by Tom Quinn
Other titles in the STRANGEST series
The Ashes’ Strangest Moments
Boxing’s Strangest Moments
Bridge’s Strangest Hands
Cinema’s Strangest Moments
Classical Music’s Strangest Concerts
Cricket’s Strangest Moments
Fishing’s Strangest Days
Flying’s Strangest Moments
Football’s Strangest Matches
Gambling’s Strangest Moments
Golf’s Strangest Rounds
Horse-racing’s Strangest Races
Kent’s Strangest Tales
Law’s Strangest Cases
London’s Strangest Tales
London Underground’s Strangest Tales
Medicine’s Strangest Cases
The Military’s Strangest Campaigns
Motor-racing’s Strangest Races
The Olympics’ Strangest Moments
Poker’s Strangest Hands
Politics’ Strangest Characters
Railways’ Strangest Journeys
Rock ’n’ Roll’s Strangest Moments
Royalty’s Strangest Characters
Rugby’s Strangest Matches
Sailing’s Strangest Moments
Science’s Strangest Inventions
Shooting’s Strangest Days
Television’s Strangest Moments
Tennis’s Strangest Matches
Theatre’s Strangest Acts
More great titles from Portico
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Copyright © Tom Quinn, 2006
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
First eBook publication 2013
eBook ISBN: 978-1-909396-17-3
Also available in paperback
ISBN: 9781861059765
The print edition of this book can be ordered direct from the publisher at www.anovabooks.com
D.A.Q.1958–1981.
Thanks to Charlotte Wadham for advice and inspiration, to Katy, Alex and James for entertainment and to Malcolm Croft at Portico Books for encouragement and jolly emails.
Contents
Introduction
Why Part of Scotland Is in London (950)
Put Out Your Fire (1066)
The Bishop of Winchester’s Geese (1171)
Squabbling Churchmen (1176)
Human Lavatory (1190)
The Right to Be Hanged by Silk (1237)
How Bedlam Got Its Name (1250)
A Piece of Cambridgeshire in London (1290)
Boars’ Heads and Frankincense (1300)
How the Women Beat the Lawyers (1314)
A Stream Flows at Westminster (1360)
Planning for Centuries Ahead (1399)
The Curse of Centre Point (1417)
Gropecunt Lane (1450)
Why We Say Sixes and Sevens (1490)
The House that Shakespeare Knew (1501)
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul (1540)
Burning Heretics (1555)
Vanished Dungeons Reappear (1556)
Cash for Waterborne Bodies (1556)
The Queen’s Bosom on Show (1597)
John Stow’s Quill Pen (1605)
London’s Only Man-made River (1606)
Derrick’s Death Crane (1610)
John Donne, Undone (1631)
A Church the Wrong Way Round (1631)
Poet Buried Standing Up (1637)
A Square of Wonders (1641)
The Stone Monument that Weeps (1652)
Strangled Hares for Kidney Stones (1658)
Why Teachers Have to Be Better Than the King (1660)
A Monarch on the Scrapheap (1660)
How to Avoid Debt in The Mall (1661)
The Governor of Duck Island (1665)
Where to Get Your Coat of Arms (1666)
Yeoman of the Mouth (1669)
The Church that Inspired a Cake (1672)
How the Royal Mistress Got Her Way (1675)
The Ultimate Celebrity Street (1675)
A Quack on Tower Hill (1680)
A Pitched Battle with the Lawyers (1684)
The Field of the Forty Steps (1687)
A Mousetrap on the Head (1690)
When Prison Marriages Were All the Rage (1697)
The Board of the Green Cloth (1698)
Pig Fat and Face Powder (1700)
Short Temper, Extravagant Habits (1705)
Buried with His Books (1705)
The Candle-stub Seller (1707)
St Mary in the Roadway (1712)
Dog Latin (1715)
A Bank with a Woolly Mammoth (1717)
The Church that Went to America (1724)
The Meanest Man in Southwark (1730)
Castrated Singers (1735)
Going to Knightsbridge by Boat (1736)
Mad Mayfair Marriages (1742)
Air Bathing in Craven Street (1757)
The Cockney Courtesan with a Sweet Tooth (1760)
Highland Soil in Westminster (1760)
How London Got Its Pavements (1761)
The World’s Oldest Hatmakers (1764)
Why Actors Say ‘Break a Leg!’ (1766)
Byron Gets Burned (1768)
Modern Bridge, Medieval Money (1769)
Obsessed by Snuff (1776)
Cockney Maori Chief (1777)
How the Bristol Hotel Got Its Name (1778)
Children for Sale (1778)
Eighteenth-Century Viagra (1779)
Beau Brummel’s Blue Nose (1794)
Betting on Cats (1795)
Nelson’s Second-hand Tomb (1804)
The Mole that Killed a King (1806)
World’s First Gaslight (1807)
Biggest Practical Joker (1809)
The Dirtiest Pub in London (1809)
A Mistress’s Revenge (1809)
Which Side Are You On? (1811)
Napoleon’s Soap on Show (1816)
How to Stop Dead Cats Flying (1819)
The Greatest Legal Scandal of All (1819)
A Club for Men Not Able to Sing in the Bath (1820)
Women Buying Men (1820)
Tom and Jerry in London (1821)
A Monument to a Man Nobody Liked (1824)
Only for the Royal Bird Keeper (1828)
When the Dead Moved Out of London (1832)
The Man Who Had Himself Stuffed (1832)
Why the National Gallery Has Giant Pepperpots (1835)
World’s Smallest Prison (1835)
Performing Pigeons (1835)
The Train Disguised as a Ship (1836)
Trafalgar Square – Permanently Unfinished (1838)
The Mysterious Crossing Sweeper (1840)
A Bridge from London to Bristol (1845)
Why the Jockeys Ate Tapeworms (1845)
Keeping the Rich Out of the Poor Seats (1850)
Staying in the Limelight (1850)
The Scandal of a Horse in Church (1852)
Why Big Ben Isn’t Big Ben At All (1852)
Trains Only for the Dead (1854)
Free Love in Victorian Clapton (1859)
Mr Crapper’s Bottom Slapper (1860)
Last of the Great London Courtesans (1861)
How to Make a Living Selling Dog Poo (1861)
&nb
sp; Ungodly Travel Denounced (1863)
Where Is the Centre of London? (1865)
Mad about Footwarmers (1867)
The Houses That Exist But Aren’t There (1868)
Islamic Sewage Centre (1868)
Where Sphairistike Started (1869)
A Roar on the Embankment (1870)
The Bridge That Could Fall Down (1873)
The House Where Time Stood Still (1874)
World’s First Phone Call (1876)
A Needle by the River (1878)
Why Saluting Is Vulgar (1879)
A Houseful of Animals (1880)
Paying for Land with Nails (1881)
The Train Station That Fell on a Theatre (1882)
Bismarck Drunk on the Embankment (1885)
Royal Sculptor Works from Gaol (1886)
A Bicycle Driven by Nodding (1889)
Betting on a Golf Ball (1889)
Violinist Hit by Fish (1890)
Why Eros Is All Wrong (1893)
A River Flying Through the Air (1895)
An Office Fit for the Gods (1895)
Cromwell Relegated to ‘The Pit’ (1895)
The World’s Ultimate Military Madman (1897)
Woman on a Graveyard Mission (1897)
Wood Bark under the District Line (1900)
A Real Train in the Theatre (1904)
Being Nice to Allah (1905)
Cows in the Park (1905)
Cheeky Porter in Buckingham Palace (1905)
Hidden Figures on the Bridge (1906)
One-legged Escalator Tester (1910)
Mystery Clock in the Strand (1910)
The King Who Never Grew Up (1911)
The Statue That Isn’t There (1912)
The Palace That Faces the Wrong Way (1912)
A Carriage Pulled by Zebras (1920)
Illegal Whisky from Respectable London (1922)
Ancient Hall Goes to Chelsea (1925)
Prime Minister Caught in a Brothel? (1926)
The World’s Most Famous Parrot (1926)
The Giant of Fleet Street (1928)
The Church That Moved (1928)
Demolished Café Returns (1929)
Entertainer with a Potato Head (1929)
A Statue with Its Own Income (1929)
Fishing from the Roof of the Savoy (1930)
The Building That’s Really an Advertisement (1930)
Cows in the Strand (1930)
Max Miller’s Last Performance (1936)
Dogs Before Nazis (1938)
Where the Dutch Declared War (1940)
Top-Secret Grass-Cutting Service (1940)
How St Paul’s Had a Miraculous Escape (1940)
Saved by a Bathtub (1941)
London Bridge Goes to War (1944)
A Curious Correspondence (1949)
Why the Americans Don’t Own Their Embassy (1950)
A Pigeon Shooter in Fleet Street (1950)
Wine Cellar Survives the Centuries (1952)
A Gift to London – a German Lamppost (1963)
Campaigning Against Peanuts and Sitting (1965)
Cabman’s Revenge (1965)
‘How Not To Get Lost In Liberty’s’ (1970)
London Fish Love Sewage (1972)
Penis for Sale at Christie’s (1972)
Family Money Arrives after Two Hundred Years (1976)
Bizarre Railway Advertisements (1977)
Tearing Up £80,000 (1979)
How the Government Lost a Hospital (1980)
Endless Secret Tunnels (1980)
Darwin on the Underground (1985)
Lost Lavatories (1985)
How Crime Became Art (1995)
Camilla – Descended from the Royal Mistress (2004)
Death by Pelican (2006)
Going Dutch (2007)
Introduction
Like all ancient cities, London is an extraordinarily rich source of strange tales. From stories of human fat sold to anglers after the hanging days at Tyburn, to tales of one-legged escalator testers, unsolved murders, flying rivers, moving churches and human lavatories.
Then there are the tales of extraordinary London characters, oddballs and inventors, mavericks and madmen – like Stanley Green, who spent his life campaigning against peanut eating, or Walter Rothschild, who taught two zebras to pull his carriage down The Mall. And away from people and places, there are the ancient rules and systems of governance that have survived the centuries to baffle historians and create numerous bizarre anomalies – dusty traditions, archaic practices and ceremonies are kept on despite, on the face of it, no longer being necessary.
Bags of nails are still paid for long-vanished plots of land, medieval legacies are still honoured each year and the pursuivants at the College of Arms still initiate prosecutions against those who infringe the rules governing the use of gules, azure and archant.
London’s wealth of bizarre tales can be attributed to the city’s love of the old ways, which is why much that is odd and ancient in London’s social and business life survives. In the City proper, for example, an ancient ordinance defines a road as a highway without houses – which is why, to this day, no thoroughfare in the city may be called a road; it’s either a street or an alley. Even big multinational corporations haven’t been able to change that.
Many of London’s strangest and quirkiest tales are well known to scholars but have been unavailable to the general public until now.
This book is the result of several years spent digging in obscure and dusty archives and in the libraries of organisations whose continued existence in the modern world is itself astonishing, but the labour has been worth it, for whatever your interest, whether political, social, architectural or historical, you will find London’s Strangest Tales a mighty feast of the mad, bad, dotty, eccentric and – at times – quite unbelievable.
WHY PART OF SCOTLAND IS IN LONDON
950
Scotland Yard is famous throughout the world but few people wonder why a police station in central London should have been given this curious name. Why Scotland? The answer takes us into one of those curious and inexplicable areas of long forgotten history.
From the late tenth century until the Act of Union of 1707 which brought Scotland and England together under one Crown, Scotland was an entirely separate country with its own tradition, rules and statutes – even today Scottish law differs markedly from English law in many respects.
During the period of independence Scotland, like most foreign countries, had a London embassy and the name Great Scotland Yard is the last echo of an independent Scotland’s presence in London.
Originally there were three streets that covered this area – Little Scotland Yard and Middle Scotland Yard have long gone – but bizarrely the rules that apply to foreign embassies today still, in theory, apply to this small area of London. All embassies are in practice foreign territory – the police cannot enter a foreign embassy unless invited to do so and their jurisdiction doesn’t include the territory of a foreign embassy.
After the Act of Union no one remembered to abolish the foreign status of Great Scotland Yard, which means that even today the little street running off Whitehall near Trafalgar Square is actually Scottish territory.
PUT OUT YOUR FIRE
1066
Many delightful traditions linger in London long after their practical usefulness has gone. The beadle who watches Burlington Arcade, for example, forbids running, umbrellas and whistling despite the fact that these are no longer evidence of a lack of gentility. In parliament an MP under certain circumstances may only interrupt a debate if he first dons a top hat. Ravens are still kept at the Tower of London for fear that if they depart the monarchy will fall.
But perhaps the oddest and longest lasting tradition is the curfew bell still rung each evening in South Square in Gray’s Inn, a centre of the legal profession since 1370.
The curfew bell rung here would have been only one of dozens rung all over medieval London, for the wo
rd curfew comes from the Norman French couvre le feu – meaning put out your fire – and it was rung not to tell citizens that they must not leave their houses but rather to tell them (since it was bedtime) that they should make sure they had extinguished all their fires and candles. The fear – to be realised in the terrible fire of 1666 – was that without a reminder someone might forget a candle or fire and the result would be that the thousands of dry timber and thatch buildings would ignite.
Originally, apart from the bells rung here at Gray’s Inn, all London churches rang the curfew – it was on the order of William the Conqueror (1028–87) – and as late as the beginning of the Second World War a dozen or more city churches still rang the curfew. Today that thousand-year tradition is still held in two places – Gray’s Inn, as we have seen, and the Tower of London.
THE BISHOP OF WINCHESTER’S GEESE
1171
To those of a religious cast of mind it may come as a shock to discover that for centuries the Christian church made a very good living from prostitution. As it happens the Church was also one of the world’s most important and vicious slave owners.
But the church in London was particularly keen to make money from prostitutes since it was so easy – in fact the prostitutes of Southwark were known as the Bishop of Winchester’s geese. With magnificent hypocrisy the Bishop of Winchester was able to collect rents from the numerous brothels he owned but then when a prostitute died in the diocese the church refused to allow her to be buried in consecrated ground.
A sad little reminder of this grim and astonishing history can still be glimpsed down a quiet street in Southwark even today. Red Cross Way runs parallel to Borough High Street and if you follow it almost as far as the junction with Union Street you come to a rusty iron gate and behind it a plot of land.
This is the remnant of Cross Bones Graveyard where the Bishop of Winchester’s geese were buried when they could no longer earn money for the church.
A royal ordinance of 1171 allowed the Bishop of Winchester to license the brothels, or stews as they were known, and to collect the income. The Bishop’s jurisdiction covered what was known as the Liberty of the Clink – the reference is to the Clink Prison, part of which can still be seen in the Anchor Inn a few hundred yards along the riverbank west from Southwark Cathedral.
In 1833 a history of the area mentions the ‘unconsecrated burial ground known as the Cross Bones at the corner of Redcross Street, formerly called the Single Woman’s burial ground…’. The writer is clearly echoing the words of a much earlier author, John Stow (1525–1605), whose great Survey of London was published in 1598.
