“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.” — William Shakespeare
I became a teenager at the age of nine. This was because I had a next door neighbor named Susie, who was thirteen. Despite our age difference, she took me under her wing and taught me about what was and wasn’t good in music. One group in the great category was The Beatles. I had to agree with her and continue to agree with her on that one. This was a girl with taste.
So, at the age of … well … uh … let’s just say adulthood, I joined the leader of a Beatles walking tour at the Marylebone Train Station in London at 11:20am on a Saturday in 1997 for what I thought was supposed to be a two hour tour. It ended up being a three hour journey through central London and St John’s Wood.
Some of the opening scenes of “A Hard Day’s Night” had been filmed at the Marylebone Train Station, including the phone boxes. We then moved to various other locations, such as the flat where the “Two Virgins” photo was taken, the registry office where Paul & Linda and George & Patti were married, the EMI offices building (empty, but still recognizable), the former Apple clothing shop, the restaurant from “Help”, and Jane Asher’s father’s home (where Jane & Paul had lived for three years). Then we hopped on the Tube at Baker Street and went out to St John’s Wood. This was the location of both Abbey Road Studios and the famous crosswalk where the album cover was photographed.
Since this was a real street with real traffic on it, trying to recreate the photo was at one’s own peril. I just took a quick photo of the crosswalk when no traffic was coming and felt good about that. Others were really struggling trying to get a photo of themselves in the crosswalk without getting killed doing it.
Thoroughly satisfied by this guided walk, I hopped back on the Tube and took it to the Embankment. Problem was, I was too dumb to realize that, once I had left central London, additional charges were added to the fare. So it was a different price to go back to Embankment from St John’s Wood than to go from Baker’s Street to St John’s Wood. When I got to Embankment, I couldn’t get out of the station. My ticket was wrong. So I went to the window for help. They didn’t count my being foreign and not understanding how it worked as an excuse, and charged me £10 for not having the right fare. That was the most expensive Underground or Subway ride I’ve ever had.
Back in 1970, an American actor named Sam Wanamaker began a quest to have a replica of the Globe Theatre built as the original had been built and as close to where the original had been as possible. The original had been built in 1599, destroyed by fire in 1613, rebuilt in 1614, and demolished in 1644 by Cromwell’s people who believed theatre to be the work of the devil. But then, there are always narrow-minded people around in just about any age. It took until 1997 before the new theatre was completed and opened to the public with a production of “Henry V”. The roof is the only thatched roof permitted in London since the Great Fire of 1666. As with the original, the center of the theatre is open to the sky, so they only perform plays in the summer.
The first Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, as they call it, was Mark Rylance. He’s the fella who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the movie “Bridge of Spies”. My mom and I had the privilege of meeting him when he brought the troupe from Shakespeare’s Globe to the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis with a production of “Twelfth Night”. We were able to have a very nice conversation with him. I’ve seen him in two more plays — “Peer Gynt” and “Nice Fish” — and have watched the rest of his career with great interest after that. He is one very talented actor.
The theatre was not quite yet completed when we visited it and took a tour. They were using the same building methods as back in the 1500s. The part that wasn’t finished was where the stage was located. I took several photos of the construction. There was a small group of about a dozen people touring the theatre in addition to us, but there were just five in our group. I really enjoy smaller groups when touring something because the tour becomes more of a conversation and less of a lecture. In larger groups it can be difficult to get a question in edgewise, especially if you have one or two people determined to monopolize the guide (usually to ask questions about the same information they have already given us — sorry, my curmudgeonly side is showing). After our tour, we had lunch at the Anchor Pub. There has been a pub on the site for 800 years, although the version that Shakespeare himself would have frequented was gutted during the Great Fire of 1666.
The Imperial War Museum was founded in 1917 and was moved to its present location in St George’s Fields in Southwark in 1936. The building had been the Bethlem Royal Hospital, aka Bedlam. I thought that was pretty fitting. Some of the greatest insanity that exists on earth is often the cause of wars.
Bethlem Royal Hospital had been founded in 1247 and shifted its location several times through the centuries. At first, it was a regular hospital. But once it began receiving the insane in 1377, it continued to receive more and more until it was exclusively a psychiatric hospital by 1460. This was when it became known as Bedlam (a corruption of Bethlem, which is in turn a corruption of Bethlehem). The building now housing the Imperial War Museum was its location in the 19th century.
The exhibits are quite interesting, including tanks, artillery, and a great collection of planes. They have the remains of the Messerschmitt that Rudolph Hess flew from German to Scotland during World War II. He was the Deputy Fuhrer and supposedly wanted to negotiate a peace contract. He was arrested instead. He was tried at Nuremburg after the war and given a life sentence.
The museum also houses a few artifacts from the Lusitania, which was a ship that was sunk by a German U-boat during World War I, killing over a thousand civilian passengers. There is a trench experience from World War I where you can get an idea of what it might have been like in the trenches. They also have a Blitz experience from World War II where everyone is seated in a bomb shelter while sirens sound and you can hear the bombs going off overheard. Then you leave the bomb shelter and see the destruction all around. That one was quite effective.
When we left the museum and headed to Westminster Bridge, we unexpectantly passed the home of William Bligh, the commander of the Bounty at the time of its mutiny in 1789. The next day we left for a tour of Devon and Cornwall.
