“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, professors, puppets, policemen, crocodiles and assorted London eccentrics –this is your official warning that Mr Punch is about to have another birthday.”
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks. Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
This day in London history time.
This day, today, May 9th, we mark one of the oddest birthdays in the London calendar.
Not Churchill.
Not Shakespeare.
Not Queen Victoria.
No.
Mr Punch.
Yes, that Mr Punch.
The hooked nose. The shrieking voice. The slapstick. The little red cap. The homicidal tendencies. The crocodile. The sausages. The cry of “That’s the way to do it!”
Only London could turn a violent puppet into a civic institution.
And here’s the lovely part.
This really is a London thing. A deeply, gloriously, wonderfully London thing.
Because every year, around May 9th, Punch and Judy Professors – that’s the proper title, by the way, they insist on “Professors” – gather in Covent Garden at St Paul’s Church, the Actors’ Church, to celebrate Mr Punch’s birthday.
Yes indeed.
A birthday party for a puppet.
And not just a handful of enthusiasts in a pub snug somewhere.
We’re talking processions. Punch booths. Clergymen. Puppeteers from all over Britain and abroad. Swazzles squawking away. Impromptu performances in the churchyard. Learned discussions about the correct operation of puppet crocodiles.
I am not making this up.
The gathering runs into the hundreds. Which sounds faintly impossible until you remember this is Covent Garden and London has always specialised in the impossible.
Now the really London bit.
Today, May 9th, is technically Mr Punch’s birthday.
Technically.
Sort of.
Maybe.
And that’s because the entire thing rests on one tiny little entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary.
May 9th, 1662.
Pepys writes that he went to Covent Garden and saw “an Italian puppet play… which is very pretty.”
That’s it.
That tiny passing remark.
No mention of Punch by name.
No mention of a birthday.
No mention of Judy.
No mention of crocodiles, sausages, policemen being walloped or babies being thrown out of windows.
Just a brief mention of a puppet show.
But historians later connected the dots. The Italian puppet character Pulcinella became Punch. And because Pepys saw the show on May 9th, 1662, that date gradually became accepted as the birthday of Mr Punch in England.
Which means one throwaway sentence in a Restoration diary accidentally created one of London’s most gloriously daft annual traditions.
And there’s another delicious wrinkle.
The celebration itself nowadays usually doesn’t happen on May 9th.
This year, for example, it’s taking place tomorrow, May 10th.
Why?
Because the organisers sensibly realised more people could attend on the Sunday.
Which somehow makes the whole thing even more English.
The birthday is fixed.
Except it isn’t.
The date is sacred.
Except it moves.
Mr Punch, one suspects, would approve entirely.
And the setting could hardly be better.
Covent Garden.
The Piazza.
Street performers.
Actors.
Tourists.
Church bells.
Pub chatter.
Buskers.
Opera singers warming up.
The smell of coffee and rain and old London stone.
You can imagine Pepys there in 1662 threading through the crowd, curious as ever, notebook almost twitching in his pocket.
And remember the timing.
This is Restoration London.
The theatres had only recently reopened after the joyless Puritan years under Cromwell.
England was rediscovering pleasure.
Rediscovering spectacle.
Rediscovering laughter.
And suddenly here comes this anarchic Italian puppet, squawking and whacking everybody with a stick.
A sort of one-puppet declaration that merriment was back.
That London was alive again.
Punch has always been slightly subversive.
That’s part of the point.
Authority figures get clobbered.
Chaos reigns.
The law looks ridiculous.
The devil himself gets involved.
And then there’s Jack Ketch.
Now there’s a London name with a shudder in it. Ketch was the seventeenth-century executioner whose incompetence became legendary. His most notorious performance was the execution of the Duke of Monmouth in 1685. Five blows to the neck, and still not properly done. Horrible. Bungled. A public execution turned into a theatre of disgust.
And somehow, because English popular culture is a very strange beast, Jack Ketch found his way into Punch and Judy. Of course he did. Punch’s world is a little wooden theatre into which the big nightmares of the street are miniaturised: the law, the gallows, the policeman, the hangman, the devil, domestic warfare, death itself. All reduced to squeaks, thwacks, shrieks and laughter.
That’s part of the power of it.
Punch and Judy is not polite entertainment. It’s folk memory with a slapstick. It’s London’s old rough theatre, carrying in its tiny booth the things respectable society would rather not look at too directly. Crime. Punishment. Marriage. Authority. The rope. The law. The crocodile.
And Mr Punch, disgraceful little monster that he is, keeps getting away with it.
A direct descendant of the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition.
And Punch had his great London artist, too.
George Cruikshank.
Born in Bloomsbury in 1792. Baptised at St George’s, Bloomsbury. Raised in a house where caricature wasn’t a profession so much as the family atmosphere. Cruikshank later said he was “cradled in caricature.”
What a phrase.
And what a London apprenticeship he had. His real school was the street. Not the academy. Not the grand tour. The street. London as classroom. London as theatre. London as zoo, circus, bear-pit, cartoon strip and human comedy.
Cruikshank was theatre-mad, street-mad, satire-mad. He drew Napoleon, dandies, drunkards, rogues, boxers, cockneys, scandals, taverns, mobs, nightmares, fairy tales and London itself, fizzing and misbehaving.
And in 1828 he turned his hand to Punch and Judy.
Which makes perfect sense.
Because Punch and Cruikshank belong to the same family of London genius. Exaggeration. Distortion. Energy. Wickedness. Laughter with its teeth showing.
Punch and Judy, you might say, are England’s most alarming married couple. The domestic drama from hell, performed in a little booth with a squeaky voice and a big stick.
Baudelaire later said Cruikshank’s gift was an “inexhaustible abundance of grotesque invention.”
Could there be a better description of Mr Punch?
Grotesque invention.
Bottled anarchy.
London slapstick with a red hat on.
And this, by the way, is one of the great reasons for tuning into London Calling.
Because otherwise this might never cross your radar.
You could live in London for forty years and never know that every May a small army of Punch Professors assembles in Covent Garden to celebrate the birthday of a puppet born from a line in Pepys’ diary.
That’s London.
That’s what makes the place inexhaustible.
You turn a corner and suddenly discover that somewhere nearby a puppet birthday procession is forming up.
And everybody involved is taking it absolutely seriously.
Which somehow makes it funnier.
And better.
So if you happen to be in Covent Garden tomorrow and hear strange squawking noises, don’t be alarmed.
It’s only Mr Punch celebrating another birthday.
Still going strong after more than three and a half centuries.
Still causing trouble.
Still refusing to behave himself.
Still very much alive in London.
That’s the way to do it.
Ok, that’s it. That’s your daily London fix for May 9th, 2026.
See you tomorrow.