London History, Up Close
Blogs inspired by Cobble's audio walks
A Constellation of Genius: The Trial of Giuseppe ‘Joseph’ Baretti
In 1769, Giuseppe Baretti stabbed a man on the Haymarket. His acquittal came via testimonies from Samuel Johnson and David Garrick and many more esteemed men.
On the evening of 6 October 1769, an Italian literary critic walked briskly up the Haymarket in London, was grabbed by the private parts by a woman in a doorway, struck her, was set upon by three men, stabbed one of them fatally, and was arrested. He was tried at the Old Bailey two weeks later for murder. His character witnesses were Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith. He was acquitted. The Man in the Dock Giuseppe Baretti was an Italian...
more‘I’ll Soon Cure Ye’: Elizabeth Calloway and the Cecil Court Fire
Thirteen houses burned, the Prince of Wales directed the firemen, Hogarth's mother died of fright, and the suspect was acquitted.
On the night of 11 June 1735, a fire broke out in Cecil Court, a narrow alley off St Martin’s Lane. By 3am, thirteen houses were gone. The Prince of Wales had arrived to direct the firemen. William Hogarth’s mother had died of fright. And a woman named Elizabeth Calloway was on her way to Newgate, charged with setting the whole thing deliberately. Cecil Court Cecil Court runs between St Martin’s Lane and Charing Cross Road, a narrow passage of the kind that defined this...
moreWe’ll Gather Lilacs: Ivor Novello at the Aldwych
Ivor Novello lived above the stage at the Aldwych for 40 years. His life was alive with parties, musicals, Hitchcock, and possibly a tryst with Winston Churchill.
Ivor Novello lived in a top-floor flat above the Strand Theatre for nearly forty years. He wrote some of the most beloved musicals in British history. He was, as his biographer put it, a consummate flirt who collected lovers as he gathered lilacs. And he may or may not have slept with Winston Churchill. When he died in 1951, 7,000 people attended his funeral. Women outnumbered men fifty to one. The Flat The Novello Theatre on the Aldwych was opened in 1905 as the Strand Theatre...
moreFanny Hill and the Streets That Made Her
John Cleland wrote Fanny Hill in debtors' prison in 1748 as a dare. It became Britain's first pornographic novel.
In 1748, a man sitting in a debtors’ prison wrote Britain’s first pornographic novel as a dare. He published it, got arrested, formally renounced it, and spent the rest of his life in poverty insisting it was a hymn to virtue. The novel outsold almost everything else published that century. John Cleland never saw the money. The novel was Fanny Hill. The setting was Covent Garden. Long before Soho claimed the title, Covent Garden was London’s original pleasure district, the...
moreGod, Guilt, and the Streets of Soho: William Gladstone’s Secret Life
William Gladstone spent evenings rescuing Soho prostitutes, flogging himself in penance, and being blackmailed for a job at Inland Revenue.
William Gladstone was Prime Minister four times, a towering Victorian moralist, and a man who spent his evenings walking the streets of Soho and Covent Garden persuading prostitutes to come home with him. His wife Catherine would give them a meal, some advice, and a bed for the night. The bed, it should be clarified, was not to be shared. Gladstone kept meticulous records of every encounter in his diary, using a small symbol of a whip to mark the occasions when he felt he had become...
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