London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
From London – a very good evening to you. It’s August 18th, 2024. Today’s pin…has to be the fire yesterday afternoon at Somerset House. Fortunately it was brought out of control. Had it not been, had Somerset House gone up in flames that would have rivaled the disastrous fire in Paris five years ago that engulfed the spire and most of the roof of Notre Dame. For starters, Somerset House is the home of the Courtauld Gallery, with its collection of priceless Impressionist paintings. And that’s before you even get started on the architectural and historical importance of Somerset House. Its being the last of the great riverside palaces that once fringed the north bank of the Thames. They were so grand, so fine that a foreign visitor once said, “the world affords no finer sight, take land and sea together, than to come up the Thames, shoot the bridge at high tide and go along to Westminster, surveying the palatial houses on the north bank of the Thames.”
Well, we – London – caught a break yesterday. That Somerset House fire could have been so much worse.
Now as for a Random, well, how about this fun but barking-mad, crazy exchange with Ann this morning. Ann’s our Foodies’ London specialist. But she’s got other feathers in her cap. Including the niche walk of niche walks. Cat Tails – A Feline Take on London History. The next outing for Ann’s Cat Tails Walk is September 8th. But what’s really tickled me pink is the one that’s coming after that. The one she’s doing on December 4th. What’s doubly pleasing about that one is it’s a walker Special Request number. A walker wrote in, said she couldn’t make the September 8th walk, was there any chance we’d be running it when she’s next here. We put Ann on the case. Ann got in touch with the walker. Ask her when are you going to be here? Let’s see if we can find a mutually convenient date – if we can, I’ll put it on for you. And lo and behold December 4th does the trick for both of them. It’s sort of the walking tour equivalent of a pianist getting a request from somebody in the audience, ‘could you play this song please?’ We can’t always do it, but we are able to from time to time. And I love it when we can do it. The last Mrs Dalloway’s London walk was a case in point. Jan, an academic in western Canada, wrote in last winter and said “is there any chance you could run the Mrs Dalloway’s London walk when I’m here next August?” I said, “sure, I think we could probably do that.” It happened. In my own mind, I called it Jan’s Mrs Dalloway’s London Walk. I’ve got a thing about customer service – what one of our walkers called “London Walks’ white glove service” and it pleased me no end that Jan could tell her friends and fellow academics out in Winnipeg, “they’re going to put that walk on specially for me.” Anyway, that’s a bit of background. The daft to and fro this morning with Ann was an off-the-wall piece of cat factoid: namely that if you stroke a cat 70 million times you develop enough static electricity to light a 60-watt bulb for one minute. That’s more or less one stroke of a cat for every Britain. Or if you prefer, one stroke for every Thai. And then it was off to the races. Got wondering what else would happen during the minute that 60-watt bulb would be on complements of cat stroke static electricity. You ready for this. 250 babies would be born in that minute; there’d be 5 earthquakes in that minute; lightning will strike the earth 360 times in that minute; 31,600 tons of water will flow over the the Niagara Falls. 55,000 barrels of oil will be used up; 1800 stars will explode; 4,500 McDonalds burgers will be eaten; there’ll be three violent crimes in the United States; a hummingbird will flap its wings 4,000 times; Bill Gates will be $15,000 dollars richer; 107 people will die; 2,040 trees will be cut down in the rainforest; you’ll blink twelve times; 83,300 people will have sex; 243,000 photos will be uploaded to Facebook; UPS will deliver 11,319 packages; 116 people will get married; 58 airplanes will take off; 25 Americans will get a passport.
There you go, you stroke a cat and you see what it can lead to. Or as that great London poet William Blake put it, you can see a world in a grain of sand, hold infinity in the palm of your hand.
Moving on, today’s Ongoing.
The tallest players in the NBA are Victor Wembanyana and Zach Edey. They’re both 7’ 4”. That’s 223.5 centimetres. That’s towering. A couple of human Sequoias. But those two NBA giants only would have come up to Charles O’Brien’s adam’s apple. Charles O’Brien – he was born in Ireland in 1761 – was 8 feet 4 inches tall. That’s 254 centimetres.
He made a living just being himself. He was part of a travelling exhibition. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was the top attraction – that’s top in several senses of the word – he was the top attraction in a freak show.
The Haymarket Theatre showed him off in a pantomime on this day – August 18th, 1782. The show was called Harlequin Teague, or, The Giant’s Causeway. The 8’ 4” Irish giant caused a sensation.
That was 242 years ago. But here’s the thing. You can see the Irish giant to this day. It’s a moving tale. O’Brien was a heavy drinker. Presumably tried to drown the hand fate had dealt him. He died very young. He was only 33. He died on June 1, 1783 in Cockspur Street, Charing Cross. This is one of those London things. You know the story you find yourself in Cockspur Street you can’ help but think about Charles O’Brien.
The poor man. It was a wretched end. He’d converted most of his property into a banknote for £700. The banknote was stolen. That took something out of him because he died not long afterward.
Something that preyed on his mind was the prospect of his corpse falling into the hands of what he called the ‘chirurgical fraternity.’ Doctors. He knew they’d want to lay hands on his body, dissect him, preserve him. Make an exhibition of his skeleton. He gave instructions for his body to be transported part way back to Ireland and to be sunk in deep water on the crossing to Ireland. He didn’t get his wish. John Hunter, the anatomist, the collector, the father of modern surgery, bribed the undertaker. Hunter’s £500 bribe did the trick. The body was stolen before it reached the sea. It was skeletonised. And went on display. And it’s been on display ever since. At the Hunterian Museum. In the words of K.D. Reynolds, O’Brien’s biographer, “in life Charles O’Brien was obliged to make an exhibit of himself, in death he was made an exhibit by others.”
Now as usual with these London tales, I have a tendency to go hareing after them. I wasn’t satisfied with a single modern biographical account. I wanted a contemporary account, a first-hand account. What they were saying back then. And sure enough I found one. His worries about what was going to happen to his corpse and his struggles with the bottle, that wasn’t the whole story. The Irish giant had other problems. But let’s hear it first hand, let’s hear it from the Morning Herald of April 19th, 1782.
“IRISH GIANT. To be seen this, and every day this week, in his large elegant room, at the Cane Shop, next door to late Cox’s Museum, Spring Gardens, Mr O’Brien, the surprising Irish Giant, who is allowed to be the tallest man in the world. His stay will not be long in London, as he proposes shortly to visit the Continent. The nobility and gentry are requested to take notice, there was a man showed himself for some time past at the top of the Haymarket, and Piccadilly, who advertised, and endeavoured to impose himself on the public for the Irish Giant; Mr O’Brien begs leave to assure them, it was an imposition, as he is the only Irish Giant, and never was in this metropolis before Thursday, the11th inst. Hours of admittance every day, Sundays excepted, from 11 till 3, and from 5 till 8, at half a crown each person.”
So in addition to everything else, the Irish Giant had to see off imposters.
Anything else? Yes, sometimes diving into these old newspapers there’ll be a happy accident. A delightful, unexpected discovery. A bonus.
Such was the case in this edition of the Morning Herald. One column over we get this tale of longevity. A man in Hermanstadt who died earlier this year in the 140th year of his age, leaving behind him, besides grand and great grand children, two sons and a daughter, the eldest in his 120th, the youngest in the 100th year of his age. Well, that’s all good fun. But what’s spun gold about the longevity story is the way it’s introduced. Here you go. “Thanks to the physician, the gunsmith, and the cook, man’s life is contracted to a narrower compass than the very circumscribed one alloted by nature; and very scarce indeed are the instances of longevity, except it is amongst those few happy ones, who are fortunately free from the three plagues above mentioned.
Love it. Three plagues that shorten a man’s life. And two of the three are doctors and cooks.
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.