Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

  With every new train and chimney stack the pollution grew, and with every new arrival the overcrowding worsened. Londoners suffered repeated outbreaks of cholera, whose cause baffled the authorities. There were many artists and writers who followed William Blake in lamenting the mills and machines and urbanisation; but I am not at all sure Turner was among them.

  In 1838, the year he saw the Temeraire, they opened the Great Western Railway from Paddington. In 1844 Turner tried to convey his feelings about this development in Rain, Steam and Speed. He shows a locomotive shooting towards us over a bridge at Maidenhead, and the painting’s “hero” is the fire blazing in the boiler.

  This is not an anti-industrial painting. If anything, it is a celebration of the vision-blurring pace and power of the new machine, unlike anything humanity had seen before. Nor could you say that Turner is exactly hostile to the tugboat in The Fighting Temeraire, as she beetles efficiently towards us, flame billowing from her glistening black chimney. Yes, you feel the pathos of the ghostly old superannuated sail ship behind her. But Turner knew nothing of carcinogens or CO2 emissions.

  As far as he was concerned, the steamboat was a wonderful new machine that could convey him speedily to Margate and the arms of Sophia Booth. I would say Turner is basically Promethean, pro-technology. But what really interested him was colour and movement, and the way the light behaved as it shone through the industrial gases of the new epoch, the excuse he found for a style of painting that was ever more impressionistic.

  In 1870, long after Turner was dead, Claude Monet came to London. He went to the galleries and saw what Turner had done. He went to the same vantage points on the banks of the Thames, and like Turner, he painted the Houses of Parliament—in this case the Barry and Pugin masterpiece whose £2 million cost Dickens had so deplored. The building was different, the smog was even thicker and Monet and Co. were to go on to become the most fashionable painters of our times, regularly smashing records at auction houses.

  But there can be no serious doubt that the first breakthrough was Turner’s. He was the first to assert the principle that what mattered was not what you saw, but the way you saw it. He was the father of Impressionism.

  In 1846 J. M. W. Turner had moved with Sophia Booth to their small house in Chelsea. If he climbed to his rooftop balcony, and looked left and right, he could see two of the finest views of the river to be had in London. On the day he died, 19 December 1851, he was found on the floor of his bedroom, apparently trying to tiger-crawl to the window to look at the river.

  Turner’s doctor reported how, just before 9 a.m., “the sun broke through the cloudy curtain that had for so long obscured its splendour, and filled the chamber of death with the glory of light.” Turner died without a groan, holding the hand of his faithful Sophia—to whom, with typical stinginess, he left virtually nothing.

  Another version has it that he offered some famous last words: “The sun is god.” This was not perhaps as controversial an analysis as you might think. In spite of the efforts of every bishop since Mellitus, London remained, beneath it all, a pretty pagan place, with only 25 percent of the population turning up to church on a Sunday. Whether he meant it or not, Turner’s curious Aztec belief is at least as plausible as any other theory, and it did nothing to dent a popularity that grows to this day.

  * * *

  In the year Turner died the Victorians went in their millions to the Great Exhibition. A Crystal Palace, or “Great Shalimar,” was built in Hyde Park, a temple to the benefits of trade and technological innovation. For a shilling Londoners could see everything from the Koh-i-Noor diamond to a demonstration of the world’s first fax machine.

  In the same year—1851—the first submarine cable was laid between London and Paris, to be followed by a cable to New York in 1866 and Melbourne in 1872. The age of telecommunications was born, and as the telegraph made shipping easier and more predictable, it was possible to cut costs and move to what we would now call a “just in time” system. More and bigger ships arrived, with bigger cargoes, and speculators dug huge new docks, the Victoria and Albert, at Plaistow levels.

  London was now incomparably the richest city on Earth, with a stock exchange more than five times bigger than that of New York (and where the more relaxed approach to settlement deadlines encouraged greater risk and greater reward). All those canals and docks and railroads and bridges and undersea cables—all that Victorian infrastructure—required finance, and hardly any of it would have been possible without the ingenuity and daring of London’s leading bankers.

  Ping-Pong

  * * *

  Of all the contributions the Victorians made to the world, the most culturally pervasive today is almost certainly sport. I remember hearing Sepp Blatter, the President of FIFA, shocking the world when he announced that football had been invented in China—when he knows fine well that the game that unites humanity was codified in London in 1863. Whatever the attractions of cuju, a third-century BC game that involved kicking a leather object through a hole in a piece of silk cloth, it is not Association Football.

  The modern Olympic games have their origins in Much Wenlock in Shropshire, where in 1850 a local physician named Dr. William Penny Brookes established the Much Wenlock Olympics, an event that involved all kinds of exertion, including wheelbarrow races and singing competitions. The thing was such a success that he bombarded the Greek king, the Greek prime minister and the Greek ambassador in London with fervent pleas that they should revive the Olympic Games themselves, in Athens—somewhat to the mystification of the Greeks. His idea was eventually taken up by the Anglophile sports nut, Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

  On it went through the nineteenth century, as sport after sport was codified in Britain—usually London. The Athletics Club was founded in West Brompton in 1866, and evolved into the Amateur Athletics Association, which itself provided the rules and template for all modern athletics. Men have been punching each other in the head since the beginning of time, and you will find references to boxing in The Iliad. But it was in London in 1867 that the Marquess of Queensberry gave his name to the modern rules, with their careful stipulations about gloves, holding and so on. In 1871 a group of thirty-two burly Victorians met at the Pall Mall restaurant on Cockspur Street and started the Rugby Football Union. In 1882 the rowers set up the Amateur Rowing Association to formalise the aggressive competitions that had been taking place on the Thames. You can see ancient Greek bas-reliefs of people playing a game that is evidently hockey—but the rules of the modern game were established in 1886 with the foundation of the Hockey Association.

  Modern lawn tennis was invented by an eccentric character named Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, and the game was originally called “Sphairistike,” or “Sticky.” In 1888 they changed the court from Wingfield’s preferred hourglass shape to a rectangle, and the Lawn Tennis Association was born. Rackets was first played by inmates of London debtors’ prisons. The world’s first squash court was in Harrow. The global home of cricket is in Marylebone. The world’s first organised swimming competitions seem to have taken place on the Serpentine in 1837.

  In case after case we see the Victorians taking a long-standing sporting activity, playing it obsessively and then deciding on the rules—partly because rules were vital to the public school concept of “fair play” and partly because rules were essential for deciding who had won the betting on the outcome.

  But there was one game that seems to be wholly indigenous to Britain: not just the rules but the very idea. The Victorians were so energetic that in the 1880s they came up with a new after-dinner entertainment. They cleared the table and balanced a row of upright books down the middle so as to form a barrier. They then fashioned a ball made of a sawn-off champagne cork or string or anything they had knocking around, and then with the help of other books or cigar box lids they biffed that projectile to and fro across the table.

  In 1890 th
ere was the first patented version, which involved a 30-millimetre rubber ball covered with cloth, strung rackets and a low wooden fence all round the table. A year later the games company John Jaques of London introduced their “Gossima” game with a 50-millimetre cork ball, a foot-high net and bats made of parchment—hence the ping pong noise.

  Soon other variants were on the market, with names like Whiff-Whaff, Pom-Pom, Pim-Pam, Netto, Ping-Pong, Parlour Tennis and Table Tennis. It was not long before Ping-Pong and Table Tennis were the two survivors, and since they had different rules they agreed in 1903 to end the confusion and form the Table Tennis Association.

  The interesting question is why the miracle took place on English dining room tables. It may be something to do with the embarrassment of trying to maintain after-dinner conversation. It may be to do with a lack of interest in food, or rain stopping play of tennis outside. It may be that Victorians were simply richer than any other society on Earth—and had the leisure to hit champagne corks at each other.

  * * *

  Lionel Rothschild

  The man who financed the empire

  Money is the god of our time and Rothschild is his prophet.

  HEINRICH HEINE, SÄMTLICHE SCHRIFTEN, VOL. V

  It is well known and statistically attested that cycling in London is safe and getting safer. But even the most experienced cyclist will accept that there are one or two stretches where you mentally cross yourself and hope that the drivers are paying attention.

  It takes a certain sangfroid to hurl yourself down the underpasses of the Marylebone Road; and then there is the palio of Hyde Park corner. I don’t just mean the bit at the top of Constitution Hill, where you have to launch into the one-way stampede of buses and taxis; the real white-knuckle moment comes after you have puffed up from Knightsbridge towards Piccadilly, and you are held at the lights along with all the Beemers and Maseratis; and when the lights change and you are released, you pedal like the devil, believe me, because you can see the army of cars drawn up on your left at the bottom of Park Lane. It is like passing in front of the cavalry of Crazy Horse or Marshal Ney, as the great beasts paw the earth and prepare to charge. And as you waggle your way into the relative safety of Piccadilly, just ahead of the tide of metal, you may ask yourself how it came about that London has an urban motorway running through what was once a famously lovely and pastoral district of Park Lane.

  We must thank a former Tory transport minister, named Ernest Marples. Among other things, this visionary decided that what London needed was big one-way gyratories around Marble Arch (which was called Marple Arch, in honour of the excavations he promoted) and Hyde Park Corner.

  In 1962 he turned this attractive area into a scene of devastation, with craters so big that my father used to claim he made use of one of them to inter a clapped-out Austin-Healey. In the course of building his five-lane roundabout around the Wellington Arch, Ernest Marples demolished a row of houses at the end of Piccadilly.

  These were not any old houses. At least one of them, 148 Piccadilly, had latterly become a bit faded—the headquarters of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. But it was still a monument of domestic grandeur, built on the scale of a London club. There were cavernous wine cellars and servants’ quarters, and vast kitchens with newfangled gas cookers, and sweeping marble staircases leading up to a piano nobile full of masterpieces of Flemish painting and French cloisonné and windows with views out over the park.

  This was the location of one of the most sensational deals ever done between a bank and the British government. That space now occupied by the roaring traffic was once the home of Lionel Rothschild, and it was here that he would meet his friend Benjamin Disraeli, the Prime Minister.

  It was 1875. Britain was at the apogee of its power and London was a great industrial centre. In the East End, the lower Lea Valley, and the area now intended for Olympic rejuvenation, there was a mind-boggling and nostril-assailing array of factories and plants.

  Indeed, that was why they were in the East End, because the prevailing wind was meant to carry their vapours away from the sensitive noses of those who lived in great mansions in Piccadilly. There were factories making jute and manure and rubber and fertiliser, and they filled the air with the signature aroma of boiled-up putrid fish. There were businesses that took in the sugar and oranges of the colonies and sent them out again at a vast markup as Keiller’s marmalade. They shipped in gas tar, and shipped it out again as creosote, naphtha, pitch, anthracene, disinfectant, insecticide and aniline dyes. London took in wool, tea, coffee, sugar, dyestuffs, you name it—and then London firms would process them and package them and send them round the world. They took in cotton from India and then sent it back to clothe the Indians themselves, until it was said that the plains of Hindustan were bleached with the bones of Indian weavers.

  Now Disraeli—romantic and opportunistic about the empire and its Empress—saw the chance to extend his country’s global lead. By 1871 a French-led consortium had opened the Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and its strategic potential was obvious. The canal cut journey times to India, because ships no longer had to slog around the Cape of Good Hope. The Suez Canal plainly opened up the whole of east Africa for trade and colonisation—and here there was an opportunity to buy it, and to put British thumbs around this vital new commercial windpipe.

  The Ottoman Empire was bust; the Khedive of Egypt was bust; the company that had dug the canal had found—as so often—that the returns on the new infrastructure project did not match up to expectations. The Egyptians wanted £4 million—a staggering sum for those days, equivalent to about 8.3 percent of the entire UK budget. Disraeli knew where to go.

  Lionel Rothschild was the leading British member of the pan-European banking dynasty. In 1870 he had been pictured on the cover of The Period magazine as the “king” of cash and bonds, with the world’s rulers paying homage to his supersized bearded person: the Emperor of China, the Turkish sultan, Napoleon III, the Pope, Kaiser Wilhelm I and Queen Victoria. He and his family had plenty of experience in financing big transport projects—they had helped to create a network of European railways. He was also a close family friend of Disraeli and of Disraeli’s wife.

  As soon as the Prime Minister had secured the agreement of the cabinet to the £4 million, the Cabinet Secretary, Montagu Corry, was dispatched to the headquarters of N. M. Rothschild at New Court in St. Swithin’s Lane—where it can be found today. He came upon the sixty-seven-year-old financier in a relaxed frame of mind, sitting in his oak-panelled room. “The Prime Minister wants four million pounds tomorrow,” said Corry.

  Rothschild picked up a muscatel grape, ate it, threw out the skin and said deliberately, “What is your security?”

  “The British government.”

  “You shall have it.”

  It was an ingenious deal for everyone. The French were confounded to see British influence so manifestly extended. The opposition Liberals, led by W. E. Gladstone, could not think of any serious objections. “Will it not give rise to all sorts of international difficulties and questions?” wrote Lord Granville, rather feebly, to Gladstone. “Ought so great a responsibility to be taken without immediately consulting parliament?” he whimpered.

  The patriotic British public was delighted to become the owner of this Middle Eastern jugular, and an elated Disraeli wrote to Her Majesty to break the good news.

  It is just settled: you have it, madam. The French government has been outgeneralled. They tried too much, offering loans at an usurious rate and with conditions which would virtually have given them the government of Egypt.

  The Khedive, in despair and disgust, offered Yr majesty’s government to purchase his shares outright—he never would listen to such a proposition before. Four millions sterling! and almost immediately.

  There was only one firm that could do it—Rothschilds. They be
haved admirably, advanced the money at a low rate, and the entire interest of the Khedive is now yours, madam.

  Rothschild’s hadn’t done too badly themselves, as you might expect. Some people said the old grape peeler had skinned the British government. They objected that it was a bit steep to charge £150,000 for a £4 million loan over three months. That was an annual interest rate of 15 percent—the sort of rate you would expect to charge the Egyptians, not the English, said men like W. H. Smith, the bookseller who was also Secretary to the Treasury. Others suggested that Lionel and his family had done some classic insider dealing, buying loads of Egyptian stock in the knowledge that it was bound to rise on the deal.

  Lionel was indifferent to criticism. When the stockbroker Arthur Wragg suggested that he should have loaned the cash to the government free of charge, he issued a muscatel-crushing put-down. “Arthur Wragg, you are a young man and will learn better. I have made one hundred thousand pounds out of the deal, I wish it had been two hundred thousand pounds.”

  As things turned out, this daring decision by the British government to buy an Egyptian waterway was an unexpected bargain for the taxpayer. By January the following year the shares in the canal had gone up 50 percent. By 1898 the government’s stake was worth £24 million—six times what Disraeli had paid for it; and by 1935 it was worth £93 million. The annual dividend on these shares shot up from £200,000 a year in 1875 to £880,000 in 1901.

  Disraeli had not only secured Britain’s interests in protecting the quickest passage to India—he had made a vast profit on the deal. The Suez Canal was to remain a British interest until 1956, not all that long, frankly, before the present author was born.

  As Disraeli noted to Victoria, it was Britain that had the banking system that allowed them to offer the right deal to the Khedive; and it would never have been possible without Lionel Rothschild.