A London Bridge mystery, demystified

A Guest Post by Stephen Cooper.

In research for my book of the Great War told through the experiences of men from one London rugby club, I stumbled across a neglected landmark with a poignant tale. In 2010 I wrote these opening words for a chapter:

“Head south over London Bridge, towards Borough High Street, the old coaching road to Kent. Southwark cathedral crouches to the right and the clumsy bulk of the station’s viaduct looms ahead. Look for a once-splendid, once-white façade: an elaborate blend of arch, balustrade and ornament, with carved swags of hops, grapes and even a stag’s head. Now grey with soot, this, like Miss Havisham’s wedding-cake, is a ghost of a building.

The hands of its clock with black Roman numerals are fixed at 11.47 as they have been since the early 1960s. Ragged shrubs sprout from crevices where no plant should grow, and the faïence frontage offers a tempting canvas to the graffiti artist. This wan face among grimy walls and thrusting plate-glass neighbours like the Shard is a ghostly survivor from another era. It is a corner of the capital where time has indeed stopped.

For over a century, Findlater’s Corner has been a familiar sight to the southbound City worker, ‘passed or seen by more persons every day than any other spot in London’*. The current structure is shrunken from its Victorian original by the encroachments of railway and advertising hoardings. Peter Ackroyd’s London the Biography observes the lingering spirit of place that binds many capital landmarks to their past. Call this instead a ‘place of spirit’, for today it is a branch of an eccentric national wine-seller, evoking its first incarnation in 1856 as headquarters of Findlater, Mackie, Todd & Co. Ltd, Wine & Spirit Merchants.

In the cruellest month of April 1915, a boy brings a curt telegram from the War Office to these same premises, addressed to the Chairman. Its formulaic words, by now dreaded in households across the country, regret a death in the family. A brother, husband and father are all fallen in one man. Since that day another spirit has haunted this corner: the gregarious wine-merchant, soldier and international rugby player, Alec Todd.”

The chapter goes on to tell of Todd’s experience as a British Lion rugby player in South Arica in 1896, of his fighting the Boer War there four years later and of his death near Ypres in 1915. He had nominated his brother, James, as Next of Kin (NOK) so that wife Alice would not hear the fateful knock at her Ascot door. He was shot through the neck at Hill 60 east of Ypres on April 18. The National Archive shows a flurry of telegrams from the War Office to the Norfolk Regiment depot to ascertain the correct NOK. By the time the ‘serious wounding’ telegram arrives at Findlater’s Corner three days later, CaptainTodd is dead in a Casualty Clearing Station near Poperinghe.

Picture: Stephen May.

The stopped clock was much photographed and internet searches revealed a history of graffiti headaches for the Council. The romantic in me speculated whether the telegram had arrived at 11:47 that April morning in 1915. Had the clock stopped perhaps on the 50th anniversary of Alec’s death? No way of knowing, but it made a good story. That is, until October 27, 2012.

This was the afternoon, three months after the book’s publication, when riding over London Bridge on my trusty Vespa, I glanced up to find the hands at 02:30. Aghast, I enquired inside: ‘Ah, that would be Boris’, I was told. Turns out our esteemed Mayor, bicycling to a meeting at his nearby City Hall, had trusted the clock’s time, only to arrive late. In a fit of civic efficiency, he commanded that a Derby clockmaker be summoned to restore the clock and change the ‘hands of time’. Thanks, Boris. The story is too good to lose, but I have relegated the Mayor’s intervention to a footnote – by way of revenge.
Todd maintains his mystique even in death. He is buried in ‘Pop’ but is also named on the Menin Gate, memorial to those with no known grave. Better that he is doubly remembered than he, or any man, be forgotten.

The full story and many other London nuggets can be discovered in ‘The Final Whistle: the Great War in Fifteen Players’ by Stephen Cooper, (Spellmount ) £14.99 from all the usual sources and also this month’s LH Members’ prize draw, don’t forget to enter.

*The Wine Trade Review  9 November 1934.

Norman Parkinson: A Class Act

This year is the centenary of Londoner of Note, Norman Parkinson (1913 – 1990), the tall, eccentric photographer with an aristocratic air and mischievous twinkle in his eye. And what an eye! Whether in black and white or colour, Parkinson mastered the medium with images which oozed class. Although he shot celebs in the second part of his career, first and foremost he was a fashion photographer; he gave mysterious, striking fashion models a uniquely cool allure. Parkinson’s best-known fashion picture is probably the one on the right, The Art of Travel, shot in Kenya for Vogue in 1951 and featuring his wife, Wenda, whom he used a lot in the late 40s and 1950s.

To celebrate Parkinson’s centenary, there is a free show of about a hundred of his works at the Lyttleton Theatre, National Theatre. They are broadly representative of his early fashion work for Vogue, featuring rangy, elegant models though to the celeb beautiful people of the 60s, 70s and 80s, including the Queen in that famous triple portrait in blue with Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother. The Beatles, Burton and Taylor, Jagger and Hall, Bowie. And on and on. Most will be drawn to these I suspect, but I loved the mid century fashion stuff. Quite beautiful models and exquisite clothes: gorgeous women in designer tweed. And it is stunning. I don’t think you see that nowadays: couturiers have lost that. Not that I’m any expert in such matters.

But you don’t have to be an expert to know your eyes are being treated to the work of a complete Master.

Lifework: Norman Parkinson’s Century of Style runs at the Lyttleton Theatre Space at the National Theatre until 12 May. Free.

Here are my favourite two images from the show.

India. A goat, a peasant boat woman and a determined posh gal in designer daywear. Bizarre and beautiful.

Three Little Dresses, 1961. Shot in Florence, a masterclass in composition. Even the pigeon looks deliberate.

World Book Day at the Guildhall Library

Readers will know that I’m quite the fan of the Guildhall. This position was strongly reinforced yesterday when I had the massive privilege of a tour of the Library with its Principal Librarian, Peter Ross.

The Guildhall Library was founded in the 1420s thanks to an endowment by that man, Richard Whittington, the wealthy Lord Mayor of London. It was, of course, a manuscript library to begin with, until print technology entered the picture at the turn of the 16C.

Then disaster struck in the late 1540s when scalliwag of history the Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector, decided to help himself to all of the collection, transporting it to his palace in three large carts, as recorded by John Stow. There is no record of what became of the collection thereafter. One would like to think that his demise at the executioner’s block was some pay-back for overdue books.

And that was the end of that until a library at the Guildhall was revived in 1820s. A little later a purpose-build home was constructed in 1870 to the East of Guildhall, designed by Horace Jones, the Tower Bridge man. Luckily it took just the one hit during the Blitz, although the books had been removed to safety.

In the 1960s the current library was built as an extension to the West of the Guildhall. Among much else, it houses the records of about 80 of the City’s 108 Livery Companies; records of Lloyds of London; records public companies within the Square Mile; admin records from the Stock Exchange. Plus, of course, many thousands of books and manuscripts, posters, broadsides and miscellaneous ephemera going back centuries. Other functions of the Library are materials conservation and protection, and it has a budget to acquire any historical printed matter relating to the City which comes onto the market.

It is the largest library in the world devoted to a single city.

The Guildhall Library is open to all and welcomes the opportunity to help members of the public with their research. It also hosts small exhibitions and displays (currently there is one featuring objects from the Worshipful Company of Bowyers (ie bow-makers)). There is a programme of talks by academic historians and authors.

My sincere thanks to Peter Ross and Anne-Marie Nankivell for their hospitality. I’ll explore the possibility of arranging a similar thing for a group of LH Members. Keep an eye on the web-site!

Except where stated, all pictures by Anne-Marie Nankivell. 

Treats in store

Pic: M Paterson

The Lure of the Underground

This is the name of a 1927 Underground poster by David Leete, to the right. Its humour, warmth, colour and indeed lure is representative of the inter-war golden age of the Tube’s commercial posters. It is one of 150  which have been selected from over 3,300 to make up this celebratory new exhibition at the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden.

You might argue that with so many to choose from, easy-peasy, they could hardly go wrong, and you’d be right. All are wonderful. But they haven’t been chosen simply as lovely art, but also what those who ran the network were trying to say about the Tube. Furthermore, they didn’t so much advertise the Tube itself (though many did that too), but rather what the Tube gives us, or more accurately where it takes us. So we have the theatre, all the major sports, museums, galleries, cinema, shows, exhibitions and the zoo. Despite not being especially close to a particular station, London Zoo has been the most frequently represented attraction.

For the Zoo, Book to Regent’s Park. by Charles Paine, 1921.

Undoubtedly, the richest poster era, as we have said, was the inter-war period. This was entirely due to the influence of one man: Frank Pick. Pick joined the Underground in in the early-1900s and almost immediately set to work in standardising how the organisation represented itself. The logo and the Johnston typeface (1913) was the basis of the branding. The job of posters was to be more than just informative. They had to be bright, clever, optimistic. Alluring. He began having them posted outside stations where they could be seen in good light and seen by all, not just paying passengers. He commissioned local talent, foreign talent, artists fresh out of art college and international stars such as Man Ray and Rex Whistler. And women! All Pick cared about was that the ideas were fresh and innovative and that the art was great.

For Property Lost, by Tom Eckersley, 1945. Eckersley got the nod from Pick fresh out of art college in the 1930s and was still producing great Tube posters in the 1970s.

Many of the problems of the Tube then are with us today. The system was often overcrowded, a situation exacerbated by peoples’ habits. Led by Pick, these were opposed with humour rather than bossiness. There is a wonderful series of  cartoon posters by the great Fougasse (Cyril Bird), exhorting people to stand on the right on the escalators; have your ticket ready at the barrier; spread out along the carriage; don’t crowd the platform entrances. There are others which try to persuade people and businesses to stagger their start and finish times for a less crowded commute; for non employed people please only to use the Tube between 9 and 4. Presumably people putting grubby feet on the seats, eating stinky food and having to be reminded to give up seats for the old and infirm still lay sometime in the yobbish future. For this period of the posters, the Tube is telling an unapologetically positive and optimistic story: London is a glamorous, sophisticated and modern metropolis: get the most out of it on the Tube. It can be argued that there is a certain innocence, naivety about all of this. But this is commercial art after all, and we must be conscious of our cynical 21st Century mind-set. This is made clear, I feel, with the later 20th Century stuff. The work is “good”, but one feels that its too clever for its own good, even classics such as Fly the Tube and the one we all know and love, The Tate by Tube. Maybe it’s the photography, barely used before the 1960s.

Congratulations to LTM for this wonderful show. Poster Art 150 continues until 27 October. Entry is included in museum ticket, standard price £15. LTM run the enlightened policy which we applaud and endorse of year-long valitity (other London institutions please take note).

Here are just a few more examples to whet your appetite.

It is Warmer Below by Frederick Charles Herrick, 1927. An oft-used theme was to use the Tube to escape the elements. The previous summer, Herrick did a poster called It is Cooler Below.

Away from it all by Underground at Whitsuntide, by MEM Law, 1932. Simple, beautiful, clever. Tube branding superfluous.

Power. The Nerve Centre of London’s Underground. by Edward McKnight Kauffer, 1931. Most artists were expert calligraphers. Understated Tube branding on this one.

10 Reasons We Love the Guildhall

1 It’s free!

2. Guildhall Yard. It wears both its modernity and antiquity very lightly. Two ancient structures – St Lawrence Jewry and the Guildhall itself – counterbalanced by the modern Guildhall Library and Guildhall Art Gallery, both late 20C. Integrated one with the other deliciously, architectural practice at its most sympathetic and very best. Then there is the pavement which incorporates the gentle curve marking the outline of the ancient Roman amphitheatre twenty feet or so below.

Guildhall and Art Gallery

St Lawrence Jewry

3 Staff. You’ll come across security who scan your bag inside the front door; someone on the front desk, and the two ladies (usually it’s ladies) who run the cloakroom downstairs. Always smiley, always friendly, always welcoming. Archivists and librarians ditto.

4 The Great Hall. A massive 15C late-gothic space containing monumental statuary commemorating Nelson, Wellington, both Pitts, plus huge statues of London’s legendary founding giants, Gog and Magog. It’s not always obvious whether it’s open, hence we had the place entirely to ourself one weekend last year. Do check!

5 The art. A very mixed bag, and something for everybody. In the main spaces at ground floor and mezzanine level there are many Victorian genre paintings and notable Pre-raphaelite stuff. But I rather like the London landscape paintings and big parades (Lord Mayor’s Show, Queen Victoria’s jubilee, etc). We use the gorgeous Blackfriars Bridge and St Paul’s by William Marlowe on the London Historian Members’ card. But special mention must go to…

6 … the massive The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 by the American artist John Singleton Copley. One of the largest oil paintings in the country, the picture was commissioned by the City of London in 1783. It’s actually a multiple portrait picture featuring the main players on the British side, made out as a battle scene. Its home in the gallery today is a bespoke space that was worked in to the design of the building.

7 George Dance the Younger. On his father’s death, George junior took over the role of surveyor for the City of London aged just 27. He designed dozens of significant London buildings, the vast majority of which no longer exist. Probably the most significant is the Guidlhall’s facade and front door. So elegant. It reminds me a lot of the fine old London city gates, demolished by his own father in 1760. Irony.

8 The Roman Amphitheatre. When you look at old models or illustrations of Roman London (there is a rather nice example in the Crypt Museum at St Hallows by the Tower), there is always a glaring omission: the amphitheatre. That’s because it was only discovered in the 1990s when archaeologists were having a bit of a sniff around prior to the construction of the art gallery. It is directly underneath Guildhall Yard. Except for ancient history purists, our Roman bits are far from spectacular, but the City has made a noble attempt to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, and I understand there is a big makeover in the pipeline.

9 Tradition. There are all sorts of grand dinners to which we lesser types are not party. Men (mainly) in Livery, Chains of Office, plumed hats, at the very least swanky white tie, their good ladies in tow. There are public ones, though, that take place in Guildhall Yard. My favourite it the Cart Marking Ceremony which happens in July.  Also the livery companies compete with one another on Shrove Tuesday in pancake races. Quite new, that one, but all traditions have to start somewhere.

Cart Marking July 2011

10 The Clockmakers’ Museum. Beyond the library you will find this little-known museum which celebrates the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers (#61, 1631) and its Members’ work and achievements down the centuries. The displays are gorgeous, inspirational and the stories are fascinating. And it’s free.

Review: Shakespeare’s Local

Visit the George Inn in Southwark and you’ll see copies of this recently-published book in the window. In reviewing this book, I am also reviewing the pub. We say pub, back in history there was clear distinction between ale house (drink only), tavern (food and drink) and inn (drink, food, accommodation). In its day it was par excellence an inn, a place where its functions were at one time or another spectacularly varied: hotel; restaurant; stables; playhouse; hop exchange; warehouse; post office, and much of the time simultaneously.

But today it is very much a pub; a pub which occupies about a quarter of its original real estate, the section which runs along what was the southern side of the old inn. It is down an alley off Borough High Street and you would miss it if you were not seeking it. The first section retains the galleried aspect which once would have run around the whole courtyard. Inside, it is as you might expect, all low ceilings and wooden beams. Plenty of wood. It is divided into small sections: about four bar/lounge bits and a restaurant bit at the far end. The walls are decorated with old photos and etchings of the inn, former denizens and worthies of the local area. There is in a frame a life assurance policy belonging to Charles Dickens. For he drank here, as did Churchill and Attlee.

Because this is a listed building under the aegis of the National Trust, there are no tellies, juke boxes, gambling machines or piped music. This is how it should be and makes for good ambience and conversational environment, almost totally lacking in pubs today. The brewery is Greene King, who don’t make fantastic beer in my opinion, but they do make a George Ale (4%) exclusively for this pub, which is not bad at all. Two pints came in at under £8 (sorry, wasn’t paying attention to my change), which is okay by me for what is supposedly a tourist trap situated in a “yuppie playground” – the author’s description of Borough today.

The George was neither the largest nor most famous of Southwark’s dozen-plus coaching inns (that accolade goes to the now-lost Tabard next door, as featured in Canterbury Tales). But it is the only surviving one, and that is what matters. In any case, it has a terrifically rich history in its own right. Pete Brown, ad industry escapee and award-winning beer writer* has written its biography. As befits the subject matter, he has a breezy style with occasional asides direct to camera. That’s not to say he doesn’t take his subject deadly seriously, he does. Shakepeare’s Local is thoroughly researched, taking forward past attempts by others which were eccentric at best, chief of whom one William Rendle.

The building of which the current George is a remnant, dates from 1676 following two disastrous fires which destroyed its predecessors. This was about half way through its life story taking us back to 15C pre-Tudor times. Brown invites us to ponder the “Trigg’s broom” (or Sugarbabes) question: is something whose fabric has been 100% replaced, still essentially the same thing? Being of romantic mien, he concludes yes, today’s George Inn can indeed be considered the same beast as its medieval great-great-grandparent and intervening iterations.

In this book, we learn what the pub was for, what it did and the people who lived in it, ran it, and crossed its portals. But as a well-rounded history book, we have context, that is to say the inter-relationship between the inn and Southwark, Southwark and London and indeed further afield. How the fortunes of the George and its owners waxed and waned through triumph and disaster; at the height of its success during the short-lived coaching age and rapid decline and redundancy with the coming of the railways and the opening of the magnificent hop exchange nearby (eclipsing all neighbouring inns’ ability to function as hop exchanges themselves); why the George survived (sort of), while all its rivals perished.

Most importantly for me, there are the heroes of this story: the George’s landlords and landladies down the ages. They all had something in common: dedication to and love of their charge, which goes some way to explaining its survival. All remarkable and determined innkeepers, special mention must go to the formidable Agnes Murray who worked at the George from 1871 to 1934, from barmaid to landlady.

Shakespeare’s Local has a few dozen illustrations. Old photos and engraving, but most handy of all – maps and plans. Of these the most remarkable is a re-drawn rendering from the earliest known map of Southwark, dating from 1542. You could line this up with the equivalent from the latest London A to Z and it would make almost perfect sense.

The book is lightly footnoted on the actual pages to which they refer, not at the back. I far prefer this. There is a good bibliography at the back and a detailed and useful timeline. But no index, unfortunately.

An excellent, informative read.

Shakespeare’s Local. Six Centuries of History Seen Through One Extraordinary Pub (352pp) by Pete Brown (2012, Macmillan) has a cover price of £16.99 but is available for around £11.

* Picture the scene. “So, Brown, what plans do you have for after you’ve left school?” “I wish to be a beer writer, sir.” “Get out.”

On the Beach: Vauxhall

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of joining two fellow Members, Victor Keegan and Hannah Renier, on a mooch around the Thames foreshore with the good people from the Thames Discovery Programme (Sunny, Eliott, John, Roger). They are a volunteer archaeology group whose mission is to discover and record as much as possible of the river’s shoreline: it is in constant flux and requires essential and frequent monitoring.

Afterwards we stopped at the local caff for much needed hot coffee and I was introduced to David Coke, co-author of the award-winning book Vauxhall Gardens: A History. I remember seeing this magnificent tome at the Vauxhall Gardens exhibition at the Foundling Museum last year, so it was nice to make the connection. My eyes popped out on cartoony stalks as David produced over a dozen historical maps of the tightly focused stretch of the river we had just explored going back many centuries and then right up until quite recent Ordnance Survey. Fascinating stuff.  David’s web site on Vauxhall Gardens is here.

On our beach stroll itself, Vic Keegan has beaten me to it (of course he has: he’s a Journalist with a capital J) and written this up on his fine blog, London My London. So I’ll simply share some captioned pictures.

If you’re a London Historians Member, we’ll be organising an outing with the Thames Discovery Programme later this year, look out for it on the web site and in your monthly newsletter.

Mooching about the foreshore with the Thames Discovery Programme.

Hardy LH Members, Vic and Hannah, with Ed the Dog.

Wooden moldings for a concrete structure, not yet identified or dated.

One of several bronze age piles thought to have supported a jetty or possibly even a bridge. As featured in the unlamented (by me) Time Team.

Upriver or down, it’s impossible to take a photo of lovely Vauxhall Bridge without an ugly tower stinking up the joint.

Vauxhall Bridge, very pretty. Opened in 1906, it replaced the original bridge of 1816.

One of eight statues representing arts, sciences and manufacturing which decorate the bridge. This one is Pottery. Sculptors Drury and Pomeroy also made Justice on the Old Bailey.

Vauxhall Bridge showing structure from the old paddle steamer jetty from before any bridge existed.

Where lesser know tributary the Effra meets the Thames. Prior to embankement it was a tad upstream from here.

Downstream of the bridge, the Albert Embankment, by the mighty Bazalgette. Serpentine lamposts reflect those on the Middlesex bank opposite.