London's Strangest Tales

by Tom Quinn

  William’s friend Edward Harcourt, Archbishop of York, was, like Buckland himself, a great collector of curiosities and had managed to obtain what was believed to be the shrunken, mummified heart of Louis XIV. He kept it in a snuff box in his London house and rashly showed it to William. ‘I have eaten many things,’ William is reported to have said, ‘but never the heart of a king.’ He then popped it into his mouth and swallowed it whole.

  Frank Buckland (1826–80), William’s son, was if anything an even more eccentric Londoner than his father. He was a naturalist and collector of animals of every description; he also helped found the Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals in the United Kingdom, which introduced all sorts of exotic creatures into Britain in an attempt, it was said, to widen the roast-beef diet of the British. Many of these introductions proved less than useful – like the grey squirrel which, a century after its introduction, has all but eradicated the native red squirrel from England.

  At the Acclimatisation Society’s annual dinner likely items on the menu would be dormice on toast followed by boiled sea slug, roast kangaroo and grilled parrot; at its first dinner in 1862 the meal included trepang – ‘Much like a horse’s hoof,’ said Frank.

  Throughout his life Frank dined regularly on rhinoceros, elephant and giraffe: he had friends at the zoological gardens who would contact him when an animal died and was once given a whole batch of giraffes that had died in an accident.

  At school, Buckland was notorious for wandering round with his pockets full of live snakes, frogs and mice, and he was often found wading into the school pond to retrieve a specimen he had left in the water to rot so that he could more easily remove the flesh from the skeleton. He kept a live owl, a buzzard, a magpie and a racoon in his room, and the descendants of a white rat that escaped from his pocket were still to be seen generations later. He also kept a monkey, a chameleon and numerous snakes.

  Away from the classroom he spent much of his spare time cooking mice and eating them; when a master discovered what he was up to he didn’t ban it, but simply told Buckland he should share his roast mice with the other boys.

  Buckland would swap eels and trout for various pieces of the anatomy of patients who had died in the local hospital. He was once heard to mutter while gazing admiringly at a fellow pupil’s head: ‘What wouldn’t I give for that fellow’s skull!’ Unlike most pupils who used their pocket money to buy sweets and chocolate, Buckland would pay his fellow pupils sixpence each if they would then let him bleed them.

  By the time he got to university, where he narrowly missed a scholarship, he had a small menagerie in a specially constructed zoo outside his rooms; here he kept snakes, a monkey, a chameleon, an eagle, a jackal and a bear which he named Tiglath-Pileser after an Assyrian king; it was known as Tig for short. His eagle once escaped and was discovered perched in the college chapel.

  Buckland rarely expressed an interest in any subject other than natural history, and said of politics that when he couldn’t understand a parliamentary bill he always translated it into Latin, in which language it apparently made more sense.

  When entertaining fellow undergraduates his normal dress was a bright-blue coat and a big red hat with tassels. Dressed like this he loved to leap up every few seconds and blow loudly through an enormous wooden horn.

  When he left Oxford Buckland decided to become a surgeon in London, but first, like most young men of his background at the time, he left for an extended period of study abroad. With his scientific interests Germany must have seemed a natural choice for Buckland, whose eccentric habits did not meet with universal approval. During one journey he was threatened with eviction from a coach after it was discovered that he had twelve live tree frogs hidden in his pockets; their deafening croaking, of which Buckland was oblivious, infuriated the other passengers who were kept awake for hours. He also tried to bring home a large quantity of big red slugs, but while he was asleep they escaped and he woke to find that one of them was making its way precariously across the bald head of the sleeping passenger opposite. Rather than face a scene Buckland left the slugs where they were and leaped off the coach.

  Back in London at a big garden party Buckland turned up with his bear, Tig, in tow. He had dressed it in a scholar’s cap and gown and proceeded to introduce it to the assembled glitterati, including Florence Nightingale, several princes and Napoleon I’s nephew (their reaction is not recorded). Tig eventually ended up in London Zoo after being caught trying to rob a sweet shop.

  At work at St George’s Hospital in London, Buckland had become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1851, but he resigned a year later for reasons never fully explained. His time at the hospital did, however, produce a number of amusing incidents. He dined out for many years, for example, on the tale of the poor woman with a bad cough who had come to him regularly every week and each time asked for larger and larger quantities of a certain cough mixture. Eventually he became suspicious and, following her, discovered that she had been making the mixture into tarts and selling them outside the hospital.

  Buckland was nineteen when his father was made Dean of Westminster; while he was living with him in the abbey precincts his eagle escaped and was found sitting on one of Hawksmoor’s magnificent towers. The bird was captured by Buckland using a live chicken on a very long pole.

  Once when travelling with his monkey, Jacko, in a bag, Buckland was about to buy a railway ticket at King’s Cross; just as he was handing his money over, Jacko popped his head out of the bag, at which the stationmaster insisted that the monkey would have to be paid for, too. After a long fruitless argument, an extremely exasperated Buckland pulled his pet tortoise out of a pocket and asked what fare he would have to pay for that. ‘No charge for them, Sir, them be insects,’ came the stationmaster’s reply. This same monkey accompanied Buckland everywhere during his time in the Life Guards. He dressed it as a troop corporal major, but when he discovered that it had been ripping the buttons off his coat he had it demoted to private and dressed it accordingly.

  In spite of the fact that his house was already filled with animals, both stuffed and living, Buckland continued to haunt the dock areas of London in search of specimens; although he was adding continually to his collection, he never threw anything away.

  In 1850 he married Hannah Papps, a coachman’s daughter. Luckily for Buckland she seemed to enjoy his mania for collecting animals as much as he did – at least there is no evidence that she objected to the hordes of monkeys one observer once saw sitting round the Buckland fire: ‘They did terrible damage and bit everyone, but he loved them dearly,’ he commented. But rats could also be seen running everywhere, over desks and tables and around the mongoose and donkey that also had the run of the place. Having so many animals frequently led to minor disasters – for example, when two antagonistic animals met on the stairs and began a terrible fight. Also, Mrs Buckland had reared a South African Red River hog boar from infancy. It was an enormous beast, and at dinner one evening it crept into the dining-room and wedged itself under a guest’s chair; then, alarmed by a sudden noise, it got up and ran out of the room but with the guest still in his chair on the pig’s back!

  Visitors frequently bumped into extraordinary animals in the most unlikely places: one woman tripped over a hippo at a turn on the staircase. The hippo was destined for the pot, but the woman had been frightened out of her wits – though Buckland merely told her that a hippo was a rare and valuable animal. ‘They don’t grow on trees, you know,’ he is reported to have said. When his animals grew old or died Buckland usually ate them anyway, but he abhorred cruelty. He had eaten many things in his time, but pronounced mole ‘poo’ and bluebottle ‘worse’.

  A keen historian, he once went through nearly 3,000 coffins in the vaults of St Martin in the Fields looking for the body of John Hunter, an eighteenth-century surgeon whom he admired enormously. Almost the last coffin contained the right man, who was reburied with great ceremony and given a proper memorial.

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nbsp; Buckland was appointed Her Majesty’s Inspector of Fisheries, and in this capacity was responsible for making sure that migratory fish were able to get up Britain’s rivers. While helping construct a salmon ladder on the Thames he put up a sign for the benefit of any salmon stuck in the weir below the as yet unbuilt ladder: ‘No road at present over the weir,’ it read. ‘Go downstream, take the first turning to the right and you will find good travelling water upstream and no jumping required.’

  His appointment as fisheries inspector had a lot to do with his wide-ranging knowledge of natural history, and a major part of his work involved travelling the country in search of spawning salmon and trout. So enthusiastic was he that he claimed he had hatched some 30,000 salmon in his own kitchen sink during his career. And if he had odd things in the sink you could always be sure that he would have even more extraordinary creatures, including humans, in the house. Dwarves, giants, rat- and bird-catchers were all invited, for Buckland delighted in everything that added to his sense of human diversity.

  A giant Irishman who visited him wrote his name on the ceiling of the drawing-room; when a spring-cleaning session led to its being obliterated, Buckland was furious.

  On one occasion he was sent to Ireland to inspect a salmon fishery, and decided he wanted to know what it was like to be a salmon; so he undressed and lowered himself into the fastest part of the salmon race. ‘How on earth do they do it?’ he was heard to mumble. It was at about this time that he began to grow oysters; he also opened a fish museum at St Martin’s Court in Leicester Square and took over the editorship of a journal called Land and Water. Energetic and highly artistic, he next began to make magnificently accurate plaster casts of fish. He once bought a huge fresh sunfish at Billingsgate, threw it down into his kitchen and made a plaster cast of it. He then found that the cast, which of course was rigid, was so big he couldn’t get it out of the kitchen again.

  Often he had so many specimens in various stages of decomposition that the whole house stank unendurably, but he never seemed to notice, probably because he was intrigued by the processes of decay. In 1866 he wrote: ‘I do not think rats will eat putrid meat…I have lately discovered in my London cellar the body of an eagle which I had forgotten and which was rather high. I know there are rats in my cellar because I will not allow them to be killed as I consider they do me good service in eating the bits thrown away in the dustbin. But these rats had not touched the eagle…’

  For Buckland, however, it was sometimes difficult to avoid eating his specimens even when he really didn’t want to, and good-looking ones were always in particular danger. ‘Directly I am out of the way,’ he wrote, ‘if they look good to eat they are cooked by my housekeeper; if they stink they are buried. What am I to do? I have to keep a sharp lookout in my house…’ Nevertheless, towards the end of his life his interest in the culinary quality of all sorts of animals intensified. He tried a porpoise’s head but thought it tasted like lamp wick, and in Land and Water he once offered readers otter steaks; all they had to do was write to him and he would send a steak by return.

  Buckland had his own remedies for a number of ailments; for example, he never wore a coat because it caused colds and flu, and if he couldn’t sleep he sat up all night eating raw onions. But apart from what may now seem his greatest eccentricities, Buckland actually did a great deal to improve our treatment of animals: he campaigned for many years for humane methods of slaughter in abattoirs, and he disliked intensely the indiscriminate slaughter of animals for sport. Moreover, he was said to have had infinite patience with animals and humans, and he was certainly unfailingly generous; he often rescued down-and-outs and former friends who had become ill or had fallen on hard times. He believed, too, that inanimate things had feelings, and planned to write a book on the spitefulness of objects: if a lamp didn’t burn properly he said it was sulky; and he punished his luggage once by thrashing it.

  But some of his vaguely scientific ideas are still difficult to swallow. He suggested fattening fish, for example, by hanging a horse’s leg or half a sheep from a branch overhanging the water. Maggots would breed on the rotting flesh, he said, and fall continually into the water where they would be eaten by the fish.

  Understandably, he is most remembered for being eccentric: children used to gather outside his London house to see the extraordinary collection of freaks who went continually in and out, and on one occasion Buckland arrived home to find all his servants standing in the street because two badgers had got out of their box and were running amok in the house. Another time a guest spotted one of Buckland’s boots apparently moving independently around the sitting-room – a mongoose had got inside it and was running around trying to get out.

  At night Buckland often went cockroach hunting – he would dash into the kitchen in his nightshirt holding aloft a syringe filled with benzine and then try to inject any fleeing insect he could catch up with.

  A visitor was once horrified to come across Buckland in the kitchen dissecting a large, far-from-fresh animal, and in between cuts he was helping himself to huge spoonfuls from a giant cauldron of stew.

  He hated boots and usually went around barefoot; once, on a train, his boots so irritated him that he kicked them off and they flew out of the window. Nothing daunted he walked to his hotel in his socks. Five feet ‘and a half’ tall, and almost as broad, he was described variously by his contemporaries as ‘sentimental, gushing, wild and sensational, and impetuous’. He never took care of his own health, always travelling hatless and coatless however cold the weather. He died at the age of 54, and wrote in his will, ‘God is so good, so very good to the little fishes that I do not believe he would let their inspector suffer shipwreck.’

  PAYING FOR LAND WITH NAILS

  1881

  The Law Courts in the Strand were built after a competition to find a suitable design. The architect, G. E. Street (1824–1881), won with the Gothic Revival building we see today but the process of implenting the design was dogged by delays caused by some very bizarre architectural requests.

  At the outset Street stipulated that standard bricks would be no good for his building, so more than 30 million odd-sized bricks had to be produced at huge cost. The next difficulty was that bricklayers from Germany had to be brought over to complete the work as all London’s bricklayers boycotted the work after a row. Street became so concerned about progress on the building that his health declined and he died before the last brick was laid.

  But the strangest thing about the law courts is that each year, in a ceremony dating back to the early twelfth century, officials from the Corporation of London come here to pay rent for a piece of ground in Shropshire, owned by the Crown but leased by the Corporation.

  The rent is paid in kind: it consists of a billhook and a scythe. Another small patch of ground on Chancery Lane and also owned by the Crown is paid for annually at the law courts in a slightly different way. For this second patch of ground the Corporation of London hands over the princely sum of six horse shoes and sixty nails!

  THE TRAIN STATION THAT FELL ON A THEATRE

  1882

  Craven Street, a narrow thoroughfare that runs down the side of Charing Cross Station, is a reminder, albeit a ghostly one, of how very different this area was before the coming of the embankment and the railway. For Craven Street is one of the last of the narrow streets that ran down to the river and up which coal and other goods were brought by wagon from the ships and barges that once plied their trade along the Thames.

  Halfway along Craven Street there is a narrow alley known as Craven Passage and in the shadow of the bridge above that carries trains into Charing Cross Station is the Ship and Shovel. When the Ship and Shovel was first built the river was only a few yards away – a small round window still exists on the river side of the pub. This was built to allow the carters and dockers who unloaded the ships to keep an eye on the river and any approaching vessels. But Craven Street has other claims to fame – we’ve already seen how Benjamin Frankli
n lived and worked here. The street’s other great claim to fame is that Charles Dickens’s unforgettable account in A Christmas Carol, of Marley’s ghost materialising out of a door knocker was based on a knocker here in Craven Street.

  But the most extraordinary thing about Craven Street is the curiously shaped theatre at the end nearest the Embankment. Crammed into a narrow space, it is difficult to understand why anyone would want to build a theatre here at all – the answer has nothing to do with an enthusiasm for the arts and a great deal to do with the oddities of London’s history.

  The builder was theatre manager Sefton Parry (1832–1887). He bought the plot of land having discovered that the railway company that owned the bridge into Charing Cross was planning to extend the platforms.

  The existing platforms were high up above the level of the ground on which Mr Parry had his eye but he calculated that they would need more ground anyway in order to build supports for the new platforms up above. He then calculated that he would get an even better price from the railway company if he built a business on the plot of land – that way he’d get paid for the land and receive compensation for the business that would have to shut down. He decided to build a theatre.

  By 1882 the theatre was complete. A year or so later, as he’d predicted, the railway company approached him and offered a large sum of money for the land. Sefton Parry unfortunately overplayed his hand and turned the offer down. He asked for a much larger sum and the railway declined. Parry was convinced they would eventually have to come to terms but he reckoned without the extraordinary ingenuity of the engineers employed by the railway company.

  Instead of buying new land on which to place the new supports needed for the new platforms, the railway company designed its new platforms in such a way that they could be propped up by existing supports. The platforms ended up immediately above the theatre but since they did not actually touch the theatre and they had no supports on Parry’s land there was nothing he could do.