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Journalism
Mr
Blowup and Chums - Guardian, August 2000
Burglary,
The Old Fashioned Way - Limb By Limb, June 2001
Cold
War Bunkers - From ‘Heritage Today’
Around
the world on 80 pence - From ‘Time Out’
The
Times - London A-Z Series No.1 (A Sample....) - "G for Gangland London"
The
Times - London A-Z Series No.2 (A Sample....) - "T for Toilets of
London"
The
Times - London At Work Series (A Sample....) - "No.12 River Police"
Mr
Blowup and Chums - Guardian, August 2000
The man at the bar clutches a pint of beer. His other hand holds a frayed
teddy bear. His pale blue t-shirt, festooned with cartoon animals, stretches
over his beer gut as he chats amiably to a woman twice his age wearing
a loose black leather dress. Around them is the civilised buzz of Sunday
afternoon conversation in a wine bar in a peaceful Kings Cross backstreet.
To the uninitiated, the monthly London Fetish Fair has all the charm of
a village jumble sale where old friends meet, new ones are made, ideas
are exchanged and quiet business is conducted over a drink. No fanfare.
No glamour. No shouting from the rooftop. No enforced dress code. So it's
easy to miss the man and his teddy bear. It's easy to ignore the bespectacled
woman being led on a chain through the crowd. And you would need to be
alert to spot photographs pinned to a table that show male genitalia secured
in medieval-looking devices.
In fact, you might not even suspect the existence in a side room of over
40 stalls bedecked with jumble of a most un-villagey kind: whips, canes,
floggers, rubber and pvc outfits, spiked collars, hoods, bondage equipment,
high-heeled boots, erotic artwork and literature, maid uniforms, military
uniforms, corsetry and piercing jewellery. Stalls include the Peaches
Spanking Club, rubber enthusiasts Mr and Mrs Blowup, the Bondage Fan Club,
dungeon builders Private Room, and a book stall staffed by the former
organiser of the all-England Spanking Championships.
According to Heather, a 30-year-old American who is one of the founders
of the London Fetish Fair, "the event is not about tying someone
to a post and flaying them alive. People still have very skewed perceptions.
The focus is on being a community event. The fetish community is a community.
Actually, it's more of a lifestyle. It's a very social event." Heather's
own lifestyle began when she bought her first pair of rubber opera gloves
at the age of 17. "I still didn't know this was fetishism. But my
whole family knew because I'd ask for rubber mini skirts for Christmas."
Although Heather says that "for a few years it's been very fashionable
to buy rubber outfits and go clubbing", she complains that fetishists
can still feel isolated because of public attitudes. "Out there people
still have very skewed perceptions."
Other Fetish Fair regulars such as Mr and Mrs Blowup, web designers who
have been involved in the fetish scene for over 25 years, agree. Mr Blowup,
the name by which he is "known on the scene", says that even
a few years ago "you couldn't get the stuff in shops, there were
no clubs and very few magazines. Now there are more shops in the UK than
almost anywhere else". The Blowups have been featured on television
wearing rubber outfits to pad around the house. "It's interesting
to see that sort of stuff on a popular programme. We like wearing the
stuff to go to fetish clubs but we don't get caught up in the harder side."
It might be assumed that the 'harder side' involves anyone who buys large
items of dungeon furniture. But Private Room, bespoke manufacturers of
dungeons, playrooms and hand-made fetish furniture, have a wide range
of clients, from a gay SM hotel in Amsterdam to an individual request
for a revolving St. Andrew's Wheel, "portable, easily assembled,
21-day delivery". Terry Pritchard, one of the partners in Private
Room, says that contrary to popular belief "people in the fetish
scene are very nice. Most could be bank managers or housewives".
The emergence of lifestyle fetishists is hailed by some as the quiet sexual
revolution of the 1990s. At the turn of the millennium, there are fetish
clubs in city centres, soft-core fetishistic literature in WH Smiths,
fetish morris dancing in London suburbs, fetishistic tv commercials, booming
business for the publishers of fetish magazines and the manufacturers
of fetish clothing, prostitutes who now offer domination as a matter of
course, thousands of websites from worldwide mistress directories to Madame
Svetlana's Institute of Sexual Pain in Siberia, increasing numbers of
women who describe themselves as 'lifestyle dominatrixes', and books such
as SM101, a technical manual for the serious sado-masochist.
All this in a decade overshadowed by a landmark court case that highlighted
Britain's repressive and often unworkable sex laws. Home secretary Jack
Straw's recent proposal to legalise consensual sexual activity between
adults comes ten years after the Spanner trial, so called after the police
operation of that name. Officers from Greater Manchester stumbled on videos
depicting middle-aged men engaged in extreme sado-masochistic acts, such
as branding each other with hot wires and forcing a nail through someone's
scrotum, to the sound of Gregorian plainchant in a purpose-built torture
chamber. Sixteen men were charged with assault, aiding and abetting assault
and keeping a disorderly house. Far from being on the margins of society,
they included a forester, an antique restorer, an ice cream salesman,
a missile design engineer, a tattooist, an ex pig breeder, two restauranteurs
and a care assistant for the mentally disabled.
When the case reached the Old Bailey, the defence might simply have been
mutual consent. In other words, no victim, no crime. Judge Rant, however,
had other ideas. He declared that consent was not an eligible defence.
The defendants had to plead guilty, were duly convicted, mostly of causing
actual bodily harm, and prison sentences were handed down. The trial exposed
discriminatory laws against gays and had serious implications for the
principle of consent. But those campaigning for the Spanner defendants
had to wait another seven years for the greatest shock of all: in 1997,
the European Court of Human Rights upheld the original convictions.
For Spanner campaigners, left and right, gay and heterosexual, from Liberty
(the National Council for Civil Liberties) to the Libertarian Alliance
and the Sexual Freedom Coalition, the European ruling was one step too
far. But the sea change, if not yet the change in law, owes much to the
high-profile collapse of the Club Whiplash case after a two-week trial
in 1996. Martin Church, manager of the Putney venue hosting the sado-masochistic
club, was charged under the same 1751 Disorderly Houses Act that had been
dusted off for the Spanner defendants. This time defence witnesses lined
up to emphasise the consensual nature of their activities, such as whipping,
spanking and hot waxing. The jury accepted this and Church was acquitted.
In the same year that Martin Church walked free from Southwark Crown Court,
the business that Mick Bushell had set up was struggling along in his
bedroom. Four years on, Bushell's Dom Promotions is one of the UK's main
publishers of fetish related magazines with a turnover of £½
million a year, 14 titles, a website, mail order fetish toys and videos
as well as offering heavy duty bondage equipment, cages and whipping benches.
"The SM world has opened its doors," says Bushell. "In
the past you would never have known about it. Now it's everywhere."
In a flat in east London, Goddess Venus, a 27-year-old lifestyle dominatrix
of part-Italian descent, sits in a high-back chair sipping wine with her
boots on her footstool. The footstool is a 24-year-old student called
Paul. He has been one of her client-slaves for the past three months.
Goddess Venus, public school educated, trained in hypnosis and with wide-ranging
interests from astrology to tarot, was aware of her sexual interests from
fantasies she had by the time she was 15. "I didn't know what they
were then but I was certainly attracting those sorts of guys from the
beginning. Now, she has young and old clients, from builders to bankers,
and sometimes sees herself as an "underpaid therapist". Although
the majority of people who visit her are "genuinely into it",
the other 30 per cent are "wanderers, experimenters, they don't really
know what they want... there is no such thing as a typical session".
Unlike a prostitute, a dominatrix will not simply offer 'all services'.
"For instance," says Goddess Venus, "I would never have
full sex with my clients. They don't get close to me at all. Within this
world there is huge respect for a mistress... If they don't toe the line
they're out.
"Everybody, if they think about it, has some sort of perversion or
fetish. The whole thing is really about sexuality exaggerated." Although
she deals with everything from "the low-key stuff right through to
heavy corporal punishment and forced feminisation", she says that
the most common fetishes involve more psychology than physical pain. "It's
a myth that people like to be caned… There are a lot of bog ordinary
Kevins who just like to see a woman dressed in pvc."
Meanwhile, back at the London Fetish Fair, the man in the pale blue t-shirt
finishes his beer, pops his teddy bear into a plastic bag and heads off
into the anonymous crowd around Kings Cross. Even if Victorian attitudes
persist and 250-year-old laws are still occasionally used to convict the
truth is that, with or without Jack Straw's new proposals, consenting
adults will always manage to find each other.
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Burglary,
The Old Fashioned Way - Limb By Limb, June 2001
Nobody could accuse Calvin Sewell of not being a good listener. But when
he carried out a series of burglaries in South London in the late 90s,
little did he know that his ear would make legal history.
Sewell had already proved his skill as a burglar many times over many
years, netting several thousand pounds worth of property and leaving police
flat-footed. The key to his success was his dog-like ability to hear.
Pressing his right ear against a door or window was his surefire method
of telling of whether anyone was home. But while dusting for fingerprints,
scene-of-crime officers began to notice a 'peculiar aspect' to otherwise
ordinary burglaries: earprints. Sadly for Sewell he was known to police
from previous convictions. Police took the unusual and historic step of
making an acetate mould of Sewell's ear. It matched Sewell's prints conclusively,
securing the burglar's ear a place in the record books and the rest of
him a place in prison.
To some this story will confirm the relentless progress of technology,
the struggle of science against crime. To others, it will confirm that
very little has changed in a burglar's modus operandum in the 150 years
since the first real study of burglars was carried out in Victorian London.
Henry Mayhew's London Labour and The London Poor was a unique investigation
of urban poverty and crime, from 'they that will work' via those that
'can't work' to those that 'won't work'. It took the author deep into
the world of cracksmen, crows, canaries, putters-up, dolly shops, low
public houses and brothels. In short, Henry Mayhew went on a 'ramble among
the thieves'.
The array of criminals, miscreants, prostitutes and general dodgy geezers
was, of course, not discovered by him. There are sixteenth-century accounts
of 'priggers of prancers' who stole horses, 'abram-men' who faked madness,
conmen such as 'anglers', 'rufflers' and 'palliards', and 'nyppers' or
'pickepurses'. The eighteenth-century London underworld was more or less
ruled by Jonathan Wild, the self-appointed 'Thieftaker General of Great
Britain and Ireland'. While apparently acting against criminals and sending
scores to the gallows, Wild organised an underworld army of thieves, robbers
and burglars with an international network of warehouses, receivers and
distributors for hooky gear. Here was an official in the crime boss super-league,
the Mr Big of his day, the Krays and the Richardsons rolled into one but
with a fancy title.
When researching Hooky Gear, a novel about a contemporary London burglar
whose life comes apart, I too rambled among the thieves although, unlike
Mayhew, I happened to know most of them before I rambled among them. The
narrator of the novel, J, is based in part on a real burglar who once
pointed out to me: 'Don't matter where you are. Gear is gear.' And from
this simple truth the timeless practicalities of burglary fan out. Where
to find it, who knows about it, how to get it, what to do with it and
when to do it again are the sort of problems with which burglars throughout
the ages have grappled.
Their solutions to these problems always begin with a good eye - or ear
- for an opening. As Mayhew wrote of successful burglars: 'They listen
at the doors of the apartments, and know by the breathing in general if
the inmates are sound asleep.' According to J, once inside, a house has
a key point from which you can hear into every room: 'Every house has
a spot like that, like a navel, like a dead centre.' To help with the
operation, burglars, like the rest of us, get by with a little help from
their friends. The 'cracksmen' that Mayhew talked to often worked with
a 'crow' or lookout and, occasionally, a woman known as a 'canary' who
carried the tools. Typically, then as now, the burglar will look for the
easy options: picking a lock with a 'betty' or 'Floyding' a door with
a credit card; jemmying your way in the back or squeezing through an open
toilet window, a window that J calls a 'burglar's mate'.
More elaborate schemes abound. Take the 'remarkable case of burglary'
that Mayhew reports being carried out in a fashionable West End house.
Two burglars got to know the cook and servant in the house and seduced
them both. During the amorous encounters upstairs, downstairs and in their
lady's chamber, the cook and servant failed to notice a third man who
made off with the silver.
A modern equivalent might be the case involving a stolen car, a box of
chocolates and a pair of theatre tickets. Burglars initially stole the
car from the driveway of a large house, then returned it with equal stealth
to its owners, complete with the aforementioned chocolates and tickets.
An accompanying note mentioned a drastic emergency and apologised for
any inconvenience. The owners took the opportunity for a free night out
and came back to a free home - free of anything, that is.
Further up the foodchain in Mayhew's London were the 'putters-up', men
who organised burglaries on the basis of inside information and would
supply the necessary tools for the job. They could also act as receivers
or fences, disposing of goods through 'dolly shops'. These 'dolly shops'
or pawnbrokers have long been associated with criminal activity. In Hooky
Gear, the character of Uncle, a well-known tag meaning pawnbroker, is
the young urban 'putter-up' and is also based on a real individual.
The average burglar is often caught between the police and men like Uncle.
While Mayhew acknowledged the burglar's manual dexterity and courage,
he also conveyed the desperation in the lives of some of these 'cracksmen':
lengthy prison sentences; wives who died while their husbands were 'transported';
the endurance test of trying to lead an honest life, of going straight.
If property is nine tenths of the law, then property is also nine tenths
of a burglar's life. And if Mayhew's case studies or the story of J are
anything to go by, a life on the rob or on the drum, with or without the
ears of a Calvin Sewell, will always be a pretty desperate affair.
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Cold
War Bunkers - From ‘Heritage Today’
New global tensions have replaced the Cold War but its bunkers and radar
installations remain as unnerving reminders of the age of superpower
standoff
Tiered banks of circular orange radar screens glow in the dim subterranean
room. Illuminated overhead boards and maps track aircraft movements from
Murmansk via the North Cape down to the Kent coast. Headsets and receivers
hang silently by their operators’ chairs, and yellow control panels
are alight and ready. This could be the set from Kubrick’s classic
doomsday film, Dr. Strangelove. But it’s the all-too-real operations
room at one of Britain’s formerly top secret Cold War nuclear bases.
With the Cold War over, English Heritage has taken the lead to ensure that
the dwindling legacy of this exceptional period is preserved. A new book, ‘Cold
War: Building for Nuclear Confrontation’ by Wayne Cocroft and Roger Thomas,
details over a hundred sites around the country. Most, either on Ministry of
Defence land or derelict, are inaccessible. But the operations room at RAF
Neatishead in Norfolk is beneath one of the few buildings open to the public.
To descend into its claustrophobic bunker, in full use until only ten years
ago, is to think the unthinkable.
It was from here that, in the 1960s in particular, Neatishead played its essential
part in a Cold War air defence strategy known as the ‘Linesman’ project
based on the ‘tripwire’ concept. After a massive nuclear missile
attack by the Soviet Union, ground radars would warn of the ensuing wave of
enemy aircraft thus triggering the retaliatory response of Britain’s
V- Force, consisting of Vulcan, Victor and Valiant bombers. In short, this
was the doomsday scenario. And Neatishead, according to Wayne Cocroft, was
on ‘the front line of the Cold War’.
During the fraught days of October 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis took
the world to the brink of nuclear disaster, most bases in Britain were on a
heightened alert. Neatishead in particular bore the brunt of front-line tension. ‘Obviously,’ says
Doug Robb, manager of Neatishead’s air defence radar museum and a former
radar operator, ‘it was a very intense atmosphere… We thought we
were going to war.’ More typically, as Robb points out, Soviet aircraft ‘electronically
probed our radars to see what was there… It was a game but a serious
game and it just went on forever.’
The air defence museum, housed in the same and original 1942 operations building,
is replete with the artefacts and paraphernalia of wartime and post-war air
defence, charting the evolution of radar from what Robb calls the ‘pretty
Heath Robinson’ contraptions of the 1940s and early 1950s, to the digital
handsets and consoles of the early computer age. There are also highly accurate
Red Army maps of Britain on which Neatishead does not, reassuringly, appear.
The intense atmosphere underground is in stark contrast to the placid RAF base
only a few miles inland on the edge of the picturesque Broads. Neatishead’s
central nervous system was protected from nuclear strike but its single eye,
a huge military-green radar, is unmissable on the carefully chosen low and
level landscape. The Type 84 is Britain’s last surviving example and
was the longest serving radar in the world, having celebrated its golden jubilee
in 1991. It first saw active service as part of the wartime Chain Home radar
stations strung out along the eastern and southern coasts. Later it evolved
into a key link in Britain’s nuclear response plan, tracking the codenamed ‘Bear’ and ‘Badger’ aircraft
of the Soviet enemy.
‘Caelum Tuemur’ – ‘we watch over the sky’ – may
be Neatishead’s motto but standing in the radar’s shadow is the second
visual clue, if not icon, of Neatishead’s potentially lethal Cold War role.
The supersonic Bloodhound surface-to-air missile, originally sited all over East
Anglia and controlled from Neatishead, seems too small and compact a rocket to
have been the country’s main defence against nuclear bombers and missiles.
But its power lay in its proximity fuse designed to detonate near flying targets:
As Doug Robb says: ‘Imagine a square mile of sky filled with shrapnel.
It would tear everything apart.’
If Neatishead was on Britain’s military front line, then Hack Green,
200 or so miles away in the heart of the Cheshire countryside, was at the centre
of the nation’s post-nuclear civil defence and government. Neatishead
is to Hack Green what the ‘four-minute warning’ was to the concept
of ‘protect and survive’. In other words, Hack Green, also accessible
to the public and a highlight of the new Cold War book, was built to last.
Sealed behind its massive blast doors and five-foot thick reinforced concrete
walls, its staff were meant to survive a one kiloton explosion at 300 metres
and temperatures of 350ºC for an hour and a half.
Beneath the 1950s bunker, in a vast two-level, 35,000 sq ft, complex, was the
intended headquarters of regional government. Walking through the labyrinthine
corridors and interlinking rooms with their preserved equipment and careful
reconstructions is, as Cocroft’s co-author Roger Thomas says, ‘one
of those sobering sights that makes you stop and think’.
On Level 1, civil servants would have discussed the finer points of nuclear
damage, radiation fallout, decontamination, civil infrastructure and public
services. Warnings of imminent attack could have been sent to a network of
5000 receivers, and 7000 sirens could have been activated. The communications
room was at the hub of the emergency network and ranges from prototype visual
display units and teleprinters, to British Telecom’s message switching
centre. If necessary, the commissioner – a civil servant or minister
with full executive power – could have spoken directly to ‘survivors’ from
the BBC radio studio on Level 2.
With its life support systems and huge air-cooling units, it was meant to be
home to 135 civil servants who could survive for up to 12 weeks. The conditions
were, and still are, basic: 40 general staff, in one female and two male dormitories,
would have operated on the ‘hot-bed’ principle, taking the still
warm beds of their colleagues after their shifts.
Meanwhile, scientists would detail the size of bombs and scale of fallout in
order to advise on refugees and public safety. Calculations would be made on
the sloping red plotting tables to ascertain the ‘threat front’,
an air or ground burst, and the ‘nuclear burst tote’ in all surrounding
sectors. AWDREY might sound like a welcoming member of staff but Atomic Weapon
Detection Recognition and Estimation of Yield was central to the business of
Hack Green. One room, staffed by a doctor and nurse, is an explicit reconstruction
of the effects of nuclear weapons on the human body, showing the ‘severe
keloids’ or flesh scarring caused by thermal radiation.
Prolonged work in an intense underground environment was bound to have an effect
on staff. By the mid-1980s, planners were wise to this. A complex colour scheme,
unlike the standard manilla, grey and off-white, was devised by designers and
clinical psychologists. ‘Who they were,’ says Hack Green’s
curator Rodney Siebert, ‘is lost in the mists of time.’ But the
idea was that red and white would denote ‘busy areas where people needed
to be kept active’ and pale blue and green would serve for rest areas
such as the dormitories. The only remaining part of the scheme is the bright
yellow of the stairwell. ‘It was meant to keep people from suicide,’ says
Siebert. ‘But it was never put to the test.’
By then, the Cold War was thawing. Barely twenty years on, Hack Green is thought
by Wayne Cocroft to be ‘the best Cold War museum in England’, complete
with Soviet uniforms, heat resistant suits, East German ‘morsegeber’ communications
equipment, once secret British government films, geiger counters and even decommissioned
strategic thermo-nuclear weapons.
Together, Neatishead and Hack Green, with their military and civil priorities,
provide an intricate national archive. As Rodney Siebert says: ‘The main
importance is that there’s a physical record of the work done by the
many thousands of individuals who kept the Cold War going.’ These days,
there are only a few individuals to keep at least the memory of the Cold War
going. And there are even fewer surviving buildings to evoke the age of the
four-minute warning and the madness of mutual assured destruction. Without
them, we might forget what it was like to think the unthinkable.
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Around the world on 80 pence - From ‘Time
Out’
The trouble with trying to travel on the cheap is that it all too easily
becomes a psychosis before you've even started travelling. You just have
to have everything for as little as possible, next to nothing, certainly
cheaper than the Joneses, so cheap, in fact, that can you assure yourself
you would have spent more had you stayed home in front of the tele.
As a result, everywhere there are would-be travellers searching through bookshops
for expensive, supposedly money-saving, travel bibles: Brunei on Fifty Pence
a Day; New Bond Street on a Shoestring; Surviving the Jungle on an Elastoplast;
Budget Dining with the World's Arms Dealers. Alternatively, they scour newspapers
for tokens, coupons, discount advertisements and special week-by-week cut-and-keep
offers for places they've never heard of, and into which they certainly couldn't
stick a pin on a map. But apparently they're cheap.
Having found a printed promise of a bargain, they sign up for charters,
packages, clubs and all-in expeditionary forces where their money
has been spent in advance
making local deals over which they have no say. Then they complain that they
never got to know the locals because there were too many English-speaking
people on the trip - most of them were probably on the same coach
and beach or in
the same cheap hotel, cut-price condo or 'authentic' safari-adventure jeep.
On the other hand, the long-distance or long-term traveller takes a somewhat
different approach. A travelling friend, who settled for a while in Cairo,
was once asked by an English tourist what the cheapest worthwhile experience
in town was. 'I am,' he answered. With that simple, sufi-like, attitude you
can travel the world, as both he and I have, for less than anyone. After
all, if you come cheap, you will always travel cheap.
Now that you've reevaluated what your life is worth, take the following in
to consideration:
1. Ways to travel
Reading a headlining transport disaster while slouched in an armchair makes
most people sit up and think. You can almost feel entire South American rainforests
being chainsawed for safety campaigners' press releases. But if you are truly
cheap, you will never hamper your schedule with risk assessment or feasibility
studies.
When I set out for an eighteen-month overland journey across Asia, I started
by buying a coach ticket from King's Cross to Istambul. The deal was the
cheapest and, of course, the best. So cheap and so good was it that the coach
crashed
in Italy, mainly because the drivers were changing places while doing seventy
in the middle lane of the autostrada (a full refund was given). I've travelled
on rickety trucks along tortuous mountain roads with a cargo of gasoline
and a crew of chain-smokers (no charge); in aeroplanes where live chickens
were
stacked in the overhead lockers and a goat roamed freely in the aisle checking
people's seatbelts (forged ticket); on cross-river ferries where passengers
had to help bail out water (they only tried to charge a deposit on the bucket);
a dawn newspaper train (free in the coal wagon); a sharabang across the sub-zero
night-time desert (free strapped to the roof).
So, without detracting from the noble cause of safety crusaders, the cheap
traveller knows what every transport official across the globe knows, namely,
that safety has to be built in to the cost of the ticket but no matter how
much more the ticket costs accidents will happen. In other words, from the
narrow statistical viewpoint of the cheap traveller, the world is as good
as risk-free.
2. Places to stay
Book ahead, they say; get to know the guy at your local bucket shop, they
advise; you must stay at this fantastically cheap hotel, your friends boast.
But the
fact is that, if a hotel is truly cheap (like cheap traveller cheap) you
won't find it in a brochure, be told about it by the travel agent, and even
your
friends won't admit to having stayed there. The point is, cheap travellers
never book hotels in advance. They stumble in to the foyer at the dead of
night when the concierge's bargain-resistance factor is at its lowest.
Besides, I would never have booked a room at the Hotel Swastika in Haridwar,
not only because it would have seemed a too-high-risk venue for a jew but
also because it was strangely absent from the brochures. Cheaper places do,
inevitably,
exist. I have slept in a resplendent marble hall (Moscow underground); an
unattended first-class railway carriage (Beijing station); a disused shack
with mountain
view (Hindu Kush). And if you fail to find such abodes, there's always sleeping
rough...
3. People to meet
Meeting people is especially important to the cheap traveller. This is because
one of the cheapest places to stay is in someone else's home. To do this,
you must have reasonable inter-personal skills and no particular odour.
I must have met these simple criteria when I was invited out of the monsoon
to stay at the Catholic Women's League in Manila. Of course there was a trade-off
for being the only male in the place: I had to be a Christian three times
that week during bible class. Then there was the policeman and his sister
in Alexandria.
I could stay as long I promised to marry her. I have yet to marry so the
promise remains unbroken. Then there was the vodka-drinking communist with
whose family
I stayed in Teheran. Vodka-drinking communists are wonderful people the world
over but in Iran even a cheap traveller has to question the sanity of accepting
their hospitality. (He was later arrested and publicly beaten by the Revolutionary
Guard.) Still, there's nothing like freeloading.
4. Things to do
For the cheap traveller, the notion of 'doing' has less to do with an itinerary
of 'must-sees' than with finding ways of extending travelling time. Here
are some possible alternatives to freeloading and begging. Buy a fake student
card;
smuggle guns and drugs; or, if you've decided to settle somewhere, sell your
passport. I have been offered the opportunity to smuggle gold, drugs, watches,
precious stones and whisky, and to participate in stacked poker games and
credit card fraud.
For the less criminal-minded, you can always do what Susan from Sidcup did.
On her travels, she met and fell in love with a man from Bengal and they
ran off to the Manali hills to make peanut butter together. As far as I know,
she's
still there, producing the best and cheapest peanut butter with no additives
or preservatives. Not even Club Med could promise romance like that.
5. Things to take
For the cheap traveller, this section is necessarily short. First, because
anything you can buy here, you can also buy there, only cheaper. Second,
because walking around with a stuffed multi-storey rucksack gives thieves
the wrong
idea, ie that you have something worth stealing. The principle to guide you
through packing is the three-sock principle. According to this, you only
need three socks for your trip. That's not three pairs but three, individual,
socks.
These can then be rotated clockwise or anti-clockwise between feet so that
you will always have one clean sock, one relatively clean, and only ever
have one sock to wash or air at a time.
Cheap travelling as practised by the true masters is more a state of
mind than a question of following the footsteps of jaded travel writers.
Since any and every experience can be equally enlightening, it really
doesn't matter how much or how little you spend. The truly cheap traveller
will always see money as an unnecessary irritation, just another thing
to pack and to take care of. Far better to climb aboard the gasoline
truck, ask for a light, and drape your just-washed sock on the windscreen.
Statistically, you will live to tell the tale. And even if you don't,
it hardly cost you a penny.
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The Times - London A-Z Series No.1 (A Sample....)
"G for Gangland London"
Four hundred gangs, netting an estimated £25 billion a year, operate
in London and the South-East, according to a police report at the end
of 2001. In the intervening 18 months, the police have targeted Yardies
in Operation Trident, immigration gangs in Operation Maxim, and have
cracked down on West London Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan
gangs, as well as North London Turkish and Kurdish drug barons. In addition,
there is a watchful eye kept on football gangs thought to be heavily
involved in the drugs trade, and the Albanian gangs which are increasingly
in control of London’s sex trade. And then there are the Chinese,
Japanese, Maltese, Mexicans and Brazilians, all of whom have an organised
criminal presence in the capital. Apologies if anyone has been left out.
Although in an ethnically diverse society one can expect ethnically diverse gangsters,
London has plenty of ‘previous’ when it comes to gangs, mobs and
firms: the Elizabethan Fraternity of High Toby went robbing along Watling Street,
now Edgware Road; the Bow Street Runners, an eighteenth-century police force,
were established by Henry Fielding who saw the ‘great irregularity’ of
London’s ‘immense number’ of streets and alleys as a forest
of criminal gangs; in the nineteenth century, thieving armies of children were
known as ‘star-glazers’ as they smashed windows and grabbed goods;
by the 1860s, gangs of pickpockets were rife aboard cross-channel steamers; Hollywood
star George Raft was famous for playing ‘Scarface’ in 1932 and also
notorious for being a director of London’s mob-connected Colony Club, a
60s gambling den; and these days ex-Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds regularly
makes celebrity appearances at cultural events connected to London crime.
London’s gangsters have often been popularised and mythologised and are
part of the culture and tradition of the metropolis without which they would
never have existed. The city brings them to life and imbues at least some of
them with the status of folk heroes. The reality is, of course, often at odds
with the myth.
1. The Gang
Turpin was the prototype Essex geezer. Almost 300 years after his birth,
the innkeeper’s son still has a grip on the public imagination
as a glamorous highwayman and leader of his ‘Essex Gang’.
Many parts of London claim associations with Turpin, from the 300-foot
One Tree Hill in Honor Oak that Turpin used as a lookout, to Epping
Forest and Finchley Common where he frequently robbed, to Broadway
SW1 where he lived for a while. And his epic ride from Westminster
to York left a trail of ‘Black Horse’ pubs in its historical
wake. But the Turpin myth owes much to Kilburn writer Harrison Ainsworth’s
enormously successful 1834 novel ‘Rookwood’. Its account
of the ride was based on another criminal’s exploits, and the
gang’s meetings at the Cock, one of Kilburn’s oldest pubs,
is equally dubious. Turpin’s notoriety, leading to his execution
in 1739, was really based on the terrorising and robbing of isolated
farmhouses around London, in the same way that modern gangs have used ‘the
robbers’ highway’, the M25.
The Cock, Kilburn High Road NW6; One Tree Hill, Honor Oak SE23, Broadway
SW1
2. The Fence
When a warrant was finally issued for the arrest of Jonathan Wild, he
was accused of having formed ‘a corporation of thieves, of which
he was the head and director’. He had in his possession a list
of seven thousand ‘Newgate-birds’ – ex prisoners – on
whom he could call. Turpin may have been a robber but Wild was the
receiver, the super-fence, the Mr. Big who ruled the London underworld
between 1712 and his arrest in 1725. Wild started as a mugger, and
ended up the self-styled ‘Chief Thief-taker of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland’. The authorities tolerated his activities
in exchange for information. The area most associated with him is,
of course, the judicial heart of London. Wild was arrested early in
his career and held at the Wood Street Compter. Later, having met the
prostitute Mary Milliner, he lived in Cock Alley opposite Cripplegate
church. At one stage he took refuge in Mint Street, a known sanctuary
also used by highwayman Jack Sheppard. He was imprisoned in Newgate,
now the Old Bailey, and executed at Tyburn, opposite what is now the
Marble Arch Odeon, and his remains are kept at the Royal College of
Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Site of Tyburn Gallows, Edgware Road W2; Mint Street SE1; Wood
Street EC2; Royal College of Surgeons Museum, Lincoln’s Inn,
WC2
3. The Napoleon of Crime
Few people today would have heard of Adam Worth but most would be familiar
with Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ arch enemy and master
criminal. While Holmes remains a figment of Arthur Conan Doyle’s
imagination, Moriarty was based on a criminal known to Scotland Yard
as the ‘Napoleon of Crime’. Pinkerton’s, the detective
agency, reported that in the 1870s and 1880s ‘one robbery followed
another’ and that Worth’s dabs were all over them. Most
of his crimes were planned from 198, Piccadilly in Mayfair, his greatest
being the 1876 theft from Agnew’s studio in Bond Street of Gainsborough’s
Duchess of Devonshire.
Sherlock Holmes Museum, 221b Baker Street NW1; 168, Piccadilly
W1.
4. The Italian Mob
The Italian Mob, also known as the Sabini brothers, were the governors
of their day, according to ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, and certainly
the first British gang with international connections. They quarrelled
with the Cortesi brothers around Saffron Hill, fought the Elephant
and Castle Mob, rumbled with the Birmingham Boys and were key players
in the 1936 ‘Battle of Brighton’ which inspired Graham
Green’s Brighton Rock. Charles ‘Darby’ Sabini flourished
for almost 20 years from his bases in ‘Little Italy’, around
the spiritual hub of St. Peter’s Church on Clerkenwell Road,
and later Soho. He occasionally imported Sicilians to carry out crimes
or aid his racecourse rackets but, with names like Battles Rossi and
Johnny Ricco, it didn’t matter where they were from.
St. Peter’s Church, Clerkenwell Road EC1; Little Italy extends
roughly from the Farringdon Road to Hatton Garden.
5. The Criminal
London’s overlapping criminal histories are exemplified by Jack
Spot, whose career stretched from the Sabini era to the Krays and who
claimed to command a thousand men. He, his arch rival Billy Hill and
another villain, Albert Dimes, were played as one character by Stanley
Baker in Joseph Losey’s 1960 film ‘The Criminal’. But
Spot’s background was distinctive. He came from the ‘Yiddishers’,
a Whitechapel gang, and organised the attack on Mosley’s Blackshirts
in the famous Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936. His career more
or less ended with another battle, the so-called ‘fight that never
was’ which left Spot savagely stabbed on the corner of Frith Street
and Old Compton Street on 12 August 1955.
Cable Street E1; Frith Street W1
6. The Hit
When the Kray brothers were arrested at the age of 16, charged with GBH
for an attack on a rival gang in Mare Street, Hackney, the judge told
them not to ‘go around thinking they were the Sabini brothers’.
But the judge need not have worried: the Krays did things their own
way, like on 9 March 1966 when Ronnie walked into the Blind Beggar
pub and shot his childhood associate George Cornell in the head with
a 9mm Mauser pistol. Cornell had, among other indiscretions, joined
rival South London mobsters the Richardsons. According to legend, the
Walker Brothers’ ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine’ was
playing on the jukebox at the time.
The Blind Beggar, 337, Whitechapel Road E1
7. The Madman
‘
Mad’ Frankie Fraser, who was born in 1923 and whose criminal involvements
embrace the Sabini and Kray eras, got his monicker after viciously attacking
Jack Spot on Praed Street in Paddington on 2 May 1956. He was also know
as one of the Richardson gang’s ‘torturers’. After
the age of 13, he spent 32 of his next 40 years in prison. In August
1991, six years after his release from prison, he was gunned down outside
Turnmills nightclub in Farringdon. These days he conducts his own gangland
tours, taking in the Richardsons’ scrapyard, Turnmills and the
Hackney streets in which the Krays grew up.
Turnmills, 63b, Clerkenwell Road EC1; www.madfrankiefraser.co.uk
8. The Associate
Big criminal have many associates but few have careers spanning 55 years
and ‘associations’ ranging from the Krays, to Frankie Fraser,
the Great Train Robber and the Brinks-Mat robbers, including road rage
killer Kenneth Noye. ‘My old man was a villain and I hope my
kids grow up to be villains,’ Francis said. ‘I would rather
die quickly by the bullet than slowly in some old people’s home
that stinks of cabbage water.’ Three weeks later, on 14 May of
this year, Francis was shot four times in the head as he got out of
his car in Lynton Road, Bermondsey. The area is also known as the Bermondsey
Triangle as it’s said to have a higher concentration of villains
than anywhere in Britain.
Lynton Road, Bermondsey SE1, also known as the Bermondsey Triangle
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The
Times - London A-Z Series No.2 (A Sample....)
"T for Toilets of London"
The 17th Century Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bludworth, famously
remarked in the early hours of the Great Fire that ‘a woman might
piss it out’. It was actually another 250 years before women could
urinate in a free public convenience in the capital. After waiting that
long, the Lord Mayor’s judgement may have been correct.
In between the first public lavatories of the 13th Century and Microsoft’s
internet-connected ‘iLoo’ which appeared last year at some music
festivals, London has been best characterised by street names such as Pissinge
Alley, of which a corrupted example, Passing Alley, remains off St. John Street
EC1. Going to the toilet in public is somewhat different to going to a public
toilet, a difference which has had an erratic reception in London’s 2000-year
history. It was in Fish Street Hill near Monument that remains of a Roman urinal
were discovered. Today, however, despite early 20th Century campaigners such
as George Bernard Shaw, the public convenience is an endangered species.
According to the British Toilet Association, one third of toilets run by city
councils had closed by 2000, leaving a very long queue with only one for every
10,000 people in the UK. Following closure, many toilets across the capital toilets
have been, one way or another, repurposed: a nail centre in Kentish Town; a restaurant
and nightclub near Spitalfields; an art gallery in Kingston. Inevitably, London’s
toilets have freely associated with all manner of events, from Joe Orton’s
cottaging expeditions in Islington and Hampstead, to Girls Aloud singer Cheryl
Tweedy’s punch-up in a Surrey nightclub toilet in October last year.
But the repurposing of the toilet is not what citizens want. The contributions
of Harington (who invented the first flush), Crapper (who lent us his name),
and Jennings (who showed us how to spend a penny), should not be in vain. Londoners,
in search of relief, can at least console themselves that the toilets that still
exist for the public are anything but bog standard.
1. Pissartists
When Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi relieved themselves on Marcel Duchamp’s
urinal in 2000, they claimed they were paying homage to the artist. Duchamp’s ‘ready-made’ object,
first exhibited in 1917, was signed ‘R.Mutt’ and later titled ‘Fountain’.
Other than that there was no real embellishment to the sanitary ware
and enamel paint urinal. Duchamp stressed that the displacement of a
common object was the work itself, the object having been selected by
the artist without any particular care. The two guerrilla artists took
a little more care in their selection of targets, given that Duchamp’s
urinal is now world-famous. Their previous targets included Tracey Emin’s ‘My
Bed’. Meanwhile, a fully functioning toilet was recently taken
down from outside the Tate: artist Monica Bonvicini’s minimalist
glass cube, entitled ‘Don’t Miss A Sec’, was toilet-as-public-art,
with the public able to look out through one-way glass as they attended
to their needs.
Tate Modern , Bankside SE1
2. Spending a penny
In the basement of the Science Museum lurks ‘The Secret Life of
the Home’ which, along with other domestic appliances, includes
a fine selection of toilets and explanatory diagrams: a 1780s pan closet
from Hampton Court Palace; a two-hole lavatory seat for workmen from
around the same period; the cheap ‘Long Hopper’ closet for
use in mid-19th Century prisons; and the workings of Reverend Moule’s ‘Earth
Closet’ patented in 1860. Thomas Crapper’s 1900 ‘Valveless
Waste Preventer’ marks the presence of one of the toilet’s
great innovators. But the less well known hero of sanitation was George
Jennings. It was he who devised the lavatories for the Great Exhibition
of 1851, charging 827,280 visitors a penny each. The Science Museum is
free but a contribution is always welcome.
Science Museum, Exhibition Road SW7
3. First Ladies’
George Bernard Shaw’s early failure as a novelist may have him
to women’s toilets. He certainly championed the cause, campaigning
vigorously and often acrimoniously for ‘the unmentionable question…of
sanitary accommodation’ for women. Even the cost of one penny he
regarded as ‘an absolutely prohibitive charge for a poor woman’.
Shaw, a member of St. Pancras Vestry and later a councillor for the Borough
between 1897 and 1906, was a committed vegetarian, Socialist and leading
light of the Fabian Society. But, with his campaign for women’s
toilets, he was up against councillors who thought that women who so
far ‘forgot their sex’ did not deserve toilets. Although
the first free public convenience for women, at the junction of Parkway
and Camden High Street, was built around 1910 after Shaw’s stint
as councillor, it owes more than a penny to him.
Parkway NW1
4. Royal flush
Now only the gateway remains of Richmond Palace, first used by Edward
III, the favourite residence of Henry VII, and the birthplace of Henry
VIII. But it was Elizabeth I who put the flush into royal with her
installation in the late 1590s of one of the new flushing toilets invented
by her godson John Harington. In 1596 Harington had introduced his
invention in the form of a book, ‘The Metamorphosis of Ajax’, ‘jakes’ being
a common word for closet or privy. As Harington pointed out, he was
now ‘worthy for my rare invention…to be made one of the
Privie…Chamber’. An equally rare local toilet which can
be seen is the listed Victorian structure in the grounds of the Earl
of Clarendon’s one-time residence. A cast-iron structure for
standing males, the toilet is embossed with the timeless advice: ‘Please
adjust your dress before leaving.’
Gokhale Walk, Twickenham; Richmond Palace Gateway, Richmond Green
5. South end
One of London’s most beautiful and last remaining Victorian toilets
stands, fittingly, at a terminus: South End Green was once a terminus
for trams and the toilets were built in 1897 by the London and North
Western Railway. Green and white tiling, wooden doors and cast iron screens
have been preserved with lottery money but one of the factors in attracting
that money, some £50,000, was the regular presence of playwright
Joe Orton. Compared to some ‘cottages’, this former gay haunt
is a palace and featured in ‘Prick Up Your Ears’, the film
starring Gary Oldman about Orton’s life. One of Orton’s less
salubrious cottages was under the railway bridge on Holloway Road, a ‘little
pissoir’ that became ‘the scene of a frenzied homosexual
saturnalia’.
South End Green NW3
6. Manholes
Sanitary engineer Thomas Crapper is surely the individual most closely
associated with the eponymous waste disposal system. But should he
be? Toilets across the land once proclaimed ‘T. Crapper Brass & Co.,
Ltd’ and First World War US soldiers stationed in England soon
turned illustrious name into famous noun. Crapper is often given credit
for the ‘Valveless Waste Preventer’ but a former employee,
Albert Giblin, is likely to have been responsible for this. Additionally,
Crapper, who died in 1910, was preceded by John Harington (see above)
and Alexander Cumming, who patented a flushing device in 1775. Still,
crap endures but Crapper’s now rare name can only be found in
rare places: two sewer manhole covers are in use at Westminster Abbey
near the exit.
Westminster Abbey SW1
7. Toilet humour
Gilbert and George cut the toilet paper at the opening of the Toilet
Gallery in Kingston in October last year, heralding the artistic rebirth
of a 1950s female toilet block. The man who put his backside on the
line to ‘show work that’s bit risky, that other people
wouldn’t show’, is Paul Stafford, director of the foundation
course in art and design at Kingston University. Stafford passed the
toilet, which was shut in 1998, every day on his way to work. A plan,
a letter, an accommodating council, and a few pennies (£12.50)
spent on locks, and the non-profit-making Toilet Gallery became a reality
sponsored by the international cleaning brand ‘Domestos’.
Toilet Gallery, 143-159, Clarence Street, Kingston
8. Toilet smells
Martin Bormann, one of the most powerful Nazi leaders who was found guilty
in absentia in 1946 and whose whereabouts were debated for many years,
was reported to have been living in London in the 1950s and 1960s disguised
as a toilet attendant on Westbourne Grove. Although the West German
authorities declared him dead in 1973, having established ‘with
near certainty’ that a West Berlin skeleton was his, the story
occasionally surfaces from the murky waters of history. The likely
area of Bormann’s sojourn today offers one of the most satisfying
toilet experiences in the capital. Local residents from the Pembridge
Association supported architects CZWG to create an award-winning toilet
in 1993 now known as ‘Turquoise Island’ and home to florists ‘Wild
At Heart’.
‘Turquoise Island’, Westbourne Grove W11
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The
Times - London At Work Series (A Sample....)
"No.12 River Police"
For over 200 years, from the same base in Wapping, police have patrolled
London’s main artery, the river Thames. Just as the river has undergone
transformation and regeneration, so too has the river police, now formally
known as the Marine Support Unit (MSU). Where once the river was the
commercial heart of the city, clogged with ships and thieves, today its
openness is a potential terrorist highway into the capital.
Policing 36 miles of river, as well as hundreds of miles of inland waterways,
attracts a certain type of officer. ‘I’ve been a police officer for
20 years all over London,’ says Inspector Chris Wicks of the Marine Support
Unit, ‘but always had a fascination for water.’ His nine years on
the river reflects an aspect of policing that ‘tends to become very vocational’,
with officers giving an average of up to 15 years service. With 30,000 police
in London and only 80 in the MSU, the six to eight annual vacancies do attract
a large number of applicants from ‘a pool of very high quality’,
says Wicks. But he emphasises that the MSU is not elitist. ‘There’s
no magic to what we look for apart from a good solid grounding in operational
policing.’ After that, MSU officers are trained in boat handling, crewing,
navigation, firefighting and survival at sea, leading to a boatmaster’s
examination and licence. All the officers are trained to deal with ‘waterborne
chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incidents’.
Photographer Bill Brandt’s 1938 image of an officer framed by a dark Docklands
alley romanticises the responsibility that the modern MSU has for the whole capital,
from Camden’s canals via Walton-on-Thames searching for clues to the killer
of student Amelie Delagrange to the 250 searches carried out every year by the
Underwater and Confined Spaces Search Team. The force’s original rowing
galleys have been replaced with, among others, four Targa fast response boats
and five rigid inflatable boats but, for Inspector Wicks, the river remains ‘very
unique’, requiring 24-hour policing to address its ‘very particular
problems’.
1. The river plunderers
The river police inevitably owe a great debt to the thousands of criminals
without whose endeavours they would not exist, and it is hard to exaggerate
the scale of crime connected to the Thames: ‘Before the existence
of the river police,’ recorded The Times in 1842, ‘it was
computed that one-tenth of the cargo of every vessel brought into the
Port of London was stolen, and men amassed enormous wealth by this
wholesale plunder.’ During the 18th Century, trade on the river
amounted to around £60 million; the 1800 feet of legal quay space
between London Bridge and the Tower could have 13,500 vessels jammed
together; queues of ships could stretch six miles from Vauxhall to
Greenwich. And, of the 37,000 river workers, from watchmen to coalheavers,
11,000 were estimated to be thieves, with a further 1000 pirates at
work. Execution Dock, overlooked by the Captain Kidd pub, is the spot
which for centuries marked the river’s relationship to its pirates,
not that a few hangings posed much of a deterrent.
Execution Dock, outside Captain Kidd pub, 108, Wapping High Street E1
2. The magistrate
Henry Mayhew is famous for his seminal mid-19th Century work ‘London
Labour and the London Poor’. Less well known is Patrick Colquhoun,
the magistrate who influenced the work with his ‘Treatise on the
Police of the Metropolis’, published in 1796. It was Colquhoun’s
investigations into the Thames watermen, who ‘indulge in every
kind of low extravagance’ and who were ‘in general exceedingly
depraved and audacious’, that uncovered the true extent of river-related
crime, with 12 warehouses in Wapping alone processing stolen goods. The
treatise, which went into several editions, argued convincingly for the
establishment of a single system of police throughout the metropolis,
including paid constables for preventing and detecting crime. On July
2 1798, the world’s first organised police force came into existence
as the Marine Police Establishment. It was run at an annual cost of £5000,
most of which came from the main benefactor of riverside policing, the
West India Merchants and Planters Company. The rowing galleys that set
off from Wapping to patrol the river that first year saved a tidy £120,000
.
3. The young police officer
At the same time as the Scotsman Colquhoun was writing his treatise,
the Essex-born John Harriott, who had spent his youth at sea, was drawing
up a scheme for a river police force which was met with complete indifference,
first by the Lord Mayor then, in 1797, by the Secretary of State for
the Home Department. Colquhoun, however, was impressed by Harriott’s
plans, and he became resident magistrate with the new force. On October
16 1798, Harriott’s past, as a sailor who had been shipwrecked
and wounded in action, came in useful. The two men were examining coalheavers
charged with the unlawful possession of coal when hundreds of others,
embittered by the threat to their illegal activities, gathered outside
the Wapping court and tried to destroy it. A ringleader was shot and
two officers injured by gunshots, one later dying from his wounds. ‘Ordering
the firearms,’ said Harriott, ‘seeing to their loading,
and giving necessary directions seemed to electrify me and make me
young again.’
4. Primus Omnium
Wapping Police Station, home of today’s Marine Support Unit, still
stands on its original 1798 site. Its location, and its motto, ‘primus
omnium’, might not have changed but its surroundings have: tranquil
river views have replaced the epicentre of the capital’s water-borne
trade. With the trade went those associated with it, such as the hundreds
of local coalheavers who stole unrelentingly from their employers and
who were described by Harriott as half savage. The original force consisted
of a Superintendent of Ship Constables with five Surveyors for day and
night patrols of the river. The Surveyors were the brains of the operation,
overseeing the muscle, which was often drawn from honest ‘lumpers’ or
from ex-naval seamen familiar with cutlasses and pistols. Wapping Police
Museum, housed in the former carpenters’ workshops which from 1914
were used to build police vessels, contains the original ledgers recording
officers and equipment, as well as the first ‘occurrence book’ from
1839, when the Marine Police became the Thames Division of the Metropolitan
Police.
Wapping Police Station (and museum), Wapping High Street E1
5. Recovering bodies
According to Marine Support Unit, 39 dead bodies were pulled from the
Thames last year. On September 3 1878 the police had to pull many more
in what is still the highest ever single loss of civilian lives in
UK waters. Over 600 people lost their lives when the pleasure steamer ‘Princess
Alice’ was struck amidships by the iron ‘Bywell Castle’.
The steamer broke in two and sunk. Even those who made it into the
river were faced with its putrid water: sewage outfalls near Galleons
Reach, downstream of Barking Creek, meant that the river was filthy.
Those trapped inside were reported by a diver to be grouped close to
exits. On the surface, Thames watermen were paid five shillings for
each body they recovered. One holidaying police officer, on board the ‘Princess
Alice’, jumped into the water to save his wife. It turned out
not to be his wife, who later washed up dead in Erith but he eventually
found conjugal bliss with the woman he saved.
memorial, Woolwich Cemetery, Kings Highway, Plumstead SE18; ‘Alice’ flag
in Wapping Police Museum (see above)
6. First and last on the scene
A murder which horrified the nation, inspired De Quincey to write his
classic essay on murder and PD James to theorise about the killer,
was one which occurred in an area profoundly connected with early 19th
Century docklands. It was also a murder in which a Thames police officer
was first on the scene, and in which officers played one of the final
parts. In 1811, the Ratcliffe Highway, now The Highway, was full of
lodging houses and taverns populated by sailors, prostitutes and criminals.
It was at the Pear Tree Inn in Cinnamon Street that the alleged killer
of seven victims, including a baby, came under suspicion when a bloody
weapon was discovered in his possession. Sailor John Williams committed
suicide before he could be tried for the gruesome murders which may
have been committed by equally gruesome weapons: a maul or shipwright’s
hammer and a ripping chisel. River police officers formed a security
guard for the procession to Williams’s burial, with a stake through
his heart, at the junction of Cannon Street Road and Cable Street.
Cannon Street Road, Cable Street, The Highway (formerly The Ratcliffe
Highway E1
7. A swimming in the head
One of the earliest recorded complaints against the police is surely
also one of the most bizarre. On December 16 1848, Inspector White
heard a cry of ‘man overboard’ from the Brunswick Steamer.
He rowed towards the spot but initially only a hat could be seen floating.
Eventually, a man was pulled from the water. Charles Holmes, living
at 209, High Street, Holborn, seemed grateful for having been saved,
and insisted it hadn’t been a suicide attempt but, rather, he
had been taken with ‘a swimming in the head’. The complaint
surfaced when Holmes’s brother, who had been involved in a ruinous
law suit against him, claimed the police had colluded to assist the
suicide. Whatever the truth, Charles Holmes must have been taken with
another ‘swimming in the head’ 11 days later when his body
was recovered, dead, from the river.
8. Life and death on the river
Just over a century after the ‘Princess Alice’ disaster,
river police attended another Thames disaster which claimed 51 lives
on August 20 1989. This time they were better equipped and four patrol
boats were on the scene within six minutes. Even so, when the dredger ‘Bowbelle’ collided
with the passenger vessel ‘Marchioness’ at 1.50am near Cannon
Street Railway Bridge it changed the role of the river police for good.
As a consequence of the disaster, lifeboat stations operate a dedicated
search and rescue service for the tidal Thames which had been a police
role for 200 years, with thousands of lives saved.
‘Marchioness’ memorial, Southwark Cathedral, London Bridge SE1
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