Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London (16 page)

Raheres tomb

Barts is part of the Barts and The London NHS Trust, its partner in the trust being the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. The Royal London was founded in 1740 as the London Infirmary and its medical school was the first in England, founded in 1785. Perhaps the hospital’s most famous resident was Joseph Merrick (1862-90), the so-called ‘Elephant Man’, whose deformities attracted the sympathy of Sir Frederick Treves (1853-1923) who rescued Merrick from a freak show in Belgium and found him a home at the hospital. Merrick was the subject of the film
The Elephant Man
(1980), with John Hurt in the title role.

T
he
Pall Mall Gazette
was founded in 1865, taking its name from a fictional newspaper featured in the work of the writer William Makepeace Thackeray. It never had any connection with the street from which it took its name and was initially conservative in tone. This changed when WT Stead joined the magazine in 1880, becoming editor in 1883. Under Stead it became a campaigning journal, arousing the criticism of one of its contributors, Matthew Arnold, at the ‘Americanisation’ of British journalism. Other writers included Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. Stead became associated with a group known as the Social Purity Movement, amongst whom was Josephine Butler, who sought to improve the treatment of women and children in Victorian Britain. Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army and Rebecca Jarrett, a reformed prostitute, were also members. Stead decided to demonstrate that, in Victorian London, it was possible to purchase a child for immoral purposes. Through Rebecca Jarrett, Stead made contact with the alcoholic mother of 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong who lived in Lisson Grove. On 3rd June 1885, Stead purchased the child for £5 and handed her over to Bramwell Booth who took the child to France where she was cared for by members of the Salvation Army.

WT Stead

On Monday, 6th July, under the heading ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, Stead published the first instalment of the story which, with salacious sub-headings like ‘The Violation of Virgins’, drew attention to the ease with which it was possible to abuse young children. WH Smith and sons refused to handle the magazine because of its sensational and pornographic character but volunteers, including the Salvation Army and George Bernard Shaw, distributed and sold the issue. The Home Secretary pleaded with Stead to cease publication of further details of the affair. Stead replied that the government would first have to pass a Bill, which had stalled in the House of Commons, raising the age of sexual consent from 13 to 16. The Bill was duly passed but in the meantime Stead’s enemies, including other newspapers who were jealous of his success, were gathering their forces.

Titanic loss

Stead, Jarrett and Bramwell Booth were prosecuted for abducting Eliza, the case turning on the legal technicality that Eliza had been acquired with the permission of the mother but not her father. Booth was acquitted, Jarrett sentenced to six months and Stead to three months. He continued to edit the
Gazette
from his cell in Holloway of which he said, ‘Never had I a pleasanter holiday, a more charming season of repose.’ He was allowed to keep his prison uniform and on 10th November each year, the anniversary of his conviction, he wore it to remind readers of his ‘triumph’. Stead died in April 1912 in the
Titanic
disaster, last seen helping others into the lifeboats and making no attempt to save himself. In 1923 the
Pall Mall Gazette
was absorbed by the
Evening Standard
which continues to flourish.

M
any of London’s most glorious examples of industrial architecture have been its power stations, some of which have since found other uses. They were built on the banks of the Thames to facilitate delivery by river of the large quantities of coal that they required. The most famous is Bankside Power Station designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott who also designed the famous British red telephone box. It was specified that the central chimney, 99 metres high, should be lower than the spire of St Paul’s Cathedral directly across the Thames. It is close to the site of ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’ theatre which opened in 1997. Power generation began there in 1952 though the complex was not completed until 1963. In 1981 generation ceased and in 1993 it narrowly escaped demolition by developers when a BBC programme,
One Foot in the Past
, inspired a campaign to preserve it. In 1994 it was acquired by the trustees of the Tate Gallery and in 2000, after substantial construction works, it opened as Tate Modern. The original Tate Gallery (financed by the Tate & Lyle sugar family) became known as Tate Britain.

Giles Gilbert Scott designed an older and larger power station at Battersea in the 1930s, the first large power station designed to provide electricity over a wide area. It began to generate electricity in 1933 and was enlarged in the 1950s. In 1983 power generation ceased and since that time a number of plans to redevelop the site (shopping malls, apartments, theme parks, etc) have come and gone without success. Its imposing structure has featured in iconic artwork for the successful British band Pink Floyd, as well as a number of episodes of
Doctor Who
and similar entertainments but its future remains unsure while it stands as a sad reminder of its former role in providing power to London.

The Tate Modern

Power to the People!

In the 1880s Sebastian di Ferranti, who was descended from the Doges of Venice through his father and a Liverpudlian photographer on his mother’s side, supplied power to premises in and around Bond Street from a small generator in the Grosvenor Gallery, Bond Street, the electricity being distributed through cables trailing across rooftops. In 1890 he opened what was then the world’s largest power station in Deptford. A fortnight later the transformer room burst into flames; nonetheless the station remained in use until 1953. The site has since been redeveloped as housing, the nearby Ferranti Park reminding residents of its origins.

Lots Road Power Station

Lots Road Power Station, on Chelsea Creek, was opened on the banks of the Thames in 1905 to provide power to the newly electrified London Underground railway lines. It was built by the flamboyant American entrepreneur Charles Tyson Yerkes and remained in use until 2002 when the Underground started to take its power from the National Grid. It was featured in a famous World War II poster titled ‘The Proud City’ as a symbol of London’s defiance during the Blitz, accompanied by a quotation from the American painter James McNeill Whistler: ‘the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall chimneys become campanili...’ Ironically, Whistler had died in 1903 protesting against the construction of the station.

At about the same time Greenwich Power Station was commissioned by the London County Council to provide electricity for London’s trams. After these ceased to run it was used to supply standby power for Lots Road and it remains in use as a back-up station, near the site of the Millennium Dome.

I
n 1951 a previously derelict site on the South Bank of the Thames on either side of Hungerford Bridge was transformed into a site for the Festival of Britain, an enterprise masterminded by Herbert Morrison, a prominent member of the Labour government, to commemorate the centenary of the Great Exhibition. It was also intended to cheer people up at a time of post-war austerity and to attract tourists, especially Americans with their much-needed dollars. Its most prominent buildings were the Royal Festival Hall, to the east of Hungerford Bridge, which survives; and the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon to the west of the bridge, which do not. The latter was a cigar-shaped tubular tower, 250 feet high, coming to a point at each end. Its steel frame was covered in aluminium panels. Designed by the young architects Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya it appeared to defy the laws of gravity since it rested on a platform of barely visible wires 40 feet above the ground. A few days before the Festival was officially opened by King George VI a student scaled the Skylon and attached a University of London scarf to the top. It was removed before the royal party arrived. When the exhibition ended it was dismantled in 1952 (the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, thought it was ‘three-dimensional socialist propaganda’) and some of it was turned into paper knives by the 600 Group scrap merchants of 600, Commercial Road, London who gave them to customers as souvenirs. A portion of it came to rest in the garden of Hidalgo Moya’s home in Rye, Sussex while a further small section was traced as recently as January 2011 in the possession of Nick Baughan, a descendant of a director of the 600 Group. The Skylon has given its name to a number of ambitious structures, notably to a restaurant near Niagara Falls. The origin of the name is the subject of many legends but it was probably cooked up in the architects’ office. At the time names ending in ‘on’ were regarded as futuristic, like the new textiles nylon and rayon.