Move On, Please

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 87, 21 February 1941, Page 5

Move On, Please

| PICKED up recently a picture of the White Tower in the Tower of London. It was bombed not so long ago, but not completely destroyed — "bent, but not broken," as the Cockneys would say. That picture reminded me of a day in the last war when I was on leave and was given a special pass to visit the Tower. Then it was that I got into conversation with an old veteran of the Yeoman Warders of His Majesty’s Tower of London, and it was from him that I learnt that this tower was the oldest

public building in London and dated back to the Early Norman days, and it was then still practically in its original condition. I wanted to see the Crown Jewels, but my guide told me that I would have to go to the other side of England if I wanted to see them, as they had been, shifted for safety’s sake a long’ time ago. From him I learnt that the walls of the Wakefield

Tower which houses the Jewel House were 8 feet thick, further that the Tower was fireproof, burglar proof and waterproof, but unfortunately the builder in William the Conqueror’s day never reckoned on it having to be bomb proof. I didn’t know till then that the Tower had been bombed, but I was shown where a bomb ‘hit the railings of the Tower, and where another fell into the moat, yet another struck the Royal Mint across the road, and the fourth dropped into Old Father Thames within a few yards of the Jewel House. He had a fund of good stories and told me that just before the last war there was a German woman who was seen gazing at the six million pound collection. She went up to the Yeoman on duty and remarked: "You may think the jewels are wonderfully guarded, but they will soon belong to the Kaiser." He finished the story by saying that all the Yeoman on duty could say was, "I don’t think so Madam, but please pass along." -("Just London," by Major F. H. Lampen, 2YA, February 6.)