Yet the general movement of the crowd was as ever one of controlled confusion. The historian of rioting noted that “Most of the people were united by a sense of anger which regularly escalated to fury. In this situation a dramatic cast, representative of any cross-section of society, was clearly evident.” Here his understanding of the patterns of riot comes into play, with his reference to “a dramatic cast” as if it were part of London’s theatre. He mentioned those, too, who attempted to compete in their bravery and aggression against the ranks of the police. “Many more spent most of their time giving moral support, joking with each other, but no less committed in occasional forays.” He noticed some who tried to establish a plan of concerted action and impose order upon incipient chaos. But they were not wholly successful. “In this sense,” he concluded, “organisation was extemporised.” These are precisely the sentiments expressed by those who watched the unfolding of the Gordon Riots, and they suggest a great truth about violence in the city.
Another witness observed that “When people thought that their lines were a bit thin, then they went to reinforce the lines running from one point to another. There were no generals.” This suggests another aspect of London riots; they are rarely orchestrated but patterns emerge from within the crowd itself. It might also be construed as part of that egalitarian spirit of the city that there can be no “generals” or leaders. One observer on the Broadwater Farm, speaking of the rioters, was “struck by how young they were. She saw ‘kids of 12 and 13.’” It may be recalled here that children were hanged in the aftermath of the Gordon Riots.
After the first confrontation there was no sustained attack but intermittent forays. Cars were overturned and shops looted. “I discovered he was an Irish boy and he said that it’s the first time he has had so much food in six months because he’s unemployed.” Yet the most violent incident took place in the Tangmere precinct of the estate. One of the policemen despatched to guard the fire-fighters putting out a blaze in a newsagent’s shop, PC Keith Blakelock, slipped and fell in the face of a pursuing mob. D. Rose, in A Climate of Fear, takes up the narrative. “The rioters came at Blakelock from all sides … he was kicked on the ground and stabbed again and again.” Here we have an example of the sudden viciousness of a London mob. “In the words of PC Richard Coombes, the mob were like vultures, pecking at his body as his arms rose and fell to death with their blows.” Another observer described them as “a pack of dogs,” inadvertently using a simile which has become customary in dealing with the threatening crowd. Older than Shakespeare’s line in Coriolanus, “What would you have, you curs?,” it suggests the wildness and the untamed savagery latent within the civic order. “The instruments were going up and down being flayed at him. The last I saw of PC Blakelock was he had his hand up to protect himself … Blakelock’s hands and arms were cut to ribbons … His head seems to have turned to one side, exposing his neck. There he took a savage cut from a machete.” And there he died.
It was another terrible episode in the history of London violence, where all the rituals of blood and vengeance have their place. The Tangmere precinct itself “is a big, squat building, shaped in conscious imitation of a Babylonian ziggurat.” Babylon is ever associated with paganism and savagery.
There were gunshots, and sporadic fires started upon the estate, but by midnight the rioters had begun to disperse. It started to rain. The violence ended as quickly and as suddenly as it had begun except, that is, for examples of brutality among the police towards various unnamed and still unknown suspects. That same pattern of vengeance was no doubt also part of the aftermath of the Gordon Riots.
It would be absurd to declare that these two events, separated by two hundred years, are identical in character and in motive. The fact that one was on a general and the other on a local scale, for example, is a comment on London’s huge expansion over that period. One travelled along the streets, and the other was confined to the precincts of a council estate; this also testifies to changes within the society of London. Yet both sets of riots were against the power of the law, symbolised by the walls of Newgate Prison in the one case and by the ranks of police officers in riot gear in the other. It might be said that both therefore reflect a deep unease about the nature and presence of authority. The Gordon rioters were generally poor, part of the forgotten citizenry of London, and the inhabitants of the Broadwater Farm Estate were, according to Stephen Inwood, predominantly “homeless, unemployed or desperate.” There may, again, be a connection. In both cases, however, the riots burned themselves out fierily and quickly. They had no real leaders. They had no real purpose except that of destruction. Such is the sudden fury of London.
Black Magic, White Magic
A woodcut from the title page of Astrologaster or the figure casterby John Melton; Londoners were notoriously fearful and superstitious so astrologers and seers of every variety were readily available. Many astrologers congregated in lodgings around Seven Dials.
CHAPTER 53
I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There
And in this dark city, whom or what would we expect to see? In 1189 Richard of Devizes records that “a sacrifice of the Jews to their father the devil was commenced in the city of London, and so long was the duration of this famous mystery, that the holocaust could scarcely be accomplished the ensuing day.” But then it truly became a city of devils as the citizens fell upon, and slaughtered, the innocent inhabitants of old Jewry.
In London, the home of pride and wealth, the devil was always greatly feared. In 1221, according to the Chronicles of London, “that ys to say vpon seynt Lukys Day, ther Blewe a grete Wynde out off the North Est, that ouerthrewe many an house and also Turrettes and Chirches, and fferde ffoule with the Woddes and Mennys orcherdes. And also fyrye Dragons Wykked Spyrites weren many seyn, merveyllously ffleynge in the eyre.” A similar vision of flying fiends was vouchsafed at a much later date in London’s history in Stopford Brooke’s Diary: “Oct. 19, 1904. England was in sunshine till we came to the skirts of London, and there the smoke lay thick. I looked down to the streets below, filled with the restless crowd of men and cars. It was like looking into the alleys of Pandemonium, and I thought I saw thousands of winged devils rushing to and fro among the mad movement of the host. I grew sick as I looked upon it.”
In medieval London many noble personages were buried within the precincts of Blackfriars, suitably robed, because it was believed that to be interred in the habit of a Dominican monk was a certain means of warding off the devil. Yet there were some who were so far beaten down by the city that they identified with the fiend. When one London thief and beggar was taunted for his infamy on his way to the Tyburn gallows he replied: “What would the Devil do for company, if it was not for such as I?” “A Straunge Sighted Traueller,” of 1608, coming to London in a poem by Samuel Rowlands, visited the whores of Shoreditch and the statue of King Lud, “and swore in London he had seene the Deuill.” A real devil was supposed to have appeared at a performance of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in the Belle Sauvage Inn on Ludgate Hill.
Yet when the devil does emerge in London he is often, according to folklore, gulled and outwitted by the cheating citizens who are more than his match in dishonesty and double-dealing. In Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass, the foul fiend is first shown the city as a kind of inferno:
Child of hell, this is nothing! I will fetch thee a leap
From the top of Paul’s steeple, to the Standard in Cheap.
But within twenty-four hours “he has been cheated, robbed, cudgelled, thrown into prison and condemned to be hanged.”
The devil can be found everywhere and anywhere in London, ranging far and wide from his own street, Devil’s Lane in Lower Holloway which has since been renamed. Richard Brothers, the self-styled prophet, claimed to have met him “walking leisurely up Tottenham Court Road.” Some claim to have seen him near the stake of the martyrs-“Thou art the seat of the Beast, O Smithfield”-and, at midnight in the streets of Victorian London, where “The devil
puts a diamond ring on his taloned finger, sticks a pin in his shirt, and takes his walks abroad.” In ancient fashion Punch tells Old Nick that “I know you have a deal of business when you come to London.” One of the devil’s duties is to wander through the prisons. Coleridge and Southey envisaged him touring the notorious Coldbath Prison, and admiring the interior of the cell set aside for solitary confinement. Byron called London the “Devil’s drawing-room.”
He has his guests, and his familiars. There is a tradition of witches in London, with the names of Old Mother Red Cap and Old Mother Black Cap still used upon shops and signs. Perhaps the most notorious was Mother Damnable of Camden Town, whose cottage lay at a fork in the road where the Underground station is now to be found. In the mid-seventeenth century she was known as a healer and fortune-teller with “her forehead wrinkled, her mouth wide, and her looks sullen and unmoved.” Her story is told in The Ghosts of London by J.A. Brooks. On the day of her death “Hundreds of men, women and children were witnesses of the devil entering her house in his very appearance and state, and … although his return was narrowly watched for, he was not seen again … Mother Damnable was found dead on the following morning, sitting before the fire place, holding a crutch over it, with a tea-pot full of herbs, drugs, liquid.” And what a sight that must have been, the devil making his way through Camden Town.
Stranger still is the case of “Spring-Heeled Jack.” He appeared in the streets during the 1830s and was soon known as “the terror of London.” One statement, given by Jane Alsop at Lambeth Street Police Office, describes how the unfortunate girl encountered him on her doorstep. “She returned into the house and brought a candle and handed it to the person, who appeared enveloped in a large cloak, and whom she at first believed to be a policeman. The instant she had done so, however, he threw off his outer garment, and applying the lighted candle to his breast, presented a most hideous and frightful appearance, and vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flame from his mouth and his eyes resembled red balls of fire.” This may seem the merest fantasy, and yet the particulars are confirmed in an account of another attack by “a tall thin man, enveloped in a long black cloak. In front of him he was carrying what looked like a bull’s eye lantern. With one bound he was in front of her, and before she had a chance to move, he belched blue flames from his mouth into her face.” The entire grotesque history is narrated by Peter Haining in The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack.
Jane Alsop’s testimony had other, equally disturbing elements. From “the hasty glance which her fright enabled her to get at the person, she observed that he wore a large helmet; and his dress, which appeared to fit him very tight, seemed to her to resemble white oilskin. Without uttering a sentence he darted at her, and catching her part by the dress and the back part of her neck, placed her head under one of his arms, and commenced tearing her gown with his claws, which she was certain were of some metallic substance.” She screamed aloud, and her sister came to the door. But in her police statement that sister, Mary Alsop, admitted that although she “saw a figure as already described … She was so alarmed at his appearance, that she was afraid to approach or render any assistance.” A third sister then ran down and dragged Jane away from the terrible assailant, yet his grip was so strong that “a quantity of her hair was torn away.” She slammed shut the door but “notwithstanding the outrage he had committed, he knocked loudly two or three times at the door.” This knocking at the door, so strange that it could scarcely have been invented, is perhaps the most alarming moment in an entire alarming episode. It is as if to say-Let me in, I have not finished with you yet.
It is not at all surprising that in the popular urban imagination “Spring-Heeled Jack” was identified as the offspring of the devil, and described by witnesses as possessing horns and cloven feet. In February 1838 he was reported to have been seen in Limehouse with blue flames issuing from his mouth, and in the same year was said to have thrown a prostitute into the water at Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey. Peter Haining has suggested that the perpetrator was a fire-eater who wore a helmet or mask to protect his face. The great leaps and bounds that were also ascribed to him were perhaps the effect of springs concealed in the heels of his shoes. The metallic “claws” have yet to be fully explained. Yet the point is that “Spring-Heeled Jack” became a true London myth because he was so fantastic and artificial a monster. With his helmet and “white oilskin suit,” breathing fire like a circus performer, he is a London devil curiously resembling the fiends portrayed in the Clerkenwell mystery plays. Accounts of his appearance and behaviour spread very rapidly all over the city; he was seen, or was reported to have been seen, in various locations. It is almost as if this bizarre figure emerged from the streets themselves, like a “golem” which is supposed to be made from the mud and dust of a certain vicinity. The fact that “Jack,” like a later and more notorious “Jack,” was never apprehended serves only to deepen that sense of anonymity which suggests the monstrous figure to be some token or representation of London itself.
For the city is seen, by many, to be a kind of hell. It became a cliché in the poetry of the nineteenth century; its citizens resembled a “Satanic throng” while the atmosphere was that of a “brown Plutonian gloom.” The sulphurous smell of coal dust and smoke provoked images of Satan, while the manifold and manifest vices of the city represented all the works of the devil incarnate.
Images of Babel and Sodom abound, therefore, yet there is a more profound sense in which the city represents hell. It is the ultimate place of degradation and despair, where solitude is sought as an escape from the exactions of pity or compassion and where the only fellowship found is the fellowship of misery. Of all writers perhaps George Orwell possessed that sense of the city most strongly and, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock, surveying the brightness of Piccadilly Circus in 1936, remarks that “The lights down in hell will look just like that.” Often “The fantasy returned to him that he was a damned soul in hell … Ravines of cold evil-coloured fire, with darkness all above. But in hell there would be torment. Was this torment?”
There are still, in this city, places where suffering seems to linger. On a small garden or patch of waste ground, near the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Howland Street, solitary people sit in postures of despair. It was close by, at 36 Howland Street, that Verlaine composed his wonderful poem “Il pleure dans mon coeur/Comme il pleut sur la ville.” “It weeps in my heart just as it rains upon the city,” all the loneliness and sorrow of London are caught in this image of the grey and falling rain. The cemetery garden behind the Hawksmoor church of St. George’s-in-the-East, beside Wapping, attracts the lonely and the unhappy. The garden of another church, Christ Church, Spitalfields, by chance by the same architect, was for many years a resting place for the vagrant and the deranged; it was known as “Itchy Park.” There was a famous area known as “Poverty Corner” along the Waterloo Road, by the corner of York Road; here out-of-work actors, artistes and music-hall “turns” used to wait in the generally forlorn hope of being seen or chosen by the music-hall agents. That corner has remained an anonymous and transient locale, between the bridge and the station, with its own peculiar sense of desolation.
Whole areas can in their turn seem woeful or haunted. Arthur Machen had a strange fascination with the streets north of Grays Inn Road-Frederick Street, Percy Street, Lloyd Baker Square-and those in which Camden Town melts into Holloway. They are not grand or imposing; nor are they squalid or desolate. Instead they seem to contain the grey soul of London, that slightly smoky and dingy quality which has hovered over the city for many hundreds of years. He observed “those worn and hallowed doorsteps,” even more worn and hallowed now, and “I see them signed with tears and desires, agony and lamentations.” London has always been the abode of strange and solitary people who close their doors upon their own secrets in the middle of the populous city; it has always been the home of “lodgings,” where the shabby and the transient can find
a small room with a stained table and a narrow bed.
A true Londoner will tell you that there is no need to travel when you have the unexplored mysteries of the city all about you; a walk down Farringdon Road, or Leather Lane, will give you as much cause for wonder and surprise as any street in Paris or Rome. “I do not understand my own city,” you might say, “so why travel elsewhere in search of novelty?” There is always a sense of strangeness in London, to be experienced around unexpected corners and in unknown streets. As Arthur Machen said, “it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Grays Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa.”
It has often been observed that certain streets or neighbourhoods carry with them a particular atmosphere over many generations. An air of emptiness or ennui, for example, can be sensed along those thoroughfares that have been created by municipal edict and have taken away much of older London in their construction-Victoria Street and New Oxford Street, artificial creations of the nineteenth century, remain anonymous unhappy places. Kingsway, cut through ancient dwellings in the early twentieth century, is merely dull. The Essex Road and the unluckily named Balls Pond Road are areas of manifest greyness and misery. Another cold spot, over many years, has been Shepherd’s Bush Green; it was described as “bald, arid, detestable” at the beginning of the twentieth century and has remained thus ever since.
London: The Biography Page 60
