St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley

I’ve had a thing for Gothic Revival for many years and still believe that one of the finest examples of the style can be seen in London: the Midland Grand Hotel, George Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece on the Euston Road.

Bradley’s book gives the history of the building that along with William Henry Barlow’s trainshed make up St Pancras Station. Now recently reopened as a hotel once again it has had a chequered past; it failed its fire safety inspection in the 1980s and for a long time British Rail were itching to get rid of it. They weren’t alone in their passion for cultural vandalism, the architectural trends of that century were seen as grossly outdated and impractical, even by the 1920s and 30s:

Even P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster got the drift, remarking somewhere that if he knew one thing about the Victorians, it was that they weren’t to be trusted around a pile of bricks and a trowel.

The trainshed is another marvel of its age, a cavernous space created by a single arch roof over the platforms. A stunning feat of engineering, its design is part of the changing drinking history in the capital:

Barlow’s first intention was that the spoil dug out for the tunnel should be used to infill the basement under his elevated platforms. Wiser counsels then suggested that this space would be better turned over to commerce, especially if this could be tied in with the railway’s own goods traffic. As it happened, there was growing demand in London for the fine ales of Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire, near the heart of the Midland system. The soft water and improved brewing techniques there allowed the production of a clear and stable brew very different from the capital’s darker and cloudier stouts and porters, a change in taste that also contributed to the slow disappearance of pewter tankards from pubs in favour of drinking glasses. The railway had already erected a beer trans-shipment warehouse for Messrs Bass alongside the nearby canal, a structure big enough to provide six acres of storage space: in brewer’s terms, enough for 100,000 thirty-six-gallon barrels; in drinker’s terms, enough for 28,800,000 pints. The huge void beneath the new station platforms, with its deep plan and stable temperature, was ideal for the same purpose and could easily be reached from the track level by means of hydraulic lifts.

Keeping this vast space stocked up with booze was hard work:

Such was the capacity of the new beer cellar that three dedicated trains loaded with casks arrived every day to replenish it, with even more coming in October, the peak month for brewing.

Best of all, the whole structure was purpose built:

The spacing of the columns at centres just over 14 feet apart was calculated to match the plans of the warehouses of Burton-upon-Trent, where the same figure derived from a multiple of the standard local cask. And so, in Barlow’s words, ‘the length of a beer barrel became the unit of measurement upon which all the arrangements of this floor were based.

Who said that the Empire was built on tea?

The Great Game: On Secret Service In High Asia by Peter Hopkirk

The advantage of an incomplete history degree is that the sense of unfinished business often prompts me to pick up a good history book. Aside from appealing to a sense of autodidactic self improvement, I feel that I’m making up for previous failure, in a small way.

The Great Game is certainly a good place to start for anyone with an interest in the history of Central Asia. The book is a cracking read, full of derring do and high intrigue, but as well as a fascinating story to relate, Hopkirk has the skill to tell it well.

One of the major players in what the Russians described as the tournament of shadows, was Alexander Bokhara Burnes, whose explorations of that desert kingdom made his name. In 1831, he was sent to Lahore to present a gift of horses to Maharajah Ranjit Singh from William IV, a ruse to survey the Indus river while transporting the animals.

Ranjit Singh ruled the kingdom of the Punjab and the British were keen to keep him onside, especially if, as they feared, the Russians were going to start pouring through the Khyber Pass and push them into the Indian Ocean. Burnes charmed the elderly ruler, who appeared to have been quite the bon viveur:

In all, Burnes and his companions were to spend nearly two months as Ranit’s guests. There were endless military parades, banquets, and other entertainments, including long sessions spent imbibing with Ranjit a locally distilled ‘hell-brew’ of which the latter was extremely fond. There was also a troupe of Kashmiri dancing girls, forty in number and all dressed as boys, to whom the one eyed ruler (he had lost the other from smallpox) appeared similarly addicted.

Burnes seemed sorry to leave, although he was sceptical as to how long the old chap would remain on his perch, especially given his penchant for booze:

‘Cunning and conciliation’, Burnes wrote, ‘have been the two great weapons of his diplomacy.’ But how much longer would he remain in power? ‘It is probable’, reported Burnes, ‘that the career of this chief is nearly at an end. His chest is contracted, his back is bent, his limbs withered.’ His nightly drinking bouts, Burnes feared, were more than anyone could take. However, his favourite tipple – ‘more ardent than the strongest brandy’ – appeared to do him no harm. Ranjit Singh was to survive another eight years – greatly to the relief of the Company’s generals, who saw him as a vital link in India’s outer defences, and a formidable ally against a Russian invader.

Ranjit Singh at least made it into old age. Burnes met a sticky end in Kabul in 1841...

Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman by James Sharpe

One of the more colourful and easily recognised characters in history, Dick Turpin is portrayed as the greatest of the highwaymen, the gentlemen thieves of the road who preyed on the rich of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The reality, as James Sharpe illustrates in this excellent history of the man and his attendant phenomenon, is that Turpin was little more than a pock-marked thug, a common criminal who committed some pretty nasty crimes.

We meet him in the days running up to his execution in York on a chilly Saturday in April 1739. John Palmer is in York Castle, kept in a strong room awaiting trial at the assizes for horse stealing. Word is out, however, that Palmer is, in fact, the wanted outlaw Dick Turpin:

‘Since he was suspected to be Turpin’, ran another ’Letter from York’, in this instance dated 23 March, ‘the whole countrey have flock’d here to see him, and have been very liberal to him, insomuch as he has had wine constantly before him.’ The same source noted that the gaoler at York Castle ‘had made £100 by selling liquors to him and his visitors’.

It would appear from accounts of the time that drinking in prison was hardly discouraged, and although Turpin was hanged at York, things got pretty bibulous down in London as well. Bernard de Mandeville’s contemporary account of execution day shows the condemned drinking copiously before being loaded onto the tumbrel:

The prisoners themselves, on Mandeville’s account, usually took care to be as drunk as possible before leaving Newgate, but, on their way to the gallows, ‘the courage that strong liquors can give, wears off’, and the condemned find themselves in danger of becoming sober again.

Before his demise on the end of a rope, Turpin started his career as a butcher in Essex. At some point in his twenties he got mixed up with bad company and was soon running with a gang of men who would break into peoples’ houses and rob them at gunpoint. The crimes that this gang committed included rape and violent abuse of the elderly; one victim being burned on the fire in an effort to make him tell them where the loot was hidden. Hardly the actions of gentlemen thieves.

After the gang was broken by the law, Turpin escaped and turned to highway robbery. Even so, things got hot for him again and he made himself scarce, reinventing himself in Yorkshire as John Palmer. It was there that he was arrested for horse stealing in 1738. During his incarceration he wrote a letter to his brother-in-law. The letter got into the hands of someone who recognised his handwriting and the game was up.

So how come the legend? A century later, Gothic novelist William Harrison Ainsworth recreated Turpin as a dashing highwayman in his novel Rookwood, describing him as a man who:

...could sing a good song, was a choice companion, and could drink three bottles without feeling the worse for them.

He also created Turpin’s supposed flight to York in one night on Black Bess, and the legend was born. Strangely enough, the subsequent enthusiasm for highwayman coincided with the end of the practice in the country...

Nearly three hundred years after he was hanged, Turpin is ubiquitous, especially in the pub:

...there are, indeed, so many pubs alleging Turpin associations that if all their claims were true, the career of England’s most famous highwayman would have been passed in a combination of perpetual motion and a permanent alcoholic haze.

On the evidence provided in this fascinating book, we are asked in conclusion whether he really deserves his fame.

The Reason Why by Cecil Woodham-Smith

One of the most popular histories of the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade, Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why focuses on two the main protagonists in the debacle; George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan and James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan.

Woodham-Smith describes how the ‘purchase system’ allowed both of these stubborn and inexperienced aristocrats to rise to positions of command by buying their way through the ranks. Pushed out of one regiment for his bullying and autocratic behaviour, Cardigan was put in charge of the 11th Hussars where he used his own money to turn the regiment into a stylish and flamboyant outfit. He achieved some degree of success in this, despite dissent from some of his officers, a situation that led to the ‘black bottle’ affair.

Cardigan’s main beef was with the ‘Indian’ officers, men who had gained proper military experience while the regiment had been stationed in India. They resented his pushiness and his use of the 11th to show off to London society. He thought their conduct unbecoming. Nothing they did was right, not even what they drank in the mess:

In India it had been the custom for officers to drink porter – it was healthier and cheaper. To this the lieutenant-colonel furiously objected. Porter was the drink of factory hands and labourers, and he wished to make the 11th famous for its splendid hospitality, for he loved the pomp and ceremony of ‘great’ dinners. He forbade bottled porter to appear on the mess table.

General Sleigh is invited to dine with Cardigan’s regiment and he entertains him extravagantly with a formal do in the mess. All is going swimmingly until one of the guests asks for an alternative to champagne. An ‘Indian’ officer called over for a waiter:

General Sleigh’s aide asked if he might have Moselle instead of champagne, and John Reynolds gave the order to a mess waiter, who, anxious to supply the wine at once, did not stop to decant it, but placed it on the table in its bottle. At this moment Lord Cardigan looked down the table, and there, among the silver, the glass, the piles of hot-house fruit, he saw a black bottle – it must be porter!

Cardigan was transported with rage. This upstart officer, an ‘Indian’ to boot:

...was drinking porter under his very nose, desecrating the splendour of his dinner table. When it was explained that the black bottle contained Moselle, he refuse to be appeased; gentlemen, he said, decanted their wine.

One of the lieutenant-colonel’s muckers is sent around the next day to remonstrate:

“The colonel had desired me to tell you,” said Captain Jones, “That you were wrong in having a black bottle placed on the table at a great dinner like last night. The mess should be conducted like a gentleman’s table and not like a pot-house.”

Well, standards have to be maintained...

A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich

From biography to history, this time to John Julius Norwich’s A Short History of Byzantium. I one day intend to read all three volumes of his work on Byzantium, but this abridged version is still an excellent history of this most fascinating empire.


My introduction to Byzantium was through studying East European and Slavonic history many moons ago. Later on I found myself making a serious attempt at writing a historical novel set in 10th century Constantinople, (serious to the point that I did an unfinished first draft of 80,000 words before giving up), which involved a fair degree of research. This book was part of that background reading.

There were over eighty rulers of the empire between the founding of the city during the reign of Constantine I in the 4th century and its fall to Sultan Mehmet II in 1453. Some of them were great, some of them not so. Among the latter ranks is the Emperor Alexander, a previous co-emperor who was in fully in charge for just over a year: 912-913.

Norwich’s glorious description of Alexander explains the book’s inclusion in this blog. He describes his demise as ‘worn out... by dissipation’ which I interpret as that notorious combination of wine, women and song:

The only good thing that can be said about the reign of the Emperor Alexander is that it was short. Worn out at forty-one by dissipation, he was to occupy the throne for a little under thirteen months. His normal behaviour could be compared only to that of Michael the Sot at his worst: there were the same senseless cruelties, the same drunken roisterings, the same acts of wanton sacrilege. On one occasion he became convinced that the bronze boar in the Hippodrome was his other self, and had it provided with new teeth and genitals in an attempt to remedy the extraordinary wear and tear that he had inflicted on his own.

It is the use of the word ‘extraordinary’ in the above passage that makes me shudder...