The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green

Bethnal Green’s blind beggar was a legendary character who gave his name to a pub that was to acquire a sinister reputation in more recent times. 

Bethnal Green

Bethnal Green is deep inside London’s “East End”. It is an area that suffered considerable damage during the London blitz of World War Two and the rebuilding was not always done with a lot of sensitivity. It has a very mixed population due to centuries of immigration and is one of Britain’s most ethnically diverse regions.

In the past it was “ruled” by criminal gangs, most notably the Krays and the Richardsons in the 1960s. Bethnal Green after dark was a dangerous place to be. The war between the gangs came to a head in March 1966 when George Cornell, a member of the Richardson gang, was shot and killed by Ronnie Kray in the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel Road.

A little further north, just off Roman Road close to where it crosses the Regent’s Canal, is a 1957 bronze statue by Elizabeth Frink entitled “The Blind Beggar and his Dog”.

So who was the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green?

The story goes back to the 13^th century. The beggar was supposed to have lost his sight at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. He had a beautiful daughter called Bessee who was sought after by four suitors, namely a knight, a rich gentleman, an innkeeper’s son and a merchant. Bessee told them that they would have to ask her father for permission to marry her, but when they saw that her father was a beggar in rags, and in no position to bestow any sort of dowry on his daughter, three of them changed their minds.

However, the fourth of the suitors, namely the knight, went ahead with his request and was amazed when the beggar offered him a dowry of £3,000 plus a gift of £100 to pay for his daughter’s wedding dress. At the wedding the beggar threw off his rags and revealed himself to be Henry de Montfort, the son of Simon de Montfort, once the most powerful man in England, who had been killed at the Battle of Evesham. Henry had spent the years since the battle begging in order to raise his daughter’s dowry, which he was now ready to hand over.

The story, first told in the 15^th century, has legend written all over it, as the evidence points to Henry having been killed rather than just blinded in the battle. It does, however, have a lesson to teach, namely that blindness is not restricted to those who have lost their sight – the outer aspect of someone is not always the full story. 

No doubt the same could be said today for the whole of Bethnal Green.

© John Welford

Dick Whittington, Lord Mayor of London

Turn again, Whittington, thou worthy citizen,

Turn again, Whittington, Lord Mayor of London.

Make your fortune, find a good wife,

You will know happiness all through your life.

Turn again, Whittington, thou worthy citizen,

Turn again, Whittington, thrice Mayor of London.

During the pantomime season in the UK there are plenty of productions of Cinderella, Aladdin and Jack and the Beanstalk that pack in the crowds at theatres around the country. However, there is one pantomime story that is based on a real-life character, and that is Dick Whittington.

Richard Whittington was born in a Gloucestershire village in about 1354. In both legend and fact he had been told that the streets of London were paved with gold, so he set off, when still only a boy, to seek his fortune in the big city, although he soon learned that – then as now – fortunes nearly always have to be earned.

He worked hard as a trader in textiles and built a very successful import-export business, with exotic materials such as silk cloth coming in and English wool going out. He made such a fortune that, by 1397, he was able to lend money to the king, Richard II, who rewarded him by making him Lord Mayor of London, a position that he retained for a second successive year.

However, King Richard was deposed in 1399 and Whittington was convinced that his good fortune had also come to an end. He therefore set out to return to his home village. According to the popular story he had only got as far as Highgate Hill when he heard the bells of Bow church pealing and seeming to call him back as though they were saying “Turn again, Whittington”.

He did so, and found that he was just as successful under Richard II’s successors, Henry IV and Henry V, as he had been before. In the famous nursery rhyme the message of the bells concludes by saying that he will be “thrice Mayor of London”, which is slightly inaccurate because Richard Whittington was to have two further spells as mayor, making four in total.

The story of Dick Whittington is not just one of a poor boy becoming enormously rich and working his way into royal favour, because he did much more with his money than just stash it away. He donated vast sums to good causes, including providing fresh water and decent sanitation in slum areas of London, and funding refuges for homeless people and a ward for unmarried mothers in St Thomas’s Hospital. He built a library at Greyfriars as well as rebuilding the London Guildhall. He never lost the common touch, which is why he insisted on being addressed as Dick, the name by which he is always referred to today.

His good works lived on after his death in 1423, because he left the equivalent in modern terms of several million pounds to build yet more improvements for the city.

Dick Whittington was popular with all classes of people and fondly remembered – hence the stories that have lived on ever since. In the pantomime story Dick Whittington’s cat is an essential element, although there is no historical evidence to confirm its existence, which is a bit of a shame!

All in all, Dick Whittington set an example that many others after him might have followed in public office, but unfortunately only a few have done so.

The photo accompanying this article is of a statue of Dick Whittington and his cat in the Guildhall, London (photograph by Elisa Rolle).

© John Welford

Sir Joseph Bazalgette

London owes a huge debt to Joseph Bazalgette for solving the problem of how to dispose of the sewage produced by a rapidly growing population during the 19th century. The infrastructure designed by him still serves the capital to the present day.

Joseph William Bazalgette was born on 28th March 1819 at Enfield. His parents were a naval officer and his wife. His grandfather was a Frenchman who had emigrated to Great Britain in 1775.

Joseph was articled to a civil engineer in 1836 and set up his own practice in Westminster in 1842. He married in 1845 and eventually became the father of ten children.

His career in public health engineering began in 1849 when he was appointed to the post of assistant surveyor to the metropolitan commission that was looking at ways of solving London’s appalling sewerage problem. At the time, most of London’s human waste was discharged straight into the River Thames, which therefore became a massive stinking sewer. It was a problem that had the full attention of the country’s legislators because the Houses of Parliament were directly affected, being alongside the river.

The solution was to build interceptor sewers that would divert the sewage from the Thames and take it to remote outfalls on the east side of the city. The chief engineer of the project was Frank Forster, but when he died in 1852 Joseph Bazalgette was appointed to take over. The commission was replaced by the Metropolitan Board of Works, of which Bazalgette remained the chief engineer until 1889.

Bazalgette’s first task was to complete the plan that Forster that instituted, which was in effect two separate systems, one for each side of the Thames. Parliament passed the required Enabling Act in 1858 and work started soon afterwards. The South London system was relatively straightforward, and the work was completed in 1865. The northern system was more complicated, partly due to the presence of the Metropolitan District Railway, and this work did not finish until 1868.

The project comprised the building of 1300 miles of sewers, 82 miles of the main intercepting sewers running alongside the river, and four huge pumping stations. Bazalgette also “tidied” the river by building the Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments, which extended for a total of 3.5 miles and included the reclamation of 52 acres of land. The Victoria Embabnkment is particularly impressive in that it that incorporates part of what is now the District Line of the Lonodon Underground, including four stations.

In 1877 the Metropolitan Board of Works was empowered to buy the twelve bridges that crossed the Thames in London, which meant that they ceased to be owned privately and could no longer charge tolls. Bazalgette had to survey all the bridges and, as a result, considerable maintenance work was undertaken. He decided that three of the bridges needed to be replaced in their entirety, so he designed and built the bridges that can now be seen at Battersea, Putney, and Hammersmith.

At the time there was no river crossing down-river of London Bridge, and Bazalgette became involved in planning for three schemes to solve this problem, namely Tower Bridge, Blackwall Tunnel, and the ferry crossing at Woolwich. However, his designs for Tower Bridge and Blackwall Tunnel were not the ones that were eventually adopted.

He was credited with improving traffic flow in London by designing and building several new thoroughfares, notably Northumberland Avenue, Shaftesbury Avenue, Queen Victoria Street and Charing Cross Road.

Joseph Bazalgette advised authorities in many towns and cities outside London as to the best way to solve their own drainage and sewerage systems. These included Oxford, Northampton and Margate, and several cities in continental Europe.

He was knighted in 1874 and elected president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1884. He retired from public service in 1889 and died on 15th March 1891 at the age of 71. He can be said to have pioneered the profession of civil engineering insofar as it served the health and convenience of the inhabitants of large cities.

© John Welford

Sir Christopher Wren

Sir Christopher Wren, famed as the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral, was born at East Knoyle, Wiltshire, on 20^th October 1632. He was the only surviving son of Dr Christopher Wren, the local rector who would later become Dean of Windsor, and his wife Mary.

His early life

After education by private tutors, including his father, he entered Wadham College, Oxford, in June 1650 and graduated with a BA in 1651 and an MA in 1653. Wadham College was known for its strength in mathematics and natural science, and its warden, John Wilkins, was one of the circle of scientists who would later found the Royal Society. Wren was greatly influenced by Wilkins, and the two men worked together on building an astronomical telescope after Wren had become a fellow of All Souls in 1653.

In 1657 Wren was appointed to the chair of astronomy at Gresham College in the City of London and in February 1661 he became Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University. Wren was active in many mathematical and scientific projects, including research in optics and experiments in printmaking, surveying, navigation and other fields.

Wren played an important part in the foundation of the Royal Society (he helped to draw up its royal charter) and his name thus became known to King Charles II.

In 1661, in an unofficial capacity, he gave advice on the repairs needed to old St Paul’s Cathedral, which had suffered from decades of neglect. This was his first brush with architecture, having previously declined a commission to oversee the refortification of the port of Tangier, based on his acknowledged status as one of the best geometricians in Europe.

During the early 1660s he developed an interest in architecture that was to take precedence over everything else in his life. Using observation, his skills as a mathematician and physicist, and intuition, he taught himself the fundamentals of architecture and was soon working on important commissions with considerable success.

His most important early commission was for the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, the circular building that is still used today for university events including degree ceremonies. This innovative building, which was always intended to be multi-functional, avoided the use of internal pillars by using traditional roof carpentry methods. The emphasis on functionality was to be the hallmark of Wren’s architectural style. Other commissions followed, including several for Oxford and Cambridge college buildings.

Plague and fire in London

Wren made his only overseas journey when he spent the period from June 1665 to March 1666 in Paris, where he met some of Europe’s greatest architects and artists, notably the French architect Mansart and the Italian sculptor and architect Bernini. This sojourn meant that not only did he avoid the plague that swept through London in 1665, but he also returned full of ideas for new buildings. In particular, he had a vision of how the crowded and insanitary city of London could be remodelled, were the opportunity to present itself.

As it happened, the fire that raged from the 2^nd to the 5^th of September 1666 seemed to be exactly that opportunity.  Within two weeks, Wren had produced a comprehensive plan for the reconstruction of London, consisting of broad straight streets radiating from large piazzas, with a new St Paul’s as its most prominent feature. However, there were many things wrong with the plan, not least its immense cost and the requirement for life to get back to normal as soon as possible. It was therefore always a non-starter.

Despite this setback, Wren was involved in some of the initial planning for re-building, as one of the surveyors chosen by the King and the City to deal with immediate practical problems. Wren made important contributions to the legislation that was drawn up to govern the rebuilding, such as the need for new buildings to be constructed from brick or stone rather than timber.

Wren’s chance came a few years later in 1669, when he was appointed by King Charles as Surveyor of the King’s Works. This gave him the status to push his own ideas forward, but the task of rebuilding a whole city depended on a large team of people, and Wren’s personal contribution was therefore limited.

Many important buildings needed to be rebuilt or restored, including around 50 churches and, of course, St Paul’s Cathedral. The degree of variation between the church designs was remarkable, even given the requirement to build churches that suited the Anglican liturgy and which were largely neo-classical in style. One reason for this is that, as mentioned above, Wren worked as the manager of a team, and a number of the designs were those of men such as Robert Hooke and Nicholas Hawksmoor, with Wren merely giving their designs his approval.

That said, the designs that were purely by Wren show his delight in experimenting with innovative shapes and geometries, such as the polygonal St Benet Fink and the complex incorporation of a Latin cross into a rectangular shape, surmounted by a dome, at St Stephen Walbrook.

St Paul’s Cathedral

Wren had already planned to add a dome to the old St Paul’s before it was destroyed by fire, so this was in his mind from the very start of the plan for the new cathedral. However, what we see today was not what Wren originally envisaged, given that the “new” St Paul’s, despite its impressive size, is nothing like as big as Wren’s first concept, or even his second. The plans went through several phases before a final design could be agreed upon, and even this was controversial. One of the abandoned designs takes the form of the “Great Model”, more than six metres long, that can still be seen today.

The opposition to Wren’s plans centred mainly on the dome, which many people regarded as being too “Romish”. Wren exploited every loophole he could to get his own way over the dome, and it cannot be denied that the end result is not what was agreed in the final “warrant design” that had received the royal warrant on 14^th May 1675.

Wren simply went ahead by instructing the various workmen to perform their own part of the operation without knowing the overall plan. Nobody therefore knew what the final result would look like, and, by the time it was complete in 1711, it was too late for any objections to be taken on board. Wren’s masterpiece took 36 years to build, and the design was undeniably all his own work.  

Other work

Wren worked on other commissions during the years when St Paul’s was under construction. One of these was for a monument on Fish Street Hill to commemorate the Great Fire, which is the massive column, with an internal staircase, that is simply known today as “The Monument”.

The library at Trinity College, Cambridge, was completed in 1695. This is undoubtedly the most splendid library building in Cambridge and arguably the most elegant of all Wren’s secular designs.

His later life

Wren’s long life covered the reigns of several monarchs, and he continued in royal favour after the death of Charles II in 1685. For William and Mary he rebuilt part of Hampton Court Palace and also transformed a Jacobean mansion into Kensington Palace. His last major secular commission, on which he worked alongside Nicholas Hawksmoor, was the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich. Wren produced his final design for the building in 1698.

Wren, who was knighted as Sir Christopher Wren in November 1673, was twice married. His first wife, whom he married in December 1669, was Faith Coghill, who bore him two sons before dying of smallpox in 1675. In February 1677 he married Jane Fitzwilliam, who died in 1680 leaving Wren to care for the two children she bore him.

In his later years Wren came under increasing criticism, mainly as a result of his architectural style falling out of general favour, and he was dismissed from his position as Surveyor of Royal Works in 1718. He died on 25^th February 1723 at the age of 90.

Sir Christopher Wren’s legacy is clearly the many splendid buildings that have survived to the present day. Unfortunately, many Wren churches were lost during the “second fire of London” that was the blitz of World War II, but there were also many notable survivors. His greatest legacy will always be St Paul’s Cathedral, the building which occupied the most extensive period of his time as an architect and to which he devoted his best inspiration.

He was buried in the crypt of St Paul’s and a tablet to his memory was laid in the cathedral floor under the central point of the dome. The inscription includes the Latin words “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice”, which translates as “If you seek his monument, look around you”.

© John Welford