London Urban Legends (2 page)

Reading Michael Goss’s article in the June 1987 small digest magazine
The Unknown
, the main aspect of urban myths that first captured my imagination was the idea that stories could migrate and adapt themselves as they travel. It was the first time I imagined stories with a life beyond their author. One could read a book written by a deceased writer, but it would still be in their book. But what if the writer was gone, the books, films and songs were forgotten, but somehow their story lived on and found an ever-changing existence travelling around the world?

I began reading magazines like
The Unexplained
and
The Unknown
as a precocious pre-adolescent looking for aliens stepping out of UFOs, ghosts drawing themselves out of ancient wallpaper and monsters lurking in the misty night but found something far more humane and fascinating that could contain all of these gaudy wonders. My fascination with the paranormal was enlarged and refined. Years later I was lucky enough to catch Jan Harold Brunvald speak at the
Fortean Times
gathering, the UnConvention, which reignited my interest.

When American psychologist F.C. Bartlett experimented with how stories change through retelling, his conclusions rang true for urban myths. Details difficult to repeat were smoothed out, and in Bartlett’s test story, ‘canoes’ became ‘boats’ and ‘bush-cats’ became ‘cats’. Any unusual parts of the story begin to be rationalised and morals formed either through this process or as a reason for telling the story. The experiment was short and contained to a small peergroup, while urban legends are feral and free, but it makes sense that stories survive, not just because they are entertaining but because they carry a central lesson or meaning.

As I have already said, the term urban myth and legend is now used to describe contemporary folk stories. One problem raised by this is that where there are gatherings of people, there are legends, myths and folklore; and London has been an urban environment for around two thousand years. If we were to find a story told by the Romans about a part of London life, would that be an urban myth? Classical myths and legends are often of gods, heroes and supernatural creatures, but urban myths also trouble themselves with royalty and celebrities and wander into the supernatural and paranormal to include ghosts, monsters and stories of miracles. They are not always stories of the common folk.

Other names have been suggested for these tales: Rodney Dale arguably wrote the first acknowledged urban myth book, without using the term, in 1972;
The Tumour in the Whale
suggested the phrase ‘whale tumours’, inspired by stories of rationing era whale meat being eaten as a substitute for beef, with its unusual status confirmed with wobbly growths. The phrase did not catch on, but Dale did bring together the phrase ‘friend-of-a-friend’ and abbreviate it to ‘foaf’ in order to describe the ever-apocryphal source of an urban myth. David J. Jacobson, in his 1948 book
The Affairs of Dame Rumour,
and Sir Basil Thomson, in his 1922 book
Queer People,
both encountered and understood the source of a story as always being just beyond arms’ length – they are quoted later in this book describing the process in more depth. Another good term for these stories is the Swedish
vandresagn
, meaning ‘wandering legends’ that travel by people sharing stories. Sharing stories is as old as humanity and is still a powerful way for us to express our feelings and innermost thoughts, from epics to emails and campfires to Kindles.

Scott Wood, 2013

But the truth is this is not how London is apprehended. It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passage, door.

Anna Quindlen, Imagined London

W
HY DO WE
use that phrase? Why is that statue so strange? Why is that big stone there? Where is that actual place?

There is often a story to answer questions like this about a local landmark. It is as if a large physical object or popular idea deserves to have a neat narrative fixed to it. Once you start examining the origins of a myth or phrase, you can be led down strange alleys and cul-de-sacs chasing old stories and ideas. Things can become confused and leave your thoughts in some disarray or, to use the particularly apt phrase, ‘at sixes and sevens’.

The phrase ‘at sixes and sevens’ is said to have a London origin and refers to a feud between the Merchant Taylors and Merchant Skinners livery companies. Both were founded in the City of London around the same time, so they argued about who should come sixth and who should come seventh in the Order of Precedence, a list of London livery companies organised by age collected from 1515.

‘To fall off the wagon’ means to succumb to the temptation of alcohol; to be on the wagon is to not drink, so to fall off is to start drinking again. One possible origin of this saying, much-loved on
The Robert Elms Show
on BBC London Radio, is from when prisoners were taken from Newgate Prison to Tyburn to be hanged. Halfway to their execution there would be a stop where the condemned could have a last drink. One origin of this tradition could be that a ‘cup of charity’ was bequeathed by Queen Matilda (wife of Henry I). The prisoner would get off the wagon at a tavern at St-Giles-in-the-Fields and have a pint of ale in the cup, and then get back on the wagon to go to Tyburn. He would never drink again. Another version, collected by Snopes, has the last stop at Marble Arch, right by the site of the gallows. A retelling from the Nursery Rhymes: Lyrics, Origins and History website puts a line of dialogue into the story. If the prisoner was offered a second drink, the guard would say, ‘No, he’s on the wagon.’ If they had friends in the crowd they would, perhaps, be pulled off the wagon and rescued. This is falling off the wagon.

The word ‘tawdry’, which means something that is cheap, low quality and maybe makes you a bit sad to give or receive as a gift, also has its origins in London. St Ethelreda’s Church on Ely Place, London’s oldest Catholic place of worship, is near London’s diamond and jewellery centre, Hatton Garden. I was told by a trustworthy source, a Blue Badge guide no less, that the church gave us the word from the poorer quality trinkets from the area which was said to be a bit ‘St Audrey’, another version of the name Ethelreda.

All of these phrases make sense on their own, hermetically sealed in their own story. Outside of these are far different possible origins. ‘At sixes and sevens’ bumbles all the way back to the Old Testament with ‘six, yea, seven’, meaning an indefinite number and so is unknown and confusing. In the
Book of Job
is the line that God ‘shall deliver thee in six troubles, yea in seven’, and it is likely that the Bible has more influence over popular culture than London’s livery companies and their lore. Another biblical origin is the story of an error in the King James Bible, in which the sixth commandment is ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ and the seventh ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery’. In the Septuagint version, not committing adultery comes in sixth and the seventh is ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’. Which puts bible scholars at sixes and sevens. Another non-biblical origin is from the French game played with dice called Hazard, where six and seven are the most hazardous numbers to shoot for and anyone attempting it is thought to be careless or confused.

Does tawdry come from St Ethelreda? Perhaps, but not the one in London. St Ethelreda’s sits within Ely Place, the site of the palace for the Bishop of Cambridge, and the church started life as the palace’s private chapel. An earlier version is that the word comes from St Audrey lace sold on at the fair of St Audrey on the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire.

The phrases ‘on the wagon’ and ‘fall off the wagon’ evolved probably not along the streets between Newgate and Tyburn but in America. The earliest known version appeared in the 1901 book
Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
, the phrase referring to the water wagons used in America to dampen down dusty roads. The American Temperance movement formed the phrase to describe someone who is not drinking. They felt so strongly about the sinfulness of alcohol that they would rather drink water from the water wagon than let alcohol pass their lips, although now I write it down this explanation sounds just as implausible as the Tyburn theory. The excellent online resource, Snopes, suggests that ‘on the wagon’ is a derivation of ‘following the bandwagon’. The bandwagon is a phrase coined, as far as we know, by the American showman P.T. Barnum to describe what his shows travelled around in, and ‘to jump on the bandwagon’ means to follow or join the fair. The word only goes back as far as the nineteenth century, with ‘on the wagon’ still coming to us from the members of the Temperance movement. Any connection to the journey to Tyburn was almost certainly retro-fitted in the twentieth or twenty-first century as speculation made story, or by joining the dots of distance and unrelated ideas to make a pleasing narrative pattern. We can’t help but do it; it’s impossible for us just to shrug and say ‘I don’t know’ when wondering about such a thing, so we write stories to explain the mysterious origins of phrase and fables.

I like the idea of infiltrating an area that is
not really exposed to me or my work.

Alexander McQueen

Royally Rude

When London-based fashion designer Alexander McQueen was found dead on 11 February 2010, the response was one of shock and grief. His suicide was all over the media and the loss was felt by even the scruffiest of Londoners.

Remembering him in the 2010 obituaries in the 12 December edition of the
Observer
, Harriet Quick, fashion features director at
Vogue
, described his collections as ‘wildly imaginative’ whilst McQueen was a ‘shy, sensitive man’. Quick suggested that a McQueen fashion show had such power it could actually affect nature, remembering that ‘his shows were frequently accompanied by freak weather’, and she describes driving through a hurricane to see a show in New York in 2000. In past times and other lands the sky threatens at war, disaster or the death of a monarch or beloved leader. Alexander McQueen only needed to showcase some expensive clothes that most people could not wear for storms to descend.