London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And this is the beginning – In the beginning was the word – so, yes, we’ve landed on
Word of the day time.
And trust me, today’s word is a lovely one.
Especially appropriate for a week in which there’s a wedding in the offing.
Consort.
Prince Consort.
We know the title.
Prince Albert, Prince Consort.
But what exactly is a consort?
Well, take it apart and it becomes rather beautiful.
It comes ultimately from the Latin consors.
Con, together.
Sors, a share, a lot. A fate.
A consort is somebody who shares your lot.
Shares your fate.
There’s a wedding thought for you.
Not somebody who just stands beside you when the sun is shining.
Somebody who draws the same lot.
Whatever’s in it.
Good or bad.
For richer, for poorer.
In sickness and in health.
Your consort.
And 207 years ago today, August 26th, 1819, a little boy was born in a castle in Germany who would share the lot of the most famous woman on earth.
And, in doing so, profoundly change London.
His name was Albert.
Actually, let’s do that word as well.
Albert.
It’s Germanic.
Originally Adalbert.
Adal, noble.
Berht, bright. Shining.
Nobly bright.
Not bad as names go.
And extraordinarily appropriate, as it turned out.
Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanuel was born at Schloss Rosenau, near Coburg in what is now Bavaria.
Germany wasn’t Germany yet.
It was still a jigsaw puzzle of kingdoms and duchies and principalities.
Albert was a prince of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld.
And twenty years later he came to England and married his first cousin.
Queen Victoria.
February 10th, 1840.
Chapel Royal.
St James’s Palace.
London.
She was 20.
He was 20.
And Victoria was smitten.
Completely smitten.
She thought him beautiful.
And he was.
Have a look at the young Albert.
Dark hair.
Fine features.
Slim.
Elegant.
Rather soulful.
Victoria was Queen of the United Kingdom.
Albert, initially, was…
well, what exactly?
That was the problem.
He wasn’t king.
A reigning queen’s husband doesn’t automatically become king.
He wasn’t even officially Prince Consort until Victoria gave him that title in 1857.
He was the Queen’s husband.
The foreign husband at that.
And plenty of people didn’t want this young German prince poking his nose into British affairs.
But poke it he did.
And thank goodness he did.
Because Albert was formidably intelligent.
Curious.
Serious.
Hard-working.
Sometimes maddeningly serious.
He was interested in science.
Technology.
Education.
Industry.
Architecture.
Art.
Photography.
Public health.
The Army.
And what the modern world might become.
And if you want to see Albert’s London, you don’t have to look very hard.
Go to Albertopolis, as it came to be called.
We know it as South Kensington.
There it is.
The great concentration of museums and institutions there didn’t just happen.
The Victoria and Albert Museum.
The Science Museum.
The Royal Albert Hall.
Imperial College.
That whole extraordinary quarter of learning, science, art and culture owes an enormous amount to Albert’s vision and to the profits and momentum generated by his great triumph.
The Great Exhibition of 1851.
And for that we go to Hyde Park.
And one of the most extraordinary buildings London has ever seen.
The Crystal Palace.
Glass.
Iron.
Light.
A building so enormous they simply enclosed some of Hyde Park’s full-grown elm trees inside it.
Six million people came.
Think about that.
Britain’s population was about 27 million.
Six million visits to this astonishing palace of modernity.
Machines.
Textiles.
Scientific instruments.
Raw materials.
Manufactured goods.
The world under one glass roof.
And Albert was one of the great driving forces behind it.
The little German prince who had arrived in Britain regarded with suspicion had become one of the chief architects of Victorian Britain.
And London is full of him.
Walk down Whitehall.
There’s the Albert Embankment.
Go to Kensington Gardens.
There’s the Albert Memorial.
And opposite it, of course, the Royal Albert Hall.
Victoria and Albert.
Albert and Victoria.
You can barely pull them apart.
Which brings us back to our word.
Consort.
Sharing the same lot.
They had nine children.
Nine.
Their descendants married into royal houses all over Europe.
Victoria became the grandmother of Europe.
But there was trouble in the family.
Especially with their eldest son.
Bertie.
The future Edward VII.
Albert worried desperately about him.
Bertie wasn’t Albert.
Albert was duty.
Work.
Self-control.
Improvement.
Bertie liked a rather different curriculum.
Food.
Women.
Fun.
And in 1861, while undergoing military training at the Curragh in Ireland, 19-year-old Bertie was introduced to a young woman called Nellie Clifden.
Who exactly Nellie was remains tantalisingly uncertain.
Actress.
Entertainer.
Possibly prostitute.
Irish, probably.
And Bertie slept with her.
More than once.
We know because the future King helpfully recorded the encounters in his diary.
The story got out.
Albert was horrified.
This wasn’t just a father thinking, “Oh dear, the boy’s been up to no good.”
Albert had spent years trying to manufacture an ideal future king.
And here was Bertie enthusiastically demonstrating that the production line had malfunctioned.
Albert was already ill.
But he went to Cambridge to see his son.
And there’s an image.
Father and son.
Walking together.
In the rain.
Albert trying one last time to get through to Bertie.
Soon afterwards Albert became desperately ill.
The official diagnosis was typhoid fever.
And on December 14th, 1861, aged just 42, Prince Albert died at Windsor Castle.
And here comes a colour.
Blue.
He died in the Blue Room.
It’s still there.
Indeed, it became known as the Albert Room.
Victoria ordered that it should be preserved.
Not as some grim death chamber.
As a living memorial.
The room was maintained as though Albert might come back.
Fresh flowers.
Clothes laid out.
Hot water put on the washstand.
Day after day.
Year after year.
Victoria had lost her consort.
The man who shared her lot.
And for the remaining 39 years of her life she mourned him.
Black clothes.
Widow’s weeds.
Albert everywhere.
Albert always.
And now let’s come back to London.
To Covent Garden.
Stand on Bow Street.
The Royal Opera House is on one side.
Across the road is the old Bow Street Police Station and Magistrates’ Court.
Today it’s no longer a police station.
There’s a rather good police museum there.
You can even inspect the old cells. Do some time in them if you want.
But look outside.
Because there’s a lovely London story attached to that building.
British Police stations traditionally announced themselves with a blue lamp.
The blue lamp became such a symbol of British policing that it gave its name to the 1950 film The Blue Lamp and, ultimately, to the world of Dixon of Dock Green.
But Bow Street was different.
Its lamp had clear glass.
White light.
And why?
Well, here comes one of those stories that London gives you.
The story goes that Queen Victoria was going to attend a gala performance at the Royal Opera House. A day or two before the palace advance guard pitched up, to make sure everything was as should be. They spotted the blue lamp. Said “oh no, that’ll never do. Her Majesty is over the way at the Royal Opera House on Wednesday, that blue lamp has to go.
Blue. That color would never do.
The colour of the room in which Albert had died. Mustn’t put Her Majesty in mind of the Blue Room at Windsor Castle.
So the offending blue glass was removed.
Bow Street would have a white lamp instead.
Now.
Fair disclosure.
It’s almost certainly a legend.
People have gone looking for documentary evidence of the palace advance guard giving that order.
They haven’t found it.
And there’s a chronological problem.
The present Bow Street Police Station building wasn’t completed until 1881, twenty years after Albert’s death.
So put it in the London trophy cabinet marked:
Wonderful stories that may not actually be true.
But I’m keeping it.
Absolutely keeping it.
Because even if the palace never ordered that blue lamp changed, the fact that generations of Londoners believed it might have done tells us something about the scale of her grief.
The colour blue itself had become contaminated by December 14th, 1861.
Albert’s death changed Victoria.
And Victoria’s grief changed the monarchy.
She withdrew.
She disappeared from public life for long periods.
And London noticed.
Her subjects noticed.
There was irritation.
Criticism.
Republican feeling stirred.
Because Victoria without Albert was, for a long time, barely Victoria at all.
She had lost the person with whom she shared her lot.
Her consors.
Her consort.
And Albert himself?
He was only 42.
That’s worth remembering when you look at the memorials.
The Albert Hall.
The Albert Memorial.
The V&A.
South Kensington.
All that stone and gold and terracotta and glass can make him seem like some ancient Victorian patriarch.
He wasn’t.
He was a young man.
A German boy who came to London at 20.
Married a Queen.
Had nine children.
Helped stage the greatest exhibition London had ever seen.
Helped imagine a new cultural quarter for the city.
Helped shape the monarchy.
And was dead at 42.
Albert.
Nobly bright.
And consort.
The one who shares your lot.
Two words.
One life.
And an awful lot of London.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
See you tomorrow.