A Picaresque Putney Pootle
With puppets and pints.
Welcome to Londonist: Time Machine’s Friday edition for paying subscribers, with a generous teaser for everyone else.
Reading and mapping the Wolf Hall novels reminds me that I haven’t visited Putney — the childhood home of Thomas Cromwell — in some time. Very little remains here from Tudor times, but it’s still possible to enjoy an historical ramble around the streets of that pleasant riverside town in south-west London.
The following was written entirely on location, in the cafes, pubs and churches of Putney, drawing on whatever historical material I happened to stumble across. I kind of like writing that way.
Fred Russell, the “father of modern ventriloquism”, lived in flat No. 71. So claims a Blue Plaque on Kenilworth Court, next to Putney Bridge.
(Can we start a rumour that he really lived in flat No. 72, but convinced everybody he lived next door, by throwing his voice?)
Russell was an interesting character. He was the first to go on stage with a single dummy and do the whole “gottle-of-gear” thing to a live audience. He kept at it, too. Just look at the dates on his plaque; 1862-1957. This man honed his vocal tricks in Victorian London, and was still performing in the age of television, a medium in which he appeared regularly. Russell was known in the business as “the oldest ventriloquist in the world”, and died at the grand old age of 95.
Besides being the ‘father of modern ventriloquism’, Russell was also the actual father of Val Parnell, the theatre impresario who gave a 12-year-old Julie Andrews her first paid gig. (She would go on to do her own puppet act, in the ‘goatherd’ scene of The Sound of Music.) This, as I’ve said many times before, is why I love finding plaques. They are not so much solid discs as rabbit holes, which lead into branching tunnels of curiosity if only we can be bothered to google.
Putney, it turns out, is a hotbed of puppets. Gerry “Thunderbirds” Anderson and Jim “Muppets” Henson both leased the same workshop in Rotherwood Road for a time. Mary Shelley, creator of the twisted, rebellious puppet known as Frankenstein’s monster, twice lived in Putney. Meanwhile, erstwhile Putney resident Nick Clegg is in the news this week for suggesting that Elon Musk is becoming a “political puppet master”.
More animated history can be found on Festing Road, to the west of Putney. This road always takes me back to my childhood. Not because I ever strayed over this way — I’d never heard of Putney — but because of the street’s on-screen identity of Festive Road. This was the abode of children’s character Mr Benn, a bowler-hatted gent who, when the fancy took him, wandered into fantasy realms via his local costume shop. The TV show, which ran in the 1970s and 80s, was written by David McKee, perhaps more famous for Elmer the patchwork elephant. McKee lived on Festing/Festive Road, as a subtle pavement plaque attests. A small footpath to the north of the road was recently named Festive Walk in another tribute to the show.
Putney’s history, of course, starts long before the age of famous puppets and cartoon adventurers. The name traces to Anglo-Saxon times, and means Putta’s landing place (on the river). Putta is another of those fellows like Wemba and Billing whose name lives on a thousand years after his death, but about whom we know nothing whatsoever.
One historic Putney resident about whom we do know a lot is Thomas Cromwell. The commoner-turned-Earl was born and raised on the Putney shore in the late 15th century. Almost nothing remains of Cromwell’s Putney — indeed, the whole town is conspicuously lacking in truly old stuff, when compared with, say, Fulham across the water, or Richmond upriver. There is one exception, however…
The church of St Mary’s goes back to at least the 13th century. It was old, even when the young Thomas Cromwell cobble-squabbled with his eel boy. What we see today is largely an 1830s reconstruction, heavily patched up again following a fire in the 1970s. However, the tower survives from the 15th century. We’re looking at the very same stones that once deflected photons into the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, 500 years ago. A few arches within the church also date from this time.