Daily Mirror, Mon 23 Nov 1953

I am a chicken worshipper, says Stan

A taxi driver who came to England twenty-four years ago from the jungles of South America yesterday knelt down to pray to a cockerel. For Fawcett Stanley Lawrence Fraser of Cranworth Gardens, Brixton – Stan to his pals – says he is a chicken worshiper and he told a London court the other day when as a witness, he affirmed instead of taking the oath. Stan says he cannot practice the correct ritual in England “for to do that you have to be wearing only a loincloth when you bow before the bird, the bird has red beads of a red cloth around it’s neck. Back home, at the full moon, the tribe swept out to the river in loin cloths” he said last night as he demonstrated how the worshipping was done. “And there, looking all proud and mighty, stood the cockerel. And down we all used to go” 

“Here in England when the full moon comes I just sit and think of chicken worshiping back home in the jungle,” said Stan. “It’s all here, right in my heart”

Stan, who is an aborigine, had to borrow the cockerel for his demonstration as he cannot keep one himself because he lives in a flat. Stan’s wife Golda, who is of Chinese descent, yesterday held their baby Simon as she watched Stan on his knees muttering strange prayers to the cockerel perched on a cushion.

As a chicken worshiper, he does not eat chickens or chicken eggs. But his wife does. “But it’s a strange thing with Simon, he won’t even eat an egg, no matter how hard his mother tried to feed him with one” Stan told a Daily Mirror reporter last night. 

He went on; “My wife takes no notice of my being a chicken worshiper. Reckon there’s about four of us in this country. I’ve been one all my life since I was born in a bamboo hut in the jungle. My boy will probably be a Christian. It’s up to him later. But me, I’m a chicken worshiper.