London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you. From London. It’s August 14th, 2024. Today’s pin, Banksy’s on a London roll. A street art extravaganza. A graffiti spree. Nine animal artworks a-leaping in nine days in the capital. This last one, it was unveiled 48 hours ago, pitched up on a white shutter at London Zoo. It’s an unveiling itself. It shows a gorilla transmogrifying the shutter into a tarp or blanket hanging in front of a cave opening, lifting it and out skedaddles a seal. The surprise prompts a clutch of birds to take wing. Take a close second look and we can see three pairs of gleaming eyes peering out at us from inside the cave. It’s good fun. Not to say classic Banksy.
Now as for a Random, you have to wonder whether there are also bats back in there in Banksy’ s cave.
In which connection, here’s one for you. Wouldn’t it be cool if the old English name for a bat made a comeback. Came fluttering out of the cave of the past. Here it comes. Flitter-mouse, that was their name for a bat back in Shakespeare’s day. And it makes the running going away. It’s much more picturesque, much more evocative than bat. My litmus test for these things is the great poets and playwrights. If they used the word it was 24-carat stuff.
And sure enough, flitter-mouse comes fluttering out of the cave of some of our greatest writers.
The swaggering, Herculean Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s stable-mate, flinging words like stardust, used it as a term of playful endearment in his play The Alchemist. “My fine flitter-mouse, my Bird of the Night.
Or Algernon Charles Swinburne, the darkest poetic soul of the nineteenth century,
caught us unawares, put a cold hand on the back of our neck with this phrase, “the dreadful daylight has come; the flitter-mouse is blind.”
They both have a pretty good ring to them, wouldn’t you say. Enough to prompt me at any rate to sked in a little seance for the word, summon it up from the dead, give it a go, we’ll see how the English rose takes to this overture, “Hey my fine flitter-mouse, come over here for a second will you.”
And will you look at this, here comes today’s Ongoing. Shooting out of the cave. What’s this? Ok, sure, if you say so. If that’s what’s called for we’ll do some curtain twitching. Eighteenth-century curtain twitching.
Another way of putting that, let’s meet the 18th century Fielding who’s just another face in the chorus line because Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones and the begetter of the Bow Street Runners, the forerunners of the modern police force, is always the 18th century Fielding who’s the headline act. Aside here, I’ll be sipping tea, so to speak, with the legendary literary and legal 18th-century Fielding in a few hours because walker Tom Underwood is coming by and a few days ago he’d asked me about a Henry Fielding Walk and I said to him, “why don’t you create one Tom, you’re a distinguished Ivy League professor of English Lit, what about it, why don’t you create one and do it as a guest appearance whenever you’re in London. Well, I’m going to push the ball further down the field, raise the matter with Tom when we raise our cups of tea in the back garden this afternoon. “What about it, Tom, I was serious the other day – why don’t you do a Captain Hercules Vinegar Walk for us?” See, what good copy Henry Fielding is, that’s already grabbed your attention, hasn’t it – Captain Hercules Vinegar, that was the great 18th-century novelist’s pen name.
Our other Fielding, the face in the 18th-century chorus line Fielding, is equally good copy. He’s just not well known. But hey, I’m the angel in front of the tomb and I’m going to roll the stone away. Meet Robert Fielding, ladies and gentlemen.
But tread carefully. Robert Fielding’s a rogue. Or to put it more precisely, he’s a rake and a bigamist. I suppose you’d describe him as minor gentry. Like Shakespeare, born in Warwickshire. My god, Shakespeare would have feasted on Robert Fielding. Like London Walks guide Tom Hooper he was admitted to Middle Temple. Barrister in other words. But his father died right on cue. Left the youthful Robert an inheritance of £600 and the young man was away. Hit the eject button on his budding legal career at the earliest possible date so he could pursue an extravagant lifestyle. As you’d expect, he moved in all the right circles – was spear carrier – now I wonder what Freudian impulse was it that led me to plump for that metaphor…anyway, yes, he was a spear carrier at the court of Charles II, that paragon of libertine kings. He was extremely good-looking – ergo his nickname, Handsome, or Beau Fielding. Dressed lavishly. He sure cut a figure. He travelled in a black coach accompanied by footmen dressed in yellow coats with black feathers in their hats and black sashes. He was kept as a ‘stallion’ – yes, that’s right, that was the word they used – by a series of wealthy mistresses. He was one of those rare beings who made gambling pay. You can guess how. Yup, you’re right again, Robert Fielding was crooked. He bribed jockeys at race meetings. He fought several duels. He married the daughter of a Yorkshire viscount. Which was just what his bank balance called for. The marriage brought him a consider fortune, which he squandered away. Now the poor dear, his wife I mean. We’re running Robert Fielding’s story today because his long-suffering wife died this day, August 14, 1698.
Her demise was like the starting pistol being fired at a race. Fielding’s fortune had thinned out considerably, it was time to get to work, do something about that state affairs. Affairs being the mot juste. Because, yes, true to form, Robert Fielding turned to marriage. It was his hole in the wall. He began by courting Charles II’s former mistress, Barbara Villiers, the Countess of Castlemaine, the Duchess of Cleveland.
But he also had designs on a recently bereaved young widow, named Anne DeLeau, who was in possession of a fortune of £60,000. In today’s money that would be a cool ten million pounds. He enlisted the aid of the widow’s hairdresser. Suspecting his nefarious designs, the hairdresser cheated the cheat. She disguised a poor woman as the widow – Fielding had never met the widow – and got the two of them to tie the knot. So the rich widow had escaped his clutches and he was married to a poor woman. Never daunted, he took another run at the Duchess of Cleveland. Got home with her.
Married her just sixteen days after he’d married the impoverished woman whom he thought was the rich widow. In due course the Duchess of Cleveland was apprised of her husband’s true character and indeed his already having bagged a wife just a few days before he married her, the Duchess. Which, not surprisingly, meant the marriage with the Duchess was somewhat strained. Fielding demanded that she give him money. She refused. He beat her. And then he proceeded to take up with her granddaughter. Fathered a child on the granddaughter. In due course the Duchess took him to court. She wanted the marriage annulled on the grounds that he had a wife, when she, the Duchess and Beau Fielding tied the knot. He was found guilty of bigamy. Condemned to death. He got free of his death sentence by successfully pleading Benefit of Clergy. Benefit of Clergy was a provision by which men of the cloth accused of a crime could claim that they were outside the jurisdiction of the secular courts and could be tried instead in the much more lenient ecclesiastical courts. And the definition of a clergyman was somebody who was literate, somebody who could read a short passage from the bible without making an error. You were only allowed Benefit of Clergy once. And they would show that you had used up your one allotment of Benefit of Clergy by branding your thumb. But Fielding even managed to duck that punishment. He produced a warrant from Queen Anne that suspended the execution of the sentence. And how does it all end, beau ended up being reconciled to the poor woman he’d married in the mistaken belief she was the young ten million pound widow. (Ten million pounds in our money.) And they lived out their days – quite contentedly – in Scotland Yard, just off Whitehall. And there in a stroke you have one of the things that’s deeply satisfying about Londoning – about being a London Walks guide. I now know the story of the bigamist and rake Robert Fielding and up he’ll shimmer, like a mirage, from here on out, when it’s hie thee David, for whatever reason, to Scotland Yard.
The stories. They make a world of difference.
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.