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.

Scandal at the Café Royal (23.11.12)

The Café Royal is due to re-open soon with much of its original features still intact. If any of its early customers chose to revisit the hotel after nearly 100 years they would immediately recognise it, unfortunately, Regent Street the road it occupies would be unrecognisable to its architect John Nash.

When in 1929 the new Regent Street was proposed the architects had every intention of building a new Café Royal and they were astonished when there was an outcry from across the world at the prospect of the beautiful Café Royal being destroyed. After a long campaign, which included representations from the Royal family, a compromise was reached – the interior of the dining room, with its magnificent decorative scheme, would be carefully removed and then when a room the exact size of the old room had been built in the new Café Royal the old interior would be slotted back into place.

The hotel was originally conceived in 1865 by Daniel Nichole-Thévenon, a bankrupt French wine merchant fleeing his creditors with just £5 in his pocket.

Later the Café Royal would flourish under the ownership of his son and at the time was considered to have the greatest wine cellar in Europe. By the turn of the 20th century, it was the centre of fashionable London, numbering among its guests dining at the hotel’s Grill Room or Empire and Napoleon Suite: Winston Churchill, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Taylor.

Some of the first boxing rules were written down in the hotel by the National Sporting Club, which held black-tie dinners before fights held there. A 1950s boxing ring complete with blood stains was auctioned by Bonhams prior to the hotel’s recent refurbishment.

Over the years the Café Royal has seen its fair share of scandal. In 1894 the night porter was found with two bullets in his head, a murder which was never solved.

The hotel’s most famous scandal arose during a conversation (the last civil one both men should engage with each other) between Oscar Wilde and The Marquess of Queensberry.

The Marquess, who instigated the hotel’s boxing matches, and whose name is associated with the sport’s rules, confronted Oscar Wilde and his friendship with the Marquess’ son.

Wilde, a serious absinthe drinker would enjoy liquid lunches at the Café Royal, and the dining room would set the scene for the early 20th century’s biggest scandal and the eventual demise of its most popular playwright.

The Marquess confronted Wilde about his dalliance with his son, the spoilt neurotic Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas.

For once Oscar Wilde could not charm his way out of his predicament as he had on numerous occasions. The Marquess of Queensbury stormed out to leave a misspelt card at Wilde’s club: ‘For Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite’.

For a playwright of Wilde’s stature, the misspelling must have been almost as serious affront as the accusation.

Wilde held a council of war at the Café Royal with among others George Bernard Shaw who urged him to let the matter drop.

In court, Queensberry could avoid conviction for libel only by demonstrating that his accusation was in fact true and furthermore that there was some ‘public benefit’ to having made the accusation openly. Queensberry’s lawyers hired private detectives to find evidence of Wilde’s homosexual liaisons to prove the fact of the accusation. The libel trial became a cause célèbre as salacious details of Wilde’s private life with blackmailers, male prostitutes, cross-dressers and homosexual brothels appeared in the press.

Wilde would lose the case and be himself arrested at the Cadogan Hotel (you now pay a premium to sleep in the same room); put on trial and served two years hard labour for gross indecency.

He would be released a broken man and never return to writing plays to such critical acclaim.

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.

Pull the other leg (20.11.12)

A one-legged transvestite female impersonator could have lost England the American Colonies in a scandal that rocked Georgian society.

It was possibly the extraordinary life of Samuel Foote that provided the material for Peter Cook’s ‘One leg too few’ sketch when Cook turns to Dudley Moore portraying a ‘unidexter’ Tarzan “I’ve got nothing against your right leg. The trouble is, neither have you”.

Born into what at one time had been one of the most illustrious families in England, a long-running dispute – reminiscent of Dicken’s Bleak House – over his mother’s inheritance, had left the family impoverished. Later send down from Oxford for idleness and ill-behaviour Foote was to spend time in a debtor’s prison.

He would become the first person to write a true-crime novel recounting the murder at sea of one of his uncles by another uncle. He then went on to write some immensely popular plays, but if this had been the sum total of his success little be known about him today.

But in 1776 his life would change when the brother of King George III, the Duke of York played a practical joke on Foote to ride a horse. He was thrown off the animal and suffered a compound fracture of his leg. With medicine in its formative years, the only recourse for this kind of injury was to have the leg amputated.

A little remorseful for Foote’s lost leg the Duke persuaded his brother to give Foote’s fledgling Hay Market Theatre a Royal warrant. This is why today it is known as the Theatre Royal Haymarket, it is also the reason actors say ‘break a leg’ to wish fellow thespians good luck.

Foote turned the leg amputation to his advantage by writing many highly successful one-legged comedies with him in the starring role. A route that Peter Cook avoided when he penned the famous ‘Tarzan Sketch’, giving Dudley Moore the one-legged part.

The ever-resourceful Foote circumvented the censorship laws which forbade imitation of other people at that time. Any work written directly for a show had to be submitted to The Lord Chancellor. As much of his work was satirical Foote invented the tea party, in which he charged its members for a dish of tea and they got a topical comedy on the side. This is why the Boston Harbour Riot was called the Boston Tea Party.

In 1776 his life would be turned upside down. By now one-legged Foote was Georgian London’s top celebrity, but his footman (presumably he only needed one footman) accused him of ‘sodomitical assault’. The press then erroneously named Foote’s accuser as Roger.

This gave the news periodicals the copy of a one-legged Foote ‘rogering’ a footman named Roger. To which retorted Foote “Sodomite? I’ll not stand for it”.

All this set Georgian society alight and as the coffee houses were discussing Foote’s predicament most failed to notice a certain Thomas Jefferson had written a rather good document declaring independence for his country, which had been ratified by 56 delegates to the Continental Congress.

The greatest lost figure of Georgian has now been the subject of an autobiography written by Ian Kelly who goes out on a limb to redress this oversight – Mr Foote’s Other Leg.

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 Elephant in the Room (16.11.12)

During the five years that I was studying there, I would spend some – well a lot – of my time at college staring out of the window at a silver cube in the middle of the Elephant and Castle northern roundabout. Today I would bet the thousands who pass through that double roundabout at the Elephant don’t even notice the enormous box in front of them.

At 75ft wide and 20ft high it is what must be by volume the largest monument in London – and nobody seems to notice it.

The Michael Faraday Memorial was designed by the brutalist architect Rodney Gordon who, with the regeneration of the Elephant in the early 60s, wanted to embody the visionary credentials of the man who was the area’s favourite son, who was born in nearby Newington Butts.

Unfortunately, even though the notorious Heygate Estate was still under construction vandalism was already a problem. So out went Rodney Gordon’s box of glass, which would have allowed the public to see the London Underground transformer beneath, and thus make a connection with the pioneer of electricity. The glass was substituted by polished stainless steel panels, but they needn’t have bothered with the increasing traffic levels closer inspection is almost impossible marooned as it is surrounded by the Elephant and Castle gyratory system.

In 1996 Blue Peter held a competition, which was won by a local schoolgirl from English Martyr R.C. Primary School, to design a lighting scheme to illuminate its 728 steel panels and thus draw the public’s attention to its presence.

That same year the monument gained Grade II listing status, unlike its neighbour the Heygate Estate currently in the process of being demolished.

The box has appeared on the BBC’s Dr Who and Harry Potter, but despite its size and prominence, it is ignored by Londoners. In 1995 the Evening Standard carried a picture of the cube with the caption ‘What on Earth is it?’

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.

Blue is the new green (13.11.12)

For a decade now I have been driving down Victoria Embankment watching as the soft incandescent Edison lights strung between lampposts slowly died of age one by one, and no one bothered to replace them.

Then the wet desolated pavement alongside the Thames was reminiscent of a late ’50s scene for a cigarette advert a lone man, stopping under a light, its gentle glow illuminating him as he lit up, to the familiar catchphrase ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’.

As the last of the old bulbs have spluttered and died a brave new lit world has replaced them – with that stark intense blue of the halogen bulb – and the string of lights between lampposts isn’t the only harsh light now to be found alongside the Thames.

Green was once the de facto colour of environmentalism when political parties adopted it into their name or their logo, but now blue has the right credentials.

Green is about trees and plants whereas blue is about oceans, rivers, lakes and the sky, ensuring adequate clean supplies of essential resources — air and water, it is also the colour of our planet seen from space.

One of the world’s biggest polluters – carmakers are now using blue as a colour and a word to express cleanness and efficiency – even for vehicles with petrol and diesel engines. Volkswagen puts a ‘Blue Motion’ badge on its most efficient cars; Mercedes-Benz adds a ‘Blue efficiency’ emblem to its environmentally friendly (and easiest to recycle) models. New Holland, part of Italy’s Fiat Group, even uses the name ‘eco Blue’ on its low-emissions range of blue tractors.

For sure, blue is more acceptable to right-of-centre political interests than the term green since that colour was appropriated by the left-of-centre parties in Europe.

So the ‘boys’ of City Hall have embraced those beautiful eco-blue lights. “You see”, they would say “lighting up the Thames hasn’t harmed a single polar bear using our blue energy-efficient bulbs”.

It started with the long overdue construction of the Hungerford footbridge with its blue lights surmounting the pillars, then the London Eye adopted it and now almost every bridge spanning the Thames is bathed in a blue glow. My cabbie colleague in his Capital Letters blog has dubbed the new Blackfriars Station, which spans the Thames and is illuminated with the ubiquitous blue lights as – Bluefriars.

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.

Twenty’s plenty (06.11.12)

Islington Council has a long history of discouraging the use of cars within its boundaries; passengers have told me of having their cars taken to the car pound one day after their residents’ permit expired.

Another wealthy resident said his cul-de-sac which was 100 metres long had 8 speed humps ‘to prevent excessive speed’.

The existing speed humps, which were designed to keep speeds below 20mph, have only managed to impair the emergency services. All the ‘boy racers’ went out and purchased wide-wheeled 4x4s and continued to drive furiously.

Islington’s next ploy was to build ‘pincer points’ which allow only one vehicle through at a time and construct innumerable pedestrian crossings on Upper Street. This has resulted in an 18 hour-a-day traffic jam with cars belching out noxious fumes and pedestrians resolutely refusing to cross at the designated places.

The slower a vehicle travels reduces the risk of injury to pedestrians, but so does observation and driving. In Islington you spend an inordinate amount of your journey looking out for obstructions installed by the council.

Vehicles are not designed to travel at 16mph (the speed you should travel as 20mph is the maximum), use far more fuel and increase their emissions at these low speeds. In addition many odometers are inaccurate at low speed resulting in drivers having to maintain a speed of 15mph.

If this north London council is serious about keeping speed limits below 20mph it can only enforce it by a complex system of average speed cameras, just how much would that cost the ratepayers?