London Urban Legends (19 page)

The Great Fire of London, now believed to have been an accident that started at a bakery in Pudding Lane, was long regarded as a piece of Catholic terrorism. Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker living in Romford, confessed to starting the fire, being an ‘agent of the Pope' and taking a bribe from the king of France. England was also at war with Holland at the time of the fire and it was feared that ‘the French and the Dutch have fire'd the City'. Despite concerns about his mental state, Hubert was hanged at Tyburn on 28 September 1666 for starting the fire, before it emerged that he had in fact arrived in London two days after the fire had begun. During the execution, an effigy of the Pope was burned with a head full of cats that screamed for the pleasure of the crowd as the flames reached them.

The Monument to the Great Fire of London at Fish Street had inscriptions blaming Hubert and ‘Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched', which were not permanently removed until 1830.

On Monday, 2 September 1666, the second day of the fire, a maid from Covent Garden called Anne English was arrested after she was reportedly claimed that a group of French men had delivered a warning to her master. The men told him to move his goods as ‘within six weeks that house and all the street would be burned to the ground'. She was interrogated at Whitehall, but denied the story stating that she had heard ‘that the French and Dutch had kindled the fire in the City.'

The helpful terrorist has an ancestor in a warning passed on before the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Just before it's failed execution, there was a warning delivered to the Catholic Lord Monteagle who was having dinner in Hoxton when he received a letter pleading with him to ‘shift of your attendance at this Parliament' as Parliament was due ‘a terrible blow' on 5 November. This is not thought to be a genuine warning from one Catholic to another however. The origin of this warning is suspected to be from Monteagle himself who knew some of those involved in plotting an attack, but did not want to be seen to betray them. Another suggestion is that it was a secret service letter that was designed to be used as evidence against those plotting atrocities. Basil Thomson was a former intelligence officer who was sometimes involved in disseminating misinformation. Perhaps, this urban legend is a covert way of drawing information out of the public. Propaganda has been used as a tool for a long time, but once the story has been released, it is free to be adapted and moulded and is not easy to control. As well as planted rumour, there were hoaxers, liars, old prejudices, people who communicate their ideas through allegory and story, and the people who believe the stories and pass them on.

There is one more tale of an act of kindness gaining insight set in London but the knowledge is of a very different nature. Broadcaster, journalist and wit Nancy Spain (1917–1964) is reported to have seen a ghost on Piccadilly. Spain saw the ghost after she had just left Fortnum & Mason and was looking for a cab. One pulled up in front of her and a woman with red hair got out, fumbling in her purse. Spain was in a hurry and paid the fare for the elderly woman who then went into the store without saying a word. Once Nancy Spain was in the cab the driver said, ‘You were caught there, Miss. That old gal could buy both of us. That was Lady C.' Speaking of the incident the next day, Spain was wordlessly given a newspaper by her mother that carried the headline, ‘Lady C. Dies in Fire'. The knowledge Spain gained through her generosity was of the world of ghosts and not of terrorism.

Spain apparently saw ghosts in the strangest places; she once encountered the spectre of her friend Bin who had died at the age of twenty-four at a restaurant. Of the event she said, ‘Once I am sure I saw her come into a restaurant. She sat down and ordered, of all things, a Scotch Egg. But when I leapt up to say hello she seemed to vanish, leaving a hard, clear line for a second, as a piece of paper does when it burns in the fire.'

The stranger's warning legend is the classic story of entertaining angels unaware, or the fairtytale of a hero or heroine who gained the favour of god through an act of kindness. The story shows how kindness can be rewarded and has the hopeful note that an attack may be avoided.

German airmen are careful not to bomb breweries and maltings in
Britain because Hitler knows that if Britons go on drinking at the
present rate, we shall lose the war.

Unnamed clergyman from Chester and Warrington
Methodist Synod quoted from
The Tumour in the Whale
.

T
HE GORDON RIOTS
of June 1780, London’s most violent protest, were inspired, or at least encouraged, by Lord George Gordon’s speeches against laws proposing to allow the nation’s Catholic citizens the right to buy land, practise medicine, teach and join the House of Commons or Lords. More fuel for the mob’s fury came as a result of fearful rumours of 20,000 Jesuits hiding beneath tunnels under the Thames, waiting to take London on orders of the Pope, like the Germans lurking in King William Street Station (
See
here
) .

By 1914, in the prelude to the First World War, it was London’s German community who had become the enemies within as London’s most violent riots since the Gordon Riots destroyed German shops and homes. The 1914 issue of
The Railway Magazine
prompted a police investigation of the abandoned King William Street tube station after suggesting it was being used as a base and weapons store for German infiltrators.

The Nazis’ Favourite Landmarks

The Blitz brought new stories. As people died and whole neighbourhoods were devastated, stories swirled around London landmarks to explain how and when they survived. Nelsons Column still stood because Adolf Hitler had taken an interest in it. On his successful occupation of London, he had planned to carry the symbol of British naval might to Germany as a way of underlining his victory.

The 1930s tower of Senate House, University of London’s imposing base in Bloomsbury, survived because, according to Graham Greene, it was used as a marker for bombers approaching Kings Cross and St Pancras stations. Senate House was also earmarked to be the base Hitler planned to use as the German central office for ruling Britain after their invasion.

The 1937 Art Deco block of flats Du Cane Court in Balham is quite pleased of its reputation as Hitler’s possible home or HQ in London. The Führer even placed spies within the building. Like Senate House, German air crews would use the Du Cane Court as a handy landmark: ‘It was turn left at Du Cane Court and then head home for Germany.’ Du Cane Court is proud enough of the legend to put the story up on its website but also sheepishly ponders whether the block’s architecture may really have attracted the genocidal leader; but ‘true or not, the flats were quite an innovation at the time’. Antony Clayton, in
The Folklore of London
, uncovered stories that the architect of Du Cane Court was a Nazi sympathiser who planned to have the building make a swastika in the middle of South London when viewed from the air. This takes us back to the stealth swastika of the kindly prisoner-of-war German soldier and his gardening surprise (
See
‘The Hidden Insult’
here
).

Some South London landmarks that were removed included the golden
Goddess of Gaiety
statue at the top of Wimbledon Theatre, which was taken down in 1940 and not replaced until 1992, as it was thought to be an excellent guide to German bombers. On the edge of London, and on the top of a hill, St Helier Hospital in Carshalton was painted black during the Second World War so it would not be used as a landmark for incoming German planes.

All of these landmarks fared better than the north tower of the ruined Crystal Palace. Having survived the fire of 1936, which destroyed the rest of the glass building, the tower was destabilised and blown up with dynamite in 1941 because many, including William Kent in his
Lost Treasures of London
book, thought it was being used as a navigation point for German bombers. Other reasons included to prevent it falling in a bombing raid; presumably a controlled explosion was safer, and the tower’s steel was needed for the war effort. This was the line used in a British Pathé news film of the demolition, called
Crystal Palace Tower – The End
. People were sceptical about the gathering of scrap metal and park railings during the Second World War, thinking that the metal was not and could not have been used for weapons and vehicles. The collecting of metal was thought to be a morale-boosting exercise and the metal was used as ships’ ballast, dumped in the Thames Estuary or taken out to sea to be dumped by Canning Town dockers in such great amounts that incoming ships had to be guided in by pilots because the quantities of metal were affecting their compasses.

Another building thought to be spared by the bombers was Winchester Cathedral, as the Nazi propaganda broadcaster Lord Haw-Haw was said to have gone to the school by the cathedral and had asked Field Marshall Goring to spare it in the raids. Another rumour told of Hitler planning to be crowned as king at Winchester Cathedral once Germany was victorious. A retort to the Winchester rumour said, ‘Any Coronation dream would obviously have Westminster Abbey as its centre.’

The removal and camouflage of prominent landmarks was perhaps a sensible precaution before and during the Blitz. On the eve of the Second World War, London was preparing for sustained aerial bombardment and for mass burials, stocking up on cardboard coffins, for example; London County Council envisaged mass burials in lime pits. The predictions for an aerial bombardment on London were based on 700 tons of high explosive being released with the casualty rates of 175,000 per week. The destruction of towers, the removal of bright objects from theatres and painting landmark buildings black therefore seems feasible. The estimates were far greater than the actual, still terrible, death toll of the war: the total bombs dropped on Britain were an estimated 64,393 tons, killing 51,509 people.

There is another factor. The architecture of Du Cane Court and Senate House must have linked them to the Nazis and Hitler in the minds of frightened and angry Londoners. Ironically, Senate House was designed to symbolise the future world, having survived the First World War, and it was actually intended to be an international beacon of learning: ‘It must not be a replica from the Middle Ages.’ Perhaps these rumours of Hitler’s interest evolved out of Londoners’ suspicions at the modernism of the architecture of Du Cane Court and Senate House and their resemblance more to the Reichstag building than to the British Museum or Natural History Museum. With enemy planes flying overhead and spies rumoured to be everywhere, the Second World War must have felt like no other time to London civilians. Perhaps all of these legends come from Londoners feeling enemy eyes directly on the landmarks of their lives.

The One and the Many