by David Long
Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls
A younger son of Lord Llangattock, the co-founder of the eponymous car company was a fearless balloonist and a ferociously quick driver but, in 1910, died when the tail of his Wright Flyer became detached. The first Briton to be killed in a flying accident, he was only the eleventh air fatality worldwide and is commemorated by a blue plaque at 14 Conduit Street, Mayfair, which was his place of work from 1905 to 1910.
London’s Fastest Ladies
Hon. Mrs Victor Bruce
The first woman ever prosecuted for speeding (she told Hounslow magistrates driving slowly made her tired), in 1929 Mrs Bruce drove a 4.5-litre Bentley at Montlhéry for twenty-four hours, capturing the world record for single-handed driving at an average of 89 mph.
Flying round the world solo the following year, she famously switched off her engine over Hong Kong to observe two minutes’ silence for Armistice Day.
Lady Mary Grosvenor
A favourite daughter of Bend’Or, the fabulously rich 2nd Duke of Westminster, Lady Mary died in 2003 aged 89. Before the war, she raced regularly at Brooklands, favouring a 1.5-litre Alta over Bugattis but denying herself a 2.0-litre Grand Prix version, perhaps because her father disapproved.
Violet Cordery
Described in the Daily Telegraph as ‘the Amy Johnson of the track’, in July 1927 Cordery arrived back in London having become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by car. She did so in an Invicta, designed by her brother-in-law Sir Noel Macklin.
Roberta Cowell
A student at University College London, in the 1940s Robert Cowell flew Spitfires but then, in 1951, changed his name to Roberta after undergoing Britain’s first ever sex-change operation.
Dorothy Levitt
In 1906, Hackney-born Levitt lifted the women’s world speed record to 96 mph. The same year her book The Woman and the Car advised readers to carry a hand mirror in their toolkits, which she said was useful to ‘restore a gel’s complexion’ after a drive and could also be held aloft to check behind while driving in heavy traffic.
Barbara Cartland
Originally a Midlands lass but always giving an impression of being more at home in Belgravia than Birmingham, the romantic authoress and fluffy pink socialite organised the first ever ladies’ race at Brooklands (in 1931) and claimed to have invented the concept of the troop-carrying glider.
WHY ARE LONDON BUSES RED?
In 1907, the year that route numbers were introduced across London, there was very fierce competition for passengers among the capital’s many small, independent bus companies. As private firms, they were free to paint their vehicles any colour they chose, and the largest of them – the London General Omnibus Company – decided to make its buses stand out from those of its rivals by adopting bright red paint and a new logo. For the latter, LGOC chose a spoked wheel design, a feature that eventually evolved into the world-famous London Transport (and subsequently Transport for London) ‘roundel’.
By the time the ongoing process of consolidation and nationalisation had led to the creation of the new London Transport organisation in 1933, red was the predominant colour for buses in the capital and it has remained so ever since. Today, there are 8,500 of them in service covering approximately 700 routes and calling at more than 19,500 bus stops along the way. With more than 2 billion passenger trips made annually, it is estimated that 90 per cent of Londoners live within 400 yards of a bus stop.
London Cabbie Slang
‘Arnie’ – ‘I’ll be back’, meaning the driver is not yet going home.
‘B&B’ – a routine check by the police (i.e. of a driver’s green badge and his licence, known as a bill).
‘Bilker’ – a customer the driver expects to do a runner without paying.
‘Blue Lights’ – police dealing with an incident.
‘Blue Trees’ – a policeman hiding behind a tree or lamppost with a speed gun.
‘Broom’ – a job the driver passes on to the next in the rank as he doesn’t want it.
‘Butterboy’ – a novice cabbie.
‘Butterfly’ – part-time cabbie, only works in nice weather.
‘Canary’ – a driver with a yellow badge, meaning he can only work in the suburbs.
‘Carpet’ – £3, i.e. three feet to the yard.
‘Ching’ – £5.
‘Churchill’ – a meal; Winston Churchill is said to have given drivers the right to refuse a fare if they’re eating.
‘Cooking’ – spending too long on a rank without a fare.
‘Droshky’ – a taxi.
‘Full House’ – full complement of passengers.
‘Gavroched’ – when the traffic in Mayfair is so bad the driver could get out and read the menu at this much-starred Upper Brook Street restaurant.
‘Hickory’ – hickory-dickory dock (i.e. clock, meaning the meter).
‘Kojak with a Kodak’ – see Blue Trees (above).
‘Legalled’ – receiving the correct fare but no tip.
‘Mexican wave’ – a pavement full of potential fares holding up their hands.
‘Oner’ – a long job, paying £100.
‘ONO’ – On and off (i.e. arriving at a rank and pulling straight off with a punter).
‘Penguin’ – passenger going to or being collected from a formal event.
‘Scab’ – minicab.
‘Set’ – an accident.
‘Sherb’ – sherbert dab, taxicab.
‘Single pin’ – solo passenger.
‘Stalking’ – working with the meter off.
‘Suit’ – city gent.
‘Turkish’ – a laugh (short for Turkish bath).
Parliamentarian Wisdom on Motoring in London
‘I do not believe the introduction of motor cars will ever affect the riding of horses.’
John Scott Montagu MP (1903)
‘Depend upon it, if these motorists and motor cars are not kept in order they will have to leave the roads altogether because in the long run the people will never submit to the intolerable nuisance which has been created.’
C. A. Cripps MP (1903)
‘I do not think it would be practicable to introduce traffic islands in London.’
Wilfred Ashley MP, Minister of Transport (1928)
‘We are satisfied that driving tests have absolutely no value.’
Lord Russell, Government Spokesman on Roads (1929)
‘We must make the motorist feel that when he is discourteous and inconsiderate on the road he is not a British gentleman.’
Herbert Morrison MP, Minister for Transport (1930)
‘My own view is that we shall have to ration cars. We shall have to have a waiting list.’
James Lovat-Fraser (1935), on the news that
there were around 220,000 cars on Britain’s roads.
Today, the figure is more than 30 million.
20
Parliamentary London
‘The problem is that many MPs never see the London that exists beyond the wine bars and brothels of Westminster.’
Ken Livingstone
Ten Peculiarities of the ‘Mother of Parliaments’
Britain has the oldest parliament in the world but is one of only a handful of countries with no written constitution. (Israel, New Zealand and San Marino don’t have one either.)
Despite an unusually long history of democracy, this country still requires the Queen to give her permission – or Royal Assent – for an Act of Parliament to pass into law. Fortunately, no monarch has refused to grant this permission since 1708.
Although the Queen takes care not to interfere with parliamentary procedure, no session is allowed to take place without the gold Mace – a symbol of her authority – being present in the chamber.
Bizarrely, the apportioning of parliamentary seats bears little relation to the number of votes cast. In 2005, Labour polled only 37 per cent of the vote but got well in excess of half the seats.
British vote
rs have no say in who gets to be Prime Minister. Once a general election has been won, the leader of the party with the most seats – not votes – goes to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen for permission to form a Government. Between elections, the governing party can also decide independently to switch leaders, as Labour did from Blair to Brown.
If no party wins an overall majority, it is quite possible for the least popular parties to get together to form a Government and, in theory, for a party to come last and still end up with its leader in No. 10.
There is no fixed period between one election and the next, although the law states that no more than five years must pass before a new election is called. This enables the party in power to choose the date that best suits them, an inherent form of bias.
The House of Lords exists in law to moderate the actions of the House of Commons, although the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 mean their lordships – who these days are anyway mostly political appointees – can be ignored if they cause too much trouble.
Despite unruly behaviour and a lot of bad-tempered banter, MPs are still forbidden from swearing or from offering personal insults such as calling a member on the opposite benches a liar, coward, hooligan, traitor, guttersnipe or git. (Once, after being censured for calling half the cabinet ‘asses’, Benjamin Disraeli turned to the Speaker and, by way of an apology, declared, ‘I withdraw. Half the Cabinet are not asses.’)
Parliamentary Firsts
The first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was Nancy Astor (1879–1964). An American who took on her husband’s Plymouth seat when he succeeded to a viscountcy and moved to the House of Lords, Lady Astor entered the Commons in 1919.
The first woman to be elected to the lower house, however, was Constance Markievicz (1868–1927) a year earlier. The London-born daughter of the polar explorer Sir Henry Gore-Booth, as a member for Sinn Féin she chose to abide by the Irish party’s abstentionist policy and did not enter the House. The same year, she was imprisoned in Holloway for campaigning against conscription.
In 1847, Baron Lionel de Rothschild similarly became the first Jewish Member of Parliament in this country. However, he refused to swear the oath of office as it included the phrase ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ and so was deemed unable to take his seat in the Commons. He stood down but was elected again three years later when, once again, he was denied the chance to sit when he refused to take the oath in its existing form.
Fortunately the law – and the oath – was finally changed in 1858, enabling Sir David Salomons, Bt. (1797–1873) to take his seat and become the first Jew ever to speak in the House. He was also the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London.
Britain’s first Asian MP was Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917), a Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in Bombay and later of Gujarati at University College London. He was elected in the Liberal interest for Finsbury Central at the 1892 General Election.
Incredibly, it was to take nearly a hundred years for any Afro-Caribbeans to be elected, but in 1987 Bernie Grant, Diane Abbott and Paul Boateng secured three London constituencies for Labour. Of these, the last-named, now Lord Boateng of Aykem and Wembley, became the first ever black Cabinet minister in May 2002.
At 5.15 p.m. on 11 May 1812, Spencer Perceval became the first British Prime Minister to be murdered, and also the first MP to die within the Palace of Westminster. He was shot dead by a disgruntled voter, John Bellingham, leaving behind a widow and twelve children and just over £100 in the bank. Incredibly, 185 years later, descendants of Perceval and Bellingham stood against each other in the 1997 election, but neither man won.
Henry Fawcett (1833–84) was Britain’s first blind MP; Jack Ashley (1922–2012) was the first to be totally deaf; and Major Sir Jack Cohen (1886–1965) was the first disabled MP. Having lost both legs at Ypres during the Great War, Sir Jack was elected to represent the Conservatives at Liverpool Fairfield in 1918 and held the seat for more than a dozen years.
DISHONOURABLE MEMBERS (I)
POLITICIAN LAW-BREAKERS
John Aislabie
Heavily implicated in the famous South Sea Bubble scandal in March 1721, Aislabie was found guilty of ‘the most notorious, dangerous and infamous corruption’ and, following his resignation from the Exchequer, he was expelled from the House of Commons and locked up in the Tower.
Jonathan Aitken
After launching an ill-advised libel case against the Guardian newspaper and Granada TV’s World in Action in 1997, Conservative MP Aitken was subsequently charged with perjury and found guilty of perverting the course of justice. Jailed for eighteen months, he undertook a course in theology, and, ‘born again’, is now president of Christian Solidarity Worldwide.
Chris Huhne
In 2012, a simple speeding offence ballooned into a far more serious charge of perverting the course of justice when the Liberal Democrat Secretary of State admitted arranging for his wife to collect three penalty points, which were correctly due to him after a high-speed run down the M11 nearly a decade earlier. While awaiting sentencing, Huhne ensured his place in history by becoming only the fifth Privy Counsellor to resign in more than 500 years.
John Stonehouse
Faking his own death in 1974 – by leaving a pile of clothes on a Miami beach – the Labour MP was shortly afterwards arrested in Australia by officers who thought they had collared Lord Lucan. Charged with twenty-one counts of fraud, theft, forgery and wasting police time, his trial took sixty-eight days, after which he was jailed for seven years. Like several of his fellow Labour members at this time, he was later discovered to have been a communist spy.
Peter Baker
Combining the roles of publisher and politician (much like his associate Robert Maxwell), when Baker’s business interests ran into trouble in 1954 he applied fake signatures to a number of letters before he was arrested and charged with seven counts of uttering forged documents. He pleaded guilty to six of these and received a sentence of seven years (later reduced to four). Incredibly, he remained an MP until after the case was decided, resigning only when he was finally incarcerated in Wormwood Scrubs.
Frank Russell, 2nd Earl Russell
A popular member of the House of Lords, Russell was nevertheless very much the black sheep of this distinguished political and philosophical dynasty. In 1901, he was famously tried for bigamy but sentenced to just three months in prison by a lenient judge on the grounds that at least one marriage had already caused him ‘extreme torture’.
William Byron, 5th Baron Byron
In 1765, Lord Byron killed his cousin William Chaworth in a duel at a pub in Soho. He was tried for the crime but, under a statute dating back to the time of Edward VI, was found guilty only of manslaughter. Made to pay a modest fine, he nevertheless refused to express any regret for running his cousin through with a blade. Like Earl Russell, he thereafter revelled in his reputation as ‘the wicked lord’ and reportedly had his sword mounted and prominently displayed at Newstead Abbey.
David Chaytor
Caught up in the great Parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009, Labour backbencher Chaytor was the first to be hauled into court. After pleading guilty to a charge of false accounting, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Others followed, although many appeared to escape with little more required of them than that they return to the public money they had seen fit to call their own.
Miranda Grell
After winning the Leyton ward of Waltham Forest for Labour by just twenty-eight votes, in September 2007 Grell went on trial under the Representation of the People Act (1983). Charged with making a false allegation against a gay rival, specifically that he was a paedophile, she was fined £1,000 plus costs and barred from holding public office for three years.
The World’s Most Famous Bell
At 6.00 p.m. each evening, the BBC broadcasts the chimes of Big Ben – live – on Radio 4. Bizarrely, anyone listening on the radio will hear the bongs before somebody standing at the foot o
f the tower, because the sound takes fractions of a second longer to travel down to the ground than through the ether.
For some reason, the hour bell is the only one to have a name – probably in memory of Sir Benjamin Hall, a generously proportioned Commissioner of Works – although the tower contains another four smaller bells.
With a diameter of 8 ft, and weighing in at 13.5 tons, Big Ben is the largest chiming1 bell in the world and, after being cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in April 1858, it took almost two weeks to cool down.
The bell tower itself leans slightly – by just over 8½ in. – to the northwest. It is not thought to be in any danger of falling down, although there was some concern about its stability during work on the Jubilee Line Extension in the 1990s.
The detailing on the much photographed clock faces at the top of the tower, each one a mammoth 23 ft in diameter, is by A. W. Pugin. All four feature the same Latin inscription: ‘domine salvam fac reginam nostram victoriam primam’, meaning ‘O Lord, keep safe our Queen Victoria the First’.
DISHONOURABLE MEMBERS (II)
TEN GREAT POLITICAL SEX SCANDALS
John Profumo
In 1963, Profumo’s crime was lying to the House of Commons, but the likelihood is that his political career was doomed anyway. As Secretary of State for War, and a married man, he had no defence against press accusations that he was engaged in an improper relationship with a model.
At the height of the Cold War, his case gained added piquancy when it emerged that Christine Keeler was also seeing the Soviet Naval Attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov.