Bizarre London

by David Long

  WHATEVER THE WEATHER

  Something of a hotspot in the capital, Camden Square, NW1, has twice achieved record-breaking monthly temperatures: 29.4 °C in May 1949 and 35.6 °C in June 1957.

  By contrast, in January 1963, Kew Gardens experienced a period of nine days on the trot when the daytime temperature didn’t rise above 0 °C. The same week, Arsenal FC had to cancel a fixture with the pitch under 8 in. of snow.

  In November 1665, a deep depression was recorded over London, thought to be the lowest ever, of 931 millibars, while December 1796 saw the capital’s coldest single day when the temperature plunged to -21.1 °C at Greenwich. A few days later, it was still only -19 °C.

  Overall, London’s coldest ever year was almost certainly 1684, when the Thames froze in central London from bank to bank, to a depth of 11 in., and remained that way for nearly two months. (Albeit for shorter periods this happened a further fifteen times, the last being in 1814, which was the year of the final ‘Frost Fair’.)

  Improved water flow through better bridges means such ice-ups no longer occur in central London, but they still happen further upstream. In 1963 at Kingston-upon-Thames, it was briefly possible to walk from one bank to the other.

  In January 1928, a storm surge in the North Sea travelled up the Thames, killing fourteen and flooding the homes of around 4,000 Londoners as well as many public buildings.

  In 1873, London notched up a record-breaking run of seventy-four foggy days. Since then, the worst pea-souper was in December 1952, which led to as many as 12,000 deaths – from respiratory illness as well as accidents involving people who couldn’t see traffic – and some 100,000 cases of medical illness.

  On 14 August 1975, nearly 7 in. of rain fell on Hampstead in just over two hours, flooding many houses. Two people were struck by lightning, one man drowned, and then huge hailstones fell on the same area, creating what one meteorologist described as ‘a sea of icy porridge’.

  In January 1977, a single piece of ice weighing 110 lb – something called a hydrometeor – smashed into a house in Ponder’s End. A few years earlier, two more had wrecked homes in Isleworth and Fulham.

  On 2 June 1975, the Guardian reported that snow had fallen on Lord’s Cricket Ground, interrupting a game between Middlesex and Surrey. One reader insisted this was untrue, as previously London’s latest snowfall had been in May 1821. He complained to the Press Council but the enquiry found in the journalist’s favour – snow had indeed fallen in June.

  11

  Eccentrics’ London

  ‘I think London is sexy because it’s so full of eccentrics.’

  Rachel Weisz

  2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628–87)

  Fortunate enough to inherit several priceless acres between the river and the Strand, George Villiers’ London estate included fifty houses, ten cottages, four stable blocks and seven interconnecting gardens – and a sumptuous ducal palace before his debts got out of hand and he lost the lot to developers.

  Somewhat eccentrically, he insisted that in return the new owners commemorate his period as landowner, and to do this by using every element of his name when naming the new streets they were building. The developers obliged, creating Buckingham Street, Villiers Street, Duke Street, George Street and even Of Alley – although the latter was subsequently renamed York Place by po-faced councillors.

  Hon. Charles Hamilton (1704–86)

  The 9th of the Earl of Abercorn’s fourteen children designed much of Holland Park for Lord Holland and, on his own behalf, spent almost every pound he had building England’s first landscaped park. Situated close to where the modern A3 crosses the M25, items of expenditure on his estate at Painshill included £700 (at 1738 prices) for anyone prepared to dress like a hermit and live alone in a cave for a year.

  No one took him up on his offer, but the rest of the cash went on moving hills, excavating valleys and building more than a dozen follies around an expensively dug twenty-acre lake. Hamilton spent so much, in fact, there was nothing left to pay for a house and, after selling the land at a huge loss, Hamilton retired to Bath and shortly afterwards died.

  Hon. Henry Cavendish (1731–1810)

  An early prototype of a barking-mad boffin, Cavendish remains all but unknown despite discovering the chemical compositions of water and air. When attending scientific meetings, he preferred not to speak to anyone and, at home in Clapham, had letterboxes installed in all the internal doors so that servants could write to him rather than conversing with him directly.

  Instead of friends, he filled this and another vast house in Bedford Square with scientific equipment and books, spending many millions on their acquisition while acting as his own librarian to save the cost of engaging a professional. After his death, he was found to own more bank stock than anyone else in England, but never spent more than five shillings on a meal.

  Martin van Butchell (1735–1814)

  When Mrs van B died in 1775, this successful dentist had her eyes replaced with marbles, her body embalmed with camphor and turpentine and the whole ensemble painted to appear more lifelike, before being put on display in the window of his Mount Street, Mayfair, surgery. In the face of protests from neighbours, he insisted his marriage contract allowed such a thing, perhaps because he could draw an income from his wife’s estate as long as she remained at home and above ground.

  Unsurprisingly, both the protests and the queues of gawpers grew as the body began to decompose, but not until van Butchell’s death in 1814 was the spectacle finally dealt with. In 1815, his son presented the mouldering corpse to the Royal College of Surgeons and, in 1944, what remained of Mrs van Butchell was blown to bits by a German bomb.

  8th Earl of Bridgewater (1756–1829)

  Inheriting £40,000 a year but worth barely ten when he died, Francis Henry Egerton was a major benefactor of the British Museum but preferred Paris to London and settled there despite knowing more Latin than French. To Parisians, he became the archetype of an eccentric English ‘milord’, travelling everywhere with sixteen carriages and a retinue of thirty servants, and equipping his pets with silver collars and expensively hand-tooled doggy boots and doggy coats.

  For sport, Bridgewater filled his tiny city garden with hundreds of rabbits, pigeons and partridges, taking pot shots at them when he was in the mood. When he died, he left each of his servants a cocked hat and three pairs of stockings, insisting they keep the house running for a further two months as if he were still alive, which they duly did.

  10th Duke of Hamilton & Brandon (1767–1852)

  A man who collected titles as others collect stamps, London-born Alexander Hamilton inherited two dukedoms, a brace of marquessates, four earldoms and seven baronies. He was known as ‘magnifico’, but only sarcastically once his sense of self-worth had led him to declare that he was the rightful King of Scotland.

  Convinced that he would be called to witness the Second Coming, he spent £130,000 on a vast mausoleum – millions in today’s terms – and another £11,000 on an Egyptian sarcophagus for himself. Unfortunately, this was so small that his feet had to be cut off in order to squeeze him in.

  5th Duke of Portland (1800–79)

  The intensely reclusive owner of 110 acres of the West End, at his house in Cavendish Square William John Cavendish Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck erected an 80-ft-high screen of frosted glass around the garden so no one could watch him arriving or see him wandering around.

  On his Nottinghamshire estate, His Grace went further still, employing 15,000 workmen to dig tunnels beneath his stately home as well as an underground riding school – he never rode – and three underground ballrooms in which no one danced. Preferring to eat nothing but roast chicken, the Duke remained unmarried.

  Sir Edward Watkin (1819–1901)

  Honouring a longstanding English tradition of animosity towards the French, having failed in his bid to build the first Channel Tunnel, in 1891 the Metropolitan Railway magnate set out to out-Eiffel the Eiffel Tower by building something s
imilar but bigger on a grassy hill in Wembley. Public enthusiasm was enormous – 100,000 turned up to see the work begin – but it quickly died away together with the money.

  Designed to soar 1,175 ft into the sky, ground subsidence, poor foundations and Watkin’s increasingly poor health meant it struggled to reach a tenth of that. When work on it stopped, it turned out to be worth less as scrap than it would cost to demolish, and for a few years it stood like an embarrassing rusty monument to Victorian bombast.

  Eventually, in 1907, a decision was taken to blow it up, and in 1923 the site was cleared to make way for Wembley Stadium.

  Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911)

  A cousin of Charles Darwin’s, Galton was a genuine polymath who pioneered the use of fingerprinting, devised numerous powerful statistical methods, drew the world’s first ever weather map, paved the way for what we now call differential psychology, and established and funded a new professorial chair at London University.

  Unfortunately for Galton’s reputation, the chair was in Eugenics, a system he devised of racial theories that were subsequently adopted by the Nazis and so are now rightly discredited. He also spent years mapping Britain to establish where the most beautiful women lived (London, he decided), and insisted on wearing what he termed ‘Galton’s Universal Patent Ventilating Hat’ in the sincere belief that if his head overheated he would fall in a fit to the floor.

  Francis Buckland (1826–80)

  Confronting a problem well understood today – too many mouths, not enough food – Francis Buckland founded the Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals in a bid to persuade Londoners to adopt a more varied diet. Its inaugural dinner was held in King Street, St James’s, in 1862, with a menu that included elephant trunk soup, sliced porpoise head and rhino pie.

  Interestingly, horse was not on the menu. With hippophilia so embedded among the aristocracy, Buckland firmly believed that ‘hippophagy has not the slightest chance of success in this country’. London Zoo provided plenty of alternatives, however, including some panther chops to go with Buckland’s ants and earwigs, Japanese sea-slugs, kangaroo, parrot and wild boar. The experiment failed, of course, but probably only because Buckland was somewhat ahead of his time.

  Julius Drewe (1856–1931)

  The founder of London’s Home & Colonial Stores built a colossal fortune from retail but then sold up and settled down to spend it. Convinced by an unscrupulous genealogist that he was descended from one of the Conqueror’s lieutenants, Drewe set out to honour his ancestor Drogo de Teign by building a vast, medieval-style castle down in Devon.

  Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, Castle Drogo unfortunately took so long to build that, by the time Drewe moved on to the 1,500-acre estate, he had only two months left to live. The last castle ever to be built in Britain soon afterwards became the first twentieth-century property to be acquired by the National Trust, which still owns it today.

  5th Earl of Lonsdale (1857–1944)

  As befitting a president of the Automobile Association, Henry Cecil Lowther conceived the strongest possible liking for its bright yellow livery. Back home in Leicestershire, he ordered new yellow uniforms for the servants, yellow cardigans for his outdoor staff and demanded that all estate vehicles – even down to the wheelbarrows – be repainted the same hue.

  Also a founding member of the National Sporting Club in Covent Garden, in 1908 he bet the American banker J. P. Morgan an incredible £21,000 (nearly £2 million today) that a man could walk solo round the world while finding a wife and supporting himself by selling postcards. He later conceived the famous boxing belts that still bear his name, coughing up the cash for their 22 ct gold decoration.

  Sir George Reresby Sitwell (1860–1943)

  Banning electricity from his household, attempting to barter for his son’s Eton education with pigs and potatoes, and having Chinese willow patterns stencilled on a herd of cows, when the London-born baronet failed to persuade Selfridges to stock his Sitwell Egg (a ‘portable meal’ of rice, smoked meat and artificial lime) he retired to his Derbyshire estate and applied himself to feverish inventing.

  For this, he set aside seven individual studies, and over time produced such must-have devices as a musical toothbrush and a miniature revolver for dispatching wasps. Unfortunately, his attempts at making knife-handles from condensed milk met with little success, and the government of the day remained unpersuaded by his plan to manufacture military gas masks using discarded peach stones.

  12th Duke of St Albans (1875–1964)

  Osborne de Vere Beauclerk, 12th Duke of St Albans, Earl of Burford, Baron Vere of Hanworth and of Heddington – but more informally known as ‘Obby’ – was a direct descendant of Nell Gwynn and, as one of Charles II’s numerous illegitimate off-spring, held the office of Hereditary Grand Falconer of England.

  By 1953, the title had long been irrelevant, but Obby was determined to make it work for him and planned to exercise his right to take a live bird to the Coronation. On being told by Westminster Abbey officials that only a stuffed one would be acceptable, he declined to join his fellow dukes in the pews and stayed at home. His Grace later left for America, where he travelled coast to coast by Greyhound bus and claimed to have received sixty-eight proposals of marriage.

  14th Baron Berners (1883–1950)

  Setting out from 40 Half Moon Street in a Rolls-Royce fitted with a piano in the back, the composer and diplomat Lord Berners doubtless raised the odd eyebrow. At home on his Oxfordshire estate at Farringdon, he could really let fly though, his bachelor lifestyle leaving him free to indulge himself however he saw fit.

  In practice, this meant fitting his whippets with diamond-studded collars, dying pet doves to match his mood and, where possible, eating colour-coded meals in which each ingredient was chosen to be the same colour as the next. By far the pièce de résistance, however, was an elegant 140-ft folly in the grounds with a sign at the top warning ‘Members of the Public Committing Suicide from this Tower Do So at their Own Risk’.

  7th Duke of Leinster (1892–1976)

  Edward Fitzgerald is almost certainly the only duke to lose a fortune without even laying his hands on the money. After running up huge debts in his youth, he sought to clear them by foolishly selling an inheritance worth millions for £60,000 and an allowance of just £1,000 a year.

  Unfortunately he came into the dukedom early, and lived a very long time, so the money was never going to be enough for him. It soon ran out, and the man the papers had cruelly nicknamed the ‘Bedsit Duke’ was found dead in a single rented room in Pimlico.

  Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke (1893–1948)

  Believing stockbrokers were as stupid as they looked (and proving it by making a killing in the City), Pyke dreamed of creating giant warships and aircraft carriers made of ice mixed with sawdust. After convincing Lord Mountbatten that such a vessel would be both torpedo-proof and unsinkable, he became one of Winston Churchill’s favourite wartime boffins.

  The ice mixture he called ‘Pykrete’ and – incredibly – it worked. Unfortunately, by the time the prototype was built and tested on a top-secret lake in Canada, the war was nearly over and the technology considered surplus to requirements. Pyke must have known he had missed his moment and, retreating to a bedsit in Hampstead, he subsequently took his own life.

  Woodrow Wyatt (1918–97)

  A former Labour MP who subsequently became one of Mrs Thatcher’s most ardent admirers, Wyatt was rarely happier than when extolling the virtues of being an Englishman – as opposed to ‘a chimpanzee or a flea, or a Frenchman or a German’. After setting out from his St John’s Wood home for a tour of Europe, the prolific Fleet Street hack was asked by one French hotelier to spell his name, to which he replied, ‘W-Y-A-T-T – as in Waterloo . . . Ypres . . . Agincourt . . . Trafalgar . . . Trafalgar.’

  Joe Orton (1933–67)

  With time on his hands before his career as a playwright really took off, Orton and boyfriend Kenneth Halliwell spent many hours defacing
hundreds of library books by inserting inappropriate illustrations and typing a series of grotesque and often highly offensive reviews on the insides of their dust jackets.

  Both were eventually jailed for six months for a total of 1,769 offences – and additionally fined 18s. 4d. for returning some of the books late. Soon after Orton’s release, he found himself lionised by London’s literary and dramatic élites and, fearing he was being edged out of his lover’s new life, Halliwell murdered him at their Islington flat before killing himself.

  Jungleyes Love (1956–2012)

  While at Harrow School, Love (real name: Charles Gibaut Bissell-Thomas) wrote to the Chinese Embassy requesting 725 free copies of Mao’s Red Book. These were duly delivered to the school and, just as quickly, returned by the masters, after which Love was suspended for writing to the headmaster of Latymer Upper School in West London asking for a place there instead.