by David Long
Knollys Rose
One of the City’s Quit Rent Ceremonies (see Odd Jobs, Chapter 13) in which symbolic rents are collected for certain lands or properties of antiquity in order to assert the overlord’s ultimate title to that land. By agreement, such token rents may be paid in peppercorns (hence the phrase), red roses and even, in one celebrated case, a roast dinner.
The Knollys Rose is a reference to a famous fourteenth-century soldier, Sir Robert Knollys, and is made each year by the Verger of All Hallows-by-the-Tower in payment for a footbridge – now long gone – linking two properties believed once to have stood in Seething Lane. The ceremony takes place on Midsummer Day following a procession to the Mansion House, and the rent of a single red rose is paid in person to the Lord Mayor of London.
Bubble Sermon
A reminder to liverymen and freemen of the Worshipful Company of Stationers that ‘life is but a bubble’, the sermon is preached on the first Tuesday of June at St Martin’s-within-Ludgate. This is done as per the will of one of the company’s eighteenth-century benefactors, Richard Johnson.
July
Doggett’s Coat & Badge
More venerable, longer and decidedly tougher than the Oxbridge affair, the world’s oldest rowing race was conceived to mark the anniversary of George I’s accession to the throne. It has been held each summer since 1715, and is supervised by the Fishmongers’ Company, with only young members of the Worshipful Company of Watermen and Lightermen eligible to take part in the sculling challenge. The winner is presented with a scarlet coat and a large silver badge, having rowed 4½ miles single-handedly while negotiating no fewer than ten bridges.
September
Oliver Cromwell Commemoration
On 3 September each year, the anniversary of the usurper’s victories at Dunbar and Worcester as well as of his own death in 1658, a short service is held by his statue outside Westminster Hall. Close to the date, the Roundhead Association, a sort of dour counterpart to the King’s Army (see page 243), also musters a small force to march nearby, in memory of those who were hanged, drawn and quartered for killing their king.
October
Lion Sermon
On or about 16 October each year, at St Katherine Cree, Leadenhall Street, a sermon is preached at the behest of Sir John Gayer, a former Lord Mayor of London and a prime mover in the East India Company. Waylaid by a lion in the Arabian desert while on a trading mission, Sir John fell to his knees to pray and was saved. Since 1649, in his memory and on the anniversary of his escape, the service traditionally includes excerpts from the Book of Daniel.
Faggot Service
Another Quit Rent Ceremony (see page 247), the Faggot Service has been held every year for more than 800 years except during Cromwell’s occupation. King John granted a piece of land at Eardington in Shropshire for a rent of two knives, one to be ‘good enough to cut a hazel rod’ and the other so bad that it would bend rather than cut ‘green cheese’.
Today, the knives have been replaced by a hatchet and a billhook, but, in order to prove that the debt is discharged, a ceremony at the Law Courts in the Strand each year sees the Solicitor of the City of London – on the order of the Queen’s Remembrancer – demonstrating that one blade cannot cut a hazel rod before using a second to break a faggot or bundle of them into pieces.
Harvest of the Sea Service
A piscatorial variation on a traditional school or church harvest festival, mid-October sees workers from Billingsgate Fish Market – now removed to the Isle of Dogs – making their annual pilgrimage to their former parish church, St Mary-at-Hill, for a service of thanksgiving. The occasion is marked by an unusually fine display of fish on a marble slab in the church porch – traditionally thirty-nine species were put on display, an echo of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles – the produce being afterwards distributed to those in need.
November
Lord Mayor of London’s Installation
The most magnificent piece of civil ceremonial in the country relates to a particularly ancient office and one that, after more than 800 years, still vests in a single person not just the office of Lord Mayor of London but also that of Chief Magistrate of the City, Admiral of the Port of London, Chancellor of City University, President of Gresham College and President of the City of London Reserve Forces.
Granted the precedence of an earl, made a member of the Privy Council and privileged to travel abroad without a passport, the incumbent also gets to live at the Mansion House, albeit for one year only, before being knighted by his sovereign. (If the incumbent is a woman, incidentally, she is still known as Lord Mayor and never as the Lady Mayoress.)
The election of a new Lord Mayor will already have taken place on Michaelmas Day at Guildhall, the oldest secular building in the capital. This is symbolically barricaded on the day with a wooden structure called the Wickets put in place and uniformed beadles installed to ensure that none but liverymen get to cast a vote.
Just as the voters are limited – somewhat surprisingly for such an important post – so, too, are the candidates, who must both be senior aldermen of the city and have served a term as sheriff. Of the two, the more senior is always chosen, which is to say that each year the result is already a foregone conclusion. The procedure is nevertheless a deeply solemn one, with as much colour and pageantry as a papal conclave – and the same strict sense of time-honoured formality.
The celebrations have to wait a few weeks more, however, when the new Lord Mayor is finally installed as the City’s new ‘chief citizen’. Expressly more public than the covert deliberations of the liverymen, this involves the new incumbent heading a lengthy, noisy and colourful procession more than 3½ miles long. It is a spectacle that attracts hundreds of thousands of spectators each year, as the new lord’s eighteenth-century gold carriage makes its way from the City of London to the City of Westminster where an oath of loyalty is sworn to the Crown.
After 500 years, the Lord Mayor’s Show is still the oldest, longest and most popular such procession anywhere in the world, and – rain or shine – it takes place on the second Saturday in November.
December
Trafalgar Square Christmas Tree
Presented to the people of London every year since 1947, the tree ‘is given by the city of Oslo as a token of Norwegian gratitude to the people of London for their assistance during the years 1940–45’.
It is decorated in a traditional Nordic fashion, and supplemented by 500 white bulbs, which are lit on the second Thursday of the month. This is done in the presence of the Lord Mayor of Westminster, musicians and carol singers from St Martin-in-the-Fields, and many thousands of members of the public. For retailers, Christmas may have started back in October, but for many Londoners this is the true sign.
22
Esoteric London
London’s Arcane and Secret Societies
‘Secret’ doesn’t necessarily have to mean ‘sinister’, but there’s nothing quite like excluding everyone else to get the collective imagination racing and conspiracy theorists jumping up and down.
After more than 300 years, London’s traditional gentlemen’s clubs, for example, continue to arouse suspicion and resentment in equal measure, even though little happens inside most of them that you wouldn’t find at any suburban golf club.
The Freemasons have similarly been pilloried for centuries for their apparent obsession with keeping things under wraps, so much so that many non-Masons seem to believe that their decision to throw open the doors of their Covent Garden HQ – anyone can turn up at Great Queen Street for a guided tour – is actually some kind of a double bluff and that really the movement is headquartered somewhere else altogether.
The truth, however, is probably just that the average member of this sort of place just wants somewhere to have a quiet drink and a chat with like-minded chaps – and, yes, even now, it is nearly always chaps rather than chapesses who tend to make up the membership.
Calves’ Head Club
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Established to meet at premises in Suffolk Street on 30 January each year to celebrate the murder of Charles I, the society survived into the eighteenth century but is now thought to be defunct. The name derived from the dishes served, a reference presumably to the removal of the king’s own head.
In the 1730s, the event got so out of hand that troops were called, and today those with Cromwellian leaning are more likely to join the aforementioned Roundhead Association and their annual march in Whitehall each autumn.
City of Lushington
A somewhat elaborate drinking club – the name comes from ‘lush’ – the society was founded in Great Russell Street in the 1760s and was still active in the area a century and a half later. Chiefly comprising ‘theatricals, singers, literary men, jovial tradesmen and well-to-do mechanics’ – i.e. pretty much anyone – the members would drink themselves silly under the watchful eye of a president dressed as the Lord Mayor with four ‘Aldermen’ on hand to ensure that newly elected candidates stood their rounds.
The Club
TV news anchor Jeremy Paxman stumbled by accident upon The Club in the 1990s while researching his book Friends in High Places: Who Runs Britain? A member carelessly described it to him as ‘the Establishment at play’ before realising (a) that Paxo had never heard of it and (b) that he had thus inadvertently helped quite a big cat out of its bag.
It is super-exclusive – Lord Chancellors and senior bishops are among those who have been blackballed during its 250-year history – and it comprises barely fifty individuals, all of them male. Mostly senior politicians, academics, financiers and members of the Great and Good, they still meet for dinner one Tuesday each month in a private dining room at 60 St James’s Street.
Freemasons
The archetypal secret society, Freemasons also make up the largest such group in London. Their origins are genuinely ancient – enabling medieval stone masons to move around the country to find work – but the society became much bigger much later.
The oldest Lodge in London is thought to date back to 1691, and, while members typically meet in fairly conventional buildings, the capital boasts a number of quite stupendous temples. These include an especially lavish one hidden somewhat unexpectedly behind locked doors in the former Great Eastern Hotel by Liverpool Street Station. Designed by Charles Barry Jr. (at a cost equivalent to £4 million today), it is not open to the public but can be hired for weddings.
Golden Dawn
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was established in London in the nineteenth century, its members engaging in theurgy or the practice of summoning a god or gods into being. Possibly they still do, as the organisation has a website, but this is noticeably unhelpful, declaring simply that ‘the London Temple Chiefs have decided that there will be no information about, or reference to, the temple or the order’.
Gormogons
The Ancient, August and Noble Order of Gormogons announced themselves to the public in a newspaper advertisement in London’s Daily Post on 3 September 1724. The founder Philip Wharton had been expelled from the Freemasons, and consequently made it a rule that no Mason could join his new order without first burning his regalia and agreeing to be ridiculed. Unsurprisingly, few found the restrictions appealing and, by 1738, the organisation seems to have disappeared.
The Hellfire Club
Perhaps the best known of the eighteenth-century secret societies, the so-called Mad Monks of Medmenham, a group of allegedly wild and dissipated aristocrats, famously gathered at the Buckinghamshire abbey of that name to celebrate black Masses while performing acts of ‘gross lewdness and daring impiety’ on the ruined altar.
Afterwards, it was said, they would eat strange foodstuffs served by naked girls on whom they liked to press their basest desires. However, much of this stuff is now thought to have been made up, as the club’s origins were solidly London-based and, as early meetings were held at the George & Vulture in the City, it seems unlikely that the landlord would have been entirely happy to see his barmaids used in this way.
The Oddfellows
Rudely described as a kind of cut-price Freemasons, this fraternal society is sometimes said to have been established by a group of knights in the 1450s, although a foundation date of around 1745 seems more likely.
Documents exist showing that, at that time, members were paying a penny to attend meetings at Southwark’s Oakley Arms, the Globe at Hatton Garden and the Boar’s Head in Smithfield, and concerned themselves mostly with self-help and companionship. Over the years, the membership in London included George IV, Winston Churchill and Stanley Baldwin, with the fathers of George Harrison and Ringo Starr joining one of the provincial fraternities.
The Order of Chaeronea
Taking its name from a fourth-century battle between a Macedonian king and the Sacred Band of Thebes (who lost), the Order was founded in the 1890s by the poet G. C. Ives as a sort of underground network for gay men. New members were required to swear ‘never to vex or persecute lovers’ and ‘that all real love shall be to you as sanctuary’.
To his lasting disappointment, Ives was unable to persuade his friend Oscar Wilde to join his fellow members, who adopted a wide range of arcane and esoteric codewords and symbols. Almost certainly they did this because at this time – as Wilde’s own experience was soon to demonstrate – the penalties for being found out were decidedly extreme.
The Theosophical Society
From the Greek theos (god) and sophia (wisdom), the Society was founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky in New York and was active in London within two or three years. Writers seemed particularly attracted to it, and several names appear in its history including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats, Lewis Carroll and Sir Henry Rider Haggard.
Still active today (in Gloucester Place, W1), it welcomes students of all religions and none; indeed, anyone keen to ‘form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity, to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy and science, and to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man’.
The 33rd Degree
Despite a brass plaque on the wall at 10 Duke Street, London, SW1, boldly identifying the building as the Headquarters of the Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree, it took until 1984 and the publication of Stephen Knight’s book The Brotherhood to alert the wider public to the existence of the very highest echelons of the Masonic movement.
Knight even went so far as to suggest in his book that the organisation was so secret that even most Freemasons did not realise that there were more than three degrees or levels to their craft. The truth, he said, was that there were actually another thirty levels and that, headed by a ‘Most Puissant Sovereign Commander’, only seventy-five Masons could attain the ultra-exclusive 33rd Degree at any one time.
Wolf Club
The nineteenth-century actor Edmund Kean was once charged with having a criminal conversation, a wonderful euphemism for an adulterous affair. He also found time to establish a club-within-a-pub at the Coal Hole on the Strand, so-named as it was popular with colliers working the Thames.
Kean and his fellow members like to claim they were henpecked husbands, innocents who were forbidden by their wives to sing in the bath, but more likely is that they came here to get drunk and to mix with the kind of women no wife ever wants to hear about.