In Aberdeen Place, NW8 just off Maida Vale stands an imposing pub with the intriguing and unique name of Crocker’s Folly. Inside it is a splendid and opulent riot of marble, deeply-moulded plaster-work and highly polished woodwork. The pub dates from the 1890s when it was simply called The Crown. It was built by a local publican and venture capitalist called Frank Crocker. He knew that the Great Central Railway was being built down to London from the West Riding of Yorkshire and the East Midlands and that it was planning to build a terminus station somewhere in what is now the postal district of London, NW8. Fortune favours the bold, or so the proverb goes. Acting quickly, Crocker built a plush and well-appointed hotel to refresh, feed and accommodate the well-to-do and discerning travellers he was sure would come to London via the Great Central. Imagine his dismay when he learnt that the terminus was going to be built about a mile away! The poor man was so distressed that it is said he committed suicide by hanging or, more spectacularly, by throwing himself from the building’s highest gable. The Crown was now a railway hotel without a railway and it had to adjust to a lesser role as an overly grandiose pub for the local community. With typically irreverent Cockney wit, it became known as Crocker’s Folly, testimony in material form either to the foolishness of greed or to the perverse and arbitrary nature of the cock-up factor. It soldiered on through the decades, fading gradually and at best shabby-genteel, until it was bought by a brewery which spent a large amount of money restoring it to its late-Victorian grandeur. On its reopening it was given as its official name the informal nickname by which it had been known for eighty years. Actually it is unlikely that Crocker did plummet to his death from its roof, but for all that it remains a memorial to a bold entrepreneur whose venture brought him nothing but heartache and premature death. This historic pub is currently (March 2007) closed and boarded up.
In Bishopsgate, EC2 stands Dirty Dick’s pub. The original Dirty Dick is supposed to have died in 1814 and to have been a well-educated and dandified young man called Nathaniel Bentley. Seemingly with the world at his feet, he was arranging a grand banquet to celebrate his forthcoming marriage when he received news that his bride-to-be had died. Totally bereft, he shut up the dining room and never entered it again, allowing its contents to rot or simply gather dust. He became a miser and recluse who lived surrounded by squalor and paid little attention to his own cleanliness or that of his surroundings. It is extremely unlikely that the pub stands on the site of Bentley’s miseries and it seems that some of the contents of his house in Leadenhall Street were brought to Bishopsgate to furnish what in effect was an early version of a theme pub. At one time the place was festooned with all manner of curious items such as mummified cats and ancient tuneless violins, everything liberally covered in dust and cobwebs. It is possible that the story of Dirty Dick provided Charles Dickens with his inspiration for the abandoned wedding feast hidden away in a locked-up room in Great Expectations. The pub has now been substantially cleaned up but the name lives on as a memorial to the tragedy that was Nathaniel Bentley’s life.
When you think about it, an extremely curious idea is that of a shrine to someone who never existed. Sherlock Holmes is an enduring fictional character. There are many theories as to whom Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) had in mind when he created Holmes with his rapier-like intellect, unremitting dispassionate logic, scientific approach to evidence, brilliant deductive powers, generally misanthropic nature and his intolerance of those who thought less quickly than himself. Holmes is all the more winsome as a character because he manifestly had his weaknesses – he could be appallingly untidy, he played the violin badly, he was moody and impatient and he had recourse to narcotics when things were not going well or when he was bored. He will forever be associated with his lodgings at No.221b Baker Street and a tableau of these rooms and of items associated with his stories was put together and displayed at the Festival of Britain in 1951. This collection was owned by a London brewery and the decision was taken to use the material to refurnish and provide a theme for a pub previously known as the Northumberland Arms but then renamed The Sherlock Holmes. It is in Northumberland Street, WC1 and devotees of the Sherlock Holmes genre flock there from all parts of the world to pay homage to the master sleuth.
In Devons Road in Bow, E3 is a pub with the unique name of The Widow’s Son, although it is usually referred to as The Bun House. The story goes that the pub was run by a widow assisted by her only son but he eventually had to go off to the Napoleonic wars. He promised that he would be back by Easter and she promised to have a hot cross bun – his favourite – ready for him. He was presumably killed in action because he never came back but his mother kept her side of the bargain. Every year until she died she hung up a hot cross bun for him over the bar and the tradition has lasted to this day, a memorial to the power of maternal love or to the futility and waste of war.
What is the impulse behind the apparent human need to create monuments and memorials? Lewis Mumford in The Culture of Cities (1938) takes up the issue and explains it in terms of a vain desire, particularly on the part of the rich and powerful, to seek what he aptly describes as a ‘petrified immortality’. He goes on to say: ‘they write their boasts upon tombstones; they incorporate their deeds in obelisks, they place their hopes of remembrance in solid stones’.
Every monument, statue, headstone and mausoleum has a purpose – it is intended to be seen and to convey some sort of message to the viewer. When originally erected it is likely to have been deliberately sited in a position relevant to its subject. In Trafalgar Square stands an equestrian statue of Charles I. This was erected after the Restoration, specifically at the place where some of the regicides had been executed and within sight of Whitehall where the King himself had been executed. It is, incidentally, England’s earliest freestanding public statue. Some monuments have been moved which can mean that they lose part of their purpose by being extracted from their original context. Paradoxically, on being moved, a monument may gain a new and more relevant context. In the grounds of what is now the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth stands a structure simply known as ‘the obelisk’. This was originally erected in nearby St George’s Circus in 1771 to commemorate the life and works of a former President of Bethlehem Hospital, otherwise known as ‘Bedlam’. This hospital had previously been located in Moorfields but was moved to a new site in Lambeth. The obelisk was then re-sited in the hospital grounds in a new and appropriate context only later to lose that context when the hospital was transferred again and the buildings adapted for use as a museum.
The eighteenth century saw the erection in Westminster Abbey of a host of monuments to national leaders and this left little space for the commemoration of the heroes of the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France which therefore tend to be found in St Paul’s Cathedral. The creation of the Thames Embankment from 1868 provided a prime site for the display of statues of another crop of later national heroes.
Monuments to Prince Albert proliferated after his death in 1861. The national memorial is of course that erected in Kensington Gardens and designed by a leading exponent of the Gothic, Sir George Gilbert Scott, with some reference to the Eleanor Crosses of the late thirteenth century. Albert was well intentioned, earnest, pompous and humourless. It is a sumptuous memorial to a man who engendered grudging respect but little affection from many in the world of industry, science and commerce for his wholehearted support for such projects as the Great Exhibition. Britain’s traditional landed ruling class and most political leaders disliked him for the hold he had over the Queen. He was deplored by many simply because he was German.
The grandiloquent Albert Memorial and the numerous other statues to his memory elsewhere indicate that the erection of a public statue is not necessarily an indication that the person represented was held in high regard by the public as a whole. Monumental statues, particularly those erected in the Victorian age, were used to glorify the concepts of royalty, hierarchical authority and continuity, thereby coun
tering growing radical demands for greater social and economic equality. Thus in the Mall close to Buckingham Palace stands the Victoria Memorial, unveiled in 1911. This expensive and elaborate memorial to Victoria constitutes a complex allegory. Around the base are four bronze lions symbolising Power. They are embraced by bronze figures representing Peace, Progress, Manufacture and Agriculture. The marble base is designed as a symbol of British naval power. Above the cascade basins are pairs of figures representing Painting and Architecture, Shipbuilding and War. Going upwards can be seen figures of Truth, Justice and Motherhood and then the Queen herself. The structure is topped by Courage, Constancy and the Winged Victory in magnificent gilded form. The meaning of such allegories must have been lost on the majority of the country’s citizens who would have been unable to find any relationship between such concepts which were largely metaphysical, and their own real and frequently very harsh everyday experience of life.
The heyday of the erection of public statues in London was the nineteenth century. It was an age of hero-worship. Honoured in this way were royalty, leading politicians and statesmen, senior military and naval men, some men of letters, a few scientists and a smattering of men from other fields of achievement. With the exception of Queen Victoria, there were very few women.
It is interesting to note some of the statuary monuments that were not built. Protracted and sometimes acrimonious debates took place about the nature of, and location for, a national memorial to Nelson. A committee of eminent men chaired by the Duke of Wellington was kept busy pondering over the relative virtues of no fewer than 120 designs and forty actual models. Any number of columns, obelisks and other structures were submitted for consideration, most of which featured Nelson but some managed to dispense with any actual representation of the great man himself. One such was a trident, 89ft high, described rather unkindly as looking like a ‘large toasting fork’. Another proposal was for a statue of a languid-looking Nelson atop a plinth from which he gazed down on a collection of naked nymphs apparently engaged in playing water polo. One submission would have had Nelson teetering precariously on top of a globe 30ft in diameter. These three would have been located in Trafalgar Square, as would have a British Naval Museum in the shape of a Gothic cenotaph. This was intended to honour Nelson’s memory and to act as a repository for a collection of items glorifying Britain’s naval achievements. It was the intention that once a year on Trafalgar Day a powerful beacon would flash out from its spire.
A proposal to commemorate victory at Waterloo and to honour the ‘Iron Duke’, Wellington himself, nearly twenty-five years before he actually died was put forward in 1828. This was an elaborate and ponderous structure to be located at Hyde Park Corner in such a way as to oblige all vehicular traffic arriving in London from the west to pass through it. Fortunately the plans to proceed with what even then would have constituted an enormous obstruction to traffic, were not proceeded with. A triumphal arch, similarly dedicated, across the New Road (now Marylebone Road) near the northern end of Portland Place, was planned for 1820. Perhaps we should be grateful that we were spared a huge bronze statue of Nelson that might have risen out of the middle of the Thames between Waterloo and Westminster bridges or the enormous effigy of Sir Robert Peel on splayed metal stilts that it was proposed should stand in the Thames, acting like some monstrous sentinel, close to either Westminster or Vauxhall Bridges.
It is almost exclusively the so-called ‘great and good’ whose lives and works are commemorated in statuary. Sadly many of these images in bronze or stone are of people who most definitely had feet of clay. In front of the National Gallery stands a representation of King James II (r. 1685–88). A fanatical womaniser and unusually arrogant, even for royalty, James was loathed by most of his subjects and was once described as having all the faults of his father but even less sense.
In Old Palace Yard by the Houses of Parliament stands a magnificent equestrian statue of Richard I by the prolific sculptor, Baron Marochetti. It was unveiled in 1860 and epitomises the concept of medieval male chivalry. In fact it encapsulates in bronze the enduring power of myths. No other English King has spent so small a part of his reign in this country as Richard. He was an active homosexual and received many warnings from senior clerics about what were described as his ‘unnatural vices’. He may have been brave but he was also greedy, violent, ruthless and cruel. He personally supervised the massacre of 2,700 prisoners after the fall of Acre during the Third Crusade. The motive for the prominent role he played in the Crusade was more to do with plunder and adventure than with the publicly-stated aims of restoring various sacred places to Christian control. Romantic stories of him dining on venison with Robin Hood and his Merry Men in Sherwood Forest or eventually being found by his faithful troubadour, Blondel, after he had sung for his supper outside just about every major castle in Europe, should not be given serious credence.
Few monarchs have been as little enamoured with their realm and their subjects as George I. It can be stated unequivocally that the feeling was mutual. Nevertheless, a few years after his death in 1727, a gilded equestrian statue to his memory was erected in Leicester Square. By the 1860s, Leicester Square and its surroundings had fallen on hard times. In 1851 an enormous globe had been set up there and the statue of George had been buried. In 1861 someone decided it was time to exhume the statue. It had not benefited by its time below ground. The whole thing was badly tarnished and the King had lost his arms and legs although his horse had not suffered quite so much, lacking just one leg. The statue was put on display propped up with sticks. In 1866 it was given a coat of whitewash and shortly afterwards a nocturnal reveller gave the horse black polka dots and donkey-like ears. Not content with that, he then added a dunce’s cap to the King’s head and gave him a broomstick as a lance. Soon afterwards, officialdom moved. The figure of the King disappeared and the horse was sold to a scrap merchant.
George IV ruled only from 1820–1830. A vast literature has been written about ‘Prinny’. A rapacious sexual predator in his younger years, he grew obese and unhealthy in middle age. He was widely regarded as a dissolute fop, unpopular enough in 1817 to have his carriage stoned by the London mob while he was travelling in it. A lack of any real virtues or admirable qualities did not prevent a statue to his memory being erected in 1836 in the Battlebridge district at the junction of what are now York Way and the Euston, Pentonville and Gray’s Inn Roads. It had an octagonal base decorated with Doric columns and figures representing the four patron saints of Britain. Atop the 60ft high base was a statue of George. This structure was widely ridiculed at the time and had only been in place for six years when the figure of the King was removed. The base was successively a police station, a camera obscura and a beer shop and before being demolished in 1845 it had become a major obstruction to traffic. This now largely-forgotten building went on, of course, to give the name ‘King’s Cross’ to the adjacent station opened by the Great Northern Railway in 1852 and consequently to the surrounding district. Even many dyed-in-the-wool Londoners don’t know how Kings Cross got its name.
In 1734 a statue in memory of Thomas Guy (1644–1724) was erected in front of the eponymous hospital. Guy is a good example of a flawed hero. His initial fortune came from the illegal importation of bibles from Holland and then the production and distribution of good-quality, cheap bibles. Later on he made a financial killing from the short-lived speculative boom known as the South Sea Bubble while many others had their fingers burnt. No sooner did he have money than he gave it away to good causes. He was MP for Tamworth, the town frequently benefiting from his generosity, but he abandoned the place when the voters failed to return him to Parliament. He then threatened to demolish the Town Hall he had just built for them. It was his munificence that led to the founding of Guy’s Hospital. In spite of his wealth and the fact that he gave so much of it away, he was exceptionally parsimonious in his private life. For example, he was too mean to buy a table cloth, preferring to eat his meals off old newspapers
on the counter of the shop he owned.
The statues of London are indicative of male-dominated societies. There is a marked paucity of women remembered in this way. It is refreshing to be able to end this chapter with a mention of the bronze statue of Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) which stands in a public garden close to the Palace of Westminster. She was perhaps the most prominent of the militant fighters for women’s political emancipation known as the Suffragettes. An activist to the core, she raised funds, recruited, organised, led marches and demonstrations and was at the forefront of the movement’s direct-action tactics such as window-smashing and arson. She displayed enormous courage by going on hunger strike almost to the point of death no fewer than twelve times, her health being permanently damaged as a result. Men either reviled or patronised her. Although women had got the vote by the time she died, her friends and associates had an enormous struggle to gain acceptance for the idea that she should be commemorated in the form of a public statue. They argued that she deserved a site in Downing Street but the male Establishment recoiled in horror from the idea that someone they considered a virago should have a statue in such a prominent place. In a moment of indiscretion which he probably went on to regret, Prime Minister Baldwin agreed to unveil the statue in Victoria Tower Gardens where, as is the way with so many statues, it goes largely unnoticed.
No consideration of how London has commemorated its dead should omit the Watts Memorial of Heroic Deeds. It is located in Postman’s Park, a tiny public garden on the site of the former churchyard of St Botolph in Aldersgate, close to the Museum of London. The memorial was the brainchild of the eminent Victorian artist George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) who, in 1887, proposed the idea of marking Queen Victoria’s Jubilee of 1887 with a tribute to examples of previously unsung heroism in everyday life. Meeting with little response, Watts decided to do something himself and he designed what might best be described as a loggia, a long open gallery with a tiled roof along the wall of which were placed tablets remembering ordinary people whose bravery had led to the loss of their own lives. Over the years fifty-three such tablets were erected. Most of them come from the Doulton factory and consist of decorative glazed tiles. An example refers to the bravery of Walter Peart and Harry Dean. They were the driver and fireman of a Great Western Railway express heading for Paddington on 18 July 1898. Near Ealing a connecting rod worked loose and one end punctured the boiler. There was a blowback from the firebox and both men were severely burnt. In spite of their awful injuries they brought the train safely to a stand, thereby possibly averting a major disaster. They died from their injuries the next day. Elizabeth Boxall of Bethnal Green was just seventeen when in 1888 she was kicked and fatally injured by a horse while attempting to save a child from being run over. Harold Rickets, a constable in the Metropolitan Police, was on holiday at Teignmouth in Devon in 1916. He died attempting to rescue a boy who had got out of his depth in the sea. Edward Morris was a boy of ten who drowned in the Grand Junction Canal in 1897 while attempting to save his friend who had got into difficulties.
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