Cheltenham's Best Kept Secret?

The only mediaeval building in a largely Regency town, right behind the High Street but if you didn't know it was there you might walk straight past.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCTohmw53PQ

What was the Brentford Griffin?

 

In the early 1980s a strange rumour spread around the West London suburb of Brentford. A quiet place (by London standards), it had once had a thriving docklands but that had long since been turned into green space and flats. It had a football ground (Griffin Park), a brewery, and was on the road to Ealing. It had a shiny new arts centre, the Watermans, nestled between road and river. Opposite the Watermans a low boat-haunted island, Brentford Ait, lay in the current of the Thames. Much that was weird could happen on an island like that.

But this rumour, now. People spoke of seeing a huge bird silhouetted against the sky; and looking more closely the bird appeared to have the rear body of a lion, and an eagle’s head.

Others asked – facetiously but not without truth – whether those who claimed to have seen the beast had perhaps been refreshed in one or more of Brentford’s many hostelries.

The first sighting we know of was in that long summer of 1984, when Kevin Chippendale was walking along near Green Dragon Lane (ominous name, that) and saw a weird creature in the sky above him. He for some reason didn’t report this until he saw it again in 1985, more clearly this time and realised it bore a strange resemblance to the heraldic animal on the signs of Fullers pubs. Brentford, as suggested above, is Fullers country. It is a rare public house around there that isn’t Fullers. So the beast was already, in effigy, everywhere.

The beast. The griffin.

A lion-like body and hind legs, feathered forequarters and clawed forelegs and the wings, head and beak of an eagle. Once a creature of malign influence it has fortunately changed its aspect through the centuries so that in recent years it is seen as a benevolent and protective being.

Now back in the days when the Watermans was built there used to be a gasometer close by. These structures, vast towers built to hold gas, have a place in the race-memory of every, at least older Londoner. And one day Angela Keyhoe was on the top deck of a bus, on the way past this gasometer when she saw something dark and winged taking a rest on top of the structure.

There were several other sightings, and the beastie found its way into the Six O’clock News. Psychic investigator Andy Collins set off for the wilds of Brentford to investigate. Collins’ booklet on the subject, The Brentford Griffin, appeared in 1985.

The legend was embellished and propagated back again through time, as such things do. Everyone’s favourite romantic royal pair, Charles II and Nell Gwynne, now had dealings with griffins. Charles supposedly gave his beloved a tame griffin. One day the animal fell into the river and fetched up on Brentford Ait where it lived for many years (griffins are of course very long-lived), found a mate and started a breeding colony.

Brentford Watermans Park

Locals agreed that they had seen winged and lion-clawed beasts in the area, some sightings going back to the 1950s.

At this time the Writer-in-Residence of the Watermans Arts Centre was one Robert Fleming Rankin, author of celebrated tosh such as The Brentford Trilogy (currently standing at 11 books). Rankin disdained such tags as Fantasy or New Weird (not a phrase back then anyway) or Bizarro (that either), describing his work as Far-Fetched Fiction. He hosted weekly poetry nights where performers would be given a drink (unless Robert thought your performance didn’t merit it). Angela Keyhoe, she of the gasometer sighting, was a regular at these events

Collins, a man with a taste for the weird rivalling that of Rankin himself (or Charles Fort or Aleister Crowley or whichever name you’d care to drop), knew a hoax when he smelt one, and this was quite evidently a hoax; specifically, a publicity stunt dreamed up by Rankin and the Watermans’ director John Baraldi.

Intriguingly his website claims that “All but one case was found to be hoaxes perpetuated by Brentford novelist Robert Rankin.” [1]

In 1998 Martin Collins (no relation) wrote to Fortean Times stating that he remembered tales of the Griffin from his schooldays in Brentford in the 1950s, and other correspondents said they heard of it in the 1970s.

Possibly Rankin, with his love of saloon-bar tall tales, was tapping into a mythology that already existed in the area. His early novels attempted to give Brentford its own myths and legends, but perhaps he found the griffin tales already there and brought them to light. It may be worth noting that griffins don’t appear in Rankin’s novels except occasionally, as a myth mentioned in passing.

Because griffins are everywhere, in Brentford. As mentioned Brentford FC's ground was called Griffin Park (it's since been replaced and the old site will become housing), and the symbol of nearby Fullers Brewery (later Fuller Smith and Turner) is a griffin.

As it turns out, the football ground is so called because it was built on land owned by the brewery. Griffin Park had a pub on each of its four corners – the only League ground to do so.

So our next question is, why is Fullers’ symbol the griffin?

For this we must go back to 1816. Fullers – founded in the 17^th century – seeking expansion, took over the brewery of Reid and Meux in Clerkenwell. This had as its symbol the heraldic griffin. When Fullers bought it out, they presumably said something like, “That’s a nice logo, we’ll have that too.”

The Griffin Brewery in Clerkenwell is long gone; the street it stood on, the aptly named Liquorpond Street, was demolished when the Victorian high-concept Clerkenwell Road was built in the late 19^th century, but a pub called the Griffin still stands, close to the original site. (This is not in use as a public house at present).

Now if you were to ask why Reid & Meux adopted the griffin as their logo … 

Detail from Gray's Inn Hall

That creature is the heraldic badge of Grays Inn, adopted some time around 1590. Grays Inn is one of the four Inns of Court (professional associations of judges and barristers) in London, and is based at Grays Inn Square nearby. The brewery simply used a respected local symbol.

If the names 'Reid' and 'Meux' sound familiar it’s perhaps because of the more recent brewery companies Friary Meux (later part of Allied Breweries) and Watney Combe Reid (taken over by Grand Metropolitan and closed in 1979). Meux may be best known for their involvement with the Horseshoe Brewery, the largest in London, which exploded in 1814 with fatal results.

And the griffin? Far from being Nell Gwynne’s riverside pet, it seems to have flown into Brentford from Clerkenwell two hundred years ago. And set up home.

 

Sources:

https://beastsoflondon.blogspot.com/2007/04/brentford-griffin.html

https://discover.hubpages.com/religion-philosophy/The-Brentford-Griffin-and-the-West-London-Dragon

https://www.mjwayland.com/mysteries/the-brentford-griffin/

https://zythophile.co.uk/2010/10/17/so-what-really-happened-on-october-17-1814/

[1] https://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/andrew_collins.htm

The Griffin was originally at 5 Liquorpond Street. Other pubs on the street in 1842 were the Duke of York (no. 19), the White Hart (no. 25) and the Globe & Dolphin (no. 30).

Gray's Inn Hall picture by CP Hoffman, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
Original here