London Urban Legends (3 page)

Another reason that McQueen was so loved was his background as a working-class east London boy who got to the top of fashion because of his skill, talent and vision. During the remembrance for him in the media a story emerged about a prank McQueen had pulled whilst an apprentice at Savile Row tailors Gieves & Hawkes. The young designer found himself making a jacket (or suit) for the Prince of Wales and could not resist the temptation to put a message within the lining of the jacket. The Radio 4 obituary show
Last Word
broadcast on 14 February 2010 described the story of McQueen writing ‘McQueen was here’ in the royal jacket as apocryphal, and his BBC online obituary recounts the story but puts a ‘reportedly’ ahead of it. Another version, alluded to on the London Design Museum website, is that McQueen actually wrote ‘I am a c***’ inside Prince Charles’ suit. This is much celebrated on the internet, and in the ‘Dressed to Thrill’ column of the
New Yorker
on 16 May 2011, Judith Thurman moved the scene of the crime to McQueen’s first apprenticeship at Anderson & Sheppherd and reported that the tailors recalled every jacket made for Prince Charles because of the alledged message.

* * *

These stories celebrate McQueen as an
enfant terrible
of the fashion world, slyly calling the establishment that fed him a c***. Like the world of artists and rock stars, the world of fashion designers is never knowingly under-mythologised and such a story feeds the myth. The swearword jacket story echoes another urban legend I heard about a car belonging to the Queen. Back in the early 1990s, I was working in a warehouse and heard a story in the staff canteen (a comfier and earlier version of the work water cooler as a place to share stories). One car – maybe more than one Rolls-Royce – constructed for the Queen had pornographic magazines secretly hidden in the body work. As well as being another rumour of royalty unwittingly carrying around obscenities, this urban legend also nods to a legend about the cars themselves. Rolls-Royce cars often glided through the popular imagination in the 1970s and ’80s and, as with anything, stories followed in their wake. The ‘Rolls of legend,’ wrote Rodney Dale in
The Tumour in the Whale
, ‘has a sealed bonnet, which must never be opened except at the factory.’ Perhaps knowing this legend inspired some factory workers to leave something inside the monarch’s car.

There is a more fully formed, muscular American version of the car urban legend picked up by Jan Harold Brunvand in his book
The Choking Doberman and Other ‘New’ Urban Legends
. It literally delivers the message of class war in the narrative. A ‘wealthy professional man’ has ordered a new Cadillac, which is perfect except for a persistent rattling sound when the car is driven, particularly over railway tracks or a bumpy street. After a number of check-ups, the man has the car deconstructed piece by piece and a bottle or tin can, hidden in the body work, is found to be the culprit. Within the recepticle there is an insulting note that reads ‘You rich SOB – so you finally found the rattle!’

Royalty to Celebrity

The Prince of Wales is not the only affluent jacket wearer to be secretly insulted by a sly tailor.
Popbitch
, the celebrity gossip newsletter and website, told the story in its 2 July 2009 email of footballer Joe Cole’s ‘beautiful bespoke suit for his wedding’. Cole had recently left West Ham to join Chelsea, and ‘someone involved in stitching up the suit’ was a West Ham supporter. Knowing the suit was for Cole, the supporter chalked a full West Ham insignia on the lining and ‘a few choice words’, including ‘Judas’.

Football folklore has its own traditions of hidden insults. Scottish memorabilia and tartan scarves can be found under the dugouts and turf of the new Wembley stadium, left at the heart of English football by Scottish construction workers. Outside of London, a similar story is told of the construction of Southampton’s new football ground, with some of the builders supporting local rivals Portsmouth. Three football shirts are buried beneath the turf, inscribed bricks are buried in the foundations and seeds were planted in the centre circle which would have, at some point, sprouted to spell out ‘Pompey’, Portsmouth’s nickname. The seed story reminds me of another legend I have heard, set during and after the Second World War, which takes us from football fans to Nazis. A German prisoner of war distinguished himself as a gardener at the English manor house where he had been put to work. The war ended and the time came for the POW to return home, and it was apparently with much sadness that he parted company with the people of the manor house. This sadness was jarred the following spring when a swastika of daffodils sprouted up on the lawn. As we shall see regularly throughout this book, urban legends, like flowers, are often seeded from older growths.

The hidden insult has travelled from royalty to celebrity. This is not surprising considering pop stars, sport stars and television personalities are our newest form of rich aristocracy and are, at present, even more in the public eye than royalty. In the 1990s the rising stars of the Britpop movement – Blur and Oasis – developed a bitter rivalry, sparked off, partly (these things are messy), by Blur releasing the single ‘Country House’ on the same day (14 August 1995) as Oasis’s single ‘Roll With It’. Egged on by the media, the race to No. 1 became a class war between the northern working-class lads of Oasis and the southern, middle-class art students of Blur, which peaked with Oasis’s songwriter Noel Gallagher wishing death by AIDS on Blur’s lead singer Damon Albarn. Once again we refer to the
Popbitch
newsletter, this time from 21 August 2009. It contained the story of Oasis buying a vintage EMI TG mixing desk from a studio in Australia. A ‘famous record producer’ heard the band were buying it and carved the name of their rivals Blur on the inside of it. Popbitch reported that the producer said: ‘He’s always wondered if the Gallaghers ever found his handiwork.’

Back in London, and hidden insults are not only aimed at football teams but whole sporting events. On 28 February 2012, the 150-day mark before the start of the London Olympics, 37ft high, 82ft wide Olympic rings were floated up the Thames. These iconic symbols were to be paraded and displayed all around London to herald the Olympics, at a reported cost of £3.2 million. This generated comments from within London of the cost when the city, along with the rest of Great Britain, was suffering from unemployment, crime and rioting, pay cuts, pay freezes and funding cuts to the arts and libraries. The fanfare of the Olympics and its expense seemed garish and crude in comparison. ‘There were better things to have spent this money on,’ said the Green Party’s 2012 mayoral candidate Jenny Jones. This attitude remained until Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, and a lot of talented Britons achieving medals finally won over even the curmudgeonliest of taxpayers. So, perhaps it was not surprising that the 22 March 2012 edition of
Popbitch
had the following story: ‘We’re told that there’s something special about one of the rings. Someone involved in their construction had a bit of a downer on the whole Olympics in London thing. So he took a shit inside one of the rings. And then had it welded shut.’

Finding the Hidden Insult

To be completely fair to
Popbitch
, they are not some golly-gosh, typo-ridden vacuous scandal rag. The newsletter often writes intelligently about the nature of celebrity and of the media, and they have a passion for music that steps outside the present pop charts. When repeating these urban legends, they are frequently in the company of the BBC, the
Guardian
and the Design Museum websites.
Popbitch
have shown themselves to be urban legend savvy when repeating the story of the rich premiership footballer paying off a couple’s mortgage so he could take their booking for the wedding venue of his choice. ‘It’s one of the oldest shaggy dog stories going’, they wrote in their 12 April 2012 newsletter before going on to reference an old legend of a female actor and television personality famous for doing on someone’s chest, or onto a glass-topped coffee table, what some disgruntled person did into one of the giant Olympic rings. The next week they even produced a desperate email saying the children of the celebrity have ‘worked their arses off’ to keep her off the internet for fear that she might stumble across the mortifying rumour.

Seeking the hidden insult may provoke similar responses: who does one ask about a rumoured swearword or stool hidden in a public place or on the back of a public figure? I have wondered about contacting Clarence House, the seat for the Prince of Wales, but perhaps they too are working very hard to keep this rumour away from his royal ears. I would not wish to be instrumental in His Royal Highness glaring at his old jackets as his butler dresses him.

The McQueen story’s popularity after the designer’s death prompted his old company Anderson & Sheppard to issue a statement about the rumour on their blog. It denied the possibility of McQueen writing an insult into a suit or jacket:

Alexander McQueen joined here in 1984 or 1985. He didn’t have an introduction I don’t think, he just came in to apply in person. The firm’s policy at the time was to take young people who had not been to college as they were easier to train. Sixteen was a typical age for apprentices joining the firm.

He worked under a tailor called Cornelius O’Callaghan – one of the best coatmakers that the firm had. Cornelius was known as Con, and was the strictest tailor at the firm. He checked his apprentices’ work thoroughly. Despite rumours that things were scribbled inside the lining of a coat for Prince Charles, Con wouldn’t have permitted that. And in fact the coat was recalled and checked after the story came out – nothing was found.

The story of the insulting objects hidden inside the Queen’s car is true. The car was a Jaguar rather than a Rolls-Royce, and pornographic magazines and a swastika were found behind a seat panel when the car was being bomb-proofed. These, perhaps, were the most offensive things the prankster could think of, as are all of the hidden insults discussed. Even a football shirt hidden in the foundations of a rival’s grounds can be viewed as a deadly insult. Stories appeared in the press in June 2001, and one in the
Buckingham Post
dated 14 June also referenced the McQueen story as ‘McQueen Woz Ere’ rather than ‘was here’.