London calling.
London Walks connecting.
London Walks here with today’s London fix.
Story time. History time.
Dogs do it. Lions do it. Chimpanzees do it. We all do it.
We mark territory. Take possession of it. It’s all about space. Our space, our turf. What we command.
In the end, their space – their world – shrank to about four square feet in a claustrophobic little 20 foot by 16 foot basement room in a merchant’s house in a city in the Urals. On the road to Siberia.
It’s the night of July 16th-July 17th. The family’s asleep. They’re awakened. Told they have to go down into that little basement room for their safety. Eleven of them – the family and a few close personal retainers – are bundled down there. They’re told the Czech forces are on the outskirts of the city. The city’s going to be a battleground.
Minutes later eleven men – hard men, some of them drunk – come into that basement room. They’re carrying firearms. Eleven men. One for each member of the Czar’s family and the handful of retainers. They’re there to execute the Czar, the Czarina, their children and the servants. Twenty-two people in that tiny room. Less than four square feet per person. The very definition of point blank range. The man in charge of the death squad – Yakov Yurovsky, a secret policeman and Bolshevik Revolutionary – reads out the order. “Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you.” The Czar, who had been facing his family, turned and said “What?”
Yurovsky raises his Mauser C-96 handgun, points it at the Czar, and pulls the trigger three times. All three bullets hit the Czar in the chest and he falls dead. The other killers open fire on their victims. Each one has been assigned a victim to kill. Protected by the bodies of the grown-ups, the children don’t die immediately. Nor do some of the women. They’ve sewn jewels into the front of their clothes. The gems afford them some protection. There are groans. The children are whimpering. The killers shoot them in the head and stab them with bayonets and knives. The orgy of violence over – some 70 bullets fired – the bodies are checked for pulses and frisked for valuables. And then they’re carried out of the charnal house. They’re loaded onto a Fiat truck, which struggles along a boggy road nine miles to a forest. The bodies are lifted off the truck and put on carts that are manhandled by a 25-strong, drunken burial squad. The grave diggers paw the female bodies for diamonds hidden in their undergarments. Two of them lift up the Czarina’s skirt and finger her genitals. The sun rising, the corpse-laden carts are hauled to the disposal site. A shallow, water-filled pit near a disused mine. The corpses are laid out on the ground and undressed. The clothes are piled up and burned. An inventory is taken of the jewellery. Completely naked, the bodies are dumped into the shallow mineshaft and doused with sulphuric acid to disfigure them. The pit is less than ten feet deep. The muddy water doesn’t fully submerge the bodies. Yurovsky tries to collapse the mine with hand grenades. That doesn’t work. The Bolsheviks have only brought one shovel. They do what they can. Try to cover the burial site with loose earth and branches. Three men are left to guard the site. Yurovsky returns to the city with 18 pounds of looted diamonds.
Pertinent background. The Czar had abdicated 16 months previously. And had been under house arrest since then. It was believed that the Czech legion moving on the city where the Czar and his family were held would free them. It wasn’t a Czech legion closing in on the Czar and his family, it was death. The autocrat, the absolute ruler of all Russia, how his space contracted, how the walls of his existence closed in upon him. The merchant’s house where they were held was a comfortable middle-class house but it wasn’t the Winter Palace or any of the Czar’s other palatial residences. The number of people looking after the Romanovs’ immediate needs shrunk from hundreds to just a handful. He wasn’t allowed to take his daily walk. The soldiers who guarded him treated him badly, physically manhandled him. When he tried to walk outside, they would lay hands on him, prod him with their rifles. Say, “you’re not going anywhere, turn around. Stand back when you’re commanded, Mister.”
Let that sink in. “Stand back when you’re commanded, Mister.” You’re not going anywhere Mister. That was the way they addressed him now. The imperial titles had gone with the Bolshevik wind.
The order to murder the Emperor of Russia and his family had come from Lenin himself.
Lenin, who just sixteen months previously, had been allowed to transit Germany from the Swiss border to the Finland Station in Petrograd. Granting that permission was King George V’s other first cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm. Lenin had crossed Germany in a sealed train. As Winston Churchill put it, “like a plague bacillus.” Kaiser Wilhelm putting the bacillus on his – and King George’s cousin’s – the three of them, the Czar, the Kaiser, the King of England were first cousins – putting the bacillus on the doorstep of imperial Russia, the Czar’s vast territory.
What happened in that small basement room in the Urals on July 17th, 1918 might not have come to that if the Czar’s first cousin – and good friend – the king of England – George V – had shown more courage, had put family first. George had extended an offer of asylum to his cousin. But then it was withdrawn. He allowed himself to be persuaded that bringing the Czar to England and harbouring him would be unpopular, might even pose a threat to the crown.
The war had changed everything.
George had become immensely sensitive to criticism of himself and the monarchy. There had been insinuations about the royal family’s German names and antecedents, insinuations that the King of England and his family might not be entirely loyal. In response to that, George had changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the entirely made up – and very English – Windsor.
Bottom line: King George V panicked. Family took second place to his throne and his place on it. His feelings for his cousin and the terrible plight, the danger he was in, was as a feather in the scales over against George looking after George. The invitation to come to England was rescinded.
And so the way was cleared for Murder to burst into that little room in the merchant’s house in the Urals, on the road to Siberia.
And in London? What happened in London on that same day? July 17th, 1918.
And the point here is the stark contrast between the shambles in that basement room in the Urals and what was going on at the same time in this green and pleasant land. The King of England was inspecting army cadets in Woolwich. And all was well with his world.
Anything else? Yes, of all things, there was a baseball game in Hyde Park. Taking place at almost exactly the same time the Czar and his family were being murdered 3,000 miles to the east. The Lord Mayor of London presided. According to the Times it was the first baseball match in Hyde Park played by American soldiers now in England. The Lord Mayor ‘pitched’ the first ball, with good will but rather faulty execution. Perhaps most revealing of all, though, the last sentence of the Times story: I’m quoting – this is, needless to say, the language of 1918, “next Wednesday afternoon, at 3.30, on the same ground, an American white team will meet an American negro team.” That’s the way things were just over a century ago.
You’ve been listening to the Today in London History podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com – home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company. London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company. And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything. It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for. And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world? You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do to attract and keep the best guides in London – you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else. Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing. It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely –
to front our walks with distinguished
professionals.
By way of example,
Stewart Purvis, the former Editor (and
subsequently CEO) of Independent
Television News. And Lisa Honan
who had a distinguished career as
diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of
St Helena, the island where Napoleon
breathed his last and, some say, had
his penis amputated – Napoleon
didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot
juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them
CBEs – are just a couple of our
headline acts.
The London Walks All-Star team of
guides includes a former London
Mayor, it includes barristers (one of
them an MBE); it includes doctors,
geologists, museum curators,
archaeologists, historians, criminal
defence lawyers, university professors,
Royal Shakespeare Company actors,
a bevy of MVPs,
Oscar winners (people who’ve won
the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)… well,
you get the idea. As that travel writer
famously put it, “if this were a golf
tournament, every name on the
Leader Board would be a London
Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks. And that’s by way of saying, Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.
A tiny, desperately sad story about tiny tots. A little boy aged five and his four year old sister strayed onto a railway line in Finchley and were elelctrocuted.