by Tom Quinn
One of the problems was that, with no thought of cost, Stevens simply continually ordered the most expensive materials he could get his hands on. He also decided to build on a colossal scale and by the time the authorities realised what was going on it was too late.
Officials at St Paul’s were so horrified that they washed their hands of the whole business and immediately called in the services of the notoriously parsimonious (and bizarrely named) Acton Smee Ayrton, who was the government’s Official Surveyor of Works.
Ayrton, who was not known for his diplomacy, went straight to the High Court and obtained an injunction that threatened Stevens with imprisonment if he did not complete Wellington’s monument within thirty days. The task was, of course, impossible. When the deadline passed bailiffs were sent in to Stevens’s studio where they took everything – paint brushes, easels, chisels and other artistic paraphernalia. The sum raised from the sale of Stevens’s equipment was derisory but the pettiness of Ayrton’s actions roused the fury of the whole of Britain’s artistic community. They petitioned Parliament and the Queen, and Stevens was soon back at work – but shaken by the disaster that had befallen him, he died soon after returning to St Paul’s and still the monument remained unfinished.
Incredibly, it took another thirty years for the artist John Tweed (1869–1933) to complete the monument – it was Tweed who made the bronze figure of Wellington on his horse, Copenhagen, atop the spectacular marble base that Stevens had made all those years ago.
Further difficulties arose when there were protests from religious zealots at the idea of a horse in a church and works stopped again – in fact it was only in 1912, some sixty years after Wellington had died, that his extraordinary monument was finally completed.
But Stevens had the last laugh – after the monument was completed someone noticed that the figure representing calumny at the base of the monument bore a striking resemblance to the man who had sent the bailiffs in to remove possessions – Ayrton’s only memorial is this deeply unattractive sculpture.
WHY BIG BEN ISN’T BIG BEN AT ALL
1852
Big Ben is one of London’s oddest buildings and the story of how it came to be built is typical of the eccentric way in which things tend to get done in London. Like the rest of the Palace of Westminster, it was built by Charles Barry (1795–1860) and Augustus Pugin (1812–1852) after a nationwide competition to find a new design for the seat of government after the disastrous fire of 1834.
The late Georgian passion for Gothic gave the Barry design a head start and after duly winning the competition, he began building the clock tower we see today, but when it was first built it wasn’t known as Big Ben at all – the name Big Ben refers to the huge bell on which the hours are struck.
All the statistics to do with St Stephen’s Tower (as Big Ben is really known) and its great clock are astonishing: the tower is nearly three hundred and twenty feet high; it took almost nineteen years from laying the first foundation stone to getting the clock going, largely because no one could agree about who should make it.
The job was first offered to Benjamin Vulliamy, the Queen’s clockmaker, who was based in Pall Mall. His design was attacked as absurd and incompetent by another clockmaker, J. Dent, and after a huge fight with letters banging to and fro and Times leaders thundering out various opinions, the commissioners charged with organising the work gave in and launched a competition to design and build the new clock.
The contract finally went to Dent amid much acrimony, in 1852. Two years later the unique clock – twenty three feet diameter – was ready, but there was nowhere to put it because wrangles over the building of the tower had delayed construction.
While all this was being sorted out, an east London company cast a great sixteen-ton bell, but during tests using a thirteen-hundredweight clapper the bell cracked. It then had to be melted down and recast, this time by the Whitechapel Bell foundry. It took sixteen horses the best part of a day to haul the gigantic bell to Parliament Square. It was then hoisted into position at the top of the tower, which was completed just in time.
When the clock began to run it was discovered that the two and a half ton hands were so heavy that the mechanism could not move them. They were redesigned in a lighter metal but now crashed down past the three each time they reached 12. Remade for a third time in hollow copper, they worked and they have kept time accurately ever since.
There are two theories about the origins of the name ‘Big Ben’: around the time the clock was due to be completed, the prizefighter and publican Ben Caunt went sixty rounds with the best bare-knuckle boxer in the country, Nat Langham. The bout was declared a draw but it made both men national heroes. Ben Caunt was a huge man and one story has it that the great bell was named after him. The other story attributes the name to Benjamin Hall, the chief commissioner of works, who was addressing the House on the subject of a name for the new bell tower when, to great laughter, someone shouted ‘Call it Big Ben!’
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the clock is that even by the standards of today’s atomic timepieces it is wonderfully accurate. When the commissioners launched their competition to design it they stipulated that it must be accurate to within one second an hour – most clock makers at the time agreed that this was impossible but that’s how accurate the clock still is today. If it does get slightly out of time, a tiny coin, kept especially for the purpose, is placed on the huge pendulum and the weight of the coin is enough to adjust the clock by a fraction of a second.
TRAINS ONLY FOR THE DEAD
1854
Just outside Waterloo Station between what was once York Street (it was recently renamed Leake Street) and the Westminster Bridge Road is a curious reddish building with a grey-stone arched entranceway. This is the former entrance to one of London’s most extraordinary railway stations.
The current building dates from the early twentieth century but it replaced a station building opened on the same site in 1854. The station was the London terminus for the Necropolis Railway – a railway devoted entirely to the dead.
To find out how this bizarre situation came about we have to remember that by the mid-nineteenth century London’s churchyards were full to overflowing. Bodies were stamped down into graves already too full and in many cases just a few inches of soil covered the decaying corpses. The result was appallingly insanitary conditions and frequent outbreaks of disease.
To ease the problems London’s churchyards were closed and building began on a number of out-of-town cemeteries – Kensal Green and, more famously, Highgate. South of London, Brookwood Cemetery was opened some 25 miles from London, but the great difficulty was how to get corpse, coffin and mourners there. The solution was the Necropolis Railway.
Funeral trains ran from what was really a private station attached to the main line. Once out of the station the funeral trains joined the main line until they reached Brookwood. Here they reversed into the grounds of the cemetery. Until 1902 when the station was rebuilt following the complete rebuilding of the rest of Waterloo Station, Necropolis trains ran every day if there was a booking. After 1900, for some inexplicable reason, trains ceased to run on Sundays and a few years later they were running no more than twice a week. In 1941 the station was bombed (the façade survived) and the funeral trains were never revived after the war.
In the late 1940s the track from London to Brookwood was taken up but the station and track survived in the grounds of Brookwood Cemetery for a little longer. There were two stations in the cemetery – the north station served Nonconformists and the south station served the Anglican dead. The north station was demolished in the early 1960s but the south station survived until a fire in 1972. Today, the remains of the station platforms can still be seen at Brookwood – the only reminder of the thousands of dead who took their last journey on the Necropolis railway.
FREE LOVE IN VICTORIAN CLAPTON
1859
In the first centuries of the Christian era there were doz
ens if not hundreds of odd little sects and heretical groups that broke away from the ancient Jewish tradition (as did Jesus himself) and claimed that their leader was the messiah. Christos is merely the Greek rendering of the Hebrew word messiah.
Many of these early sects were ruthlessly suppressed as what was considered ‘orthodox’ belief came to be enforced by one particular group – the Christians. This, of course, later split into the Roman Catholic strand of Christianity and the Orthodox strand. But there were also many Gnostic (meaning secret knowledge) Christian sects whose beliefs were considered heretical.
One gnostic sect believed that Judas was the one true disciple on the grounds that he was the only one who helped Christ slough off his mortal body. The existence of this gnostic strand of early Christianity was confirmed spectacularly when in 2004 scholars discovered a previously unknown gospel from the late third century – this was the Gospel of Judas Iscariot.
In later centuries, Christianity was split and riven by other sects, the Rosicrucians, Muggletonians, Ranters and Peculiar People among others. Most spectacular of all, of course, was the major split that occurred at the Reformation.
But a little church in north London which still stands today was once home to a Christian sect that was bizarre even by the standards of early gnostic and other apocalyptic sects.
The church, whose architecture hardly betrays its bizarre origins, was once the home of the Agapemonites, a sect that – like the American Mormons – has its origins in one man’s desire to legitimise a promiscuous sex life.
The story begins with Henry James Prince who, while a student at St David’s theological college in Wales, set up the Lampeter Brethren in 1836. Ordained at the age of 28, Prince made himself head of the brethren whose main aim seems to have been what in the 1960s would have been termed free love.
By 1859 Prince had married a wealthy woman who then conveniently died. He also resigned from the Church of England and set up the Agapemonites using money he’d inherited from his wife. Prince was apparently a remarkably charismatic man and within a few years his new church – ‘agapemone’ is Greek for abode of love – was attracting numerous followers. Women seem to have been particularly keen to join. All new members pooled their wealth and lived communally under the rule of Prince.
A wealthy London businessman gave Prince a huge donation and agreed to become the great man’s butler, but when Prince helped himself to Louisa Nottidge’s fortune her family sued him and won – the Agapemonites had to pay the money back.
Despite an occasional setback the Agapemonites were now wealthy enough to build the church that still stands in the Clapton district of Hackney. The building was known as the Ark of the Covenant and it cost £16,000 to build.
By the 1890s the church was attracting people from across the world, though in relatively small numbers. They came to listen to Prince tell them that he was John the Baptist come back to earth. By the end of the century he was telling his congregation that he was no longer John the Baptist but had become the Incarnation of the Holy Ghost.
Prince’s right-hand man was John Hugh Smyth Piggot, a parson who had studied at the London College of Divinity in Highbury. He met Prince in Ireland in the mid-1880s and was a member of the Salvation Army for a while.
The two men seemed to have spent most of their time persuading the female members of their congregation that the way to salvation was via the bedroom. But there was an occasional explanation of the sect’s more general theological ideas – the Testimony, for example, was published in the 1890s. It is astonishing it ever convinced anyone given that it is full of precisely the same sort of predictions and pronouncements that characterise pretty much every other oddball sect from the Mormons to the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The Testimony says that the world is about to end and that members of the church must be celibate unless called upon by the church itself to sacrifice their celibacy in pursuit of a higher truth.
Prince insisted that as the Lord’s anointed he must travel in style – he had a coach and four and whenever he thundered through the London streets his coach was accompanied by a full complement of foxhounds.
He told his followers that as a spirit he could not die so it must have come as a shock when he dropped dead in 1899.
What really astonished his followers, however, was the fact that Prince had condemned every other church member who had died – he had said that any member who died only did so because he had not lived properly according to the rules of the Agapemonites. As he, by implication, was supremely aware of how a good Agapemonite should live he would never die, but die he did.
Prince was buried upright (another Agapemonite idea) and Piggot took over as leader. Piggot clearly thought that Prince had undersold himself when he declared that he was John the Baptist (and later the Holy Ghost) so on 7 September 1902 he told his congregation something even more remarkable. His exact words were recorded for posterity:
Christ suffered for sin and it was promised for them that waited for him He would appear a second time with salvation to man from death and judgement. Brother Prince was sent before his Lord’s face to prepare the way for the second coming of him who suffered for sin, to prepare the way for the restoration of all things.
His testimony was true and the word of the holy ghost in him was perfect and I who speak to you tonight – I am that Lord Jesus Christ who died and rose again and ascended into heaven. I am that Lord Jesus Christ come again in my own body to save those who come to me from death and judgment.
Yes, I am he that liveth and behold I am alive for ever more. I am come again for the second time as the bridegroom of the church and the judge of all men, for the father has committed all judgment unto me because I am the son of man. And you – each one of you – must be judged by me.
By the following Sunday word of this astonishing sermon had leaked out and a crowd of more than six thousand gathered outside the Ark of the Covenant. Police were called to keep order and the mood grew ugly. In earlier times, of course, anyone claiming to be Jesus would have been burned at the stake. The Edwardians of north London were cross but not that cross – they confined themselves to jeering Piggot when he arrived in his coach and four.
In the event the police failed to keep order and the crowd surged into the church, where Piggot duly repeated his claim to be Jesus.
Piggot’s coach was bombarded with sticks, stones and bricks as he travelled home and such was the scandal surrounding his outrageous claims that the sect was forced to move to a remote location in Somerset. Here a young woman called Ruth Preece joined the sect and became Piggot’s second wife.
Life was strict in the Somerset Abode of Love – the women members of the sect were known as helps (they did all the work) who might graduate to be ornamentals, entitled to be waited on by the helps. About thirty of the youngest and most attractive members of the sect became Piggot’s concubines. Piggot sat on a gilded throne and everyone had to call him master.
Ruth Preece eventually became spiritual bride in chief but seems to have got on well with the first Mrs Piggot.
In 1909 it became known to the church authorities that Piggot’s concubines had given birth and a consistory court was instituted to try Piggot in absentia. He was defrocked on 9 March.
By this time more than one hundred women were living at the Abode of Love with Piggot. As he grew older all sorts of potions were tried in an attempt to keep him young and vigorous; all failed. He died in 1927 and the sect was taken over by Douglas Hamilton. The sect began to decline and by the 1940s only a dozen or so members were left. Piggot’s two sons served in the forces; his daughter vanished abroad. Hamilton died in 1942.
By 1950 the tiny group of remaining sect members were still convinced that Piggot would return to them. He did not and the last of the Agapemonites – Ruth Preece – survived into the 1960s. The Ark of the Covenant in Clapton still stands but is now a Catholic church. Piggot’s bizarre sect has gone forever.
MR CRAPPER’S BOTTO
M SLAPPER
1860
A strange London story that turns out not to be true is that the word ‘crap’ – in the vulgar lavatorial sense – comes from the pioneer of the flushing lavatory, Thomas Crapper (1837–1910).
But even if that is not true there remain some wonderful tales about Crapper, who walked penniless to London in 1850 aged fourteen and became apprenticed to a master plumber in Chelsea. A decade later he had set up on his own and his company soon became the most famous sanitary-ware manufacturer in the world – a manufacturer that was still in existence in the early 1960s.
Crapper was a brilliant engineer who revolutionised the way we go to the loo. Before Crapper, London lavatories relied on turning a simple tap on to flush the loo, but the problem with this system was that people forgot to turn the tap off and water was left running (sometimes intentionally) all the time. A trickle of water did not make for a particularly hygienic flushing system. The result was a chronic loss of pressure in London’s water system and badly flushing loos.
Crapper’s flushing lavatory was brilliant because it was automatic, saved water and was propelled by enough force to flush properly. Instead of the loo with a simple running tap he invented the system we use today – a small tank filled automatically with no risk of overflow and using only relatively small amounts of water. The tank also produced enough pressure to flush the loo properly in one go.
So convinced was he of the brilliance of his various designs that he invited a bemused public into the works every now and then to see how a particular loo and cistern combination could flush away a dozen apples or several potatoes. Visits became one of the highlights of Saturday afternoons in Chelsea!
