London Urban Legends Read Online Free PDF Page B

licence: it is owned by the Freemen of the Vintners Company.
    It goes without saying that all of these stories should be taken with a fair amount of salt, the most artery hardening one being the story I stumbled upon, saying that the Blind Beggar pub in Bethnal Green, of Kray infamy, was named after the Edinburgh bodysnatcher William Hare who, after getting William Burke executed, found himself in Limehouse where he was thrown into the lime pits. Blinded, he migrated to Bethnal Green to become the famous beggar. The generally agreed story of the Blind Beggar is that he was Henry de Montfort, son of Simon de Montfort, who had been defeated by the son of Henry III, Prince Edward, at the battle of Evesham. Wounded and blind from the battle, Henry lived in disguise as the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green to escape the attention of Edward, who was now King Edward I. According to this legend the Blind Beggar is another aristocrat incognito amongst ordinary Londoners.
    These stories have plenty of meaning; they remind us of the biblical teaching of entertaining strangers as they may be angels or royalty in disguise, and that the lives of the rich, famous and infamous are like ours. They still drink and have sex, and yet are different; they need to build secret tunnels to go and do it. They, like saints and ghosts, bring a mysterious aura to a location, be it a cosy old pub or an unremarkable boozer with a claim to fame. In a city that has always enjoyed the money of tourists and travellers, such a claim or artefact can draw people to a location and feed urban legends for centuries afterwards.

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THE GENITALS OF LONDON
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    To Pee or Not to Pee: An Overview of Electricity Related Deaths,
and Examination of the Question of Whether Peeing on the
Third Rail Can Kill

    PowerPoint presentation, medical examiner’s
office in Cook County, Illinois
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    T HERE ARE FEW things less socially acceptable than a stray penis. The penis is chiefly for having sex and urinating, two things that are unacceptable in public. For this reason, no doubt, it is the penis that protrudes into a number of London urban legends, demonstrating the ongoing fascination and awkwardness people feel about it.
    So pity the man in the following legend collected by Rodney Dale and written up for his book The Tumour in the Whale . A man rushes into the saloon bar of a City of London pub, puts his hat and briefcase on a table, orders a whisky and tells the barman that he is ‘bursting for a pee’. The landlord tells him to go through a doorway and turn left, which the desperate man does, undoing himself on the way. Thinking he is arriving at the toilet the man pulls out his ‘apparatus’, as it is referred to in the story, but finds himself standing on a platform in the public bar with his private parts on display. The barman sees him, is enraged, and throws the man out onto the street. Our hero returns to the saloon bar to retrieve his hat and briefcase, just as the barman is telling the landlord about what happened. After a shout of ‘that’s him!’, the frustrated man, still not having had his pee, is thrown out onto the street again. Years later the man walks into a pub in Ipswich and sees the former City of London pub landlord behind the bar. ‘Don’t I know you?’ the landlord asks.
    A more cautionary tale is told in Paul Screeton’s book Mars Bars and Mushy Peas , of the only child of a north London Cypriot family, who is left alone for the first time. Half an hour after his strict parents have left for their holiday in Limassol, the boy is smoking, drinking whisky and masturbating to hard-core porn while naked. If only he had waited longer; his parents soon came home, having forgotten their passports.
    In 1978, a couple were caught out having sex in a small two-seater sports car somewhere in Regents Park. The near-naked man suffered a slipped disc, trapping the woman under ‘200 pounds of pain-racked, immobile man,’ said a Dr Brian Richards. In her