On the evening of 6 September 1871, during a thunderstorm over Kettering, contemporary accounts describe large flocks of birds flying about overhead and calling out with a continuous, mournful whistling sound quite unlike ordinary birdsong, unsettling enough to those who heard it that it was written down and remembered rather than dismissed as an unremarkable feature of the storm.
The phenomenon was identified at the time with the Seven Whistlers, a piece of folklore found across England and particularly persistent in mining districts, holding that seven birds crying together at night are the restless souls of those who helped crucify Christ, doomed to fly forever in search of an eighth companion they will never find, and that hearing their combined cry foretells disaster to come. The contemporary account notes that the last time such whistling had reportedly been heard was shortly before the Hartley Colliery disaster, a genuine and devastating mining accident that had claimed many lives, and that the very day after the Kettering sighting a colliery explosion occurred at Wigan, a coincidence that cemented the omen's power in the minds of those who had heard the birds.
The Seven Whistlers belong to a broad, genuinely old strand of English folklore rather than to any one specific town or region, and this Kettering sighting is one of many such reports recorded around the country during the nineteenth century, a period when mining communities in particular remained acutely alert to any sign, however slight, that might warn of disaster underground.
Comments