Slasher Mary and the Rokeby Venus
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Prime time. Crime time.
You ready?
Here goes.
Today, March 10th, 2026 –
we begin our London story
not in Trafalgar Square.
Not in the National Gallery.
Not in front of the painting.
No, we begin somewhere far more unexpected.
Number 48 Doughty Street in Bloomsbury.
A quiet Georgian house.
Today visitors ring the bell,
step inside,
climb the staircase,
and peer into a small study upstairs.
Because this house is now the Charles Dickens Museum.
The house where Charles Dickens lived.
The house where he wrote Oliver Twist.
But the night before today’s March 10th anniversary – so we’re talking the night of March 9th, 1914 – on that night the Dickens House was something else entirely.
In those days it was a hostel for single women.
And one of the women sleeping there that night was Mary Richardson.
History would remember her by a nickname the newspapers gave her the next day.
Slasher Mary.
Yet on the night before one of the greatest and most beautiful paintings in the world –
the Rokeby Venus –
the night before the Rokeby Venus was mutilated with a meat cleaver, the woman who carried out that frenzied attack,
Slasher Mary as she came to be known,
was sleeping there.
In that house.
The very house where Dickens once lived and wrote those great novels.
The next morning – March 10th, 1914 – she woke up. Got up.
Got dressed.
She prepared herself for what she had decided to do.
Mary Richardson was twenty-eight years old.
A suffragette.
A militant suffragette.
By 1914 the struggle for women’s suffrage in Britain had entered its most confrontational phase.
Its deeds not words phase.
Windows were smashed.
Post boxes burned.
Golf greens dug up.
Railway stations attacked.
A future prime minister’s house was fire bombed.
It was political theatre designed to shock the nation into paying attention.
And on the morning of March 10th, 1914, Mary Richardson set out to stage one of the most shocking acts of all.
Before leaving Doughty Street she concealed her weapon.
Not a pistol.
Not a bomb.
A meat cleaver.
She put her arm in a sling. Concealed the meat cleaver in the sling. Well hidden underneath her coat.
Then she stepped out into the Bloomsbury morning and walked west.
Past the British Museum.
Through the streets of the West End.
Until eventually she reached Trafalgar Square.
And the National Gallery.
Inside the gallery visitors moved quietly from painting to painting, just as they do today.
One of the pictures drawing their attention was a masterpiece by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez.
vel-AH-sketh
The Rokeby Venus.
Look at the painting.
The scene could hardly be lovelier.
Venus reclining on soft cushions in the safety and sanctuary of her private world.
A boudoir scene.
Intimate.
Quiet.
Almost dreamlike.
Calm.
Sensual.
Everything in her universe exactly as it should be.
Rather like that quiet Georgian house in Bloomsbury where our story began.
Safe.
Ordered.
Serene.
Or so it seemed.
A little cherub – Cupid – holds up a mirror so she can admire herself.
And Velázquez
has done something very clever with the composition.
Venus has her back to us.
The most beautiful back in European painting.
Smooth.
Luminous.
Serene.
She has no idea we’re there.
She’s absorbed in her reflection in the mirror.
And she has no idea Mary Richardson is there either.
Think about the setting.
The National Gallery in London.
A quiet morning in 1914.
Visitors drifting from picture to picture.
The hushed atmosphere of an art gallery.
People standing in front of the Rokeby Venus doing what people had been doing for generations.
Admiring that beautiful back.
Perhaps a gentleman or two lingering a little longer than necessary.
And you can’t help wondering about the moment just before it happened.
Did Mary Richardson hesitate?
Did she have to steel her nerve?
She’s standing there in the gallery.
The meat cleaver hidden in the arm sling beneath her coat.
People all around her quietly looking at the painting.
And then, without warning, the quiet of the gallery explodes.
A woman steps forward from the crowd.
She reaches into her armoury – to speak – reaches into her arm sling –pulls the meat cleaver out.
And she begins to strike.
One blow.
Two.
Three.
Seven savage slashes in all.
Gasps.
Cries of horror.
Visitors recoiling.
Guards rushing forward.
And where, a moment earlier,
there had been the most serene image in London,
there is now a slashed painting hanging on the wall.
In seconds the boudoir
has become an abattoir.
And Venus –
that beautiful unsuspecting figure with her back turned to the world – has been metaphorically butchered.
And mulling over what happened in the Spanish Pictures Room that day, what always stops you in your tracks is the thought: the attacker was not a man.
The attacker was a woman.
Slasher Mary. Mary Richardson. A militant suffragette.
When she was arrested she explained why she had done it.
She said she objected to the way men stood in the gallery staring at the naked Venus all day long.
In her view the painting symbolised the way women were treated.
Which raises an obvious question.
If the problem was the men looking at the painting…
why attack the painting?
Why not attack the men?
Richardson’s answer was simple.
Destroying the painting, she believed, would shock the nation into paying attention to the suffragette cause.
And shock the nation it certainly did.
The attack made headlines everywhere.
The gallery closed the room.
Experts were summoned.
The canvas painstakingly restored.
Today, if you stand in front of the Rokeby Venus, you would hardly know the attack ever happened.
But once you know the story, it is impossible to look at that painting in quite the same way again.
Because there she still reclines.
Venus.
In the safety and sanctuary of her private world.
Her back turned to us.
Unaware of the spectators behind her.
And unaware that one March morning in 1914 a suffragette stepped out of the crowd in the National Gallery…
and brought down a meat cleaver on the most beautiful back in European painting.
Brought it down seven times. Most of those seven slashes cut across Venus’s back and shoulders. The cuts, the welts, it was almost as if she was whipping the most beautiful woman of them all, Venus, the Goddess of love and beauty.
Whipping – slashing – love, beauty, desire, fertility, sensuality.
C’est tout. Well, not c’est tout.
Because there’s tomorrow.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…to the farthest syllable of London time…
Tomorrow this tale of sound and fury will be yesterday’s tale. A walking shadow signifying… well, rather a lot. But we’ll be moving away from it. We’ll have our back to it.
Tomorrow we move from suffragettes and slashed paintings to something very different indeed.
Because tomorrow, March 11th, marks the birthday of one of the most brilliant and gloriously eccentric minds ever to wander through London.
Douglas Adams.
Creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The man who taught the world three essential truths.
Don’t panic.
Always know where your towel is.
And remember that the answer to life, the universe and everything…
is 42.
Tomorrow we follow Douglas Adams through London.
Through the BBC.
Through radio comedy.
And through the birth of one of the most beloved works of science fiction ever created.
Douglas Adams.
Tomorrow.
Right here.
London calling.
See you next time.
That’ll be tomorrow.
Until then may the London force be with you.
Or as pilots say, may you have blue skies and tail winds. And as we at London Walks say, may your cup overflow with great Londoning.