On 12 May 1891 prominent member of the National Vigilance Association, an anti-vice pressure group, Captain Edmund Verney, MP, was expelled from The House of Commons. He had pleaded guilty to conspiring to procure, for corrupt and immoral purposes, a girl of nineteen and was sentenced to one year of imprisonment. It’s good to see that today not much has changed with our political leaders.
On 12 May 1906 John Bull Magazine was first published designed to bring satire and political comment to its readers
When Julian Assange was holed up at the Ecuadorian Embassy those visiting included Pamela Anderson, Lady Gaga, Eric Cantona and Nigel Farage
On Knight’s Road in Docklands, the world’s largest tin of syrup is affixed to Tate & Lyle’s factory producing the world’s oldest branded product
The finest dentures of 19th-century London contained real human teeth, some gleaned from casualties of the Battle of Waterloo
The Wiener Library, Russell Square contains 1 million items relating to the Holocaust, it is the world’s oldest library of related material
Now charmingly inaccurate, the life-sized models of dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park, constructed in the 1850s were the first in the world
The basement at 27 Endell Street was once the animal depot for West End theatres once 2 bulls escaped liberating a menagerie on Soho streets
Mitcham Cricket Club has played on the world’s oldest cricket pitch since 1685, and today is still an active cricket club
Amersham is the second most westerly tube station, the highest at 147 metres above sea level and the second furthest Underground station from central London
Burrell & Co on Blasker Walk in Docklands once manufactured dyes, red smoke from the chimneys would tint the local pigeons rose-pink
Wartime song A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square was almost certainly a robin, the only town bird known to sing at night
Trivial Matter: London in 140 characters is taken from the daily Twitter feed @cabbieblog.
A guide to the symbols used here and source material can be found on the Trivial Matter page.
On 5 May 1760 for murdering a servant serving bad oysters Earl Ferrers got the hangman’s drop breaking the neck as opposed to a slow throttle
Forty Elephants were a gang of prolific female shoplifters from the 1920s who stashed stolen goods in specially adapted bloomers
London’s railings used to be brightly coloured. On the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria decreed that they all be painted black
In his will Dickens stipulated that no monuments be erected to his memory, that’s why London has no statues of one of its greatest writers
The American Declaration of Independence was printed in Caslon typeface designed in Chiswell Street by William Caslon, it’s now a Tesco
In 17th century London antics in St. James’s Park were put to verse: ‘Nightly now beneath their shade/Are buggeries, rapes and incests made’
Opening in 1910 with 2,286 seats the London Palladium had its own telephone system, so patrons could talk to each other
A white strip near BBC White City marks the finish of the world’s first modern marathon in 1908 originally 25 miles extended to 26 miles 385 yards
Traffic congestion in 18th century led to a law being passed to make all traffic on London Bridge keep to the left in order to reduce collisions, it was incorporated into the Highway Act of 1835
On 5 May French couturier Coco Chanel choose today to launch her first perfume No 5, for obvious reasons
On 5 May 1930 Amy Johnson took off from Croydon, in her Gypsy Moth plane ‘Jason’. She became the first woman to fly solo to Australia, arriving on 24th May
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