London Urban Legends Read online

  To Clare, Arthur and Alfred Wood: a world of

  wondrous stories would mean nothing without you.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I AM IMMEASURABLY GRATEFUL to my wife Clare anyway, but she not only listened to me as I wittered and wibbled on about this book; she also took the children out so I could write, and fearlessly and methodically undertook the arduous first proofread of this book. I am very, very grateful to you, Clare. Also the greatest of thanks to my family and friends, my colleagues at Bishopsgate Institute and The History Press for their patience, support and trust while I took so damn long writing this book.

  Thank you to my friends and those who helped with the book for their advice, guidance, research, encouragement, stories and ears to sound-off into: David V. Barrett, Jason Godwin, Simon Round, Neil Denny, Catherine Halliwell, Sarah Sparkes, Ross McFarlane, Paul Cowdell, Neil Transpontine, Vicky Hill, Caroline Oates, John Rimmer, James Clarke, Matt Brown, Lottie Leedham, Jeremy Harte, Joe McNally, Elizabeth Pinel, Alex Margolis, Mark Pilkington, Johnny Radar, Elizabeth James, Martin Goodson, Tom Oldham, Reena Makwanna, Richard Sanderson, Danielle Sutcliffe, Steven Barrett and those of you I have doubtless forgotten. Thank you, I could not have done it without you.

  There is a bibliography at the back of this book, but writing and researching London’s urban legends would have been far harder and a lot less fun without the writings of Rodney Dale, Jan Harold Brunvand, Michael Goss, James Hayward, Steve Roud, Antony Clayton and Barbara and David Mikkelson, as well as the editors, writers and contributors of the Fortean Times, Magonia magazine and the Folklore Society Newsletter. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

  I owe a debt of gratitude to the London Metropolitan Archive, Royal Society of Architects Archive, the British Library and British Newspaper Library, Bishopsgate Institute Library and Archive, Guildhall Library and Transport for London’s Corporate Archives, as well as Clare Norman at Lidl public relations, Tom Artrocker, Jo Tanner at Us Ltd and the Museum of London archaeology department for their patience.

  Thank you to the London Fortean Society, the London Cryptozoology Club and the South East London Folklore Society who have let me indulge my obsession for these topics in public.

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  one

  London Phrase and Fable

  two

  The Hidden Insult

  three

  The Queen’s Head and the Krays’ Arms

  four

  The Genitals of London

  five

  Legends of Rock

  six

  New Legends as Old

  seven

  Legendary Landmarks

  eight

  The Suicidal Sculptor

  nine

  The Devils of Cornhill

  ten

  The Misadventures of Brandy Nan

  eleven

  Plague Pits

  twelve

  Subterranean Secrets

  thirteen

  The Corpse on the Tube

  fourteen

  The Stranger’s Warning

  fifteen

  Nazis Over London

  sixteen

  Criminal Lore

  seventeen

  London Blades

  eighteen

  The Accidental Theft

  nineteen

  Concrete Jungle

  twenty

  The Fantastic Urban Fox

  twenty-one

  Where the Wild Things Are

  twenty-two

  Folklore and Fakelore

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  * * *

  Ghost and other horror stories, political and social commentaries, dirty jokes (hundreds of them!), black humours tales, episodes of revenge, and topical pieces which rely on the audience’s shared reaction to AIDS, nuclear warfare, foreigners, etc.

  Michael Goss answers his question ‘What are urban legends about?’ in the article ‘Legends for Our Time’ in the July 1987 issue of The Unknown.

  * * *

  THIS IS A book about urban legends and London. The brief for the book is a brilliant one: collect, share and attempt to interpret the funny, scary, filthy and bizarre contemporary legends weaving their way through everyday London life. I hope to have written a book that is about London and urban legends, as well as how they relate to each other. This is a book of London tales that finds strange stories and lost and bizarre truths amongst the folklore. This is a book that looks at urban legends using the capital city of the United Kingdom as a frame whilst not neglecting their ability to travel anywhere there are people, and their talent for adapting very quickly to their environment. It is true that urban legends are universal rather than local, but one way urban legends thrive is by their immediacy: they attach themselves to people and places. It is also true that the temperament of tale-tellers, their audience and the landscape they share shapes their legendary life. Some of the stories in this book are as synonymous with London as mash and liquor with your pie, as people who talk all the way through gigs and having to queue for the swings in the playground. If you are not familiar with the city, this book is a strange introduction, but it can still show you around. You would be just as likely to find yourself standing over a possible plague pit or under a forgotten church gargoyle as in the middle of Trafalgar Square or outside Buckingham Palace. Ideas about London are far more widely spread than ones on urban legends, so I shall spend a few more pages introducing those. But fear not, the city runs through this entire book.

  Urban myths are thought of as untrue stories pretending to be true, which they partly are, but I have recently heard many a fallacy or falsehood being denounced as being merely an urban myth. This is not true: there is always some level of narrative within an urban myth or legend. I may have stretched the meaning myself here to include moral panics, delusions and hoaxes, but each of these carries a story within them or are delivered by a fear or belief with a narrative. Urban myths are the stories told by ordinary people to entertain and to communicate a truth, opinion or prejudice through a story. Just as fairy tales explain the dangers of going into the woods at night, tell stories of kings or princesses going to a market in disguise, or why a local rock looks a certain shape, an urban myth will explain the dangers of using the London underground at night, tells a story of a celebrity or princess going to a local pub or bar, or describes why a building or statue is a certain shape. Other urban legends are a mad idea that rocket through the public consciousness, a story just plausible enough to spread: rioters releasing animals from London Zoo; a green patch of land in an overcrowded city lying empty because it hides a deadly secret. Others are even more vague, like the idea that big cats (pumas and panthers) have escaped their rich owners or zoos, and prowl the edges of the city; that urban fox hunts are something that may be useful and real.

  There is a mystery to these myths. I have not set out to solve these mysteries, but to offer (hopefully) informed suggestions as to how and why they came to be.

  Origin of Myths

  In keeping with something as nebulous as urban myths, the origins of the phrase, along with the term urban legend, are not straightforward. Many believe that the American professor and writer Jan Harold Brunvald coined the phrase ‘urban legend’, and his books certainly helped popularise the phrase, but the credit could also go to American folklorist, Richard Dorson, who apparently used it in a 1968 essay ‘Legends and Tall Tales’ (in Our Living Traditions, edited by Tristram P. Coffin). Dorson is the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary, but this does not make him the man who minted the phrase. Dorson used it himself
in a 1962 article. Researching the origin in Foaftale News, Charles Clay Doyle and Lara Renee Knight found a New York Times article from 6 December 1925 regarding Europe’s population growth: ‘Around the subject of population there has been a growth of popular legend hard to remove. Great Britain illustrates the urban legend.’ This described a myth of urban life: that it is unhealthy and squalid compared to rural living and is not used to describe contemporary legends and myths. The phrase is old, has multiple uses and its roots are hard to uncover.

  Reading Michael Goss’s article in the June 1987 small digest magazine The Unknown, the main aspect of urban myths that first captured my imagination was the idea that stories could migrate and adapt themselves as they travel. It was the first time I imagined stories with a life beyond their author. One could read a book written by a deceased writer, but it would still be in their book. But what if the writer was gone, the books, films and songs were forgotten, but somehow their story lived on and found an ever-changing existence travelling around the world?

  I began reading magazines like The Unexplained and The Unknown as a precocious pre-adolescent looking for aliens stepping out of UFOs, ghosts drawing themselves out of ancient wallpaper and monsters lurking in the misty night but found something far more humane and fascinating that could contain all of these gaudy wonders. My fascination with the paranormal was enlarged and refined. Years later I was lucky enough to catch Jan Harold Brunvald speak at the Fortean Times gathering, the UnConvention, which reignited my interest.

  When American psychologist F.C. Bartlett experimented with how stories change through retelling, his conclusions rang true for urban myths. Details difficult to repeat were smoothed out, and in Bartlett’s test story, ‘canoes’ became ‘boats’ and ‘bush-cats’ became ‘cats’. Any unusual parts of the story begin to be rationalised and morals formed either through this process or as a reason for telling the story. The experiment was short and contained to a small peergroup, while urban legends are feral and free, but it makes sense that stories survive, not just because they are entertaining but because they carry a central lesson or meaning.

  As I have already said, the term urban myth and legend is now used to describe contemporary folk stories. One problem raised by this is that where there are gatherings of people, there are legends, myths and folklore; and London has been an urban environment for around two thousand years. If we were to find a story told by the Romans about a part of London life, would that be an urban myth? Classical myths and legends are often of gods, heroes and supernatural creatures, but urban myths also trouble themselves with royalty and celebrities and wander into the supernatural and paranormal to include ghosts, monsters and stories of miracles. They are not always stories of the common folk.

  Other names have been suggested for these tales: Rodney Dale arguably wrote the first acknowledged urban myth book, without using the term, in 1972; The Tumour in the Whale suggested the phrase ‘whale tumours’, inspired by stories of rationing era whale meat being eaten as a substitute for beef, with its unusual status confirmed with wobbly growths. The phrase did not catch on, but Dale did bring together the phrase ‘friend-of-a-friend’ and abbreviate it to ‘foaf’ in order to describe the ever-apocryphal source of an urban myth. David J. Jacobson, in his 1948 book The Affairs of Dame Rumour, and Sir Basil Thomson, in his 1922 book Queer People, both encountered and understood the source of a story as always being just beyond arms’ length – they are quoted later in this book describing the process in more depth. Another good term for these stories is the Swedish vandresagn, meaning ‘wandering legends’ that travel by people sharing stories. Sharing stories is as old as humanity and is still a powerful way for us to express our feelings and innermost thoughts, from epics to emails and campfires to Kindles.

  Scott Wood, 2013

  1

  LONDON PHRASE

  AND FABLE

  * * *

  But the truth is this is not how London is apprehended. It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passage, door.

  Anna Quindlen, Imagined London

  * * *

  WHY DO WE use that phrase? Why is that statue so strange? Why is that big stone there? Where is that actual place?

  There is often a story to answer questions like this about a local landmark. It is as if a large physical object or popular idea deserves to have a neat narrative fixed to it. Once you start examining the origins of a myth or phrase, you can be led down strange alleys and cul-de-sacs chasing old stories and ideas. Things can become confused and leave your thoughts in some disarray or, to use the particularly apt phrase, ‘at sixes and sevens’.

  The phrase ‘at sixes and sevens’ is said to have a London origin and refers to a feud between the Merchant Taylors and Merchant Skinners livery companies. Both were founded in the City of London around the same time, so they argued about who should come sixth and who should come seventh in the Order of Precedence, a list of London livery companies organised by age collected from 1515.

  ‘To fall off the wagon’ means to succumb to the temptation of alcohol; to be on the wagon is to not drink, so to fall off is to start drinking again. One possible origin of this saying, much-loved on The Robert Elms Show on BBC London Radio, is from when prisoners were taken from Newgate Prison to Tyburn to be hanged. Halfway to their execution there would be a stop where the condemned could have a last drink. One origin of this tradition could be that a ‘cup of charity’ was bequeathed by Queen Matilda (wife of Henry I). The prisoner would get off the wagon at a tavern at St-Giles-in-the-Fields and have a pint of ale in the cup, and then get back on the wagon to go to Tyburn. He would never drink again. Another version, collected by Snopes, has the last stop at Marble Arch, right by the site of the gallows. A retelling from the Nursery Rhymes: Lyrics, Origins and History website puts a line of dialogue into the story. If the prisoner was offered a second drink, the guard would say, ‘No, he’s on the wagon.’ If they had friends in the crowd they would, perhaps, be pulled off the wagon and rescued. This is falling off the wagon.

  The word ‘tawdry’, which means something that is cheap, low quality and maybe makes you a bit sad to give or receive as a gift, also has its origins in London. St Ethelreda’s Church on Ely Place, London’s oldest Catholic place of worship, is near London’s diamond and jewellery centre, Hatton Garden. I was told by a trustworthy source, a Blue Badge guide no less, that the church gave us the word from the poorer quality trinkets from the area which was said to be a bit ‘St Audrey’, another version of the name Ethelreda.

  All of these phrases make sense on their own, hermetically sealed in their own story. Outside of these are far different possible origins. ‘At sixes and sevens’ bumbles all the way back to the Old Testament with ‘six, yea, seven’, meaning an indefinite number and so is unknown and confusing. In the Book of Job is the line that God ‘shall deliver thee in six troubles, yea in seven’, and it is likely that the Bible has more influence over popular culture than London’s livery companies and their lore. Another biblical origin is the story of an error in the King James Bible, in which the sixth commandment is ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ and the seventh ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery’. In the Septuagint version, not committing adultery comes in sixth and the seventh is ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’. Which puts bible scholars at sixes and sevens. Another non-biblical origin is from the French game played with dice called Hazard, where six and seven are the most hazardous numbers to shoot for and anyone attempting it is thought to be careless or confused.

  Does tawdry come from St Ethelreda? Perhaps, but not the one in London. St Ethelreda’s sits within Ely Place, the site of the palace for the Bishop of Cambridge, and the church started life as the palace’s private chapel. An earlier version is that the word comes from St Audrey lace sold on at the fair of St Audrey on the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire.

  The phrases ‘on the wagon’ and ‘fall off the wagon’ evolved
probably not along the streets between Newgate and Tyburn but in America. The earliest known version appeared in the 1901 book Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, the phrase referring to the water wagons used in America to dampen down dusty roads. The American Temperance movement formed the phrase to describe someone who is not drinking. They felt so strongly about the sinfulness of alcohol that they would rather drink water from the water wagon than let alcohol pass their lips, although now I write it down this explanation sounds just as implausible as the Tyburn theory. The excellent online resource, Snopes, suggests that ‘on the wagon’ is a derivation of ‘following the bandwagon’. The bandwagon is a phrase coined, as far as we know, by the American showman P.T. Barnum to describe what his shows travelled around in, and ‘to jump on the bandwagon’ means to follow or join the fair. The word only goes back as far as the nineteenth century, with ‘on the wagon’ still coming to us from the members of the Temperance movement. Any connection to the journey to Tyburn was almost certainly retro-fitted in the twentieth or twenty-first century as speculation made story, or by joining the dots of distance and unrelated ideas to make a pleasing narrative pattern. We can’t help but do it; it’s impossible for us just to shrug and say ‘I don’t know’ when wondering about such a thing, so we write stories to explain the mysterious origins of phrase and fables.