Notable residents The Canting Crew The Canting Crew is an informal name for a group of Ankh-Morpork
beggars who are too anarchic for the Beggars' Guild, which has a tendency to constrain them with rules. Members of the group can often be found beneath Ankh-Morpork's Misbegot Bridge and are normally accompanied by the talking dog, Gaspode.
Death joins the crew in the
16th Discworld novel,
Soul Music where he takes the name,
Mr Scrub. Death is successful at taking coin and enhancing the group's earning power where he also becomes known as
the Grateful Death. In
The Truth, the crew are recruited by the
Ankh-Morpork Times editor,
William de Worde to become
newspaper hawkers, where they capitalise on their unintelligibility to sell copies.
Foul Ole Ron Excessively seedy, momentously dirty, overpoweringly smelly and entirely incomprehensible,
Foul Ole Ron is the best-known member of the crew. He is often accompanied by Gaspode, the world's only
thinking-brain dog (as opposed to a '
seeing-eye dog'). ''Ron's smell'' has become strong enough to not only melt earwax but to acquire a separate existence entirely — it occasionally arrives ahead of Ron and opts to stick around for a while after his departure. Ron's '
catchphrase', "Buggrit, millennium hand an' shrimp...", was the result of Pratchett feeding a random text generating program with a
Chinese takeaway menu and the lyrics to
They Might Be Giants's song
Particle Man. His catchphrase (minus 'buggrit') is also used by Mrs Tachyon, a character in the
Johnny Maxwell series, also by Pratchett. Foul Ole Ron is in one verse of
Sam Vimes's "City version" of ''
Where's My Cow?'' that Young Sam enjoyed, but
Lady Sybil Vimes disapproved of this version.
Altogether Andrews Altogether Andrews is a mass of many
personalities, none of them named Andrews with most having higher social status than Altogether. The Duck Man speculates that Andrews was once a mild-mannered
psychic, mentally overwhelmed by the other
souls. Andrews is generally regarded as one of the most consistently sane of the group, since at least five of his personalities can hold a sensible conversation with other people. The personalities 'voted' on whether to act as street vendors for
The Ankh Morpork Times (in
The Truth) and Andrews held up five fingers to indicate the outcome of his personalities' decision.
Coffin Henry Sometimes spelt 'Coughin' Henry'.
Coffin Henry has a
habitual cough from which he gets his name, it is described as sounding 'almost solid'. Like Ron, he has a verse in ''Where's My Cow?'', as adapted by Vimes to fit city life. In it, Henry goes "Cough, gack, ptui". While Ron asks people for money to stop following them, Coffin Henry makes money by not going anywhere. People send him small sums to not turn up at their parties asking people to look at his interesting collection of skin diseases. He also wears a sign saying "For sum muny I wont follo yu hom".
The Duck Man The Duck Man is the intellectual of the group, and in comparison appears relatively sane, he seems unaware of the duck that lives on his head and has little memory of life before joining the Canting Crew, referring to it as "when I was someone else". Possibly once rich and well educated at some time, he wears the tattered remnants of an expensive suit. As a boy, he "messed around in boats". Somebody apparently wants him dead, as the price on his head at the Assassins' Guild is $132,000, but there's a chance he put that contract on himself. The Duck Man appears in several of Pratchett's books, including
Hogfather,
Soul Music,
The Truth and
Feet of Clay.
Arnold Sideways Arnold Sideways is noted for being completely legless, literally — a cart ran over his legs several years ago and he now gets around on a wheelbarrow, usually pushed by the Duck Man. He carries an old boot on a stick, so muggers desperate enough to try to rob the beggars often find themselves being kicked on the top of the head by a three-foot tall man.
Willie Hobson Willie Hobson runs Hobson's Livery
Stable, which stables, rents and sells horses. The Stables is a popular location for circumspect meetings. Hobson is a large man, who looks like a shaved bear, he has delivered his equine-brokering services to the great and good and others of Ankh Morpork. Hobson's name may make one think of the real stable-owner,
Thomas Hobson, best known as the name behind the expression
Hobson's choice.
Mr Hong Mr Hong never appears in any of the books, having died before the start of any of the stories, but remains an important part of
Ankh-Morpork's
collective memory. Several times in the stories a character is admonished to "remember what happened to Mr Hong when he tried to open the Three Jolly Luck Takeaway Fish Bar on the site of the old fish god temple in
Dagon Street on the night of a
full moon and a
lunar eclipse at the
winter solstice." This incident acts as a deterrent for Morporkians against meddling too much with the occult or supernatural or doing something else that is just as stupid. Though it is never satisfactorily explained what happened exactly, in
Jingo it is revealed that only his kidney and a few bones were found.
Doughnut Jimmy Universally known as
Doughnut Jimmy, Dr James Folsom is a highly proficient
horse doctor that Samuel Vimes instructs to treat Lord Vetinari in the
19th Discworld novel,
Feet of Clay. A human doctor, that is, a doctor for humans do not have high success rates in the city, whereas Jimmy earns his living by making sure his patients who are worth thirty thousand dollars are still a good
bet to pick up first place in the Quirm
Steeplechase. Jimmy treats animals worth considerable amounts of money and faces considerable trouble if his patients die. A former jockey, Jimmy won a lot of money by
not winning races and was highly skilled at achieving results. ==Geography==