Last Saturday I was once again drawn to the Seething Lane Garden. It was a sunny afternoon and I thought I’d revisit the wonderful carved paving stones that I have reported on before. The garden is much more open than it used to be …
These are the carvings I like best out of the 30 that are laid there..
A scene from a Punch & Judy show …
Trigger warning! They’ve dropped the baby …
A monkey sitting on a pile of books chewing a rolled up document …
A meticulous representation of a flea …
A plague doctor in 17th century PPE. He wouldn’t have known that the rat crouching cheekily at his feet was a carrier of the pestilence …
After his decapitation, the head of poor King Charles I is held up by the executioner …
A very happy lion …
A galleon under full sail …
All the carvings refer to incidents in the life of Samuel Pepys – some of which are recorded in his famous diary. In the examples above, he wrote of visiting a Punch & Judy show, of his pet monkey getting loose and misbehaving, his purchase of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (which contained the flea drawing) and his visit to the zoo to see an old lion called Crowly.
As a schoolboy he witnessed the execution of the King and in 1665 he stayed in London throughout the time of the plague (represented by the doctor). The galleon is the Royal Charles that brought Charles II back to England at the Restoration (and Pepys was on board). Trinitas refers to Trinity House where Pepys was a Master on two occasions.
He was in London during the Great Fire of 1666 and took a boat out on the River Thames to witness the destruction …
Note the piece of furniture floating past.
At the age of 25 he survived an operation to remove a bladder stone ‘the size of a tennis ball’ and this too is represented in the garden …
Pepys is commemorated with a splendid bust by Karin Jonzen (1914-1998), commissioned and erected by The Samuel Pepys Club in 1983 …
The plinth design was part of the recent project and the music carved on it is the tune of Beauty Retire, a song that Pepys wrote. So if you read music you can hear Pepys as well as see his bust …
Pepys was evidently extremely proud of Beauty Retire, for he holds a copy of the song in his most famous portrait by John Hayls, now in the National Portrait Gallery. A copy of the portrait hangs in the Pepys Library …
The paving designs were created by a team of students and alumni of City & Guilds London Art School working under the direction of Alan Lamb of Swan Farm Studios Ltd. Here are some pictures of the sculptors at work.
Tom Ball working on the flea …
Mike Watson working on Pepys’s monogram …
And finally, Alan Lamb working on a theorbo lute, one of many instruments Pepys could play …
Do visit the garden if you have the chance. Another of its interesting features is that it is irrigated by rainwater harvested from the roof of the hotel next door!
I have written two blogs about Pepys in London and also two about this garden. You can find them here:
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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A few years ago I became intrigued by a particular pub name – the Bishops Finger …
For a while, this was the signage …
But, after a bit of research, I realised that this wasn’t a very good representation of what people used to call ‘a bishop’s finger’.
It actually referred to the shape of the hand when giving a blessing. Here is a stained glass representation of Jesus Christ giving the gesture …
The present day sign gives the clue to its original slang meaning …
Yes, it’s a finger post indicating directions.
Not to be confused, of course, with the Vulcan Greeting …
‘Live long and prosper!’
Incidentally, the Bishops Finger name dates from 1981. The pub had been purchased by Shepherd Neame in the 1970s, and the change in name was to name the pub after one of their leading beers. The pub had originally been called the Rutland and had also been the Rutland Hotel.
For centuries Smithfield (or smooth field) was a place of execution where many suffered terribly for their beliefs, one of the most famous being William Wallace, ‘Braveheart’ in the movie of that name. Two plaques commemorate him and his execution. This one is facing the street, its railings often adorned with flowers and Scottish flags …
Translations from the Latin: I tell you the truth. Freedom is what is best.Sons, never live life like slaves. And the Gaelic: Death and Victory, an old Scottish battle cry.
The other is quite discreet and you’ll find it on the wall just inside the entrance to the churchyard of St Bartholomew the Great …
Wallace, manacled, stands upright and proud awaiting what looks like decapitation with an axe, a basket ready to catch his head when the deed is done. The noose that he glances at, however, indicates a different fate and decapitation would have been decidedly merciful. The plaque is, therefore, a little misleading.
Having been sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, Wallace was first dragged naked behind a horse from the Tower of London to Smithfield, being jeered and booed by onlookers the whole way. He was hanged but cut down before dead after which the rest of the gruesome sentence was carried out. There is no record of any last words. Parts of his body were sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Perth and Stirling for public display. Wallace’s head, meanwhile, was dipped in tar and set on a spike on London bridge, ‘a grisly reminder of King Edward’s justice’.
No contemporary image of how he looked exists but we do know how Mel Gibson portrayed him …
There’s a great article in The Scotsman newspaper about Wallace and the myths surrounding him and you can read it here.
Almost adjacent to Wallace’s memorial is the one to Protestant martyrs, erected in 1870 by the Protestant Alliance London. …
A few feet from this spot, more than 60 Protestants were burned at the stake, mainly in the reign of Queen Mary (1553-1558), hence they are known as the Marian Martyrs …
Through Mary’s short reign at least 277 persons were burnt, including five bishops, twenty one clergymen, eight gentlemen, eighty four tradesmen, one hundred husband-men and servants, fifty five women, and four children.
Nearby, the Hand and Shears Pub boasts of offering ‘Last Ales before Newgate Public Executions’. The pub’s name relates to the cloth workers who would gather here ahead of the ancient Bartholomew Fair …
Here it is in 1952 … …
Here’s the signage in close up …
The Justices Licence refers to the Alehouse Act of 1552 which defined in law that it was illegal to sell beer or ale without the consent of the local Justices of the Peace. This was the first time that a licence was required to sell beer and ale and was an attempt to address the drunkenness and disorder that was being caused by the widespread availability of alcohol.
The Act required that each person granted a licence was responsible for maintaining good behavior at their premises and any problems could result in a fine or loss of licence. From the sign it appears that the Hand and Shears was granted a licence in 1552.
Here’s the pub in 1852, the year the present building dates from …
Its predecessor in 1811 …
As is often the case, you’ll find more fascinating detail about the pub and its history in the brilliant London Inheritance blog.
The lovely Sir John Betjeman lived nearby at 43 Cloth Fair …
Walk into the adjacent Cloth Court and look up. Near Sir John’s blue plaque you’ll see a wonderful Trompe-l’œil painting TheSailor’s Home Coming …
When the next door neighbours bought Betjeman’s flat, intending to rent it out, they had this window bricked up to give themselves more privacy. However, they found they didn’t like staring at a wall. So they got the mural and stained glass artist Brian Thomas (some of whose work can still be seen in St Paul’s Cathedral) to create the Sailor’s Home Coming Window in order to give them something to look at …
Unfortunately it’s rather difficult to see from the street but it has been described as follows : A happy re-union in which a ruddy faced sailor, freshlyreturned from his travels, is welcomed back into the bosom of his family. His children hug him enthusiastically, whilst an exotic songbird, perhaps a souvenir of an earlier voyage to some far flung corner of the Globe, wobbles unsteadily over the whole harmonious scene.
Sir John’s old flat is available to rent. You can find more details here.
Live long and prosper!
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City pubs often have a rather interesting history so I thought I’d do a bit of research on some of my favourites, starting with the Hoop & Grapes on Aldgate High Street (EC3N 1AL).
Here it is in 1961 when, before or after a beer, you could also get your eyes tested at the adjacent optician and acquire teeth at Supreme Denture Service Ltd. If your new teeth looked good you could have a picture taken of your happy smile at the Regal Studios …
The Hoop & Grapes is the oldest licensed house in the City, built in 1593 and originally called The Castle, then the Angel & Crown, then Christopher Hills, finally becoming the Hoop & Grapes in the nineteen twenties.
Here it is today …
The pub has been described as being like a skinny waif sat between two fat people on a bus.
The name Hoop & Grapes advertised the fact that you could buy both beer and wine there. The first impression, when you turn your back on the traffic to enter, is of the appealingly crooked frontage with sash windows fitted in the seventeen twenties at eccentric angles …
Two 18th century oak posts guard the entrance, each with primitive designs of vines incised upon them …
The very old door still bears traces of when it was the entrance to the, posher, ‘Saloon’ Bar …
I like the old lantern with the street number on it …
You can read more about the site and medieval Aldgate here.
Incidentally, there is another Hoop and Grapes on Farringdon High Street …
It once had had a special licence for many years, allowing the pub to open between two and five in the morning for the convenience of printers who worked in nearby Fleet Street. This only allowed the pub to serve those working in the newspaper trade, and other trades which involved night or early morning working, such as London’s markets. I can personally attest to the fact that the pubs that held these special licences often were not too careful in checking that their customers worked in the allowed trades!
It was built in 1721 on part of the historic burial grounds of St Bride’s Church. As an inn, it gained notoriety as a location for illegitimate Fleet Weddings.
In the 1990s, it underwent several changes and was eventually closed down and scheduled for demolition. However, as the last surviving pub with a history of Fleet weddings, it was given a stay of execution and became a Grade II listed building …
Saved just in time.
During the renovation works burial remains from St Bride’s Church were discovered and many bodies found there were moved into the British Museum.
Last year I briefly visited The George Inn in Southwark …
The George is a very old Inn, dating back to at least the 16th century. It was mentioned by Stowe in 1598 as one of the ‘fair inns of London’ and was rebuilt in 1676 after a serious fire. For many years it was owned by the trustees of Guy’s Hospital, which was on the eastern boundary of the original George Inn – the building we see today is a small part of the original inn and the associated buildings to support the coaching business.
Catching a coach from one of the Inns in Southwark was almost the equivalent of walking across London Bridge today and catching a train at London Bridge Station. And there were many inns to choose from as this old print illustrates …
Coaches from Southwark served numerous destinations in the counties of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire and in 1809 W.S. Scholefield, who was running the George at the time, published a list of the destinations from the inn, and their frequency:
Gradually these enterprises went into decline as the railways put them out of business.
Here’s what Charles Dickens had to say about the old inns in his first novel ThePickwick Papers:
There are in London, several old inns, once the head-quarters of celebrated coaches in the days when coaches performed their journeys in a graver and more solemn manner than they do in these times; but which have now degenerated into little more than the abiding and booking places of country wagons … In the Borough especially there still remain some half-dozen old inns, which have preserved their external features unchanged, and which have escaped alike the rage for public improvement and the encroachments of private speculation. Great, rambling, queer old places they are, with galleries, and passages, and staircases wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories, supposing we should ever be reduced to the lamentable necessity of inventing any.
The George in 1858 …
In 1874, Guy’s Hospital sold the George Inn to the Great Northern Railway. The coming of the railways had seen a rapid decline in travel by horse and coach, so the sale of the inn to the GNR, who used the site as a receiving station for goods to be transported on their rail network, was in many ways a logical continuation of the main transport function of the inn.
The following photo shows the courtyard of the George, looking towards Borough High Street, with a sign above the entrance to the GNR offices …
Here it is in 1889 …
We are very fortunate to have The George to remind us of the coaching heyday.
By the way, I have written in a previous blog about the famous Bull & Mouth Inn, the signage for which can still be see in the Museum of London rotunda …
It had stabling for 700, yes 700, horses, most of it underground, and the yard could accommodate 30 coaches. This is a picture of the yard, probably painted around 1820 by H. Shepherd (1793-1864) …
And this is the frontage as painted by John Maggs (1819-1896) …
The inn was extensively remodelled and rebuilt in 1830 and became the Queen’s Hotel, the old sign being reattached to the new building. The hotel itself was demolished in 1888 to make way for the new General Post Office which now displays this plaque …
I hope to write about more pubs and their history over the coming weeks.
As is often the case, I am indebted to two fellow bloggers for much of my research. The London Inheritance blog is absolutely superb on the history of The George and The Gentle Author writes as lyrically as usual about the Hoop and Grapes.
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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 …
Photo credit : Katie Wignall.
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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