Whistling Jimmy, the mysterious Pied Piper of Cape Town

Lawrence Green, a prolific South African author of the mid-20th century, was renowned for his true’ tales of the unusual and bizarre. His story of Whistling Jimmy’, a rat-catcher who claimed to know all the tricks, was exactly in this mould. Graham Jooste looks at Green the author and retells the story of the rat-catcher.

Well-known South African journalist and travel writer Lawrence Green (1900–72) once owned a yacht, the yawl Amelia, which he kept moored at Table Bay Docks. One day, while inspecting his boat, he was annoyed to see that a rat had gnawed a sail, badly damaging it. Green set a trap, baiting it with tomato. (Apparently, rats find this difficult to resist.)

When Green returned to his yacht the next day, he found the rat dead, lying stiff beside the trap. But the bait was uneaten and the trap unsprung. Puzzled, he went to visit the port authority, which in turn sent a rat-catcher named Jimmy to help him. He was precisely the kind of individual who fascinated Green, who went on to interview him and add yet another tale to his remarkable collection.

LAWRENCE GREEN: A UNIQUE WRITER

Green’s travel writing, which included Strange Africa (1936), Old Africa Untamed (1940), and In the Land of the Afternoon (1949), are more than mere travelogues; they are vivid and evocative accounts of an Africa that was already receding into the past even as Green was writing. In doing so, he rescued from oblivion many amazing stories and strange tales.

Doubtless many of these were apocryphal. But few of his readers, then or today, cared; that is not why one reads Green. He never purported to be a historian dealing in dates and hard facts; he was first and foremost a storyteller who produced compelling descriptions of nature and the ocean.

As one critic notes, Green was “a poet of open spaces”. He was attracted to figures who had chosen a “solitary existence in order to challenge their occupation, or lack of it, and nature in absolute solitude". Jimmy, the ratcatcher, was just such an individual.