David Long - A History of London in 50 Lives

Writer and journalist David Long has regularly appeared in The Times and the London Evening Standard , as well as on TV and radio. He has written many popular and well-received books on London, including Hidden City , Tunnels Towers & Temples and the successful A History of London in 100 Places , which is also published by Oneworld. Find him online at www.davidlong.info.

A Oneworld Book

This e-book edition published by Oneworld Publications, 2015

Published in North America, Great Britain
and Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2015

Copyright 2015

The moral right of David Long to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available
from the British Library

ISBN 9781780745701
eISBN 9781780745718

Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

Oneworld Publications
10 Bloomsbury Street
London WC1B 3SR
England

It is not the walls that make the city, but the people who live within them.

George VI

For all the noble churches and superb buildings that James Boswell observed on his arrival in eighteenth-century London, the fact that he noted the variety of perfect and curious characters is a reminder that a city, any city, is nothing without its citizens. And assuming one accepts Disraelis famous description of the heart of the British Empire a hundred years later as somewhere that provided a roost for every bird then London can fairly be said to have been the birthplace or the destination for birds of every feather.

Choosing only a few dozen of them one cannot hope to tell the full story, but that was never the intention behind this book. Nor is A History of London in 50 Lives an attempt to describe only the most illustrious, notorious or obscure Londoners. Instead it comprises a personal selection of some of the more interesting figures from the last few hundred years: heroes and villains; well-known names alongside others who are far less so; men and women who were born in London and helped make it great, or those who came here from elsewhere and were themselves made by their time spent in this truly unique and special city.

Reading the stories of any of these figures it is clear that however you view the place as Disraelis modern Babylon, Arthur Conan Doyles great cesspool, or as it was for Herman Melville somewhere a man could easily disappear King George was right. Londons story is the story of Londoners, born, made or adopted, and always was.

DAVID LONG
www.davidlong.info

The oldest shop in London is that of the hat maker James Lock in St Jamess Street, and the second-oldest the wine merchants a few doors down the hill. Lettering outside Berry Bros. & Rudd proudly states established in XVIIth Century, and inside the panelled premises of the eighth-generation family firm are giant leather-bound ledgers containing the personal details of many distinguished customers including Lord Byron, Beau Brummell, George IV, King Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III.

The idea of a Frenchman buying wine in London (let alone a French king or an emperor) seems extraordinary until one walks around the corner into King Street. There, a nineteenth-century wall plaque the only one in London to include the French imperial eagle confirms that Napoleon III was not simply a customer but also one of the locals.

As Prince Louis Napoleon, Bonapartes nephew and heir, he spent some years living in exile in St Jamess, initially in Carlton House Terrace and then Carlton Gardens before taking on the lease of a new house in King Street in 1847. This was expensively fitted out as a shrine to his uncle, a place to display a large collection of various uniforms and other relics of Bonapartes ill-fated adventures across Europe. London looked on somewhat bemused, but as the young Frenchman seemed to pose no threat he was invited into society, while members of the Army & Navy Club (aka The Rag) on Pall Mall granted him honorary membership.

More surprising, perhaps, as Europe was being rocked by revolution and London was hit by the Chartist riots of 1848, the future emperor enrolled briefly as a special (an unpaid part-time police officer) before resigning and returning to France.

He was elected president of the short-lived Second Republic the same year, and then following a coup dtat in 1851 and the creation of the Second Empire he ruled for nearly twenty years as Napoleon III. As the last Emperor of the French he enjoyed some success domestically, and sensibly proclaimed that LEmpire, cest la paix (the Empire means peace). Unfortunately he was unable to hold to this maxim, and proceeded to fight a great number of wars and on a mammoth scale in the Crimea, Italy, Mexico, against Prussia and even Korea.