London Urban Legends

by Scott Wood

  Kent goes on to repeat another story which appeared in The Times on 19 August 1950. It told of a Londoner visiting New York for the first time, who was early for meeting a friend. He nervously took the express elevator to the top of the skyscraper his appointment was in and was rewarded with an amazing vista of the city from the roof. Full of admiration, the Londoner told his friend about the view but the friend, a busy ‘New Yorker born and bred’, smiled superciliously and snapped that he didn’t have the time ‘for such rubber-necking’.

  The Londoner didn’t back down and told his friend that he should be ashamed of not taking advantage of the fine things on his doorstep. The New Yorker, with a broader smile, asked his Londoner pal how the view was from the top of St Paul’s. It was the Londoner’s turn to smile, the story says, as he had passed the cathedral every day on the way to work and had never gone beyond the Whispering Gallery.

  Kent doesn’t spot this as an urban legend; the term and concept was not around when Kent was writing Walks in London. He does point out that his first story of the Snowdonian interviewee had been published, by him, some time before the New York version appeared. Perhaps other versions existed before the Snowdonian story that tells of the busy lives of Londoners and the things they do not get to do.

  Neil? Kneel!

  On 1 September 1983, Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith recounted a story of American tourists visiting the Houses of Parliament on a holiday in London. The story goes that they encountered Sir Quentin Hogg, Lord Hailsham, the Keeper of the Woolsack, ‘resplendent in the gold and scarlet robes of his office topped by a ceremonial wig’. The pomp of the Houses of Parliament is intimidating to Londoners, so the effect on a corridor of American tourists by this visitation must have been great. Then Lord Hailsham sees, beyond the tourists, his friend the Hon. Neil Matten MP. He shouts his friend’s name: ‘Neil! Neil!’

  The crowd of tourists fall into embarrassed silence and then fall to their knees.

  While this story very clearly illustrates American confusion and awkwardness when faced with British parliamentary pomp, it does not illustrate life in the Palace of Westminster. There is no Keeper of the Woolsack in UK Parliament; Sir Quintin Hogg was Lord Chancellor, who sits on the woolsack in the House of Lords and is custodian of the Great Seal, a symbol of the sovereign’s approval of state documents. The Lord Chancellor is responsible for the Great Seal unless a Keeper of the Great Seal is appointed. Parliamentary process can baffle anyone beyond its sphere, so there is no shame in confusing the details, but it does put doubt on the story.

  There has also never been a Neil Matten in the House of Commons. Neil Marten was the Conservative MP for Banbury between 1959 and 1983. According to Andrew Roth’s The MPs’ Chart, Marten was a ‘pro-commonwealth, anti-EEC … witty, sharp, tense, neat, balding, wartime agent’. Hogg and Marten were Conservatives together and certainly knew each other. The story, with its confused titles and ‘scrawled on the back of a beer mat’ – misspelling both men’s names – has the air of a story told verbally, hastily written down and then repeated without checking any details.

  In his Los Angeles Times column, Jack Smith was using this story as a way of tracing an American urban legend. A tale titled ‘The Elevator Incident’ by Jan Harold Brunvand in The Choking Doberman and Other ‘New’ Urban Legends, describes a small group of women getting into an elevator in New York. A man gets into the elevator with them and makes the command to ‘sit’. The women sit, causing the man to apologise, as he was talking to the dog. At this point the man is revealed to be a celebrity who treats the women to dinner.

  The Waters of Senate House

  The imposing University College of London building Senate House keeps going below ground level. Standing at its base, in several places, is a drop showing lower levels of the building created to bring natural light into the basement levels. This gully has water gushing out of it in numerous places, giving it the name of ‘the moat’. Researching Senate House folklore for her project ‘The Ghosts of Senate House’, the artist Sarah Sparks recorded stories of a spring, lake or pond beneath the building. John Stone, the Building Services Technical Officer, took her into a lower basement to show the source of the water.

  Water is flowing through a fissure in the wall and collecting on the floor. The duck boards dotted along the tunnel serve as stepping stones and were placed there when the building was first constructed showing that the water was always present. A channel two inches by two inches has been carved into the stone floor to allow the water to flow into a sump pumping the water up to The Moat above.

  She then goes on to speculate that:

  Geologists, employed to investigate the water, suggest that a spring up to a mile away has been diverted by building work however, this does not account for the fact that the water has been present to a greater or lesser extent since the buildings construction. I speculate that this water may originate from one of the lost rivers of London, possibly the Fleet. John agrees that there may be some truth in this citing that recent excavations of North Block Green unearthed an old conduit.

  The Fleet is a mile or two away from Senate House, slurping under Farringdon Road and Farringdon Street through the Fleet Sewer. Speaking to Sarah about the water some months later, she told me an investigation had found that the water was coming from a leaking water main and not some lost spring or river. However, by September 2013 the leak has yet to be found.

  The water has been there since before Senate House. Charles Holden, the architect, reported that one of the few problems he had with the construction of the building was a large pocket of water in the building’s foundations. It was decided it should be left, as pumping it out could destabilise surrounding buildings as the ground moved to fill the gap left by it. The joists are said to pass through the water and into the clay beneath.

  Londoners love the idea of our lost rivers, so it may not be surprising that another one is being used as a way of drawing people into a building. In his book London’s Lost Rivers: A Walker’s Guide, Tom Bolton described the River Tyburn’s appearance in the basement of Gray’s Antique Market on Davies Mews off South Molton Lane. The market owners moved into the building in 1977 and found the basement flooded. Claiming the water was the Tyburn, they channelled it into a twee model river with a small bridge and goldfish. The owners of the building take their attraction seriously, putting signs up instructing visitors to not touch the waters of this working river. Tom is not so sure, pointing out that while the Tyburn does flow under South Molton Lane, the river flows through a sewer so would not be fit to be channelled through a building. The water is possibly from groundwater springs that may have fed the Tyburn before it was buried and enclosed.

  8

  THE SUICIDAL SCULPTOR

  * * *

  In London, starving workers dine

  With old Duke Humphrey; as for wine,

  ’Twas made by Christ, in ‘Auld Lang Syne’

  But now he’s turned teetotaler.

  Woe in London Brimstone Ballads

  * * *

  Unknown Stone

  If we can be certain of one thing in London, it must be our statues. To be set in stone suggests confidence and permanence, and London’s representations of its great and good must be a solid link back to the best of our shared past. ‘Dining with Duke Humphrey’ is a sweet but sad expression from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London which means, in short, to be too poor to be able to afford dinner. The homeless and hungry lost scholars would congregate by a memorial of the hospitable Duke Humphrey of Gloucester (1391–1447) in the grounds of St Paul’s Cathedral.

  This event becomes sadder still when one realises that the cenotaph at the centre of this crowd is not for ‘Good Duke Humphrey’ but Sir John Beauchamp. London’s oldest outdoor indigenous statue (not counting anything ancient, lifted and shipped in from Egypt) is of King Alfred the Great, a bearded and caped figure who is believed to have once stood in the Palace of Westminster and who is now slummin
g it in Trinity Square in Southwark.

  However, the 1910 book Return of Outdoor Memorials in London by the London County Council could not find any reference to who the statue might be, and lists it as Alfred with a question mark by it. The book notes: ‘The Secretary of Trinity House states that the Corporation have endeavoured to ascertain the facts in connection with the origin of the statue, but without success.’ Understandably, due to the blank drawn about its origins, the statue’s status as London’s oldest is uncertain too. King Alfred is thought to date back to the fourteenth century. The statute of Queen Elizabeth I that stands on the façade of St Dunstan-in-the-West can also claim to be the oldest, as it was erected during the Queen’s reign, either in or around 1586. Nearby are the statues of London’s mythical founder, King Lud and his son Tenvantius, who may have first been erected on the gates at Ludgate in 1586.

  Another mystery memorial is the ‘Eagle Pillar’ that stands in Orme Square, just off Bayswater. No one can remember what the double pillar with an eagle on the top is there to represent. The theories are that it was erected by a grateful Mr Orme, who made a fortune selling gravel to Russia; that it is a French eagle in honour of Louis Napoleon’s stay on the square, and/or that it commemorates the French Embassy, which once stood at No. 2 Orme Square. Or the eagle could in fact be a phoenix for a fire insurance company; the Geograph website notes that a ‘nearby house has birds looking like phoenixes in its frontage’. The final guess in Return of Outdoor Memorials of London is a bit fed up with all the rest; it merely suggests that ‘the column is not a memorial at all, but simply an ornament picked up in a builder’s yard’.

  Suicidal Sculptors

  If we are uncertain about London’s oldest stone statue, we’re fairly certain that our oldest bronze statue, cast in 1633, is of King Charles I on horseback, which now stands at one end of the Mall by Trafalgar Square. The statue itself was cast just before the start of the Civil War in 1642, and on the outbreak of the war it was taken from its original spot on King Street, Covent Garden, and hidden in the crypt of the church of St Paul. During the interregnum, it was sold to a brazier named John Rivett, who was given orders to break it up. The canny Rivett broke the statue up by making and selling nutcrackers, thimbles and spoons made from the bronze of the dead king’s statue. When the Restoration arrived, Rivett was able to provide the new Royalists with the fully intact statue that he had in storage.

  This could be the urban legend about the statue of King Charles, but there is another attached which has proven to have far greater longevity and pedigree. In a letter dated 6 December 1725, Cesar de Saussure, from Lausanne, encountered the statue and recorded the story of the sculptor who had been ‘almost beside himself with joy and pride’ at his creation. However, on taking a closer look at the equestrian statue he realised the sculptor had forgotten to include the girths of the saddle (the strap or belt that goes around the horse that keeps saddle and rider on). The sculptor was so distraught to see his error set in bronze under the king’s image that he hanged himself. ‘This man was without doubt an Englishman’ spat de Saussure, ‘this trait depicts his energetic character.’

  A community constable told Jeremy Harte of the Folklore Society that the reason the fourth plinth on Trafalgar Square is empty is because a huge equestrian sculpture was planned to be placed on it, and the sculptor was confident it would be his masterwork. The day was set for the unveiling, the sculpture waited under a huge sheet, dignitaries gathered and a band played for the ceremony. The sheet was removed and the crowd began to laugh because the sculptor had left the stirrups off his masterwork. The sculptor was so humiliated he ran down Northumberland Avenue and threw himself into the Thames.

  This story has legs, six of them. It has also travelled over to the statue of the Duke of Wellington outside the Royal Exchange in the City. In a letter in the June 2002 issue of FLS News, John Spencer half-remembers having the statue’s lack of stirrups pointed out to him by his grandfather and being told that the sculptor only realised his mistake when the king arrived to unveil the statue. Overcome with shame and embarrassment, the sculptor skulked off and shot himself. A year later, John was looking at the statue of George III in Windsor Great Park and overheard a middle-aged man explaining to a boy that the sculptor realised too late that the statue was stirrup-less and so committed suicide.

  In reality, the sculptor of the Charles I statue was not an energetic Englishman, but a fellow Frenchman to de Saussure named Hubert Le Sueur. As well as the equestrian bronze, Le Sueur cast busts for England’s royalty and aristocracy. Once the English Civil War began, his commissions naturally dried up and he moved back to France to work. He vanished into obscurity afterwards, long after the Charles I statue had been unveiled. The sculptor of the George III statue at Windsor Park portrayed him riding like a Roman, and the Romans did not use stirrups.

  The fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square is not empty because of a shameful event involving stirrups. The original plan was for an equestrian statue of William IV to be placed there, but the plan was abandoned due to lack of funds. Another rumour about the plinth is that it is now reserved until after the death of Elizabeth II, so a statue of her can be placed there.

  I have heard the legend told about the Maiwand Lion that stands in Forbury gardens in Reading, down the road from Windsor. The sculptor, George Blackall Simonds, is said to have killed himself on realising (after it had been completed) that the lion, one of the world’s largest cast-iron statues, was incorrectly represented. Its stance is said to look more like a domestic cat walking than that of a lion.

  Farther afield is the story of another enthusiastic English sculptor who threw himself into the Danube when he heard that the lions he had designed for the Chain Bridge in Budapest had been cast without tongues. These Hungarian lions are stone, not metal, and were certainly carved with tongues; it’s just that they can only be seen from above.

  Backward Buildings

  The eighteenth-century Fort George, on the coast between Nairn and Inverness in Scotland, was apparently designed to be invisible from the sea, but when the architect rode out to view this on completion (why not before?) he could still see one small piece of the fort and so reached for a handy pistol nearby to shoot himself.

  The most famous error of this type is the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, which is said to have been built the wrong way round with a modest entrance for the public at one end and two imposing turrets for the back entrance. It is said that when the architect discovered the error, he leapt to his death from the building. In truth, of course, the building had not been built backwards and the architect probably does not haunt his cursed building. Frank Crocker, however, is said to haunt the hotel he built on Aberdeen Place in NW8. It was built not the wrong way round but in the wrong place. Crocker believed that the terminus for the Great Central Railway would arrive at St John’s Wood, and so he went about building the Crown pub and hotel on Aberdeen Place between 1898 and 1899, in anticipation of the masses. It was a fine building with a marble bar and fireplace and guest rooms with imitation Jacobean plaster. Adding another layer to the myth is the Shady Old Lady blog, which says the sly architect of the building managed to get his dig in by including a bust of the Emperor Caracalla in the pub, a Roman emperor known for his ‘architectural excesses and his complete insanity’. Caracalla is remembered for his massacres and the exuberant public baths he is said to have commissioned in Rome. However, the London terminus for the line ended at Marylebone, not St John’s Wood. And so, ruined financially with nothing to show except a grand hotel with no customers, Crocker jumped out of a high window and the pub’s name changed from the Crown to Crockers Folly. The Doctor Johnson pub in Barkingside, east London, has the same story to explain its size: it was built to service the users of a new road in and out of London which never arrived.

  As Antony Clayton points out in The Folklore of London, the Doctor Johnson pub is so large because it is an ‘improved’ public house to serve the growing
housing estates on the edge of London. The Crown Hotel, aka ‘Crockers Folly’, was completed about the same time as Marylebone station, and so was not positioned on Aberdeen Place by mistake. While Frank Crocker died relatively early at the age of 41, his death was of natural causes.

  The sculptor or architect’s mistake, followed by suicide, is a story that must always be hanging in the air, waiting to attach itself to a large building or statue or when something is out of place or missing, like Charles I’s saddle girth. The narrative is then inevitable: the grand project, some hubristic pride, the realisation of the error and then the shameful ending.

  9

  THE DEVILS OF CORNHILL

  * * *

  Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,

  Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,

  Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh

  There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

  W.H. Auden, The Secret Is Out

  * * *

  THE BEST WAY to find the devils of Cornhill is to walk north from London Bridge, up the west side of Gracechurch Street, through the city of London toward Liverpool Street station. Just before you get to the corner shared with Cornhill is one side of St Peter upon Cornhill Church. Its white stone is caked with a layer of grime and three tousle-haired cherubim, with wings round their necks like ruffs, gazing aloof and detachedly across the street. You then turn from Gracechurch Street into Cornhill, glance up, and leering down at you is a red terracotta demon with a dog-like body and a yowling, distended maw. It also has breasts, and a demonic face, its arms and chest are human. On the apex of the building crouches another larger demon, smirking to himself as he watches the passers-by on Cornhill. He looks as if he is preparing to launch himself onto an unsuspecting city worker or passing vicar below. It’s a busy street, but I suspect few people feel comfortable loitering at this particular spot.