Saturday 30 November 2002. We had had a bit of a turn on the London Eye and came down to terra firma to walk across the Thames over Westminster Bridge.
We walked behind the Houses of Parliament. Fran fancied looking around Westminster Abbey but there was a huge queue. So we went back to Whitehall and a look at the imposing but not exactly inviting offices of Government.
I had an idea and we decided to go off in search of the Cabinet War Rooms, passing Her Majesty's Treasury.
We eventually found it at the end of the street facing St James' Park near a statue of Clive of India. During World War II this was Prime Minister Churchill's secret bunker from which the war was directed.
Inside all was as it had been left at the end of the war. The Government staff and Senior Officers of the Armed Forces had been replaced with waxworks but everything else was original. It was kept secret for forty years. The day after the Japanese surrendered the lights were switched off for the first time in six years, the doors locked and it was left exactly as it was. The yellow-stained maps and surfaces bear testament to the fog of years of cigar and cigarette smoke. A stark reminder of how close we came to being ruled by Hitler.
It was one of the most interesting places I've ever been. Then we decided to walk down The Strand to St Paul's, passing Charing Cross and The Savoy Hotel.
This is - and isn't - Charing Cross. It is the forecourt of Charing Cross Station, to be sure. The monumental cross is a representation, not even a replica, of the Queen Eleanor Cross which was the final such monument along the route from Lincoln to the then hamlet of Charing which at the time of the original cross in 1249 occupied what is now Trafalgar Square and the extension south along what is now Whitehall to The Strand. Twelve crosses between Lincoln and here in Charing marked the nightly resting places of King Edward I's beloved wife Queen Eleanor of Castile during her post mortem journey from Lincoln back to Westminster Abbey after dying during a Royal Progress, probably of fever, in 1290.
The original cross was destroyed by Oliver Cromwell's order in 1647. Upon it's site in 1675 after the Restoration of the Monarchy, an equestrian statue of King Charles I was erected where it stands to this day at the south of Trafalgar Square, the centre of London from where all measurements to London terminated. So if you see a sign "London 213 miles" then you are 213 miles from the horse's tail of the statue.
But back to Charing Cross Station which takes its name from the long-lost hamlet. The cross there was built to commemorate the opening of the station in 1864 and it is taller than the original Eleanor Cross.
The Savoy Hotel stands on land between The Strand and the River Thames and was built by Richard D'Oyly Carte using the profits from his Gilbert and Sullivan light operas. Opening in August 1889, it set standards far in excess of the normal for its time. It was the first hotel with electric lighting throughout, the first with electric lifts, the first with constant hot and cold running water and most of its rooms included bathrooms.
After six months of opening César Ritz was engaged as manager and he brought in Auguste Escoffier as chef de cuisine and Louis Echenard as maître d'hôtel. In 1897 they were dismissed. Both Ritz and Echenard were implicated in the loss of wines and spirits on a grand scale and Escoffier was found to have been accepting gifts from the hotel's suppliers. This was hushed up at the time, though Ritz was inclined to sue for wrongful dismissal. With the probable scandal likely to affect other rather successful business interests he was persuaded to not to make a fuss. Amazingly the full details were only publicly known in 1985.
The Savoy became wildly successful. Even their own orchestras, The Savoy Havana Band in the 1920s and laterThe Savoy Orpheans led by Geraldo in particular became well known through early BBC broadcasts live from the Savoy Ballroom and through sales of dance music released on 78rpm records. Most of Hollywood's famous stars have stayed there including Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra and Churchill was wont to take his cabinet to lunch there.
Nearby there was the faint sound of music and happy voices and we passed under the arches into the courtyard of The Courtauld's Gallery to see what was going on.
Passing through into the courtyard we saw first a large Christmas tree and then the skating rink seen in the photograph below. The Courtauld Gallery was established at Somerset House on this site in 1932. It has a large collection of important works of art from such illuminaries as Manet, Monet, Rubens, Turner, Constable, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gainsborough, Gauguin, Degas, Van Dyke, Renoir and Van Gogh (including his self-portrait with bandaged ear).
Ice skating is a form of sport, exercise and/or fun that I've never felt the compunction to try somehow. Now don't get me wrong - as a kid you would find me in a school playground running full tilt on snow to launch myself onto an ice slide of twenty or thirty feet long, standing sideways to the direction of travel, feet rigidly spread to maintain balance and would present any torn and bloody flesh for purple iodine to be liberally painted on my knees should my exit from the slide be less than elegant... But skates, like skis, have never presented themselves of any great appeal to me.
Ice skating though is thought to go back some 4,000 years would you believe. In southern Finland travellers would skate to save energy on journeys. Animal bones would be favourite I imagine. Certainly sharp edged skates made from steel would only start to be used in the 13th or 14th centuries. But the basic design hasn't changed much since then.
In England, skating on metal skates developed after the Restoration in 1660. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary that on 15 December 1662 he had gone with the Duke of York (later King James II) to watch the latter skate on the frozen lake in St James Park, remarking that the Duke "slides very well"...
We carried on along The Strand and came to The City of London - the famous square mile that contains the law courts and financial business centre of London. It is a county in its own right and at the time when the Romans were still knocking about, falling over themselves laughing at the locals' wood and mud houses, it was pretty much all there was of London.
The church is St Clement Danes, of nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons fame, although St Clement's church in Eastcheap not far away also claims to be the church associated with the rhyme.
There are several theories as to why the name includes the word "Danes". London was on the border between the English and the Norse of the Danelaw and it may have originally been built to commemorate massacres. It also was the burial place of one of England's Danish kings, King Harold I - Harold "Harefoot" from 1040, though any remains of the tomb have long since vanished.
The church was rebuilt by William the Conqueror and again in the Middle Ages. Following the Great Fire of London in 1666 the tower had to be rebuilt from the very foundations. The tower survived when the rest of the church was rebuilt in 1680-82 and a steeple was added in 1719.
On 10 May 1941 during The Blitz the church was bombed and gutted by fire. Looking at photographs taken during that night you could scarce believe that it could have survived. The ten bells fell from the tower to the ground, yet whilst the interior was devastated, the outer walls, tower and steeple survived. The church was fully restored funded by an appeal by the Royal Air Force and in 1958 it was reconsecrated in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip as the Central Church of the Royal Air Force.
