Introduction
Bendonium Aye
Bendonium: A history of The Bendonium Society
It all began in the spring of 1910 when
Lord Arthur Wilcox was finally excavated from his burrow by worried neighbours.
Lord Wilcox hadn’t been seen by anyone for over four months and the only signs
of life on his rambling Compton estate were the giant mounds of earth that would
appear almost nightly.
He’d been burrowing, moving tons of earth each night, steadily downwards,
helped in his endeavours by a dozen monks from nearby Copthorne Abbey. His task,
he admitted after his incarceration in the Compton lunatic asylum, was to help
Brother O’Fiddius, known locally as the mad friar, to find Bendonium, although
he never told of the nature of Bendonium or why O’Fiddius should require it.
Soon after Lord Wilcox’s committal, he was declared insane in June 1910;
Brother O’Fiddius disappeared without trace leaving all the monks in the
monastery dead, their heads peculiarly shrunken and their bodies covered in a
mass of fat bees. A note purporting to be from brother O’fiddius was found, it
read, “Gone down Copthorne market to buy some pigs’ muck”.
During late 1910 and early 1911 Lord Wilcox
received regular visits at the asylum from a band of travelling performers
calling themselves “Pundacherry Large” and sometime in early 1911 he told
them that they must find Bendonium or he would end his days in the asylum and
would “likely as not be suffocated by bees”.
The Bendonium Society was formed on January the 16th 1911: its
founder members were Lord Wilcox and the five members of Pundacherry Large,
whose names were; Jacob Bebbings, Jacob Bubba, Jason McPugg, Ronald
Postlethwaite and Vincent Crammlington. Little is known of the first meeting of
the Bendonium Society, as no minutes were taken, the only witnesses to the
meeting being Wilcox’s collection of pickled Ram-men, except that it was
decided that they would hire a ship at Liverpool and sail immediately for Alaska
in search of Bendonium.
In Liverpool’s docks they found the Bundy, an old Norwegian whaler, for sale.
They secured the Bundy, filled its hold with turnips for ballast and set sail
the next day. There is no record of the voyage or of the arrival of the ship in
North America, the only evidence that they arrived being a giant burrow filled
with over ten thousand turnips found North of Anchorage in summer 1912 and a
photo that appeared in a local newspaper in winter 1911. The photograph shows
five deformed miners at work and was included with a story about miners
suffering from mysteriously shrinking skulls and a giant bee infestation that
resulted in the evacuation of a small mining community, half its population
being found suffocated and with tiny faces.
