London Daily Lens

Thousands of people cross Vauxhall Bridge every day without ever noticing there is a second St Paul's Cathedral on it.

It is held in the hand of a bronze figure attached to one of the bridge piers, a scaled down replica of Wren's dome roughly the size of a fist. You cannot see it from the pavement unless you lean over the parapet and look down, which is rather the point.

The bridge opened in 1906, replacing an earlier crossing that had been the first iron bridge over the Thames. Critics thought the new one dull, so eight monumental bronze figures were commissioned from sculptors Alfred Drury and Frederick Pomeroy, four each, to liven it up.

They were not ready in time for the opening. The figures finally went up over two days in September 1907, each weighing between 35 and 43 hundredweight, hauled into their niches by workmen with little more than ropes and pulleys. One newspaper called them the strange watchers of the Thames.

Drury's four sit on the upriver side and include Architecture, the one cradling the cathedral. Pomeroy's four face downriver.

To find it, walk the upriver side of the bridge, which is on your right coming from the Pimlico side, and look over the parapet beside the second metal panel along. If you are passing underneath by boat, look up.

On this day in 1758, Horatio Nelson was born in a rectory at Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, the sixth of eleven children of a country rector.

He joined the navy at twelve through the influence of his uncle Maurice Suckling, and discovered almost at once that he suffered from seasickness, a complaint that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

He paid a heavy price for his career. He lost the sight in his right eye to flying stone and sand at Calvi in 1794, and his right arm at Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797, telling the surgeon to hurry up and fetch his instruments because he knew the arm had to come off.

The victories came anyway. Cape St Vincent, where he broke formation without orders and boarded two Spanish ships in succession. The Nile in 1798, which stranded Napoleon's army in Egypt. Copenhagen in 1801, where he famously held his telescope to his blind eye and ignored the signal to withdraw

His affair with Emma Hamilton scandalised polite society and cost him his marriage, and their daughter Horatia was born in 1801.

He was shot by a French marksman at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 and died three hours later, aged 47, having been told the battle was won.

London Bridge Station 🇬🇧

Queen Elizabeth II — 70-year reign

👑 A reign that lasted more than seven decades.
Queen Elizabeth II became monarch in 1952 at the age of 25 and went on to reign for more than 70 years — longer than any previous British monarch.
In 2022, she also became the first British monarch to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee.
A remarkable lifetime witnessed through generations of British history.

On this day in 1943, a Halifax bomber took off from RAF Holmsley South in Hampshire on a routine U-boat patrol. Eleven days later, six of its crew were pulled out of the Atlantic, having stayed alive by fishing with a pair of underpants.

Flying Officer Eric Hartley found U-221 on the surface that afternoon and went in low, straddling her with eight depth charges at 17.13. The submarine went down by the stern with all fifty hands. Among them was her captain Hans-Hartwig Trojer, born in Transylvania, which had earned him the nickname Count Dracula.

The Halifax was hit by flak on the run in. With the starboard wing burning, Hartley ditched about three miles away. Two gunners, Sergeants Triggol and Griffiths, were killed. The remaining six, including Group Captain Mead, their own station commander, scrambled into a rubber dinghy with no way to signal for help.

Hartley kept a log. It is a remarkably calm document. Four tins of emergency rations, Horlicks tablets, a piece of chocolate and five tins of water. A 35 foot swell capsizing the dinghy on 1 October. Mars mistaken for a ship's light. Whales blowing fifty yards off and porpoises passing with what he described as a close fighter es**rt of seagulls.

They caught rain on handkerchiefs and sucked them dry. With no bailer aboard, they scooped the freezing water out of the dinghy using their flying boots. On 3 October they built a net from a bellows handle and Ken Ladds' underpants, and caught nothing but jellyfish, which they squeezed in a handkerchief hoping for water and threw away in disgust. The next day they rigged a mast and sewed two shirts together with copper wire to make a sail, which worked better than expected.

By 7 October two men were delirious. On the 8th, at half past two, Ladds spotted a mast on the horizon. They fired three flares, and twenty minutes later the destroyer HMS Mahratta had them aboard. They were carried ashore at Plymouth on stretchers on 10 October.

Hartley got the DFC and returned to active service. He married his sweetheart Maud in 1945, became a bank manager in Oldham and died in 2003.

The Mahratta had less luck. She was torpedoed off Norway in February 1944 while es**rting an Arctic convoy and sank within minutes. Of 236 men aboard, 16 survived.

The eastern end of Queen Victoria Street in London, 1955, with St Stephen Walbrook church under repair after the Blitz and the Bank of New Zealand building at number 1 standing centre left.

The street was Victorian surgery on the City, cut through a warren of medieval lanes to link Blackfriars Bridge with Bank Junction. Approved in 1863 and finished in 1871, it was given a gentle curve to soften the steep climb up from the river, and cost over a million pounds.

Lanes like Five Foot Lane, Dove Court and White Bear Alley disappeared for it, and ancient Bucklesbury, once home to Thomas More, was cut short. Slicing through the old street pattern at an angle left the narrow triangular plots that still give the road its wedge-shaped buildings.

This stretch took a battering in the war. Bombing gutted much of the surrounding area, and the rebuilding was still going on a decade later, which is why the 1955 view is full of scaffolding and cleared ground. Wren's St Stephen Walbrook was among the casualties, its dome badly damaged, and repairs dragged on for years.

The church survived it all and is still standing today, though later development along the street means it is hidden from view in the modern shot.

On this day in 1975, Doug Scott and Dougal Haston became the first Britons to stand on the summit of Everest, reaching the top by the south west face, the hardest route on the mountain and one that had turned back five previous expeditions.

The expedition was led by Chris Bonington, who had already made his name with the first ascent of the south face of Annapurna in 1970 and had tried this same face on Everest and failed in 1972. His operation was colossal. Twenty four tons of equipment and eleven tons of food were shipped out from Britain, 4,000 metres of fixed rope were strung up the face, and the whole thing rested on 33 climbing Sherpas under Pertemba Sherpa plus another 20 porters ferrying loads through the Khumbu Icefall.

Scott and Haston left the top camp at 3.30am. Haston led the Hillary Step with next to no protection, and Scott later admitted he had at one point been holding the rope in his teeth so he could take a photograph.

They reached the summit late in the afternoon, too late to get down. The pair dug into a snow cave just below the South Summit at 8,765 metres and sat out the night, the highest bivouac anyone had ever made. Scott reckoned it was around minus 50, and reported afterwards that he had spent part of the night talking to his own feet. Neither man had a sleeping bag, and Scott had gone up without any down clothing at all.

Both came down alive and without frostbite. The Queen sent her congratulations. Doug's wife Jan said simply that she had always known he would do it one day.

On 26 September 1975, Boardman and Pertemba met Mick Burke a few hundred metres below Everest’s summit as they descended. Burke continued upwards alone into worsening weather and was never seen again. His body was never found, and whether he reached the summit remains unknown.

Before brushes and rods, some chimney sweeps used a goose.

The practice belongs mainly to the 17th and 18th centuries, though it hung on in rural corners well into the 20th. The bird's legs were tied and it was forced into the flue, where the panic did the work. Trapped in a narrow, pitch black shaft, the goose beat its wings against the brickwork and knocked the caked soot loose.

It gave us a saying that survived long after the practice did: the blacker the goose, the cleaner the flue.

Soot from coal fires is sticky stuff, and a quick brush will not shift it. Left alone it builds in the flue until it catches, and chimney fires killed people regularly. That was the reasoning behind a method nobody would defend now.

Children were used for the same reason. The hearth tax meant households ran extra flues through existing chimneys rather than building new ones, which made the flues narrower and narrower, too tight for a grown man with the tools of the day.

The goose was finished off by a Bristol engineer named Joseph Glass, who in the early 1800s developed the rods, canes and brushes that could be worked up a flue from the fireplace below. Sweeps still use the same system today, though the brushes are nylon rather than whalebone.