An operatic soprano, born in Venice. She leased a house in Soho Square which became London’s entertainment hotspot, specialising in masked balls and banquets. Her concerts featured Johann Christian Bach. She introduced a one-way traffic system to control the crowds flocking to her venue. She had a child by Casanova. At one point she controlled all the theatres in The Austrian Netherlands. She was imprisoned for debt in Paris, after which she returned to England under a false name and died of breast cancer in Fleet debtors’ prison. Mentioned by Laurence Sterne, Dickens, Thackeray and Tobias Smollett.
Enon chapel eventually became a dancing venue but was previously a place of worship. The ground floor was used for religious ceremonies while the vault below, separated only by the wooden floor, was used for burials, allegedly packed to the level of the floor above with thousands of coffins. It was claimed that church goers were falling sick owing to the proximity of decaying bodies and that there were bodies floating down drains into the river Thames.
Later investigation by John Snow (famous for identifying the causes of cholera) proved that the various allegations were much exaggerated but in 1847 a prominent surgeon called George ‘Graveyard’ Walker filled four large van loads of skeletons which he transferred from Enon chapel to West Norwood cemetery for burial in a huge single grave.
The building was then occupied by a theatre which advertised ‘dancing on the dead’ but it appears not all the bodies had been removed. Further transfers were required after which a different theatre moved in with a new, rather better insulated, floor.
Talking about West Norwood cemetery there was once a coffin found drifting in the river Effra towards the Thames. It was traced back to a grave in West Norwood cemetery but the relevant location was undisturbed, The coffin had seemingly dropped into the river from the grave. How many others did the same but were undiscovered, I wonder?!
Odette Hallows was an agent for the Special Operations Executive who survived the second world war but only at the cost of repeated interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo during which she lost all her toenails and enduried three months’ solitary confinement in complete darkness on starvation rations in an underground bunker. She witnessed others screaming from torture and cannibalism by starving prisoners.
How did she survive? Perhaps she had been toughened by suffering temporary blindness and paralysis as a child. Her approach was “surviving another minute – that was experiencing another minute of life”
She may also have been saved by her clever deception that she was married to a fellow imprisoned SOE , Peter Churchill, who she claimed was the nephew of Winston Churchill.
Odette and Peter did indeed get married after the war but divorced a few years later and married Geoffrey Hallowes.
Odette was the first living woman to be awarded the George Cross. There is a plaque dedicated to this remarkable woman on the side of St Paul’s church in Knightsbridge.
NB: Thanks to fellow tourist guide Rosalind, for the inspiration. www.wideeyedlondon.com
