The Ravenmaster

by Christopher Skaife

  A child by his side who is round and fat.

  “Father and Mother, pray come here,”

  In tones so pleasant, laughs lively Prue:

  “You’ve shown me things that are odd and queer,

  A Beefeater’s baby I’ll show you!”

  After Prue and her parents, the accounts of the ravens at the Tower start to proliferate. There is raven contagion! In Birds in London, published in 1898, W. H. Hudson claims, “For many years past two or three ravens have usually been kept at the Tower of London.” And so the stories begin to grow.

  You can see the beginnings of the legend of the ravens growing and blossoming before your very eyes in the work of Major-General Sir George Younghusband, of the Guides Cavalry, a formidable soldier who served in the Second Afghan War, the Mahdist War, the Third Burmese War, the Second Boer War, and the First World War, and who was appointed Keeper of the Jewel House at the Tower in 1917. In his book The Tower from Within, Younghusband provides a comprehensive guide to life at the Tower, its history and traditions as understood at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Younghusband:

  Round and about the site of the ancient scaffold, or sitting silent on a bench near by, may be seen the historic ravens of the Tower. No doubt when forests grew close up to the moat the turrets of the old Tower made an ideal place in which ravens could build their nests, and rear future generations of Tower ravens. But as the city grew around and the forests receded, and with them fields for forage, the ravens would no longer nest or breed in their old haunts. They have therefore since then from time to time had to be replaced by new blood from outside. The present birds were given to the Tower by Lord Dunraven, and one of them is now of considerable age.

  It would be of historic interest if those whose ancestors have suffered at the Tower would send from their homes successors to the old ravens, as they die off, and thus maintain a very old tradition in a manner well in keeping.

  It seems likely that the “very old tradition” that Younghusband mentions was no more than thirty or forty years old at the time. Nonetheless, a few years later, in 1924, when he published another book about the Tower, A Short History of the Tower of London, he elaborated upon the theme of the Tower’s ancient raven traditions:

  Walking about on the Tower Green, or perhaps perched on the steps of the White Tower, may be seen a few ravens, three or four, sometimes five. These are the Ravens of the Tower and as much part of it as are the Yeomen Warders. What their origin may have been is lost in the mists of antiquity, but possibly when the Tower stood alone—a rock-like edifice amidst the fields and forests which then surrounded it—ravens built their nests in its high turrets. An historian mentions that they were gazing on the scene when Queen Anne Boleyn was executed. Perhaps after the ravens ceased to nest in such unquiet surroundings as the Tower they formed part of the menagerie maintained by Kings of England in the Tower as one of their regal fancies. Whatever their origin may have been, they are now maintained on the strength of the garrison, are duly enlisted—having an attestation card as has a soldier—and daily receive their ration of raw meat and other delicacies issued by the Yeoman Warder in whose charge they are placed. […] A whole chapter could be filled with stories about the Tower Ravens and their adventures and escapades and amusements, and these can be gathered from any of the kindly Yeoman Warders whom the visitor may meet, but here unhappily there is no more space for them.

  We have a saying in the military, “Pull up a sandbag and I’ll tell you a story,” and I suggest at this point you do exactly that: pull up a sandbag and this kindly Yeoman Warder will offer you his own take on the history of the ravens at the Tower.

  Personally, I have no doubt that ravens have long been present here. The White Tower was for many centuries one of the tallest buildings in London, and what with Smithfield Market nearby, and the amount of rubbish and decaying flesh that would anyway have been bobbing its way downstream in the River Thames, the Tower would have been an ideal spot for ravens to congregate and nest. In a letter written by Sir Walter Raleigh to Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cranborne, in the winter of 1604–1605, while he was imprisoned in the Bloody Tower, Raleigh implores his friend to “save this quarter which remaineth from the ravens of this time which feed on all things.” Poor Sir Walter was clearly having a bad day when he wrote the letter, though the good news is that he survived his imprisonment in the Tower and was in fact pardoned by the King in 1617 and granted permission to go off in search of El Dorado—though admittedly he was then beheaded in the Old Palace Yard at the Palace of Westminster in 1618! Anyway, his plea to Robert Cecil to save his wasted body from the ravens suggests that there were indeed ravens in and around the Tower at the time.

  What we know for sure is that the ravens only became a notable and remarkable feature at the Tower sometime in the late 1800s. Perhaps it was simply because the raven population throughout the rest of the country had declined so sharply, having been hunted down and killed as vermin, that the few remaining birds at the Tower became worthy of comment. But I think there’s more to it. Here’s what I think happened. This is the unproven and untested Skaife Theory about the creation of the legend of the ravens at the Tower, derived from many years of research and experience working at the Tower: you could also call it the Yeoman Warder Theory. The Yeoman Warder Theory is based on an understanding not only of the nature and behavior of the ravens, but also on the nature and behavior of human beings. The Yeoman Warder Theory is that it was the Yeoman Warders themselves who had a hand in inventing the legend of the ravens at the Tower, and for their own profit.

  Imagine the scene.

  It’s the 1880s. The Tower has begun opening its gates to ever greater numbers of the general public, to the great unwashed, accepting paying visitors to the most notorious prison and fortress in the land, with its gruesome history of murder, executions, and torture. And here you are among them—washed, unwashed, whatever—waiting in anticipation for the Tower’s ancient wooden gates to open and your Beefeater guide to meet you. Slowly the gates begin to part, creaking and groaning from almost a thousand years of use. From behind the great gate appears an old man leaning on a twisted wooden cane, wearing a dirty dark blue uniform decorated with scarlet and braid, an odd medal or two pinned to his chest. On his head is a curious hat, set at a jaunty angle. There’s a strong whiff of gin and stale tobacco about him.

  “Give me a shilling and you can come in,” he growls. “And I will tell you our dark, dark secrets.” You hand over your coin, he shoves it in his pocket, and then he turns and hobbles back inside the Tower. “Follow me!” he cries. “And keep up!”

  So you enter through the gates and follow him as he begins to recount his dreadful tales of the Tower’s history.

  As you reach the Traitor’s Gate, he stops and turns. “Do you dare to go farther inside?”

  You nod, fearful and excited, and he rubs his fingers together. “In which case … I will need another coin or two.” He scowls.

  And so it goes—the deeper you penetrate inside the Tower, the deeper his pockets are filled with your hard-earned cash. Until at last, at the scaffold site on Tower Green, the ancient Yeoman Warder claims actually to have seen the ghost of Anne Boleyn! And to have heard the pitiful whimpers of the two boy princes, murdered deep within the Bloody Tower! And to himself have felt the shudders as the murdered Queens of England laid down their heads and the sharp edge of cold metal fell upon their dainty necks! And there—he points, finally, triumphantly—are the ravens, reminders of our dark past, souls of the departed, the very souls of those who were executed on the private scaffold site on Tower Green! “Witness the ravens! Here since the beginning of time! Here since Anne Boleyn herself was executed!”

  What a way to enhance the story! Living, breathing representations of the life of the Tower. And all it would have taken would have been to trim the feathers of a few ravens and feed them the occasional scraps, and that’ll be another penny, sir!

  Enough of
my cockamamie theories. Back to the present. There’s cleaning to be done. Wherever there are humans or animals, there is always cleaning to be done.

  21

  BLOOD SWEPT LANDS AND SEAS OF RED

  If you go on any army base anywhere in the world on the eve of an inspection, you’ll find soldiers frantically cleaning, fixing, and painting things. We used to have to paint everything in our regimental colors—yellow and royal blue. Horrible. Rocks, tree trunks, everything. Basically, if it moved, and indeed if it didn’t move, we cleaned it or we painted it, or both. You always want yours to be a good tidy unit—shiny boots, freshly pressed uniforms, all your kit in good order—but more important, it’s this sort of discipline that’ll save you on the battlefield. Making sure that everything works and is clean and ready, and that you know how it works and how to work it, having practiced it again and again until you can practice it no more, and then practicing it again and again until you really can’t practice it anymore, and so on, eventually forms habits that become instincts. The basic disciplines of cleaning and tidying and good old-fashioned spit and polish also instill in you the art of being intensely observant. A good soldier will always notice when something’s changed, when something’s out of place, and when something’s wrong. And these are skills that might one day save your life.

  So it’s not surprising that one of the first things I learned with Ravenmaster Derrick Coyle was the importance of cleaning the cages. Derrick was old-school: when it came to raven care, everything had to be perfect. I do my absolute best to maintain the same standards. These days I undertake a deep clean of the enclosures about once a month, disinfecting everything, hosing and raking over the gravel, making sure every single piece of cached food is cleared, checking for any damage to the wire or the wood, oiling all the moving parts, checking the perches and the night boxes. And every day I go through a simple clean and tidy routine. Is everything in place? Is everything where it should be? Everything in order? The same routine, 365 days a year. In fact, I would say that a large part of being the Ravenmaster is being persistent, punctual, and a bit of a perfectionist.

  But for all the necessary routine and monotony there are of course some days at the Tower that stand out—the special occasions, events, and ceremonies that are unusual and that you never forget.

  For me, one of those days and one of those occasions was August 16, 2014.

  You probably know the story of the ceramic poppies at the Tower. To commemorate the centenary of the beginning of the First World War, Historic Royal Palaces commissioned the artists Paul Cummins and Tom Piper to create a piece of art. They came up with the idea of making a spectacular sea of ceramic red poppies, precisely 888,246, the number of British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed during the war. With the help of thousands of volunteers from all over the world, including my daughter, during a period of 117 days between the seventeenth of July—the first full day of Britain’s involvement in the war—and the eleventh of November, the Tower’s moat was filled with poppies, each one representing a soldier killed in action. It was the largest-ever installation work in the U.K., titled Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red. If you’ve never seen it, you need to look it up. It is simply astonishing. The task of arranging the poppies was in itself immense and required a vast amount of coordination from the project team, managed by John Brown, the then Deputy Governor to the Tower, and Yeoman Warder Jim Duncan RVM, now my Yeoman Sergeant, and the efforts of all the Historic Royal Palaces staff and Tower residents. Truly a military operation.

  This remarkable work of art became an important site for visitors to congregate and to pay their respects. People came to leave flowers and photos tied to the railings. They came day and night, day in, day out. I remember my wife and I would sometimes wake in the morning to the incredible sound of the cheers from the awaiting crowds when the floodlights were turned on to illuminate the poppies. I’ve never heard anything like it. And through the narrow slits of our house in the Casemates you could see the vivid red of the poppies shining, bathing the Tower in this beautiful, terrible glow. It was surreal. For those of us living at the Tower, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red dominated our lives. There were occasions when we couldn’t leave the Tower because of the sheer volume of people gathered outside.

  As part of the commemorations, the public was asked to nominate family members who had been killed in action during the war, and every evening at the Tower, at sunset, a Yeoman Warder would walk out into the sea of poppies and read out 180 names, followed by the traditional call of the Last Post.

  On Saturday, August 16, 2014, it was my turn to read the names.

  I rehearsed all day. I was determined to pronounce each name correctly. I didn’t want to let down any of those fallen soldiers and their families.

  * * *

  When sunset came I dressed in my uniform, with my collection of medals proudly pinned to my chest, and made my way along the narrow path that meandered its way through the sea of ceramic poppies. The crowd was gathered in silence, as they were every night.

  I put on my reading glasses, took the list of names so that I could see them clearly in the shadows, and looked up at the crowd. I took a deep breath and for a moment I remembered my own service career and all those who had gone before me.

  I remembered driving back to the barracks from our final exercise during training. We were in an old army coach, all the weapons in the back—rifles, machine guns, antitank weapons. And a lorry drove into us at high speed. I was sitting toward the back of the coach. The lorry driver was badly injured. We tried to put a field dressing on his wounds, putting into practice our recently acquired first-aid skills. When we had our passing-out parade there were a lot of us in wheelchairs and on crutches. That’s when I realized that we weren’t playing soldiers anymore.

  * * *

  I remembered when we finished our training and finally joined our regiments. I became a part of the Queen’s Division, which was made up of the Queen’s Regiment, the Royal Anglian and the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers: a proud moment. I was in the 3rd Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment, until we were amalgamated with the Royal Hampshire Regiment in 1992 and we all became the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, known as Di’s Guys, after Diana, Princess of Wales. I met the princess a couple of times. She was our Colonel-in-Chief—a lovely lady. The day she died I had just been posted as a Drum Major instructor to the Infantry Training Centre at Catterick in North Yorkshire. I remember arriving and hearing the news and all of us just sitting in the mess, staring at the television in disbelief.

  I remembered my very first posting with the regiment to Bad Fallingbostel in Germany, Lower Saxony. I was eighteen. Ours was a mechanized battalion, so we spent a lot of our time as infantry soldiers on exercises in army personnel carriers in and around Germany, and a lot of our time as drummers playing at beer festivals. I was young and enjoying my new life, making new friends, many of whom are still my best friends a full thirty-five years later. It was at the time of the Cold War, and Germany was our playground.

  But then, almost as soon as we arrived at the battalion base in Germany, we started what was called the Northern Ireland package—a two-week training course where we learned riot training and street patrols, preparing us for deployment to Northern Ireland. And then we were deployed. Which was a bit of a shock.

  The early 1980s were a terrible time in Northern Ireland. We flew into Aldergrove, and within forty-eight hours I was out on top cover in an armored Land Rover, getting petrol-bombed in Andersonstown. I remember thinking to myself, “What the hell am I doing here?” That first four-month tour in Belfast was a rude awakening. I was part of a four-man team patrolling the streets, all of us blokes from London and the southeast of England, with not a clue about what was happening in Northern Ireland, but trying to do our best, to do our duty, many of us just eighteen or nineteen years old, and we had about eleven contacts in that first tour as a battalion. It was hard. It was dangerous. We were pretty unpopular, out
on patrols, driving around in the Pigs—the classic old armored personnel carriers—looking for IEDs, doing house searches, sangar duties, stagging on, “p checking” people. It sounds silly, but that was one of the hardest things, p checking—asking people for their papers. We were only teenagers, after all, and there we were asking people for their personal details, checking up on them. Understandably, not all of them responded warmly to our requests.

  There were some close shaves. Snipers, bullets, bombs. I remember eating breakfast one morning in a police station and a grenade coming over the wall and the shrapnel hitting the table right in front of me. This was a long way from playing soldiers in my back garden as a lad. When I married I ended up living off base in Northern Ireland with my wife. She was twenty-one, I was twenty-two. We were just kids, really. Two young English kids way out of our comfort zone, and—I’ll be honest—it was not a good time to be a British soldier living off base in Northern Ireland. We were subjected to some pretty nasty stuff—threats, intimidation, more bombs. That’s how terrorism works, after all. We just tried to get on with it.

  We had our good times as well. I remember I was in Turf Lodge once and this little girl came up to me and said “Hey, mister, my mum prays for you every night.” Another time, just off the Falls Road these little old ladies invited us in for a cup of tea and a piece of cake. They couldn’t have been more kind. It was those acts of kindness that made you think what you were doing was worthwhile, that made you realize the importance of every small gesture and remark.

  Being in the military is a strange life, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. In the army you work together, you live together, you grieve together, you celebrate together. The army was my family.

  And so I looked at the list of names and began to read.

  On the exact spot among the poppies where I was standing to read, one hundred years ago, one of the very first battalions of the volunteer army began to be raised from the City of London, from the streets round and about the Tower. In just a matter of days 1,600 young men had joined what became the 10th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, known as the Stock Exchange Battalion. Many of them were killed on the Western Front.