Haunted London (18 page)

The late Mr ‘Gerry’ Dawson, who became museum curator in 1957, following his retirement as a detective inspector after twenty-seven years’ service in London, once told me that he had seen a dark figure in the museum several times but it always disappeared when he approached and he tended to think that it must have been a trick of the light, although it appeared in different parts of the museum. He also told me about a murderer’s death-mask from which mysterious hairs grew at one time, and although the curator cut the hairs short, they grew again slowly. The death mask was that of a murderer whose beard had been cut off before he was hanged as it might have hindered the hangman’s work. Charles ‘Gerry’ Dawson died in 1970 on his way to the Black Museum.

SOMERSET HOUSE

Somerset House, a palace when the Strand was known as the King’s Road, linking Westminster with the City of London, was later occupied by the Inland Revenue, Probate Registry and the Registrar General. The first government department to occupy Somerset House was the Admiralty, where Lord Nelson was a frequent visitor, and it is his ghost that has been seen within the precincts of this historic building, which was one of the first in this country to be designed in Italian Renaissance style. Canaletto knew Somerset House and painted several pictures from the terrace.

The present Somerset House has been in existence some two hundred years. The first Somerset House, a Tudor extravaganza, saw many a brutal death by dagger, sword or poison. That first house was built by the Duke of Somerset when he was Protector of all the Realms and Dominions of the King’s Majesty and Governor of His Most Royal Person — the ten-year-old Edward VII — in 1547. To find room for the noble building he had in mind he demolished several bishop’s houses, the old church of St Mary le Strand (rebuilt in the middle of the Strand in 1714-17) and a charnel house. It was said that more than a thousand cartloads of human bones were removed and buried in Finsbury Fields. There is some mystery about the architect of Somerset House, although it is generally thought to have been Sir John Thynne, who built haunted Longleat, a house that contains some of the features of old Somerset House.

In 1551, the Duke of Somerset was falsely accused of a plot against Warwick, whose eldest son had married Somerset’s daughter Anne, and after practically every possible charge had been made against him he was found guilty of felony and died on Tower Hill, his great palace beside the Thames still unfinished. The Princess Elizabeth received Somerset House as a town residence, and when she became queen she retained possession and used the great house as a royal palace, a meeting place for her council and as a kind of grace-and-favour residence for friends and relatives. Some of these were of questionable character and substance, such as Cornelius de la Noye, who was provided with an apartment where he practised alchemy, having persuaded the queen that he could transmit base metals into gold, manufacture precious stones and produce a potion with powers of perpetual youth.

During the reign of James I, his queen, Anne of Denmark, preferred Somerset House to all her other palaces and there she smuggled Roman Catholic priests to celebrate Mass, beginning a trend of deceit and intrigue that culminated in the Great Popish Plot seventy-five years later — an affair that nearly destroyed the monarchy.

Queen Anne died suddenly at the court in 1619 and a week later her embalmed body was conveyed by river at night to Somerset House (then called Denmark House) to lay in state there for over two months. King James, having satisfied himself that his wife was recovering, had gone to Newmarket, and the end came quickly and unexpectedly. Yet the king had a morbid fear of death and if he could convince himself that he had some excuse for not being at her death-bed there can be no good reason for his absence at her funeral.

Six years later, the king’s embalmed body lay in state at Denmark House for a month, after he had died at Theobalds of a fearful attack of dysentery that led to rumours of poison.

Charles I installed his fifteen-year-old bride Henrietta Maria in Denmark House and she began to bring back some of its frivolity and style until the King ordered her interfering mother, who stopped at nothing to further the Roman Catholic cause in England, to leave the country together with the whole of the queen’s French suite. For a time after that the silent stones of Denmark House saw deep sadness as poor Henrietta, surrounded by the unresponsive English, and seeing little of her husband, wept in her loneliness. But soon the young couple were reconciled and gaiety returned to the house by the river.

Henrietta Maria had a passion for dwarfs and in 1627 she received an eighteen-inch-high, nine-year-old dwarf in a pie as a gift. She was much upset when one dwarf fell to his death from a window at Denmark House, and when a dwarf couple married, with the king giving the bride away, the pair lived at Denmark House as part of the royal suite.

During the violent storm that brought down trees in St James’s Park on the night of 3 September 1658, Oliver Cromwell died and his embalmed body lay in state at Somerset House, by this time called again by its original name. However, visitors saw only a wax effigy clothed in royal purple and holding the sceptre and orb, for the body itself had not been properly embalmed and was quietly removed and buried in Westminster Abbey. A fortnight later, the crowned wax effigy was carried at the official funeral.

Before long the brother of King Charles II, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, died of the smallpox and his body lay for some weeks at Somerset House. While there for the funeral, the Princess of Orange died from the same disease and her body was carried in torchlight procession from Somerset House to Westminster Abbey. The body of the Queen of Bohemia lay in state at Somerset House, and that of the Duke of Albemarle, and also the body of the Earl of Sandwich who had brought the king back from Holland.

Apart from acting as a royal mortuary, Somerset House was the scene of many macabre incidents. Pepys relates that one Tom Woodall was killed in a drunken brawl at Somerset House, and in 1678, Sir Edmund Barry Godfrey, a highly respected magistrate, disappeared and his body, run through with his own sword, and with a livid mark around the neck, was found in a ditch. There is evidence to suggest that he was murdered at Somerset House, where he had been persuaded to come to meet some Catholic priests, and where he was probably murdered by the palace sentries and the body hidden in the vast mansion for some days and then taken to Primrose Hill where it was found. Some say his ghost walks at Somerset House. In 1720, Somerset House became the meeting place for some of London’s Satanists or Hellfire Clubs and the following year a royal proclamation forbade such clubs, although twenty years later they were revived by Sir Francis Dashwood and his notorious Monks of Medmenham. On the lighter side, Elizabeth Chudleigh, maid of honour to Augusta, Princess of Wales, appeared at the Somerset House Ball in 1749 as Iphigenia — naked for the sacrifice! The princess pretended to be embarrassed and threw a veil over the girl.

A hundred years later, Somerset House first boasted a resident ghost. Out of all the gruesome happenings, violent deeds and associations with death, Somerset House is haunted by the quiet ghost of Horatio Nelson. The Admiralty was established at Somerset House in 1786 in premises later occupied by the Inland Revenue, and for years its museum and exhibition of model ships was a popular attraction. The great admiral spent some of his most poignant and happy hours within the region of Somerset House, and in 1806 his body was carried up the Thames past Somerset House to Whitehall in readiness for the last journey along the Strand and burial in St Paul’s Cathedral. It does not seem unlikely that even in death Nelson found the atmosphere of Somerset House irresistible. His ghost, the thin and spare and frail-looking form with one arm missing, quite unmistakable, has usually been seen on bright spring mornings, walking briskly across the rough stones of the quadrangle towards the old Admiralty Office. In most cases the figure is seen from a distance and invariably it disappears before it can be challenged. Some witnesses have detected a wispy and almost transparent cloud surrounding the figure that appears unusually sharp in the morning light.

When Charles Weld was librarian of the Royal Society, then occupying rooms in the north block of Somerset House, he learned about a curious story that was said to account for the watch-face inserted high up on the wall of the quadrangle. During the course of construction, a workman was said to have fallen from the scaffolding and was halted in his descent by his watch-chain catching on a portion of the wall. As a mark of his gratitude, he inserted his watch into the face of the wall, a memento of his lucky escape. Alas for legend, the watch-face was placed in its present position by the Royal Society as a meridian mark for a portable transit instrument in one of the windows of their rooms.

One little mystery before we leave Somerset House. In the basement, known as the West Search, there is a strange little self-contained snuggery, panelled in wood designed to look like stone and with dummy windows and dummy skylights. No one seems to know the original purpose or history of this pretence apartment.

THE TEMPLE

The Temple, on the Victoria Embankment, was originally the headquarters of the Knights Templars who came here in 1184. When the Order was dissolved in 1312 the property was acquired by the Crown and given to Aymerde de Valence, Earl of Pembroke. On his death in 1323 it passed into the possession of the Knights Hospitallers of St John who leased it to students of the Common Law. On the dissolution of the Knights of St John in 1539 the Societies of the Inner and Middle Temples leased the property to the Crown, and in 1608, James I granted the property to them and their successors forever.

Among the mysteries of the Temple there is the curious affair of the skeleton discovered when electricity was installed in the Middle Temple Hall. The skeleton, in a perfect state of preservation, was found in a box in a recess of the wall near the roof. It was judged that the skeleton must have remained hidden there for over 200 years. And among the tragedies there is the Brick Court murder by a Miss Brodrick who killed her lover, Mr Eddington, when he deserted her and the cruel murders in Tanfield Court of old Mrs Duncomb and her little maid, Annie Price, by a charwoman, Sarah Malcolm.

The Temple has seen much strife and suffered much damage over the years. Wat Tyler wrecked many of the buildings in 1381 and the Great Fire burnt most of the Inner Temple in 1661. There were other fires in succeeding years and the Second World War took its toll, yet there are still buildings, gateways, arches and cloisters that would be recognized by the scores of famous people who knew the Temple. Dr Johnson lived here, as did Oliver Goldsmith, Lamb and Thackeray. Elias Ashmole, friend of diarist John Evelyn, and founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, had chambers in Middle Temple Lane, and Sir Francis Drake knew this place, as did Queen Elizabeth I.

Others who had chambers at the Temple include Lloyd Kenyon, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, and Sir Alexander Cockburn, who achieved the same distinction; Sir Gordon Hewart, Lord Chief Justice; Sir Edward Carson and George Jeffreys. However, it is not the ghost of the infamous Judge Jeffreys of the Bloody Assizes that haunts these ancient precincts but that of Sir Henry Hawkins, afterwards Lord Brampton, whose ghost has been seen many times, usually around midnight, clothed in wig and gown gliding noiselessly though the cloisters with a bundle of papers under his arm. Or sometimes in the fading hours of daylight, his hurrying form has been glimpsed in the vicinity of one of the fine archways that ‘the hanging judge’ must have known so well during his days at the Temple.

The archway at the Temple where the ghost of Sir Henry Hawkins has been seen as daylight fades, with a bundle of papers underneath his arm.

BRUCE CASTLE, TOTTENHAM

Bruce Castle, Tottenham (now part of the London Borough of Haringey), a former Elizabethan manor house, has been restored as a museum. The property was once owned by Rowland Hill, the originator of the penny postal system, and it is appropriate that the exhibits at Bruce Castle include a museum of British Post Office history. There is also a ghost that appears on 3 November every year. The haunting is said to date back to the seventeenth century when the beautiful Costania, Lady Coleraine, threw herself to her death in desperation at being kept locked in a tiny room over the central porch by her jealous husband, Henry, the second Baron Coleraine.

On 3 November 1680, she is reported to have made her way to the parapet outside, her baby in her arms, and there jumped to her death, screaming hysterically. The event is said to have been re-enacted for many years afterwards on each anniversary. As the years passed, the vision faded, but the sound of screams are said to have been heard within living memory and C. H. Rock, a museum curator, told me some years ago that he had heard from a seventy-six-year-old lady living in Essex, who resided opposite Bruce Castle as a child, who claimed to have heard the screams several times. After a parson held a prayer meeting the ‘ghost’ quieted down for a time, but a few years later, one 3 November, the screams were heard again.