by John Healy
The apology was duly accepted. Alas, it was 300 years too late. When asked, ‘Why the fire engine?’ the Lord Mayor replied, ‘We still do not trust you bakers.’ There was hilarious laughter all round and it made the evening television news and the next day’s newspapers.
A thought that often crosses my mind is whether the Great Fire was deliberately started in order to eliminate all traces of the Great Plague in 1664. At its height this horror claimed up to 7,000 souls per week in London alone, although this doesn’t sound a lot compared with the worldwide ‘flu pandemic in 1918 which took well over 50 million lives. In London, the Great Plague was caused by rodents that came ashore from foreign trading ships. These rats were infested with fleas which carried the bubonic plague. The Great Fire would have destroyed any remaining rats that carried the diseased fleas but whoever started it did not realise how severe the fire was going to be and it got totally out of control.
The Great Fire destroyed the beautiful old wooden shops and dwelling houses that stretched from one side of the old London Bridge to the other. There are many old paintings in museums depicting this ancient wooden bridge, bustling with everyday life. It’s such a shame to have lost such a historic bridge.
In time, a stone bridge was built to replace London Bridge. Years later it was sold to an American businessman. Apparently the Yank thought he was buying Tower Bridge, which is a much more elaborate piece of engineering. The one he purchased was dismantled, stone by stone, and shipped to the Nevada Desert where it was reassembled. It turned out to be a very successful tourist attraction but it wasn’t quite what he thought he was getting!
Underneath the present London Bridge in Upper Thames Street there is a church by the name of St Michael Paternoster Royal, associated with the pantomime character Dick Whittington, thought to be Sir Richard Whittington, who lived from 1354 to 1423. I read some years ago that his coffin was moved around a bit when a German doodlebug fell near the church, lost all its markings and is now mixed up with about ten other similar caskets within the church. Sir Richard is believed to have been a poor boy when he first came to London expecting to find the streets paved in gold. Down in spirit, he was leaving the City via Highgate Hill when he is supposed to have heard the sound of Bow Bells telling him to return to London. This he did, and became Lord Mayor of London, not once, not twice but three times. The authorities erected a stone statue of his cat on Highgate Hill, supposedly on the spot where he heard the bells. His story is so loved that is has been immortalised in the pantomime Dick Whittington, beloved by children at Christmas time.
Chapter 13
My cab journeys were always leading me back to London Bridge, and a funny thing happened to me once when I was on the taxi rank there. Things were very slow for some reason or other, until the moment my passenger door was suddenly opened by a drunk. He got in by one door and left by the other door almost immediately. He then came to my window and gave me a fifty pence piece, and said ‘Thank you very much’ before staggering off. The other cabbies and I roared with laughter. That’s what too much drink can do to a person. It was the quickest fare that I ever had, I went nowhere and did not even start my engine. But I did get the massive fare of fifty pence.
I felt well pleased when my next fare turned out to be the great actress and now a Member of Parliament, Glenda Jackson. She asked to be taken to the House and I had an awful longing to say ‘Your house or mine?’ but I resisted.
* * *
Near to London Bridge is Lambeth Palace, a beautiful red brick building, and stuck onto one side is a church called St Mary-at-Lambeth. It is associated with Admiral William Bligh of The Bounty (1754 to 1817), who lived round the corner in Lambeth Road and is buried in a large tomb in the rear garden of the church. Some of the Tradescant family, who were botanists, are also buried in this churchyard. They had links with The Bounty because the ship sailed on a hunt for breadfruits, but the crew mutinied and that put a temporary halt to their search. There is a large blue plaque on the Lambeth Road house dedicated to Bligh.
The church has had a garden museum for many years, and there is a superb herb garden to the rear. The museum has the actual desk that belonged to Gertrude Jekyll (1843 to 1932), author of fifteen books on Victorian gardening. This lady was extremely famous as a landscape gardener and designed gardens all over the world. There is also a fascinating collection of extremely unusual garden implements dating back hundreds of years and a collection of strange gravestones. One says, ‘Here lies Thomas Crisp who died of the thunder and lightning whilst standing at his window.’ The church is really worth a visit, at least for an hour or so. All a visitor has to do is to donate a couple of pounds for the upkeep of this rare and unusual building.
Mounted on the outside front wall to the left of the main door of St Mary’s is a very large, thick black slate measuring about four feet by three feet. It’s an extremely bigoted plaque, even for that time. The bold, heavy, hand-carved wording on this huge slate that dates from the seventeenth century, says that one Bryan Turbervile bequeathed one hundred pounds for the betterment of the local community. It then goes on to say, ‘None to be put to chimney-sweepers, watermen or fishermen and no Roman Catholic to enjoy any benefit thereof.’ What do you think of that? Is this an early example of discrimination? It’s certainly unacceptable prejudice by one person against his fellow man and sadly still exists today.
A short drive down the Lambeth Road we find the famous Lambeth Walk, as immortalised by the song, ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’. It is not what it used to be. Now all you will find are lots of dowdy flats, but if you stop and close your eyes for a moment you can imagine the ghosts of yesteryear, the old music hall soloist giving a rapturous rendering of ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’, and the whole audience from the stalls to the balcony singing at the top of their voices. What a vision!
I now drive away from Saint Mary’s and cross nearby Lambeth Bridge, turning left along Millbank and heading towards Tate Britain. In the 1800s, Millbank Prison stood on this site. Most of the inmates were awaiting deportation to the colonies – places like Australia. Some had merely stolen a loaf of bread, a silk scarf or committed an even more trivial offence. A large percentage of the deportees did not ever survive the journey as they died from starvation, dysentery, disease, sea sickness, rape, severe beatings or for some other horrible reason.
Across the road and to the right, there is a small pillbox monument to the aforementioned deportees. It is a little larger than the average dustbin. It is made of stone and there is a plaque on the side giving all the information appertaining to these poor souls.
Chapter 14
I was driving along the Embankment once when I was hailed by a well-known millionaire, who asked me to loan him fifty pence to buy a newspaper. When we arrived at his gargantuan property he went into the house to get some cash and when he emerged he said, ‘There is your fare, and there is your fifty pence, and this is fifty pence for yourself.’ Well! I drove The Hack at breakneck speed to the nearest shop to purchase a lollipop with this huge tip. I would love to say who he was but it would be unfair to his family – they might find out how he was squandering the family fortune. He really was a well-respected character that everybody knows and looked up to and the temptation is killing me but I still cannot reveal his name. He might sue me for my measly few pounds and add it to his millions.
* * *
As I continue on my imaginary tour, I have just dropped off some people at the Temple. This place has some history. Inside, there is the Temple church where you can find nine, full-size stone effigies of the Knights Templar laid out on the floor. It looks very scary.
The church was built by the Knights Templar, who were known as the Crusading Soldier Monks from the order of Saint John in the twelfth century. They were the Crusaders of God and had great influence in the Holy Land and lots of other places such as Malta. Many relics of their escapades can still be found all over the world. In this church they filmed some of the scenes for the movie The D
a Vinci Code.
Nowadays, the Temple is where all the top lawyers have their Chambers. We are talking money. They make loads of cash out of terrible sadness: divorce, law suits, immigration, human rights, slander etc, and their fees are unreal. A poor labourer earns a fraction of their inflated charges. He would have to work at least a week to earn what they can make in a couple of hours. But if I was a lawyer I probably would do the same as they do.
Chapter 15
We are now leaving the Temple and turning left into Fleet Street. This was the hub of the newspaper world. It’s sad that it’s all gone now. Most have moved to Wapping and the Docklands area.
At number 186 Fleet Street there was a barbershop on the corner of Bell Yard belonging to the infamous Sweeney Todd. He was credited with over fifty murders, although this number was only an estimate. Todd had a trapdoor under his special barber’s chair. He would slit his customers’ throats, rob them, and then pull a lever that dropped the client into the basement, where he would carve the best portions of meat from the body. Then his girlfriend, Mrs Lovett, would cook the meat into tasty pies.
This was around the year 1785. The remains of the corpses were hidden under the crypt of the nearby St Dunstan’s church but the carved-up bodies started to decay, giving off a foul smell. People complained about the whiff, an investigation was carried out and Todd was apprehended. He was hanged at Tyburn and his body went for medical experiments. So, he too got carved up. However, there is no proof that Todd ever existed and some historians dispute this grisly tale, but where there is smoke, there’s fire, I say.
The story of Sweeney Todd first appeared in a magazine known as a ‘Penny Dreadful’, which was like a comic book for the working man in the 1830s. Charles Dickens wrote a weekly magazine costing one shilling but only the well-off could afford his well-cultured magazine. The ‘Penny Dreadful’ was for the lower classes. That’s all they could afford to pay, one penny. Then came the ‘Penny Horrible’, the ‘Penny Awful’, the ‘Penny Blood’ and various others.
* * *
Driving along Fleet Street we come to Saint Clement Danes church. It is thought to have featured in the old nursery rhyme, ‘Oranges and Lemons said the bells of St Clements’, although some say that was another church in the City. Anyway, the church in Fleet Street is now called the RAF church. The first Saint Clements church was built in the ninth century, the present one was built by Christopher Wren.
We move along now to the Strand and at some time around the year 2000 I was next on point (at the front of the rank to pick up) at the Savoy Hotel cab rank. The actor Richard Harris lived in these opulent premises and he came to my cab window and asked me to drive him to a specialist wig shop just off Berkeley Square.
He was going to have his head measured for a wig, which he was to wear in a film. For some reason I got the impression that this was the film Harry Potter. I know for sure that he played the part of Professor Albus Dumbledore, head of Hogwarts Academy. During my brief meeting with this extraordinary man he told me he had given up the drink but to me he looked fairly poorly and I could not help feeling that his end was nigh. Harris died soon after my encounter with him and I think the Harry Potter film was the last movie he ever made.
Richard Harris was born in Limerick in Ireland and became a well-established Shakespearean actor who went on to star in Cromwell, The Guns of Navarone and Mutiny on the Bounty. He had so many successful films under his belt. I enquired about the song he once recorded, ‘MacArthur Park’ and asked him what it was about. It included the words, ‘I left the cake out in the rain’. He said, ‘I haven’t got a clue what that song was about, I just sang it and took the money.’ He was quite chatty to me on the cab journey and this might have been because I too was born in the county of Limerick.
* * *
The Savoy Theatre was built in 1889 by impresario Richard D’Oyly. He owned the D’Oyly Carte Company, who performed The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance and HMS Pinafore, operettas written by Gilbert and Sullivan. Some of the rich and famous who have stayed in the Savoy include Frank Sinatra, Sir Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, President Harry S Truman, John Wayne, the famous Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor, and others too numerous to mention.
Chapter 16
I recall the time I was hailed by a most attractive lady who wanted to go to a place near St Paul’s Cathedral. She looked very familiar. As we headed along Fleet Street we got chatting. I showed her some photos of famous people I had previously picked up such as Charlton Heston, Jean Alexander who played Hilda Ogden in Coronation Street, Kenneth Williams, Michael Caine and Ken Livingstone. There are really too many to mention. When we got to her destination, she said, ‘Go on, take my picture, I am a fairly famous singer’. I did not have my camera that day and I was so annoyed but she just smiled and refused to tell me her name. I’m convinced now that she was Elaine Paige – and I never forgot my camera again.
* * *
There is a fairly large statue of Queen Anne (1665–1714) outside St Paul’s Cathedral. The statue is life-size, carved in marble and surrounded by circular railings. Queen Anne had seventeen children and not one of them ever lived beyond the age of twelve. How sad is that, even for a queen.
* * *
There was a time in the late eighties when I had to take a colleague out with me on a television job to repair a colour television for a high-class prostitute in Orange Street, Soho. We rang the bell, which was answered by the maid, who took us into the kitchen and explained that her boss was with a very high profile Government minister in the bedroom. He was having his wicked way and would we mind waiting for a little longer.
When the minister had done the business, the Madam came out of the bedroom wearing only her knickers and bra. She told us that her client did not want to be identified but that the only exit was through the kitchen. The near-naked lady asked us if we would mind holding on to one end of a blanket while she and Romeo held the far end, but they would be on the reverse side. We all held the blanket above our heads and did a little dance. We went to the left, they went to the right. When the half circular dance was completed we found ourselves in the bedroom where the television was. The minister meanwhile was gone in a flash and we did not see his face at all. The harlot gave us £20 each, which was a week’s wages at that time. Whatever was the client being charged for his little bit of nookie? My colleague and I left the premises singing ‘Blanket Going Round’ instead of Blanket on the Ground, the Billie Jo Spears hit.
Chapter 17
I remember picking up a very sweet old lady in the East End once. We got chatting, and during the course of our chat she told me that she was in possession of a rent book for 10 Rillington Place. This was a rare thing indeed. There were about eight women murdered at that premises in the forties and fifties. In 1950, a man called Timothy Evans was wrongly hanged for two of these murders but the real culprit was John Reginald Christie. He murdered Evans’s wife and daughter, his own wife and quite a number of innocent girls, plus a number of unwitting prostitutes. He hid the bodies behind wallpaper, in cubby holes, under the floorboards, in the outhouse and in the back garden. He was hanged in 1953 in Pentonville Prison by Albert Pierrepoint, who had also hanged Evans. That rent book must be worth quite a few pounds to the many ghoulish collectors of murder memorabilia.
In 1966, Evans was given a posthumous pardon. They dug him up from his prison grave and he was eventually laid to rest in a proper cemetery. A lot of good that was to him. Rillington Place was eventually pulled down and rebuilt. They changed the name twice because too many people were turning up to see the site where these infamous murders took place and still they kept turning up, so the authorities placed a large gate at the entrance. This gives the present residents much more privacy from the weirdos who gather to stare at nothing.
* * *
I once picked up a young couple from St Pancras Station. They wanted to go to a block of flats in the Oval. Us cabbies had alr
eady experienced a bit of trouble with punters from these flats. The man told me that he came from the Caribbean and his girlfriend was English. She was very scantily clad with a giant pair of boobies fully on display. If she looked to the left her boobies swung to the right and vice versa. Anyway, when we arrived at the flats, he opened the passenger door and took to his heels. I wasn’t going to give chase so I got out of the cab, went to the already opened door and asked her if she had the metered fare, to which she said no. She then burst into tears, although I think they were crocodile tears. I knew I had lost the fare but I still could not take my eyes away from those non-stop-moving boobies.
At this point a passing police car pulled over. The policemen asked if everything was OK, I told them the situation and one of the cops went to speak to the girl. He went back to the squad car with a big smile on his face.
Then all four of the policemen took it in turns to talk to the girl. It was really only to have a stare at this well-stacked, ‘abandoned’ female. They wanted to take her down to the police station but I said no. I did not want the bother of having to be a witness in court, not to mention all that paperwork, so I told her to f . . . off.
I thought that I was reasonably polite. I knew this Caribbean scrote was probably waiting for her around the corner and they would walk away laughing and I would have to take the loss. It was only about £15 or so and we always had cash put by for such occurrences.
Then there was a time when a call girl changed her knickers and bra in the back of my cab while on her way to a customer who had phoned her from the Hilton Hotel. She did not mind me having the odd peek in the rear mirror. The trouble was, she threw all her old underclothes out of the window, but she smiled in such a sexy way and she was a good tipper. The temptation for me to be her next customer was unbelievable but I was a happy and contented husband and only entertained those naughty thoughts for a little while. The thing that worried me most was if the knickers and brassiere had flown out of my cab window and wrapped themselves around a pedestrian’s face. What if they had taken my cab number and reported me to the police? My licence could have been suspended.
