The London Walker

“Feed the birds, tuppence a bag,” sings the old woman in Mary Poppins. She’s sitting on the steps of St Paul’s, which is a stretch geographically, as we associate pigeon-feeding with Trafalgar Square. It’s an even bigger stretch considering the actress was sitting in Walt Disney’s Burbank Studios in California, with St Paul’s a painted glass plate behind her. And here lies a modest ambiguity, one of many, concerning our relationship with this quite remarkable creature. The film treats feeding the birds with tenderness, fun, a sense of tradition; nowadays, they are seen as pests, vermin banned and chased from the capitals famous landmarks, although I don’t believe anyone has yet told the pigeons.

I do need to fore-warn you: I have gone further down this pigeon hole than was probably sensible. What I found is that the history of the pigeon is, strangely enough, also a reflection and a history of us, and sometimes we don’t come out looking that good.

We’re fond, indeed sentimental about the animals who share our homes and have dutifully helped with our labours: be it the dog, the cat, or the horse. The pigeon, though, rarely makes the list, and yet it has been with us for thousands of years. We domesticated it, bred it, housed it, raced it, on occasion ate it, sent it with messages, took the poor thing off to war. Then, in a fine display of our human character, once we no longer needed it, we decided it was best to be rid of.

The relationship goes back further than you’d think, and of course, it started badly for the pigeon. In Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, archaeologists found rock dove bones, estimated to be 67,000 years old, bearing clear cut marks and signs of burning. Our Neanderthal cousins were catching pigeons and cooking them. Not quite domestication, more a light lunch, something to tidy you over before dinner.

I had hoped, being very much a dog person, to provide some proof that the pigeon had beaten the cat to domesticity. But I’m afraid I can’t. The dog obviously has a comfortable lead. They’ve been mastering our affections, indeed exploiting them, longer than any other species, but the cat and the pigeon trail somewhere behind, with the dating still long debated.

What’s certain is that the ancient Egyptians, as they raised their mighty tombs along the Nile, were keeping pigeons in great numbers, for their meat and for their dung, which made a brilliant fertiliser. The Romans took it further. Their dovecotes were so grand that the Latin word for one, columbarium – pigeon house, ended up being used to describe the niches in Roman tombs, where the dead were stacked in rows, much like the well-behaved feathered tenants in the gardens above.

Pliny the Elder records pigeons carrying messages out of besieged Mutina in 43 BC during the struggles involving Mark Antony and Octavian, at the time of the Second Triumvirate. Already the pigeon was proving useful in the business of human conflict, a career it would pursue with remarkable distinction.

And in Roman London, we have a rather lovely little survivor. A beautiful depiction of a bird, modelled from white clay, was discovered near King William Street, in the heart of the old City. Dating to the first century AD, its purpose remains something of a mystery. Perhaps it was an offering at a shrine, or simply a child’s toy. What we can be sure of is that it’s definitely a pigeon. A London pigeon!

The Normans are most commonly credited with establishing the great medieval dovecote tradition in Britain. They used it more or less as a statement of class and wealth. In many places the right to keep one was restricted to the lord of the manor, and a substantial dovecote could easily hold hundreds of birds. The birds fed in the local tenants’ fields, and in return the manor got fresh meat and eggs. You, however, being a lowly peasant and much resented, could not touch them, only watch the birds eat your cabbages and seedlings.

The droppings in these enormous dovecotes were harvested too, for tanning, fertiliser and, by the Tudor period, for saltpetre, a key ingredient in gunpowder. Funny to think now, but officials could turn up with a warrant and dig the proverbial ‘s**t’ out of your dovecote. The pigeon, in short, was a nobleman’s asset and a useful component of national security, and its poo could make cannons go ‘bang’!

But keeping hundreds of birds inevitably led to a few pitching for freedom and setting off on their own journeys of independence. Like Dick Whittington there must have been enigmatic adventurous pigeons who flocked to the capital to seek their fortunes. London, with its crowded rooftops, church towers, and endless supply of discarded food, must have seemed a promising place.

By 1666, the City was full of them, under the bridge, in the gates, in lofts, under eaves, in the turrets and walls of the Tower. On 2nd September, as the Great Fire took hold and swept through the city, Samuel Pepys wrote a line that has stuck with me longer than most of his extraordinary diary:

“the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balcony’s till they were some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.“

The birds wouldn’t leave their homes. It’s an odd detail to find moving in an account of an entire city burning, and yet it is. Pigeons possess an extraordinary attachment to a place, an instinct so powerful that we would later harness it to carry messages across continents and through the chaos of war. They know where they belong, and can travel remarkable distances to get there. And clearly, as Pepys was witnessing, this attachment to familiar roosts was a powerful one. The birds despite the heat and flames, couldn’t leave their rooftop nests, their loved territories, and so died as a result.

The City was being consumed, and even its birds seemed reluctant to let go.

Victorian London took the pigeon and made a hobby of it, known with understatement as “the fancy”, an obsessive urban subculture. Across the poorer streets of the East End, pigeon lofts became a familiar sight. In and around Spitalfields, Charles Dickens observed the curious popularity of keeping birds among people living in crowded, often miserable conditions. There was something rather poignant about it, perhaps the appeal wasn’t so difficult to understand. A pigeon could go where its owner couldn’t, it could climb into the clear blue sky in great beautiful flocks, floating above the din and noise, and if all went to plan, they would loyally, almost lovingly, return.

The birds, most descending from the great medieval manor dovecotes, now belonged in small working class back gardens and rooftop lofts. On Sundays, birds could be bought and sold at Club Row in Bethnal Green, a market that survived into the late twentieth century.

Fantails, pouters, tumblers, carriers: breeders produced birds with ruffs, inflated chests and tails like open fans. Looking at illustrated records of these new hybrid versions it reminds me of the New York Met Gala. It seems like some birds were so weirdly bred they could neither fly nor walk, one record talks of a pigeon that was very good at falling backwards. I imagine a few of these strange versions were missing the good old days of living in cliffs around Gibraltar and featuring only lightly on the neolithic lunchtime menu. Ah, the good old days.

Charles Darwin, who was fascinated by absolutely everything, was completely hooked on pigeons and used them in his On the Origin of Species. He kept them at Down House, joined London fanciers’ clubs that met in pubs across the capital, and gave pigeons pride of place in the opening arguments of his famous work. His point was that if a few generations of London breeders could turn one wild rock dove into all of these, imagine what nature might manage with a few million years.

The theory of evolution owes something to men in London pubs, sat around wobbly tables knocking back pints of frothy brown ale, talking to Darwin about pigeons.

The class distinctions were rather telling, too. Gentlemen shot pigeons, including live birds released from traps at fashionable shooting clubs. Working men flew them. And somewhere between the two, the pigeon became a source of entertainment, competition, status and considerable financial investment. Fortunes would be paid for racing birds.

Even our language bears traces of these peculiar arrangements. When the country estates traded in live birds for clay targets, they became known as clay pigeons. The expression stool pigeon, meaning a police informer, has its origins in the use of decoy birds to lure others into traps. Then there was pigeon English where we reference the colourful blending of languages and phrases, putting the cat among the pigeons was a way of saying chaos would ensue.

In the City, meanwhile, the birds had a day job. In 1850, Paul Julius Reuter used carrier pigeons to transport stock prices between Aachen and Brussels, bridging a gap in the European telegraph network, before moving to London and founding the news agency that carries his name. There’s a persistent story that Nathan Rothschild learned the result of Waterloo by pigeon and made a fortune on it. It’s obviously untrue, but thats never stopped anyone in the City, as well as a whole bunch of tour guides, from repeating a good rumour.

The pigeon’s talent was simple but extraordinary. Take a bird far from its home, release it, and it will find its way back. No wires, no batteries, no GPS. Just an instinct honed over generations, combined with a remarkable ability to recognise and interpret the world. A boomerang with feathers.

Humans being humans immediately saw, not a stunning talent of the natural world which is and remains largely beyond understanding, they saw instead ‘military possibilities‘.

During the two world wars, pigeons became messengers, carrying vital information across battlefields, over seas and through enemy territory. When radio communications failed or could not be risked, a bird with a small message attached to its leg could sometimes succeed where modern technology could not. And some became heroes.

In 1942, an RAF Beaufighter ditched in the North Sea. Among those on board was a pigeon called Winkie. Soaked and exhausted, she escaped and flew home. Although she carried no message, it enabled the RAF to work out where the plane had crashed. The stranded airmen were rescued as a result.

Winkie became one of the first recipients of the Dickin Medal, established in 1943 by Maria Dickin, founder of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, to honour extraordinary acts of bravery by animals in wartime.

Another pigeon, Gustav, carried news from the Normandy beaches on D-Day. During Operation Columba, pigeons were parachuted into occupied Europe in small containers, with instructions for civilians to attach information about German military activity and release them towards Britain. The Air Ministry grew so concerned about the safety of its pigeons that it ordered the destruction of peregrine falcons along parts of the south coast. My favourite story is the one that still won’t talk.

In 2012, the remains of a wartime pigeon were discovered in a chimney in Surrey, a coded message still attached to its leg. The message was examined by GCHQ, but without the necessary code material its meaning remained unresolved. What was on that scrap of paper?

And this brings us to the central London square where the pigeon became a celebrity, and eventually a pest.

For much of the twentieth century, Trafalgar Square was the great pigeon-feeding centre: a bag of seed, bird on your head, photograph for the album. For generations of visitors that was the London experience. Nowadays we do the London Eye or go up the Shard. I remember the old ladies selling bags of dried peas below the National Gallery. Then, in the early 2000s, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, decided the square had had enough. The pigeons were accused of fouling buildings, damaging stonework and creating an unpleasant environment for visitors. Numbers had reached several thousand. Feeding was banned and a Harris hawk was hired to patrol the place. If you are in town early in the morning go to the square before the crowds and you might catch site of the bird of prey and his handler doing a little wander.

The pigeons of London are refugees from domestication. They descend from a noble bird, Columba livia: the rock dove. Once a resident of cliffs and sea ledges, it much preferred a rocky shelf over a leafy bough. Which is fortunate, because to a bird with little grasp of global markets, a skyscraper looks like an enormous cliff face. Window ledges, railway arches, church towers, concrete bridges: we have built, in our cities, the largest pigeon habitat in the world. Wherever human beings build cities, the pigeons follow.

Then there’s the biology, which is where I lost most of an afternoon. Both parents make milk, a curdy secretion, to feed their chicks. Pigeons drink by suction, unlike most birds, which tip their heads back. The head-bob isn’t nerves: they hold the head still between steps so the eyes can lock on to the world. Navigation draws on the sun, magnetic fields, possibly smell and, in an Oxford study that tracked homing pigeons with GPS, roads. The birds followed them, and turned at the junctions. The London pigeon, it seems, has done the Knowledge, without the moped.

Look at a pigeon properly next time.

It’s been our lunch, our post, our hobby, our spy, our war hero and our nuisance. All it ever asked for was a ledge and a bite of something. We built it a cliff, then resented it for moving in.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing for more funny and intriguing stories, or better still come and join me on one of my public walks through the city, just check the walks page for the latest dates.