London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Good morning, London. It’s July 20th, 2024.
Today’s pin, Did you see that moon last night? If not, make sure you see it tonight, the low London sky, London cloud cover permitting. Last night’s was the best in a lifetime’s moonwatching for this lad. That’s getting on for about 600 full moons. It was low, it was huge, it was creamy golden-yellow – a big round dab of butter, Duke Skywalker out for a Look At Me stroll of a July evening.
Which makes it doubly appropriate that today is National Moon Day. I’m asssuming that’s an American designation but we’ll take it all the same. And it turns out that today’s the 55th anniversary of the first ever moonwalk. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin exiting Apollo 11 on the Sea of Tranquility on July 20th, 1969. ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’
Well, this podcast is a small step for this man and a bit of a leap for London Walks. On December 26th, 2021 I think it was I put out a Today in London History podcast. And then another one the next day. And another one the day after. For those of you who know baseball that turned out to be my Joe Dimaggio hitting streak. 420 consecutive days I punched out a daily London Walks podcast. But eventually I hit the wall. Just couldn’t maintain that pace. I’d like to try to get back there if possible. But not the B-29 versions I’ve been flying of late. A lot of the podcast missions I’ve been flying these past few months have taken me six, seven, eight hours a day. That’s ok for an occasional. But I obviously can’t maintain that time commitment, that output, on a daily basis. So to get back to a daily London Walks podcast – or as near as I can muster – I’m going to have to – on occasion – turn this into a Daily London Briefing. A daily London Walks briefing. Or Today’s London Walks Bulletin, if you prefer. So there you go, I’ve just shown my hand for the way ahead for this card game.
That said, I’m going to try to stick to the PRO – Pin – Random – Ongoing – format.
So for a Random for today, let’s stop by the 1851 census for a minute. Let’s see how people the length and breadth of the UK – including Londoners – were making a living 173 years ago. The Numero Uno occupation for men in 1851 was shoemaking. In that year there were 243,052 male shoemakers plying their trade in the UK. At the other end of the scale, the rarest occupation – there was only one of them – was executioner. And sure enough, he was a Londoner. And curiously, he gave as his occupation ‘shoemaker’. The reason being there weren’t enough executions in a year to count being a hangman as a full-time job. His name was William Calcraft and he lived in Tower Hamlets with his wife and their granddaughter, both of them named Louisa. Wonder what it was like for the granddaughter? Did she get teased? Was she something of a black sheep given the trade her grandfather plied?
In 1851 William Calcraft was in the middle of his career. He’d begun as a hangman in 1829 and kept going until 1874, by which time he’d executed some 450 people. An average of about one a month.
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And William Calcraft the Executioner drops us neatly into today’s Ongoing. I’m going to recommend a walk for today.
You can think of it as the Trifecta Plus One. Or if you prefer, a poker hand of four Aces.
Those aces are: Guide, Area, Subject, and Rarity.
The walk is Dan Parry’s Pirates, Press Gangs and Execution Dock. Goes at 2.30 pm this afternoon from Tower Hill Underground Station.
And yes, it’s a four aces hand – it’s got at all. Brilliant guide. If Dan Parry were a pirate he’d be the most successful pirate of all, review-wise he captures prize after prize. You can think of his hundreds of five-star reviews as battle honours on Dan’s regimental colours.
Another ace is the area the walk explores. It heads down to the Thames. Pirate territory. The old waterfront. Execution Dock. How do you go wrong with that?
And as for the subject, Pirates…they’re all over the high seas of our minds, of our culture. The hugely successful Pirates of the Caribbean films. Shows, pubs, exhibitions, festivals, sports teams, rum bottles, and, yes, a great London Walk – pirates are crawling all over the rigging of our minds. To say nothing of their being in a good many pockets.
And finally, rarity, scarcity – Dan’s Pirates Walk doesn’t come up very often. So catch it while you can.
Ok let’s do a bit of a scene setter and then weigh anchor. Let’s start with pirates and piracy in a lot of pockets. Avast and ahoy, let’s hear it for the dollar sign. It was originally the American symbol for the peso, the fabled piece of eight. There wasn’t a lot of cash sloshing about in the America of yesteryear. The predominant currency was Spanish silver English pirate ships had shall we say liberated. It became the sign for money. The green stuff, the gold stuff, the silver stuff – money – is always a draw. But there’s more to it than that. Pirates have got in amongst us because of their lifestyle. They were rebels. They were freewheeling and free spending. Led lusty, wild lives. It was two fingers to the powers that be. Defiant to the last, on the gallows they’d give vent to the toast, “Damnation to the Governor and Confusion to the Colony.”
And it’s easy to understand the appeal of taking to sea with a charismatic leader like Captain Kidd if you were a member of the great underclass. If your luck held it was a much better deal than slaving away at home or sailing on a merchant or naval ship.
The captain’s iron hand on a naval or merchant ship was symbolised by the cat-o-nine-tails. You heard of the cat o’nine-tails? It was a whip that at the business end separated into nine flails. So a hundred lashes with the cat was really 900 lashes.
Ted Hughes wrote a great poem about Parliament and the Cat.
The poem’s titled Wilfred Owen’s Photographs. The title maybe requires a bit of unpacking. Wilfred Owen was of course the greatest of the Great War Poets. One day he decided that words couldn’t possibly convey to people back home the hell that was trench warfare. He thought, the only way they can understand this is to see photographs of where we are, of our lives and deaths in the trenches. Photographs of the battlefield.
Get that about the title and its relation to the poem makes perfect sense. Here’s the poem.
Wilfred Owen’s Photographs
When Parnell’s Irish in the House
Pressed that the British Navy’s cat-
O-nine tails be abolished, what
Shut against them? It was
Neither Irish nor English nor that
Decade, but of the species.
Predictably, Parliament
Squared against the motion. As soon
Let the old school tie be rent
Off their necks, and give thanks, as see gone
No shame but a monument–
Trafalgar not better known.
‘To discontinue it were as much
As ship not powder and cannonballs
But brandy and women’ (Laughter). Hearing which
A witty profound Irishman calls
For a ‘cat’ into the House, and sits to watch
The gentry fingering its stained tails.
Whereupon . . .
quietly, unopposed,
The motion was passed.
What needs mentioning here, though, is that flogging was just level one of punishment on British and American merchant and naval ships. It was just the warm-up act. Punishment could extend to broken bones and gouged eyes and knocked-out teeth. And of course death. Famously – or infamously – one sailor was – I’m quoting – “beaten upon the head with an Elephant’s dry’d pizzle.”
Different story for pirates. They were hard men. They were armed. By definition they were mutinous. The captain never had that sort of absolute authority over them. Take Captain Kidd, for example. He figures on Dan’s walk. To punish recalcitrant sailors he had to put things to a vote with the crew. He needed their approval, needed majority consent before he could have punishment meted out.
It’s a flash of insight to realise that a pirate ship was a utopia of sorts. A pure democracy. Captains were elected. Injured men received compensation for their injuries. The men were paid in shares rather than wages. And the shares were near enough to damnit to equal shares. As a rule the captain never received more than twice what ordinary seamen received. Think about how that stands up with today’s compensation packages across our occupational waters. The great New York banker – J.P. Morgan – I’ll be in his neck of the woods on my Kensington Walk this afternoon – up on Kensington Gore, that splendid house that boasts two blue plaques – one to J.P. Morgan and one to the future President Kennedy, who lived there when his father was the American ambassador over here – anyway, J.P. Morgan once said “no one at the top of a company should earn more than 20 times what those at the bottom earned.”
That’s going it some compared to how it was on a pirate ship. But it’s nothing compared to how things are a century on from J.P. Morgan. I’m thinking of that Tesco CEO earning nearly 900 times as much as the average Tesco worker. You almost have to feel sorry for those poor American CEOs of major U.S. corporation – they’re limping along at a mere 200 to 1 ratio of pay to median worker pay in their firms.
Piracy indeed.
Anyway, that’s enough of an appetiser for Dan’s Pirates, Press Gangs and Execution Dock walk. Let’s weigh anchor, get this ship underway. Let’s get this piece voiced.
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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.