Bizarre London

by David Long

  Duke of Westminster

  300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia

  Baron Howard de Walden

  110 acres, mostly around Harley Street

  Viscount Portman

  110 acres, mostly around Marylebone

  Earl Cadogan

  90 acres, mostly in Chelsea

  Mr Paul Raymond

  70 acres, mostly in Soho

  HRH Prince Charles

  40 acres, mostly around Kennington

  Viscount Petersham

  29 acres, mainly around South Kensington

  Duke of Bedford

  20 acres, mostly in and around Bloomsbury

  Marquess of Northampton

  20 acres, mostly in Canonbury and Islington

  Marquess of Salisbury

  20 acres, much of it around Leicester Square

  Duke of Norfolk

  10 acres, most of it commercial property

  Baron Rothschild

  4 acres, much of it in the Paddington area

  LONDON’S OLDEST CLUBS (AND THEIR SECRETS)

  Some of central London’s most historic and architecturally most important buildings are never open to the general public. With lofty Georgian and Victorian interiors, extensive art collections, elegant libraries, smoking rooms and restaurants – and, in a few cases, large gardens and even subterranean swimming pools – these are the comfortably discreet bastions of traditional London clubland.

  The oldest date back literally hundreds of years and, despite jokes about old buffers and crusted port, their appeal remains as strong as ever and membership can be hard to obtain. Inevitably, some have fallen by the wayside, like the Cocoa Tree Club at 64 St James’s Street, which, until 1840, had its own brothel and a good many MPs among the members. But, spacious and conservative, today’s survivors seem on the whole to be in rude good health.

  1693 – White’s

  37-38 St James’s Street, SW1

  Most clubs would be overjoyed by royal visits, but when Her Majesty lunched at White’s – a strictly private event and a unique honour in 300 years of this emphatically all-male establishment – it was decided to hang the official photograph of the occasion in the loo.

  1762 – Boodle’s

  28 St James’s Street, SW1

  For many years, the rules allowed for any member seeking to join White’s to be sacked immediately, and waitresses were required to ensure their skirt hems were no more than 18 in. from the ground. The club was also the last to dispense with chamber pots, which it retained for the benefit of older members ‘whose habits were formed before the days of modern sanitation’.

  1764 – Brooks’s

  60 St James’s Street, SW1

  Among the club’s more eccentric members, the 9th Duke of Devonshire used to sit in the entrance hall striking fellow members he didn’t like the look of with a lead-weighted walking stick. Sir Edward Elgar similarly used to require the hall porter to telephone his home in Worcestershire so he could hear his dogs barking, while the 12th Duke of St Albans frequently dropped in to have his watch wound by the staff.

  1819 – Travellers’

  106 Pall Mall, SW1

  At its foundation, candidates had to have travelled at least 500 miles in a straight line from England, and no fewer than five of the original members – Wellington, Canning, Lord Aberdeen, Lord John Russell and Palmerston – went on to become Prime Minister. As this might suggest, the club has never enjoyed the reputation of being the most fun.

  1824 – Athenaeum

  107 Pall Mall, SW1

  With a preponderance of bishops and academics among its members, the club relishes a reputation for seriousness. It was, for example, the last to install a bar (nearly a century and a half after opening) but then made the substantial error of electing a DJ as a member – Jimmy Savile, the prodigious sex-offender.

  1824 – Oriental

  Stratford Place, W1

  Waitress Alice was employed at the club in 1916, and more than 60 years later (aged 91) she was still reporting for duty at 5.30 a.m. each morning. The club also famously retained the services of three hedgehogs in the kitchen, in an attempt to deal with an infestation of black beetle.

  1830 – Oxford & Cambridge

  71 Pall Mall, SW1

  Until the mid-1990s, lady members – albeit Oxbridge graduates like their male counterparts – were forbidden to use the main staircase or principal library. (A shelf of romantic novels was rumoured to have been set aside for their use.)

  1831 – Garrick

  15 Garrick Street, WC2

  Members famously blackballed Bernard Levin and Jeremy Paxman but admitted Lord Havers who, as Attorney-General during the 1987 Spycatcher trial, carelessly gave away details of how he planned to win the case. He did this by discussing it openly while standing at the urinals, and promptly lost.

  1832 – Carlton

  69 St James’s Street, SW1

  Because all Conservative Party leaders have enjoyed the privileges of membership, in 1975 the members effectively chose to declare Margaret Thatcher an ‘honorary man’ rather than change the rules to admit lady members.

  1832 – City of London

  19 Old Broad Street, EC2

  Disgracefully, members considered selling off their elegant nineteenth-century clubhouse in the 1970s, reaping a substantial personal profit from its demolition. Fortunately, planning permission was denied them, and this potentially lucrative but philistine move was abandoned.

  1836 – Reform

  104-5 Pall Mall, SW1

  In 1977, the smoking room echoed to the sound of monocles falling into pink gins when pictures were published in Penthouse magazine showing a television presenter in the club. The late Paula Yates was photographed, naked, on the staircase, in the library and on the floor of the main saloon.

  1837 – Army & Navy

  37 Pall Mall, SW1

  The club is still known as ‘the Rag’ to its largely military membership because, in the early days, the quality of the food was so poor that after suffering a meal there it was described by one of its own members as a ‘rag and famish affair’.

  1841 – Pratt’s

  14 Park Place, SW1

  The personal possession of the dukes of Devonshire since the 9th Duke bought it in the 1930s, this small but exclusive basement club opens only in the evenings. It has one long table that members share and, to avoid the befuddled becoming even more confused, the club servants all answer to the name George (except one waitress who is known as Georgina).

  1849 – East India

  16 St James’s Square, SW1

  At one point, the club boasted no fewer than a dozen members who had been awarded the Victoria Cross, but during the Indian Mutiny it nearly collapsed due to the huge proportion of officers and administrators recalled to the subcontinent. Since then, having absorbed several others – including the Devonshire and Public Schools – it seems to be thriving.

  1857 – Savage

  1 Whitehall Place, SW1

  Despite its professed modesty (the name comes from a seedy drunk, an eighteenth-century poet who was imprisoned for murder and died a pauper) and its lack of a clubhouse, the peripatetic Savage can boast that in a single year no fewer than three of its members sat on the throne of England: George V, Edward VIII and George VI.

  1862 – Naval & Military

  4 St James’s Square, SW1

  As recently as the 1950s, the club employed an ancient, one-armed Boer war veteran as a runner. Ex-Sergeant Harris was paid 6d. a mile to carry messages around London for his members, and to help them with their luggage.

  1863 – Arts Club

  40 Dover Street, W1

  The club scandalised London in the nineteenth century by allowing members to play billiards on Sundays, and sacked the poet Swinburne after he lost his temper and trashed a number of members’ hats by jumping up and down on them.

  1868 – Savile

  69 Brook Street, W1

  For many years, t
he club continued the tradition of sending snuff round with the port, it having been observed that many of those who survived the 1919 Spanish ’flu pandemic had partaken of both.

  1868 – Turf

  5 Carlton House Terrace, SW1

  In 1963, the membership included more than half of Britain’s dukes and, as at Boodle’s, there were still four chamber pots available in various sizes for those members who preferred to use them.

  1876 – Beefsteak

  9 Irving Street, WC2

  Around 1905, the police raided the club, a first-floor dining room off Leicester Square, thinking it was a brothel. They discovered the Prime Minister lunching with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England – and withdrew.

  1882 – National Liberal

  Whitehall Place, SW1

  Proud of its immense clubhouse – an exuberant explosion of polished marble and encaustic tiles – in the 1920s members were annoyed to discover the Conservative Lord Chancellor using it for ‘comfort breaks’. On being challenged, Lord Birkenhead claimed he had mistaken the place for a public lavatory.

  1891 – Caledonian

  9 Halkin Street, SW1

  The club once agreed to set up a block and tackle to enable the corpse of a 24-st member to ‘leave the club in an orderly fashion’ – maybe there’s something in those rumours about deep-fried Mars bars north of the border after all. In the 1960s, uniquely for a London club, but unsurprisingly, it had nearly 200 members whose names began with ‘Mc’ or ‘Mac’.

  1893 – Cavalry & Guards

  127 Piccadilly, W1

  Great ones for stuffiness and standing on ceremony, junior officers were traditionally barred from positioning themselves in front of a fire and had to rise from their chairs whenever a superior officer entered the room. A member who found himself in court was also likely to be expelled for bringing the club into disrepute, even if he was acquitted by the jury.

  1895 – City University

  50 Cornhill, EC3

  The club was late to grant membership to graduates of universities other than Oxford and Cambridge, but until relatively recently had one of the longest waiting lists in London despite (or perhaps because of) a longstanding refusal to admit women.

  1897 – Royal Automobile

  89 Pall Mall, SW1

  The best-equipped club in London is also one of the least exclusive, so much so that having been tipped off by Kim Philby, spies Burgess and Maclean were able to lunch here before fleeing to Moscow and did so without being recognised.

  1917 – Royal Air Force

  128 Piccadilly, W1

  In 1954, the committee inadvertently approved the candidature of Flying Officer J. L. Bird, only to return the subscription cheque when it emerged that Jean Bird was, in fact, a member of the Women’s Royal Air Force.

  London’s Largest Private Gardens

  Buckingham Palace – 42 acres

  Very much the sovereign’s private domain, limited public access is granted only very rarely, for example by invitation to one of the aforementioned Palace Garden Parties and to the occasional special jubilee event. Highlights for the fortunate few include more than 2.5 miles of gravel paths, an extensive lake fed from the Serpentine and a mulberry tree planted (for the benefit of silkworms) for James I. The celebrated 39-ton ‘Waterloo Vase’ was intended by Napoleon to mark his victories, but was instead presented to the Prince Regent after his defeat.

  Winfield House, Regent’s Park – 12 acres

  Since 1955, the official residence of their ambassador to the Court of St James’s, neo-Georgian Winfield House was sold to the American people for a single dollar by the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. Unusually for London, many of the plants are still raised on site from seedlings, with new plantings being made at a rate of around 7,000 a year by a gardener recruited not from the USA but from Leeds Castle in Kent.

  Lambeth Palace – 10 acres

  The London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury for nearly 800 years, the impressive gardens at Lambeth Palace are managed by a staff of just three, one of whom is part time. Because of this, volunteers are keenly sought, which is probably the best way to gain regular access as the gardens are rarely open to the general public.

  Chelsea Physic Garden – 4 acres

  Britain’s second-oldest botanical garden (after Oxford), this delightful, hidden enclave was established in 1673 to train apprentices of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries (see Chapter 13). The walled garden is opened to the public on special days, a fascinating treat for horticulturalists as its warm microclimate has proved perfect for the more than 5,000 edible, medicinal and historical specimens that grow here.

  Inner Temple Garden – 3 acres

  Broad lawns, large plane trees and rare specimens of medlar, quince and mulberry make this quiet, riverside oasis one of the delights of central London. Though very much the private preserve of lawyers, it opens at 12.30 p.m. on most weekdays, although the public are expected to be gone by 3.00 p.m. and, if they are not, will be ushered out fairly smartly.

  Aubrey House, Kensington – 2 acres

  The most private of all and thus largely unknown, this large, eighteenth-century house near Holland Park was home to the 1st Earl Grosvenor – a direct ancestor of the present Duke of Westminster – and is now owned by writer, publisher and philanthropist Sigrid Rausing. The gardens are never open to the public.

  16

  Military London

  ‘The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers, and warmed and cheered all our hearts.’

  Sir Winston Churchill

  London’s Ten Biggest Bangs

  In the City, the term ‘Big Bang’ refers to the process of financial deregulation that ushered in the yuppies during the 1980s. For London’s military and civil authorities, however, it has rather different connotations, arising in large part from their own unwise habit of sanctioning munitions manufacture in built-up areas but also to London’s unenviable but longstanding status as a target for terrorist groups.

  SCOTS, IRISH OR WELSH – SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

  Their unique ceremonial role means the officers and men of the Brigade of Guards are the most readily identifiable soldiers in the British Army, but comprising five different regiments they are also the hardest to tell one from another. To most Londoners and the vast majority of tourists, the Foot Guards all seem to wear the same delightfully anachronistic red uniforms. In fact, subtle differences on their tunics enable observers to distinguish one regiment from another, as the following table shows:

  *A hackle is a clipped feather plume, and a bearskin should never, ever be referred to as a ‘busby’. At the time of writing, the hats are still made using genuine black bear from official Canadian culls, but the search is on for a suitable synthetic alternative able to withstand the effects of static electricity build-up and the British weather.

  1650 – All Hallows-by-the-Tower

  When twenty-seven barrels of gunpowder stored in a yard next to the famous City church (see Chapters 5 and 21) exploded on 4 January, the west tower was destroyed together with around fifty houses in the area and the Rose Tavern. The death toll was conservatively estimated at sixty-seven.

  1716 – Moorfields

  Mr Bagley’s Foundry was commissioned by the War Office to melt down a quantity of captured French cannon but, unfortunately, workmen poured the molten metal into damp moulds. The moisture caused these moulds to explode, killing Matthew Bagley, his son and fifteen of their men while injuring a number of VIPs observing the process. The horse having bolted, the extent of the carnage persuaded the government to take munitions work in-house from that point onwards and to move it out of London – in particular to Woolwich Arsenal.

  1846 – Woolwich Arsenal

  With the Arsenal soon taking responsibility for all British ‘brass’ gun manufacture (actually bronze), in 1846 the press reported that ‘an explosion of the most awful character’ had been reported
at Woolwich, and that seven workmen had perished in the blast. Under cover of official secrecy, the cause was not revealed.

  1864 – Belvedere Powder Magazines

  On 1 October, two powder magazines situated on the south bank of the Thames exploded. Between them, the pair, located between Woolwich and Erith, had been used to store an estimated 52 tons of gunpowder and the blast was felt throughout London, and heard up to 50 miles away. The calamity claimed nine lives, a figure that would have been much higher had not the two magazines been built out on a relatively desolate area of marshland.

  1867 – Clerkenwell House of Detention

  On 13 December, the prison yard was rocked by an explosion. In an attempt to free their arms dealer and other prisoners, members of the Fenian Society had conspired to bring down the yard wall using a wheelbarrow full of explosive. A dozen people were killed, and as many as 120 injured when the blast brought down houses in Corporation Row. Several executions followed, including that of ringleader Michael Barrett, the last person to be publicly executed in London (see Chapter 1).

  1874 – Regent’s Park