Bizarre London Page 7
A similar fate was meted out to the figures on the façade of what is now the Embassy of Zimbabwe on the Strand. Carved by Jacob Epstein, ‘The Ages of Man’ caused such a scandal in Edwardian England that certain specifically masculine portions of the figures were cut back following the public outcry about their dimensions. (Similar complaints about his work at 55 Broadway, the headquarters of what became London Underground, led to the penises of ‘Night’ and ‘Day’ being shortened by 1½ in.)
In the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey, a carving of St Matthew shows the apostle wearing a pair of spectacles, although these were not invented until at least 1,200 years after his death.
While it is the Monument in Fish Street Hill that officially commemorates the Great Fire of London, the rebuilt St Paul’s is, for many visitors, the definitive reminder of that time. But how many of them realise, however, that the gilded flames above the dome incline in such a way as to indicate the direction of the wind on the first day of the fire in 1666?
The sixteenth-century statue inside the gates of St Dunstan-in-the-West in Fleet Street is the only statue of Elizabeth I anywhere in London. Were this not in itself surprising enough, for such a popular sovereign, it was lost for many years when for reasons now forgotten it was deposited in the cellar of a local pub. London’s third-oldest statue (see below), it was discovered only by accident, by workmen demolishing the building in 1839, after which it was put back on display.
LONDON’S OLDEST STATUE
The title is usually awarded to a badly weathered statue standing in the middle of Southwark’s beautifully unspoiled Trinity Church Square. This is popularly supposed to be of King Alfred, but no one knows for sure. At barely 600 years old, however, it postdates its subject by several centuries and is therefore nowhere near as ancient as the black basalt bust situated over the main entrance to Sotheby’s Bond Street headquarters.
The bust in question is of an Egyptian lion god, Sekhmet, and was auctioned in the early nineteenth century but never collected by the buyer. Eventually, Sotheby’s adopted it as the company’s unofficial mascot, and it has since been dated to approximately 1320 BC.
Ten Blue Plaques Not Yet Awarded
Saracen’s Head Buildings, Cock Lane, EC1
The London showroom of John J. Royle, Mancunian inventor of the world’s first self-pouring teapot (Patent no. 6327, dated 1886).
Wood Green Empire, High Street, N22
In March 1918, the Chinese magician Chung Ling Soo (real name Bill Robinson) dropped down dead here after failing to catch a bullet in his teeth, during the death-defying finale to his famous stage show. Although it turned out to be less death-defying than he’d have planned.
68 Tottenham Court Road, W1
Where an unknown John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) was briefly employed handing out leaflets on behalf of the Official Church of Scientology. Usually, of course, it’s the other way round and celebrities wait until they’ve made it before coming to the cult.
81–82 Pall Mall, SW1
Where the notorious eighteenth-century quack Dr James Graham established his Temple of Health & Hymen. With its mirrored ceiling, giant bed and rather worrying-sounding ‘medico-Electrical apparatus’, childless couples were invited to attend and to ‘obtain the desire of their lives’. Graham made a mint selling his unfortunate gulls ‘imperial pills, electrical aether and nervous aethereal balsoms’, but then found religion and died in an asylum.
34 Haydock Green, Northolt, Middlesex
Stanley Green died here in 1994 after spending more than twenty-five years walking up and down Oxford Street carrying a placard warning shoppers of the perils of protein. (The placard – ‘Less Lust, By Less Protein’ – is now in the Museum of London.)
18 St James’s Square, SW1
Home to the only suicide buried in Westminster Abbey. In 1822, Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh killed himself with a pocket knife, but was afforded the honour even though committing suicide was a serious crime (and remained so until 1961). The public were outraged, rioted outside the house and booed Castlereagh’s coffin when it appeared.
Church House, Great Smith Street, SW1
Self-proclaimed prophet Joanna Southcott left a locked box here, insisting it be opened only after her death and with twenty-four bishops as witnesses. She died in 1814 – without giving birth to the new Messiah, as she had promised to do – and when the box was opened it contained nothing more than a few coins, a nightcap and a trashy novel.
Leicester Square Theatre, WC2
Built on the site of Lucy’s Bagnio – essentially a brothel – where in 1762 an illiterate Surrey woman Mary Tofts claimed to have given birth to fifteen rabbits. Several surgeons appeared to believe her – including George I’s personal physician – but she was threatened with prosecution under a medieval statute as a ‘vile cheat and imposter’. The charge refused to stick, however – the hoaxed realising they would look pretty foolish in court – and she returned to Surrey and resumed a life of petty crime.
201 Deptford High Street, SE8
After breaking a German spy ring operating from this address in 1915, British Intelligence continued supplying information to the enemy – all of it false – while invoicing them for the service at a rate of £6 a week.
71 Brewer Street, W1
Marks the site of the home for thirty-three years of the diplomat, soldier and spy Chevalier Charles d’Eon de Beaumont (1728–1810). In the 1770s, the Chevalier began dressing as a woman, scandalising London society and encouraging more than £100,000-worth of wagers about his sexuality. A jury eventually ruled that the Chevalier was indeed a woman but, before interment at St Pancras Old Church, doctors determined that the body was anatomically that of a man.
If You Want to Get Ahead, Get a . . . Beaver
High above busy Oxford Street – on the roof of numbers 105–9 – are three of London’s strangest little statues. If anyone noticed them from the pavement they could be rats, but on closer inspection they turn out to be beavers, the wide flat tail of one of them being just about visible from the street. It’s a curious choice – an animal that is no longer either native or much loved and not especially heroic – but the rear of the building provides a clue. Here, large terracotta letters in relief spell out the words ‘HAT FACTORY – HENRY HEATH – OXFORD STREET’.
From the 1820s until the 1930s, the factory annually turned out thousands of top hats and others, the buyers of which were promised ‘First, Their Quality; Second, Excellence of Finish; Third, Style’. Traditionally, such hats were made using felted fur from ‘Beaver, Otter, Rabbits, Hares and Musk Rats’, the first of these being much preferred as it offered better protection against the English rain.
In part because of this quality, the European beaver had been hunted to extinction long before 1820, but quantities of Canadian beaver were imported by the Hudson’s Bay Company from the 1700s onwards and London hatters used it wherever possible.
Acknowledging the animals’ contribution, Mr Heath incorporated three of them into this charming building’s design – unfortunately so high up that passers-by rarely notice them – and in St Helen’s Place, Bishopsgate, another can be seen on the gilded weathervane of what was once the London headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company itself.
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1 In London at least, Napoleon Bonaparte arguably fared no better. His own statue, showing him completely naked for extra humiliation, still stands at the foot of the stairs of Apsley House, the London home of his nemesis, the Iron Duke.
7
Dead London
‘Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs?
It’s the second biggest cause of death amongst the English in general. Sheer boredom . . .’
Alexander McCall Smith
LONDON’S WEIRDEST WILLS
A. A. Milne
J. M. Barrie famously bequeathed the rights to Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children – which kind of makes sense. Wh
en it came to disposing of the rights to Winnie the Pooh, however, A. A. Milne curiously decided to divide the profits between his wife and son (that is, Christopher Robin and his mother), his alma mater Westminster School, and the already well-upholstered Garrick Club in Covent Garden.
As recently as 1998, the club’s fortunate members were still wondering what to do with all the cash pouring in from Disney. Depressingly, several wished to divide the massive honeypot among themselves – a windfall of nearly £40,000 each, apparently – but in the end it was decided to refurbish the clubhouse and then to give anything left over to charity.
Jeremy Bentham
The eighteenth-century philosopher (and founder of University College London) firmly believed that the bodies of dead people should be put to more practical use than being simply stuck in the ground. In particular, he felt that great men should be preserved and put on display to encourage others to excel.
If properly preserved, his Will insisted, every man could be reborn as his own statue. Accordingly, when he died in 1832, he had himself dissected, embalmed, stuffed and mounted in a smart glass case by the entrance to UCL. It’s still there today but sadly now has a wax head, as the original rotted away.
Charles II
Royal Wills traditionally remain hidden from view but fortunately the odd, impetuous monarch cannot help but betray his true feelings – and so it was with Charles II. While apologising for taking so long to die, he asked his brother (James II) to ‘let not poor Nelly starve’ – and Nell Gwynn never did.
Besides securing the prestigious Dukedom of St Albans for her illegitimate son (fathered by Charles), Nell also got a splendid address for herself: 79 Pall Mall. More than 300 years later, the house Nell knew has gone, but its replacement is still the only freehold property on the south side of the street, with the remainder held by the Crown.
Ben Jonson
The actor and dramatist Ben Jonson (1572–1637) managed to grab one of the much-prized plots close to Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey – plenty of eminent men and women apply but fail to get one – but, bizarrely, his Will led to him being buried standing up.
This was almost certainly because Jonson’s reduced circumstances meant he could not afford a larger plot than one 18 in. square. For much the same reason, the inscription on his tomb spells his name incorrectly – ‘Johnson’ – almost certainly because the same Will allowed just 18d (or 7½p) for the inscription, which even back then paid for only the lowest class of stonemason.
William Somerset Maugham
One of the most prolific, best-selling, widely read and wealthiest authors of the twentieth century, Somerset Maugham was briefly married, lived at 6 Chesterfield Gardens, Mayfair, and had a family. He nevertheless changed his Will to leave his fortune to a young man from the slums of Bermondsey, doing so while very publicly disowning his daughter Liza.
She contested the amendments to the Will, and these were eventually overturned. But Maugham’s response was vicious and, in a new volume of memoirs, he revealed that his daughter had been born out of wedlock. This came as a shock to Liza and to polite society in London and alienated many of the author’s fans and oldest friends.
London’s Magnificent Seven
People are living longer, the mortality rate in the capital is at its lowest ever, and cremation has never been more popular than now. But even with an estimated 70 per cent of people opting for cremation, 50,000 deaths a year in London mean more than five acres of fresh ground have to be found each year to bury them. Moreover, the problem is getting worse, with many recent arrivals, including Muslims, Buddhists and Orthodox Christians, showing a religious preference for inhumation.
Of course, the capital has always been massively overcrowded, and not just for the living. The search for burial space is a longstanding problem – recall Samuel Pepys bribing a sexton in Chapter 5 – and some of the solutions have been truly gruesome. At nineteenth-century Spa Fields in Islington, for example, an estimated 80,000 bodies were squeezed into space intended for 1,000 by mutilating remains and burning their coffins.
To avoid such horrors, most Londoners now – and indeed for several generations – have been buried many miles from where they lived. This is chiefly because all the inner London boroughs long ago ran out of space and very few churchyards – and none at all near the centre – have even a single vacant plot.
The decisive change was back in the mid-nineteenth century, with the creation of the so-called Victorian Valhallas, a series of vast and often beautifully landscaped cemeteries. These were well away from the city’s historic centre and expressly devised to accommodate its growing population of dead.
By far the largest is East Finchley’s St Pancras and Islington Cemetery where more than 800,000 burials have been conducted, on a site extending over 190 acres. (The famous London Necropolis covers an area ten times the size, and was once connected to Waterloo by its own private railway; but this is well outside London, at Brookwood in Surrey, and anyway has only a quarter as many graves.)
The most celebrated, however, are the Magnificent Seven, the creation of which was encouraged by an Act of Parliament brought in during a rapid period of growth during the first half of the nineteenth century. This saw the population of London more than double from around one million to well over two, and with parish churchyards literally overflowing – as unsightly and distressing for the living as it was dangerous – traditional parish burials were no longer possible, even for the very rich.
In the face of the crisis, many solutions were proposed, perhaps the strangest of which was the construction of an immense, ninety-four-storey pyramid on Primrose Hill. Large enough to dwarf anything the pharaohs had commissioned, and with room inside for an incredible 5,167,104 of London’s dead, Thomas Willson’s Brobdingnagian scheme was eventually shelved in favour of a simple plan to remove the deceased to what the 1830 Act called ‘places where they would be less prejudicial to the health of the inhabitants.’
The idea immediately proved both popular and fashionable, in large part because young, hungry and energetic joint-stock entrepreneurs embraced it with enormous enthusiasm. Entities such as the newly formed General Cemetery Company and the splendidly named London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company identified at once an opportunity for great profit in the provision of beautiful, Elysian landscapes in which to accommodate the monied dead and their families.
1832 – Kensal Green Cemetery
At Kensal Green, the first of these companies planted many hundreds of trees on its new 54-acre site, while a stylish Greek Revival chapel was even equipped with such mod cons as hydraulic lifts to take the deceased down into the spacious and beautifully appointed catacombs below.
Once the cemetery had bagged its first two Royal Highnesses – younger children of George III – London’s rich and fashionable quickly followed. Today, visitors wandering through what has often been described as the ‘Belgravia of Death’ can find many famous names, including those of Thackeray, Trollope and Wilkie Collins, Sir Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Victorian England’s leading showman Blondin, who crossed the Niagara on a tightrope before retiring to Ealing. W. H. Smith is another guest, whose tomb takes the form of a massive stone book, and General James Barry who, on his death in 1865, was discovered to have been a woman.
1837 – West Norwood Cemetery
Smaller but no less spectacular – it has around seventy Grade II and II* listed buildings and monuments – West Norwood has seen around 200,000 burials and cremations with many thousands more interred in a massive series of catacombs and the fabulous Greek Orthodox Necropolis.
The cookery writer Mrs Beeton is buried here in a very simple tomb (she was only 28), as is the machine-gun pioneer Sir Hiram Maxim. Anyone in search of something more extravagant can do no better than seek out the family vault designed for Sir Henry Doulton – of Royal Doulton fame – which is created almost entirely of pottery and terracotta.
1839 – Highgate Cemetery
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br /> The famous final resting place of Karl Marx, an active body of supporters means that Highgate is now perhaps the best preserved cemetery in London. With an abundance of Egyptian architectural features – as previously noted, the ‘style of the Nile’ was much in vogue at the time of its creation – it boasts three large Grade I structures and is an important wildlife reserve for this part of London. The most eccentric monument, however, was designed for the Maples furniture-store family and resembles a vast four-poster bed.
As the cemetery is still open for business, the 170,000 residents are a nicely varied bunch and, as well as the usual Victorian grandees, they include author Douglas Adams, Lucien Freud, and the father of current Labour leader Ed Milliband. The latter was a communist like Marx, yet both ended up in a place famous for maintaining rigid class distinctions and for pricing plots at a level calculated to ensure that none of the ‘workers of the world’ could even consider moving in alongside them.
1840 – Abney Park Cemetery
Creating Europe’s first wholly non-denominational ‘burial garden’, the creators of Abney Park in East London also favoured Egyptian motifs, in part as a way to avoid reliance on conventional religious iconography.