In the fall of 1954, the children of an industrial district of Glasgow, learning that a local vampire with iron teeth had “killed and eaten two wee boys” from their neighborhood, decided to mobilize hundreds of their best and storm the cemetery where it was thought to live. The hunt commenced one afternoon after school; a procession of students assembled and grew as they headed for the Southern Necropolis. Upon arrival, finding the gates closed, the children—“some were so young they could scarcely walk,” reported a city paper—scaled the walls. Once inside, “their excited shouts and screams became so loud that normal conversation was impossible” and continued past nightfall. The operation was the fifth of eight such hunts documented between the 1930s and 1980s, one of which—an operation against “Springheeled Jack”—involved thousands of children and lasted for several nights.
It is often said that today’s eighteen-year-olds behave like the fifteen-year-olds of the 1990s, but this is altogether too generous: one would be hard-pressed to find a grown adult alive today with the organizational competence of the midcentury Glaswegian second-grader. The hale boys and girls of our own country’s republican age, barreling down waterfalls and skirmishing among themselves over miles of town and field—“there were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only ‘small stuck-up caricatures of men and women’”—seem yet more foreign. And when compared to even the most precocious young activists of our time, the “abbot of the local youth” of seventeenth-century Saint-Jeanne, a small village on the French Riviera, who extorted a tax from village newlyweds with the threat of public ridicule in song from a chorus of rowdy children, appears as the right hand of God.
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