London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead. Story time.
History time.
You ready? Just as well if you are because here’s your daily London fix.
And then there’s St Mary Abbots.
And before we go any further, you can rest assured St Mary Abbots is a cornerstone of our Kensington Walk.
Now this is where London does that thing it does so well.
It quietly gathers together an absurd cast of characters and has them all pass through the same door.
Because St Mary Abbots is not just a church.
It’s a meeting point.
A crossroads.
A kind of human sorting office for remarkable lives.
Step inside and you are not just in a handsome Victorian church.
You are in a kind of matrimonial hall of fame.
And not just matrimonial, either. Literary, theatrical, heroic, Dickensian, downright improbable.
Take Ezra Pound, for starters.
The great modernist firebrand.
The man who told his generation to make it new.
He marries here in 1914.
And his bride, wonderfully, improbably, is named Dorothy Shakespeare.
A name practically begging to be written into literary history.
And Pound, of course,
is right at the centre of that extraordinary London moment.
Yeats, Eliot, Joyce.
Midwife to modernism.
Editing The Waste Land. Championing Joyce when nobody else would touch him.
A sort of one-man cultural detonator,
striding about London in flamboyant clothes,
causing things to happen,
making literature happen,
making other people’s literature happen.
And here he is, of all places, at St Mary Abbots, getting married.
And what a life that marriage sits inside.
Because Pound doesn’t stay put. Not geographically, not intellectually, not morally.
He starts out in Idaho.
Hailey, Idaho.
American frontier beginnings.
Not exactly the obvious launching pad for the man who will become the great impresario of European modernism.
Next stop for Pound: Philadelphia.
Early studies. Latin,
Romance languages.
A bit of teaching. A bit of trouble. Then, in 1908, he does what so many ambitious young Americans of his generation do.
He comes to Europe.
Venice first.
Self-publishes his first book of poems. Then London.
Because London, at that moment, feels like the centre of things.
And he makes himself indispensable. Inserts himself. Connects people. Champions people. Edits, pushes, provokes.
A catalyst. You can almost feel the energy coming off him.
And then, as the years go on, the trajectory shifts.
Paris. Then Italy. Rapallo.
The poetry grows more ambitious, more difficult, more sprawling. The Cantos. A lifetime’s work.
A kind of vast, unfinished map of culture and history.
And alongside it, something darker begins to take hold.
An obsession with economics. With politics. With systems.
And, fatally, with the wrong systems.
He becomes enamoured of Mussolini. Fascism.
Social credit theories. Convinced, absolutely convinced, that he has seen through the failures of modern society and found the answer.
And then the war.
Pound broadcasting from Rome. Radio talks aimed back at America. Rambling, polemical, often laced with deeply offensive and antisemitic material.
The sort of thing that leaves a stain that cannot be easily washed out.
At the end of the war he’s arrested by Italian partisans.
Handed over to the Americans. Held in a detention camp near Pisa.
For weeks, in an open-air cage. Exposed to the elements.
A poet in a wire enclosure.
It’s almost too symbolic to be true.
He writes there. The Pisan Cantos. Some of his finest work, produced under the most brutal conditions.
Then back to the United States. Charged with treason.
Declared unfit to stand trial. Confined for years in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington.
And eventually released.
Back to Italy. Older. Quieter.
A figure of immense literary importance and deeply compromised judgement.
A man who helped make modern literature and at the same time entangled himself in some of the ugliest politics of the twentieth century.
All of that.
All of that life.
And here, in 1914, at St Mary Abbots, he is simply a bridegroom.
But St Mary Abbots isn’t finished.
Because just a year earlier, on October 15th, 1913, another, very different figure walks up that aisle.
Beatrix Potter.
Forty-seven years old. Famous. Independent. Not, by temperament, especially keen on social fuss. So the ceremony is small. Intimate. Almost swallowed by the scale of the place.
Her parents, mind you, are pleased by the prestige of the setting.
St Mary Abbots is the place to be married if you want to do things properly. The church itself, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott and dating from 1872,
is a proper Victorian statement.
Tall, grand, Gothic Revival, full of aspiration.
The high altar gleams with Italian mosaic panels of the four Evangelists.
The windows soar.
The place has the air of wanting to be a cathedral when it grows up.
And there is poor little Beatrix,
or not so little really, but private, self-contained, almost dwarfed by it all.
The groom is William Heelis.
A solicitor from the Lake District. Sensible. Solid. Dependable.
In trade, as her parents rather sniffily saw it.
Which is precisely why they opposed the match.
Which, naturally,
only makes the romance stronger.
And there’s something wonderfully human in Beatrix Potter’s letters at this point.
She is nearly fifty and yet she sounds like a rebellious teenager. They wouldn’t let him come to the house for ever so long, she says, and the opposition only made us more fond of one another.
That’s lovely. That’s alive.
That’s not the voice of a plaster saint of children’s literature.
That is a woman in love.
And then comes the bit that is so good you would reject it if it turned up in a novel for being too neat.
The London wedding is over.
The formalities are done.
Mr and Mrs Heelis go back north. Back to the Lake District.
Back to fields and fells and the real life they actually want.
They arrive at the station.
And waiting for them is their tenant farmer.
With a wedding present.
A new white bull for the farm.
There it is.
The perfect wedding gift for Beatrix Potter.
Not silver.
Not crystal.
Not some insipid gravy boat.
A white bull.
You couldn’t stage it.
From Kensington respectability to a bull in a field.
That’s the arc.
That’s the whole thing in miniature. London ceremony,
Lakeland reality.
And still St Mary Abbots isn’t done.
Because G. K. Chesterton comes on stage as well.
Another giant.
And in his case giant is not just a metaphor.
Chesterton was a big man physically, a big man intellectually, a big man spiritually, a big man rhetorically.
Essayist, journalist, poet, novelist, Christian apologist, defender of common sense, prince of paradox. He too is part of the St Mary Abbots story.
And Chesterton gives us something else as well.
He gives us lines.
Wonderful lines.
Quotable lines. Chesterton is one of those people who seems to have spent half his life manufacturing sentences the rest of us can borrow.
“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”
That’s Chesterton.
And what a marvellous line to have in mind in a church. A church where, for all the famous names attached to it,
what is really being celebrated, over and over,
is ordinary human commitment. Marriage. Promise. Hope.
The great thing itself.
And then this one,
another beauty, and very apt for a London church layered with centuries of story:
“I have always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.”
There you are.
That could almost be the motto for a London Walk.
Life first as a story.
London first as a story.
A building first as a story.
St Mary Abbots, certainly, as a story.
A place where the walls hold lives. Where the air has memory.
And if Chesterton brings the life of the mind into the building,
Douglas Bader brings something else entirely.
Grit.
Steel.
Bloody-mindedness.
Douglas Bader married Thelma Edwards here in 1931.
He was twenty-one.
She was sixteen. And by then his life had already become one of those stories that sound implausible because reality has overreached itself.
He had been a brilliant young RAF pilot.
Gifted. Dashing. Then came the crash in 1931.
Catastrophic. He lost both legs.
One above the knee, one below.
That, you might think, would be that.
Not for Douglas Bader.
He learned to walk on tin legs. Learned to fly again.
Refused, point blank, to be written off.
“I’ll never use sticks,” he said.
And that sounds exactly like him, doesn’t it.
Defiant. Crisp.
Impatient with weakness, especially his own.
He became a golfer to a handicap of four.
Which is ridiculous, really.
Not content with learning to walk again and fly again, he also had to become extremely good at golf.
And later, of course, came the war and the making of the legend. Fighter ace.
Battle of Britain hero.
The legless ace.
Shot down over occupied France. Captured.
Sent to Colditz.
Repeatedly tried to escape.
He had that sort of temperament. Not for him passive acceptance.
Not for him docility.
His very presence seems to say: obstacle noted, now let’s get round it, over it or through it.
And there’s another lovely,
haunting thing to say about Bader and St Mary Abbots.
The roof over your head in the church today is not the roof he walked under when he went down the aisle.
The wartime bombing took care of that.
The church we see now carries a later ceiling, plainer, postwar, a 1955 replacement for what had been there before.
That matters.
It’s one of those little London truths.
The building remembers damage. The building itself has been through a war, just as Bader had.
So when you stand there and think of Douglas Bader walking up the aisle on those artificial legs,
proud as Lucifer and probably twice as stubborn,
you are not just thinking about marriage.
You are thinking about survival. About endurance.
About a church and a man both marked by the violence of the twentieth century.
And then, because London never knows when to stop,
into this procession comes Ellen Ternan.
Now there’s a name with an aftertaste.
Not a household name now,
not like Charles Dickens, but for those who know the Dickens story,
an absolutely electric one.
The young woman at the centre of one of the great shadow lives of Victorian England.
The hidden attachment.
The concealed relationship.
The private world behind the public monument.
Dickens, so bustling, so energetic, so public, so overwhelmingly there in the nineteenth century, had this other life.
And Ellen Ternan – a teenage actress – is the key to it.
She was just a year younger than Charles Dickens’s eldest daughter.
She was 18.
Charles Dickens was 45.
And yes, she became his mistress.
Ellen Ternan. Nelly he called her.
The private life behind the most public of men.
Dickens dies 13 years later, in 1870.
Six years later, in 1876,
Ellen Ternan walks up the aisle here at St Mary Abbots.
And that matters.
Because it’s not just another society wedding.
It’s a kind of turning of the page.
A deliberate step out of the shadows.
She marries a clergyman.
The Reverend George Wharton Robinson.
Twelve years her junior.
Which raises eyebrows, of course it does.
It’s a curious match on the face of it.
The actress with a past, the young clergyman with a future.
But it’s also a reinvention.
A new name. A new role.
A new life.
And where does that new life take them?
Southsea.
Which is where the story does one of those very London, very Dickensian curls back on itself.
Because in Southsea lies Highland Road Cemetery.
And in that cemetery is Maria Beadnell.
Dickens’s first love.
The young woman he adored in his youth. The one who got away. The one who left her mark so deeply that she echoes through his fiction.
And there, in the same ground, lies Ellen Ternan.
The first love.
And the last love.
Buried within reach of one another.
You couldn’t script it. Or rather, Dickens might have tried, and an editor would have told him to tone it down.
So yes, Ellen Ternan is very much part of the St Mary Abbots story. Not vaguely, not atmospherically, but precisely.
She is here, in 1876, walking up the aisle, stepping out of one life and into another.
And carrying with her all that Dickensian freight.
All that secrecy. All that feeling.
Ellen Ternan. Dickens’s mistress. Young enough to be his daughter.
She’s in the orbit of St Mary Abbots too.
Which means that this church does not just gather the respectable and the celebrated.
It gathers secrecy as well.
It gathers complication.
It gathers the human mess.
The part of the story that never makes it onto the commemorative plaque.
And that’s very London.
Because London is never only what it says it is.
London – the most secretive, the most mysterious of all western cities – is always also the concealed room, the second address, the relationship not spoken of,
the life behind the life.
The official façade on the street. The private sorrow or ecstasy tucked round the corner.
And if we are widening the lens still further,
there’s Sir John Fielding in the background as well,
reminding us that St Mary Abbots reaches back before all this.
Back into the eighteenth century. Back into old Kensington.
Back into a London of magistrates and highwaymen,
Bow Street and blind authority, rough justice and rougher streets. Sir John Fielding,
the Blind Beak of Bow Street,
half-brother of the famous novelist Henry Fielding,
belongs to that older London.
And his connection reminds us that St Mary Abbots is not some bright young Victorian arrival.
It has roots. Deep roots.
Layers under layers.
So what have we got here,
in this one church, in this one corner of Kensington?
Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespeare, with literary modernism in tow.
Beatrix Potter and William Heelis, with late-found love and a white bull waiting up north.
G. K. Chesterton, booming away in paradox and common sense.
Douglas Bader, the legless ace, all tin legs and willpower and battle-scarred courage.
Ellen Ternan, carrying the hush and ache and secrecy of Dickens’s hidden life.
Sir John Fielding in the deep background, giving us older London, darker London, pre-Victorian London.
That’s some cast list.
Poets.
Children’s authors.
Essayists.
War heroes.
Actresses.
Magistrates.
Scandal.
Courage.
Love.
Secrecy.
Endurance.
All passing through the same space.
All, in their different ways, part of the story of this city.
And that, really, is London.
It doesn’t always trumpet its treasures.
It doesn’t put up a sign saying extraordinary human lives intersected here.
More often it simply layers them in. Quietly. Patiently.
One life on top of another.
One century under another.
One doorway opening onto half a dozen worlds if only you know how to read it.
And that, of course, is what we do on a London Walk.
You don’t just look at St Mary Abbots.
You see it.
You see Pound full of voltage and ambition.
You see Beatrix Potter, private and determined, almost lost in the grandeur.
You hear Chesterton rolling out one magnificent sentence after another. You see Douglas Bader coming up the aisle on his artificial legs,
hard as nails, refusing all pity.
You sense Ellen Ternan in the shadows, bringing Dickens and all that tangled Victorian feeling with her.
You feel old Sir John Fielding somewhere in the foundations, reminding you that this ground was old long before Gilbert Scott raised these walls.
You see the whole improbable procession.
And once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it.
And that’ll do for today. That’s your London fix for today.
See you tomorrow.
I’m not sure but I’ve got a hunch you’ll meet Brian and Courtney from North Carolina.
Those two, they’re a bit of all right.