London's Strangest Tales

by Tom Quinn

But then, just when Hook’s friend admitted that he had lost the bet, the hoax started to go wrong, because Hook had persuaded his friend to write also to a number of powerful officials – the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister to name but two – and when they began to arrive Hook realised that his harmless jest could have serious repercussions.

  Half London was in an uproar over the hoax and there was almost a riot. The policed were informed and but for a few high-placed officials who tried to calm the situation, Hook would undoubtedly have been prosecuted for wasting everyone’s time. Realising that he had badly miscalculated Hook suddenly vanished and spent the next six months holed up in a friend’s house deep in the countryside.

  THE DIRTIEST PUB IN LONDON

  1809

  Many London pubs are far older than they might at first appear. In Bishopsgate, for example, Dirty Dicks dates back to the early eighteenth century despite the fact that the pub looks typically mid-Victorian. The cellars here are original and it was in the pub above them that one of London’s most extraordinary and eccentric characters once lived.

  The story varies in its details but it seems that Nathaniel Bentley, a local businessman and dandy who ran an alehouse, decided to get married. Everything was prepared and the pub’s dining rooms had been laid out with beautiful flowers, cutlery, linen and a huge cake, but on the night before the wedding the bride died. Distraught, Bentley sealed up the room where the table had been laid for the wedding breakfast and never opened it again. He also stopped washing and only changed his clothes when they rotted and fell off him. He allowed his pub to become one of the filthiest houses in London but people flocked to it to see if it really was as bad as they’d been told and Bentley made a fortune – a fortune he never spent because he bought nothing. He lived for nearly forty years, and died finally in 1809. He was a rich man by then. He once said: ‘What is the point of washing my hands or anything else for that matter when they will only be dirty again tomorrow?’

  The remnants of the old clothes that hung from the ceiling were only cleared out (they fell foul of new health and safety rules) in the 1980s, but the old pub still has a few fake rags here and there to remind us of its decidedly grubby past.

  A MISTRESS’S REVENGE

  1809

  Disputes between lovers always involve emotional excesses and when lovers fall out it adds a new twist to the old saying: all’s fair in love and war.

  Salisbury Square, just off Fleet Street, once witnessed the conclusion to one of the strangest emotional disputes in the history of England. The problem began when Frederick, Duke of York (the second son of mad George III), began to lose interest in one of his mistresses, one Mrs Mary Anne Clarke. Mrs Clarke was his favourite mistress from 1803 until 1809 but then his enthusiasm began to wane. In short he completely lost interest in her. Mrs Clarke was furious at being unceremoniously dumped, but she would have accepted this meekly enough if the Duke had given her the pension she felt she deserved, together with a house in a fashionable part of London. The Duke for his part thought that he could simply discard her and that would be the end of it, but he had reckoned without the fury of a woman scorned.

  When the Duke refused to see her or give her any money Mrs Clarke sat down and wrote her memoirs, in particular her memories of her relationship with the Duke. The notoriety of Mrs Clarke and the public’s appetite for scandal meant the publisher was convinced he would have a huge sale and make his fortune, so he printed ten thousand copies – an enormous number for any book at the time. Mrs Clarke then let the Duke know that the book was about to come out. In earlier times he’d have had her head cut off, but even in Georgian England such an idea was unthinkable. The Duke knew when he was beaten. He immediately paid her a pension, bought her a house and bought up all 10,000 copies of the book – these were piled up in Salisbury Square and burned. If one copy survived and were to turn up now it would be worth a fortune!

  WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

  1811

  In eighteenth-century London political party meant more than the side of the House of Commons on which one sat. Particular clubs, for example, were associated with particular factions – Brooks’s Club was for the Whigs (who later transformed into the Liberals) and White’s for the Tories. But there were other more bizarre ways to indicate one’s political allegiance.

  At the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane – the present building, put up in 1811, is the fourth on the site – new plays were always attended by the great and the good, but there was a problem. King George III and his son the Prince Regent hated each other and refused to sit in the same room, let alone speak to each other. But they both hated to miss a first night. To get round the problem the King was always directed up one side of the grand foyer and the Prince up the other side. Politicians who arrived at the theatre would make sure that they were seen to go up the right side according to whether they supported the King or the Prince’s faction.

  The tradition of theatre staff directing theatregoers up ‘the King’s side’ or ‘the Prince’s side’ continues to this day.

  NAPOLEON’S SOAP ON SHOW

  1816

  It’s hard to understand now, but despite the fact that he was defeated at Waterloo the Emperor Napoleon was one of the most popular figures in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century – popular in the sense that people were absolutely fascinated by everything to do with him now that he was safely imprisoned on the island of St Helena.

  The great bogeyman of Europe who had terrified the British ruling classes (they thought he would encourage the lower orders to get above themselves) was now like a lion in a cage – awe-inspiring but harmless.

  Napoleon fever reached a peak in around 1816 when the showman William Bullock bought a vast collection of Napoleon’s personal effects – the collection included Napoleon’s carriage, his horses, his combs, brushes, wine, spirits and even a small bar of his soap!

  Even more extraordinary was the fact that Bullock managed to persuade Napoleon’s former carriage driver to accompany the collection. It was all brought to Bullock’s new British Museum, which was situated in Piccadilly, and within a few months almost half a million people had queued to see the collection. Bullock made a fortune and the British appetite for sensation was satisfied.

  In fact Bullock did so well that he moved his collection of Napoleon artifacts into what he called the Museum Napoleon. But the obsession with the fallen Emperor didn’t end there – a forty square metre replica of the battlefield at Waterloo was created at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly with every detail, soldiers, artillery, horses and landmarks included.

  HOW TO STOP DEAD CATS FLYING

  1819

  One of the delights of London is that if you know what you are looking for you will find odd, quirky little places in the busiest thoroughfares and many of these have fascinating and often curious histories. Piccadilly must be one of the most famous streets in the world, but just off it is a row of tiny Georgian shops virtually unchanged since they were completed in 1819.

  The shops in question are in the Burlington Arcade and they are here for a most bizarre reason. Visitors often think the Georgian planners who built these little shops were simply building to make a profit. In fact they built the arcade to cover a narrow alley that ran alongside Burlington House, now the home of the Royal Academy but in the early nineteenth century still a private home. The owner of Burlington House was Lord George Cavendish, who had complained for years that while sitting in his garden he was constantly hit on the head by oyster shells, apple cores, old bottles and even an occasional dead cat. These unpleasant items were thrown over the wall between the garden and the lane which then existed at its side. Cavendish decided that a row of shops would put paid to the nuisance and so he had them built and the alleyway vanished forever. Samuel Ware was asked to design the beautiful shop fronts which exist largely unchanged today, and though the shop interiors are tiny the shopkeepers have always sold luxury goods, so what they lack in quantity of stoc
k they more than make up for in quality.

  Originally the arcade was a single storey, but an upper level was added in 1906 and above the shops the rooms were let – according to one wag they were let to ‘the better sort of courtesan’. The beautiful triple-arch entrance was destroyed for no good reason in 1931 and the new design was much hated. There was also some damage during the war but the arcade remains one of the world’s first shopping malls. Instead of security men it still has a beadle who will ask you to leave the arcade if he catches you running or whistling or carrying an open umbrella!

  THE GREATEST LEGAL SCANDAL OF ALL

  1819

  The law has always been something of a scandalous institution. Lawyers have the best trade union in the sense that entry to the profession is strictly controlled and because lawyers never undercut each other and there is no genuine competition between practitioners, the poor public is always forced to pay very high prices for the advice it receives.

  But the scandal of lawyers’ costs today – a disgrace that no government dares tackle simply because politicians themselves tend to be drawn from the ranks of the legal profession – is nothing compared with the scandals of the past.

  One of the greatest and most extraordinary of all legal humiliations, a scandal that outranks every other London legal dishonour, was known as the Great Jennings case.

  Anyone who has read Charles Dickens’s great novel of London life Bleak House will remember the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which is the central symbol in that novel of social decay and corruption.

  The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, though bizarre in its tortuousness, impenetrability and sheer longevity, was based on the Great Jennings case which was heard in the Old Hall, Lincoln’s Inn. The real case was no less absurd than the story Dickens created to satirise it.

  The Great Jennings case started in 1819 when Dickens was only seven and didn’t end until 1870, the year in which the great novelist died. But why was the case such a scandal? The answer is that the lawyers involved made no real efforts to conclude it; it was in their interest to keep it going as long as possible only because they were earning fat fees. The case finally ended when the money involved in the case ran out – it had all been used up funding lawyers’ fees.

  A CLUB FOR MEN NOT ABLE TO SING IN THE BATH

  1820

  Old pubs tend to survive longer than other buildings in London – with the exception of churches, of course. The Coal Hole in Carting Lane is a case in point. The present building dates back to the early 1800s but the pub commemorates an earlier nearby tavern of the same name.

  The pub gets its name from the wharf used by coalmen that stood nearby before the Embankment pushed the river further away. For centuries coal was brought to London by ship from the mines of Northumberland and Durham (which is why in earlier centuries coal was always called sea coal) and the tough city coal heavers who lugged the sacks from the ships uphill to the carters liked to drink in this pub.

  During the eighteenth century the pub was hugely popular with actors and theatre managers including the great tragedian Edmund Kean (1787–1833), who started the Wolf Club.

  The sole qualification for membership was that the applicant should have been forbidden by his wife to sing in the bath! The Wolf Bar in the present attractive Arts and Crafts interior with its pretty leaded windows commemorates this bizarre drinking club. And when you step out of the pub you can still look down the sloping lane and see the bright river – just as the coal heavers of earlier centuries did.

  WOMEN BUYING MEN

  1820

  We are all familiar with the idea of men paying women for sex – prostitution is, after all, the world’s oldest profession – but it is less common for the traffic to operate in the other direction. A bizarre tradition of women buying men did, however, exist in Victorian London though it probably only rarely led to sex.

  The story begins with the bizarre development of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. To the modern visitor the two areas of open space seem almost indistinguishable, though they are divided by the road that crosses the park from Bayswater Road in the north to Kensington Gore in the south – Kensington Gore takes its name from ‘gara’, an old English word describing a triangular plot of land which was left when ploughing fields of irregular shape.

  Kensington Gardens really began to develop when William III decided he didn’t like Whitehall Palace, the traditional home of English monarchs. He retreated to Kensington soon after 1688 and to the palace we see today. The gardens round the palace – including the famous Round Pond and the Broad Walk – were developed by Queen Anne and later by Queen Caroline, wife of George II.

  It was Caroline who commissioned the work to dig the Serpentine – before Caroline, this had been a series of small ponds surrounded by marshland and through which the Westbourne River ran. When Caroline died George discovered that she’d stolen more than £26,000 of his money to complete the work. He was apparently furious as he’d been under the impression that the work had kept Caroline occupied for years and at no cost.

  But throughout this period Kensington Gardens was a private area open only to royalty and their courtiers. Hyde Park by contrast was open to all and as a result it developed a slightly seedy reputation – prostitutes plied their trade here and robberies were commonplace.

  By the beginning of the nineteenth century the rules were relaxed a little and Kensington Gardens was opened to ‘the respectably dressed’ – the gates were guarded by officials who turned away those who did not look respectable. At that time this meant the poor, who would have easily been identified by their practical, workday clothes.

  But the ban on the lower orders meant that servant girls and soldiers from nearby Knightsbridge Barracks could not walk in the park. Instead they walked in Hyde Park and a tradition began that servant girls and others would pay soldiers to escort them – the girls wanted their friends to see them being escorted by a handsome guardsman in full dress uniform and they wanted it so badly they were prepared to pay for it.

  A walk in the park with an artilleryman cost nine old pence; a guardsman’s company for half an hour would set you back a shilling. If you could only afford a private it would cost sixpence. Such things would never have been allowed in Kensington Gardens.

  But even today the distinction between the parks is very real and this is reflected in the way they are policed – the Metropolitan Police still control Hyde Park while the Royal Parks Constabulary look after Kensington Gardens.

  TOM AND JERRY IN LONDON

  1821

  If they think about them at all, most people probably imagine that the famous cartoon characters Tom and Jerry have their origin in the United States and more particularly in the vast film industry of that country.

  In fact Tom and Jerry have their origins far earlier and on the other side of the Atlantic. The story starts in 1821 – well within the Georgian era – when London was enjoying a boom in publishing. Books, pamphlets and newspapers were being produced in ever greater numbers as literacy and the appetite for reading material spread through society.

  A century earlier books had been largely the preserve of the rich or at least the comparatively well off, but by 1821 the popular press had taken off with a vengeance – in addition to cheap pamphlets and books there were broadsides (single news sheets usually about murders and executions) song sheets, chapbooks and penny dreadfuls.

  Among the most innovative of the new publishers was Pierce Egan (1772–1849), a sporting journalist, who began a new series of publications in 1821 entitled Life in London or the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorne Esq and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees Through the Metropolis.

  The series was so popular that other publishers produced pirated versions of it and within a few months it had been turned into a stage play – the title had changed by now to Tom and Jerry or Life in London but it was so popular and tripped so easily off the tongue th
at it is not difficult to see how it crossed the Atlantic in the head of some entrepreneur emigré and ended up transformed into the cartoon we know today. The basic idea of two characters getting into a series of scrapes remains the same but Egan’s loveable human rogues have been transformed, of course, into a cat and a mouse.

  A MONUMENT TO A MAN NOBODY LIKED

  1824

  One of the most curious monuments in London, the Duke of York’s column just off The Mall, was built to commemorate Frederick, the second son of George III, a man who did nothing other than run up huge debts. Despite being a member of the royal family and therefore by definition enormously well connected, Frederick’s monument could not find a financial backer: George his brother wanted it built but wouldn’t pay for it; none of Frederick’s wealthy friends would pay so the government decided, without consultation, to dock one day’s pay from every soldier in the British army to finance a monument to a man for whom the population had neither respect nor affection.

  So some of the poorest subjects in Britain were forced to pay for a monument to one of the richest and most profligate aristocrats in the land. But Frederick had to pay in the end, because from the moment it was completed in 1824 the monument, which cost £25,000, and the figure of the Duke which surmounts it, became the butt of jokes: a favourite for many years was that Frederick’s column had to be as high as it is – 124 feet – so that Londoners wouldn’t have to put up with the stink of the Duke whose undistinguished statue stands on top; the other highly popular jibe was that the column had to be exceptionally high to protect Frederick from his creditors.

  ONLY FOR THE ROYAL BIRD KEEPER