Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London (20 page)

The first theatre on Bankside was The Rose which was built by an impresario and property developer called Philip Henslowe in 1587 and was the location of the first productions of Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine
and Shakespeare’s
Henry VI, Part I.
Its success was such that it was soon followed, and eclipsed, by The Swan and The Globe, also on Bankside. It was forgotten until construction work revealed its foundations and ground plan close to Southwark Bridge where there is now an exhibition. Philip Henslowe features as a prominent character, played by Geoffrey Rush, in the 1998 film
Shakespeare in Love
. The Globe in fact began life in 1576 close to the later site of The Curtain in what is now Curtain Road. It was built by the actor James Burbage and prospered but after a dispute with the owner of the land on which it stood Burbage and his company dismantled it one night, moved it across the river and re-erected it as The Globe in 1599, one of the shareholders being William Shakespeare who was presumably also one of the removal men. Like many theatres of the time it had a relatively short life and was destroyed by fire in 1613 during a performance of
Henry VIII
when an enterprising special effects man fired two cannon to welcome the arrival of the actor playing the king. These set fire to the thatch and the theatre was destroyed. The only casualty was a man whose breeches caught fire and who ‘put it out with bottled ale’.

Shakespeares Globe Theatre

The construction of a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe was due to the enterprise of the American actor Sam Wanamaker who died in 1993 before the project was completed. Having seen a replica of the original theatre at a fair in Chicago as a young man he came to London to see the original and was shocked to find that it no longer existed. The actual site of the original Globe is nearby and its foundations may be seen in the courtyard of some flats on Park Street.

A special, if bizarre, place in the history of theatre is reserved for a much later structure, the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, built in 1720. Henry Fielding became its manager in 1735 and proceeded to produce a series of plays which satirised the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole as a cynical swindler. The government attempted to prosecute the proprietor of the theatre under the 1714 Vagrancy Act, taking advantage of the fact that the Act enabled actors to be classed as vagrants. The defence argued that, as the freeholder of a substantial property – the theatre – the proprietor, whose name was John Harper, was clearly not a vagrant. They further argued that he was unsuitable for the normal penalty for vagrancy, hard labour, because ‘he being so corpulent, it is not possible for him either to labour, or to wander a great deal’. Enraged, in 1737 Walpole passed the Theatrical Licensing Act which made the Lord Chamberlain responsible for issuing licences to theatres and for licensing plays before they could be staged. The office survived until 1968.

He was in charge

Other theatres have less controversial histories. One of the most famous throughout the world is the London Palladium in Argyll Street near Oxford Circus. It opened as a music hall in 1910 with over 2,000 seats and made the careers of a number of entertainers as well as featuring many established stars like Judy Garland, The Beatles and Danny Kaye whose show in 1948 was so popular that special arrangements had to be made to obtain tickets for King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the two princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. On 25th September 1955 the London Palladium turned to the still new medium of television for the legendary
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, the first show featuring Gracie Fields. In 1958 an unknown entertainer called Bruce Forsyth was brought from a small venue in Eastbourne to host the show and built an audience of 28 million – half the total population of Britain at the time. On one occasion in 1961, during an actors’ strike, Sir Bruce Forsyth and Norman Wisdom carried the whole show themselves and earned widespread praise. In 1967 the show came to an end but the Palladium remains one of London’s most popular venues and still hosts the Royal Variety Performance each year.

The London Palladium

U
ntil 1950 brewing was one of London’s major industries with hundreds of substantial breweries throughout the capital. There is now only one major brewery left – that of Fuller, Smith and Turner in Chiswick. All the others have moved out of town. Whitbread’s Chiswell Street Brewery, opened in 1750, survives as a conference centre, beer having last been brewed there in 1976. But it is estimated that there are still about 7,000 pubs in London. In the 18th century, with a population one tenth of that which London now has, there were 15,000 drinking establishments, many of them selling gin to a population that used it to pacify querulous babies as well as to escape the realities of their lives. The drunkenness which was commonplace in Victorian Britain (not a phenomenon unique to the 21st century) led to the passing of licensing laws which regulated the numbers of pubs and their opening hours. These were further restricted during World War I when a story circulated that the disasters of the Battle of the Somme were due in part to a shortage of shells caused by excessive drinking by munitions workers. This was nonsense but a good story and led to the nationalisation of pubs near armaments factories, including pubs in Enfield where Lee-Enfield rifles were made. These were sold back to the private sector in 1922 though licensing laws of various degrees of restrictiveness have been a feature of pub life since.

Many of London’s pubs have strange names which echo their histories. One of the busiest is the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping. This riverside pub, popular with sporting teams as well as journalists, dates from 1520 when its association with pirates and smugglers earned it the name The Devil’s Tavern. Nearby is Execution Dock where pirates and smugglers were hanged and their bodies left swinging from a gibbet for the duration of three tides. In 1777 its name was changed when a ship called the
Prospect
, registered at Whitby, was moored nearby. Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens and JMW Turner were regular patrons.

The Prospect of Whitby

Another pub with sinister associations is the charming Lamb and Flag in Rose Street, Covent Garden. First recorded in 1623 it is one of central London’s oldest pubs and was originally called The Bucket of Blood because of the prize-fights with which the Covent Garden area was associated well into the 18th century. The first official poet laureate, John Dryden, was attacked here in 1679 for writing scurrilous verses about one of Charles II’s mistresses, the Duchess of Portsmouth. The pub has a bar named in Dryden’s honour. Even older and more sinister is The Ostrich at Colnbrook, near Heathrow Airport (ironic given the non-flying species of bird). Dating from 1106 it owes its notoriety to a 17th-century landlord called Jarman and his wife whose hospitality extended to murdering and then robbing their guests by tipping them from their beds into a vat of liquid. They were caught when the body of their last victim, a wealthy merchant called Thomas Cole, was found in a nearby brook, thereby allegedly giving the area its name, Colnbrook.

Teetotal pub

Other pubs have gentler associations. The Mayflower, in Rotherhithe High Street, was built in about 1550 and known as The Shippe. In 1620 Captain Christopher Jones moored his vessel, the
Mayflower
, nearby before sailing for America with the Pilgrim Fathers, picking up passengers from Plymouth on the way and returning in subsequent years. In the 18th century it was rebuilt, supposedly incorporating timbers from the
Mayflower
in its structure. It was renamed The Spread Eagle and Crown but changed its name back to The Mayflower in 1957. It is very popular with American visitors and, because of its association with the USA, for many years it was the only place in the UK which sold American postage stamps.

Not far distant, in Greenwich, is The Trafalgar Tavern which opened in 1837 and quickly became a favourite meeting place for government ministers to enjoy dinners consisting of whitebait taken from the Thames. The last official Whitebait Dinner was celebrated by Gladstone’s ministry in 1880 after which The Trafalgar went into decline. It was restored and reopened in 1968, complete with whitebait dinners (though not from the Thames, from which the fish had vanished). A dining club called Saints and Sinners, including some of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers, resumed the habit of dining there.

The Anchor on Bankside dates from the 15th century and was almost certainly known to Shakespeare on account of its proximity to the Globe and other Elizabethan-era theatres. On 2nd September 1666 as the Great Fire of London gathered strength, Samuel Pepys visited the pub and ‘staid till it was dark and saw the fire grow’. It also featured in the opening credits of the popular television series
Minder
. Perhaps the most unlikely pub name in London is The John Snow in Broadwick Street, off Carnaby Street in Soho. It stands close to the site of the former surgery of Dr John Snow who observed that people drawing water from a nearby well died of cholera and concluded that cholera was transmitted in polluted water. Few believed him at the time. John Snow would no doubt be alarmed to learn that he is commemorated in a pub – by all accounts he was a strict teetotaller. Finally, The Princess Louise in High Holborn, named after Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, has been described as ‘the most beautiful pub in Britain’. In 2007 it was thoroughly refurbished and returned to its full Victorian splendour with ornate plasterwork, gilt mirrors, decorated tiles and wood-panelled booths around an island bar. Prop up the bar and you’re likely to be rubbing shoulders with thirsty professors from nearby London University and curators from the British Museum.