The London Cleopatra’s Needle – having survived a deadly and storm-thrashed sea journey – has indeed accrued the most macabre legends. There are claims that Cleopatra’s Needle emits an occult power that encourages passers-by to fling themselves into the Thames. As well as being a favoured spot for suicides, this allegedly cursed artefact is said to contain the spirit of an Egyptian pharaoh and to have been the focus of a magical ritual by Aleister Crowley. The homeless and destitute who congregate on the Embankment will go nowhere near it, mocking laughter is said to echo over the water at night, and a character with scaly skin and a tall headdress has been seen diving into the Thames beside it without causing a ripple or splash.

Cleopatra’s Needle in London towers beside the Thames (Photo: Mrs Ellacott)

Cleopatra’s Needle in New York was the focus of rituals involving thousands of Freemasons. Hauled across the Atlantic and dragged through the city thanks to the most remarkable feats of engineering – and thanks to the interventions of America’s richest man – the needle is said to stand in a weird Masonic alignment with New York’s other obelisks. The London Cleopatra’s Needle, it’s claimed, is also positioned as part of a network of occult sites – arranged in the shape of a pentagram some reckon, as a diagram of the eye of the Egyptian god Horus insist others.

Cleopatra’s Needle in New York City’s Central Park (Photo: Ingfbruno)

Below is a story of colonial competition, of the jostling of rising and falling empires. It’s a tale of Masonic schemes to transmit age-old messages encoded in hieroglyphs; an account of eerie time capsules, World War I bombs, the spirits of dead sailors, and outpourings of dark energy said to have influenced none other than Jack the Ripper. It’s a story of how Cleopatra’s Needles crossed seas and oceans and how they continue to assert their weird and baleful power upon our minds even today.

The Early History of Cleopatra’s Needles – Sun Gods, Huge Granite Columns and Cleopatra’s Roman Lovers

Around 1450 BC, Pharaoh Thutmose III decided to commemorate his 30 years on the throne by ordering two obelisks to be sculpted from enormous, single blocks of red granite. These blocks were quarried at Aswan – close to the Nile’s first cataract – then somehow transported over 500 miles to Heliopolis, which now lies in the northern suburbs of Cairo. Though the Nile was definitely involved in moving these massive monuments, no one is quite sure how Thutmose managed to shift them over such a long distance. Thutmose had hieroglyphs inscribed in a single column on each of the four sides of Cleopatra’s Needles and the obelisks were then erected outside a temple to the sun, with each guarding one side of its gateway. (In Ancient Egypt, obelisks symbolised the rays of the sun god Aten-Ra.) Around two centuries after Thutmose had set the obelisks up, Pharaoh Ramesses II added more hieroglyphs to celebrate his military triumphs – arranging his text in two columns running down the obelisks’ sides, flanking Thutmose’s carvings.

The obelisks remained outside the temple of the sun for more than 1,400 years, although at some point they seem to have toppled over and lain buried in sand for half-a-century. In 12 BC, the Romans moved them over the-not-inconsiderable distance of 130 miles to Alexandria. (Again, the Nile was involved and – again – we don’t know exactly how they did it.) There they were erected outside the Caesareum – a temple built by Cleopatra in homage to her Roman lovers Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. (Hence, the obelisks’ connection with Egypt’s most famous – and last – pharaoh.) The monuments stayed at the Caesareum for almost two millennia, but the obelisk that would become the London Cleopatra’s Needle once again tipped over and was covered by sand. This turned out to be fortunate as it meant its hieroglyphs were protected from the eroding effects of the desert’s sand-blasting storms. But the ambitions of new and rising empires meant the long stay of Cleopatra’s Needles outside the Caesareum would not prove permanent.

A sketch of the ruins of the Caesareum from 1798. The Cleopatra’s Needle that ended up in New York City is upright. The London obelisk can be made out in the foreground, mostly buried in sand.

Cleopatra’s Needle Is Readied for Transport to London – Battles, Egyptomania, Rival Obelisks and the Beginnings of ‘the Curse’

In 1798, Napolean launched an invasion of Egypt, an act that began decades of struggles for control of the country between the British, the French, the fading Ottoman Empire that had ruled Egypt for centuries, and Egyptian leaders who wanted to establish a powerful independent state with colonial territories of its own. These conflicts would involve battles, revolts and diplomatic manoeuvrings. Additionally, when Napolean invaded Egypt, he brought with him around 160 ‘savants’ – scholars, linguists, archaeologists and scientists – to investigate that intriguing land of temples, statues and tombs. There were also around 2000 artists and engravers, who created images of these monuments. As the research of the savants and the sketches of the artists filtered back to Europe, they sparked a phenomenon known as Egyptomania, in which the continent went mad for all things Ancient Egypt. Egyptian designs influenced furniture and jewellery, Egyptian themes cropped up in novels and plays, and pyramid-shaped mausoleums appeared in Europe’s graveyards. Egyptomania also led to an enthusiasm for real Egyptian objects, with mummies, artefacts and even obelisks ‘acquired’ from the country. It’s against this backdrop of colonial power struggles and Egyptomania that the story of Cleopatra’s Needle plays out.

In 1819, the viceroy and de facto ruler of Egypt and Sudan – an Albanian named Mohammed Ali, who’d wrested significant power from the Ottomans – bestowed (the reclining) Cleopatra’s Needle on the British as a diplomatic gift. This present was intended to celebrate British triumphs over the French at the Battle of the Nile (courtesy of Lord Nelson) and the Battle of Alexandria (under Sir Ralph Abercromby). The prime minister, Lord Liverpool, expressed gratitude for the gift, but the Brits were faced with the problem of how on earth to transport the 224-ton, 69-foot megalith the 3880 nautical miles to England. With no solutions becoming apparent, the obelisk was allowed to stay in its age-old position in the Caesareum’s ruins. As time drifted on, however, certain people in the British establishment became increasingly unhappy at the thought of such a prestigious monument lying unappreciated under its centuries of sand.

Coloured photograph of Sir James Edward Alexander in 1860. Some years later he would strive to bring Cleopatra’s Needle to London.

In 1867, General Sir James Edward Alexander – a Scottish writer, traveller, soldier and Egypt enthusiast – visited Paris, where his competitive instincts were inflamed by his observation that the French already possessed an Egyptian obelisk. In the Place de la Concorde, there towered a magnificent, yellow-granite, 75-foot monolith, boasting a weight of over 250 tons. This obelisk – from Luxor – had been gifted by Muhammed Ali in 1833, possibly as part of a strategy of using Egypt’s wealth of ancient artefacts to play Egypt-obsessed European nations off against each other. Tolerating far less delay and dithering than the British, the French had shipped their megalith home and had unveiled it in October 1836 in a ceremony officiated by King Louis Phillipe in front of 200,000 people.

The Luxor obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, Paris (Photo: Craig Booth)

Alexander was determined that London should have an obelisk to match the one reared up in Paris. Accompanied by the British Consul General Edward Stanton, Alexander met the Khedive of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha. Isma’il was a visionary leader, but – under his ambitious rule – Egypt had slid into debt. Modernisation programmes – encouraging industrialisation, urbanisation, agricultural improvement and the expansion of education – as well as costly wars with Ethiopia had bankrupted the treasury. The European powers had used these pressures to wring concessions from Isma’il Pasha, with the British and French assuming control of most of Egypt’s finances and acquiring Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal. Against such a background, it’s likely that Isma’il felt he had little choice but to go along with Alexander’s determination to get Cleopatra’s Needle out of Egypt. Incidentally, if Cleopatra’s Needle is cursed, Isma’il Pasha may have been one of its first victims. He would be swiftly removed from power – at France and Britain’s behest – in 1879. He went into exile, eventually being offered sanctuary by the Ottomans, where he ended up virtually a state prisoner in an Istanbul palace beside the Bosphorus. He died in 1895, due to – according to Time magazine – the effects of trying to down two bottles of champagne in one swig.

Isma’il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan. Was he the first victim of Cleopatra’s Needle’s curse?

Alexander now needed to work out a way to shift the colossal obelisk and to find the money to fund its voyage. Help for both these matters came through a friend, a stupendously wealthy surgeon, dermatologist and – yes – fellow Egypt nut called Sir William James Erasmus Wilson. In 1877, Wilson agreed to contribute the massive sum of £10,000 (almost one million in modern money) to finance the monolith’s journey. While trying to figure out how this journey would be accomplished, Wilson turned to a friend: a locomotive and railroad engineer and – again – Egypt obsessive named Mathew William Simpson. Simpson, who worked for the Khedive, came up with the idea of digging the obelisk out of the sand then cocooning it in an iron tube, 16 feet wide and 92 feet long. The plan was that, once constructed, this cocoon would become a cylinder-shaped boat, named the Cleopatra. The Cleopatra would be tugged by a steamship – the Olga – all the way to England.

1830s lithograph of the Caesareum. The New York Cleopatra’s Needle stands in the background while the London needle is partly buried in sand.

As Simpson – due to his obligations to the Khedive – was unable to devote himself to the work, he recruited another engineer – John Dixon – to finish off the design. John kitted out the Cleopatra with a rudder, keels, mast, bridge and cabin. He had the Cleopatra built in pieces in England, at the Thames Iron Works. These pieces were shipped out to Egypt then fitted around the obelisk under the direction of Waynam Dixon, John’s brother. Finally, the Cleopatra was ready for its journey, waiting to be hooked up to the Olga, which would be under the command of one Captain Booth. At this point – it seems – the obelisk was ready to show its fury and discomfort at being hauled away from its native land.

Ferocious Storms, Death at Sea and a Strange Time Capsule – Cleopatra’s Needle’s ‘Cursed’ Voyage to London

The strange procession of the Olga and Cleopatra – with the latter commanded by one Captain Carter and crewed by Maltese mariners – sailed through the Mediterranean with little incident. But as the ships were passing through the notoriously temperamental Bay of Biscay, an incredible storm blew up. With the rain smashing down, the wind battering the boats and the waves unrelenting and mountainous, Captain Booth became convinced the Cleopatra would sink, taking the Olga down with it. He decided to attempt a rescue of the Cleopatra’s crew before cutting the ropes and letting Cleopatra’s Needle drop to the ocean bed in its metal sarcophagus. A smaller boat, manned by six sailors, set out from the Olga to pick up the Cleopatra’s men. However, the raging sea overwhelmed the smaller boat and its sailors were lost. Eventually, the Olga managed to draw up alongside the Cleopatra and save its five crew members. Captain Booth then ordered the tow ropes cut and the Cleopatra was carried away on the waves, with all those present assuming the tubelike ship with its cursed cargo would sink. Five days later, however, a Spanish fishing craft spotted an odd-looking boat bobbing on the now-much-calmer sea. It was the Cleopatra, miraculously undamaged. Mathew Simpson’s innovative design had somehow survived all the Bay of Biscay could hurl at it. A Glasgow steamer – the Fitzmaurice – towed the Cleopatra to the northern Spanish port of Ferrol. The Anglia – a paddle tug – was then sent to haul the Cleopatra to Britain.

Cleopatra’s Needle Being Brought to England, by George Knight, 1877. The Olga and Cleopatra are depicted struggling in rough seas.

On 21st  January, 1878, the ships reached the Thames. Shoreside crowds clapped and cheered, cannons fired salutes and all the schoolchildren in the estuary town of Gravesend were given the day off. There was some debate about where Cleopatra’s Needle would go – a wooden model of the monolith had previously been put up outside the Houses of Parliament, but this location was deemed unsuitable. Eventually, the Embankment was chosen – the curious decision being made to erect an archaic monument on a symbol of modernity and progress: the elegant riverside walkway had recently been constructed to conceal an enormous sewer, the central part of an innovative underground network devised by Joseph Bazalgette. On 12th September 1878, Cleopatra’s Needle was hoisted into position. Two Victorian sphinxes – designed by English architect George John Vulliamy – were set up on each side of the obelisk, facing inwards towards it (more on this strange orientation below). The Embankment was also lined with Egyptian-style benches, boasting camels and winged sphinxes as part of their metalwork.

An illustration from the journal ‘Engineering’ showing Cleopatra’s Needle being erected on London’s Embankment

As the obelisk was lowered into place, a time capsule was entombed beneath it. The capsule’s contents could hardly have been more Victorian. It contained a gentleman’s lounge suit and 10 illustrated newspapers, including that day’s edition of The Times. The capsule also held Bradshaw’s Railway Guide (again, a thrusting achievement of Victorian progress), an assortment of women’s dresses and cosmetics, Queen Victoria’s portrait, children’s toys, Bibles, collections of coins, a razor (more on this later), and 12 photographs of what were considered exceptionally beautiful women (these pictures are said to have been chosen by Captain Carter). Other items included a baby’s bottle, some of the cables that had hauled Cleopatra’s Needle upright, a map of London, an account of the monument’s dramatic journey to England, a three-inch bronze miniature of the obelisk, a box of cigars and a selection of hairpins. As we shall see, certain elements of this ensemble have helped fuel the mythos of a haunted Egyptian megalith and its occult influence on the darker side of life in the capital.

The Creepy Mythology of Cleopatra’s Needle – Strange Beings, Eerie Laughter, Weird Alignments, Jack the Ripper and Aleister Crowley

A certain amount of paranormal lore is associated with Cleopatra’s Needle in London. Such lore has cropped up in ghost anthologies, on websites, and in literature, poetry and film. It is, indeed, sometimes difficult to separate what might be considered ‘genuine folklore’ from internet memes and the outpourings of artistic imaginations, but this section will attempt some sort of summary of the notions that have grown up around London’s ancient obelisk.

Perhaps the most famous piece of folklore linked to Cleopatra’s Needle is chronicled in the book Haunted Waters (1957) by the ghost-hunter Elliott O’Donnell. O’Donnell starts his tome by claiming: “I have often felt when in proximity to some rivers and pools as if the water possessed a strange, magnetic influence and attraction, as well as sensing the presence of a spirit, sometimes friendly and sometimes evil and inimical.” He feels this is especially true of the Thames, which “should assuredly be haunted, for no river in Great Britain has witnessed more murders and suicides.” O’Donnell recounts how, in the early 1890s, he would wander along the Embankment and chat to “the wretched down-and-outs, homeless and hopeless” who could be found “on nearly every seat.” Some of these homeless people confided that “they had felt a ghostly presence, urging them to end their miserable existence by jumping into the river.” O’Donnell goes on to say that the “spot where Cleopatra’s Needle stands was well-know to be haunted. None of the outcasts would venture near it. Two of them told me that one night they saw a tall, nude, shadowy figure, with a peak-shaped head and a body covered with what looked like scales, suddenly appear by the needle, wave a long arm at them and leap over the wall into the river. They said that they sometimes heard unearthly groans and hellish, mocking laughter in the river.”

According to the folklorist Steve Roud in his London Lore, a peculiar London myth concerns the siting of the sphinxes at the needle’s base. The two Victorian sphinxes – decorated with hieroglyphic inscriptions reading “the good god, Thuthmosis III given life” – are facing inwards towards the needle, rather than outwards as they would have been in Egypt. It is a widespread belief, Roud states, that they were “positioned inwards to protect London from its occult power”. If there’s any truth in this legend, the other folklore linked to Cleopatra’s Needle would suggest this precaution hasn’t worked.

In London, Cleopatra’s Needle is flanked by two Victorian sphinxes – were they positioned facing inwards to contain its occult power? (Photo: DaringDonna)

London legend states the monument is a popular location for suicides. Twice, apparently, policemen were approached by an agitated woman claiming someone was about to leap in the river. The officers ran towards the obelisk, only to see the very same woman plunge into the water. It’s also claimed that the apparition of the naked diving man began appearing shortly after Cleopatra’s Needle was set up and that it is in fact the spirit of one of the sailors who perished in the Bay of Biscay. Unearthly screams heard around the monument are said to issue from the lost sailors. An inscription on the needle’s pedestal commemorates the seafarers who drowned.

One of the large Victorian sphinxes positioned on either side of Cleopatra’s Needle, London. (Photo: Colin Smith)

An even more outlandish legend insists that the spirit of Rameses II is trapped inside the obelisk and that this has meant a powerful curse has been placed on London. This assertion is linked to the infamous British magician Aleister Crowley. Allegedly, one night, Crowley conducted a ritual to liberate the soul of Rameses. The ceremony involved the feeding of animal blood to a human skeleton. I’m not sure how Crowley would have got away with dragging a skeleton through the capital’s streets or how a skeleton could be fed with anything, but Crowley’s procedure is said to have failed. It’s claimed the laughter heard around the obelisk is Rameses mocking Crowley’s attempt.

Another tale attests that in 1880 a young woman, Mrs Davis, was walking along the Embankment when she felt herself pulled against her will towards Cleopatra’s Needle. As the force dragged her closer, terrifying laughter rang out, she lost all control over her legs and hurled herself into the Thames. A vagrant rescued her, but while recovering in hospital she suffered nightmares in which she was tormented by a tall red-robed woman with black almond-shaped eyes. The woman would open her mouth, exposing fang-like teeth, before the skin and flesh were torn from her face. Another incident some claim was caused by the obelisk’s curse is easier to verify. During World War I, a bomb exploded close to Cleopatra’s Needle, with its shrapnel pitting the plinth and scarring one of the sphinxes. Following the War, this damage wasn’t mended. It was felt the scars were part of the obelisk’s story and – some would say – evidence of its curse.

Hieroglyphs on Cleopatra’s Needle. Does this London obelisk imprison the spirit of a pharaoh? (Photo: Man vyi)

A curious piece of lore relates to the time capsule embedded beneath Cleopatra’s Needle. Among other objects, it contains – if you recall – pictures of attractive women and a razor. It’s been asserted that the positioning of these items under the occult monolith sent waves of evil energy into the capital that encouraged the crimes of Jack the Ripper. While such a notion might seem far-fetched, the obelisk has made it into artistic depictions of this sinister episode in London’s history. In Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, Jack the Ripper is Dr William Gull, a high-ranking Freemason and physician to the Royal Family. Gull states: “Few symbols match this stone in its potency … carved fifteen hundred years before Christ’s birth and raised at Heliopolis by Thotmes, etched with hieroglyphic prayers that Atum, Egypt’s Sun god, might increase his sovereignty.” Gull also remarks on the “Daguerrotypes of our epoch’s most lovely women … and a razor”. Gull places the needle within a pattern of sites around the capital charged with dark mystical energy. The Ripper argues that if one were to draw lines connecting such sites – which include Hawksmoor churches (some boasting their own obelisks), Daniel Defoe’s obelisk tomb in Bunhill fields, the Tower of London with its macabre history and St Paul’s (apparently, previously, a temple of Diana) – they would make up a … pentagram. The film version of From Hell (2001) has Ian Holme, as the Ripper, informing a victim in his coach about the six men who died bringing the obelisk from Egypt before murdering her. 

Indeed, a number of writers and psychogeographers have embedded the needle as a central point in London networks of occult power. In his poetry collection Lud Heat, Iain Sinclair positions the needle as part of an arrangement of burial grounds, sacred hills, suicide ponds and Hawksmoor churches. (Nicholas Hawksmoor, nicknamed ‘the Devil’s architect’, was a Freemason fond of decorating his churches with ‘pagan’ symbols such as pyramids, mausoleums and – yes – obelisks.) The lines linking these sites form several shapes, including a triangle (or, if you like, a pyramid), a pentagram and a diagrammatic representation of the eye of the Egyptian god Horus. Sinclair writes, “There is a subsystem of fire obelisks: St Luke, Old Street, and St John, Horsleydown. They form an equilateral triangle, raised over the water, with London’s true obelisk – ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’.”

Let’s now move on to consider the Cleopatra’s Needle in New York, which – as we shall see – is also not lacking in occult significance nor in theorists eager to place it within systems of dark power in that metropolis.

Egyptian-style benches on London’s Embankment – evidence of Egyptomania? (Photo: Robin Sones)

Cleopatra’s Needle Comes to New York – America’s Egyptomania, Nautical Adventurers, Cannonballs and Freemasons

In New York’s Central Park, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stands an artefact that at first looks somewhat incongruous. On a hillock – known as Greywacke Knoll – is a red granite obelisk covered in faded hieroglyphs. Weighing in at 250 tons (even its pedestal weighs a hefty 50), the obelisk is officially the oldest outdoor manmade structure in New York. This object – forming a strange backdrop to the park’s lycra-clad traffic of cyclists and joggers – reaches a height of 68 feet. It would have appeared even more striking when first set up in 1880, when few buildings in New York were that tall.

The process by which this monument came to be in this location is a story that in some ways mirrors the transportation of its twin obelisk to London. For New York – and American society in general – was experiencing its own version of Egyptomania. Some of the city’s more outlandish tombs – and even some of its prisons – had been built with Egyptian-influenced designs. The 50-foot granite walls of the Croton Reservoir – completed in 1842 – had been constructed in an Egyptian style. Around 1878, when London claimed its obelisk, New York was mushrooming in size and gaining in importance, with the Industrial Revolution and immigration firing its growth. As the prime city of an ambitious emerging empire, New York felt it needed its very own artefact from an impressive empire of yore. And, as with the London needle, this would be achieved courtesy of a determined and obsessive military officer, his influential backers, a very rich patron, some astounding feats of engineering, and a daring voyage.

An 1842 Lithograph of the Croton Reservoir – a sign of New York City’s Egyptomania?

How this version of Cleopatra’s Needle came to be in New York is outlined in an excellent 2020 episode of the Bowery Boys podcast. The podcast tells us that procuring the obelisk became the passion project of several wealthy men, but it particularly came to motivate one Colonel Henry Honychurch Gorringe. Gorringe was an intriguing character, much of whose life was bound up with both mythology and the sea. As a boy, he was shipwrecked then rescued from the coast of India. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War and by the beginning of the 1870s had got a job at the US Hydrographic Office, in which he produced maps of coastlines and drew nautical charts. Gorringe had numerous adventures at sea and at one point became convinced he’d rediscovered the mythical land of Atlantis. In the mid-1870s, he ended up in Alexandria, where he first beheld the twin set of Cleopatra’s Needles at the Caesareum. Perhaps knowing the recumbent obelisk had been promised to the British, Gorringe started to form ideas regarding its still-upright sibling. He began to agitate for the up-and-coming nation of the USA to claim its own gargantuan Egyptian artefact.

Henry Honychurch Gorringe in 1883 – did he fall victim to the curse of Cleopatra’s Needle?

He was far from the only American with such an ambition. The country’s growing self-confidence and the liberal dose of Egyptomania the young nation had ingested had led many to a conviction that they must match their European rivals and show them that New York was truly one of the globe’s foremost cities. With more than a hint of sarcasm, one newspaper commented, “It would be absurd for the people of any great city to hope to be happy without an Egyptian obelisk. Rome has had them this great while and so has Constantinople. Paris has one; London has one. If New York was without one, all those great sites might point the finger of scorn at us and intimate that we could never rise to any real moral grandeur until we had our obelisk.”

Gorringe was a Freemason, and this too would motivate him to acquire one of the Cleopatra’s Needles for New York. The Freemasons – a mysterious and influential secret society – had begun as guilds of stonemasons who worked on medieval cathedrals. Freemasons tend to be fascinated by the doings of ancient civilisations, by arcane emblems, and by what one might call the occult. Hence, it’s unsurprising they’re keen on Ancient Egypt – the ancient civilisation par excellence, with its mysterious hieroglyphs, intriguing religion, and powerful magical and metaphysical traditions. Also, the Egyptians had been experts in architecture and working in stone. When examining Cleopatra’s Needle, Gorringe discovered what he thought were ancient Masonic signs and seems to have persuaded himself that these hieroglyphs were attempts of Ancient Egyptian Freemasons to send messages to the Masons of the future. Gorringe, therefore, became convinced he had to get the obelisk over to New York to make its teachings available to America’s Masons.

Gorringe teamed up with Elbert Farman – the US Consul to Egypt – and they persuaded the Khedive to offer them Cleopatra’s Needle. With Egypt suffering deep financial problems – and eager to improve trade with the USA – the Khedive had little choice but to acquiesce. However, there was still opposition to Gorringe’s desire to remove the monolith. Britain and France objected to the upstart Americans acquiring an obelisk and discovered an eagerness to preserve Egypt’s heritage, lobbying the Egyptian authorities not to allow the artefact to go. In addition to this, the Egyptians themselves were growing more concerned about the carrying off of their inheritance. Demonstrations were organised and angry editorials appeared in newspapers. To top it all, an Italian man came forward claiming to own the land on which Cleopatra’s Needle stood – he was quietened by a threat from Gorringe to sue.

The Cleopatra’s Needle that would go to New York City still upright in the Caesareum in 1880. Its twin obelisk had already been removed to London.

Another potential source of friction had a more American tone. There was the possibility of debates in Congress, debates with the potential to delay the acquisition of Cleopatra’s Needle for years. An arrangement was therefore contrived by which the obelisk was directly gifted to the City of New York, thereby bypassing the threat of lengthy and tortuous disquisitions. The only problem remaining was how to facilitate and fund the transport of the monument, especially now that New York was expected to come up with the cash. Raising such a sum wasn’t guaranteed to be easy. The torch-bearing-arm of the Statue of Liberty was around that time exhibited in Madison Square Park, in an attempt to revive the stuttering campaign to generate the money to assemble the rest of the figure. However, as far as Cleopatra’s Needle was concerned, assistance soon arrived. The railroad magnate – and America’s richest man – William Vanderbilt stepped in and donated $100,000 (well over $3 million in modern money). Vanderbilt – a Freemason – helped select the site on which the obelisk would stand. Greywacke Knoll was chosen as Vanderbilt didn’t want the magnificent monolith overshadowed by growing city.

The challenge now was how to shift the obelisk and get it over the Atlantic to New York. Vanderbilt invited proposals on how this could be done and in August 1879, Gorringe was granted the commission. Gorringe first built a long wooden crate. After encasing Cleopatra’s Needle in this vast coffin, he used hydraulic jacks and various devices to lower it. The next problem was how to get the obelisk and its box to the Nile. Gorringe came up with a clever solution – he laid out a track of cannonballs and rolled the crate over them. Gorringe had bought an old Egyptian postal ship and reinforced its hull – and it was onto this ship he had Cleopatra’s Needle loaded. The monument’s pedestal and the stairs leading up to it were also hoisted on board. Unlike the disastrous voyage of Cleopatra’s Needle to London, the sea journey to New York was mostly hassle-free. On July 19th 1880, the postal ship with its ancient freight arrived off New York’s Fire Island.

Cleopatra’s Needle being loaded onto the modified postal ship to begin its voyage to New York City. It was slid onto the boat via a specially created portal in the hull.

The next day, a pilot boat guided the ship to Staten Island, where it passed through the quarantine station. Given the all-clear, the boat sailed up the Hudson River and docked at 23rd Street. New York had been ardently anticipating the artefact’s arrival, and while the boat was docked, 1700 people per day came aboard to gaze upon the monument. But even though Cleopatra’s Needle had been successful transported to New York, there was still the logistical issue of how to get it across the city to Central Park. The decision was made to first move the pedestal. The boat sailed further upriver to 51st Street, where a crane offloaded the 50-ton base onto a carriage. 32 horses dragged it through the city, with the carriage’s wheels carving deep grooves into the road due to the weight of its burden. The pedestal was, however, successfully put in place in Central Park, with the city now in even more of a ferment about its ancient acquisition. This would only be heightened when New York’s Masons put on a spectacular demonstration of reverence. Masonic mythology attaches great importance to the idea of cornerstones and the brotherhood were determined to welcome this very special foundation stone to their town.

Strange Masonic Rituals, Weird Occult Alignments and a Miniature Cleopatra’s Needle on a New York Grave

On October 9th 1880, a solemn procession of over 9,000 Masons and members of the Knights Templar paraded up 5th avenue to Central Park, with many clad in black clothes, tall hats, white gloves and aprons. A crowd of 50,000 lined the route. After the Masons arrived at the pedestal, a grand ceremony was conducted. Grain – symbolising plenty – was tipped over the stone. Next, the Grand Senior Mason poured on wine – symbolising joy – before his junior poured on oil, representing peace. The Grand Marshal then walked to each side of the platform and said: “In the name of the Grand Lodge of the State of New York, I now proclaim the cornerstone of this obelisk – known as Cleopatra’s Needle – duly laid in ample form.” On every side of the base, he recited these words three times, after which the mass of assembled Masons clapped their hands thrice. Grand Master Anthony then made a speech, all about the Ancient Egyptians and their pyramids and how they had the power to predict the future.

However, the Grand Master didn’t go as far as Gorringe in claiming a connection between Egypt’s ancient inhabitants and modern Freemasons. According to The New York Times: “The most remarkable part of the Grand Master’s address was that in which he disclaimed any Masonic origin for the hieroglyphics found upon the obelisk and this was a part of his oration, coming from such high Masonic authority, that could not have been edifying to those persons who have found – as are professed to believe – evidences of the existence of the Masonic Order at the time this obelisk was first erected.” Gorringe and others, as The New York Times implied, must have been gutted to hear the Grand Master’s words.

As for Cleopatra’s Needle itself, first the boat sailed to a dock on 96th Street, where the obelisk was floated from the ship catamaran-style on pontoons. To move the monument to its place in Central Park, Gorringe hit upon another ingenious idea. He had the obelisk rolled on railway-like tracks, with workers continually taking up the lengths of track behind and positioning them again in front of the monolith as it made its stately way through the city. In this manner, Cleopatra’s Needle covered approximately a block a day, taking 40 days in total to reach its destination. The most challenging part of the journey was when the obelisk had to get across the real railroad tracks of the Hudson River Railway. However, this railroad was part of a Vanderbilt-owned firm. One order from the tycoon halted the trains so the obelisk could lumber over the tracks. On January 5th 1881, Cleopatra’s Needle arrived at Greywacke Knoll.

The vast edifice was then kept suspended above the base, awaiting a ceremony set for January 22nd during which Gorringe himself would lower it onto its plinth. Gorringe had completed all the calculations, but remained anxious in case something might go wrong on his big day. So, on the night of January 20th, he crept into Central Park with a band of collaborators. They did a midnight test run, during which Gorringe was relieved to observe everything would be all right. On January 22nd – despite sub-zero temperatures – thousands of New Yorkers watched as the obelisk was manoeuvred into the position it still occupies today. As in London, a time capsule was placed beneath. Among other items, it contained the American Declaration of Independence, a set of military medals, and a guide to Egyptian and Masonic symbols.

Cleopatra’s Needle remains a popular attraction in Central Park, New York City (Photo: King of Hearts)

Since that time, Cleopatra’s Needle has remained a much-visited tourist site. The monument’s looming presence in the centre of New York helped fuel American Egyptomania into the 20th century, when the craze for all things Egyptian was again boosted by the British archaeologist Howard Carter’s discover of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. It seems the needle’s position outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art has had a galvanising impact on the Met’s collection. Perhaps not willing to be outdone by European museums, the Met financed expeditions to Egypt between 1906 and 1936. The Met boasts a phenomenal collection of Ancient Egyptian artefacts, including the Temple of Dendur. An exceptionally holy site seen as home to the gods, the temple was rescued from the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam and reassembled in the Met in the 1960s.

Questions, though, remain about the positioning of Cleopatra’s Needle. As early as 1923, newspapers were pointing out that the obelisk isn’t in exact alignment with the sun. (Egyptian obelisks have traditionally also functioned as sun dials.) It’s been argued, however, that this is no mistake and that a different – possibly Masonic – alignment has always been intended. According to the website Forgotten New York, there are three obelisks in Manhattan, though the other two are significantly younger than Cleopatra’s Needle. One of these monuments – found in the graveyard of St Paul’s Chapel – was constructed in the 1830s to commemorate Thomas Addis Emmet, an Irish lawyer and revolutionary and Attorney General of New York State. Although a cube-shaped chamber lies under the obelisk, Emmet isn’t interred there. Instead, he was buried at St Mark’s Church in the Bowery and later reburied in Ireland. The third obelisk – in Worth Square, at the junction of 25th Street, Fifth Avenue and Broadway – marks the resting place of General William Jenkins Worth (a powerful Freemason). This obelisk – which dates to 1857 and stands close to the Flat Iron Building – reaches 51 feet and is the second oldest monument in New York. All three obelisks, it’s claimed, align perfectly at 29 degrees east of north, with General Worth’s marking the line’s midpoint. Just one block away from the Worth Obelisk is … New York’s Masonic Hall and Grand Lodge. The reader must use their judgement to decide whether this is all a coincidence, a bizarre Masonic code or some sort of occult psychogeography.

The Worth Monument in New York City. This obelisk stands in alignment with Cleopatra’s Needle and the obelisk of Thomas Addis Emmet (Photo: Jim Henderson)

This section of the post would, however, be incomplete without mentioning at least one other obelisk. In 1885, Henry Honychurch Gorringe died at the age of just 43 as a result of injuries received when either trying to alight from or board a moving train. The more superstitious might see the curse of Cleopatra’s Needle in Gorringe’s demise – a curse expressed in the irony of Gorringe meeting his end courtesy of the invention that had made so much money for the man who’d financed the obelisk’s transport. Moreover, 1885 was the year in which Gorringe published his book Egyptian Obelisks, which mainly explored his acquisition of Cleopatra’s Needle for Central Park. However, Gorringe’s friends did not seem to perceive the dark shadow of the obelisk in his death. Gorringe was buried in Rockland Cemetery, Sparkhill, New York State. His memorial stone declares: “his crowning work was the removal of Cleopatra’s Needle from Egypt to the United States, a feat of engineering without parallel.” In 1886, his friends erected a replica of Cleopatra’s Needle over his grave. The unveiling ceremony drew 500 people and was widely reported in the press. The monument – decorated with Egyptian-style cartouches and with an illustration showing how Gorringe raised and lowered the needle – stands at over 25 feet and is of white granite. It cost $25,000 dollars (around $840,000 in today’s money) and – like the original obelisk in Central Park – it stands on its own knoll, from where it overlooks the Hudson River.

Why might these Strange Legends Have Grown up around Cleopatra’s Needles and Might the Obelisks Be Returning to Egypt?

Along with Egyptomania, there was a general idea that Egyptian artefacts were cursed. Thus, all the legends of cursed mummies inhabiting the museums and disturbing the private collectors of North America and Europe. One legend, for example, concerns an artefact known as the Unlucky Mummy that ended up in the British Museum. Said to be the remains of a priestess or princess called Amen-Ra, the Unlucky Mummy was held responsible for illnesses and deaths, and for actions as outlandish as haunting London Underground stations via secret tunnels, sinking the Titanic and starting the Second World War. It’s perhaps inevitable that an Ancient Egyptian object as imposing as Cleopatra’s Needle would generate tales of curses and vengeful ghosts. The London Cleopatra’s Needle especially, given its traumatic voyage to England, fitted into the ‘cursed object’ narrative. Hence the legend of the sphinxes trying to deflect its occult power. Though there seem to be less stories of ghosts and curses linked to the New York obelisk, we could ask whether the elaborate Masonic ceremonies that prepared the plinth for the monument’s arrival were not also intended to abate its paranormal influence. As non-Masons, I suppose, we can only speculate and never know.

A frequent suggestion for this association of unquiet spirits, unruly occult powers and potent curses with Egyptian artefacts is guilt over colonial plunder and exploitation. And how could these artefacts – the obelisks ripped from their temples, the mummy cases with their mournful eyes and affectingly human faces gazing accusingly across millennia – not be offended by being carried across seas and oceans to cold, far-off lands? The story of Cleopatra’s Needles is very much the story of militarism and empire. These monuments to Egyptian imperial might, crowing in hieroglyphs of military victories, were unsurprisingly sought out by later empires to celebrate their conquests and triumphs. Carved on the base of the London obelisk is:

“This obelisk

Prostrate for centuries

on the sands of Alexandria

was presented to the

British nation A.D. 1819 by

Mohommed Ali, Viceroy of Egypt

A worthy memorial of

our distinguished countrymen

Nelson and Abercromby”

Britain and France – as well as batting for territory and influence in Egypt – also battled for its artefacts, the larger and more prestigious the better. As America was beginning to feel its status as the new and rising empire on the block, it inevitably wanted an obelisk of its own.

We might question, however, if Cleopatra’s Needles will always remain in Central Park and beside the murky Thames, with its tidal rise and fall perhaps a modest imitation of the mighty fluctuations of the Nile. Concern has been voiced about the condition of the artefacts in their foreign homes. The American needle especially is somewhat worn, with its hieroglyphs quite faded. Already blasted by the sands of the Libyan Desert – unlike its London cousin it wasn’t protected for centuries by lying under sand in the Caesareum – it has suffered from New York’s harsher climate, with its hotter summers and colder winters than London. There was also a disastrous attempt to renovate it in 1885, when it was covered in gasoline and 700 pounds of granite were chiselled away, a process that probably damaged or removed a good few hieroglyphs. In 2011, the needle was inspected by Zahi Hawass – the Minister of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities – who penned a letter declaring: “If the Central Park Conservancy and the City of New York cannot properly care for the obelisk, I will take the necessary steps to bring this precious artefact home and save it from ruin.” Though the London obelisk is in a somewhat better state, a comment from Hawass in 2018 suggested he was also less than impressed with its condition: “I went to see it yesterday and I was ashamed … If they don’t care, they should return it.”

The hieroglyphs on the Central Park Cleopatra’s Needle have become worn thanks to the New York climate, acid rain, air pollution and misguided attempts at renovation (Photo: Captain-tucker)

For now, however, the obelisks are likely to remain in position and these imported monuments will doubtless continue to form a central part of the networks of myth, folklore, imagination and foreboding that run through both cities. It’s as if the monoliths are immense pins holding in place these strange threads of energy and power. Or, as Jack the Ripper puts it in From Hell: “They call it Cleopatra’s Needle. He who’d wield it would the BEST of tailors be, to do its work, increase the Sun God’s sovereignty … encoded in this city’s stones are symbols thunderous enough to rouse the sleeping Gods submerged beneath the sea-bed of our dreams.”

This article’s main image shows Cleopatra’s Needle in London. (Photo: Colin Smith)

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Kensal Green Cemetery, an Abandoned Lover’s Tomb and the Spookiest Ever Telephone Mix-up

L. – as the man in the ghost story is referred to – was wandering through Kensal Green Cemetery after attending a funeral when he found himself lost in the sprawling 72-acre Victorian graveyard. Kensal Green was then one of London’s most fashionable burial grounds. The celebrities and innovators interred there included Charles Babbage, who had invented an early computer – called the Difference Engine – in collaboration with the daughter of Lord Byron. Other famous tenants were the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel; the novelists Anthony Trollope, W.M. Thackery and Wilkie Collins; Pre-Raphaelite painter W.C. Waterhouse, and the news vendor W.H. Smith. L. drifted past the ivy-entangled angels and elaborate gothic mausoleums and strayed into a poorer and more overgrown section of the graveyard. Already a little depressed from the funeral, he began to experience a rising melancholy, a sense of oppression from all the monuments to death and mourning around him. He, however, attempted to shake such feelings off and to interest himself in the different tombs, in the grave markers and their inscriptions. What was life, after all, but for living and he was certainly living his. Moneyed and successful, he moved in the capital’s intellectual circles, enjoying a stimulating social life. He felt he still had much to enjoy in what he hoped would be a long and pleasurable existence.

Kensal Green Cemetery was the burial place for some of London’s wealthiest and most famous people (Photo: Marathon)

Still, the cold, foggy, drizzly weather saddened him; he was irritated by the insistence of the clay soil of the cemetery in clinging to his feet. He wandered down a leafy pathway, taking in the epitaphs on the graves when his eyes flicked over an inscription that made him suck in a breath. He peered more closely and shuddered as he realised he hadn’t been mistaken. The grave was hers, all right. The headstone belonged to an ex-lover, Elsie, who L. had long ago left behind as his personal and professional life took an upward turn. Elsie – a lowborn girl from a dreary suburb nicknamed “the Clerks’ Dormitory” – had possessed “no working brains and no money to speak of”.

The publisher felt a stab of guilt as he remembered his decision to ditch Elsie, feeling she would inevitably hamper his social rise. He recalled how – on hearing of her passing – he’d been too embarrassed even to send a wreath from his Bond Street florist to her humble address. L.’s guilt was deepened by her grave’s condition. A simple cross – soot and weather-stained – poked out of the naked earth, listing at an angle “as if tired”. L. imagined Elsie “lying alone in wet clay and deeper darkness – nasty, sticky clay like that which he tried to clean off his boots by rubbing them against the marble surrounds.” L. made a note of the grave number – perhaps he could pay for a more dignified memorial. After all, someone else might “stumble upon it who knew the story and the name of his invisible mistress.” He winced at the thought of the gossip her dilapidated resting place might arose.

Elsie’s grave was found in a more modest section of Kensal Green Cemetery (Photo: Mr Ignavy)

Swiftly finding his bearings, L. strode from the gates of Kensal Green Cemetery and got into his car. But as he was driven back to Mayfair, he could pay no attention to the copy of The Times that vibrated on his lap. Arriving home, L. gave his coat and hat to his valet – Bowden – and tried to settle down to dinner. Yet, throughout the meal – and throughout the evening – he found himself weighed down by thoughts of mortality and memories of his defunct sweetheart. His mind became so gloomy that – after dismissing Bowden and the other servants – he decided to telephone a friend, hoping this acquaintance could call round for an hour and cheer him up.

L. went to the phone in his library, dialled the operator and asked for what he thought was his friend’s number. But as the operator put him through, L. realised he had requested Kensal Green _____, the number of Elsie’s grave. He stammered out his error, but it was too late and cold shivers overtook him as the receiver at the other end was picked up. A familiar voice answered. At first it sounded muffled, but soon became clearer.

“Yes, who’s calling?”

L. was so shocked he couldn’t help but give his name.

The other speaker gasped with delight.

“Why, it’s never you, darling,” Elsie exclaimed. “Do you want me? Of course, I’ll come.” (This was the way Elsie had always spoken during their telephone calls.)

L. tried to stutter “No, no, no” but couldn’t get his lips to form the words.

“I won’t be long,” Elsie said. “But I was very far away, darling, when you rang up.”

In utter horror, L. let the receiver slip from his hand. He thought about fleeing the house, but – in his panic – couldn’t make up his mind so he ended up waiting to see what would occur. When would the ghost arrive? How would she look? Surely she wouldn’t be clad in “her earth-stained shroud, with the seal of corruption on her face?” L. poured a large brandy and tried to calm down. “Damn it all, he wasn’t afraid of any woman living, much less a dead one. Let her come – even if she brings all the clay of Kensal Green with her!”

The front door opened quietly then closed itself. The temperature plummeted and from the hallway came the sound of footsteps stumbling and dragging, as if their owner’s legs had been stiff for a long time. Next came three gentle knocks on the library door. L. did not get to greet his ghostly visitor. He passed out in a faint and was discovered by Bowden in the morning’s early hours.

“And believe me or believe me not,” Bowden said, “bits of wet clay were sticking to the carpet and some was on his dinner jacket. Beats me how it got there. As for the hall mat; it was all mussed up. Why can’t people wipe their feet like Christians?”

After some time, L. began to recover from his experience of Kensal Green Cemetery and its ghost. He started to enjoy his successful and luxurious life again. But the incident bestowed upon him two new habits he would always thereafter follow. He would never again use the phone or attend funerals.

What Does This Strange Ghost Story of Kensal Green Cemetery Tell Us?

Whether these outlandish events happened or not, they perhaps give us an insight into the mentality, concerns and upheavals of the period in which the tale is set. This ghost story, first of all, has a strong class element. There’s L.’s urge for social mobility and his eagerness to leave his embarrassing past – represented by Elsie – behind. But despite L.’s success and wealth, there’s a sense he’s not totally accepted in fashionable and privileged circles. L. “preferred to speak to titles” and “knew to a nicety the degrees of the social scale and what status is demanded by Claridge’s, the Ritz and the Berkeley.” However, “he collected few friends but numerous acquaintances” and “his name never featured as a guest at Bohemian or theatrical gatherings”. L. cannot escape his origins – they continue to haunt the publisher. One slip-up under stress has the ghosts of his past resurrected. A past he’d hoped was dead and buried disinters itself and relentlessly hunts him down.

There’s also, of course, the class consciousness of the authors – how they give their story more credibility by attributing it to the Hon. Alec Carlisle. Their book True Ghost Stories is full of such name drops of the powerful and influential. In the stories themselves, many of the characters sport titles or reside in manor houses and even some of the spooks boast immaculate dress sense. As for Marchioness Townsend – the term ‘marchioness’ denotes a noble rank, meaning a marquess’s wife or widow. The self-consciously bohemian Maude M.C. Ffoulkes was a literal ghost writer who sought to join that aristocratic set and who collaborated with down-at-heel, exiled European royals in the early 1900s to produce – sometimes scandalous – autobiographies.

A lavish tomb in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery (Photo: Marathon)

The story of Kensal Green Cemetery’s ghost also seems full of repressed sexuality. Though society had by that time shaken off some of the more rigid Victorian restrictions, many still had a horror of the body and sex, especially – it seems – the sensuality of the lower-class and female. The fact that Elsie’s desires are so strong they can resurrect her from the grave and are expressed in such gothic and lurid form, the fact that L. finds himself ravished and daubed with graveyard dirt perhaps hint at sexual feelings that many in society would have liked to have kept in a box buried under six feet of mud but which had the distressing habit of breaking free from their confinement.

Another aspect of the tale is how the superstitious and folkloric combine with social progress and modern technology. There’s L.’s use of new-fangled telecommunications, but it is that very technology that delivers the ghost to his door. It seems the supernatural has the ability to subvert humanity’s most impressive inventions. Even the location – Kensal Green Cemetery – hints at social renewal. Kensal Green is one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ – a series of spacious graveyards built on London’s then-outskirts to relieve pressure on the capital’s overcrowded and insanitary churchyards and crypts. This progress is, however, still prone to disruption by the unruly (un)dead. It’s interesting that occult and macabre legends are associated with other Magnificent Seven cemeteries. In the 1970s, London and the entire country were gripped by rumours that a vampire lurked in Highgate Cemetery while a myth has grown up about a neo-Egyptian tomb in Brompton Cemetery being a magically powered Victorian time machine. Brompton Cemetery is also said to be haunted by the murdered Victorian actor William Terriss, who is buried there and who also haunts Covent Garden Underground Station.

A telephone exchange in Montreal, 1895. At the time of the Kensal Green ghost story, most calls had to be connected through an operator.

Many of the turn-of-the-century anxieties found in the tale of Kensal Green Cemetery and its ghost surface in other gothic literature of the period. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance, is full of social tensions, with its middle-class fears of both the aristocracy and the working class. The book frets over the role of the liberated ‘new woman’ and even has Lucy Westenra – manic with her unleashed vampiric sexuality – breaking from her tomb and roaming an area suspiciously like Highgate. Dracula is also full of the technological advances of the time – telegrams, phonographs, blood transfusions, trains – that contrast strangely with the folkloric powers of stakes, crucifixes and bulbs of garlic.

So, the story of Kensal Green Cemetery and its ghost – as grotesque as it might appear – maybe gives us a window into the priorities and concerns of a different era. The account of this lascivious spook contains within it a range of social, sexual, psychological and technological anxieties. Though now long-buried beneath the clay of time, this absurd yet chilling tale does make one wonder what other things might lie under the patina of the everyday mind, just waiting for the opportunity to be resurrected.

(This article’s main image – showing a gothic tomb in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery – is courtesy of Marathon.)

The post Kensal Green Cemetery’s Strange Ghost Story – Grave 132 Please, Operator appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

This legend maintained that a pregnant sow had somehow tumbled into a sewer and become lost in the maze-like world of London’s drains. After sustaining herself on the offal and rubbish that regularly washed through the system, the sow had given birth to her litter down there. According to one 19th-century account, her piglets soon grew up to ‘multiply exceedingly and become almost as ferocious as they are numerous’. Their inevitable inbreeding and strange light-starved environment apparently produced a race of monstrously large, black-furred hogs. These wild pigs were a terror to the ‘toshers’ – men who roamed the sewers hunting for coins, jewellery and other valuables that had slipped down drains to lie in the tunnels’ noxious silt. The toshers claimed the pigs hurtled out of the gloom to attack them if they got too close and that they had to keep a constant watch for the creatures if their subterranean wanderings took them anywhere near Hampstead. Some toshers even armed themselves in case they encountered the beasts.

It seems the story of the Hampstead sewer pigs first grew up as a piece of occupational folklore among the toshers before being introduced to the general public courtesy of the journalist Henry Mayhew in his book series London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a vividly written, popular and highly influential work. The legend would also make it into the Daily Telegraph and even get a mention from Charles Dickens, all of which no doubt led many Londoners to shiver with the fear that there actually might be bands of ferocious pigs charging about just a few feet below them.

A quiet lane in Hampstead – did wild pigs once rove the sewers beneath it? (Photo: Nigeljbee)

But could there really have been a colony of feral boars roaming the sewers beneath Hampstead? Other than the toshers’ legends, what evidence was there for the existence of such creatures? What exactly did Mayhew say about the sewer pigs in his book? And what aspects of the toshers’ dark and dangerous lives in the thousands of narrow miles of London sewers might have triggered the rise of such a strange piece of folklore?

Continue reading for legends of a ‘Queen Rat’ who could transform herself into a stunning woman with an exceptional appetite for sex, of accounts of alligators swimming in the sewers of New York, and of rat swarms devouring toshers lost in lonely pipes. Also read on to learn how an infamous ‘Great Stink’ finally forced London to reorganise its sewer system – courtesy of the legendary Joseph Bazalgette – and how this rationalisation eventually helped drive some of the more outrageous myths from that subterranean world.

How the Legend of Hampstead’s Giant Sewer Pigs Was Born

A story recorded as early as 1736 has a pig fleeing a butcher’s knife and escaping into the sewers somewhere around Smithfield, a famous meat market on the edge of the old City of London. This plucky hog apparently spent five months roaming London’s sewers and feasting on their detritus before eventually emerging from the Fleet Ditch (the River Fleet, which had by that time become little more than an open sewer, a watercourse that, according to the poet Alexander Pope, ‘rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames’).

The first published account of Hampstead’s subterranean pigs, however, comes from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew had spent most of the 1840s scrutinising the lives of London’s more impoverished residents. He studied the work such people did, along with their domestic arrangements, sources of entertainment and religious beliefs, combining his own observations with official statistics. Among those he interviewed were food vendors, ‘bone grubbers’, ‘Hindoo tract sellers’, an eight-year-old girl who sold watercress, ‘pure finders’ (who hunted out dog dirt then sold it to tanners), rat catchers, prostitutes, sweatshop workers, and ‘sewer hunters’.

The sewer hunters seem to have especially fascinated Mayhew. Also known as ‘toshers’ – after the ‘tosh’, meaning the scrap metal, nails, coins and bits of jewellery they sought out – these men walked London’s sewers with long-handled hoes. With these tools, they scoured the sediment on the pipes’ bottoms for such ‘treasures’. Mayhew wrote that until ‘some years ago, any person desirous of exploring the dark and uninviting recesses’ could get into London’s sewer system via the mouths of the huge pipes that gaped on the shore of the Thames and then simply ‘wander away, provided he could withstand the combination of villainous stenches that met him at every step, for many miles, in any direction.’ The toshers – their lanterns strapped to their chests – tended, however, to navigate this labyrinth in groups: due to fear of rat attacks. Through numerous conversations with the toshers, Mayhew came to piece together ‘a strange tale … of a wild race of hogs inhabiting the sewers near Hampstead’ which he described thus:

‘The story runs that, a sow in young, by some accident got down the sewer through an opening, and, wandering away from the spot, littered and reared her offspring in the drain: feeding on the offal and garbage washed into it continuously. Here, it is alleged, the breed multiplied exceedingly, and have become almost as ferocious as they are numerous. The story, apocryphal as it seems, nevertheless has its believers …’

A sceptic may, however, assert that – if a man could get into the sewers by simply walking into a pipe – surely the pigs could get out via the same method. According to Mayhew, though, the toshers ‘ingeniously argued, that the reason why none of the subterranean animals have been able to make their way to the light of day, is that they could only do so by reaching the mouth of the sewer at the riverside, while, in order to arrive at that point, they must necessarily encounter the Fleet Ditch (which was by then enclosed), which runs towards the river with great rapidity, and as it is the obstinate nature of a pig to swim against the stream, the wild hogs of the sewers invariably work their way back to their original quarters, and are thus never to be seen.’

A tosher at work in the London sewer system

Though Mayhew wrote somewhat sceptically that ‘the reader of course can believe as much of the story as he pleases’, the tale of the wild pigs seems to have spread. Dickens referred to the legend and on 10th October 1859 an article mentioning Hampstead’s feral hogs appeared in the Daily Telegraph, by which time the story seemed to have acquired apocalyptic overtones:

‘This London is an amalgam of worlds within worlds, and the occurrences of every day convince us that there is not one of these worlds but has its special mysteries and generic crimes. Exaggeration and ridicule often attach to the vastness of London, and ignorance of its penetralia common to us who dwell therein. It has been said that beasts of chase still roam in the verdant fastness of Grosvenor Square, that there are undiscovered patches of primeval forest in Hyde Park and that Hampstead sewers shelter a monstrous breed of black swine, which have propagated and run wild among the slimy feculence, and whose ferocious snouts will one day uproot Highgate archway, while they make Holloway intolerable with their grunting.’

But could there have been any truth in the legends of the monstrous swine of Hampstead’s sewers? Could a pig have really got down there and started a hideous mutant breed or might the legend rather be some strange projection, some outlandish symbol of the daily sufferings of the capital’s toshers? Let’s plunge deeper into the dark waters of this very odd tale and attempt to find out.

Could There Have Been Any Truth in the Legends of Hampstead’s Huge Underground Pigs and What in the Toshers’ Lives Might Have Led to Myths of Such Monsters?

Theoretically, it could be possible that domestic animals ended up falling into sewers. London was full of livestock at that time – wandering pigs, cattle being driven to market – and many ditches and sewers were wide open or at least easy to enter. Whether any of these beasts would have managed to survive down there, completely failed to get out and succeeded in breeding a tribe of descendants is, however, more questionable. Henry Mayhew was, despite the protests of those he interviewed, dubious about the existence of such creatures, noting, ‘What seems strange in the matter is, that the inhabitants of Hampstead never have been known to see any of these animals pass beneath the gratings, nor to have been disturbed by their gruntings … it is also right to inform (the reader) that the sewer hunters themselves have never yet encountered … the monsters of the Hampstead sewers.’

Henry Mayhew – author of London Labour and the London Poor – wrote the first known accounts of the monstrous pigs of Hampstead’s sewers.

So, while it’s not impossible that a colony of pigs might have bred in the London sewer system, we should perhaps lean towards the sceptical in this matter and look for other explanations as to why this outlandish legend might have grown up. Perhaps we could see the sewer-dwelling hogs as a kind of symbol – in fleshy ferocious form – of the dangers and discomforts the toshers faced.

Their job was certainly perilous. London’s sewers – built over centuries without much planning – sprawled for thousands of sludgy miles. Perhaps a thousand miles of these narrow passages would have been navigable to humans though – Mayhew noted – they averaged a height of just three-feet-nine-inches. The toshers faced threats such as cave-ins, getting hopelessly lost in the endless warren, and stagnant fumes, not to mention rat attacks and the danger of being drowned when the tide came creeping up the Thames and into the tunnels. The tide filled the sewers to their ceilings twice daily. But, in addition to this, some sluices were raised at low tide, releasing tsunamis of sewage that could drown or even pulverise the incautious. Explosive gases, such as sulphate hydrogen, could lurk in the passageways while another hazard was falling bricks. ‘The bricks of the Mayfair sewer,’ the biographer of London, Peter Ackroyd, writes, ‘were said to be as rotten as gingerbread, you could have scooped them out with a spoon.’

To make matters worse, in 1840, the work of the toshers was declared illegal. Nobody was allowed to enter London’s sewer network without permission and a £5.00 reward was available to those informing on anyone doing so. This added to the dangers toshers faced as it meant they had to do most do their work at night, relying solely on lanterns, deprived of even the light that filtered down through gratings or shone from tunnel mouths. ‘They won’t let us work … as there’s a little danger,’ one sewer hunter complained. ‘They fears as how we’ll get suffocated, but they don’t care if we get starved!’

Flushing London’s sewers – sluices could sometimes release water, drowning unwary toshers.

Mayhew described the sewer hunters thus: ‘(They) may be seen, especially on the Surrey side of the Thames, habited in long greasy velveteen cloaks, furnished with pockets of vast capacity, and their nether limbs encased in dirty canvas trousers, and any old slops of shoes … (They) provide themselves, in addition, with a canvas apron, which they tie round them, and a dark lantern similar to a policeman’s: this they strap before them on the right breast, in such a manner that on removing the shade, the bull’s eye throws the light straightforward when they are in an erect position … but when they stoop it throws the light directly under them so that they can distinctly see any object at their feet. They carry a bag on their back, and in their left hand a pole about seven or eight feet long, on one end of which there is a large iron hoe.’

This hoe was an essential part of the tosher’s kit. As well as being used to rake through the sewer’s muck in search of valuables, this implement could save lives. Mayhew stressed that ‘should they, as often happens even to the most experienced, sink in some quagmire, they immediately throw out the long pole armed with the hoe, and with it seizing hold of any object within reach, are thereby enabled to draw themselves out.’

A group of toshers photographed in London’s sewers in the late 19th century – unlike earlier illegal toshers, these men were employed by the city

Though the tosher’s job was a dangerous one, it did have some rewards. Most toshers worked in gangs of three or four, led by an experienced man who could be between 60 and 80-years-old. These veterans knew where hidden cracks were located, cracks in which coins were frequently found lodged. Mayhew wrote of men who’d ‘dive their arm down to the elbow in mud and filth and bring up shillings, sixpences, half-crowns, and occasionally half-sovereigns and sovereigns. They always find these coins standing edge-uppermost between the bricks in the bottom, where the mortar has been worn away.’

The sewers could indeed harbour riches and it’s estimated that they supported a workforce of around 200 scavengers, many of whom went by nicknames, such as Lanky Bill, One-eyed George and Short-armed Jack. Mayhew found they could earn as much as six shillings a day ( about £36 in modern money), which – while it might not sound much – would have placed them in the upper income bracket of the working class at the time. Mayhew, with some astonishment, noted, ‘At this rate, the property recovered from the sewers of London would have amounted to no less than £20,000 (about £2.38 million today) per annum.’

Despite its many hazards, the sewer hunters didn’t necessarily view their work as unhealthy. Mayhew noted the men were fit, strong and even ruddy in skin tone. They often enjoyed remarkable longevity. Some even felt the stinking air of the tunnels ‘contributes in a variety of ways to their general health.’ Mayhew suspected that – if they were to become ill – it was more likely to be the fault of the fetid slums they lived in. The journalist described one narrow court south of the Thames as containing around 30 houses, each with no less than eight rooms, with each room stuffed with nine or 10 inhabitants.

Around the time Mayhew was making his records, though, life in the sewers was worsening. In addition to the new law forcing toshers to work at night, the tunnels in which they laboured were becoming filthier. Until the early 1800s, sewers transported little more than rainwater, with toilets discharging into cesspits rather than the sewer network. A law of 1847, however, closed all cesspits and ordered that latrines should empty directly into sewers, resulting in the tunnels building up linings of excrement. By the end of the decade, the Thames they all flowed into was biologically dead.

According to Michelle Allen – author of Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London – by the mid-19th century London’s sewers were ‘volcanos of filth, gorged veins of putridity, ready to explode at any moment in a whirlwind of foul gas, and poison all those who they failed to smother.’  Mayhew noted that the ‘deposit’ found in London’s sewers ‘has been found to comprise all the ingredients from the gas works, and several chemical and mineral manufacturies; dead dogs, cats, kittens and rats; offal from slaughter houses, sometimes even including the entrails of animals; street pavement dirt of every variety; vegetable refuse, stable dung; the refuse of pig styes; night soil; ashes; rotten mortar and rubbish of different kinds.’

The Fleet runs through a London sewer – apparently the river’s force prevented Hampstead’s sewer pigs from escaping the network.

Despite all this, the toshers seem to have considered animal – specifically rat – attacks and bites as the greatest danger of their trade. (Though it’s likely that more rats would have entered the sewers and the rat colonies down there would have expanded thanks to the increasing levels of waste London’s subterranean pipes were struggling to deal with.) Mayhew interviewed one Jack Black – ‘Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty’ – who told him, ‘When a bite is a bad one … it festers and forms a hard core in the ulcer, which throbs very much indeed. This core is as big as a boiled fish’s eye, and as hard as stone. I generally cuts the bite out clean with a lancet and squeezes … I’ve been bitten nearly everywhere, even where I can’t name to you, sir.’

The rat catcher Jack Black, depicted in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor

Mayhew stated he’d heard many stories of mass rat attacks on toshers, with the desperate men ‘slaying thousands in their struggle for life’. The rats didn’t dare attack toshers in a group, but if a pack of the creatures assailed a single man, he had little hope. The tosher would fight bravely, swinging at and batting the animals with his hoe until ‘at last the swarms of the savage things overpowered him’. The unfortunate tosher would likely be ripped to pieces, pieces that would drift with the rest of the sewage towards the Thames. His fellow toshers might discover some of his remains a few days later ‘picked to the very bones’.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the worsening state of the sewers and the existence of – real life – monstrous animals in them led to tales of ferocious beasts of a more mythical nature, such as Hampstead’s subterranean pigs. Hazardous working conditions can produce legends of weird beings. In mining folklore, there were creatures called ‘knockers’ – leprechaun-like characters, often clothed in miniature miners’ garb – who created the ‘knocking’ sound miners heard just before cave-ins. Some miners saw knockers as malevolent spirits who tried to cause collapses by hammering away at supports while others viewed them as kindly sprites who knocked to warn miners of approaching disaster. In the US steel industry, there emerged a character called Joe Magarac – a superhuman labourer made entirely of steel who drank molten metal, moulded steel with his bare hands, and saved workers from accidents. In Glasgow, a legend of an iron-fanged, child-eating vampire grew up around an iron works, a foundry which blighted its poverty-plagued neighbourhood with air, noise and light pollution.

Jacqueline Simpson and Jennifer Westwood  – in their Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends – mention another mythical creature known to the toshers: one ‘Queen Rat’. This rat followed groups of toshers through the sewers and – when she saw one she liked the look of – she would transform into a beautiful and seductive woman. Despite her beauty, however, her eyes – like a rodent’s – still reflected light and she had claws on her toes. If the tosher ‘gave her a night to remember’, Queen Rat would grant him luck, making sure he found lots of coins and precious items. If, however, the tosher was brash enough to boast of his exploits to his friends or if he clumsily offended the rodent queen, his luck would abruptly change and he’d drown or suffer a terrible mishap.

A legend handed down in a London family claims that in around 1890 a tosher called Jerry Sweetly met Queen Rat in a public house. Jerry took the girl to a dance, after which she ‘led him to a rag warehouse to make love’. As the two frolicked, Queen Rat bit Jerry on the neck, which she commonly did to mark her lovers so no other rats would hurt them. This, however, surprised Sweetly, causing him to lash out, at which Queen Rat sprang into the warehouse’s rafters. From there, she shouted, ‘You’ll get your luck, tosher, but you haven’t done paying me for it yet.’ Sweetly’s first wife died while giving birth and his second spouse was killed on the Thames, crushed between a barge and wharf. But good luck favoured all his children and – each generation – a girl is born into the Sweetly family with contrasting eyes: one blue, the other the grey colour of the Thames.

Could it be that the giant sewer-dwelling pigs of Hampstead and the tales of Queen Rat were legends invented by the toshers to express in mythical form their grim working conditions and the dangers they faced, both general hazards and those specifically associated with animal attacks? This to me seems a likely explanation, but what we must now ask is what happened to this strange folklore and what made it die out?

‘The Great Stink’ – Joseph Bazalgette’s Improvements Rationalise London’s Sewers and Challenge the Legend of Hampstead’s Underground Pigs

By the middle of the 19th century, it was clear that the way London dealt with its human waste needed to be overhauled. While there was an extensive sewer network, it was piecemeal, uncoordinated and frequently burdened beyond its capacity to cope, mainly due to a mushrooming population that had increased from one to three million in the first half of the 1800s. Mayhew wrote that during spring tides, effluence ‘burst up through the gratings and into the streets’ until the districts close to the Thames ‘resembled a Dutch town, intersected by a series of muddy canals.’ Almost all the filth of London did, eventually, however, end up in the Thames, with the introduction of the flushing toilet making matters much worse as it allowed wealthier inhabitants to channel their waste straight into the river.

The scientist Michael Faraday described how ‘near the bridges, the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense they were visible at the surface’ while Charles Dickens complained the Thames was ‘a deadly sewer … I can certify that the offensive smells, even in a short whiff, have been of a most head and stomach distending nature.’ The Thames was also the source of much of the capital’s water for drinking and washing and – unsurprisingly – several cholera epidemics ravaged London. The Metropolitan Board of Works had wanted to improve the city’s system of sewer disposal for years but had never had enough money.

Monster Soup – Commonly Called Thames Water, by William Heath, 1828. A woman drops her teacup in horror after a microscope reveals her drink’s impurity.

Things changed, however, in the summer of 1858 – when London endured an episode known as ‘the Great Stink’. A spell of freakishly hot weather exposed just how much human effluent, industrial waste and other pollutants the Thames was carrying and resulted in the most unbearable stench rising from the river. The stink overwhelmed all neighbourhoods close to the Thames, Westminster included.

The curtains of the Houses of Parliament were soaked in chloride of lime in a futile effort to rebuff the pong and there were discussions about moving the government to St Albans or Oxford. The prime minister Benjamin Disraeli was reported as fleeing from a committee room, ‘with a mass of papers in one hand and his pocket handkerchief applied to his nose’ and during a debate he referred to the Thames as ‘a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors’. The press too complained long and loud about the state of the river and newspapers filled up with garish cartoons highlighting just how disgusting the Thames was. The City Press observed that ‘it stinks, and whoso inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it’ while The Standard described the watercourse as a ‘pestiferous and typhus breeding abomination.’ Queen Victoria and Prince Albert did attempt to take a pleasure cruise on London’s river, but the foul stench soon drove them ashore.

The ‘Silent Highwayman’. Death rows on the Thames, claiming the lives of those who won’t pay to have the river cleaned up. From Punch magazine, 1858

Perhaps because the river’s problems – rather than just slaying the poor and middle class with recurrent epidemics of cholera and typhoid – had now reached right into the home of power and assailed the very nostrils of the monarchy, action was swiftly taken. A bill was rushed through Parliament, becoming law in just 18 days. The bill provided money for a massive new sewer scheme, with The Times commenting that MPs had been ‘forced by sheer stench’ to tackle the issue.

A filthy Father Thames meets the scientist Michael Faraday. Faraday performed an experiment in which he dipped a piece of white paper in the river to test its opacity.

Joseph Bazalgette – the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works – was hired to design this new system, a network projected to cost the massive sum of £2.5 million (over £317 million in modern money). Bazalgette connected up the existing labyrinths of municipal drains and built 1,100 miles of new drains under London’s streets. All these drains, in turn, fed into 82 miles of brick-lined sewers, which themselves flowed into six large ‘interceptor sewers’, some of which were built around London’s ‘lost’ buried rivers, like the River Fleet. The interceptors discharged into two even more enormous tunnels that ran along the north and south banks of the Thames. Aided by pumping stations at Deptford and Abbey Mills – which used the biggest steam engines then operating in the world – these tunnels shifted all of London’s effluent eight miles downstream to be dumped in the Thames Estuary.

Bazalgette’s gargantuan project devoured 318 million bricks and 670,000 cubic metres of concrete. Thousands of labourers were employed to dig the new tunnels while the demand for bricklayers drove the wages of those craftsmen up by 20%. Though the construction of his system wasn’t without its problems, many of Bazalgette’s sewers still serve London to this day and his designs have very much marked the face of the city. His huge riverside tunnels are buried under elaborate embankments – among them the Victoria, Chelsea and Albert Embankment – the construction of which narrowed the Thames by 22 metres. Bazalgette’s project was not completed until 1875, by which time the sewer system could carry two billion litres of wastewater every day.

A sewer being constructed as part of Bazalgette’s project in Bow, East London, 1859

We might ask what all this has to do with colonies of feral pigs living underneath Hampstead. It appears – as Bazalgette’s scheme involved so much surveying and reconstruction and the pouring of so many labourers and engineers down into London’s underworld – that the whole sewer network became far less of a enigma. Bazalgette himself insisted on inspecting every interchange between the old drains and new sewers and signing off every single plan that was part of his grand project. As there were absolutely no reports of any workmen or contractors encountering the supposedly large hoards of terrifying swine, the legend seems to have been discredited before fading from memory. But even the most rationally organised sewers will still have a certain mystery about them, will always represent a sort of urban Hades, a dark and claustrophobic netherworld, a collective unconscious of the city where strange, semi-mythical beings still might lurk, as we’ll find out in the next section.

Joseph Bazalgette depicted as a London sewer snake, in Punch magazine, 1883

Alligators in the Sewers of New York, Subterranean Cows and How ‘Improvements’ Might Sometimes Create Their Own Monsters

In addition to Hampstead’s wild pigs and the folklore of Queen Rat, there are other strange tales of underground animals. One of the most notorious legends of subterranean creatures comes from New York. On February 9th 1935, New York’s newspapers were abuzz with the news that an alligator had been found in an uptown sewer. Some East Harlem teenagers had been shovelling snow down a drain when one of them had noticed movement. Peering into the hole, he’d been shocked to realise he was looking at an alligator. The youths lassoed the animal with a clothesline, dragged it up into the street, and – when it snapped at them – they beat it to death with their shovels. The beast’s corpse weighed 125 pounds and boasted a length of seven-to-eight feet.

Could this report have been true? Though newspapers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were often full of what we’d today call ‘fake news’ – ranging from ‘unlucky mummies’ to man-eating plants – there are other accounts of alligators cropping up in New York. In 1932, two alligators – one almost three feet long – were discovered near the Bronx River in Westchester while in 1937 a barge captain lassoed a nearly five-foot, one-hundred-pound creature off Pier Nine in the East River. ‘Well, I can’t throw it back where the boys go swimming,’ the captain said, when the police declined to take the alligator off his hands. ‘I guess I got myself a pet.’ Just six days later, a two-foot alligator was spotted crawling along a Brooklyn subway platform and was caught by the police.

The New York sewer alligators are likely to have been discarded pets. Baby alligators were once quite a craze, with one ad in a boys’ magazine stating: ‘Do you want a baby alligator? You bet you do. What boy wouldn’t?’ These alligators, the ad promised, could be sent through the post at a total charge of $1.50. Newspaper reports gave details of postal clerks sometimes struggling with such creatures that had escaped their packages. The alligators, of course, didn’t stay babies for long, no doubt leading to some being slipped down the drain. Though it seems there was some truth in the tales of alligators swimming in New York’s chilly waters and crawling in the city’s sewer pipes, it’s likely the extent of the issue was exaggerated by the media and a panicking public, resulting in scare stories somewhat similar to those of Hampstead’s subterranean swine.

An alligator is captured in New York’s East River

Cows were also once believed to run beneath New York streets – in special tunnels constructed at the end of the 19th-century to relieve ‘cow jams’ in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Such tunnels were rumoured to have existed beneath Twelfth Avenue, under Greenwich, Renwick or Harrison Street, and under Gansevoort Street in the West Village. Some say the tunnels are oak-lined, others that they’re lined with field stones or made of steel. Some claim these bovine corridors were demolished to make way for gas mains; others assert they still lie beneath New York in a perfect state of preservation. The Edible Geography website sees this legend as something of an eruption of the countryside into the heart of the new urban environment: ‘What’s amazing about these elusive cow tunnels is that, whether or not they actually exist, they form a shared urban fantasy – a mythical meat-processing infrastructure haunting contemporary New York.’

Edible Geography also delves into the folklore of Hampstead’s sewer pigs, pointing out that – in the mid-1800s – when the legend of Hampstead’s underground swine was at its most vigorous, Hampstead was a semi-rural farming village on the outskirts of London. At the time, however, London’s relationship with its rural surroundings was changing due to factors such as the advent of railways and factories, the Metropolis’s ever-expanding growth, and migration from the countryside to the city. Might Hampstead’s legends of sewer pigs then, like New York’s cow tunnels, have perhaps been a reaction against these upheavals, a way to remember the rural in an environment that was rapidly urbanising? Might the pigs have been a relatively short-lived, transitional myth that was doomed to be swept away by even greater progress – the building of Bazalgette’s sewer system? In 1859, the writer Richard Rowe complained of how such ‘improvements’ had blighted the landscape, lamenting how sewers and railways had ‘played sad havoc with the country around London’, scarring it with ‘cannon-like drained pipes’ that ‘crash the nettles in the ditches’ and ‘raw red entrances’ to tunnels that resembled wounds. It might also be said, however, that the Hampstead and Highgate area does seem to be home to a lot of odd myths – from haunted old pubs, to a vampire said to have skulked in Highgate Cemetery, to the ghost of a semi-plucked chicken that the 17th-century philosopher Francis Bacon had tried to preserve by stuffing with snow.

Whatever the cause of the strange legend of Hampstead’s underground pigs, it is perhaps a story that can be seen as mapping London’s rapid and traumatic development, a story which draws from the danger, tough working conditions, wealth, poverty, sickness, filth, progress, hope and myth that have clustered around the growth of one of the world’s darkest and most influential cities.

(This article’s main image is courtesy of padonak39)

The post The Monstrous & Terrifying Wild Pigs of Hampstead’s Sewers appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Miss Havisham received the letter cancelling her wedding as she was getting dressed (a letter which also revealed her intended had swindled her). She has, thereafter, worn just one shoe, as she’d only managed to put one on before the letter was delivered. All the clocks in Miss Havisham’s house are stopped at twenty-to-nine, the moment she learned of her betrayal. The blinds are kept permanently down, meaning she lives in a candlelit twilight. She’s permitted nothing to be moved since the day she was deserted. The wedding cake and the remains of the bridal banquet are still laid out – rotting, mouldering and stale – on a disintegrating tablecloth. Beetles and spiders lurk among the remnants of the aborted feast. The rooms of Miss Havisham’s decaying mansion, Satis House, are never cleaned or dusted. Grime encrusts the windows – further restricting the penetration of daylight – and dust has piled up on the furniture and floors.

Many people think of Miss Havisham as old, but according to Dickens’s notes, he envisaged her as only in her mid-thirties at the beginning of the novel she appears in, Great Expectations. Dickens, however, implies that the years without sunlight have prematurely aged her. (Dickens obviously didn’t understand the effects of UV rays.) Pip, the hero of Great Expectations – who Miss Havisham lures as a young boy to her mansion while entertaining the possibility of perhaps ruining his life – describes her as looking like ‘some ghastly waxwork at the fair’ or ‘a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress’. Miss Havisham informs Pip that she is ‘a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born.’ Dickens depicts Miss Havisham as resembling ‘the witch of the place’ while Pip sees the ‘withered bridal dress’ as like ‘grave clothes’ and ‘the long veil so like a shroud’. Miss Havisham is almost vampire-like, with Pip suspecting ‘the admission of the natural light of day would have struck her to dust’. She does perhaps follow the timeless existence of the nosferatu. After Pip’s first visit to Satis House, ‘the rush of daylight quite confounded me and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight of that strange room many hours.’

Miss Havisham looking skeletal in a 1910 illustration by Harry Furniss

Miss Havisham adopts a girl, Estella, who she at first wishes to guard from suffering a fate such as hers by warning her against the evils of the male sex. She later, however, upon noting how beautiful Estella is becoming, decides to use her protégé as an instrument of revenge against men, rearing her to be cold and manipulative. Pip is one of the unfortunate males to come under Estella’s seductive influence. He falls for her and – unsurprisingly – Miss Havisham’s machinations have dismal consequences for both these young people’s lives.

Miss Havisham is certainly a peculiar character, but it may surprise you to know that many believe she didn’t slide fully formed from the imagination of Charles Dickens. There is said to have been a prototype – a dark figure of London legend – called Jane Lewson. Jane, who died when Dickens was a boy, also lived a secluded life in a gloomy mansion. She permitted no object to be moved and allowed no cleaning to be done. Her windows grew so grimy that she lived in continual dusk. Like Miss Havisham, Jane always wore the same clothes, clothes that appeared so gothically grand that ‘Lady Lewson’ became her nickname. Moreover, it’s claimed that Lady Lewson endured her hermit-like, twilit existence until the incredible age of 116.

But who exactly was Jane Lewson and did she really inspire Charles Dickens to create Miss Havisham? How might Dickens have heard of her? Could there have been other models for Miss Havisham – jilted women who never removed their bridal gowns, who lived as recluses and who never allowed their decades-old wedding feasts to be cleared away? And how might their stories have ended up in Great Expectations?

Keep reading for tales of candles perpetually burning on ancient wedding cakes, skins plastered with generations of make-up and pig fat, macabre takes on feng shui and new teeth freakishly growing in 87-year-old mouths.

The Dusty, Cobwebby, Reclusive and Very Long Life of Lady Lewson – a Model for Miss Havisham?

Jane Lewson was – or so she claimed – born in 1700, in London. Her maiden name was Vaughan and she grew up on Essex Street, off the Strand, with parents she would always emphasise were of the utmost respectability. At 19-years-of-age, Jane married an old and extremely wealthy merchant, taking his surname of Lewson. She moved into his large opulent house in Clerkenwell, a neighbourhood on the city’s then-northern fringes. The district was considered well-to-do, despite the presence of a few undesirables and eccentrics and the looming mass of the notorious Coldbath Fields Prison (now Mount Pleasant Sorting Office). As far as eccentrics were concerned, Jane Lewson was destined to become one of the area’s most famous human oddities.

Jane gave birth to a daughter, but when she was just 26, her husband passed away, with Jane inheriting much of his fortune and his grand house. For a time, Jane and her daughter lived a relatively normal life, with the only – possibly – perplexing thing about Jane Lewson being the fact she rejected so many suitors, all of whom were eager to gain the hand of the young, attractive and very rich widow. Things changed, however, when Jane’s daughter married and she left home to live with her husband. Jane then appeared to embrace solitude. She seldom went out to socialise and welcomed few visitors.

This in itself may not seem so unusual – society has always had its loners and recluses. It was more the whispers about how Jane lived inside her massive gloomy mansion that elevated eyebrows. She allowed nothing to be changed, moved, thrown out, washed or cleaned. The windows acquired a crust of grime, making the rooms duskier, while dust settled as thick as snow on tables, chairs and picture frames. Layers of dirt obscured mirrors and tinted walls. Jane’s hatred of cleaning even extended to her own person. She wouldn’t wash as she believed the grime on her skin shielded her from illness and that exposure to water was the surest way to get sick. Added to this, she’d smear her skin with pig fat each morning – fat that never got washed off – on top of which she’d apply powder and make-up. Believing each greasy layer was further protection against disease, she maintained she had no need for drugs or doctors.

Jane wore the same style of clothes throughout her life, a style which dated back to the reign of George I (1714-27). As the years passed, she began to resemble a person from another era, a time-travelling curiosity. Her neighbours referred to her as ‘Lady Lewson’ as her manner of dress – and the gold-headed cane she clutched – seemed so archaic and grand in the rapidly modernising city. She’d wear ruffs, frills and a long silk gown. Her hair would be piled to the height of half-a-foot around a horsehair frame, with a few curls left dangling, and the whole display would be capped by a large straw bonnet. A black silk cloak trimmed with lace protected her from the elements. This was her costume every day for her last 80 years.

A depiction of Lady Lewson from The Book of Wonderful Characters (1869) – was she a model for Dickens’s Miss Havisham?

As more dirt and generations of cobwebs built up on her windows, Lady Lewson went on insisting they shouldn’t be washed. She feared this would shatter the glass and either kill the person cleaning it or permit germs to be carried in with the outside air. This added to her mansion’s gloom as the filth-coated windows, in her later years, allowed barely a sliver of light in. Lady Lewson stipulated the beds must be kept made up for visitors – visitors she never invited. Some said the same clothes stayed on the beds for years, mouldering and mildewed. Others claimed Lady Lewson had her maids prepare the beds each morning – the only things that got changed in the house – in case the non-existent visitors unexpectedly turned up.

As Jane aged, she got more and more superstitious and her obsession with staving off illness and death deepened. She’d only drink out of one cup, believing this cut the likelihood of her catching a cold. Jane had similar ideas about knives, forks and plates and would only sit on one chair. She became even more insistent that nothing in the house should be moved, believing the mystic alignment of her possessions – in a kind of macabre feng shui – was responsible for her remarkable longevity and robust health. She barely suffered an hour’s illness though she lost her sight towards her life’s end.

Though she seldom ventured outside her property, Jane Lewson did enjoy her garden. She’d sit in it and read and would occasionally invite the few acquaintances she had left alive to come and take tea with her there. They’d sit and discuss ‘old times’. She was reputed to have an excellent memory and loved relating events from the early 1700s. The only journeys out she seems to have made were occasional trips to her local grocery store.

Pip with Miss Havisham inside the gloomy Satis House

The author Edith Sitwell described Lady Lewson as a ‘strange and ancient trumpery’, stating ‘her likeness to a cobweb is produced by the fact she wears the “ruffs and cuffs and fardingales” of her youth.’ In what seemed a further defiance of the natural order, Lady Lewson ‘at the age of 87 cut two new teeth, which were a source of pride to her and of wonder to her neighbours.’

Edith Sitwell continued, ‘Her large house in Coldbath Square contains only four other beings, ghosts like herself, two lapdogs, an aged cat, and an old man whose occupation had been that of wandering from house to house in the district earning pieces of food by running errands and cleaning boots.’ This man acted as her cook, butler and – by that time – sole servant.

Death Finally Lays His Skeletal Hand on Lady Lewson’s Shoulder

Many had likely begun to think of Lady Lewson as immortal. However, the sudden passing of an – also aged – neighbour in spring 1816 led her to shiver and realise her own appointment with death must come. The shock of her neighbour’s demise caused Jane to weaken. She became bedridden, refused medical help, and on Tuesday 28th May died at what she claimed was the age of 116. On June 3rd, she was buried in the famous dissenters’ graveyard Bunhill Fields, which contains the remains of Daniel Defoe and William Blake among other luminaries.

After Jane’s death, her house was opened to the curious, who must have gaped at its ancient, dust-shrouded artefacts. One Mr Warner was astonished by the lengths Jane had gone to in order to keep out germ-bearing intruders. Warner noted that strong boards – bound together with iron bars – reinforced the ceiling of the upper storey.

Jane Lewson’s fame is attested by the fact that obituaries to her appeared in several publications, including The Observer. The obituaries stressed she’d died at the age of 116 and had lived through the reigns of five monarchs. She was taken to Bunhill Fields in a grand hearse pulled by four horses. Two other carriages accompanied it, containing her executor and a few relations, relations she’d always refused to see.

So might Jane Lewson have been Dickens’s model for Miss Havisham? Dickens was only four when Lady Lewson died, but her story was well-known in London and it’s likely Dickens heard it growing up. Jane Lewson – who today might be diagnosed as suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder or anxiety or a hoarding syndrome or some phobia – certainly resembles Miss Havisham in her reluctance to have things cleaned or rearranged, in her always wearing the same clothes (though not a wedding gown) and her reclusiveness. However, Jane did marry and was not a jilted bride. She gave birth to, rather than adopted, a daughter and there’s no evidence she raised her child to take revenge on men. Contrary to common perceptions, Lady Lewson’s advanced age also isn’t reflected in the Miss Havisham character, a woman Dickens envisaged as in her early middle years.

Could there, then, have been other models that Dickens based Miss Havisham on rather than – or at least in addition to – Jane Lewson? Let’s find out below.

Might Charles Dickens Have Based Miss Havisham on an Australian, Eliza Emily Donnithorne?

Miss Havisham with Pip and Estella in Great Expectations

One possible candidate for Miss Havisham was an Australian woman, Eliza Emily Donnithorne (1821-1886). Eliza was born in South Africa and spent much of her childhood in Calcutta, India, where her father served as master of the mint and as a judge. When Eliza was about 17, her father relocated to Sydney, Australia, where Eliza later joined him. They lived in Cambridge Hall (later Camperdown Lodge) and when Eliza’s father died in 1852, he left her most of his estate.

Though evidence for Eliza’s story is scanty, most accounts claim that – at the age of about 30 – she was jilted on her wedding day. Her fiancé – some sources identify him as George Cuthbertson, a shipping clerk – failed to turn up at Cambridge Hall for the wedding breakfast. According to local legend, the distraught Eliza commanded that the feast and decorations should not be cleared away. After the embarrassed guests had left, Eliza had the blinds pulled down. They were never raised again, meaning she’d always live in semi-darkness. She spent the remainder of her life as a recluse amidst the decaying food and tattered streamers. Eliza never took off her wedding dress.

She had the front door chained, meaning it would only open a couple of inches. Callers therefore never saw her as – if she really was forced to answer the door – she could stay out of view. She never heard from Cuthbertson again and – when she died 30 years after being jilted – those who came to collect the body found her still attired in her wedding gown. Dust lay deep on the floor and grime encrusted the windows. In the dining room were the remnants of the three-decade-old wedding banquet – heaps of mouldy crumbs.

Eliza Emily Donnithorne was buried next to her father in St Stephen’s Churchyard (now Camperdown Cemetery), in the Sydney suburb of Newtown. Since the 1890s, many Australians have maintained that she inspired the Miss Havisham character, meaning her grave is one of the most visited in the necropolis. When vandals attacked the grave in 2004, the Australian National Trust and the UK Dickens Society funded most of the restoration work.

The grave of Eliza Donnithorne and her father James in Camperdown Cemetery, Sydney (Photo: TTaylor)

As Dickens never visited Australia, we might ask how he came to know about Eliza’s story. Dickens did follow events in the Australian colonies and discussed them in his weekly magazine Household Words. One 1935 newspaper article claimed Eliza’s father was ‘a great friend of the famous writer’, but gave no evidence to back this statement up. A more likely way of Dickens hearing about Eliza was through an Australian correspondent, one Caroline Chrisholm. Chrisholm – a humanitarian and social reformer – supplied Dickens with Australian news and Dickens published some of her articles in Household Words. Chrisholm could well have been acquainted with the Donnithorne family or at least known people close to them. She ran a shelter for young female immigrants in Newtown, near the Donnithorne home, and Chrisholm and her husband seem to have been involved in the same Sydney social circle as Donnithorne’s father. Chrisholm and Eliza Donnithorne were also once patients of the same doctor.

Caroline Chrisholm herself at least partly inspired a Dickens character – Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House. Mrs Jellyby – a busybody and inept do-gooder – takes on a variety of social causes with obsessive enthusiasm while neglecting her family. The most preposterous of these, Dickens implies, is her insistence on campaigning for votes for women. Chrisholm’s efforts were, however, at least impressive to some as she is considered a saint in the Anglican Church and is being considered for sainthood in the Catholic Church too, a religion she converted to when she married at 22-years-of-age.

Caroline Chrisholm – did she tell Dickens the story of Eliza Emily Donnithorne, on whom he then based Miss Havisham?

The problem with the claim that Eliza Emily Donnithorne was the model for Miss Havisham is that little is known for certain about Eliza’s life. An interesting take on her legacy, expounded in Evelyn Juers’ 2012 book The Recluse, is that – rather than Eliza inspiring the Miss Havisham character – Dickens’s depiction of Miss Havisham attached itself to Eliza’s legend after her death. Eliza’s story, therefore, became increasingly embroidered with details from Great Expectations as time went on.

Other Prototypes for Miss Havisham – the ‘Wealthy Recluse’ Elizabeth Parker and Margaret Catherine Dick

Many claim that – while staying at the Bear Inn in Newport, Shropshire – Charles Dickens heard a story that would inspire the figure of Miss Havisham. It’s said that one Elizabeth Sarah Parker (1802-1884), of Chetwynd House, Newport, became a recluse after being jilted by Sir Baldwyn Leighton on her wedding day. Following this traumatic experience, Miss Parker spent the rest of her life secluded in the upper storey of Chetwynd House while the ground floor remained bare and unfurnished. Except one room, that is. This room, which never saw daylight, contained her mouldering wedding cake, on which candles were kept continuously burning. Elizabeth only came out of her retirement once. She attended a ball in Newport clad in her wedding dress – because it was wrongly rumoured Sir Baldwyn Leighton would be there. Elizabeth Sarah Parker died in June 1884 and was buried in Chetwynd Church.

This intriguing story has, however, been subjected to some significant myth-busting. Extensive research by Newport archivist Linda Fletcher, in collaboration with the Dickens Fellowship, has unearthed no evidence of either Dickens visiting Newport or of Elizabeth Sarah Parker being the model for Miss Havisham. The letters and papers of the gossipy Newport researcher T.W. Picken (1834-1919) show no mention of any visit from Charles Dickens, even though such a visit would have happened during Picken’s time. A search of all of Dickens’s diaries, letters and journals has also revealed no references to trips to Newport. In addition, Miss Parker was living in Chester or Whitchurch rather than Newport at the time Dickens was writing Great Expectations and she didn’t move to Chetwynd House until she was around 60, after Great Expectations had been published. As for Sir Baldwyn Leighton, he actually married Elizabeth’s older sister, Mary, and there’s no evidence Elizabeth abandoned public life. Perhaps – as may have been the case with Eliza Emily Donnithorne – the details of Dickens’s Miss Havisham entwined themselves around memories of Elizabeth after her death.

The ghostly remains of Miss Havisham’s wedding banquet in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

Another possible prototype for Miss Havisham was Margaret Catherine Dick (1827-78) from the village of Bonchurch, on the Isle of Wight. Dickens spent the summer of 1849 in Bonchurch, working on David Copperfield, and got to know quite a few of its inhabitants. He dined with the Dick family at their house, Uppermount, and he’s said to have based the character of the harmless madman Mr Dick on Margaret’s father Samuel (or at least used his name).

Margaret Dick was jilted at the altar in Holy Trinity Church, in the nearby settlement of Ventor, in 1860. She thereafter left the family home and lived as a recluse at a house called Madeira Hall. Another Bonchurch woman, Catherine Haviland, may have supplied the name for the Miss Havisham character. Catherine moved to the Bonchurch area in 1852, living opposite Madeira Hall. The well-to-do Miss Haviland had a coach house and stables built, a building now called Haviland Cottage. A similar structure is mentioned as the coach house of Satis House in Great Expectations. Dickens returned to Bonchurch in November/December 1860 and it’s almost certain that he would have heard from his acquaintances about both Margaret Dick’s jilting and Miss Haviland’s arrival in the village. One possible objection to this theory is that the serialisation of Great Expectations began in the magazine All Year Round on 1st December 1860. This would make the timeframe from inspiration to publication incredibly tight, but it seems Dickens did write many of the novel’s episodes during the serialisation process and he may well have heard about goings-on in Bonchurch through letters prior to his trip there. Margaret Dick died in 1878 at the age of 52 and was buried in nearby Ventor Cemetery.

So Who Did Inspire Charles Dickens to Create Miss Havisham – Lady Lewson or Some Other Reclusive Woman?

I suspect much of the input for Dickens’s depiction of Miss Havisham did indeed come from tales of Lady Lewson. Much about Jane Lewson fits the Miss Havisham narrative – the long years of solitude in a badly lit, decaying, filthy mansion; the continual wearing of the same archaic clothes; the obsessive refusal to allow anything in the house to be changed. As Lady Lewson was not, however, a jilted bride, Dickens perhaps also found inspiration elsewhere. Of the other stories detailed above, it seems most likely he would have drawn from that of Margaret Catherine Dick in Bonchurch, especially as he had knowledge of that village’s gossip. Maybe he combined Margaret’s broken-hearted retirement with the retreat of Lady Lewson into an odd world of gloom and dust and things that can never be moved or cleared away. It’s also possible – if the story of Eliza Emily Donnithorne was true, rather than being embellished with Dickens’s own imaginings after her death – that Dickens may have taken inspiration from the letters of his Australian correspondent Caroline Chrisholm.

The narrative of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations does, however, have one significant difference to the tales of all the women presented here. The women above remained in their sombre solitude until they died of natural causes – mostly at ages which, for the time, would have been considered reasonably good lifespans. And Jane Lewson, of course, is reputed to have lived to an age that would be incredible even today. This was not the case with Dickens’s fictional Miss Havisham.

The final time Pip visits Miss Havisham, she – realising what she has done to him and Estella – throws herself at his feet, hugging his legs and begging him to forgive her. A startled Pip thinks, ‘And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was in, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?’

Miss Havisham begs Pip’s forgiveness, in an 1877 edition of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

As he’s leaving the grounds of Satis House, Pip looks back and sees ‘her seated in the ragged chair upon the hearth close to the fire, with her back towards me. In the moment when I was withdrawing my head to go quietly away, I saw a great flaming light spring up. In the same moment, I saw her running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her, and soaring at least as many feet above her head as she was high.’

Sprinting up the stairs and back into her room, Pip ‘dragged the great cloth from the table … and with it dragged down the heap of rottenness in the midst.’ With the mouldering table cloth – in the process burning his own hands – he covers Miss Havisham, trying to put out the flames as ‘patches of tinder yet alight were floating in the smoky air, which, a moment ago, had been her faded bridal dress. Then I looked around and saw the disturbed beetles and spiders running away over the floor, and the servants coming in with breathless cries.’

A surgeon is summoned and, though Miss Havisham is badly burnt, he judges her condition ‘far from hopeless’. He has her laid on the ‘great table’, the table that had so recently borne her wedding feast, ‘which happened to be well-suited to the dressing of her injuries.’

‘Though every vestige of her dress was burnt …’ Pip narrates, ‘she still had something of her old ghastly bridal appearance; for, they had covered her to the throat with white cotton wool, and as she lay with a white sheet loosely overlying that, the phantom air of something that had been and had changed was still upon her.’ Miss Havisham lingers on for a few weeks and – though for a time it seems she is improving – she relapses and dies.

It’s interesting that Dickens has Miss Havisham exit the book in this way. Though he obviously had compassion for the character, there was something about the unnaturalness of her lifestyle and her long-cherished resentments that made her seem like a ghost, a vampire or – as Dickens put it – a witch. Perhaps burning was the only way in which Dickens felt this eerie figure – and the strange mouldering world of decay and stopped time she had built up around her – could finally be exorcised.

The post The Real Miss Havisham? Lady Lewson’s 116 Years amidst Cobwebs & Grime appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

This wooden casket – depicting the enigmatic face of a woman – is adorned with winged gods and hieroglyphs, their colours vibrant almost 3,000 years after being painted. You might be tempted to pause, to stare at the artefact. But maybe, after some time, though you wouldn’t want to yank away your gaze, you might become aware of a disturbing feeling, a mix of foreboding and fascination that grows more ominous the longer you look. Prickles could pass over your skin, your heart start to rap. Reluctantly, but thankfully, you might then haul away your eyes and drift on to other exhibits, but your weird encounter with the mummy case, and perhaps thoughts about its occupant, might linger for hours, days afterwards, cropping up in your dreams and invading quiet moments.

You wouldn’t be the first to feel this way. This object – given the identification number 22542 and currently displayed in room 62 of the museum – is at the centre of an extraordinary tangle of London folklore. Known as the ‘Unlucky Mummy’, this cursed artefact is said to have brought death, illness, injuries, bankruptcies and deep unhappiness to many who came into contact with it. It’s said to have smashed glass, spookily distorted photos, and created strange nocturnal lights and eerie footsteps in the houses it was kept in.

The Unlucky Mummy displayed in the British Museum (Image courtesy of amanderson2)

After its donation to the British Museum, the Unlucky Mummy caused more deaths and accidents. Night-time knockings, shrieks and moans reverberated from the case. One legend asserts the Unlucky Mummy’s ghost travelled down secret passageways to haunt two London Underground Stations and was responsible for the disappearance of two women at one of those Tube stops. Some stories even maintain the mummy was on the Titanic and that it was the mummy’s curse that sank that famous ship. It’s claimed the Unlucky Mummy is the corpse of an Ancient Egyptian princess, who was also a priestess of the powerful sun god Amen-Ra. The potent magic and occult knowledge she learnt in this role allegedly made sure that all those responsible for removing her from her tomb and keeping her from her resting place were pursued and punished.

But where exactly did the Unlucky Mummy come from and how did it find its way to the British Museum? Could there be any truth in the outlandish stories attached to the artefact and – if not entirely accurate – where might these tales have originated? Read on to learn of ominous warnings from palm readers, of Victorian seances in the British Museum’s Egyptian Room, of the beginnings of lurid tabloid journalism, and of the tragic misfiring of shotguns in the marshes of the Nile.

The Ominous Legend of Amen-Ra, the British Museum’s Unlucky Mummy

A number of similar, but varying, stories tell of how the Unlucky Mummy was discovered, brought to England and ended up in the British Museum. Below is an attempt to weave these legends into a coherent narrative.

These accounts centre on one Thomas Douglas Murray (1841-1912), a wealthy Oxford graduate, author, horse breeder and amateur archaeologist. Fascinated with all things Ancient Egyptian, Murray had been in the habit of frequenting Cairo and exploring Egypt. It’s said that as a young man, Murray visited the palmist and astrologer Count Louis Hamon, otherwise known as ‘Cheiro’. The moment Cheiro took hold of his customer’s right hand, he’s reputed to have experienced foreboding and great fear, feeling that the hand would one day be separated from its owner. The palmist had visions of the hand drawing a valuable prize and of a succession of calamities following this event.

Most stories state that in the 1860s – though some place the occurrence as late as the 1880s – Murray travelled to Cairo with two companions. There they met an Arab who showed them the coffin of a freshly excavated mummy. Murray was enchanted with the well-preserved casket, dazzled by how wonderfully it was decorated in gold and enamel and by the queenly features of the young woman depicted on it. Examining the casket more closely, Murray concluded its hieroglyphs stated that the woman was a princess and high-priestess of Amen-Ra. Not only that, but the picture writing declared the princess herself was named ‘Amen-Ra’ after the god she followed. All three Englishmen yearned to purchase the splendid artefact and the Arab was eager to sell. The friends agreed that they’d draw lots and that the winner would then get to bargain for the coffin. Murray won, negotiated the relic’s price and had the case packed up and sent to England that evening.

The Unlucky Mummy, the notorious cursed exhibit of the British Museum

The Englishmen next headed up the Nile to enjoy some duck shooting. But Murray’s gun exploded, injuring his right arm. He hurried back to Cairo to seek medical attention, but his progress was hampered by weirdly powerful headwinds. What should have been a straightforward journey took 10 days and by the time Murray made it to Cairo gangrene had infected the wound. To halt the disease’s spread, his arm had to be amputated. After Murray had recovered somewhat, the three decided to return to England. Before they set off, however, they heard disturbing rumours about the man who’d discovered Murray’s mummy in Luxor. He’d either died shortly after touching its bandages or had walked off into the desert in a daze never to be seen again. Two Egyptian servants who’d handled the mummy case – and been somewhat disrespectful towards its occupant – would be dead within a year and another servant who’d cracked a joke about the mummy would meet his doom even more quickly.

On the voyage back to Britain, both Murray’s friends died and were buried at sea. On reaching his London house, and feeling far from well himself, Murray saw that the mummy’s casket had been unpacked and was waiting for him in the hallway. Rather than being struck by the beautiful craftsmanship that had so bewitched him in Cairo, Murray now sensed the artefact emanated an ancient malignity. Murray couldn’t shake the notion that an atmosphere of foreboding and evil had settled on his house. Some say that during this time Murray – who had an interest in spiritualism – was visited by the Russian occultist and founder of the Theosophy movement Madame Blavatsky (1831-91). Blavatsky immediately felt ‘an evil influence of incredible intensity’. On being asked if she could exorcise the Unlucky Mummy, Blavatsky said, ‘There is no such thing as exorcism. Evil remains evil forever. Nothing can be done about it. I implore you to get rid of this evil as soon as possible.’

Murray was, then, probably relieved when a journalist writing an article about him asked to borrow Amen-Ra’s casket. Soon after the Unlucky Mummy entered her house, her mother tumbled down some stairs and died. The journalist’s fiancé broke off their engagement, her prize dogs went mad and she became ill. She sent Amen-Ra back to Murray.

Murray, perhaps somewhat unethically, palmed the Unlucky Mummy off on a friend, a Mr Wheeler. Wheeler was deluged by misfortunes and soon died broken-hearted. Before his death, Wheeler had passed the mummy on to a married sister. Amen-Ra’s arrival in her house heralded an inevitable string of unfavourable events, but she was still fascinated enough by the casket to take it to a Baker Street studio to have it photographed. She was horrified to learn that ‘when the plate was developed, although the negative had not been touched in any way, it was seen that there looked out the face of a living Egyptian woman, whose eyes stared furiously with an expression of singular malevolence.’ Not long afterwards, the photographer died suddenly and his son suffered an accident during which he was badly cut. When a man who’d purchased one of his photos of Amen-Ra brought it into to his house, every piece of glass in his home shattered. Another photographer unwise enough to take a picture of the Unlucky Mummy smashed his thumb and his assistant – while adjusting the camera – fell and cut his face.

The next time Wheeler’s sister met Murray, she poured out this list of gruesome goings-on. Finally realising it was unfair to keep lumbering his acquaintances with Amen-Ra, Murray suggested donating the mummy to the British Museum. But this proposal didn’t lessen Amen-Ra’s malice. Murray asked a friend, an Egyptologist, to organise the transfer of the mummy to the museum. This man couldn’t resist arranging for the coffin to have a stopover at his house so he could study it. He soon died, with a servant confiding that his master hadn’t slept since the Unlucky Mummy had entered his home. The carrier who brought the case containing Amen-Ra to the British Museum died within a week. While transporting the Unlucky Mummy, his truck hit and trapped a pedestrian as it reversed and a worker who helped unload the artefact broke his leg.

Victorian visitors examine Ancient Egyptian artefacts in the British Museum.

When Amen-Ra was put on display, the problems didn’t end. Nightwatchmen and cleaners reported poltergeist-like phenomena, with tappings, hammerings, moans and sobs coming from the casket. A journalist covering Amen-Ra’s story took a photo of her coffin in its glass display case. Again, the photograph revealed a woman’s face glowering with hatred. After showing the horrifying image to Sir Ernest Wallace Budge – the museum’s Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities – the journalist went home, locked himself in a room and shot himself. Others who dared to photograph or sketch the exhibit also suffered misfortunes. A nightwatchman died as did the child of a visitor who flicked a cloth at the Unlucky Mummy. One museum employee claimed that one evening at dusk he’d seen a figure suddenly sit up in the bottom half of the casket. A being with a hideous yellow face then glided towards him in a repulsively smooth motion. Thinking the entity was going to push him down a nearby trapdoor, the man sprang forward and the apparition vanished.

Sir Earnest A. Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum

According to the ghost-hunter Robert Thurston Hopkins, Budge grew increasingly worried by such reports and tried moving the Unlucky Mummy to see if this would help. Some accounts claim he sent Amen-Ra to the basement. During the Unlucky Mummy’s removal to the cellar, a man sprained his ankle and a week later the manager who’d supervised her demotion died in the museum at his desk. Most stories, however, state that Amen-Ra was simply moved from the display case she shared with other exhibits to a more prestigiously positioned case of her own. Her new home was completed with a flattering explanatory label. After this, it’s said, the disturbances became less dramatic and less frequent although for decades night cleaning staff reported ghostly appearances around the case and feelings of dread and terror emanating from it. As for Thomas Douglas Murray, the man who started all the trouble with his rash purchase of the Unlucky Mummy in Cairo, his problems didn’t cease after the British Museum accepted Amen-Ra. As the years passed, Murray’s fortune was whittled away and he died – bankrupt and in poverty – in 1912.

A Merging of Mummy Tales, Lashings of Journalistic Embellishment and a Seance in the British Museum’s Egyptian Rooms

Records indeed show the artefact that became known as the Unlucky Mummy was presented to the British Museum by a Mr A.F. Wheeler on behalf of a Mrs Warwick Hunt of Holland Park in 1890 (Wheeler’s married sister?). This, however, immediately throws doubt on the assertions Wheeler died soon after Murray had given him the mummy.

What appears to have happened is that accounts of the ‘Unlucky Mummy’ became meshed with tales of an entirely different Egyptian artefact that Murray had heard about. Murray came across the story of an Englishwoman who’d acquired an Egyptian mummy and displayed it in her drawing room. The morning after she’d installed it, she entered the room to find everything smashed. She moved the mummy to another room, only to have that room’s contents pulverised too. The mummy was exiled to the attic, but this didn’t halt the weird goings-on. That night, weighty footsteps tramped up and down the stairs, accompanied by eerie flickering lights. The following morning, all the lady’s servants quit.

This tale seems to have ignited Murray’s imagination. It’s unclear to what extent Murray really was involved with the purchase of the Unlucky Mummy and its journey to England. Some sources state he had no association with the object whatsoever until it ended up in the museum while others claim he bought Amen-Ra from an American millionaire collector of antiques, called James Carnegie. Carnegie was a patron of the famous German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who may have discovered the Unlucky Mummy during a dig. Whatever the truth, Murray – excited by the tale he’d heard and knowing Amen-Ra had recently been gifted to the British Museum – went to examine (or re-examine) the institution’s new artefact. He was accompanied by his friend, the famous – some would say notorious – journalist W.T. Stead.

The two men – both of whom had a deep interest in spiritualism – felt the face painted on Amen-Ra’s casket had an extremely sad look, going so far as to conclude ‘the expression on the face on the cover was that of a living soul in torment.’ This prompted Murray to contact the museum to ask if he and Stead could hold a seance in the Egyptian Section to attempt to contact the Unlucky Mummy’s spirit. According to Budge, ‘they wished to hold a seance … and to perform certain experiments with the object of removing the anguish and misery from the eyes of the coffin-lid.’

Mummies and other artefacts in the British Museum’s First Egyptian Room

W.T. Stead (1849-1912) was one of the first investigative journalists, whose style foreshadowed much of the shock, outrage and hyperbole that would characterise 20th-century tabloid-style reporting. He was also one of the earliest media figures to recognise that journalism could sway public opinion and as editor of The Pall Mall Gazette he ran a number of controversial campaigns.

The most famous of these was centred around a series of 1885 articles entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, which dealt with child prostitution. To prove the problem of child prostitution existed, Stead set up the ‘purchase’ of one Eliza Armstrong, the 13-year-old daughter of a chimney sweep. The first instalment in the four-part series warned that the next issues of The Pall Mall Gazette were certain to sell out. Stead was proved right – copies were swapped for 20 times their normal price, 10,000 customers besieged the Gazette‘s offices and the demand was so phenomenal the Gazette even ran out of printing paper. Though considered a hero by many for exposing this trade, Stead was sent to prison for abduction – on the ‘technical grounds’ that he hadn’t first obtained ‘permission’ for his purchase from Eliza’s father. He served three months in Coldbath and Holloway jails. His journalism, nevertheless, helped pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent from 13 to 16. The bill was dubbed by many the ‘Stead Act’. Stead’s campaign against child prostitution is said to have inspired George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and even influenced Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The journalist WT Stead in later life. Did he help invent the Unlucky Mummy myth?

Stead pioneered the use of enormous attention-grabbing headlines and inserted maps and diagrams to break up lengthy articles. He’d also incorporate eye-catching subheadings and did much to popularise the use of interviews, in which he’d sometimes mingle his own opinions with those of his subjects. His lurid descriptions of life in London’s slums pressured the government into appointing a Royal Commission, which recommended the slums should be demolished and low-cost housing put up. Stead also campaigned against brothels and gambling dens and badgered the government into the disastrous decision to send the eccentric General Gordon to protect British interests in the Sudan. As Stead’s career progressed, he became more interested in and committed to the peace movement, covering the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 and advocating for a ‘United States of Europe’ and ‘High Court of Justice among the Nations’ (ideals that foreshadowed the United Nations and EU). Stead was a repeated nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Another, more controversial, obsession was spiritualism. Stead published a spiritualist magazine, Borderland, and maintained he was able to communicate with his deputy editor by means of telepathy and automatic writing. Stead also claimed to have acquired a spirit guide, one Julia A. Ames, an American temperance campaigner and journalist Stead met in 1890 shortly before her death. Though many Victorians lambasted spiritualism as superstitious nonsense, plenty more were fascinated by it and ouija boards and seances were fixtures of many polite drawing rooms. We had, then, the potent mix of a massively successful and influential journalist, the Victorian obsession with spiritualism and table tapping, and spooky rumours concerning Ancient Egyptian artefacts. (A craze for all things Ancient Egypt was another feature of the Victorian epoch.) This combustible concoction seems to have resulted in the birth of an explosive legend.

For any journalist at the time, the idea of a night-time seance being conducted in the British Museum’s Egyptian Rooms – with a table ringed by earnest figures surrounded by mummies and painted caskets and sombre gods – would have made excellent copy. And the unfortunate fact the museum turned down Murray and Stead’s request didn’t stop such articles being printed. The first appears to have been written by Stead himself and other excitable journalists soon picked up the story, with each likely adding in more sensationalist details in the hope of shifting newspapers. Their articles tended to merge the tormented soul of Amen-Ra’s mummy with the crockery smashing relic of the Victorian drawing room and to put this together with the idea of the aborted seance and other legends of Ancient Egyptian curses. The public lapped it up and an intriguing myth was soon in circulation.

We might wonder why Stead and Murray decided to propagate such a yarn. Both men were then in their forties, well-established and not in desperate need of funds. It seems that their profound spiritualist beliefs spurred them to make their claims about Amen-Ra’s curse. They may have hoped an outlandish story would capture the attention of those sceptical about the paranormal and lead them to an interest in spiritualist practices. If their aim was to publicise such beliefs, they succeeded as the story became widely popular, was retold frequently and resonated for years. Much of this popularity would, however, be aided by an unexpected incident, an incident that would involve W.T. Stead in the most tragic way imaginable. The myth of the Unlucky Mummy would become entwined with another story destined to assume the proportions of legend – the sinking of the Titanic.

Did the Unlucky Mummy Sink the Titanic?

One of the most fascinating claims about the Unlucky Mummy was that it was responsible for sinking the Titanic. Apparently, the British Museum had reached the point where it could no longer tolerate the spooky goings-on around the mummy and the artefact’s curse continually injuring or picking off its staff. The decision was made to try to offload the mummy and an American collector agreed to buy Amen-Ra. Her new owner packed her up and booked a passage for himself and his new possession on a ship to the States – a ship that just happened to be the infamous Titanic. This luxurious liner, the largest ship afloat at the time, hit an iceberg then went down in the early hours of 15th April 1912 on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. The tragedy resulted in 1,517 deaths, mainly due to insufficient lifeboats and confused and disorganised evacuation procedures.

The Titanic setting out from Southampton – did the Unlucky Mummy’s curse sink the ship?

So was this the end of Amen-Ra? Did she sink to the bottom of the North Atlantic’s cold waters, a place from which even her powerful magic would struggle to exert its malignant influence? Apparently not, according to some versions of the story. During the chaotic scramble for the lifeboats, amidst the cries of ‘women and children first’, the collector paid a bribe to have himself and his mummy stowed in one of these lifesaving crafts. After bobbing on the night-time waves, Amen-Ra – along with the surviving passengers – was rescued by a ship named the Carpathia and completed her journey to the New York.

Inevitably, however, the Unlucky Mummy was soon causing mayhem and misery at the home of its American owner so he decided to send her back to Britain. This, for some reason, was done via Canada, aboard a liner called the Empress of Ireland. After setting out from Quebec City, the Empress collided with a Norwegian coal ship on 29th May 1914 on the St Lawrence River. The Empress sank so quickly there was only time to launch seven of her 40 lifeboats and 840 people went down with the vessel to a watery doom. Amen-Ra, perhaps unsurprisingly, avoided this fate and ended up being placed on yet another liner, the Lusitania. Off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, on 7th May 1915, the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine. Almost 1,200 died and this time, it’s said, Amen-Ra sank with them.

A different version of the legend states Amen-Ra did indeed go down with the Titanic and that she’ll curse anybody who dares disturb her undersea tomb. Dark mutterings of this hex were supposedly heard among the crew on a failed 1980 expedition to locate the Titanic’s wreck.

But was the Unlucky Mummy really on the Titanic and did she finish up floating down to the ocean’s bottom? Records exist for the cargo that sailed with the Titanic, a fascinating list including feathers, hatters’ fur, auto parts, rabbit hair, elastics and early refrigeration gadgets, but absolutely no mummies, cursed or otherwise. The best evidence, however, that Amen-Ra didn’t end up in the chilly Atlantic depths is the fact you can still see her today, secure and dry, in a glass display case in the Egyptian Section of the British Museum. So how did this outlandish tale of the Unlucky Mummy on the Titanic come about?

Again, it appears W.T. Stead was to blame. Stead did travel on the Titanic – he was heading to the States because President Taft had invited him to address a peace conference at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Stead couldn’t resist entertaining the other passengers with the macabre tale of the Unlucky Mummy. He’s said to have begun his narrative during an 11-course dinner party on Friday 12th April and to have drawn it out until after midnight as his listeners sat rivetted.

On the night the iceberg struck, however, Stead had retired to bed early at 10.30 pm. Witnesses observed him helping women and children into the lifeboats and in an act ‘typical of his courage, generosity and humanity’ giving his life-jacket to another passenger. He was spotted calmly reading a book in the first-class smoking room as the Titanic went down, but a survivor, Phillip Mock, recalled him later clinging to a raft with the American business magnate John Jacob Astor IV. ‘Their feet became frozen,’ Mock said, ‘and they were compelled to release their hold. Both were drowned.’ Spookily, Stead had written an article in 1886 and a story in 1892 about the calamities that could result from ships having insufficient lifeboats and hitting icebergs. Stead’s tragedy was compounded by the fact it was widely believed he was due to be awarded 1912’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Luxury on the Titanic – inside the doomed ship’s Turkish baths

The notion the Unlucky Mummy was on the Titanic appears to have come about from an article published in the New York World a few days after the ship’s sinking. The article contained an interview with a survivor – one Frederic Kimber Seward – who mentioned Stead telling his creepy story. It seems that, over time, the accounts of Stead’s presence on the Titanic and the story he narrated morphed into a belief that Amen-Ra herself had travelled on the vessel. From there, it would be just a short logical hop to assume such a famous cursed artefact had caused the ship to sink.

The Unlucky Mummy’s Killing of an Over-Inquisitive Journalist and Amen-Ra’s Haunting of a London Underground Station

Even before the Titanic catastrophe, Amen-Ra had been getting quite a reputation. As mentioned above, much of this had to do with the embellishments of journalists and one of the most famous, and tragic, to have researched the Unlucky Mummy was Bertram Fletcher Robinson. A dashing up-and-coming editor and reporter, Robinson began with the intention of debunking the far-fetched stories that had grown up around Amen-Ra. The more he investigated, however, the more he became convinced the curse was real. In 1904, an article by Robinson – A Priestess of Death – appeared on the Daily Express front page. In it, Robinson ominously wrote, ‘It is certain that the Egyptians had powers which we in the 20th century may laugh at, yet can never understand.’

A few years later, Robinson was commissioned to write a longer article for Pearson’s Magazine, which had the same owner as the Express. As Robinson pried deeper into the secrets of Amen-Ra, his friends – aware of the disasters that had befallen those who’d dared meddle with the mummy – voiced concern. One such friend was Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle, who Robinson had shown around his native West Country when Doyle was researching legends of phantom black dogs for his Hound of the Baskervilles. Doyle stated, ‘I warned Mr Robinson against concerning himself with the mummy at the British Museum. He persisted …’

In January 1907 – before he could finish his article – Robinson died at the age of just 36. Much of his research did, however, end up in an article Pearson’s eventually published in August 1909. In the same piece, Doyle set forth his ideas about Robinson’s death. ‘I told him he was tempting fate by pursuing his enquiries,’ Doyle darkly stated. ‘The immediate cause of death was typhoid fever, but that is the way in which the elementals (nature spirits) guarding the mummy might act.’

Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who held editorial positions with Vanity Fair, the Daily Express and Granta. Was he killed by the Unlucky Mummy’s curse?

The Pearson’s article might be the source of – or at least be responsible for amplifying – much of the mythology around the Unlucky Mummy. The article mentions the photographer capturing Amen-Ra’s glowering face and the loss of an arm while duck shooting on the Nile. The piece, however, has the owner of the mummy dying in Cairo while we know that Murray (assuming these people were one and the same) didn’t pass away till 1912. It’s possible that the owner of Pearson’s Magazine took advantage of Robinson’s untimely death and resurrected the old mummy myth to shift copies of his publication. Throwing in quotes from the famous Arthur Conan Doyle likely did no damage to the magazine’s bottom line. Doyle could be credulous. A Freemason and committed spiritualist, he was convinced the escapologist Harry Houdini had supernatural powers, despite Houdini continually denying he possessed such attributes. Doyle was also duped into believing fairies supposedly photographed in Cottingley, Yorkshire, were real and – along with W.T. Stead – wrongly claimed two stage magicians, Julius and Agnes Zancig, had psychic abilities.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1893 – a believer in the curse of the British Museum’s Unlucky Mummy

An even more bizarre story about the Unlucky Mummy claims she haunted a London Underground station. British Museum Station – a now abandoned Tube stop that served the institution of the same name – was reputedly connected to the museum by a secret passageway. The ghost of Amen-Ra would progress down this tunnel at night sporting a loincloth and magnificent headdress. She’d terrify passengers and staff with horrendous, unearthly shrieks, shrieks said to have resulted from the trauma of being ripped from her tomb and brought many miles to a strange land. Her anguished howls would reverberate down corridors and along tracks, seriously disturbing all who heard them.

Was British Museum Underground Station haunted by the Unlucky Mummy’s ghost?

Thanks to the opening of Holborn Station – less than 100 metres away – in 1906, British Museum Station became less and less frequented (unless it was the ghost frightening people off). It was announced that British Museum Station would close in 1933 and – shortly before it shut – two British newspapers offered a cash reward to anyone brave enough to spend a night alone there. Nobody took up the challenge.

Some claim the legends of the haunting of British Museum Station were sparked by a film, a comedy thriller called Bulldog Jack. In this movie, a secret tunnel leads from a London Underground station to the British Museum, where it emerges from an Egyptian sarcophagus. But – as the film didn’t premier until 1935 and British Museum Station closed in 1933 – it’s more likely that the legend influenced the film rather than vice-versa. Bulldog Jack, however, helped keep alive and spread Amen-Ra’s myth, especially as the film itself would contribute in a strange way to the Unlucky Mummy’s notoriety. On the night Bulldog Jack was released, two women are said to have disappeared while walking through the tunnels of Holborn Station. Screams and moans were heard around the time they vanished and scratch marks appeared on the walls. During the following days, there were sightings of the headdress-wearing priestess. Even today, some assert, if you stand on the platform at Holborn, you can occasionally hear shrieks and wails echoing down the tracks from British Museum Station. Amen-Ra remains one of the most famous of the London Underground’s many ghosts.

Was the 1935 film Bulldog Jack partly inspired by legends of the Unlucky Mummy’s curse?

There are, though, no police records or newspaper accounts of women going missing or being murdered near Holborn Station on the night Bulldog Jack premiered and the rumours of their disappearance were likely connected to the hype around the film. The tales of British Museum Station being haunted, however, probably came from old stories of the Unlucky Mummy and the media sensationalism linked to them. Such legends were likely bolstered by the fanfare surrounding the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 and the rumours of curses in the years that followed. Again, the press played a role. Lord Carnarvon, who funded the tomb’s excavation, signed a strict and exclusive agreement with The Times that limited the rights of other papers to feature the story. When Carnarvon died shortly after the tomb’s discovery – from an infection following a mosquito bite, a similar cause of death to that which probably befell Tutankhamun  – it seems the other papers took revenge, and no doubt boosted their sales, by gleefully speculating about a ‘curse’. The Daily Express quoted a mystic and novelist who claimed, ‘The most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb.’

How Much Truth Was There in the Outlandish Assertions about the Unlucky Mummy and What Were the Roots of Amen-Ra’s Strange Myth?

The Unlucky Mummy has been blamed for a lot of things – illnesses, injuries, deaths, abductions, the sinking of huge ships and the terrorising of passengers and staff on the London Tube. Legend even states that Sir Ernest Wallace Budge once muttered, ‘Never print what I saw in my lifetime, but the mummy case of Princess Amen-Ra caused the War.’ Apparently, the Unlucky Mummy was presented to the German Kaiser and the string of misfortunes that followed pushed the volatile emperor towards triggering World War I.

The truth would appear less dramatic. For a start, ‘Amen-Ra’ isn’t even a mummy. The artefact said to have caused all this trouble is merely the top half of a wooden coffin, dating from around 950 to 900 BC. The mummy it would have once shielded seems to have been left behind in Egypt. As for the knockings, apparitions, injuries and deaths supposedly visited on the British Museum after accepting Amen-Ra, these persistent rumours led Budge to issue a statement in 1934 that the museum had never possessed a mummy, coffin or cover that had been involved in any paranormal occurrences. He made it clear that the museum had never sold Amen-Ra’s coffin lid, that the coffin cover had never sailed on the Titanic and that it had not left the museum since arriving there. Budge admitted the artefact had been moved to the basement, but this was simply a precaution to protect the ornate lid – as well as many other treasures – during the First World War.

As early as 1923, Budge was trying to debunk the myths around the ‘Unlucky Mummy.’ In an interview with the New York Times, Budge related how the coffin lid of Amen-Ra had become confused with the crockery smashing mummy of the suburban drawing room and how the museum authorities had turned down Stead and Murray’s request to hold a seance. Budge described some of the hysteria that had grown up around the ‘mummy’, stating that people had sent letters from as far away as New Zealand and Algiers, containing money to buy flowers to be placed at Amen-Ra’s feet. The money had been put towards the general upkeep of the museum.

But was the coffin lid – despite its romance being somewhat lessened by the fact it no longer had a mummy to enclose – really part of the burial paraphernalia of a princess and priestess called Amen-Ra? Budge thought so, agreeing with Murray’s assessment by stating the cover’s owner would have been of ‘royal blood’. Early British Museum publications describe the artefact as having belonged to ‘a priestess of Amen-Ra’. Modern experts, however, disagree. The idea the casket sheltered the remains of a princess appears to have simply arisen from the high quality of the board. Though the coffin likely protected of a person of status, there’s no evidence its occupant was royal. There’s also no proof such a person was a priestess. Budge may have wrongly reached this conclusion because of a mention of King Amenhetep I on the coffin case, a benefactor of the priesthood of Amen-Ra at Thebes, where the lid probably came from. Moreover, there’s no indication the coffin’s tenant bore the name Amen-Ra herself.

Mummies and a frieze showing funeral rites in the British Museum’s First Egyptian Room

In addition to the embellishments of journalists and misunderstandings of early curators, it seems that a cast of colourful – and far from reliable – narrators have contributed outlandish additions to the Unlucky Mummy myth. The idea about the three disrespectful Egyptian servants dying appears to have come from a book called Witchcraft and Black Magic by Montague Summers (1880-1948). Summers was a highly eccentric character who claimed to be a Catholic priest, though there’s no evidence he was ever ordained. He believed in the literal existence of vampires and werewolves and could be seen swanning around the reading room of the British Museum – in a black cloak and buckled shoes – clutching a portfolio with ‘Vampires’ written on it in big blood-red letters.

Another colourful individual linked to the Unlucky Mummy myth was the folklorist and Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Murray put forward the notion that elaborate medieval secret societies practised witchcraft as an alternative religion to Christianity, a concept that – though now largely debunked – has had a strong influence on the Neo-Pagan movement. Murray, when almost 100 years old, confessed that she liked to entertain her students by talking about ‘Amen-Ra’s evil influence’ when taking them around the British Museum. Some were so frightened, they refused to enter the room containing the coffin case. Murray also claimed she’d invented certain myths about the mummy during an interview she didn’t take seriously. The ideas about the mummy sinking the Lusitania and Empress of Ireland appear to have come from her. Murray admitted she was astonished to hear such stories earnestly repeated as fact many years later.

There’s also the palmist Cheiro, who maintained that – after his dire predictions about Thomas Douglas Murray – Murray returned to see him with his empty right sleeve fastened across the front of his coat. During this meeting, Murray apparently related his Egyptian misadventures and subsequent struggles with the Unlucky Mummy. Cheiro was another unconventional figure who claimed to have – while still in his teenage years – travelled from his Irish home to India, where he learnt occult knowledge and the secrets of palmistry from the Brahmins. He’d acquire a high degree of fame, reading the hands of influential clients such as the Prince of Wales, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, W.T. Stead, and the prime ministers William Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain. Other tales about the Unlucky Mummy seem to have originated from the ghost hunter Robert Thurston Hopkins, including the story about the photojournalist shooting himself.

And what About Sir Ernest Wallace Budge? Though he felt a professional duty to present himself as a man of science, reason and scepticism, he was also fascinated by the supernatural. Budge – the British Museum’s Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities for 30 years, a philologist and translator of the Egyptian Book of the Dead – was a member of the Ghost Club. According to Peter Underwood, author of Haunted London, ‘Budge, in private if not in public, certainly believed in Egyptian magic and the power of their dead.’ Budge died in 1934, shortly after making his statement dismissing the myths surrounding the Unlucky Mummy. Could ‘Amen-Ra’ have been avenging his belittling of her powers?

Pearson’s Magazine, featuring the curse of the Unlucky Mummy, in 1909

But we might also ask why tales of vengeful mummies and ancient curses so excited the Victorian and early 20th-century public. One reason was ‘Egyptomania’ – an enthusiasm for all things Ancient Egypt that began in Georgian times, springing from the colonial opening up of Egypt and advances in archaeology. Egyptian themes cropped up in operas and novels; tombs resembling miniature pyramids appeared in British churchyards; and Egyptian designs featured on furniture, jewellery and buildings. Egyptomania could lead to some far-fetched notions and outrageous goings-on. There were claims the Egyptians had understood the secrets of time travel – with a neo-Egyptian mausoleum in London’s Brompton Cemetery gaining a reputation as a ‘Victorian time machine’ – while the body of a Manchester heiress was even transformed by a less than honest doctor into an Egyptian-style mummy.

Yet could there be more behind this fascination for – and fear of – the legacy of Ancient Egypt? From 1798, when the French invaded Egypt under Napoleon, colonial powers – the French, the British, the Ottoman Turks and a dynasty descended from Albanian mercenaries originally employed by the Ottomans – vied for power and influence in the country. Britain launched an attack on Egypt in 1882, bombarding Alexandria for 10-and-a-half hours and causing a fire that destroyed much of the city. A successful land invasion followed and the British would remain in Egypt – in one way or another – until 1922.

Despite this victorious conquest, many in Britain felt disquiet about their country’s conduct. As would be the case in more modern times, people wondered whether a European nation should be getting involved in a Middle-Eastern country’s affairs, despite being told by their government the intervention was necessary to depose a tyrannical regime. Most of these doubters, however, didn’t express their unease openly through fear of seeming unpatriotic. Their anxieties and guilt perhaps manifested in another way – in a terror of cursed Egyptian artefacts taking revenge on Europeans who’d dared to disrespect them. An example of such an artefact is Cleopatra’s Needle, a huge obelisk that was shipped from Alexandria to London and now stands beside the Thames. The obelisk has accrued a rich folklore of hauntings, curses and occult powers.

All this combined with worries about how various types of science, and developing disciplines like history and archaeology, were upending old sacred ways of thinking. Advances in archaeology and comparative mythology – together with breakthroughs like Darwin’s laws of evolution – were making it harder to literally believe in the Bible and traditional Christianity, hence the fascination for seances and table rapping. (The growth of capitalist individualism also made it harder to accept that unique and precious individuals could one day cease to exist – thus the attempts to contact loved ones on ‘the other side’.) What better metaphor could there be for science overturning and outraging the ancient and sacred than archaeologists rifling Egyptian tombs and museum curators examining and labelling artefacts then placing them in the sterile environment of the glass case? And what better encapsulation of fears about where such sacrilege could lead than thrilling legends of age-old magical curses, legends ably amplified by a growing modern media?

In Guy Boothroyd’s 1899 novel Pharos the Egyptian, a character asks, ‘And pray by what right did your father rifle the dead man’s tomb? Perhaps you will show me his justification for carrying away the body from the country in which it had been laid to rest, and conveying it to England to be stared at in the light of curiosity.’

Such anxieties and fears have not departed even today. Visitors still report unsettling sensations when viewing the Unlucky Mummy’s coffin lid. In 2013, there was intense curiosity – and not a little unease – when an Egyptian statuette in the Manchester Museum began rotating in its case. (The rotating turned out to be caused by vibrations from passing traffic and visitors’ footsteps.) A May 2020 article in The Sun claimed that security guards in the British Museum had been witnessing strange phenomena like unexplained footsteps, glowing white orbs hovering above staircases, sightings of a ghostly female dwarf, alarms going off for no reason at midnight, and sudden plunges in temperature in the Egyptian galleries.

One guard – who’d worked at the museum for 29 years – said, ‘It was like walking into a freezer. My stomach turned over. The feel of the gallery was – you wanted to get out. I’m a great believer that, wherever you’re buried, you should stay there. A lot of the mummies there should be back in their graves.’

This article’s main image is courtesy of the British Museum (© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

The post The Unlucky Mummy – Curse of the British Museum & Sinker of the Titanic? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Legend has indeed given Mother Damnable a notorious reputation. Her parents, it’s said, were hanged for causing a young girl’s death by witchcraft and her lovers either met gruesome ends or mysteriously vanished. Three were reputedly dispatched by her hand, with the charred body parts of one being discovered in her oven. She’s alleged to have given shelter to the infamous female bandit Moll Cutpurse. In her old age, when rumours of her dabbling in the black arts were at their most intense, Mother Damnable was blamed for any misfortune that befell the inhabitants of Camden Town. (Then little more than a hamlet and collection of alehouses scattered around a crossroads on a northerly route into London.) The villagers would apparently gather outside the witch’s cottage and berate her. Mother Damnable would respond by leaning from her window and flinging foul abuse. Usually, the appearance of her huge, vicious black cat  – widely thought to be a devilish familiar – sent the yokels scurrying.

But was Mother Damnable really a practitioner of black magic? Was she a murderer? Did she exist at all? Was she perhaps a composite of several infamous females? Why was she associated with a pub that remained notorious for centuries after her death? What was Mother Damnable’s connection with the renowned Yorkshire fortune teller Mother Shipton and what did Dracula author Bram Stoker have to say about her? And why might rumours of witchcraft have attached themselves to such a person in the first place? Read on for tales of gallows, hairless cats, bat-embroidered cloaks, spooky crossroads and weird potions.

Mother Damnable’s Notorious Parents and her Four Dead or ‘Disappeared’ Lovers

According to the legends, Mother Damnable’s real name was Jinney – or Jinny or Jenny – Bingham. Though records of her birth have either been lost or never existed, she seems to have been born around 1600. She was the only child of a brickmaker, Jacob Bingham, from Kentish Town, which was the nearest settlement of any size to Camden. Her mother was the daughter of a Scottish peddler, who Jacob met while serving in Scotland in the army. His military service over, Jacob returned to the Camden Town area with his Scots wife and resumed his brickmaking trade. The couple and their young daughter, however, would sometimes travel around the country to peddle Jacob’s wares.

At about 16 years of age, Jinney Bingham became pregnant by her boyfriend, a man known as ‘Gypsy’ George Coulter. Her father built the couple a cottage on a patch of waste land, commonly believed to be the spot now covered by Camden Town Tube Station. (Though some say the cottage stood on the site now occupied by the – perhaps appropriately named – World’s End pub just across the road.) George’s residency in the cottage would prove a short one. Accused of stealing sheep near Holloway, he was tried at the Old Bailey and hanged at Tyburn (A notorious place of execution close to Marble Arch). Jinney next took up with a man named Darby, a heavy drinker. Their relationship soon became full of furious arguments and violent confrontations. After one particularly brutal incident, Jinney is said to have sought her mother’s advice on how to deal with her drunken lover. Darby vanished shortly afterwards. No one knew what had befallen him and no investigation was conducted into his disappearance.

But Jinney was about to lose more people in her life. Her parents were ordered to appear in court, accused of killing a young girl by means of witchcraft. The two were found guilty and hanged. Jinney, perhaps to fill the emotional gap left by their execution, began cohabiting with a man named Pitcher. As with her liaison with Darby, their relationship soon degenerated into a series of arguments and fights. Pitcher, like his predecessor, wouldn’t be part of Jinney’s life for long. Unlike with Darby, however, it soon became clear what had happened to him. Pitcher’s body was discovered – charred and toasted – in Jinney’s oven.

As there was a body, there could be an investigation and Jinney Bingham was put on trial for Pitcher’s murder. Things were looking grim for her until an associate popped up in the witness box. This acquaintance said Pitcher had a habit of hiding in the oven to escape Jinney’s savage tongue. Perhaps, having done this, he’d fallen asleep and his roasting had merely been an accident. The court was convinced and Jinney was acquitted.

An image of ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’, said to be from 1676

Despite her evasion of the noose, the trial ruined Jinney’s – already far from spotless – reputation in her neighbourhood. People avoided her and she became more reclusive. She’d normally wait until nightfall to leave her home, when fewer people were around. Nobody could say for certain how she supported herself, a fact which likely gave rise to more gossip. It was around this time she acquired certain nicknames – Mother Damnable, Mother Redcap and the Shrew of Kentish Town. (In that era, a ‘shrew’ was an ill-tempered, aggressive woman prone to nagging and scolding, as in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.)

In the 1640s, during the English Civil War, the reclusive Jinney Bingham was surprised by an urgent banging on the door of her cottage. She opened it to see a man who begged her for shelter, claiming he was being pursued. Jinney gave him lodgings and the man – who turned out to be wealthy – became her lover. Moll Cutpurse – a notorious thief who wore men’s clothing, smoked a pipe and pimped both male and female prostitutes – sometimes stayed with them during the Civil War and its aftermath. Jinney’s wealthy lover would, however, prove little better at getting on with her than her previous partners. Though their vitriolic relationship dragged on for many years, he eventually died. The villagers suspected Jinney had poisoned him. Their claims were investigated, but the inquest decided there was insufficient evidence to support this allegation. Around this time, rumours grew up that Mother Damnable – as her parents had – was meddling in the black arts. Such gossip would dominate the later years of Jinney Bingham’s life.

Mother Damnable’s Old Age, Reputation for Witchcraft and Devilish Death

As Mother Damnable aged, she became ever more reclusive. Usually, just her large, vicious black cat provided her with company. Villagers did, however, sometimes sneak in to see her thanks to her reputed skills as a teller of fortunes and – according to Samuel Palmer’s local history book St Pancras (1870) – ‘a healer of strange diseases’.  The same residents, however, scapegoated her for anything that went wrong – the death of a cow or child, perhaps, or the failure of a business or crops.

Palmer stated that ‘when any mishap occurred, then the old crone was set upon by the mob and hooted without mercy. The old, ill-favoured creature would at such times lean out of her hatch-door, with a grotesque red cap on her head.’ The cap was said to be worn to hide her baldness. Palmer goes on to describe Mother Damnable as having ‘a large broad nose, heavy shaggy eyebrows, sunken eyes and lank and leathern cheeks; her forehead wrinkled, her eyes wide and her looks sullen and unmoved. On her shoulders was thrown a dark grey striped frieze, with black patches, that looked from a distance like flying bats. Suddenly she would let her huge black cat jump upon the hatch by her side, when the mob instantly retreated from a superstitious dread of the double foe.’

Despite her age and isolation, Mother Damnable never seemed to want for anything. The house, having been built by her father, was hers and she presumably either made sufficient money from fortune-telling and herbalism or had enough left over from her rich boyfriend. She probably died around 1680 and, according to legend, the Devil was seen coming to collect her wicked soul and she was found with a concoction of herbs still bubbling over her fire.

Samuel Palmer quotes from the ‘old pamphlet’ describing the witch’s demise. According to this text, one of those who discovered Mother Damnable thought it would be a good idea to give some of her potion to the cat. The feline’s ‘hair fell off in two hours, and the cat soon died’. Mother Damnable, the pamphlet continues, ‘was stiff when found, and … the undertaker was obliged to break her limbs before he could place them in the coffin and … the justices have put men in possession of the house to examine its contents.’

Palmer concludes by asserting: ‘Such is the history of this strange being, whose name will ever be associated with Camden Town, and whose reminiscence will ever be revived by the old wayside house, which, built on the site of the old beldame’s cottage, wears her head as the sign of the tavern.’

The above account is the story of Mother Damnable as popularly understood in legend. But how true might such a tale be and – if it is more folklore than fact – what could have influenced the evolution of this weird myth? Let’s investigate in the next sections.

Camden Town Tube Station – built over the home of the notorious witch Mother Damnable? (Photo: Sunil060902)

Might Mother Damnable Have Been a Fearsome, Foul-Mouthed, She-Dragon of an … Innkeeper?

In this strange case, it might be wise to see to how much we can tease out the possible narratives of Mother Damnable, Mother Redcap, the Shrew of Kentish Town and Jinney Bingham, see how far they go back and question to what extent these different names might be referring to the same person.

A Mother Redcap is mentioned in a letter said to have been sent from Whitehall by one Henry Foxhall to Charles Firebrace in 1666, but perhaps the most interesting early sources depict a ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’. These sources, consisting of pictures and a satirical rhyme, are dated 1676 and probably came from a broadside. (Broadsides were single sheets of paper hawked in the streets and printed with poems, news or ballads.) The earliest copies of the 1676 sources we have, however, are from 1793. They appear in James Caulfield’s Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters of remarkable Persons, from the Reign of Edward III to the Revolution; collected from the most authentic accounts, which seems to have been published in batches between 1790 and 1795.

The pictures show Mother Damnable as a witchy-looking old woman in patched threadbare clothes seated close to a fire, but the accompanying rhyme appears to depict her as a foul-mouthed, combative pub landlady rather than a worker of magic. We learn that Mother Damnable was prone to ‘cursing, fuming, flinging fire in the face of Madam, Lord, Knight, Gent, City Squire’. We also learn that whenever she was ‘ruffled into the least pet, will cellar-dore key into pocket get, then no more ale, And now the fray begins!’ During this ‘fray’, customers are warned to beware of ‘heads, wigs, hoods, scarfs, shoulders, sides and shins’. As the fracas unfolds, the ‘fierce she-dragon’ Mother Damnable ‘sends forth such dismal shrieks and uncouth noise, As fills the town with din, the street with boys.’

The satirical rhyme about ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’. The spilt and broken tankards in the background might also indicate she was the landlady of a rowdy establishment.

So how might this ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’, this terrifying landlady, connect with the witch of Camden Town, Jinney Bingham? Caulfield – who claimed to have acquired the pictures and rhyme from the collection of a ‘J. Bindley Esq’ – states that Mother Damnable’s real name was unknown. But beneath one of the pictures is written: ‘Mother Damnable, the remarkable shrew of Kentish Town, the person who gave rise to the sign of Mother Recap on the Hampstead Road, near London, an dom 1676.’

I suspect this caption was written by Caulfield or some other later writer rather than dating to the late 1600s. The language – though I wouldn’t claim to be an expert – doesn’t sound like 17th-century English and the tense would indicate it was written after Mother Damnable’s death. (The tenses used in the verse, on the other hand, make it sound like Mother Damnable is vigorously alive, as she might well have been in 1676.) What Caulfield, or whoever wrote the caption, is doing, however, is making an explicit connection with a pub that stood for a long time at the crossroads where Jinney Bingham’s cottage is once said to have been located. (Now either the site of Camden Town Tube Station or the World’s End.) This pub – also for a long time – seems to have been called The Mother Red Cap (or Old Mother Red Cap), which – as we’ve seen – was another of Jinney’s nicknames. The satirical rhyme links Mother Damnable to Kentish Town rather than Camden, but as Camden Town was so small in those days it was often lumped in with its more sizeable neighbour. So it’s possible the pub of the notorious alewife of the Mother Damnable rhyme might have been situated at Jinney’s crossroads – and the alewife herself might have been Jinney.

The first known reference to a pub in this location is from 1690. Though we can’t know what the pub was named in such times, the idea seems to have arisen that it was long called the Mother Redcap after a notorious ex-owner. A sketch reputedly from 1746 names the pub the Old Mother Redcap while a cartoon from 1820 includes a painting of the pub with that name (though minus the ‘Old’). In his Book for a Rainy Day or Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833 (1905), J.T. Smith wrote that the Mother Red Cap had a terrifying reputation as ‘it has been stated that “Mother Red Cap” was “Mother Damnable” of Kentish Town in early days, and that it was at her house that the notorious “Moll Cut-purse”, the highwaywoman of Oliver Cromwell’s days, dismounted and frequently lodged.’ In Old and New London (1878), Edward Walford reports that ‘the old house was taken down, and another rebuilt on its site, with the former sign, about the year 1850. This again, in its turn, was removed; and a third house, in the modern style, and of still greater pretensions, was built on the same site a quarter of a century afterwards.’

The sign – which always seems to have been rescued from any demolition and displayed outside each version of the Mother Red Cap – according to Walford: ‘Exhibited that venerable lady – whether she was alewife or witch – with a tall, extinguisher-shaped hat, not unlike that ascribed to Mother Shipton.’

A bucolic sketch of the Mother Red Cap, said to be from 1746

So Jinney Bingham – if that was indeed her name – might have been an innkeeper rather than a witch. If Jinney was an innkeeper, one would suspect she’d have presided over a less than respectable hostelry, perhaps some sort of grog shop. (Maybe, due to the tavern’s prominent location, though, the madams, lords and gents of the rhyme occasionally wandered in – to be quickly repulsed by the landlady and clientele.) A character running a rough pub popular with travellers and criminals might well – like the Jinney of legend – have possessed a robust will, volatile temper, razor-edged tongue and propensity to undertake occasional violent acts. The supposed location of Jinney’s cottage – on the corner of a busy crossroads on a route into London – seems to me a more likely site for an alehouse than a ramshackle witch’s dwelling. It’s hard to imagine such a piece of prime real estate being a scrap of waste ground on which a poor workman might erect a humble house for his daughter. Jinney’s giving of lodgings to people – like Moll Cutpurse and the Civil War fugitive – might also suggest innkeeping was her occupation. In addition, ‘Mother Redcap’ was a common nickname bestowed on female innkeepers from the late 1500s onwards. The name is mentioned, for instance, in a 1595 jestbook, a 1597 play and a 1656 ballad. It seems that only in the 1800s did the name Mother Redcap cease to denote an innkeeper and start denoting a witch.

Cartoon of 1820 showing a picture of the Mother Red Cap in Camden Town

But might there not have been some indications of witchiness around this ferocious landlady? It’s been suggested that alewives were perceived by some to have a witchy aura. They owned cats to keep rodents away from the malt, wore tall black hats so they’d stand out in the marketplace, used broom-like braided twigs to remove yeast from fermented beer and displayed magical-looking stars as a sign of their ale’s purity. Furthermore, the 1676 rhyme compares Mother Damnable to other notorious females – Mother Shipton, Mother Louse and ‘Macbeth’s wayward women’. Mother Louse was another infamously ugly and sharp-tongued alewife, but Mother Shipton (of whom we’ll hear more later) and the women mentioned from Macbeth were seen as witches. It’s unlikely, however, that the author of the rhyme was seriously suggesting Mother Damnable was a witch. Though by 1676 the persecution of witches had lost some of its intensity, executions for witchcraft continued into the early 1700s and those suspected of this offence were despised social outcasts. No one would have wanted to drink in a bar run by a witch. What the broadside might have done, however – especially if it had sold well – was put the idea in some minds that there was some link between witches and Mother Damnable and – as we’ll see below – this association may have grown stronger over the centuries.

So How Did Mother Damnable Come to Be Seen as a Witch and What Did Mother Shipton Have to Do with It All?

The 1676 sources depicting ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’ – assuming the materials James Caulfield acquired for his book were genuinely from around that date – would suggest there might have been a formidable landlady with that nickname and that she might have run a pub on Jinney’s crossroads. But, as we’ve seen, these sources describe her as alewife rather than witch. They also make no mention of her slaying her lovers, of her parents being hung for practising the black arts and of the Devil’s remarkable visit to her cottage on the day of her death.

Most of what we know today about the Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable character comes from Samuel Palmer’s 1870 book, the full title of which is the snappy St Pancras, Being Antiquarian, Topographical, and Biographical Memoranda, Relating to the Extensive Metropolitan Parish of St Pancras, Middlesex, with Some Account of the Parish from Its Foundation (St Pancras was the large semi-urban parish that then included Camden Town). Palmer appears to have been the first to link the name Jinney Bingham with the Mother Damnable figure. The only reference to sources he makes, however, is his mention of the ‘old pamphlet’ describing Mother Damnable’s death. I haven’t been able to find any earlier references to this pamphlet. Some of the descriptions Palmer gives – the likening of the patches on the cloak to bats, for instance – smack more of Victorian Gothic Romanticism than how people would have perceived witches in the 1600s. (Palmer – a writer, painter and disciple of William Blake – was an important figure in the English Romantic movement.)

We might suspect, then, that the shrewish and combative aspects of Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable stemmed from the attributes of a real person and only in the Victorian age became mingled with legends of witchcraft. This could have been thanks both to a misunderstanding of the term Mother Redcap, the meaning of which had changed over time, and the Romantic Victorian embellishments of writers like Samuel Palmer. (The letter from Henry Foxhall, though supposedly sent in 1666, actually first appears in a book published in 1843, perhaps suggesting some gothic Victorian enhancements may have taken place with that correspondence.) From Palmer’s descriptions of Mother Damnable, it would seem he was familiar with the pictures published by Caulfield. Could Palmer have observed Mother Damnable kneeling before the fire and allowed his gothic imagination to invent her teapot full of ‘drugs, herbs and liquid’? (Palmer and other later writers perhaps also converted Mother Damnable’s inclination for casual violence into a string of murders.)  

The English Romantic Samuel Palmer (1805-81) in a self-portrait of 1826. Palmer did much to popularise the tale of the Camden Town witch Mother Damnable.

It is possible, however, that Palmer drew at least some of his material from local oral traditions. The turning of Mother Damnable into a witch was probably not a completely Victorian innovation. To understand how this switch of identity may have come about, we’ll need to turn our attention again to Camden Town’s inns. One such tavern had a very similar name to the Mother Red Cap: the Mother Black Cap.

The Mother Black Cap seems to have been established by about 1750. It must have been in existence by 1830 at the latest, as a manuscript from around that date mentions both the Mother Black Cap and Mother Red Cap in a list of Camden Town’s pubs, along with eight other hostelries with names like the Laurel Tree, the Hope and Anchor, and the Elephant and Castle. The Mother Black Cap, according to Walford, stood ‘at the northern or upper end of the High Street’. Mother Blackcap was a common name for Mother Shipton, a semi-legendary witch and fortune teller with astounding prophetic powers said to have lived between 1488 and 1561 and to have been born near Knaresborough, Yorkshire. Walford comments, ‘It is not a little remarkable that two inns bearing the names of these semi-mythical ladies exist within half-a-mile of each other.’

The first records of Mother Shipton and her prophecies appeared in 1641, 80 years after her reported death. By this stage, accounts of the prophetess would have passed somewhat into the realms of the mythic. Though Mother Shipton was generally seen as a less malevolent character than Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable, the legends of the two enchantresses have certain aspects in common. Mother Shipton was also said to be hideously ugly, she knew the medicinal properties of plants and herbs, and – like Jinney Bingham – she suffered ostracisation because of her ugliness and reputation as a witch. Her husband died young and – as with the Shrew of Kentish Town and her lovers – some suspected Mother Shipton of causing his death. The Devil was also rumoured to be involved in Mother Shipton’s story. Some said Mother Shipton sold him her soul in exchange for her weird powers; others that her mother Agatha had been seduced by the Devil or had summoned him herself, with their union resulting in the birth of the strange child that would grow up to be Mother Shipton. Like Mother Damnable, Mother Shipton foretold the future, though her prophecies tended to be grander than Mother Redcap’s predictions about her neighbours’ affairs. Mother Shipton predicted the first piped water system in York, Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries and Break with Rome, and the spectacular growth of the capital: ‘Shall Highgate Hill stand in the midst of London’. Several accounts have her casually assigning a date for the Apocalypse. Despite her fame as a witch, Mother Shipton, like Mother Damnable, wasn’t put to death. She died peacefully in her bed at an old age.

The famous Yorkshire witch Mother Shipton – a model for Camden Town’s Mother Damnable?

We might wonder why a witch from the north would have a pub named after her in Camden Town. Mother Shipton did have a nationwide fame. D.C. Mackay, in his Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1841), wrote, ‘The prophecies of Mother Shipton are still believed in many of the rural districts of England. In cottages and servants’ halls, her reputation is still great; and she rules, the most popular of British prophets, among all the uneducated and half-educated portion of the community.’ Her popularity in the north, however, seems to have been especially strong.

In his 1910 book Famous Imposters, the author of Dracula Bram Stoker devoted a chapter to Mother Damnable’s legend. Stoker felt the Mother Black Cap pub was likely so-named because ‘Camden Town was a suburb through which the northern traffic passed on its way to and from London.’ It was, therefore, ‘wise to use for publicity and entertainment names that were familiar to north country ears. Before the railways were organised the great wheeled and horse traffic between London and the North – especially Yorkshire which was one of the first Counties to take up manufacturing and the wool trade – went through Camden Town. So it was wise forethought to take as an inn sign a Yorkshire name. The name of Mother Shipton had been in men’s mouths and ears for about two-hundred years, and as the times had so changed that the old stigma of witchcraft was not then understood, the association with Knaresborough alone remained.’ As for Mother Damnable’s reputed end, Stoker wryly comments, ‘What a pity it was that no veracious scribe or draughtsman was present in the crowd which had noticed the Devil’s entry into the house. In such a case we might have got a real likeness of His Satanic Majesty – a thing which has long been wanted – and the opportunities of obtaining which are few.’

So, in Camden Town, two public houses were named after notorious women of legend. One – the Mother Black Cap – was named after Mother Shipton, a well-known soothsayer and witch, whereas the other – the Mother Red Cap – may have been christened in honour of Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable, a sharp-tongued shrew with a reputation for violence who, nonetheless, might not have originally had associations with magic. Despite this, there were similarities in the two women’s legends and both pubs’ landlords – according to Stoker, ‘open and avowed trade rivals’ – likely used those legends to promote their competing establishments. Over time, the two ladies with similar names – who also, excepting the colour of their headgear, probably looked similar on their pub signs – may have been confused by the residents of Camden Town and the travellers that stopped there. Bits of Mother Shipton’s myth could therefore have sneaked into the folklore surrounding Mother Redcap. (Perhaps building on the tenuous links already made as long ago as the 1676 broadside.) In this way, witchcraft might have been added to the list of fearsome attributes the sword-tongued shrew possessed. Victorian writers may have then applied a gothic gloss to the legend of Mother Damnable, giving it its current form.

The Black Cap pub in Camden Town, which closed in 2015, was a descendant of the Mother Black Cap. (Photo courtesy of Nylki)

Of course, the Mother Damnable character might over the years have accumulated aspects of several women. A number of scholars – including the folklorists Steve Roud and Jacqueline Simpson and the historian John Callow – do see Mother Damnable as a composite figure of two or more individuals. Mother Louse has already been mentioned and it’s also been suggested that one of the models for Mother Redcap was a follower of the Duke of Marlborough’s army during the Reign of Queen Anne (1702-14). In Holloway, not far from Camden Town, a coin or token is said to have been discovered dated 1667 and crudely stamped with the inscription ‘Mother Read Cap’s in Holloway.’ Another possible prototype for the Mother Redcap myth was an alewife named Eleanor Rumming of Leatherhead, Surrey, who lived in the reign of Henry VIII. The poet John Skelton (c.1463-1529) described Eleanor as being ‘ugly of cheer, her face all bowsy, wondrously wrinkled, her een bleared, and she grey-haired.’ It’s interesting, though, that none of these women seem to have been associated with witchcraft, a fact that would perhaps support the idea that the witchy aspects of Mother Damnable were imported into her myth thanks to Mother Shipton and a confusion – especially after a few ales – of pub signs. But is this necessarily the case or might parts of Mother Damnable’s legend really match up with deep folkloric notions of the magical and attitudes towards witches that were current in the 1600s? Let’s try to find out below.

Crossroads, Black Cats, Scapegoats and the Coming of Capitalism – How Might the Mother Damnable Legend Match up with the Folklore and History of Witchcraft?

Although the Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable legend might have arisen in the Georgian and Victorian epochs from the fusing of various elements – and various semi-historical figures – certain things about her mythos do equate with folkloric notions of witches and the historical knowledge we have of those who tended to be accused of witchcraft.

Mother Damnable owned a black cat and such felines already had their reputation as sinister beings and witches’ familiars in the 1600s. It’s possible, however, that the cat was later added to her myth. It’s also interesting that her cottage was said to have stood at a crossroads. Crossroads, perhaps because they symbolise the intersection of different realities or realms, are in many parts of the world seen as magical sites. In England, they were reputed to be places where magical rituals occurred. They were also sites where suicides were buried and gallows and gibbets set up. This was partly due to the belief that the unquiet ghost of the suicide or executed convict would be confused by the choice of four ways and therefore wouldn’t wander off to haunt nearby settlements. There were indeed once plans to erect a gallows at Mother Damnable’s crossroads. In 1776, The Morning Post stated, ‘Orders have been given from the Secretary of State’s office that the criminals capitally convicted at the Old Bailey shall in the future be executed at the crossroads near the “Mother Red Cap” inn, the half-way house to Hampstead, and that no galleries, scaffolds or other temporary stages be built near the place.’

Ye Olde Mother Red Cap in 1930 opposite Camden Town Tube Station. Some, however, say the station itself was the site of the original tavern.

It seems these gallows were either never erected or never used. This may have been because of the popularity of the site with Londoners. In Old and New London Walford wrote, ‘At the beginning of the present (19th) century the “Mother Red Cap” was a constant resort for many a Londoner who desired to inhale the fresh air and enjoy the quiet of the country, for at that time the old tavern – which, by the way, was also known as the half-way house to Highgate and Hampstead – stood almost in open fields and was approached on different sides by green lanes and hedgerow roads. At that time too, the dairy over the way, at the corner of the Chalk Farm, or Hampstead, or the Kentish Town Roads, was not the fashionable establishment it afterwards became, but partook more the character of “milk fair” … for there were forms for the pedestrians to rest on, and the good folks served out milk fresh from the cow to all who came.’ This bucolic scene perhaps contrasts with some of the crossroads’ more sinister associations and Smith’s depictions of the Mother Red Cap as a terrifying inn.

A postcard showing the Ye Olde Mother Red Cap pub in Camden Town around 1925. The pub is listed under that name in directories from the 1930s and 1940s. In 1985, it was renamed The World’s End.

Returning to Mother Damnable, though, research by historians – such as Keith Thomas in his Religion and the Decline of Magic – indicates that in the Early Modern Period (1500-1700) certain types of people were more likely to be accused of witchcraft. Though individuals of any age, sex or social rank could have the charge of witchcraft levelled against them, older poor women were much more frequently accused. This was largely because the emergence of the capitalist system was leading to a more individualistic and money-orientated outlook on life. The old feudal bonds of community were weakening and people were less inclined to give charity to their poorer neighbours. And the poorest of all tended to be old, often widowed women, who had no one to support them and to whom the economic and social structures of the time gave little opportunity for employment. But the old ways of thinking hadn’t gone entirely so when such people turned up begging at their neighbours’ doors and were sent away, the neighbours were likely to feel guilt. As so often is the case, this guilt expressed itself as anger and blame towards the victims of the social system. When a mishap occurred – an animal dying, a failure of crops – and the householder remembered the old woman he’d turned away (and perhaps turned away with a good few curses and threats coming from the crone) he might assume she’d cast a spell on him.

It’s interesting that the rumours of Mother Damnable practising witchcraft became more intense towards the end of her life. It’s also intriguing that her neighbours were depicted as harassing her when any of them had suffered a misfortune. What doesn’t fit this narrative, however, is that Mother Damnable never seems to have wanted for anything and was never put on trail for witchcraft. This could indicate that – if one of the prototypes of the Mother Damnable figure was some sort of enchantress – she might have been a cunning woman. Cunning men and women were village folk magicians who used a combination of sympathetic magic, Christian prayers, amulets and talismans, and herbal remedies to help neighbours who came to them in trouble. They might, for instance, cure human and animal diseases, help find lost goods or identify thieves. Though being accused of witchcraft was an occupational hazard for a cunning woman or man, it was something that in fact happened infrequently, perhaps indicating the importance communities placed on such people. The Mother Damnable character’s brewing up of potions, her relative prosperity and the fact she wasn’t tried for witchcraft might suggest that one of the models for her was such a person.

Is Camden Town Tube Station still infused with the dark spirit of the witch Mother Damnable? (Photo: Rossographer)

All this is, of course, speculation and the scarcity of sources from the time she was said to have lived makes it difficult to do more than take educated guesses about Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable’s identity. But an attempt to understand her strange narrative could run something like this. A female innkeeper in the 1600s – infamous for her sharp tongue, aggressive demeanour and violent tendencies – was so notorious that pubs built on the site of her tavern were thereafter named after her. Her legend thus established, it over the years merged with tales of similar redoubtable alewives and – possibly – with memories of old women accused of witchcraft and cunning folk. The setting up of a rival tavern nearby – called the Mother Black Cap, after Mother Shipton – either introduced magical elements into her myth or enhanced any such elements already there. This was largely due to the public confusing Mothers Blackcap and Redcap and merging their legends, legends which may have already boasted striking similarities. When excitable Victorian writers put a fashionably gothic overlay on it all, the terrifying tale of black magic and villainy was complete.

I think Camden Town Tube Station is still a strange spot. The atmosphere’s heavy, as if with centuries of foreboding, and the meeting of four roads throbbing with London traffic does give one a feel of a crackle in the air. On a London Underground network replete with tales of ghosts and hauntings, the origin myth of Camden Town Station stands out as especially eerie. Perhaps, also, the spirit of Mother Damnable lives on in the gothic culture the area’s now famous for, with its market stalls of black drapery and witchy trinkets. The psychogeography of Camden’s pubs also hints at an influence from the tutelary spirit of the once notorious innkeeper. There’s the doomily named World’s End; there was until some years ago a pub bearing the name the Halfway House (called now, I think, the Camden Eye, with a somewhat ominous-looking eye painted on its gable). There was also, until 2015, a pub called the Black Cap – a descendant, I believe, of the original Mother Black Cap. This pub was a haunt of the serial killers Dennis Nilsen and Anthony Hardy and Nilsen picked out some of his victims in there. On a less dark note, a pub called the Mother Black Cap appeared in the cult film Withnail and I (1987), set in Camden Town in 1969. The main characters, drink-soaked and drug-infused out-of-work actors, are threatened with violence in the establishment. Perhaps the spirit of Mother Damnable has truly settled on Camden and – despite ongoing attempts to corporatise, sanitise and gentrify the neighbourhood – isn’t going to leave any time soon.

The post Mother Damnable – the Wicked Witch of Camden Town Tube Station appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

His life story does read like a gothic novel or Romantic poem – an epic in which art and imagination launch a promethean challenge against the gods of poverty, indifference and prejudice. Chatterton spent a lonely childhood poking around his local – and extravagantly gothic – church, even learning to read from the ancient parchments and medieval manuscripts he stumbled across in there. Later Chatterton struggled to hold onto his poetic muse in the face of mistreatment from sadistic schoolmasters, the beatings and humiliations of an enervating apprenticeship, and – as he tried to make it as a professional writer – a crippling lack of cash.

But what’s more famous than Chatterton’s life is his death. It’s become a cliché of artistic demise – the despairing genius ending it all in an opium-scented attic. Much of this perception is thanks to a painting – The Death of Chatterton – by the Pre-Raphaelite Henry Wallis (shown above). Completed in 1856, this image – with its clever contrasts of light and shade – has the shockingly pallid poet slumped across his bed, his frilly shirt dramatically (and perhaps a little homoerotically) falling open. The suicide’s torn-up works scatter the room; an extinguished candle smokes spookily; the bottle of arsenic which has done the deed lies discarded on the floor. The window is ajar, indicating the flight of Chatterton’s soul or muse. Out of that window, we see the dome of St Paul’s and the spires and rooftops of a city that bustles on, indifferent to the departure of genius.

The Death of Chatterton was exhibited with a quote from Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus: ‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough’. The influential art critic John Ruskin praised the picture and crowds thronged into any gallery showing it. The man who bought The Death of Chatterton – one Augustus Egg – sold the rights to make engraved reproductions of the piece, meaning Wallis’s striking image was distributed widely.

Thomas Chatterton’s death, though, has overshadowed his equally dramatic life. Chatterton – while barely into his teens – pulled off a forgery of faux-medieval poems so elaborate and inventive that debate seethed about their authenticity for decades after his death. In his short life, Chatterton fooled patrons, fell out with well-known gothic authors, wrote scorching political diatribes, impressed radical MPs and lord mayors, penned caustic satires, seduced numerous women, and – ominously – tumbled into an open grave.

But do the circumstances of Chatterton’s death really match the assumptions people have made about it for centuries? And should his life be viewed as a flaming comet of Romantic genius streaking across a dull sky or as a complex construct of fraud, fantasy and bullshit? Or perhaps as both? Let’s head back to a strange, impoverished Bristol childhood as we start our attempts to find out.

Thomas Chatterton’s Strangely Gothic and Pseudo-Medieval Childhood

Born in November 1752, Chatterton was – like David Copperfield – a posthumous child. His father – also called Thomas Chatterton – had been the master of a local school as well as being a sub-chanter (an assistant singer) at Bristol Cathedral. Chatterton Senior was also a musician, poet, antiquarian and numismatist who had a fascination for the occult. His early death meant Thomas was born into a precarious and impoverished situation, with his mother starting a small girls’ school and taking in needlework to avoid financial calamity.

An immense gothic edifice loomed over the lives of the Chatterton family, as it had done for generations. Their modest home stood in the shadow of St Mary Redcliffe Church. Thomas’s father’s school had also stood near this building and his uncle served as the church’s sexton (the official responsible for the maintenance of the church and graveyard). The Chatterton family had long held the office of sexton on a hereditary basis and Thomas grew up enchanted by his uncle’s work.

The Bristol house in which the poet Thomas Chatterton was reputedly raised. The wall/façade on the right is the only surviving wall of his father’s schoolhouse. (Photo: William Avery)

St Mary Redcliffe has been a place of Christian worship for over 900 years though most of the current building was constructed between the 12th and 15th centuries. The grade-I-listed church is famous for its stunning gothic architecture and is said to be one of the largest parish churches in England, if not the largest. Dramatically sited on a red cliff overlooking the River Avon, the church was used by sailors as a landmark. Seafarers would pray in it before undertaking a journey and then give thanks in the church for their safe homecoming, facts which may have led to St Mary’s enormous popularity with wealthy Bristol merchants. These traders paid for the church to be lavishly enhanced in first the Decorated Gothic then Perpendicular Gothic styles. The elaborate funerary monuments of these merchants, as well as other local notables, further embellished the building.

Young Thomas loved to wander around the church, entranced by the massive gothic arched windows, by the sombre effigies of knights and merchants recumbent on their splendid tombs, by the forests of pillars, the decorated vaults, and the numerous carvings of gargoyles, grotesques and Green Men. His enthusiasm for history and culture embodied in stone didn’t at first, however, translate into an aptitude for learning. Thomas was actually thought to be mentally backward. He showed no interest in children’s games or in the books used to teach kids to read. Thomas was prone to slipping into dreamy dazes – he might sit for hours in a silent trance before bursting into tears for no reason. Considered an imbecile, he was expelled from the first school he attended.

The nave of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, the stunning gothic church that inspired Thomas Chatterton. (Photo: Alex Zhurakovskyi)

This began to change when Thomas became aware of the old manuscripts St Mary Redcliffe held. In the church’s muniment room – a space over the porch on the north side of the nave that contained chests of documents – he found dusty and forgotten parchments and deeds, some dating back as far as the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). Fascinated, he used these ancient records as his playthings and this seemed to ignite a passion for reading. He learnt his first letters from a musical folio with illuminated capitals, one of a batch of medieval folios his father had fetched home from the church some years earlier. Despite Chatterton Senior’s antiquarian interests, he appears to have had no notion of preserving these precious documents, but had rather intended they should be used as sewing patterns or as bindings for his pupils’ books. Thomas’s mother had been about to tear up a folio for waste paper when its beautiful ornamentation captured Thomas’s gaze. According to his mother, Thomas ‘fell in love’ with the capitals so she seized on the chance to teach him the alphabet with the folio’s help. If this story is true, it indicates Thomas’s instinctive delight in medieval art as well as the meagre regard those around him had for cultural relics.

A mid-15th-century musical manuscript with an elaborate illustrated capital

After swiftly mastering his letters, Thomas learnt to read from a large bible printed in blackletter font, a gothic and archaic typeface. He haughtily informed his sister that he didn’t like reading out of small books. His choice of reading matter and his explorations of St Mary Redcliffe seem to have incited an enthusiasm for the gothic, religious and medieval as well as perhaps notions of personal grandeur. When his sister asked what design he’d like painted on a bowl he’d been given, Thomas said, ‘Paint me an angel, with wings, and a trumpet, to trumpet my name all over the world.’ This early egotism was perhaps a reaction to a growing sense his father’s death had robbed him and his family of respect and status in the local community.

By the time Thomas was six-and-a-half, his mother was realising her boy might be gifted. By the age of eight, he’d read and write all day if no one disturbed him and would devour any books he could obtain. Also at eight, Thomas was sent to Colston’s Hospital, a charitable boarding school founded by the Bristol-born merchant, Tory MP and slave trader Edward Colston (1636-1721), whose statue near Bristol Harbour was controversially torn down during a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020. Colston had peevishly insisted that only the sons of Anglican and Tory-supporting families could attend the school and – perhaps unsurprisingly – it was a far from appropriate environment for the sensitive Thomas Chatterton. The curriculum was limited to practical subjects like reading, writing, arithmetic, commerce and law, as well as the Anglican catechism (a document expounding the basics of the Church’s doctrine). Discipline was harsh, any boys showing the slightest tendencies towards religious non-conformity were immediately expelled, and pupils had to submit to having the tops of their heads shaved so they were tonsured like monks. Chatterton’s behaviour at the school – where he spent a miserable six years – alternated between delinquency and sulkiness. The only positive aspect of his experience there was the presence of Thomas Phillips, a talented poet employed as an assistant teacher. Phillips provided encouragement to any pupils – Chatterton included – with poetic inclinations.

Pages of a blackletter Gutenburg Bible. Thomas Chatterton learnt to read from a bible printed in this gothic script.

Thomas Chatterton began to write poetry at 10. At the age of just 11, he had his first works published – some religious poems inspired by his confirmation appeared in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal. Another Chatterton poem the same journal printed concerned an act of vandalism that had taken place at St Mary Redcliffe. A beautiful cross of unusual workmanship – which had been in the church for at least three centuries – had in 1763 provoked the rage of a puritanical churchwarden who decided it was an idolatrous monument and destroyed it. On 17th January 1764, this overly pious person found himself the subject of a clever satirical poem by the precocious Thomas, which transformed him into a laughing stock across Bristol.

Despite these fleeting successes, the youthful Thomas Chatterton was realising life was tough. In addition to being poor and fatherless and being forced to attend a brutal educational establishment, he had a growing awareness that his sensitive disposition and artistic leanings were out of place in late-18th-century Bristol. A thriving seaport and mercantile centre, this busy and money-orientated metropolis appeared to have no time for poetic fancies or the appreciation of art. Unsurprisingly, Chatterton couldn’t help contrasting this abrupt and utilitarian attitude with the gothic carvings, the beautifully scripted documents and the lovingly constructed medieval church that had so enraptured his early childhood.

Vault of the Nave of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, the local church of the poet Thomas Chatterton. (Photo: NotFromUtrecht)

Chatterton retreated, both physically and mentally. He commandeered a tiny attic in his mother’s house and began to build a world more palatable to his inclinations. During holidays and whenever he could escape from school, he’d lock himself in this room with his books, which he spent his little pocket money on borrowing from a circulating library. Chatterton also filled his hideaway with drawing materials and with the treasured manuscripts and ancient parchments he’d looted from the muniments room at St Mary Redcliffe. In this attic, the impoverished boy weaved an elaborate fantasy realm, a realm that took much of its inspiration from the Middle Ages. These fantasies would result in one of the most audacious literary frauds history has ever known.

The Young Thomas Chatterton Creates an Incredible Literary Fraud

In his attic, surrounded by his books and medieval parchments, mesmerised by the gothic carvings and the romanticised images of the Middle Ages swirling in his head, Chatterton began to create not only poems but in fact a poet. He dreamt up a medieval genius, a character so powerful he’d overlap with Chatterton’s own life. Like with later artists who’d sculpt potent alter egos – David Bowie, for instance – Chatterton probably had some difficulties differentiating his own personality, worldview and creativity from those of the medieval poet he’d conjured up. Chatterton named this imaginary poet Thomas Rowley and – though imaginary – Rowley would soon be very much impinging on the ‘real world’.

Perhaps this whole turn of events was triggered by a pseudo-medieval poem Chatterton wrote at the age of 11, called Elinoure and Juga. When Chatterton showed the poem to Thomas Phillips, he for some reason claimed it was by a 15th-century poet. Chatterton was astounded when Phillips believed him and the success of this deception likely encouraged him to plunge deeper into his world of fantasy.

Chatterton’s Holiday Afternoon, an engraving by William Ridgway (1875) after a picture by W.B. Morris. Thomas Chatterton is shown secluded in his attic surrounded by ancient manuscripts.

Thomas Rowley – as well as being a gifted versifier – was a chronicler, priest and monk. Rowley’s poems were centred on a romanticised version of late-medieval Bristol, a town filled with citizen heroes and heroines. One of the most praiseworthy inhabitants was Rowley’s patron, William II Canynges. Unlike the mean-spirited and unimaginative bourgeoisie of Chatterton’s time, Canynges was an open-minded and munificent sponsor of literature and the arts. William II Canynges had actually been a real-life resident of Bristol. A successful merchant, he was one of the wealthiest citizens in England of his era and an occasional financier of the king. Canynges served five times as Bristol’s lord mayor and three times as an MP and dedicated a chunk of his wealth to renovating and enhancing St Mary Redcliffe. Canygnes, who died in 1474, would have been known to Chatterton as his recumbent effigy and elaborate tomb can be found in St Mary’s. His name also cropped up in the records of leases, heraldry, grants and bequests that Chatterton had purloined from the church’s muniments room.

The Rowley poems stress Bristol’s function as a strategic gateway to the West Country and the city’s admirable residents sally forth to fight against various invaders who threaten England’s liberty and independence. In Rowley’s surrealistic, dreamlike verses – and in the dramatic interludes he wrote to be performed in the grand house of his patron – his heroes and heroines speak with a passion and idealism Chatterton thought was sadly missing in the Bristol of his time. As for Canygnes, Rowley produced a poem in praise of his greatness, The Storie of William Canynge. Here we learn that Canynges – perhaps with an echo of how Chatterton saw himself – was a ‘fate-marked babe’, a child genius ‘as wise as anie of the eldermenne’. The poem then outlines a life filled with achievements, accolades and generous acts. After his wife’s death – in brave defiance of the king’s insistence he remarry – Canynges makes the noble choice to enter the Church, abandoning his worldly wealth and status and the attractions of the ‘second dames’ to become a ‘preeste for lyfe’.

The tomb of William Canynges in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. It supports the effigies of Canynges and his wife Joan. (Photo: Lobsterthermidor)

But if Chatterton wanted to pass off his own poems as those of a medieval writer, he had to employ language that sounded convincing. He strove to create a jargon of the Middle Ages, by scrutinising books from the circulating library as well as those he obtained by ingratiating himself with Bristol’s booksellers. He appears to have drawn much from the Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, compiled by the philologist John Kersey and published in 1708. Other elements in his fabrication were likely taken from the works of the poet and antiquarian John Weever (1576-1632) and the writings of the antiquarian and herald John William Dugdale (1605-1686), who did a great deal to establish medieval history as a subject of serious study. Other sources appear to have been the antiquarian, genealogist and historian Arthur Collins (1682-1760) – best-known for his Peerage of England – and Thomas Speight’s editions of the great medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s-1400). Chatterton would have studied the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) and Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays and likely had access to Elizabeth Cooper’s The Muses Library, a whopping 400-page tome containing the works of older English poets like Edward the Confessor (1003-1066) and the Earl of Surrey (1517-47).

Chatterton probably also plundered Thomas Percy’s three-volume Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which included Percy’s highly useful Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, a work contrasting medieval with modern ballads. Another source seems to have been Ossian – a collection of ‘ancient Scottish epics’ the poet James MacPherson claimed to have transcribed either from accounts passed down orally or from old Gaelic manuscripts he’d discovered. These epics – the publication of which began in 1760 – were both massively popular and massively controversial, with Dr Johnson, among others, denouncing them as a fraud created by MacPherson himself. Out of these diverse, centuries-spanning sources – no doubt augmented by his finds in the muniment room – Chatterton cobbled together his fake medieval argot. A sample of Chatterton’s pseudo-medieval language – from The Storie of William Canynge – is below. This passage depicts – if I’ve understood it right –  a poet reclining by the banks of a stream, musing on Bristol’s River Avon:

Anent a brooklette as I laie reclynd,

Listeynge to heare the water glyde alonge,

Myndeynge how thorowe the grene mees yt twynd,

Awhilst the cavys respons’d yts mottring songe,

At dystaunt rysyng Avonne to he sped,

Amenged wyth rysyng hylles dyd shewe yts head;

Engarlanded wyth crownes of osyer weedes

And wraytes of alders of a bercie scent,

And stickeynge out wyth clowde agested reedes,

The hoarie Avonne show’d dyre semblamente.

We might ask why Chatterton spent so much effort and time coming up with this incredible imaginary world, as well as the incredible imaginary language he used to describe it. It was partly, of course, a way of escaping from the depressing reality of his everyday existence. The psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan, however, also felt it had to do with Chatterton being fatherless. To compensate for this misfortune, Chatterton tried to ‘reconstitute the lost father in fantasy’ by developing an idealised image of the father-like, wealthy patron William Canynges. Kaplan also argued that Chatterton’s masculine identity had been challenged by the fact he’d been raised by two women, his mother Mary and sister Sarah. Chatterton, therefore, took upon himself a kind of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ narrative, in which a poor boy pursues a miraculous method of rescuing his household from poverty. Rather than using magic beans, Chatterton aimed to do this via his startling imagination and literary talents.

But to achieve his dreams Chatterton felt he’d need a patron – and finding one as wonderful as William Canynges wouldn’t be easy for a fatherless boy without connections in the materially minded Bristol of the late-1700s. Chatterton, nevertheless, was going to try.

A second effigy of William II Canynges in St Mary Redcliffe. This one was moved from the Collegiate Church of Westbury-on-Trym – where Canynges served as a canon – after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. (Photo: Lobsterthermidor)

Thomas Chatterton Tricks Patrons and Suffers a Stultifying Apprenticeship

When he was almost 15, Thomas Chatterton finally escaped the dire surroundings of Colston’s Hospital, beginning an apprenticeship in July 1767. He was to learn the duties of a legal clerk in the office of the Bristol attorney John Lambert. Chatterton wouldn’t prove a much better apprentice than he had pupil, showing little interest in his work and maintaining his sullen and insolent disposition. As for Lambert, he was enraged to find out that Chatterton wrote poetry and did all he could to stop his strange apprentice pursuing his muse. Lambert would search Chatterton’s desk and if he found any scraps of verse, would tear them up and give Chatterton a sound beating. What made this situation particularly dismal was that Chatterton, like most apprentices of his time, lived in his master’s house, meaning that – as he had at school – he could only retreat to his beloved attic during the holidays. On the positive side, Lambert was often away on business so Chatterton was left alone for long periods, which he could dedicate to his writing. Chatterton also seems to have fallen in with a crowd of young men with similar interests, a fact which no doubt spurred him on towards his goal. The interests of this group, however, also appear to have included heavy drinking and chasing girls.

In September 1768, when Chatterton was in his apprenticeship’s second year, a new bridge over the River Avon opened in Bristol, replacing a picturesque structure built in the reign of Henry II (1154-89). This event inspired Chatterton to send an article – under the penname Dunelmus Bristolienis – to Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal. Chatterton’s piece was centred around ‘a description of the mayor’s first passing over the old bridge’ and Chatterton – or Dunelmus – claimed its content derived from a 15th-century manuscript he’d unearthed. Like his Rowley writings, Chatterton’s article was bursting with a sense of history, civic pride and elaborate pageantry. The article attracted the attention of William Barrett, a surgeon with antiquarian interests. Barrett, who was searching out sources for a book that would be entitled History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol, got in touch with Chatterton.

Chatterton had soon sold Barrett the ‘manuscript’ on which he’d based his article and went on to sell him a number of Rowley works, which masqueraded under such titles as the Bristowe Tragedie or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin (a ballad mourning the death of a Lancastrian knight); Ælla, a Tragycal Enterlude; and the ‘dramatic fragment’ Godwyn. Chatterton also offloaded onto Barrett the works The Tournament; Battle of Hastings; The Parliament of Sprites; and Ballade of Charitie; along with numerous short pieces. In addition, he managed to palm off onto the surgeon Rowley’s Memoirs and the History of Bristol, a document supposedly written by an 11th-century Prior of Durham that Rowley had ‘merely’ revised and corrected. The youthful poet claimed his father had found these manuscripts in a chest in St Mary’s muniments room and that he’d solely performed the service of transcribing the ancient documents to save them from oblivion. The credulous Barrett included these works in his book though it wouldn’t be published until 20 years after Chatterton’s death. Although History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol would be deemed a colossal failure, later judgement has been kind to Chatterton’s efforts, with many viewing them as powerful and (perhaps ironically considering they were forgeries) curiously original writings.

Chatterton’s article about the bridge also caught the interest of two men who ran a pewter business, George Catcott and Henry Burgum. Catcott was enchanted by the Rowley myth and would seek out and pay for works reputed to be from the pen of the 15th-century poet for years after Chatterton had died. For Burgum – a self-made man who’d risen from humble origins – Chatterton devised a fictitious aristocratic pedigree. He claimed to have unearthed a document showing the pewterer’s descent from the ‘de Bergham’ family, whose illustrious ancestry could be traced as far back as the Norman Conquest. Chatterton came up with a ‘de Bergham’ coat of arms, which he emblazoned on a piece of suitably aged parchment – probably a spare sheet from the muniments room – to which he added a written pedigree of noble lineage. Chatterton even enhanced the deception by including a Syrr Johan de Berghamme in one of the Rowley poems, The Tournament. Burgum paid Chatterton five shillings for the parchment – which Chatterton told him had lain undisturbed for centuries in St Mary Redcliffe – but it turned out Burgum wasn’t as naïve as his business partner. Growing suspicious, Burgum checked his alleged ancestry with the College of Heralds and discovered he’d been duped. Chatterton would satirise Burgum – and the five shillings he’d parted with – in a later poem.

We might wonder why Chatterton went to so much effort to pass off the products of his pen as the work of a 15th-century poet rather than claiming them as his own. One reason is that, if he had, he’d have likely been ridiculed for writing in an archaic style. There was also a certain amount of snobbery around at the time with regards to modern literature, with the idea that – especially if such literature included fantastical elements – it was the throwaway output of hack writers simply designed to entertain. Such fluff, it was thought, couldn’t be compared to the great works of the past. Another factor was that few people would have anyway believed a youth like Chatterton could have produced such pieces. Apparently, Chatterton did – on a few occasions – try to claim credit for the Rowley poems, but his assertions were just laughed at as he wasn’t considered intelligent enough to have written them.

During his apprenticeship, however, Chatterton made his first steps out of his medieval fantasy world. In this period, he also wrote modern poems, with his Resignation having attracted belated praise as especially enchanting. He developed his talent for satire too, writing endless pieces mocking the residents of Bristol, including his patrons Catcott, Burgum and Barrett, and the city’s mayor, bishop, dean and other notables. But reflecting on the course his life was taking, Chatterton realised something had to be done. Though triumphant at having gulled his three patrons, the sums he’d extracted from them were too small to make any significant difference to his circumstances. Chatterton knew he’d have to look further in his search for income, sponsorship and any sort of release from his apprenticeship’s drudgery. He’d have to look to London.

A Clash with a Gothic Writer and a Sardonic But Effective Suicide Note

In December 1768 – now aged 17 – Chatterton sent a letter to the London publisher James Dodsley. Chatterton offered Dodsley ‘copies of several ancient poems, and an interlude, perhaps the oldest dramatic piece extant, wrote by one Rowley, a priest in Bristol, who lived in the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV.’ Though he signed the letters with the initials of his pseudonym Dunelmus Bristolienis, he requested that Dodsley’s reply should be sent ‘care of Thomas Chatterton’. He, however, appears to have received no answer. He sent another letter to Dodsley enclosing an extract from Rowley’s tragedy Ælla, but either again got no response or merely words of mild encouragement.

Still determined to find a patron of the calibre of William II Canynges, Chatterton hit on the idea of writing to Horace Walpole (1717-97). Walpole – the 4th Earl of Orford and son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole – was, like Chatterton, obsessed with the Middle Ages. Credited with having written the first gothic novel in English, The Castle of Otranto (1764) – a tale of ghosts, murder and family skulduggery – Walpole also spearheaded a more general gothic revival that would gather velocity in Victorian times. His palatial Twickenham mansion, Strawberry Hill, was built in a fanciful neo-gothic style and even had fireplaces modelled on tombs in Westminster Abbey.

Horace Walpole by Joshua Reynolds, painted 1756-7. For a time, the famous gothic writer corresponded with Thomas Chatterton.

Chatterton was clever in his approach to Walpole. In 1762, Walpole had published his Anecdotes of Painting in England so Chatterton made use of Walpole’s fascination for art. He devised a scenario in which William II Canynges had sent Thomas Rowley off around England to catalogue the country’s paintings. The result of Rowley’s artistic tour was The Rise of Peyncteynge yn Englande, wroten bei T. Rowleie, 1469 for Mastre Canygne. Chatterton posted Walpole this document – along with samples of Rowley’s poetry – and Walpole was intrigued. He eagerly wrote back, praising the poems as ‘wonderful for their harmony and spirit’ and stating, ‘Give me leave to ask you where Rowley’s poems are to be had. I should not be sorry to print them; or at least a specimen of them, if they have never been printed.’

Buoyed by Walpole’s response, Chatterton wasted no time in sending him more examples of Rowley’s craft. Chatterton, however, also made a serious mistake, admitting to Walpole that he was the son of a poor widow and an apprentice clerk, but that he desired a more refined occupation. He hinted that Walpole might help him achieve this and the older man’s suspicions were inflamed. Walpole showed Rowley’s works to some friends – the poets Thomas Gray and William Mason – whose opinion was that they were modern fakes, albeit ones of admirable literary quality.

Literary fraud was a sensitive topic for Walpole. Not only had he been embarrassed by declaring his belief that Ossian was genuine, but he himself had been mocked for producing a hoax. Fearing a modern novel with supernatural elements wouldn’t be taken seriously, he’d disguised his authorship of The Castle of Otranto. The first edition had been anonymously published, with its title page stating it was a translation by ‘William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphirio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St Nicholas at Otranto.’ It was claimed Muralto’s manuscript had been discovered in Naples in 1529 and that this document was in turn based on a much older narrative that dated back to the era of the Crusades. William Marshal was, of course, Walpole and – though he may have been inspired to some degree by Italian legends – the ‘manuscript’ was entirely his own work. The Castle of Otranto proved immensely popular and Walpole felt obliged to add a throat-clearing explanation to the second and third editions, admitting he’d composed the story in ‘an attempt to blend two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern.’ Following this confession, critics turned on the book, dismissing it as lightweight, ridiculous, unsavoury and even immoral.

Horace Walpole’s extravagant neo-gothic mansion Strawberry Hill. (Photo: Chiswick Chap)

With Chatterton’s deception exposed, Walpole wrote back to him coldly. He advised the young poet to remain in the attorney’s office until he ‘should have made a fortune’ and could therefore finance the artistic life he craved. Though Chatterton responded with passionate arguments against Walpole’s assertions that Rowley’s harmonies sounded too modern and that his works were unlikely to have survived since the Middle Ages, it was to no avail. The problem Chatterton now had was getting his manuscripts back as he’d sent Walpole the only copies. He had to badger Walpole three times before the more established writer got round to returning them. In his final letter to Walpole, Chatterton wrote, ‘I think myself injured, sir; and, did you not know my circumstances, you would not dare to treat me thus. I have sent twice for a copy of the M.S.: – No answer from you. An explanation or excuse for your silence would oblige.’ Chatterton also composed an insulting poem about Walpole, which seethed with class animosity. He’d claim the sole reason he didn’t send it was because ‘my sister persuaded me out of it’:

Scorn I will repay with Scorn, & Pride with Pride.

Still Walpole, still, thy Prosy Chapters write

And twaddling Letters to some fair indite,

Laud all above thee, – Fawn and Cringe to those

Who, for thy fame, were better Friends than Foes …

Had I the Gifts of Wealth and Luxury shar’d

Not poor & Mean – Walpole! thou hadst not dared

Thus to insult. But I shall live and stand

By Rowley’s side – when Thou are dead and damned.

Despite Walpole’s rebuff, Chatterton didn’t give up his literary aspirations. The London-based Town and Country Magazine published Rowley’s Elinoure and Juga in June 1769, but Chatterton was now moving towards writing more modern works under his own name and he produced few Rowley pieces in what remained of his life. Around this time, Chatterton’s mentor Thomas Phillips died, depriving him of another father-like figure. In mourning, Chatterton produced three elegies, poems some have seen as foreshadowing Keats’ style:

When golden Autumn, wreathed in riped’d corn,

From purple clusters prest the foamy wine,

Thy genius did his sallow brows adorn,

And made the beauties of the season thine.

Pale rugged Winter bending o’er his tread,

His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew;

His eyes, a dusky light congeal’d and dead,

His robe, a tinge of bright ethereal blue;

His train a motley’d sanguine sable cloud,

He limps along the russet dreary moor;

Whilst rising whirlwinds, blasting keen and loud,

Roll the white surges to the sounding shore.

The diversity of Chatterton’s output at this point – when he still had to labour at his clerk’s desk and dodge his master’s attempts to tear up his work – is astounding. From August to November 1769, he wrote burlesques, burlettas and satires and in December had another piece published in Town and Country Magazine called The Antiquity of Christmas Games, payment for which probably eased the family finances a little. He also produced an Elegy, Written at Stanton Drew bemoaning the fact a ‘Maria’ had rejected him. Chatterton does seem to have been becoming aware of his attractions to the female sex and to have started to take advantage of it – a tendency that would soon be causing him serious problems. With girls and women, he could be blunt. In 1770, he wrote a note to one Esther Saunders arranging to meet ‘in the morning for … we shant be seen a bout 6 a Clock. But we must wait with patient for there is a Time for all Things … There is a time for all things – Except Marriage my Dear. And so your hbl Servt. T. Chatterton, April 9th.’

Despite his deeply religious background, Chatterton was evolving into a free thinker, writing, ‘That God being incomprehensible, it is not required of us to know the mysteries of the Trinity … it matters not whether a man is a pagan, Turk, Jew or Christian if he acts according to the religion he professes … if a man lives a good moral life he is a Christian.’

A certain political radicalism had also entered Chatterton’s thought. He’d become a fan of the radical MP and journalist John Wilkes, who was a supporter of the freedom of the press, freedom of religion and of America’s desire to gain independence from the British Empire. Wilkes was also a libertine, being a member of the notorious Hellfire Club, a group of free-thinking aristocrats that staged riotous parties and blasphemous mock-religious rituals. Wilkes is thought to have been responsible for an outrageous stunt – he released a baboon dressed up with horns during one of the club’s ceremonies and some members were so startled they thought it was the Devil. For Chatterton, Wilkes likely represented the kind of libertarian, progressive patriotism he’d celebrated in his Rowley poems. He soon plunged into the conflict between the more radical party in British politics championed by Wilkes and the conservative faction headed by the Queen, the Duke of Grafton and the Earl of Bute. Chatterton wrote polemics – under a new penname, Decimus – some of which made it into radical publications, including the Middlesex Journal and the April/May 1770 issue of The Freeholder’s Magazine.

Thomas Chatterton’s political hero John Wilkes. As well as being a famous radical MP, he was known as ‘the ugliest man in England’.

These successes must have been exhilarating, but they couldn’t disguise the fact Chatterton was still a desperately poor 17-year-old trapped in an unhappy Bristol apprenticeship. Vowing he’d earn his living by his pen – and knowing that to have even the slimmest chance of doing so he’d have to move to London – he came up with another clever scheme, one that inevitably involved his writerly talents. Having just posted off a political diatribe to the Middlesex Journal, on Easter Saturday 1770 he sat down to write what he termed his Last Will and Testament, a document containing a series of sardonic bequests. Claiming he’d end his life the next evening, he directed that his ‘grammar and prosody’ should be left to his former patron Mr Burgum, his ‘humility’ to one Reverend Mr Camplin,  and his ‘religion’ to Dean Barton. To his home city, he left ‘all his spirit and disinterestedness, parcels of goods unknown on its quay since the days of Canynge and Rowley’ and his ‘debts in the whole not five pounds to the payment of the charitable and generous Chamber of Bristol’.

The will, however, wasn’t completely in jest and did betray much of the angst Chatterton was suffering. A more heartfelt passage commended his friend Michael Clayfield and Chatterton stipulated his mother and sister should be placed under ‘the protection of my friends, if I have any’. When Lambert saw the testament, he seems to have either taken the threat of suicide seriously or used the will as an excuse to get rid of his troublesome charge.

Lambert terminated Chatterton’s apprenticeship and the youth was free to move to London. His friends had a whip-round so he wouldn’t be totally broke when he arrived. By April 26th, Chatterton was in the capital.

London and the Death of Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton began his life in London lodging in Shoreditch, then a disreputable district on the eastern borders of the old City. He stayed at the house of a relative, a Mr Warmsley, and had to share a room with another tenant. His roommate later remarked that Chatterton would spend much of the night writing. Indeed, Chatterton’s first weeks in London were productive. He worked on eclogues, lyrics, operas and satires, as well as firing off political polemics. These political articles appeared in radical magazines though their editors paid him little and sometimes nothing. Nevertheless, intoxicated by his first scraps of London income, he bought presents for his sister and mother, posting them off with optimistic letters describing his new life. And, in a way, things were looking hopeful. The polemics written under his Decimus persona had captured the attention of his hero John Wilkes, who ‘expressed a desire to know the author’. Chatterton had also drawn the admiration of London’s liberal Lord Mayor, William Beckford, who ‘greeted him as politely as a citizen could’.

After nine weeks in Shoreditch, he moved to the neighbourhood of Holborn. Unlike in his former lodgings, he had an attic to himself so could write without worrying about disturbing fellow tenants. This attic may have recalled his old sanctuary at his mother’s house. Perhaps inspired by such memories, he worked over a Rowley poem – the Excelente Balade of Charitie – and sent it to Town and Country Magazine. It was rejected.

The move to Holborn coincided with other problems. Chatterton’s meagre income from his political writing dried up. The government was clamping down on dissent, meaning magazines had become wary of publishing polemics in the style of Decimus. On June 21st, William Beckford died, snuffing out any hopes Chatterton had of help from him, and in July the editor of Freeholder’s Magazine was jailed. Though he had some poems published in Town and Country in June and July – which, with their otherworldliness and grand mythologising, hint at themes Blake and Coleridge would explore – Chatterton was soon struggling to scrape together enough money to eat. A neighbour, Mr Cross – a pharmacist – invited the poet to share his dinner several times, but Chatterton proudly refused.

Things weren’t helped by his landlady, the perhaps ironically named Mrs Angel, raising the rent after what appear to have been some sexual shenanigans. In a letter to his old patron Catcott, Chatterton described how ‘staggering home one night from the Jellyhouse, I made bold to advance my hand under her covered way, and found her a very very woman. She is not only an angel but an arch angel; for finding I had connection with one of her assistants, she has advanced her demands from 6s to 8s 6 per week, assured that I should rather comply than leave my Dulcinea and her soft embraces.’

Chatterton’s problems seem to have tipped him into depression. Walking with a friend through the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church, Chatterton – absorbed in thought – didn’t notice a newly dug grave and tumbled into it. His companion helped him out, joking he was happy to assist in the resurrection of genius. Chatterton told him, ‘My dear friend, I have been at war with the grave for some time now.’ St Pancras Old Churchyard has literary connections – Mary Shelley’s parents were laid to rest there as was Dr John Polidori, the writer of the first vampire novel. During his career as an architect, Thomas Hardy supervised the transfer of thousands of bodies from the graveyard to make way for a railway. Could Chatterton’s topple into the grave have been an attempt by the ancient necropolis to claim another literary occupant?

St Pancras Old Churchyard, where Thomas Chatterton fell into an open grave shortly before his death. The church has several literary connections. (Image courtesy of Kim Fyson)

Chatterton’s situation grew more desperate and he even seems to have been willing to abandon his literary dreams. He wrote to his old patron Barrett asking if he could find him a position as a surgeon on ship, but – as Chatterton had no medical experience – Barrett couldn’t help. On 24th August, Mrs Angel – perhaps repenting of her earlier behaviour – realised that Chatterton ‘had not eaten anything for two or three days’ and begged him to join her for dinner. Chatterton declined, saying he wasn’t hungry, but a local baker claimed that on the same day Chatterton had tried to beg a loaf.

On the night of August 24th, Thomas Chatterton died. He’s widely believed to have committed suicide, tearing up the last poem he’d been working on and throwing the pieces on the floor before gulping down opium followed by arsenic in water. The next day, Chatterton’s room was broken open and his body was discovered in a convulsed state. His pocketbook was found too – receipts in it showed how little the magazines had paid him: a shilling for an article, less than eightpence a song and payment withheld for work accepted but not yet published. An inquest would deem Chatterton had died of arsenic poisoning.

His tragedy was compounded by the fact that – unknown to Chatterton – an Oxford academic, one Dr Fry, had become interested in the Rowley poems. A few days after Chatterton’s death, Fry came to London with the intention of finding the boy and offering him support ‘whether discoverer or author merely’. Upon hearing the sad news, Fry purchased from Mrs Angel the scraps of paper she’d swept up from Chatterton’s attic on the morning of the 25th. The poem he’d ripped up was Rowley’s Ælla  – he’d probably been trying to improve the ending of that tragic interlude. Dr Fry pieced together what he could and the fragments are now kept in Bristol Public Library and Art Gallery.

Chatterton’s death would become immortalised in Romantic lore as the despairing suicide of a precocious genius rejected by an uncaring and philistine world. The praises of later generations of poets and – especially – Wallis’s highly dramatic painting have ensured this notion of Chatterton’s end has stayed wedged in the public consciousness. Chatterton may well have committed suicide: he was desperate, depressed and had – at least half-seriously – contemplated such an act before. But several modern scholars suggest a different explanation for Chatterton’s demise – accidental overdose.

This theory asserts that Chatterton had been taking arsenic to treat venereal disease. Arsenic was, in Chatterton’s era, considered a remedy for such illnesses and the poet’s chemist neighbour, Mr Cross, stated that Chatterton had been undergoing treatment for a sexually transmitted condition (probably gonorrhoea). Chatterton may have confused his dose of arsenic or unwittingly created a lethal cocktail by mixing it with opium, a drug he was known to use.

As befitted his penniless state, Thomas Chatterton was interred in the cemetery of Holborn’s Shoe Lane Workhouse. There’s a story Chatterton’s body was secretly transported to Bristol so his uncle the sexton could bury him in the grounds of his beloved St Mary Redcliffe, but there’s no evidence to support this rumour. A memorial was, however, later erected outside the church, engraved with lines from Chatterton’s poem Will:

Reader! Judge not. If thou art a Christian, believe that he shall be judged by a

Superior power. To that power alone he is now answerable.

A Doomed Romantic? A Martyr to Art? The Peculiar Gothic Afterlife of Thomas Chatterton

As Chatterton was a little-known poet – and because those who did know of him tended to view him as merely a transcriber of Rowley – his death at first attracted little comment. A book appeared in 1777 – Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others, in the Fifteenth Century – edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt, an expert on Chaucer who believed the poems genuinely medieval. The book’s second edition – published the next year – did, however, admit they were probably Chatterton’s own work. Debate, though, about the authenticity of the Rowley poems raged on into the 1800s, a fact which would no doubt have amused their true author. Most scholars would eventually view the poems as ingenious forgeries.

As Chatterton did gain a little fame, one who suffered was his old nemesis Horace Walpole. Walpole spent the last 20 years of his life battling the stain on his reputation caused by the perception that a rich privileged writer had mistreated a tragic, poverty-stricken talent. Walpole did regret his disdain of Chatterton, stating ‘I do not believe there ever existed so masterly a genius.’

The Romantic Poets, however, would seize on Chatterton as a paragon of the doomed, tormented yet brilliant artist. They admired his radical politics, his dogged commitment to his vision and his martyrdom to his muse. Shelley commemorated Chatterton in Adonis, Wordsworth paid him homage in Resolution and Independence, and Coleridge praised him in Monody on the Death of Chatterton. For Wordsworth, Chatterton was ‘the marvellous boy, the sleepless soul that perished in his pride’; for Shelley, he was an inheritor ‘of unfulfilled renown’ scorned by an ungrateful public who ‘hooted him from the stage of life’. Byron contrasted him favourably with Wordsworth and Burns while Keats dedicated his Endymion – beginning with the line ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ – to ‘the memory of Thomas Chatterton’. Keats felt Chatterton was ‘the purest writer in the English language … tis genuine English idiom in English words’ and William Blake proclaimed, ‘I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton that what they say is ancient, is so.’

Chatterton’s posthumous influence was by no means confined to England. The early French Romantic Alfred de Vigny came up with a play – Chatterton – in which the disparaging words of Lord Mayor William Beckford trigger the young man’s suicide. A darker side of Chatterton’s foreshadowing of the Romantic movement could possibly be seen in the early deaths of several of its leading members, but the ages at which the later poets passed on – Keats at 25, Shelley at 29, Byron at 36 – make them seem positively mature compared to Chatterton.

When the Pre-Raphaelites got hold of the Chatterton myth, his immortalisation as a dark-fated genius was complete. Henry Wallis produced his famous picture of Chatterton’s suicide, getting the young novelist and poet George Meredith to pose in the chamber of a lawyer friend in Gray’s Inn, a room whose view of the London skyline was likely similar to the one from Chatterton’s attic. The Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a Chatterton fan, helping prepare an edition of his poems and declaiming, ‘Not to know Chatterton is to be ignorant of the true day-spring of modern Romantic poetry.’ Later writers also found themselves influenced by the weird aura of Chatterton’s work, life and death. Oscar Wilde would campaign unsuccessfully to have a plaque to him put up at Colston’s School.

Thomas Chatterton has left a strange legacy of genius and deception, of tragedy, triumphant fraud and astonishingly precocious achievement. His life – and maybe even more so his death – for a long time shaped perceptions of what it meant to be a poet, a writer, an artist, perceptions that have proved so strong that – even in our cynical age – we have not completely eluded their shadow.

The post Thomas Chatterton – Doomed Poet, Gothic Hero or Cynical Forger? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Intrigued by how the tomb towers over the other grave markers, you might move closer and observe its Neo-Egyptian design. You might suspect this mausoleum has generated legends. Coming closer still, walking up the steps, you’d see the tomb’s huge bronze door bears a band of hieroglyphs. Scarab beetles are prominent – Ancient Egyptian symbols of the defiance of death and time and the embrace of the eternal.

You’d be right to think this mausoleum has become a node of London legend, a focus for urban myths, a nexus of the most incredible folklore. Some believe the tomb contains a working time machine or teleportation device, cobbled together by an eccentric Victorian inventor with the help of an Egyptologist who’d discovered scientific secrets while decoding hieroglyphs on the walls of tombs or carved into sarcophagi.

The tomb is the resting place of Hannah Courtoy – a wealthy London heiress obsessed with Ancient Egypt – and her two spinster daughters. The men responsible for the time machine the Courtoys allegedly share their mausoleum with also lie in Brompton Cemetery. Just a few metres from the Courtoy tomb is the grave of the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi, his headstone carved with a depiction of the jackal-headed god Anubis. And near the graves of Bonomi and Courtoy – in an unmarked plot – lies Samuel Alfred Warner, an idiosyncratic inventor whose ideas for ‘teleporting torpedoes’ so interested the British Navy they allowed him to blow up boats in the English Channel.

The hieroglyph-inscribed door of the Neo-Egyptian Courtoy tomb, Brompton Cemetery, London – note the scarab beetles, symbolising victory over death. (Photo: Peter Trimming)

But what were the connections between Hannah Courtoy, Joseph Bonomi and Samuel Warner? How did Hannah come by the immense wealth needed to build such a spectacular tomb? Could there be any truth in the legend that a time machine lurks in the Courtoy mausoleum? And might Hannah Courtoy, her daughters, Bonomi and Warner still be zipping through time and space today, having cheated aging and death and just occasionally returning to their Brompton Cemetery base?

Keep reading for tales of disagreeable French wigmakers, knife-armed prostitutes, bitterly contested wills, murders undertaken to protect national security, and secret teleportation passages to other London Victorian graveyards and even Paris cemeteries.

Hannah Courtoy’s Tomb in London’s Brompton Cemetery

Brompton Cemetery is one of London’s so-called Magnificent Seven – the ring of large Victorian graveyards built in the countryside on the then-outskirts of the capital to relieve pressure on the rapidly growing city’s gruesomely overcrowded churchyards and burial grounds. Kensal Green Cemetery opened in 1833 while the highly gothic West Norwood Cemetery was accepting burials by 1837. Highgate Cemetery opened in 1839; Abney Park, Nunhead and Brompton Cemeteries were in business by 1840; and Tower Hamlets Cemetery opened in 1841.

Victorian angels in Brompton Cemetery, London. (Photo: Edwardx)

These graveyards – with typical Victorian enthusiasm – were grandly laid out, with vast gates, long tree-shaded avenues, landscaped grounds and elaborate networks of catacombs. Much of the design drew inspiration from ancient civilisations and earlier epochs. Highgate Cemetery boasts an imposing Egyptian-style gate leading into the Egyptian Avenue while the padlocked doors to Brompton Cemetery’s extensive catacombs are emblazoned with the age-old occult symbol of snakes curling around staffs. In both Brompton and Highgate, urns are kept in buildings known as Columbariums, a custom which draws from Roman mortuary practices. Brompton was planned in the form of an enormous outdoor cathedral, in the style of Rome’s St Peter’s Square and Basilica, with its ‘nave’ running from Old Brompton Road towards the central colonnade and chapel. The cemetery was luxuriantly planted with shrubs and trees. Ornate graves and mausoleums – ranging from pseudo-gothic chapels and Arts-and-Crafts faux-medieval reliquaries to Egyptian-style obelisks (symbolic of the sun god Ra) – have added to Brompton Cemetery’s gloomy yet appealing grandeur.

The Main Avenue in Brompton Cemetery, looking towards the chapel. Note the Neo-Egyptian obelisks. (Photo: Russell Trebor)

Those buried at Brompton include the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, John Keats’s muse Fanny Brawne, the founder of the Cunard shipping line Samuel Cunard, and the murdered Victorian actor William Terriss, whose ghost apparently haunts Covent Garden London Underground Station. Beatrix Potter would stroll the cemetery and pick out names from gravestones for her characters – with Peter Rabbett and Mr Nutkins among those chosen. But – out of all the broken pillars and shrouded urns and praying angels and other Victorian memento mori and funerary art – it’s the Courtoy mausoleum that stands out most.

Completed in 1854, the Courtoy tomb is twenty feet tall and made from polished granite. Its bronze door is ornately inscribed with what appear to be Hannah’s initials, H.C. Egyptian hieroglyphs decorate one of its steps and the tops of its walls, as well as a rectangular band on the door. The mausoleum’s crowned with a structure resembling a stepped pyramid and attractive Egyptian designs adorn its cornices. One thing that’s perhaps drawn the attention of psychogeographers and occultists is the fact the tomb stands on its own kind of island, its own circle of ground in the middle of a crossroads. Crossroads in folklore are liminal places, with the intersection of two roads suggestive of a spot where different states or dimensions might meet – life and death, this world and the otherworld, perhaps even different eras. Crossroads were for a long time sites of gibbets and gallows. Suicides were buried at these junctions and magical rituals conducted. Crossroads were even viewed as places where – as in the case of the blues musician Robert Johnson – you could approach the Devil to ask a favour.

The Courtoy Mausoleum – or Victorian time machine – in London’s Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Peter Trimming)

Those with a fondness for the esoteric have also pointed out that – in addition to the hieroglyphs – the tomb bears strange decorations. There are wheel-like motifs at the door’s bottom, which some claim are symbols for – or components of – the time machine. High on the walls, on all four sides of the tomb, are large circular holes. Each of these contain what appears to be a glass orb and each has eight smaller holes in a ring around it. Some say these patterns resemble clocks or dials; others assert the glass spheres are crystals that power the time machine; yet more enthusiasts maintain the holes suck in the sun’s energy or are connected in some way to Bonomi’s explorations of the occult. Many indeed claim Bonomi designed the Courtoy tomb.

Wheel motifs on Brompton Cemetery’s Courtoy tomb – are they components of a time machine? (From a photo by Peter Trimming) 

A mausoleum like this must have cost a huge amount of money and we must ask where Hannah got it from, especially as she started life at a humble level, working as a servant and barmaid. Also, we might wonder exactly how Bonomi and Warner are said to have collaborated with regards to the strange tomb and the weird machine it supposedly contains. Read on and we’ll try to find out.

The Unusual Life and Strange Egyptian Obsessions of Hannah Courtoy

Hannah Courtoy was born Hannah Peters, most sources say in 1784. She left home young, escaping an abusive father, and worked as a housekeeper and in taverns. In 1800, a friend introduced her to John Courtoy, a 70-year-old man in bad health. Of French descent and originally a wigmaker, Courtoy had made an enormous fortune from lending money. He appointed Hannah his housekeeper and a close relationship soon developed between the two. The sources are unclear about what Courtoy’s malady was, but some hint it had been caused by a psychological trauma triggered by a prostitute slashing at him with a knife.

Whatever effect this incident had on Courtoy’s physical health, it appears – at least – to have had a lasting mental impact, making him antisocial and taciturn. He warmed to his young housekeeper, however, and – within a year of entering his employment – Hannah gave birth to the first of what would be three daughters. Hannah always claimed the daughters were John Courtoy’s and she took his name though they never married. Some, however, suspecting Hannah of gold-digging, believed the friend who’d introduced her to Courtoy – one Francis Grosso – had fathered the girls.

Despite managing to get closer to the grumpy Courtoy than anyone else, Hannah still struggled with living with a man who could be profoundly unpleasant. She appears to have escaped into the fascinating world of Ancient Egyptian civilisation and myth, topics which obsessed many Georgians and Victorians. The colonial opening up of Egypt by the British and French and advances in archaeology fuelled these fixations. In 1877-8, the almost-3,500-year-old obelisk Cleopatra’s Needle was shipped to London stand next to the Thames. Plundered objects filled the British Museum while newspapers were full of the exploits of archaeologists and – sometimes – the curses placed upon them by the angry Pharaohs whose tombs they broke into. One particularly outlandish story had a mummy’s screaming ghost haunting not only the British Museum, but also a nearby London Underground Station the spook accessed via a secret tunnel. Another strange episode had an English doctor attempting mummification himself, turning a Manchester heiress into a mummy that ended up exhibited in one of that city’s museums. Egyptian motifs appeared on products as diverse as jewellery and furniture, Egyptian themes invaded operas and novels, and miniature pyramids even popped up in British graveyards to hold the remains of eccentric squires and wealthy professional men. Hannah – like so many of her compatriots – appears to have become more and more engrossed with the mystical society that once flourished on the banks of the Nile.

The gates to the catacombs of Brompton Cemetery, London, decorated with the occult emblem of snakes curling around staffs. Note also the memento mori symbols of downward-facing torches and a winged hourglass. (Photo: Marathon)

As John Courtoy aged and his health further declined, Hannah seems to have gained more influence over him. In 1810, Courtoy made a will leaving most of his fortune to an ex-wife named Mary Anne Woolley and their five children. This will was amended in 1814 to award Hannah the largest share of Courtoy’s assets. When Courtoy died in 1818, both Woolley and Courtoy’s French relatives challenged the amended will, claiming Courtoy had developed dementia and hadn’t been completely in his senses when he’d altered the document. Court battles dragged on until 1827, but by this date Hannah and her daughters had secured most of Courtoy’s wealth.

Hannah, boosted by her inheritance, lived a lavish life, a life that meant she could indulge even more in her ‘Egyptomania’. Indeed, her wealth and status gave her access to some of those most knowledgeable about Ancient Egypt. Diaries kept by a Courtoy servant, Maureen Sayers, show a regular visitor to the house was the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi. Hannah and Bonomi soon struck up a friendship and spent hours discussing Egyptian hieroglyphs, religion, magic and astrology. All this led Hannah to conclude the Egyptians had possessed a deep understanding of the cosmos and its workings. One subject Hannah and Bonomi may have dwelled on was time travel. The Victorians frequently speculated that the Ancient Egyptians had knowledge of this art. H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella The Time Machine, for instance, features the motif of the Sphinx. During their lengthy chats about Egyptian lore, the idea seems to have been raised of Hannah funding one of Bonomi’s expeditions. (Cynics might say this could explain the amount of time Bonomi dedicated to his female disciple). The two also arranged for the construction of a 175-foot monument to the Duke of Wellington, a structure they made sure resembled an Egyptian obelisk.

Hannah Courtoy’s friendship with Bonomi continued as the years passed. Many claim Hannah chose him to design her tomb and its Neo-Egyptian style certainly pays homage to their obsessions. The elaborate mausoleum was, however, not ready when Hannah passed away on 26th January 1849 at 14 Wilton Crescent, Belgravia, one of London’s most exclusive addresses. It would be half-a-decade before Hannah’s body could be moved into its final – though opulent – abode. Two of Hannah’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth – neither of whom married, reputedly because they didn’t want men chasing their money – joined her in the mausoleum, in 1876 and 1895 respectively. Hannah’s other daughter Susannah – who married the barrister Septimus Holmes Godson – is buried elsewhere in Brompton Cemetery.

The Courtoy tomb – rumoured to be a Victorian time machine – in London’s Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Matt Brown)

Mysteriously, no plans of the Courtoy tomb can be found in Brompton Cemetery’s archives: some claim it’s the only tomb for which plans are unavailable. But couldn’t the tomb just be opened so we can know what’s inside? The mausoleum’s key is missing and – as a large key of archaic design would have to be specially made to unlock the tomb – the door cannot simply be opened by a locksmith. Perhaps tellingly, the cemetery authorities seem reluctant to have such a key created. But did Bonomi really design Hannah’s mausoleum? And could the Courtoy tomb really contain a Victorian-Egyptian time machine or teleportation device? To answer such questions, we’ll need to know a little more about the lives of Joseph Bonomi and Samuel Alfred Warner.

Joseph Bonomi the Younger – Did He Deduce the Secrets of Time Travel during His Egyptian Research?

Joseph Bonomi the Younger was born in London in 1796. His father – the unsurprisingly named – Joseph Bonomi the Elder was an Italian immigrant, who grew famous for his skill as an architect and draughtsman and as a designer of country houses. An older brother, Ignatius Bonomi, was also a noted architect.

Joseph the Younger – who would become well-known as a sculptor, artist, Egyptologist and museum curator – began his artistic journey by studying at the Royal Academy. In 1822, he travelled to Rome – his father’s native city – to continue his education there, but after several months found himself in debt. He was rescued by the Scottish antiquarian and Egyptologist Robert Hay, who offered him a modestly paid commission to join an expedition to Egypt. Thus began a lifelong fascination for Bonomi.

Portrait of the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi the Younger, by Matilda Sharpe (1868) – did he discover the secrets of time travel?

In Egypt, he sketched antiquities and temple interiors, even inventing a kind of drawing-frame-cum-viewfinder to record such ancient remains more accurately. Bonomi also produced plaster casts of the reliefs of the famous temples of Kalabsha. After two years with Hay, Bonomi – resentful at his low salary – fell out with him. He stayed in Egypt, however, living in Cairo, where he illustrated the pioneering Egyptologist James Burton’s Excerpta hieroglyphica. His finances restored by such work, Bonomi re-joined Hay in 1832 and – after a couple more years in Egypt – undertook tours of Syria and Palestine. In 1839, he contributed illustrations to Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians by Sir John Gardiner Wilkinson, a man described as ‘the father of British Egyptology’.

Upon his return to England, Bonomi followed his family tradition by branching out into architecture. He co-designed the entrance to Abney Park Cemetery, ensuring the gateway was built in an Egyptian style, complete with hieroglyphs signifying the graveyard was ‘the Abode of the Mortal Part of Man’. Bonomi masterminded the famous Egyptian facade for the Temple Works flax mill in Leeds, which opened in 1841, and in 1850 he designed an ‘Egyptian spring’ at Hartwell House, Buckinghamshire, for the mathematician, antiquarian and numismatist Dr John Lee. Between 1842 and 1844, he even fitted in another tour of Egypt, this time as part of a Prussian expedition.

Abney Park Cemetery’s Neo-Egyptian gateway, designed by Joseph Bonomi the Younger. (Photo: Tarquin Binary)

Bonomi kept up his practice of being an illustrator and was considered one of the most skilled reproducers of hieroglyphs in Britain. He  published books on Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia illustrated with his own drawings and wrote well-received works on obelisks and other Egyptian monuments. He also compiled and illustrated many Egyptian collections, including that of the Egyptologist Samuel Birch, who produced a hieroglyphical grammar and dictionary and translated The Book of the Dead. Along with the architect Owen Jones, Bonomi set up the Egyptian Court in the spectacular Crystal Palace when – after it had housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 – it was rebuilt in Sydenham, South London, in 1854. Bonomi also helped arrange the Egyptian exhibits in the British Museum and became the curator of the Sir John Soames Museum in 1861. Joseph Bonomi the Younger died in March 1878 and was laid to rest in Brompton Cemetery.

The Neo-Egyptian Facade of Temple Works flax mill in Leeds, designed by Joseph Bonomi the Younger. (Photo: Sarah Grice)

So Joseph Bonomi had a profound understanding of hieroglyphs and Ancient Egyptian culture and had worked closely with many of Britain’s leading scholars of Egyptology. He’d also proved himself as a architect of Neo-Egyptian buildings. It’s therefore entirely possible that Hannah Courtoy would have asked him to design her mausoleum and that – as he was close to her – Bonomi would have accepted the job. While we don’t know if this is what took place, those who argue there’s a connection between Bonomi and the Courtoy tomb point to an intriguing detail on Bonomi’s own headstone.

Bonomi’s tombstone is fairly modest, certainly in comparison to the lavish Courtoy mausoleum. At its top are the Christian symbols of a cross and the Greek letters alpha and omega, but further down things get a lot more Egyptian. Towards the stone’s foot is an engraving of the Egyptian deity Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death, mummification, embalming, tombs, cemeteries and the afterlife. There are two intriguing things about the depiction of the deity. One is that the god is facing in the direction of the Courtoy tomb. The other is that Anubis is positioned on some sort of structure or plinth. Some have remarked on this edifice’s similarity to the Courtoy mausoleum. While the dimensions of Anubis’s plinth don’t exactly match the trapezoid shape of the Courtoy tomb, you have to admit – if you allow just a little imagination to colour your thinking – that the resemblance is curious to say the least.

Joseph Bonomi’s gravestone in Brompton Cemetery – note the depiction of the Egyptian god Anubis: is he looking towards the Courtoy tomb? (Photo: Edward Hands)

But what of the more outlandish notion that Bonomi – while deciphering hieroglyphs – stumbled upon the secrets of time travel and helped build a time machine that he hid in the tomb? And if he did make such a bizarre discovery, how might Bonomi have transformed this esoteric knowledge into a practical invention? Bonomi – despite his many talents, deep learning and artistic skill – wouldn’t have had the technical know-how to create such a cutting-edge contraption. In fact, no one in Victorian England would have unless they’d managed to crack some of the most difficult scientific puzzles facing humanity and made a technological leap centuries ahead of their time. One name has been proposed for a man who might just have accomplished such things – Samuel Alfred Warner.

Did Samuel Alfred Warner Invent Brompton Cemetery’s Time Machine?

Samuel Alfred Warner was born in 1793 in Heathfield, East Sussex. His father, William, a carpenter, was rumoured to have a sideline in smuggling. Little is known of Samuel’s early life, but by 1819 he appears to have been working with a London chemist on an explosive. For some time, he served King Pedro I of Brazil and on returning to England managed to capture the interest of King William IV with claims he’d invented secret weapons.

From around 1830, Warner maintained he’d produced two startling innovations. One was what he termed an ‘invisible shell’, a kind of high explosive underwater mine or torpedo ‘no bigger than a duck’s egg’. The other he called the ‘long range’, which, it appears, was a balloon that dropped the ‘invisible shells’ automatically. Warner seems to have attempted an unsuccessful trial of these weapons in collaboration with Charles Green, a pioneering hot air balloonist.

Undeterred, Warner pressed on, conducting a demonstration on an Essex lake that was watched by the prime minister Sir Robert Peel – a demonstration that saw a boat blown up. The government were intrigued and committees were appointed to look into Warner’s inventions. The problem was that, when questioned by the committees, Warner refused to reveal any details of his gizmos until he’d been assured of a payment of £200,000 for each, a staggering sum for the time. Warner – seen by many as a charlatan today – further complicated matters by claiming that during the Napoleonic Wars he’d served under his father on a ship chartered by the British government for espionage purposes and that he’d destroyed two enemy vessels using his inventions. He provided no proof for this narrative, which was marred by anachronisms.

Nevertheless, a further trial of Warner’s devices was arranged, in the English Channel off Brighton in 1844. A substantial crowd watched another ship being destroyed, but officials deemed they couldn’t ascertain what exactly had caused this. Sceptics suspected Warner had attached explosives to an already weakened vessel before the demonstration began. The establishment, however, didn’t lose faith in Warner’s gadgets and in 1852 the House of Lords appointed another committee to examine his claims. After this committee had existed for only one week, though, the Duke of Wellington decided that – as the matter was of military importance – the Ordinance Department should investigate it. The Ordinance Department, however, doesn’t appear to have followed through with any inquiry and official enthusiasm for Warner’s ideas lapsed.

In the early days of December 1853, Warner died in unclear circumstances, leaving a widow and seven children. The fact that he was buried in an unmarked grave indicates he made little – if any – money from his supposedly revolutionary inventions.

So what could connect this offbeat inventor with Joseph Bonomi and Hannah Courtoy and what might link him to the Courtoy tomb and the time machine it allegedly contains? Some say Warner knew or was friends with Bonomi or that for a time the pair were business partners. There’s also the mystery of what exactly Warner’s weapons were capable of. It’s claimed that – as the remote detonation of a bomb would have been impossible with the technology of the era – Warner’s torpedo could have only worked via some kind of teleportation or time slip. This – it’s asserted – Warner achieved thanks to secret knowledge gleaned from hieroglyphs by his friend Bonomi. Funded by Hannah’s fortune, the duo then developed their ideas and constructed a time machine, which they hid in Brompton Cemetery’s Courtoy tomb.

Hannah Courtoy’s Neo-Egyptian tomb in London’s Brompton Cemetery – does it conceal a Victorian time machine? (Photo: Edwardx)

Mythmakers have also seized on the date and unexplained manner of Warner’s death. He died not long after official interest in his theories ended. Might the government have decided his weapons were simply too dangerous to be unleashed on the world or feared them falling under the control of an enemy nation? Could the powers-that-be have therefore murdered Warner to prevent him offering his services to another state or inflicting mass carnage on the planet? Some have even suggested it was Bonomi who bumped Warner off, perhaps out of jealousy or to keep the knowledge of their remarkable invention secret. Others say it isn’t Warner who lies in the unmarked grave – the body in there’s just a decoy and Warner’s actually alive and traversing the aeons in his contraption.

Questions, those fond of a good urban legend assert, do remain. Warner was buried around the time the Courtoy tomb was completed. And Bonomi’s Egyptian-themed headstone was set up not long before Warner’s death. Though Bonomi wouldn’t pass on till many years later, the stone was erected to mark the resting place of four of his children who died of whooping cough in 1852. Might there be more than coincidence here? And why did Hannah’s tomb take so long to finish if there wasn’t some project of great scientific complexity going on? Let’s plunge deeper into this myth and see if we can find any answers to its riddles.

A Teleportation Chamber and the Making of a Surprisingly Modern Myth

It’s been claimed the Courtoy tomb isn’t actually a time machine at all, but rather a teleportation device. This idea was floated most famously in a 2011 blogpost by the London musician Stephen Coates, otherwise known as the Clerkenwell Kid. Coates maintains that teleportation passageways were created to connect the Courtoy mausoleum to tombs with similar designs in London’s other great Victorian graveyards. In fact, all the Magnificent Seven cemeteries were graced with these Neo-Egyptian teleportation buildings. On his blog, Coates provides photos of tombs in Highgate and Kensal Green with resemblances to the Courtoy mausoleum. Another, at Abney Park, is rumoured to have been designed by Bonomi. Coates admits, however, that the ‘teleportation chambers’ in the other cemeteries ‘appear to have entirely vanished’.

A Neo-Egyptian tomb in Kensal Green Cemetery, London – one of Coates’s alleged teleportation chambers. (Photo: Philafrenzy)

The purpose, Coates claims, of all this teleportation malarkey was to create ‘a transportation grid around London to reduce the time taken to travel the large distances of the vast congested metropolis.’ So, then, a kind of precursor to the London Underground was planned using a hieroglyph-derived method of occult propulsion rather than steam or electricity. Some have taken Coates’s theories further, claiming the metaphysical metro even connects to an Egyptian mausoleum in a Paris graveyard – though it’s uncertain whether this Victorian Eurostar links up with Père Lachaise Cemetery or the burial ground in Montmartre. As for Samuel Alfred Warner’s mysterious demise, Coates feels he may have became ‘lost while teleporting’.

As entertaining as Coates’s blogpost is, I suspect that much of the myth of Brompton Cemetery’s ‘time machine’ grew up from articles like it. An influential article seems to have been one published by the international news agency Reuters on 29th October 1998. This piece, written by Helen Smith and likely with an eye on the upcoming festival of Halloween, features quotes from a little-known author called Howard Webster. Webster states that he began researching the Courtoy tomb after being struck by it while visiting Brompton Cemetery for an unrelated project. The article tells us Webster ‘now believes the twenty-foot-tall building was a time machine built by a maverick Victorian genius, Samuel Warner.’ Webster also makes the now familiar claims that Warner was murdered by the government, that he collaborated with Bonomi and that Hannah Courtoy financed their endeavours. In addition, Webster mentions the engraving of Anubis on Bonomi’s headstone, emphasising that the god is looking towards the mausoleum and that the direction the deity faces also ‘suggests in Egyptian mythology a soul lost out of time.’

Smith’s article also quotes a ‘spokesman at Brompton Cemetery’ called James Mackay, who has a somewhat sober take on Webster’s claims. While Mackay admits it’s possible that ‘some of the papyri they (archaeologists at the time) were decoding dealt with time travel’, he thinks that Warner was ‘an ingenious hoaxer who used tricks to blow up ships for his weapons demonstrations and managed to dupe the Courtoy spinsters into believing he could build them a time machine.’ Mackay does, however, acknowledge that if Warner did believe he was constructing such a device ‘his choice of a cemetery was a shrewd and appropriate one … it was one of the few places where one could work unobserved and where even the most eccentric structures could be explained away.’ Mackay points out that ‘a cemetery where the wealthy and famous are buried is also a location that one could say with great certainty is unlikely to be the subject of redevelopment over time.’ Just like the Egyptian tombs Bonomi imitated, these ‘structures could remain intact over centuries’.

A Victorian gothic mausoleum in London’s Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Edwardx)

Adding to the mystery, the Reuters article claims ‘there is almost no trace of the Courtoy spinsters. They left no will or other record of their existence, even though the size and opulence of their tomb suggests they were wealthy and influential.’ The article also states the Courtoy mausoleum is the only one in Brompton Cemetery for which no plans can be found, with Mackay remarking ‘the biggest mystery is that you couldn’t build anything in the cemetery without plans and there are no plans’. In addition, Smith’s piece stresses that ‘there is no surviving key’ and that the tomb’s ‘huge bronze door … has not been opened for more than 120 years.’ It also has Webster raising the possibility that ‘Warner’s is not the body in the unmarked grave … I like to believe … he is still alive and travelling through time in his machine.’

I’d suggest this article is the genesis of Brompton Cemetery’s time machine myth. Most of the legend’s central ideas seem to have been arrived at by Webster in his ‘research’. Smith does feature the ‘cemetery spokesman’ Mackay, but it’s not clear from the article if he’s just responding to Webster’s notions or referencing more established folklore. One point he does make, however, is wrong – the Courtoy tomb isn’t the only one in Brompton Cemetery missing its plans. Blueprints are unobtainable for a number of major mausoleums. Likewise, it isn’t in any way exceptional for the keys of old tombs to be lost. The article’s assertion that the Courtoy’s left no will is also incorrect – Hannah Courtoy’s will can be found in the National Archives and is even available online. And I haven’t been able to find any trace of the writer Howard Webster anywhere else despite a thorough trawl through the internet. It’s my suspicion that Webster, an obscure author – having seen the unusual tomb and discovered that a famous Egyptologist and erratic inventor were buried nearby – concocted most of the, admittedly impressive, legend during the 1990s. Popularised by Smith’s widely read article, the myth become a piece of accepted London folklore and others over the years embellished it.

Many of these embellishments, while quaintly fascinating, can also be discounted. The idea that the circular motifs carved into the door’s bottom are components of the time machine is highly questionable. Such indentations are common in Victorian mausoleums – a means of allowing any foul vapours to escape the tomb, thereby preventing gases building up to dangerous levels. As for the ‘crystals’ and ‘dials’ set in the stone near the top, the glass could simply be decoration and the smaller holes also openings through which the fumes of decomposition could disperse.

The ‘missing key’ may have been lost as late as 1980 – some suggest during a visit by Hannah’s descendants though it’s unclear whether they went inside the tomb. The reluctance of the cemetery to replace it is probably down to the fact that having such an implement forged by an expert artisan would be quite an expense, especially for a graveyard full of ancient and precious monuments that must be maintained. The exterior of the Courtoy Mausoleum was, however, repaired in 2009 as frost-cracked chunks of granite had started dropping off the sides.

The Arts-and-Crafts tomb of Frederick Richards Leyland, in the style of a medieval reliquary, Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Edwardx)

Fresh attention was focused on the Courtoy tomb and its legend when the mausoleum featured on the cover of a 2003 album by the Scottish Musician Drew Mulholland, who records as Mount Vernon Astral Temple. The cover of the album – entitled Musick that Destroys Itself  – shows an spooky vortex radiating from the tomb’s entrance. Stephen Coates’s popular blogpost then added more to the myth. Interestingly, in his post, Coates suggests the Courtoy tomb inspired Dr Who’s Tardis – an intriguing idea for which there’s, unfortunately, no proof. For anyone, however, looking at the tomb and knowing its legends, the realisation it resembles some stone-walled Tardis must inevitably spring to mind. As for his concept of the seven Victorian-Egyptian teleportation chambers, Coates – while admitting he ‘came up with the whole teleportation system as the background to a short story’ – prefers to characterise his idea as an ‘alternative theory based on historical fact’. Maybe there’s just something about creepy Victorian graveyards and their tendency to generate weird folklore – it’s been rumoured, for instance, that vampires have lurked in both Highgate Cemetery and Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis.

Enthusiasm for Brompton Cemetery’s myth shows no sign of abating. For those with an inclination towards the gothic, the cemetery runs moonlight tours, which inevitably stop at the tomb-cum-time-machine. Storytelling sessions have also been organised at the graveyard, by Coates and the storyteller Vanessa Woolf. The money raised will go towards the funding of a key by which the mausoleum could be opened as well as contributing to renovation efforts in the cemetery. The first event took place in 2015 and, Woolf says, ‘We were absolutely overwhelmed with bookings.’

‘There’s a huge interest in the story in London,’ Woolf told the website Mental Floss. ‘This is a story rooted in the secret, in the occult, but no one is quite sure what actually happened.’

But what if a new key could be fabricated? Woolf said, ‘It’s much nicer in a way not having it. It’s all really in the minds of the audience. It’s a slab of rock. The real magic is in their minds.’

Coates, while eager to get a look inside the tomb, still feels that ‘opening it may not establish it’s not a time machine. It may just deepen the mystery.’ He indeed suspects – even if the tomb’s interior proves to be that of an ordinary mausoleum – the really interesting stuff might be concealed in a secret subterranean chamber. Getting access to that would be the next step.

(This article’s main image – of the Neo-Egyptian Courtoy tomb in London’s Brompton Cemetery – is courtesy of Edwardx.)

The post Brompton Cemetery’s Time Machine – a Victorian Contraption Hidden in a London Tomb? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Above a bronze fountain, the naked Eros teeters gracefully, almost overbalancing but not quite. This god of carnal and romantic love, both bawdy and beautiful, is perhaps a suitable deity to hover over the West End with its numerous distractions and entertainments, pleasures and indulgences, and ephemeral crowds seeking sometimes innocent amusements, but also sometimes darker and more destructive goals.

But why, you might wonder, is a Greek divinity poised in such a place? The statue has a strange and controversial history, a history involving opium wars, heroin addiction, enormous levels of prostitution, naughty World War II servicemen, temperamental fugitive sculptors, puns and ribald word plays, earnest Victorian philanthropists, and outraged calls for Eros to be removed and melted down.

But what if I were to tell you that – contrary to popular belief – Piccadilly Circus’s Eros statue isn’t of Eros at all? It was originally intended to be his brother, Anteros. There is, admittedly, a family resemblance – both are lithe, winged, bow-and-arrow wielding gods with a penchant for nudity.

But while Eros’s fiery arrow creates intense lust and obsessive romantic love; the love inspired by Anteros’s missile is of a more sober, respectable kind – a love for one’s fellow humans and deep concern for their welfare. Anteros shuns self-centred sexual urges and all-consuming crushes and instead encourages us to take a broader view, inspiring us with a disinterested and level-headed benevolence.

Indeed, Piccadilly’s Anteros monument is officially known as the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain. It was built to commemorate Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the Seventh Earl of Shaftsbury (1801-1885), a Tory politician, committed evangelical Christian and social activist. During his long career, Shaftsbury fought to improve the lives of child labourers and the inmates of insane asylums, as well as campaigning against Britain’s involvement in the opium trade. Some of Lord Shaftesbury’s admirers – disapproving of the pagan background of Anteros – even insisted the sculpture be renamed The Angel of Christian Charity.

Eros at Piccadilly Circus (Photo courtesy of Benh Lieu Song)

It’s the thesis of this blogpost that the statue in Piccadilly Circus has proved an ambiguous and ambivalent deity, presiding over – on the one hand – lust, debauchery and pleasure seeking, and – on the other – zealous attempts at urban improvement and moral reform. Under Eros’s – or Anteros’s – raised bow and archer’s gaze, all kinds of things have transpired.

But who exactly was Eros? Who was Anteros? Who was Lord Shaftesbury? Who sculpted Piccadilly Circus’s controversial statue and why has it been so infamous? How has ‘Eros’ survived bombing raids, urban upheavals, vandalism and repeated attempts to remove him from his exalted post? Read on and we’ll find out.

Eros – the Greek God of Sex and Love

Eros was the Greek God of romantic love and sexuality. His Roman equivalent was Cupid and he’s lingered on through Christian and modern times as the type of arrow-armed cherub seen on Valentine’s cards. Eros’s name comes from the Greek ἔραμαι, meaning to desire or love.

In later Greek sources, Eros is the son of the love goddess Aphrodite. A mischievous character, his meddling in the affairs of gods and mortals causes them to fall passionately in love with often unsuitable individuals. Unlike the plump Cupids of Renaissance art and modern iconography, though, the Greeks depicted Eros as an athletic young male, brimming with sexual vigour.

The Roman philosopher and dramatist Seneca wrote of Eros: ‘He smites maids’ breasts with unknown heat, and bids the very gods leave heaven and dwell on earth in borrowed forms.’ A Greek epic of the 3rd century BC has the goddess Hera telling Athena: ‘We must have a word with Aphrodite. Let us go together and ask her to persuade her boy, if that is possible, to loose an arrow at Aeetes’ daughter, Medea of the many spells, and make her fall in love with Jason.’

The god Eros (Image courtesy of Miguel Hermoso Cuesta)

Another epic – this time from the 5th century AD – states, ‘Eros drove Dionysus mad for the girl with the delicious wound of his arrow, then curving his wings flew lightly to Olympus. And the god roamed over the hills scourged with a greater fire.’

According to the Roman poet Ovid, not even Eros’s mum was immune to his potent arrows: ‘Once, when Venus’s son was kissing her, his quiver dangling down, a jutting arrow, unbeknown, had grazed her breast. She pushed the boy away. In fact, the wound was deeper than it seemed, though unperceived at first. (And she became) enraptured by the beauty of a man (Adonis).’

In addition to roguishly triggering love and lust, Eros had other functions. Some saw him as a god of liberty and friendship and warriors from Sparta and Crete offered him sacrifices before battle in the hope he’d protect them and ensure victory. Eros seems to have – somewhat fittingly – been worshipped by a fertility cult in late antiquity and to have been a popular object of veneration, along with his mother Aphrodite, in Athens. The fourth day of every month was dedicated to him.

Eros was a member of the Erotes, a group of winged male deities frequently linked with love between men. He also formed part of a triad – along with the god Hermes and divine hero Heracles – that granted gay lovers characteristics such as beauty, loyalty, eloquence and strength.

Some saw Eros as a very ancient god. In his Theogony (one of the oldest of Greek sources), Hesiod states that Eros was the fourth god to appear, being preceded into existence only by Chaos, the earth goddess Gaia, and Tartarus (the abyss). The philosopher Parmenides believed Eros was the first of all gods to manifest. Participants in the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries viewed Eros as an extremely early god, claiming he was the son of Night:

‘Black-winged night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love (Eros) with his glittering golden wings, swift as whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light.’

Eros about to plunge his arrow into a helpless victim. ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ (1602-3) by Giovanni Baglione

But, despite his many legends and capabilities, Eros is chiefly remembered as a love god. Interestingly, a Greek and Roman folktale – Eros and Psyche – has Eros getting a taste of his own arrows. Psyche – though just a mortal woman – was so stunning she caused men to leave off the worship of Aphrodite as they all rushed to pay devotions to her. The jealous goddess sent Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest being in the world, but Eros was instead smitten with her himself. The pair endured separation and heartache as they dealt with the meddling of Psyche’s envious sisters and a series of impossible tasks Aphrodite set the mortal beauty to see if she was worthy of her son.

Psyche managed to complete the challenges and was granted immortality. With Eros, she had a daughter – named either Voluptus or Hedone (meaning physical pleasure or bliss). On winning immortality, Psyche seems to have acquired butterfly wings. She symbolised the human soul and her name meant ‘butterfly’ in Ancient Greek.

So Who Was Anteros?

Eros’s brother Anteros was quite a different entity. He symbolised a calmer, requited love rather than the burning, passionate love represented by his sibling. Eros’s mother Aphrodite and father Ares produced Anteros as a playmate for Eros, who was lonely. He thus represents the idea that, to be healthy, love must be reciprocated by another. The name Anteros means ‘love returned’ or ‘counter love’.

In appearance, Anteros is similar to Eros, being a bow-and-arrow-clutching winged youth. Hence, the confusion of the two at Piccadilly Circus. Anteros, however, is usually depicted with butterfly wings whilst Eros’s are of the feathered type and Anteros’s hair tends to be longer. Anteros is also one of the Erotes.

The statue of Anteros fires his invisible arrow in Piccadilly Circus. (Photo: Lisa)

Plato believed Anteros represented the sensation of being filled with love for another. Divine love then fills the soul of the beloved in return and this results in the love being reciprocated. The Platonic idea, however, depicts this love as friendship rather than the carnal love of Eros.

Anteros did, though, have a more sinister side. He avenged unrequited love, penalising people who rejected the advances of those who adored them. A story tells of an altar put up to Anteros in Athens as a memorial to a Metic (or foreigner) named Timagoras by his fellow Metics. Timagoras had fallen for an Athenian called Meles. Upon hearing of Timagoras’s love, Meles jokingly commanded him to leap off a huge rock, which Timagoras did. On seeing his admirer’s dead body, Meles leaped from the rock too.

Who Was Lord Shaftesbury?

It might at first seem strange that a fountain topped by a naked pagan god should be dedicated to Lord Shaftesbury, a sternly moral, fundamentalist Christian who sought to right a great deal of what he saw as abuses in the world. But an examination of his life might lead us to see why such a statue ended up being erected in his honour. It’s all, in its own strange way, to do with love.

Born in London in 1801, Anthony Ashley-Cooper was educated at Manor House School in Chiswick before spending three years at Harrow and going on to Oxford University. The childhood of Lord Ashley – as he was known until his father died and he inherited his title – seems to have been arid and loveless, a circumstance apparently common among the British upper classes at that time.

Lord Shaftesbury in 1877 – but how did this austere Christian inspire Piccadilly Circus’s Eros statue?

The biographer of Ashley, G.F.A Best, wrote, ‘He saw little of his parents and when duty or necessity compelled them to take notice of him, they were formal and frightening.’ Ashley never liked his father and often described his mother as ‘a devil’.

A source of light in these gloomy early years came from the family housekeeper, Maria Millis. The affection she gave him and her hands-on Christian faith made a deep impression on Ashley. Best states, ‘What did touch him was the reality, and homely practicality, of the love which her Christianity made her feel towards the unhappy child. She told him Bible stories; she taught him prayer.’ Ashley also seems to have had a positive relationship with his sisters.

Ashley’s misery, however, continued at school. Manor House, apparently, contained ‘a disgusting range of horrors … The place was bad, wicked, filthy; and the treatment was starvation and cruelty.’ During his teenage years, Ashley’s Christian faith deepened and two experiences during this time seem to have shaped his later preoccupations. A pauper’s funeral once passed him at the bottom of Harrow Hill: ‘The drunken pall bearers, stumbling along with a crudely made coffin and shouting snatches of bawdy songs, brought home to him the existence of a whole empire of callousness which put his own childhood miseries in context.’

To the young Ashley, then, the world seemed a cruel, vulgar, uncaring, filthy place. But his second profound experience at school suggested ways existed by which it might be improved. A pond in Harrow School’s grounds was notorious as a breeding place of mosquitos. When asked to write a Latin poem, Ashley chose the pond as his topic, hoping to make the school authorities take notice of the festering pool. He succeeded – the pond was inspected then filled in.

So Ashley began to feel a zeal for social reform. Though a patriarchal Tory who felt the middle and lower orders should know their place, he did seem to genuinely care for the plight of the wretched and disadvantaged. In terms of religion, he was a pre-millennial evangelical Anglican – meaning he believed Christ would return soon, a factor that gave his activism an urgency.

In 1826, Ashley became a Tory MP, representing Woodstock – what was known as a ‘pocket’ or ‘rotten’ borough. (A constituency with a tiny population, which the local Lord made sure would vote for his chosen candidate) Though Ashley’s principals didn’t seem to get in the way of his accepting such a corrupt appointment, he did use his position in Parliament to campaign against what he considered society’s worst abuses.

One of the first causes Ashley got involved with was the reform of Lunatic Asylums (as they were then called). During a visit to such an institution in Bethnal Green, Ashley found patients sleeping chained up and naked on beds of straw. They had to perform their bodily functions in their beds and on the weekends, these beds weren’t cleaned out. On Mondays, the patients were washed down with freezing water. 160 people had to share a towel and there was no soap. Throughout his political career, Shaftesbury campaigned to improve such conditions, backing a number of parliamentary bills. Shaftesbury wrote, ‘Beyond the circle of my own Commissioners and the lunatics that I visit, not a soul, in great or small life, not even my associates in my works of philanthropy, has any notion of the years of toil and care that under God, I have bestowed on this melancholy and awful question.’

Another of Ashley’s causes was the condition of the child labourers who toiled in Britain’s rapidly expanding industrial system. He campaigned to ensure under-18s weren’t expected to work more than 10 hours a day, introducing the Ten Hour Act in 1833. Though he had some success in reducing working hours, his goal was not achieved until 1847. A Lancashire-based campaigner for the Ten Hour Act wrote, ‘If there was one man more devoted to the interests of the factory people than another it was Lord Ashley. They might always rely on him as a ready, steadfast and willing friend.’

Ashley successfully opposed the employment of women and children underground in coal mines, a campaign resulting in the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842. Children as young as five had jobs beneath the surface; slightly older children and women pushed and hauled heavy carts of coal during gruelling 12-hour shifts. The shocking fact that these women sometimes worked bare-breasted and – possibly worse – even wore trousers was a key factor in getting an outraged Victorian public onside and the act through Parliament.

Ashley was also a champion of young chimney sweeps. These ‘climbing boys’ – some of whom had been sold by their parents – had to clamber up filthy narrow flues. They suffered burns and skin lacerations; their noses and throats filled up with soot; and they worked under the constant risk of suffocation. The boys often ended up crippled and notoriously prone to a disease associated with their occupation – cancer of the scrotum. Ashley vigorously supported a bill in 1840 aimed at outlawing the employment of these boy chimney sweeps, but it wouldn’t be until 1875 that he succeeded in getting an enforceable act passed. Ashley personally rescued a young sweep he found living behind his London house in miserable conditions and sent him to school to ‘be trained in the knowledge and love and faith of our common saviour.’

A chimney sweep with a tiny ‘climbing boy’.

Another issue Ashley plunged into was the debate that raged around opium. In 1880, Lord Shaftesbury (he acquired his title after his father’s 1851 death) became the president of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, which had been formed by Quaker businessmen in 1874. This ‘trade’ basically consisted of the British pressuring Indian farmers to grow opium, which was then sold at auction with the understanding that those who bought it would smuggle it into China. The problem was that the British bought large quantities of Chinese tea, but the British Empire didn’t create any products China needed, except silver, a fact which threatened a shortage of that metal. The solution to righting the trade deficit – as the British Empire saw it – was to bully China into taking imports of Indian opium. Heavy taxes on Indian opium farmers boosted the finances of the British East India Company while opium smuggling is thought at one point to have accounted for 15% to 20% of the British Empire’s revenue. ‘Opium Wars’ were fought in 1840 and 1857 to make the Chinese accept opium imports.

All this caused tortures of conscience for the morally minded. It’s estimated that by the early 1900s, over a quarter of Chinese men were regular users of opium or addicts and China’s own opium production boomed in response to this demand. It also disturbed the likes of Lord Shaftesbury that many Chinese associated Christianity with opium as some early missionaries had arrived on opium ships.

Some felt Britain itself was threatened by the worldwide opium explosion. Lurid newspaper reports had whites lured into East London opium dens run by Chinese immigrants. Novels – like The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens – dwelled on the seedy nature of opium smoking. Such fears were, however, exaggerated – there were plenty of British opium addicts, but they tended to take the substance in ‘medicinal’ concoctions such as laudanum. Lord Shaftesbury’s successor as president of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, Sir Joseph Pease, unsuccessfully tried to pass a motion in the House of Commons in 1891 calling the trade ‘morally indefensible’ and insisting government support for it be withdrawn. Pease’s motion wasn’t adopted until 1906 and the opium trade between India and China didn’t end until 1913.

‘The Asian Vice’ by Henri Vollet, inspired by common anxieties about whites being corrupted in Chinese-run opium dens

Lord Shaftesbury died on 1st October 1885 at the age of 84. His funeral service took place in Westminster Abbey and many poor people lined his coffin’s route, including costermongers, boot blacks, crossing sweepers, factory workers and flower girls, with many waiting hours to see the cortege pass. Though Lord Shaftesbury had been an upholder of the system that had ultimately caused the oppression of such people, he seems to have genuinely done the best he could to reform its grimmest aspects. Such concerns led to Shaftesbury being termed ‘the poor man’s earl’.

A biographer of Lord Shaftesbury, Georgina Battiscombe, stated, ‘No man has in fact ever done more to lessen the extent of human misery or to add to the sum total of human happiness.’ According to the influential Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, Shaftesbury was ‘the best man of the age … far above all the other servants of God in my knowledge … a man most true in his personal piety … fulfilling both the first and second commandments of the law in fervent love to God and hearty love to man.’

So how did this serious, intense, deeply Christian aristocrat come to be commemorated by what – however mistakenly – many consider to be a statue symbolising fleshy love and romantic lust? Let’s find out in the next section.

Eros Is Erected at Piccadilly Circus – Outrage, Theft and Sculptors Fleeing the Law

Not long after Lord Shaftesbury’s death, people began to discuss the possibility of a memorial. Such was Shaftesbury’s popularity, the idea quickly caught on and – less than a year after the Earl had passed away – the sculptor Alfred Gilbert was commissioned to devise a fitting tribute.

Though the memorial was commissioned swiftly, the creation of ‘Eros’ would prove a lengthy process. Gilbert seems to have considered the duty of commemorating the great man such a weighty one it would take him five years even to come up with a concept.

He finally hit on the notion of a bronze fountain, ornately decorated with nautical themes. The fountain – no doubt reflecting Shaftesbury’s concern for the public good – would be of the drinking variety. The bronze base would support a spectacular dome of water upon which a god would majestically float.

This stately deity, Gilbert explained, would be Anteros and the fountain would be named The God of Selfless Love, thereby honouring Shaftesbury’s lifelong philanthropy. Gilbert felt Anteros symbolised ‘reflective and mature love, as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant.’

The model Gilbert chose to pose as the winged youth was his own studio assistant, a 16-year-old Anglo-Italian called Angelo Colarossi. Angelo – who, as an imitator of a wing-sporting divinity, was perhaps appropriately named – also served as a model, along with his father, for the apocalyptic 1892 painting by Frederick, Lord Leighton And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were In It.

‘And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were In It’ (1892) by Frederick, Lord Leighton. The boy also modelled for ‘Eros’.

Though the fountain itself is bronze, Anteros was cast from aluminium. Today the two metals form an interesting contrast, with the algae-like green of weathered bronze juxtaposed with the hardy aluminium’s seemingly immortal shine. ‘Eros’ was the first statue cast from aluminium in the world, with the honours being performed by George Broad and Son at the Hammersmith Foundry. Using aluminium was a vital factor in the execution of Gilbert’s grand plan – its lightness enabled ‘Eros’ to balance in his balletic posture.

‘Eros’ proved immediately controversial. Even his sculptor had been tormented by doubts, especially with regards to the monument’s location. Gilbert felt Piccadilly Circus – a cramped, strangely-shaped space in the middle of a congested confluence of roads – was  ‘an impossible site, in short, on which to place any outcome of the human brain, except possibly an underground lavatory!’

The Duke of Westminster unveiled the statue on 29th June 1893 and the complaints began straight away. Prudish Victorians were shocked by Anteros’s nudity. The sculpture isn’t totally naked – a wind-billowed bit of fabric covers what my grandmother used to refer to as ‘the possible’ – but enough of Anteros was revealed to be considered disturbing. Many simply felt the statue was too sensual a memorial for the exceedingly respectable Shaftesbury.

The location of ‘Eros’ also drew much criticism though not for the spatial and artistic problems Gilbert had griped about. Piccadilly – in the epicentre of the West End with its theatres and bars – was seen as too frivolous a setting for a monument to such an earnest man. Far worse, the neighbourhood was associated with loose and rowdy conduct and – even worse than that – with prostitution.

Anteros – often mistaken for his brother Eros – on the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, Piccadilly Circus, London. (Photo courtesy of Colin Smith)

To mollify these moral objections, the statue was renamed The Angel of Christian Charity, giving a more Christian slant to the ideal of love Anteros represented. But the statue’s new name never stuck and few have ever referred to the artwork as Anteros. Perhaps – as we shall see – appropriately for its location, the figure has always been known as Eros to Londoners.

Not everybody, though, disliked the new monument. The Magazine of Art praised Eros as ‘a striking contrast to the dull ugliness of the generality of our street sculpture, a work which, while beautifying one of our hitherto desolate open spaces, should do much towards the elevation of public taste … and serve freedom for the metropolis from any further additions to the old order of monumental monstrosities.’

Despite such encouragement, the memorial’s early life didn’t go well. The fountain’s base proved too small, meaning water splashed around it, muddying the space surrounding the monument. Gilbert had – in the generous spirit of Lord Shaftesbury – chained cups to the fountain for people to drink out of. The cups were soon stolen. And the memorial was a target of so much vandalism that London County Council had to pay a keeper just to watch over it.

As for Gilbert, his work on ‘Eros’ – rather than earning him money – plummeted him into debt. While he received £3,000 for creating the monument, it actually cost him £7,000 to make, with the structure’s elaborate base accounting for most of the excess. Anxious to escape his creditors, Gilbert fled the country and ended up living in Belgium for 25 years. Perhaps even more traumatically, he doubted his own artwork. Feeling his fountain was an insufficient memorial to Shaftesbury’s greatness, he argued the whole thing should be melted down, with the metal being sold off and the money used to build homeless shelters.

Alfred Gilbert – who took on the ill-fated commission to create the ‘Eros’ statue at Piccadilly Circus, London

But whatever the sentiments of Gilbert – and the statue’s many critics – Eros stayed. He’s become a tutelary deity of the busy, hedonistic West End, floating over its throngs of romantics and pleasure seekers, ready to loose an invisible arrow who knows where. But still, the spirit of his more sober brother – and, by extension, the ghost of the sober Lord Shaftesbury – are there too, urging restraint, reform and ‘moral improvement’. Let’s see how the competing divinities of Eros and Anteros – strangely embodied in the same statue – have spread their contradictory influences around Piccadilly.

Eros or Anteros – Which Deity Presides over Piccadilly Circus?

Piccadilly Circus was created in 1819 to link Regent Street with the thoroughfare of Piccadilly. This street was named after Piccadilly Hall, a house first mentioned in a source of 1626. The word ‘Piccadilly’ comes from the fact the house was owned by one Robert Baker, a tailor well-known for his piccadills or piccadillies – terms used for various collars and ruffs. ‘Circus’ comes from the Latin word for ‘circle’, referring to the layout the road junction once had. Piccadilly Circus was, though, first known as Regent Circus South. It didn’t gain the title ‘Piccadilly Circus’ until the mid-1880s, when Shaftesbury Avenue – named after the charitable Lord – was constructed and linked to it. Ironically, these very alternations caused Piccadilly Circus to lose its rotund shape.

Eros at Piccadilly Circus, in the days before neon adverts and motorised transport

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Eros and Anteros have competed for mastery over Piccadilly Circus. Control of this axis – which, though slightly awkward, the capital still manages to rotate around – could be seen as quite a prize. There’s a sense that Piccadilly Circus is somehow the centre of all things, that all roads meet there, that it’s the hub of London, of England, and was even – in colonial days – the nexus of the whole British Empire.

The Baedeker Guide to London (maybe already plumping in Eros’s favour) declared it as ‘for the pleasure seeker, the centre of London’. The phrase ‘it’s like Piccadilly Circus’ is a well-known expression to describe anywhere bustling and crowded. A 1930s guidebook characterised the Circus as ‘a centre of gaiety … where thousands and thousands of people and almost as many cars struggle in vain for freedom.’ The pioneering nuclear physicist Lord Rutherford, in 1932, compared the journey of a neutron into the nucleus of an atom as ‘like an invisible man passing through Piccadilly Circus. His path can be traced only by the people he has pushed aside.’ In Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), a character from Trinidad feels the ‘Circus have magnet for him, that Circus represent Life, that Circus is the beginning and ending of the world.’

It might even be said Piccadilly Circus is a symbolic focal point of the global capitalist system, with the famously gaudy lights of advertisements curving around the building opposite Eros. The first illuminated ad – made up of incandescent light bulbs – was for Perrier water in 1908. Such incandescent arrangements were replaced with neon signs, some of which – such as a large Guinness clock – boasted moving parts. A Coca-Cola sign was up by 1954, and Coke has remained a presence at the Circus ever since. Other brands to have twinkled over Eros include Bovril, Nescafe, Foster’s, McDonald’s and Samsung. The neon lights were eventually replaced with digital projections then LED displays, but Piccadilly’s flashing commerciality has long given the impression the Circus is a pivot around which the world’s economic hubbub revolves.

Early illuminations at Piccadilly Circus

So which deity does, in fact, preside over this vital interchange, this emblematic centre? Let’s dig back into (fairly) recent history and try to make up our minds.

The Case for Eros

Much of the bustle and business around the ‘Eros’ statue has long been associated with the satisfaction of lusts so we could say it’s fitting that this deity teeters above the West End. Dostoyevsky visited London in 1862 and wrote of the neighbourhood: ‘At night, prostitutes crowd several streets in this quarter by the thousands … here are sparkling expensive clothes and near rags and extreme differences in age all gathered together’ as well as ‘mothers who were bringing their young daughters into the business. Little girls around 12-years-of-age take you by the hand and ask you to go with them.’ In the 1830s, it was estimated that London contained 80,000 prostitutes, of which 8,000 would die each year. By the mid-19th century, around £8 million per year was thought to be spent on prostitution in the capital, equivalent to over £1 billion in modern money.

‘Every ten yards,’ a German visitor wrote, ‘one is beset, even by children of 12-years-old, who by the manner of their address save one the trouble of asking whether they know what they want. They attach themselves to you like limpets … often they seize hold of you after a fashion of which I can give you the best notion by the fact that I say nothing about it.’

Eros at Piccadilly Circus, probably in the 1930s

Prostitution was common in many parts of Central London, with the streets around Covent Garden and the Strand well-known for this activity. Piccadilly, though, seems to have served as a symbolic central point, a emblematic vortex of this trade. Around the turn of the 20th century, the American novelist Theodore Dreiser wrote of the capital’s prostitutes: ‘There were regular places they haunted … Piccadilly being the best.’ By this time, of course, Eros had been erected to watch over Piccadilly’s fleshy pursuits.

Eros’s influence was evident during World War I. Soldiers returning from the front meant the sex industry in the area boomed. The newspaper Weekly Dispatch mentioned one young officer who – when walking to Piccadilly Circus down Regent Street – was propositioned 16 times, including by teenagers and children. Levels of prostitution remained high between the wars, with pimps, prostitutes and their clients frequenting the bars and restaurants around Piccadilly Circus. Not that such habits were new – in 1896, the Trocadero restaurant had a policy that ‘if a lady alone should gain admittance she must immediately be surrounded by screens.’

World War II, unsurprisingly, led to another boost in behaviour that would have had Lord Shaftesbury’s eyebrows shooting up. Though the Eros statue was removed at the War’s outbreak to protect it from damage, it seems the god’s spirit still imbued Piccadilly. London was full of servicemen – including the, by local standards, well-paid American GIs – and this caused rates of prostitution to double. Such activities were aided by the difficulty of policing blacked-out streets. There was a sense that – as the controversial London author Thomas Burke had written – ‘the street is more private than the home.’ All these escapades were, of course, appropriate to Eros’s realm – the god some Ancient Greeks had seen as a ‘son of Night’.

American servicemen outside Piccadilly Circus Tube Station

The prostitutes – known as ‘Piccadilly Commandos’ – who swarmed around the American soldiers were so numerous and determined they caused alarm in the British establishment, with some even seeing them as endangering Anglo-American relations. In September 1943, Admiral Sir Edward Evans – the Head of Civil Defence in London – wrote to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, complaining of ‘vicious debauchery’ and claiming that ‘American soldiers are encouraged by these young sluts, many of whom should be serving in the forces.’

Not all the women drawn to the GIs were, however, prostitutes. World War II saw a general loosening of sexual morals, much of which happened around Eros’s plinth. After long shifts doing war work in the factories, young women headed to the West End to have fun. Official documents lament the antics of these girls ‘freed of parental control’. The female ‘hordes’ who crowded around West End hotels and troop hostels, it was feared, could create an embarrassing image of Britain abroad and supply the Nazis with ideas for propaganda.

The GIs themselves were seen as far from blameless. A police superintendent stated, ‘They congregate around Piccadilly Circus and Coventry Street, many of them the worse for drink and quarrelsome, until the early hours of the morning. They are easy prey for the innumerable prostitutes that frequent the neighbourhood.’

An American soldier flirts at Piccadilly Circus – note the flower seller. Could she be the daughter of one of the flower girls who watched Lord Shaftesbury’s cortege?

The senior American military surgeon based in Britain, Brigadier Paul Hawley, recorded that 30% of all doses of VD among American soldiers in the UK were picked up in London. Though some sources refer to the prostitutes themselves as ‘Piccadilly Commandos’, others claim this name was given to American soldiers who’d acquired the clap around where the Eros statue had so recently stood. Burning arrows, indeed. Though Eros had traditionally been a protector of warriors, he doesn’t seen to have shielded these American troops from such ailments. 

The official anxiety over sexual immorality in London’s West End was dealt with in a thoroughly British way. A committee of Whitehall bureaucrats was set up to produce a report. If the committee ever arrived at any conclusions, no one knows what they were.

Eros returned to Piccadilly Circus in 1947 and, in the Post-War world, the area maintained its connections with the sex industry. In 1955, the American biologist and sexologist Alfred Charles Kinsey visited London. Kinsey – whose books Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953) had shocked suburban America – counted around 1,000 prostitutes on the streets of the West End.

Piccadilly’s reputation as a centre of prostitution doesn’t seem to have declined until the turn of the 1960s. In 1959, the Street Offences Act made it illegal to loiter or solicit for the purposes of prostitution. The act pushed working girls off the street, and away from Piccadilly, into the clubs, massage parlours and walk-ups of nearby Soho. This change, some argued, made it easier for unscrupulous pimps and seedy entrepreneurs to exploit sex workers and rip off clients.

A postcard from the 1960s, showing Eros at Piccadilly Circus

Though the sex trade has largely been banished from Piccadilly Circus, the bustling district is still popular with those hoping to find either romance or something more casual. Websites still recommend Eros’s domain as a place where such visitors to London might stumble upon success.

In Ancient Greece, Eros wasn’t just famous for kindling love and lust between the sexes. He could also spark same-sex attraction and so it’s not surprising that Piccadilly Circus was once the centre of the capital’s gay life. Gays seem to have, especially, gravitated towards the Circus after Leicester Square was ‘cleaned up’ in the 1920s. Next to Piccadilly Circus was the Café Royal, upon which Thomas Burke commented, ‘Here and there may be seen queer creatures … an hermaphroditic creature with side-whiskers and painted eyelashes … male dancers who walk like fugitives from the City of the Plain. Hard-features ambassadors from Lesbos and Sodom.’

In his book Queer London, Matt Houlbrook argues that Piccadilly Circus was the focus of London’s gay scene until the 1950s, with notable venues including the lesbian Lilly Pond, on the corner of Coventry Street, the Regent’s Palace Hotel, the Criterion (also known as the ‘Witches’ Cauldron’ or ‘Bargain Basement’) and the Trocadero.

Piccadilly Circus at night, in 1962

Lord Shaftesbury campaigned vigorously against the opium trade – so it would have probably distressed him to know that his memorial would overlook the most notorious spot for opioid consumption in Britain. The actress Sheila Hancock (born 1933) recalled the difficulties of entering Piccadilly’s subterranean Criterion Theatre: ‘The first hazard was climbing over the recumbent drug addicts who used the stage door to inject the heroin prescription they got from the all-night Boots in Piccadilly Circus. (It became 24-hours in 1925 and was next door to the Criterion.)’

Once accessed, the Criterion was ‘a gloomy catacomb where only the mice were healthy on their diet of theatrical greasepaint, which they shared with the cockroaches. There were no windows, so the outside was banished once you’d descended into hell. We actors had to resort to oxygen inhalers on matinee days to keep us bubblingly energetic for our merry romp.’

Though the law later changed, doctors in the 1960s could prescribe heroin to addicts. There were around 200 known addicts in Britain and the majority got their prescriptions from the 24-hour Boots chemist on Piccadilly Circus. (The shop is still there though it no longer – as far as I know – dispenses opioids.) In the run-up to midnight, a queue of addicts formed, all clutching their prescription slips for the next day. The heroin was of top-notch pharmaceutical grade and came in tablets called ‘jacks’ (which is where the phrase ‘jacking up’ comes from). Fresh syringes and needles were handed out with each prescription. So, for a certain time, Boots the chemists at Piccadilly Circus – right beneath the monument erected to a passionate opponent of the opium trade – was Britain’s biggest heroin dealer.

The 24-hour Boots chemist at Piccadilly Circus, London – this humble shop was once Britain’s biggest heroin dealer.

The Case for – and against – Anteros

In spite of the lust and hedonism the statue of Eros has come to symbolise, there’s been another spirit at work around Piccadilly Circus – a spirit promoting a more sober and ‘responsible’ notion of love, expressed in a concern for the ‘betterment’ of society and the restraint of certain human impulses. The attempts to reign in the prostitution trade detailed above could fit into this pattern.

There have been plans to reform, renovate and even destroy Piccadilly Circus. Following the death of Edward VII in 1910, there were calls to clear away the Circus and replace it with a more orderly, rectangular open space named King Edward VII Square. Eros – that embodiment of disorder and desire – would be taken down and a statue of the king astride his horse put up. (We might query, though, whether a depiction of Edward, a notorious womaniser, would have set a better example than the Greek god of fiery love.) The planned square would also substitute the Circus’s shady bars and subterranean theatres with a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and National Opera House. The arrival of the First World War – and then the Second – meant this neatening-up of the Circus’s congested and lively chaos never took place.

The 1950s saw renewed efforts to deal with the awkwardly asymmetrical Circus and the tumultuous life that swirled around Eros. A plan was hatched to build a huge office block on the site of the Café Monico, which would be just one of a ring of office towers, including a 132-metre edifice on the site of the Criterion Theatre. Concern about traffic jams led to the suggestion that several lanes of traffic could hurtle through the area while pedestrians would be elevated onto concrete walkways 60 feet up in the air. This plan was viewed favourably throughout the 1960s and a short film was even made, Goodbye Piccadilly, to preserve memories of what many assumed would soon be vanquished.

While these changes were never enacted, by 1972 a new plan had appeared – three octagonal towers would rise on the graves of the Trocadero, Criterion and Monico buildings. The chairman of Westminster Council’s planning department said he hoped demolition could start as soon as possible, sweeping away what was ‘little more than a down-at-heel, neon-lit slum.’

Such sentiments were, however, opposed by many in London, who viewed their ‘neon-lit slum’ with fondness. The Observer wrote, ‘Piccadilly Circus, more than anywhere else in the country, is a place for the people. It is not, first of all, a traffic junction or an office centre. It is somewhere people go to wander about, gawp and gossip, and generally amuse themselves. Those who have drawn up successive plans for its redevelopment have failed to understand its real nature, and, one after the other, their efforts have been laughed to scorn.’

Indeed, Eros has survived, as has the disorderly and disreputable Circus he rules over. That’s not to say that the neighbourhood and its local deity have seen no changes. In 1922, Eros had to be moved when construction began on Piccadilly Circus’s London Underground station. Eros was exiled to Embankment Gardens until the work was complete. He returned in 1931, but when World War II started he was moved again, for his own safety. Like many young Londoners, he spent the War outside the capital, in his case in Egham, Surrey.

Eros was removed and the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain covered in World War II.

When the god came back in 1947, he was re-sited somewhat. Eros now pointed his invisible arrow down Shaftesbury Avenue. This encouraged urban legends to grow up that the statute had been designed with a bow but not an arrow as a pun on the word ‘Shaftesbury’: as in the idea the arrow – or ‘shaft’ – had been ‘buried’ in that road. (There have also been – inevitably, given the history of the area – more ribald puns about the ‘burying of shafts’.) Another idea claims Eros’s bow is directed at Shaftesbury’s family home and last resting place in Wimborne St Giles, Dorset. But Alfred Gilbert couldn’t have had these intentions when he designed Eros – the archer originally took aim down Lower Regent Street, in the direction of the Houses of Parliament. In the early 1980s, Eros was again taken down, this time for restoration, before being returned in 1985.

Eros presides over Piccadilly Circus in 1994 – note the old Routemaster bus. (Photo: Colin Smith)

It’s clear that the spirit of Eros has triumphed over his critics and also over his more sensible brother, but – although Eros is loved by many – he still hasn’t gained total acceptance. The attempts to vandalise his statue – which started soon after Gilbert put it up – have continued, as if some people are disturbed at a deep level by what the god represents. Damage to the statue was discovered during its 1980s restoration and the statute was also vandalised in 1990. It was again taken away for repairs and didn’t return till 1994. In 2012, a tourist even broke Eros’s bowstring and a new one had to be fitted. Vandalism seems prevalent around the festive period. In 2013-14, a ‘snow globe’ was erected around the statue, filled with blowing ‘snow flakes’. Though primarily a visual spectacle, the globe had the added effect of keeping Eros safe from vandals. In 2014-15, a giant box for Christmas presents placed around the monument fulfilled a similar function.

Piccadilly Circus in modern times, which is still reigned over by Eros. (Photo courtesy of Colin Smith)

Though reforms – ranging from the provision of public transport to the shaking off of the area’s reputation for prostitution – have lessened the passionate chaos Eros presides over, it’s likely this mischievous deity will be viewed with affection by most Londoners and visitors to the capital for some time to come. The statue has survived criticisms, wars, attempted redevelopments, vandalism and even the disapproval of its own creator. It’s as if this god has claimed his territory and doesn’t intend to be expelled from it.

(This article’s main image – showing Anteros, commonly known as Eros, at Piccadilly Circus, London – is courtesy of Juan Pablo Garnham. Is it perhaps from the time Eros’s bowstring was broken?)

The post Piccadilly Circus’s Eros – Statue of Sin or Figure of Morality? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

But how far back does this peculiar legend go? Is it genuinely ancient or much more recent than we might think? And what folklore – associated both with the area around the Tower of London and with the playful, cunning and intelligent raven – might have woven itself into this strange story?

Let’s first take a look at the legend of the ravens and the Tower of London as it’s commonly understood before exploring what folkloric, mythic and historical resonances might have become caught up in it. We’ll then investigate just how much this wonderfully gothic tale holds up under the light of a more clinical scrutiny.

Prepare yourself for accounts of infuriated royal stargazers, eccentric Welsh bards, severed yet talkative heads, and ravens being given ranks in Britain’s armed forces. You’ll also read about Tower ravens deciding to relocate to pubs, sorcerers sending their souls outside their bodies, decapitated queens, London’s three sacred mounds, Victorian gothic resculptings of England’s bloody history, and how the Tower of London’s precious ravens have been threatened by the Covid-19 lockdown.

The Tower of London and Its Ravens – a History of Legend, or a Legendary History

Many believe that ravens have lived on the site of the Tower of London since at least Roman times, congregating in the Roman fortifications that preceded England’s famous stronghold. In his Biography of London, Peter Ackroyd suggests that semi-domesticated ravens would have been a common sight around the Roman city of Londinium, with the birds helping keep the streets clean by scavenging scraps and bits of offal.

After the Romans left and the medieval epoch began, it appears that Londoners still appreciated ravens – as well as kites – for the same reason. Laws prescribed the death penalty for killing these birds and some ravens were apparently so tame they’d eat bread from children’s hands. One traveller remarked on the city’s ‘quite tame’ kites and it seems that butchers threw out their leftovers for ravens and kites to gobble.

Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, William the Conqueror – keen to assert his authority over a potentially rebellious London – built a wooden stockade where the Tower of London now stands. After a fire in 1077, which destroyed much of the wooden city, the Normans began to build the White Tower, a stone fortification that’s still the centrepiece of the Tower of London today. As the years passed, various monarchs added to the stronghold and a moat was dug so the dark waters of the Thames could encircle it. In the Middle Ages, there’s no reason to suspect that London’s ubiquitous ravens wouldn’t have frequented the expanding fortress. Eastcheap Market – famous for its butchers – was nearby so it’s likely some ravens that congregated there made the short hop and wing-flap to the Tower.

The White Tower, the first stone building constructed at the Tower of London and still its centrepiece (Photo: Gareth James)

Legend claims that a particularly gruesome function of the Tower may have attracted them. For centuries, the Tower of London held prisoners – mostly royal or aristocratic – accused of treason. The lives of these inmates sometimes came to an end beneath the executioner’s sword or axe, occasionally on Tower Green – inside the Tower’s Walls – but more commonly on Tower Hill, just outside them. Ravens, due to their scavenging habits, have long been associated with gallows, gibbets and places of execution.

The birds were said to pluck out the eyes of the newly decapitated. They may have also scavenged blood and scraps of flesh. English executioners were not known for their competence. As there weren’t that many royal or noble-born traitors to behead (commoners convicted of treason were hung, drawn and quartered), executioners were usually out of practice. They also seem to have often been drunk.  The messy, drawn-out hacking or slashing, then, might have allowed nimble ravens to swoop in for a snack. A visitor to London records children ‘gathering up the blood which had fallen through the slits in the scaffold’ following a beheading on Tower Hill. If children could do this, then why not the city’s ravens?

The ravens, though, sometimes had a sense of decorum. When Henry VIII executed his second queen Anne Boleyn in 1536, he – perhaps out of some lingering affection for her – had her beheaded on the private Tower Green rather than the public Tower Hill, where convicts knelt before jeering crowds. Henry also brought over a skilled French swordsman – to mercifully allow his ex a swift clean passage from this life. The ravens, sensing the solemnity of the event, apparently ‘sat silent and immovable on the battlements and gazed eerily at the strange scene. A queen about to die!’ The birds weren’t, though, it’s said, so considerate when Lady Jane Grey – a young noblewoman who reigned for a farcical nine days before being deposed in favour of Mary I – was executed in February 1554. Though Jane also had the privilege of being beheaded on Tower Green, the ravens soon flew in to peck her eyes out.

The first reference, however, to the legend that the kingdom will fall if the ravens leave the Tower of London concerns the reign of Charles II (1660-85). Charles’s royal astronomer, John Flamsteed, had an observatory in the White Tower. Flamsteed complained about the Tower’s ravens – of which there were apparently hundreds – flying past his telescopes and obscuring the sky. Some versions of the legend say Charles himself was fed up with the birds’ droppings besmirching his optical instruments.

Charles commanded that the ravens should be destroyed, but one of his courtiers reminded him of the legend that the ravens leaving the Tower would mean the monarchy’s collapse. Perhaps thinking of his father’s fate – who’d lost his kingdom and his head not long ago – Charles ordered that the ravens should be protected forever, with at least six kept at the Tower at all times. As for Flamsteed, he and his observatory were shunted out to Greenwich, where there’s still an observatory to this day.

A different take on the legend says that – after the Great Fire of London in 1666 – citizens started persecuting ravens for scavenging. Flamsteed explained to Charles that the death of the last raven would result in England’s fall, so Charles ordered that six should be kept safely in the Tower of London.

Much folklore is woven around the Tower of London’s ravens. (Photo: Steve Krause)

Thereafter, folklore asserts, all England’s monarchs made sure there were at least six ravens in the fortress. This custom perhaps acquired more urgency when London’s wild raven population began to decline. No longer revered as vital cleaners of the streets, from around the turn of the 19th century ravens were accused of preying on livestock and hunted down. Their numbers plummeted in the capital and the surrounding countryside. The last pair of wild ravens in London were recorded nesting in Hyde Park in 1826. Wild ravens are still extinct in the capital. Gulls, which don’t seem to have appeared in London until around 1890, eventually replaced them as the city’s airborne scavengers.

The Tower ravens, however, found a new purpose as the Tower of London morphed from a place of imprisonment and execution into more of a tourist attraction. The ravens helped create a suitably macabre backdrop to the gothic tales of executions and medieval skullduggery the Victorians delighted in. As Britain moved into the 20th century and Victorian restraint eroded, the tales of beheadings got more gruesome and the ravens found themselves increasingly popular, appearing in a range of artworks and books.

England under Threat – The Tower of London and Its Ravens Struggle with World War II, Escapes, Kidnappings and Covid-19

World War II wasn’t a good time for the Tower of London’s ravens. The Tower closed to the public and the moat – long-drained over health fears – was turned into a vegetable garden to help the war effort. The fortress even resumed its former role as a jail, holding German spies and prisoners of war, with one man being executed there. The ravens, deprived of the food handouts and amusement the tourists brought, were – though – put to use as unofficial spotters of enemy planes and bombs. Those bombs, however, killed several ravens while others fled the Tower or died of shock during air-raids. Legend says Winston Churchill – a Freemason fascinated by the occult – was superstitious enough to boost the ravens’ numbers. When the Tower of London reopened to visitors on New Year’s Day 1946, a full contingent of ravens was waiting to welcome them.

The ravens at the Tower have since been extremely well-treated. They’re housed in a luxurious aviary close to the Bloody Tower and the sole task of one of the Beefeaters, the Ravenmaster, is to look after them. The ravens are well-fed – in addition to treats from visitors, they get through a tonne of meat a year. Sheep’s hearts and biscuits dipped in blood are particularly popular snacks. The Tower ravens – due to their pampered lifestyles – enjoy exceptional longevity. The longest-lived on record made it to 44. When they do expire, the ravens are laid to rest in a special graveyard, in the Tower of London’s South Moat. Recently, seven or eight ravens have been kept at the Tower – the ‘traditional’ six with one or two spares.

At the Tower of London, the sole task of one of the Beefeaters – the Ravenmaster – is to look after the fortress’s ravens. (Photo: Bjorn)

The clan of ravens has, however, sometimes seen its numbers depleted, potentially placing the monarchy and kingdom under threat. The strength of superstition can be seen in the fact any ravens lost are swiftly substituted. Some ravens have been dismissed in disgrace. Since the War, the Tower of London’s ravens have been official members of the British armed forces, even being awarded ranks. This means that – like soldiers, sailors or air force personnel– they can be sacked for misbehaviour. Raven George was retired to Wales after amusing himself by damaging car aerials. A decree was issued, which curtly stated: ‘On Saturday, 13th September 1986, Raven George, enlisted 1975, was posted to the Welsh Mountain Zoo. Conduct unsatisfactory, service therefore no longer required.’

Another raven is thought to have been kidnapped shortly after World War II, a mystery that has never been fully explained. In May 2013, a fox sneaked into the Tower and killed two ravens while another bird – Charlie – bit a bomb-sniffing dog and died after the dog grabbed him. The Tower ravens have the feathers on one of their wings clipped, meaning they can fly but not far. This hasn’t prevented some escaping. The – appropriately named – Grog fled the Tower for an East End pub and another bird, Muninn, went missing for three days. She got across the Thames, but was captured in a back garden in Greenwich and brought back to the Tower.

The latest challenge to the Tower and its ravens is the Covid-19 pandemic, a situation that has sparked a number of humorously concerned articles in the British press. After the Tower closed to visitors, the ravens missed both the fun they had with the tourists and the tidbits the tourists feed them (though visitors aren’t officially meant to feed the birds). Ravens – mischievous and intelligent – need constant amusement. Those at the Tower have been known to delight themselves by stealing sandwiches out of people’s hands and tricking them by ‘playing dead’.  One bird – called Edgar Sopper – did this so convincingly that the Ravenmaster really thought he had died. He sorrowfully picked up the ‘corpse’ only to have the raven bite him and flap off ‘croaking huge raven laughs’. With the dearth of visitors due to the coronavirus, the ravens have been given footballs, squeaky toys and teddies to keep them entertained. But the lack of amusement and food – ravens have been knocking on the Beefeaters’ windows begging for scraps – have already led to some escape attempts, with the birds Merlina and Jubilee being the worst offenders.

The Tower of London – this massive fortress covers 12 acres and hosted nearly 2.86 million visitors in 2018. (Photo: Duncan)

But what strands of folklore might be wrapped up in the – apparently powerful and enduring – legend of the Tower of London and its ravens? Let’s examine the archetypes and anxieties that might lurk behind this myth before querying the antiquity of the legend itself.

What Strands of Folklore Might Be Entangled in the Tales of the Tower and Its Ravens?

Bran the Blessed, Bran’s Talkative Severed Head and the ‘Sacred Psychogeography’ of Tower Hill

The Welsh medieval collection of tales The Mabinogion – written in the 12th and 13th centuries but drawing on much older oral traditions – includes a character called Bran the Blessed. Bran – a giant and king of the island of Britain – appears in the story Branwen, daughter of Llyr. In this account, Branwen – Bran’s sister – marries the Irish king, but is treated badly, leading to a battle on Irish soil between the king’s followers and Bran’s.

After the battle, Bran – fatally wounded in the foot – asks his followers to ‘cut off my head and take it to London. Eventually, you must bury it in state on the White Hill of London, turning my head towards France.’

Bran’s head is, therefore, ceremonially lopped off. His followers return with it to Britain and spend many years in strange wanderings, during which the head – still able to speak – proves an entertaining companion. Bran’s entourage finally reach London and the head is interred as Bran has requested, with the understanding that it’s faced towards France to repel invasions from the Continent. Interestingly, the White Hill is thought to be the mound known as Tower Hill today and the Welsh name ‘Bran’ translates into English as ‘crow or raven’.

There are aspects of Bran’s legend that relate to the functions of the Tower of London and the later folklore that would surround it. Bran is a king and the Tower – as well as being a prison – was also long used as a royal palace. When William the Conqueror began to build the Tower, its purpose wasn’t only to overawe the unruly City of London, but to guard the vital thoroughfare of the Thames, up which invaders – such as Vikings – had come. Even as late as World War II, the Tower was garrisoned with soldiers and was one of the fortifications designated to protect London in the event of a German land assault.

Bran’s myth is undoubtedly linked with the Celtic cult of the head. The Celts believed that the head contained the soul as well as the intellect, and the heads of enemies were prized as powerful magical instruments. It’s interesting that Bran’s head was buried in a place where 125 heads are estimated to have rolled over the centuries.

Tower Hill is associated with other ancient kings. King Brutus – the mythical founder of Britain and London – is said to be buried there. Some legends claim King Arthur – somewhat arrogantly – dug up Bran’s head from Tower Hill, stating that he would be the one who’d keep Britain safe from Saxon invasion. Perhaps the eventual loss of England to the Saxons was the result of this rashness.

The site of the scaffold on Tower Hill, outside the Tower of London’s walls. Around 125 heads rolled here while only seven people were beheaded on the more famous Tower Green. (Photo: Bryan MacKinnon)

It’s difficult to know whether the legend of Bran had any influence on the later legend of the Tower of London’s ravens, but it’s intriguing that both myths have links to kingship, ravens and the security of the realm. Tower Hill has also been seen as a significant protrusion by antiquarians and modern psychogeographers. It’s apparently one of ‘London’s three sacred mounds’, the other two being Tothill, near Westminster Abbey, and Penton Hill, near Islington. All three hills boast – or are close to – healing springs and excavations on Tower Hill have also revealed traces of a medieval well and Iron-Age burial. Perhaps Tower Hill has been a strange centre of mythic energy for some time.

The Tower of London, the Ravens and the External Soul

A concept that might shed light on the mystery of the Tower of London and its ravens is the notion of the ‘external soul’.  The idea is that a person can hide their ‘soul’ or ‘life’ in some external object, often an animal or plant. As long as the soul remains concealed and the plant or animal stays well, the person is invulnerable, but if the plant or animal is harmed or destroyed, the person will suffer injury or death. This idea was popularised by James George Frazer in his massive study of folklore, myth and religion The Golden Bough (1890) and – though Frazer is out-of-fashion today – his musings on the external soul might go some way to helping us understand the strange beliefs centred on the Tower’s ravens.

Folktales from many parts of the world feature a wicked character – often a giant, ogre or warlock – who has hidden his soul far away. This evildoer has usually kidnapped a princess and a hero must locate the external soul in order to kill her captor and free her. In a Norse story, a giant has hidden his soul in a well, in a church, on a distant island. In the well is a duck, in the duck is an egg and in the egg is the giant’s soul. The story’s hero manages to find the egg, he squeezes it and the giant bursts.

In some cultures, when a baby is born, their life is said to be bound up with a particular tree. If the tree grows strong and healthy, so will the young person, but if it withers and dies, the person will get sick and die too. Close to Dalhousie Castle, near Edinburgh, there grew an oak said to be intimately connected with the fortunes of the fortress’s owners. If a branch fell off the tree, it was thought a family member would soon die. In some tribal societies, people might believe that the lives of the members of a particular clan or the men or women of the tribe are bound up with those of a certain kind of animal: elephants, perhaps, or tortoises or monkeys. They will, therefore, avoid killing all members of that species as they cannot know which individual elephant or tortoise has their life linked with a certain individual of their clan.

With the ravens of the Tower, it’s slightly different as it’s thought the fate of the whole nation is connected with their welfare rather than just the lives of particular individuals. But might some shadowy notion of the external soul be seen in our somewhat ‘totemic’ attitudes towards the ravens?

Folklore Links the Raven with Death, Executions, Prophecy and Kingship

The common raven is found across Europe, North America, North Africa and northern and central Asia. In many parts of the planet, the raven’s intelligence, playfulness and striking black plumage have seen it gather similar associations in the local folklore. Much of this folklore ascribes characteristics to the raven that are also reflected in the Tower of London legend.

The legend foretells England’s (possible) doom and ravens are seen as sombre birds of prophecy. In Wales, it’s said that a raven cawing from a steeple overlooking a house means one of its occupants will soon die while a Scottish legend states that if a young child drinks from a raven’s skull, they’ll gain the gift of foresight. In Greek myth, ravens are linked to Apollo, the god of prophecy, and are the god’s messengers on earth. A Viking tradition claimed that if a warband’s banner – emblazoned with a raven – fluttered they’d be victorious in battle while if the banner drooped, they’d lose. The raven’s connection with prophecy probably comes from the bird’s unnerving ability to imitate human speech, leading to ravens being seen as ‘oracles’. Many visitors to the Tower of London have been surprised by a croaked ‘hello’ from a raven.

Since the late 1800s, the Tower of London’s ravens have been a tourist attraction. (Photo: Laura LaRose)

Ravens, like the Tower legend, are linked to kingship. A Cornish tradition claims that King Arthur turned into a raven after death and killing a raven was apparently for a long time a taboo act in that county. The legend of the German king Frederick Barbarossa – who shares some characteristics with Arthur – states that the monarch isn’t dead, but rather sleeping surrounded by his knights in a mountain cave. Ravens fly around the mountain and – when they cease to do so – he’ll wake up.

Though they’re not explicitly part of the Tower of London’s raven legend, the Tower has a strong association with executions and death. These themes are also found in the folklore of the raven, probably due to the birds’ deep black plumage, their ‘death-rattle-like’ croak and their habit of scavenging. Ravens are notorious for haunting gallows, scaffolds and gibbets. The executioner’s block is sometimes called a ‘ravenstone’ while in Germany ‘ravenstones’ can refer both to gravestones and ravens’ droppings after they’ve feasted on the corpses of criminals. In Celtic mythology, the warlike goddess Morrigan can take the form of a raven while hovering over scenes of slaughter and some Siberian peoples see ravens as spirits of war and violence. In Serbian legends, ravens often announce the deaths of heroes.

These are just some of the examples of the rich folklore of the raven that can be found across the world. Perhaps some of these associations contributed to the mythology of the ravens in the Tower.

But Wait a Minute – Might the Legend of the Ravens and the Tower of London Just Be a Victorian Invention?

Two ravens perch in front of the White Tower, at the Tower of London. (Photo: Jack’s Adventures in Museum Land)

Until quite recent times, it was accepted that the myth of the ravens at the Tower was of ancient pedigree, so accepted in fact that no one had actually researched how far back it went. But in the last couple of decades, this assumption has been challenged by two scholars: Boria Sax and Geoff Parnell, who’s an official Tower of London historian and member of the Royal Armouries staff. Sax and Parnell have concluded that there are no records of ravens at the Tower before the Victorian age.

This is especially curious as the Tower of London was long associated with all kinds of animals. Among its many functions, the Tower was London’s zoo, housing an impressive array of beasts, most of which had been given to the Royal Family by foreign monarchs. The Tower menagerie lasted from the late 1100s to 1835, when the remaining animals were transferred to the new London Zoo in Regent’s Park. The Tower’s zoo held – at various times – Barbary lions, leopards, wildcats, lynx, jackals, hyenas, brown and grizzly bears, eagles, monkeys, wolves, owls and a tiger. One famous resident was a polar bear, who was taken each day to fish for his lunch in the Thames. An African elephant, captured as a trophy during the Crusades, was given gallons of red wine by his keepers, who thought it would keep out the cold. The elephant didn’t live long. By the 18th century, the Tower zoo had become a popular visitor attraction – admission cost three half-pence though you got in free if you brought along a dog or cat to feed to the animals.

By 1828, the zoo boasted 280 animals from at least 60 species. There is, though, one striking omission from all the records, inventories and reports of the zoo’s creatures. There’s not one mention of ravens. This might be understandable for the centuries during which ravens were widespread in London, but there’s also no mention of the birds being kept at the Tower when London’s wild ravens were dying out.

The earliest reference to ravens in connection with the fortress is in the 1840 novel The Tower of London: A Historical Romance by William Harrison Ainsworth. This melodramatic book – which would do much to establish the image of the Tower in the Victorian mind as a gruesome torture chamber – mentions a flock of ravens and crows wheeling around during the execution of Lady Jane Grey. It seems, however, that Ainsworth just brought in these birds to give his beheading scene a suitably sinister backdrop – there’s no suggestion of such creatures actually living in the Tower.

An illustration in William Harrison Ainsworth’s gothic novel The Tower of London (1840) shows ravens wheeling in the sky, but not actually inside the Tower.

The first two sources to depict ravens within the Tower itself date from 1883. An illustration in the newspaper The Pictorial World includes a raven, though the bird is not of central importance in the picture. The raven is near Tower Green so the bird is probably being used as a gothic prop to emphasise the Green’s association with executions. The other 1883 source – a picture in the children’s book London Town – shows what we might nowadays consider a typical Tower of London scene. There’s a Beefeater and two haughty-looking ravens – a girl and dog are sheltering anxiously from the birds behind the Beefeater’s legs.

A picture from 1895 shows two ravens in the Tower of London, who are – with typical ravenlike mischievousness – tormenting a cat by pulling its tail. The picture appeared in the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) journal The Animal World accompanied by a short article. We learn that one of the ravens is named Jenny. A painting by H.E. Tidmarsh – entitled Place of Execution in Front of St Peter’s Chapel – shows a raven landing ominously near a family of sightseers. This painting was published on a postcard in 1900 and later appeared in Cassell’s Magazine in June 1904. A 1904 picture by S.T. Dadd – called Ravens at the Tower – shows a Beefeater and some tourists with two ravens near the ‘site’ of Tower Green’s scaffold.

One of the two earliest-known depictions of ravens in the Tower of London, from the children’s book London Town (1883).

These sources indicate that in the late 1800s ravens became a feature of the Tower, often being associated with its history of beheadings. Boria Sax suggests that the ravens were – due to their strong cultural links with executions – employed to boost the Tower’s status as a tourist attraction, hence their appearing near Tower Green in visual materials. Public interest in the Tower’s decapitations seems to have been sparked by the fact that – on a visit to the stronghold – Prince Albert had remarked that Queen Victoria would like to see the spot where Anne Boleyn was executed. By 1866, a spot had been identified, a spot soon dramatised by the dubious claim that a permanent scaffold had stood at that location. The spot was surrounded by railings and marked with a plaque, and tourists presumably felt no visit to the Tower was complete without pausing there. Over the years, Sax argues, the ravens were increasingly required to act as gothic ornaments to this site of doom, which encouraged the Tower to maintain a flock.

The supposed site of the scaffold on Tower Green, close to St Peter’s Chapel – notice the raven perch in the background. (Photo: Chris Nyborg)

This would indeed fit with the Victorian view of the Tower – the Victorians were determined to reinvent the fortress as a medieval gothic Disneyland. Children were encouraged to pose with their heads on the executioner’s block. The stronghold’s post-medieval buildings were cleared away and the dilapidated Lanthorn Tower – despite originating in the Middle Ages – was deemed not medieval-looking enough. This problem was remedied by ‘renovations’, including the addition of gargoyles and grotesques. It’s not surprising that the ravens fitted into this world, but we might ask where the Tower’s ravens came from. Wild ravens – that could have been captured and tamed – would have by this time no longer flitted into the fortress.

Parnell suspects ravens may have been introduced to the Tower thanks to the popularity of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven (1845). This poem – featuring a young man grieving for a dead lover who’s surprised at midnight by a raven tapping on his window – started a craze for keeping the birds as pets. The Tower’s Beefeaters and other staff, Parnell argues, might have succumbed to this fashion. Their birds could have then morphed from private pets into an official flock.

An alternative suggestion is that the Tower’s ravens were supplied by the appropriately named Dunraven family. According to The Tower from Within by George Younghusband (1918), the Fourth Earl of Dunraven (1841-1926) provided the birds, perhaps in the hope of demonstrating some sort of spiritual connection between his lineage and the Tower. The Second Earl had been a patron of the eccentric Welsh bard Iolo Morganwg, who seems to have persuaded the family that their castle in Glamorgan had been the seat of King Bran, who wasn’t only a monarch and giant but also a raven god. Morganwg was a colourful individual, who styled himself as a ‘druid scholar’. A stone mason, poet and collector of ancient Welsh literature, Morganwy claimed that an age-old Welsh tradition had survived both the Roman invasion and the conversion to Christianity, but some of his ‘ancient manuscripts’ were discovered after his death to be documents he’d forged. Perhaps, nonetheless, Morganwy’s lingering influence over the Dunravens encouraged them to donate some black-winged birds to the fortress built near the burial place of Bran. (From Younghusband’s book, we also have the first account of ravens being present at the execution of Anne Boleyn.)

Yet another possibility is that the Tower bought the ravens from Philip Castang, an old family firm – operating out of London’s Leadenhall Market – that sourced animals for zoos and private owners. In 1955, the firm’s manager wrote to Country Life magazine claiming he had ‘the order for the first Tower ravens’ framed and hanging on his office wall. Frustratingly, the company has now closed, the manager has died and the order has vanished.

Place of Execution in Front of St Peter’s Chapel, H.E. Tidmarsh (1900), the fourth earliest-known visual depiction of a raven in the Tower of London

Sources from the turn of the 20th century begin to mention the ‘tradition’ that a set number of ravens must be kept in the Tower. The 1898 book Birds of London states ‘for many years past two or three ravens have usually been kept at the Tower of London’ while an essay from 1904 proclaims ‘five pet ravens may be seen in ominous proximity to the Block … The ravens, which haunt the locality with dismal croaks, are a private gift to the Tower, and should one die it is replaced by the donor.’

Five does seem to have been the number settled on around this time. An intriguing account of a visit to the Tower comes from the Japanese writer Natsume Soseki, who toured the fortress on Halloween in 1900. Soseki might best be understood as a Japanese equivalent to someone like James Joyce, with his work blending the fantastical and everyday in a sort of early magical realism. Soseki’s portrayal of his visit has him seeing the ghosts of Walter Raleigh, Lady Jane Grey, Guy Fawkes and the two princes murdered by Richard III, but he also describes the ravens and insists there are five. When he returns to his lodgings, he tells his landlord about his excursion. The landlord responds, ‘There were five ravens there, I suppose … They’re sacred ravens. They’ve been keeping them there since ancient times and, even if they become one short, they immediately make the numbers up again. There are always five ravens there.’

So, from these sources, we can see the idea emerging, around 1900, that a certain number of ravens have long been kept in the Tower and that if one dies or disappears, it must be replaced. But – although we would assume there must be some reason for this ‘timeless custom’ – none of these sources seem to give it. When then, could we say with certainty, does the notion arise that the ravens vanishing will mean the collapse of the Tower, the monarchy and the nation?

The earliest-known mentions of such a legend are from World War II. The story about Charles II ordering that six ravens be kept in the Tower cannot be traced back any earlier than 1944. This didn’t, however, stop this tale finding its way into the Oxford Dictionary of Folklore, published in 2000. The War also appears to have seen the ‘optimal’ number of ravens raised from five to seven. The idea of Churchill stepping in to boost a dwindling population may also be untrue. Legend claims that, by the time the War was nearly over, just one pair of ravens – Grip and Mabel –  had managed to hang on. But it seems that shortly before the Tower’s reopening, the two ravens absconded for a nearby wood. Parnell found a note in the Tower’s records solemnly stating ‘there are none left’. Though the Tower, monarchy and British state all remained intact, some blame the post-War loss of the British Empire on the ravens’ escape.

So, What’s the Conclusion? Is the Tower of London’s Raven Legend a Recent Invention or Ancient Myth?

Although it’s likely that in centuries gone by London’s ubiquitous wild ravens would have frequented the Tower – and may have been drawn to the executions of its inmates – the ‘tradition’ of deliberately keeping ravens in the Tower of London doesn’t seem to have arisen until the later 1800s. Around 1900, the notion grew up that a set number of the birds must be maintained in the stronghold. The idea the ravens’ departure would mean catastrophe for the nation may have also originated around this time, but no sources appear to actually state this until World War II.

It seems, then, that the Tower of London’s raven myth is a recent one, but we might ask why such a strange belief emerged in the Victorian era and the first half of the 20th century. In his book The Invention of Tradition (1994), the historian Eric Hobsbawn argued that modern states often claim that their pageantry, customs and legends are ‘rooted in the remotest antiquity’. Such claims have the effect of making modern nations seem ‘the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so “natural” as to require no definition.’ Such notions become particularly insistent during times of upheaval, stress and change.

In the Victorian age, Britain underwent enormous and rapid urbanisation, industrialisation and technological advancement, as well as a dizzying realignment of the class structure as the upper-middle class surged, the aristocracy weakened, and a growing and disenfranchised working class started to demand their rights. There was also the pressure of maintaining a huge overseas empire and the wars of conquest and brutal suppressions of native peoples that entailed. Faced with such challenges, it must have been tempting to try to claim that Britain and its empire were organised on age-old principals stretching back into misty antiquity and that just under the grimy surface of the Victorian industrial world could be found quaint traditions and a stable hierarchy that had lasted for centuries. There were, for example, assertions that breeds of dogs and other animals were far older than they really were and an often automatic assumption that folkloric dances and ceremonies sprang from an ancient, even pagan past.

There was also a massive vogue in Victorian art, literature and architecture for the medieval and folkloric, an obsession whose influence was felt in the Tower of London. These obsessions were strong enough to survive the death of Victoria herself in 1901 and to continue for some time into the 20th century. The Tower of London and its developing raven myth fitted well into all this. Wrapped up in the imagined continuity of this colony of birds were England’s age-old monarchy and echoes of a feudal era of secure social relations – an era whose black-winged mascots could still be seen hopping about in the present day. In addition to that, the birds added drama to the (recently enhanced) gothic theme park of the Tower with its tales of imprisonment and bloody execution, which all bestowed pleasing frissons of horror on a pleasant Victorian or Edwardian day out.

An ‘executioner’s block’ at the Tower of London – its gruesome history of beheadings has always proved popular with tourists. (Photo: John Morris)

It’s interesting that the Tower of London’s raven legend got a boost in World War II, when the nation was under serious threat. A number of myths seem to have either arisen or been strengthened on our besieged island at this time. As well as the invention, or at least reinforcement, of the legend about the ravens fleeing the Tower, a bizarre belief grew up that the Celtic queen Boudicca – who’d rebelled against Roman rule – was buried under a platform at Kings Cross Station.

But maybe all this is too cynical. I’m of the opinion that – although the Tower’s raven legend developed in fairly recent times in response to social and political stresses – the myth does draw on earlier folklore and deeply held archetypes. The raven’s associations with monarchy, prophecy, execution and death are all apparent in how the bird has been depicted at the Tower and the Tower’s raven legend might well display the human tendency to believe our wellbeing and even survival can be invested in some external object. There’s also the legend of Bran’s head – which at least may have prompted the Dunravens to donate ravens to the Tower – and the strange mythic significance that Tower Hill has accumulated through the centuries.

Perhaps such a strategic spot as Tower Hill, and such a crucial building as the Tower, will always have the tendency to generate myth. Tower Hill lies close to the lowest points at which – for many centuries – the vital thoroughfare of the Thames could be bridged or forded, making it a natural spot from which to control trade or resist invasion. And the Tower itself was for centuries probably the most vital building for upholding the British monarchy and state. It’s served as a royal palace, an armoury, a barracks and – of course – a jail for elite prisoners suspected of plotting to bring the monarch down. The Tower of London was also for many years the Royal Mint – performing the essential function of distributing, and maintaining the quality of, the coinage of the realm. In the fortress’s Byward Tower, a medieval religious mural – promising the fires of hell to thieves and fraudsters – once looked over the room where merchants brought in their gold bullion to sell to the Crown. The Tower also watched over the crucial trading settlement of the City of London, seen by monarchs as both a potential centre of revolt and a cash cow to be milked via taxation. Even today, tensions arise between the government and the City over issues like tax avoidance, banking regulation and money laundering.

It’s no surprise that the Tower and its environs, having been symbolic for years of power structures and important government interests, have had myths woven around them. And when one considers the deep folklore of the sinister and cunning raven, it’s perhaps also no shock that some manifestations of the Tower’s mythology have been embodied in these hopping, croaking and mischievous birds.

(This article’s main image, showing the ravens Jubilee and Muninn at the Tower of London, is courtesy of Colin.)

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