Blood & Tears

Tonight I attended a Blood & Tears guided walking tour, which despite its gruesome informativeness, was quite fun. I learned a lot. None of the information was useful, but, well, now I know considerably more about serial killers than I did before. (also, I'm really sorry about the spacing of this post, but the editor thingie won't let me fix it, so you're going to have to struggle with it. I apologize)

See the tunnel those people are walking in front of?

Of course you do, because I've just posted a photo of it. Upon beginning construction to build that tunnel (and the buildings around it, presumably) the workers were lucky enough to find human bones buried. Hundreds of bodies. And you can thank Queen Mary, and her Catholic tirade against Protestantism. That's how she earned the name Bloody Mary, and, well, now you know where she put the bodies.


This lovely and solemn stone is a tribute to some of the first to die under Queen Mary's reign. John Rodgers was born Catholic and was a firm believer in the faith ... until he had a change of heart and became a firm believer in Protestantism. Just as Queen Mary took the throne. Lucky for him. As they were burning him at the stake (in 1555), people stood in awe of him.

Why?

Because he refused to make a sound. And as people watched him burn to his death, they realized that he was washing his hands in the flames, purifying them (and himself) as he died.

Cheerful, huh?

This plaque, a few feet down from the one pictured above, is a tribute to William Wallace.

Don't remember who William Wallace was?

Shame on you.

Think blue and white face paint... and Mel Gibson .... and lots of shouting.

Yup... William Wallace was Braveheart (and apparently he was quite a bit shorter than Mel Gibson. People in general were much shorter back then. Who knew?)



Mel Gibson.... ooops, I mean William Wallace was put to death near this spot on August 23, 1305. He was hung, drawn and quartered, which is a very neat way of describing a very messy process.



Mr. Wallace was hung ... first.



And then they cut him down before he was dead.



.... and cut out his stomach and other various innards.



..... and then they tied each of his limbs to four separate horses and had the horses run in four separate directions until Mr. Wallace was in four seperate pieces.



In case you hadn't noticed, definitely not a fun way to die. Although come to think of it, there really isn't a fun way to die (unless maybe you pass away while you're on your way down a waterslide or something, but even that's not very fun).

That chubby little cherub is so cute, isn't he?

Well, not exactly.

You see, that chubby little golden cherub is chubby because he represents greed. What you're looking at is a memorial to the Great Fire of 1666. This spot basically marks the edge of the area the fire affected. It started in a bakehouse in Pudding Lane, and this street, where it finally stopped, also had some sort of dessert name (I can't remember it, sorry. My mind fails me in my old age). In any case, the fire burned down 80% of London. And it killed 9 people, including the maid in the bakehouse where the fire started. The moral of the story is ..... don't trust bakers (just kidding) and don't build your city out of wood. The street (you can see the street sign in the photo, but it's blurry), is no longer aptly named after a dessert, but is now called Cock Street (go ahead, laugh it up).

The people thought that the fire was a punishment from God because the city had become too greedy and immoral. Thus, the chubby little cherub up there is a constant reminder of what happens when you eat that extra slice of cake.

This lovely photo (I know, I'm an artist, aren't I?) is part of the facade of the Central Criminal Court, one of the most famous courthouses in the world... and formerly Newgate Prison.

This is the current courthouse. It's almost beautiful, in its own grim, forbidding kind of way. Back when it was a prison, it housed (several times) a burglar by the name of Jack Sheppard. Mr. Sheppard, who entirely has my respect for his valiant attempts, escaped three times. The prison walls were, at this time, about two feet thick, and the final time he escaped, he was in a solitary chamber, with no windows. Besides this, his hands were chained, his feet were chained to the floor, and the chains between his hands and his feet were chained together. Not an easy situation to get out of, but he did it. You see, Mr. Sheppard was sentenced to die the following day, and he didn't quite feel ready to meet his maker.

Mr. Sheppard, being rather smaller than the average guy, managed to slip his hands through the manacles, apparently with much scraping and blood and effort. Then, being extraordinarily innovative, he found a point in the chains that held his feet where the chain was a quarter of the thickness of the rest, a weak link, proverbially and literally. And he smashed at it until he broke through the chain.

Now he's unchained. How did he get out of a windowless room you ask?

He climbed up the 20 foot tall chimney.

Apparently, the builders of the prison had thought that prisoners might attempt to escape this way (and they were right) because the chimney was blocked off with iron bars. Where you or I would have given up, Mr. Sheppard persevered, sawing at the bars with his chains until one of them broke off, breaking off as many as he could and then slipping out.

He made it up to the next level and eventually out to the roof, where he expected to jump to safety. But, alas, there was nowhere for him to jump to.

So he went back down several levels, back through the chimney to his room, to make a rope out of his bedsheets, before repeating the escape process all over again and finally making it out.

Unfortunately, his escape didn't do him much good, since, despite his ingenuity and apparent talent, the man was not too bright. He stayed in London, and celebrated his escape by having a pint at his local bar, in the neighborhood he'd grown up in.... which was across the street from the prison. The dude passed out drunk, they arrested him and he got the death sentence he'd fought so hard to escape.

By the way, he'd only stolen 10 pounds.

Crime doesn't pay.

This is the church across the street from the now-court/former-prison and there's an underground tunnel leading between the two. Before you start thinking of insidious plots, I assure you, the use of the passageway was quite practical.

Every Sunday night at midnight, a priest would walk the passageway ringing a bell (and timing his journey) to let all of the condemned prisoners on the other side know that their end was nigh. You see, prisoners were executed at 8 a.m. Monday morning, and it was the priest's rather ominous words (there's a whole speech written out, but I can't remember it. I think it rhymed) and the clanging of the bell, that let them know they were going to die in exactly 8 hours.


This picture isn't anything special (I'm sure you agree) and really, the only reason I'm including it is that several hundred years ago, were I standing on the exact same spot from which I took the photo (and if I were alive several hundred years ago, which would probably make me the Highlander. That would be really cool, I've always wanted my own sword), I would probably be drowning. This street follows the course that the Fleet River once took (and technically still takes). The Fleet River, once the second major river running through London, became so smelly and disgusting (London's biggest slaughterhouse is nearby, and while you can't see very well from the photo, I'm standing at the foot of a hill, and all of the refuse and dirt and general nasty stuff ran downhill and into the river) that they forced it 20 feet underground, where it remains.

I am sure, glancing at this amazing and fabulous photo, that you are just dying to know all of the horrendous and violent things that occurred on this very spot.

Well, I'm going to have to disappoint you, because there are none. In fact, this is just a copy shop, where the workers stand around all day and make photocopies for people who aren't willing to do it themselves. It is, in fact, a quite old copy shop.

It is also where a 21-year-old David Bowie worked before getting his big break.

See, you're not the only one whose job sucks.

I'd love to tell you some gruesome tales about this spot as well, except for there aren't any. This is, however, the oldest functioning shop in London. It was not always a 'curiosity' shop, our tour guide pointed out, and it certainly wasn't the one endoresed by Dickens, but it is the oldest functioning shop.

While we did see the residences of renowned serial killers, I failed to take photos of them, so you're just going to have to take my word for it.

We saw the location of the shop where Sweeney Todd (you know, Johnny Depp, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street) had his barber shop (which is now some sort of office supplies store, so I didn't really think it was worth taking a picture of. I mean, you guys know what a post-it looks like). And we also saw the alley where he committed his first murder (1785, I believe, although I might have gotten my dates confused), which I must say, is rather creepy, and significantly colder than the surrounding area. The way leading into the alley is also mirrored now, so you can see if there's anyone following you ...

Sweeney Todd killed approximately 160 people over a number of years (9 years, I think), and he had two tunnels underneath his shop. One led to the vaults of the church a few doors down and the other led to his sweetheart's mince pie shop, where she cheerfully served up his victims in pie form to the lawyer's and businessmen of Fleet Street. It was only when the church vaults began to smell that people caught on.

We also visited (briefly) the haunts of Jack the Ripper. Despite his enormous reputation, Jack the Ripper only killed 5 women, 4 of them in the streets of Whitehall and one of them in her room. His reputation is based very much on the ways in which he killed them but I'll spare you the gory details. We also stood on the street outside the residence where Montague John Druitt lived. Many believe that Druitt was the Ripper.

He was a lawyer who lived not far from Fleet Street, was good-looking (you can google him) and intelligent. In short, he was exactly the kind of guy you'd trust and exactly what a prostitute would look for in a customer: rich, handsome, and very trustworthy-looking. Druitt also had a year of medical schooling before he took up his law degree and his father was a doctor, which explains the .... treatment of the bodies. He also killed himself shortly after the fifth death (died December 31, 1888), which would explain why the Ripper stopped so suddenly. There really isn't much evidence to link him to the murders, but then again, these things did happen well over 100 years ago.

I'm sure I've written enough to creep you out for a while, and while we saw other stuff, I'm not going into detail. But I really did enjoy the walking tour and I definitely think I'll take another one (maybe a Shakespeare one next time, so I can regale you with some less bloody details). I hope you found this one as interesting and .... informative as I did.