Bizarre London Page 5

  1945 – John Amery

  The Old Harrovian son and brother of British MPs, Amery amassed an impressive seventy-four motoring convictions before joining the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. In 1941, he was recruited by the Nazis and began making pro-German broadcasts from Berlin in the hope of encouraging British internees to change sides.

  Towards the end of the war, he joined Mussolini and, following his capture by Italian partisans, was handed over to the British. Interviewed by MI5 and charged with treason, Amery pleaded guilty in a trial that lasted just eight minutes. Sent to Wandsworth Prison, he was hanged after telling the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, how much he had been looking forward to their meeting.

  1946 – Lord Haw-Haw

  Britain’s most famous traitor always argued he was no such thing, as William Joyce was born in Brooklyn, NY, to parents who had taken US citizenship. He was educated in England, however, and lied about his age to join the Royal Worcester Regiment before falling under the spell of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

  In 1940, he took German citizenship and spent much of the war broadcasting anti-British propaganda under the call-sign ‘Germany Calling’. Captured by British forces in northern Germany at the war’s end, Joyce was brought back to London, tried and, on 3 January 1946, hanged at Wandsworth.

  1946 – Theodore Schurch

  A day after Lord Haw-Haw’s execution, Hammersmith-born Schurch was hanged at Pentonville, the only British soldier to be executed for treachery throughout the whole of the Second World War. After defecting in order to spy for the enemy, his crimes included posing as a PoW to gain the trust of other prisoners before betraying them to the Germans. Today, Schurch also enjoys the distinction of being the last person to be executed in Britain for a crime other than murder.

  1951 – Burgess and Maclean

  Espionage’s most famous double act, Old Etonian Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, met at Cambridge. Quickly recruited to the Russian cause, the pair began moving effortlessly toward the higher echelons of the Foreign Office, Diplomatic Corps, MI5 and the BBC. Soon, Maclean had access to atomic secrets, and Burgess was well placed as a Second Secretary at the embassy in Washington.

  In 1951, Burgess was recalled to London for ‘serious misconduct’ and, tipped off by Philby (see page 50), the two immediately fled the country. Burgess died in Moscow, a drunk aged fifty-two, and Maclean followed him twenty years later. Bizarrely, the latter’s ashes were brought back to the country he had betrayed, and scattered at Penn in Buckinghamshire.

  1961 – George Blake

  A British spy who became a double-agent for the USSR, Blake’s duplicity only came to light when he was exposed by a Polish defector. Sentenced to forty-two years in prison – still a record for any British court, but then he was conceivably our deadliest traitor – Blake was sprung from Wormwood Scrubs in west London by a fellow inmate, assisted by two anti-nuclear campaigners.

  Via a safe house at 28 Highlever Road, London W10, Blake was spirited away to Moscow concealed in a hidden compartment of a campervan. A committed Marxist-Leninist, at the time of writing he was still living in that city and drawing a regular KGB pension. He is thought to have given away the identities of up to 400 agents, but continues to deny that he was ever a traitor and, as recently as 2007 (when he was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship), insisted that ‘to betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged.’

  1963 – Kim Philby

  Born in the Raj to British parents, Philby became a communist while a student at Cambridge in the 1930s. Recruited as a Soviet agent at that time, he secured a position with the British Secret Intelligence Service, ironically as the head of anti-communist counter-espionage.

  Posted to Washington after the war, as First Secretary at the British Embassy he was responsible for liaison with the CIA from 1949 to 1951. He later moved to the Middle East and, in 1963, after protesting his innocence to the press on a visit to his mother’s flat in Grove Court, South Kensington, he disappeared. Resurfacing in Moscow, he was granted Soviet citizenship and remained there until his death in 1988.

  1964 – Anthony Blunt

  Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures before he was identified as a Soviet double-agent, Blunt made a private confession in 1964. Even so, it was to be fifteen years before he was publicly exposed as the ‘fourth man’ (in Andrew Boyle’s book, Climate of Treason) and named as such by PM Margaret Thatcher.

  The public outrage was palpable – not least at the justifiable sense that there had been an Establishment cover-up – and the Queen moved quickly to strip him of his knighthood. His boyfriend subsequently fell from a sixth-floor balcony after a row and, never recovering from the disgrace of his exposure, the reviled Blunt finally died of heart failure in 1983 at his home at Portsea Place, W2.

  London’s Killing Fields

  The Millennium Hotel, Grosvenor Square, SW1

  In 2006, a former member of the Russian Federal Security Service, Alexander Litvinenko, had a cup of tea at the hotel. He later died of radioactive poisoning, and it is now thought that during Litvinenko’s visit to the hotel an unidentified foreign agent was able to secrete a tiny particle of polonium-210 into his teapot.

  Waterloo Bridge, SE1

  On his way to work at the BBC, the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was fatally poisoned using a specially adapted umbrella that deposited a tiny pellet of highly toxic ricin into his leg.

  24 Carlton House Terrace, SW1

  In 2007, having been outed as a longstanding agent for the Israeli secret service Mossad, the Egyptian businessman Ashraf Marwan fell to his death from his balcony. Still treated as suspicious, his death has never been explained.

  Shellbourne Hotel, 1 Lexham Gardens, W8

  In 1952, Polish-born Christine Granville was stabbed to death at the hotel. Despite her wartime heroics as a highly effective and much decorated SOE agent, it was a crime of passion rather than a professional hit. A friend of Ian Fleming’s, Granville is thought to have provided the model for at least two Bond girls, Vespa Lynd and Tatiana Romanova. Her murderer, Dennis Muldowney, was hanged at Pentonville on 30 September 1952.

  Tower of London

  Charged with ‘committing treachery in that you at Ramsay in Huntingdonshire on the night of 31 January 1941 / 1 February 1941 descended by parachute with intent to help the enemy . . .’ Joseph Jakobs was the last person ever to be executed at the Tower. He was dispatched by an eight-man firing squad at precisely 7.12am on 15 August 1941.

  31 Pembroke Gardens, W8

  A drunken spendthrift with a shocking drugs habit, cipher clerk Ernest Oldham paid for his extravagant lifestyle by spying for Stalin’s secret police, the OGPU. In 1932, he lost his job at the Foreign Office due to his unreliability, and no longer of any use was bumped off the following year. His death was disguised as a suicide, and it suited both sides to reach a verdict that he had, in fact, killed himself by sticking his head in the oven.

  The Bandstand, Clapham Common, SW4

  Found beaten to death in 1911, burglar and petty thief Leon Beron’s body was distinguished by the letter ‘S’, which was deeply carved into each cheek. Though no one was ever charged or found guilty for the crime, it has long been supposed he was killed by anarchists after being uncovered as a police spy.

  END OF AN ERA

  Long after the death penalty was abolished in this country for relatively ordinary offences such as murder, it remained on the statute books for the very special crime of high treason. At Wandsworth Prison, the country’s last set of gallows was kept oiled and ready until as recently as 1994, and it was not until 1998 that the law was finally changed. Spies and other traitors now face being simply locked up with the rest of the criminal fraternity.

  5

  Under London

  ‘London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous . . . a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings, just like a brain.’

  James Geary

  From pipe
s to plague pits, through tombs and tunnels to private railways, vast underground office complexes and bunkers large enough to shelter 12,000 people at a time, the London that lies hidden beneath the one we know seems not much smaller and many times more mysterious.

  Government Moles

  Much is made these days about the need for government transparency, but whenever our democratically elected rulers feel the need to slip beneath the radar, you can be sure they have plenty of places where they can disappear:

  Storey’s Gate

  Protected by a 17-ft concrete shield – this can be seen at ground level from St James’s Park – an estimated 6 acres of space, more than 200 offices in total, were excavated beneath the Treasury in the run-up to the Second World War. Like an iceberg, only a tiny part is visible to the public – namely Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms – but the authorities prefer to remain tight-lipped about the remainder, which lies hidden below. (During his wartime service, the comedian Norman Wisdom was stationed down there, but he was removed and put on a charge after addressing the PM as ‘Winnie’ and subsequently never gave away any secrets.)

  Post Office Tunnels

  Even now, the true extent of these is unclear, although the original plan was to link the aforementioned Whitehall complex to other top-secret facilities near St Paul’s, at Covent Garden, Waterloo and Moorgate. Codenamed Citadel, Bastion, Rampart and Fortress, these outposts were no sooner completed than rendered redundant when the Russians developed their own nuclear armoury.

  Three Citadels

  In the early 1930s, convinced that another war with Germany was inevitable, three secret command centres were excavated deep beneath north London. These were at Cricklewood, Harrow and Dollis Hill – the last named being buried deep beneath the innocuous-sounding Post Office Research Station. This was a facility charged with devising new techniques for bugging foreign embassies and consulates in the capital, but has recently been converted into flats.

  Beneath the Squares

  Between the wars, beneath Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Queen, Russell, Bloomsbury and Woburn squares, the London County Council excavated many thousands of yards of deep trenches. These were protected by concrete and earth banking, and air-locked against gas attack, but little is known about what became of them following Germany’s defeat.

  LONDON’S MOST INTRIGUING CRYPTS

  All Hallows-by-the-Tower, EC3

  Also known as All Hallows Barking and occasionally St Mary’s, the building is built on the foundations of a Saxon church and was rumoured to be the final resting place of the heart of Richard the Lionheart. More certain is the existence of a small museum of Roman and Saxon artefacts in the crypt, including an outstandingly well-preserved section of Roman tessellated pavement.

  St John’s Waterloo, SE1

  With marshy ground requiring much deeper-than-usual foundations, this nineteenth-century church has a vast crypt, although the latter is only rarely opened to the public. Originally intended for prestigious interments, it was more or less gutted after the church was bombed in the 1940s. Bizarrely, an open pipe in the floor shows how close to the surface the water table lies, an ongoing concern as this vast stone edifice is supported by 200-year-old oak piles.

  Carmelite Monastery, Magpie Alley, EC4

  Encapsulated beneath a modern office building, but visible behind a large picture window, is a surviving fragment of what was once a mighty religious foundation. From 1253, the Carmelite Order of the White Friars held a large plot of land between Fleet Street and the Thames, on which were built a church, cloisters, cemetery and herb and vegetable gardens. Following the depredations of Henry VIII, this small portion was used as a coal cellar, but is now safely preserved for all to see.

  St Pancras New Church, NW1

  Crypt burials were always popular among the well-to-do and remained so until they were outlawed in London in 1854. By then, 557 bodies had been interred beneath this busy church and, today, the space – which during two world wars served as an air-raid shelter – has been remodelled as an unusual but popular art gallery.

  St Bride’s, Fleet Street, EC4

  This was such a popular place for burials that, when his brother died, Pepys had to bribe the sexton to ‘justle together’ the bodies to make room. Archaeological enquiries here have uncovered evidence of at least seven different churches dating back nearly 1,400 years, and what is almost certainly London’s first community of Irish settlers. Occasional guided tours take in the charnel house and ossuary, an unusually grim discovery to find beneath the modern city.

  Ministry of Defence, Whitehall, SW1

  A unique secular crypt, and the last surviving remnant of Cardinal Wolsey’s magnificent riverside palace at York Place. Following its acquisition by Henry VIII, this was incorporated into Whitehall Palace, the spacious undercroft becoming the king’s private wine cellar. Somehow it survived the massive fire that destroyed the Palace in 1698, but was then more or less forgotten until work started on the new ministry building in the 1930s. Now safely encased in a protective collar of reinforced concrete, one of London’s most fascinating Tudor relics is sadly not ordinarily open to view.

  St John Clerkenwell, EC1

  A precious survivor of the same king’s ransacking and destruction of the monasteries, Clerkenwell’s famous St John’s Gate was built in 1504 by Sir Thomas Docwra and formed part of Clerkenwell Priory, the English wing of the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem. Latterly, it became a tavern and then the headquarters for the St John Ambulance Association, but it was substantially rebuilt after being badly damaged by enemy action in the 1940s. Because of this, the Norman crypt of the nearby church of St John is now the oldest and most authentic part remaining of the old priory, a small but beautiful and exquisitely decorated Early English structure. The church itself, though much restored since, escaped destruction at the Dissolution as Henry VIII used it to store his hunting tents.

  London’s Lost Rivers

  London’s rapid expansion from medieval times onwards means that once pretty streams rapidly degraded into open sewers and were then converted into closed ones. Happily, their names are often commemorated in the streets and residential areas above, meaning their courses can be traced although the rivers themselves are rarely if ever seen.

  Earl’s Sluice

  This rises near Denmark Hill and flows into the Thames at Rotherhithe after joining the River Peck (which gives its name to Peckham). The mouth is by Surrey Quays, where once old whalers used to tie up. The earl in question is Robert Fitzroy, an illegitimate son of Henry I.

  The Effra

  Flowed from Upper Norwood through Dulwich and Brockwell Park into Brixton and then beneath Oval Tube Station. It joins the Thames at Vauxhall, but does little to justify its name, which is a Celtic word meaning ‘torrent’.

  The Fleet

  The most famous of the missing rivers rises on Hampstead Heath (close to the bathing ponds) and travels downhill via King’s Cross, Holborn and Clerkenwell to join the Thames at Blackfriars. The name is from the Anglo-Saxon for estuary – ‘fleot’.

  The Grand Surrey Canal

  Intended to link the county with the capital, this freightway reached no further than Peckham before it was overtaken by the railways. It closed in 1971 and has since been largely filled in.

  The Neckinger

  From ‘devil’s neckinger’ – hangman’s slang for the noose – this rises close to the Imperial War Museum, passes by Elephant and Castle and through Bermondsey to enter the Thames near St Saviour’s Dock.

  The Tyburn

  This rises in Haverstock Hill and flows through Marylebone, down what is now Avery Row in Mayfair, past Shepherd Market and beneath Buckingham Palace. A small section can be seen in the basement of Grays Antiques on Davies Street, and the outflow beneath Pimlico’s Grosvenor Road is readily identified from the opposite bank of the Thames.

  The Walbrook

  Long an important source of fresh water for the City, the Walb
rook entered the Square Mile close to All Hallows London Wall – hence the name – and joins the Thames west of Cannon Street Station. Now called the London Bridge Sewer, its fate has matched those of most of London’s forgotten waterways.

  The Westbourne

  With its origins in Hampstead and the short-lived Kilburn Spa, the river flowed through Maida Vale and Bayswater and into Hyde Park. Partly dammed to create Long Water, it then flows beyond Sloane Square – travelling over the station platforms in a pipe – and enters the Thames by Chelsea Bridge.

  Grosvenor Canal

  Only a few hundred yards long, in the 1820s London’s shortest canal served the Chelsea Waterworks Company, which incurred royal displeasure when its steam pump sent noxious fumes over Buckingham Palace. It was the first to use iron pipes in place of leaky wooden ones until new regulations outlawed using Thames water for domestic supplies. One end of the canal then disappeared beneath platforms 15–19 at Victoria Station, but part of an old arch through which barges once passed can still be seen by Bridge House on Ebury Bridge Road.

  THE ENVY OF THE WORLD?