by Tom Quinn
1895
Number Two Temple Place, just behind the Embankment near Waterloo Bridge, is one of the most extraordinarily luxurious offices in London. It was built in Portland stone in 1895 by the fabulously wealthy American millionaire William Waldorf Astor (1848–1919).
Astor employed John Loughborough Pearson (1817–1897) as his architect but was absolutely rigid in his insistence that certain types of wood and marble be used and that only the finest craftsmen should be employed for every detail of the work. Virtually every part of the interior – from the ebony columns to the marble and stonework and even the window grilles – was handmade. The cost was astronomical, certainly tens of millions in today’s terms.
Astor even had a gilded copper model of the Santa Maria – the ship in which Columbus discovered America – fixed to a weather vane on the roof and in the courtyard there are two cherubs each holding a telephone receiver to its ear!
All the expense and effort was not designed to produce a fabulous home but an office for just one man!
CROMWELL RELEGATED TO ‘THE PIT’
1895
London has many odd statues and monuments, including the recently erected and rather endearing monument in Park Lane to all the animals that have died in human conflicts – the horses and ponies of the First World War, the glow worms used to read maps by and pigeons used to carry messages.
But the animals’ monument is a recent arrival on the London statue scene. The statue of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) outside Westminster Hall has been there considerably longer and the tale of just how it ended up there is wonderfully odd.
When the idea of a statue to Cromwell was first mooted in 1895 the idea was put forward by the Liberal government led by Lord Rosebery (1847–1929). But in 1895 Rosebery was able to hang on to power only because he was supported in most matters by the Irish Members of Parliament. With their votes the Liberals’ tiny majority in the house was turned into a working majority. The Liberals tried to force a bill through Parliament agreeing funds for the Cromwell statue but all the Irish MPs voted against. The bill was defeated and the Irish were so upset at what the Liberals had tried to do that they stopped voting with them. An election was held and the Tories won – and all because Rosebery had been unwise enough to push a point about a statue!
When the statue idea reared its head again some years later those politicians in favour of it being erected told the Irish that it was to be placed in an area known as ‘the Pit’ – this is the area of lawn well below the walls of Westminster Hall. Considerably lower than the modern street level this is the original level of all the land in this area. The Irish were delighted that the man who had committed countless atrocities in Ireland should be consigned to the Pit and they voted in favour. Cromwell has been in the Pit ever since.
THE WORLD’S ULTIMATE MILITARY MADMAN
1897
London was once described as a hotbed of eccentricity. Much of this reputation undoubtedly stems from the presence since the Middle Ages of large numbers of lawyers, whose success has always been in direct proportion to their ability to baffle and bamboozle the public.
Military men have also been famously strange, but among the very strangest has to be Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle, who spent much of his life in London chasing his superiors through the corridors of the Ministry of Defence.
Wintle was born in 1897 in Russia where his father was employed as a diplomat. In spite of his Russian birth, or perhaps because of it, Wintle always claimed that he got down on his knees every night before he went to bed and thanked God for making him an Englishman and a Londoner: being an Englishman was, he said, ‘the highest responsibility as well as the greatest honour’.
He was besotted by the idea of Englishness and utterly biased against every other nation, but his European upbringing meant that he spoke German and French ‘at all times of the day’ and was steeped in the culture of western and central Europe.
During his first stay in England with an aunt in Clapham, south London, when he was about ten, he developed the great loves of his life: horses, cricket, vegetable marrows, country railway stations and umbrellas. The gift of an umbrella from a famous London maker when he was twelve made him feel he was ‘on the way to becoming a complete English gentleman – it was the apple of my eye’. In fact he was so fond of this umbrella that he slept with it and always left a note in it when he rolled it up which said: ‘This umbrella has been stolen from A. D. Wintle.’
Wintle believed that knowledge of the uses of umbrellas and a proper regard for them was the true mark of a gentleman; umbrellas also lay at the heart of the difference between an Englishman and a Frenchman or a German. ‘The Frenchman gets up in the morning,’ explained Wintle, ‘and consults his barometer. If there is to be no rain he leaves his umbrella at home, sallies forth and gets a drenching.’ The Englishman, by contrast, is too stupid to understand all these barometers and things so he always takes his umbrella with him. But it doesn’t end there, for whatever the circumstances ‘no Englishman ever unfurls his umbrella, which means he gets wet’.
As soon as the First World War started Wintle joined up. On his first day in the trenches the soldier standing next to him was killed. Wintle was so terrified that he stood stock still and then saluted. ‘That did the trick,’ he said later, ‘and within thirty seconds I had again become an English man of action.’ A few months later he narrowly missed being killed himself when a shell blew him off his horse. He lost his left eye and most of his left hand, but he was apparently more concerned about the welfare of his horse and relieved to hear that it was unharmed. When the armistice was signed he noted in his diary: ‘I declare private war on Germany.’ And from that day on he always said that he knew the Germans were merely lying low, and that the First and Second World Wars were parts one and two of the same war; something with which many historians later came to agree.
As part of his campaign to convince officialdom that the war really wasn’t over at all, he returned to London and spent every day for months at a time lobbying Whitehall officials until they could stand it no more and he was posted from central London to Ireland. Disappointed, he nonetheless enjoyed numerous compensations, such as the chance to ride virtually every day.
‘It is impossible to be unhappy on the back of a horse,’ he wrote, adding that, ‘all time spent out of the saddle is wasted.’
Back in London recovering in St Thomas’s Hospital during the 1930s after breaking his leg in a fall, Wintle met Boy (Cedric) Mays, who was to become a lifelong friend. Mays was dangerously ill with mastoiditis and diphtheria in a ward just down the corridor from Wintle. He was not expected to live, but Wintle heard of the young soldier’s plight and visited him. His first words to Mays were: ‘What’s all this nonsense about dying? You know it is an offence for a Royal Dragoon to die in bed. And when you get up, get your hair cut!’ Astonishingly it worked, and Mays recovered. He later said that after Wintle’s order he had been afraid to die.
By 1938 Wintle was working in military intelligence in the heart of Whitehall and driving everyone to distraction with his odd habits and obsessions. He said he couldn’t remain silent in the face of what he saw as his superiors’ incompetence. ‘Our slowness during the year gained at Munich was appalling,’ he claimed, ‘and if our leaders had been deliberate traitors they could not have played Germany’s game better.’ He just could not believe that there were military men and government ministers who still insisted there would be no war.
Once he was proved right and the Second World War began, Wintle made strenuous efforts to see active service, even though by this time he was well into middle age. He went to see his MP and presented himself at medical boards disguising the fact that he only had one eye; but it did no good. He then attempted to get to France by impersonating a senior officer and trying to steal an aeroplane. This led to a court martial after Commodore Boyle, the man Wintle had tried to impersonate, decided to prosecute. Before the trial date was set, however, W
intle visited Boyle in his Ministry of Defence office, waved his gun at him, and told him that he ought to be shot for doing so little. Next morning Wintle was arrested and taken to the Tower of London.
By now the authorities were thoroughly embarrassed by the whole affair and offered Wintle a way out. To their horror he insisted on a trial, which he thought would be great fun. He was found guilty of assault and given a severe reprimand. Back in the saddle he went to North Africa and then, because of his fluency in French and German, he was sent to work undercover in Nazi-occupied France.
At the end of the war Wintle retired and began his last great battle. This time it was on behalf of his sister, Marjorie. She had looked after a certain Kitty Wells, a wealthy elderly relative of Wintle’s, for more than twenty years. When Kitty Wells died it was found that she had left her considerable fortune to her solicitor, Frederick Nye. The will was hugely complex and Wintle believed it had been drawn up by Nye – the main beneficiary – deliberately to cheat Kitty Wells, who would not have been able to understand it when she signed it.
At first Wintle simply wrote to Nye to express his concern. Nye didn’t reply. Undaunted, Wintle began his campaign against the solicitor. He printed gross libels about Nye in the local papers. Still no response. Wintle then kidnapped Nye and took him to a hotel room, removed his trousers, photographed him wearing a paper dunce’s hat, and then turned him out (still trouserless) into the streets.
This was too much. Wintle was arrested, but then that was exactly what he had wanted. He was found guilty of assault and sent to prison, where he was by all accounts enormously popular among guards and inmates. He himself enjoyed the experience enormously. When he was released from Wormwood Scrubs six months later, he again went on the attack. Assisted by Cedric Mays, whom he had brought back to life all those years ago, he took Nye to court. The case bankrupted Wintle but he merely observed that though he was now a pauper he was at least an English pauper.
But Nye had not reckoned with Wintle’s determination. With Mays’ help, Wintle appealed to the House of Lords, spent three days presenting his own case and – to the astonishment of everyone – he won. The Lords argued that if they found it impossible to understand the will, it was fair to assume that when Kitty Wells was persuaded to sign it, she could not have understood it either. This was the first time a layman had represented himself and won his case in the Lords.
Wintle had once said that he’d like Schubert’s Serenade played by the Royal Dragoons at his funeral, and Mays had said he would arrange it. But when Wintle died in 1966, the Dragoons were serving overseas. Nothing daunted, and in a spirit that Wintle would have applauded, Mays fortified himself with the greater part of a bottle of whisky, went into the nave of Canterbury Cathedral, stood to attention, and sang the whole thing on his own.
WOMAN ON A GRAVEYARD MISSION
1897
In the second half of the nineteenth century the British became obsessed with death – furniture became heavier and darker as the century wore on and the cult of death was promoted almost single-handedly by Victoria’s refusal to get over Albert’s demise. In tandem with this a number of eccentric authors spent years studying and writing about the most obscure aspects of death – and in London death did indeed have an obscure and fascinating history.
In medieval London most churches adopted the same system for burials. Compared to later ideas about burial – particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before cremation became acceptable – the medieval system was a good one. Londoners were buried in their parish churchyard but without coffins and without headstones. Generations of gravediggers gradually buried their fellow parishioners before being buried themselves, and the burials moved slowly across from one side of the graveyard to the other. By the time the graveyard was full it was time to go back to the beginning where the first or earliest burial had taken place. The ground was then dug up again for the latest corpses and any bones would be carefully moved into a special section of the church called the charnel house. Because no coffins were used a body would decay completely within ten years – as the gravedigger in Hamlet says, a corpse ‘will last you some eight or nine year’.
But as the centuries passed gravestones became popular and the habit of moving old bones to the charnel house fell out of fashion. Instead, graves were dug deeper with corpses placed one on top of the other to fit them all in. Parish populations grew and the number of burials increased dramatically – so much so that churchyard overcrowding became a serious problem and a serious threat to health. This became much worse when coffins began to be used because the coffins made the bodies last longer. Disturbing old graves became unacceptable unless they were the graves of the poor.
In other parts of the world by the early nineteenth century similar problems had already been dealt with – cremation was encouraged and huge out-of-town cemeteries established. It took several serious outbreaks of cholera and typhoid in London before the authorities finally agreed that city churchyards must be closed to all new burials.
With this history very much in mind the London world of books then produced one of the maddest authors in the history of publishing. Mrs Basil Holmes spent most of her adult life trying to track down and record in great detail every burial ground (and burial!) in London – not an easy task given that in the mid-1800s there were more than five hundred graveyards in central London alone.
The indefatigable Mrs Holmes eventually finished her monumental London Burial Grounds in 1897. In part its publication is testimony to the Victorian obsession with detail, but despite her efforts and a lifetime’s devotion to her research the book has never been republished.
WOOD BARK UNDER THE DISTRICT LINE
1900
When the District line was built beneath the Embankment two of Britain’s most powerful lobbying groups – MPs and the legal profession – were not happy. Other landowners had been forced to accept that the new railway would pass under their land because the might of the railway was such that individual objections were always overruled. They had been similarly overruled in earlier decades as the main overground railways opened up even the most remote parts of the country.
But the members of the Inns of Court, from whose ranks MPs, ministers and ultimately members of the House of Lords tend to come, put their collective foot down.
They told the railway engineers that they would not allow trains to run nor tunnels to be dug beneath Parliament Square or beneath the Inns of Court unless extra precautions were taken to ensure that there was no noise and no vibration once the trains began to run.
The railway company knew it was up against some of the most powerful vested interests in the country so they agreed to include a thick layer of finely chopped tree bark immediately beneath the railway track running through the tunnels, but only along those sections running through Parliament Square and through the Temple. Even today if you take the District line you will notice that somehow the train runs smoother and more quietly under the MPs and the lawyers.
A REAL TRAIN IN THE THEATRE
1904
The Coliseum at the bottom of St Martin’s Lane near Trafalgar Square is arguably London’s strangest theatre. Why, for example, is it called the Coliseum and not the Colosseum, which would be the correct spelling? Numerous odd stories explain the discrepancy but the best is that the builder of the Coliseum, Sir Oswald Stoll (1866–1942), was such a terrifying personality that when he scribbled the name he wanted for his new theatre on the back of an envelope, his staff, who realised it was a misspelling, were too terrified to tell him and so the name stuck.
Another story says that Stoll deliberately chose an odd spelling to make his theatre unique. In later life when he was challenged about the misspelling he always insisted that he knew what he was doing and chose the eccentric spelling so that no one would confuse his wonderful new building with ‘that mouldly old ruin in Rome’.
Apart from its odd name the Coliseum is odd in other ways – it is London’s
largest theatre and was deliberately built to be bigger than its nearest rival, the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, which Stoll thought a rather inferior piece of work.
The Coliseum was also revolutionary in design: it had a lift that astonished playgoers because it took them to their boxes and to the circle and upper circle; it had a revolving stage – the first ever seen in London – and it had a roof garden and three restaurants.
The Coliseum also had its own post box and its own railway, the latter designed to take VIPs from the door to their seats!
BEING NICE TO ALLAH
1905
There is a popular idea that trying to save old buildings – our built heritage to use the current jargon – is somehow a modern phenomenon. In fact for centuries the public has rallied to save much-loved old buildings faced with destruction by corrupt or uncaring officialdom. The unforgivable destruction of London’s last Jacobean mansion – the celebrated Northumberland House at Charing Cross – is a case in point. This extraordinary building, largely unaltered since its completion in 1610, was threatened with demolition in 1886 to build, of all things, a road. Despite protests from tens of thousands of Londoners and any number of historical societies the house was pulled down and a dull road – what else could a road be? – was created in its place. But this act of municipal vandalism was only one in a huge number of similar decisions that culminated in wholesale destruction – particularly in the City – in the 1960s when the last few remaining medieval and renaissance buildings were destroyed by Corporation of London officials.
When Northumberland House was demolished another beautiful and rare medieval survival was also faced with destruction – this was Wych Alley, an area of medieval houses on the site of what is now the Aldwych. Wych Alley lasted a little longer than Northumberland House, lasting in fact until 1905.