London's Strangest Tales

by Tom Quinn

  William Chambers (1723–1796) was brought in to partly rebuild and remodel the house in 1762 and it was left alone then until the 1820s when John Nash (1752–1835) doubled the size of the main block and refaced the house with Bath stone. He demolished a couple of wings and had Marble Arch made as a triumphal entrance to a new courtyard – Marble Arch was then discovered to be too narrow for the royal coach.

  One would have thought that the designers would have measured a coach or two before going ahead – they didn’t because they wanted the arch to be an exact copy of the Roman Triumphal Arch of Constantine. George IV and his architect John Nash wanted to reflect the dignity of ancient Rome, but in their obsession with ancient precedent they forgot modern practicality. The width of the arch itself is perfect for a Roman chariot but far too narrow for a Georgian coach. The embarrassing arch was moved in 1851 to an isolated spot at the end of the Edgware Road and there it has stayed ever since. And still to this day only royal coaches are allowed to go through the arch – except, of course, they don’t fit so it remains unused.

  But back to Buckingham House. After spending more than half a million pounds of taxpayers’ money (the budget was £150,000) on it George IV died in 1830 having never actually lived in the house. His ‘improvements’ were still unfinished. The new king, William IV, spent more money on the house.

  It’s easy to forget that before Queen Victoria and the growth in which they took part of newspapers, which brought a sense of the monarch as a public figure, the royal family did not care what the general public thought of them. They lived private lives and the grand public ceremonies were only ever seen by other important people. If a king spent too much money on a project no one would dare criticise them anyway, although Parliament might grumble.

  But as the monarchy realised that its public role was developing and that it had to show its face to the world, a decision was taken to turn Buckingham Palace around so that instead of facing into its private park it would face down The Mall in a decidedly public manner. This is why what we think of as the front of the palace is actually the back – the ‘real’ front faces the private park as it has always done.

  It was Victoria who had the east front added in the 1840s by Edward Blore (1787–1879). For the first time the house faced down The Mall.

  But the endless tampering with the house didn’t end there – Blore’s French stone was considered too soft so it was replaced a few decades later by the architect Sir Aston Webb (1849–1930) using the rather harsh Portland stone we see today.

  A CARRIAGE PULLED BY ZEBRAS

  1920

  Aristocrats traditionally have the time and the money to indulge the most obscure, eccentric tastes. And the combination of money and eccentricity has always produced Londoners of exceptional lunacy.

  Take Walter Rothschild (1868–1937), for example. Decidedly but brilliantly eccentric, he hated speaking to people, was blackmailed out of a fortune by his mistress and trained three zebras to pull his carriage along Pall Mall. Unfitted for the normal routes into public life that Rothschild elder sons tended to take, he set up a natural history museum that eventually grew into the biggest private museum in the world.

  Throughout his life he was prepared to pay almost anything for a rare or unusual specimen, and by 1920, after working in virtual seclusion for years for eighteen hours a day, he had amassed some two thousand complete mounted animals, two hundred animal heads, three hundred sets of antlers, three thousand stuffed birds, seven hundred reptiles, one thousand stuffed fish, three hundred thousand bird skins and two hundred thousand birds’ eggs. He was a brilliant if utterly obsessive zoological classifier – his enthusiasm and dedication was eventually rewarded when a subspecies of giraffe was named after him.

  The stories of his madcap adventures in London are legion. Among the best is the story of his motorcar outing in Hyde Park. He was hurtling through the park and had reached the bridge over the Serpentine when he spotted a chauffeur standing outside a stationary car with a folded rug over his arm. Rothschild immediately shouted at his own driver to stop. He leaped from the car, explaining that the rug in the other chauffeur’s arms was made from the pelts of extremely rare tree kangaroos. Having waited till the owner of the rug arrived he refused to leave until the rug had been sold to him – the owner of the rug was shrewd enough to demand an absurdly high price but Rothschild would have paid almost anything.

  ILLEGAL WHISKY FROM RESPECTABLE LONDON

  1922

  The attempt to ban alcohol completely in America – the Prohibition Era, 1920–33 – was one of the greatest disasters of twentieth-century social policy. Alcohol may be bad for you; it may be the cause of motoring and other accidents, not to mention numerous other social problems, but banning the world’s oldest and most popular drug was never going to work.

  Once alcohol was outlawed the pleasure-loving people of America simply got their supplies from illegal sources, thus turning millions of law-abiding Americans into criminals overnight.

  Alcohol supply became central to the huge fortunes amassed by American criminals like Al Capone, but the curious thing is that since alcohol was perfectly respectable in much of the rest of the world, American criminal gangs could buy it perfectly legitimately even though it was destined for the sleazy underworld of US gangland.

  Which is how one of London’s most respectable and ancient wine merchants is said to have become involved in keeping America supplied with whisky during the thirteen years prohibition lasted.

  Berry Bros and Rudd in London’s St James has been supplying wine and spirits since the seventeenth century, so when an American walked into the shop and ordered several hundred cases of whisky they probably thought nothing of it. But Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond was planning to take his whisky where whisky drinking was no longer allowed.

  Ironically, during Prohibition demand for whisky in America increased, which meant a boost in business for many of Britain’s whisky sellers, including the highly respectable Berry Bros, who didn’t think twice about selling their wares to Americans since such sales – so long as the sale itself was carried out in England – were perfectly legal.

  There is evidence to suggest that big orders for whisky and other alcoholic drinks were delivered by British suppliers to Nassau in the Bahamas, which was still then a British colony. Certainly Berry Bros shipped a great deal of Cutty Sark Whisky into the Bahamas at this time and – according to legend – that whisky was then taken out into international waters off the New Jersey coast where it was sold on in the dead of night to American gangsters like Al Capone.

  Scottish distillers did a roaring trade, as did the London-based merchants, and since they were shipping to a British colony it was all perfectly legal. Those who think it’s all a myth need only look at the figures – in 1918, before prohibition, the citizens of the Bahamas were knocking back some 944 gallons of whisky a year. By 1922 they were apparently drinking more than 386,000 gallons a year! Whisky sales via London ports to other British islands near the US mainland also increased – islands like the Turks and Caycos and Grand Cayman suddenly became inordinately fond of alcohol.

  The American Government complained bitterly to the British Government about the exports of whisky to their colonies but nothing was done simply because the trade as far as the islands was legal and one suspects that the British Government knew that the American law against alcohol was ultimately unenforceable.

  ANCIENT HALL GOES TO CHELSEA

  1925

  London is constantly changing and in various periods the pace of that change may increase or decrease, but in essence it never stops, which is why buildings built before 1700 are so rare.

  Perhaps the most interesting, bizarre and least-known early building is Crosby Hall, which was built near Bishopsgate in the City of London by Sir John Crosby, a wealthy wool merchant. The house was completed between 1466 and 1475 and though it is no longer in Bishopsgate it survives because of the enthusiasm of a group of preservationists in the 192
0s.

  Crosby Hall now stands in Chelsea near the site of Sir Thomas More’s (1478–1535) former home. The hall is largely complete – it has its original roof and oriel window and is the only remaining tangible evidence of how the wealthy built in fifteenth-century London.

  It was moved stone by stone in 1925, but is substantially unaltered and the last example left of a medieval London merchant’s house. The casual visitor may think as he passes the house on the north bank of the Thames near Cheyne Walk that it is a piece of fake Gothic architecture but he’d be mistaken – this is the real thing.

  PRIME MINISTER CAUGHT IN A BROTHEL?

  1926

  No one really knows why clubs started in London, but the whole idea of like-minded people getting together regularly to discuss mutual interests seems to have been, in its origins, peculiarly British and the very first clubs were certainly based in London.

  The first clubs included the Wolf Club, whose only qualification for membership was that a man had to have been forbidden to sing in the bath by his wife (see page 170); the Lunar Society (whose scientifically minded members met when there was a full moon); the Fly Fishers’ Club, whose members were addicted to pursuing trout by the most difficult means possible; the Garrick, where actors and those in the media were able to boast to each other about how wonderful they were; the Macaroni Club, whose members, according to one critic, were ‘upper-class effeminate practitioners of sodomy, a crime imported from Italy by our spindle-shanked Gentry, who make the grand Tour but to bring home the vices of our Neighbours, and return, if possible, greater Coxcombs than they were before Embarkation’; and the Beefsteak, originally known as the Sublime Society of Steaks. It began in 1735 and is still based in Irving Street. Its founder members met – bizarrely enough – to discuss the disgraceful tendencies of ‘levelling’ – by which they meant the tendency, which cannot have been that common in early eighteenth-century London, for different classes to mix. Beefsteak members were the supreme reactionaries who believed that birth conferred a status that neither success nor failure in life could change.

  By 1926 the club was still meeting and some of Britain’s most powerful reactionaries were members. Unfortunately, they met in an old rather seedy house on the edge of Soho and at a time when the police were taking a more than usually enthusiastic interest in local brothels.

  On one particular summer evening a policeman saw four elderly and rather disreputable-looking men enter a house. The policeman made a written note to the effect that ‘They looked highly suspicious and eager not to be observed’. The policeman called for reinforcements, convinced that they were about to raid a brothel. They forced their way into the house and arrested the four men, who happened to be the Governor of the Bank of England, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  When their identities were revealed the arresting policemen refused to believe them and threatened them with further prosecution for attempting to impersonate their betters! Despite the best efforts of the Beefsteak Club it seems that class isn’t always that obvious!

  THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS PARROT

  1926

  Archaeology is not just about discovering how the great lived or worshipped. It’s also about how the poor lived – but as the poor tend to have less they have tended to leave fewer artifacts in the archaeological record. Which is why an occasional commonplace survival from an earlier era deserves the attention it often gets. One such survival is the Cheshire Cheese public house just off London’s Fleet Street.

  In 1666 the Great Fire of London destroyed Old St Paul’s, crept down Ludgate Hill towards the River Fleet and even destroyed a number of houses on the west of the river in what is today Fleet Street. But a few houses did escape the flames only to be destroyed – for example – when the hideous modern buildings of King’s College were built.

  Fleet Street was always famously bordered by a mass of tangled courts and alleyways typical of a crowded city that had grown slowly over many centuries.

  Most of these courts and alleys are now built over or lined with dull office buildings but in Wine Office Court there is a most surprising survivor – a late seventeenth-century pub that looks exactly inside as it would have looked when it was first built. What’s more, the interior is not a re-creation – the tables in the public bar, the fireplace, the décor and the pictures on the wall have all been here for at least two hundred years.

  If we compare the interior of the Cheshire Cheese to prints and drawings of early London coffee houses we realise that the Cheese is the last of these long-vanished and once hugely popular features of London life.

  The fame of the Cheshire Cheese spread far and wide and from the 1850s it was on the itinerary of most visitors to London.

  And by 1900 the pub had a resident who was to become almost as famous as the Cheese itself – this was Polly the Eccentric Parrot. Polly was known across the world for her bizarre antics and for her intelligence and abilities as a mimic. Famously garrulous and rude about visitors she didn’t like, Polly celebrated the end of the First World War in 1918 in her own way. She imitated the noise of champagne corks popping an estimated four hundred times and then fell off her perch suffering from exhaustion.

  When she died in 1926 she was estimated to be over forty and her antics over the years she spent at the Cheshire Cheese earned her an accolade unique in the animal kingdom – her obituary appeared in more than two hundred newspapers worldwide.

  Polly lived at the Cheese during its most famous days but the list of celebrities who drank here is extraordinary: mostly literary figures are associated with the pub – Dr Johnson, who lived just two minutes’ walk away in Gough Square, is reported to have come here every night for years along with his friend and biographer James Boswell (1740–1795); Dickens sat through many long evenings in the corner by the door in the room opposite the public bar; in the eighteenth century the actor and impresario David Garrick (1717–1779) came here with his friends the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) and Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; in the nineteenth century as well as Dickens, Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was a regular together with Tennyson (1809–1892) and Carlyle (1795–1881); by the twentieth century everyone from Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) to Mark Twain (1835–1910) and Conan Doyle (1859–1930) came.

  Above the fireplace in the public bar is a fascinating portrait dating from 1829, darkened by the smoke from countless candles and coal fires, of the waiter William Simpson. Apart from the fact that paintings of servants are rare the picture is interesting because the very table on which Simpson leans in his portrait is still in the bar nearby.

  In the nineteenth century, the Cheese had one other claim to eccentricity: its landlord made some of the biggest pies in London. Filled with beef, oysters and lark each pie weighed between fifty and eighty pounds! Each was big enough to feed about 100 people and among those who ceremonially dished up the first serving were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and future Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947).

  THE GIANT OF FLEET STREET

  1928

  London’s Inns of Court, home of lawyers since the Middle Ages, have produced vast numbers of eccentrics, oddballs and criminal lunatics over the centuries.

  One of the strangest of these legal loonies was Judge James Crespi. Christened Caesar James, Crespi was born in 1928 and educated at Cambridge. He was a remarkable eccentric by any standards, although by profession he became a quite brilliant advocate. He claimed that he saved his most eloquent speeches for the Fleet Street wine bar El Vino’s, where apparently the wine waiter always greeted him with a clenched fist across his breast and the words ‘Ave, Mr Crespi’. He also became enormously fat, though luckily all the taxi drivers knew him by sight so he never walked anywhere – his huge bulk made it virtually impossible anyway – except one novice cabby who once mistook Crespi’s wing collar for the dress of a waiter, and dropped him at the staff entrance to t
he Savoy.

  He married a woman he met in a nightclub, but for reasons he was never able to recall. The marriage was described by Crespi as ‘Obviously a case of mistaken identity’ and it lasted less than a week. When asked if he regretted anything in life he simply said, ‘Being mistaken for Lord Goodman, whoever he is.’

  THE CHURCH THAT MOVED

  1928

  Whatever one might think of its superstitious aspects the Church of England has been pretty good at preserving the historic past. Among the few buildings that survive from the distant past in London today, for example, are the churches (most heavily restored after the carnage of the Second World War), but even the church has occasionally let the side down and allowed wonderful historic buildings to be destroyed.

  During the Reformation vast quantities of English art was destroyed largely because most of it was religious art – the iconoclasts of the Reformation decided that plain white churches were far more interesting than highly decorated churches, so wall paintings were destroyed or covered up; statues and other decorative sculptures hurled on to the bonfire. London undoubtedly suffered particularly badly from this kind of thing – churches in remote rural districts were sometimes left alone – but anyone who thinks church destruction ended with the Reformation would be mistaken.

  As late as the 1920s the then Bishop of London (clearly something of a philistine) decided that London had far too many Wren churches. No doubt he decided that Wren was a little dated and not much of an architect anyway, and promptly demolished half a dozen.