Bullets, holes and good knocks

Tony Perrottet travels in Great Britain on the tracks of the loose clubs of pre-victorian period and he tells us one of his discovery : "The visitors of the whole world come numerous to Saint Andrew to play on his respectable golf course, the oldest of the world. For me, the city abounds of history. I thought too of bullets, holes and good knocks but not in the same way as they suppose. At 10 am in the morning, I crossed by running the flowery convents (yes, there where Prince William studied!), under Gothic arcs on my way to the warehouse of the museum of the university, an unpretentious building in front of the commissionership. Once arrived, one desk clerk accompanied me up to an anonymous room, of one clinical whiteness, as if I was going to have to pass there. The door opened, and two merry curators entered carrying heavy cardboard boxes containing the relics of the famous society of Scottish masturbation of the XVIIIth century, Of Beggar Benison, and his even more perverse offspring, the Wig Club. Having greeted me warmly, they put gloves in white latex and began to put the contents on the table, depriving carefully the paper of archives and the packaging of bubbles resisting to acids around every object. "Here they are, I was amazed : the most bizarre rests of the British history." "These objects are quite known here at the museum ", confessed Jessica, one of the curators. It was not difficult to see why. A phallus then the other, shaped with glass or metal, were carefully deposited. They were followed by a variety of slings, bowls, trays and medallions engraved with obscene, vaguely nightmarish images, as resembling lighthouses in penises or cocks with head of penis. Someone is decorated with vulvaires forms, but the male organ was mostly privileged. I took the Tray of Initiation, the bowl with seed of the members of the Benison during more than a century, and I read the inscription, " THE PASSAGE OF A MAN TOWARDS A WOMAN. " There was above an awkward drawing of an erection with a hanging grant and then a date, on 1732. " I hope that we washed it ", I say. Then, were presented to me two of the " priapic glasses ", each of about twenty centimeters long. They were made with glass flabbergasted and were not handled carefully ; each suffered from a cracked gonad. It was maybe this fragility which had inspired the another version, this one longer, priapic glasses but in metal. There was also a horn with the mysterious inscription " My breath is strange ", coming from the book of Job. And a rather beautiful bowl with punch. The collection of the relics of the Beggar Benison and the Wig Club was never shown to the public. " Saint Andrews is a really family place of interest ", says the second curator, Amy, who wore a candy pink dress, pink earrings and mats. " We had thought of making an exhibition of the least dirty objects, but the management put its veto. How were we going to explain their use at least to 10 years old children ? "And quid of legendary wig, the object the most crowned for the followers of the club? This secret, supposed mascot to be weaved with pubic hairs of the mistresses of King Charles II, was worshipped at first by Benison, but its powers were such as it became the object of his own club. All what remains is a box with wooden wigs. As the presenter of a television quiz show, Amy opened quite slowly the acrid door to reveal the support, a wooden head with a striking chin and a nose. Somebody painted eyes there ; regrettably, they squinted. The effect was morbid. The wig, as for it, missed. "At a certain moment, the wig left its box ", she says sadly. " It never arrived at the museum. "The origin of the pubic wig is a fascinating story in itself. According to the local folklore, the relic is dated from 1651, when hedonist king Charles II visited Scotland where we welcomed him with loose drinking bouts, especially in Fife. Later, it sent the wig to present to his distracted Scottish friends, its size being a symbol of the virility of king. In the 1730s, the beloved headgear was given to Beggar Benison by his guard, the count of Moray, and worn during ceremonies by the sovereign of the club to collect its talismanic power. Then, in 1775, a schism struck the world of the Scottish clubs. Lord Moray, a descendant of the original guard of the wig, left with the appreciated object and established in Edinburgh his own society under the name of Wig Club. Rather than to practice the ritual masturbation, the new members were obliged to embrace the wig with reverence and to contribute to the embellishment of the mane by bringing a hair resulting from the intimate region of their own mistresses. It is to compensate for this loss that king George IV, who had become an honorary member of the Benison four decades earlier, presented in 1822 to the club a buckle of the pubic hairs of his own mistress in a fine silver snuffbox. The mythology of the club supports that king met the sovereign of the club in docks, in Leith, during his official visit announced with a lot of advertising and was given the snuffbox in the hands. The bundle was supposed to be the embryo of a new wig, but the idea failed. At least nobody stole it, I thought, when I was finally able to touch the royal present in its hiding place to Saint Andrews's club. We worried, when Prince William studied here, from 2001 to 2005, when the press begins to be interested in this lineage of royal debauchery. "You know the British scandal newspapers ", says Jessica with a shrug of shoulders. I considered this stories of " royal connection " by asking me who had been able to steal the wig... In the subterranean archives of the library, together with the pale PhD students winking eyes in front of their laptops, I examined the documents of the Beggar Benison and the heaps of correspondences until I find a connection with leather crumbled book : the reports of "Knights Companions of the Wig" from their first meeting of March 6th, 1775. On the decorated cover is represented a gold-coloured drawing of the stolen pubic wig - even more crazy, in charge of and buckled (more crazy, loaded with and buckled) that I had imagined it, as an exuberant head of broccoli. I made the history of the wig throughout the last century. I learnt that it is thanks to an officer of the retired Scottish army, Lt. Collar. M.R. Canch Kavanagh, that Saint Andrews's relics are safe. In 1921, Kavanagh, among whom both passions were the military camouflage and the clubs of masturbation, located the objects of the Beggar Benison and the Wig Club. They had been kept by the last surviving members and were in Glasgow in the Museum Kelvingrove. The curator tried desperately to get rid of it. Then, Kavanagh bought them, and for a moment, he even tried to refresh the rites of the Beggar Benison in Edinburgh. It seems that the wig gets lost during the 1930s. In 1938, when the American historian Louis C. Jones of Columbia University looked for it for a book on georgiens clubs, he received a report which said that it was "in the office of a lawyer in Leith but was never able to discover it. "Here is the end of the story. But I did not stop thinking of this last detail. Could the sacred relic always be in the piece of furniture file of a solicitor? I went to Leith, the district of the port of Edinburgh (it supplies Trainspotting of Irvine Welsh's nice decoration set), before reporting me that rather than to visit the office of every solicitor and every lawyer of the city, I would better make post a classified add. Maybe somebody had heard the stories told by his grandfather and did he know where was the relic but had kept the secret information?. "I had a fast answer of the writer of the local on-line magazine, Leith Links. "This subject seems far too interesting to be ignored ", he says to me. He invited me to write a paper on the wanderings of the wig, which appeared recently under the promising title " the story of the lost wig: is the strangest relic of the Scotland hidden from Leith? A current investigation by our correspondent in New York. "At the top of the article was a caricature of king Charles II, bald, asking: " did you see my wig? " I ended by a call for help to all the amateurs of Scottish history : Could the wig - doubtless in a bad state after all this time - always be somewhere in a cupboard locked into the desk of a solicitor in Leith?... If you have information, contact, please, the historian Tony Perrottet. I spoke about my media Blitz with the historian David Stevenson. He was not optimistic. " I imagine that one day a young clerk put the hand in a dark cupboard and fell on a ball of dusty hairs. He doubtless gave a shout of horror and threw it to the fire. " Except, I thought, if it was stolen by agents of Buckingham Luxury hotel, who would have wanted to erase any historic track of the bad royal behavior. I think of holding the next intrigue of Dan Brown."