London's Strangest Tales

by Tom Quinn

  All went well until 1905 when it became clear that the engineers who’d built the new platforms more than twenty years earlier had been overzealous in trying to save their bosses’ money. The overburdened supports gave way one night after a workman accidentally cut through what should have been only one of a number of fail-safe supports and nearly half the station collapsed on to the roof of the theatre. The theatre was demolished and five people were killed, but despite being built for no good dramatic reason Parry’s enterprise had done well. The railway company had to pay huge sums in compensation and the Playhouse Theatre was rebuilt. It remains one of London’s best-known and most popular theatres even today.

  BISMARCK DRUNK ON THE EMBANKMENT

  1885

  Ever since London’s river embankment was completed in the 1880s the authorities have been irritated by the fact that it attracts down-and-outs. With benches set at intervals along its length the Embankment was bound to prove a magnet for the homeless then as now, and among the more illustrious tramps to have slept here are George Orwell (1903–1950), who later described life on the road in his unforgettable book Down and Out in Paris and London.

  That an old Etonian like Orwell should end up destitute on the Embankment is strange enough, but how few people are aware that the greatest German statesman of the nineteenth century, Otto Edward Leopold von Bismarck (1815–1898), also slept on a bench on the Embankment?

  Bismarck became Chancellor of Germany in 1871 and in 1885 he visited England. As part of the elaborate itinerary organised for his visit, Bismarck was taken – for reasons that have never really become clear – to the long-vanished brewery owned by Barclays in Southwark.

  Other dignities and celebrities had been taken to the brewery on many occasions and at the end of such visits the visitor was always asked if he or she would like to try the company’s strongest beer. Bismarck was delighted at the idea and was presented with a half-gallon tankard filled to the brim. He should have taken a sip and handed it back but instead, assuming it was all for him, he drank the whole lot. Perhaps in a spirit of waggishness one of the brewery staff then told the Chancellor that very few men had managed to drink two of the half-gallon flagons. German honour was clearly at stake so Bismarck immediately insisted that the half-gallon flagon be refilled and he proceeded to drink that as well.

  Astonishingly he managed to stay on his feet and even to walk in a fairly straight line back to his carriage – the brewery staff apparently applauded him out of the building – which then crossed the river and headed back towards Westminster along the Embankment.

  Before they reached Westminster Bridge the Chancellor shouted for the carriage to stop. He looked out of the window, saw the benches by the side of the river and told his assistant that he intended to sleep off the effects of his huge intake of beer. He staggered away to the nearest bench having left instructions that he was to be woken in exactly one hour. His coach, along with the coaches filled with Foreign Office officials, waited patiently at the kerbside while the most famous German statesman in history fell fast asleep on his bench. Exactly one hour later and none the worse apparently for his ordeal he set off for the Foreign Office and some decidedly ticklish discussions about international diplomacy.

  ROYAL SCULPTOR WORKS FROM GAOL

  1886

  There are two bizarre tales about the statue of Queen Anne that stands in front of the entrance to St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s not the original statue that was completed in 1712 because by the end of the nineteenth century the original was so worn by time, pigeon droppings, coal smog and vandalism that the authorities decided to commission a new statue.

  Public sculpture was far more in demand in Victorian England than it is now and many artists whose names mean nothing today were virtually household names a century and more ago.

  When a new statue of Queen Anne was needed the City approached the celebrated sculptor Richard Claude Belt. He promised to complete the work in the year it was commissioned – 1886 – but then it all went disastrously wrong. Like many artists Belt was talented but a bit of a reprobate. He was constantly running up debts and getting into scrapes, and about the time he accepted the commission for the new statue of Queen Anne he got into a particularly bad scrape and was imprisoned for fraud. He’d spent the first part of the money advanced for the statue. The city authorities had no intention of throwing that money away by commissioning another artist to start all over again but they couldn’t just get Belt released. The answer was to get special permission to deliver stone and tools to Belt’s cell!

  And that’s exactly what happened, with the result that we can confidently say that the St Paul’s statue of Queen Anne is the only public work of art completed by a convicted prisoner while he was actually in prison.

  Belt’s statue was threatened with demolition a few years later when Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The authorities thought that Anne should be removed to make it easier for the royal coach to sweep up to the front of St Paul’s so they went ahead with plans to at least move if not simply do away with Belt’s statue, but when the Queen heard of the plan she was furious. She is reported to have said: ‘If you remove the statue of Queen Anne for me, who is to say that a statue of me will not be removed to accommodate some future monarch after I am dead?’ She was no doubt horrified at the thought that the Prince of Wales, the son she loathed and blamed for her husband’s death, would become king and then have his revenge on her by getting rid of the dozens of public statues of her that had gone up all over the country during her long reign.

  A BICYCLE DRIVEN BY NODDING

  1889

  Modern inventions can often seem weird but that is often simply because they are made for very specific uses that baffle most of us – the particle accelerator is a good example. But the number and variety of our modern inventions is as nothing to the creative fervour of our Victorian ancestors.

  Hugely imaginative and convinced that technology could solve every problem, the Victorians came up with dozens of gadgets that, in a more evolved form, are still with us today – the telephone and the vacuum cleaner to name but two. They also invented the bicycle of course, but not content with the basic bicycle they tried to come up with modifications and improvements that were sometimes taken to absurd lengths.

  Anton Oleszkiewicz, who was said to be far more English than the English despite his Russian surname, was convinced that the velocipede, as the bicycle was then known, could be vastly improved if the cyclist’s every movement – and not just the movement of his or her legs – could be used to power the machine.

  And so it was that in the autumn of 1889 he announced to the world from his London home that his Winged Messenger or New Improved Driving Mechanism for cycles would change cycling for ever.

  His new device consisted of a complex series of levers and springs that ran from the back wheel of the bicycle via the saddle and all parts of the frame to an elaborate, all-encompassing leather harness that was fixed around the cyclist’s upper body. One cyclist who tried it out took half an hour to strap himself in; once that was done he then had to attach himself to the first of the levers – a long steel rod that ran from a position on the harness at the front of the chest down to a horizontal rod that was hinged, sprung-loaded and fitted to a chain wheel just below the saddle.

  To ride this extraordinary new bicycle the rider, having strapped himself in, was advised to ride in the normal way until he had attained ‘a stately speed’. According to the instructions he was then to begin throwing his upper body backwards and forwards ‘rhythmically and with as much violence as possible’. Each violent movement was – in theory – transmitted down the chest rod into the hinged lever and on to the small chain wheel above the back wheel. An extra chain ran from this wheel down to the main chain wheel in the centre of the cycle’s rear wheel.

  Oleszkiewicz organised a trial day in London’s Hyde Park and passers-by were no doubt astonished to see a group of cyclists apparently sufferi
ng from epileptic fits as they whizzed along by the Serpentine. The experiment was not a success, however, as two cyclists fell off the back of their machines, several suffered extreme motion sickness and none could discern any increase in their speed. Nothing daunted, Oleszkiewicz went on to try his hand at man-powered flying machines.

  BETTING ON A GOLF BALL

  1889

  The clubs of St James’s are the last bastion of old-fashioned British elitism. You won’t find a name plate on the front door of any London club for that would be rather vulgar and might attract the wrong sort; Brooks’s doesn’t even have a number.

  All the members of the Carlton Club, Brooks’s and White’s are establishment figures – politicians, bishops, members of the aristocracy. Every member will have been educated at an expensive public school in Britain and their general attitudes have probably changed little since the days of empire.

  But if London clubs are reactionary today they were far more so in former times. In its day the now vanished Almack’s Assembly Rooms (essentially a club) was far more exclusive than any club still with us. Almack’s at one time or other refused to admit both the Duke of Wellington (appallingly badly dressed) and the Prince Regent (arriving too late in the evening). Almack’s rules were laid down by a committee of half a dozen aristocratic women – an extremely odd arrangement given that most clubs fought tooth and nail well into the second half of the twentieth century to avoid having to admit women at all.

  Brooks’s and White’s were famous in earlier times for their bizarre obsession with strange bets. At Brooks’s someone once took bets on whether or not a waiter at a nearby club had been to Eton and was the son of a bishop. The bets were taken and it turned out that the waiter had indeed been to Eton and was indeed a bishop’s son.

  It is said that when a man collapsed on the steps of White’s the members immediately started betting on whether he would survive or not; even more bizarrely a member in the late 1880s took bets on whether or not he could hit a golf ball all the way from the Royal Exchange to the club’s front door. The members took bets on whether it could be done in fewer than one thousand hits. The member who took the wager achieved the feat in a little over two hundred and seventy hits.

  VIOLINIST HIT BY FISH

  1890

  It’s now quite common in London to see geese flying overhead or swans; even, occasionally, a rarity such as a cormorant. Along the Thames right into the heart of the city herons now stalk the shallows and various wildlife bodies tell us that owls roost in Parliament Square while kestrels hover above the Commercial Road.

  In the nineteenth century things were very different, as pollution caused by millions of coal fires – not to mention heavy industry – meant there was far less wildlife than today.

  But having said that, London’s bigger parks have always provided a haven for wildlife, which is why reports of ducks wandering across Kensington High Street with their ducklings coming along behind were always quite common.

  Far less common was the bizarre wildlife encounter in Kensington reported in a Victorian newspaper.

  Miss Charlotte Wadham, a young and attractive violinist, was walking home one autumn evening after what the delightfully old-fashioned newspaper reporter described as ‘a musical engagement involving the celebrated Mr Bach’. She was halfway up Kensington Church Street when she was struck by what she later described to the newspaper as ‘a terrific blow to the side of the head’. In fact the bump was so hard that she was knocked unconscious for a few moments.

  One of the witnesses who helped the injured woman into a local house where brandy was administered (much, apparently, to the delight of Miss Wadham) described an extraordinary circumstance that almost certainly accounted for the knockout blow. When the witness had run up to the prostrate Miss Wadham he spotted a large fish lying on the pavement nearby. Being a fisherman he knew that this was not the sort of fish one buys at a fishmonger. It was in fact a roach, a common British freshwater fish, but completely inedible. The witness told the newspaper that at first he could not understand how the fish came to be lying in the street, but in helping the injured woman to her feet he noticed something very odd indeed. The woman’s head and the shoulder of her coat were dusted here and there with fish scales. The scales were without question from the dead roach found at the scene.

  When the newspaper reporter compiled his report on the incident he quoted a professor of zoology who stated that Miss Wadham was almost certainly felled by a roach dropped by a passing bird, possibly a heron or cormorant.

  Miss Wadham’s violin, much to her relief, was unharmed.

  WHY EROS IS ALL WRONG

  1893

  Londoners often take absolutely no notice of correct terminology. Just because something has an official name doesn’t mean it won’t end up with a nickname (often an irreverent nickname) – Cleopatra’s Needle, for example, has nothing to do with Cleopatra at all but calling it Cleopatra’s Needle added an air of romance and the name stuck.

  The statue of Eros in Piccadilly is rather similar given that it has absolutely nothing to do with Eros at all. In fact everything about this small, world-famous statue in the centre of Piccadilly is odd. For a start it is made from aluminium, one of the worst metals to withstand the British climate. Then its cupid-style bow is all wrong – bows of this type were strung on the opposite side. As if that were not enough the statue is also facing the wrong way.

  The story of this most bizarre statue begins with a fountain built at public expense in memory of one of London’s great philanthropists – the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, after whom Shaftesbury Avenue is named. Shaftesbury spent much of his life and fortune trying to clothe, feed and educate the poor.

  The money for the fountain was quickly raised and then some bright spark suggested it should have a statue on top. The money for the statue came pouring in and Alfred Gilbert (1854–1934) was commissioned to design it. Gilbert chose to portray the angel of Christian charity, which is what the statue actually is, but the telltale bow made Londoner’s immediately christen it Eros, the god of Love.

  The statue was designed to aim its arrow up Shaftesbury Avenue (with which Shaftesbury had been most closely associated) and although it has faced in a number of different directions over the years it has never, ever faced the right way. No one knows why.

  The statue was put up and the fountains turned on in 1893 but the basin into which the water fell was too small and the force of water too great – passers-by were soaked and the fountain had to be redesigned almost immediately.

  Alfred Gilbert, though now largely forgotten, was hugely influential in the 1880s, but he was as eccentric and bohemian as the statue he designed. He argued about every stage of the work, hated the final result (particularly the fountain on which his sculpture stood) and told the people who’d commissioned him to make the statue that they should take it down, melt it ‘and make it into pence to give the unfortunate people who nightly find a resting place on the Thames Embankment to the everlasting shame and disgrace of the greatest metropolis of the world’.

  Often short of a penny himself, Gilbert accepted every commission offered to him but hardly ever completed them, simply because he had taken on too much. He eventually had to flee the country or risk being imprisoned for debt.

  For the first half-century of its life Eros became an unofficial market place – every day throughout the season flower girls gathered here to sell their wares. They were never removed and were in fact much loved – but after the war, for reasons no one has ever quite been able to fathom, they never returned and the statue is now simply a place where every tourist must have his or her photograph taken.

  A RIVER FLYING THROUGH THE AIR

  1895

  Sloane Square Station now finds itself in one of London’s smartest districts. It lies at one end of what was London’s first bus route – buses ran from Sloane Square up Sloane Street to Knightsbridge and back again a distance of less than a mile – but the tube station
is nothing out of the ordinary. Built at the end of the nineteenth century as part of the District line, it has always served the wealthy residents of Eaton Square and Belgravia. Like so many pioneering railway builders, the men behind the District line were used to overcoming geological and political difficulties, but they were almost stumped by the difficulties surrounding the building of Sloane Square Station.

  When the engineers started work they discovered that a river ran across the path of their proposed railway.

  The long-hidden River Westbourne rises to the northwest of Hyde Park (hence Westbourne Terrace) and originally flowed through Hyde Park, enabling eighteenth-century engineers to build the Serpentine. But where the water flows out of the Knightsbridge end of the Serpentine it once continued down towards Sloane Square and on to the Thames.

  The railway engineers who built Sloane Square Station were temporarily baffled. Eventually they came up with the solution that still makes Sloane Square one of the strangest stations on the whole underground network.

  The engineers built a huge round pipe more than five feet in diameter to carry the River Westbourne over the platforms and railway lines – anyone who gets off at the station today need only look up to see the massive pipe still in position and the river still runs through it.

  Intriguingly it is believed that there may even be a few fish still swimming in the pipe – descendants of the roach, perch and gudgeon that once gathered in the shallows when this was a clean sparkling stream running through open country.

  AN OFFICE FIT FOR THE GODS