole town agreed was funny.

I ought to say at once what kind of man he was, since everything turns on it, and I ought to say it fairly. Graham Dowse was not a bad mayor. He had kept the library open two days a week when the county wanted it shut, and he had got the Sunday bus back to Louth after four years without one. But he had a weakness, of the kind a satirist hopes for and a moralist cannot find, because there is no sin in it: he liked his name on things. There was a small plate with it on the bench by the war memorial, and another on the defibrillator box outside the Co-op, and a third, in vinyl, because brass was dear that year, on the glass of the bus shelter by the cattle market. When the Christmas lights were switched on, he switched them on, and was photographed doing it for the Advertiser, which printed his picture most weeks, chiefly because he was the only person in the town who sent it anything.

---

Patricia Skipworth had written the Ollerby Players' pantomime for twenty-six winters. Before that, and for some years alongside it, she had been the secretary of the primary school on Church Lane, from 1975 until her retirement, which meant that she had known most of the cast and most of the audience at the age of six, and had sent a fair number of them home with a note. She had known Graham Dowse at six. In her first term at the school he had brought a conker into the office on a string and asked her to keep it safe for him until home time, and she had tied a label to it, and he had made her write his name on the label, and then watched to see that she spelled it right.

The Players did whichever pantomime they could hire the costumes for that year from the theatrical supplier in Lincoln, and the story mattered less than people supposed. What the town came for was the local verses. Somewhere in the second half, the Fairy or the Demon King, who in the old way speak in rhyme, would turn from the plot to the audience and say four or six lines about Market Ollerby; and the Dame, at the songsheet, would have her own couplets about the parking and the bins. Pat had kept a rule about these for twenty-six years, though she had never written it down: anything a man did in front of you, you could laugh at; nothing he did behind your back. A man's hat, his speeches and his Christmas lights were the town's. His marriage, his bank and his conscience were not.

That year it was Dick Whittington. She opened the script on the kitchen table in August, and turned to the finale, where Dick, home from the sea with his fortune and his cat, is made Lord Mayor of London, and the bells that called him back on Highgate Hill ring out again. Turn again, Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London. Graham Dowse had been elected to his third term as Town Mayor in May.

She said afterwards that she sat with that for a while. Then she made a cup of tea and did not write anything for a week.

---

The committee met in October, as it always did, in the back room of Codd's hardware shop in the Market Place, among the paraffin drums and the boxed mousetraps, with an electric fire on that smelt of burnt dust. There were five of them: Trevor Codd, who owned the shop and chaired the Players; Keith Brackenbury, a postman, who had played the Dame for eighteen years; Leanne Tuxworth, a dental nurse, who was to be the Fairy; the treasurer, Mrs Hebb, who said nothing at committee unless money was mentioned; and Pat.

Trevor had a grievance, and I will give it its due, since he believed in it. In April the council had moved the Thursday market off the Market Place to the cattle-market car park, on the Mayor's casting vote, and Trevor's Thursday takings had fallen by a third. He had borne it all summer. He had come to the October committee with something written on the back of a delivery note.

"I want the toilets," he said. "Everybody knows about the toilets. Forty-one thousand pound, and who got the contract? His wife's cousin, from Horncastle. Get Keith to say it at the songsheet. Sarah the Cook can say anything. She's daft."

"Is it true?" said Pat.

"Everybody says it."

"That's not what I asked you, Trevor."

"It's true enough."

"If it's true," said Pat, "it's for the auditor, and if it's not, it's for his solicitor, and either way it's not for Keith in a frock. Who do we hire the Corn Exchange off?"

Trevor knew who they hired the Corn Exchange off. It was the town council, at a hundred and ten pounds a night instead of the two hundred and forty it charged for weddings, and the reduction had never been put in writing. Mrs Hebb looked up at the mention of money and then looked down again.

"So what are you going to give him?" said Trevor. "A pat on the head?"

"I'm going to give him what he wants," said Pat. "I'm going to give him his name on something."

Keith Brackenbury, who had been eating a custard cream, stopped eating it.

---

I should like to say something here about how such a thing is done, since it is the only part of this story in which I can claim any competence. There are two ways of hurting a man in verse. The first is to call him a thief, which is easy, and which anyone in the back of a hardware shop can do; it requires no art, it convicts the man who says it as often as the man it is said of, and it leaves the target nothing to do but be angry. The second is harder. You take the small fault, the one he has not noticed in himself, which is not a crime at all, and instead of attacking it you honour it: you put it in robes, and walk it up the aisle, and crown it, and let the ceremony do the work. The man so treated is not knocked down. He is left standing exactly where he was, with his head on his shoulders, and it is only some while afterwards, if ever, that he finds it is no longer joined to anything. The first way is a butcher's. The second I should call a headsman's, if the word were not too grand for a pantomime in Lincolnshire, and Pat would not have used it. She said only that you had to make him laugh first.

She wrote at the kitchen table, in pencil, on the backs of last year's scripts, which she kept in a drawer for that purpose. She wrote, first, the lines the Fairy speaks over the kneeling Dick, which the hire script supplied and which she made better, and then the turn to the audience. By the end of a Sunday afternoon she had four lines for it:

No bench so humble, and no bin so low,
But he has opened it, to let us know.
Thrice Mayor of London! Let thy name be spread
In brass, and read where nothing else is read.

The first couplet was the funnier. Everybody in the Corn Exchange would see the bench by the war memorial and the box outside the Co-op the moment it was said, and the word bin would get a laugh by itself, as it always does. She read it aloud twice, and then she read the four lines aloud with the first two covered by her hand, and then she drew a single line through the first two, neatly, as she had once drawn lines through dinner registers, and wrote nothing in their place.

I confess I should have kept them. It is a good couplet, and I can see what she saw: it said the same thing as the second, only louder, and the second needed the room. The bench and the bin are a list; the brass is a coronation. Put the list first and the audience is laughing at a man already; give them the coronation alone, in the words of the old legend, and they have to find the man for themselves, and when they find him they are pleased with their own wit as well as with hers. I can see it, and I should still have kept them. She was a better judge than I am of when to leave off.

---

At the first read-through, in the Corn Exchange in November, Trevor Codd listened to the finale with his arms folded and then said: "That's it?"

"That's it," said Pat.

"He'll not even notice."

Keith Brackenbury, at the end of the table with his Dame's script in a carrier bag, said: "I read that plaque every morning on my round. There's nowt else to read in there." And then, having heard himself, he put his hand over his face, and Leanne Tuxworth laughed so hard that she had to go out to the kitchen, and that was the end of the argument, though Trevor did not concede it then or afterwards.

Pat took Leanne aside in the kitchen when she had recovered, among the urns and the trays of cups, and told her how the lines were to be said. Not as a joke. As a herald. As if she were reading out the King's honours on the wireless, and had never heard of Sheep Street in her life. "Don't look at him," Pat said. "Don't look at anyone. Look at Dick. And don't wait for the laugh. If it comes, it comes after you've stopped."

---

They opened on Friday the fifth of December. The Corn Exchange seats two hundred and twenty on plastic chairs, and it was full, and the radiators along the side walls ticked as they always do in the first hour and then gave up. The front row, row B, since row A had been taken out years before to make room for the children to sit on the floor, was reserved, as it was every year, for the Mayor and his wife, who came in at five to seven. He wore the chain of office, which he was entitled to do at a public occasion in the town, and which nobody had ever seen him leave off at one. His wife, Janet, had a bag of satsumas, and offered them along the row.

I will not describe the whole pantomime. The cat was played by a girl of fourteen, the Rotary Club's treasurer's daughter, who was very good. King Rat fell off the edge of the stage in the first half, which was not in the script, and was cheered. Keith's songsheet in the second half had a verse about the potholes on the Horncastle road, which was in the script, and was cheered more. And at twenty past nine the bells rang on the recording from the back of the hall, and Dick knelt before the Guildhall, which was two rostra and a painted cloth, and Leanne Tuxworth in a silver dress over a thermal vest raised a wand made from a garden cane and spoke over him.

She did it exactly as she had been told. She looked at Dick. She said the lines the hire company had supplied, as Pat had mended them, about the cat and the voyage and the good heart rewarded, and then without any change of voice at all she said:

Thrice Mayor of London! Let thy name be spread
In brass, and read where nothing else is read.

There was half a second in which nothing happened. Then it began at the back of the hall, among the men standing by the bar, low at first, the laugh of men who had all been in the same place and had all, at one time or another, stood and read the same thing; and it came forward along the rows, and was taken up by their wives, who had been told; and by the time it reached row B it was the whole hall.

Pat was standing at the side, by the fire door, where she always stood. She said afterwards that she watched the chain, and that it moved before anything else did, and that for a moment she could not tell what it meant. Then Graham Dowse put his head back and laughed, and went on laughing, and clapped, and turned round in his chair to look at the hall laughing with him, or at him; and Janet, who had not laughed, looked at her husband, and then she laughed as well, and gave the man next to her a satsuma.

Horace says that nothing forbids a man to tell the truth laughing, ridentem dicere verum. He says nothing about hearing it so, and I have never known what to make of the hearer's part.

---

In the second week of January a letter came for Pat on the town council's paper, in the Mayor's own hand, not the clerk's.

Dear Mrs Skipworth, it said. A grand show, best for years. Could I trouble you for the Fairy's verse at the end, written out, for the Mayor's scrapbook. With thanks and the compliments of the season, Graham.

She wrote it out on a sheet of good paper, in the hand the school had used for certificates, the hand in which she had once written his name on a label for a conker. She did not add the couplet she had cut. She posted it the same day.

It was Keith who told her, at the beginning of February, coming off his round, where it had gone. It had not gone in the scrapbook. It had been framed, in a narrow black frame with a white mount, and it had been hung on the wall of the gentlemen's in Sheep Street, directly beneath the plaque, at the Mayor's own expense, which Keith understood had come to twenty-two pounds.

Now there are two ways of reading what he did, and I have weighed them both, and I will set them side by side. In the first, he understood the stroke perfectly from the moment the hall began to laugh, and he did the one thing that could answer it: he took the crown and wore it, and hung the verse where every man who read the brass would read the verse beside it, and so showed the town that he could be laughed at and stay standing, which is more than most of us could show. If that is the truth, he was the wittier of the two, and Pat's stroke was returned to her, as the best ones are. In the second, he never felt it at all; he heard two hundred and twenty people laughing, and his name in it, and thought it was the same thing as applause. If that is the truth, the stroke went clean through, and the head is still standing, and nobody need ever tell it otherwise.

I can find reasons for both, and I cannot give the verdict to either. Pat could have asked him; she sees him every November at the war memorial. She never has. She has not seen the frame. It hangs, as far as I know, where it was put, on the one wall in Market Ollerby she cannot go in and read.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Iōanne Drȳdenō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Dryden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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