The Ravenmaster Read online

  Drummers are a little bit different. We think differently. We behave differently. It’s often the case that if there’s someone in a platoon and they’re not fitting in, they’re put into the Corps of Drums, because drummers are always seen as a bit, shall we say, unusual. A little bit independent-minded, a little bit quirky. The training for a drummer is also different. As junior soldiers, in the mornings we’d be out digging trenches or bayonet training and then we’d have music lessons in the afternoons. Most of us had never had a music lesson in our lives, and the ones we got in the army were certainly not like what you might have had at school. The section corporal would come out and he’d say, “This is the note G,” and he’d show you how to play the note G on your fife and he had a big bass drumstick and if you played the wrong note he’d just bang you on the head with it. And that’s how I learned how to play music—being banged on the head for eighteen months with a bass drumstick by a section corporal! It seemed to work: we formed a nice little Corps of Drums, and many years later I eventually became a Drum Major myself.

  (And just to be absolutely clear, for the record, since even some of my friends and family—and occasionally even a Yeoman Warder—tend to get confused about this, or like to pretend they’re confused: drummers are not bandsmen. Bandsmen play musical instruments primarily for entertainment and delight: they are musicians. Drummers do not play primarily for entertainment and delight, as you’ll know if you’ve ever heard a Corps of Drums going at it full pelt. Drummers are fully trained infantry soldiers who also happen to play the drums.)

  As an infantry drummer you have to prove yourself twice over. As you progress in your career you have to do twice the number of courses and take on twice the responsibility. Which was always fine by me. It also means that caring for the ravens in addition to my other work as a Yeoman Warder has never been a problem. For some people it might be a bit of a hassle. For me, I couldn’t imagine my life here without them. I don’t so much look at it as having two jobs as having twice as much fun. Part of the fun of being a Drum Major back in the day was all the dressing up for ceremonial occasions—and again, it turns out that my time in the army was preparing me for my life at the Tower.

  The uniform we Yeoman Warders wear on a daily basis is what’s called Blue Undress. It’s not the full ceremonial uniform with the frilly Tudor ruff and the tights that you might have seen us wearing at important state occasions. (The tights used to be stockings—and the fiddle with stockings! Ladies, I had no idea.) The Blue Undress uniform consists of a tabard in royal blue and scarlet with the Queen’s insignia on the front, trousers with a red stripe, a bonnet, black shoes and socks, and a big brass-buckled belt. In the winter we also have a cape. I wear the Ravenmaster’s badge of office on the sleeve of my tabard, on my right arm between my wrist and my elbow. It features a raven’s head, representing Brân the Blessed; the Crown, representing royalty; and a laurel wreath, which symbolizes authority. The badge of office was first worn in 1969 by the first officially appointed Ravenmaster, John Wilmington. (If you look closely you’ll see slight differences in other Yeoman Warders’ uniforms: some of us wear our regimental badges on our radio pouches, or regimental buttons rather than the usual standard-issue buttons.) I should probably also explain that the Queen’s insignia, the big EIIR on the chest of our tabards, stands for Elizabeth II Regina. You’d be amazed at how many people ask what it means—the traditional Yeoman Warder response to such a question being something like “Extremely romantic, sir” or “Exit second right, madam.” I’ve also heard Yeoman Warders use “Early riser,” “Elderly retainer,” and, of course, “Emergency Response, how can I help you?”

  The Yeoman Warder’s uniform—we don’t call it a costume, thank you, because it is not a costume, it is a uniform; there is a difference: a costume is a style, a uniform is a means of identification—was designed in the mid-1800s as a more comfortable form of dress for the Warders, who before that had to wear the full ceremonial outfit every day. These days we only wear the full state uniform on special occasions or in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen. Keeping the full state uniform fresh and stiff is a task in and of itself. (That famous Tudor ruff, for example, is made of a stiffly starched white cotton, crimped together, and held in place with some pretty heavy-duty thread. It’s designed to keep your neck straight and your head up in the presence of royalty, which it most certainly does.) We also have a semi-state uniform, which is basically a watered-down version of the full state. Semi-state consists of the State Dress jacket of royal scarlet, decorated with seventy-one meters of gold braid sewn onto strips of black velvet. Embroidered onto the chest is the royal crown and royal insignia and embroidered on the back is the Tudor rose of England and a thistle and shamrock, representing Scotland and Northern Ireland. In semi-state you wear white gloves and blue undress trousers but not the full state scarlet breeches, which are held tight just below the knee with gold braid and a brass buckle, adorned with Tudor rose rosettes made of red, white, and blue ribbons. Full state also requires the special highly polished shoes, with Tudor rose rosettes attached that match the rosettes on the breeches, and the dreaded scarlet woolen stockings, which are nowadays the much more practical thick tights, especially made for men with a hole at the front, for obvious purposes. (A long-standing joke is to instruct any new and unsuspecting male Yeoman Warder that the hole has to go at the rear.)

  Uniform on—and it’s out to meet the public.

  15

  THE STORY

  In the Tower we organize ourselves according to an ancient system of work called the Waite, which is basically a kind of rota which ensures that there are always the right number of people on duty at the various posts throughout the Tower, day and night. There are posts on the inner circuit and posts on the outer circuit. We also work what we call Specials, which are the world-famous Yeoman Warder guided tours. Each tour lasts for about an hour, and we do three tours a day.

  Doing the tours takes some getting used to. Being a Yeoman Warder requires a unique skill set, which the military doesn’t entirely prepare you for: it’s sort of a cross between being a security guard, a ceremonial guard, an amateur historian, and a stand-up comedian. One piece of advice: do not, under any circumstances, heckle a Yeoman Warder giving you a tour. All I’ll say is if you come on a tour and want to heckle, it pays to have a good sense of humor and a pretty thick skin.

  * * *

  I love doing the tours. For me it’s one of the best parts of the job. My tour usually begins with the words “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress, the Tower of London. My name is Chris, I’m the Ravenmaster here, and for the next five hours I’m going to be your guide…” The tour doesn’t actually last for five hours, of course, but like all of us Yeoman Warders I could probably talk about it for at least that long, if not much longer.

  When you’re first taken on at the Tower you’re appointed one of the older Yeoman Warders as a mentor. My mentor, now long since retired, was a brilliant tour guide, one of the greats. With your mentor you learn what we call the Story. The Story is a script about the history of the Tower and all its buildings, all of the historical events and characters connected to the Tower, all the dates and anniversaries, the ghost stories, and the stories about torture and execution and murder and mystery. It covers absolutely everything Tower-related that you can possibly think of, and you have to learn all thirteen thousand words of it. Many of the details haven’t changed for more than two hundred years, since we first started admitting large numbers of visitors to the Tower in the early nineteenth century. It takes about an hour or an hour and a half to recite the whole thing, and you have to be able to recite it to your mentor verbatim, from memory, word for word, from beginning to end. The Story forms the basis of the tours—and it is a story. I always say to our visitors, if you want to know the actual history of the Tower, don’t ask a Yeoman Warder, go and read a book. If you want to know about history, read some history. If
you want to hear a story, come on a tour.

  Once you’ve learned the Story you can improvise around it, adding your own insights and details, but not until you’ve learned it exactly, precisely, by heart. This way, at any time during a tour another Yeoman Warder can take over if necessary, because frankly sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes you have people who are taken ill on the tour, and there are all sorts of other problems that can arise when you’re dealing with the public. You can imagine. We’ve seen it all. We quite often have fainters, for example, who get overcome when we talk about some of the more gruesome parts of the Tower’s history.

  To be a good Yeoman Warder you’ve got to be able to tell a good story. You’ve got to be a storyteller. You have to be able to captivate an audience, whether they’re age eight or they’re eighty, whether there’s twenty of them or two hundred of them, wherever they’re from, and even if English isn’t their first language. It’s a form of public theater, an open-air one-man or one-woman show, and your only instrument is your voice. I always warm up with a few vocal exercises—do-re-mi and a bit of mmm-ing and ee-ing for resonance—and then I’ll make my way down to the Byward Tower, have a quick sip of water, and walk out to meet the group. Breathe. Smile. Talk.

  You always know straightaway, within the first couple of minutes, whether you’ve got a good audience, and if they’re a good audience, they get a great tour. And if they’re not, well, they still get a great tour, but it definitely takes that extra little bit of work. You have to work the crowd. And they certainly work you. People pay a lot of money to come into the Tower, and quite rightly they want to hear the tales and legends told properly, whatever sort of a day you’ve had, and whatever sort of a day they’re having. Sometimes you get couples who are arguing, or you get children who don’t want to be there, or adults who don’t want to be there, but still you’ve got to find a way of telling them about the two boy princes, and the Duke of Monmouth with his head sewn back on his body, and Anne Boleyn, with her lips and eyes moving after she’d been beheaded. You can’t mess it up and you can’t let them down. You have to find a way of telling the same stories and answering the same questions day in, day out. You not only have to find your own way of telling the Story, you also have to find your own way of retelling the Story. When I act as a mentor to Yeoman Warder trainees I always remind them that even though they might have told the story a thousand times, for the paying visitor it’s their first time.

  Doing a really great tour is like being a jazz musician: a moment’s improvisation based on a lifetime’s experience. You can learn the Story in about six months. But there’s a world of difference between mere rote learning and real mastery. You can use all sorts of tricks to be able to recall the basic facts: picture association, memory palaces. My mentor taught me all that. But to make the Story your own probably takes three or four years of solid practice. If you’re someone who wants to tell the Story with a bit of humor, you have to learn how to tell a joke. You have to get your timing exactly right. You have to know what to leave out, and when to pause, what to emphasize. And if you want to add details or facts they’ve got to be accurate. There has to be a satisfying shape to the story. And you have to have stamina. After more than a decade of treading the boards at the Tower I’m probably as good at it now as I’m ever going to be, but I’m still always trying to perfect the Story.

  Exactly where I get my interest in storytelling I don’t really know. At the hair salon back in Dover where my mum and my nan worked, there was certainly a lot of chat, and my nan Marie was also an amateur opera singer. She was a tiny lady with a big personality, and she and my granddad were leading lights in the Dover Operatic Society, so there was definitely something theatrical about them. They used to take us on holiday in their beautiful old golden Humber car, with us children rolling around in the back on the red leather seats, and we would drive all the way to Bibione in northern Italy, with its beautiful beach. We’d go to their house in Dover for Christmas, and there might be up to about twenty of us gathered around the giant table in the dining room, the good room, and they would grind their own coffee and they would serve us children cider and biscuits. There was a river at the end of the garden, and we’d all head down there with fishing nets to catch sticklebacks. We’d ride around on our bikes and trikes. It was really a magical place. Maybe that’s where I inherited my love of spectacle and theater.

  Or maybe it’s just human nature, to want to entertain others and ourselves. I remember back in Dover, camping out with my mates on Sugar Loaf Hill, scaring ourselves senseless with ghost stories. I was always in the plays at school—the bright lights, the experience of putting on a show. Dressing up, the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd, all of that. I was also in the church choir. For a brief period, I was head choirboy—don’t tell my Yeoman Warder colleagues, though, or I’ll never hear the last of it! At school I always loved history classes because history meant stories. Real “sceptr’d isle” sort of stuff. And in the army, there were all the long nights standing guard, telling stories about old girlfriends and drunken nights on the town and tall tales from our operational tours of duty.

  When I was coming toward the end of my military career I went to the army careers office to talk to them about my options and I said I might like to do something connected with history. I wouldn’t say they laughed out loud, but certainly their ideas about what old soldiers could do and my ideas about what I wanted to do were not the same. I knew that I wanted to do something that stretched me a bit. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of options for history-loving storytelling infantry soldiers, let alone infantry soldiers who are drum- and fife-playing specialist machine gunners—these are very niche skills. Despite all of the skills I’d learned, I realized I was going to have to start all over again.

  So I decided to take matters into my own hands, and while I was still serving, I took myself off to do a part-time degree course in archaeology at Sussex University. I wanted to go all the way back and start at the very beginning—I think I rather fancied myself as the next Indiana Jones. And it was great fun, let me tell you, going to university. I’d never experienced anything quite like that before: it was more of a culture shock than joining the army. Little did I know that just like my military training, all this new experience—learning how to independently research a subject, explaining your thinking in seminars and small groups—was going to put me in good stead for working at the Tower.

  I was at this time on a posting down in Brighton as a PSI—a permanent staff instructor—of a machine gun platoon, training Territorials, the U.K.’s volunteer army reserve force. It was a great job. It meant I could be at home with my family much more. It was the closest thing to a normal life during my whole career in the military. This was when I started working on my degree. One day I was talking to the old caretaker at the Brighton Territorial Army Centre about my love of history and he suggested that if I liked history so much, I should apply to become a Yeoman Warder. I barely knew what a Yeoman Warder was, and I certainly didn’t know you could apply to become one. He had a friend who worked up in the Jewel House at the Tower and he got me a number to ring. So I just called up the Chief Yeoman Warder and asked for an application form. Easy.

  16

  APPLICATION

  Not so easy. I was about to apply to the Tower when I realized I didn’t meet the essential criteria. I had the minimum required twenty-two years of unblemished service in the military, but you’re supposed to be at least the rank of a Warrant Officer, which I was not. I was a Colour Sergeant. If you’re a drummer, a Colour Sergeant is about as far as you can go, because you spend a lot of your time training and organizing the drum corps. A Colour Sergeant is just above a Sergeant but below a Warrant Officer. So it looked like I was out even before I tried to get in. Nonetheless, my wife encouraged me to apply. She’s like me—she has what you might call a can-do attitude, only more so. Quite literally I wouldn’t be here without her.

  The Tower received about
a hundred applications the year I applied—2005—and just twelve people were invited for interview. I was among them. For the interview you had to give a twenty-minute presentation on a figure from history. I chose Henry VI, allegedly stabbed to death while at prayer in the Tower, in the Wakefield Tower, on the night of May 21, 1471. This was me, remember, who’d barely scraped through school! I did all my research—I read all the books and the articles—and I knew my presentation by heart. Instead of doing weapons training or drill with my platoon in Brighton I would get them to listen to me practicing my presentation. Brighton TA 3PWRR Machine Gun Platoon: sorry, lads.

  So on the day of the interview my wife and I traveled up to the Tower. I’ve only ever had two job interviews, and on both occasions I was fully accompanied by the women in my life: my mum came with me to the army recruiting office in Dover back in the early 1980s, and my wife came with me to the Tower of London almost twenty-five years later!

  When we arrived at the Tower, my wife went on a tour to show partners of the applicants an idea of what it might be like to live here, while those of us who’d applied for the job were gathered together to meet the Chief Yeoman Warder, who introduced himself and then organized us into groups to do our presentations. When it came to my turn I was pretty nervous, but I gave it my all and thought it went okay—except I do remember the Chief Yeoman Warder and the other Tower staff sitting there stony-faced throughout. Then we were interviewed individually. There were the standard interview questions: Why do you want to come and work here? What skills and experience can you bring to the job? Tell us about a time when you had to act as part of a team. The usual sort of thing. Then there were a few questions specific to the Tower: How would you feel about people taking photographs of you all day long? Fortunately I’d rehearsed answers to all the questions I could anticipate. I can honestly say I put my heart and soul into that interview.