London's Strangest Tales Page 9

  CASTRATED SINGERS

  1735

  The German composer George Frederick Handel (1685– 1759) was in many ways far more English than German. He lived in London from 1710 until his death in 1759 and he was central to one of the most bizarre traditions in the history of music.

  In the early decades of the eighteenth century London had begun to rival the great continual centres of music across Europe. This had a much to do with London’s sheer physical size but also its increasingly dominant role as a financial centre, a role it retains to this day. In 1713 the musician Johann Mattheson wrote: ‘In these times, whoever wishes to be eminent in music goes to England. In Italy and France there is something to be heard and learned; in England something to be earned.’

  Handel clearly appreciated this and his music, from Zadok the Priest – still sung at every crowning of a new British monarch – to the celebrated Water Music was hugely popular; so much so that he was awarded a pension of £200 a year while still in his thirties.

  But central to music in London as elsewhere at this time were the castrati – men who had been castrated in their early teens to ensure that their voices never broke. Thousands of boys from poor backgrounds – mostly Italian – were castrated but only a few made it to the top of the castrati singing profession. Castration alone would not ensure that a great boy soprano voice would turn into a great castrato voice. But in London the castrati who retained their magnificent voices were lionised. Handel wrote mostly for seven world-famous castrati: Bernacchi, Senesino, Nicolini, Carestini, Caffarelli, Conti and Guasagni.

  The castrati were idolised wherever they went – women swooned when they heard their extraordinary voices and the singers were famous – rather like modern rock stars – for being temperamental. They were paid vast amounts and behaved appallingly.

  Working from his house in Brook Street – the house is now the Handel Museum – the great composer one day received a note from a visiting castrato saying he did not like the piece Handel had written for him. Handel, who was one of the few composers not prepared to put up with temperamental singers (partly because he was so temperamental himself!), sent a note to the singer’s lodgings saying, ‘You dog! You think you know better than I do what is best for you to sing? If you don’t sing it I won’t pay you.’

  The singer – probably Senesino – changed his mind, sang the piece and was cheered to the rafters.

  On another occasion Handel threatened to throw a castrato out of the first-floor window of his house in Brook Street!

  Whatever we might think today no one in the eighteenth century thought it was a bad thing to castrate a boy in order to protect and enhance his voice. Hormonal imbalances caused by castration often made a castrato look as well as sound rather odd – Senesino was extremely tall but with a tiny head, for example – but he was still adored by his fans.

  But how were boys castrated? Well, if a boy was considered to have potential he was given opium or alcohol and then made to relax in a bath of hot water. The carotid artery in his neck might also be depressed to induce unconsciousness – then the norcini – a specialist physician who only carried out this particular operation – would slice through the ducts leading to the boy’s testes, preventing him ever reaching puberty.

  But what did the voice sound like? Apparently its unique ability to move came from the delicacy of the boy soprano voice combined with the power of adult lungs.

  Curiously many of the most successful modern pop stars, such as Chris Martin from Coldplay and Tom Chaplin from Keane, use the highest register of their natural tenor voices to create songs that are particularly emotionally intense. The effect is without question reminiscent of the castrato voice.

  Astonishingly the practice of castrating boys was not made illegal in Italy until 1870 and our direct knowledge of what the voice sounded like comes from a single sad recording of the last known castrato. Allessandro Moreschi made the wax cylinder recording in London in 1902 a few years before his death. It can still be heard by special request at the British Library in London’s Euston Road.

  GOING TO KNIGHTSBRIDGE BY BOAT

  1736

  The Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park is one of London’s best-known landmarks. It has an unusual history in that it was originally not a lake at all but a stretch of one of London’s many small rivers, each a tributary of the Thames.

  Just outside the western wall of the old City of London was the Fleet River, which ran down what is now Farringdon Street through Ludgate Circus and thence into the Thames. Further west, but again running north–south, the Tyburn flowed down what is now Edgware Road on through Victoria and parallel with Vauxhall Bridge Road before reaching the Thames.

  The Westbourne flowed from Hampstead Heath down through west London and across Hyde Park, down modern Sloane Street and across Sloane Square before reaching the Thames just to the east of Christopher Wren’s magnificent Chelsea Hospital.

  It was Charlotte, George II’s queen, who decided that Hyde Park needed a great lake. The park itself had been the property of the Crown since Henry VIII took it from the monks of Westminster in 1536 (the monks had in their turn no doubt taken it from someone else) to use as a hunting ground. The public at this time were strictly forbidden to enter the park.

  Early in the seventeenth century James I allowed limited access to the park but only for the nobility and aristocracy. Charles I opened the park to the public in 1637 and created The Ring – the sandy road that allowed the fashionable for the next three centuries to parade and be seen on foot and on horseback and in their carriages.

  Queen Charlotte decided the lake would make the park far more attractive so the River Westbourne was dammed and excavations began to produce the splendid stretch of water we see today.

  But the first phase of the work left the River Westbourne flowing above ground as a way to control the level in the lake. In 1736 a massive flood led to the Westbourne bursting its banks and the whole of the area south of the Serpentine down through the Albert Gate, through Knightsbridge and Belgravia was under several feet of water for weeks. The Thames watermen made the most of an opportunity and rowed sightseers from Chelsea up to Knightsbridge and beyond. At this time most of the roads around London were impassable to wheeled vehicles for most of the year anyway so the sudden appearance of extra water for boat travel – always the preferred mode of transport for Londoners – made Hyde Park far more popular than it would otherwise have been.

  MAD MAYFAIR MARRIAGES

  1742

  Mayfair was once a rather sleazy area and certainly nothing like the millionaires’ quarter it has now become. Something of its less salubrious past can be discovered in Shepherd Market where prostitutes still ply their trade, but more or less exclusively for the well to do.

  But Mayfair was also once home to one of London’s strangest churches. Until the Marriage Act of 1754, the Mayfair chapel was a continual thorn in the side of the authorities – it was here that the eccentric clergyman the Reverend Alexander Keith conducted marriage ceremonies for anyone who turned up at any time of day or night and absolutely no questions asked.

  For the church and secular authorities of the eighteenth century, churchmen just didn’t do this sort of thing, but if the clergyman was properly ordained there was very little anyone could do to stop it.

  For young runaways and the romantically inclined in an age when marriages were largely a matter of convenience, financial or otherwise, the Mayfair chapel was a godsend.

  The authorities hated it because it represented a threat to the financial and dynastic plans they had for their own offspring, but Alexander Keith knew the law and he was perfectly entitled to do what he was doing.

  The popularity of the Mayfair chapel can be judged by the fact that in just one year – 1742 – he married no fewer than 700 couples – and all with neither licence nor banns.

  Parliament launched several attempts to change the law to make these marriages illegal but they immediately abandoned the attempt whe
n they realised – the Lords particularly – that to do so would be to make many of their own nephews, nieces and grandchildren illegitimate.

  Among the most famous marriages conducted at the Mayfair chapel was that between the Duke of Hamilton and Elizabeth Dunning, one of the great beauties of Georgian England. The couple were in such a hurry that an old brass washer had to be used in place of a gold band.

  AIR BATHING IN CRAVEN STREET

  1757

  It’s a little-known fact that Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), one of the men who signed the American Declaration of Independence, lived for 16 years in a crooked little terraced house in Craven Street, a street that, before the building of the Embankment in the 1860s, ran down to the mud banks of the River Thames.

  Craven Street survived the building of the Embankment – which effectively pushed the river back two hundred yards – as well as the building of Charing Cross Station, the German bombs of the Second World War and the obsession with redevelopment in the 1960s. Virtually all the houses in the street are eighteenth century although most have been over-restored to create office space.

  No. 36, Franklin’s old home, is one of the few to survive with its interior virtually intact – what we see today are the doors, chimneypieces and staircases once used by Franklin himself and it was here that Franklin pursued some of his more eccentric interests.

  Franklin was a great friend of Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Matthew Boulton (1728–1809) and Josiah Wedgwood (1730– 1795), all members of the Lunar Society, a Midlands-based dining club of industrialists and engineers who embraced every new invention of the late eighteenth century – the first great period of the Industrial Revolution.

  Franklin was passionate about science long before he became passionate about American politics. He was also a noted eccentric and if you had wandered along Craven Street early in the eighteenth century on a summer’s day you might easily have seen Franklin sitting in his downstairs drawing-room window completely naked!

  He was a great believer in the medical benefits of what was then called ‘Air bathing’ – a form of recreation to which William Blake (1757–1827) was also partial in the garden of his house across the river in Lambeth.

  Franklin was also fascinated by electricity, dentistry, chemistry and optics. Like his friends in the Birmingham factories he believed that science would lead to a better life for mankind. He was also keen on practical experiments. He was part of that group of inventors who organised public demonstrations of electricity by spinning a glass ball against a leather pad to produce a huge build-up of static. As one contemporary put it: ‘Franklin is a lightning rod philosopher who goes to the Charterhouse School each week, catches a charity boy, strings him up on silk cords, rubs him with glass and extracts sparks from his nose.’

  Franklin’s other exploits included swimming in the Thames at Chelsea on his back while paring his nails. He did it just to prove it could be done and he also had a set of wooden false teeth made.

  The great radical writer William Cobbett (1763–1835) disliked Franklin, describing him as ‘That crafty and lecherous old hypocrite’, but he was much loved by his Birmingham industrialist friends.

  When his house in Craven Street was being restored in the 1990s a mass of human bones was found buried in the basement – at first the police suspected a serial killer but it turns out that Franklin lodged with William Hewson, a doctor who ran an anatomy school from the Craven Street house. The bones showed evidence of surgery – skulls had been trepanned, for example, and leg bones mended.

  But whatever went on in this particular house we know there was a roaring trade in corpses in eighteenth-century London. The ‘resurrection men’, as those who stole bodies from graveyards were known, would have rowed to the river steps at the bottom of Craven Street before delivering their gruesome cargo – human bones from babies, teenagers, the middle aged and elderly were all found buried here. The other source of at least some of these bones would have been the gallows that then stood just behind the garden wall of No. 30.

  While he lived at Craven Street, Franklin complained about the smoky fire in his rooms – the metal damper he invented to solve the problem still exists in the house.

  Before the Embankment was built Craven Street ran down to the edge of the Thames and, like the Londoners of old, you can still take a boat from here to the Tower of London or to Greenwich. Famous residents included Henrich Heine (1797–1856), the German poet, and Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721), the great woodcarver. The author James Smith wrote a splendid satirical poem about the lawyers who were his neighbours in the street during the early nineteenth century:

  In Craven Street Strand, ten attorneys find place

  And ten dark coal barges are moored at its base.

  Fly honesty Fly, seek some safer retreat

  For there’s craft in the river and craft in the street.

  A poetical lawyer responded with the following verse:

  Why should honesty fly to some safer retreat

  From attorneys and barges god rot ’em

  For the lawyers are just at the top of the street

  And the barges are just at the bottom.

  Benjamin Franklin’s house – the scene of so many of these bizarre tales – is now open to the public having recently been beautifully restored.

  THE COCKNEY COURTESAN WITH A SWEET TOOTH

  1760

  The huge popularity of marzipan in Victorian England (it was far more popular than it is now) is entirely attributable to a cockney girl who became one of the best-known and most sought-after courtesans in Paris.

  Born in Stepney in 1760, Eliza Marchpane grew up in abject poverty – with no schooling and no other way to earn a living her only option was to become a prostitute. She began by working the pubs along the notoriously dangerous Ratcliffe Highway, but she quickly realised that once her looks were gone her income would dry up.

  She set off for Paris knowing nothing of the city or the language. How she lived after arriving we do not know but within a few years she was certainly known to the aristocracy – she dined regularly at the houses of the nobility under the assumed title Marquesa de Marchpane. Her cockney French simply made her sound exotic to the Parisian nobility, who admired her good looks and vivacity. In memoirs of the time she is described as extraordinarily attractive and her fame quickly spread far beyond Paris – she became the darling of the aristocracy in Vienna where she is said to have seduced the young Mozart.

  Gifts of houses, jewellery and lavish clothing from her admirers had made her rich and when she returned to England in about 1800 she brought with her the recipe for an almond paste she had tasted first in Austria.

  Her large house in the West End became a fashionable centre and at every party she gave there were always cakes and other sweets made from almond paste. Eliza ended her days in Brighton where she was for a time the lover of the Prince Regent, whose enormous girth no doubt had more to do with his love of Eliza’s almond paste than with any affection he might have felt for her. She died in 1830.

  HIGHLAND SOIL IN WESTMINSTER

  1760

  The British are notoriously eccentric and as a general rule it is probably pretty safe to say that the richer the individual the greater the eccentricity. One of the most eccentric London residents of all time has to be the eighteenth-century Earl of Fife. A staunch Jacobite who hated the repression of the Scots that followed their defeat at Culloden in 1745, he was determined to get the better of the English whenever he could.

  But the Earl was in a tricky position – from 1760 on he found that he had to visit London regularly for business reasons and the easiest way to do this, then as now for the very rich, was to buy or build a house. But the Earl’s motives were not entirely financial – he hated the idea of being in London at all and by building his own house he could avoid the horror of having to stay in an English hotel run by the hated English.

  But even if he built his own house in London it would still be on Englis
h soil, which was anathema to the good Earl. His solution was to buy a plot of land on Horse Guards Avenue near Whitehall. He then arranged, at enormous expense, to have a merchant ship filled with Scottish soil and sailed down the coast and up the Thames to Whitehall Steps. From here the soil was carried up Whitehall in a series of carts and dumped on the Earl’s new acre of ground. Once the detested English soil had been completely covered with far superior Scottish soil the Earl went ahead and built his new house.

  Sadly not a trace of that house remains today; but since we have no evidence that the soil beneath the house was ever removed we must assume that the land here is still as Scottish as it was in 1760.

  HOW LONDON GOT ITS PAVEMENTS

  1761

  Near the top of Whitehall, a hundred yards or so from Trafalgar Square where Nelson looks down from his column towards Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, there is a little-known alleyway.

  Few Londoners ever bother with it, let alone visitors, but it has a history as rich and interesting as many of London’s better-known landmarks.

  Walking down from Trafalgar Square, Craig’s Court is a narrow alley to the left. It runs into a small square or court where the façade of Harrington House, built in 1702 for the Earl of Harrington, still stands, though it has been remodelled over the centuries. The Earl built his house here just a few years after a huge fire destroyed the medieval palace of Whitehall.