London Urban Legends (8 page)

Researching things is great, not only because you find out things you want to know, but that you always happen upon strange and probably apocryphal facts you never knew you needed to look into. A story dated 15 August 1993 in the
Independent
newspaper tells me that Crouch End once had more curry houses than all of Austria. This does sound possible, although twenty years on and TripAdvisor is listing thirty-one Indian restaurants in Vienna alone.

I stumbled on this while reading up on the connection between megalithic American folk-rocker Bob Dylan and his visits to Crouch End. Apparently he viewed a house there back in 1993 and became a regular at the Shamrat of India curry house. ‘I recognised him from the telly,’ said the owner at the time, ‘but I’m more of a Beatles fan myself.’ Bob wasn’t getting a lot of love in Crouch End back then – the owner of the local guitar shop said that ‘he used to be good, but he’s rubbish now.’

According to urban legend a further indignity for Dylan may have happened around the same time. The real untrue story of Bob Dylan in Crouch End begins with his friendship with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, who once owned a recording studio called the Crypt, on 145 Crouch Hill. Stewart invited Dylan round, saying that the next time he was in Crouch End he should visit the studio. Dylan was seemingly so keen that he gave the studio’s address at the airport so he could go straight there. Unfortunately the taxi driver dropped Dylan off, not at Dave Stewart’s grand recording studio in an old church, but on nearby Crouch End Hill, where No.145 was a house. Dylan knocked on the door, asked for Dave and to compound his series of unfortunate events a Dave did live at the house, but was out at the time. Dave’s wife said that he would be back soon, so would the mumbling American gentleman like to come in and wait for him? And would he like a cup of tea? Dave the plumber later arrived home and asked his wife if there were any messages for him. She said, ‘No, but Bob Dylan’s in the living room having a cup of tea.’

Writer Emma Hartley investigated the story for her ‘Emma Hartley’s Glamour Cave’ folk music blog in a post dated, of course, 1 April 2013. She rang the Crypt studio and was told by an Anthony Lerner that he had ‘heard it from the man who was Dave Stewart’s chief sound engineer at that time’. Emma went out to Crouch End to knock on the door of the house on Crouch End Hill. It was while walking up the hill that she discovered that there is no No. 145. Perhaps the taxi driver was even more cloth-eared than we thought and took Dylan to No. 45 Crouch End Hill, which was, at least in the 1891 census, a residential property. Or perhaps the whole story is made up.

Consoling herself with a drink at Banner’s Restaurant, No. 21 Park Road, Crouch End, she spotted a mural on the side of the building showing Bob Dylan asking, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ Inside, Emma was shown a brass plaque declaring that ‘Bob Dylan sat at this table, August 1993’. Apparently, after his ill-fated trip to a possibly non-existent house on Crouch End Hill, Dylan went to console himself with a drink. At the time, however, Banner’s alcohol licence did not allow people to have a drink without food, so Bob Dylan was turned down. He asked them ‘Do you know who I am?’ just so the restaurant staff were sure of who they were denying booze. The response is not recorded, but it seems like Bob Dylan just can’t get a break in Crouch End.

They were not history, but legends …

Steve Roud, London Lore

The Deptford Jolly Roger

Tucked down a street that’s off another street that comes off Creek Road in Deptford is St Nicholas Church. The churchyard is dense and old, and Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlow is buried somewhere in its grounds. On the gateposts leading into the churchyard is another of the church’s famous features: two large decaying, yet still grinning, stone skulls crossed with bones underneath. This striking feature has acquired a legend to suit its visual impact, because these skulls and crossbones are the inspiration for the pirate flag, the Jolly Roger.

Deptford’s maritime history is mostly obliterated, save a couple of warehouses and watergates by the river, but it was once the ‘King’s Yard’, having been founded by Henry VIII, remaining a naval and shipping hub until after the Napoleonic Wars. Captain James Cook’s ship the HMS
Resolution
set off from and was refitted at the dockyard, and Sir Francis Drake was knighted by Elizabeth I aboard the
Golden Hind
at Deptford. By the 1840s ships had become larger, and the shallow, narrow bed of the river made getting to Deptford difficult, closing the area to major shipping.

With over 300 years of naval history, Deptford must have had its fair share of pirates, or would-be pirates, passing St Nicholas Church on their way to their ship, the tavern or even to their execution. Many of them who looked up were inspired by these blood-curdling sculptures enough to incorporate their likeness into their flag and spread the terror of it across the seas.

London bloggers, ever on the lookout for an eye-opening and quirky fact, love the story. An undated ‘Summer Strolls’ walk around Deptford published by
Time Out
mentions the legend; even the website of St Nicholas and St Luke’s churches repeats the story, although keeps its factual possibility at fingertips’ length. The site describes the skull and crossbones flag as a means for British privateer sailors (‘freelance’ sailors who were paid on commission, working for the British Navy, fighting against the French, Spanish and Dutch ships for the control of the world’s trade routes) to hide their nationality by flying the Jolly Roger rather than the English or Union Flag. The Information Britain website even names Henry Morgan, a former British admiral turned privateer who must have been familiar with Deptford, as the St Nicholas parishioner who first got the idea.

The difference between a privateer and a pirate is who benefits from the loot you steal. Henry Morgan was privateering for England and would have flown the English flag as he raided and looted innocent (or enemy) ships.

Historically, the Jolly Roger was not a ubiquitous symbol of piracy and was not adopted as a universal symbol of the pirate’s outlaw status. Pirate flags were more in keeping with naval rules of engagement than the attitude of criminals. When one ship attacked another, a red flag was flown to indicate that they were in conflict. If the attacking ship was victorious, it would take the ship and its cargo and take the surviving crew prisoner, or ‘give quarter’. To fly a black flag meant to give no quarter: the attacking ship would take no prisoners, so to avoid a slaughter the defending ship had best surrender without a fight. Pirates favoured the black flag, as often this is what would happen; even when outnumbered, enemy ships would surrender to avoid a massacre.

Over time, pirates began to decorate their black flags with personal symbolism in a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century example of ‘pimping’ something up: Thomas Tew’s black flag showed an arm holding a dagger; Edward Teach, the infamous Blackbeard, flew a black flag featuring a skeleton stabbing a heart with an arrow; Bartholomew Roberts, Black Bart, had himself on his flag, holding one side of an hourglass with Death holding the other side. (This was followed by an even more flamboyant flag of himself holding a dagger and a flaming sword, with each foot on a skull). Calico Jack, John Rackam, flew a skull crossed with swords underneath while Henry Every flew a skull in profile with crossed bones beneath; not quite the symbol on the Deptford church. Edward English, born in Ireland, did fly the skull and crossbones, but there are few records of his early life and it is not known whether he visited Deptford.

The skull and crossbones itself is an old symbol that had already graced Spanish graveyards by the time St Nicholas was built. The earliest mention of pirates raising the skull and crossbones comes from a logbook entry dated 6 December 1687. It reads: ‘And we put down our white flag, and raised a red flag with a Skull head on it and two crossed bones (all in white and in the middle of the flag), and then we marched on.’ There may be a possibility that a pirate, when designing his own flag, thought of St Nicholas in Deptford and copied the design. That pirate did not do it so well, though. As the church’s website points out, the skulls wear a laurel-wreath on their heads, probably to signify the victory over death over transient flesh. This wreath has not made it on to any pirate flags. It is still a story loved in Deptford, though. A local pub, the Bird’s Nest, has even nicknamed itself the ‘pirate pub’ due to the Jolly Roger legend.

The London Stone

History can be hidden in plain sight in the dustiest and busiest locations. Opposite Cannon Street station, set behind a metal grid in front of a branch of WHSmith sits the London Stone. The stone was the centre of a story in 2012 that named it as essential to the survival of London itself. It had been in its approximate location for a millennia or two, but the redevelopment of Cannon Street meant that property company Minerva wanted to move the stone, so that they could demolish the 1960s office block it occupies. The plan was to place it in the corner of its gleaming new Walbrook building on the corner of Cannon Street and Walbook. ‘The new dedicated setting will enhance the significance of the asset,’ Minerva wrote in 2011, ‘and better reveal its significance for current and future generations.’ Minerva did not, however, count on newspapers reporting the story with fears that moving the stone would be disaster to London. The
Evening Standard
, along with other papers, discovered an ancient saying that read: ‘So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long will London flourish.’