“Wem-ba-lee! Wem-ba-lee! Wem-ba-lee!”
Generations of football supporters have rallied around this chant. It’s a traditional tune of the terraces, sung by those whose team is heading towards a Cup Final or play-off clash at Wembley. “Wem-ba-lee!” The name of the national stadium is gleefully mangled. Or is it?
Wembley stadium is named after the local area of Wembley, which first enters the records in a the year 825. Here it is written as “Wemba lea”. Later variations1 include “Wembeleg” (1249), “Wembele” (1282) and Wambeley (1334). Evidently, the place had an enunciated ‘-e-’ infix for hundreds of years. Those football fans chanting Wem-ba-lee are simply harking back to a purer form of the place name. Medieval scholars, all of them.
Wemba Lea is a fairly typical Old English place name. Its original meaning was almost certainly the “clearing of Wemba”. That much you can get from Wikipedia. But let’s step back and think about this a little more. Once upon a time, a real, actual human person called Wemba lived out his2 life amid the Forest of Middlesex. Wemba, we can assume, had cleared a patch of land within the forest and used it to farm. He, or his recent ancestors, would have migrated here from northern Germany or Scandinavia, among the waves of Anglo-Saxon settlers during the centuries after the Roman withdrawal.
Beyond this educated guesswork, we know nothing about Wemba. Was he also a community leader or chieftain? Did he have a family and leave descendants? Did he have a beard? Was he admired, feared, loved or despised? Was he fond of cheese?
All must be answered with a shrug. His life is a mystery. Yet this shadowy proto-Londoner’s name would be remembered forever. Not just remembered, but sung proudly, by millions of people, for decades, perhaps centuries. His tiny clearing in the woods has evolved into the most celebrated sporting venue on the planet. In name, Wemba is the most famous Londoner who ever lived. In biography, he is utterly unknown.
Wemba is not alone in his quasi-fame. He may, perhaps, have met the farmer Coena, whose holdings would grow into nearby Kenton; or perhaps he bartered for fish with a fellow named Ecgi, whose weir to the north would one day become Edgware. On the other hand, the three could have lived centuries apart. Further afield, there once was a chieftain called Brixi, whose settlement was noted for its prominent meeting stone on the banks of the Effra. Today, we know it as Brixton. A chap called Badric long ago presided over an eyot or ait (island) in the Thames. Badric’s ait, or Batricheseie would graduate into Battersea. Maisters Hoc and Haca bequeathed Hoxton and Hackney. Every single one of these gentlemen is obscure to history, yet their names are known to millions all these centuries later3.
At least their names are known. Millions of souls played out their lives in London and never left a trace. The unreckonable dead fail to haunt the city that has forgotten them utterly. These people lived, loved, cried, laughed; had regrettable sex and bar-room arguments; enjoyed cheese, wondered what the stars are for, farted loudly (possibly on account of the cheese), admired lacework, chewed on straw, told lies, gossiped, pranked, threw wooden spoons in anger, and eventually died. Soon, they would fall out of living memory, and disappear from the realm of human information as thoroughly as if they had never existed. These were people as real as us. Yet we shall never know their names nor any whisper of their existence, thanks to the lack of societal record keeping over most of London’s history.
Each life, no matter how humble, sets off many uncountable chains of circumstance. We all make mundane choices every day. Each one minutely alters the course of local or even world events — a concept commonly known as the butterfly effect. In that sense, all those millions of unknown Londoners did not lead meaningless lives. Their everyday actions and interactions summed and multiplied throughout the weft of history, in ways we cannot possibly tease apart.
Not usually, anyway. Just as there are different types of infinity, so too are there different types of obscurity. Some of those forgotten Londoners did leave a paper trail. The unknown mother or father who named their child Wemba, for example, indirectly affected what would be printed on your football ticket 1,500 years later.
But we can find more consequential examples.
We all know that London’s story begins with the Romans4. In AD 43, the legions, under Claudius, came over from the continent to subdue and settle the land. At some point between AD 43 and AD 47, they arrived at the Thames. Someone made the decision on where to ford the river. Someone (possibly the same someone, possibly not) chose where to set up camp. Someone ordered a permanent settlement. And then someone decided to call it Londinium — perhaps leaning on an existing Celtic word. Who that someone was, in each case, is a mystery. Yet these on-the-spot decisions, which might easily have gone a different way, had profound implications for world history. Had a scout turned left instead of right, the decision-maker he reported back to might have favoured land to the west rather than the slopes of (what became) the City. Londinium might have been founded further upriver, where bridging and fording would be easier. It might have been called Thamesischester or Catuvellaunium or some random appellation that paid homage to a soldier’s favourite aunt. It might not have existed at all. Unknown individuals, making spur-of-the-moment decisions, 2,000 years ago, would ultimately lead to every facet and feature of the London we know today. Had any one of those decisions gone differently, you would not have heard of Buckingham Palace, or Fleet Street or Christopher Wren. You would not be reading these words. History would be so different that you would not exist.
It’s fun to play with inflection points like this. Which individual(s) decided where to place London’s walls, run the roads and knock through gates? These decisions still determine the City’s street plan 2,000 years later. Who, in a slightly later age, decided that St Paul should be venerated atop Ludgate Hill? And why? We know nothing about any of these individuals, other than that they must have existed.
Then there are the people who changed the city forever without knowing it, and without us ever knowing them. Every plague and epidemic that swept the capital must have started with ‘first cases’, a small number of people who unwittingly caught the disease from elsewhere, only to bring it home to their families and neighbours. We do not know, for example, who carried the Great Plague of 1665 to London. It seems to have spread out from St Giles and the docks. Somebody introduced it into these areas — perhaps after visiting relatives in a neighbouring town, or returning from an infected port. Those carriers probably lost their lives a few days later, but not before setting in motion a chain of contagion that would ultimately see off a fifth of the population. In a sense, it doesn’t really matter who these individuals were. The plague was always going to hit sooner or later. But I do find it intriguing to ponder how the mundane actions of one or two never-identified persons can trigger such momentous events5.
We could conjure up dozens of further examples. I’ll finish with one from more recent times. During the early 1930s, dozens of automatic traffic signals were installed across central London. One such set was placed at the corner of Southampton Row and Russell Square, probably in 1932 during measures to disentangle an experimental one-way system.
One dull, grey morning, 12 September 1933, a 35-year old Hungarian was walking through the area deep in thought. The man reached the new set of lights and paused to wait for the red signal to stop the traffic. Eventually, the lights changed and he stepped into the carriageway. Historian Richard Rhodes described what happened next: “As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come.” The man was the physicist Leo Szilard, and his sudden revelation was the nuclear chain reaction. It was one of the most important thoughts in human history, which would lead to atomic energy and atomic weapons; a quarter of a million deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the most profound shift in geopolitics the world has ever seen.
According to Szilard himself, it all came together at this particular set of traffic lights. Something about the conditions, the traffic, the pause — in that specific time and place — triggered his momentous insight. Had one of the drivers set out early, or somebody not honked their horn at a particular moment, then perhaps he would not have made the intellectual leap. Had an anonymous traffic engineer set the lights to change on a different phasing, he might have crossed uninterrupted and dreamed along a different path. Had his hotel waiter taken a few seconds longer over Szilard’s breakfast, then his walk and thoughts would have unfolded differently.
Sure, he might have had his eureka moment at some other point. Unquestionably, the nuclear chain reaction would have eventually been fathomed by one of the other great physicists of the era. But then history would have played out differently, to who knows what consequences. In our universe, Szilard was the first to glimpse the atomic future thanks to an anonymous cast of thousands, none of whom knew they had played a cameo in shaping the atomic age.
History, in its grandest conception, is not a linear chain of A leads to B leads to C. It is an infinitely complex mesh of happenstance and perturbation.
The new London Museum should devote an entire gallery to the Unknown Londoner. Wemba, Brixi, Roman scout, bubonic peasant, traffic light phase-regulator, reader of slightly erratic newsletters; we are all, every one of us, as important as the Whittingtons, Dickens’s, Victorias and Churchills of this world.
Thanks for reading! You have changed the world, ever so slightly, by doing so. You could change my world, ever so slightly more, by leaving a comment below or recommending this newsletter to a friend. And feel free to email me anytime on matt@londonist.com
According to the Survey of English Place Names.
I am no expert on Anglo-Saxon names, but all sources assume Wemba to be a male name, so I’ll stick with the convention.
Etymology is the most pedantic of pastimes, so I should clarify here that most of these derivations are historians’ best-guesses, and not strictly proven. The wider point, that familiar place names often derive from the personal names of real individuals, who lived over 1,000 years ago, still stands.
Yes, plenty of people lived in the region for thousands of years before that, as I explored here. But the Romans were the first to establish a permanent settlement, so far as is known.
We do have a name for the first person whose cause of death is recorded as plague: Rebecca Andrews on 12 April 1665. However, it’s unlikely she was the first to bring the disease into London. Others may well have died earlier and given a different cause of death; or the originator may actually have survived.
If you like this sort of thing, then I can recommend 'The Greatest Nobodies of History' by Adrian Bliss. (I should mention that I was involved in the book's editorial process.) https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455333/the-greatest-nobodies-of-history-by-bliss-adrian/9781529907452
A brilliant piece of writing! Loved reading it!