London's Strangest Tales

by Tom Quinn

  The result was that a year later huge crowds gathered at Cornhill in the City to watch the arrival of a long line of carriages pulled by a very passable imitation of an ancient ship.

  When word got out much of the route was regularly lined with spectators eager to see this extraordinary engine, which was – as its inventor had suggested – particularly impressive when viewed from the ground as it passed sedately over one or other of the company’s viaducts.

  The only thing that spoiled the general effect was the noise and the clouds of dense smoke.

  Despite its initial popularity the idea of locomotives imitating ships did not catch on and the London and Greenwich soon reverted to more practical-looking engines.

  TRAFALGAR SQUARE – PERMANENTLY UNFINISHED

  1838

  Present-day Trafalgar Square is built on the site where Henry VIII and earlier kings once kept their birds of prey and their horses. The site was first built on when Chaucer was Clerk of the King’s Works in the 1380s and Richard II needed somewhere close to the rambling Palace of Whitehall for the royal hawks. Gradually the word mews was used not just for hawks and falcons but for other animals kept either for royal use or entertainment. The royal mews lasted well beyond the destruction by fire of the Palace of Westminster but the area in which the mews stood gradually became a warren of small dirty lanes where ‘thieves and vagabonds abound’, but by the time the area (by then known as the Bermudas) was cleared completely to allow for the building of the present square the word ‘mews’ had passed into the language and meant any narrow alleyway where horses were kept. Today in Belgravia and Mayfair the narrow back lanes behind grand house are still often called mews, for here the servants lived in small cottages or above the stables where their employers’ horses were kept.

  Like most building projects in London, Trafalgar Square was the subject of endless disputes and arguments – the plans for the National Gallery (completed in 1838) were derided by many who thought the proposed building an architectural disaster.

  But unlike most projects, which are eventually built and completed, however greatly modified during the planning process, Trafalgar Square has never been completed and remains unfinished to this day.

  The unfinished bit is the empty plinth in the northwest corner – this has been empty ever since the square was first built and though in recent years some bizarre sculptures have been placed on the unused plinth (including an upside-down see-through version of the plinth itself!) there are still no plans to erect a permanent statue here.

  THE MYSTERIOUS CROSSING SWEEPER

  1840

  It’s easy to forget that London’s streets were, until comparatively recently, completely uncared for. In Victorian times many streets were cobbled, or were made from wooden sets (blocks of wood packed tightly with their end-grain uppermost to reduce wear) but elsewhere they were entirely unmade. In poorer districts the population would still throw their slops into the street just as their medieval ancestors did. And of course everywhere was the dung left by thousands of horses. But the mess in the streets had one great advantage – it produced jobs for hundreds if not thousands of London’s poorest citizens. These were the crossing sweepers. Perhaps the most famous crossing sweeper – a trade that vanished with the coming of the motor car – was Jo in Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House. Jo was Dickens’s attempt to show how damaging it was to society as a whole to allow children to live the sort of life Jo lives. Illiterate, half-dressed even in winter and forced to sleep in the streets, Jo earns a few pennies each day by sweeping a path through the horse manure from one side of a London street to another. Many destitute men, women and children were forced to do this work simply because they had nothing else, but one of the most remarkable stories of a crossing sweeper concerns a real-life sweeper called Brutus Billy or Charles McGhee.

  Nothing is known of McGhee’s history, but he was an elderly black man who had probably come to England from the West Indies. For many years in the early nineteenth century he swept a path across Fleet Street where it meets Ludgate Hill near a wealthy linen draper’s shop in Fleet Street. The shop was owned by Robert Waithman who later became MP for the City of London. From the window above the shop the draper’s daughter watched the old crossing sweeper and on cold days she arranged for someone to take him a bowl of hot soup and some bread. When McGhee died some years later it was discovered that he had left all his savings – some £700, which was an extraordinary sum in Victorian times – to the draper’s daughter.

  A BRIDGE FROM LONDON TO BRISTOL

  1845

  The Clifton Suspension Bridge is one of the wonders of nineteenth-century engineering, but one of the strangest things about it – a fact that is almost forgotten today – is that it started life in central London.

  The story begins with the decision by the Earl of Hungerford to build a fruit and vegetable market to rival the one at Covent Garden. Hungerford market began life in 1692 on the site now occupied by Charing Cross Station but it never came to rival Covent Garden, the more famous market down the road. An attempt to improve things – by bringing customers in from south of the river – came when Isambard Kingdom Brunel built Hungerford Suspension Bridge in 1845.

  Hungerford market finally disappeared when the railway company bought the land and built Charing Cross Station, but they too needed a bridge over the river and it would have to carry trains.

  Before the current walkways were built, the railway company sold the old suspension bridge to the city of Bristol and then built their new railway bridge – in the strict legal sense there are still two bridges here, which may explain why on some maps the existing bridge is referred to as Hungerford Bridge while others insist on calling it Charing Cross Bridge. The reason is that the London public had got used to being able to cross the bridge and the railway company’s plan would have deprived them of their old crossing because the new bridge would have been used by trains only. The railway company was forced by public pressure to build its railway bridge with a pedestrian footbridge alongside, which is why today the railway bridge into Charing Cross Station is the only railway bridge in London that also has a pedestrian footbridge. The pedestrian footbridge is Hungerford Bridge, while the railway bridge alongside is Charing Cross Bridge.

  WHY THE JOCKEYS ATE TAPEWORMS

  1845

  One of the most expensive and fashionable parts of London is Notting Hill. Until the 1850s, however, Notting Hill was an area mostly of poor cottages, remote farms, brick kilns and gravel pits. It first became fashionable, not when the grand houses we see today were built but a decade or so earlier when one of London’s long-forgotten racecourses attracted the rich and the fashionable from right across London and beyond.

  An article in the Sporting Magazine for 1837 describes the wonders of the new racecourse:

  Making the cours aristocratique of Routine (alias Rotten) Row, you pass out at Cumberland Gate, and then trot on to Bayswater. Thence you arrive at the Kensington Gravel Pits, and descending where on the left stands the terrace of Notting Hill, find opposite the large wooden gates of a recent structure. Entering these, I was by no means prepared for what opened upon me. Here, without figure of speech, was the most perfect racecourse that I had ever seen. Conceive, almost within the bills of mortality, an enclosure some two miles and a half in circuit, commanding from its centre a view as spacious and enchanting as that from Richmond Hill, and where almost the only thing that you can not see is London. Around this, on the extreme circle, next to the lofty fence by which it is protected is constructed, or rather laid out – for the leaps are natural fences – the steeplechase course of two miles and a quarter. Within this, divided by a slight trench, and from the space appropriated to carriages and equestrians by strong and handsome posts all the way round, is the race-course, less probably than a furlong in circuit. Then comes the enclosure for those who ride or drive as aforesaid; and lastly, the middle, occupied by a hill, from which every yard of the running is commanded, besides mi
les of country on every side beyond it, and exclusively reserved for foot people. I could hardly credit what I saw. Here was, almost at our doors, a racing emporium more extensive and attractive than Ascot or Epsom, with ten times the accommodation of either, and where carriages are charged for admission at three-fourths less. This great national undertaking is the sole result of individual enterprise, being effected by the industry and liberality of a gentleman by the name of Whyte. This is an enterprise which must prosper; it is without a competitor, and it is open to the fertilization of many sources of profit. As a site for horse exercise, can any riding-house compare with it? For females, it is without the danger or exposure of the parks; as a training-ground for the turf or the field it cannot be exceeded; and its character cannot be better summed up than by describing it as a necessary of London life, of the absolute need of which we were not aware until the possession of it taught us its permanent value.

  But if the racecourse was one of the wonders of Georgian London, the jockeys were even more astonishing. Such was the pressure to win at all costs that tactics were used that would be completely unacceptable today. A jockey’s weight, then as now, was vital and a practice arose among the jockeys at the Notting Hill Hippodrome that seems grotesque now but was apparently perfectly accepted at the time. When a jockey wanted to lose weight he deliberately infected himself with tapeworms so that regardless of how much he ate or drank he lost weight. This was vital before a big race that might earn a successful jockey a small fortune. After the race, or when it was no longer necessary to be stick-thin, the jockey would take a powerful emetic to purge himself of the tapeworms, though without modern medicines this can only ever have been partially successful.

  Despite its popularity Notting Hill Racecourse did not survive long. The pressure for building land in those far off unregulated days was such that it was quickly buried beneath bricks and mortar.

  The Sporting Magazine takes up the story:

  After four years of a very chequered and struggling career, its last public meeting was held in June, 1841. At this date the land along its southern and eastern sides was beginning to be in demand for building purposes, and so pieces were sliced off to form those streets and thoroughfares which lie to the north of Westbourne Grove and south of the Great Western Railway. A large portion of the riding ground, however, was still kept laid down in turf – rather of a coarse kind, it must be owned; and some hedges were preserved, over which dashing young ladies would ride their chargers as lately as the year 1852. But in the course of the next five or six years the green sward, and the green trees, and the green hedges were all swept away.

  KEEPING THE RICH OUT OF THE POOR SEATS

  1850

  Very soon after the railway system began to spread across England, the Victorian obsession with class began to rear its ugly head – carriages were quickly designated first, second or third class and they were used according to whether a particular traveller was at the top of the social pile (i.e. did absolutely no work at all), solidly middle class, or rough working class. But the railway owners prided themselves on the fact that their first-class carriages attracted only the very well-to-do and the aristocracy. Refinements to the service were always aimed at first-class passengers and at the groups who could be assumed to enjoy travelling in some style. After all, this is where the greatest profits were to be made. And it is easy to imagine the railway owners lamenting the fact that it was necessary, merely to keep the wheels of commerce in motion, also to provide third-class coaches, or wagons as they might better be described.

  Third class made little in the way of profit for the railway company owners but factory owners who might have a share or two in railway stock wanted cheap transport for their staff. Imagine then the horror of the railway directors when they heard rumours that the well-to-do were, in increasing numbers, buying third-class tickets for some of the busiest and potentially most profitable routes. The problem was particularly acute in and around London.

  One director simply could not believe that this was happening so he spent several weeks travelling each day on trains across and around the capital. He discovered that a significant proportion of those who, judging by their dress, should have known better were happily asleep or reading their newspapers in carriages made to carry only those lesser mortals who dug the roads, or cleaned the sewers. Those behaving badly included landowners, gentleman farmers and even, God help us, the odd baronet.

  In short, first class had invaded third, an event that hinted at the worst kind of revolutionary fervour and, worse, meant a loss of funds for the railway directors and shareholders. This situation could not be allowed to continue, but the solution was hard to find. Booking-office clerks could hardly be asked to refuse to issue third-class tickets to anyone who seemed able to afford first class.

  The director reported the situation to his fellow directors: ‘I discovered that there were certain persons in superior positions who were base enough to travel third class and in order to bring these offenders to a proper sense of their position and to swell the revenues of the company, I recommend that we introduce what might best be termed special inconveniences.’

  Special inconveniences turned out to be ‘soot bag men’.

  Thus on a bright spring morning in 1850 began one of the most extraordinary journeys in railway history. A team of four chimney sweeps had been specially hired. Each was assigned a third-class carriage that was believed to harbour individuals who did not belong to the working classes.

  The decision about which carriages needed ‘special inconveniences’ was based on observations made by a senior porter who watched to see if anyone well turned out entered a third-class carriage. He then kept a note and reported his findings to the sweeps.

  As soon as the train set off on its journey from Euston the sweeps went into action. They entered the third-class carriages and immediately unfolded several of their recently used sacks and began to shake them out, thus covering everyone in the carriage with a layer of grime and dirt. The working men, of course, took little or no notice since their work obliged them to wear rough and dirty clothes anyway. But the well dressed were horrified. But what could they do – if they complained to the management they would be told to travel first class since third-class passengers were used to dust and dirt and the railway company could do nothing about it.

  The ruse worked and the numbers of passengers travelling first class rose, and as time passed fewer of the middle classes risked a confrontation with the soot-bag men.

  According to an early edition of the Railway Times other rail companies found it more convenient to make sure that sheep or even pigs travelled regularly in their third-class carriages.

  STAYING IN THE LIMELIGHT

  1850

  In the nineteenth century the passion for theatrical extravaganza reached such dizzying heights that real bears and lions were brought on stage for certain plays; in the West End for drama set in hotels real waiters from nearby hotels were sometimes engaged (a few people in the audience could always be relied on to recognise the waiters who were thought to add to the reality of the scene); real trains were driven across the stage; and special effects of dazzling complexity (though entirely mechanical) were used to create various illusions – one of the most bizarre was the use of the limelight men.

  These were men employed to heat manganese dioxide in a sealed bag to produce oxygen; at the appropriate time the oxygen was mixed with hydrogen from another bag to produce an extraordinary incandescent light – colours varied from yellow to red and a skilled limelight man could produce the whole range of colours by judicious mixing.

  If various coloured lights had to be produced at the same time dozens of limelight men had to be employed in the wings, since one man could produce only one light at a time. Then there were the extraordinary pulleys and wires, sliding backdrops, trapdoors, painted boards and sheets that became ever more complex and intricate as the years passed, but nothing could compare with the Standard Theatre i
n London’s East End. Here, from 1850 on, the theatre re-created Derby day and Ascot races using real horses.

  As many as fifty horses and riders were kept waiting in a special marshalling yard to the side of the stage but outside the building at the back. When the principal players in the drama started watching a race a door was opened at the side of the stage but out of sight of the audience. The massive door led to a ramp which ran down to the marshalling yard. At a given signal the horses were galloped round the back of the theatre so they had time to pick up speed before racing up the ramp on to the stage and across it at full speed, to the astonishment of the audience. At the other side of the stage from the entrance ramp there was another large door and another ramp that allowed the horses to gallop off the stage down the ramp and back into the yard where they slowed up. They might then gallop around the back of the theatre again to hurtle back on to the stage two or three times before the play came to an end.

  THE SCANDAL OF A HORSE IN CHURCH

  1852

  When the Duke of Wellington died in 1852 plans were immediately put in hand to erect a suitable monument in St Paul’s Cathedral to a man perceived as the greatest military genius in British history. The monument was commissioned from the sculptor Alfred Stevens (1817–1875). He was offered £14,000 – a huge sum at the time – but Stevens was a man of extravagant vision, so much so that almost all the money was found to have disappeared within a few years and it hadn’t even paid for the materials, let alone the work required.