GIANTS OF LONDON

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 140, 10 December 1929, Page 18

GIANTS OF LONDON

MANY LOST WONDEES

ANCESTRAL COG AND MAGOG

They were a famous race, the London Giants, long enduring. Now the familiar figures in Cheapside are about to book passages across the Atlantic to grace the utilitarian Mr. Ford's, great motor-ships, and with. them disappears from the London streets the last of the Giants. Gog and Magog in Guildhall will still keep guard over the City Fathers at Common Council or feast, but even they are not originals. Captain Richard Saunders made them, in 1708, so the bucolic old fellows have more than two centuries to their score. But before them were giants which burnt' in Guildhall in the Great Tire of London, fashioned of wickerwork and rushes, which had been carried through London streets on many occasions in my Lord Mayor's Show, till City rats and mice, it is'said—and may be advanced age—left them no longer capable of standing upright without support, writes Walter G. Bell in the "Daily Telegraph.". Far back the old story goes to Brute, who,, when founding the city of Troynovant, which we call London, captured the true ancestral Gog and Magog from among the gigantic race then flourishing in England, and caused them to be chained to his gates as porters.

ST. DUNSTAN'S COLOSSI. Little less famous were the twin eolissi which, by striking their bells, gave the time to Fleet street till the destruction. of old St. Dimstan's Church in 1830. Sir Walter Scott wrote of them in "The Fortunes of Nigel," but he was wrong in placing them in the City highway in King James I.'s reign—half a century too soon. The ingenious Mr. Harrys, of "Water lane (Whitefriars street), fashioned them and the clock, and after two and a half centuries they still perform their tricks at St. Dunstan's, Begent's Park, the mansion so honourably associated with effort for our blinded soldiers. Unfortunately it is on the garden front that the clock and automata have been placed, and only a distant glimpse of them obtains from the park. . This phenomenon of Giants, so actual to earlier generations of Londoners, still awaits investigation, by the Eoyal Society. For its study we must go back to the Elizabethans. Old John Stow knew well the London Giants. There ■was the towering fellow of St. Mary Aldermanbury, represented in the antiquary's lifetime by no more than a Bhankbone strung upon the church wall —"very great, for it is in length 28 inches and a half of assize." "True it is," observes Stow, wonderingly, "thatthis bone (from whencesoever it came), being of a man, as the form showeth, must needs tie monstrous, and more than the proportion of five shankbones of any man now living among us."

of An oliphant; ; Of the Giant of St. Laurence Jewry Stow was less convinced, though he recalls a childhood's recollection. "I myself more than seventy years since" —he was writing -about 1597—"have seen in this church the shankbone of a man (as it is taken) and also a tooth of very great bigness. . . The tooth (being about the bigness of a man's fist) is long since conveyed from thence; the thigh, or shankbone, of 25 inches in length by rule, remaineth yet fastened to a piece of timber."

In a marginal note he wrote: "The tooth of some monstrous fish, I take it." The shankbone "might be of an Oliphant." He kept open mhul, --and wisely we should do the same. It may havo been an Oliphant. William Harrison, who wrote a chapter on Giants in his "Description of Britain," incorporated in Holinshed's Chronicles, is more engaging. Her had no such disturbing doubts; He knew the Aldermanbury Giant's bone, which, he measured as 32in, and to show the living generation what manner of creature . this was, he recalls • that there Btood on the east wall, not far from the bone itself, an image made by some skilful artist in full proportion, "which showeth the person of a man full 10ft or 12ft high:" A yet more ample. Giant, rising 28ft high, Harrison attests,' having held in his hand its tooth,' weighing lOoz of Troy, "on the tenth day of Maich, in the year 1564" —he is exact as to date. Its other relics, a skull so capacious that it would hold five peeks of wheat, and shinbone 6ft in length and of marvellous greatness, were "extant and to be seen." . Then there is the fellow of whom Harrison tells with a mouth 16ft wide. Frankly, I have my doubt about that London Giant.