Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London (9 page)

The Golden Boy of Pye Corner

Where the Great Fire burned for three days in the 17th century, the lesser-known Great Bishopsgate Fire of 1964 burned for seven days. On 5th December the London Fire Brigade was alerted to a fire at the British Railways Bishopsgate Goods Depot near Liverpool Street. Two hundred and thirty-six men and 61 appliances were used to extinguish the blaze and were finally removed from the scene on 12th December, a week later. Two people died and Liverpool Street Station was closed for a week. A coroner’s enquiry established that the fire had probably been started deliberately, possibly to conceal theft from the goods at the depot. Nothing was ever proved.

I
n Fore Street, Cripplegate, is one of London’s most amazing churches, almost lost amidst the brick, glass and steel of the Barbican. John Foxe, author of
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,
is buried here as are the Elizabethan explorer Martin Frobisher and the poet John Milton. Oliver Cromwell, who appointed Milton to the post of Secretary of Foreign Tongues while he was Lord Protector, was married in this little church and the children of Edmund Shakespeare were baptised here. A long tradition holds that Edmund’s brother, William Shakespeare, acted as their godfather and this legend gained strength in 2007 when it was learned that in 1604 William was lodging with a Huguenot family called Mountjoy in Silver Street, nearby, within the parish of St Giles. Another worshipper at the time was Sir Thomas Lucy, who is buried in the church and who was satirised by Shakespeare as Justice Shallow in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
following a poaching incident by William in Lucy’s deer park near Stratford-upon-Avon.

St Giless Church

But perhaps this little church’s greatest claim to a place in history lies not with poets but with bombs. On 24th August 1940 a German bomber became lost at night over southern England. The Luftwaffe had been ordered to attack Royal Air Force (RAF) stations to eliminate the RAF in preparation for the planned German invasion – but had been forbidden to bomb London. By this stage in the Battle of Britain the RAF was severely stretched. Believing that he was over open country, the German bomber pilot jettisoned his bombs and turned for home. The bombs fell on St Giles’s Church, Cripplegate. The pilot was disciplined for his error by Luftwaffe commander-in-chief Hermann Göring. Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered an immediate retaliatory raid on Berlin which did little damage but so enraged Hitler that he ordered the Luftwaffe to attack London instead of the RAF stations. London suffered in the Blitz that followed but the RAF could hardly believe its luck. This was a turning point. The RAF took advantage of the respite to recover, and was able to attack the Luftwaffe with renewed strength. Within three weeks the air battle was won and the planned German invasion postponed indefinitely. The church, which lies close to a large section of the remaining Roman Wall, was extensively restored after the war.

I
n his ode ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3rd 1802’, William Wordsworth wrote of London as ‘All bright and glittering in the smokeless air’. But by 1819 his fellow poet, Shelley, wrote:

William Wordsworth

‘Hell is a city much like London A populous and a smoky city’. London smog arose in the days before smokeless fuel as a mixture of smoke and the fogs that swept through the capital. Most homes had coal-burning fires which emitted copious quantities of smoke and to this was added smoke from industry. Steam locomotives were a leading culprit; though romantic and much admired they were also serious pollutants. London smog was recorded in the novels of Charles Dickens and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The French writer Hippolyte Taine wrote that ‘no words can describe the fog in winter. There are days when, holding a man by the hand, one cannot see his face’. At this time Horseguards Parade was covered in a thick layer of soot and frantic efforts were made to clean up the capital before the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Punch wrote that ‘Every street is either whitewashing its face or rubbing up its dingy complexion with a fine layer of London cement.’

The situation in the Metropolitan Underground Railway was particularly dire. Special steam locomotives had been designed to minimise the escape of steam into the tunnels but they were not very effective and did nothing to reduce the smoke. The results were recorded in a letter to
The Times
in 1887 written by RD Blumenfeld who was to become editor of the
Daily Express
. In his diary he wrote: ‘I had my first experience of Hades today and if the real thing is to be like that I shall never again do anything wrong. I got into the Underground Railway at Baker Street. I wanted to go to Moorgate... the smoke and the sulphur fill the tunnel. The atmosphere was a mixture of sulphur, coal dust and foul fumes so that by the time we reached Moorgate Street I was near dead of asphyxiation and heat. I should think these underground railways must soon be discontinued, for they are a menace to health.’ Blumenfeld’s pessimism was mistaken which was fortunate since his son, Sir John Elliot, became chairman of London Transport in the 1950s. A Committee of MPs was not reassured by the evidence of the Metropolitan Railway company that employees suffering from lung conditions like bronchitis and tuberculosis had been cured by exposure to the smoke; or by a train driver who told them of his excellent health after 34 years’ service, even when he added that the smoke was seldom so thick as to render the signals invisible!

Smog for sale!

In 1875 the Public Health Act specified that factories should consume their own smoke ‘as far as may be practicable’; a well-intentioned but ineffective call to arms. In the 1950s it was possible for visitors to the capital to buy tins of London Smog from gift shops to take home as souvenirs. The problem reached its climax with the Great Smog of 1952. This combination of smoke, fog and vehicle exhaust fumes killed 12,000 people in London alone and prompted the Clean Air Act of 1956 which banned the use of certain polluting fuels, promoted the use of smokeless fuel and banned black smoke. Eventually London could breathe again.

B
y 1850 exhibitions to celebrate national achievements in industry, art and other fields were becoming popular. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, however, was the first international exhibition. The idea is generally credited to Albert, Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort but it was in reality the brainchild of Henry Cole (1808-82) who put the idea to the Prince after visiting the Paris Exhibition of 1849. Cole had already made a name for himself working with Rowland Hill in the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840, been responsible for the design of the famous Penny Black postage stamp and invented Christmas cards in 1843. Although Albert nominally presided over the committee that organised the Great Exhibition Henry Cole was its moving spirit, cajoling, chiding and bullying builders and exhibitors so that he became, in the words of the Prime Minister Lord Derby, ‘the most generally unpopular man I know’. Recognising that behind the bullying exterior lay a dynamic personality, Albert coined the phrase ‘We must have steam, get Cole.’

The Great Exhibition

The problem of creating a pavilion for the exhibition in Hyde Park seemed insuperable and the very idea attracted the scorn of
The Times
which protested that it would turn Hyde Park into ‘a bivouac of all the vagabonds of London’. Almost 250 designs for the pavilion were submitted to and rejected by the committee, including one from Isambard Kingdom Brunel which would have required a year’s supply of bricks and been impossible to dismantle. Sir Joseph Paxton’s (1803-65) Crystal Palace design, sketched on a piece of blotting paper during a dull meeting, proposed a prefabricated structure made from standardised glass panels in a frame of cast iron components. It was so revolutionary that the organisers of the Exhibition were able to charge spectators to watch it being assembled in Hyde Park. Six times the size of St Paul’s Cathedral it dominated the southern side of Hyde Park (roughly where Rotten Row is now) and defied doomsayers who predicted that it would collapse when the choir sang the Hallelujah Chorus at the opening ceremony presided over by the Queen. Almost 14,000 British and foreign participants displayed 112,000 exhibits to 6,039,195 visitors, almost as many as visited the Millennium Dome in 2000.

First time with diarrhoea and a bent penny…

Besides viewing such exhibits as early American tractors, Swiss watches and peacock feathers, visitors consumed almost 2 million buns and over a million bottles of soft drinks from a little company called Schweppes. Using a water closet for the first time was a novelty for 827,000 visitors, paying a penny each and thus adding the phrase ‘spend a penny’ to the language. The Exhibition was a financial success as well as a great public spectacle. A profit of £186,437 (multiply by 1,000 for the modern equivalent) was spent in beginning to create the Kensington Museums. Henry Cole was the first director of what soon became the Victoria and Albert Museum (voted Britain’s favourite visitor attraction in 2010) and he was knighted in 1875, becoming known as ‘Old King Cole’. The area, noted for its fine collection of museums which now include the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum as well as Imperial College and the Royal Albert Hall, became known as Albertopolis, after the late Prince.