Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

  There was hilarity, scandal and outrage. It wasn’t just that Stead was guilty of a put-up job, he appeared to have violated the very law for which he had just successfully campaigned. Though he had not touched Eliza (he just wanted to show what might have happened), he and various other plotters, including the midwife and the procuress, were accused of abducting an underage girl.

  The heroic campaigner against prostitution was convicted of abduction and procurement and sentenced to three months, which he served mainly in Holloway. He would afterwards claim that he had a perfectly splendid time, and edited the Gazette while in prison. But his journalistic career never quite recovered.

  He left the Pall Mall Gazette, which then declined and was eventually folded into the Evening Standard in 1921. He founded and edited Review of Reviews, in which he pioneered character sketches of the current celebrity and such immortal headlines as “Baby Killing as an Investment” and “Ought Mrs Maybrook to Be Tortured to Death?” In 1893 he launched his own “Daily Paper,” but his reputation was starting to suffer from his opposition to the Boer War.

  He had become more and more preoccupied with spiritualism and campaigns for world peace—for which he was several times nominated for the Nobel Prize—and he was starting to lose that supple feel for the pulse of the reader.

  If we strip away his occasional absurdity, and the bungle of the Maiden Tribute, there is something irresistible about Stead. He loved and cared about journalism, and with his interest in interviews, in colour, quotation, personality and sensation, he revolutionised and (for my money) improved his profession.

  What other editor can claim to have personally founded two papers, forced the government to legislate on at least three occasions and recruited Oscar Wilde and G. B. Shaw as reviewers? He worked phenomenally hard, taking the train in from Wimbledon to be in the office from 8:20 a.m. By that time he had read everything in the papers down to the inquests—even though he had begun the day out on the Common, in his dressing gown, giving each of his little children a ride on the donkey he owned.

  Of course he was lubricious, in the classic Victorian way. The writer Mrs. Lynn Linton even said that he “exuded semen through the skin,” whatever she meant by that. But he was hardly wrong to conceive the exercise of the Maiden Tribute.

  If his techniques were faulty, we must surely enter in his defence that this was one of the world’s first efforts at investigative journalism. Even if the story of little Lily was stunted up, Stead had exposed real cruelty and abuse, and done society a service.

  Stead’s life ended on 15 April 1912, in what was to remain one of the biggest news stories of the twentieth century. He didn’t need to fabricate any quotes; he didn’t need anyone to play any role for him; he didn’t need to stunt up the mise-en-scène. The entire event was enacted before his boggling eyes.

  The only pity was that he was unable to go over the copy. He was off to New York in pursuit of world peace (and, some said later, the Nobel Prize that awaited him) and had somehow managed to book a passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic.

  With typical prescience he had already published articles about what might happen if a mail steamer went down in the mid-Atlantic with too few boats, and about a White Star liner rescuing the survivors of a ship that hit an iceberg. He was last sighted, said the survivor Philip Mock, clinging to a life raft with John Jacob Astor IV, until their feet became frozen and they had to let go.

  Another account says that earlier in the evening he had heroically helped several women and children into the lifeboats. He had then gone into the first-class smoking room, lit a cigar and started reading a book. I like to think that he was urged to follow the example of some of the less principled men who had found places in the boats, and that in the tradition of some of the very greatest reporters he made his excuses—and stayed.

  * * *

  Anybody who has seen James Cameron’s excellent film of the disaster will know that the Titanic was heavily segregated by class. The white-tied millionaires floated with their partners in the ballroom; the loveable twine-belted third-class passengers stamped and scraped their fiddles in the steamy belly of the ship.

  It is a broadly accurate representation of a world that had only two years of life left in it. In 1914 Londoners were caught up in the first of two connected world wars that were cumulatively disastrous for Britain and for the commercial and political dominance she had established in the world. From London alone 124,000 young men were sent to be slaughtered, mainly in the strategic idiocy of the Western Front. One in ten of London males in their twenties or thirties was killed. There was scarcely a family in the city that was not affected by the catastrophe.

  It was a shock that accelerated—of necessity—the emancipation of women, and that fatally undermined the old culture of deference and respect. The prewar class system could not survive such carnage. The world of Downton Abbey (if it ever really existed) was no more. As Winston Churchill was to discover in the Second World War, British troops no longer assumed that their generals must be wise and justified when they invited them to die for their country.

  In other ways the First World War was rather good for London. Employment was near capacity, with thousands of women employed in munitions factories. As for the interwar period, it was almost a golden age. Recall Betjeman’s elegiac poems about the Metroland of the 1930s. Or think of the Just William stories, about a young boy growing up in a sylvan Elysium where he could tickle trout in streams and roam with his faithful dog Jumble and play in tumbledown barns. That was interwar Bromley, a world where young girls could go for a tramp in the woods—as the old joke goes—and the tramp had nothing to fear.

  London was growing ever vaster, propelled to all points of the compass by swish new electric underground trains and trolley buses and big red omnibuses going boggler boggler boggler down leafy lanes. Suburban Londoners lived in huge peaceful developments, the garden cities of mock-Tudor or pebbledash semidetached houses, and they were speedily carried in the morning and evening to the centres of an economy that was remarkably diverse and robust.

  While much of Britain suffered in the Depression of the 1930s, London remained strikingly buoyant, manufacturing everything from Smith’s crisps to Hoovers, to rifles, to motor cars. By 1939 the city was six times as extensive by geographical area as it had been in 1880, and the population stood at an all-time high of more than 8.7 million people—and that is about a million more than there are today.

  And then history threw its second big punch of the twentieth century. London had soaked up the force of the first blow pretty well. This punch the city took full in the face.

  The Routemaster Bus

  * * *

  When Transport for London announced in 2005 that they were finally going to banish the Routemaster buses, a great cry of lamentation went up over the city. It was as though the ravens were to be evicted from the Tower. Newspaper petitions were got up, learned pamphlets were written in defence of a machine that was already pretty ancient.

  The last Routemaster had left the Chiswick production line in 1968, and those still left on the streets throbbed and heaved through the traffic like wounded battle elephants. They had no air-conditioning, and Brussels had condemned the bus as an insult to contemporary health and safety standards.

  But they were loved. They stood for London in the twentieth century. You only had to show a glimpse of one in a film to establish where you were. They were the only splash of colour in the grey of the postwar world, and they kept their chic for the next fifty years, and for one fundamental reason. They were the last bus on London’s streets to be built by Londoners, for Londoners, in London, and with specific regard to the needs of London passengers.

  The Routemaster story began in 1947, the year Britain was also meditating such popular revolutions as the NHS. Wartime bus production in Chiswick had been given over to the manufacture of Handley Pa
ge Halifax bombers, and memos began to circulate wondering whether there was anything that could be learned from that experience. It was decided that there was. In fact, it was decided, in a rare postwar burst of confidence, that London Transport was going to use everything they had learned over the years about buses and their passengers to create a master bus. It took years of research, design and planning—indeed it took the Russians less long to put Sputnik in space—but by 1956 the bus was ready. They copied the riveted aluminium fuselage of the wartime planes to create a bus that could be assembled and taken apart like Legos.

  There was a special new cubbyhole where the conductor could stand, out of the way of passengers hopping on and off via the open platform. It had a heating system—a big advance for the times; the wheels had their own independent suspension, and there was a fully automatic gearbox for a smoother ride. Mainly, though, it was a masterpiece of urban design.

  Before he died in 1941, London Transport’s legendary chief executive Frank Pick had decreed that buses must look good. They must be pieces of “street furniture,” he said. Like policemen’s helmets or Giles Gilbert Scott’s telephone box, they were to catch and hold the eye. It was Douglas Scott—who also did Potterton boilers and Rediffusion radio sets—who gave the Routemaster its curved roof and the lovely rounded windows. He specified the “Burgundy lining panels, Chinese green window surrounds and Sung Yellow ceilings” of the interior. He created the tartan moquette of dark red and yellow for the seats, and London Transport expended so much thought and energy on the designs because they wanted bums on those seats.

  Buses were in increasing competition with private cars, whose numbers doubled in London between 1945 and 1960. The trolley buses—clean and green and popular—were (sadly) taken off the streets to make way for the car; and the Routemaster was meant to be the replacement for the trolley buses.

  It was a great success. They built 2,875 of them between 1954 and 1968, and there were so many vacancies for crew that London Transport actively recruited for drivers and conductors in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad. Yes, the Routemaster bus played a part in the Caribbean immigration that was to transform and diversify London. On they chugged through the 1970s and 1980s, and even if there were only six hundred left by the 1990s, they were still landmarks of the city, each of them, as popular historian Travis Elborough has put it, a burly red diesel-powered Beefeater that stood for London.

  If there was one thing that doomed them to their final execution in 2005, it was the government’s fatal 1960s decision to pour money into British Leyland buses—in the hope of keeping that doomed business alive—instead of investing in the development of London’s own bus.

  The result is that the machines on the streets today have lorry engines and lorry gearboxes, and would be frankly more suited to carrying 32 tonnes of gravel than a complement of passengers. It is therefore only fitting that the New Bus for London has been designed as a bus for the streets of the city, with clean, green technology; and it restores the Routemaster’s hop-on hop-off platform that was so essential to its appeal.

  * * *

  Winston Churchill

  The unsung founder of the welfare state—and the man who saved the world from tyranny

  There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, RADIO BROADCAST, 1943

  If you have not yet done so, can I suggest that you go to the Cabinet War Rooms. I mean the bunker whose entrance is to be found to the right of the Clive Steps, between the Foreign Office and the Treasury. You may have unconsciously dismissed it as a tourist trap, a money-spinning shrine to the cult of Winston Churchill. You only have to go under the sandbagged lintel and down the steps to see that this is no gimmick.

  This isn’t some Tussauds-style animatronic Churchill experience: this is the real thing. You are taken down and back seventy years to the moment when London and Britain faced their supreme trial; and as your eyes adjust to the low-watt lighting of the former command centre, you begin to grasp something about being a Londoner in the Second World War. You will find it easy to ignore the global Churchill-worshipping pilgrims, with their wide eyes and audiophones pressed religiously to their ears.

  The rooms have been so meticulously preserved that you can almost believe you are back there in the 1940s. You can hear the rattle and purr of the oversized Bakelite telephones—red, white and green—that link this tiny warren of interconnected offices with British forces around the world. You can imagine the soft mutter of the uniformed service johnnies, their waxed moustaches drooping in the heat, as they stick their round-headed coloured pins into the maps: here the sinking of another capital ship, there another humiliating Japanese breakthrough.

  You can see the dark patches widening under the nylon armpits of good-looking shorthand typists, as they tap tap tap to keep up with the blistering pace set by the whisky-fuelled lucubrations of their chief client, and you can hear the pathetic efforts of the 1940s gizmos that are charged with keeping them cool—the wall-mounted fans or the solitary and newfangled mahogany air-conditioning unit, made by Frigidaire and donated by the Americans.

  If you are lucky, Gerry McCartney, the Director of Operations, will make an exception and allow you into the War Cabinet Room itself; and here you can almost taste the gulfs of tobacco taken in and exhaled by the nut-coloured lungs of its most famous denizens—Eden, Beaverbrook, pipe-puffing Attlee and Churchill himself, each with his square metal ashtray in front of him.

  I have never been anywhere so instantly redolent of a dead historical figure and of his personality. I can almost sense him padding around behind us in the corridors in one of his red boiler suits, calling for a secretary or a fifty-centilitre bottle of Pol Roger, or pouring himself one of his tall glasses of whisky and water before addressing the nation on the set that is still mounted on his desk.

  When you go into his bedroom, you feel his physical presence in the neat little Civil Service–issue bed with its plain headboard and blue-quilted bedspread, in the white ceramic potty underneath, in the authentic Romeo y Julieta lying like a desiccated dog turd in the metal canister on the bedside table. You can draw the curtains on the wall maps opposite his bed, and you can see the very sight that greeted Churchill when he woke from one of his frequent power naps—a detailed depiction of Britain’s defences and vulnerabilities: the places where it would be easy to guard against a German tank breakout, and the places where it would be trickier.

  Then you suddenly catch a whiff of the dominant emotion of this place. It is not so much the bustle, or excitement, or even the tension. It is the desperation.

  When they first started to fortify this government furniture store in the summer of 1938, London was at the heart of what was still the mightiest empire the world had ever seen. In a few short months all that power and might had been chivvied and contracted into these few shabby rooms, with their dowdy brown armchairs and ugly curtains—the whole thing somehow reminiscent of one of those local paper stories about council staff opening a flat and finding the mummified remains of a forgotten old-age pensioner.

  You can see the desperation in the primitive information technology: the yellowing dockets and files, the fridge-sized scrambling devices, the pitiful pot of glue—now reduced to an oily black sludge—in front of Churchill’s desk, glue he would use physically to cut and paste his briefings into an order he liked. You can see the desperation in the little wooden sign that informed these light-deprived war voles what kind of day it was outside. Above all, you can understand their fear and urgency when you consider the concrete slab, between three and nine feet thick, that has been placed above the ceiling.

  The cause of desperation was simple. London was under attack, bombarded with an indiscriminate sadism that it had never known before. Among all the other noises—Churchill’s growlings, the phones, the fans—you can imagine the noise of high explosive falling on
London, and trying to work with the knowledge that even this bunker could probably not withstand a direct hit.

  Looking back at the Second World War, it is pretty clear that it was a disaster for Britain and for British standing in the world. For my generation of postwar softies, brought up to fear nothing more than the sporadic campaigns of the IRA or al-Qaeda, the Blitz seems an unimaginable horror. It was more terrifying and vastly more lethal than the Great Fire of London (which killed how many? That’s right—eight people); and it went on so long—night after night, month after month, from the autumn of 1940 to the spring of 1941, and then with a resumption in 1944 and a series of deafening false climaxes like a hideous parody of a Beethoven symphony.

  Everyone knew that it was coming, and that London was all but defenceless. When Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich in 1938, he tried to justify his appeasement of Hitler by telling the cabinet of his fear as he flew upriver towards London and saw the thousands of vulnerable rooftops beneath him. It was the aerial threat to London that wound Churchill up in 1934, when Hitler had come to power and was boosting the German air force. “It was the greatest target in the world,” he warned, “a kind of tremendous fat valuable cow, tied up to attract the beasts of prey.”

  He had issued dreadful warnings about what would happen if they failed to listen to him. There would be thirty or forty thousand people killed in only a week or ten days of intensive bombing, and three to four million panicking Londoners would be driven into the open country. “The flying peril is not one from which we can fly. It is necessary to face it where we stand. We cannot possibly retreat. We cannot move London. We cannot move the vast population that is dependent on the estuary of the Thames.” By 1939 people had seen the newsreels of what happened when the Japanese bombed Shanghai. They knew what the Condor Legion had done to Guernica in 1937.