Black Plaques London E-Book

John Ambrose Hide

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 410

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Black Plaques are not to be found proudly mounted on a wall – and for good reason. What with their commemoration of a brutal execution outside Westminster Abbey, the selling of sex toys in St James's Park and an intruder at Buckingham Palace with Royal undergarments stuffed down his trousers, this is not sort of historical subject matter that authorities choose to grace a building's facade or depict on a visitor information board. In fact, many might hope that such indecorous and inconvenient episodes remain quietly overlooked. But this book jogs such artful lapses of memory and at more than one hundred locations across London, Black Plaques lift the carefully placed rug to discover an unsightly, but strangely beckoning, stain.

Leseprobe

First published 2019

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© John Ambrose Hide, 2019

The right of John Ambrose Hide to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

‘Black Plaque’ and ‘Black Plaques’ are a registered trade mark of John Ambrose Hide.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9117 9

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

INTRODUCTION

BLACK PLAQUES

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This collection of stories from the past makes use of the vocabulary and social graces of former days – that is to say, the physically sick called for a physician and the mentally sick a lunatic asylum or madhouse, while voyeurs patronised freak shows, felons were sent to gaol, the thirsty headed to an alehouse (and subsequently a boghouse), and the lecherous sought not a sex worker but a bawd, harlot, whore or strumpet.

On a similar cautionary note, it is hoped that the expressed premise of bringing to light a mixed buffet of succulent historical exploits will appeal to a particular class of inquisitive gourmand, however courtesy obliges mention that thanks to the lavish detail provided in the depictions, there may exude from this book a tang more gamey than to some readers’ tastes.

Dates are given in modern style and both the spelling and punctuation of quoted material are modernised if it helps clarity.

The photograph of a detail from Jean Cocteau’s mural in the Church of Notre Dame de France is used with the kind permission of the church as well as the Comité Jean Cocteau.

INTRODUCTION

The Black Plaques portrayed in this book are not to be found proudly mounted on a wall, and as will swiftly become clear, for good reason. What with their commemoration of a brutal execution outside Westminster Abbey, the selling of sex toys in St James’s Park, and an intruder at Buckingham Palace with Royal undergarments stuffed down his crotch, this is not the sort of subject matter that authorities choose to grace a building’s facade or depict on a visitor information board. In fact, many people might hope that such indecorous and inconvenient episodes remain quietly overlooked.

But Black Plaques jog such artful lapses of memory. At a stroke, London’s familiar streets and buildings are cast in a quite different light when imprinted – of necessity by proxy, with these Memorials to Misadventure, thus drawing long overdue attention to awkward moments history has done its utmost to discreetly ignore, misrepresent, or prompt a timely bout of amnesia – happily, circumstances that offer fertile conditions for stories of exquisite ripeness.

My motivation to lavish Black Plaques on London arose after a visit to that icon of the city, St Paul’s Cathedral, for it was only sometime after a visit, I happened to discover that in 1514 a man imprisoned at the building’s medieval precursor was murdered by virtue of a red hot needle thrust up his nose. And not only that; the perpetrators of this impolite enterprise were churchmen who endeavoured to bestow the bloody scene with the semblance of suicide – for which the corpse then stood trial in the Lady Chapel. Such a startling sequence of events is not considered worthy of even a footnote in the official history of the Cathedral – a weighty tome with the proportions of a paving slab – so needless to say, neither does it feature anywhere in today’s ‘visitor experience’. My discovery left me with the feeling that I had been denied the opportunity to stand where events took place and quietly contemplate the mother of all nosebleeds.

While this inglorious affair came as news to me, it is by no means unknown to scholars of the Tudor period, however their focus is not unexpectedly directed towards learned interpretations of the episode’s context and consequences, as opposed to the nitty-gritty of its unpleasant operation at what is now a global tourist attraction. Similarly, the Cathedral’s governing body concerns itself with priorities far loftier than acquainting visitors with earthy tales of brain-skewering on the premises, yet this was a tale needing to be told about St Paul’s and a commemorative plaque – inevitably one both unofficial and incorporeal – was the means to correct this oversight.

When it came to delving into the dustbins at other locations, it soon became apparent that this was not an isolated instance in which the powers that be had covered a compromising stain with carefully placed rug. And so as a matter of public duty I began to bestow Black Plaques – each one a vignette of an unbecoming event at a particular locale, where the blot in question is at best obscured, at worst obliterated from common consciousness, and its uncomfortable truths are distilled into a compendious inscription. Thus, Black Plaques London offers an antidote to run-of-the-mill guidebook spiel on sites such as Covent Garden, Regent Street or Banqueting House, and besmirches the reputation of umpteen less prominent addresses. At many of the sites there are no physical remains that relate to the dishonourable deeds depicted – as is the case with the prison at the old St Paul’s – which of course has helped those unsavoury blotches to fade into obscurity.

The Great Fire of 1666 expunges reminders of an awkward episode at St Paul’s.

While perched on the threshold, this is an opportune moment to mention that among the words of remembrance offered herein, nostrils are by no means the only bodily orifice to be poked with something. Eligibility criteria for Black Plaques place no subject off-limits and some of the dedicatory epigraphs are richly laden with lewd and lurid details that are perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea; even this introduction is soon to make an insightful deviation into what London Underground’s indefatigable cleaners refer to as Code Two.

For those still reading, so as not to cause misunderstanding I should also give forewarning that Black Plaques are not simply a generous slice of forbidden fruit. Granted, they shine a spotlight on women’s breasts offered up to the caresses of a dead man’s hand, and boys’ buttocks yielding to the vigorous attentions of the Bishop of London, but moments of indelicacy such as these are counterbalanced by altogether more sober and sobering sagas. I explain this uneasy mixed bill of levity and gravity shortly, but beforehand it is instructive, and I hope not too wearying, to engineer an encounter between conventional (and in London, most commonly blue) plaques and their troublesome new in-laws.

Should a visitor from outer space assess the track record of our species solely by reading commemorative plaques, it is not controversial to conclude that they would form a thoroughly undeserved impression of Earth’s self-ordained ‘wise’ hominids. But labouring under this inordinately generous view, our interplanetary guest might query why these unpredictable blue blobs tend to mark merely the house (or ‘site of the house’) in which our exemplary specimens ‘lived’. Such a discerning extraterrestrial and I cannot be alone in wondering what links the four walls that enclosed our paragon of virtue’s domestic, sleeping and ablutionary arrangements with their praiseworthy endeavours. Furthermore, humankind exhibits the inconvenient habit of moving house, so the notably peripatetic Charles Dickens has bagged eight plaques in London solely for places in which he lived (or even ‘stayed’). Dickens’ reputation justifies such a number but perhaps the seventeenth-century ‘Master Astrologer’ William Lilly ought to have foreseen that were he more domestically mobile, he might be better remembered. (Lilly is commemorated with a sole plaque mounted on the disused Strand/Aldwych Underground station – a place I fancy he would not have been familiar with.) Plaques such as these do not explicitly identify where something of significance took place; they are not pinpointing what you might call hallowed ground.

At the risk of rocking the commemorative boat yet further, I suggest the habit of marking the place of someone’s birth or death is even less meaningful. I am sure that my interstellar associate would graciously concur, judging the former to be an achievement for which they could scarcely claim credit and the latter to represent the least commendable act of their entire lives. By way of illustration, our hospital facades are conspicuously devoid of a mosaic of memorials yet a blue plaque on the handsome six-storey house at No. 32 Elm Park Gardens in Chelsea infers that a Mr and Mrs Cripps resided at the property in 1889 when their son Stafford made his appearance in the world. Many years later he became: ‘Sir Stafford Cripps – Statesman – born here’, and while it might be diverting to speculate that perhaps a heavily pregnant Mrs Theresa Cripps was only visiting No. 32 when she became indisposed, a quick investigation reveals nothing so beguiling, and conventional expectations ring tediously true. This was indeed Sir Stafford Cripps’s parents’ home – that is until young Stafford reached the tender age of 4, when the family upped sticks and moved elsewhere. With that in mind, quite what should be gleaned from this plaque eludes me, while our alien anthropologist would surmise that Earth’s two-legged primates celebrate privilege by birth.

However, it can at least be declared that No. 32 Elm Park Gardens consists of the very bricks and mortar that echoed with Cripps junior’s first faltering speech, because in some cases the backdrop for the dedicatee’s passage through their mother’s birth canal has long been demolished. In Marylebone, painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti has the misfortune of a plaque on a 1920s building to record the outcome of Mrs Frances Rossetti’s labour during the 1820s. Here, the commemorative boat has keeled over. (Incidentally, for those unaware that Rossetti had his long-dead wife exhumed, a Black Plaque carefully digs up this morbid tale.)

While much of this haphazard situation arises from plaques erected by preceding generations and present-day reticence in toppling them, the examples highlight the difficulty of fittingly memorialising individuals at a single location with a token smattering of words. Thus, in preference to commemorating people, Black Plaques mark sites where, to put it bluntly, shit happened. Reminding ourselves not only of names but events makes for a much more potent experience; stand outside Westminster Abbey and picture the scene when a man was burned alive on the spot and ghosts from the past can suddenly seem alarmingly close. Perhaps the absence of a physical plaque or information board makes the effect more compelling because the experience is a private and personal one, driven by the power of imagination. However, it would be prudent to first confirm the precise whereabouts beside the Abbey to avoid visualising the gruesome spectacle of April 1555 while stood on the site of a nineteenth-century boghouse in which a Member of Parliament was discovered, breeches ornamenting his ankles, in the receptive company of a young guardsman burdened by similarly disordered dress.

As subject matter for illustration, artists favoured the execution at Westminster (see page 321) over its boghouse.

Admittedly, some of those individuals commemorated with real-world plaques also performed the feats for which they are famed where they lived, however this is seldom the message portrayed. Of all plaques across London, approximately 85 per cent mark solely where someone was born, lived, died or a combination of that terse trio. Yet, were William Lilly’s plaque to proclaim not ‘Master Astrologer Lived In A House On This Site’ but ‘Piss Prophet Practised From This Site’ then I imagine it would attract significantly more attention. For it was from the comfort of his home that Lilly ‘read’ clients’ urine samples, including one originating from the terminally ill leader of Parliament John Pym. (Lilly skipped the unpalatable business of actually examining Pym’s piss and simply used the time it showed up as the basis for his planetary computations. He astutely recognised that the moon’s position signified that Pym would die – and lo and behold, so he did.) Lilly also possessed great prowess for detecting witches from their wee, though his prognostications regarding any imminent plague or fire (as conspicuously occurred in 1665–66) were less clear-cut and he instead prudently forecasted how ‘for many hundreds of years yet to come’, England would experience plague, fire, feasting, famine, war, peace and mole infestations.

The Strand’s abandoned Tube station (which Lilly perhaps had indeed anticipated through swarms of subterranean mammals) basks in a fresh golden light when one is sufficiently au fait to picture Lilly peering at pots of piss. And if that brief sketch has whetted an appetite for piss prophets then a quick leak reveals that such opportunism affords them a warm welcome into this hall of shame, where the number one exponent of testing (and disturbingly, tasting) urine has a Black Plaque on Berwick Street in Soho.

It ought now be apparent from the digression into forecasting the future by dint of the erstwhile contents of someone’s bladder, that instead of offering a few fleeting words, Black Plaques probe deep into the meat and potatoes. After all, it would be decidedly frustrating to behold a plaque that declared merely: ‘Theresa Berkeley – Renowned Whipper – Dispensed Discipline Here’, so I hope their more generous, picturesque narratives stimulate exquisitely vivid scenes in the mind’s eye.

One of William Lilly’s 1651 forecasts that ‘doth perfectly represent the future condition of the English nation’.

But those prophets who trousered the profits of piss might be granted one revelation that is entirely credible and pertinent; with their acute grasp of human psychology these self-appointed soothsayers would recognise that the demand for their services – supplying surrogate sense and meaning in a chaotic and cruel world – is perennial. Today, this rich vein is tapped with great skill and subtlety by a diverse range of more hygienic merchants, for whom punters piss only their cash. Bookshelves (and web servers) groan under the weight of wisdom readily dispensed to satiate this craving to understand ourselves and our surroundings, and the subject category of Black Plaques London is not immune to the phenomenon. For this reason, there is one aspect in which Black Plaques take their lead from conventional plaques: trustworthiness.

Storytelling of the ilk ‘Secret’, ‘Hidden’ or ‘I Didn’t Know That About’ London constitutes a crowded and at times homogeneous field, and the reason that another contender has presumed to muscle its way in can be summarised: caveat emptor. Be it seeking truth from a piss prophet or publication: buyer beware. And the unholy trinity of reasons for caution are: legend, folklore and mythology. London, perhaps more than anywhere else, has an extensive, tangled and deeply ingrained web of anecdotal lore – a not inconsiderable obstacle for anyone who ventures to penetrate the mysteries of the obscure or taboo. Where facts are flimsy, legend gets busy and when repeated sufficiently it can become stubbornly set in stone as historical ‘truth’ – quite literally so in the case of one monument described later. Countless Londoners enjoy a hazy awareness that a kink in the Piccadilly Line swerves around a plague pit, Sir Christopher Wren aligned St Paul’s Cathedral with Temple Church for arcane masonic purposes, and Adolf Hitler earmarked Du Cane Court in Balham as his London HQ (although the Führer apparently also favoured Senate House in Bloomsbury as well as Whiteleys Shopping Centre in Bayswater). Cyberspace, that renowned conveyor of questionable truths, has a voracious appetite for such eminently repeatable gobbets and the longterm future of these whimsies looks assured – their constant regurgitation allowing further ‘improvement’. Elements of undeniable fact add to their plausibility: there are indeed plague pits in London (as there are seemingly unexplained bends in Underground tunnels), Wren chose not to build St Paul’s on medieval foundations, and not every substantial modern building in London was detrimentally remodelled by the Luftwaffe. But such proverbial grains of truth do not an anecdote make, and wishful embroidering has introduced glaring discrepancies with the mundane truth. (To deal summarily with the aforementioned plague pits, purely because they occupy such a privileged position in the canon of London mythologising: the meeting of a Tube train tunnel and plague pit is yet to occur. And while on the subject of potential spoilers: Black Plaques fully recognise the existence of ghosts – in the shadowy recesses of the human imagination; ditto, little green men or, for that matter, women.)

Far be it from this author to rehearse the socio-psychological factors behind the creation and survival of myths, but among London’s clangers a great number arise through misunderstanding (and a straightforward example is provided by London’s primary execution site – Tyburn, where felons were not tied and burned) and perhaps even bypass the grain of truth (Victorian ghost stories and Dan Brown novels demonstrate inconspicuous leaps to non-fiction) but persist through prejudice (viz. a daft Yank snapping up the wrong London Bridge from wily Brits). Were it not for bigotry such red herrings would long be netted and filleted.

Yet they also linger through laziness. For some, the folkloric delicacies are so delightful it is best not to investigate them too thoroughly for fear of finding them at variance with the facts – a situation deftly handled by invoking the time-honoured get-out clause: ‘according to legend’. Woe betide those who subject their storytelling to scrutiny because once the magic is punctured, it becomes needlessly bothersome to ‘un-discover’ that inconvenience and no amount of linguistic sleight of hand can redeem it. Without doubt, cultivating mythology in this book would have been a straightforward matter, while cutting through it introduced the disadvantageous complication of laborious effort, but what that toil uncovered is no less colourful and has added frisson for being factual. Indeed, laying bare the manner in which myths arose is vastly more engrossing than the myths themselves, as may be discovered in some of the bunkum-busting bombshells dropped amongst these pages.

Be that as it may, I feel duty-bound to confess great torment overcoming the conspiratorial urge to slip in a magnificent new confection of my own manufacture in this collection to set loose among London legend – and some of the stories that follow might encourage the impression that I succumbed to that temptation. But suffice to say, much like the responsibility involved in erecting a plaque on a building, the conferral of Black Plaques comes with the wearisome burden of getting the facts right.

And with that being unequivocally and courageously declared, as the commemorative words that follow lay bare, to err is congenitally human, so any blunders herein are manifestly the author’s and his alone.

The interests of trustworthy public edification are not the only quality that Black Plaques share with their respectable real-world counterparts. There is something to be said for stumbling upon a plaque that suddenly piques one’s interest, and this sense of serendipitous discovery is the rationale for presenting Black Plaques in similarly unpredictable order. Nothing is to be gained from arbitrarily grouping narratives thematically, geographically or chronologically, whereas by diving head first into a pair of knickers at Buckingham Palace, then turning the page to unearth bodies beneath Kennington Park, etc, I hope readers are swept along in an exhilarating roller coaster ride. Moreover, by meandering through London in this way, readers may discover connections for themselves – be they overt, such as the imaginative gambits employed by men across the ages to either gratify their sexual ambitions or appease a deity (or a subtle combination of the two); opaque, for instance how the Strand station site also housed a theatre in which two cross-dressing young gentlemen had an infamous outing (in both senses); or obscure, for example, some intimate uses for German white wine. For the convenience of those who seek material of specific special interest, or wish to revisit a story but recall only that it entailed, say, an unhappy brush with erotic asphyxiation, fulfilment may be found in the comprehensive index.

To wrap up this bout between decorous public plaques and the indecorous sub-species presented here, the two share one further quality: neither make any claim to be exhaustive. These pages could be filled solely with either places of execution, the former sites of gay molly-houses or even the premises of piss prophets, and in a roundabout way such books already exist. The Black Plaques Executive Committee – the official body charged with determining the sites to be dishonoured, comprises a single member: the author, and the process of identifying and evaluating eligible improprieties is subject to the idle whims and fancies of that office-holder. (Rumour has it that henceforth, the committee’s decision-making is apt to be swayed by overtures from deep-pocketed lobby groups prone to gourmandising.) Which brings us back to the question of defining the guiding principle behind the bestowal of Black Plaques.

The exhibition of an enfeebled Frenchman is indexed under: Seurat, Claude Ambroise, Pall Mall, freak show and skeleton, ‘living’.

Returning to St Paul’s Cathedral and the unfortunate fellow nursing a burning needle up his nostril, the reason that this saga became the inaugural and emblematic Black Plaque lies with the fact that it is not a straightforward one-dimensional tale of murder (again, a topic given more than adequate treatment elsewhere). The episode was – and its current obscurity implies it still is – a peculiarly awkward mix of circumstances that happen to swerve between tragedy and comedy. It also had profound consequences for the nation and were schoolchildren to study it their faces might light up at the prospect of pondering events leading up to the English Reformation. (It is deeply ironic that had the nose job taken place at the Tower of London, Yeoman Warders would leap at the chance to horrify young visitors with the grisly melodrama.) Not every Black Plaque can claim such historical significance but they all possess this piquant blend of qualities that, when laid bare, stick out like a thoroughly unwelcome spot. And crucial to the Black Plaques physiognomy is the wide variety of colour, texture and filling in those blemishes. Several inglorious episodes warrant inclusion purely because they illustrate behaviour of such flagrant audacity, ingenuity or absurdity it is difficult not to feel some misdirected admiration – in fact, protagonists (or perhaps better put: antagonists) of many Black Plaques more than adequately atone for their wayward moral compass through their gift of grotesque entertainment. Other uneasy incidents fulfil the definition of history proposed by eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon as ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’.

But while posterity forever enjoys the smug wisdom of hindsight, this does not infer that Black Plaques are a means to cast stones at our ancestors, because as I am about to suggest, the current herd of hairless apes is barely any better.

Without wishing to become high and mighty over the idiosyncratic gazetteer of mishaps, misdeeds and mischief that you hold in your riveted gaze, I was dismayed to discover that once Black Plaques had been conferred on the most deserving sites, the whole was found to be more foreboding than the sum of its unedifying parts. Collectively, in its own modest way this unrepentantly subjective miscellany of misadventure conjures up an encyclopaedic survey of humanity’s frailties, flaws and foibles – a lengthy charge sheet that includes (deep breath): cowardice, cruelty, dishonesty, envy, greed, homophobia, hubris, hypocrisy, ignorance, incompetence, lust, narcissism, naivety, misogyny, prudery, schadenfreude, selfishness, snobbery, vengefulness and xenophobia. Present form suggests these to be ineradicable shortcomings of the human intellect (as is the unavoidability of our various inelegant bodily functions) and it became clear that in my self-indulgence I had unwittingly plumped for stories that enjoyed an exceptionally intoxicating cocktail of them, not only in events themselves but, just as importantly, in our reactions towards them today. Cowardice, hypocrisy and plain squeamishness have suppressed cringeworthy or unsettling stories such as the brutal force-feeding of suffragettes, the Victorian establishment’s zest for female genital mutilation, or simply a Member of Parliament’s memorable fart. (I trust that readers who have made it thus far are of sufficiently robust constitution not to label this work: ‘I Didn’t Want To Know That About London’). So while the substance of some Black Plaques can appear comfortably distant, this compendium holds a mirror to its audience and parallels with the present-day can also feel uncomfortably close.

Nowadays we have at our fingertips considerably more convenient forms of pillorying.

As befits a metropolis that has long stood at an international crossroads, Black Plaques London does not merely highlight peculiarly British blemishes of character, but those of what might be styled Homo londoniensis – inhabitants of a city driven by its own singular imperatives. And reflecting on the roles played by women in the ensuing drama, this sorry behaviour materialises predominantly among the male of the species. Evidence presented here challenges the notion that mankind is somehow the pinnacle of creation because Exhibit A is Homo insapiens – and fingers crossed this does not become our eventual epitaph. But before we sink into cynicism and misanthropy, it is worth a gentle reminder that as a cure for The Great Forgetfulness, Black Plaques are merely a means to rebalance commemorative subject matter and such a damning indictment stems naturally from this in-built bias towards our dark side. Readers who wish to restore their faith in humanity may remind themselves of those do-gooders and noble pillars of society who merit blue plaques, or view Black Plaques through blue-tinted spectacles. To this end, one of several possible examples (beyond the comforting fact that we no longer proffer our piss to prophets) is the hospital of the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem (a.k.a. the Bethlem/Bedlam lunatic asylum – yes, it crops up later), which should be widely celebrated as one of the first places on earth where people suffering the twin afflictions of mental illness and poverty were cared for, because that was the primary human impulse behind it. These pages recall moments when civilisation was not enjoying its finest hour, so focus is placed solely on the bad bits of Bedlam.

American James Norris found treatment at Bethlem Hospital especially wanting (see page 271).

So while Black Plaques can be seen as a delicious serving of fresh anecdotes with which to regale one’s drinking companions, they also provide food for sober reflection. I can assert with reasonable confidence that as well as being less cruel to animals and women, we are by and large cleaner and healthier than our predecessors. However, I hope the opportunity for a spell of retrospective rubbernecking prompts interesting thoughts on whether it would be asking too much of human nature to wish for anything more.

John Ambrose Hide

BUCKINGHAM PALACE SW1

GRUBBY NICKER

As dawn was breaking one morning in December 1838, the night porter at Buckingham Palace was suddenly confronted by a ghostly face at his door. But when the apparition promptly vanished, he was left wondering whether it had been a figment of his imagination, so out of caution he alerted police who began a careful search of the building.

Smudges of a curious fatty, yet sooty substance was all that confronted constables until a figure was spotted lurking in the shadows of the Marble Hall. Quietly creeping up on the intruder, an officer lunged at them – but the mysterious dark form was daubed with grease so simply slipped from his clutches; it scurried across the room, leaped out of a window and sprinted across the lawn. When police finally caught up with it, the trespasser turned out to be 14-year-old Edward Jones, Britain’s first royal stalker.

Jones was frogmarched to the kitchen, where the full extent of his filthiness became apparent, leading officers to believe that he had disguised himself as a chimney sweep. It later became clear that Jones was habitually this dirty, however his grubbiness had been cultivated by means of a bottle of bear’s grease – a popular (though misguided) hair loss treatment that he had discovered in a state bedroom and, for reasons known only to him, chosen to smear over himself. But most appalling to onlookers was the conspicuous bulge in his trousers that, when forcibly slackened, caused the spilling out of several items of Queen Victoria’s underwear.

Undergarments made no appearance on Jones’s charge sheet and a prevailing desire to avoid airing intimate Royal laundry in public eased a jury towards a verdict of sending the youth on his way.

But two years later, despite an assassination attempt on the Queen and the birth of her first child, palace security was again found wanting. During a December night in 1840, the Queen’s midwife heard something moving in the Royal dressing room, just a door away from the sleeping monarch. She summoned assistance and from beneath a sofa was dragged a creature of ‘most repulsive appearance’; there was no mistaking that it was soap-shy Jones again. On this occasion he had none of the Queen’s unmentionable apparel on his person, but there was an awkward feeling that he might have observed it being worn by its owner. Nothing more than a wry grin escaped Jones’s lips, but were he to delight the press with the finer details of his escapade there would be acute embarrassment. Consequently the safest course of action was to deal with the scoundrel in a manner more befitting treasonous barons in medieval times: he would be interrogated in secret by the Privy Council.

Jones merrily informed the venerable assembly how he climbed a wall into the palace garden, hopped through an open window, then curled up for a snooze under one of the servant’s beds. The following evening, he sauntered off to procure dinner and when suitably sated wandered between state rooms and private apartments. A trail of dirt confirmed his palace peregrinations and this time Jones was handed three months’ hard labour.

Palace security was stepped up with a detachment of fourteen constables on twenty-four hour watch, yet on 16 March 1841, a midnight patrol of the Grand Staircase revealed a squat shadow lolling in a recess beside a pair of grimy shoes. With weary resignation, an officer called out: ‘What, Jones is that you?’ to which: ‘Yes, it is me,’ was the sheepish reply. Once again, Jones recounted his caper around the palace to the Privy Council – how he tried a throne for size, pulled out books in the library, then came upon a room with a crown and jewels to play with. Grubby stains again bore out the truth of his tale so ‘In-I-Go Jones’ returned to the treadmill.

When the scoundrel later emerged frail and sickly from what seemed a concerted effort by the authorities to break him, his family had an unexpected surprise – their landlord, Mr James, was suddenly expressing heartfelt concern for the delinquent boy’s welfare. As luck would have it, a Captain acquaintance of his would shortly set sail from London so why didn’t the lad sign up as an apprentice seaman? Jones declared no yearning for the sea but the promise of financial favour dulled any reasoning so he gaily set off – unaware that it was an emigrant ship bound for New Zealand. But the plan had an unexpected flaw: the boy’s exploits had brought such notoriety, the captain recognised his cargo and immediately offloaded it; the rascal reached no further from Buckingham Palace than Gravesend. James was evidently not devoid of nous because he hurriedly bribed another boy to take the voyage and on arrival announce he was Jones, thus satisfying the shadowy figures behind the plot – but the deception lasted merely a few weeks.

Had this story been a work of fiction, it would now conclude with a dramatic last act, but regrettably, the final curtain is somewhat threadbare. After James spent several years making whistle-stop tours of Britain’s docks with the boy, coaxing him aboard ships bound for far-flung regions, the scallywag’s grimy trail finally loses its scent somewhere in Australia.

KENNINGTON PARK SE11

BATTLE LINES

The south field of Kennington Park bears a distinct series of bumps, which in summer become a pattern of brown lines in the grass; they are the ghostly outline of a vast underground air raid shelter dug in 1938 to accommodate up to 3,000 people. Towards one end the contours become fainter, and for tragic reasons.

Like many Second World War shelters in parks and commons across London, Kennington Park’s was built by the local authority from pre-cast concrete slabs; wall panels slotted into floor and roof sections to form a warren of tunnels buried 12in below ground. But even before war was declared, workers died while constructing shelters such as these due to their poor-quality materials and the speed at which they were built, and concerns were voiced over their grid layout because an explosion would funnel straight through them. While later versions adopted a zig-zag design or steel frame with reinforced brickwork, these early so-called trench shelters remained highly vulnerable.

The scale of its inadequacy became apparent at 8 p.m. on 15 October 1940 when a 250kg high-explosive bomb struck the southern end while several hundred men, women and children were taking refuge from an air raid. Not only was the impact zone obliterated, but the huge blast lifted the shelter’s roof so its walls caved in under the weight of soil; an area of almost 10,000 sq ft collapsed and amid a scene of utter horror; those not blown to pieces were buried alive.

Messages relayed to the Air Raid Precautions post offer a dreadful glimpse into the tragedy that night. Rescuers arrived with shovels to dig out survivors in the darkness but five hours after the bomb landed, it was estimated that at least 100 people were still trapped underground – their condition perhaps hollowly described as ‘fairly calm’, despite the fact that further bombs had landed in the vicinity. A couple of hours later, those who had not been recovered were declared dead and rescue attempts were called off. Screens were erected around the devastation, quicklime scattered to hasten decomposition, and all memories of the disaster erased for the rest of the war and some time afterwards.

An official death toll has never – or perhaps will never – be given, not least because numbers entering the shelter were not recorded and bereaved families may have kept their grief private. Although the bodies of forty-eight victims were recovered, it is generally declared that 104 people lost their lives; the remains of those unrecovered individuals still lie beneath the grass.

An easily overlooked memorial in the adjacent sunken garden commemorates ‘over 50’ men, women and children who died in the tragedy.

DUDMASTON MEWS SW3

COTTAGE SPY

In 1953, male homosexuality was causing moral panic and the Government acknowledged its duty to halt the spread of what Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe labelled ‘this plague’. Answering urgent Parliamentary questions about the sharp rise in sexual delinquency, Fyfe fulminated: ‘Homosexuals in general are exhibitionists and proselytisers and are a danger to others, especially the young’, and expressed confidence that male perversion could be curbed through custodial sentencing: sodomy and bestiality warranted life imprisonment, attempt to commit unnatural offence or indecent assault on a male person: ten years, gross indecency: two years, and importuning: six months on summary conviction, or two years on conviction on indictment. One parliamentarian urged the adoption of medical procedures because the conviction rate was such it necessitated two or three men to a prison cell – which could only exacerbate the epidemic.

It was while walking home at about 11 p.m. on 21 October 1953 that the newly knighted Sir John Gielgud visited the gentleman’s lavatory on Dudmaston Mews. As the actor made his exit, an attractive young man sauntered in and smiled at him. A particular glance or wink was sufficient for gay men to discreetly identify each other and because this particular lavatory was a well-known ‘cottage’ for homosexual liaisons, Gielgud turned around and followed him back in. Despite being an immensely private man, Gielgud evidently derived a thrill from both the fruits and hazards of cruising.

What happened next remains unspecified, but at a timely moment when an act of intimacy was perhaps on the cards, the man revealed himself to be a plain-clothes officer from Metropolitan Police B Division – one of the so-called ‘pretty police’ who lurked in men’s toilets to entrap homosexuals. Dudmaston Mews was one of at least thirteen gents’ lavatories across the West End known to be ‘notorious for perverts’, so the Home Office arranged that they were staked out by pairs of undercover officers working four-week shifts as agents provocateurs. It is uncertain exactly what form training took for those alluring members of the constabulary chosen to adopt the role, but it was by far their most unpopular duty.

Whatever Gielgud’s endeavours in meriting the withdrawal of police notebooks, he was arrested for ‘persistently importuning male persons for immoral purposes’ – a charge that reveals how this was not his first brush with lavatory-dwelling law enforcement. His only response was: ‘I am so terribly sorry,’ which, while not exactly Shakespearean, was a line he no doubt delivered with impeccable pathos.

At Chelsea police station the actor informed officers that he was a single man named Arthur Gielgud – perhaps in a fumbled attempt to hide his identity (something Alec Guinness had successfully pulled off when in a similar predicament a few years earlier, giving the name of a Dickens character, Herbert Pocket). Gielgud had, in fact, been christened Arthur but when asked his profession stated that he was a self-employed clerk earning £1,000 a year. While the story may have grated with his refined enunciation, it conformed with the working man’s cap he donned to blend in on his forays; Gielgud was bound over to appear at West London Magistrates’ Court at 10.30 the following morning.

Many among the police and judiciary were uncomfortable with the witch-hunt of homosexuals for little more than tactile or suggestive behaviour – especially when caught by entrapment – and at 8 the next morning Gielgud’s telephone rang. The caller was a police sergeant, who informed the actor that a magistrate was prepared to hear the case before the court opened to the public – and more importantly the press – thereby letting him slip away before he was spotted. Through luck or design, the magistrate turned out to be of a sympathetic persuasion and showed no outward sign that he recognised the renowned Knight Bachelor and star of a triumphant run of Venice Preserv’d stood before him. Gielgud pleaded guilty following advice that the case would not be reported if he did so, and fumbled an explanation for his situation, declaring that he had been tired and drunk. Rather than face six months in prison, he was fined £10, told to seek immediate treatment from his doctor and warned how his conduct imperilled young men and was a scourge in the neighbourhood.

But his fortune was short-lived. As the actor hurriedly exited the scene, a sharp-eyed reporter was arriving for the first hearing and immediately recognised him; by afternoon the story was front-page news. A Tory peer called for Gielgud to be stripped of his knighthood, taken into the street and horsewhipped, but the proposition drew less support than he hoped because in the court of public opinion attitudes were beginning to soften. When Sir John returned to the stage he found himself greeted with a standing ovation – a reaction he thought would have been inconceivable only twenty years earlier (though he noted with bitterness how newspapers were less cruel in those times). But despite popular indifference to his sexuality, he later wrote how his arrest led him to contemplate suicide, until on reflection he resolved that such a course of action was unnecessarily ‘melodramatic’.

SHEEN GATE, RICHMOND PARK SW14

SHREWD OPERATOR

Folklore attributes mystical qualities to ash trees, and a revered specimen known as the Shrew Ash once stood in open ground near Adam’s Pond at Sheen Gate. However, in contrast to the cherished tree, our forefathers invested the humble shrew with the most malignant character. Should the creature cross your path, crawl over you, or more ominously, sink its teeth into you, the prognosis was bleak. Lameness in livestock was one of several conditions commonly triggered by the velvety fiends.

To arm the parish against such evil, the tree was imbued with magical healing properties; a hole was bored in its trunk, a live shrew pushed inside it and the opening plugged – an operation perhaps embellished with mystical incantations now long forgotten. Twigs or leaves from the tree were then caressed over the person or beast’s afflicted region and their malady miraculously transferred itself to the unfortunate shrew – as could be witnessed for oneself on inspection of the wretched creature. And locals need not wait for a varmint to strike because branches also acted as a deterrent, so were hung in cattle sheds at calving time as protection against shrewish mischief.

But should immured critters fail to work, all was not lost; this particular tree possessed another therapeutic quality by dint of being cloven, or split in two down the trunk. Before dawn, sickly infants were brought to it for a ritual superintended by a ‘shrew mother’, who passed them nine times around a witchbar – a wooden stake wedged between the divided trunk – while muttering mysterious and likely incomprehensible verses, timed so that a specific ‘word’ coincided with the first ray of sun. If going through such motions subsequently proved of little purpose, blame could be laid on flawed timekeeping, though as with all similar methodologies, one success quickly blotted out 100 failures.

In all likelihood, the tree was cloven owing to earlier service curing ‘weak, ricketty or ruptured’ children. Young ash trees were split in two down the trunk and the sections held apart while the naked youngster was drawn through the gap as many times as seemed fit. The tree was then tightly bound back together and as it healed, so did the poorly child.

Warty folk also flocked to the Shrew Ash. Pins were pushed in its bark, jabbed into the wart then back in the tree, and with a few verses of ‘Ashen tree, ashen tree, pray buy these warts off me’, the growths were expected to deflate. (In the event that unsightly scabbing was the only outcome, the next thing to try was rubbing them with a piece of stolen beef.)

The ancient tree was still a focus for rituals in 1875 when the greater part of it was blown down, and though its magic powers waned thereafter, it survived until the storm of 1987.

ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL EC4

CLERICAL ERROR

Guidebooks to St Paul’s omit to mention that the medieval cathedral (which was destroyed in the fire of 1666) contained a prison cell, and the experiences of one inmate were exceptionally ungodly.

In 1511, at the funeral of his newborn baby in Whitechapel, prosperous tailor Richard Hunne refused the priest’s demand for the infant’s christening robe as payment. Ecclesiastical law permitted the church to claim a possession belonging to the deceased, so the priest sued Hunne in the church court. The grieving father was unperturbed; civil law indicated that a corpse could not own property, so Hunne boldly raised the stakes: he issued a writ in the King’s court under a law entitled the Statute of Praemunire, cautioning church authorities that it was treason to appeal to a power higher than the King – in this case, a foreign jurisdiction under the Pope. From a trivial squabble, church and state were now on a collision course.

Hunne’s impudence did him no favours with the Bishop of London, who accused him of heresy and condemned him to the prison cell in the Cathedral’s south-west tower. And when the prisoner was found hanging from the ceiling shortly afterwards, his captors revealed that a guilty conscience had driven him to suicide.

Hunne’s demise was no impediment to the progress of his trial and the former tailor was summoned to court in the Lady Chapel before three bishops, the Lord Mayor, city officials and a concourse of churchmen. The not insignificant burden of evidence had been resolved when, just in the nick of time, a Bible printed in English complete with heretical annotations attributed to the dead defendant fell into the hands of the prosecution, and following four days of proceedings with silence throughout from the accused, it came as no surprise that Hunne was found guilty. As was customary, the condemned heretic was removed to Smithfield, tied to a stake and burned – though because this act was wholly incompatible with Christian principles, the sentence was effected by secular authorities.

That might have been the end of the affair were it not for the City of London Coroner Thomas Barnewell, who examined the prison cell shortly after the grisly discovery. Puzzlingly, he found Hunne’s body hanging ‘with fair countenance, his head fair combed and his bonnet right sitting upon his head, his eyes and mouth closed without any staring, gaping or frowning. Also without any drooling or spurging in any place.’ Furthermore, he noted ‘the skin both of his neck and throat fret away’ and ‘out of his nostrils two small streams of blood to the quantity of four drops. Save only these the face, lips, chin, doublet, collar and shirt was clean.’ In contrast however, Hunne’s jacket lay in the opposite corner of the cell with a ‘cluster of blood’ staining its front, alongside a ‘great parcel’ of bloodiness on the floor. It was not to be the coroner’s most challenging case because, along with the litany of suspicious detail, someone had left behind a luxurious fur-lined gown; ‘Wherefore we find that Richard Hunne was murdered.’

Barnewell soon discovered that a church official, Charles Joseph, had fled to Essex and claimed sanctuary, so he was duly apprehended and robust interrogation at the Tower of London prompted a confession: the Bishop’s Chancellor, Dr Horsey, had instructed him to kill Hunne and then contrive the illusion of suicide. (In truth, Hunne may have been tortured to disclose his associates, but in the circumstances an admission of murder was expedient.) Drafting in muscle in the shape of the bell-ringer, they had pinned Hunne down, heated a long needle in a candle until red hot, then thrust it up his nose and into his brain to kill him cleanly. Alas, as churchmen not hitmen, the lynching went horribly wrong – Hunne struggled, suffered a catastrophic nasal haemorrhage and in the scuffle his neck was broken.

However, all was not lost. With Horsey’s assistance they washed Hunne’s body, dressed it a clean shirt and, warming to the deception, closed his eyes, combed his hair and arranged his nightcap before stringing him up from a hook in the ceiling. Blind to the fact that the stool Hunne supposedly jumped from was on the other side of the cell and Horsey’s gown lay over the stocks, they snuffed out the candle and departed.

While the evidence was compromising, it not a calamity because, as members of the clergy, all three were immune from prosecution. Public outrage was another matter, however, and the affair became a source of great embarrassment to the young Henry VIII – not least because Hunne’s property had been forfeited to the Crown. The royal solution was an exemplary fudge: Horsey waived his immunity to appear before the King’s court charged with murder, and under written instructions from Henry, the Attorney General accepted his not guilty plea and dismissed the case; the three perpetrators were then obliged to make themselves decidedly scarce.

It was only sometime later that Henry resolved whether he or the Pope wielded more authority, and doubtless recalling the legal manoeuvre employed by the obstinate tailor, indicted the entire English clergy under the very same law.

OLD BILLINGSGATE MARKET EC3

SWEAR TO COD

Selling fish spawned such deplorable language that Billingsgate, the name of fish market on the site from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, became a synonym for swearing.

Fishermen have long been noted for their command of the more colourful corners of the English tongue and the circumstances of their profession stimulated their wives to follow suit. Responsibility for selling the catch originally fell to the womenfolk and this was not to be done through meek chinwagging; to tout their wares in the busy market they bellowed and shrieked at the top of their lungs – their salty vocabulary further enriched by the urgency of shifting a perishable stock. (Should it fail to sell, the reeking remains were carefully set aside to be peddled beside the pillory.) Although these women were more liberated than many of their gender, it was their unsparing profanities that led ‘fishwife’ to become another term for someone with a coarse tongue.