by Tom Quinn
It was a narrow thoroughfare of early timber-framed buildings swept away by the largely forgotten architect G. L. Gomme who – like so many London planners – thought it would be a great idea to create a new road. Mr Gomme’s new road cut through from Holborn to the north down to the Strand. The result was Kingsway with the crescent-shaped development of Aldwych at the southern, Strand end.
Bush House was to be the centrepiece building of the new Aldwych and it was originally intended as a huge trade centre. An American architect, Harvey Corbett, turned Gomme’s dreadful idea into a reality by designing the lumpy buildings we see today – but if the buildings are leaden and undistinguished they do have one virtue. In a bizarre act of eccentricity they are officially and permanently unfinished.
Unlike many modern Americans, Corbett was rather a fan of Islam and he took to heart an ancient Persian adage which states that ‘Perfection is an attribute of Allah; it is therefore blasphemous for man to assume he has created something perfect’. With this idea in mind Corbett left the decorative top of one of the building’s distinctive columns unfinished. If you walk today through the western colonnade from the Strand look carefully at the tops of the columns – one is quite clearly and deliberately unfinished.
Leaving it like this meant that Corbett could always claim that his building was incomplete and therefore not blasphemous. Modern commentators are inclined to remark that even if he had finished the building no one could have accused Corbett of blasphemy as the building is a very long way indeed from perfection anyway.
COWS IN THE PARK
1905
Despite the best efforts of developers, London’s parks have survived the centuries pretty well. Occasionally roads have sliced through some of them – Park Lane, for example, really was a lane before being turned into a six-lane highway for no good reason. The oldest and most interesting of the parks – St James’s – was originally established as a hunting ground so kings and courtiers could hunt deer from the nearby palaces of St James and Westminster.
The point of the hunting grounds was not that they should be big enough to give the deer a sporting chance, but that they should be small enough to guarantee a kill. One of the strangest stories associated with St James’s has nothing to do with hunting or indeed with royalty. It concerns the small café that still stands near the lake.
The story begins in 1905 when London’s planners decided to build the grand semi-circular Admiralty Arch at the Trafalgar Square end of The Mall. The arch was designed to take up only a small area of what had been open space, but there was a problem. Two elderly women had walked to this corner every day for as long as anyone could remember accompanied by three cows. Having arrived at the edge of the park they tethered their cows and set up stall – for a penny a glass passers-by could enjoy a drink of milk, fresh and still warm from the cow. It was a treat much enjoyed by Londoners and visitors alike and the two women made a very good living. But their place of business was in the way of the new arch and the authorities were not going to let them stand in the way of progress.
They were told to remove themselves forthwith, but word leaked to the press and the public rebelled en masse – questions were raised in the House of Commons and the Lords and articles by the great and the good appeared in newspapers saying that it was an outrage to remove one of the most delightful traditions associated with the park. But what clinched it for the two elderly dairymaids was that Edward VII remembered drinking at the ladies’ corner and he too thought it was an outrage that they should disappear.
The difficulty was that though the ladies claimed an ancient right to sell milk in the park they had no paperwork to prove it. When questioned by a Commons Committee they insisted their families had sold milk in this corner of the park since the mid-seventeenth century. Researchers got to work and uncovered a long history of milk selling in St James’s Park. References in obscure documents dating back centuries did indeed make occasional reference to the sale of milk. It was becoming increasingly difficult to justify the removal of the two milkmaids and their cows.
At last the planners relented and the ladies were allowed to stay but they were told they would have to move away from The Mall and closer to the lake. They were also told that the right to sell milk would die with them. In the end this did not happen, however. The last of the two women died in about 1920 but the sale of refreshments did not die with them. The right to sell refreshments in the park seems to have become a right defined simply by long use and the present kiosk, situated where the two women and their cows once plied their trade, exists under that ancient right.
CHEEKY PORTER IN BUCKINGHAM PALACE
1905
There is a long tradition of mighty magnates rewarding their courtiers, friends and mistresses, either with dukedoms, knighthoods, vast tracts of land or monetary gifts, but instances of complete strangers being rewarded by monarchs are far more rare.
Edward VII, a bloated and unattractive figure whose life was permanently overshadowed by his mother Queen Victoria, was a bit of practical joker, so when he came across a cheeky porter in Buckingham Palace he was delighted by the man’s audacity.
It all began when a picture ordered for the palace was delivered by a porter from a local art gallery. He was directed into the king’s study and left alone to unwrap the painting. It took just ten minutes or so to remove the picture from its elaborate protective wrapping but somehow the official who’d led him into the room had forgotten all about him and he was left there. Clearly bored and unsure about what to do next, the porter eventually sat at a rather untidy desk in the corner of the room where he spotted a mass of writing paper – each sheet had the words Buckingham Palace emblazoned across the top.
The porter sat down, took a sheet of paper and, to pass the time, began to write a letter. At that precise moment Edward VII waddled into the room and the embarrassed porter leaped to his feet. The king walked over to the desk, looked down at the writing paper and hooted with laughter. He gave the porter a guinea – a great deal of money in 1905 – and showed him the door.
What so amused the king was the porter’s opening few words which read:
‘Dear Dad, Please note change of address…’
The story became and remained one of the king’s favourites and he dined out on it for the rest of his life.
HIDDEN FIGURES ON THE BRIDGE
1906
The modernist movement in architecture seems largely to have consisted of a move to ban all forms of decoration from buildings. For the man on the Clapham omnibus, of course, this meant that the built environment that was once designed to delight and entertain both passers-by and those who lived or worked in a particular building suddenly came to look increasingly dull and utilitarian. It is no accident that critics of modernist architecture see it as a close ally of fascism – cold cruel lines, brutal in their conception and execution came to epitomise the most famous architecture of the 1930s onwards and most famously in the work of Le Corbusier and his followers.
The last great flowering of architecture that could be witty and decorative, playful even, came at the end of the much maligned Victorian era. We tend to think of the Victorians as lacking in grace and humour – an entirely false idea. Their builders and architects loved to embellish and decorate even in areas of a building that would only rarely be seen – much as the builders of medieval churches would encourage their carpenters to carve the underside of pews, the Victorians encouraged a riot of decorative stone, wood and brickwork.
One of the most unusual structures in London came about as a result of just this kind of impulse – in 1906 the present Vauxhall Bridge was finally completed. Like all Victorian and earlier bridges across the Thames it is enlivened with decorative detail, but what strange impulse persuaded the designers to add eight sculptures that can only be seen with great difficulty?
On the downstream side of the bridge the figures represent science, local government, education and the fine arts; on the upstream side they r
epresent agriculture, sculpture, pottery and engineering.
Among these extraordinary sculptures is a perfect miniature version of St Paul’s held in an outstretched hand!
Little St Paul’s on the Water, as it has long been affectionately known among watermen, is very difficult to see from the bridge itself – you have to lean over the parapet, but it is worth it!
ONE-LEGGED ESCALATOR TESTER
1910
London’s underground railway system is the oldest in the world and many of the tunnels we travel through today are relatively unchanged from when they were first built late in the nineteenth or early in the twentieth century.
When the Piccadilly line opened in 1906 it was the longest underground line in the world, covering more than ten miles. It was later extended to thirty-two and then finally covered more than forty miles, but even at ten miles it was one of the wonders of the world – it was also rather terrifying for passengers unused to travelling below ground.
But hardly had the public got used to this remarkable long-distance underground railway than the company that ran the trains introduced something even more remarkable.
When London’s first railway escalator began operating at Earl’s Court Station on the Piccadilly line in 1910 the passengers, to a man, were too terrified to use it. The railway company was aghast – they’d paid huge sums to have the revolutionary equipment fitted but it was all wasted if no one would dare use it. Then a bright spark had an idea – why not employ someone to use the escalator throughout the day to give the public confidence? The idea was accepted and Bumper Harris, a man with a wooden leg, was thereafter employed for a number of years to go up and down the escalator all day. Soon the public began to realise that if a man with one leg could use this remarkable new transportation system safely there was no reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Of course Bumper, about whom almost nothing else is known, did his job too well – the public soon thought nothing of using the new moving staircase and he was out of a job.
MYSTERY CLOCK IN THE STRAND
1910
With its vast number of churches and older public buildings, London is a great place for public clocks – although, sadly, architects of modern buildings usually think it beneath their dignity to include clocks on their glass and steel cubes.
Remarkably accurate clocks and watches are now cheap to buy and available to all, but it was not always thus and in order that apprentices, schoolboys and others should be able to get to work on time city ordinances required church clocks to be kept well maintained – particularly their striking mechanisms, which carried news of the hour far beyond those who were close enough to the church to see the clock.
A law was passed by Henry VIII that all church and other official clocks in the city must be painted blue and gold and, officially at least, that law has never been rescinded, which is why city clocks are still mostly painted in the king’s colours.
London has numerous highly eccentric clocks – the clock at St Dunstan’s in the West with its giants beating the hours on a bell with their clubs, for example; or Fortnum and Mason’s clock outside their famous shop. But perhaps the most bizarre and least known is the Law Courts’ clock in the Strand.
What makes this clock so unusual is that it was built by an illiterate Irishman who only made clocks as a hobby, yet it is supremely accurate – in fact when completed it was said to be the most accurate clock in London. The difficulty arose when a second clock was needed and the court authorities wanted something of similar quality. Only then was it discovered that the original had been made by a man who – because he could not write – had kept no record of how he did it, which is why the Law Courts’ clock is unique and always will be.
THE KING WHO NEVER GREW UP
1911
In the modern world princes try at least to seem to be in touch with their people. They haven’t a clue how to do it, largely because they still insist on sending their sons to Eton and teaching them to shoot red deer, but they pay lip service to the idea that we are all equal. In the past the son of a king or queen did as much as he could to lead a life utterly different from that of his subjects and if you as much as suggested that he was no better than his footman he’d have had you arrested. The democratic principle is very much a recent phenomenon.
Horribly treated by his mother Queen Victoria, the future Edward VII was a prince who felt that he could let go of the reins entirely when the old Queen finally died in 1901. The pious, serious son she had hoped to create by telling him how hopeless he was in comparison with her late husband, had turned into a grossly overweight sensualist who enjoyed the favours of a string of mistresses and spent the relatively short time during which he was king indulging his passion for eating, drinking, shooting – and of course womanising.
But with all this there was a difficulty. No whiff of scandal was allowed to attach itself to the King of England, so despite the vast hypocrisy of the whole thing, elaborate efforts were made by the King’s courtiers to make sure he could do what he liked while appearing to stick to the rules of decorum and good behaviour. How did they do it? Well, at the two-hundred-year-old Rules restaurant in Maiden Lane they built a special side door that led to a private room where the King could entertain his mistresses and when he went to the theatre he was ushered into a private, well-screened box far away from the public gaze. He was like a little boy who, long deprived of sweets, is let loose in a sweet shop.
Much of this is of course well known, but less well known is Edward VII’s passion for fire engines, a passion that led to some very odd behaviour at No. 13 Rupert Street, Soho. Here the King would enter as king and emerge disguised as a fireman sitting on top of a fire engine. No one knows quite how often he indulged this passion but it certainly continued until within a few months of his death.
THE STATUE THAT ISN’T THERE
1912
When Peter Llewellyn Davies, a successful publisher, killed himself in 1960 by throwing himself under a train at Sloane Square, the newspaper headlines were all variations on a theme and that theme was Peter Pan.
Llewellyn Davies, like his four brothers, had been the inspiration for what is one of the most famous characters in children’s fiction.
Peter Pan came into existence almost by accident when author J.M. Barrie (1860–1937) met the Llewellyn Davies boys in Kensington Gardens in 1900. He befriended their mother and father and when both died of cancer, Barrie virtually took over the boys’ upbringing. He showered them with gifts and paid for their education. The games they played together in Kensington Gardens inspired the story of the boy who never grew up.
Years later the only surviving brother, Nico, told an interviewer that Barrie’s motives were not sexual. But there is no doubt that Barrie was an unhappy man who wished to live vicariously, as it were, through the boys he idolised. Certainly his own marriage was a disaster and there were rumours that it was never consummated, for Barrie seems to have loved the idea of being in love – particularly with young actresses – rather than the reality of it.
When Peter Pan was first performed in London in 1904 it made Barrie famous – and very rich. In 1912 he conceived the idea of a statue of Peter Pan in the park where he had first played with the Llewellyn Davies boys, but this proved difficult and complex. Statues in the royal parks are permitted only following agreement by Royal Commission or, at the least, a parliamentary committee. But Barrie was world famous by now and not an easy man to refuse. After making enquiries he received an extremely odd reply to his request to erect the statue. He was told that he would not receive permission, but at the same time there would be no objection. On that basis Barrie assumed he could go ahead so he commissioned Sir George Frampton (1860–1928) to make the statue we see today.
Barrie himself unveiled the new statue at midnight and on his own – he liked the idea that children would see it the next morning and assume it had simply appeared as if by magic.
Initially the statue was hated (though not by childre
n) but by 1921 it was the most popular statue in London, a position it almost certainly retains to this day.
But the lives of the boys who inspired the story and the statue were curiously unhappy – despite material wealth and expensive private educations provided by the ever generous Barrie, they seem to have been deeply troubled. Michael Llewellyn Davies, Barrie’s favourite of the five brothers, drowned with a close friend during his last year at Oxford. There were rumours that it was a suicide pact and it is certainly true that Michael drowned at a spot on the river where only a good swimmer should have been – Michael could not swim at all. George was killed in action during the First World War and Peter, as we have seen, committed suicide. In Peter’s case the connection with Barrie and the story of Peter Pan was almost certainly central to his decision to end his life.
In 1952 he had burned more than two thousand letters between his brother Michael and Barrie – he called the collection of letters ‘The Morgue’ and told friends that he absolutely loathed the connection with Barrie. It is odd that something that has brought so much pleasure to countless thousands of children across the world should have brought only sorrow to the five children who inspired it. Curious too that their memorial, the statue of Peter Pan, is a statue that, officially at least, isn’t even there.
THE PALACE THAT FACES THE WRONG WAY
1912
Buckingham Palace is known throughout the world as the London home of the royal family, but it has a curious and less well-known history. The present building is the fourth on the site and it started life as a small, rather unpretentious house lived in by the Duke of Buckingham.
Built at the end of the seventeenth century, the original house bore no resemblance to the present building. Buckingham sold it in 1761 to George III, who wanted it for his wife Charlotte. Some fourteen of George’s fifteen children were born in the house.
