Bizarre London Read online

  Lord George Gordon

  The twenty-nine-year-old duke’s son was probably only indirectly responsible for the many hundreds of deaths that occurred during the 1780 anti-Catholic riots that bore his name (see Chapter 17). As their instigator, he did well to escape being found guilty of high treason, especially as nearly thirty of his supporters were sentenced to death.

  Admittedly, he spent eight months in the Tower of London, but he was then set free on the grounds that he had merely lost control of the mob rather than egging them on. While incarcerated, he was also allowed an unusual degree of luxury – for example, he frequently entertained guests to dinner in his cell – and on his release he moved to the Midlands, converted to Judaism and changed his name to ‘Yisrael bar Avraham’ (‘Israel Son of Abraham’).

  SO MUCH FOR THE GOOD OLD DAYS

  In London, the application of the death penalty reached its zenith during the elegant Georgian period, when the number of capital offences increased to well over 200. It is hard not to see the escalation as just a cynical ploy to cut the cost of imprisoning offenders for long periods, and, for a while, citizens of London could be hanged for such trivial crimes as the theft of five shillings (the equivalent of 25p today) or impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner. Consequently, between 1770 and 1830, as many as 35,000 death sentences are thought to have been handed down.

  Ten London Serial Killers

  Dennis Nilsen – fifteen victims

  Immortalised as the ‘Muswell Hill Murderer’ (and more rarely as the ‘Cricklewood Killer’), Nilsen murdered fifteen young men in north London, dissecting them and retaining some parts while flushing others down the loo. He was convicted in 1983 when the drains at his home became blocked by the sheer quantity of organic matter Nilsen had forced into the system.

  John Haigh – nine victims

  The notorious ‘Acid Bath Murderer’ was hanged in 1949 after using a vat of corrosive liquid to conceal his crimes. In the mistaken belief that there could be no conviction without a body, Haigh was undone through some brilliant forensic work by a Home Office pathologist who found traces of human fat in amongst the congealing gloop . . . and some acid-proof false teeth. In the hope that he would be deemed insane and escape with his life, Haigh insisted he was a vampire – but this ruse failed.

  Jack the Stripper – eight victims

  In the mid-1960s, a mystery killer in west London got away with murdering six working girls, with another two probable victims. Their bodies, strangled and stripped, were dumped in or near the Thames at Hammersmith and, despite interviewing an incredible 7,000 witnesses, police were never able to nail anyone for the crimes. World Champion boxer Freddie Mills remains a leading suspect, but he killed himself in Soho before it could be proved either way.

  John Childs – six victims

  A contract killer who killed six people for cash, Childs attempted to incinerate the evidence in the fireplace of his Poplar flat after dismembering the bodies. He was sent down in 1980, the Independent newspaper describing how, for at least two of the murders, Childs had dressed all in black – complete with an undertaker’s top hat – to heighten the dramatic effect of his sickening crimes.

  Jack the Ripper – five victims

  Victorian London’s most famous killer has spawned more books, plays and movies than any other, with an estimated 100 names in the frame for who might actually have killed the women. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is how he got away with it – that he was a man is one of very few things Ripperologists can agree on – and that, unlike every other serial killer, he brought his activities to an end without first being caught.

  Robert Maudsley – four victims

  After working as a rent boy in the London of the Swinging Sixties, Maudsley killed a man with a hammer and was sent to Broadmoor. Since his incarceration, he killed three more times, and is now one of an estimated three dozen British serial killers whose so-called whole life tariffs mean they will never be released.

  Gordon Cummins – four victims

  Six attacks in six days, and four of them fatal, the ‘Blackout Ripper’ took full advantage of wartime lighting regulations to conceal his vicious assaults on women in the West End in 1942. Fortunately, he dropped a gas mask case near the scene of one of his attacks and was traced using his RAF personnel number. The twenty-eight-year-old was strung up after the briefest of trials and, with a war still to win, there was minimal press coverage. This is probably why these days he has been more or less forgotten.

  Thomas Wainewright – four victims

  In it for the money, in 1830 Wainewright insured his sister-in-law for an astonishing £18,000 (£15 million today) and then bumped her off. He fled to France but, on his return years later, was suspected of killing his uncle, his mother-in-law and a friend. Lacking firm proof after so long, the authorities charged him with fraud instead, but after being transported to Tasmania he confessed to what he had done.

  George Chapman – three victims

  Arrested in 1902 for the murder of three barmaids, two of whom he claimed to have married, Chapman’s notoriety was assured when a policeman joked about having caught Jack the Ripper. In reality, the preferences of the two killers were completely different – poison versus mutilation, barmaids versus prostitutes – but Ripper fever has never abated, and the public likes nothing more than a new suspect to theorise about.

  John Straffen – three victims

  Initially incarcerated at Wandsworth, Straffen was locked up for a total of fifty-five years, which still stands as a UK record. In 1951, the twenty-one-year-old killed two young girls, and then a third after escaping from Broadmoor, and he died in 1977 without ever being released. At the time of his conviction, Straffen was diagnosed as a ‘major mental defective’ and is now thought to have had an IQ of just 58.

  HEADS YOU LOSE

  Simon of Sudbury’s head was hacked off during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 after the Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard II’s hated Chancellor, had been dragged out of the Tower of London where he had taken refuge. His head is now preserved in a church in his Suffolk home town.

  In 1661, on the twelfth anniversary of Charles I’s murder, Oliver Cromwell’s corpse was dug up and ritually beheaded. His putrefying bonce spent some years on a pike outside Westminster Hall, and it was to be nearly 300 years before it was finally reburied, at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, his alma mater.

  The head of the wooden effigy of Edward III in Westminster Abbey is a rare example of medieval realism. It shows the king’s mouth drooping to the left, presumably a symptom of the stroke that killed him, a surprising feature from an era when rulers were traditionally depicted in an idealised form.

  With a minimum of ceremony, and in the absence of a coffin, Anne Boleyn’s neatly excised head was crammed into an arrow box alongside her body. This was then buried beneath the floor of the church of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London, and remained there undisturbed until the 1870s.

  After his bungled beheading in 1685, the two halves of the Duke of Monmouth are popularly supposed to have been sewn back together in order that the dead duke could ‘sit’ for a family portrait.

  In 1305, the head of William Wallace was parboiled and dipped in pitch to preserve it and then displayed on London Bridge. The tradition of doing this to traitors continued until 1660 and is commemorated today by a white spike at the southern end of the bridge’s modern replacement, after the original London Bridge was relocated in 1967 in its entirety to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, USA. The new spike is enormous, but hardly anyone seems to notice it or know what it symbolises.

  2

  Ghostly London

  In the days and weeks following 10 October 1971, when the old London Bridge officially reopened following its stone-by-stone removal to Lake Havasu City in Arizona, reports began of figures in Victorian dress being seen strolling around the local scrublands. It’s a nice idea, and the logic of it is irresistible, but in general the ghosts of London tend to stay put
, and do so in sufficient numbers to give the capital a reputation as one of the most haunted places on the planet.

  Perhaps given its long and eventful past, that’s hardly surprising. A history steeped in legend, the survival of literally thousands of historic buildings – not to mention a network of narrow streets and alleys in the Square Mile1 that have somehow resisted the developers – it’s no wonder that ghost-hunters have found the capital to be home to so many spirits, and from so many different centuries and walks of life.

  Indeed, whether you choose to follow in the footsteps of Jack the Ripper – who is said to leap from Westminster Bridge as Big Ben sounds each New Year’s Eve – to explore some of the quieter corners of the ancient City of London, or to spend time in the crypts and cloisters of St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, you’ll soon hear about – or experience for yourself – something to make your spine tingle.

  Not all the ghosts are quite as old as you might suppose, however. In Westminster Abbey, for example, it is said that after the crowds have dispersed on Armistice Day, a uniformed figure has been observed to materialise by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A moving spectacle, his head bowed in sorrow at his own fate and that of his dead comrades, it must be a chilling sight.

  Stories about most London spirits, though, tend to concentrate on the departed of earlier eras, and by quite a margin. Still at the Abbey, for example, there is the floating medieval monk known as Father Benedictus who reportedly hovers a foot or two above the floor of the Abbey. Most commonly seen between 5.00 and 6.00 p.m. in and around the cloister, he has been known to engage visitors in conversation, many of whom (including a celebrated couple of Americans in the 1930s) don’t seem to realise that they are talking to a ghost.

  The legendary ‘Princes in the Tower’ are also said to haunt the Abbey from time to time, having been buried there when their bodies were rediscovered in 1674. That said, and for understandable reasons, their two ghosts (still holding on to each other, and crying in terror) have more often been seen to materialise in various rooms of the Tower of London, the place where they are thought to have been confined by their uncle, the much-maligned King Richard III.

  The Tower, predictably, is one of the ghost-hunter’s richest grounds – as well it might be after nearly 1,000 years. As long ago as the thirteenth century, labourers working there claimed that the ghost of St Thomas à Becket had twice destroyed their work with a sweep of his crozier. And each year on 21 May, the ghost of the hapless Henry VI is said to pace up and down the Wakefield Tower marking the anniversary of his murder.

  But perhaps the most unnerving is the murmuring and mysterious yellow glow that has been reported in the nearby Salt Tower. Accompanied by a touch ‘like cold fingers on the back of the neck’ say those who have witnessed it, this strange phenomenon has been attributed to Henry Walpole, a Jesuit who was viciously tortured here on the orders of Henry VIII.

  Naturally, the Tower has its very own ‘white lady’, too, as well as a mysterious, shimmering phial of bluey-white liquid that flies through one of the ancient windows, and the floating, evanescent figures of at least two ill-fated queens. These are, of course, Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn, each of whom came to a famously bloody end on the premises. The ghost of the last-named was once even challenged by a sentry, who reportedly fainted when she ran on to his bayonet and straight through him. Later court-martialled for falling asleep on duty (a technical desertion in military law), he was acquitted on the evidence of two bystanders who said they had witnessed the whole extraordinary episode.

  Somewhat less expected, perhaps, is the sighting of a ghost on the London Underground, although having cut a swathe through scores of ancient grave sites, beneath countless churchyards and more than its fair share of plague pits, it is maybe not that surprising that mysterious presences have occasionally been detected in more than a few of the network’s tunnels and stations.

  Not far from the Tower, for example, station staff at Aldgate have been keeping a log of haunting incidents since the 1950s. In one of them, a maintenance worker is said to have survived an incredible 22,000-volt shock from the third rail, and to have done so immediately after a colleague had observed what he took to be a grey-haired figure – his guardian angel, perhaps? – stroking the man’s hair.

  50 BERKELEY SQUARE:

  LONDON’S MOST HAUNTED HOUSE?

  For more than seventy years, the beautifully preserved William Kent townhouse, premises of leading antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros, on the west side of Mayfair’s Berkeley Square, have long enjoyed a reputation as the capital’s most ghost-infested private home.

  During his tenancy of the building, Prime Minister George Canning (1770–1827) was among the first to witness strange goings-on in the house and, at various times, there have been reports of a malevolent brown ‘mist’ on the staircase, as well as a ghostly white figure – possibly a young woman who jumped to her death from the attic after being propositioned by an older man. Add to this stories of young blades accepting a bet to spend a night in the house but then being carried out dead or insensible the following morning.

  In the way of these things, details are sketchy to say the least, but the house was certainly occupied several times by the sort of colourful characters who, we like to think, might leave behind traces of their presence. Besides the Prime Minister, these included a reclusive nonagenarian called Miss Curzon for much of the early eighteenth century, a man called Myers who rarely stepped out in public after being jilted by his fiancée, and a lunatic who was locked away in an upstairs room by his brother.

  As for the gamblers, only Lord Lyttelton of Frankley (1744–79) is said to have escaped unaffected. He was armed with a blunderbuss, which he claimed he used to shoot at an apparition. A few weeks later, he said he dreamed of a lady in white who told him he had three days to live . . . and three days later he died aged just thirty-five.

  At Bethnal Green Tube station, in 1981, a member of staff claimed to have heard the sound of children crying, an echo, it is thought, of more than 170 local residents who died at the station during the Second World War. (During a panic, hundreds of them sought shelter from incoming enemy bombers, and many were crushed in the stampede.) Covent Garden is similarly said to be haunted by the ghost of the successful actor-manager William Terriss, who was stabbed to death outside the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre in Maiden Lane in 1897. Across the river at Elephant and Castle, the ghost of a young woman has similarly been seen to pass through the carriages and down one of the tunnels.

  Back above ground, in 1982, another equally mysterious figure made herself known when a photographer visited the glorious eighteenth-century interior of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate on the edge of the City. Developing his film a few hours later, Chris Brackley found that in one picture the apparition could be seen gazing down at him from the gallery. Surprised, as he knew the only other person in the building at the time was his wife, Brackley was later contacted by a builder who, working in the crypt a while previously, claimed to have dislodged the lid of a coffin revealing the well-preserved face of a woman whose description closely matched that of the pale figure in the photograph.

  Still in the City, the magnificent precincts of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, the Bank of England, are haunted by another lady of their own. Dressed in black mourning clothes and nicknamed ‘the Bank Nun’, she is thought to be the spirit of Sarah Whitehead whose brother Phillip was found guilty of forgery and executed in 1812. Presumably following a breakdown, Sarah refused to acknowledge what had happened and became a regular visitor to the bank in the years before her own death. Typically, she would call in to the bank several times a week, on each occasion collaring staff members and demanding of them, ‘Have you seen my brother?’

  Her story is sad but not as chilling as the screams frequently heard around the medieval gatehouse of St Bartholomew the Great – restored by Sir Aston Webb, architect of Buckingham Palace’s most familiar façade – or the story of a curse th
at is said to hover over the British Museum. There, the decorated sarcophagi and skeletal remains of the mummies make the first-floor Egyptian Galleries some of the most visited rooms in the museum, and also the most haunted.

  One of the exhibits in particular, a mummy labelled only as ‘unnamed singer of Amen-Re’, is said by believers to have put a curse on all its future keepers. Following its discovery in Egypt in the 1880s, the first person to buy it disappeared without a trace, a second was wounded in a shooting accident, while the third, fearing for his life, hurriedly sold the mummy on to an antiquary. He shipped it to London some time around 1888, but as soon as it was sold, a spiritual medium warned the new owner to get rid of it on pain of death. In pretty short order, it was somehow implicated in the death of a photographer who’d attempted to take a picture of it for an advertisement and then – more bizarrely – in the deaths of all the pets belonging to its final private owner.

  Suitably warned, she arranged for the mummy to come to the British Museum, but the curse struck one more time, killing one of the porters carrying the exhibit up to the first floor. Happily, no more has been heard from the anonymous performer since an exorcism was carried out on it by two psychics in 1921.

  And finally, after all, it is perhaps this fear of their being exorcised that keeps a few of London’s more famous ghosts out in the cold, where maybe they feel safer. How else to explain a spirit matching the description of Lord Nelson, for example, which has been observed crossing the great courtyard at Somerset House? He never enters any of the buildings that once housed the Admiralty, where his brother Maurice Nelson was on the staff. And in St James’s Park, witnesses have similarly reported a headless woman rising out of the water before running into the nearby bushes. She is thought by some to be the wife of a guardsman, a maniac who hacked off her head and slipped her body into the lake.