AROUND this time of year letters editors of The Times enjoy an annual game: sighting the first letter to announce the first cuckoo. The game began unusually early this winter, on November 23, when a reader wrote from Whitstable: “Incredible as it may be I have just heard a cuckoo. A friend says she heard one this morning at the other end of the town.”
We did not publish the letter, not because of any specific doubt in our minds (global warming and so forth, who knows?), but because — and this will come as something of a shock not only to most of our readers, but also to many of my own colleagues — according to our digital archive we haven’t actually published a straightforward “first cuckoo” letter since 1940. Dated April 25, 1940, it was from Mr Edgar Newgass, Wiston Old Rectory, Steyning, Sussex, and read in its entirety: “Within a matter of 24 hours or so we heard our first cuckoo and nightingale too, and the first swallows put in their appearance. This was between the morning of April 16 and the following morning.”
We do treat such letters with some caution, however, and with good reason, as the following will demonstrate.
From Mr Fydekker, FRS, February 6, 1913: “Sir, While gardening this afternoon I heard a faint note which led me to say to my under-gardener, who was working with me, ‘Was that the cuckoo?’ Almost immediately afterwards we both heard the full double note of a cuckoo, repeated either two or three times — I am not quite sure which. The time was 3.40; and the bird, which was to the westward — that is to say, to windward — appeared to be about a quarter of a mile away. There is not the slightest doubt that the song was that of a cuckoo. The late Professor Newton, in the fourth edition of Yarrell’s ‘British Birds’ (Vol. II., p. 389, note), stated that although the arrival of the cuckoo has been reported in March, or even earlier, such records must be treated with suspicion, if not with incredulity.”
From Mr Fydekker, FRS, February 12, 1913: “Sir, I regret to say that, in common with many other persons, I have been completely deceived in the matter of the supposed cuckoo of February 4. The note was uttered by a bricklayer’s labourer at work on a house in the neighbourhood of the spot whence the note appeared to come. I have interviewed the man, who tells me that he is able to draw cuckoos from considerable distances by the exactness of his imitation of their notes, which he produces without the aid of any instrument.” (This correspondence appears in the anthology of letters to The Times 1900-1975, edited by Kenneth Gregory and titled, naturally, The First Cuckoo.)
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There were echoes of this cautionary tale in a Times diary item on February 10, 1986: “Before any of you dash off letters saying, ‘I’ve heard the first cuckoo of 1986’, I’d like you to know about a report that appeared in The Times in the second week of February, 1948, after Scarborough residents claimed to have heard the first cuckoo: ‘Yesterday Mr Hezekiah Johnson, a corporation road-cleaner, said, ‘I wait until a crowd gathers at the Northstead bus stop and then I go into the park nearby and do the cuckoo. They all take it in’. He added, ‘I used to do the nightingale when I had my teeth in’.”
That we still publish “first cuckoo” letters is perhaps the greatest myth in Times lore, and I am almost reluctant to explode it. Some of our writers got the message early on: on March 10, 1956, a leader noted that the correspondence columns of The Times “appear to have developed an allergy” to the first cuckoo as the annual harbinger, and Bernard Levin opened a Comment article on April 26, 1973: “I seem to have missed, this year, the correspondence about hearing the first cuckoo of spring.” But even today writers still begin: “In the way that the letters pages of The Times reflect readers’ obsessions, such as the decline of the Church of England or hearing the first cuckoo . . . ”
So enduring is the myth that the first cuckoo still serves correspondents well as a point of reference. On April 21, 1972, Mr Wadham Sutton got away with a letter to the Editor reading: “Sir, Today I heard a performance of Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. This is a record.” On June 25, 1977, Mr David Mallon wrote from the Mongolian State University in Ulan Bator: “Sir, I heard today the first cuckoo of this year. Is this a record for Outer Mongolia?” And on November 30, 1978, on the eve of what was to be a year-long closure of The Times in a dispute with the print unions, Mr Hamish McLellan wittily wrote: “Sir, The last cuckoo?” only to be followed up, on November 13, 1979, by Mr D. J. Connolly: “Sir, Last Monday I believe I heard the sound of the first phoenix of the year. Who said it was extinct? Welcome back.”
So I too extend a warm welcome, wherever he or she presently is, to the first cuckoo of this spring. But please, don’t tell us about it.
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