London Urban Legends

by Scott Wood

  With over 300 years of naval history, Deptford must have had its fair share of pirates, or would-be pirates, passing St Nicholas Church on their way to their ship, the tavern or even to their execution. Many of them who looked up were inspired by these blood-curdling sculptures enough to incorporate their likeness into their flag and spread the terror of it across the seas.

  London bloggers, ever on the lookout for an eye-opening and quirky fact, love the story. An undated ‘Summer Strolls’ walk around Deptford published by Time Out mentions the legend; even the website of St Nicholas and St Luke’s churches repeats the story, although keeps its factual possibility at fingertips’ length. The site describes the skull and crossbones flag as a means for British privateer sailors (‘freelance’ sailors who were paid on commission, working for the British Navy, fighting against the French, Spanish and Dutch ships for the control of the world’s trade routes) to hide their nationality by flying the Jolly Roger rather than the English or Union Flag. The Information Britain website even names Henry Morgan, a former British admiral turned privateer who must have been familiar with Deptford, as the St Nicholas parishioner who first got the idea.

  The difference between a privateer and a pirate is who benefits from the loot you steal. Henry Morgan was privateering for England and would have flown the English flag as he raided and looted innocent (or enemy) ships.

  Historically, the Jolly Roger was not a ubiquitous symbol of piracy and was not adopted as a universal symbol of the pirate’s outlaw status. Pirate flags were more in keeping with naval rules of engagement than the attitude of criminals. When one ship attacked another, a red flag was flown to indicate that they were in conflict. If the attacking ship was victorious, it would take the ship and its cargo and take the surviving crew prisoner, or ‘give quarter’. To fly a black flag meant to give no quarter: the attacking ship would take no prisoners, so to avoid a slaughter the defending ship had best surrender without a fight. Pirates favoured the black flag, as often this is what would happen; even when outnumbered, enemy ships would surrender to avoid a massacre.

  Over time, pirates began to decorate their black flags with personal symbolism in a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century example of ‘pimping’ something up: Thomas Tew’s black flag showed an arm holding a dagger; Edward Teach, the infamous Blackbeard, flew a black flag featuring a skeleton stabbing a heart with an arrow; Bartholomew Roberts, Black Bart, had himself on his flag, holding one side of an hourglass with Death holding the other side. (This was followed by an even more flamboyant flag of himself holding a dagger and a flaming sword, with each foot on a skull). Calico Jack, John Rackam, flew a skull crossed with swords underneath while Henry Every flew a skull in profile with crossed bones beneath; not quite the symbol on the Deptford church. Edward English, born in Ireland, did fly the skull and crossbones, but there are few records of his early life and it is not known whether he visited Deptford.

  The skull and crossbones itself is an old symbol that had already graced Spanish graveyards by the time St Nicholas was built. The earliest mention of pirates raising the skull and crossbones comes from a logbook entry dated 6 December 1687. It reads: ‘And we put down our white flag, and raised a red flag with a Skull head on it and two crossed bones (all in white and in the middle of the flag), and then we marched on.’ There may be a possibility that a pirate, when designing his own flag, thought of St Nicholas in Deptford and copied the design. That pirate did not do it so well, though. As the church’s website points out, the skulls wear a laurel-wreath on their heads, probably to signify the victory over death over transient flesh. This wreath has not made it on to any pirate flags. It is still a story loved in Deptford, though. A local pub, the Bird’s Nest, has even nicknamed itself the ‘pirate pub’ due to the Jolly Roger legend.

  The London Stone

  History can be hidden in plain sight in the dustiest and busiest locations. Opposite Cannon Street station, set behind a metal grid in front of a branch of WHSmith sits the London Stone. The stone was the centre of a story in 2012 that named it as essential to the survival of London itself. It had been in its approximate location for a millennia or two, but the redevelopment of Cannon Street meant that property company Minerva wanted to move the stone, so that they could demolish the 1960s office block it occupies. The plan was to place it in the corner of its gleaming new Walbrook building on the corner of Cannon Street and Walbook. ‘The new dedicated setting will enhance the significance of the asset,’ Minerva wrote in 2011, ‘and better reveal its significance for current and future generations.’ Minerva did not, however, count on newspapers reporting the story with fears that moving the stone would be disaster to London. The Evening Standard, along with other papers, discovered an ancient saying that read: ‘So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long will London flourish.’

  The London Stone is oolitic limestone and no one knows why it is there or what its original purpose was. It may have been part of a monument in front of the palace of a provincial Roman governor, which lay where Cannon Street is now. It may be a Saxon milestone of some sort: its original location is also the centre of Saxon London when it was re-established by King Alfred in AD 886. The stone has had its name since the twelfth century; an address recorded in a document dated between 1098 and 1108 is ‘Eadwaker aet lundene stane’. In his 1598 Survey of London, Stow writes of ‘a great stone called London Stone, fixed in the ground very deep, fastened with iron bars.’ It is thought that it was damaged in the Great Fire of London in 1666, which possibly reduced it to something near its current size; the stone was placed by the door of the rebuilt St Swithin’s Church.

  Things start to get strange for the London Stone, as far as we know, from Jack Cade’s 1450 rebellion. Cade, invading the City of London, struck the London Stone and declared himself the mayor of London. As John Clark, former Senior Curator (Medieval) at the Museum of London points out, much of our knowledge of this event comes from Shakespeare’s dramatic interpretation in Henry VI Part 2. Clark points out that there is no historical precedent for the Lord Mayor having to strike the London Stone, and contemporary chronicles were ‘at a loss as to its significance’. In the 1720 update to Stow’s Survey of London, John Strype got druids involved for the first time, suggesting that the stone was ‘an Object, or Monument, of Heathen Worship’. London poet and mystic William Blake ran with the idea, suggesting that it was a Druid altar stone. Thomas Pennant, in his Some Account of London, suggested that the London Stone could have ‘formed part of a druidical circle’. The idea that the stone somehow protected London was first considered in Pennant’s Account:

  At all times it has been preserved with great care, placed deep in the ground, and strongly fastened with bars of iron. It seems preserved, like the palladium of the city.

  This refers to the statue of Pallas Athene that protected the city of Troy. This all fitted very well into the legend first concocted by twelfth-century writer Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain that Brutus of Troy brought the Brutus Stone to Britain after his city’s destruction, and ancient kings would swear oaths over it. After all, didn’t Jack Cade strike the stone and declare himself ruler of London? Perhaps the London Stone is the stone of Brutus? There is already a Brutus Stone in Totnes where the refugee Trojan landed, but that probably doesn’t matter. The first to suggest that the London Stone is the stone of Brutus seems to be Welsh supremacist and language advocate Revd Richard Williams Morgan under his nom de plume Môr Meirion. In 1892, in an article in ‘Notes and Queries’, a pre-internet user-generated content publication where questions were asked and answered by public correspondence, Morgan is the first to ‘discover’ the ancient saying ‘so long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long will London flourish’. In his 1857 book The British Kymry, Or Britons of Cambria, Morgan suggested that the London Stone is the palladium of Troy, possibly dragged under the wooden horse as the city burned. The Newburgh Telegraph of 18 December 1909 described the stone as a ‘relic of Homer’s
days’.

  In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the London Stone was incorporated into a number of ley-lines (lines that can be drawn through a number of sacred sites to decipher arcane truths about the sacred landscape). By 2002 the London Stone was linked to Elizabethan occultist John Dee, in a claim that he believed it had magical powers. It was even given another legendary secret identity as the stone from which King Arthur drew Excalibur. These stories came out suspiciously near to London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics.

  There is little danger in moving the London Stone: in fact, it was moved from the centre of Cannon Street in 1720 when it became a traffic hazard. It was incorporated into the post-Great Fire St Swithin’s Church. As a part of the church furniture, it moved around a little until it ended up in the corner of the church. Come 1884, when the District Line was being constructed, the London Stone was kept where it was, but the earth beneath it was removed. St Swithin’s was gutted by Second World War bombing and the stone was moved to its current location in 1961, when the offices at 111 Cannon Street were built. At the time of writing, part of the new Cannon Street gleams under the spring sun while older buildings are being closed down in anticipation of demolition. The London Stone still sits in its tatty 1960s site, accompanied by a huge sign advertising cheap office space.

  The Ravens in the Tower

  One of London’s most famous pieces of folklore is of the ravens of the Tower of London. Everyone knows, or knows of, the saying ‘If the Tower of London ravens are lost or fly away, the Crown will fall and Britain with it.’ This is why the wings of the ravens are clipped so they do not fly away. Why would the ravens even be in a book full of upstart urban legends? Could the London Stone legend be a corruption of this famous piece of tradition?

  One story of how the ravens gained their power over our nation comes via the first astronomer royal, John Flamstead. As is the way with these things, there are two versions of the story. The first has Flamstead and King Charles II gazing through telescopes in Greenwich when their view is obscured by ravens. They were frustrating Flamstead by either flying in front of the telescopes or defecating on the lens. Charles II said that the ravens must go, but Flamstead told the monarch that it is unlucky to kill a raven and that ‘if the ravens left the Tower, the White Tower [the oldest part of the Tower of London] would collapse and a great disaster would befall the Kingdom’. In other versions of the tale it is an obscure soothsayer who warns the king after Flamstead complains about the ravens.

  However, when Dr Parnell, official Tower of London historian, went through records of the Tower of London’s menagerie he found records of hawks, lions, leopards, monkeys and a polar bear, but no mention of a raven. Dr Parnell along with American writer Boria Sax, who was also interested in the Tower’s raven-lore, went through as much literature as possible and found the earliest mention of ravens at the Tower in a supplement called The Pictorial World on the Tower of London from 1883.

  Where the legend itself comes from is another story, the earliest written version found only dates as far back as 1955, although the legend was recorded earlier. Natsume Soseki was a Japanese writer sent to study in London in 1900. He visited the Tower and wrote an account that Boria Sax describes as ‘phantasmagoric’. Soseki entered the Tower like it was a gothic nightmare, and ‘met’ the ghosts of Guy Fawkes, Walter Raleigh and Lady Jane Grey. The ghost of Lady Jane tells a child, who can only see three ravens, that there are always five. Soseki writes the following on his encounter with a raven up-close and his thoughts on the Tower’s executions: ‘Hunching its wings, its black beak protruding, it stares at people. I feel as if the rancour of a hundred years of blood have congealed and taken the form of a bird so as to guard this unhappy place for ever.’

  Returning to his lodgings, Soseki is told by his landlord: ‘They’re sacred ravens. They’ve been keeping them there since ancient times, and, even if they become one short, they immediately make up the numbers again. There are always five ravens there.’

  Soseki’s account was not translated into English until much later, but it is possible he picked up a folk-belief gathering around the idea of the ravens. Sax compares the impressionistic way Soseki writes to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, representing the world of London as Joyce represents Dublin, but threading it with fiction. No one at present can ascertain where one ends and the other takes over.

  Could the raven myth have been created earlier? It may not be much of a surprise that Dr Parnell did not find ravens in the Tower’s menagerie because ravens have long been indigenous to London. To record them at the Tower would be the same as listing the pigeons at London Zoo. Another suggestion for the ravens’ presence was that they were a joke gift to the Tower by the 3rd Earl of Dunraven. Dunraven was interested in Celtic raven myths (he had ravens incorporated into his family crest) and must have known the Welsh legends of the Mabinogion. One tells of the hero-giant Bran being fatally wounded in battle and having his head removed and taken to Gwynfryn, a white hill in London with his head placed looking toward France so he could always keep Britain safe. Many think the white hill is the hill the White Tower is built on. Then myth-makers will nod as they tell you the word Bran, in Welsh, means ‘crow’, which is almost like a raven.

  The ritual of the raven numbers is embedded now, whatever its origin. Interviewed for the Fortean Times issue 206, Yeoman Ravenmaster Derek Coyle repeated the Charles II legend and that there must always be six ravens at the Tower by Charles’ decree. It may be possible that wandering through early twentieth-century London, Soseki misheard the number as five instead of six. While Coyle does not mention the legend directly, he does say that he keeps twelve birds at other locations to be sent for if numbers at the Tower drop too low. The cynical suspect that the story of the ravens was an extra fable created for tourists that Londoners took to their hearts too. The truth is that there were no ravens in the Tower of London by the end of the Second World War, as some ravens had died in bombing raids and others had pined away or died of shock. By the time the Tower was reopened in 1946, a new set had been found. Their wings are clipped to stop them leaving, not because the Tower may fall if they do, but because it is very difficult to stop ravens from flying away.

  The Lions in the Tower

  The ravens in the Tower urban legends may have been inspired by the London Stone story, but also by an earlier animal fable of the Tower. London Zoo started life as the Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London, with the lions being the most popular. John Ashton, writing in his 1883 Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, reports that seeing the lions at the Tower was the first thing all those new to London did, and that when three of the four lions died in 1903, it was thought to be a ‘dire portent’. The lives of the lions of the Tower were inextricably linked to the lives of the sovereign. In 1603, when one of the lions died just before the death of Queen Elizabeth I, it was seen as portentous. Joseph Addison went to the Tower just after the unsuccessful Jacobite rising of 1715, with a friend sympathetic to the Jacobite cause. The plan was to install James II’s son on the throne. The friend asked if any of the lions had fallen ill after the would-be king was defeated at Perth and fled, and was told the lions were in the best of health. Addison wrote: ‘I found he was extremely startled, for he had learned from his cradle that the Lions in the Tower were the best judges of the title of our British Kings, and always sympathise with our sovereigns.’

  In earlier, less certain centuries, the fate of the nation and its people depended far more greatly on the monarch than now. It may be possible to think that the link between the lions’ lives to that of the king transferred itself, once the lions left in 1835, to concerns about the nation connected to the ravens.

  Once the lions had moved out of the Tower, they still managed to be an attraction there. Once a year, tickets would go out to people inviting them to the Tower to witness the washing of the lions. The invites were sent out in error in 1860, long after the lions had left the Tower, and the day of the ‘annual ceremony’
became 1 April. The meeting place was the fictional ‘White Gate’ to the Tower, and The Chambers Book of Days reported that on the day, cabs ‘rattled about Tower Hill all that Sunday morning, vainly endeavouring to discover the White Gate’.

  7

  LEGENDARY LANDMARKS

  * * *

  London is a wide place and a long, but rumour

  has a wider scope and a longer tongue.

  J. Fisher Murray, Physiology of London Life

  * * *

  WILLIAM KENT, IN his 1951 book Walks in London, recounts a story related to one of London’s top tourist spots, St Paul’s Cathedral. A boy from Snowdon was at a job interview at local textile manufacturers Hitchcock, Williams & Co., who were founded in St Paul’s churchyard. The interviewer asked him if he had ever climbed to the top of the mountain. The boy said he had not, and was told there was ‘no vacancy for one who was so unenterprising’. The next day, the boy returned and told his interviewer that he had just climbed up to the ball of St Paul’s Cathedral. He asked the man, who worked for years in the shadow of St Paul’s dome, whether he had ever done so, and the interviewer had to admit that he had not. The boy’s point was taken; he was employed and was ‘proved a most profitable servant’.

  A nice story about how Londoners, like most people, often don’t visit the wonders on their doorstep. Londoners I’ve known almost take pride in some of the London landmarks they have not visited, although these are often seen as lowbrow tourist places such as Madame Tussauds, the Trocadero and Covent Garden Market. They would be less likely to admit to never going to the Victoria & Albert museum or the Globe. Like the St Paul’s story, there is probably a busy life involved too – Londoners live and work in London, and sometimes something in your immediate locale just doesn’t seem like a priority. Stories that tell of success from unconventional ingenuity in job interviews always touches anyone who has had to undergo the rigours of interviewing for a position. This is a successful story. So successful, in fact, that it’s had an American remake.