London's Strangest Tales Page 5

  Gruesome stories from Tyburn are legion – relatives of the condemned would often run under the gallows, for example, and hang from the dangling man’s legs to make sure he died quickly – but there was one major problem and it took the hangman Thomas Derrick to solve it. The problem was that on hanging days – which were always public holidays – there were usually too many to be hanged easily one at a time. Derrick introduced a gallows that could take up to a dozen or more at a time – the general shape of the new gallows took its inventor’s name and, its shape being uncannily like that of the modern derrick crane, the name stuck.

  Early references to hanging show how far into the consciousness of the London public the name derrick had penetrated. In 1608 an anonymous commentator wrote of a condemned highwayman: ‘He rides his circuit with the Devil, and Derrick must be his host, and Tiburne the inne at which he will lighte. At the gallows, where I leave them, as to the haven at which they must all cast anchor, if Derrick’s cables do but hold.’

  JOHN DONNE, UNDONE

  1631

  The author of some of the greatest short poems of the seventeenth century, John Donne (1573–1631), is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral where he was dean for a number of years. Donne is the author of many famous lines that have passed into the language – ‘no man is an island’, for example, and ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’ – but in addition to writing verse he was a busy public man who sat as an MP in Elizabeth I’s last parliament and worked for some time as a lawyer before taking holy orders.

  By the time he entered the church he was already in middle age and probably a little embarrassed about his earlier versifying days. His piety certainly seems to have increased and towards the end of his life he commissioned his own monument, a life-size marble statue showing the poet in his shroud and peeping gloomily out from the folds of its hood. He posed for the sculptor in the very shroud that was later used to bury him.

  Donne kept the monument itself in his house in the years up to his death and it was said that he sat in front of it every day when he said his prayers. When he died in 1631 it was placed in old St Paul’s.

  Nearly half a century later, of course, St Paul’s burned down destroying pretty much everything within the church with one exception – John Donne’s monument. Visitors today can still see the smoke-blackened lower parts of the marble – the only visible evidence of the Great Fire that consumed so much of London in 1666 – but Donne peeps out from his hood unperturbed and even at the last his wit did not desert him. He wrote his own epitaph and the words are still there on the effigy: ‘John Donne, Undone.’

  A CHURCH THE WRONG WAY ROUND

  1631

  St Paul’s Covent Garden is one of London’s quirkiest churches. It was built as part of London’s first planned square in 1631. Its architect – he was also the architect of the square and all the houses in it – was the great Inigo Jones, who had studied the work of Palladio in Italy and longed to produce something similar in London.

  The idea of a square surrounded on three sides by collonaded walks was met with derision by Londoners but the Duke of Bedford, one of London’s richest men and a great enthusiast for all things Italian, pressed ahead anyway.

  The houses were built and were immediately popular with London’s fashionable elite despite those early misgivings. But the church that Jones was asked to build at the west end of the square is bizarre because it is built the wrong way round.

  Problems began when the Duke of Bedford, who seems to have been keen for the houses to be beautifully built, told Jones that he really didn’t care much for the idea of a church at all and that therefore it was to be built as cheaply as possible – ‘I want it little better than a barn,’ he is reputed to have said – but Jones, being proud of his work, decided that he would build magnificently anyway: ‘I will build the handsomest barn in England,’ he claimed.

  The planned design involved having a main entrance into the square – in other words at the east end of the church – but when Archbishop Laud got wind of the plan he was furious and, despite the fact that the church was almost complete, he ordered that the east end of the church be blocked up and that the entrance should be rebuilt at the west end where it remains to this day. The heavy portico at the east end, reminds us that this should originally have been the grand entrance.

  It is ironic that the building on which least care was lavished, officially at least, is the only one to survive from Inigo Jones’s time. During the years of Covent Garden’s fame – which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century – the houses were proudly kept but as the fashionable moved out in the eighteenth century the square became famous for its brothels and gin shops.

  This was caused partly by the growth of the vegetable market, which had started in the middle decades of the seventeenth century but had grown enormously a century later. With late-night revellers from the theatres, gin palaces and coffee houses open all night to service the market porters, the area lost its reputation as a genteel district and became the debauched squalid place depicted in Hogarth’s ‘Morning’ from the series Four Times of the Day.

  Inigo Jones’s plan for a piazza made the word fashionable for decades and hundreds of London girls were christened ‘Piazza’ in the years up to 1650.

  POET BURIED STANDING UP

  1637

  Westminster Abbey has long been the last resting place of the great, the good, the brave – and the poetically inclined. Among the more interesting epitaphs is T.S. Eliot’s (1888–1965) splendidly enigmatic:

  The communication of the dead

  Is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

  The lines come from Eliot’s own great poem Four Quartets.

  But the strangest monument in the abbey seems remarkably unassuming on the face of it – a small stone, moved from the floor of the abbey to a wall in the last century to protect it from wear and tear, reads simply: ‘O rare Johnson’. The lines (including the mis-spelled surname – it should be Jonson!) were written by the now forgotten poet Jack Young and they refer to the great Elizabethan and Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson (1572–1637), who is buried in the abbey in a most unusual way.

  Jonson, the son of a bricklayer, was extraordinarily lucky as a child to come to the attention of the antiquary William Camden, then a master at Westminster School. Camden paid for Jonson’s schooling and in robbing us of a master bricklayer he gave us instead a master playwright.

  Jonson’s comic masterpieces Every Man in his Humour, Bartholomew Fair, Volpone and The Alchemist are unlikely ever to be forgotten and they were hugely popular in his lifetime, but despite his success Jonson was not a good businessman like his contemporary William Shakespeare. Where Shakespeare invested his money in land and property, Jonson seems to have spent his on wild living – in a drunken brawl he killed a fellow poet and only escaped hanging because he was able to plead benefit of clergy. In Elizabethan England, bizarrely, a man who had committed murder but could read Latin was not executed. Instead his thumb would be branded – as was Jonson’s – with the letter M.

  Towards the end of his life and still living in poverty Jonson is supposed to have discussed his funeral arrangements with the Dean of Westminster. ‘I am too poor to be buried in the abbey,’ he is reported to have said, ‘And no one will lay out my funeral charges. Six feet long by two feet wide is too much for me. Two feet by two feet will do.’

  The dean is said to have immediately promised Jonson he could have his tiny area in what was to become known as Poets’ Corner, clearly thinking that Jonson intended only to have a small memorial attached to the spot. In fact Jonson was properly buried in the abbey when the time came – he did it by arranging to have himself buried standing bolt upright in his grave where he remains to this day. It was his final joke.

  In the 1840s work on the floor of the abbey disturbed the grave and Jonson’s leg bones were found standing upright; his skull was intact too and apparently still with red hair attach
ed to it!

  Other graves in Westminster Abbey have strange stories attached to them – the poet Byron (1788–1824) was not commemorated here until 1967 because of his disreputable lifestyle (despite the fame of his poetry) and even Shakespeare had to wait until 1740 for a monument to be erected for him. The difficulty for the authorities when they thought of Shakespeare was reconciling themselves to the fact that despite being a commoner with only a relatively rudimentary education he became and remains the greatest writer in the English language – perhaps in any language. The same feeling of unease has fuelled numerous claims over the centuries that other more aristocratic scribblers are responsible for the plays and poems and merely used Shakespeare’s name.

  A SQUARE OF WONDERS

  1641

  There are lots of wonderfully odd things about Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The name reminds us that this was for centuries open ground where the lawyers from the Inns of Court enjoyed walking, so much that when building began in the 1640s a deputation from the lawyers to the builders persuaded them not to cover the whole site with new houses but instead to leave the central area open, which is just as it remains to this day.

  Other oddities about the square include Sir John Soane’s (1753–1837) extraordinary house – rarely can a single relatively small house have been so stuffed with antiquities. Special cupboards and sliding display cases of great ingenuity and complexity had to be built at great expense to house Sir John’s vast collection in such a small space. The house is now open to the public.

  The square was and is also home to the Royal College of Surgeons – in earlier times tumbrils travelled regularly across the square carrying the bodies of the recently executed for dissection at the college. And in the college museum is the skeleton of Jonathan Wilde, the famous highwayman who was also the model for John Gay’s (1685–1732) celebrated character Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera.

  The square was the scene of an encounter that typified the reasons for the seventeenth-century Londoner’s love of ‘pretty, witty’ Nell Gwynn, Charles II’s favourite mistress. Stories about Nell abound but two of the best concern her time here in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Travelling here from Covent Garden one summer day she found herself surrounded by a mob that jostled her coach. She quickly realised that the angry crowd thought she was Charles’s very unpopular French mistress, Catholic Louise de Keroualle (1649–1734). With great presence of mind Nell straightaway stuck her head out the window and shouted: ‘Pray good people be civil, I am the Protestant whore!’

  On another occasion she sat in her house in Lincoln’s Inn – number 58 – with her son by Charles II playing nearby. The boy was aged about five. Nell was irritated that Charles had so far done nothing for the boy but she knew that direct appeals to him would do nothing. When he arrived to see her he played with his son for a while but the boy then ran off to the other side of the room and wouldn’t return. Nelly saw her chance: ‘Come here, you little bastard!’ she shouted. Charles was horrified. ‘Why do you use that terrible name?’ he asked. ‘Well, you have given him no other,’ she replied. Charles promptly made the boy Duke of St Albans with land and an income that his descendants enjoy to this day.

  But without question the oddest aspect of Lincoln’s Inn Fields is that its dimensions are precisely those of the base of the Great Pyramid at Giza!

  THE STONE MONUMENT THAT WEEPS

  1652

  Most of the world’s superstitious belief systems like nothing better than a bit of physical evidence. If you believe in miracles it’s always good to be able to claim that you’ve actually seen one and in many cases the belief in the miracle will even survive proof positive that it was all nonsense in the first place.

  London’s oldest church, St Bartholomew the Great, was and still is occasionally the scene of what the more credulous would consider a miraculous occurrence.

  The church of St Bartholomew is also something of a bizarre joke since it was built by a court jester. Henry I’s fool, who was known as Rahere, had the church built in 1123 and it has never been bombed or burned or substantially rebuilt – a very rare state of affairs in London. There is less of it than there once was certainly, for at the Reformation it was trimmed down to its present size. In medieval times church buildings were constructed out across the present graveyard to nearby Smithfield market. The gateway building that leads into the church precincts was long hidden under plasterwork until early in the twentieth century restorers discovered that it is in fact fine Tudor craftsmanship and it has now been restored.

  The flexibility of some medieval careers can be judged by the fact that Rahere went from being Henry I’s jester to become prior of St Bartholomew the Great and he is buried here in the sanctuary.

  Until recently the Butterworth charity was distributed every Good Friday on a table tomb in the churchyard – money and hot cross buns were handed out to the poor here but we have to go inside the church itself to discover something miraculous.

  There is a bust of Edward Cooke on the south wall. Cooke died in 1652 and the words carved in marble beneath his bust ask each passer-by to weep for him. If the passer-by finds he has no tears to spare the inscription suggests he or she should ‘stay and see the marble weep’. And it really does happen – partly the position of the monument on the wall and partly the fact that it is marble leads to a phenomenon in which moisture condenses easily and then runs in rivulets down the stone eyes.

  STRANGLED HARES FOR KIDNEY STONES

  1658

  In earlier centuries the idea of objective truth – in the scientific sense in which we might understand that term today – was largely absent. Medical, scientific and religious experts relied on authority: in other words if the great and the good said something was true then that was accepted for centuries without anyone ever worrying about proof.

  A good example is the huge number of strange books of cures and medical preparations published over the centuries. In the late seventeenth century there seems to have been something of a flurry of medical publications emanating from London and all claiming that the cures they detailed for everything from the gout to the plague were published on the best authority – in other words they were the ideas of well-known doctors. No one seems ever to have worried about whether these various cures actually worked, which is astonishing when one reads the ingredients of the cures given for various ailments.

  The following is a good example. It’s a cure for kidney stones and comes from a book of medical recipes published at the Angel in Cornhill in 1658:

  In the month of May distil Cow dung, then take two live Hares, and strangle them in their Blood, then take the one of them, and put it into an earthen vessel or pot, and cover it well with a mortar made of horse dung and hay, and bake it in an Oven with household bread, and let it still in an Oven two or three days, baking anew with anything, until the Hare be baked or dried to powder, then beat it well, and keep it for your use. The other Hare you must flea and take out the guts only, then distil al the rest, and keep this water: then take at the new and full of the Moon, or any other time, three mornings together as much of this powder as will lie on a sixpence, with two spoonfuls of each water, and it will break any stone in the kidneys.

  How could this – and dozens of equally unlikely recipes – ever have been written down with any confidence as a genuine cure for kidney stones? Impossible though it is to believe, perhaps it really did work! More likely is that as a number of kidney-stone sufferers managed to pass the stones in their urine anyway – thus becoming cured – this vile mixture or something similar came to be given the credit for those who would have recovered unaided anyway.

  WHY TEACHERS HAVE TO BE BETTER THAN THE KING

  1660

  Despite George Bernard Shaw’s foolish quip – ‘Those who can do, those who can’t teach’ – the whole future of each generation depends to a large degree on the skills or otherwise of the teaching profession. Given that undeniable fact it is astonishing that teachers are not held in higher
esteem – in the past things were very different and a teacher was absolute ruler in his little kingdom, which may explain why teachers were permitted far greater liberties: children could be flogged until well within living memory and for the least mistake or misdemeanour.

  The teaching profession was also a great producer of eccentrics – some would say madmen – and among the maddest was undoubtedly Dr Richard Busby (1606–1695).

  A prolific author of Latin texts, he was educated at Westminster School where he was later to become headmaster, a role he filled for an astonishing 58 years, and in all that time his proud boast was that not one boy had passed through the school without being personally flogged by the good and no doubt deeply religious doctor. Christopher Wren was among a number of famous men who felt the master’s lash in their early days.

  Like all dictators, Busby would accept no argument or criticism – when one of his fellow schoolmasters questioned the doctor’s judgment, Busby sent a team of schoolboys with axes to chop down the staircase leading to the rebellious teacher’s apartments. The teacher was left with no choice but to recant before being allowed to shin down a rope.

  When at last old age had taken its toll and Busby was forced out and replaced by Dr Friend, the following verses were being chanted all over Westminster: