General Chat

Boot and Flogger

This unusual name appears above a Vintner's premises in Redcross Way almost under the railway just along Southwark Street The Flogger" was a wooden tool for tapping the cork home when bottling wine.
The Boot was the leather case in which the bottle stood for safety.
This is one of the few remaining "Free Vintner';s "
These need no licence to sell intoxicating liquor.
you could drink all night if the proprietor wished to keep open. This privilege dates back to the time of Edward 111 who fiinding his purse empty, borrowed moeny from some of the City Vintner's, instead of repaying then he granted them the right to sell wine without a licence.

rita

In 1451 after the Battle of Agincourt, the Duke of Orleans, nephew of the French king, was brought to the Tower as a hostage. While a prisoner there he wrote The First Valentine Card, a love poem to his wife.

Henry VII was responsible for forming the Yeoman of The Guard, better known as Beefeaters. The name derived either from the French "bufferier", meaning food taster, or from the French belief that all Englishmen eat roast beef, a French description for the English being " les rosbifs"

To the north of St Katherine's Dock, where Cable Street meet Dock Street, there is a red plaque commemorating The Battle of Cable Street, fought on 4th October 1936 between Eastenders, prostesting against a march by Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts, and police attempting to clear the way for the marchers. A bus was turned over to use as a barricade. Mosley's motor car was pelted with bricks, and there was some of the most bitter hand-to-hand fighting ever seen in London. There were many arrests, but the East Enders stood firm and the march had to be abandoned.

Very First A-Z Streetmap of London

was the creation of writer and painter Phyllis Pearsall (1906–96), who got lost in London in 1935 while using a 20-year-old street map, the most up to date that was then available. Enlisting the services of James Duncan, a draughtsman who worked for her cartographer father, and setting up her own office in a bedsit in horseferry road, she spent more than a year walking the streets of the capital, covering 3,000 miles on foot, identifying and locating 23,000 streets, roads, squares, avenues, alleyways and cul-de-sacs, and creating her own map.

Unable to find a publisher willing to invest in the project, Mrs Pearsall formed the Geographers’ Map Company and produced the first edition herself in 1936, paying for the initial print run of 10,000 copies and delivering the first batch to W.H. Smith in a wheelbarrow. It was an instant success and has dominated the UK market ever since. Seventy years on, A-Z Street Maps are still produced by the company, ownership of which its founder transferred to a trust for the benefit of its employees in 1966, and which was renamed the Geographers’ A-Z Map Company Ltd in 1972.

Mrs Pearsall remained involved with its operations right up to her death at the age of 89. The number of streets listed in the London A-Z rose from 23,000 in the 1st edition to nearly 70,000 by the 5th edition (2004).

Now a large housing complex on the Brixton/Stockwell border, Angell Town takes its name from the eccentric landowner John Angell, who died in 1784. His grandfather Justinian had acquired the property by marriage. Angell Town was built up in the early nineteenth century as a desirable estate for the new middle classes. Most of the old town was replaced in the 1970s by a council estate that combined 1960s-style blocks with the newer concept of overhead walkways and linking bridges, some of which were later removed in an attempt to prevent robbers and vandals making easy getaways.

Archway Road skirts the eastern side of Highgate Hill and the Archway locality is at its southern end. In the early nineteenth century work had begun on a tunnel under Hornsey Lane but the roof collapsed, bringing the lane down with it. This forced a change of plan and in 1813 a cutting was dug and a Roman-style viaduct built to carry Hornsey Lane across it. Junction Road was constructed at the same time as a feeder for the new road. However, the viaduct proved too narrow for the volume of traffic and the present Archway bridge opened in 1900. Much of the locality’s original development was as cheap housing for working people who were displaced from St Pancras and Somers Town by the railway building of the mid-nineteenth century. The Archway Tavern was built in 1888, the third public house on this site in the course of three centuries. Archway station was the northern terminus of what is now the High Barnet section of the Northern Line from 1907 to 1939, during which time the station was called Highgate. After this, the Archway name took hold of the area, which had formerly been considered part of Upper Holloway. Many newcomers to London rent their first home here, but there are also ‘problem’ estates, notably in the Holland Walk area. Plans to demolish the eyesore of Archway Tower and replace it with more humane architecture are currently under consideration.

Archway was the scene of the third and final ‘brides in the bath’ murder, committed by George Joseph Smith at 14 Bismarck Road, now Waterlow Road. Smith drowned Margaret Lofty in the bath just two days after he had married her in December 1914.

Squeezed almost out of existence by Fulham, Chelsea and Earls Court, between which it lies, West Brompton was an area of fields and market gardens until the late eighteenth century. Much of the land was acquired from 1801 by the Gunter family, confectioners of Berkeley Square. Over the course of the nineteenth century the Gunters and their lessees built thousands of houses on newly created streets, named after a variety of family associations. Edith Grove, for example, honours Captain Robert Gunter’s daughter, who died of scarlet fever at the age of eight. Finborough Road is named after the country seat of the Pettiward family, another local landowner. Brompton cemetery was founded in 1837 as the West of London and Westminster Cemetery. It has a formal layout with a central chapel, based on St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Previously the land had been fields and market gardens, mainly owned by Lord Kensington. An additional 4½ acres was obtained in 1844 from the Equitable Gas Company, giving access to Fulham Road. The cemetery was compulsorily purchased from the private owners in 1852 by the General Board of Health, becoming the first and only London cemetery under government control. Around 200,000 people have been buried here, including eleven holders of the Victoria Cross, 3,000 Chelsea Pensioners, suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, and singer and operetta composer Richard Tauber. In 1997 the Sioux Indian Chief Long Wolf was reburied in South Dakota, having been interred at Brompton in 1892.

The children’s writer Beatrix Potter often walked in the cemetery and seems to have found the names for many of her characters on the gravestones here.
Names on the cemetery's headstones include Mr Nutkin, Mr McGregor, Jeremiah Fisher and Peter Rabbett

Blackheath

A pretty village and common, separated from Greenwich Park by Shooters Hill Road and originally focused on the junction of roads to Greenwich, Woolwich and Lee. Most of the heath, which got its name either from the colour of the soil or from its bleakness, was in the hands of the earls (originally barons) of Dartmouth from 1673. In addition to its use as pasture, Blackheath was extensively quarried for gravel, particularly in the eighteenth century. This left a terrain of craters and ravines, a few of which survived to be used as landfill sites for bomb rubble after the last war, (a subsidence in April 2002 caused serious disruption for months afterwards). The first street to be completed was the prosperous Dartmouth Row in the 1690s, but with that exception the Dartmouths were slow to grant leases on their freehold and the heath in 1780 had just a few roadside cottages on its southern edge. It was over the next 25 years that a high class settlement appeared, expanding after the Napoleonic wars and acquiring the name Blackheath Village. Its present charm and popularity owe much to the survival of properties dating from this period. North-east of the village’s central triangle, impressive residences went up on land belonging to the speculator John Cator after he began to sell leases in 1793. The North Kent Railway Company opened Blackheath station in 1849 after local objections prevented the cutting of a line through Greenwich Park. The railway stimulated a housing boom in the 1860s and 70s and several of the original cottages were cleared to make way for more salubrious properties. At this time, the heath itself passed into the hands of the Metropolitan Board of Works after the Earl of Dartmouth agreed to waive his manorial rights. Its 270 acres are now given over to kite flying, jogging and casual sports.

Blackheath has a proud sporting history. It was the site of the first golf club in England, laid out by James I, and Blackheath was one of the founder members of the Rugby Football Union. The Blackheath Harriers athletics club moved south to Hayes in 1927.

The Foundling Hospital in London, England was founded in 1739 by the philanthropic sea captain Thomas Coram. It was a children's home established for the "education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children." The word "hospital" was used in a more general sense than it is today, simply indicating the institution's "hospitality" to those less fortunate.

The first children were admitted to the Foundling Hospital on 25 March 1741, into a temporary house located in Hatton Garden. At first, no questions were asked about child or parent, but a distinguishing token was put on each child by the parent. These were often marked coins, trinkets, pieces of cotton or ribbon, verses written on scraps of paper. Clothes, if any, were carefully recorded. One entry is, "Paper on the breast, clout on the head." The applications became too numerous, and a system of balloting with red, white and black balls was adopted. Children were seldom taken after they were twelve months old. On reception they were sent to wet nurses in the countryside, where they stayed until they were about four or five years old. At sixteen the girls were generally apprenticed as servants for four years; at fourteen, boys became apprentices in varying occupations for seven years. There was a small benevolent fund for adults.

In September 1742, the stone of the new Hospital was laid in the area known as Bloomsbury, lying north of Great Ormond Street and west of Gray's Inn Lane. The Hospital was designed by Theodore Jacobsen as a plain brick building with two wings and a chapel, built around an open courtyard. The western wing was finished in October 1745. An eastern wing was added in 1752 "in order that the girls might be kept separate from the boys". The new Hospital was described as "the most imposing single monument erected by eighteenth century benevolence" and became London's most popular charity.

In 1756, the House of Commons came to a resolution that all children offered should be received, that local receiving places should be appointed all over the country, and that the funds should be publicly guaranteed. A basket was accordingly hung outside the hospital; the maximum age for admission was raised from two to twelve months, and a flood of children poured in from country workhouses. In less than four years 14,934 children were presented, and a vile trade grew up among vagrants, who sometimes became known as "Coram Men," of promising to carry children from the country to the hospital, an undertaking which they often did not perform or performed with great cruelty. Of these 15,000 only 4400 lived to be apprenticed out. The total expense was about £500,000, which alarmed the House of Commons. After throwing out a bill which proposed to raise the necessary funds by fees from a general system of parochial registration, they came to the conclusion that the indiscriminate admission should be discontinued. The hospital, being thus thrown on its own resources, adopted a system of receiving children with considerable sums (e.g., £100), which sometimes led to them being reclaimed by the parent. This was finally stopped in 1801; and it henceforth became a fundamental rule that no money was received. The committee of inquiry had to be satisfied of the previous good character and present necessity of the mother, and that the father of the child had deserted it and the mother, and that the reception of the child would probably replace the mother in the course of virtue and in the way of an honest livelihood. At that time, illegitimacy carried deep stigma, especially for the mother but also for the child. All the children at the Foundling Hospital were those of unmarried women, and they were all first children of their mothers. The principle was in fact that laid down by Henry Fielding in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling: "Too true I am afraid it is that many women have become abandoned and have sunk to the last degree of vice [i.e. prostitution] by being unable to retrieve the first slip."

There were some unfortunate incidents, such as the case of Elizabeth Brownrigg (1720-1767), a severely abusive Fetters Lane midwife who mercilessly whipped and otherwise maltreated her adolescent female apprentice domestic servants, leading to the death of one, Mary Clifford, from her injuries, neglect and infected wounds. After the Foundling Hospital authorities investigated, Brownrigg was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang at Tyburn. Thereafter, the Foundling Hospital instituted more thorough investigation of its prospective apprentice masters and mistresses.

Postmotem Reading.

The Love of Learing could hardly be more throughly evinced than by Edward Chamberlayne a churhman and antiquary who was born in Oddiington Gloucestershire in 1616 and died in Chelsea in 1703
His memorial stone by the river is in Latin and states that he wished that his books should be sealed in wax and buried with him so that he could continue his studies after death. It is not recorded whether this request was excuted.
There is another oddity, too at All Saints The building was almost completely destroyed by enemy action but fortunately the Thomas More Chapel survived To the West of the church there is a memorial garden to Magaret Roper one of More's daughter's.A Statue of More in his Robes as Lord Chancellor now stands in front of the church, with the unusual festure of a reproduction of his signature on the Plinth..

rita

Born in 1720 to a working class family, Elizabeth married James Brownrigg, an apprentice plumber, while still a teenager. She gave birth to sixteen children, but only three survived infancy. In 1765, Elizabeth, James and their son John moved to Flower de Luce Road in London's Fetter Lane. James was prospering from his career as a plumber, and Elizabeth was a respected midwife. As a result of her work, Saint Dunstans Parish appointed her overseer of women and children, and she was given custody of several female children as domestic servants from the London Foundling Hospital.

There is little biographical information available to explain her subsequent behaviour. However, Elizabeth Brownrigg proved ill-suited to the task of caring for her foundling domestic servants and soon began to engage in severe physical abuse. This often involved stripping her young charges naked, chaining them to wooden beams or pipes, and then whipping them severely with switches, bullwhip handles and other implements for the slightest infraction of her rules. Mary Jones, one of her earlier charges, ran away from her house and sought sanctuary with the London Foundling Hospital. After a medical examination, the Governors of the London Foundling Hospital demanded that James Brownrigg keep his wife's abusive tendencies in check, but enforced no further action.

Heedless of this reprimand, Brownrigg also severely abused two other domestic servants, Mary Mitchell and Mary Clifford. Like Jones before her, Mitchell sought refuge from the abusive behavior of her employer, but John Brownrigg forced her to return to Flower de Luce Road. Clifford was entrusted to Brownrigg's care, despite the Governors earlier concerns about her abusive behavior toward her charges. As a result, Brownrigg engaged in more excessive punishment toward Clifford. She was kept naked, forced to sleep on a mat inside a coal-hole, and when she forced open cupboards for food because she was fed only bread and water, Elizabeth Brownrigg repeatedly beat her for a day's duration, chained to a roof beam in her kitchen.

By June 1767, Mitchell and Clifford were experiencing infection of their untreated wounds, and Brownrigg's repeated assaults gave her no time to heal. However, Brownrigg's neighbors were beginning to suspect something was awry within her household, and resultantly, they asked the London Foundling Hospital to further investigate the premises. As a result, Brownrigg yielded Mary Mitchell, but Foundling Hospital Inspector Grundy then demanded to know where Clifford was, and took James Brownrigg prisoner, although Elizabeth and John Brownrigg escaped.

In Wandsworth, a chandler recognised the fugitives, and the trio stood trial in the Old Bailey in August 1767.


[edit] Trial and Execution: August-September 1767
By this time, Mary Clifford had succumbed to her infected wounds, and Elizabeth Brownrigg was charged with her murder. At the trial, Mary Mitchell testified against her former employer, as did Grundy and an apprentice of James Brownrigg. Medical evidence and autopsy results indicated that Brownrigg's repeated assaults and negligence of Clifford's injuries had contributed to the fourteen year old's death, so Elizabeth Brownrigg was sentenced to hang at Tyburn. Crowds condemned her on the way to her execution, and even sixty years later, the Newgate Calendar crime periodical still bore testimony to the impression that Elizabeth Brownrigg's crimes had made on Georgian and Victorian England. Both the Newgate Calendar and Old Bailey trial records are available online.

Greater Love.

The Churchyard of St Botolph-without -Aldergate has and entrance opposite the General Post office in King Edwards street.and being much frequented by postmen. has earned the name of Postmans Park.
There is a well attended flower Garden with a gold fish pond but the main interest lies in the covered loggia This, the gift of the painter G.F.Watts in 1880, is lined with cramic Tablets recording acts of heroism by the ordinary people which have cost them their lives. one of the earliest reads.

" Herbert Moconoghu, schoolboy from Wimbledon , aged 13, his parents absent in India, lost hisl life in vainly trying to rescure his two school-fellows who were drowned at Glovers Pool Croyde North Devon August 28th 1882."

rita

n

Hi Carol

Nice to know someone else is interested in the Hitory and Oddities of London.

rita.

London was a honeypot for migrants searching for work.

Also, it was a place to move to if you wanted to escape your past, ie parents who had an illegitimate baby, escaping debts, the police, enemies etc.

Ben

Did you know Lambeth Bridge is painted Red to match the red benches in the House of Lords, located at the rear end of the Palace of Westminster, while Westminister bridge is painted green to match the benches in the Commons.

Just found out the other day a plaque has just been erected on Peckham Rye Common commemorating a battle there by Bodicea.
I lived in Peckham for years and never knew any thing about the battle on the common!
Cathie in Cornwall