London Trivia

by JOHN SHAND

1

WHEN the Romans were in London they enclosed the city within a great wall of such solidity that fragments of it still remain. In 1939, after centuries as an open town, London raised another wall to protect itself in war — a wall as high as the clouds but tenuous as a spider’s web; and, like a web, it hung in the air to catch things that fly. Most of those who saw the balloon barrage rise unexpectedly, as if by magic, were more pleased by the sight than alarmed by what it signified. This attitude was foolish, no doubt. We were like children clapping our hands at a house on fire. But those swaying balloons, effortlessly carrying their long steel ropes, were pretty as they turned in the wind, shining like silver in the sun or fading out of sight in the gray rain; and in the silence of night we learned to enjoy the aeolian chant, the wailing music of the wind sounding in the stretched cables.

Looking back from the right side of the war, I think we were wise when we enjoyed our new London Wall as a rare, exciting, and ephemeral addition to the common pleasures of the metropolis. We should have been no better off had we taken fright at it; and anyway, it turned out to be more successful as a work of art than as a weapon of defense. It did not stop bombs from falling; but it looked well, and at least it provided a subject for solitary musing.

The new wall, rising above the ruins of the old, dramatically illustrated the continuity of history and gave point to the adage that things change but remain the same. Here was a theme as rich for meditation and wonder as Wordsworth found when on Westminster Bridge he declared: “Earth has not anything to show more fair” than the towers and temples shining in the beauty of the morning. Was the wheel coming full circle? Would the famous city of London — yesterday the colonial outpost of a world empire, today the heart of a commonwealth of nations — tomorrow sink again into obscurity, or even disappear forever amid the ruins of European civilization?

As we look at the bomb-wrecked areas today, we see how easily London could vanish. Grass and a thousand varieties of weed flourish and already collect a thin soil in which bushes and small trees seed. Seen thus, the city for a moment appears only as a vast clearing that could quickly relapse into primeval wilderness. Strange birds flash in daylight among the gray rubble, while at night the owl, finding food and room to move, sails around St. Paul’s or hoots triumphantly from some ruined belfry. Thus the ancient cities were buried, which now we curiously dig for in jungle and desert. So soon does Nature resume her sway in the midst of a metropolis still very much alive.

To me, the excellence of life in London lies in the emotion of such rare moments, far more than in the pleasures, not contemptible either, of meeting new wits and examining old monuments. I wonder the poets do not more often sing these keen delights. Who can forget walking for the first time across Hampstead Heath and seeing the whole city spread before him from the green top of Parliament Hill? Maps and words and figures had proved it was a mighty town, but to overlook it, as from the cockpit of an aeroplane — the astounding size of the place!

And yet, the littleness of the place! The City keeps within its small ancient boundaries, while Greater London, with its eight millions of people, covering 693 square miles, may be viewed as a conglomeration of small towns and villages, even of one-street hamlets. Each group of citizens is divided by its occupations, amusements, manners, and even by its many variations of dialect — as Shaw has noted so amusingly in Pygmalion. They jostle for room in the streets and the subways, but they do not meet. They take a beeline daily between home and work, and the rest of the city is unknown to them. If required by accident to deviate from their accustomed routes, they lose their way as easily as strangers. Ask a Bloomsburian how to get to Bedford Park, ask a Kensingtonian the road to Kennington, inquire on the heights of Highgate for the marshes of Erith, or even in Maida Vale for Primrose Hill, and the rustic Cockneys will scratch their noddles in vain.

2

ONCE unon a time a Cockney was one who was born within sound of Bow Bells. A city of homely size, of comfortable area, was pictured by that definition. Bow Bells have been broken by bombs, but while they still rang faintly above the weekday traffic or echoed in the silent Sabbath streets, the one place where a Cockney was least likely to be born was within sound of them. Even the police seem to have given up trying to cope with the ever expanding map of the metropolis, and some seem to be cultivating an almost incredible ignorance. An American journalist walking near the Guildhall asked a policeman in this year of grace 1946 what was the name of the church in front of him? The policeman was in good temper, unoccupied by crime or the exigencies of directing automobiles; he simply did not know, and obviously did not want to know.

The taxi driver can still be depended on to carry a fare wherever he wants to go —“C’est son mètre,” as a joker said, as he calculated the fare on the mileage clock; but if the average driver while carrying you to the Abbey or the Tower can tell you, “It’s an oldish place, sir,” that is about as far, in these days of compulsory education, as his historical and antiquarian lore will go.

But we happy few, we lovers of London (most of us born elsewhere), we will not sneer at the Cockney; for he poor fellow, being native to the place, thinks it incumbent upon him not to explore, lest by doing so he might thereby be mistaken for a visitor. And to give him his due, the Cockney, as Hazlitt noted, may conceal a jealous pride in his city, though he knows so little about it, though he enjoys so small a portion of its wealth and luxury. Tn his essay “On Londoners and Country People” Hazlitt is contemptuous of this pride. He pictures with disdain this poor creature who, because he lives in the capital, thinks himself superior to those who live outside it. “He resides in a garret, or a two pair of stairs’ back room; yet he talks of the magnificence of London as if all the houses of Portman or Grosvenor Square were his by right or in reversion. He meets the Lord Mayor in his coach and without ceremony treats himself to an imaginary ride in it,”

Well, the Cockney of today still enjoys standing for hours to see the procession go by, still likes to crowd in the Mall to watch the debutantes going to dance at the Palace, still finds it fun to stare at notables stepping out of limousines for a first night or a charity fete — but is there not here a touch of the artistic, or the purely disinterested mind? Is it ignoble to be able to enjoy vicariously the pleasures of the pageant, the banquet, and the play? Is it even the lesser pleasure? Surely the delight of the spectator gaping outside the Guildhall may exceed that of the Lord Mayor’s guests about to put their knees under the loaded tables of civic hospitality.

Who that has in course of duty attended such affairs remembers them with joy? If there was pleasure it was in that peculiar sense in which Dr. Johnson, visiting the Pantheon, replied to Boswell’s statement that there was not half a guinea’s worth of pleasure in seeing the place, by saying that at least there was half a guinea’s worth of inferiority to other people in not having seen it. One remembers chiefly only the happy accidents that sometimes relieved the tedium, as, for example, at a festive dinner in the Great Hall of Lincoln’s Inn when the long line of pompous speeches seemed to stretch to the crack of doom and the march of platitude echoed unceasingly from the vaulted roof — a night of terrible eloquence, the oppression of which ended only when one’s neighbor, a distinguished scientist, pointed out a fortunate side view down the high table which enabled us to see that the royal guest of honor, as bored as the rest, was playing “noughts and crosses” on a menu card under cover of the cloth.

In the diurnal drama of a major city it is often the minor players in the long list of dramatis personae that provide the spectator with the most entertainment. Dickens knew it and proved it. Of all the characters in his novels, we enjoy most and remember best the obscure eccentrics, not his heroes, heroines, and villains. And those who believe that these diverting creatures have vanished from the London scene are as mistaken as those who believe that they never existed outside the fantastic imagination of their creator. Just as it is true that such people as Mr. Guppy, Captain Cuttle, Mrs. Jellyby, Miss La Creevy, the Marchioness, Mr. Serjeant Snubbin, Silas Wegg, Flora Finching, and Poor Jo were all much nearer to being portraits of real humanity than were the characters necessary to the plots, so it is true that the wildest humor of Dickens fell below, rather than exceeded, the possibilities of nature.

Do you remember Mr. Wemmick’s father — “the Aged” — in Great Expectations? Wemmick Senior’s little gothic cottage in the South London district of Walworth was reached by crossing a ditch over a plank, which was hoisted up and down like a drawbridge; and the comforting notion of a house fortified against the dangers of war, revolution, and simple burglary was increased by a flagstaff flying a real flag, and by a real gun that was fired every night at nine o’clock.

Delightful, but absurd? Amusing, but incredible? Well, I knew (up to the beginning of the war) a much respected gentleman in the City of London who ran a prosperous and prosaic business, but whose secret passion was ships. He collected everything nautical, from models of ships small enough to go inside a bottle to authentic ship’s figureheads as huge and heavy as an Epstein statue. On weekends he retired to a house on the river which for joyous eccentricity easily surpassed anything imagined by Dickens. The visitor fetched a servant to open the front door, not by pressing a button, but by pulling a rope which sounded a ship’s bell. Almost the entire ground floor housed the collection of giant figureheads — nightmarish gods in the twilight, but jolly enough in daylight, all freshly painted in the gilt-and-gaudy style of their original colors.

There was no staircase to the sitting room, but a ship’s ladder with white ropes for handrails. The room was a mixture of captain’s cabin and ship’s bridge; and the owner, in nautical costume, with a piratical black patch over one eye, had all the instruments of navigation at hand — in case his house slipped into the Thames and started sailing for the sea. Conversation was continually interrupted while he clapped a telescope to his good eye to examine a ship going by, and to name its owners and probable cargo. When he wanted tea or a glass of grog he sounded an engine-room telegraph bell which communicated with the kitchen, and a manservant in steward’s uniform promptly appeared.

This London businessman rode his hobby horse with the same mixture of passionate interest and shy consciousness of its absurdity as that with which Uncle Toby followed Marlborough’s battles with Corporal Trim on the bowling green. He apparently knew the history of half the famous clippers that once were launched from Blackwall, and the personal characters of all the present pilots of the Thames Estuary. The floor of his fantastic chamber was laid out as a ship’s deck, and all round the walls were illuminated tanks, filled with fish, the fronts of which were glass portholes taken from famous liners. Imagine a stormy night, a gale thrashing the rain on the windows, and the host and a company of sailors all telling tales of shipwreck while they imbibed liberal supplies of rum and whiskey. For it was on such a night that one visitor, rising unsteadily to his feet, noticed for the first time the inhabitants of the glass tanks, and shouted: “Take to the boats, men, we’re sinking! The fish are staring through the portholes!”

Yes, in spite of wars, taxation, bureaucracy, socialism, London still holds her quota of individualists, and if another Dickens is ever born he will find them out. Is there not a touch of Dickensian fancy in two old London women, one rich and the other poor, who meet once a week in this fashion? The poor woman earns a living trundling a barrel organ around the streets; the rich one lives a lonely life in a West End mansion. Once a week the sharp-voiced, weather-beaten old East Ender takes her hired barrel organ and trundles the heavy instrument through the traffic from the Angel to Marble Arch — a journey of several miles. There, in a secluded street, she churns out her concert for a fee of five shillings, while her audience of one, in shawl and lace cap, sits delightedly by the drawingroom window. There was a day when a policeman, new to the beat and deaf to music, gruffly instructed the barrel organist to “move on,” and the strains of La Bohème were interrupted. But only for a moment. The ungallant policeman was peremptorily told by the lady of the mansion, who popped her head out of the window, to interfere at his peril with the lady turning the handle, and the concert continued.

The barrel organ, once among the most popular street amusements of the Londoner, is slowly disappearing, and will soon go the way of the songs of the street traders and the tinkle of the muffin bell. The museums ought to acquire some of them before it is too late. During a walk to discover where, how, and by whom these instruments were kept for hire, one lately encountered a scene fit for Hogarth’s pencil.

It was in a dark little eighteenth-century alley in the Italian quarter of Mount Pleasant that one found the home of the piani di estrada — the street piano, as it is accurately named in its native tongue. The old storeroom was lit only by a dull jet of gas, and in the corners loomed the dark shapes of the barrel organs. Some male troupers opportunely arrived on their way home to supper and bed. Painted an inch thick and attired in shabby female finery and ludicrous wigs of flaming reds and yellows, they wheeled in the organ which they used to accompany their dancing and singing.

The tired buskers were not too tired to chatter about the day’s work, and pleased by a sympathetic audience, they danced a final jig to the strident music. As the handle was turned and the music went round and round — it was the tune with that very title (the melody once swept the town, though it is dead as Caesar now) — the dancers’ shadows wavered fantastically on walls and ceiling while other more sinister shadows filled the hungry hollows of their rouged cheeks. It was a macabre ballet — a funeral dance for the barrel organ.

3

THESE little scenes are outside the scope of the guidebook, untouched by the statistics of officialdom, and may seem unimportant to those anxious to know only how the London of the future is shaping; yet they are not without value. They remind us that the anonymous crowd we jostle in the streets is composed of individuals. They are marginal sketches to enliven dull texts about London’s social problems. Buildings great and small have been knocked down by war and will now be set up again in peace; Conservative politicians have been swept aside and Labor politicians put in their place; but wars, however terrible, and political revolutions, however complete, are but ripples on the surface in a city old enough to have been described by Tacitus as “renowned for the number of its businessmen and the density of its traffic.”

London has seen many wars and revolutions. Those of its citizens, still alive, who saw whole acres of the City’s most famous thoroughfares going up in flames under a rain of fire-bombs, will never forget the appalling yet fascinating spectacle; especially will never forget that moment when the raiders fled and the guns stopped, and how the silence was filled with the low roar of flames, the crash of falling masonry and glass — the fierce crackling of a gigantic bonfire composed of houses and offices of no great value and of historic buildings impossible to overvalue.

But Londoners have survived this second Great Fire as they survived the first of 1666. Already we read about it with the same feeling of something past and done with, as we read Pepys’s celebrated description of the city being cremated in his time. We do not read, as of something past and done with, the diarist’s descriptions of London’s rich men, poor men, beggarmen, thieves — for they, under different costumes, remain the same, as do the theaters, taverns, palaces, and brothels, under different names and in changed localities.

The architects have planned a new London, as Christopher Wren planned it under similar circumstances; and the planners of today, like those of yesterday, are being crushed and flattened by the natural pressure of an immediate demand for somewhere to live and to work. We should enjoy a beautiful city; we do not want merely an ugly, workaday city, but the returning hosts of men and women and the growing flood of visitors cram the available buildings to bursting point, and the irresistible demand for a roof of any kind must soon overcome all aesthetic considerations, as it did in the seventeenth century.

The heart is sickened by consideration of the human miseries involved; the mind is overwhelmed by the size of the problem — or, at least, the hearts and minds of politicians and editorial writers are, by public cry and proclamation, so sickened and overwhelmed. But the individual fights his own fight, wins or loses, without pretending much interest in the fate of his fellow citizens; and the present writer, though he lost his old home, and lives in imminent danger of being turned out of his current home with nowhere to go, still prefers to enjoy the native humors of the town rather than to grow melancholy over the solemn problems common to us all. Shall there not be cakes and ale because we are not so thriving as of yore? Are we likely to thrive again if we sit down and sigh? Londoners are a cheerful folk and will laugh their way through the dangers of peace as they did through the terrors of war.

There are great men and little men of London — dull dogs, all of them — who would not give twopence to know the cheap little eating house near St. Paul’s where one gets a better meal today (though less elaborately served) than at the Savoy or the Ritz. But Dr. Samuel Johnson, that eminent citizen, was always ready to hear about such things.

Johnson, who once announced that “most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things,” who affirmed that “let fanciful men do what they will, it is difficult to disturb the system of life,” delighted in London trivia and was often able to illustrate the subject with examples from his own experience. When Boswell observed that the poor in London went about gathering old bones, and wondered why, Johnson, erudite in more than bookish matters, told him: “Sir, they boil them, and extract a grease for greasing wheels and other purposes,” and proceeded to expound the secrets of the trade in detail.

Talking of his first days in London, Johnson remembered that he dined very well for eightpence. “It used to cost the rest a shilling, for they drank wine; but I had a cut of meat for sixpence and bread for a penny, and gave the waiter a penny; so that I was quite well served, nay, better than the rest, for they gave the waiter nothing.” Was he not always ready for a ramble, even at three in the morning? Johnson was a true London Bohemian and, in spite of his respect for rank and convention, was on Falstaff’s side of the fence.

If Dr. Johnson found amusement and instruction in these domestic details of London life, we need not be ashamed to describe them; and though of making books on London there is no end, the enthusiastic observer may always hope to tell of things unrecorded or forgotten or to give an individual picture of a hackneyed subject — for it is ten to one that your novelty is old news to a dozen others.

4

O TOWNE of Townes!” exclaimed William Dunbar in his tribute to the city, “London, thou art the flour of Cities all.” The poet was writing to please the “burgomasters and great oneyers” and must be forgiven his boast. If, five hundred years later, we repeat the boast, we do so only in a whisper, of course, lest we cause offense in a world shrunk so small that we can all hear what everybody else is saying. Dunbar, just like any modern visitor, chiefly gaped to see the lords, barons, merchants “ full of substance” and “most delectable lusty ladies bright,” the riches and royalty of the capital city, the palaces and churches, the tower of “Julyus Cesar,” and other obvious splendors.

Doubtless these are things to be enjoyed. The royalty of old St. James’s, the hotel-like grandeur of Buckingham Palace, are very well, though few of us may hope to see inside them and talk with those who live in them. The riches of Bond Street and of Piccadilly are on view to all — if only, as children look at toys, through the window. Let us by all means stare dutifully at famous buildings and people, reverently push our way through the ever crowded Abbey, humbly search for the hidden beauties of those City churches which have survived the war or have not yet been sold for office sites by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.

The Lord Mayor, to us as to Dunbar “Above all Maires . . . most worthy,” is a sight not to be missed, whether in all the panoply of civic fuss and ceremonial or in plain clothes distributing justice at the Mansion House. The Tower of London — beefeaters, crown jewels, and all — indubitably demands our homage. And we salute the Monument, Big Ben, Nelson on his column, and other familiar landmarks unknown to the old poet. The tourist has scarce time even for these celebrated gewgaws.

But if foreign and country visitors, and the Cockneys themselves, see only some of the listed treasures, there are in each generation a few enthusiasts — odd fellows with an insatiable curiosity about London, who search its streets with that same passion which impels others to cross deserts and climb mountains. Walk with one of these and the dullest district becomes entertaining. These explorers find treasure in the most unlikely places. They know all the antique lore of the city — where to find the oldest houses and inns, the tradesmen with the longest connection with their trade, the obscurer clubs, where the famous lie in forgotten graves. They are constantly adding entertaining notes and supplementary chapters to the library of books already written on London.

5

THERE is, too, the London reporter — that indefatigable journalist who tells us what is new in town, whose daily entries keep London’s Domesday Book perpetually up to date. He shows us to ourselves and to the world as we are today — fighting for houses and flats, battling against government controls, rebuilding our ruined streets with temporary huts, queuing for rationed food, cleaning up sandbags and shelters, saying farewell to Europe’s refugees, welcoming world conferences, parting with the soldiers of the Commonwealth and the United States, staggering under strikes, crowding in record-breaking numbers the theaters, concert halls, and art galleries, darning our shabby clothes, and striving against odds to regain that foreign trade upon which London has thrived for nearly two thousand years.

It is no idle custom of the City Fathers to visit the bust of Stow, the old chronicler of London, and to place in his right hand once a year a new quill pen. It symbolizes the value in which we hold all London’s chroniclers from Tacitus to the clerk who tabulates the City budget. Those who sketch the contemporary scene hold a livelier interest for the majority of readers than those who delve in the past, and one hopes that industrious compilers are collecting choice specimens of their craft for the benefit of posterity.

Was not Pepys a London reporter of the first rank? Was not Dickens the prince of London reporters? The workaday journalist cannot hope to possess the skill of Dickens in describing the sinister silence of a London fog or in sharpening the comedy of Cockney talk. He cannot hope to have Pepys’s gift for gossip and anecdote. But except for the indispensable books of reference, I confess that the London reporter’s pages seem to me to be more instructive and amusing than all but the very best volumes of London’s historians and antiquaries.

I was never able to find pleasure in seeing places merely for the sake of seeing them. The noblest building has no charm for me until some personal emotion has endeared it. Vainly I once tried to feel, as others said they felt, awed by the beauty of Wren’s cathedral. It was useless to pretend. So far as it could be seen from the surrounding narrow streets and over the roofs of high office buildings St. Paul’s seemed a handsome edifice; but perhaps because the aesthetic feeling — in some a pure passion — in me requires a personal emotion to give it warmth, my admiration for the cathedral never developed after my first curiosity had been satisfied. It was part of London, not part of my London. Only since that memorable night when, from a roof in Fleet Street, I watched the great dome with its golden cross rising serenely above the smoke and flames of the burning city, has my heart responded to this masterpiece in Portland stone. Now, though I pass it daily, I never grow tired of looking at it.

The interior of St. Paul’s usually depressed rather than exhilarated me until one day, attending a national service there, I was taken by privilege to a little balcony high inside the dome. There, when I was alone above the crowd, yet at one with them, St. Paul’s completely came to life for me. The swelling voices of the choir, the solemn organ, the kneeling congregation, a shaft of sunlight that for a moment illuminated a group of nobles and commoners, and above all, the nation’s need for the blessing we were there to pray for — these gave a human warmth to the cold beauty of the cathedral and a human proportion to the vast structure. St. Paul’s ceased to be merely a great example of architectural genius and was seen as what it really is: a church, a place for men to worship in. My imagination at last took wings. I saw that the beauty of St. Paul’s, its fame, age, historic associations, could enrich but not create the emotion roused by the exercise of its true function. From that moment I could indeed admire it.