Some of the characters who brought chaos to the streets of Tayside and Fife in centuries past have been resurrected in a new Courier e-book.
Monsters, Ministers and Mayhem, written by Chris Ferguson, glorifies the riotous and irreverent who made headlines and shocked sensibilities over the past 300 years.
It is an unconventional historical work which sidesteps events of gravity and highlights the ridiculous but colourful antics of our forebears.
Monsters, Ministers and Mayhem was compiled from newspaper reports from The Courier, the Dundee Advertiser and predecessor publications.
It is available as an e-book from Amazon and costs just £1.79. Further formats will follow.
The book is illustrated with rare old photographs including ones of Dundee’s Seagate before redevelopment and a fair at the now disappeared Greenmarket in the city.Click image for more info
Chris, who is an assistant editor at The Courier, said: “The archives of newspapers perhaps provide one of the richest sources of social history available. For more than two centuries they have been the organs of record in communities across the world.
“Proceedings of state, church and commerce have been catalogued with diligence but so have the antics of everyday people.
“It is these tales that allow us to understand how people lived, the social conditions of the time, what made them laugh or fired their imaginations.
“For this volume I have combed the archives to uncover characters who delivered humorous disorder to the doors of our predecessors.”
These characters include the merry sailors who lost a polar bear in a city centre, the bored brown bear who paid a surprise visit to a shop and the “female bruisers” who brawled their way through Victorian Scotland.
Then there are the mobs, whipped into fury by agitators, whose stampedes through cities had the mercantile classes cowering in fear.
In Monsters, Ministers and Mayhem you can meet the Scots street girls who gloried in their shame and offended ecclesiastical sensibilities, the merchant who kicked the daylights out a fellow worshipper in church one morning, the doctor who developed an eye-watering cure for haemorrhoids and the dog that turned out for a football team.
Chris said: “I have also thrown in a sleepwalker on a bike, a crowd of 5,000 chasing a ghostly pony and dark tales of witchcraft.
“As you make your way through the volume you will also learn why you shouldn’t employ a bald man, encounter the men who wrestled with a sea monster and learn a lot about bacon rolls.”
To buy the e-book for Amazon Kindle, visit bit.ly/monstersbook