London

by Peter Ackroyd

  The crowd of the nineteenth century was also aware of itself as a new form of human congregation. That great representative of Victorian feeling, W.P. Frith, endlessly depicted crowds in paintings which themselves attracted endless crowds. The London theatres were filled with melodramas in which the transient crowd was the characteristic setting for individual stories of pathos and violence. There is an account by George Gissing of the continuous movement “of millions” on Jubilee Day (1887). “Along the main thoroughfares of mid London where traffic was now suspended; between the houses moved a double current of humanity … a thud of footfalls numberless and the low unvarying sound that suggested some huge beast purring to itself in stupid contentment.” So the crowd becomes a beast, contented and obedient, wandering through the city which has created it. But then its movements may become suddenly alarming. “These big crossings are like whirlpools; you might go round and round, and never get anywhere.” It is easy to see “how perilous such a crowd might be.”

  The crowd, aware of its identity, sends signals to itself. During a bad reverse for British troops during the Crimean War, “we all stood about the streets—regardless of all appearances, reading the telegrams (in the newspaper) with breathless anxiety … There was a perfect sea of newspapers and curious faces behind, intense gravity prevailed … People walked along speaking in whispers and muttering.” The citizens of London then become one body with a corporate feeling of dismay; the crowd is alive and alert, responding in unison. The cry of “Mafeking is relieved,” on 17 May 1900 at nine thirty in the evening, had an equally instantaneous effect upon this corporate body. “Instantly the cry was taken up on the omnibuses and the people came clambering down in hot haste to hear the news repeated over and over again … Others rushed off into the byways, carrying the tidings further and further away, and all the time the streets became thicker with people cheering, shouting and singing.” This mass excitement is almost as disturbing as the “intense gravity” of the crowd recorded four months earlier; both show symptoms of that excess and over-reaction, close to hysteria, by which city life is characterised.

  There is something childish about the mob in action, as if it had been bru-talised, or infantilised, by the condition of living in the city. In the fourteenth century the London mob greeted one supposed enemy with a “savage yell,” and five centuries later at a Chartist meeting in Coldbath Fields “a most fearful shout burst from the lips of the crowd.” It is the same terrifying and implacable voice. In 1810 the crowds during the Burdett riots “stopped all vehicles and compelled the occupants to signify their adherence to the cause.” In the same period a mob around a pillory “resembled beasts dipped in a stagnant pool.” The “vast and tumultuous crowds” which gathered to watch the battle of Sidney Street in 1911 provoked similar reactions, when a reporter for the News Chronicle noted that “the voices of these many thousands came up to me in great murderous gusts, like the roar of wild beasts in a jungle.”

  Yet the city itself is curiously unmoved by its crowds. One of the reasons for civic peace in London, as opposed to other capitals, lies directly in its size. Its very scale determines its quietness. It is at once too large and too complex to react to any local outbreaks of passionate feeling, and in the twentieth century the most marked characteristic of riots and demonstrations was their failure to make any real impression upon the stony-hearted and unyielding city. The disappointment of the Chartist uprising in 1848, preceded by a large meeting on Kennington Common, anticipated the inability in 1936 of Oswald Mosley to proceed down Cable Street with thousands of fascist sympathisers. It was as if the city itself rebuked them and held them back. The poll tax riots of the late 1980s, around Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, were another instance of a violent local disturbance which did not affect the relative composure of the rest of the city. No movement could sweep through the entire capital, and no mob could ever control it. The city is so large, too, that it renders the average citizen powerless in its presence. In the early decades of the twentieth century there was something curiously compliant and complacent, not to say conservative, about the Cockneys; unlike the Parisians they did not want to fight the conditions of the city and were happy to live with them unchanged. That happy equilibrium could not last.

  One unwelcome novelty of the latter half of the twentieth century, for example, was the race riot, among the most notable being those of Notting Hill in 1958 and of Brixton in 1981. The Notting Hill riots began with individual harassment of black men by gangs of white youths, but an incident on 23 August provoked a full-scale riot. Tom Vague, in the aptly named London Psychogeography, describes “a crowd of a thousand white men and some women … tooled up with razors, knives, bricks and bottles.” In the following week a large mob proceeded down Notting Dale and beat up any West Indian they could find, but the worst rioting took place on Monday 1 September, in the central area of Notting Hill Gate. Mobs congregated in Colville Road, Powis Square and Portobello Road before going on a “smashing rampage, chanting ‘Kill the niggers!’ … women hang out of windows shouting, ‘Go on boys, get yourselves some blacks.’” One observer noted that “Notting Hill had become a looking-glass world, for all the most mundane objects which everyone takes for granted had suddenly assumed the most profound importance. Milk bottles were turned into missiles, dustbin lids into primitive shields.” So an area of London becomes profoundly charged with the emotions of its inhabitants; everything is irradiated and transformed by their hatred. The accoutrements of a civilised city had suddenly been transformed into primitive weapons.

  A youth leader remarked that “Those sort of boys take up any activity to break the boredom,” and in the twentieth century boredom had to be considered a component of any crowd behaviour. The sheer daily tedium of living in impoverished and unprepossessing surroundings is enough to break the spirit of many Londoners, who feel themselves trapped in the midst of the city without redress or relief. It creates not apathy but active tedium. Thus the violence starts.

  On that Monday evening the West Indians collected together in Blenheim Crescent with “an armoury of weapons including milk bottles, petrol and sand for Molotov cocktails.” The white mob entered the area, with shouts of “Let’s burn the niggers out!,” and were greeted by home-made bombs. The police arrived in force, just before things could develop into out-and-out race war; some rioters were arrested, the others dispersed. Then by curious chance the great heat of these August days was swept away by a thunderstorm, the rain falling among the debris of broken bottles and wooden clubs. At their trial in September certain white rioters were told: “By your conduct you have put the clock back 300 years.” But this would only take them back to 1658; they had in fact behaved like their medieval predecessors who “swarmed” upon supposed enemies or aliens with often fatal results.

  In the spring of 1981 the young black Londoners of Brixton, enraged by the perceived prejudice and oppression of the local police, erupted in streetrioting. For the first time petrol bombs were used in attacks upon the police, together with the conventional deployment of bottles and bricks, while a general wave of burning and looting left twenty-eight buildings damaged or destroyed. The depth and diversity of the disturbances suggest that they had a cause more fundamental than those of police oppression, however, and we may find it in the propensity among certain Londoners for riot and disorder. It then becomes a way of fighting structural oppression, whereby the very texture and appearance of the streets are oppressive and oppressing.

  Poverty and unemployment have also been cited as the causes of sporadic violence, like that in Brixton; certainly they confirm the character of the city as a prison, confining or trapping all those who live within it. What more inevitable consequence, therefore, than rage against its conditions and its custodians? There have been other race riots; there have been riots against the police; there have been riots against the financial institutions in the City of London. Reports produced after the event characteristically refer to “the collapse of law and
order” as well as the “fragile basis” of civic peace. But in fact the curious and persistent feature of London life is that “law and order” have never collapsed and that civic peace has been maintained even in the face of grave disorder. It is often wondered how, in its diversity and bewildering complexity, the city manages to function as a single and stable organism. In a similar fashion the fabric of the city, despite a variety of assaults, has always been preserved. Its mobs have never yet dominated it.

  CHAPTER 44

  What’s New?

  The crowd lives upon news and upon rumour. Elizabeth I recalled that, as a princess, she had asked her governess, “What news was at London?” On being told that it was rumoured she was about to marry Lord Admiral Seymour, she replied, “It was but a London news.” So in the sixteenth century “London news” was considered to be fleeting and inaccurate but, even so, the object of much curiosity. In King Lear the “poor rogues / Talk of Court news … who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out.” Shakespeare also invoked “the newes / Of hurly burly innovation” in Henry IV, Part One as well as “the new newes at the new Court” in As You Like It. It was often observed that, on entering a coffee house, the first and immediate enquiry was “What news? What news?”

  The city is the centre of scandal, slander and speculation; the citizens are rumourmongers and backbiters. In the sixteenth century there were handbills and pamphlets and broadsheets devoted to the more sensational events of the day, and the street-sellers ensured that they were reported from door to door. In 1622 a weekly pamphlet of news was published in London, under the rubric of “Weekly Newes from Italy, Germanie, Hungary, Bohemia, the Palatinate, France and the low Countries etc.” Its success was such that it provoked the publication of many other weekly pamphlets which went under the common title of “Corantos.” The “news” was treated with great suspicion, however, as if the reports of London were based on faction or fractiousness. It was not an honest city and the editor of the Perfect Diurnal, Samuel Peche, was described in the 1640s as being “constant in nothing but wenching, lying and drinking.” He was, in other words, a typical Londoner.

  There was one other aspect of London “news” which did not escape the attention of Ben Jonson. In his The Staple of Newes (1625) he suggests that news ceases to be “news” when it is printed and distributed; its essence is intelligence given in whisper or rumour, the kind of report that in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries could permeate all London within a very short period. Jonson had his own view, then, of the “stationer” or publisher of news, who

  knows Newes well, can sort and ranke ’hem

  And for a need can make ’hem.

  In 1666 the London Gazette emerged as the most authoritative of the public prints. “It inserts no News but what is certain,” wrote one contemporary, “and often waits for the Confirmation of it, before it publishes it.” It was printed on single sheets each Monday and Thursday, and was sold on the streets by vendors known as “Mercury women” calling out “London’s Gazette here!” in Cornhill, Cheapside and the Royal Exchange. Macaulay described it as containing “a royal proclamation, two or three Tory addresses, notices of two or three promotions, an account of a skirmish between the imperial troops and the Jannissaries … a description of a highwayman, an announcement of a grand cockfight between two persons of honour, and an advertisement offering a reward for a stray dog.” It may be considered certain that the highwayman, the cockfight and the dog provoked the most attention.

  It is some indication of the appetite for news in London that its first daily newspaper, Daily Courant, issued in 1702, predates by some seventy-five years the appearance of a “daily” in Paris. By the end of the eighteenth century there were 278 newspapers, journals and periodicals available in the city. Most of this astonishing number were published within the Strand, Fleet Street and those adjoining streets east of the present Waterloo Bridge and west of Blackfriars.

  Fleet Street is an example of the city’s topographical imperative, whereby the same activity takes place over hundreds of years in the same small area. In this case, too, it was an activity that dominated the character and behaviour of those who took part in it, so that it can be said that the very earth and stones of London created their own particular inhabitants. In 1500 Wynkyn de Worde set up his printing press opposite Shoe Lane, and in the same year Richard Pynson established himself as a publisher and printer a few yards down the road at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane. He was succeeded as Printer to Henry VIII by Thomas Berthelet who set up shop by the conduit, again opposite Shoe Lane, and in the early 1530s William Rastell began a printing firm in the churchyard of St. Bride’s. William Middleton printed at the George, Richard Tottell at the Hand and Star, John Hodgets at the Flower de Luce—all signs within the narrow and crowded thoroughfare.

  “This part of London,” wrote Charles Knight, “is a very Temple of Fame. Here rumours and gossip from all regions of the world come pouring in, and from this echoing hall are reverberated back in strangely modified form echoes to all parts of Europe.” So it is an echoic as well as ancient place, a part of London from which that strange commodity known as news spreads in all directions.

  In the eighteenth century news was disseminated largely by means of the daily and weekly journals provided by coffee houses and taverns. “What attracts enormously in these coffee-houses,” wrote Saussure “are the gazettes and other public papers. All Englishmen are great newsmongers. Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news. I have often seen shoe blacks and other persons of that class club together to purchase a farthing paper.” Another eighteenth-century account, by Count Pecchio, is of “English working men” in taverns for whom “are published a number of Sunday newspapers which contain an abridgement of all the intelligence, anecdotes, and observations, which have appeared in the daily newspapers in the course of the week.” “In the coffee-houses, as soon as the newspaper arrived,” wrote another commentator, “there was the silence of the grave. Each person sat absorbed in his favourite sheet, as if his whole life depended on the speed with which he could devour the news of the day.”

  Here we have the image of the Londoner as “devourer” of the news, just as he was a devourer of food and drink. It is one of the first intimations of the “consumer,” one who can only experience the world by the act of ingestion or assimilation. A city is perhaps by its nature an artificial arrangement, so it creates artificial demands. Addison characterised as a definite London type “the Newsmonger” that “rose before Day to read the Postman” and was avid for the “Dutch Mails” and “inquisitive to know what passed in Poland.” There were those who followed the latest case of rape or divorce in the Sunday newspapers, with the same avidity as their medieval counterparts purchased ballads “o’ the newest and truest matter in London.” The search for fresh titillation or sensation is strong and enduring and, in a city where the inhabitants are surrounded by a bewildering variety of impressions, only the most recent can be entertained. That is why, in a city of fire, the latest news is “hot,” especially at the coffee house “where it is smoking new.” “Our News should indeed be published in a very quick Time,” commented the Spectator, “because it is a Commodity that will not keep cold.” It must be shouted out like “Fire!” to arrest the attention of the passers-by.

  London itself was like a newspaper, as Walter Bagehot observed, where “everything is there, and everything is disconnected,” a series of random impressions and events and spectacles which have no connection other than the context in which they were found. In reading the newspaper, the Londoner was simply continuing with the normal perceptions of urban life; he “read” the public prints and the city itself with the same idle curiosity, as if the newspaper confirmed that vision of the world which London had already imparted to him. The very form of the city was imprinted in the pages of the journals—a man called Everett of Fleet Street sold his wife to one Griffin of Long Lane for a three-shi
lling bowl of punch (1729), a boar lived off the rubbish of Fleet Ditch for five months (1736), a man found frozen and standing upright in the same ditch had been drunk and fallen into the mud (1763), bread and cheese were thrown to the populace from Paddington steeple according to annual custom (1737), the wife of one Richard Haynes was delivered of a monster with nose and eyes like a lion (1746), a grave-digger was found smothered to death by his own exertions in an open grave (1769), a man stood up in the church of St. Sepulchre and shot at a choir of charity children (1820), a man named James Boyes walked in front of the congregation in a chapel at Long Acre and proclaimed himself Jehova Jesus (1821). And so it goes on, endlessly, the “news” conveying the accidents and disasters of the city in columns of print like thoroughfares. It was well known to the firemen of London, as one of their greatest hazards, that a crowd would spring up immediately around any great conflagration in order to witness the course of its destruction.

  That is why, in a period of growth and uproar, the news itself became more strident. The sale of early nineteenth-century newspapers, for example, was a raucous affair. “Bloody News,” “Horrible Murder!” and “Extraordinary Gazette” were bellowed out “with stentorian lungs, accompanied by a loud blast of a long tin horn” by porters and costermongers who kept editions of the papers under their hatbands. The advent of the steam-printing press also allowed the newspapers to imitate the “resistless force” of London, with all its energy and expansiveness. Two and a half thousand copies of The Times could be printed every hour and the whole process came to the attention of Charles Babbage, the inventor of the prototype computer, who remarked that the great rollers of the steam press devoured sheets of white paper “with unsated appetite.” Charles Knight noted that the courts around Fleet Street are “bustling and vivacious” with the production of more news to ever larger readerships—“the fingers of the compositors cease not; the clash and clang of the steam press knows no intermission.” Sales of newspapers amounted in 1801 to sixteen million copies; thirty years later it had increased to thirty million, and the figures continued to rise.