For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

A close shave (25.01.12)

For many years I’ve thought of Sweeny Todd as an urban myth, alongside Robin Hood and King Arthur, but a book by the late Peter Haining Sweeny Todd: The Real Story of The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has gone some way to dispelling that belief, although it must be said that many academics dispute his findings. He asserts that the 25th of January 2012 marks the 210th anniversary of Todd’s hanging for crimes which if true would make him Britain’s most prolific serial killer.

His abused early life would match the profile for the makings of a psychopath. Todd was born on 26th October 1756 in Brick Lane to a mother who for a living wound silk in Spitalfields and a drunken father employed as a silk weaver and who would regularly beat his son and wife. Spoilt by the mother who as he later related “would make quite a pet of me”, kissing him and calling him a pretty boy. As he grew up hating his life at home Todd would visit the nearby Tower of London where instruments of torture were displayed to discourage miscreants.

In the harsh winter of 1768 both his parents seem to have succumbed to gin, the cold or both and disappeared from the records and from Todd’s life.

Two years later at the age of 14 Todd entered Newgate Prison for an unrecorded crime and was to spend five years within its walls working with a man called Plummer the prison’s barber. As his assistant, Todd would soap the condemned men’s chins for shaving before they walked to the gallows. A tough life in Newgate for on one occasion he was left for dead after a beating for pilfering from a murderer.

On his release in 1775 semi-literate, Todd had acquired new skills which he intended to put to good use. He set himself up as a street corner barber and within five years had opened a barbers shop near Hyde Park corner.

Violence surrounded him, his shop was within walking distance of the gibbet at Tyburn which was to be the principal place of execution in London for the next three years until Tyburn’s gallows were decommissioned in 1783 when Newgate was used as London’s principal place of execution as Todd would later discover. He hated his parents and abused his wife he had in short all the makings of a modern-day serial killer.

In December 1784 an annual news chronicle reported a story: “A young gentleman, by chance coming into the barber’s shop to be shaved and dressed, and being in liquor, mentioned having seen a fine girl in Hamilton Street, from whom he had had certain favours the night before. The barber, concluding this to be his wife, and in the height of his frenzy, cut the young gentleman’s throat from ear to ear and absconded.” Todd would recount later after his arrest “My first ‘un was a young gent at Hyde Park Corner. Slit him from ear to ear, I did”.

He next appeared at 186 Fleet Street (now home to the Dundee Courier) in a dilapidated shop adjacent to St. Dunstan’s Church, just yards from Bell Yard, the two locations were connected by a series of tunnels beneath the church. Paying £125 for the lease he set himself up as a barber-surgeon, with a red and white striped pole representing the bandages and blood of his profession, and above the shop a yellow painted sign reading “Sweeny Todd, Barber”. In the windows were jars displaying rotten teeth showcasing his prowess at extraction.

London’s first newspaper the Daily Courant then located in Crane Court just a few yards up Fleet Street from Todd’s barber shop reported the murder on 14th April 1785 of a young gentleman who had been seen in conversation with a man dressed as a barber stating “The two men came to an argument, and of a sudden, the barber took from his clothing a razor and slit the throat of the young man, thereafter disappearing and was seen no more”.

Four other murders near his shop have been attributed to Todd, an apprentice who was carrying money for his master, a pawnbroker, a share dealer and a petty crook. Not wishing to be caught in the street committing foul deeds he had now devised a way of dispatching his victims within the confines of his shop. Probably inspired by a waxworks exhibition in Fleet Street which featured revolving machinery which made the waxworks kick out to frighten visitors, his chair was positioned on either side of a moveable square of floorboards. The only evidence of its use is of victim Thomas Shadwell, a watchman at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, in the form of an incomplete document written by the victim’s son.

He now needed a means of disposing of his victims and a young widow called Mrs Lovett who had a penchant for strong, violent men and owned a baker’s shop nearby fitted the bill. As with serial killers, he repeated his method; after murdering he would take clothing and valuables and then would strip the body and carry the body parts in a box through the tunnels beneath St. Dunstan’s Church where Mrs Lovett would use the remains as filling for her meat pies.

In a city, which by the standards of today we would find nauseating, the stench of rotting bodies in the area prompted the Daily Courant to report: “The dreadful charnel house sort of smell would make itself most painfully and disagreeably apparent”.

Enter Richard Blunt of the newly formed Bow Street Runners being suspicious of Todd told his men to watch the shop and on several occasions, he visited the barber himself and was shaved, but always had a companion.
It was when they entered the tunnels they found the evidence they needed of his crimes. His Blunt’s party entered a disused family vault to find the recent remains of human bodies and following a trail of footprints found themselves at the back of Lovett’s underground cookhouse. Later returning to Todd’s barber shop when he was out evidence of found including the valuables stolen from his victims before being turned into pies.

Lovett killed herself with poison before coming to trial, but in the Christmas of 1801 London witnessed “one of the trials of the age”. Todd was charged at the Old Bailey with a single murder that of Francis Thornhill, who had on his person before disappearing a string of pearls worth £16,000 intended for a young woman in London. He entered Todd’s shop to be shaved never to be seen again, Todd later pawned them for £1,000.

The Attorney General told the court that clothing from 160 people had been found in the shop, and a leg bone found in the church vaults belong to Thornhill. A surgeon, Sylvester Steers, who had treated Thornhill for a leg fracture, recognised the bone as his patient’s.

The jury took just 5 minutes to reach their guilty verdict. Sweeny Todd was not hanged at Tyburn but was taken from his cell in Newgate on the morning of 25th January 1802 and hanged in front of a crowd of thousands. He was 46 years old. After hanging for an hour his body was carried to the Royal College of Surgeons and ironically was butchered for the benefit of medical science.

The case of Britain’s most prolific killer inspired The Strong of Pearls, a serial published in a weekly magazine in 1846, it was dramatised by George Dibdin Pitt in 1842, in what is regarded as the first true-life drama, and it has been the basis for numerous books, plays and films, and inspired Stephen Sondheim for write a musical. The term Sweeny has in turn become cockney rhyming slang for the Metropolitan police’s Flying Squad which then became a long-running television drama The Sweeny 1975-82.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Walled in Waldorf (20.01.12)

When you are the richest man in America and require an office – and somewhere to house your mistress – you need something just a little palatial, and that is exactly what William Waldorf Astor did in 1892 when he commissioned John Louthborough Pearson to design 2 Temple Place.

Astor had inherited a fortune of some $100 million on the death of his father in 1890 and after a family row declared America “was no longer a place where a gentleman could live”, a remark for which his countrymen never forgave him.

After buying the Cliveden Estate (later of Christine Keeler fame) and fearing for the safety of his family he blocked access to the land, prompting the sobriquet “Waldorf by name walled off by nature”. He would later buy Hever Castle in Kent and again ever mindful of security would banish visitors at night from the castle and raise its drawbridge. On another occasion, he asserted to Lady Warwick that he pulled a lever beside his chair every door in 2 Temple Place would close and she could not possibly get out without his permission, a rather alarming prospect as she later recorded in her memoirs.

Astor’s mild paranoia about security was to our benefit. His office – he did after all own a house in the more fashionable Carlton House Terrace one mile away – is built in the Gothic style of the late Victorian period. It looks like a fortified house from the outside, with a golden weathervane on its roof, a copy of Christopher Columbus’ ship the Santa Maria.

But it’s when you enter the house that you are in for a treat. “Hello there, yes the entrance is free and our exhibition of William Morris has a 72-page catalogue if you would care to borrow it. The cafe and toilets are on your left around the corner”. Amazing when did you ever get a greeting like that in an art gallery, or see at the foot of the stairs the largest floral display of amaryllis outside the Royal Horticultural Society?

On the interior of the house no expense was spared by Astor, no flight of fancy too grand, this is Victorian over-embellishment taken to the highest level. Panels featuring Shakespearian themes, Arthurian knights and what must be a pair of the finest Victorian stained glass windows in London.

Now after a succession of corporate owners the Bulldog Trust, a charity that aims to inspire others into philanthropy has purchased Astor House the ex-office of one of England’s greatest charitable donors. Astor himself took up British citizenship and was given a peerage for his charitable benefactions.

The Bulldog Trust intends to open its doors every year to house exhibitions. At the moment transferred from Walthamstow is the William Morris collection which finishes at the end of the month. Beautifully presented and rated 2nd best by Time Out. Who said of Astor House:

“Lavish, quite bonkers . . . and rather endearing . . .”

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

The London Beer Flood (10.01.12)

The spot where Freddy Mercury stands strutting his stuff, some 200 years ago was one of the most deprived areas of London and the scene of the Capital’s most bizarre tragedy.

Before New Oxford Street was constructed the area behind Centre Point, the St. Giles area, was a rookery where some of the poorest of London lived in dirty, cramped conditions, and on the boundary of the rookery, on the site of the Dominion Theatre stood the Meux’s Brewery.

A popular beer at that time was porter, a dark beer which originated in London during the early 18th century. Prior to that beer was distributed to the publican “very young” and ageing was performed in the ale house, porter was the first beer to be aged at the brewery and dispatched to be drunk immediately. It was also the first beer which could be made on a large scale, and as it was invented in London and drunk by London’s porters it naturally became known as London Porter.

Working in London’s markets were thousands of porters and manual labourers who would daily consume three or four pints of this dark heady brew that had an alcohol content of between 6.6 and 7.0% ABV.

The brewing process of porter enabled producers to make it on an industrial scale, building ever larger vats to accommodate its growing demand. Meux’s Brewery Company had by 1795 vats 22-foot high that could contain 8.4 million pints of beer. So large were these barrels, upon the completion of a new one a reception would be held and one account relates that 200 diners sat down to a meal within its gigantic walls.

This highly profitable enterprise came to an end on Monday 17th October 1814 at about six in the evening, when a corroded hoop on a large barrel prompted the sudden release of over 2 million pints of this heavy brown liquid. The explosion could be heard 5 miles away. It destroyed the brewery wall and badly damaged two houses. Some were drowned by the tsunami of beer and others were overcome by the fumes, while an even greater number were hampered in rescue while using pots to collect this manna from heaven. The area, as today, was very flat and rescuers were sometimes up to their waists in beer trying to evacuate people from their basements.

Some nine people died that day as a direct result of the accident, and one victim died some days later of alcohol poisoning; he had heroically attempted to stem the tide by drinking as much beer as he humanly could.

As with the way of the poor in those days, to try and make ends meet families displayed the victim in their house propped up in an armchair for inspection at a small fee. In one house so many crowded into the room that the floor collapsed, the spectators plunging into the basement, which was of course full of beer.

The smell of beer lasted for months and many lost their homes and livelihoods, while the Meux Brewery was taken to court over the accident, but the calamity was ruled an Act of God with the death simply casualties.

Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi once said: “Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune”. He could have been talking about 18th-century London.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Suicidal bakers (06.01.12)

Topped by what looks like a flaming Christmas pudding, this, the tallest isolated stone column in the world, stands 202ft high and although obscured by office buildings, the Shard being the latest can still offer commanding views of The City. If you have the energy, and it must be said, the courage to ascend its 311 steps the view is spectacular from the top of London’s Monument.

You climb up inside the column with just a thin, worn handrail to prevent your rapid descent until you arrive at the viewing platform. This was once a favourite spot for people wishing to commit suicide who had a head for heights. There must be something about kneading dough or the fact that as a result of a nearby baker’s oven the City was consumed by fire, that has made this ledge the launch pad of choice for suicidal bakers.

Six unfortunates have committed suicide by jumping from the top of the Monument and three had associations with baking; John Cradock in 1788; a man named Leander in 1810; and Margaret Moyes a daughter of a baker in 1839. This knead to end one’s life stopped in 1842 when a cage was inserted over the platform.

James Boswell – Dr Johnson’s biographer – came here in 1762 to climb to what was then the highest viewpoint in London. Halfway up he suffered a panic attack, but he persevered and made it to the top, where he found it “horrid to be so monstrous a way up in the air, so far above London and all its spires”.

Poor Boswell didn’t have the incentive that you now have of receiving a certificate for your efforts when you reach terra firma. But as you receive the proof of completing your ascent at the bottom of the column, there is no check of your bravery in having reached the very top.

The Monument stands on the site of St. Margaret’s Church in Fish Street, the first church lost to the Great Fire of London; the column stands 202ft high and 202ft from the seat of the fire in Pudding Lane which in 1666 destroyed four-fifths of the City.

It was designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke who had wanted to use its hollow centre to suspend a pendulum for scientific experiments, but the vibrations from the heavy traffic on Fish Hill made the conditions unsuitable. During the construction, they also used it as a fixed telescope, again with unsatisfactory results.

The architects originally wanted to surmount the column with a phoenix (embodying the motto of London (of which we, alas seldom use): “Resurgem” – “I am reborn”, this was abandoned in favour of a colossal statue of King Charles II. But the Monarch pointed to the fact that he didn’t start the fire, so why should he be plonked on top of the monument which commemorates its origins. So a golden flaming Christmas pudding it was.

Lastly, one curious incident happened during the Blitz. On 9th September 1940 one of the first heavy high-explosive bombs to fall on the City landed on King William Street, almost exactly 202ft from the Monument the same distance to the west as our culprit bakery was to the north.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

When I were a nipper (04.01.12)

When I were a nipper at about this time of year we would go up West to see the annual pantomime at the London Palladium. In the early 1950s, the Palladium would always have its annual feast of comedy characters in drag: Frankie Howard; Richard Hearne (Mr Pastry); Max Bygraves; and my all-time favourite Norman Wisdom.

But the highlight of the trip was not an early introduction into the world of theatre, but the gastronomical delight that preceded the show – a trip to a Lyons Tea Room or Lyons Corner Houses. In the days when Lyons had aspirations beyond a Mr Kipling Bakewell tart these vast emporiums dominated the casual dining market in London.

The first Lyons teashop opened in Piccadilly in 1894, the premises are still a cafe and are now called Ponti’s where you can still see the original stucco ceiling of the original teashop. The Lyons teashops became so popular that in the 1950s there were seven along Oxford Street alone and 250 nationally, but it was their Corner Houses which were the most impressive. In total London had three: one on the junction with Tottenham Court Road and Hanway Street; a second at Coventry Street and Rupert Street; the third at the intersection of Strand and Craven Street.

They were huge, and the entire ground floor was taken up as a food hall where Mum would buy such luxury goods as coleslaw or Parmesan cheese. Above were three or four levels of restaurants each with its own decorative style with an orchestra playing throughout the day.

But the best was the waitresses in their maid-like black dresses, with white aprons and tiara-type hats. Originally called “Gladys” by 1926 it was felt that name was old fashioned and suggestions included “Sybil-at-your-service”, Miss Nimble”, Miss Natty”, “Busy Betty” and “Dextrous Doris”, but they eventually were referred to as Nippies because of their ability to move speedily around the diners’ tables and often no doubt trying to avoid the advances of middle-aged men, although it was reported by Picture Post that every year 800-900 Nippies got married to customers “met on duty” and the publication wrote that being a Nippy was good training for becoming a housewife.

The Corner Houses also had hairdressers, telephone booths, theatre booking agencies and a food delivery service. These were also pioneers of self-service dining, and an amusing anecdote by John Hall tells of the Lyons Corner House in the Strand which offered a fixed-price meal, with the attraction of being able to fit as much as you could on your tray for the one price. Unfortunately, the tray was on a conveyor belt moving down the counter quicker than you could stack it with food.

Two other Corner Houses were managed under the Maison Lyons brand one at Marble Arch and the other in Shaftsbury Avenue called The Trocadero, which during the war was given over to American troops and known as Rainbow Corner, it can’t have been a coincidence that the Windmill with its proud boast “We Never Close” who offered male entertainment was opposite.

In a world just recovering from a devastating war and sweet rationing still in force, with much of London laid to rubble by the bombing high tea was a luxury but sadly the last teashop closed in 1981. Now the good news is that Lyons-style tea houses are set to return. Headed by a former operations chief at Starbucks, but don’t let that put you off, using the Lyons teashop brand the first opened in Bluewater shopping centre and female members of the CabbieBlog were among the first to sample the delight of finger sandwiches, scones and cakes: And their opinion? Brilliant.