by Tom Quinn
Harrington was convinced that Whitehall Palace would be rebuilt, so it must have seemed logical that if his family lived right next to it – overlooking it in fact – they would be perfectly poised to visit the court every day and seek patronage. Patronage meant titles or jobs in the king’s gift that entitled the holder to an income, but required little or no work of him. It was a system that, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, was known as Old Corruption, but in the mid-eighteenth century it was just the way things were done.
As it turned out, Harrington was wrong and the palace was never rebuilt, so he sat there in his huge house and with Parliament half a mile away at the other end of Whitehall.
A more curious tale than the history of the house is the history of the alleyway beside it, because this is where London’s pavements began.
Until the mid-eighteenth century, London’s streets had no pavements at all. In other words there was no physical distinction between that part of the roadway where wheeled vehicles travelled and that part where pedestrians walked. Whenever the cart and carriage drivers wanted to they would drive along the streets as near to the walls of the houses as they liked. This meant that going for a walk was a dangerous business, particularly when you remember that eighteenth-century London had far fewer wide streets than it does today. It also meant that in particularly narrow streets, carriages occasionally got stuck – quite literally – between the houses.
Kerbstones and pavements began to appear after the Speaker of the House of Commons, Mr Speaker Onslow, got stuck in Craig’s Court after a visit to Harrington’s house.
Parliament had long debated what to do about the narrow, dirty, dangerous streets of London, but they could never reach agreement about who should pay for improvements. Then one day early in the 1760s Onslow drove in his massive, stately carriage up Whitehall and into Craig’s Court. At the narrowest part of the alleyway where it opens into the courtyard his carriage got stuck fast between the walls of the houses on either side. If there had been kerbstones and pavements the driver would have been stopped before he got stuck.
After fruitless attempts to extricate the carriage, a red-faced and by all accounts extremely angry Mr Speaker Onslow had to be extricated through a hole cut in the roof of the carriage.
He returned to Parliament on foot and when the next debate on the state of the streets was held he helped vote through a bill that compelled each householder in London to pay for a row of kerbstones in front of his or her house.
More early kerbstones can be seen if you retrace your steps down the narrow alleyway and out into Whitehall. If you cross the street and look at the kerbstones here (roughly in front of the 1930s theatre) you’ll see several are marked with an arrow. The mark was introduced by Elizabeth I to stop people stealing army and navy property and it is still used today. The pavement act of 1762 that made the Harringtons provide kerbstones in Craig’s Court also obliged Admiralty officials to provide kerbstones outside their premises at the top of Whitehall. As they were Admiralty kerbstones they had to have the arrowhead mark which one or two retain to this day.
THE WORLD’S OLDEST HATMAKERS
1764
Two-thirds of the way down St James’s towards the palace of the same name is a small ancient shop that seems to be out of keeping in its scale and appearance with every other building in the street. These are the premises of Locks, the world’s oldest hatmakers, whose records conceal a wealth of odd tales about famous long-vanished Londoners.
Locks have been making hats in this part of London since the seventeenth century. Since 1764 when they moved a few yards along the street, they’ve been in the shop in St James’s Street they currently occupy. Its interiors and fixtures have changed little – creaking timber shelves hold hats of all kinds and the shop still uses an extraordinary device – a conformator – to measure each client’s head. The details of the head, including distinguishing lumps and bumps, are then kept on file so that new hats can be made to order even if the customer is on the other side of the world.
Locks have made hats for everyone from Nelson to Charlie Chaplin. Most famously they invented that iconic fashion statement of the late Victorian and early twentieth-century City of London – the bowler.
First made in about 1850, the bowler hat actually started life as a gamekeeper’s hat – it was designed for the immensely wealthy Lord Coke of Norfolk whose gamekeepers were occasionally attacked by poachers. The bowler was, it seems, an early form of crash helmet to protect them from attack and presumably from an occasional plummeting pheasant!
How the bowler made the bizarre transition from the broad acres of rural Norfolk to the square mile is still a mystery, but from 1850 until 1950 and beyond it was the one fashion item no City worker would be without.
WHY ACTORS SAY ‘BREAK A LEG!’
1766
The theatrical phrase ‘break a leg!’ – a good-luck wish before a performance – has its origins in a little-known but curiously endearing story from the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket.
When Samuel Foote (1720–1777) took over the running of the theatre in the second half of the eighteenth century he knew he was taking a risk because the theatre, then known as the Little Theatre, did not have a licence – theatre licences could only be granted by the King and the King resolutely refused to grant the Little Theatre a licence because a previous owner had published a number of pamphlets attacking the government and the Crown.
Foote was undaunted and attempted by every means to obtain the necessary royal warrant but all to no avail. He found a way round the problem temporarily by not charging those who came to see his plays. Audiences could get in free but Foote made up for what he failed to take at the door by charging hugely inflated prices for coffee and food during the intervals.
This infuriated the Crown and made it less likely that Foote would ever get the royal seal of approval, but a bizarre turn of events changed all that. The King’s brother the Duke of York overheard Foote boasting about his horsemanship and challenged him to ride with him the following morning. Foote agreed but the Duke deliberately brought a horse that had never been ridden. Foot inevitably was thrown and badly injured – he broke a leg and spent weeks recovering. The Duke was stricken with remorse and to make up for what he had done he granted Foote the royal licence for which he had waited so long. It was 1766 and the Little Theatre in the Haymarket became the Theatre Royal, a title it has enjoyed uninterrupted ever since. The phrase ‘break a leg’ passed into the language – a sign that present disaster can quickly be transformed into future success.
BYRON GETS BURNED
1768
Albemarle Street just off Piccadilly was for more than two centuries the home of one of the world’s most extraordinary publishers: John Murray, who came to London in 1768 to seek his fortune.
Born in 1739 he was originally John McMurray but dropped the Mc on coming to London after a number of years’ service as a lieutenant in the marines. Murray’s first office was in Fleet Street where, quite by chance, he took over No. 32, the site of Wynkyn de Word’s printing press established in 1500. But within a few years he had moved to 50 Albemarle Street from which office, among a host of dazzling writers, the firm published David Hume, Byron, Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Gladstone and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
By 2005 – some two hundred and thirty years later – the firm was still being run from this small house at 50 Albemarle Street, making it the oldest independent book publisher in the world. The original fireplaces were still here until the company was finally sold in 2003; the alcoves and odd corners remain in what is still in essence an eighteenth-century house.
Little had changed in more than two centuries by the time the company was sold and, most astonishing of all, the firm was always run by a John Murray – the last was the seventh direct male descendant of the founder.
It was only when the seventh John Murray’s two sons (neither incidentally called John) decided they did not want to go into the family busin
ess that the firm was reluctantly sold to a huge multinational whose name – for the sake of decency – had probably better not be mentioned.
There are moves to make 50 Albemarle Street into a museum but in the meantime the company’s archives – thousands of letters and other documents relating to its history and the host of famous authors it published – are likely to be sold, at the time of writing, for as much as £40 million. Most of the material has never been catalogued or seen.
Everything to do with John Murray is remarkable but most intriguing of all was a meeting that took place in 1824 in an upstairs room in front of a fireplace that is still there. John Murray the second met with the executors of Byron’s estate shortly after the poet’s death. They held in their hands two manuscript volumes of the great poet’s diaries but they were so scandalised by the contents that they decided to throw them on the fire and thus was lost for ever what would have been one of the greatest literary treasures of the Romantic age. Perhaps, too, the publisher was getting his revenge on the poet who would often arrive in the office and while talking to Murray would practise his fencing by lunging at the various books around the room and tearing holes in them with his sword!
MODERN BRIDGE, MEDIEVAL MONEY
1769
Right across London numerous ancient and sometimes very obscure foundations and trusts run and maintain everything from schools to rowing competitions – some of these date back four or five hundred years and they are still administered in the way the original benefactor intended. One of the most delightful of all these ancient funds has had enormously beneficial consequences for Londoners and tourists alike.
For more than a thousand years the only river crossing downstream of Putney was London Bridge. But by the early eighteenth century London Bridge was so crammed with houses and shops that the narrow lane for pedestrians and horse carts that ran across it was a nightmare to negotiate.
Pressure began in Parliament for a new bridge to be provided and in 1750 Westminster Bridge was built, put up despite huge protests from the watermen who had plied their trade on the river since the Dark Ages and whose living was seriously threatened as each new bridge was built.
Westminster Bridge cost a fortune to build – there were regular complaints in Parliament about the money being spent on it – but it would have cost nothing if it had been within the city boundaries. The reason is that over the long centuries that London Bridge had been the only crossing, countless wealthy Londoners had left money in trust for its upkeep. This money had been shrewdly invested in property across the city and elsewhere. When Blackfriars Bridge was built in 1769 the cost was entirely covered by the Bridge House Estates – the fund that had been set up in 1209 to keep London Bridge in good repair. Astonishingly money from that fund is still used to maintain Blackfriars, Tower Bridge, Southwark Bridge and, of course, London Bridge itself.
OBSESSED BY SNUFF
1776
Today drug taking is frowned on by the respectable, but in earlier times there was no stigma at all attached to those who regularly took opium – famous drug-addict authors like Thomas de Quincey (whose Confessions of an English Opium Eater was published in 1821), poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and members of the royal family were enthusiastic drug takers and they would have laughed at the idea that taking opium was somehow a bad thing. However, opium was always the drug of choice for the relatively well off – lower down the social scale, the most popular drug of all before cigarettes was snuff. Snuff taking was almost universal in Georgian and Victorian England, but few were as enthusiastic about powdered tobacco as the infamous Margaret Thomson.
When she made her will in the early part of the nineteenth century Mrs Thomson, who lived in Essex Street just off the Strand, stipulated that the beneficiaries of her will would not get a penny if they failed to ensure that her coffin was filled with all the snuff handkerchiefs that were unwashed at the time of her death; she also wanted to be surrounded with freshly ground snuff in her coffin. Six of the greatest snuff takers in the parish were requested to be her pallbearers, and each was asked to wear a snuff-coloured hat. Six girls were instructed to walk behind the hearse, each with a box of snuff which they were to take copiously for their refreshment as they went along.
The priest who officiated at the ceremony was invited to take as much snuff as he desired during the service, and Mrs Thomson left him five guineas on condition that he partook of snuff during and throughout the funeral proceedings. In return for a bequest of snuff, her servants were instructed to walk in front of the funeral procession throwing snuff on the ground and on to the crowd of onlookers. And throughout the long day of the funeral, snuff was to be distributed to all comers from the door of the deceased’s house.
COCKNEY MAORI CHIEF
1777
Poverty and a long tradition of seafaring and work on the river – both as dockers and sailors – meant that historically London’s East End was always one of the most cosmopolitan districts of the capital.
The East End has also produced a large number of eccentrics and odd characters whose instinct for survival was second to none – becoming eccentric may well have been one way to survive the incredible poverty of an area that was so run down at one time that even the police were careful to avoid certain districts.
One of the most extraordinary characters ever produced by the East End was Joseph Druce. Born in Shadwell in 1777, the son of a labourer who was often out of work, Joseph never went to school but having been a mudlark – a child who searched for copper nails and other flotsam and jetsam below the waterline – he eventually got a job working on the wherries and fishing boats that plied the Thames at that time in large numbers.
Earning a pittance no doubt contributed to Druce’s descent into petty crime – this gradually became more serious and in 1791 he was caught red-handed having broken into a house and taken to Newgate Gaol.
At his trial the verdict was a foregone conclusion. He must have expected the death sentence since it was virtually mandatory for everything from pickpocketing to stealing apples – even children were routinely hanged. But the tide was turning – not towards more lenient sentences necessarily but towards the idea of sending criminals to the distant colonies. Aged just thirteen Druce was sentenced to transportation to New South Wales for life.
In practical terms transportation was a death sentence anyway – if the convict was lucky enough to survive the long sea journey in what were usually unseaworthy vessels, he had a good chance of dying quickly from an unfamiliar disease in the new country.
According to one estimate only 10 per cent of those transported were still alive ten years after reaching Australia.
Druce was one of the lucky ones. He worked on a farm and later became a bush ranger. Before he was twenty he’d become a policeman, but the lure of adventuring proved too much and he took a job on a merchant ship sailing between Australia and New Zealand. In New Zealand he became friendly with a Maori chief who became ill – apparently at death’s door, the Maori chief and his family had given up hope, but Druce made a few suggestions about the chief’s diet and miraculously he recovered. As a gesture of thanks the Maori chief suggested that Druce marry his daughter, which made Druce the first and only Londoner ever to become a Maori chief!
By 1801 Druce’s wife had died and on hearing that his life sentence had been rescinded he was free to return to London, which he did the following year. In 1819 he was provided with a home at the Greenwich Seamen’s Hospital where he died the same year.
HOW THE BRISTOL HOTEL GOT ITS NAME
1778
London still has at least one Bristol Hotel – it is in Berkeley Street, W1 – but during the late eighteenth century the city boasted a profusion of hotels, all called Bristol. Outside London and indeed right across Europe the situation was the same. There were Bristol hotels wherever travellers tended to stop for the night.
The reason has to do with one of London’s oddest characters – a man largely forgotten tod
ay but in his lifetime a byword for luxury and extravagance.
Born in 1730, Edward Hervey studied at Westminster and Cambridge. Through the influence of his brother, Lord Bristol, he was made Bishop of Cloyne, though as he himself admitted he had absolutely no connection with or interest in Ireland. However, he soon started manoeuvring for the bishopric of Derry, which was worth more money than Cloyne, again using the influence of his brother, and he was successful. When he heard the news he was playing leapfrog with his fellow clergy in the garden at Cloyne Palace and is reported to have shouted: ‘I will jump no more, gentlemen. I have surpassed you all, and jumped from Cloyne to Derry!’
He was thirty-nine, married, and earning a reputation as an eccentric largely because he was sympathetic to the local Catholic population which, under English rule, could own virtually nothing nor hold any office of any worth. His outspokenness on the subject almost led to him being impeached for treason, and Walpole, Charles James Fox and most other English parliamentarians thought him mad, bad and dangerous to know.
He got nowhere with his radical views, however, and developed instead his personality. He built three huge houses, his favourite being the size of Blenheim Palace, perched on a cliff top at Lough Foyle. On the death of his brother in 1778 he became Lord Bristol and went to live in London.
His house parties – held in his huge London residence – were legendary; he would often invite the fattest clergy to stay and then, after dinner, make them race round the house against each other. If he invited the clergy wives he always sprinkled flour outside their bedroom doors to see if he could catch them moving about between bedrooms during the night.
In his latter years he rarely visited Ireland and spent most of his time getting drunk in London and travelling extensively in France and Italy, where he spent so lavishly that hotel owners vied with each other to make their hotels more attractive to the great man. Hundreds renamed their hotels after him in order to indicate to other potential customers that the great Lord Bristol had stayed there and dozens retain the name ‘Bristol’ to this day.