London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And a very good morning to you from London! It’s August 29th, 2024.
Today’s pin… What’s not to like about this one? It’d be hugely important if it were coming from Timbuktoo or McMurdo Station in Antarctica or Robinson Crusoe Island 400 miles west of South America.
But it’s not, it’s coming from here, the UK. Southampton in particular but with a helping hand from London and Cambridge. Cambridge and London – that’s the double for us, what’s not to like? So what’s the tale? Cancer has been described as the Emperor of All Maladies. So a pleasure to wake up this morning to Radio 4 reporting that a cancer vaccine – the holy grail of preventing the Great Plague of our day and age – is a step closer. Imperial College cancer expert Professor Pat Price – who incidentally trained at Cambridge University – Professor Pat Price says we’re getting closer to a vaccine that uses natural killer cells to fight cancer.
What also jumped out at me was her observation that we’ll get there faster thanks to Covid. As Professor Price put it, because we’ve learned such a lot about virus technology and vaccine technology from Covid it means that once we know what to target we can rapidly make these vaccines.”
How’s that old saying go, it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good.
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Anyway, that’s the good…the bad news is served up by today’s Random. Human beings are a funny lot. This time of the year, it’s back to school time. And that seems to be the case no matter how old you are, no matter how many years ago you left school. And by that I mean, it’s this time of year that grown-ups go back to school in the shape of school reunions. There usually at five-year intervals. The 25-year reunion of the Class of 1999. Or the 40-year reunion of the Class of 1984. I’ve never been to one. It’s maybe curmudgeonly of me, but I want nothing to do with them. I’d sooner stick toothpicks in my eyeballs than attend a Class Reunion. But anyway, sure enough this was one of those years for my lot. And sure enough when the invitation pitched up I declined. “No, thanks, include me out.” Unfortunately my best boyhood pal was on the steering committee and he was able to call in a favour. They sent out to all of us a questionnaire. I wanted no part of it – not least because it couldn’t have been more banal, more mindless – but, alas, pulling on the other end of the string was my oldest friend. We’ve known each other since we were five years old. He said, ‘go on, please fill it in for us.’ So I gritted my teeth and grumpily complied. When I sent it off to him my pal replied, “thanks for your X-rated answers to the questionnaire.” Well, the questions were so mind-numbingly banal I just wasn’t going to play ball. By way of example, one of the questions was, “What living person do you most admire?” I knew that a lot of the people I’d gone to school with were going to answer that question with the name Donald Trump. I was right. I didn’t know what the runner-up would be. I was interested to learn that the runner-up was Jesus Christ. On reflection, I of course should have known that the Galilean would get a lot of votes. The bronze went to Elon Musk. Well, you can see why I had a marked aversion to sitting down to that game of cards. But there was that powerful pull of boyhood friendship. So in the end I relented. But I refused on principle to answer that question – and the rest of them – in the row that I knew my classmates were all going to hoe. So my answer to the question, “What living person do you most admire?” My answer to the question who do you most admire was, “Anybody but a celebrity. Somebody who does a real job of work. A street cleaner, a plumber, a carpenter, a bus driver, a garbage man…the people who do the work that makes our lives possible.”
Perverse of me perhaps but how do you not throw a spanner in the works of a question like that?
Anyway, thinking about it after the fact, it occurred to me that I could have said Bill Bryson. He and I have a lot in common. He grew up in Iowa. I was born in Iowa. We came over here in the same year. We both married English women. We’re both writers. He’s a very successful genius writer, I’m a hack. But on the other hand, I’ve got London Walks, he doesn’t have.
And he went back. I stayed put.
Anyway, yes, Bill Bryson is something of a celebrity. And I have enormous admiration for him. He’s a Renaissance man. Knows so much. You learn so much from his books. And he writes beautifully. And that brings us to today’s Random. Feast on this folks, compliments of Bill Bryson. Taking survey of a house – your house, his house, my house, anybody’s house – Bryson says, “The real life in your house is on a much smaller scale. Down at the realm of the very tiny, your house teems with life; it is a veritable rainforest for crawling, clambering things. Armies of tiny creatures patrol the boundless jungles of your carpet fibres, paraglide amid floating motes of dust, crawl across the bedsheets at night to graze upon the vast, delicious, gently heaving mountain of slumbering flesh that is you. These creatures exist in numbers you cannot comfortably imagine. Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never), is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye but unquestionably there. It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung – or frass, as it is known to entomologists.
Frass – see you’ve learned a new word. This is why you make a point of regularly stopping for a drink at the London Calling saloon. And the rest of it, I knew you’d want to know that when you jump into bed there are two million mites lined up to welcome you back. Thanks for that Bill Bryson.
Ok, today’s Ongoing.
As always, the general principle is the more you know about something the more interesting it becomes. Every London Walks knows about William Terriss.
And if we’re guiding along Maiden Lane, when we get to the back of the Adelphi Theatre, we talk about him. He was murdered there on a December evening in 1897. Stabbed to death by an insane, jealous, out-of-work actor. Terriss was the most famous actor of his day. It’d be like Daniel Craig and Antony Hopkins being stabbed to death today.
And as London stories go, Terriss’s death is a witch’s brew. Terriss was the headline act in a play at the Adelphi called Secret Service. Hi co-star was the actress Jessie Millward. Jesse Millward and Breezy Bill Terriss as he was known were lovers. Incredibly, Jesse Millward had been having recurrent nightmares in which Terriss was calling out “Sis! Sis!” from a locked room, the door of which she burst open to catch him as he fell.
On the ill-fated night Terriss left Jessie Millward’s flat for the theatre. Just before 7 o’clock, outside the locked stage door of the Adelphi Theatre, the assailant, out-of-work actor John Henry Graves, plunged the knife, repeatedly, into the great actor. His co-star Jessie Millward, arrived in time to witness the dreadful scene and to hear Terriss’s last words: “Sis!Sis!”
Graves – horribly appropriate name for a murderer – was found guilty but insane. He spent the rest of his life – he died in 1937 – in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. The theatre community was up in arms at the lenient sentence. The great actor Sir Henry Irving said, “Terriss was an actor, so his murderer will not be executed.”
Anything else? Yes, Terriss’s ghost stalks that part of London to this day.
Anyway, that’s the tale that we all know. And recount for our walkers. It’s a fun if macabre moment on that walk. If there’s a musical on and we get the timing right – it’s the interval – the dancers all look out of their dressing room windows and cheer us on.
What I didn’t know until now – this is adding a few more sticks to the bright fire of that story – is that Terriss had a daughter who was a famous actor in her own right. Ellaline. Incredibly, she was born at the Ship Hotel, in Stanley, in the Falkland Islands. Terriss and his young bride were on a very long and extraordinary honeymoon. A honeymoon to the Falkland Islands via Montevideo, which was in a state of revolution. And the crossing – across the south Atlantic – was extremely hazardous. That voyage was a close call. Anyway, they get to Port Stanley and Terriss’s heavily pregnant young wife presents him with a baby girl. Who will go on to become a famous actress. And I tell the story today because today, August 29th, is the anniversary of Ellaline Terriss’s theatrical career taking off. It was 1891. She was 20 years old. She was playing Arrah Meelish in a now forgotten play called Arrah-na-pogue. A star was born.
Father and daughter. Their names in the lights. Carrying all before them on the London stage.
And then came 1897. Ellaline’s first child dies shortly after his birth. And then her father is stabbed to death. And then, just a few months later, her mother dies.
Coda: Ellaline Terriss was regarded as “a perfect type of English beauty” with a “Dresden shepherdess air of delicacy.”
She died in 1971. In a Hampstead Nursing Home. Not far from where I’m pulling this together.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks 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 accomplished, in many cases
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 a 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.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z,“internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star team of guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former Museum of London archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes
criminal defence lawyers,
Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre 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 walking and Good Londoning
one and all. See ya next time.