Johnson's Life of London Read online

  To give you the relevant comparisons, Chinese dialects together can muster about half a million; Spanish, 225,000; Russian, 195,000; German, 185,000; French, 100,000, and Arabic, 45,000. English is the international language of air traffic control, business and the UN, and there is no other language capable of conveying the offside trap with comparable succinctness.

  Of course it makes us very proud that this grammar—honed and simplified by the despised medieval English peasantry—has become the grammar of the modern world. It pleases us to think that we invented it, we hold the copyright and we are somehow the best exponents of writing it. We laugh when we pick up a menu in Vietnam and discover “pork with fresh garbage.” Tears of patronising joy run down our cheeks when a Japanese menu offers “strawberry crap”; and yet any such feelings should be immediately qualified by the reflection that one in four eleven-year-olds is still functionally illiterate in London; and of the 1.4 billion people who speak English across the world, many have long since exceeded the average Briton in proficiency.

  English has slipped the surly bonds of England and become Globish, a vast syncretic unifier of our human culture. The best we can say is that the whole adventure really got going in the fourteenth century, that the adoption of English as a respectable literary language culminated with Chaucer—and that it could only have happened in London.

  There is one last reason why we should be thankful for Chaucer, and it is not just to do with the language he wielded, but the kind of stuff he wrote. With his bawdy, his mockery, his self-mockery, his pricking of hypocrisy and his terrible puns he is the worshipful fader and first “foundeur” not just of our “Englissh,” but of something we like to see in our characters.

  We love Chaucer and we venerate him for the very good reason that he so obviously loves us. He held up his affectionate and kaleidoscopic mirror to the jumble of London’s classes and personalities (and never mind the pilgrimage; The Canterbury Tales is an essentially London poem). He holds them so close to us that we can touch their clothes, hear their voices, even listen to the gurgle of their stomachs.

  The knight and the miller actually interrupt each other, so closely are they packed together; and as in poetry, so in life. The knight and the miller are still packed together, still interrupting each other, on the everyday pilgrimage that is the number 25 bus.

  The rise of English in the age of Chaucer was a function of economics and of politics. The triumph of this once subservient language reflected the confidence and clout of the London merchants who spoke it. One man above all has come to stand for that new class, a man whom Chaucer almost certainly knew very well.

  The story of his rise has been handed down and embellished, from generation to generation, to become the quintessential story of London as a city of opportunity.

  The Flush Toilet

  * * *

  You think the flush toilet was invented by Thomas Crapper, don’t you? Think again, my friends.

  If you go to the Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke on Trent, you can see a replica of a most intriguing and visionary device that was first designed to accommodate the perched buttocks of the Virgin Queen. Only two of these fascinating devices were ever made—and one of them was in London.

  It was installed in the Queen’s now demolished palace at Richmond in about 1596, and was the invention of Sir John Harington, her godson and one of her most wayward courtiers.

  “Big Jack” Harington was a slightly louche and pretentious courtier, who got into trouble by translating lewd verses from Italian and circulating them among the ladies of the court.

  He was banished on several occasions. One evening he was languishing in Wiltshire, in the company of Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, and the conversation became scatological.

  Inspired by the technical problems they had discussed, he wrote a lavatorial treatise called “The Metamorphosis of Ajax”—Ajax being a pun on “a jakes,” then a common word for a toilet. He sent his efforts, complete with blueprint, to the Queen.

  As he made clear, his mission in designing a new bog was social and political—to win back the Queen’s favour and to “give occasion to have me thought and talked of.” He succeeded.

  The Queen was said to be pleased with his efforts, and the contraption was installed.

  The replica at Stoke is based on his own instructions, and it consists of a rectangular wooden bench with a circular hole—a concept familiar at least since Roman times. The revolution is in the big square cistern to the rear and an oval lead pan below the bench, lined with pitch and filled to about six inches with water. The oval pan sloped downwards towards a plug, to which was attached a long rod with a key handle at the end. When you wanted to empty the pan, you pulled the key handle and the contents of the pan would empty down the privy shaft.

  You then closed the plug at the end of the pan and replenished the pan with water by lifting another rod-plug in the cistern.

  Brilliant!

  Apart from having two handles, the Harington flush toilet was like a modern toilet in overall concept and a considerable advance on Whittington’s Longhouse.

  Alas, it did not catch on.

  Though Harington’s invention found favour with the Queen (who was fastidious about her personal hygiene, and “always had a bath once a month, even when she didn’t need one”), it was another two hundred years before anything similar appeared for the general market.

  What this premature breakthrough perhaps shows is the growing post-Reformation interest in cleanliness, and the lengths to which London courtiers would go to please their monarch.

  Some wrote her epic poems, some sonnets. Some brought her new crops from new continents. Some performed before her in companies of players, and some designed new toilets for her in the hope of restoring themselves in her eyes.

  It is in honour of John Harington (or so it is sometimes said) that Americans refer to the modern flush toilet as the “john.”

  * * *

  Richard Whittington

  Not only the world’s first great banker, but a man who set high standards for philanthropy

  Now when I was a nipper we didn’t learn our military history from Mediaeval Total War. We didn’t sit like lidless lizards in front of video war games like Call of Duty—Black Ops.

  We had a perfectly splendid and fully illustrated magazine for the mildly swotty prepubescent called Look and Learn, and I was a devout subscriber. Sometime in the late 1960s Look and Learn first published a picture of the climactic moment in the life of Sir Richard Whittington.

  It was a banquet that he gave, as Mayor of London, in honour of the King of England—and what a hell of a party it must have been. It would be fair to say that in recent years not every Guildhall banquet has turned out to be a roistering beanfeast of national jubilation. I once hired a white tie and tails in order to hear a speech by Gordon Brown. On another grim occasion, we all had to go and suck up to President Putin in the hope that he would let BP have some oil contracts. Recent festivities at this historic national venue include the Ofsted Conference, the Royal Life Saving Society Awards and the Leading Hotels of the World Showcase. But in 1415 the Guildhall was still under construction.

  With its impressive frontage and its soaring limestone vaulting, it had the air of a Flemish maison de ville, which was not surprising, since it was built with the proceeds of the cloth trade with Flanders. The building reflected the prosperity and growing ambition of the Londoners, and tonight they had reason for euphoria.

  It was called Agincourt, perhaps the most sensational victory over the French in the whole of English history. Outnumbered at least four to one, the young King Henry V had led English bowmen in a massacre of the enemy elite. The flower of French chivalry lay pincushioned in the mud of Picardy. They lost three dukes, eight counts, a viscount and an archbishop. The way was clear for England to renew
its claim to the French throne—and now was the moment for Mayor Whittington to lead the rejoicing, on behalf of the City of London.

  It was also the moment for this wily and brilliant merchant to demonstrate, before the monarch himself, the central role that he—Whittington—had played in the triumph. The Mayor laid on a fantastic binge. The wenches were as comely and fragrant as any in late medieval London. The minstrels twanged from the gallery. No doubt there were jugglers, strongmen and tumbling dwarves, expertly miming the defeat of the French (and unconsciously reviving the ancient traditions of the building. Beneath the feasters’ stamping feet, lost and silent in the foundations, were the ruins of the Roman amphitheatre).

  The dishes were rare and costly. The wine ran in conduits. The fire was fed with sandalwood and other aromatic fuel. The twenty-eight-year-old King was amazed.

  “Even the fires are filled with perfume!” he cried.

  “If your majesty forbids me not,” Sir Richard Whittington is supposed to have said, “I will make the fire even more fragrant.”

  As the King acquiesced, the Mayor drew forth a bundle of bonds—pieces of paper recording the debts owed by the King—and threw them on the flames. “Thus do I acquit your majesty of a debt of sixty thousand pounds.”

  It is hard to compute £60,000 in today’s money, but it must run into tens of millions of pounds. To absolve the King of debts on that scale was not just an act of stunning generosity, it was an act of state. Imagine if the Gnomes of Zurich had gone to Harold Wilson and told him that his country’s debts were forgiven. Suppose the bond markets were to hold a sumptuous dinner party for David Cameron, and one of the bankers rose drunkenly at the end to proclaim that the deficit would no longer have to fall on the shoulders of the UK taxpayer but that they would absorb it themselves.

  You’d think the world had gone mad; and as it happens there isn’t much evidence that this scene took place at all, let alone as depicted in the pages of Look and Learn. On the night in question, it looks as though the King was in France rather than the Guildhall. But the basic truth is indisputable: that Dick Whittington helped bankroll England’s military machine at the critical moment in the Hundred Years’ War; that he lent large and crucial sums to three successive monarchs; and that he absolved Henry V of his debts, as he absolved many others.

  Across the United Kingdom, the story of Dick Whittington’s life is pantomimed at Christmastime. The story as it is depicted in these performances is in one sense an egregious piece of tabloid misreporting. But it is also a powerful lesson in how a top financier can sanitise his reputation and win the undying affection of the public.

  The standard fable has it that long, long ago there lived a poor boy called Dick Whittington. He had no mother and no father, and often nothing to eat. One day he heard of the great city of London, where, said everyone, even the streets were paved with gold. Dick decided to go to London to seek his fortune.

  London was a big and busy city, full of people both rich and poor. But Dick could not find any streets that were paved with gold. Tired, cold and hungry, he fell asleep on the steps of a great house. This house belonged to Mr. Fitzwarren, a rich merchant, who was also a good and generous man. He took Dick into his house and gave him work as a scullery boy.

  Dick had a little room of his own where he could have been very happy if it had not been for the rats. They would run all over him as he lay on his bed at night and would not let him sleep. One day Dick earned a penny shining shoes for a gentleman, and with it he bought a cat. After that Dick’s life became easier, the cat frightened away all the rats and Dick could sleep in peace at night.

  One day Mr. Fitzwarren called all the servants of the house together. One of his ships was leaving for a far-off land with goods to trade. Mr. Fitzwarren asked his servants to send something of their own in the ship if they so desired, something that could perhaps be traded for a bit of gold or money. Dick had only his cat to send—which he did with a sad heart.

  Dick continued to work as a scullery boy for Mr. Fitzwarren, who was very kind to him. So was everyone else, except the cook, who made Dick’s life so miserable that one day Dick decided to run away. He had reached almost the end of the city when he heard the Bow Bells ring out. “Turn again Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London,” chimed the bells. Dick was astonished, but he did as the bells said and went back to Mr. Fitzwarren.

  When he returned he found that Mr. Fitzwarren’s ship had returned, and that his cat had been sold for a great fortune to the king of Barbary, whose palace had been overrun with mice. Dick had become a rich man.

  He soon learned the business from Mr. Fitzwarren, married his daughter Alice, and in time became the Lord Mayor of London three times, just as the bells had said.

  However, the real Dick Whittington was not born poor. There is no evidence that he tied his possessions in a handkerchief suspended from a stick. He did not “turn again” at Highgate Hill, at the sound of Bow Bells. He was Mayor of London not thrice but four times. He did not have a cat.

  Between 1400 and 1423 there were only two years in which he did not make loans to the crown. In that sense he was of serious importance in economic history. It was fully sixty years later that the Monte di Pietà in Perugia first made its loans to the poor, in exchange for knives or caps or other pawned items. Before the Fuggers of Augsburg, before the Medicis of Florence, there was Dick Whittington, merchant and banker in all but name. Like Chaucer, whom he certainly knew, Dick Whittington was so politically agile as to occupy London’s two worlds—the City and the court at Westminster—and he made so much money from the proximity of the one to the other that his personal endowments are still paying out to the needy today.

  Whittington was born between 1354 and 1358 in Gloucestershire, and his parents were not peasants but the lord and lady of the manor of Pauntley, with their own coat of arms. It is true that Sir William Whittington had been “outlawed” for the offence of marrying the daughter of Sir Thomas Berkeley without royal consent (you needed the King’s consent to marry the daughter of a courtier, on the theory that he ought to have first dibs). But the Whittingtons were not despoiled of their manor; indeed, they continued to lord it over Pauntley for the next two hundred years, and their descendants can be found to this day in the village of Hamswill.

  Richard Whittington’s only problem was that he was the youngest of three brothers, and with no chance of inheriting, his options were (a) hang around Gloucestershire hoping to meet a nice rich girl, (b) study for the law at the Inns of Court, (c) enter the Church, (d) enroll for military service with a baron or (e) become an apprentice and enter a trade. We do not know exactly why he chose to become an apprentice, but in his mid- to late teens he did indeed make the four- or five-day hike to London, entering at Newgate in about 1371. As we have just seen, London was a city pullulating with money and vice.

  The last big plague scare had been a couple of years before, in 1369, and there was a frenzied feeling to the earthly pleasures of the crowd. We have a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury (the po-faced fellow who tried to persecute Chaucer) complaining that at this time Londoners were no longer observing Sunday as a day of rest. As Whittington wandered in search of his lodgings, he might have seen bears being baited, thieves or cardsharps in the pillory, mendicants displaying their fascinating skin diseases and waving their mutilated stumps with Pythonesque enthusiasm.

  He might have been caught up in one of any number of Saint’s Day parades and processions with all the attendant drunkenness, vomiting and sin. Wide-eyed though he was, young Dick passed these temptations by. His mother had a contact, a mercer by the name of Sir Hugh or possibly Sir John or even Sir Ivo Fitzwarren, whose family had come over with the Conqueror; and Dick kept right on to his house and the prospect of a job.

  To be an apprentice was a serious business. You were required to attend Mass and absorb the sermon, and you had to turn out for archer
y practice at Smithfield. You might be born of good family, but your existence was Spartan. A junior apprentice might sleep in the loft, and a senior apprentice would have to make do with a bale of hay in the house. You wore a flat, round cap and a very short haircut, with a coarse long coat, and you walked in front of your master or mistress at night with a lantern or with a long club about your neck. In Tudor times, the apprentices were to become a major political force, famed for rioting and thuggery. But as an apprentice mercer, young Dick was already a cut above, and he took to his duties with great conscientiousness.

  A mercer is a trader in cloth and apparel of all kinds. It was an age when people were not only getting richer but wanted to differentiate themselves by the luxury of their gear; and so the rag trade was where the money was. Dick would have learned how to comb fleeces; how to pack bales of cloth; how to distinguish guild marks; how to fold and wrap delicate fabrics; how to rub them between thumb and forefinger, and declare that they were the nicest pieces of schmutter he had ever seen and that their price was therefore substantially more than their cost.

  King and court were now spending more and more time at Westminster, and the tradesmen made money from the eternal pomposity of officialdom. Skinners supplied the rabbit skin fur for their collars; drapers supplied the heavy fabrics; mercers like Whittington provided just about everything: linen, velvet, taffeta, damask, silk, ribbon. Cloth of gold? Suits you, sir! The royal purchasing agency was called the “Great Wardrobe,” and if the Great Wardrobe called on your shop, you were blessed with custom from the whole court.