London Urban Legends Read online

  14

  THE STRANGER’S WARNING

  * * *

  That was the way with Man; it had always been that way.

  He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was afraid of had always been himself.

  Clifford D. Simak Way Station

  * * *

  ADEADLY STRANGER LURKING in the back of a woman’s car has not been the only warning to circle around the internet, purportedly coming from the Metropolitan Police. A fake message warning people not to travel on the London Underground emerged on 24 July 2005. The email claimed that controlled explosions had taken place around 15 July, at Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square stations. They had not. Much like the fake warning of the stranger hiding on the back seat (See Criminal Lore) persons unknown were inventing police warnings.

  The fear of the enemy amongst us, either terrorists or infiltrators, has haunted people for a long time and a particular sort of urban legend has accompanied these fears. In the twenty-first century, urban myths or rumours of the ‘Helpful Terrorist’ or ‘Strangers Warning’, have been spread quickly by email and internet forums. Our century has seen terrorist attacks across the world and these have left fear and folklore in their wake. Over the winter of 2001, an email warning of the possibility of an attack started popping into people’s inboxes. Below is a typical version taken from the website Snopes.com. It arrived via the girlfriend of a friend of a relative of a friend – even farther removed than the standard ‘friend of a friend’:

  Morning all,

  Had a bizarre message from my brother in the early hours of this morning …

  His friend’s girlfriend was shopping in Harrods on the weekend. There was an Arab man in front of her who was buying a number of things with cash – he was a few pounds short so the girl offered him £3 to cover it.

  He thanked her profusely and left. When she left the store the man followed her out and thanked her again and warned her not to travel on the tube today! [1 October 2001]. She was a little thrown by this so she went to the police. The police were very sceptical but in order to eliminate her suspicions gave her the photo-ID book of all known dissidents in the UK. He was on the second page listed as a known terrorist.

  This is apparently true and the police are apparently taking this extremely seriously. The most likely time would be rush hour this evening so please avoid it if you can – who knows it may be nothing but is it worth the risk?

  PS- I don’t have a lot of people’s e-mail addresses so obviously please forward this on to anyone and everyone.

  I am certain that if the Metropolitan Police suspected that the London Underground was going to be bombed on a specific date, they would not leave it up to members of the public to spread the word via email.

  The ‘foaf’ in this version of the urban legend is generally a woman, which may be because women are considered more kind; it has consistently been a woman throughout the legend’s evolution.

  The woman gives the mystery man £3 and warns of danger in London, with this legend it is typically the larger fee in London and a lesser fee of 68p at a cash and carry when Birmingham is the potential target for attacks. As well as the London Underground and Birmingham, warnings have been given regarding Coventry, Tamworth, Milton Keynes and Chester. This type of urban folklore has spread to America, with the warning given to a woman about drinking a popular brand of soft drink after 7 September. In an alternative version, a male waiter, after giving a customer change for the phone, is warned to avoid a second popular soft drink after 1 June.

  Many tales of the ‘Helpful Terrorist’ have been borne from the sad events of 11 September 2001, including warnings from boyfriends to their girlfriends not to go near the World Trade Centre or the Pentagon on that day. The story of 9/11 was retrospective and so false but there was a warning for later that year: ‘Don’t go to any malls on Halloween’. It seems that many urban legends evolve from huge events and are subject to change as the story is carried from person to person.

  The Enemy Within

  One of the most disturbing urban legends covers the possibility of the enemy among us, that the person sitting next to us could be a terrorist, or the far more dangerous implication that a group of people living within our community are complicit in the actions of a terrorist cell. It seems unlikely, but some urban rumours have entire communities that are aware of terrorist assaults prior to the actual event.

  These rumours can gather such momentum that city authorities have to release statements ensuring the public that they are untrue. Such is the nature of an urban legend, that the repeated telling can give a story credibility although it has no apparent basis in fact, nor any evidence to support it.

  In New York, the police released an announcement in January 2003. ‘There is no terror plot or threat connected to the rumor that is circulating in New York and in other cities abroad,’ said Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne. This was apparently in response to a rumour that a cab driver had warned one of his female customers of an impending terror plot.

  Snopes, an invaluable aid in gathering rumours, also related an earlier version of the stranger’s warning legend. In 2000, a version of this story was circulating in Manchester in which a woman helps a young man out by lending him some money while in the queue of a fast-food restaurant. She is rewarded by being warned to keep out of a local shopping centre in March on that year in a soft Irish accent. The change in stranger is important: the is an urban legend that attaches itself to many different ethnicities.

  The rumour of the helpful terrorist goes further back than this century and from terrorism to all out war. During the First and Second World War there were many strange and frightening rumours flying around London and the rest of the UK, and some that seem familiar today. Rumours of the enemy among us came in the shape of supposed fifth columnists walking our streets. At the start of the Blitz, there were fears that German agents were signalling to bombers circling London. One German-Swiss man in Kensington was arrested for smoking a large cigar: ‘He was puffing hard to make a big light and pointing it to the sky,’ said a witness who feared the smoker was in fact communicating with enemy bombers.

  During the Battle of Britain, it was rumoured that Hermann Göring himself had flown in a bombing raid over London. By 1942, this had evolved into Göring being seen sitting in an air-raid shelter in Plymouth after parachuting in to watch the city being blitzed. Just as Adolf Hitler had his eye on London offices and flats and had visited the UK in his youth (See Nazis over London), Osama Bin Laden was often sighted in America after he became public enemy number one. He was usually seen in coffee shops or eating in fast-food restaurants.

  The First World War was fertile ground for rumour and folklore, with stories of angels protecting British troops as they retreated from their first engagement at Mons. There was the hope of Russian allies travelling through Britain by train to reinforce the frontline. These warriors were identified by the snow on their boots.

  Once the Great War began, bizarre rumours began to spread across the city. Concrete, patented in 1849, became a source of anxiety. Tennis courts were suspected of being secret German machine gun placements, and a factory in Willesden with views of the Crystal Palace that was constructed from concrete was raided by police in 1914, because it was discovered that it had another office located in Leipzig. The owner of Ewell Castle successfully sued the Evening News and the People after the newspapers published a story saying that their concrete-bottomed lake was being capable of mounting five heavy guns, which had the firepower to take out the main railway line into London. Evidence given for the castle owner being a spy included his expensive car. On 3 October 1914 the rumour led to the Daily Mail asking: ‘Is it too much to ask that our kid gloved government will ascertain how many German owned factories have been built in this country which incidentally command Woolwich, Dover, Rosyth? A timely inspection might reveal many concrete structures.’ Police led a futile search of the abandoned King William tube station when the
Railway Magazine suggested there was a cell of enemy agents occupying the location and using it as a base to shoot and bomb their way across the city.

  One night in October 1916, a Zeppelin was said to have descended onto Hackney Marshes and a tall man with an eye patch was lowered down in a basket. He got out, asked a couple of bystanders the way to Silvertown and they told him to follow the River Lea until he got to Bow. The man and the Zeppelin then disappeared into the night. The couple then informed the police.

  Sir Basil Thomson, head of CID at Scotland Yard during the start of the First World War wrote an informative and entertaining book about his investigations from that time, Queer People. In the book, he tells a tale of a caddish German officer ‘being seen in the Haymarket by an English friend; that he returned the salute involuntarily but then changed colour and jumped into a passing taxi, leaving his friend gaping on the pavement.’ Other legends have a young girl meeting her fiancé who is an enemy officer in disguise. He forgets himself briefly greeting her with affection, before remembering himself and turning away. Infiltrators have revealed themselves in various ways, such as swearing to themselves in their native tongue.

  Around the same time, a familiar story was spread. The following is from Queer People:

  The next delusion was that of the grateful German and the Tubes. The commonest form of the story was that an English nurse had brought a German officer back from the door of death, and that in a burst of gratitude he said at parting, ‘I must not tell you more, but beware of the Tubes in April [1915].’

  Basil Thomson tracked this rumour:

  We took the trouble to trace this story from mouth to mouth until we reached the second mistress in a London Board School. She declared that she had had it from the charwoman who cleaned the school, but that lady stoutly denied that she had ever told so ridiculous a story.

  The rumour appeared during the Second World War too, but this time the nurse was treating a captured German pilot and was rewarded for her kindness by being advised to carry her gas mask on 15 September. Did a rumour from the cleaner of an unnamed London Board School migrate almost entirely intact to the twenty-first century? Perhaps the reason the character in the tale is always a woman is because the original figure was a female nurse. It is clear that the person given the warning is kind and worthy of the advice. In fact, the latest version of the story does contain a role-reversal. After the shooting of Osama Bin Laden, Paris feared it would suffer reprisal attacks. In the Parisian version of May 2011, one man returns another man’s wallet, and is rewarded by being advised not to use the Metro the following day. A legend being told at the same time sees one woman helping another by sparing some change for a parking meter near Carnegie Mellon University – she is told not to attend any rallies for the Tea Party.

  Like the mugger hidden on the back seat of a woman’s car, or dead eyes staring at you on public transport late at night, this urban myth relates to fear, prejudices or a blind spot in general knowledge where wild speculation can takes its place. The Strangers Warning relates to a very specific situation in which there is a threat of attack by persons unknown on civilians in an urban setting. It is bound within the fear of attack that the Helpful Terrorist story is able to pass from person to person as a truth, especially during times of great anxiety when emotions are running high and people want to believe in the good of a stranger.

  The following is an interview with Alexander Walters, who served a term of one year in prison for a hoax bomb alert at Heathrow airport on 15 September 2001. On 26 November 2002, the Guardian reported:

  He had been out walking his dog on September 15, when an urge suddenly seized him to phone Heathrow airport on his mobile.

  ‘There is a bomb at the airport,’ he told the operator. ‘You have exactly one hour.’ The call was traced to his phone - which, like him, was in south Wales.

  What on earth was he thinking?

  ‘I didn’t think at all. I just went for a walk. It was just something that happened so fast that I didn’t even know what I was doing until it was too late.

  ‘It wasn’t attention-seeking, it was just, I think, a way of letting anger out. I had one or two problems at the time, and obviously I did something really stupid.’

  What was he angry about?

  ‘I wouldn’t know, it was just a spur of the moment thing. You just totally switch off and do something you shouldn’t have done. And then before you know it has caused this huge thing.’

  Is this what the author of a hoax email in thinking or feeling as he or she writes it?

  This Era’s Enemy

  The Great Fire of London, now believed to have been an accident that started at a bakery in Pudding Lane, was long regarded as a piece of Catholic terrorism. Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker living in Romford, confessed to starting the fire, being an ‘agent of the Pope’ and taking a bribe from the king of France. England was also at war with Holland at the time of the fire and it was feared that ‘the French and the Dutch have fire’d the City’. Despite concerns about his mental state, Hubert was hanged at Tyburn on 28 September 1666 for starting the fire, before it emerged that he had in fact arrived in London two days after the fire had begun. During the execution, an effigy of the Pope was burned with a head full of cats that screamed for the pleasure of the crowd as the flames reached them.

  The Monument to the Great Fire of London at Fish Street had inscriptions blaming Hubert and ‘Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched’, which were not permanently removed until 1830.

  On Monday, 2 September 1666, the second day of the fire, a maid from Covent Garden called Anne English was arrested after she was reportedly claimed that a group of French men had delivered a warning to her master. The men told him to move his goods as ‘within six weeks that house and all the street would be burned to the ground’. She was interrogated at Whitehall, but denied the story stating that she had heard ‘that the French and Dutch had kindled the fire in the City.’

  The helpful terrorist has an ancestor in a warning passed on before the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Just before it’s failed execution, there was a warning delivered to the Catholic Lord Monteagle who was having dinner in Hoxton when he received a letter pleading with him to ‘shift of your attendance at this Parliament’ as Parliament was due ‘a terrible blow’ on 5 November. This is not thought to be a genuine warning from one Catholic to another however. The origin of this warning is suspected to be from Monteagle himself who knew some of those involved in plotting an attack, but did not want to be seen to betray them. Another suggestion is that it was a secret service letter that was designed to be used as evidence against those plotting atrocities. Basil Thomson was a former intelligence officer who was sometimes involved in disseminating misinformation. Perhaps, this urban legend is a covert way of drawing information out of the public. Propaganda has been used as a tool for a long time, but once the story has been released, it is free to be adapted and moulded and is not easy to control. As well as planted rumour, there were hoaxers, liars, old prejudices, people who communicate their ideas through allegory and story, and the people who believe the stories and pass them on.

  There is one more tale of an act of kindness gaining insight set in London but the knowledge is of a very different nature. Broadcaster, journalist and wit Nancy Spain (1917–1964) is reported to have seen a ghost on Piccadilly. Spain saw the ghost after she had just left Fortnum & Mason and was looking for a cab. One pulled up in front of her and a woman with red hair got out, fumbling in her purse. Spain was in a hurry and paid the fare for the elderly woman who then went into the store without saying a word. Once Nancy Spain was in the cab the driver said, ‘You were caught there, Miss. That old gal could buy both of us. That was Lady C.’ Speaking of the incident the next day, Spain was wordlessly given a newspaper by her mother that carried the headline, ‘Lady C. Dies in Fire’. The knowledge Spain gained through her generosity was of the world of ghosts and not of terrorism.

  Spain app
arently saw ghosts in the strangest places; she once encountered the spectre of her friend Bin who had died at the age of twenty-four at a restaurant. Of the event she said, ‘Once I am sure I saw her come into a restaurant. She sat down and ordered, of all things, a Scotch Egg. But when I leapt up to say hello she seemed to vanish, leaving a hard, clear line for a second, as a piece of paper does when it burns in the fire.’

  The stranger’s warning legend is the classic story of entertaining angels unaware, or the fairtytale of a hero or heroine who gained the favour of god through an act of kindness. The story shows how kindness can be rewarded and has the hopeful note that an attack may be avoided.

  15

  NAZIS OVER LONDON

  * * *

  German airmen are careful not to bomb breweries and maltings in

  Britain because Hitler knows that if Britons go on drinking at the

  present rate, we shall lose the war.

  Unnamed clergyman from Chester and Warrington

  Methodist Synod quoted from The Tumour in the Whale.

  * * *

  THE GORDON RIOTS of June 1780, London’s most violent protest, were inspired, or at least encouraged, by Lord George Gordon’s speeches against laws proposing to allow the nation’s Catholic citizens the right to buy land, practise medicine, teach and join the House of Commons or Lords. More fuel for the mob’s fury came as a result of fearful rumours of 20,000 Jesuits hiding beneath tunnels under the Thames, waiting to take London on orders of the Pope, like the Germans lurking in King William Street Station (See here) .