London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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A very good day to you, London Walkers. Far and wide and near and close.
It’s Friday, June 27th, 2025.
It’s Ladies Day. Well, Ladies Day at London Walks. We’ve yclept it Ladies Day for two very good reasons.
Which you’re going to have wait for, but they will be forthcoming.
But first that word yclept. You won’t have heard it before. But it’s a treat of a word. Hoary with age. It means “called” or “named.” And how old is hoary with age. Well, yclept is an Old English word. And I mean Old English in its formal historical linguistic sense. The earliest form of English. Our English is Modern English. Chaucer’s English – that’s what, 600 years ago – is Middle English. And a few hundred years before Chaucer, that was Old English. The English of Beowulf. Anglo-Saxon English. The English of over 1,000 years ago. So that’s how hoary with age yclept is.
The bible in these matters – the Oxford English Dictionary – tells us that yclept was much affected as a literary archaism by Elizabethan and subsequent poets. And in less dignified writing it’s often used for the sake of quaintness or with serio-comic intention.
Thwack. Bulls eye. That hit home, didn’t it. That’s us, that’s London Calling. Less dignified writing. No question about it, I rolled out that 1,000 year old word ycleped for the sake of quaintness.
And because we hoe our own row here, do it our way. London Calling has yclept this day – Friday, June 27th Ladies Day for two very good reasons.
The first very good reason is it was 332 years ago today – June 27th, 1693 – that the first women’s magazine was published. It was called the Ladies Mercury.
And I knew you’d want a little taster. So I got digging. Hooked and reeled in this reference to the Mercury in a contemporary fellow publication, the The Athenian Gazette.
Strap yourself in. Here’s an example of the talk of the town when William and Mary were on the throne. The Athenian Gazette correspondent says, “Discoursing on these frogs and the worm mentioned in your Mercury, an old Gentleman affirmed that to his knowledge, about 50 years since, in a shower of rain, there fell with it here in London an innumerable company of small frogs. And he knew a woman that was violently distracted, and upon the advice of a sea-surgeons’s widow, had a medicine directed which brought from her several strange worms, upon which her delirium left her.
So let’s reprise that. In the 1640s a London lady was barking mad, out of her mind. Delirious. There’s a hard rain. It’s raining cats and dogs and small frogs. Innumerable small frogs. The downpour of small frogs inspires a neighbour, a sea-surgeon’s widow, to talk the bat-shit crazy lady into ordering a medicine. The lost her marbles lady takes the medicine. Whereupon, in due course, she, the crazy lady, brings forth several strange worms. The worms leave her. And when they leave her, dilerium also leaves her. She comes back to her senses. Welcome to 1640s London boys and girls. Now if you think about it, we’ve got a remarkable scenario here. First of all, the crazy woman in 1643 looking out the window – the word window, incidentally, originally meant wind eye – it was an opening in the wall of a house that let fresh air in – the poor crazy woman looks out of the window and sees that it’s raining frogs as well as raindrops. Now that sight can’t have done wonders for her imperfect grasp of reality. Anyway, the downpour of frogs leads to the medicine which leads to the downpour of strange worms – they check out, take their leave from the crazy woman’s body – and as soon as they’ve cleared off, her wits check back in.
And so we come to the kicker. If the London lady in question has a powerful imagination – and my guess would be she did have – well, why wouldn’t the thought cross her mind that 332 years from now a lot of people in America – including a woman named Laurie Bennet in a place called Florida and a man named David in a place called Alabama – and people in France and Canada and people in a place called Australia and another far away place called Japan are going to be thinking about me and the day it rained frogs here in London and the great medicine the sea-surgeon’s widow recommended and the strange worms that slithered. And with them, riding bareback on those strange worms, my delirium also quitting me. That Shakespeare play my husband took me to. Hamlet. What did that Hamlet character say, “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”
And think of the Editor of the Ladies Mercury in the 1690s. Someone asking him about his readership. He can see, “people will be reading the Ladies Mercury three centuries from now.”
Now go on, give us a thumbs up. Only at London Walks do you get stuff this recherché.
Anyway, so that’s the first reason this is Ladies Day.
The second reason is the main part of this podcast. It’s an interview with a wonderful lady. Bonnie Macbird. She’s a compatriot of mine. Which isn’t so important. What is important is that she’s a live wire. She’s really fun. Extremely bright. And has done and is doing interesting things. Why can’t they all be California girls. Bonnie grew up in San Francisco. Moved to L.A., where she had a film career. And now she’s in London. In London doing really special stuff. She’s directing Blue Stockings, the main summer production of the Hampstead Players Theatre Group, which is about to open. And she’s a novelist. She writes Sherlock Holmes. And to call a spade a spade, nobody’s doing it better than Bonnie Macbird. The critical reception couldn’t be piled higher. The Sherlock Holmes Journal itself puts it thus: “as satisfying as anything Conan Doyle wrote.” The greatest American bibliophile of them all, the Washington Post’s Michael Dirda, described Bonnie’s most recent Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Devil’s Due, as, and I’m quoting, “one of the best Sherlock Holmes novels of recent memory.”
Anyway, “the game’s afoot.” Here’s bonny Bonnie.
[Bonnie Macbird interview follows]
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com –
home of London Walks,
London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do
to attract and keep the best guides in London –
you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating:
the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative –
is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor
(and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)…
well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar
and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…
come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.