London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks.
Streets ahead. Story time. History time. Ok, just back from the Grand finale of the London Camino. The walk all the way across London from the Hertfordshire border in the north – that’s where Charlie and his walkers started about a week ago – to the Surrey Downs, the southern border, where we crossed the finish line this afternoon. I expect I’ll do a proper piece on it one of these days but right now, fresh from breasting the finish line, I’m just going to jot down some one-word impressions. They’ll give you the flavour of it. I guess first of all, that moment in the woods near New Aldington when Charlie gathered us round and said, “Congratulations, you’re in Surrey. You’ve done it. You’ve just crossed the border.” Everybody cheered. It was a high. The sense of accomplishment was, well, palpable. It was a concentrate of good feeling – very good feeling – that moment.
But, yes, some jottings. Pieces of today’s puzzle. I’m just going to read them out. You can put them together yourself. They were highlights. In some cases, “unexpecteds”. Starting with the tram. There’s a good tram service there. I think it’s the only one in London. All these years, I’d never ridden on a London tram. An old, now defunct horse-race ground. Golf courses, no end of golf courses. A secret opening that was the linchpin of the day. If Charlie hadn’t known about it we would have had to detour at least a mile. Allotments. A bridlepath. A pond. A deer. Woods. More woods than you can shake a stick at. We were pretty much in green – and woods – all day. Horses grazing in a pasture. Stables. And grand houses. All of London spread out before us from that eyrie, that viewing platform, surely the best one in London, up on top of Addington Hill. Fine country inns.
And that’s just a soupçon. Watch this space.
Right, handbrake turn. We’re leaving the London Camino and heading somewhere completely different.”
But actually, come to think of it, there is a connection. You take in that view from that eyrie up on top of Addington Hill and go where you may, rest where you will, eternal London will haunt you still.
And that great line, is the main course of today’s podcast. Let’s hear it again.
“Go where we may, rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.”
What a line.
Five words in that second line and London is caught.
Eternal London haunts us still.
I wish I’d written that.
The man who did write it was Thomas Moore.
Irishman. Poet. Songwriter. Satirist. Celebrity. Friend of Byron.
And here’s the first wonderful thing about that immortal line about London.
Moore wasn’t in London when he wrote it.
He was in Venice.
Venice!
Think about that.
One of the most beautiful cities on earth.
The Grand Canal.
Gondolas.
Palaces.
The light on the lagoon.
He could have written:
“Eternal Venice haunts us still.”
I mean, wouldn’t you?
But Moore didn’t.
He wrote London.
And even better, he was having a little fun with us.
But we’ll come to that.
First, Thomas Moore.
Born in Dublin in 1779.
And that’s important.
Moore wasn’t an English poet who happened to write about Ireland.
He was Irish.
Catholic Ireland.
His father was a grocer and wine merchant. His mother was ambitious for her son. And young Thomas had brains, charm, musical ability and, as it turned out, a considerable talent for getting himself noticed.
He went to Trinity College Dublin.
That itself tells us something.
Catholics had only recently been permitted to enter Trinity.
And Moore was there in the great political ferment of the 1790s.
This was the Ireland of the United Irishmen.
The Ireland of Robert Emmet.
Revolution was in the air.
Moore knew Emmet.
And when Emmet was executed after his failed rebellion in 1803, the memory stayed with him.
Ireland stayed with him.
But then London came calling.
In 1799 Moore arrived here to study law at Middle Temple.
And law, I think it’s fair to say, was never going to stand much of a chance against Thomas Moore being Thomas Moore.
Because Moore had something much more useful than legal aptitude.
He had entrée.
He could sing.
He could perform.
He could write.
He could charm a room.
And London society opened its doors.
Remember, this is before recordings, before radio, before Spotify, before any of it.
If you wanted to hear a song, somebody had to sing it.
And Thomas Moore could walk into a drawing room, sit down at the piano and hold the room.
He became fashionable.
Very fashionable.
And slightly naughty.
Early on he published a collection of poems under the name Thomas Little.
Little Moore.
Thomas Little.
You see what he did there.
And some of the poems were sufficiently erotic to cause raised eyebrows.
The Edinburgh Review attacked them.
And Moore did what any thin-skinned young poet of the period might do when he received a bad review.
He challenged the reviewer to a duel.
Of course he did.
The reviewer was Francis Jeffrey.
The two men met at Chalk Farm.
Pistols.
Seconds.
The whole absurd apparatus.
And fortunately the authorities intervened before anybody was killed.
Then came the embarrassing bit.
It was reported that one of the pistols had contained no bullet.
Which led Lord Byron to make fun of Moore’s supposedly bloodless duel.
Moore was furious.
So Moore challenged Byron.
You can see where this is going.
One duel leads to another.
Except that this time something much better happened.
The two men became friends.
Very good friends.
And that friendship was eventually to put Thomas Moore at the centre of one of the great literary acts of destruction.
But before we burn Byron’s memoirs, we need the music.
Because this is where Moore became Moore.
The Irish Melodies.
Old Irish airs, given new words by Thomas Moore.
And some of them became enormously famous.
The Last Rose of Summer.
The Minstrel Boy.
Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms.
Songs sung in drawing rooms throughout Britain and Ireland.
Songs that travelled around the world.
And underneath the prettiness, underneath the melody, there was often something else.
Ireland.
Loss.
Memory.
Exile.
A country dispossessed.
Moore could smuggle politics into a drawing room on the back of a beautiful tune.
That’s clever.
He could make people sing Ireland before they realised quite what they were singing.
And that brings us back to London.
Because Moore had an interesting relationship with this city.
London made him.
London society embraced him.
London publishers published him.
London gave him friends, connections, celebrity.
But he never stopped being Irish.
And then comes Byron.
In 1819 Byron entrusted Moore with his memoirs.
Think about that.
Byron’s memoirs.
Lord Byron.
One of the most scandalous, talked-about, sexually notorious men in Europe.
His own account of his life.
And Moore had the manuscript.
Then Byron died in 1824.
And Byron’s friends, publisher and family were terrified of what those memoirs might contain.
A meeting took place.
And the manuscript was burned.
Burned.
One of the great lost books of English literature.
Gone.
Thomas Moore was there.
Imagine being a writer and watching Byron’s unpublished autobiography being fed to the flames.
We will never know what was in it.
And perhaps that’s precisely why the story still bothers us.
Moore later wrote the major biography of Byron and received 4,000 guineas for it.
So there’s Thomas Moore.
Irish patriot.
London celebrity.
Songwriter.
Poet.
Friend of Byron.
Would-be duellist.
And accessory, if that’s not too strong a word, to one of literary history’s great bonfires.
And now let’s go to Venice.
Because in 1823 Moore published Rhymes on the Road.
He presented it as the journal of a travelling member of something wonderfully called the Poco-Curante Society.
And that gives us our Word of the Day.
Poco-curante.
It’s Italian in origin.
Poco, little.
Curante, caring.
Caring little.
Unconcerned.
Indifferent.
Nonchalant.
A person who doesn’t much care.
And Moore’s traveller is looking at Europe with this slightly amused, detached eye.
Which brings us to the poem.
He’s abroad.
Surrounded by the glories of continental Europe.
And what does he keep encountering?
The English.
English people abroad behaving, essentially, as though they were still in London.
Their society.
Their gossip.
Their preoccupations.
Their London world travelling with them.
And Moore writes:
“Go where we may, rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.”
Now here’s what I love about it.
We can read that today as a magnificent declaration about London.
And I do.
I absolutely do.
Because once London gets into you, it doesn’t readily let go.
You go away.
London follows.
A street name.
A voice.
A smell.
A particular quality of light.
A red bus glimpsed in a film.
A Tube roundel.
A church tower.
And suddenly you’re back.
Eternal London haunts us still.
But Moore was also being funny.
It wasn’t simply a love letter to London.
There was a satirical glint in his eye.
These English travellers couldn’t escape London because, in a sense, they’d brought London with them.
They’d travelled hundreds of miles across Europe only to recreate their own little London wherever they went.
And that makes the line better.
Not worse.
Because that’s what great lines do.
They escape from the circumstances in which they were written.
They become larger than their author intended.
Two hundred years later, I can take Thomas Moore’s joke and hear something quite different in it.
I hear what London does to people.
Certainly what it’s done to me.
I’ve lived here for more than half a century.
And I can go away.
Rest where I will.
But London comes along.
It’s in the bloodstream now.
And perhaps that’s what a great city eventually becomes.
Not somewhere you live.
Not somewhere you visit.
Something you carry.
Thomas Moore was in Venice.
He had Venice in front of him.
But somewhere in his head…
was London.
“Go where we may, rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.”
Thomas Moore.
Irishman.
Londoner.
And five words that have been following this city around for two hundred years.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Eternal London haunts us still.
See you tomorrow.