Bizarre London

by David Long

  Having had his right hand damaged by an exploding grenade a decade earlier, the Hungarian shooter Karoly Takacs taught himself to shoot with his left hand and won an Olympic gold medal in the Rapid-Fire Pistol event.

  Arthur Wint became the first of many Jamaicans to strike Olympic gold (in the Men’s 400 m) while high-jumper Alice Coachman became the first African-American woman to win a gold medal in a track-and-field event.

  In Diving, all four gold medals, and six out of the remaining eight silver and bronze medals, were won by the USA. Victoria Manalo Draves won both golds in the women’s events, with Sammy Lee winning a gold and a bronze in the men’s.

  Uniquely, a three-way tie was declared for the men’s Pommel Horse, with all three Finnish gymnasts each being awarded a gold medal with no silver or bronze being presented.

  Refusing to return home with the athletes following her county’s inclusion in the Soviet Bloc, Czechoslovakia team president Marie Provaznikova became the first defector in Olympic history.

  A notable member of the American team, Hawaii-born Toshiyuki ‘Harold’ Sakata, won weightlifting silver and went on to play the part of Oddjob in the 007 film, Goldfinger.

  The Games were also the first to introduce some important technological innovations, including starting blocks for runners and what became known as the photo finish.

  In post-war, ‘austerity’ Britain there were no resources to build an athletes’ village so, for 1948, competitors were billeted in some of London’s many disused military barracks. They were shipped into the arena using army trucks, with British athletes expected to stay at home or make their own arrangements.

  Ahead of the Games, in an early exercise in recycling, many tons of waste from household fires in Leicester were collected and brought to London to build a new cinder track at Wembley.

  Few records were broken this time round, however, perhaps because the competitors were too hungry to give their best. With rationing still in force, consideration had been given to asking the teams to bring their own food, but eventually the rules were waived and competitors were allowed 5,500 calories a day – compared to 2,600 for ordinary Londoners.

  1948 also saw the BBC’s first foray into large-scale sports coverage, the Corporation paying a hefty £1,000 for the rights to televise the Games. Viewers were promised sixty-four hours of action from the various sports fields, although hardly anyone could actually afford to own a television set at this time.

  As in 2012, the events were widely spread across London, with boxing, wrestling and gymnastics taking place in West Kensington (on a site now covered by the Empress State Building), and cyclists being trucked out to the Victorian velodrome that still survives in Herne Hill.

  LONDON 2012 – BORIS JOHNSON’S GOLDEN

  MOMENTS

  ‘The excitement is growing so much I think the Geiger counter of Olympo-mania is going to go “zoink” off the scale.’

  ‘Get some burgers, or else you’ll be eaten by bears . . .’ (on hearing that McDonald’s was to sponsor the supposed fitness-fest).

  ‘The whole of the exterior of this building [the Velodrome] is lovingly rubbed with rhubarb.’

  ‘I had hot tears of patriotic pride from the beginning [of the opening ceremony]. I was blubbing like Andy Murray.’

  ‘It is hard to think of a single Chinese sport at the Olympics, compared with umpteen invented by Britain, including ping-pong, I’ll have you know, which originated at upper-class dinner tables and was first called whiff-whaff.’

  ‘There are semi-naked women playing beach volleyball in the middle of the Horse Guards Parade immortalised by Canaletto. They are glistening like wet otters and the water is splashing off the brims of the spectators’ sou’westers.’

  ‘The whole thing is magnificent and bonkers.’

  ‘“Inspire a generation” is our motto. Not necessarily “Create a generation” . . . which is what they sometimes get up to in the Olympic village.’

  ‘In the heart of the Olympic Park, there are riparian meadows of wildflowers whose colour and glory are heart-breaking. There are cornflowers and viper’s bugloss and rare and delicate orchids that are being neither trampled nor picked – but simply admired, by vast crowds, as evidence of our national genius for gardening.’

  ‘I think we are showing great natural restraint and politeness as host nation in not hoarding the medals more so far.’

  19

  Driving London

  ‘London Transport commissioned a study to find out why buses were running late and it turned out it was because they kept stopping to let people on.’

  Rory McGrath

  London’s Famous Motoring Firsts

  One of several significant London motoring firsts, the traffic island was the idea of a Colonel Pierpoint who came up with it in the 1860s. Placing the first at the top of St James’s Street, one assumes so that he could cross safely to his club, the Colonel was naturally proud of his creation and was in the habit of turning round to admire it. Unfortunately, on one occasion he missed his footing as he did so and was promptly run over by a cab.

  In those days, of course, his nemesis arrived with a horse up front as the first mechanically driven versions didn’t make their appearance until 1897. But even when they did, and despite their very considerable novelty value at the time, these early pioneers were considerably slower than their horse-drawn alternatives and the fashion for them was soon exhausted.

  As a result, having led the world with this new technology in the closing days of the Victorian era, by the start of the Edwardian era there were still only nineteen automobiles trundling around central London – compared to 10,361 conventional horse-drawn vehicles on London’s streets, the last of which survived until just after the Second World War (see Taxi! panel below).

  London’s first set of traffic lights appeared at the junction of Great George Street and Bridge Street in 1868. Designed by Superintendent John Peake Knight of the South-Eastern Railway, it used semaphore arms as well as lights but was gas-powered and unfortunately blew up, killing a policeman and causing a cavalry stampede. The semaphore arms were intended to replicate a policeman’s arms, but the experiment was abandoned and London remained light-free until 1929.

  The first ever multi-storey car park made a surprisingly early debut, too, opening for business in 1901 when motorcars were still an expensive rarity. Located immediately behind Piccadilly Circus in Denman Street (where today NCP still offers a similar, if somewhat costlier, service), it covered more than 19,000 sq ft on no fewer than seven storeys. The upper ones were reached via a hydraulic lift rather than a ramp, a device capable of raising a three-ton vehicle. If nothing else, the existence of such a facility so early on suggests that almost a century ago parking in central London was already quite a considerable problem.

  This then begs the question: why did it take so long to introduce the parking meter? First seen sprouting out of the sidewalks of Oklahoma City in the USA, it wasn’t until 1958 that British motorists got some of their own. Once again, London led the way, with a handful appearing on the pavements of Mayfair at a time when 1s. (5p) would be sufficient to keep the authorities at bay for a full hour.

  London can lay claim to Britain’s first successful self-service petrol station, too, and this country’s first-ever drive-in bank. Designed with passing motorists in mind, the latter was installed by the venerable Drummond’s Bank (now part of the Royal Bank of Scotland) in a building by Admiralty Arch on Trafalgar Square. London also got the country’s first traffic police. While lacking vehicles of their own, the earliest recruits were issued with so-called ‘egg bombs’ – filled with green and white paint – to hurl at any speeding motorists.

  TAXI!

  Sadly, looking like it’s about to be consigned to a museum, London’s iconic black cab has a surprisingly ancient heritage. The now defunct Corporation of Coachmen first secured a charter to ply for hire in London in 1639, the word ‘cab’ being derived from the French, ‘cabriolet de p
lace’.

  Despite being licensed by Parliament, cabs at first failed to attract the right class of customer, and in 1694 a group of women travelling in one through Hyde Park behaved so badly that cab drivers were henceforth banned from royal parks for the next 230 years.

  Cabbies had a reputation for getting drunk and behaving badly until a number of Victorian philanthropists paid for distinctive dark-green cab shelters to be built where drivers could stop for lunch. Drinking alcohol in them was forbidden, together with any talk of politics and, of the original sixty-four, around a dozen still survive.

  London’s first mechanically driven taxis appeared in the 1890s but were electric rather than petrol-powered. Their novelty value was enormous but, unfortunately, they were so heavy – all those batteries – that the horse-drawn competition was quicker. It took nearly sixty years for motorised taxis finally to rule the road.

  The official name of a black cab is a Hackney Carriage, but this has no connection with the East London suburb. Instead, it comes from an old French term, ‘haquenée’, meaning an ambling old nag or horse.

  Horse-drawn cabs survived until the 1940s, largely because of police reluctance to license any kind of new technology. Gottlieb Daimler invented the internal combustion engine in 1883, and built a petrol-powered cab soon afterwards, but it was more than two decades before the Metropolitan Police agreed to allow such a newfangled contraption on to the streets.

  The taximeter was invented in 1891 by Wilhelm Bruhn, and gives the cab its familiar name. Introduced to London in 1907, it indicated the distance travelled in order to prevent rows with the driver about the size of the fare.

  In France, taxis were used to take troops to the front in the First World War, but back in London their numbers slumped by more than half when petrol shortages gave the horse another brief advantage.

  Long after horse-drawn cabs were gone for good, London cabbies were still governed by a number of weird rules and regulations dating back centuries. For decades, cabs had to be designed with a space next to the driver for a bale of hay, and with sufficient headroom in the back to accommodate a man in a top hat, but this rule was finally abolished in 1976.

  Some of the archaic laws concerning cabs do still exist, however, and can affect passengers as well. We’re not meant to shout ‘Taxi!’ at a moving vehicle, for example – it’s technically a breach of the law – but instead to go to a taxi rank, or what the rules quaintly define as ‘a place appointed’.

  Perhaps the most bizarre of the regulations relating to cabbies in London is a law requiring drivers to answer the call of nature ‘against the rear of the vehicle, and in a seemly fashion’. In theory, any taxi driver embarrassed about doing this can ask a police constable to shield them with his cape.

  Taxi drivers are also forbidden to carry passengers who admit to having a notifiable disease such as bubonic plague or smallpox, and can refuse to pick up anyone they suspect of harbouring such a disease.

  Drivers also have to avoid driving too slowly. If they do, they can be charged with loitering – or with ‘driving too furiously’ if they are caught speeding within London’s historic Square Mile.

  Although modern black cabs look pretty similar, the classic London black cab was the old Austin FX4, which was introduced in 1958 and remained in production until 1996. That’s a record for a British vehicle, one that is unrivalled by any make except the original Mini, and that is unlikely to be beaten by any of its replacements.

  For a while, London black cabs went on sale in the Far East, where they were badged as ‘Big Ben Novelty Cars’, but the most famous version was a luxury model of the FX4 built for the oil billionaire Nubar Gulbenkian. ‘Apparently, it can turn on a sixpence . . .’ he used to tell his friends. ‘. . . whatever that is.’ (The Duke of Edinburgh had a smarter-than-average one for a while, too, liveried in British Racing Green on the outside, and tan leather within.)

  In 1885, a man called John Leighton wrote to the GPO suggesting the boundaries of London be redrawn to make each individual borough a regular hexagon two miles across. This, he said, would enable travellers to consult a map and see at once how much their journey would cost by cab, but fortunately the introduction of the taximeter rendered his scheme redundant.

  Roadside petrol pumps, of course, were in themselves nothing new, and the first in this country appeared in Shropshire before the First World War. But self-service stations were decidedly novel, the first practical one opening for business in London in November 1961 at the foot of Southwark Bridge. (The idea had been tried before, at Patcham in Sussex in the 1930s, but unfortunately it relied on a primitive ‘shilling-in-the-slot’ pump and the honesty of the locals – neither of which proved to be at all dependable.)

  It was in London, too, that the first dedicated club for automobilists opened, the lavishly appointed Royal Automobile Club at 89 Pall Mall. Its nickname was and is the Chauffeur’s Arms, a sneering reference to its relative youth – the clubhouse was only completed in 1911 – and the fact that it is by far the least exclusive of the traditional St James’s gentlemen’s clubs. That said, with its Turkish baths, squash doubles court, a private post office and what is still the capital’s most beautiful swimming pool, its facilities are the best of any West End club – and the neighbours know it.

  Occupying the site of the old War Office – parts of which were incorporated into the clubhouse – it was designed by Charles Mewes and Arthur J. Davis, architects of the Ritz Hotel. The building was hugely advanced for its day, too – those early motorists were naturally more technically minded than most – with an eight-storey, 2,000-ton steel skeleton supporting the immense Portland stone façade. This behemoth’s arrival on such a prominent site was not universally welcomed in clubland, however; members of older and socially much smarter establishments clearly deplored what one of their number described as a ‘furred, goggled, spare-tyred and cigar-smoking crowd’.

  As to the reason for all this, the car itself, London cannot claim to have built the first but it has certainly been responsible for some pretty odd examples. Willesden was home to the Iris factory, from 1905 until the outbreak of the Great War, churning out a cumbersome and rather crudely made tourer named for the goddess of the same name. She was known as the Speedy Messenger of the Gods, although the name was also said by the factory to indicate (somewhat optimistically) that ‘It Runs In Silence’.

  Then there was E. H. Owen of Kensington, a shadowy outfit that, from 1899 until 1935, advertised in The Autocar and elsewhere. It claimed to be a car manufacturer, but no such car as an ‘Owen’ was ever seen and nor has the precise location of the factory ever been discovered.

  And finally, a major player still with us today and one that was first established just over the river in Lambeth. The original factory took its name from the home of a medieval warrior who once lived on the site on the south bank of the Thames, and when the company relocated to Luton – coincidentally where the warrior had had his country seat – it took his heraldic emblem to use on the company badge. The warrior was called Fulk le Bréant, his home was Fulk’s or Fawke’s Hall, and the warrior’s griffin is still to be found on the front of every car which leaves the Vauxhall factory.

  Motoring’s Most Distinctive Extinctions

  Bridget Driscoll

  At Crystal Palace in 1896, Bridget made her mark in history as the first person to be killed by a car. The car was moving at just 4 mph, and today the running total of motoring fatalities is thought to exceed 30 million worldwide. (The first driver to die was Edwin Sewell three years later. He was thrown from his 6 hp Daimler in Grove Hill, Harrow, when a rear wheel collapsed, and his passenger died shortly afterwards in hospital.)

  Graham Hill

  Born in Hampstead in 1929, Graham Hill is still the only driver to win motorsport’s Triple Crown, meaning the Formula One World Championship, the Le Mans 24-Hour Race and America’s Indianapolis 500. Unfortunately, he lost when he took part in the BBC’s Call My Bluff and, in 1979, died a
fter crashing his plane while trying to land in thick fog north of London.

  Eleanor Thornton

  A Stockwell girl, and almost certainly the model for Rolls-Royce’s celebrated flying lady bonnet mascot, the Spirit of Ecstasy. Thornton was lost at sea in 1915 when the SS Persia went down after being torpedoed by a German U-boat. Her lover survived, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu having taken the precaution of donning a life-vest before losing hold of his mistress.

  Cecil Kimber

  Fired from his own company and working as a travelling salesman, MG founder Cecil Kimber died in a 1945 train derailment outside King’s Cross. Bizarrely, the only other fatality had the same first name and initials – Cecil Kirk. Kimber himself had only been on the train because he had no petrol coupons left to fill up his MG.

  Percy Lambert

  Percy Lambert, the first motorist ever to travel 100 miles in one hour, was killed at the Brooklands circuit while trying to beat his own record. He was buried at London’s fashionable Brompton Cemetery in 1913 (see Chapter 7), and interred in a coffin stylishly streamlined to match the Talbot car in which he died.

  Rudolf Diesel

  Last seen alive in September 1913, the pioneering engineer drowned on his way to London on the steamer Dresden. Theories suggesting both murder and suicide have been advanced, but it took ten days to find his body, by which time it was so badly decomposed that a postmortem was no longer possible.

  Eric Fernihough

  The last Englishman ever to hold the World Land Speed Record for motorcycle and sidecar, a feat he accomplished riding that most English of marques – the Brough Superior – at Gyon in Hungary. It’s somewhat appropriate, then – if a little premature – that the thirty-three-year-old Fernihough died on St George’s Day 1938 shortly after his new and improved Brough had been unveiled at London’s Earl’s Court.