Andy asks:

“I wonder if you or readers know any more about the accident that closed Woolwich Road between Chevening Road and Calvet Road this morning?
There were police roadblocks along with tape across the road. I asked one officer what was going on and he just said it was a motorbike accident. I asked if it was fatal but he said “not yet” and left it at that.

It seemed odd to me that they closed the whole road as there was no evidence of wreckage or anything I could see. There were a couple of busses parked up so I’m wondering if they had something to do with it and they were awaiting investigation?”

As someone who hasn’t walked along that part of the road this morning I can’t help, ‘fraid. But I remember when I passed Vanbrugh Hill a few weeks ago and there was that terrible cycling fatality, they’d closed off large chunks of the road, presumably to collect evidence.

But maybe someone else has some news? Let’s keep that poor motorcyclist in our thoughts, eh…

Actually, not so much ‘faded’ but ‘ generally unnoticed,’ there’s nothing faded about the word “Circus” carved high into the house at the entrance to Gloucester Circus – it’s still crisply clear, if you think to look up and find it.

I don’t know if it’s original to Michael Searles’s vision, but I have no reason to believe it’s not, and it’s good to see it so beautifully looked after. It’s actually wrapped around the house’s main chimney, relieving the severity of a wall full of blind windows, which must have always have been so – this was right in the middle of the Window Tax years, so they would have been created thus; it’s sort of fun to think that filled-in windows had become a valid design feature in themselves by that time, filling an otherwise blank wall.

Perhaps because of the way the circus was built, there isn’t a sister word ‘Gloucester’ on the other side, but then maybe it never was intended to be there. I guess it could just be that the buzz-word of the day, ‘circus’ was enough to persuade people they were buying into Modernity.

I’ll come to the house itself another day, but in the meantime, I’m still looking up, just in case I see another curious thing…

I was entertaining myself yesterday evening with an 1804 copy of the London Gazette. Most of it isn’t really news at all – it’s more a notices sort of paper, with the odd snippet of what His Majesty was up to (officially, of course, not the mad stuff, which would have been much more interesting.)

I find myself completely fascinated by such things and although a lot of it’s skimmable, it’s a window into another world that I can never resist. Among the notices were:

• Enough commissions of new officers to delight an entire lost novel’s worth of Jane Austen heroines
• A frightening amount of bankrupts
• A request for any remaining subscribers to the City of Dublin Tontine (the world’s most ridiculous get-rich-slow idea) to make themselves known
• The average price of muscovado sugar (44 shillings, ten pence and three farthings per hundreweight, in case you’re interested)

There were a lot of naval notices too, ranging from the dull-but-lucrative-for-someone “The Principal Officers and Commissioners of His Majesty’s Navy do hereby give Notice that on Thursday 19th of this month at One o’ Clock, they will ready to treat with such persons as may be willing to contract for supplying His Majesty’s Yards at Deptford and Woolwich with Birch Brooms”…

…to a long list of vessels captured and detained by the Squadron under the command of Commodore Hood, along with their contents – from cotton and cocoa to an entire shipment of slaves, who were clearly having an even worse time of it than usual.

If you were lucky enough to have been the Captain, Officers or Crew of His Majesty’s gun-brig Monkey “who were actually on board at the Recapture of the Snow Orforva and the Brig William, on the 26th November 1803,” you’d hit paydirt – part of the loot. Official announcement was given that they would “be paid their respective Shares of the salvage of the said Recaptures on the 21st January 1804.” And the remuneration wasn’t bad, either – ranging from First Class officers in line for a £107, 10s and a halfpence windfall, to £2 16s 4d for fifth class.

But the one that really caught my attention was from the Chest Office at Greenwich, which doled out pensions to retired sailors. The ‘chest’ was the Chatham Chest – literally a big box full of sixpences stopped out of sailors’ wages to provide money for illness. It had been horribly defrauded over the years, but it did still provide some cash for worn-out seamen.

The notice was classic red tape that any of us would recognise today, which was why I loved it. It began

“Notice is hereby given to the Greenwich Chest Pensioners, that each of them as were admitted Pensioners by the governors of the late Chest at Chatham, on Account of total Blindness, or for the Loss of a Limb, will not be required to appear before the Directors at the Expiration of the Term expressed in their Tickets.”

Fair enough – it’s unlikely any of them was about to grow a leg back or suddenly regain their sight. But it goes on to make it quite clear that everyone else will have to jump through hoops a-go-go. What I love about this (the random upper case letters are original, BTW) is the specificity of it all. The following is all one sentence:

“Persons allowed Pension Money by the said late Governor for Hurts of any other Description, will not be paid beyond the Term for which their several Pensions were granted, unless they have been examined at this Office, any Tuesday most convenient to themselves near the Time appointed for them to be reviewed, except those transmitting Certificates from their Captains or Commanders that they cannot be spared from Duty in His Majesty’s Fleet, to whom Payment will be extended Two Years; and also Pensioners who, from ill Health or Infirmities, are unable to appear, from whom a Certificate of the Cause of Inability will be required, Signed by Two Surgeons, and the Minister and Churchwardens of the Parish in which such Pensioners Respectively reside.”

Plus ca change…

Just a quickie to let you know that when Kirsty complained that the deadline for comments about the Olympic Greenwich Park proposals was actually before the date she received the letter about it, she was informed that it has been extended to 27th January, so there’s still time to have your two penn’orth.

As Michael Caine wouldn’t say, not many people know that…

Laura asks:

“Can you or anyone recommend a good, trustworthy garage in Greenwich, open at weekends? I moved to Greenwich almost a year ago, so have yet had to really use any garage.

I was advised to try Kwikfit for convenience …but they are fully booked. Another recommended garage was Paul Smee in Woolwich, but he doesn’t open on weekends. I have taken my car to Universal before for a new battery, but they don’t do MOTs. Any help would be much appreciated, its due to expire on Sunday.”

The Phantom replies:

I hear good reports about Riverside Garage in Charlton – Rathmore Road, SE7 7QW, (Tel 020 8858 0041) but I don’t know if they’re open at weekends.

Maybe someone can suggest some other favourites?

Sorry to everyone who caught my rambling rant this morning. I’ve now cut it out as being entirely irrelevant to the title of this post, save the bit that bemoans the loss of The Big Smoke, from the print-edition of Time Out, but which at least lives on in blog form, and is just as fine, if not finer than before. Newsy, interesting snippets of comment on issues actually important to Londoners – in other words stuff I actually want to read – like the fate of The Cutty Sark…

What may or may not be going on behind those hoardings has been a bone of contention for a while. For some time last Autumn, things got really unpleasant and I decided to leave the subject for a while, but now the glorious Big Smoke has mentioned it, I feel it’s time to start discussing it again.

There’s no point in my re-hashing what Steffan Meyric Hughes has discussed so beautifully in his article, save to say that the chief engineer of the project, Professor Peter Mason, has resigned over what he considers to be the ‘damaging’ plans to raise the ship so that a conference-centre type space can be squeezed in below.

I knew he was considering resignation, from an article in Professional Engineering magazine (don’t ask what I was doing reading that…) but I didn’t know that he actually had done the deed. The University of Greenwich did some modelling on the impact that effectively putting the old girl in stiletto heels for the rest of her days would do (one wonders why they weren’t commissioned to do this before work started) and concluded that the resulting damage would be untenable. The professor decided that he couldn’t bear vandalism to be done on his watch and did the honorable thing.

I thought I’d check the Cutty Sark’s official website to find out what’s going on. The ‘latest news’ section has not been updated since October 2008. As someone who has supported them in the past, I used to get occasional newsletters from them – they have dried up too.

In the absence of real news from the Trust, it’s easy to start speculating. They really need to address this.

With all this business about the Olympics, we (and yes, I include myself in this) have taken our eye off the Cutty Sark ball. We’re so used to seeing that eyesore in the middle of town, with it’s flapping, shredded plastic tarps and always-closed information point, that we’ve almost stopped seeing it. It’s time we started looking again. I have written to the Cutty Sark Trust, asking them what’s happening. I wonder if I’ll get a reply.

“Thou art an arrante whore and came from Greenwiche!”

In early 17th Century Petworth, it would seem, that was about the worst thing you could say to anyone. In fact, it was so offensive in the fair Sussex town to imply that a woman came from Greenwich that it was considered worth going to court over.

I don’t know. First it was Greenwich geese, then barbers, and now, thanks to the marvellous Julian Watson and his friend Peter Jerrome from the Petworth Society, I have a new insult to add to the Greenwich cannon of execrable terms – “Greenwich Bird.”

The court case 0f 1603 centres around an innkeeper’s wife, Margaret Goodman, (presumably quite used to some choice language in her line of work) who was so offended by one Thomas Westdeane accusing her, in the open streets of Petworth, of coming from Greenwich that she took the trouble to gussy up a case against the bounder.

Actually, as Jerrome points out, this would have been a church court, and it was, in those days a bit of a case of ‘accuse or be accused’ – if you didn’t do something public about a slur on your character, it was not only assumed that the remark was apt, but it might mean a case against you from the very bishop to whom you should have gone to complain in the first case.

Goodman prepared for the case, by lining herself up three stellar witnesses who had heard Westdeane call her a “Greenwich Birde” outside the mercer John Bywimble’s shop.

Before we go any further I guess I should explain the insult – though I doubt it takes much imagination to work it out. Greenwich at the time was a busy port, full of sailors – and ladies who enjoyed entertaining them. Margaret had been accused of whoring.

Joanna Curtyes was inside the shop at the time, “buying of wares,” and heard the plaintiff and the accused coming along the street. They were clearly having a right old ding-dong, and Joanna heard “angrie words betwixt them.”

Westdeane told Goodman that she was not honest. “Oh yeah?” she said (or words to that effect.) “How’s that then?” He replied she was a whore.

The storm in this particular teacup getting splashier by the moment, Margaret Goodman called over the good mercer, Joanna and William Mose, a yeoman who just happened to be around at the time, and dared Westdeane to repeat what he’d just said. Which he did. “Thou art an arrante whore and came from Greenwiche.”

A bit later on Westdeane made things worse for himself when he asked Joanna if she was going to bear witness at the court and what she would say. She told him she’d tell what she heard, and he replied that he would teach a whore to spit in a man’s face. Joanna reckoned that, in her view, the slander would mean that Margaret “amongste grave men within the parishe of Petworth…is of lesse estimacon than before she was.”

William Mose agreed that the barney between the accuser and accused took place, and he thought the original argument had been about Margaret’s brother, but he know hear any more details. He also heard Westdeane call Margaret a whore and a Greenwich bird, and what’s more, John Bywimble had heard it too.

Bywimble himself (don’t you just love that name?) didn’t appear, but a tailor, Mark Upfield, confirmed that the pair had been “walkinge togeather verye discontentedlye and brawlinge one with another.”

Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be an outcome recorded from this suit, though given the weight of witness evidence and the lack of anything coming from Westdeane himself, it’s probable that Margaret won her case and he would have faced a fine or possibly paid public penance in white sheets for his “incontinence”.

So there we go – an example of someone else’s local history having a direct message about our own. The image, by the way, is part of the testimony of William Mose. In the middle of the fourth line down, if you’re sharp-eyed, you’ll see the insult that started it all, still, outrageous today in some parts of Sussex, I understand…

While the snow has been falling and I’ve not wanted to venture out for more than a pint of milk, I’ve been amusing myself with the shamefully-out-of-print Greenwich and Blackheath Past by Felix Barker, and found myself fascinated by a chameleon-like character of the sort you just don’t get to see these days. John Major famously ran away from the circus to join another one but he was such a grey character that he was probably a changeling anyway. John Townsend, on the other hand, ran away from the theatre to become an MP but was a character so full of life and colour that the House was never going to keep him completely amused.

Townsend may not have been born in a trunk in 1819 but I’ll wager his dad sold a few. If my experiences down at Greenwich Auctions are anything to go by, you need to be a bit of an actor to do that kind of work and although barking out prices on secondhand furniture wasn’t for Townsend Jr, he would have learned projection from his old dad, if nothing else.

The lure of the greasepaint touched him even as a lad, and he appeared on stage from a very early age. He went on to lease the Theatre Royal Richmond straight after Edmund Kean had vacated the premises, then went on the road with his own company. His forte was Shakespearean tragedies, which somehow makes his brush with politics even more surreal.

Perhaps seeing Britain with a jobbing actor’s eye gave him his compassion because when his father died and the 33 year-old had to give up acting to take over the family business, Townsend became a Poor Law Guardian and the next thing he knew he was fighting for dockers’ rights. I get the feeling that he was elected MP for Greenwich almost by accident.

But once the limelight is in your blood, it’s hard to give it up, and John Towsnend MP, even whilst sitting at Westminster, couldn’t resist treading the boards. He played Shylock at Marylebone Theatre “to deafening applause” and received “long and prolonged cheers” when he gave his Richard III at Rochester. Ever the showman, he went one better at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre by being the last actor ever to play the doomed king on horseback (presumably not whilst speaking the line about being willing to part with his kingdom for a steed…)

Can you even imagine Nick Raynsford as a Shakespearean character? I’ll look forward to hearing your suggestions for parts he might be suitable for. I guess today we’re not completely without parliamentary clowns appearing on inappropriate media vehicles – witness George Galloway making an arse of himself on Celebrity Big Brother for that one – but actors?

Trouble was, poor old Townsend was a dreadful businessman and I can’t imagine he’d made himself very popular with the local businesses he wanted to make pay their workers decent wages. He was forced into bankruptcy and had to give up his seat. He went back to acting full time and seems to have been much better loved as an actor than an MP, which, I suppose, is hardly surprising.

When he was 40, his health started to deteriorate, and he decided to emigrate. In order to get enough cash to make the crossing, he announced that he would give one last performance, at the Royal Hill Lecture Hall in 1866.

All 900 seats for the evening of “Dramatic Entertainment” had been snapped up faster than a Julie Andrews night at the O2, landing Townsend the princely sum of £200. He, along with his wife and fourteen year-old son (‘unanimously pronounced the most accomplished junior swordsman of the day’), performed for his ex-constituents one last time, then boarded a boat for Canada.

Of course, once he was there, he couldn’t resist acting any more than he could here. He continued until he retired in 1877, and I’m sure he stayed performing for family friends until his death in 1892. If it’s in your blood…

There’s something about the snow that can really clarify things we usually forget exist. I walk past the old reservoir in Greenwich Park on a regular basis and pay it no real attention – and yet it’s a big feature – if you look at the aerial view in the link above, it covers a large area. The bare trees and snow-covered mound really show it for how it is.

The guys at Subterranean Greenwich reckon it was opened briefly in the war for assessment as a possible air raid shelter, but I’m rather hoping they manage to persuade Royal Parks to let them go in there and see it themselves on behalf of the rest of us – I’d love to know what it’s like in there now. I can’t help feeling that it should be useful – maybe to be turned into something cool eventually too, like an art gallery or something.

I meant to get a pic of the Anglo Saxon burial mounds (which were badly damaged by the erection of the reservoir – until local people protested and what remained was preserved) but it started to snow again, and I’m not dedicated enough to trudge around looking for the best angle in this weather.

BTW, talking of local people protesting about potential damage to the park, there’s a public meeting at 2.00 pm this Sunday (17th Jan), at John Roan School, held by NOGOE, to talk about the Olympic proposals. Expect a bunfight if anyone from LOCOG actually turns up…

I’ve been thinking about this morning’s post. As I said, I don’t encourage family history enquiries – I don’t have any interest in my own family’s past and I don’t really ‘get’ the whole digging-up-the-ancestors phenomenon (my mum does it and I still don’t get it.)

But from the responses today I can see that Phantomites are a generous bunch – and seem to enjoy a challenge. Should I perhaps relax my hitherto fierce attitudes to family tree-huggers and start posting a few more ‘personal’ posers rather than ploughing through them at a (very) slow rate myself via the privacy of email? Or does the idea of trying to find someone else’s Great Uncle George who worked at the dog food factory send you to sleep?

I’m open on this one – though it would help clear the Giant Backlog of Doom in my inbox…