Symbols & Secrets – Page 131 – Walking the City of London

Temple Bar and the banjo-playing Lady

On 7th September 2017

What happened to Temple Bar in the 126 years between when it was demolished in 1878 and its return to the City in 2004?

It once marked the boundary between the City of London and the City of Westminster and now stands proudly at the entrance to the Paternoster Square piazza, alongside St Paul’s Cathedral. It has been nicely spruced up having been relocated from an exile in the countryside, the second move in its history since it was originally erected in Fleet Street in 1672.

The City of London once had seven gates which restricted access and could be closed, or barred, for security or in times of emergency, but only Temple Bar survived into the nineteenth century. It escaped demolition for a number of reasons, including its design being attributed to Sir Christopher Wren and the fact that it was the point at which royal personages were welcomed into the City by the Lord Mayor. It also had the macabre reputation of being the place where the heads and other body parts of executed traitors were displayed before the public. The last two to meet this fate were Francis Townley and George Fletcher who were executed for their part in the 1745 rebellion which aimed to place Bonnie Prince Charlie on the throne.

A contemporary print showing the traitors’ fate – ‘A Crown or a Grave’ was the Rebellion’s motto

The heads of Fletcher and Townley were put on the Bar August 12, 1746. On August 15th Horace Walpole, writing to a friend, says he had just been roaming in the City, and

passed under the new heads on Temple Bar, where people make a trade of letting spy-glasses at a halfpenny a look

A storm in March 1772 finally blew the grisly things off into the street and ‘against the sky no more relics remained of a barbarous and unchristian revenge’.

The room above the street was once used for the more mundane purpose of storing the ledgers of the nearby Child’s bank.

The Child’s Bank ledgers in 1876, two years before the Bar’s demolition

By the 1860s the Bar had become a serious obstruction to traffic, the road needed widening and also room was required for the construction of the Royal Courts of Justice. Demolition was decided upon but fondness for the Bar resulted in it being taken down ‘brick by brick, beam by beam, numbered stone by stone’, and stored in a yard off Farringdon Road until a decision for its re-erection could be reached.

Demolition, above, started on January 2 1878 and was completed just eleven days later. It was replaced by the Temple Bar Memorial and on this monument today is a plaque commemorating the removal of the old Bar – a curtain is being dramatically drawn over it.

Farewell Temple Bar – the Angels of Fortune and Time pull across the curtain

Ten years later, enter Lady Valerie Meux, a beautiful ex-actress and singer who had married Sir Henry Meux of the wealthy brewing family. Sir Henry’s family never accepted her and, I must say, she was a tad eccentric, driving herself around London in a phaeton carriage drawn by a pair of zebras. She took a fancy to Temple Bar and in 1887, her husband having purchased it from the Corporation of London, all 400 tons of it were transported to their house in Theobalds, Hertfordshire.

The historian E V Lucas, who had walked through the arch as a child, was outraged and later wrote in his book A Wanderer in London …

The transplantation of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon to the British Museum – from dominating the Acropolis and Athens to serving as a source of complexity to Londoners in an overheated gallery in Bloomsbury – is hardly more violent than the transplantation of Temple Bar from Fleet Street and the City’s feet to Hertfordshire and solitude

Lady Meux was delighted with her purchase. At Theobalds it was meticulously reconstructed as a new gateway to the estate and, in the upper chamber, she entertained guests such as Winston Churchill and the Prince of Wales. I love this picture of Lady Meux serenading her husband with her banjo whilst he leans against her chair wearing his tweeds and stout walking boots.

Here she is, more formally, in an 1881 painting by James McNeill Whistler entitled Harmony in Pink and Grey (Frick Collection).

Lady Meux died in 1910 and the Bar remained on the estate, sadly suffering from the effects of the weather and some vandalism.

Fast forward to 1976 and the Temple Bar Trust was established with the intention of returning it to London. This was finally achieved on 10 November 2004 when, in its new location, it was opened by the Lord Mayor.

Temple Bar in its new home

The upper room where Lady Meux entertained – the statues are of Charles I and Charles II

All credit to the Trust, the City of London Corporation and the Livery Companies who put together the funding needed to bring the Bar back to the City – I think it looks terrific.

Also, though, spare a thought for the beautiful, wilful and eccentric Valerie Meux. I think she deserves recognition too – who knows what might have happened to this great building were it not for her intervention.

Three Queens and a King

By The City Gent

On 31st August 2017

In Architecture, Memorials

I have chosen these four statues because I love the background stories behind them and hope you find them interesting too.

First up is the one of Henry VIII over the main entrance to St Bartholomew’s hospital, the only outdoor statue of the king in London. If you have seen and admired the famous Holbein portrait, the king’s pose here is very familiar. He stands firmly and sternly with his legs apart, one hand on his dagger, the other holding a sceptre. He also sports an impressive codpiece.

The hospital was founded in 1123 in the reign of Henry I and, during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1331, Wat Tyler died there of a stab wound in what we would now call the A&E department. Bart’s, as it became known affectionately, was put seriously at risk seven Henrys later in 1534, when Henry VIII commenced the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The nearby priory of St Bartholomew was suppressed in 1539 and the hospital would have followed had not the City fathers petitioned the king and asked for it to be granted back to the City. Their motives were not entirely altruistic. The hospital, they said, was needed to help:

the myserable people lyeing in the streete, offendyng every clene person passyng by the way with theyre fylthye and nastye savors.

Henry finally agreed in December 1546 on condition that the refounded hospital was renamed ‘House of the poore on West Smithfield in the suburbs of the City of London, of King Henry’s foundation’. I suspect people still tended to call it Bart’s. Henry finally got full public recognition when the gatehouse was rebuilt in 1702 and his statue was placed where we still see it today. The work was undertaken and overseen by the mason John Strong, who was at the same time working for Sir Christopher Wren on St Paul’s Cathedral. Such were the masons’ talents, no architectural plans were needed to complete the work.

Fleet Street boasts two queens – one responsible for the execution of the other.

Mary, Queen of Scots was born in 1542, daughter of King James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise. Briefly Queen of France, in 1559, Mary ruled Scotland from 1542-1567. Following an uprising she fled to England putting herself under the protection of her cousin, Elizabeth I. Mary’s fervent Catholicism, and claim to the English throne, made her a target for plots and Elizabeth ordered her beheading for treason in 1587.

Mary Queen of Scots House was built in 1905 for a Scottish insurance company but I have been unable to discover which one. The developer, Sir Tollemache Sinclair, was a big fan of the Queen and his architect, R. M. Roe, created an extravagant, theatrical building with a special niche for her statue. Head slightly bowed, she peers down at us wearing an elegant headpiece and a wide prominent ruff. Unfortunately the sculptor’s name is unknown. Do glance up at her if you pop in to Pret’s on the ground floor for a lunchtime sandwich.

143-144 Fleet Street

And now her nemesis.

She looks young, doesn’t she?

This statue of Queen Elizabeth I is nearby in a niche at St Dunstan-in-the-West and its history is rather complex. Some current thinking is that the Queen dates from 1670-99 despite a date on the base of 1586, which would have made it the only statue carved in her lifetime. It is now thought that, rather than the date of sculpture, this date was inscribed on it when the statue was placed on a restored Lud Gate in 1670 after the Great Fire and is merely making reference to the original gate. When the gate was demolished in 1760 she was moved to a previous St Dunstan’s but this was torn down in 1829-33 to be replaced by the current building. Meanwhile it seems that the statue spent the time in the basement of a nearby pub. It was only when that too was demolished in 1839 that the statue was rediscovered and put in its current niche on St Dunstan’s. Millicent Fawcett, the prominent suffragist, left £700 in her will for the statue’s upkeep and the funds are managed by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

And finally Queen Anne.

Brandy Nan, left in the lurch, her face to the gin shop, her back to the church

One has to feel sorry for Anne – and not just because of the scurrilous rhyme referring to her alleged fondness for alcohol. Of her 18 pregnancies, none of her children survived infancy except for one boy who reached 11, and this sadness may have contributed to her tendency to overindulge in both food and drink.

Here she stands outside the west entrance to St Paul’s Cathedral – an 1884-6 sculpture which replaced an earlier weather-beaten version of 1712. She looks imperiously upwards, holding a sceptre and orb and wearing the Order of St George around her neck.

She is surrounded by allegorical figures, the picture below being that of America.

‘America’ with a not very accurate alligator

America wears a feathered head-dress, holds a metal bow and has a quiver of arrows on her back. Her foot rests on what looks like the severed head of a European. The strange lizard like creature was described in the original statue as ‘…an allegator creeping from beneath her feet; being an animal very common in some parts of America, and which lives on land and in the water’.

Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee here in 1897. She sat outside in her carriage for the service, being then too infirm to climb the Cathedral steps. It was suggested that Anne’s statue should be moved for the occasion, but Victoria would have none of it, apparently commenting

‘Certainly not, someone in future might want to move a statue of me, and I should not like that at all’.

Samuel Pepys and his ‘own church’

By The City Gent

On 24th August 2017

In Architecture, Memorials

Samuel Pepys is one of my heroes. Clever, witty, curious, hard-working and, some would say, licentious, we owe him a lot. His diary gives us a wonderful insight into his times, and his work on the Navy Board and with the Admiralty played a major role in rebuilding England’s naval strength at a critical time in history. Not only that, his personal intervention with King Charles II probably helped curb the spread of the catastrophic Great Fire of 1666.

There are many, many books written about Pepys and a short little blog like this can’t really do him justice. So instead, in this and in future blogs, I will write briefly about some of the places and events Pepys wrote about in his diary and see what remains of them today.

A bust of Samuel Pepys by Karin Jonzen, 1983, in the St Olave churchyard

In July 1660 the Pepys household moved to a house in the Navy Office building on Seething Lane and his famous diary dates from that year to 1669, when he stopped writing it because he feared losing his sight. This location meant that his local Church (‘our own church’ as he described it) became St Olave Hart Street, which is still there for us to explore today and is the subject of this blog. It has a really gruesome but stunning churchyard entrance incorporating impaled skulls and crossed bones dated 11th April 1658. The Latin inscription, roughly translated, reads ‘Christ is life, death is my reward‘ and the central skull wears a victory wreath.

Charles Dickens called it ‘St Ghastly Grim’

Fortunately for us, Pepys was around to give us an intimate personal account of two of the most awful events that struck London in the seventeenth century – the ‘Black Death’ plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666.

When in 1665 it became apparent that a major pestilence was striking London, Charles II and the entire Court moved to Oxford. The Privy Council was endowed with wide-reaching powers to try to control its spread, appointing ‘Searchers’ to seize dying victims and to quarantine both them and their households.

Pepys wrote on 7^th June 1665 about a terrible sign he encountered on his way to Covent Garden:

‘I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, ’Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there – which was a sad sight to me’.

Despite such efforts, the plague spread slowly and remorselessly. According to the official records, the ‘Bills of Mortality’, 68,596 people died of it in London in 1665 but the true figure was probably more like 100,000. Even the lower figure represents a very high percentage of the population at the time, which was about 460,000.

It had eventually subsided by January the following year and on January 30^th 1666 he visited St Olave, but found the experience deeply shocking:

‘It frighted me indeed to go through the church… To see so many graves lie so high upon the churchyard, where many people have been buried of the plague.’

And five days later, on February 4th he wrote:

‘It was a frost and had snowed last night, which had covered the graves in the churchyard, so I was less afraid of going through’.

The churchyard survives, its banked-up top surface a reminder that it is still bloated with the bodies of plague victims, and gardeners still turn up bone fragments. Three hundred and sixty five were buried there including Mary Ramsay, who was widely blamed for bringing the disease to London. We know the number because their names were marked with a ‘p’ in the parish register.

Note how much higher the graveyard is than the floor at the church door

In 1655 when he was 22 he had married Elizabeth Michel shortly before her fifteenth birthday. Although he had many affairs (scrupulously recorded in his coded diary) he was left distraught by her death from typhoid fever at the age of 29 in November 1669.

Do go into the church and find the lovely marble monument Pepys commissioned in her memory. High up on the North wall, she gazes directly at Pepys’ memorial portrait bust, their eyes meeting eternally across the nave where they are both buried. When he died in 1703, despite other long-term relationships, his express wish was to be buried next to her.

Memorial to Samuel Pepys

And the sculpture of Elizabeth – I think she looks beautifully animated, like she is in the middle of a conversation.