ENCOUNTERING AN OLD FAMILY GHOST

When I visit London, I always try to walk in the footsteps of my Victorian ancestors and around their old haunts. The name of one of them, my gg grandfather ‘William George Lemon’ (1830-1897), can be written anagram-style as ‘Glowing mile, more ale’.

One wet, dark evening in 2015 my daughter and I walked the mile (well, a kilometer actually) from Victoria station to enjoy the wine and ale of a small but haunted public house named 'The Grenadier' in Belgravia. The rain-splashed cobblestones glistened eerily, reflecting the lights from the affluent mews dwellings of the back-street crescent where the pub is hidden. The haunted pub stands right next door to where 10-year-old William George and his parents lived around 1840 and was originally built in 1720 as the officer’s mess for the 1^st Regiment of Foot Guards. In the map below you can see that the barracks was just across the Knightsbridge Road from Hyde Park and just north of Wilton Crescent.

The old barracks below Hyde Park is the rectangular block above "Ch" (church). The Grenadier pub is located just below the "Ch" and the Lemon home just inside them. This map circa-1840

The Grenadier c1935

Some floors of the building opened as a pub in 1818 which chose its name in honour of the Grenadier Guards who fought at Waterloo just 3 years earlier. The inn’s main clientele - the foot guards - were based in the old barracks buildings nearby, though the barracks themselves were demolished in the 1830s. Cottages, apartments and a mews block were built in its place, renamed as ‘Old Barracks Yard’. This was where the Lemmon family lived. Now, just as then, the pub is somewhat secluded and incongruous with the ostentatious homes of the affluent classes (and Embassies) around it. The Grenadier was supposedly frequented by the Duke of Wellington who kept horses nearby.

    While the officers dined on the upper floors, the common soldiers drank, gambled and squabbled in the cellar. The squabbling on occasion escalated to the point of murder and the pub is known for being haunted “every September by a silent figure who paces through the rooms rattling the furniture; this is said to be a young subaltern [junior officer] who was beaten to death there one September by fellow soldiers who accused him of cheating at cards.”*1. The year of this incident is unknown, only the month, but it was well before the 1840s. The Lemmon family likely knew of this haunted history.

“Objects either disappear or else are mysteriously moved overnight. Unseen hands rattle tables and chairs, and a strange icy chill has been known to hang in the air. On one occasion a Chief Superintendent from New Scotland Yard was enjoying a drink in the pub when wisps of smoke began to waft around him. His curiosity aroused, he reached towards the apparent source of the smoke, and with a cry of pain, pulled his hand quickly back an invisible cigarette burnt it.” *2. The ghost in question is known as “Cedric”. 

While Hannah and I were at the Grenadier, seated below a ceiling of old bank notes, her smartphone mysteriously froze and all the photos I took (on a Canon Mark-II camera) had an unusual glow and grain to them, not something simply attributable to a slow shutter speed or the poor light. Perhaps Cedric wanted to say hello for old time's sake... But this visit was in October not September.

The phone that mysteriously froze in a photo that should have been much better quality.

REFERENCES:

Source Ref.-1: Book; Green Men & White Swans: The Folklore of British Pub Names” by Jacqueline Simpson 2011

Source Ref.-2: Website: Story by Richard Jones on London Ghost Walks website 2004, accessed 2019