Now you see it … then you don’t! Many Londoners were shocked when Temple Bar, the boundary gate they walked through from the Strand to Fleet Street and the City of London, was torn down in 1878 because the horse-drawn traffic was creating a bottleneck.

 

Public opinion, highlighted in the Press, finally led to the Mayor of London pledging later to rebuild the historic monument elsewhere.

 

But just when critics thought things couldn’t get any worse, they went on to discover that the stones of the old gate had been bought by a banjo-playing sex worker and barmaid. Its replacement was a monument of an ugly Winged Griffin, still in place today, that didn’t take up much space. The Griffin is a dragon, which is the symbol of the City of London.

 

It wasn’t until much later that the mayor kept his word and a new Temple Bar was built. So, many Londoners grew up never seeing the old historic building and it remained just a memory of those who walked through its gates all those years ago.

The gate of Temple Bar, demolished stone by stone

 

Temple Bar has gone and the Griffin goes on show.

 

The City of London Corporation saved the stones that made up the structure. Clerks numbered each individual stone and drew a plan of their positions, before they were stored in a yard in Farringdon Road.

 

Along came nutty socialite Lady Valerie Meux, 52, wife of Sir Henry Bruce Meux (of the Meux’s Brewery Company, makers of porter), who owned a house in Theobalds Park, near Cheshunt.

 

Known for her strange behaviour, Lady Meux, a self-proclaimed actress, met her husband in a London casino, where she was a sex worker and often rode around London in an open carriage pulled by zebras.

 

She began having Temple Bar rebuilt as the gates to her home in 1888.

The London Evening Standard reported: “The foundation stone of Temple Bar was laid on Saturday afternoon by Lady Meux at the entrance to Theobalds Park, Cheshunt. Before the ceremony Lady Meux was presented with a model of Temple Bar worked in oak, a silver trowel, and a mahogany mallet.

 

“After depositing a bottle, some current coins, several newspapers, and other articles, the stone was lowered and declared well and truly laid. About 400 tons of the stones have already been carted to Cheshunt at a cost of £200.”



Quiet retirement: Temple Bar rebuilt for Lady Meux

 

Old Temple Bar’s connection with the Press continued as it frequently appeared in newspapers with photos of the local fox hunt meeting in front of the gate. And banjo playing Lady Meux often entertained in the upper chamber of the gateway with guests such as the Prince of Wales and Winston Churchill.

 

In 1984 the Temple Bar Trust became owner of the monument and permission was granted for the removal of it from Theobalds Park. The reconstruction and restoration were completed in 2004 placing Temple Bar back in the City, in Paternoster Square, near to St Paul’s Cathedral.

***

A WOMAN SCORNED … WHO LOVED A NEWSPAPER MAN

I CAME across this little ditty the other day called THE TYPICAL NEWSPAPER MAN. Obviously written by a woman, it is signed off by Anon, with no clue who was behind it. Whoever she is, her heart must have been broken by a scribbling hack as she talks about husbands, and she must have been American because she used the word ‘dude’. Difficult to date. Have a read:

Apologies to all the wonderful woman journalists I have worked with, but I haven’t come across any news lady poems to highlight yet.

 

***

CAMERA ICON’S TRAIL OF DEATH

 

Bertollin murder scene 1910

 

THE EXPRESS and other British newspapers in the early 1900s were behind the game when it came to running pictures of grisly interior crime scenes and relied on artwork illustrations and engravings alongside collected photographs of victims and outside shots of their houses, to go with their stories.

 

But one man was ahead of the race to bring the most chilling scenes of murder to the courts and the public, as newspaper readers craved more tales of horror. And with the coming of the wirephoto in 1921, it was possible to transmit pictures almost as quickly as news itself could travel.

 

That man was Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon best known for inventing the mugshot, but he mostly helped police and courts in France by snapping the morbid crime scenes using his own techniques and new technology.

 

Some of his close-up pictures showed scenes of chaos; the struggle that took place and severe injuries to the victim. However, in others, a figure lies in a perfectly neat room — adding to the mystery of the atrocity. He had a sense of the dramatic.

 

The details of his pictures were used in evidence at hundreds of court cases, and he was the envy of police forces across the world, including Scotland Yard. Even some court officials were shocked by the grotesque nature of some of the images … masses of women’s hair, cut throats, dismembered torsos, sweating slabs, violated intestines and body debris.

 

Many were used in a book called Crime Album Stories, a series of 25 illustrated texts describing 43 murders which occurred in Paris between 1887 and 1902.

 

An unknown employee of the Prefecture of Police stole several Bertillon prints which he or she mounted in an album and carefully annotated; the choice was made on the shock value of the photographs. The album ended up in a Paris shop specialising in curiosities and morbidities and finally went across the world.

 

Bertillon, who was a French police officer and biometrics researcher, devised a method of photographing interior crime scenes looking down through a camera mounted on a high tripod. His talents were kickstarted in 1887, when flash powder was invented, and he was much sought after when it became possible to reproduce halftone photographs on printing presses running at full speed.

 

He also developed “metric photography,” which used measured grids to document the dimensions of a particular space and the objects in it, including the size of the body.

 

There were of course, many more technical calculations to his methods that highlighted the horror behind closed doors and helped identify the victims. This time Paris led and Fleet St followed.

***

ONE FOR CAMERA BUFFS: I am told by a photographer mate that the ‘Golden Age of Photojournalism’ was the 1930s through to the 1950s, because of the development of the compact commercial 35mm Leica camera and the first flash bulbs that allowed journalists true flexibility in taking pictures.

***

MAKING A LIVING FROM DOG’S YOU KNOW WHAT …

MY PIECES recently over the plight of London’s poor and vulnerable in the 19th and 20th centuries, recorded by newspaper writers of the day, revealed the despair over the scourge of poverty among the young. Not enough was done and poverty still exists today, probably always will.

But surely nothing was worse than Victorian times as Dickens revealed in books and publications. And newspapers, well, they did their bit when they could, but their readers were mostly the gentry who employed slave labour among the young.

 

Poor children were often expected to start working aged 6 or 7, and sometimes as young as 4 or 5 to keep out of the poor house, according to reporter Henry Mayhew’s reports in the London Chronicle and government records on public view. Being poor was a sign of failing in life and there wasn’t much sympathy. People like Dr Barnardo who cared about the young were rare. Here are some of their jobs that I found …

 

Pure Finders were boys and girls who collected dog poo for the tanneries, mostly with bare hands; leech collectors aged under 10 were used as human traps for the sucking worms used by doctors and hospitals; Toshers sifted through raw sewage on the banks of the Fleet and Thames, to find valuables despite noxious gases, crumbling tunnels, swarms of rats and tides which could drown them. Many drowned in sewage.

 

Match girls; Teenage girls in match factories, handled toxic white phosphorus giving them unbearably painful abscesses in their mouths, facial disfigurement and fatal brain damage, a condition known as ‘phossy jaw”, which caused their jaw bones to glow in the dark.

 

Rat boys: Hired to kill rats with their bare hands when houses were infested. They suffered skin diseases, fevers and death. The biggest rats had to be taken alive to be used in fighting pits against dogs. And then of course there were the chimney sweep boys with black lungs and airways blocked with soot for life, what was left of them.

Just a few jobs of the many.

***

Notebook: Robert Maxwell, not a popular newspaper boss, had some awful habits. At lunches and dinners in the Mirror building with guests he would insist on his key executives, including editors, sitting on his right. After the meal he would pull a cigar from his pocket and dunk it in the executive’s glass of wine on his right, then put the other end in his mouth and light it. No one ever said a thing. Would you? On one occasion he even did it to a Mirror editor’s wife.

***

Express carpet biter Jocelyn Stevens would walk up and down the trains taking him to our Glasgow and Manchester offices, tearing up all Express newspapers left on seats so that boarding passengers would have to buy new copies to read them.

***

TERRY MANNERS

 

28 October 2024