London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
How’s the saying go, London isn’t a city, it’s a world. And sure enough, the world that is London includes Australia.
We’ll be touching down there in just a minute.
But we’re going to start by going to Hampstead.
To a house in Hampstead.
But not just any house.
A house that helped give birth to one of the most famous fictional characters in the world.
Mary Poppins.
Because today, August 9th, is the birthday of P. L. Travers. She was born on August 9th, 1899.
Not in London.
Not even in Britain.
She was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Queensland, Australia.
But she came to London.
Reinvented herself.
Became P. L. Travers.
And eventually created that extraordinary nanny who arrives from nowhere, carried on the east wind, with her carpet bag and parrot-headed umbrella.
And one of the places where the magic began was Hampstead.
The Admiral’s House.
You can still see it.
It’s in Admiral’s Walk, just off Hampstead Grove, a few minutes from the Heath.
And if you know Mary Poppins, something about it may seem strangely familiar.
Because this is the house that inspired the home of Admiral Boom.
You remember Admiral Boom.
The retired naval officer who lives next door to the Banks family.
His house looks like a ship.
There’s a deck on the roof.
A flagstaff.
And, most memorably, a cannon.
Twice a day, at eight in the morning and six in the evening, Admiral Boom fires it.
The whole neighbourhood knows what time it is.
Big Ben may have Westminster.
Mary Poppins has Admiral Boom.
And here’s the lovely thing.
P. L. Travers didn’t make the house up.
Well, not entirely.
Because the real house in Hampstead is almost as strange as the imaginary one.
It was built in the early eighteenth century for a man called Charles Keys.
It was originally known as Golden Spikes, probably because a Masonic lodge met there.
And then along came one of those people whom history occasionally serves up with a name so perfect you suspect somebody has been tampering with the evidence.
Lieutenant Fountain North.
Fountain North.
A Royal Navy man.
He took up residence there in the late eighteenth century.
And Fountain North apparently couldn’t quite leave the Navy behind.
So he brought the Navy to Hampstead.
He transformed the top of his house.
He added a lower deck.
And above it a quarterdeck.
A ship.
On top of a house.
On top of Hampstead Hill.
And there are accounts of Fountain North firing cannon from his extraordinary landlocked vessel to celebrate royal birthdays and British naval victories.
Imagine being his neighbour.
Peaceful morning in Hampstead.
Birdsong.
Church bells.
A little breeze coming across the Heath.
BOOM.
Fountain North has heard some good news about the Royal Navy.
Now, there’s an old Hampstead story that the house belonged to Admiral Barton.
It’s a wonderful story.
There’s only one problem with it.
It isn’t true.
Admiral Barton did live in Hampstead.
But he didn’t live here.
Somewhere along the way two naval men and two Hampstead stories became entangled.
And the legend won.
Indeed, there’s another delicious wrinkle.
For much of Fountain North’s time it wasn’t even called Admiral’s House.
He called it The Grove.
The name Admiral’s House came later.
Much later.
So the Admiral’s House wasn’t an admiral’s house.
And the man responsible for its wonderfully nautical appearance wasn’t an admiral.
He was Lieutenant Fountain North.
Which, frankly, is better.
The house had another brush with immortality.
John Constable knew it.
Constable lived nearby and painted it several times.
One version he exhibited under a title that could hardly be improved upon.
A Romantic House at Hampstead.
And romantic it certainly is.
It was also home in the nineteenth century to one of the giants of Victorian architecture, George Gilbert Scott.
So think of the cast of characters gathered around this one extraordinary Hampstead house.
Fountain North.
John Constable.
George Gilbert Scott.
And then P. L. Travers.
Travers arrived in England from Australia in 1924.
She was twenty-four.
She’d already been an actress.
She wrote poetry and journalism.
And she had already changed her name.
Helen Goff had become Pamela Lyndon Travers.
The Travers came from her father, Travers Robert Goff.
He had been a bank manager.
He was also an alcoholic.
And he died when Pamela was seven.
That matters.
Because behind all the magic of Mary Poppins there is something darker.
Loss.
Disorder.
A family in trouble.
And a mysterious adult who arrives and somehow puts things right.
Mary Poppins is funny.
Magical.
Sometimes frightening.
Often wonderfully strange.
But she isn’t sentimental.
And neither was her creator.
Anybody whose Mary Poppins comes entirely from Julie Andrews may be in for a surprise when they meet the Mary Poppins of the books.
She’s vain.
Sharp.
Cross.
Mysterious.
She doesn’t explain herself.
She certainly doesn’t exist to please people.
And her creator could be equally formidable.
Which brings us to Walt Disney.
Disney wanted Mary Poppins.
Travers did not want Disney to have Mary Poppins.
He pursued the rights for years.
She feared that Hollywood would sweeten her strange, prickly, mysterious creation.
Eventually she agreed.
The film appeared in 1964.
Julie Andrews played Mary.
Dick Van Dyke played Bert.
It became one of Disney’s greatest successes.
Five Academy Awards.
Songs practically everybody can hum.
And P. L. Travers hated much of what Disney had done to her creation.
Especially the animation.
She’d resisted animation from the outset.
At the film’s premiere she told Walt Disney that the animated sequence had to go.
Too late.
The ship had sailed.
And what a ship.
The film became immortal.
But Travers never surrendered ownership of Mary Poppins in the deeper sense.
This was her character.
Her world.
Her strange creation.
And there’s something appropriate about that possessiveness.
Because Mary Poppins herself belongs to nobody.
She arrives when she chooses.
She leaves when she chooses.
She refuses to explain where she’s been.
And when the wind changes, she’s gone.
Travers went on writing Mary Poppins books for decades.
There were eight of them in all.
And her interests became increasingly esoteric.
Myth.
Folklore.
Mysticism.
Eastern religion.
Fairy tales.
She saw Mary Poppins as something more than a children’s character.
Something older.
Stranger.
The mysterious visitor.
The magical stranger who crosses the threshold, rearranges the world and disappears again.
P. L. Travers lived to be ninety-six.
She died in London in 1996.
But today is her birthday.
August 9th, 1899.
And this morning I’m guiding in Hampstead.
So I’ll be going past the Admiral’s House.
And when we get there, we’ll look up.
At the quarterdeck.
At the flagstaff.
At Lieutenant Fountain North’s extraordinary attempt to put a little piece of the Royal Navy on top of Hampstead Hill.
A real house that became an imaginary house.
A house painted by Constable.
A house lived in by George Gilbert Scott.
A house transformed by a man called Fountain North.
And eventually a house that sailed straight into Mary Poppins.
And is still there.
High and dry.
Hundreds of feet above sea level.
The most wonderfully landlocked ship in London.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
Happy birthday, P. L. Travers.
And that’s it, London Walkers, it’s anchors away
on today’s daily London fix.
See you tomorrow.