Imagine being 90 years old at birth - but hey, Aloysius (Lockjaw) Fox was always destined to be different. Conceived several years ago by Gavin Wilson, cartoonist Peter Woolcock and artist Diana Tetlow also had a hand in his creation.

According to his “father”, he arrived in the world “fully loaded” on Thursday, May 29 and met with a rapturous reception. In fact, witnesses to the event thought Lockjaw was a huge joke.

If his genealogy seems dubious, his character is not. A resident of the ‘Cashew City Twilight Home', Lockjaw views life from a long history of following events and meeting people from all walks of life, including Bermuda governors and even Sir Winston Churchill. Yet he stands in awe of no one.

While his grip on history may be skewed, neither this nor anything else deters him from expounding on topics as diverse as politics, the economy, marriage and what it's like to be a ladies' man. He's also good at reminiscing about some of his fellow St. David's Islanders.

Lockjaw is without doubt a curmudgeonly character, and his vocabulary could curl lettuce at times, but he mines from a mother lode of homespun philosophies which are shot straight from the hip, and punctuated with dual-directional, surplus digestive gases, as well as expectoration.

His wardrobe is a pastiche of Front Street twice removed and free advertising, and the snag riding solo in his lower gum is testament to a committed disdain for dentists.

With a face like melted rubber, a nose that could hook fish, and ears like satellite dishes, Lockjaw oozes about as much sex appeal as a city drain. In fact, when he burst onto the Bermuda scene last week witnesses laughed like drains.

Now, many fathers would take severe umbrage at people laughing hysterically at their new-born, but not Gavin Wilson. In fact, the more they laugh at Lockjaw the better he likes it because he has spent years of his life creating the life-sized muppet who will surely become one of the most popular and enduring stars of the dinner-theatre circuit.

The inspiration for Lockjaw Fox began years ago when Mr. Wilson attended the funeral of a well-known St. David's Islander - a man whom he had known and admired, and to whom he came to pay his final respects. The church was packed to overflowing as he made his way to the front, where the deceased lay in the open coffin resplendent in a suit, possibly for the first time.

“The man had a heart as big as the ocean and was the salt of the earth,” Mr. Wilson remembers. “I sat back down and up came the undertaker to put the lid on. The organ was going, and one of the assistants started screwing the lid down at the foot end.

“As he did so the head end began to rise. So the process was reversed, and the foot end began to rise. Apparently they hadn't allowed enough space for the man's prominent nose! In the end they crunched him down. Then the minister announced that the service was being held in the late afternoon against the deceased's wishes.

“Apparently he had wanted a morning service so he'd have all day to get used to the hole! We were already 90 minutes into the funeral and the service hadn't started so unfortunately I had to leave.

“Driving home I thought about how Bermuda had just lost one of St. David's Island's icons and I asked myself, ‘How many are left?' All these old boys had gone, and with them all of the wonderful old stories,” Mr. Wilson says. “Then I thought, ‘What have we got that is local entertainment? There was only one thing which stood out: ‘Not the Um Um Show'.

“The rest are musicians, and as wonderful as they are, they are musicians, which is a segmented part of entertainment. ‘Not the Um Um' is more contemporary and more like a theatrical revue. So I asked myself, ‘What if I could find an old guy like the deceased, how would I recreate him?

“Would I dress up, sit down and play him?' No, that wouldn't work. I watched a lot of Jim Henson's muppets on “Sesame Street” with my daughter Jessica, and I said, ‘That's it! I've got to get a puppet, but who is he going to be - a 90-year-old St. David's Islander, or what one would look like?”

Settling on that concept, Mr. Wilson's next move was to find someone to draw what he had in mind.

“There is only one person in the world I could talk to about it: Peter Woolcock,” he says. “Two days later - two days! - he came back with a concept that only he could come up with. In my wildest imagination I could never have come up with it. It was far beyond what I wanted. The man is a genius.”

Mr. Woolcock takes up the story.

“Gavin asked me if I would be willing to tackle a novel project. He had some little fantasy about a funny, St. David's Islander muppet which he could take around. He gave me details of the character and asked me to sketch out some ideas. I was fascinated. It was the sort of project that someone like me salivates over.

I roughed out the whole face, as well as in profile, and also the body based on a St. David's Islander I had had dealings with. I sent the drawings to Gavin and asked him to let me know if I was on the right track. He was absolutely delighted and no changes were made.”

With the image decided, the next step was to transpose the drawings into a three-dimensional model, and again Mr. Wilson turned to the one artist he felt would be perfect for the job: Mrs. Diana Tetlow. Her immediate response was that the figure must be a larger-than-life character, and she duly set about creating him, beginning with the head.

First she made a clay model based on Mr. Woolcock's drawings, followed by a two-part negative mould made in Ultra Cal plaster, which weighed about 75 pounds.

“I planned to use a rubber compound called Pliatex for Lockjaw's head because it is exceedingly flexible, and which I hoped would allow his face to have expression,” Mrs. Tetlow says. “Gavin was really enthusiastic about joining in the process, but unfortunately we were both so keen to see the result that we hurried it up, and our first effort was extraordinarily distorted because many of the layers hadn't set.

"We had a few good laughs, and decided that he would be Lockjaw's brother, whom Gavin promptly named ‘Roadtoad'.”

The second attempt, executed with greater time and patience, proved to be perfect. Next Mrs. Tetlow turned to creating the rest of puppet: the body, the wardrobe, and the fitting of the head onto the torso.

“We were building up a portrait of a non-existent character which needed to be modelled on some reality, and while Peter's drawing was inspired by someone he knew, Lockjaw's body was based on my father's shape in my mind's eye - barrel chested and skinny legged,” she says.

Construction of the torso took careful planning and some trial and error. It had to be hollow and at the same time lightweight, yet strong enough to support the head. Despite no previous experience in a project of this nature, Mrs. Tetlow duly produced a successful formula.

After creating the hands from Pliatex, she fashioned the hairy legs and feet from donated parts which had formerly been used to display Bermuda socks, “characterising” them with a latex skin, and “hair” fashioned from unravelled rope. They were the only prefabricated parts of Lockjaw.

Similarly, Mrs. Tetlow wove the eyebrows from rope fibres, but she drew the line at hair on the head as it would have taken “years” to complete. A cap hides the deficit.

Although the original intention was to allow the head to rotate, by the time the artist figured out the mechanics it was too late to amend Mr. Wilson's extensive rehearsals.

Lockjaw's wardrobe includes an old blue shirt and yellow, rolled up trousers, paint-splattered Docksiders and cap, and suspenders with string.

While awaiting removal to the Royal Hamilton Amateur Dinghy Club for his debut, Lockjaw sat quietly on Mrs. Tetlow's sofa with his back turned to incoming visitors.

“There were quite a few who greeted him before it dawned on them that he wasn't real,” she laughs. “Eventually Gavin covered him with a sheet because he could give some people rather a jolt.

Even so, until last week Lockjaw has been so much a part of my household that I can't remember when he wasn't. I think it's the same for Gavin, who has been very patient with me during the making of him. Certainly, the project has been tremendous fun for all of us.”

Mr. Wilson says that without Mrs. Tetlow “the whole thing would not exist”.

“If Lockjaw is to be a success, then it is due entirely to what Diana has done. She has turned Peter's concept into this character. She is just phenomenal, particularly when you consider that she hadn't done a project exactly like this before.”

Mr. Wilson says that development of Lockjaw's character - which he sums up as “an old curmudgeon for whom everything is a pain in the butt because that is the only way you can make him work”- is based on years of knowing St. David's Islanders and listening to their stories.

“I used to go out fishing with them, and for years I also did the finish line for the Newport-Bermuda Race off St. David's, where you were rubbing shoulders with the most extraordinary collection of people,” he says. “I love dialects, and I love listening to people speak and what they say. I'd think, ‘Whoa, that's interesting, I've never heard that before' and then I'd hear it again. So I'd file it away somewhere in my head'.”

Other stories from a friend's years in the Bermuda Regiment, as well as those recounted by others, were similarly “filed,” later to be embellished as he put the script together.

“You have to do that because you are saying, not reading, the script and you also have to give it some kind of continuity,” Mr. Wilson explains.

Once the basic script was crafted, the next step was to “bounce it” off his wife, Linda, whom he says has been “brilliant”, and special friends whose opinions he also values highly.

“I might think something's funny, but you can't trust your own judgment, so it's necessary to get feedback from other people. You have to decide, ‘How broad can you make its appeal without losing the whole thrust of a 90-year-old St. David's Islander?',” Mr. Wilson says.

“You don't know who is in your audience, so you have to try and appeal not just to born Bermudians but to all Bermuda residents, which is important.”

After several years of working on his “baby”, Lockjaw's creator says it was Joseph de Campos Guerra, the general manager of the Royal Hamilton Amateur Dinghy Club, who finally ended his procrastination and committed him to specific performances dates there.

The rest, if not history, is at least its first chapter, if advance sell-out of all unadvertised performances is an indicator.

The show, entitled ‘Suck Rocks and Molly Millers', is not all about Lockjaw Fox, however. Rather, it is a three-man production which also includes songwriter, musician and signer Chris Broadhurst, who opens the show and performs all of his own material, much of it satirical, and some of which was written for the now defunct ‘Um Um' productions of John White.

Apart from showcasing Mr. Broadhurst's well-known talents, the segment also allows time for Lockjaw to “arrive”, having hitched a ride on a cement truck from St. David's.

While audiences have apparently loved the show, which Mr. Wilson stresses is an adult one, he says that future performances will depend on demand and the availability of himself and Mr. Broadhurst.

In any case, they would continue to be held in private clubs, similar to the route followed by ‘Not the Um Um' shows. First, however, there will be a post mortem on last week's performances, in which the valued advice of Mrs. Wilson and friends will again be taken, and of course Lockjaw will also have his say.

“You have to realise that the people who do this are masochists,” he says. “It is a very scary thing to go out in public with your own material. It's not like a play. I can't say, ‘Well, I didn't write the script'.”

Of course, Lockjaw has the last word on his co-star Wilson and ‘Suck Rocks and Molly Millers'.

“Don't listen to any of that (expletive deleted) Wilson comes out with about how much hard work this show has been for him,” the old curmudgeon says.

“That bye can talk more (expletive deleted) in ten minutes than a humpback can produce in a month. All he does is sit there and ask me a few half-assed questions. Most of what he asks is so igrint that I think when he fell off the top of the Stupid Tree he must have hit every branch on the way down. I'm the one who tells all the stories, does all the work. I'm telling you like it is.”