London calling. London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks. Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
This day in London history time.
“This day, May 8th, saw the birth of a London baby who’d spend the better part of a century whispering wonder into our ears.”
Sir David Attenborough turns 100 today. Born May 8th, 1926, in Isleworth, then Middlesex, now swallowed up by Greater London. West London boy. London born.
London made, in a curious sort of way.
And what a London it was.
Picture it.
A London of clattering tramcars. A London where chimney pots still ruled the skyline. A London with horse manure still very much part of the urban décor.
A London of flat caps, ration memories still lingering from the Great War, and policemen who looked as though they’d been carved out of suet pudding.
No television in people’s homes yet.
That’s the first astonishing thing.
The man who would become the face and voice of
television nature documentaries was born before television properly existed.
In fact, just a few months before his birth,
Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated his mechanical television system in London.
So when baby David Attenborough arrived in May 1926, television was basically a mad scientist’s parlour trick.
No one could possibly have imagined that this little London baby would someday stride across the Serengeti, descend into the deep ocean, whisper beside gorillas, and become arguably the most trusted voice on the planet.
And London in May 1926 was in a state of uproar.
Because Britain was in the middle of the General Strike.
That’s the huge backdrop here.
The General Strike had begun on May 3rd, just five days before Attenborough’s birth.
Coal miners were out. Railwaymen out.
Transport workers out.
Printers out. Millions on strike. Britain partially paralysed.
So while the newborn Attenborough was blinking into the light in Isleworth,
London streets were strange and unsettled.
Newspapers thin or absent. Buses disrupted.
Trains uncertain.
Volunteers trying to keep essential services running. Middle-class university boys suddenly driving buses.
Cabinet ministers panicking about revolution.
Winston Churchill thundering away in government newspapers.
The atmosphere must have felt electric.
And yet there was also this strange calmness reported in parts of London.
Fewer vehicles. Quieter streets. Less smoke. Less racket.
Oddly enough, one can almost imagine the future naturalist approving.
Because London in 1926 was still filthy by modern standards.
Coal smoke everywhere.
The Thames still effectively an open sewer in places.
Fog thick enough to butter.
Birdsong often drowned by machinery.
And yet there were still scraps of wildness.
Kestrels over outer London fields.
Eels in tributaries of the Thames. Foxes beginning their long urban takeover.
Bomb sites hadn’t yet happened, of course, but market gardens and patches of countryside still pressed surprisingly close to the capital.
Attenborough was born into a London that had not yet entirely crushed nature.
And the world?
Oh, the world of May 1926 was a corker.
In America, Harry Houdini was still alive.
He’d die later that year.
Marilyn Monroe had not yet been born.
Neither had Queen Elizabeth II, though she’d arrive the same year.
J. R. R. Tolkien was teaching at Oxford.
Virginia Woolf was alive and writing. In fact, just the previous year she’d published Mrs Dalloway – that dazzling London daydream of Big Ben, Westminster, Bond Street, omnibuses and troubled souls moving through the capital.
And here’s a lovely thought.
When Attenborough was born, Agatha Christie was already famous.
Arthur Conan Doyle was still alive.
Thomas Hardy was still alive.
And up in Hampstead, an elderly George Bernard Shaw was still booming opinions at anybody within range.
London then was packed with giants.
The city was humming with modernity but still deeply Victorian underneath.
You could hear jazz in Soho.
You could buy eels on street corners.
You could still see veterans of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
And somewhere in west London, a baby named David Frederick Attenborough was beginning the longest and perhaps most beloved public life any Briton has ever had.
Astonishing to think about the span of it.
He was born before penicillin.
Before radar.
Before the discovery of Pluto.
Before sliced bread became standard.
Before the Queen.
Before colour television.
Before the jet engine transformed travel.
Before the word “ecology” was in common use.
And now here he is, turning 100 in a world where schoolchildren in Tokyo, Nairobi, Vancouver and Buenos Aires instantly recognise his voice.
That voice.
Half kindly grandfather.
Half Anglican archangel.
Half patient biology master.
And yes, I know that’s three halves. But Attenborough somehow earns them.
Today Britain celebrates him with BBC specials and a great gathering at the Royal Albert Hall.
And fair enough too.
Because there are public figures and there are national treasures.
And then there are the very, very few who become part of the emotional weather of a country.
Attenborough belongs to that last category.
He didn’t merely show us animals.
He taught us how to look.
How to notice.
How to marvel.
And perhaps most importantly of all, in this noisy, frantic age – how to pay attention.
Happy 100th birthday, Sir David.
London salutes you.
And on that agreeable note, see you tomorrow one and all.