Category: Quirky Page 11 of 23

From Submariners to the Blitz Firefighters – a walk along Embankment towards St Paul’s.

On 3rd March 2022

In Architecture, Art Deco, Memorials, Quirky, Sculpture, Wartime

A lovely Sunny day last Saturday tempted me out for a walk.

The national Submarine Memorial Memorial on Victoria Embankment (EC4Y 0HJ) is, I think, one of London’s most moving.

Although able to hide when submerged, once struck the vessels were often unable to rise to the surface and became effectively underwater coffins. In the First World War fifty four boats were lost and with them the lives of 138 officers and 1,225 men. At the inauguration in 1922 Rear Admiral Sinclair, the Chief of the Submarine Service, reminded those present that, during the Great War …

The number of those killed in the Submarine Service was greater in proportion to its size than any other branch of His Majesty’s fighting forces … one third of the total personnel.

In November 1959 new panels commemorating Second World war losses were unveiled by Rear Admiral B W Taylor.

Wright and Moore, writing for the 20th Century Architecture website, describe the memorial as a complex mixture of narrative and symbolism …

Sculptor: F B Hitch Architect: A H R Tenison Founder: E J Parlanti

The central figures recreate the scene set inside the submarine exaggerating it into a small, claustrophobic tunnel. The crew use charts and follow dials, the captain is braced at the centre with the periscope behind his head. Around the vessel a shallow relief depicts an array of sea creatures or mermen appearing to trap and haul the submarine in fishing nets, reminding us that the submarines were as much prey to the tempestuous elements as they were to the enemy.

On both corners are allegorical figures. Next to the list of vessels lost between 1914 and 1918, Truth holds up her mirror. Just further to the left in the picture are two of the 40 bronze wreath hooks in the form of anchors …

On the right, next to the vessels lost in the Second World War, Justice wears a blindfold and as usual holds a sword and scales …

On a more lighthearted vein, walk east from the Memorial on the north side of the road and you’ll find this chap frantically trying to hail a taxi …

Taxi! by the American Sculptor J Seward Johnson is cast bronze and is now interestingly weathered. If you think the baggy trousers, moustache and side parting are erring on the retro, that’s because this particular office worker was transferred from New York in 2014. It was sculpted in 1983 and originally stood on Park Avenue and 47th Street.

I love this pair of ‘dolphin’ lamps (although they are actually sturgeon) ..

Neptune also makes an appearance …

Further east you can wave to the pretty mermaid who embellishes the Art Deco style Unilever Building …

Further along the lamps repay detailed study …

Across the road, a jolly friar looks down from the Blackfriar pub …

Carry on along Queen Victoria Street and admire the imposing College of Arms building …

… and its ornate gate …

St Peter’s Hill runs north alongside the College and at the top you will find the Firefighters Memorial. On its octagonal bronze base are the names of the 997 men and women of the fire service who lost their lives during the conflict. The sculpture features two firemen ‘working a branch’, with their legs spread to take the strain of the hose …

A sub-officer directs others to assist. There are clues to the identity of this figure scattered among the debris at the figures’ feet: the letters CTD for C.T. Demarne. At the unveiling, his colleagues from the fire service claimed that there was no need for such clues. One who was interviewed by the Telegraph stated: ‘You can tell it’s Cyril by the way he’s standing…he always waved his arms about like that when he was ordering us about’.

By 1943 over 70,00 women had enrolled in the National Fire Service in the United Kingdom. This memorial commemorates those who lost their lives in the London bombings …

The lady on the left is an incident recorder and the one on the right a despatch rider.

Across the road, just south of the Cathedral, is this rather handsome bearded gentleman …

John Donne 1572-1631 by Nigel Boonham (2012).

In 1617, two years after his ordination, Donne’s wife died at age 33 after giving birth to a stillborn child, their twelfth. Grief-stricken at having lost his emotional anchor, Donne vowed never to marry again, even though he was left with the task of raising his ten surviving children in modest financial circumstances. His bereavement turned him fully to his vocation as an Anglican divine and, on November 22, 1621, Donne was installed as Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The power and eloquence of his sermons soon secured for him a reputation as the foremost preacher in the England of his day, and he became a favourite of both Kings James I and Charles I.

His bust points almost due west but shows him turning to the east towards his birthplace on Bread Street. The directions of the compass were important to Donne in his metaphysical work: east is the Rising Sun, the Holy Land and Christ, while west is the place of decline and death. Underneath the bust are inscribed words from his poem Good Friday – Riding Westward :

Hence is’t that I am carried towards the west, This day when my soul’s form bends to the east

The most familiar quotation from Donne comes from his Meditation XVII – Devotions upon Emergent Occasions published in 1624:

‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main … and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’

Incidentally, if you walk around the east side of the Cathedral you will see scars from the Second World War bombing which illustrate just how close the building came to destruction …

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A mystery solved and some things that made me smile.

By The City Gent

On 27th January 2022

In Gardens, Memorials, Quirky

Let’s start with the mystery.

Back in August last year I spoke of a mystery connected to these two gravestones in the old parish churchyard of St Ann Blackfriars in Church Entry (EC4V 5HB) …

My ‘go to’ source of information when it comes to grave markers is the estimable Percy C. Rushen who published this guide in 1910 when he noticed that memorials were disappearing at a worrying rate due to pollution and redevelopment …

So when I came across the last two stones in this graveyard with difficult to read inscriptions I did what I normally do which is to consult Percy’s book in order to see what the full dedication was.

There was, however, a snag. Neither headstone is recorded in Percy’s list for St Ann Blackfriars. Let’s look at them one by one. This is the stone for Thomas Wright …

Fortunately, the book lists people in alphabetical order and, although there isn’t a Wright recorded at St Ann’s, there is one recorded at St Peter, Paul’s Wharf. It’s definitely the same one and reads as follows :

THOMAS WRIGHT, died 29 May 1845, father of the late Mrs Mary Ann Burnet.

The inscription of another stone recorded in the same churchyard reads …

CAROLINE, wife of JAMES BURNET , died 26 July 1830, aged 36.

MARY ANN, his second wife, died 12 April1840, aged 36.

JAMES BURNET, above, died … 1842, aged …3

St Peter, Paul’s Wharf, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and not rebuilt but obviously its churchyard was still there in 1910. And it was still there in the 1950s as this map shows. I have indicated it in the bottom right hand corner with the other pencil showing the location of Church Entry and St Ann’s burial ground …

This is the present day site of Thomas Wright’s original burial place, now Peter’s Hill and the approach to the Millennium Bridge …

The stone must have been moved some time in the mid-20th century, but the question is, was Thomas moved as well? Have his bones finally come to rest in Church Entry? I have been unable to find out.

This is the headstone alongside Thomas’s …

It reads as follows …

In Memory of MARY ROBERTS wife of David Roberts who died the 14th February 1787 aged 34 years. Also two of their children who died in their infancy … the aforesaid DAVID ROBERTS who died the 25th May 1802, aged 52 years.

The mystery surrounding this stone was that, although there are quite a few people called Roberts recorded in Percy’s memorial list, none of them are called Mary or David. So, assuming, the book is complete (and Percy was obviously very fastidious) I wondered where this marker came from.

As a result of the blog, I was contacted by Leah Earl who had been researching old parish records. She discovered that the burials of David and Mary Roberts are recorded in the burial registers for St Peter, Paul’s Wharf, so the grave marker ought to have been there when Percy was transcribing. Since Percy was so careful I can only imagine that he missed this stone either because it had fallen on its face or it had been hidden behind some stones that had been stacked up.

Here are the two pages from the records.

David Roberts is fourth from the bottom on this page …

In this page you can see the tragic year of 1787 unfolding …

The record states that Mary, David’s wife, was buried on the 18th February and her newborn son, John, ten days later. Another child, Sophia, is buried three months after her mother on 30th May. These must be the two children of theirs who ‘died in infancy’. You’ll see that Mary’s age is given as 34 on the gravestone but 35 in the written record.

There is also a record of an Ann Roberts who died aged four on 22nd November 1787 but presumably she is not the child of David and Mary since she’s not mentioned on the marker.

About one in three children born in 1800 did not make it to their fifth birthday and maternal deaths at birth have been estimated at about five per thousand (although that is probably on the low side). Just by way of comparison, in 2016 to 2018, among the 2.2 million women who gave birth in the UK, 547 died during or up to a year after pregnancy from causes associated with their pregnancy. The 1800 equivalent rate would have meant 11,000 deaths.

If you are interested to know more about maternal mortality, its history and causes, you’ll find this incredibly informative article in The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Most disturbing is how doctors who discovered the underlying cause of many deaths were disbelieved and vilified by the medical profession as a whole, thus allowing unnecessarily high mortality to continue for decades.

Now, on a more cheerful note, here are a few things that made me smile recently.

As I descended the stairs to Mansion House Station from Bow Lane I came across this little oasis of calm tucked away in a corner …

I have no idea what this is all about but it really cheered me up – so nice that it hasn’t been vandalised.

A couple of cars caught my eye …

Lord knows what this was doing parked outside the Linklaters law firm. Maybe the partners were going to a wedding.

And surely this car belongs to an old – school yuppie …

I wouldn’t argue with the sentiment above this door …

And finally, the City is being populated with some cheery new benches. These are in Aldermanbury …

Incidentally, the tree in the background is Cercis siliquastrum. It is also known as the ‘Judas tree’. This comes from the legend that Judas Iscariot, full of shame after his betrayal of Jesus, hanged himself from one of its branches.

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New year quirkiness – a ‘cottage’ by the tracks, an eccentric doctor and an interesting piece of tree.

By The City Gent

On 6th January 2022

In Architecture, Quirky

Regular readers will know that I can’t always think of a theme and, instead, produce a random collection of stories that may be of interest and today’s blog is one of those.

I’ll start with The Cottage at number 3 Hayne Street, just off Charterhouse Square …

I am indebted to Katie Wignall, the Look up London blogger, for some background information.

The road was first called Charterhouse Street and laid out in 1687 but then along came the Metropolitan Railway and, as part of the work to extend the railway from Moorgate to Farringdon, Charterhouse Street was demolished. In 1873-74 Hayne Street replaced it (according to Pevsner, it’s named after the developer).

So now, teetering on the edge of the tracks and overlooking Barbican Underground Station, house number 3 is the final remnant of this 19th century thoroughfare …

The view from the station platform …

It was scheduled for demolition but I think that would be rather sad. It seems safe at the moment so let’s hope the plans to destroy it have been abandoned. Maybe one day someone might actually live there (would suit an Underground railway enthusiast!) …

So often entrances don’t look very promising but turn out to reveal something quite fascinating and this is true of Masons Avenue.

Firstly, it doesn’t look much like an ‘avenue’, defined in my dictionary as ‘a broad road in a town or city, typically having trees at regular intervals along its sides’. Really more of an alley, it runs between Basinghall Street in the west and Coleman Street in the east and contains a number of very interesting features …

It’s lined with a mock-tudor frontage, which is sadly less than 100 years old — it dates from 1928 …

There is also a nice boundary mark for the parish church of St Stephen Coleman Street dated 1860 …

That figure in the middle is a cockerell in a hoop. In 1431, John Sokelyng, who owned a neighbouring brewery called ‘La Cokke on the hoop’, died and left a bequest to St. Stephen’s on the condition that a mass be sung on the anniversary of his death and that of his two wives. The gift was commemorated by a cock in a hoop motif that would decorate the church until the building was destroyed in the Blitz in 1940. Here’s the marker again in its wider setting …

Number 12 boasts an attractive stained glass window (about which I have not been able to find any information) …

In my view, however, the alley’s crowning glory is this old pub …

It is very nice to find a pub sign where the portrait does justice to its name, in this case William Butler (1535–1618). Wikipedia states he was ‘an English academic and physician. A Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, he gained a reputation as an eccentric, a drunkard, and (was once described as) the greatest physician of his time’ …

Here is an image held at la Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé …

I am always a bit wary of describing medical practitioners from previous centuries as ‘quacks’ since very often they were simply following traditional procedures and in many cases were incredibly well educated.

Some of Dr Butler’s remedies could, however, be described as ‘eccentric’ even for the times. For example, as a cure for epilepsy, he would fire a brace of pistols near his unsuspecting patient, to scare the condition out of them. He is said to have revived a man suffering from an accidental opium overdose by placing him in the chest cavity of a recently-slaughtered cow, and cured another patient of a fever by having him thrown off a balcony into the Thames. On a more enlightened note, he opposed the then common practice of blood-letting.

Here’s his portrait, held at Clare College, to which he bequeathed £260 (about £65,000 today) for the purchase of ‘finest gold,’ from which a chalice and a paten were made…

His biggest claim to fame (apart from being court physician to King James I) is his invention of a medicinal drink known as Dr Butler’s purging ale. Eighteenth-century recipes for the drink listed the ingredients as betony (a bitter grassland plant), sage, agrimony (a wayside plant popular in herbal medicine), scurvy-grass (a seaside plant high in Vitamin C, also used to make scurvy-grass ale), Roman wormwood (less potent than “regular” wormwood but still bitter), elecampane (a dandelion-like bitter plant that continues to be used in herbal cough mixtures) and horseradish, which were to be mixed and put in a bag which should be hung in casks of new ale while they underwent fermentation.

Whether this cured anything or not is unknown but it’s quite likely some degree of purging took place after drinking it! In any case, Doctor Butler’s ale became so successful that a number of pubs were named after him of which the Masons Avenue hostelry is the last remaining. Sadly, Purging Ale is no longer available on tap.

His archive is available to view at his old college and you can read more about it here. Look out for this document where he uses an extra thick nib to describe someone as a ‘Brasen faced lyer‘ …

The pub has some nice external decoration but I couldn’t visit the interior due to Covid-related closure …

Whilst in pedantic mode I couldn’t help but notice that the name of the alley in the City nameplate carries an apostrophe whereas the name in the pediment over the entrance does not …

And finally, a piece of tree. You’ll find it on the Barbican Highwalk if you access it from Barbican Underground Station …

The plaque explains all …

Perhaps I’ll sit there when looking for inspiration for next week’s blog.

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