Edgware Road E-Book

Léo Woodland

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 201

Beschreibung

From Romans at one end to Romanians at the other, journey through time to discover the legacy of Edgware Road. Meet murderers, mayhemmakers, mistresses and Great Train Robbers who made their mark on history. Encounter the shy boffin who shortened the war, the nudists who shocked the prudish and the country's cruellest workhouse, but a few of the fascinating tales that make Edgware Road special. Take a fascinating stroll along London's most colourful road and its surroundings, full of stories to tell and secrets to keep.

Leseprobe

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Léo Woodland, 2024

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

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 1 80399 628 8

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologie

CONTENTS

1777   Lady Hamilton’s Scandals

1810   Curry Comes to London

1820   Death to the Ruling Class

1825   Death in the Water

1829   Dr Gurney’s Steamy Dreams

1835   Romans and Footpads

1835   The Shame of the Workhouse

1837   The Edgware Road Killer

1864   A Night at the Palace of Fun

1868   The First Cycle Race

1868   A Man Called Rudd

1870   The Smell of Steam

1900   The Birth of Aviation

1904   Of Trams and Tubes

1908   Moving Pictures Move in

1915   Stag Lane, Stairway to the Stars

1916   The Sad Case of C.L.R. Falcy

1924   Homes Fit for Heroes

1927   The Newcomers

1929   The Birth of Tesco

1930   The Nudists of the Welsh Harp

1935   Jaques the Piano Man

1935   A Little Place Off the Edgware Road

1937   The Spies and the Shapely Blonde

1939   The Secret Control Centre

1942   The Crook Who Fooled Hitler

1943   Dambuster in Chief

1944   British Tommy Helps Win the War

1944   Sex and Smut

1950   The Arab Connection

1951   To Work ’Til You’re Dead for a Room and a Bed

1956   Jack Spot, Professional Gangster

1958   Green Licking

1960   Water Sports

1970   Concrete Defeat

1978   A Robber’s Last Stand

1985   Football Kicks Off

2014   George and the Romanians

The End of the Road

Has there ever been a road so short yet so colourful? Well, maybe. A lot has happened in the world, after all. But history has been made on this road, nevertheless, and not always happily. The mere 10 miles of the Edgware Road as it leans lazily northwards out of London take some beating when it comes to social history in Britain. They and its surrounding streets have seen advancing invaders, public executions, highwaymen, an insurrection, murderers and gangsters, a Great Train Robber and a naturist ‘riot’. And the birth of Tesco, and a workhouse so cruel that those who lived nearby preferred to call their town something else. Plus the roots of modern aviation.

Every nation on earth has settled along the road. Arab immigrants and their successors post signs in gorgeous curling writing outside their shops. The Irish came here, too, to build roads and houses, to find themselves exploited and ruined, to fight in the street and, as a sad song puts it, ‘to work ’til they’re dead for a room and a bed’. The Jewish population grew so large that it has the nation’s largest synagogue. Mosques dot the length of the highway. Sikhs built a gurdwara at Brent and Hindus their temples.

There are Romanians in Burnt Oak, a south Indian population in Edgware, and the road has an inter-war housing estate for rehoused slum dwellers that was of such leafy design that Burnt Oak station for many years pointed out that it was ‘for Watling’.

Will you join me for a walk through time and history?

1777

LADY HAMILTON’S SCANDALS

She was as beautiful as a butterfly and as proud as a queen, was Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green.

Where’s that from? From a song from Victorian times. Harry Clifton wrote and sang it as he toured the music halls. It’s about a milkman who falls in love with the maid he sees in a gentleman’s house as he goes about his round. He asks her to marry him. ‘What stuff!’ she scoffs, and she sends him on his way, broken-hearted.

Paddington Green is at the south of Edgware Road. It was quite the area in Polly Perkins’ day, enough so that those who lived there could employ butlers, cooks and maids. It still had the air of the villages of Paddington and Lilestone that formed it. It’s rather less salubrious now; when the BBC filmed a series there in late 1998, its characters included a transexual prostitute, a jack-the-lad in the car park business, and a teenage model. A series 200 years earlier would have included Emma Hamilton. She too lived in Paddington Green. And she was Nelson’s lover, of course.

Emma was conniving, flirtatious and quick to profit from any situation at someone else’s expense. She changed her name when it suited her. She frequented high society but the Prince of Wales was sure he’d seen her working as a prostitute in Covent Garden. Her names included Emma Lyon, Hart, Hartley and Hamilton. It makes her hard to follow.

What we know is that she was born into poverty in Cheshire in 1765. She was known then as Emy Lyon. Sometime around her 12th birthday she made her way to London. She became a maid for a Dr Budd of Bart’s Hospital, at his home south of the Thames in Chatham Place, Blackfriars. She worked there with another youngster, Jane Powell, who dreamed of becoming an actress. Both girls agreed it was better than working as a skivvy. And maybe they dreamed enough that they didn’t get on with their work, because Budd sacked both within a year.

They crossed the Thames to mingle in what another era called the demi-monde of Covent Garden. Powell did become an actress but Emy ended up behind the scenes in the costume department of Thomas Linley’s Theatre Royal, in Drury Lane. She earned extra cash by dancing as a classical goddess at so-called sex therapy courses run by James Graham at his Temple of Health in the Strand. He claimed to have invented or discovered electrical aether and nervous aetherial balsam. Girls dressed, or more probably dressed lightly, as classical goddesses helped gentlemen with their recovery.

That may strike us as faintly shocking now but it was less so then. Many women worked as prostitutes, and not always the lowly. Emy will have seen prostitutes in Covent Garden and she was once identified as one there. Most were in their 20s and, like Emy, from outside London. Prostitution was common and open, so common that nobody knew how many prostitutes there were. A magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun, reckoned 50,000. Others were more cautious and said 6,000 or 7,000.

The most prolific of the ‘scarlet ladies’ was Charlotte Hayes, often referred to as Madame Kelly. She was Irish, as her name suggests, but not at all restricted to Ireland. Her ventures included an upmarket brothel, Le Chabanais, near the Louvre. And forget grubby workmen with a bottle of absinthe in one hand and half a baguette in the other: her customers included the future Edward VII, the artist Toulouse-Lautrec and, long afterwards, Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant.

Madame Kelly also opened a brothel in Soho, expanded to St James’s and then elsewhere. Emy joined her as a servant. She was 14. There is no sign that she joined the troupe of horizontales but there’s little reason to suppose she didn’t. In any case, it was that there she met Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, a ‘witless playboy’ according to those who knew him and a man who, as MP for Portsmouth, never once spoke in the House of Commons. He invited her – some say bought her – to join him at his country estate at Uppark House, a majestic building of two floors and an attic near Petersfield in West Sussex. She lived there in a cottage, from which she emerged to entertain friends by, it’s said, dancing naked on a table.

Fetherstonhaugh threw her out when she became pregnant. His friend, Charles Greville, another Member of Parliament, took her in once she’d agreed to give away her daughter, also called Emma, to change her name, and to never see Fetherstonhaugh again.

Emy, now calling herself Emma Hart, moved into Greville’s house in Paddington Green in 1782. There, he passed her on to his uncle, William Hamilton, the British ambassador in Naples. Emma joined him in Italy on her 21st birthday, 26 April 1786. They married five years later in the old Marylebone parish church at the top of Marylebone Lane – it’s now a sandwich shop – before returning to Naples, where she became a society wow. She married under her original name of Emma Lyon.

It was in Naples that she met the admiral, Horatio Nelson. He wanted a mistress and Emma wanted a celebrity date. They began a ménage à trois at 23 Piccadilly with the elderly Lord Hamilton. She had Nelson’s daughter there, Horatia, and the gossip became overwhelming. They fled central London. Nelson paid £9,000 for Merton Place in 1801 and called it Paradise Merton. It stood in Merton High Street in what is now south-west London. The ground floor was cramped but upstairs were eight bedrooms.

Hamilton died in 1803. He left Emma a small pension but the estate went to Charles Greville. Nelson died at Trafalgar two years later. Once again, Emma didn’t get a lot out of her loss. His brother got all the land and houses except Merton, and Emma received the house, £500 a year and £2,000 in cash. It was a fortune then, it’s true, but far less than she’d been used to and not enough to maintain Paradise Merton. Her money dwindled to the point at which she turned to friends to help her sell the house and to carry on living there at a nominal rent. The lavish life had gone, though, and she took to the bottle. Her creditors caught up with her, and in 1813 she went to a debtors’ prison.

That could have been worse; the rules for ‘genteel’ prisoners allowed them to spend their sentence not in a cell but at a house near the jail. Even that was more than she could tolerate and she determined to flee abroad. On 1 July 1814, she boarded a private boat and sailed to Calais with £50 in her purse. There, she lived at the Hôtel Dessin, described as the best in town. She continued spending on credit, living with a housekeeper and servants. Her health worsened and so did her credit. Religion seemed the only answer and she turned to the Roman Catholic Church.

Then the money ran out for good. She and Horatia moved into a single room at 27 rue Française in the port area. The district has been rebuilt after wartime bombing and her flat no longer exists, the nearest being a modern beauty parlour at No. 23. By then she was addicted to laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. She died on 15 January 1815, aged just 49, and she was buried beside the church in the rue du Four. The upright stone, green with age, referred to her as Emma Lady Hamilton. It recorded her name, dates of birth and death, and that she was married to William Hamilton. Emma’s date of birth was first written as 15 Jannary; rather than start anew, the stonemason added a loop below the legs of the second N. The grave was destroyed in the war, but a memorial to her has stood since 1994 in the nearby Parc Richelieu.

She had fallen a long way, had Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green.

1810

CURRY COMES TO LONDON

Chicken tikka masala, said a foreign secretary, is Britain’s national dish. Traditionalists demanded Robin Cook’s head for such treason. But even they couldn’t deny that, first, curry had made great inroads into British culture and that, second, chicken tikka masala is so British that it’s unknown in India and Pakistan. The masala sauce that gives its distinctive taste was added only to suit British tastes.

There are so-called Indian restaurants – in fact more often owned by Pakistanis with Bengali chefs – on almost every town’s high street. Their roots are in the East India Company, a private venture given the right to develop trade with India but which in the end both conquered and administered it. It had a private army larger than the Queen’s. Only when the company failed, despite being able to rob the great wealth that once existed in India, did the government take over India’s administration itself.

By then, countless employees and civil servants had developed a taste for the food they found there, and they brought that longing home with them. Norris Street Coffee House served curry in the Haymarket, London, as early as 1733. More restaurants grew up around Piccadilly in the next fifty years. But not until 1810 did a purely curry restaurant open, run by an Indian. It was then that the Hindoostane Coffee House opened just off the Edgware Road at 34, now 102, George Street. It’s between Gloucester Place and Baker Street. The owner was Dean Mahomed, a Bengali traveller, surgeon, entrepreneur and a captain in the East India Company.

Mahomed, sometimes spelled Muhammad, was born in Bihari in Bengal, the north-east of the country, in 1759. He joined the East India Company’s private army when he was 11. He rose to become a captain, stayed with the army until 1782 and then emigrated to Cork, in Ireland. There he married a local girl, Jane Daly, the daughter of a wealthy family. She was a ‘fair and beautiful’ fellow student ‘of a family of rank’. Her portrait shows her as square-faced with wide-spaced eyes, a prominent nose and a small mouth. She would not now be considered a beauty.

Some accounts say that Mahomed married again, bigamously because Jane was still alive. The second wife is also said to have been called Jane. Much about Mahomed’s life is unclear or simply invention but it seems probable that there was just the one Jane, that the couple eloped and lived together, their marriage delayed by being of different religions. That would account for claims of bigamy. In any case, Jane’s name appears as his wife on his gravestone.

Jane and Mahomed moved to Portman Square when he was about 50 – remember that little is clear – and there they joined other former employees of the East India Company. He guessed that they’d like a taste from their past and he opened the Hindoostane Dinner and Hooka Smoking Club in 1810. The name shortened to the Hindoostane Coffee House.

The Morning Post announced on 2 February 1810:

Sake Dean Mahomed, manufacturer of the real currie powder, takes the earliest opportunity to inform the nobility and gentry, that he has, under the patronage of the first men of quality who have resided in India, established at his house, 34 George Street, Portman Square, the Hindoostane Dinner and Hooka Smoking Club. Apartments are fitted up for their entertainment in the Eastern style, where dinners, composed of genuine Hindoostane dishes, are served up at the shortest notice … Such ladies and gentlemen as may desirous of having India Dinners dressed and sent to their own houses will be punctually attended to by giving previous notice.

The Times advertised on 27 March 1811:

Mahomed, East-Indian, informs the Nobility and Gentry, he has fitted up the above house, neatly and elegantly, for the entertainment of Indian gentlemen, where they may enjoy the Hoakha, with real Chilm tobacco [from a village in Pakistan], and Indian dishes, in the highest perfection, and allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any curries ever made in England with choice wines.

Mahomed miscalculated, however. His neighbours did indeed like curry but they had their own cooks at home to prepare it. They saw no reason to go out to eat other people’s food or to ask for it to be brought to their door. Mahomed belatedly realised his mistake. His money was running out. He sold his restaurant within a year and he became bankrupt. He then opened a spa in Brighton, at 102 King’s Road where the Queen’s Hotel now stands, and offered shampoos with Indian oils. A sign in capitals, the width of the building, announced ‘Mahomed’s Baths’. Legend says, or maybe he himself said, that he was the so-called shampooing surgeon to King George IV and William IV.

He advertised himself as the ‘inventor of the Indian Medicated Vapour Baths’, adding a decade to his age to make himself sound more convincing. ‘What six or seven hours rest will produce in cases of fatigue, the vapour baths and shampooing will effect in a few minutes,’ he wrote. ‘The herbs of which my bath are impregnated are brought expressly from India and undergo a certain process known only to myself.’ Customers relaxed in a bath infused with Indian oils and herbs until they perspired. They were then put into a cloth tent through which a masseur could rub them vigorously. Or if the customer was a woman, through which Jane could do the massaging. Clifford Musgrave’s work Life in Brighton (1970) says:

The fashionable invalids were eager for some fresh way of whiling away their time, and the highly scented steam baths were found by many to be far more agreeable than sea-water baths, whether hot or cold, and to sufferers from rheumatism and kindred ailments the massage was soothing and relaxing. There was, moreover, the intriguing sensation that one was enjoying something of the voluptuous indulgences of the East.

The process may not have been entirely pleasant, however. An unconvinced writer likened it to ‘stewing alive by steam, sweetened by being forced through odoriferous herbs … dabbed all the while with pads of flannel’.

Mahomed persisted in his self-appointed title of ‘Sake’, the ‘venerable one’. His shampoos, he insisted, were ‘a cure to many diseases and giving full relief when everything fails; particularly rheumatic and paralytic, gout, stiff joints, old sprains, lame legs, aches and pains in the joints’. He hung certificates and testimonials on the walls of the building’s plush entrance, along with crutches that he claimed customers had abandoned, Lourdes-style, thanks to his miracle oils. One letter read: ‘I am very unwilling to leave your house without acknowledging my gratitude for the wonderful cure effected on Mrs Wartnaby by the use of your Vapour baths and advice.’ Another enthused: ‘Through the divine blessing, you have been the means of so much benefit to my bodily health, that I cannot leave this place without testifying my gratitude to you upon that account.’

Mahomed could blunder in his quest for publicity, however. The testimonials were not always spontaneous. One begins: ‘In compliance with your request of yesterday’s date, I feel much pleasure in stating, for the benefit of whomsoever it may concern, that, in the year 1816, I was completely crippled from contractions in both legs, and that from the use of your bath for six weeks, I found myself greatly recovered.’

It got Mohamed nowhere. Vapour baths soon became commonplace, cheaper, and better known as Turkish baths. Shampoo, once unknown, was no longer novel. He complained:

Several pretenders have, since my establishment has formed, entered the field in opposition to me who profess to know the art. Yet I am sure their ignorance must appear manifest to the world. It is a pity the public should be deluded by mere pretenders who bring into disrepute by their bungling stupidity the legitimate practice of a most useful and beneficial discovery.

Mohamed moved into a modest house in Black Lion Street and died at his son’s home at 32 Grand Parade in December 1850, the year his vapour baths were demolished. He claimed to be 101 years old. His plaque in St Nicholas’ churchyard reads:

Sacred to the memory of SAKE DEEN MAHOMED of PATNA HINDOOSTAN who died on the 25th of February 1851 aged 101 years and JANE his wife who died on the 26th of December 1850 aged 70 years. Sacred to the memory of ROSANNA, daughter of SAKE DEEN MAHOMED of PATNA HINDOOSTAN and JANE his wife, who departed this life January 7th 1818 aged 3 years also of HENRY EDWIN MAHOMED their son who departed this life January 30th 1823 aged 12 years.

There’s a circular blue plaque on the Queen’s Hotel to mark the site of his venture. It was paid for by the Chattri Memorial Group, which maintains a memorial to the Indian dead of the First World War on the Downs near Patcham. It was there that Hindus and Sikhs who died in Brighton’s war hospitals were cremated. The Prince of Wales unveiled it on 21 February 1921. A green plaque put up in London by Westminster Council records the ‘site of Hindoostane coffee house 1810, London’s first Indian restaurant. Owned by Sake Dean Mahomed 1759–1851.’

It wasn’t the end of curry, of course. Mahomed was simply ahead of his time. Progress, however, was slow. The Independent, covering the life of Sake Dean Mahomed, reported that there were just six Indian restaurants in Britain before the Second World War. But, says the same report, Indians who came to rebuild London after the Blitz went on to open cafés and canteens for their own communities. From there they opened restaurants for the established population, sometimes in bombed-out fish-and-chip shops. There, they sold curry and rice alongside more traditional food. Fish and chips and other meals vanished as customers developed a taste for Indian dishes. Seeking a formula, restaurants copied each other in putting waiters in dinner jackets and pasting red flock paper on the walls.

And chicken tikka masala, invented in Britain and sold only to Britons, became the national dish. According to one politician, anyway.

1820

DEATH TO THE RULING CLASS

Guy Fawkes and chums weren’t the last to have a down on politicians. Walk for six streets along the Edgware Road from the Marble Arch and then turn right into Harrowby Street in front of the Argos shop. Pass one junction to the left, which is Brendon Street, and walk on to a covered alleyway also to the left, between a dry cleaner’s and a barber’s shop. It leads to Cato Street. No. 1a in Cato Street looks like a modernised stable, which indeed it is. Between its upper windows is another of those circular blue ceramic plaques. It marks the site of the Cato Street Conspiracy.

The house with its two bedrooms is now a Grade II listed building. It was on sale in 2020 for £1.4 million. Contemporary engravings, however, show a far different place. In one, the road is cobbled and dirty. Women and men alike wear high hats with peaks above the eyes. It has since moved upmarket along with the area but the street looks now much as it did then. The buildings are all there and recognisable. The archway beyond the hayloft is still there, although part of the building above it has clearly been rebuilt.

The Cato Street conspirators met in the hayloft on that top floor of No. 1a. Again, we have a contemporary illustration. It shows a small, square room with an exterior door of vertical wooden planks. It has a square peephole at eye level. To its left is a sash window with six panes to each section. To the right are two interior doors, one to the hay rack. There’s a small trapdoor in the floor to the left, a central table and various other fittings, including a rack that was to serve as a step to escape through the window.

The country in those days was riddled with injustice, the conspirators said. The notorious Corn Laws kept the cost of bread high and the people short of food. The laws were intended to line the pockets of farmers and thereby keep them inclined to support the government. Those who complained were often beaten up. The Corn Laws were repealed in 1815 and then only after much bitter debate.