London's Strangest Tales

by Tom Quinn

  Towards the end of his life he received a ‘round robin’ criticising him for being absent for so long from his parish, but he sent each signatory an inflated pig’s bladder containing a dried pea along with a copy of the following verse:

  Three large bluebottles sat upon three bladders.

  Blow bottle flies, blow; burst, blow bladder burst.

  A new-blown bladder and three blue balls

  Make a great rattle.

  So rattle bladder rattle.

  He died in 1803 aged seventy-three.

  CHILDREN FOR SALE

  1778

  The idea that parents are and always have been concerned for the welfare of their children is certainly untrue. Even today in parts of Africa parents sometimes decide that a child is possessed by the devil and that child may, as a result, be killed. So-called honour killings – common across many parts of the Islamic world – mean that a female child who speaks to a person who is not a member of her family will sometimes be killed.

  In Britain in earlier centuries – indeed even as recently as the end of the nineteenth century – children were regularly sold by their parents either for sex or into domestic service that amounted to a lifetime of slavery.

  Travellers to London were always astonished at the number of prostitutes who swarmed around London’s theatres and parks – many reported that at times on a Saturday night there were more prostitutes than potential customers!

  But one of the most extraordinary and shocking stories from Victorian London came from the pen of the famous Russian writer Dostoevsky. After visiting London in 1863, he wrote: ‘In the Haymarket I saw mothers who had brought their young daughters, girls who were still in their early teens, to be sold to me. Little girls of about twelve seize you by the hand and ask you to go with them.’

  EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY VIAGRA

  1779

  Dr James Graham was a genuine doctor, but at a time when all genuine doctors were by modern standards complete frauds – the evidence for this can be seen in the fact that, for example Edinburgh medical textbook of 1750 listed under ‘valuable remedies’ the following: horse dung, pig skulls, frogspawn, ants’ eggs and ground-up human skulls.

  But Dr Graham, though interested in medicine, was far more interested in money, which is why when he left his native Edinburgh for London in around 1774 he set up his surgery in the most fashionable part of town – St James.

  By 1779 he had realised that an important medical affliction was not at that time being addressed by any medical practitioner. Dr Graham decided that he would corner the market in cures for infertility. He set up his Temple of Health in Pall Mall and took large expensive advertisements in the London newspapers. In these he made outlandish claims for the extraordinary benefits of what he called his ‘Celestial Bed’. The idea was that infertile couples would seek out the doctor, ask his advice and then be directed to his own certain cure: the Celestial Bed. Not only would the bed cure infertility – it would also ensure that any children conceived on it were far stronger and more beautiful ‘in mental as well as in bodily endowments than the present puny race of Christians’.

  The bed could only be rented and couples paid exorbitant sums for the privilege – perhaps as much as £100 per session. Graham claimed that while an infertile couple had sex on his bed he would activate a mechanism that would surround the happy couple with ‘celestial fire’ and cherishing vapours. He would also pump through glass tubes the very same perfumes used by the Turkish Sultan to guarantee that he could keep up with the demands of his enormous harem.

  Despite the bed’s mattress being made from the baked tails of sexually rapacious ‘English stallions’, history does not record the levels of satisfaction enjoyed by Dr Graham’s customers, but we do know that within a few years of the advertisements appearing the good doctor vanished from the London scene.

  BEAU BRUMMEL’S BLUE NOSE

  1794

  Beau Brummel (1778–1840), close friend of the Prince Regent and arbiter of fashion in the early part of the nineteenth century, had in his younger days been an officer in the 10th Light Dragoons. When he wasn’t soldiering he lived in some splendour in a house in Chesterfield Street in London’s Mayfair, where he taught the Prince of Wales to tie his own cravat (the prince never quite mastered the art) and where endless numbers of the fashionable came to be passed fit to be seen in society by the great arbiter of taste.

  Brummel had been commissioned into the dragoons by his friend the Prince Regent but despite his fashion sense he was a hopeless incompetent when it came to matters military, for Brummel was one of England’s most forgetful soldiers.

  His biggest difficulty was that he could never remember the faces of the men in the troop he commanded – it was a chronic problem that led to huge embarrassment and there seemed to be no solution but, then as now, incompetence was no bar to high rank in the British army provided one had the right accent and background, which of course Brummel had.

  Then Brummel himself came up with a solution – he noticed that one of the men in his troop had a very blue nose and he ordered that this man should always be in the front rank when the men were assembled. If Brummel then failed to identify his troop of men he would need only to look for that blue nose to know that he was in the right place.

  All went well until one day at the Horse Guards in Whitehall. Brummel sat immaculately dressed on his splendid horse and was approached by a senior officer who demanded what he thought he was doing.

  Brummel stared in blank amazement at the squadron commander.

  ‘You are with the wrong troop,’ he was told in no uncertain terms.

  Panic-stricken, Brummel stared around and with a sigh of relief spotted the blue nose in the men lined up just in front of him.

  ‘I think, if I may say so, you are mistaken,’ he replied. ‘I’m not so foolish as to be unable to recognise my own troop.’ But what Brummel, who famously spent most of his army career in front of a mirror, did not know was that there had been a troop reorganisation and ‘blue nose’ had been moved to another troop without his knowledge.

  BETTING ON CATS

  1795

  Bond Street is unusual in that unlike almost every other London district it has never lost its reputation as a fashionable place to shop. It’s also unusual in that it is the only street that runs right across Mayfair from Piccadilly to Oxford Street. Despite this, the street is actually two streets – the southern section, which runs as far north as Burlington Gardens, was built in the early 1680s by Sir Thomas Bond, the northern section in the 1720s.

  Most of the original seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses have now gone (Aspreys’ shop is an exception) but from the first the street was so popular as a shopping destination that it also became an important place simply to be seen, so much so that it began to rival both the famous pleasure gardens at Ranelagh and Rotten Row.

  Among those who regularly promenaded here in the late eighteenth century was the Prince of Wales, later the Prince Regent. The prince was a notorious gambler who would bet on almost anything – he once took a bet on which of two raindrops would be first to run to the bottom of a window – but he was also something of a simpleton who was regularly fleeced by his gambling-mad courtiers.

  The politician Charles James Fox (1749–1806), a supporter of American independence, anti-slavery campaigner and Britain’s first Foreign Secretary, once got the better of the Prince of Wales in a bizarre bet made while walking down Bond Street one sunny afternoon.

  Fox noticed a cat lounging at the side of the street so he suggested to the Prince that each should choose one side of the street and then wager who would see the greatest number of cats during a walk from one end of the street to the other.

  Fox was crafty enough to choose the side of the street in full sun rather than the shady side and at the end of their walk he had spotted thirteen cats to the Prince’s grand total of none. The baffled prince was forced to hand over the entire contents of his purse.

&nbs
p; NELSON’S SECOND-HAND TOMB

  1805

  Despite suffering almost continually from seasickness – he never became a seasoned sailor – Nelson became the greatest of all British naval heroes. It seems, too, almost as if he knew that it was his duty to die in battle at sea, which is of course precisely what happened.

  But Nelson was so concerned that his death should be in keeping with his life that he commissioned his own coffin well in advance. Though it sounds rather ghoulish today this was actually quite common in earlier times. Nelson was very specific about his coffin – he had it made from the salvaged timber of a French ship sunk at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 and left strict instructions about what was to be done in the event of his death.

  When he was killed at Trafalgar in 1805 Britain lost its greatest hero and looked around for a suitable way to bury him. Clearly it had to be in St Paul’s Cathedral and as he had chosen his own coffin there was no problem there. But what about a sarcophagus?

  As they thought about this someone remembered that stored away and forgotten at Windsor Castle was a massive black marble sarcophagus that had lain unused for more than three hundred years.

  The sarcophagus had originally been made for Cardinal Wolsey. At the height of his power in 1521 Wolsey sent for the Italian sculptor Rovezzano. He wanted a tomb in keeping with his sense of his own worth. The vast sarcophagus that emerged from the hands of the Italian was extraordinarily impressive but before he had time to use it Wolsey fell out with Henry VIII. His palaces and houses were taken away and Wolsey was disgraced. Henry VIII decided that the black sarcophagus would be perfect for him so it was sent to Windsor to be ready when Henry died. When Henry finally gave up the ghost more than twenty years later Rovezzano’s magnificent work seems to have been overlooked and it remained forgotten until those officials hunting around for something suitable for Nelson remembered the tomb’s existence.

  The really interesting question however is: how could something as big as Wolsey’s sarcophagus have been forgotten and overlooked for so long?

  THE MOLE THAT KILLED A KING

  1806

  St James’s Square retains just a few of its original early eighteenth-century houses, but this small square has been home at various times to an extraordinary list of the famous and the infamous – Gladstone and Pitt lived here along with half a dozen earls, several dukes and numerous royal mistresses. In fact within a decade of the square being built in 1670 every single house was lived in by someone who had a title or was sleeping with someone with a title.

  But what makes the square really interesting is the bizarre statue of William III in the gardens. The statue is only here because the residents got fed up with the fact that the centre of the square was long used as a refuse tip for the householders – at one time it was piled high with ‘kitchen rubbish, dead cats, scraps of timber and noxious mountains of refuse’. They wanted something to give the middle a purpose and a statue seemed as good an idea as anything. But that’s where the problems began.

  The idea of a statue of William was not initially popular so despite their enormous wealth the residents of the square refused to pay for it. Then a merchant offered money in his will but his family contested the will for the next seventy years and it wasn’t until 1806 that the statue was finally completed.

  Even when the statue was finally made and put on its plinth there was something odd about it – it includes, for example, a small molehill at the feet of the horse on which William is seated. What is the molehill for? The answer is that William is said to have died after falling from his horse. The horse had tripped on a molehill.

  William was the Protestant king brought to England from Holland to replace the last Catholic, King James. James’s supporters and all Jacobites then and now still toast the little gentleman in velvet – i.e. the mole that built the molehill that killed a king.

  WORLD’S FIRST GASLIGHT

  1807

  Today we take street lighting – at least in cities and towns – for granted and it is hard to imagine what life was like when a dark night really did mean that you couldn’t safely go out at all. On such nights there was little to do other than read quietly by the fire if you could afford oil lamps or candles, or go to bed if you were poor. Along the great and fashionable streets of the city there had been attempts to illuminate the dark winter evenings but with varying rates of success. Until recently it was still possible to see what they might have been like as the In and Out club in Piccadilly still kept its flaming flambeaut alight in two iron braziers fitted high up on the gate pillars. But now they too have gone and London knows only its warm summer evenings when light is unnecessary until late in the evening and its electrically lit winter evenings.

  The lack of light at night in Victorian and earlier periods meant that some areas of London – notably the East End Docks, the Rookeries of St Giles and the Devil’s Acre, a large area of slum housing near Westminster Abbey – could not be policed. Locals knew the streets and alleys in these areas better than anyone and the police would not risk pursuit in the darkness.

  But though it is popularly believed that gaslight – the first great revolution in London lighting – did not generally become available until the latter half of the nineteenth century, there was in fact a bizarre and much earlier attempt to bring systematic lighting to London.

  The year was 1807 and Londoners were eager to do what they could to celebrate the king’s birthday. London was full of Germans at this time – Britain had a German king who was surrounded by German courtiers and all things Germanic were fashionable.

  A German engineer called Albert Winsor was then living in London and he decided to do his bit by installing posts with lamps on top all along one side of The Mall. He set up a small gas tank and built underground pipes connecting the lighting posts with each other and with his gas tank.

  The gas tank was based on an invention of the Scottish engineer William Murdoch – Murdoch built an airtight tank which he filled with coal that was then heated up from the outside. The coal in the tank then released gas which Murdoch allowed to escape through a pipe fitted to his tank. The gas was fed to an appliance that was then ignited. This was the system Winsor employed in The Mall.

  Late one gloomy autumn evening he had an assistant release the valve on his tank and another assistant walked along the mall lighting each flaring lamp.

  These were not the gas lamps we are familiar with from old films about London – later gas lamps had silken mantles that meant the gas and the light could be angled downwards. Winsor’s lights simply flamed up from the top of their posts, but the world’s first street lights – which these certainly were – caused a sensation across the capital.

  A journalist on the Pall Mall Gazette wrote: ‘London saw something so strange in the Mall of late that our parents and grandparents having seen it would take to their beds quaking with fear that the end of the world and the general loss of sanity had come. The distinguished Mr Winsor threw light along this royal road in a manner unprecedented and we are left wondering as much at his audacity as at his ingenuity.’

  But the oddest thing of all about Winsor’s lights were the pipes he made to link them – he tried conventional water pipes but they simply would not stand the pressure. He tried various other solutions and all failed. Then he thought of gun barrels – they have to withstand enormous pressures from exploding cartridges, he thought, and promptly approached the Woolwich Arsenal from whom he obtained a large number of elderly muskets. He stripped them down and reused the barrels to make his gas pipe.

  The experiment worked perfectly. It is perhaps ironic that the street that runs from The Mall through St James’s Palace is today one of the last streets in the world still to have traditional mantled gas lamps. They have been there now for more than a century – if you want to see what London looked like at night in Victorian times this is the only place you can still do it.

  BIGGEST PRACTICAL JOKER

  1809

  The
re’s something rather odd about practical jokes – they’re not witty and they rely for their humour on other people’s discomfort, but for centuries the British have made coming up with spoofs of various kinds something of a national obsession.

  One of the greatest of all practical jokes became known as the ‘Berners Street Hoax.

  It was perpetrated by the writer and serial bankrupt Theodore Hook (1788–1841), who was said to be the most entertaining man in London – he was so entertaining in fact that when he was known to be at his club, the Athenaeum, other members would make a special effort to be there just to listen to him.

  The Berners Street Hoax began when Hook laid a wager with a friend that he could make an obscure house in Soho the most famous house in London and he could do it in a month.

  The two friends parted and Hook set to work. He paid several of his friends to write letters to hundreds of London tradesmen, politicians, men of the church, celebrities, writers, actors and artists. All the letters were written as if from an obscure house in Berners Street, Soho.

  Having posted the letters Hook invited the friend with whom he’d made the bet to sit in the upstairs drawing room of a house opposite the house that was the subject of the bet.

  As the day progressed hundreds of tradesmen arrived with various goods; furniture drays arrived carrying beds and wardrobes; a hearse arrived, a clock maker; plumbers and carpenters, tailors and fencing masters.