Martin Fone's Blog, page 283
September 13, 2017
Book Corner – September 2017 (2)
Crime and Punishment – G F Newman
At a certain time during the day earlier this year I would take a short drive in my car and on the cat’s whiskers, tuned to Radio 4 (natch), was a drama called The Corrupted. My journey was so short I only caught about five minutes at a time but it piqued my interest. I was able to track the source material down, a two-volume thriller called Crime and Punishment by the creator of the TV series, Law and Order, G F Newman. It was published in 2009.
If I was expecting a modern take on Dostoevsky’s tortuous musings on the moral dilemma that committing a murder causes, then I was in for a disappointment. This is a fast and furious tale of crime, violence, sex and corruption – not my normal fare at all. The story starts in post war London in 1951 and the brutal murder of her old man by Cath. This traumatises the son, Brian Oldman, who witnesses the killing and sets him on a path of crime and violence in cahoots with his draft dodging uncle and boxer, Jack Braden. The first book, which is the better of the two, is a litany of beatings, mindless violence and the occasional killing as Brian and his even more psychopathic uncle battle for supremacy of their manor against the likes of the Krays and Richardsons.
Oh yes, we are in the world of faction and pretty much every other page has a reference to a real life person or character. At times it seems as if Newman is on automatic pilot – oh, I’ve written 500 words and haven’t mentioned a real person so I better throw one in now. So we find the likes of Churchill, Tom Driberg, Maggie Thatcher, Emil Savundra, Jack Slipper of the Yard and Ronnie Biggs peppering the pages. That the cast list has so many people from London’s rather recent dodgy past makes you wonder whether Oldman and Braden are pseudonyms for real gangsters but I think it is just a rather unsubtle attempt to give colour and context to the tale.
The police, or at least most of them, are in the pay of the crims and they generally have some hold over the judges, so the journey to retribution is long, winding and uncertain. Brian eventually gets his just desserts but there are so many loose ends and incomplete story lines that it all becomes a bit of an unsatisfactory mess. It is as though Newman has painted too extensive a picture and struggles to control his material. In the end, he jettisons all of the sub plots to bring the tale of Brian Oldman to a conclusion. Even so, the story is too long and could have benefitted from a gangster’s razor being put through it.
This is not my cup of tea but it served as an undemanding read on a sun lounger on a beautiful beach whilst sipping a long cool drink. Newman’s style is direct, breathless and he can tell a story. But the plot is often too implausible and too full of holes to lift the book from anything other than what it is – a good, low brow holiday read.
Filed under: Books, Culture Tagged: Brian Oldman, Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky and Crime and Punishment, Emil Savundra, Faction, G F Newman, Jack Braden, The Corrupted on Radio 4
September 12, 2017
Stone Walls Do Not A Prison Make – Part Two
The Rabbit proof fence of Western Australia
Blame it on an English settler, Thomas Austin.
Rabbits were not indigenous to Australia and were first introduced in 1788 to provide a source of meat for the settlers and convicts. They were bred on special farms and kept in enclosures and seemingly were as happy with their lot as they could be, rarely attempting to break out. But life in the outback can be a little boring. To ginger things up, Austin in October 1859 had the bright idea of releasing twenty-four wild rabbits into the grounds of his property so that his guests could amuse themselves by hunting them. As he was reported to have said at the time, “the introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting.”
Unfortunately, the hunting skills of Austin’s guests were not great and the rabbits bred, well, like rabbits. Worse still, the rabbits Austin released were two separate types, which interbred to produce a hardy and vigorous species. And even worse, rabbits normally don’t breed in the winter because the little ones are susceptible to the cold. Of course, there is no equivalent to a Northern hemisphere winter in Oz and so the rabbits were able to breed all the year round. Food was abundant and within ten years, even though up to two million rabbits were killed a year, there was no discernible dent in the population.
So great was the damage to crops that the Inter-Colonial Rabbit Commission offered a prize of £25,000 “to anyone who could demonstrate a new and effective way of exterminating rabbits” in 1887. There being no convincing solution, a surveyor, Arthur Mason, despatched to look at the rabbit population in 1896 suggested that a barrier be built along the border with South Australia and another further west to protect Western Australia’s crops. Nothing happened for a further five years but in 1901 a Royal Commission decided that the only solution was a barrier fence across the State.
So work started in 1902 to erect a fence, some 1,824 kilometres long, which stretched from the south coast to the north-west coast of WA along a line which ran north of Burracoppon which is 230 kilometres east of Perth, the longest in the world. It was completed some five years later.
But as you might have expected, there was a major flaw in the plan. It takes time to erect a fence and rabbits have time on their paws aside from copulating and munching their way through crops. They would find a way around the fence as it was being built. And so a second fence, prosaically called Fence No 2, was built to the west of the first fence, a mere 1, 166 kilometres in length, running from Point Ann to the point where it joins the first fence at Gum Creek. They may have concluded that it had ended at Shit Creek because a third fence had to be erected, running from there to the coast, a mere 257 kilometres.
And this formidable barrier of wire was the Western Australian farmers’ principal defence against rabbits and other itinerant creatures and parts of it still exist. In the 1950s, however, a more aggressive approach was adopted to containing rabbit numbers – introducing viruses including myxomatosis. Initially, this approach was successful as numbers dropped from around 600 to 100 million. But the rabbit wasn’t finished yet and genetic modifications have allowed it to build numbers back up to the two to three hundred millions.
If only Austin had stuck to cards and charades.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Burracoppon, Inter-Colonial Rabbit Commission, introduction of non-indigenous species, longest continuous fence in the world, myxomatosis, rabbit proof fence of Western Australia, rabbits in Australia, Thomas Austin
September 11, 2017
Quacks Pretend To Cure Other Men’s Disorders But Rarely Find A Cure For Their Own – Part Sixty
Dr King’s New Discovery for Consumption
Some diseases, which are still with us, have changed their names over time. A major killer in the 19th century was consumption. We now know this wasting disease as tuberculosis and whilst there are vaccines available to immunise you, I still read of outbreaks in the press. In the days before the vaccine had been discovered, the consumptive proved to be fair game for the practitioners of the art of quackery. One such was Herbert E Bucklen.
In around 1878 Buckland purchased the rights to some patent medicines from a Dr Z.L.King and moved the business from Elkhart in Indiana to Chicago. The crown jewel in his Gladstone bag was King’s rather prosaically named New Discovery which was aimed specifically at consumptives. Bucklen was a tireless advertiser – no journal was too big or small – and by 1885 he had established the New Discovery as a nationally recognised brand. His major coup came in 1893 when at the Chicago World Fair he offered for 50 cents a 31 page booklet which contained colour lithographs of the world fair buildings together with extensive advertising for his products.
Naturally, the advertising was fulsome. Adverts proclaimed that the New Discovery was the only sure cure for consumption in the world and that it struck terror to the doctors, presumably because it showed their inadequacy with dealing with what was hitherto nigh on incurable. It was also efficacious, the ads went on, in dealing with “all diseases of the throat, chest and lungs and permanently cures coughs, asthma, bronchitis, incipient consumption, lung fever, pneumonia, loss of voice…” – the list goes on and on. The copy becomes almost lyrical when it describes the perils of delay; “delay not a moment when that hacking cough and flushed cheek admonish you that the insidious viper, Consumption, is secretly gnawing at the vitals and, ere long, your doom will be sealed.”
All the patient had to do was send off for a free sample and then further bottles would be available for just one dollar a time. The patient was warned to beware all imitations and make sure that they only consumed the potion bearing Dr King’s name. The advertising worked, bottles flew off the shelves and Bucklen made a fortune.
The big questions, though, were what was in it and did it work? Well, what might fill honest medical practitioners with a degree of dread was that it was a mix of morphine and chloroform. For the consumptive, this was a pretty deadly concoction. The chloroform would supress the cough – a tick in the box there, then – but the problem was that it would suppress the natural reaction to try and clear the lungs of the stuff that was blocking them. Regular ingestion of morphine would induce a cheery disposition in the patient and the sense amongst relatives that the potion might be working. So a vicious circle would develop, hastening their eventual demise.
Naturally, there was no warning as to the potential harm that regular doses of the New Discovery could cause, either in the advertising or on the label of the bottles. After all, the aim of the game was to maximise sales, not to look after the patient’s welfare. It took exposure from the likes of the Journal of the American Medical Association and Samuel Hopkins Adams in his book, the Great American Fraud, to bring Bucklen’s money-making scam crashing down.
Filed under: Culture, History, Science Tagged: consumption, Dr King's New Discovery, Herbert E Bucklen, ingredients of Dr King's New Discovery, Medical quacks, Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Great American Fraud, tuberculosis
September 10, 2017
Beer Glasses Of The Week
As a regular drinker, I’m quite fussy as to how my beer is presented. There is nothing worse than a glass bearing the previous toper’s dirty fingerprints, lipstick or residue from the last pint. The glass goes back forthwith, I can tell you.
Then there is the pint where the head disappears at a rate of knots or where disturbing bubbles appear on the inside of the glass. This often leads to an interesting debate with the bartender as to whether it is the glass which is dirty or whether the beer is suboptimal.
According to a video released by MillerCoors, I learned this week, there is a way to resolve that particular argument. Wet the glass and shake some salt into it. If the salt coats the glass evenly all over, then it is clean. If it doesn’t, there are still some oily or greasy deposits on the glass. So if the glass passes the test, it must be the beer.
The problem, of course, is that you need to remove the beer before conducting the test. One for fastidious bartenders to conduct, methinks. But these things matter now that Surrey at £4.40 has become the most expensive county in which to buy a pint, supplanting London for the first time, according to CAMRA’s 2018 Good Beer Guide.
Whether the cleanliness of the glasses was much of a concern for Oliver Struempfel is a moot point. He just broke his own record by carrying 29 steins of beer over a 40 metre course in Abensburg in Germany, I read this week. What’s more, he spilled less than 10% of the contents. Struempfel, who had been in training for the feat since February, actually carried 31, weighing around 70 kg in total, but two fell as he was putting them down.
Shaken but not stirred, I guess.
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: 2018 Good Beer Guide, Abensburg, CAMRA, how to test whether your beer glass is clean, MillerCoors, Oliver Struempfel, record for carrying steins of lager, surrey has most expensive pint in UK
September 9, 2017
Bee Stunts Of The Week
What is it with men and bees? In my latest book, Fifty Curious Questions – how’s that for a gratuitous plug? – I call for volunteers to extend the experiments into the calibration of the intensity of bee stings on various parts of the human anatomy. It seems that the call to arms is being answered, if these stories I stumbled upon this week are to be believed.
First we have Juan Carlos Noguez Ortiz, a worker on a honeybee farm in Ontario in Canada, who smashed the Guinness World Record for sitting in a sealed dome while more than 100,000 bees crawled over his face and neck. He endured the ordeal for 61 minutes beating the previous best of 53 minutes 34 seconds hands-down. Defying bee-lief, he claimed only to have suffered a couple of stings.
Less fortunate was Kiwi, Jamie Grainger, who accepted a bet for NZ$1k to help towards paying for his forthcoming nuptials by positioning his bare backside atop a hive of bees. Grainger, a serial risk taker who once accepted a NZ$500 bet to eat a slug, sat there for 30 seconds, was stung numerous times but claims it was the easiest money he had ever earned. It’s going to be one hell of stag do, is all I can say.
“There’s nowt so queer as folk”, said a spokesman for the bee community.
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: Fifty Curious Questions, Guinness Book of Records, Jamie Grainger, Juan Carlos Noguez Ortiz, man sits on bee hive for bet, man smashes world record for wearing a bee beard, man wears bee beard for hour, Martin Fone
September 8, 2017
What Is The Origin Of (144)?…
Brown as a berry
When I was a youngster I would occasionally hear someone comment that a child was as brown as a berry. By this they meant that the kid had quite a suntan, something that was more admired in those less health conscious times than it is perhaps now. I suppose we should be grateful that the simile didn’t stray into more racist territory but it is one that has always struck me as a bit odd. I’m not an expert on berries but I thought that one of the primary purposes of a berry was to attract potential pollinators like birds who would then eat the fruit and excrete the seeds elsewhere. That’s why berries are bright in colour and so a brown berry doesn’t seem to cut the mustard.
When I started looking into the phrase, the first surprise I had was that it has a long pedigree. A couple of examples can be found in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the 1380s. In the Prologue, when describing the horse which a monk was riding, Chaucer wrote, “his palfrey was as broun as is a berye.” The Cook’s Tale contains the following description of the eponymous narrator; “broun as a berye, a proper short felawe.” The simile was already in use as a descriptor of appearance and it was almost certainly in parlance, whether common or otherwise, well before Chaucer put quill to parchment.
The second surprise relates to the word brown. It is often a mistake to view the past, particularly the mediaeval era, through modern eyes and with modern sensibilities. We live in a technicolour world, full of vibrant colour. But a millennium ago, the world, if not monochromatic, had a limited palette from which to paint. For sure, Mother Nature was as colourful and vibrant as she is now, perhaps more so, but dyes for clothing were prohibitively expensive and well beyond the ordinary purse. Often the only splash of man-made colour that Joe Public saw was on the walls of the local church.
What this meant was that the mediaeval mind was much more sensitive to tone and texture than colour. It is a bit like watching black and white TV rather than colour – the shadows and light take on more importance. This is borne out in the use of brown. In around 1330 a sword was described as being made “of brown steel.” In the context of swords and armour, brown wasn’t used to describe colour per se but rather to indicate that the object has lustre and shine.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest definition of brown as dusky or dark and words with a similar root in other European languages – brun in Swedish and Old French meaning a dark colour ranging from black to reddish-brown and in High German meaning dark-coloured – bear this out. It is probable that Chaucer was using the simile to indicate that the monk’s horse and the cook’s complexion was shiny and dark but not necessarily brown in colour, as modern usage would suggest.
You may be browned off that I haven’t found a definitive answer. This phrase, which is attributed to military slang, possibly from the Indian army or one of the World Wars although the OED’s first citation is dated 1938, means to be angry or annoyed. Some fifty or so years earlier it was used in a horticultural context to indicate damaged or ruined crops. The Oxford Journal in 1883 when reporting the fruit harvest in Canterbury noted, “fortunately the weather has been damp and cool…because otherwise the remaining fruit would have been browned off and rendered useless.” Perhaps the military slang was a euphemism, drawing attention to the hue of the person in high dudgeon. Brown is a trickier word than it seems.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: brown as a descriptor of shade, Geoffrey Chaucer, origin of brown as a berry, origin of browned off, origin of cut the mustard, The Cook's Tale, The Prologue of the Canterbury Tales
September 7, 2017
A Measure Of Things – Part Nine
It was not until the development of the coal-burning furnace in the 16th century which produced the temperatures necessary to manufacture thick glass and the discovery of cork as an efficient sealant, that the bottle came into its own as a means of transporting wine. Although the bottle has been challenged by the box in recent years, it stands triumphant as a means of selling and serving wine. Wine bottles come in a bewildering array of shapes and understanding the relativity of sizes reacquaints us with some biblical characters along the way.
Surprisingly, it was as recent as 1979 that the United States adopted 750 millilitres as the standard size for a wine bottle, a measure quickly adopted by the European Union to facilitate trade. Prior to that the sleek, long bottles with which we are familiar varied in size from anywhere between 700 and 800 millilitres. What determined the size of the bottle was the capacity of the glassblower’s lung!
Typically, the smallest size of bottle that wine comes in is the piccolo which is a quarter of a standard bottle of wine. It is also known as a pony, snipe or split. The half bottle, unsurprisingly, holds 375 millilitres or half a standard bottle of wine. Moving up the scale we have the magnum which is the equivalent of 1.5 litres or two standard bottles and the double magnum which holds twice the volume. A box of wine is usually the equivalent of a double magnum.
The first biblical character we come across is Jereboam who was the first king of the northern Kingdom of Isreal after the revolt of the ten northern Israelite tribes against Rehoboam. Confusingly, a jereboam when used in respect of champagne is 3 litres or four standard bottles but in the context of still wine equates to six standard bottles. The term for a volume equal to six standard bottles of champagne is Rehoboam, after the biblical king who, following the rebellion, was left with what was known as the Kingdom of Judah.
A methuselah, named after the oldest man in the Bible, is the equivalent to eight standard bottles of champagne. In the world of still wines, this measure is known as the Imperial. As we move up in size, the terminology used in respect of champagne and wine harmonises so a salmanazar, who was an Assyrian king, is the equivalent of twelve standard bottles or nine litres. A balthazar, one of the three wise men, is the name given to a bottle which holds 12 litres or the equivalent of sixteen standard bottles while a Nebuchadnezzar, named after the famous Babylonian king, is 15 litres.
The granddaddy of all bottles in terms of champagne is the Melchizedek or Midas which holds thirty gallons of the sparkling wine. You would probably need to share Midas’ fabled touch in order to afford such a bottle.
Most wine drinkers stick to standard bottles but perhaps they should try a magnum. After all, as one rather sexist former colleague of mine once told me, wine bottles are like breasts – one is not enough and three are too many. Cheers!
Filed under: Culture, History, Science Tagged: glassblower's lung, what is a balthazar, what is a jereboam, what is a magnum, what is a methusulah, what is a midas, what is a nebuchadnezzar, what is a salmanazar, when was the volume of a wine bottle standardised, wine bottle sizes
September 6, 2017
Book Corner – September 2017 (1)
Lincoln In The Bardo – George Saunders
It is very rare, in my experience, for a book to live up to its media hype but that is certainly the case with Saunders’ first full-length novel – he previously had made his name as a writer of short stories.
This is a wonderful book which operates on a number of levels. Ostensibly, it tells the story of what happened when Abraham Lincoln lost his Willie, his eleven year old son who probably died from typhoid. Willie died in February 1862 in an upstairs bedroom whilst the Lincolns were holding a state function on the ground floor. The couple never really recovered from their loss, Mary retreated to her bed, couldn’t bear to attend the funeral and spent a long period of her life under sedation. Abe was President at the time and in the middle of the Civil War with death tolls mounting, the prospects of success uncertain and the cares of state weighing heavily on him.
To make sense of the book readers need to be aware that the bardo, according to Tibetan Buddhist belief, is that transitional state between your past life and your future life, a sort of limbo. The characters we meet in the bardo, particularly two of the principal narrators, Hans Vollman who longs for the pleasures of his unconsummated marriage bed postponed as a result of a freak accident, and Roger Bevins, who committed suicide and instantly regretted it, fervently believe that it is only a matter of time before they are allowed to return to their former lives. With the innocent naivety of a child, Willie realises that this is bunkum and that they are dead and will remain dead for eternity.
The handling of Abe’s grief and the scenes where he revisits Willie’s tomb and cannot resist the temptation of lifting him from the casket is powerful and moving as is the scene where Lincoln senior is possessed by the inmates of the bardo and persuaded to walk away from the cemetery and return to life.
There are occasional raiding parties of the dead, trying to round up stragglers to move them on from their limbo-like existence. The bardo is full of picaresque characters, all with a tale to tell – abused slaves, priapic young men, wasters, drinkers, doting mothers, the whole gallimaufry of human life. We almost drown in the cacophony of hopeful, desperate and ultimately deluded voices. My favourite character is the elderly reverend who has a knowing way about him and clearly has a greater appreciation of the meaning of the bardo than his compatriots.
But what is mind-blowing is the style and structure of the book. It is rather like a patchwork quilt with contributions from each of the characters, interspersed with extracts from contemporary and post factum accounts, presumably all genuine, although I haven’t bothered to trace each source. Unlike a play, the character to whom the remarks are attributed or the source from which the passage is extracted appears afterwards. At first, this seems quite disconcerting as you are not quite sure who or what is saying what but you soon get used to the cadences of their speech and their perspective. The effect is astonishing as it gives the sense of a babble of voices, cutting in and interjecting as they do in real, or perhaps in this instance unreal, life. This literary conceit adds immeasurably to the sense that you are reading a great piece of literature and one that surely will stand the test of time.
Filed under: Books, Culture Tagged: Abraham Lincoln, bardo, George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo, Tibetan Buddhists and the bardo, what is a bardo, Willie Lincoln
September 5, 2017
Gin o’Clock – Part Twenty Eight
The ginaissance keeps rolling on. In 2016 the Treasury received £3.4 billion in tax revenue from the sale of gin, up 7 per cent from 2015, and exceeding the £3.2 billion levied from beer. The Wine and Spirit Trade Association reckoned that 43 million bottles of gin were sold in 2016 and that there are now more than 80 brands on sale. And Charles Rolls, who founded Fever-Tree, cashed in some of his shares in May and trousered £73 million. Where will it all end?
I had a useful insight the other day into the power of branding to attract or deter a consumer. I had noticed the bottles of Daffy’s Small Batch Premium Gin on the shelves of our local Waitrose for some time and always found a reason to pass them over. Thinking about it, it was the image on the front of the bottle – a tousle-haired blond above a cocktail glass. It seemed a bit – well, girly. This time, though, as I was anxious to replenish my depleted stocks and this was the only one I hadn’t tried, I swallowed my male chauvinism and bought a bottle.
The bottle is a slightly dumpy one with a natural cork stopper and the hooch, which is crystal clear, weighs in at an acceptable an pedantically precise 43.4% ABV. Leaving the imaging aside on the bottle, it has a helpful strip to the right hand side identifying the botanicals. Pride of place is given to a salad mint from the Bequaa valley in Lebanon – something I had not experienced before in a gin. The rear of the bottle states that this is “the finest copper pot single-batch distilled gin” – no probably here – and “the adventure started with our discovery of what Lebanese mint can bring to the finest gin.”
The other six botanicals listed are juniper (natch), coriander, angelica, lemon peel, cassia and orris. The bottle states that the Lebanese mint is mixed with eight other carefully chosen botanicals; so we are missing a couple. I suspect one is orange peel but as to the other, who knows? The botanicals are steeped in a neutral grain spirit from northern France for four days, distilled in the Midlands and then sent to Edinburgh where it is blended with Scottish water, minus minerals, until the desired ABV is reached.
Having made a great play about the mint, I was going to be fascinated to see what it did to the taste. To the nose the aroma is fresh and floral and in the mouth the liquid tastes rich and slightly oily. There is a hint of mint but it doesn’t overpower the other botanicals, rather adding some freshness to the overall taste. The after taste is warm and nutty and stays long in the throat. My fears that the mint would take over in the way that the horseradish does in Thomas Dakin Small Batch Gin but my fears were unfounded.
It is a lovely gin and one to sip and savour rather than to swill. The moral of the story is never judge a book by its cover.
And if you were wondering, Daffy was the name of an elixir given to children in Victorian times, often mixed with gin or, if there was none available, replaced by gin. As Mrs Mann explained to Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist, “’why, it’s what I’m obliged to keep a little of in the house, to put into the blessed infants’ daffy when they ain’t well’..as she opened a corner cupboard, and took down a bottle and glass. ‘It’s gin, I’ll deceive you not, it’s gin’.”
Filed under: Gin Tagged: Charles Rolls, Daffy's elixir, Daffy's Small Batch Premium Gin, Fever-Tree, Lebanese mint, Oliver Twist, Thomas Dakin Small batch Gin, Treasury excise from gin exceeds beer in 2016
September 4, 2017
The Streets Of London – Part Sixty Three
Bull Inn Court, WC2
This narrow passageway runs between the Strand and Maiden Lane and is located to the eastern end of the Strand. Other than avoiding the crowds on your way to or from the Covent Garden area, the main reason to visit this oasis of quiet is to pop into the wonderful Nell Gwynne pub which, as well as a splendid array of beers, boasts one of the best juke boxes in the town and one of the steepest set of stairs to the bog.
The court took its name from the Black Bull which served its ales for around 150 years from the early 16th century until the landlord was forced to sell up, presumably because of pressure from developers. It was pulled down in 1685 to make way for one of a series of courts to appear at the eastern end of the Strand. Bull Inn Court is clearly shown on John Roque’s large scale map of the metropolis which appeared in 1746 and unlike some of the other courts that were built in this part of the Strand in the late 17th century, it and Lumley are the only ones that survive today.
The current pub takes its name from the infamous mistress of Charles II, Nell Gwynne, who was born in nearby St Martin-in-the-Fields and sold her wares in Covent Garden before moving on to the stage at Drury Lane. The pub (natch) boasts that Nell used to frequent the original pub that stood there. Although this is likely, there is no evidence to its veracity. Anyhow, it makes a good tale and is a hook to draw in the punters. The site occupied by the pub looks as though it was built after or at least contemporaneously with the Court rather than it being the precise site of the of the original Black Bull. The Gwynne’s website states that it was built on the site of the Old Bull Inn and this may have been the name of the first pub there after the court was developed. Just to add to the confusion, some records show the pub as the Bull’s Head.
The Maiden Lane end of the Court was the scene of a notorious murder. On 16th December 1897 William Terriss, famous for his swash-buckling roles, was going through the stage door to the Adelphi Theatre when he was stabbed to death by an impecunious actor, Richard Archer Prince, whom Terriss had had dismissed and with whom the victim had been seen arguing the previous night. The press could not get enough of the story but Prince pleaded insanity, a regular ruse in those days to avoid the hangman’s noose, and was sent to Broadmoor where he remained until his death in 1936. This relatively lenient sentence got the hackles of the acting community up. Henry Irving noted, “Terriss was an actor, so his murderer will not be executed.”
For fans of the paranormal the ghost of William Terriss has been seen on occasions at the Adelphi Theatre. The Nell Gwynne is also said to be haunted but the only spirits I have seen there have been in bottles.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Adelphi Theatre, Bull Inn Court WC2, Henry Irving, John Roque, Nell Gwynne, the Nell Gwynne Pub, the nurder of William Terriss, William Terriss
