by Scott Wood
By 1914, in the prelude to the First World War, it was London’s German community who had become the enemies within as London’s most violent riots since the Gordon Riots destroyed German shops and homes. The 1914 issue of The Railway Magazine prompted a police investigation of the abandoned King William Street tube station after suggesting it was being used as a base and weapons store for German infiltrators.
The Nazis’ Favourite Landmarks
The Blitz brought new stories. As people died and whole neighbourhoods were devastated, stories swirled around London landmarks to explain how and when they survived. Nelsons Column still stood because Adolf Hitler had taken an interest in it. On his successful occupation of London, he had planned to carry the symbol of British naval might to Germany as a way of underlining his victory.
The 1930s tower of Senate House, University of London’s imposing base in Bloomsbury, survived because, according to Graham Greene, it was used as a marker for bombers approaching Kings Cross and St Pancras stations. Senate House was also earmarked to be the base Hitler planned to use as the German central office for ruling Britain after their invasion.
The 1937 Art Deco block of flats Du Cane Court in Balham is quite pleased of its reputation as Hitler’s possible home or HQ in London. The Führer even placed spies within the building. Like Senate House, German air crews would use the Du Cane Court as a handy landmark: ‘It was turn left at Du Cane Court and then head home for Germany.’ Du Cane Court is proud enough of the legend to put the story up on its website but also sheepishly ponders whether the block’s architecture may really have attracted the genocidal leader; but ‘true or not, the flats were quite an innovation at the time’. Antony Clayton, in The Folklore of London, uncovered stories that the architect of Du Cane Court was a Nazi sympathiser who planned to have the building make a swastika in the middle of South London when viewed from the air. This takes us back to the stealth swastika of the kindly prisoner-of-war German soldier and his gardening surprise (See ‘The Hidden Insult’ here).
Some South London landmarks that were removed included the golden Goddess of Gaiety statue at the top of Wimbledon Theatre, which was taken down in 1940 and not replaced until 1992, as it was thought to be an excellent guide to German bombers. On the edge of London, and on the top of a hill, St Helier Hospital in Carshalton was painted black during the Second World War so it would not be used as a landmark for incoming German planes.
All of these landmarks fared better than the north tower of the ruined Crystal Palace. Having survived the fire of 1936, which destroyed the rest of the glass building, the tower was destabilised and blown up with dynamite in 1941 because many, including William Kent in his Lost Treasures of London book, thought it was being used as a navigation point for German bombers. Other reasons included to prevent it falling in a bombing raid; presumably a controlled explosion was safer, and the tower’s steel was needed for the war effort. This was the line used in a British Pathé news film of the demolition, called Crystal Palace Tower – The End. People were sceptical about the gathering of scrap metal and park railings during the Second World War, thinking that the metal was not and could not have been used for weapons and vehicles. The collecting of metal was thought to be a morale-boosting exercise and the metal was used as ships’ ballast, dumped in the Thames Estuary or taken out to sea to be dumped by Canning Town dockers in such great amounts that incoming ships had to be guided in by pilots because the quantities of metal were affecting their compasses.
Another building thought to be spared by the bombers was Winchester Cathedral, as the Nazi propaganda broadcaster Lord Haw-Haw was said to have gone to the school by the cathedral and had asked Field Marshall Goring to spare it in the raids. Another rumour told of Hitler planning to be crowned as king at Winchester Cathedral once Germany was victorious. A retort to the Winchester rumour said, ‘Any Coronation dream would obviously have Westminster Abbey as its centre.’
The removal and camouflage of prominent landmarks was perhaps a sensible precaution before and during the Blitz. On the eve of the Second World War, London was preparing for sustained aerial bombardment and for mass burials, stocking up on cardboard coffins, for example; London County Council envisaged mass burials in lime pits. The predictions for an aerial bombardment on London were based on 700 tons of high explosive being released with the casualty rates of 175,000 per week. The destruction of towers, the removal of bright objects from theatres and painting landmark buildings black therefore seems feasible. The estimates were far greater than the actual, still terrible, death toll of the war: the total bombs dropped on Britain were an estimated 64,393 tons, killing 51,509 people.
There is another factor. The architecture of Du Cane Court and Senate House must have linked them to the Nazis and Hitler in the minds of frightened and angry Londoners. Ironically, Senate House was designed to symbolise the future world, having survived the First World War, and it was actually intended to be an international beacon of learning: ‘It must not be a replica from the Middle Ages.’ Perhaps these rumours of Hitler’s interest evolved out of Londoners’ suspicions at the modernism of the architecture of Du Cane Court and Senate House and their resemblance more to the Reichstag building than to the British Museum or Natural History Museum. With enemy planes flying overhead and spies rumoured to be everywhere, the Second World War must have felt like no other time to London civilians. Perhaps all of these legends come from Londoners feeling enemy eyes directly on the landmarks of their lives.
The One and the Many
An earlier British folk tale took place in Dorset and was recorded in 1930. A West Lulworth man remembered a story told to him by a 104-year-old resident of the town, who apparently witnessed Napoleon arriving at Lulworth Cove in August 1804. He arrived at the cove with a companion seeking a place to land for an invasion, but was heard to mutter ‘Impossible!’ before ‘folding his maps and returning to his boat’. Emperor Bonaparte personally taking the time out to inspect land sites on enemy territory seems as likely as Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler’s deputy, braving anti-aircraft fire to take a look over London.
Both stories have a possible origin in fiction. Thomas Hardy claimed to have invented Napoleon’s trip to Dorset for a short story in 1882 and was amazed to hear the story repeated back to him by friends. Stories of Göring’s midnight flights over London may have been inspired by a fake news report that Göring, who was an ace fighter pilot during the First World War, had piloted a plane over London on 15 September 1941 escorted by two bombers.
However, I think there may be more happening within these legends than just a misinformed regurgitation of fiction. Mother Teresa is quoted as saying, ‘If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.’ She was thinking of human responses to suffering: people will give more for an individual rather than a group of people. We are interested in times of war. These stories reflect how people think and feel during a war with an invasive force.
With an event the scale of the Second World War, it would be impossible to imagine the thousands of troops involved in the planned attacks on us. To think of their equipment, how it is maintained and who supplies this aggressive organisation, it is far easier to look to the head of the enemy, the very top, and imagine them taking a very close personal interest in our homes, the beaches they could land on, the buildings they could live in. Somehow, this – Adolf Hitler picking his offices and deciding where he would be crowned – is far easier to imagine and respond to than one nation moving against another.
16
CRIMINAL LORE
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Adults tell fairy tales, to adults, although the maudlinized
and castrated samples in print belie the fact.
Richard Dorson, Folklore and Face
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Beware all Lady Drivers
It is just before Christmas 2003 and Antony Clayton was checking his email. He found the following warning sent to him on 17 December with the su
bject line ‘Danger when Filling Up at Petrol Stations’:
Beware all lady drivers. This is a West End Central Police Crime Prevention information message providing details of local crime and disorder issues. If you have information about any crimes mentioned please contact the Crime Desk at West End Central Police Station on … . We need your help to make Westminster a safer environment.
A woman stopped at a pay at a petrol pump station to get fuel. Once she filled her petrol tank and after paying at the pump and started to leave, the voice of the attendant inside came over the speaker. He told her that something had happened with her card. The lady was confused because the transaction showed complete and approved. She relayed that to him and was getting ready to leave but the attendant, once again, urged her to come in to pay or there would be trouble. She proceeded to go inside and started arguing with attendant about his threat. He told her to calm down and listen carefully. He said that while she was filling her car, a guy slipped into the back seat of her car on the other side and the attendant had already called the police. She became frightened and looked out in time to see her car door open and the guy slip out.
One would hope that warnings from Westminster police would not contain so many typographical errors and banal attempts at drama. The message concludes with a warning:
The report is that the new gang initiation thing is to bring back a woman and her car. One way they are doing this is crawling into the women’s cars while they are filling with petrol or at stores at night-time.
Be extra careful going to and from your car at night. If at all possible do not go alone.
1. ALWAYS lock your car doors, even if you are gone for just a second.
2. Check underneath your car when approaching it and check in the back before getting in.
3. Always be aware of your surroundings and of other individuals in your general vicinity, particularly at night.
Antony Clayton got to the end of the warning and knew just what to do. An author of a number of books on London, including The Folklore of London, he submitted the dread message to the Folklore Society News (FLS News) and it appeared in Issue 43, June 2004. The legend itself spread, and arrived to a different reader pretending to be an email sent by Harrow Council Civic Centre which concluded: ‘This is a real warning! The alert originated from a London company who had a female employee involved in the above instance.’
In some ways the gang member hiding in a woman’s car has a similar plot to the corpse on the tube urban legend. A woman is travelling alone at night; she is in danger, but is unaware of it until a man distracts her by frightening or annoying her until she learns the truth.
There may be, along with the corpse on the tube, some subconscious concern or disapproval of women travelling alone in the urban night, with all its strange but very real dangers. Women are still thought of as more vulnerable than men, so to be plausible these stories may choose a lone woman as the target of the anonymous nocturnal predator.
This is a legend we share with America. Snopes has collected versions via email in 1999 and 2000, and in 2001 a version very much like the London one appeared, minus the Westminster police contact details but with the warning: ‘THIS IS TOO SERIOUS ... DO NOT DELETE. PLEASE PASS IT ON!!’
By 2004 the Dublin version named a gang, the ‘Westies’, who were carrying out these surreptitious attacks, and the message warned that the abducted woman would be taken at knifepoint and gang raped.
The gang initiation aspect is not part of the story yet, but it is easy to see how it became linked. The idea of gang initiation feeds many urban legends, the most popular being the warning to never flash your car headlights back if a strange car flashes them at you. The car has a would-be gang member inside who needs to murder the first driver to flash back at them in order to join. Snopes has a version of the story from 1999, where hidden gang members hamstring a woman and ‘remove a body part’ to gain entry to the gang. The victim is always a woman. In the 1998 version the attacker is a serial killer, still coasting on the 1990s wave of cultural interest in the mind of serial murderers which drew people to films such as The Silence of the Lambs. Despite Hannibal Lector still haunting the cinema and television, the fear of criminal gangs was soon to sweep the serial killer out of the popular imagination and out of this urban legend.
Like the male rescuer in the corpse on the tube legend, there is a suggested element of danger from the rescuer, until he speaks to the woman (in the earliest version he speaks to the woman’s husband when she gets home but happily urban legends have moved on since 1967) and tells her of the dangerous stranger in the back of her car. In The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1983), Brunvald writes: ‘In more imaginative sets of these legends the person who spots the dangerous man in the back is a gas station attendant who pretends that a ten dollar bill offered by the woman driver is counterfeit. With this ruse he gets her safely away from her car before calling the police.’
As we have seen in the early twenty-first century London version of this urban legend, with its faulty credit card, the story is the same but the props change over time.
Child Abductors through History
Another widely travelled abduction legend made it into the FLS News No.37 June 2002 issue. Correspondent Susan Hathaway heard from a work colleague that his wife’s ‘friend’s daughter’s college friend’ was the mother of a child who had gone missing in a John Lewis store near London. Security was alerted and all doors were sealed to ensure the child did not wander out of the building. A few minutes later the child was found emerging from the toilets with a different coloured dress, a new short haircut and a group of strangers herding her. The Mumsnet internet forum has a thread for sharing and disarming scare stories including this child-danger story. Locations for it included an east London Tesco, a Co-op on the Isle of Wight and other shops in Bristol, Tokyo or Gloucester.
An earlier pre-email version had a ten-year-old boy, not the more usual pre-teenage girl, being accosted in a shopping centre toilet by ‘an ethnic gang of youths’ and castrated. Another story has a teenage girl going to the toilet in the restaurant of a large shop only to not return after half an hour. As with the girl with the re-dyed hair, the daughter is found just in time as she is being dragged unconscious out of the loo by two ‘husky women’ – she was being dragged off to be a white slave in the Middle-East.
The version with the castrated boy may have arisen from an earlier generations prejudice against Jewish communities.
The popularity and worldwide dispersal of urban legends involving crime and criminals is easy to imagine. Newspapers in North Wales, Leinster, Shropshire and Plymouth have published denials that child-snatchers are operating in shop toilets in their area. Each story contains a warning about a criminal practice, or the consequence of one moment of a lowered guard.
17
LONDON BLADES
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A Whitechapel Beau: one who dresses with a
needle and thread and undresses with a knife.
Attribute
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Hidden Blades
Back in September 2010 I took part in an artist’s workshop on myth making. I took along a clipping about the dangers of hidden razor blades to illustrate a London version of a popular myth. Two of the group of eight said, ‘Oh, you mean like the hidden razor blades in the water slide at Crystal Palace swimming pool?’ They were more than happy to join in this violent idea of child-slicing with a broader tradition and share their stories. I came away with an addition to an urban myth and the thought that this sort of thing is probably quite normal for an artist’s workshop on myth making, taking place in an abandoned shop at the top of the Elephant and Castle shopping centre.
In his book Urban Legends Uncovered Mark Barber told the same rumour about a nearby waterslide in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. A Surrey chap himself, Barber told of a popular slide called ‘The Black Hole’ that children slid down in complete darkness. In 1985 a rumour persisted that ‘gangs of youths’ were st
opping halfway down the slide and planting razorblades stuck down with chewing gum (for an extra unhygienic twist). A 13-year-old girl received serious injuries on her back and legs from using the slide. The popularity of ‘The Black Hole’ declined, and after a while the park, Barber reports, closed down.
A friend who grew up in south-west London remembered the same rumours being attached to a waterslide in Richmond. Again, it was chewing gum that held the blades in place. A strange message on an email list dedicated to lidos claimed that the ‘Wild Waters’ flume in Richmond Park was closed due to hidden blades injuring sliders and that a ghost known as ‘The Phantom Slider of Richmond’ haunted it, describing it as ‘the most famous flume haunting in the UK’. I am not sure how serious the message on the lido list is. It does pick up the razor-hysteria which has spread far enough across the world that in America, where this legend is repeated, it is told that waterslides in England are banned because they bristled with hidden blades. American readers: this is not true.
In 2008, a 16-year-old worker in a McDonald’s in New Plymouth, New Zealand, was cut by a broken pen whilst cleaning a children’s play tunnel. The hidden-blade myth was well known enough that the blame was first put on a razor hidden there by persons unknown and with malicious intent to wound a child.
There’s a similarity here to the ubiquitous urban legend of the razor blade hidden in the Halloween apple given to the trick or treating child. This legend transcends location, but is more popular in America. However, I’ve heard this repeated throughout my life, especially growing up during the 1970s and ’80s. In his column ‘Halloween Sadists’, reprinted in Curses! Broiled Again!, Jan Harold Brunvand looked up the evidence for children being injured as a result of razor blades, syringes and poison hidden in their Halloween booty, and found none at all.