Pubs with a secret history

Ed Glinert10 April 2012

What is the world coming to? Jack the Ripper's favourite pub, the Ten Bells in Whitechapel, is to be sold. The place where the Victorian serial killer sought out his victims is likely to be turned into a new bar. Still, the capital has plenty of other boozers with a rich history. But where are they?..

The Roebuck

354 King's Road, Chelsea

John Lydon met the rest of the Sex Pistols in this pub (now a D?me) in August 1975, a few days after meeting Malcolm McLaren in his nearby boutique, Sex. McLaren's assistant, Bernie Rhodes (later manager of The Clash), decided that Rotten's chutzpah was just the sort of "attitude" that he and McLaren were looking for in a singer to front a new band. An intrigued Rotten turned up and, in front of Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock, sang along to Alice Cooper's "(I'm) Eighteen" so voraciously he immediately got the gig.

French House

49 Dean Street, Soho

Soho's leading Bohemian hostelry, previously the Yorkminster, was run for much of the 20th century by the French family, the Berlemonts. When Victor Berlemont took over the pub in 1910 he was the only foreign landlord in Britain and used to eject troublesome customers by announcing: "I'm afraid one of us will have to leave and it's not going to be me." One day a vicar walked in and announced to the surprised bar staff, "I'm from the York Minster," to which the barman replied, "No, you're in the Yorkminster".

The vicar then explained that he had been sent by the Dean of the Minster in York who had mistakenly received the pub's wine. "We were so pleased until we looked at the address label and realised that the postman saw the 'Dean' bit but not the 'Street' bit," said the vicar. During the Second World War the pub became a meeting place for the French Resistance, and legend has it that De Gaulle drew up his Free French call-to-arms after lunch upstairs.

Anglesea Arms

215 Selwood Terrace, South Kensington

Bruce Reynolds, an aspiring thief, began plotting what became the Great Train Robbery, the most talked-about British theft of the 20th century, at this pub with an associate known only as "Geordie". The original plan - later, of course, changed - was to rob the gold train which was loaded up with a ton of the metal from South Africa at Southampton. A few weeks later they drove to the line, near Weybridge, at 3am and waited for the train. They were soon joined by a number of cop cars, the police having coincidentally chosen the same spot to watch the safe progress of the train. The cops never noticed Reynolds's and Geordie's car.

Blind Beggar

337 Whitechapel High Street, Whitechapel

George Cornell was not the first person to meet his end in the Blind Beggar. At the beginning of the 20th century the pub was home to a gang of pickpockets, one of whom, Wallis, killed a man by pushing the ferrule of an umbrella through his eye. Wallis was acquitted (no one saw anything, least of all the victim) and driven back to the pub accompanied by triumphant supporters. When Ronnie Kray killed Cornell at the Blind Beggar on the 8 March 1966 there were again problems with who had seen what, and for the first few months afterwards none of those present - the barmaid, other drinkers, Cornell's pal - admitted seeing anything. Then, after persistence by Nipper Read's officers, it all came back: how Cornell had been sitting on a stool by the small U-shaped bar drinking a light ale when Kray and an accomplice, Ian Barrie, had entered the pub; how Cornell had turned round, seen Kray, and exclaimed: "Well, look who's here then", before being blasted to Kingdom Come; and how in the commotion the needle of the juke-box got stuck in the middle of the record it was playing, the Walker Brothers' The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore, repeatedly playing the word "anymore". Kray was convicted of the murder at the Old Bailey three years later and never saw freedom again.

The Ten Bells

94 Commercial Street, Spitalfields

The pub most associated with Jack the Ripper, now up for sale for offers of around £1.2 million, was where Annie Chapman, the Ripper's second victim, drank in between working as a prostitute in the surrounding streets. Chapman visited the pub the night she was murdered, as did the Ripper's final victim, Mary Kelly. One hundred years later the Ten Bells was briefly renamed "The Jack the Ripper" to mark the 100th anniversary of the killings, and sold a Ripper Tipple cocktail and Ripper T-shirts.

The Grave Maurice

269 Whitechapel High Street, Whitechapel

A gloomy and uninviting dive, the Grave Maurice was the Krays' favourite watering hole in the early 1960s. When the Met's Inspector Leonard "Nipper" Read learned that Ronnie Kray was to be interviewed here for TV he visited the pub incognito, sat by the window and saw a flash American car draw up outside, a smartly dressed man get out, feel in his pocket for his gun, and enter the pub. The man looked carefully around, went back outside, looked up and down the road to make sure that the pavement was clear and then opened the back door of the car in a grand manner. From the vehicle stepped Ronnie Kray, dressed like Al Capone, his cashmere coat nattily tied at the waist reaching down to his ankles. Flanked by minders, Kray made a suitably grand entrance while his entourage frisked the interviewer, even though the latter was in a neck brace. When the interview finished Kray left as ostentatiously as he had arrived, with the minder visually sweeping the street before allowing his charge outside.

Freemasons Tavern

61-65 Great Queen Street, Covent Garden

Few London pubs can claim quite so illustrious a history as the Freemasons Tavern, now the New

Connaught Rooms banqueting centre but still retaining the plush furnishings and baroque d?cor that attracted the Conservative Party to host the world's first-ever party conference here in 1867. Four years previously the Football Association held their first meetings within. The leading clubs of the day such as No Names Kilburn, Blackheath and Crystal Palace (Arsenal was still an armaments factory and Chelsea a fishing village) spent hour after hour debating whether players should be able to run with their hands around the ball, and finally decided against it.

The Old Red Lion

72 High Holborn, Bloomsbury

When Charles II took the English throne in 1660, 11 years after his father, Charles I, had been beheaded by Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentarians, the pub celebrated by displaying the freshly exhumed bodies of Cromwell, his son-in-law Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw, the squire who issued the order to behead Charles, overnight before they were taken to Tyburn (now Marble Arch) to be hanged and decapitated.

Unfortunately Bradshaw's body, which had badly decayed, was not satisfactorily embalmed and so pub patrons had to put up with a nasty whiff during the one-night exhibition.

Dirty Dick's

202-204 Bishopsgate, City

Dirty Dick was the nickname of Nathaniel Bentley, a local 19th century ironmonger who preserved the unused wedding breakfast left over when his fianc?e died on the eve of their marriage and spent the rest of his life in squalor. When Bentley died the landlord of the pub bought the contents of his shop and house - including what remained of the wedding breakfast - as well as the bodies of Bentley's dead cats, and displayed them here. This gave Charles Dickens the idea for the post-nuptial fate of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. The bizarre collection was removed in the 1980s.

The Fitzroy Tavern

16 Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia

Not many pubs have given their name to an area, but the Fitzroy's popularity with artists such as Augustus John and Nina Hamnett (who used to approach strange men and cajole them into buying her a drink by rattling a money box in their face) was so great in the 1940s that they called the locale Fitzrovia. The name stuck, mainly because no one could previously agree whether it was North Soho, Bloomsbury or "that bit north of Oxford Street".

Ed Glinert is the author of A Literary Guide to London (Penguin).

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