London Urban Legends (14 page)

There stands Brigham, like a bird on a perch.

His hand to the bank and his back to the church.

In his book
Curses! Broiled Again!
, Jan Harold Brunvand repeated the Brigham Young song and also found a statue of Scottish poet Robert Burns in Dunedin, New Zealand, standing in The Octagon, the city centre plaza, with his back to St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral and facing the ‘commercial section of the city’. He correctly writes that he suspects there are more of the same legends elsewhere. I suppose it makes sense not to have a statue facing into a church with its back to arrivals, and with the famous figure looking outwards on to the material world, there is bound to be something inappropriate and unsuitable for their gaze to fall upon. I think it is human nature to comment on the juxtaposition between the two, but the rhyme that links Queen Anne and Brigham Young is a curious one, without pointing out that this must be the only thing linking these two historical figures. I would say the Salt Lake City rhyme follows the London one, though I have not found conclusive evidence for this, and I am sure any book on Salt Lake City urban legends may beg to differ. The Queen Anne statue is older, however: Brigham’s bronze went up in 1847 and I am inclined to think that this urban legend migrated from England to America in this instance and not the other way around.

The earliest reference I can find to the ‘Brandy Nan’ rhyme is from an article of royal nicknames from the
Northern Echo
on 12 May 1896, which tantalisingly says that ‘readers will remember the following lines which a wit of questionable taste bestowed on [Queen Anne’s] statue’. The rhyme was well known enough to make it into
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable
, published in 1898.

The original statue did receive a lot of abuse aside from insulting poems. In September 1743 the
Universal London Morning Advertiser
described the release of John Vaile, who had spent time in an asylum for breaking off the statues sceptre. ‘Notes & Queries’ from 11 April 1857 remembers that an arm was knocked off the statue in 1780, and was rumoured to have been done by a drunken man (though it may just have fallen off.) It notes that ‘the statue of Queen Anne in St Paul’s Church Yard seems endowed with the undesirable power of provoking the malice of iconoclasts’.

People still couldn’t leave the statue alone in the 1960s, as a
Daily Telegraph
story from 20 October 1967 states that the statue is still ‘a persistent target for vandals and over the years has been robbed of limbs, fingers, orb and sceptre.’

The statue of Queen Anne now has a fence running across her plinth and stands in peace; the only real indignity delivered to her now is how often she is mistaken for that other slightly stout female monarch, Queen Victoria.

Brandy Nan on the Prowl

The iconoclasts had better watch out. Way west of St Paul’s, over on Queen Anne’s Gate just off St James’ Park, is another statue of Queen Anne that has an even stranger story attached to it than that of a boozy poem and a connection to a Mormon leader. In this quiet corner of affluent London, on the anniversary of Queen Anne’s death – 1 August – the statue gets down from its pedestal and walks up and down the road.

The earliest version of the statue moving that I have found was in a cartoon by Peter Jackson for the
Evening News
. A later version, in the
Reader’s Digest
book
Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain
is the source for paranormal researcher James Clarke’s account in his book
Haunted London
. James’ account has the addition of the statue’s promenade taking place on the stroke of midnight of the anniversary of the queen’s death which, he told me, came from the guide of a walking tour he had taken. Always a reliable source.

Everyone loves the terrifying thought of statues coming alive. The earliest account I could find that may relate to Queen Anne’s statue moving is from
Return of Outdoor Memorials in London
and reads as follows: ‘The children of the locality were accustomed in their play to call upon the statue, by the name of ‘Bloody Queen Mary’, to descend from its pedestal, and on receiving, naturally, no response, to assail it with missiles.’

This does not sound to me like an account of a walking statue, but of a game played by children. There may be other and earlier stories of the Queen Anne statue walking around that the compiler of
Returns
may not have known about, but the children did. Or perhaps it was a game children played before pelting the statue, and the story grew from misreadings of this account and similar ones. But where did the story of the statue moving on an auspicious date come from?

Western Europe’s landscape is littered with stone circles, lines of stones and other clusters of stone left from our Neolithic past. At present, these are places of fascination; tourist sites that, for some, hold some ancient peace and wisdom within their bulk and patterns. Earlier peoples had a terror of these giant stones lying on the land and formed different stories of magic to explain them. So the Bulmer Stone in Darlington turns nine times at midday, while the stones that make up the circles of Nine Maids of Belstone Tor and Merry Maids of St Buryan are in fact petrified women who danced on the Sabbath. All of these legendary stones move at some point in time – at cock’s crow, at midnight, at midday, on Midsummer Eve or Midwinter Eve or some other time. There are at least three hundred accounts of stones or stone circles moving at a liminal time, like the change of one day to another for Queen Anne, and the legend has managed to make its way from the countryside and into Westminster to attach itself to the statue. This may have been unconscious, as folklore, or conscious, by attaching an older myth to a new object. That statues move like megaliths has also made its way to Bloomsbury, where a recent tale emerged about the stone lions sitting outside the north entrance of the British Museum. Be there at midnight and you will see them stand up and stretch. Ideas are more durable than stone: even before statues wear away, their meaning can become lost and confused but ideas can breed and evolve amongst human humour, wit, error and fear, and can travel in the breath and letters of everyone.

The Black Death has entered London’s folk memory as a founding urban myth; every pothole in the road, every bump in a tube journey, every square or roundabout seems to have a plague story attached to it.

Richard Barnett,
Sick City: Two Thousand Years
of Life and Death In London

W
HEN I FIRST
moved to the capital I lived in south-west London. I was told that nearby Mortlake had gained its name from the time of the Great Plague. The bodies of plague victims had been sunk into the lake which, forever more, was known as ‘The Lake of the Dead’: Mort-lake. I was not the only new arrival to London to hear about the city’s burial sites for plague victims. A friend fresh from the north west of England and new to south-east London was told that she would need inoculating before going up to the giant plague pit that is Blackheath. Even after decades here it feels like a step cannot be taken in London without crushing someone’s bones, and a journey cannot be made without passing by, or through, a plague pit.

Clear pieces of land in the overcrowded city are thought to be where plague pits sit and seethe in the landscape. A work colleague and I were discussing this, and he told me that the ‘small green on Caledonian Road and Wynford Street is on the site of a plague pit. That’s why it was never built on.’ He was told this in the early 1970s when he started a job in that area.

These mass graves are too dangerous to dig into or build over; infection may be lurking beneath the soil waiting for fresh air and a fresh chance to infect people. I read on a web forum that if there is an oval bulging out of an otherwise straight alley behind a line of Victorian houses, it is because there is a plague pit there. These could be seen on maps of nineteenth-century Tottenham, Stoke Newington and Islington before twentieth-century developers blundered over them.

Mount Pond on Clapham Common is a plague pit, as is the triangular piece of land where Champion Hill meets Denmark Hill in Camberwell. Horniman Triangle, the field opposite the Horniman Museum, is a plague pit. The roundabout on the corner of Gypsy Hill and Allen Park is a pit. In Norbury in the 1980s there was a protest against plans to put storage containers on a piece of land thought to be a plague pit.

They are not just a suburban danger, however. In his book
Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets
, Stephen Smith mentions that the Harvey Nichols basement menswear department has a low ceiling as the building cannot be dug any deeper into the ground, for fear of disturbing a pit. In the 1970s and ’80s the London Folklore Group’s newsletter,
London Lore
, told of an international bank with an office in the City on Gracechurch Street whose employees thought it was built over the graves of plague victims. The building had its own water supply, which some of the workers in the bank would refuse to drink for fear of infection.

The London Underground has to curve around, drop under or plough straight through the assembled subterranean plague victims previously left in peace. The 1972
Reader’s Digest
book
Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain
lists a tale about the Bakerloo line whilst on the way to St John’s Wood from Baker Street. This is now part of the Jubilee line. There is a point between the stations where the ears of passengers ‘pop’ as the tube tunnel drops to dip underneath a plague pit which sits beneath the Marylebone war memorial. The Piccadilly line between Knightsbridge and South Kensington stations has to bend around Brompton Oratory to avoid a plague pit. Bank station, in the heart of the City, is built on a plague pit or at least will stink ‘like an open grave’ from fumes wafting up from the pit Liverpool Street station is built into. The Victoria line cut through a plague pit under Green Park in the 1960s, and according to Mike Heffernan on the Unexplained Mysteries website: ‘A huge tunnel-boring machine ploughed straight into a long-forgotten plague pit at Green Park, traumatising several brawny construction workers on site.’

Stephen Smith reveals why Muswell Hill does not have a tube station: ‘They started to dig a tunnel there and hit a plague pit!’ One can also find on the internet the answer to the mystery of why there are far fewer tube stations in south London: because of endless pockets of dead plague victims. Tube drivers using the southbound escape tunnel for runaway trains on the Bakerloo line between Lambeth North and the Elephant and Castle must take care to not hit the end too hard, as a plague pit lies just beyond the walls at the end of the line.

Blackheath