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.

Have a nice day (01.06.2010)

It started as a promising day, the sun was shining, we had a new Government and yes, I had earned enough to warrant a trip to the bank. I proffered my deposit, the cashier smiled and said good morning, and then her eyes alighted upon a £50 note of mine. In a nanosecond a money checker detection pen appeared and like a censor from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office she had drawn a line across the note.

“It’s a forgery, I’m afraid, and I can’t give it back, but I can if you wish, give you a receipt”. Great, £50 down.

Rapidly striding off to WH Smiths, and taking the cashier’s advice to purchase for myself said detector pen, my mood darkened.

In an effort to cheer myself up and repair my dented ego, I did a bit of research on counterfeiting and also to confirm that I wasn’t the only London cabbie to get caught.

As a large city London has vast sums of cash changing hands each day, and this makes the Capital a perfect place to distribute this worthless junk. This was recognised in the Middle Ages and they used some rather novel methods to deter offenders.

Clipping was a popular past time in this period, where small clips were taken from the edge of a coin and using them to mint a counterfeit. Coin clipping is why many coins have the rim of the coin marked with stripes, text or some other pattern that would be destroyed if the coin were clipped, a safeguard attributed to Isaac Newton, after being appointed Master of the Mint.

Unlike today the threat to England’s economy from counterfeiting and ultimately the country’s security was appreciated by Parliament and offenders had a multiple choice of punishments, ranging to having one’s ears removed to hanging.

The Treason Act 1415 was an Act of the Parliament of England which made clipping coins high treason and punishable by death. (It was already treason to counterfeit coins.) The Act was repealed by the Treason Act 1553, and then revived again in 1562. The Act originally only protected English coins, but was later extended in 1575 to cover foreign coins “current” within England. The Coin Act 1575 also abolished (for coin clipping only) the penalties of corruption of blood and forfeiture of goods and lands (see what I mean by multiply punishments).

In modern times fraudsters have now a range of aids to perfect their craft making detection harder, so there is far more counterfeit currency in circulation. Remarkably last year the total amount of fake £1 coins hit 37.5 million, the highest sum since the coin was introduced in 1983, and a rise of 26 per cent since 2007, when 30 million were found to be fakes. Even more remarkable is that convicted forgers these days retain their ears, and only serve the shortest of sentences.

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.

100 years down the drain (28.05.2010)

Readers of a delicate disposition should log off now for today’s post is about well… spending a penny.

With a surname like Crapper you would have thought another choice of vocation would have been preferable, for apparently the derivation of the vulgar verb, is not taken from Thomas Crapper’s surname, as many believe, but comes from Middle English word crap itself a derivation from the Dutch Krappe.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Thomas Crapper’s death, the man one could argue, who has improved all our lives immeasurably with his invention of the floating ballcock (another inappropriately named device), and although he did not invent the ceramic toilet he revolutionised the public attitude to toilets with the first bathroom showroom.

Thomas Crapper came to London from Yorkshire at the age of 11 in 1848, first setting up shop as a sanitary engineer on what is now Draycott Avenue, but later his firm that became celebrated for their water closets opened at for business at 120 King’s Road [see picture], his showroom alas is now an empty clothing shop.

Throughout history our ancestors have found ingenious ways to use them and we apparently spend three years of our lives sitting on them, so how did we get on without Thomas Crapper?

The Romans viewed going to the toilet as a social affair, they would discuss the news and gossip of the day and maybe even negotiate a business deal whilst they were there, the City wine bar of its day. Not surprisingly, toilet paper had yet to be invented; instead a piece of sponge fixed to a short wooden handle was used and shared by everyone.

In the Middle Ages, the wealthy built “garderobes”, little rooms jutting out from the walls of their homes. Garderobes, to “guard”’ the “robes” were also used to store clothes, as the smell kept moths away. It’s this medieval loo that we take the word “wardrobe” from, but not everyone had such a luxury, many would have used chamber pots during this period, throwing their waste out of a window, shouting “gardy loo” – Gardez l’eau is French for “watch out for the water”. In fact the City would fine householders if the detritus reached above a certain height outside their city homes.

The Tudors would happily “pluck a rose” (as they called it) anywhere: in chimneys, corners of rooms or in the street. Toilets by then were often referred to as “the jakes”. Then in 1596, Sir John Harrington invented the first water closet with a proper flush. Queen Elizabeth I used it and was so impressed that she had a “john” built at her palace, hence the expression of “going to the john”, however, it was not widely used elsewhere as it was expensive to install.

By the 1700s, the most likely place to keep your chamber pot was in the dining room, often in a sideboard. Chamber pots and commodes were commonplace even into the 1800s and if staying at a wealthy house, in your bedroom you could pull out the drawer and inside find a metal bowl “pee pot”, one for the man and another for the lady, which could be used and then emptied by the chambermaid in the morning.

It wasn’t until 1775 that Alexander Cummings invented the first modern flushing toilet, but later into the 19th century and the height of the British Industrial Revolution, the population in towns and cities increased, but the number of toilets didn’t. Neighbouring families would often have to share an outside privy, the “necessary house”. It wouldn’t be until 1910 that the toilet was changed to the closed water tank and bowl that we all know and love.

Toilet facts:

Gongfermorswere the people who removed human excrement from privies and cesspits (gong being another word for dung).They were only allowed to work at night.

Royal loos were scrubbed out by workers called gongscourers.

In 1760 George II expired on the toilet.

People would tip ash from fireplaces and nearby coke furnaces on top of sewage to stop it smelling.

The normal charge to use a public toilet was a penny. People spoke of “spending a penny” as a polite way of saying they were going to the loo.

Before toilet paper was invented people would use leaves, moss, stones, and grass, rags, and oyster or mussel shells bits of broken pots or bunches of herbs. Wealthy ladies would use goose feathers.

The first loo paper was used in Britain in 1857. It was sold in chemists from under the counter because people were embarrassed to see it on display.

Toilet rolls were not sold until 1928 and coloured paper wasn’t introduced until 1957.

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.

London’s crap years (21.05.2010)

Depressed? Worried about the austerity measures promised by our new Political Masters? Before you decamp London for pastures new, consider this if you may, as CabbieBlog gives you the 10 years you really should be anywhere else but in our Capital City.

1212: Everybody has heard of the Great Fire of London in which only nine people lost their lives, but this one was much worse, leaving 3,000 dead according to medieval accounts. The conflagration led to new laws requiring the use of brick and tile for rebuilding instead of wood and thatch.

1348: The wise would have left long before November when the Black Death struck the Capital. With crowded streets and bad sanitation making the contagion spread even faster. By the time it had run its course half the population of England would be dead. Afterwards wages increased due to the chronic shortage of labour.

1381: With revolting peasants marching on London, the teenage king Richard II seeking refuge in the Tower of London. Prisoners released, palaces ransacked and burned and the Archbishop of Canterbury beheaded, scores of lawyers were also beheaded, so the year wasn’t all that bad.

1664: Call it what you like; dropsy, griping of the guts, wind, worms or the French Pox (we always like to blame the Frenchies), the Great Plague killed 100,000 that year. Manufacturing collapsed as Newcastle colliers refused to deliver fuel to London, and servants ransacking their master’s empty mansions.

1666: The Great fire destroyed 13,000 houses; 87 churches; 52 livery company halls; 4 prisons; 4 bridges; 3 City gates; Guildhall; the Royal Exchange and Customs House. The City was rebuilt within 6 years, so good news if you were a builder, not you day if you owned the bakery where it started.

1780: It started as an anti-Catholic march on Parliament, but after a gin distillery was breached the Gordon Riots turned into an orgy of looting and burning. At the end some 850 people had died, including bankers from the Bank of England, which must have seemed a good idea at the time. Once order had been restored its 21 ringleaders were hanged.

1858: It wasn’t until Parliament had to be evacuated because of the smell from sewers disgorging effluent into the Thames, that an efficient sewage system was commissioned. After a long dry hot summer and a cholera epidemic caused by the insanitary conditions it was known as the Great Stink.

1918: If the Great War wasn’t bad enough, returning soldiers brought back with them the flu virus. Killing more than the war London was especially vulnerable with it’s densely pack population transmitting the contagion more effectively. By the time the virus had run its course 220,000 Britons had died.

1940: On the night of 29th December Hitler sent hundreds of bombers to destroy London, the ensuring firestorm left 436 dead and ultimately damaging or destroying 3.5 million buildings by the time the Blitz was over. The blackout also caused the country’s highest ever traffic casualty figures.

1952: In December sulphur dioxide combining with rainwater and oxygen to form deadly sulphuric acid suspended in a dense fog and lasting for 7 days killed 4,000 residents together with scores of livestock at Smithfield. The Clean Air Act stopped the problem and an excuse for children to bunk off school.

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.

Smooth Operators (11.05.2010)

In a recent consultation document it would appear that our Mayor “Bicycle Clips” Boris has all but given up on trying improving the average speed to transverse London, with an average of 10 mph it has hardly changed since the days of horse drawn transport in Victorian London.

His traffic boffins have come up with an idea called “Smoothing Traffic Flow” which it is claimed can make journey times more predictable but not any quicker. With London’s streets now gridlocked for most of the working day due to roadworks.

Your journey times are pretty predictable now albeit at walking pace.

The scheme has some good initiatives, such as Pedestrian Countdown which is a timer telling pedestrians crossing the road how much green time remains, it is a pity those same lights are ignored by pedestrians already.

Another is lane charging where it is hoped to charge utilities a fee every time they dig up the road, unfortunately legislation brought in when London was given its own mayor 10 years ago, the then (unelected) minister for London, John Gummer, capitulated to the privatised utility companies in their outrageous demand for unrestricted access to the ground beneath London’s streets. That dreadful decision, leading to Oxford Street being dug up 176 times in a single year and the Strand 154 times and has remained to this day. With this situation Boris almost thrown in the towel on his promise to charge utilities per hole in the road.

The Mayor has also ordered a review to identify which, if any, traffic lights may be unnecessary and could safely be removed, which sounds great until you realise that in the last 10 years over a 1,000 additional sets have been installed and that newly planned signals will be exempt from the review, so just to stand still they are going to have to get very busy removing some old ones.

With London’s population predicted by some to reach over 12 million in the next 15 years and with increasing wealth giving many the opportunity own a car, London is set to become as bad as Mumbai.

The majority of roads are not controlled by Transport for London and local boroughs are continually harassing motorists with the zeal of a religious convert. Not content with having a small army of traffic wardens, The People Republic of Camden (a nuclear free zone, in case you asked) is building kerbs out into the road to reduce lane capacity. While the Guardianista’s of Islington are working flat out (sorry for the pun) to ensure they have the tallest road humps in town, and with a mandatory 20 mph speed limit on all its roads, chance would be a fine thing to be able to travel beyond walking pace.

The previous Mayor’s initiatives to improve air quality have, it would seem, come to nothing. Scientists are baffled why despite vehicles being cleaner due to legislation forcing owners to install systems that reduce PM10 particulates. If they had cared to ask me I could point them in the right direction, one monitoring site is opposite Madame Tussaud’s where traffic moves at a snail’s pace along the Marylebone Road, another is located at Tower Hill near where by selling a 3-lane road to private developers they have created a daily 12-hours gridlock.

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.

End of the line for K2 (16.04.2010)

As iconic as my black cab, the K2 telephone boxes have since 1936, been an intrinsic part of London’s urban landscape. But who actually uses telephone boxes these days?

With almost universal mobile phone ownership their original function has been overtaken by a number of uses its designer couldn’t have imagined possible.

Their use as a rather well designed notice booth for call-girls (or boys) is now falling by the wayside as they find more effective ways of advertising their services and using it as a public urinal has its limitations, not least that its cramped compartment renders the user in danger of watering their shoes.

With brilliant originality they named it K2 for Kiosk No. 2, it was a course preceded by K1 which was constructed in concrete. The design this time in cast iron, by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott had won a Post Office competition three years earlier, and started a whole series of similar looking telephone boxes.

Its distinctive domed roof and all-over red make it the prototype of the classic K6, which was introduced nearly ten years later. Ventilation was provided via the crown in the roof section – it was made up from small, round holes!

Legend has it that the dome was Scott’s homage to the 18th Century architect Sir John Soane, R.A. (1753-1837) whose family tomb is surmounted by a very similar feature. Unlike the tops of modern British phone booths, Scott’s Soanian dome is a proper roof, dealing effectively with rain and litter while also being aesthetically pleasing.

But what makes K2 special is that it was mostly restricted to the London area and considerably bigger than its successors.

In London kiosks positioned by tourist locations have survived BTs desire to replace them with utility “shower cabinets” and stand as an iconic feature of London. Their purpose now would seem only to be as a photo opportunity for visitors.

Without ever suggesting their removal, could we not find some new use for these beautiful structures? For a start the London Tourist Board should come to an arrangement with BT to pay for their maintenance and cleaning, covered in grime they’re a disgrace.

Perhaps we could use them as one man internet cafes, or greenhouses with orchid.