Walk 4:
Westminster and Lambeth
Addresses say a lot about Londoners. Those who live in swanky Mayfair, for example, are either rich as Texans or just diplomats pretending to be. Islington is populated by latte liberals, while privileged conservatives wait for socialist Armageddon near World’s End, Chelsea. Living south of the river was once avoided by people of every stripe. Its rough, working-class reputation goes back to when the area was popular for bear baiting, theatres, and music halls. Yet today crossing the river can be as surprising as crossing Montreal’s cultural divide of Boulevard Saint-Laurent and discovering a fascinating parallel city.
This walk begins at St. James’s Park Tube Station and ends at Westminster Tube Station. Walking distance is about 1.5 miles (2.4 km).
A Short History of the Area
Westminster was once a marshy island west of the medieval city of London. Although it was home to a church dedicated to St. Peter as far back as the 600s, it was the pious Saxon king Edward the Confessor (ca.1003–66; reigned from 1042) who built the first abbey here in 1065 known as the “Minister in the West.” Competition for wealthy benefactors was fierce in those days and Edward’s abbey struggled against its great rival St. Paul’s Cathedral to the east. The expression “robbing Peter to pay Paul” may stem from these early ecclesiastical squabbles.
Over the next centuries, Westminster like the City of London grew in prominence and importance. When King Henry VIII (1491–1547; reigned from 1509) moved his court to Whitehall from Westminster, the old palace became home to Parliament. It’s been associated with political mudslinging ever since. Centuries later, tenements in the area were razed to create an imposing array of stores, hotels, and offices for the politically powerful. New arrivals included the Army & Navy Store, which catered to the smart military man, as well as his wife or lady friend — and occasionally all three.
Across the river, Lambeth was no stranger to mud either. Its name may actually derive from the Saxon word for muddy harbour. This area flooded so often it was popularly known as Lambeth Marsh. While it never prospered quite like its neighbour to the north, it was home to a number of medieval manor houses such as Lambeth Manor (later Lambeth Palace), the origins of which date back to 1197. Other great manor houses endure in name only. Henry VIII, for example, demolished Kennington Manor to renovate Whitehall Palace. He may have done this for the convenience of building materials or simply out of spite: the first of his six wives, the Spanish Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) once lived there.
With the arrival of the Archbishop of Canterbury to Lambeth Palace in the thirteenth century, a number of charitable institutions sprang up south of the river. These included almshouses, schools, and early hospitals like St. Thomas’s. A late addition in 1815 was the new Bethlehem Hospital, the oldest charitable institution for the insane in England. Buying a ticket to view the inmates had once been a popular pastime in London and the hospital became familiarly known as “Bedlam.” Today, it houses a museum to another type of insanity: war.
The Walk
At St. James’s Park Tube Station, exit nearest Broadway and turn right toward Victoria Street. On our left is the headquarters of the London Metropolitan Police Force, more commonly known as New Scotland Yard, with its familiar revolving triangular sign. The Yard was the world’s first civilian police force and derives its name from the precincts of its first headquarters in Whitehall. It moved to this location in 1967. On the ground floor is a crime museum showcasing mementos from its most notorious cases. Unfortunately, it is open to only those in the trade. That is, in law enforcement.
Hudson’s Bay is certainly a country that Sinbad the Sailor never saw, as he makes no mention of mosquitoes.— David Thompson
Victoria Street ahead of us is a busy commercial thoroughfare which runs west from Parliament Square to Victoria Railway Station. Across Victoria Street is Strutton Ground, a midday marketplace full of T-shirt and vegetable vendors. Just beyond this market is Grey Coat Hospital School, founded in 1698. Today a preparatory school for young girls, it began life as a charity orphanage for Westminster’s poor. Above the entrance you will find figures of a girl and boy in traditional Grey Coat uniforms.
One of the school’s famous sons was the adventurer and geographer David Thompson (1770–1857) who journeyed across 55,000 miles (88,500 kilometres) of Western Canada mapping more wilderness than any other explorer. Never without his sextant, Thompson was called Koo Koo Sint, the man who looks at stars, by the Indians.
Grey Coat School: The Man Who Looked at Stars
David Thompson entered this world as a pauper and left it scarcely any richer: despite a lifetime trapping and exploring Canada, he died penniless, broken in spirit, and badly in debt. What he left behind, however, was a priceless piece of Canadian history: a manuscript of his incredible journeys across Western Canada published only after his death.
Thompson was born in nearby Marsham Street to Welsh parents who came to London in search of work. After his father died, Thompson entered Grey Coat Hospital School where he excelled in mathematics and navigation. At fourteen, he apprenticed to the Hudson’s Bay Company as a fur trader and left London for the wilds of Canada, never to return.
As luck would have it, the young Thompson was sent to work under the explorer and fur trader Samuel Hearne (1745–92), in Churchill, Manitoba. Life was dull and uneventful in Churchill, but Thompson helped Hearne write his memoirs, which probably whet the young man’s appetite for both adventure and storytelling. At the end of his apprenticeship, he set off on his own with a sextant and nautical almanacs.
Thompson devoted the next years of his life to fur trading, exploring, and map-making throughout western Canada — first for the HBC and then for the North West Company. He charted a route between Hudson Bay and Lake Athabasca across northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the future border between Canada and the United States, and made a perilous journey in winter over the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean in 1811. That he did this half blind and with a lame foot was a testament to his amazing fortitude and determination.
Yet after retiring to Montreal in 1812, Thompson proved less a businessman than an explorer and suffered repeated financial failures. He had to make ends meet by mapping Montreal’s streets and pawning his instruments. In 1857, he died in obscurity in Longueuil, Quebec, leaving behind his journal and notebooks under a mountain of debt. These extraordinary tales would be published in 1914 and confirm posthumously his right to the title of Canada’s greatest geographer, map-maker, and surveyor.
Now let’s turn left on Victoria Street and head toward Parliament Square. Today, this part of the street is a bit modern and soulless, with little to interest us. In the late 1800s, however, 17–19 Victoria Street was the gloomy headquarters of Canada’s first “ambassador” to Britain.
Trivia: A plaque in honour of David Thompson’s explorations and surveying in early Canada can be found on the wall of Grey Coat Hospital School in Westminster. It was unveiled in 2007.
His appointment was a clear signal that Canada was growing up and ready to take on the Mother Country; if not quite as equals then at least a little more so. Yet he didn’t have an easy time of it.
Grey Coat Hospital School for paupers near Victoria Street. David Thompson, Canada’s greatest map-maker, left here to join the Hudson’s Bay Company, never to return.
17–19 Victoria Street: Canada’s First Diplomat
Although Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald would campaign later on the theme: “A British subject I was born — a British subject I will die,” by 1879, he had come to realize that Britain and Canada didn’t always see eye to eye. He decided an official Canadian minister resident in London would be the best way to represent the young country on matters of finance, defence, immigration, and trade. But British officials balked at the idea. Canada was just a colony, after all, and not the Hapsburg Empire.
When Macdonald persisted, the British reluctantly agreed to a low-ranking official or a “special commissioner.” But that still wasn’t good enough for Macdonald, who argued his man in London would serve a general purpose and not a special one. He should at least have the rank of high commissioner. As at Yorktown, the British threw in the towel. Privately, however, Macdonald fumed over the wordplay. “It was a matter of no importance to the Imperial Government what title we may give our agent,” he complained to the governor general. “We might call him Nuncio or Legate or legate a latere gubernatoris if we pleased.”[1]
Into this exalted if ill-defined job first stepped Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt (1817–93). A Father of Confederation and Conservative MP, Galt was impatient, unpredictable, and prickly — hardly a smooth, gin-sipping role model for Canada’s future cadre of diplomats. To make matters worse, British Tories were voted out of office in 1880 and were replaced by Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809–98) and his unfriendly Liberals. “It could not be worse,” Galt fretted to his boss. “The members of the Ministry unmistakably ignore me, from Gladstone downward I have never seen inside of one of their houses.”[2]
But it was on the home front that the new High Commissioner battled the most. Horse races, canapés, and club memberships were expensive in London but Galt believed they were the cost of doing business. No sooner was he in the job than he felt obliged to ask for more money. Old Tomorrow flatly refused. In the all-too-familiar refrain of diplomats ever since, Galt told Macdonald huffily: “This cannot be done by staying at home.”[3] Rebuked and disillusioned, he tendered his resignation eventually and came home. Perhaps he was the quintessential diplomat after all.
Trivia: After thirty years, Canada vacated its first offices on Victoria Street. “One had to engage a guide and an interpreter in order to find it,” one High Commissioner complained. “Oh my, but it was a depressing place.”[4]
Let’s continue our walk along Victoria Street. At the corner of Tothill and Victoria streets (2–8 Victoria Street) we come to the site of the old Westminster Palace Hotel (now offices). In 1866, delegates from Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick assembled here to put the finishing touches on the principles behind Canada’s first constitution, the British North America Act. Along this dark desert highway of Victoria Street, you could say we’ve come to the Hotel Confederation.
The virgin birth wasn’t the only miracle worth celebrating on Christmas Eve 1866. Colonial delegates in London also finalized Canada’s constitution.
2–8 Victoria Street: The Hotel Confederation
The Westminster Palace Hotel may not have served pink champagne on ice like the hotel imagined by the Eagles, but it was billed as the epitome of luxury for its day. British nineteenth-century luxury, that is. Built in 1859 in the French Renaissance style, the 400-room hotel was the first equipped with elevators in London and boasted every modern convenience, except ensuite bathrooms (in fact, there were only fourteen bathrooms). It’s probably the reason Canada’s cranky newspaperman George Brown (1818–80) deemed it only moderately comfortable.
On the ground floor beyond the front desk was a long conference room decorated in white and gold. It was normally used for lectures and music. But in December 1866 it was here that a small group of colonial politicians, with Macdonald as chairman, finally gathered to hammer out the last details of their union.
The delegates were up against the clock. In New Brunswick, an election loomed that might overturn the colony’s vote in favour of union. In Britain, the wobbly Conservative government needed to pass the bill could fall any day. “We must obtain action during the present session of the Imperial Parliament,” warned the excitable Charles Tupper (1821–1915) of Nova Scotia, “or all may be lost.”[5]
But if old habits die hard, old political habits die harder, and the sixteen delegates soon got bogged down over the same old issues that had blocked earlier negotiations. Frustration was evident among them. “Our friends from the Maritime provinces are excessively fond of talking,” one complained.[6]
But Christmas brought another miracle besides the virgin birth. As December 25 drew near, the delegates finally agreed on a set of resolutions. On Christmas Eve, they handed them over to British officials to create a legal document that would eventually become Canada’s constitution — and broke just in time to enjoy the holidays.
Trivia: A commemorative tablet from the conference room where the British North America Act was finalized was presented to Canada after the Westminster Palace Hotel was demolished in 1974. It’s now mounted outside the doors to the Library of Parliament in Ottawa.
Before we move on, let’s briefly consider another episode at the Westminster Palace Hotel that occurred during the London Conference. This one left a young Macdonald spending a miserable Christmas in bed — perhaps like Scrooge dreaming of ghosts past, present, and future.
2–8 Victoria Street: Macdonald’s Humbug Christmas
One night in December 1866, during the London Conference, John A. Macdonald returned late to his room at the Westminster Palace Hotel tired, cold, and maybe even a little drunk. It had been an eventful day. On his way back to London from a visit to the British colonial secretary’s country retreat near Newbury, Macdonald had narrowly escaped injury when the train on which he had been travelling jumped the tracks and landed in a ditch. Now safely ensconced in his hotel, Old Tomorrow lit a candle and climbed into bed with his newspapers, pulling the bed curtains around him to ward off the damp winter chill. Perhaps he also poured himself a night cap as he drew a candle near to read.
A few minutes later, Macdonald awoke to find the sheets and bed curtains ablaze. Without time to lose, he leapt out of bed, pulled everything to the floor, and tried to extinguish the flames with water and a bolster pillow. He then ran to George-Étienne Cartier (1814–73) and Alexander Galt in the adjoining rooms to fetch help. Only once the fire was out did Macdonald notice his own wounds. His hair, forehead, and hands were scorched and his shoulder burnt. Yet with a view to his important mission he kept calm and carried on. “I got it dressed and thought no more of it,” he said in a letter to his sister.[7]
The Westminster Palace Hotel where the Fathers of Confederation finalized Canada’s 1867 constitution. Advertising to the contrary, some thought the hotel only moderately comfortable.
But Macdonald’s injuries grew worse by the day. By the time the delegates had inked their deal, he was running a high fever. His condition was so acute a doctor ordered him to bed over Christmas. As the other delegates set off merrily to visit friends and family for the holidays and to celebrate their accomplishment, Macdonald remained alone in his hotel room, dining only on tea and toast, and more than a little humbug. For Canada’s future chieftain, it was far from a merry Christmas.
Across from us is Westminster Abbey. This is Britain’s national cathedral, coronation chamber, and royal mausoleum all rolled into one. It is also Britain’s most popular visitor attraction.
Trivia: During the London Conference, Sir John A. Macdonald visited Highclere Castle, the country home of the colonial secretary Henry Herbert, Lord Carnarvon. It became the informal drafting room of Canada’s constitution. Highclere later became famous in the TV series Downton Abbey.
We’ll start our tour by admiring the West Front of the church. Despite the facade’s medieval appearance, it is more modern than that. It was designed by the English architects Christopher Wren (1632–1723) and his disciple Nicholas Hawksmoor (ca.1661–1736) and completed in 1745. If visitors from Montreal have a sense of déjà vu, there’s good reason. Westminster Abbey not only inspired faithful pilgrims but architects too.
Westminster Abbey: Notre-Dame de Westminster
In the early 1800s, it seemed the Maudits anglais (damned English) were everywhere in Montreal. If the establishment of English-speaking McGill University wasn’t bad enough, they had raised a monument to Admiral Horatio Nelson in Place Jacques Cartier. So when it came time to build the city’s Roman Catholic cathedral, many French-Canadian leaders wanted something brash, showy, and, well, a bit more French in style. What they got didn’t exactly answer their prayers.
The problem began with the architect. James O’Donnell (1774–1830) was a Protestant Irishman who specialized in Gothic Revival architecture, then in vogue in England and the United States. He won the commission for Montreal’s Notre-Dame with his Irish charm and eloquence and set about designing a Gothic masterpiece to loosely recall Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris — even down to its dimensions.[8] Yet O’Donnell had never been to Paris to see the original. But he had visited London.
With its neat grid of vertical and horizontal lines, the towers of Montreal’s Notre-Dame bear a striking resemblance to those of Westminster Abbey. The narrow pointed arches, finials, buttresses, and other details are also similar. Inside O’Donnell took his inspiration from another London church: St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The result, observers said, was a veritable potpourri of architectural fumbling which “resembles nothing so much as a collection of Gothic shapes cut out of cardboard and pasted together.”[9] Jérôme Demers (1774–1853), superior of the Seminary of Quebec, had even graver ecclesiastical concerns. He complained the new basilica looked simply far too Protestant.[10]
Now let’s go around to the North Porch of the Abbey and head inside. As your eyes adjust, it’s easy to mistake the place for a cluttered antique shop with old statuary packed to the rafters. Over 3,000 very important corpses are buried here with over 600 monuments for us to peruse. One could probably spend the better part of a day here — and at the price of admission why wouldn’t you? — but that wouldn’t leave us time for the rest of our walk.
Trivia: The towers of Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica are known as Temperance and Perseverance. Perseverance looks westward to the English part of the city; Temperance looks eastward to the old Molson brewery.
Let’s begin our tour here in the North Transept. This area is called Statesmen’s Aisle. Many of the British worthies we’ve encountered on earlier walks are memorialized here. Among them is William Pitt (1708–78), 1st Earl of Chatham, and the mastermind behind the British victories at Louisbourg and Quebec in the Seven Years’ War. In the same grave is his son, Britain’s youngest prime minister, William Pitt (1759–1806), known as Pitt the Younger. He was only twenty-four when he took office.
Déjà vu: Montreal’s Notre Dame Basilica (right) borrows a detail or two from London’s Westminster Abbey, much to the chagrin of some French Canadian churchgoers.
In ancient Roman togas are Tory Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), alongside four-time Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98). Gladstone, known as the Old Grand Man, was anti-slavery as well as anti-imperialist and favoured independence for Canada to avoid further drain on Britain’s public purse. With this in mind, he confided that the appointment of Canada’s first diplomat was a step in the right direction.[11]
Also in the west aisle is a memorial to George Montagu-Dunk (1716–71), 2nd Earl Halifax, by the sculptor John Bacon. As president of Britain’s Board of Trade, in 1749 Halifax ordered an English town to be built in Nova Scotia to counter French settlement in the area, which he immodestly named after himself. The enterprise was criticized as wasteful. Edmund Burke (1729–97), a conservative Whig, threw up his hands over the cost of Halifax, complaining to Parliament: “Good God! What sum the nursing of that ill-thriven, hard-visaged, and ill-favoured brat, has cost to this wittol [cuckold] nation!”[12] Ironically, the two cherubs on Halifax’s memorial hold up a mirror of prudence and tread on hypocrisy. Many of Halifax’s detractors thought it should have been the other way around.
On this western side of the Transept is a memorial to Jonas Hanway (1712–86). Hanway was an eccentric philanthropist who helped rebuild Montreal after a devastating fire in 1765. As a result of his fundraising, London sent two shiny fire trucks to the stricken city, as well as the controversial bust of King George III that we encountered on Walk 2. Hanway is also thought to be the first Londoner to use an umbrella in the mid-1750s, which ultimately spelled the end of the fur trade. Until then, fur hats made of beaver pelts had kept Londoners dry.
England would be better off without Canada; it keeps her in a prepared state for war at a great expense and constant irritation.— Napoleon Bonaparte
In the Statesmen’s Aisle we find a memorial to Robert Stewart (1769–1822), Viscount Castlereagh, an Anglo-Irish statesman renowned for his diplomatic skills in Europe. Yet when it came to the affairs of North America, his talents were a little less obvious.
Castlereagh Memorial: A Millstone Around His Neck
Castlereagh was a tall, painfully thin man who always looked bored and was fond of dressing in black. In January 1812, he became Britain’s foreign minister and immediately faced off against a man half his height but many times his ambition: the French military dictator Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821).
Focused on Britain’s war against Napoleon, Castlereagh miscalculated the anger of Americans over his country’s heavy-handed control of the seas to blockade France. Raids on U.S. ships and impressment of their British-born sailors into the Royal Navy angered Americans and confirmed to them Britain “ruled the waves, and waived the rules.” So they declared war and invaded Canada.
The result was our War of 1812, a war within a war. The fact that Canada fended off a U.S. invasion owed much to the loyalty of French Canadians, a small but superior British land force, and, not insignificantly, timid American military men.[13] But no thanks was owed to Castlereagh, who described the conflict in North America as a millstone and wanted to end it quickly.[14] When the Americans sent a high-level delegation to Ghent to negotiate a peace, he sent second-rate officials who abandoned Britain’s First Nation allies and gave back territory Britain had won. Some were left wondering whose side Castlereagh was really on.
In later years, Castlereagh became increasingly neurotic, to the point where the Duke of Wellington told him “you cannot be in your right mind.”[15] To prevent suicide, he was stripped of all knives, razors, and pistols. To no effect. One morning Castlereagh found a small pocket knife and cut his own throat. Immortality in Westminster Abbey wasn’t kind either. The poet George Lord Byron (1788–1824) suggested the epitaph:
Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.
Let’s turn now and head into the north ambulatory with the high altar on our right. In the St. John the Evangelist Chapel on our left is a memorial to Sir John Franklin (1786–1847), who disappeared trying to discover Canada’s Northwest Passage. Like his statue in Waterloo Place, this white marble bust was created by the sculptor Matthew Noble and placed here by Lady Jane, Franklin’s admiring and determined widow. His epitaph, by the poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–92), is a great deal kinder than the one proposed for Castlereagh. It reads:
Not here: The white north has thy bones; and thou, heroic sailor-soul, art passing on thine happier voyage now toward no earthly pole.
Also commemorated in the same chapel is Sir Francis Leopold McClintock (1819–1907), an Irish-born explorer known as the Arctic Fox. McClintock established Franklin’s fate in 1859, after discovering some of Franklin’s frozen belongings on King William Island. He was also one of the more successful explorers of the Arctic owing to his adoption of Inuit technology.
McClintock Memorial: An Explorer’s Best Friend
Having joined the Royal Navy when he was only twelve, Francis Leopold McClintock’s early career was neither exciting nor extraordinary. All that changed in 1848, however, when he was thirty and sailed to the Canadian Arctic in search of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition.
With their ship stuck in the ice off Somerset Island, McClintock and Sir James Clark Ross (1800–62) used Inuit sleds pulled by dogs to journey across the island. By imitating the Inuit, McClintock and Ross were able to travel great distances and explore new areas previously unseen by Europeans. Back in England, McClintock adapted the sledding technique to take advantage of the manpower available on navy ships. Using teams of men instead of dogs, McClintock covered over 745 miles (1,200 kilometres) on his next trip in the search for Franklin and, in 1855, discovered incontrovertible proof that Franklin and his men had perished. The discovery earned McClintock fame and a knighthood.[16]
But McClintock’s sleds would ultimately prove less effective than the Inuit originals. In the 1911 race to the South Pole, Norway’s Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) used the Inuit method of sledding to beat Britain’s Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) to the pole. Scott, who adopted McClintock’s method using men rather than dogs, perished on the journey.
In the Islip chapel, next on our right, is a modern floor marker to Admiral Sir Charles Saunders (1715–75), a forgotten but key player in the British conquest of Quebec. With thirty-two years service in the navy, this capable but quiet man skilfully manoeuvred Wolfe’s fleet down the St. Lawrence River and landed his troops. Along with Brigadier-General George Townshend (1724–1807), he signed the document of Quebec’s surrender.[17]
Trivia: In 1752, James Wolfe watched Parisians using umbrellas against the sun and rain and wondered why the English didn’t use them.
We now come to the unmistakable monument to the man himself: Major-General James Wolfe (1727–59). At the base is a bronze relief of the assault on Quebec. Above it is a neoclassical sarcophagus supported by two British lions, which is empty (Wolfe is buried in Greenwich), and simply bears his epitaph. But the real showstopper is what’s above. It’s a Pieta-like composition of Wolfe dying in the arms of two soldiers while an angel of Victory descends with a laurel wreath and palm branch. A lanky, muscular Wolfe is draped modestly only in a cloth.
In a wave of patriotism after Wolfe’s death, British members of Parliament voted to erect this monument to the newfound hero of Quebec at public expense. The winner of a national design competition was a relative newcomer to the scene named Joseph Wilton (1722–1803), whose only leg up over more experienced sculptors was that he had already carved a bust of Wolfe.[18] But if MPs believed Wilton actually knew what the man looked like, they were sadly mistaken.
Wolfe Memorial: The Face of a Hero
Unlike other military heroes, Major-General James Wolfe only became famous in death. Although there are many portraits of him, few if any were painted while he lived. From written descriptions and caricatures by his men, we have some basic facts. Wolfe was six feet tall and scrawny, with flaming red hair and pale, freckled skin. He also had a long beak-like nose and a forehead that sloped back distinctively when viewed from the side. Hardly the muscular man on the Westminster memorial. In fact, some even thought him downright ugly.[19]
For the sculptor Wilton, Wolfe’s facial features posed a particular challenge. When Wolfe’s body arrived back in England, Wilton went down to Portsmouth to make a death mask. But after weeks at sea the General’s corpse was too badly decayed to be of much use. The resourceful Wilton did the only thing he could, given the circumstances. He asked people who knew Wolfe and modelled the hero after a nobleman’s servant who some believed resembled him.
Working from this servant’s face, Wilton smoothed out Wolfe’s bird-like features and gave him a muscular body, like a Photoshop artist might do today. This is the image of Wolfe that endures in stone.
Continue along the ambulatory, which forms a semi-circle around the tomb of Edward the Confessor. At the far eastern end is the Chapel of Henry VII, a fine example of English medieval architecture and the most magnificent part of the abbey. Note in particular its fan vault ceiling.
Henry VII (1457–1509; reigned from 1485) and his wife Elizabeth of York established the Tudor dynasty and are buried in a black marble tomb at the far end of the chapel. Henry is of interest to us because he played an important, if largely unrecognized, role in the discovery of Canada. In 1497, he sponsored an explorer named Giovanni Cabota, better known as John Cabot (ca.1450–99), “to seeke out, discover, and finde whatsoever isles, countreys, regions or provinces of the heathen and infidels whatsoever they be, and in what part of the world soever they be which before this times have been unknowen to all Christians.” Henry got less than he bargained for.
Henry VII Tomb: His Majesty’s New Found Fish
Henry Tudor was a cautious, penny-pinching king whose rule straddled the brutality of the Middle Ages and the dazzle of the Renaissance. Having violently snatched the crown from a previous king at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, Henry discovered his newly acquired treasury was nearly empty and spent the rest of his reign finding ways to fill it.[20] So he wasn’t really in a position to be extravagant a few years later when he was offered the chance to finance an amazing voyage across the ocean by a Genoa explorer named Christopher Columbus. Instead Columbus went to Henry’s rival, Spain’s rich King Ferdinand (1452–1516) and the rest, as they say, is genocide.
Columbus’s discovery of the New World in 1492 may have irked Henry a little, particularly since his own fishermen from Bristol had probably known about North America for some time. So when a second Genoan named John Cabot pitched the idea of a northerly route to Asia a few years later, backed by Bristol merchants, Henry wouldn’t miss the chance twice. He gave Cabot a monopoly to all trade his voyage generated, less than one-fifth to his depleted treasury, of course.
Alas for Henry, Cabot’s adventure yielded nothing but more fish. Cabot’s first voyage in 1496 was a failure. On his second, a year later, he planted the English flag in Newfoundland or possibly Nova Scotia, believing it to be Asia. When he returned without riches, Henry grudgingly granted him £10 and a pension “to hym that founde the new isle.” The king remained ever hopeful, however, and sent Cabot back a third time, laden with goods to trade with the Chinese for gold and spices. But Cabot vanished never to be seen again. When Henry died so did his country’s desire to explore the New World until many years later.
The magnificent Chapel of Henry VII also serves as chapel to the Order of the Bath, the oldest British order of chivalry. Sir John A. Macdonald was made a Knight Commander of the Bath for bringing about Confederation in 1867 and later elevated to the higher rank of Knight Grand Cross.[21] In addition, he became an Imperial Privy Councillor in 1879. He might have received the title right honourable a few years earlier if the Pacific Scandal involving political kickbacks hadn’t tarnished his name. As it was, Queen Victoria invited him to her home on the Isle of Wight to receive the honour but didn’t offer him any supper. His nameplate can be seen in one of the stalls.[22]
A number of other royals are buried in the Chapel. In the north aisle are Henry VII’s granddaughters, the Catholic Queen Mary (1516–58) and her half sister the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603). Across the chapel is a monument to the beheaded Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–87). Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, is also found here.
In an unmarked grave under the chapel floor is George II (1683–1760), the last king to be buried in the Abbey. He was king for most of the Seven Years’ War and approved Pitt’s choice of the young Wolfe to lead the expedition against Quebec.
Now exit the chapel and continue around the Ambulatory toward the South Transept and Poet’s Corner.
To our left, near the ornate wood Choir Screen, are the graves of a number of well-known scientists. In the nave is a memorial to the New Zealand-born Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, who was chair of physics at McGill University from 1898 to 1907. His work on radiation led to the award of a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 and ultimately to the development of the atomic bomb.
A spot in Poet’s Corner on our left is probably the highest recognition that can befall an English-speaking poet, though it hardly makes up for the lifetime of penury most endure. The tradition of burying poets here began with Geoffrey Chaucer (ca.1340–1400), though this honour apparently wasn’t so much for his Canterbury Tales as it was for his long association with the Abbey. The other names here read like the bookshelf of a university English major. We’ll focus briefly on two.
Trivia: Evangeline was the subject of Canada’s first feature-length dramatic film. It was produced in 1913 and filmed in Nova Scotia.
The first poet on our tour is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82), whose marble bust was placed here by British admirers in 1884. Ironically, it was this American poet who helped draw the world’s attention to the most shameful act by the British in the history of Canada: the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755. This tragedy of the Seven Years’ War might have been an historical footnote had it not been for Longfellow’s skill in turning a tragedy into a powerful love story that captured the hearts of millions of readers and in the process helped awaken Acadian nationalism and pride.
Longfellow Memorial: Evangeline and the Acadians
The Acadians were French-speaking Catholics caught in a no-man’s land in the conflict between New France and New England. Their expulsion from Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia, by British and New England troops was the first time in modern history that a group of civilians was forcibly removed as a threat.[23] Loaded onto ships, they were dispersed across the continent; many settling in Louisiana. Their only crime was to refuse allegiance to one power over another.
Longfellow heard the story of a man and woman separated by the expulsion from a pastor in Boston, and decided to make it the subject of an epic verse in dactylic hexameter, the challenging meter of Homer and Virgil. “Evangeline is so easy for you to read,” he once said, “because it was so hard for me to write.”[24] The poem tells the story of a faithful and persistent maiden named Evangeline Bellefontaine who spends her life searching for her lover, Gabriel Lajeunesse, after the expulsion, only to find him years later in a poor house in Philadelphia, where he dies in her arms. The story proved so wildly popular after it was published in 1847 that it was translated into 130 languages.
Longfellow’s most famous work had unforeseen consequences. While his intent was merely to portray the faithfulness of women, the poem came to symbolize the plight of the Acadian people who rallied around its story of suffering. They adopted Evangeline as their own Joan of Arc and searched in vain for evidence she was real. But Longfellow’s poem was only a work of popular fiction, and he was not one to let facts get in the way of a good story. He neatly omitted, for example, the role his own countrymen had played in the expulsion. Moreover, he had never been to the Acadian people’s peaceful and bucolic land. The evocative “forest primeval” of his Acadia was based solely on the forests of Maine.
The second poet we’ll consider briefly in Poet’s Corner is the Englishman Thomas Gray (1716–71). He was a poor poet who lived above a milliner’s shop on Jermyn Street, which we discovered on Walk 2. Gray seemed to like writing melancholy poetry, whether about humans or cats. His masterpiece was “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” It was published in 1751 to great acclaim and had one significant admirer in Canada: Major-General James Wolfe.
Gray Memorial: The Curfew Tolls for General Wolfe
For a poet who didn’t write a great deal, Thomas Gray certainly had a way with the words. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” contains lines that are probably familiar to those who have never read it. Perhaps the best known is the warning against those who would seek fame and fortune: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
Major-General James Wolfe is traditionally believed to have read the poem to his men before launching his famous assault on Quebec. Perhaps he imagined the carnage to come or was contemplating his own fate as he succumbed slowly to the ravages of tuberculosis. “Gentlemen,” he said, staring up at the steep, dark cliffs from the river basin, “I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec.”
Is the romantic story true? Most likely, say historians, though when exactly Wolfe had time to read the poem before the assault is less certain.[25] What is clear is that Wolfe’s leather-bound and annotated copy of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is now preserved in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. It is inscribed to Wolfe by Katherine Lowther, the woman he planned to marry.
Leaving Poet’s Corner, we head into the South Aisle of the nave. Here we find a beautiful monument by Robert Adam to Major John André (1750–80) paid for by King George III. André was a dashing British soldier captured in the American Revolution in a plot involving General Benedict Arnold (ca.1741–1801), a rebel leader who famously switched allegiance to the British, and Lieutenant-Colonel John Graves Simcoe (1752–1806), a British spymaster in New York. André was executed while Arnold escaped to New Brunswick. Simcoe, meanwhile, carried his anti-Americanism to Upper Canada as the province’s first lieutenant governor.[26]
In the nave we also find the grave of Sir Freeman Freeman-Thomas (1866–1941), 1st Marquess of Willingdon. He was governor general of Canada from 1926 to 1931 and was the first to take his advice from the prime minister in Canada rather than in Britain. Canada was a piece of cake compared to his next job. As viceroy of India, he faced off with the great civil disobedience campaigner Mahatma Ghandi (1869–1948).
Andrew Bonar Law was a private family man who didn’t drink, womanize or gamble. “Well, what do you like?” David Lloyd George once asked. “I like bridge,” Law replied.
Also in the nave is a stained-glass window to Donald Smith (1820–1914), 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal. Smith was a wealthy philanthropist and governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company who made his home in London. As one of the directors of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, he drove the last symbolic spike at Craigellachie, British Columbia, in 1885. In the process, he badly bent it. Strathcona is not buried here but in Highgate Cemetery in North London, next to his wife.
At the westernmost end of the nave, we come to the grave of Andrew Bonar Law (1858–1923), a native of New Brunswick. He was the only British prime minister born outside of the United Kingdom and probably the least known. The Liberal Prime Minister Henry Herbert Asquith (1852–1928) once quipped: “It is fitting that we should have buried the Unknown Prime Minister by the side of the Unknown Soldier.”
Law Memorial: The Unknown Prime Minister
At sixty-four, the soft-spoken Andrew Bonar Law may not have been the youngest or most charismatic British politician to move into 10 Downing Street, but he was the only New Brunswicker.
Law was the son of a Presbyterian minister who emigrated to the colony in 1845. Raised with three siblings near Rexton, Bonar (rhymes with honour) grew up poor as a proverbial church mouse. When his mother died, Law was sent to Scotland to be raised by childless relatives who happened to be very rich. They adopted the young boy as their own.
Law was a serious and studious young man who is said to have read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire three times before he could vote. With a head for making money and a sizable inheritance, it wasn’t long before Law too was very rich. But he was also scrupulously honest, modest, and private, and never drank anything stronger than ginger ale. A friend once called him “a good deed in a naughty world.”
As an adopted Scot, Law took politics with his porridge. He ran for Parliament in 1900 and quickly became a leading figure in the Conservative Party. In the wartime coalition government of Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1863–1945), Law served as deputy prime minister before a stunning upset led to him to becoming prime minister in October 1922.
But his time at number 10 was brief. Tired and in poor health, he was diagnosed with cancer and resigned after only 209 days in office. He died shortly afterward.
One of Law’s closest friends was the Canadian newspaper baron and financier Max Aitken (1879–1964), 1st Baron Beaverbrook. Like Law, Beaverbrook was a wealthy and political Presbyterian who hailed from New Brunswick. He was with Law right to the last. A satirical poet wrote:
Round Pembroke Lodge in Edwardes Square
Like rooks the claimants caw
While Aitken keeps with gargoyle stare
His vigil over Law.[27]
In the northwest tower chapel of the nave is a patriotic marble tablet with a figure mourning George Augustus Howe (ca.1725–59), 3rd Viscount Howe. He was one of William Pitt’s energetic young generals who was carelessly killed on his way to dislodge Louis-Joseph de Montcalm (1712–59) and his French forces from Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga, New York. Wolfe called him the very best officer in the king’s service whose loss was “one of the greatest that could befall a nation.”
Now let’s exit Westminster Abbey from the west door and continue east toward the river. Turn right and head toward Abingdon Street.
Trivia: The old manse in Rexton, New Brunswick, where Andrew Bonar Law was born is today a national historic site. A cairn notes he was a man of “noble character and sterling integrity who served his king and country faithfully.”[28]
Near the Peers entrance to the House of Lords is a bronze equestrian statue of King Richard I (1157–99; reigned from 1189), by the Victorian sculptor Carlo Marochetti. After a bomb exploded nearby during the Second World War, Richard’s raised sword was badly bent. Vincent Massey (1887–1967), Canada’s high commissioner to Britain at the time, campaigned to keep it that way as a lasting symbol of the war but city officials thought otherwise and had it straightened. The same couldn’t be said for Richard’s reputation after having reputedly slept with the king of France.
Trivia: The mayor of Bathurst, New Brunswick, once showed Emmeline Pankhurst his city’s new Home for Fallen Women. “Ah, where is your Home for Fallen Men?” she asked.[29]
A little farther on we come to a statue to King George V (1865–1936; reigned from 1910) followed by Abingdon Park, where the medieval Jewel Tower stands. It was built around 1365 and is one of the only remaining parts of the original Palace of Westminster — the other being Westminster Hall. For a small entrance fee, you can learn about the history of Parliament and see where Edward III (1312–1377; reigned from 1327) kept his loot. Otherwise, cross Abingdon Street and enter Victoria Tower Gardens, a quiet riverside park next to Parliament. Here we encounter our next Canadian discovery.
Near the entrance to Victoria Tower Gardens is a 1930 statue by A.G. Walker of Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), a militant suffragette from Manchester who won the right for British women to vote in 1918 after leading a long and sometimes violent struggle. Pankhurst and members of her Women’s Social and Political Union were frequently arrested for civil disobedience, illegal marches, and destruction of property. Pankhurst herself was clapped in irons seven times. In 1916, Pankhurst toured Canada and inspired many women seeking the vote there, including Nellie McClung (1873–1951) and Emily Murphy (1868–1933), members of the Famous Five who challenged Canada’s definition of “person.” Ironically, Manitoba was the first province to give the vote to women in 1916, which only hardened Pankhurst’s resolve to win the vote back home in Britain. Many in the suffragette movement contributed to this memorial.
Trivia: In 1917, Canada produced the world’s first sex-education film. Whatsoever a Man Soweth depicts a Canadian soldier named Dick meeting a prostitute in Trafalgar Square. An older soldier warns him: “Do you realize young man, the risks you run in association with such women?”
After winning the vote, Pankhurst became a Canadian citizen in 1923. “There seems to be more equality between men and women [here] than in any other country I know,” she said about her adopted country.[30] But the militant wasn’t about to rest on her petticoat in Canada. She was a natural-born agitator who was soon raising placards and marching against another thorny issue: one that wasn’t fit to be mentioned in polite company.
Pankhurst Monument: Mrs. P and the French Disease
Demobilized Canadian soldiers returning from the First World War brought home more than just medals and tales of heroism. They brought back venereal disease. During the war there were over 60,000 cases of sexually transmitted disease among Canadian soldiers, the most widespread being syphilis, or the French Disease.[31] Soon half a million people in Canada were infected. The epidemic galvanized governments, doctors, and reform groups to take action. What was crucially needed to halt the spread of the disease was a popular orator who could lead a moral and public health crusade.[32]
Pankhurst was just what the doctors ordered. After winning the crusade for women’s votes in Britain she had briefly fought against Bolshevism in North America, but now needed a steady job that paid well. She moved to Toronto, joined the Canadian National Council for Combating Venereal Disease, and became a well-known spokeswoman for social hygiene. She called this “her greatest crusade.”
Like the seasoned agitator she was, Pankhurst whipped up crowds in Canada using her old suffragette hat tricks. She handed out lapel pins, called her talks public health demonstrations, and shamelessly used the media to advance her cause. Visiting colleges, churches, and factories she described venereal disease as the enemy in our midst that attacked families and drove women into prostitution. “Men and women now have votes,” she proclaimed. “What they have to do is to forget old grievances and work together in a spirit of co-operation for the new future that lies in front of them.”[33]
But even diehard agitators know when to call it quits. Pankhurst’s health declined and she eventually grew tired of her Canadian crusade — and Canadian winters. The great crusader packed her bags one last time and returned to Britain, where she died in 1928.
Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst’s memorial stands in Victoria Tower Gardens next to Parliament.
Pankhurst (left) with Nellie McClung, one of Canada’s Famous Five, in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1916.
Admire the view of the river and the Lambeth shore as you walk through the park. This promenade offers a fine view of the old Victorian wards of Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital across the river which we will learn more about shortly. One of London’s most dramatic statues is also found in the park: the Burghers of Calais (1915) by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). The colourful Buxton Memorial and drinking fountain nearby commemorates the leaders of the Anti-Slavery Movement and the 1833 Act of Parliament that emancipated slaves in the British Empire. Upper Canada was the first British colony to ban slavery, but its Act of 1793 didn’t apply to current slaves in deference to the local merchants, magistrates, and legislators who owned them. [34]
Exit Victoria Tower Gardens at Lambeth Bridge. Just beyond Horse Ferry Road is Thames House. This is home to the secretive British Security Service, more popularly known as the spy agency MI5, which stands for Military Intelligence-Section Five.
Trivia: Venereal disease was so rampant in the First World War that Canadian soldiers often had to drop their trousers for weekly inspections. The ritual was known as the “short arm parade.”
If there was a single event that set off the Cold War and its legacy of spying between East and West, it was likely the defection of a Soviet Embassy cipher clerk in Ottawa named Igor Gouzenko (1919–82). His flight in 1945 with 109 classified documents stuffed under his shirt revealed that a Soviet spy network was working in the West to obtain nuclear secrets. One of Gouzenko’s allegations was the existence of an important agent in Britain named “Elli.” Some believed this was head of MI5 himself, Sir Roger Hollis (1905–73).
He was a great scholar, but, yes, he had a sideline.— Pierre Théberge, former director of the National Gallery of Canada, on Anthony Blunt[35]
The fact that spies might penetrate such lofty places in the British establishment was not inconceivable. One of the most famous spy cases MI5 uncovered was the Cambridge spy ring in the 1950s. This was a group of upper-class young men who were recruited by the Soviets while at university. All of them subsequently obtained key government jobs and passed along secrets. One of these, the so-called “Fourth Man,” was a respected art historian named Anthony Blunt (1907–83). Blunt confessed his crimes to MI5 in 1964 but was not identified publicly until 1979. When his treachery was unmasked, the public learned it wasn’t just the Soviets Blunt worked for. He was on Canada’s payroll, too.
MI5 Headquarters: The Spy Who Loved Art
Anthony Blunt was a tall, spidery man, with long arms and legs and a drawn face that seemed to many cold and indifferent. Yet his weary detachment masked a brilliant mind when it came to Renaissance art — as well as a gnawing lifelong secret.
As a young man in the 1930s, Blunt viewed the Soviet Union as a bulwark against Fascism. He became a student Marxist, passed secrets to the Soviets during the Second World War, and then embarked on a distinguished career as Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures and director of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art.
When Blunt was exposed in 1979, his world collapsed like a flimsy shed under the weight of Siberian snow. He was stripped of his knighthood, pursued by the tabloid press, and vilified mercilessly. It also came to light that he was responsible for buying some of Canada’s most important European works of art that today hang in Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
Blunt was paid a retainer to scout out acquisitions for the two galleries, which he put toward a scholarship for Canadians at his institute. Using his connections in the art world, he advised Canadian curators on upcoming art sales that might interest them. It was through Blunt that the AGO acquired works by such notable painters as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Henri Matisse, and Edgar Degas. He also assisted in the purchase of the gallery’s first Pablo Picasso and sculpture by Henry Moore. But not all of his choices were welcome. When he once recommended a naughty brothel scene by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, the priggish governors of Canada’s National Gallery turned it down.[36]
Spying wasn’t the only blemish on Blunt’s career. In 1953, he helped the National Gallery of Canada purchase Augustus and Cleopatra by the seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). It later turned out to be a fake.
Now let’s cross the river into Lambeth. In the early 1800s, this area was very different from today. Before the marshes were drained and the Albert Embankment was added in 1868, the area was a jumble of wharves, warehouses, and custom houses frequented by potters and boatmen. Two urban landmarks that survive are immediately in front of us.
The first is Lambeth Palace on the left with its Tudor gatehouse dating to around 1490. The palace has been the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England, for nearly 800 years, and was once described by those living north of the river as the only picturesque site in Lambeth. Beyond the palace doors are the Archbishop’s chapel, a Great Hall containing the church’s library, and a public park. Anglicanism spread to Canada with British immigration, particularly with Tory loyalists fleeing from the United States. One loyalist was the Right Reverend Charles Inglis (1734–1816), the rector of Trinity Church on Wall Street in New York City. He fled the U.S. after uttering the words “God Save the King” in front of George Washington (1732–99). Inglis was consecrated bishop of Nova Scotia at Lambeth Palace in 1787 — the first bishop in Canada.
Trivia: The first Thanksgiving service in Canada was performed by Robert Wolfall, an Anglican chaplain on Sir Martin Frobisher’s Arctic expedition in 1578. This occurred forty-two years before the New England Pilgrims celebrated their first Thanksgiving.
Adjacent to Lambeth Palace is the partially medieval church of St. Mary-at-Lambeth. It is the oldest structure in the area. One of the windows along the western side of the church depicts a local legend known as the Lambeth Pedlar. He is said to have left land to the church as long as his dog could be buried in the churchyard. St. Mary’s narrowly escaped demolition in the 1970s after the number of parishioners declined, and is now the Garden Museum. Archbishop John Moore (1730–1805), who consecrated Bishop Inglis, is buried here with a number of other archbishops.
In the churchyard you will find the grave of Vice Admiral William Bligh (1754–1817), a name that is forever associated with the mutiny on HMS Bounty. On his grave is a breadfruit, the food staple that attracted his ill-fated crew to the South Pacific. He lived at 100 Lambeth Road and was a parishioner here.
Before the infamous mutiny, however, Bligh was Master of HMS Resolution that sailed on the third voyage of Captain James Cook (1728–79) along the coast of British Columbia. Bligh Island in Nootka Sound bears his name. A cairn there marks the spot where he landed in 1778. Nearby Resolution Cove is named after Cook’s ship.
The grave of the much-maligned William Bligh behind the church of St. Mary, Lambeth. He sailed with Captain James Cook to British Columbia in 1778 where Bligh Island is named after him.
St. Mary’s was also the parish church of the family of Lieutenant-Colonel John By (1779–1836), the builder of Canada’s Rideau Canal.
The Bys were customs clerks in the area going back several generations. As a child, By had likely watched the teeming commerce of the River Thames pass by his front door and been awed by the river’s ability to transport all manner of things. He was born, baptized, and raised all within a stone’s throw of here. Although he didn’t become a customs clerk on the river like his forebears, water in a way still influenced his life’s work. As an army engineer, he built a small canal near Pointe-des-Cascades, Quebec, and designed a factory complex near Enfield Lock in London. His greatest accomplishment, however, would be his downfall.
St. Mary-at-Lambeth: Bye, Bye John By
The costs for building the Rideau Canal were grossly underestimated from the start. Based on a quick assessment by a civilian commission, the winding canal through the swampy forest between Lake Ontario and the Ottawa River was projected to cost a meagre £169,000. That was good enough for Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley (1769–1852), 1st Duke of Wellington, who was impatient to see his pet project for the defence of Canada get underway. He seized on the figure, pushed the plan through Parliament, and instructed Lieutenant-Colonel John By, a Royal Engineer in the military, “to proceed with all despatch consistent with economy” and not to wait for parliamentary grants.
In 1826, By arrived back in Canada and did what was he was told, hiring 2,000 men and building forty-seven locks and fifty-two dams over five years. He also doubled the canal’s width to accommodate steamboats and military barges. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before costs began to balloon and draw attention back in Britain. The final bill was more than four times the estimate. Had the duke remained in government, he might have defended the cost overruns as necessary. But history didn’t work out that way. In 1831, his Tory party was defeated at the polls and the Whigs came to power. Like all new governments, they wanted to show they were more fiscally prudent than the previous guys — especially overseas. Caught in a political bunfight, By became a scapegoat for the expensive canal in the remote Canadian wilderness.
In 1832, By was ordered home where he faced an inquiry on overspending and improper contracts. Fortunately, he kept meticulous records — most importantly, the duke’s original orders — and was exonerated from any wrongdoing. But friends were few and far between, and the controversy took a deep personal toll. Instead of being honoured for his feat of incredible engineering, By retired to the countryside and faded from sight. He died a broken man at fifty-six.[37]
Now return to the pathway along the Albert Embankment. As the dates on the ornate lampposts confirm, the Embankment was completed in 1870. The wall was subsequently raised more than half a metre to prevent flooding, which is why the benches along here had to be raised as well.
First along the pathway is a memorial to the secret agents of the Second World War. Known as the Special Operations Executive (SOE), this was a small and clandestine group of men and women who operated behind enemy lines “to set Europe ablaze,” in the words of Winston Churchill. They were trained in guerrilla warfare such as propaganda, subversion, and sabotage. The figure on the memorial is that of Violette Szabo (1921–ca.1945), a British spy of French descent who was captured and killed on her second mission in Occupied France. Some of these secret agents trained at the famous “Camp X” near Oshawa, Ontario. This was a covert training ground for Canadian, British, and American agents masterminded by Sir William Stephenson (1897–1989), a Manitoba-born spymaster known as the “Man Called Intrepid.”
Further along the Embankment we come to a plaque on the wall placed by the Ottawa Historical Society. It commemorates the birthplace of Lieutenant-Colonel By. He was born in a small brick house that once stood here.
Guy’s and St. Thomas’s, a university hospital, rises behind the wall beside us. Its origins go back to medieval times when a hospital was built here by monks in honour of Thomas Becket (1118–70), the meddlesome Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered on orders of the king. Central Hall, which contains an interesting display about the hospital’s history, and the red-brick wards facing the river are the only parts of the immense complex that date from the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria opened these buildings in 1871 as a teaching hospital. It attracted medical students from around the world, including one of Canada’s most notorious murderers.
At 103 Lambeth Palace Road (now demolished and part of Archbishop’s Park) lived Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (1850–92), a medical student at St. Thomas’s. Cream was a smartly dressed, broad-shouldered man with a badly crossed eye. If other walking tours of London paint the city’s East End as the den of Victorian vice and murder, we are about to learn differently. The arrival of the railroad into Lambeth turned it into a dangerous warren of dark alleys and archways. Cream was convicted of administering deadly strychnine to four prostitutes who lived or worked in the area in 1891–92. His victims were Nellie Donworth of 8 Duke Street, Matilda Clover of 27 Lambeth Road, and Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell of 118 Stamford Street.
As detectives from Scotland Yard pieced together Cream’s murderous habits, they discovered a macabre trail that wound its way back to Canada and the United States, and included up to seven murders. His life would end on the gallows in London with an even-stranger twist.
Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital: The Strange Case of Dr. Cream
Thomas Neill Cream was born in Glasgow and moved to Canada as a child in 1854. In 1872, his parents sent him to McGill University to study medicine. If he had a nasty reputation at the time, it wasn’t recorded. One of his professors only recalled he was fond of fancy clothing and could be rather wild.[38]
Soon after graduating, however, things began to turn sour for Cream. It began when he allegedly botched an abortion on his new wife and fled the marriage to study at St. Thomas’s Hospital. After she died — possibly from taking medicine he had mailed her — Cream returned to Canada to set up a medical practice with her money. In short order, another woman was dead. Cream dodged a murder charge but his professional reputation was in tatters. He wasn’t so lucky the next time. Turning up in Chicago, he was convicted of administering strychnine to a prostitute and sent to the Illinois State Penitentiary in 1881 for life.
Incredibly, the story doesn’t end there. Released from prison early for good behaviour, Cream returned to his old stomping ground of Lambeth — and his old ways. Following a series of local murders involving strychnine, Cream was arrested after bragging about his crimes to a retired police officer. After deliberating ten minutes, a jury convicted him of murder and a judge sentenced him to hang.
But it was on the gallows that the strange case of Dr. Cream became even stranger. Before the noose snapped, the hangman reported Cream confessed: “I am Jack” sparking rumours he might be Jack the Ripper. Although the parallels between the two are intriguing, a link is fanciful. While the dapper Canadian may have been capable of such horrific crimes, the methods of the two murderers were very different. More importantly, Cream was in a Chicago prison during the five principal murders attributed to the Ripper. Yet if the story has any truth, he remains the only person to this day to have confessed to the Ripper’s crimes.
The construction of St. Thomas’s Hospital in 1856 coincided with the return from the Crimean War of nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale (1820–1910).
Trivia: A wax likeness of Thomas Neill Cream, the McGill-educated Lambeth Poisoner, was displayed in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors in London from 1892 to 1968. His case is still featured at Scotland Yard’s secretive Crime Museum.
Nightingale gained renown as the Lady with the Lamp for her compassionate care of wounded soldiers in the war. As a leading advocate of better health care, she advised on the creation of separate wards at St. Thomas’s to prevent the spread of disease that still exist today. She also insisted that her nurses — sometimes called Nightingales — be clean, quiet, and sober. The Florence Nightingale Museum is at 2 Lambeth Palace Road in Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital.
The Reverend John Smithurst, a missionary in Manitoba’s Red River settlement. A lifelong bachelor, he cultivated a tidy garden and the memory of Florence Nightingale.
That Nightingale was wed to nursing is well-known. What is less well-known is that she may almost have wed a man who became a Manitoba missionary.
Florence Nightingale Museum: Manitoba Is for Lovers
In St. John’s Anglican Church in Elora, Ontario, west of Toronto, are stained-glass windows dedicated to the memories of two people: one, the famous nurse of the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale, and the other a largely unknown country rector named John Smithurst (1807–67). Before joining the parish in Elora, Smithurst was a missionary for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Manitoba’s Red River district. Some say none other than Florence Nightingale herself sent him there.
In an age when women were often little more than property, Nightingale took charge of her own life and never married. But she did have suitors. One of these may have been her cousin William Shore who in an oddly similar tale moved to the United States after failing to woo her.[39]
Smithurst was eighteen years her senior and lived close to Nightingale’s family in Derbyshire. Some believe the pair were cousins too and may have been engaged. The story goes the families objected to the marriage and Nightingale encouraged a distraught Smithurst to perform church work instead. “John, I want you to go and be a missionary to the Indians of North America,” she reputedly told him. What Smithurst lacked in marriage appeal he made up for in religious zeal. After joining the Church Missionary Society, he moved to Canada’s Red River area in 1839 where he baptized over 300 people and started writing the first Cree-English Dictionary. Folks there said their conscientious priest had the best-arranged house and garden in the settlement. [40]
In 1852, Smithurst settled in Elora to become rector. He seems to have perpetuated the Nightingale myth by naming his house Lea Hurst after his and Nightingale’s birthplace. A communion service given on behalf of a mysterious admirer and addressed to Smithurst as “a dear friend” similarly fanned the flames of the Nightingale legend and their romantic if uncertain story of unrequited love.[41]
A few steps beyond and we find ourselves at Westminster Bridge. Opened in 1862, the wide bridge is guarded at opposite ends by a bronze statue of Boudicca, a Celtic warrior queen who led a revolt against the Romans in A.D. 60, and a stone lion that used to adorn a brewery in Lambeth. Turn left and cross back over to Westminster Tube station. Alternatively, take the river walkway under the bridge to visit the Southbank attractions such as the London Eye, London Aquarium, Royal Festival Hall, and National Theatre.