Read Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London Online
Authors: Editors of David & Charles
Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London (15 page)
The Bow Street Runners had been set up in the 1750s by Henry Fielding (author of
Tom Jones
) and his brother John as an alternative to the ineffective Charlies and corrupt thief takers which preceded them. They were based at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, Covent Garden, where the brothers dispensed justice with an honesty formerly absent from their predecessors, the Basket Justices, who openly carried baskets which invited bribes from those attending court.
The Bow Street Runners quickly rid Covent Garden of the gangs of organised criminals who plagued the area and were soon joined by a mounted force which ranged over a wider area. The Bow Street Runners were merged with the Metropolitan Police in 1839, along with the Thames River police. Bow Street remained a magistrates’ court until July 2006 when its last case concerned an alcoholic vagrant. Its work was transferred to Westminster Magistrates’ Court. Bow Street Court and police station are to become a hotel, convenient for the nearby Covent Garden Opera House. Bow Street police station was the only one to have a white lamp outside rather than the famous standard blue lamp so that Queen Victoria, on her visits to the opera, would not be reminded of the Blue Room at Windsor Castle where Prince Albert had died in 1861, the year blue lamps were introduced.
THE SUPERGRASS
Thief takers earned money by informing on criminals for reward. The most extraordinary was surely Jonathan Wild (1689-1725) who not only informed on criminals but actually organised robberies so that he could profit from the proceeds of the robberies as well as by ‘grassing’ on those who carried out the robberies and by charging victims for the return of stolen goods. He finally fell foul of the law and his execution at Tyburn in 1725 was a cause for rejoicing. His exploits formed the basis of John Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera
and Bertolt Brecht’s
The Threepenny Opera.
Jonathan Wild
Cops of brawn
Just as the City of London has guarded its independence from the wider Metropolitan authority, with its own Lord Mayor, so it has own police service, the City Police, which was formed in 1839. It has its own Commissioner entirely independent of the Metropolitan Police. Its headquarters is at Wood Street, on the former site of a Roman fort, and there are two other stations at Bishopsgate and Snow Hill. It has about 800 police officers (compared with 33,000 for the Met) and its own uniform with brass badges and buttons rather than the white of other police services; red and white chequered cap and sleeve bands (the colours of the City) are worn rather than the usual black and white. They are the reigning Olympic tug-of-war champions, having won the gold medal in 1920, the last time the event was included in the Olympics.
Once a temple of Olympic exertion – now shrine to consumerism
I
n 1908 a Hungarian impresario called Imre Kiralfy laid out 140 acres of ground in Wood Lane, London W12 to house a Franco-British Exhibition. The rather ugly concrete pavilions were whitewashed and soon given the name ‘White City’. The Central London Railway (now the Central Line), recognising the opportunity to generate traffic from visitors to the exhibition, extended westwards the line which had opened in 1900 and opened White City Station. The exhibition was a modest success but Kiralfy and the Central received a bonus when the venue was used for the London Olympics. These should have been held in Rome but the untimely eruption of Vesuvius led the Italian government to announce that they could no longer accommodate the games.
The chairman of the British Olympic Association was the redoubtable Lord Desborough (1855-1945) who had previously climbed the Matterhorn, rowed for Oxford in the Boat Race and swum across the base of Niagara falls – so re-scheduling the Olympics was for him a small matter. The 1908 London Olympics scored a number of ‘firsts’. Thirty-seven women were allowed to compete, including the formidable British competitor Lottie Dod (1871-1960). Having won the Wimbledon ladies’ singles title in 1887 at the age of fifteen (still a record) she won a silver medal for archery at the London Games while her brother William won the gold medal in the men’s event.
Lottie Dod
The Games left a permanent legacy in the Marathon. In the three previous Olympics the length of the race had varied slightly but King Edward VII requested that the race begin on the lawns of Windsor Castle so that his grandchildren, including the future Edward VIII and George VI, could watch. The route, via Stoke Poges and Wormwood Scrubs, finished in front of the royal box at White City, a distance of 26 miles 385 yards which became the standard for the event for future competitions. First to enter the stadium was an Italian confectioner called Dorando Pietri. Exhausted and disorientated he ran the wrong way round the track and collapsed. Faltering repeatedly, he was helped to the finishing line and, after protests from the perpetually chippy USA team, promptly disqualified. The following day Queen Alexandra presented Pietri with a silver cup as a consolation prize.
The end of culture
One legacy of the London games did not endure. During the games the organisers agreed that in future medals would be awarded for architecture, sculpture and literature. At the 1912 Games, in Stockholm, the gold medal for literature was awarded, diplomatically, to the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), who had been the moving spirit behind the revival of the Olympics (and strongly opposed the participation of women!). These awards were last made at the 1948 Games, also held in London. The White City Stadium was subsequently used as a venue for athletics and greyhound racing and was for a time the home of Queens Park Rangers football club. It is now the site of the Westfield Centre, Europe’s largest shopping centre, selling everything from food and fashion to furniture and books.
COMETH THE HOUR COMETH THE MAN, RUNNING FAST
As the opening ceremony began for the 1948 London Olympics the British Team – which, as host nation, would enter the stadium last – discovered that its Union Flag had been left in an official’s car. A young medical student who was assisting the official was despatched post-haste to retrieve it. His name was Roger Bannister. Needless to say, he made it in good time.
The manager of the British football team was Matt Busby, who handed out Craven A cigarettes at his team talk. Kenneth ‘They think it’s all over... it is now’ Wolstenholme made one of his first match commentaries, during the England team’s defeat by the flagrantly professional players of Yugoslavia.
Smallpox
Some unusual London hospitals
B
oats approaching the Port of London in 1881 were greeted by the sight (and smell) of three old ships moored in the Thames off Greenwich to accommodate the victims of smallpox, known to contemporaries as ‘the loathsome disease’. The cries of sufferers as they scratched their pustules until they bled were accompanied by the smell they emitted. Eighty-five years earlier a Gloucestershire doctor, Edward Jenner, had demonstrated that smallpox could be prevented by vaccination with cowpox, a harmless condition, but such had been the opposition to the practice of being injected with an animal disease that many continued to succumb. An isolation hospital had been built in Hampstead in 1867 but when it began to fill with smallpox victims in an epidemic of 1870 the residents of the newly fashionable area were gripped by fear. They complained that ambulance crews bringing patients to the hospital stopped at the nearby pub, the Old Bull and Bush, thereby spreading the infection. The hospital survived and is now the famous Royal Free Hospital, but to avoid further controversy the authorities, in the form of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, transferred sufferers to the three converted ship hulks moored off Greenwich: the former battleship
Atlas
, the frigate
Endymion
, and the retired paddle-steamer
Castalia
. They remained there until 1902, performing very valuable service during which time more than 20,000 patients passed though them.
Edward Jenner
The Old Bull and Bush
HOGARTH’S FAVOURITE BOOZER
The Old Bull and Bush is adjacent to Hampstead Heath close to the unused North End Station on the Northern Line. The building, which is Grade II listed, dates from the 17th century, one of its early patrons being the painter William Hogarth (1697-1764) who was involved in creating its garden. It has traditionally attracted Cockneys visiting Hampstead Heath and it was this connection that led to its being celebrated in a song by music-hall star Florrie Forde called ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’.
Ostensibly an even less likely contender for the role of hospital is St James’s Palace, the fine Tudor building which was created by Henry VIII. For many years it was the principal residence of the sovereign and is still the official home of the Court of St James to which foreign ambassadors are accredited. Charles II and Queen Anne were both born there and it is the home of Princess Anne, the Princess Royal. However, it was a hospital long before it became a palace. It may date from before the Norman Conquest and was certainly in use in the reign of Henry II (1154-89). By the 15th century it had become a leper hospital for young women run by nuns of the Augustinian order and was given by Henry VI to his new foundation, Eton College. The dissolution of the religious houses led to its acquisition by Henry VIII for his new palace.
Jest a hospital
London’s oldest hospital is St Bartholomew’s (Barts as it is better known), situated close to the meat market at Smithfield. It was founded by Rahere, a court jester to Henry I, who had suffered an attack of malaria on a pilgrimage to Rome and as a result saw a vision of St Bartholomew telling him to found a hospital at the Smooth Field (Smithfield). The only surviving part of Rahere’s original foundation is the fine little church of St Bartholomew-the-Great which contains Rahere’s tomb and once accommodated a print works where future great American polymath Benjamin Franklin worked as a typesetter. Nearby is the equally interesting St Bartholomew-the-Less, founded in 1184 as a chapel to the hospital.