When Tower admission had teeth - London's original meal deal

However, it wasn’t until sometime in the 1700s that stories from the - newly named - Tower of London Menagerie started to get a little weird - visitors could apparently gain admission by paying threepence or by bringing their live domestic pets to be fed to the lions.

The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. Add to that updates relating to the podcast, a touch of humour and a dash of "lots more". 31st August 2025.

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Happy Sunday!
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There's been quite the uproar from animal rights groups and the public across the UK and Europe over the last few weeks.

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It turns out that some Zoos have embraced a rather unsentimental approach to retirement planning, where yesterday’s star attractions become today’s main course.

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In Germany, the Nuremberg Zoo euthanised 12 baboons due to overcrowding, which they then fed to the lions, tigers, wolves and polecats.

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Temperatures were raised further when the zoo announced that they had also dismembered the animals “out of respect for visitors” who may be watching the feed.

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The Aalborg Zoo in Denmark took a different approach; it advertised for pet owners to donate their ageing rabbits, chickens and guinea pigs to feed to its carnivorous residents such as the European lynx and Sumatran tiger.

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Outraged animal lovers might want to take a deep breath before looking too far back in history.

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If feeding ageing baboons to lions seems ghoulish, the Tower of London’s rather creative admission policy in the 18th century might be deemed downright barbaric.

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The Tower of London, on the banks of the River Thames in the shadow of Tower Bridge, has a side to its history which is well recognised.

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It started out as the central White Tower, completed in 1100 by the Normans.

One hundred and fifty years later, Henry III constructed the inner curtain wall, a moat and additional towers.

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By the end of the 13th century, Edward I had added the outer walls, integrated with St Thomas Tower, home of the Traitors’ Gate. And so on and so on.

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As the years passed, those additions and renovations became part of the history of the Tower, like the evolving growth rings in the cross-section of a tree trunk.

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However, there is another history to the Tower of London that is less well known.

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It all started in the early 1200s when the unpopular and ineffective King John (1199 - 1216) received “three boatloads of animals from Normandy”.

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Diplomatic gifts were wonderfully uncomplicated in those days. You didn’t send flowers or a decent bottle of claret. You sent lions. Or bears.

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But where to put a collection of large, hungry and probably cranky predators who have been confined during a crossing of the English Channel?

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It’s a bit like gifting someone a piano without checking if they live in the attic flat of a four-storey Victorian terrace. In this case, however, the piano had claws and an insatiable appetite for raw meat.

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King John’s solution was to house them at the Tower of London. They would be a visible extension of England’s royal prestige and provide some entertainment for select visitors and passing monarchs.

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The habit was catching, and the number of animals in captivity at the Tower steadily grew. But it was a gift from Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II to Henry III in 1235 that turbocharged the rate of expansion of the collection.

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He had dispatched three leopards, in recognition of England’s heraldic beasts.
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Out of Curiosity

King John's coat of arms comprises three prominent lions facing outwards, each with one paw raised as if caught mid-stride.
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In the 12-14th centuries throughout Western Europe, a ‘rampant’ lion referred to a lion standing on its hind legs, while a ‘leopard’ referred to a lion walking with its head turned at right angles to face the viewer.
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So, the assumed wisdom is that the gift from Frederick II was probably three lions, but referred to as ‘leopards’ to emphasise their relevance to the English coat of arms.

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Little did King John or Henry III realise that this impromptu gathering of exotic animals would be a permanent feature at the Tower for another 600 years.
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​The Royal Menagerie kept expanding. Lions appeared from Africa, bears from the Americas and, in 1252, King Haakon IV of Norway raised the stakes further by sending a polar bear.
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The list grew longer and more exotic: Pelicans, monkeys, lynxes, jackals, ostriches and hyenas; apparently, no animal was too rare, too temperamental or too completely unsuited to the English climate.
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Alongside the Lieutenant of the Tower’s duties of imprisoning human miscreants and organising the occasional execution, he now had to maintain the king’s menagerie.
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​Queen Elizabeth I changed things up a little when she allowed paying visitors to visit the Royal Menagerie. However, it wasn’t until sometime in the 1700s that stories from the - newly named - Tower of London Menagerie started to get a little weird;
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​Visitors could apparently gain admission by paying threepence or by bringing their live domestic pets to be fed to the lions*.
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Your cat, your dog, even your neighbour’s prize parrot could serve as both entertainment and a healthy meal for a bored lion.
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​Charles Dickens visited the menagerie as did Sir Edwin Landseer, the celebrated British artist and sculptor.
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In fact, it was Landseer’s hands-on familiarity with large cats, gained through his study and dissection work at the Tower of London Menagerie around 1814, which made him the perfect candidate to sculpt the four magnificent lions that now guard Nelson’s Column at Trafalgar Square.
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​By the 1830s, public attitudes towards animal welfare were softening. Perhaps feeding household pets to caged lions wasn’t such a great idea.
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​Practically speaking, the menagerie had become expensive to run and was proving even more impractical for nurturing exotic animals than it had been 600 years earlier under the reign of King John.
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In 1828, the new London Zoo at Regent’s Park opened with purpose-built enclosures and qualified keepers. The Tower of London Menagerie’s time would soon be up.
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The Duke of Wellington - he of Battle of Waterloo fame - had been Constable of the Tower since 1826. Presumably, having defeated Napoleon, he found London’s snarling predators less intimidating.

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Nonetheless, it was Wellington who was responsible for ordering the closure of the 600-year-old attraction.
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On a bleak morning 190 years ago last Thursday, 28 August 1835, the Tower of London Menagerie closed its doors for the last time. Most of the 150 animals were transported to London Zoo, with the remainder sold off privately.
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The closing of the menagerie represented a shift of British public opinion away from the idea of exotic animals suffering as entertainment, and more towards concepts of animal welfare and conservation.
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Ironically, this newfound concern for caged lions and tigers came three years before the British Empire freed its last enslaved humans in the colonies in 1838, set in play by the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.
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​The Empire’s moral compass was still searching for its true north.
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​*The general consensus among historians is that accounts of the menagerie’s admission policy to ‘bring-a-pet’ are plausible, but not proven. Certainly, cats and dogs were fed to lions for entertainment and documented accounts some time later confirm the practice existed. However, no direct evidence from the time has yet to be found to satisfy all historians.

Dates with History

Tomorrow…

Have you ever looked at a map of Europe and wondered why there is a small tract of land on the Baltic coast, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, that is actually Russian?
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That small territory is the Kaliningrad Oblast, with Kaliningrad its largest city. Today, it serves as the headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet, some 230 miles from mainland Russia.

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Kaliningrad is a heavily militarised zone filled with air defence systems, nuclear warheads, support aircraft and ballistic missiles able to reach 300 miles across Europe.
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​But how come?
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​For several centuries, the old Prussian settlement of ’Twangste’ existed on the site of today’s Kaliningrad. When the Teutonic Knights invaded and destroyed Twangste 770 years ago tomorrow, 1 September 1255, they renamed the new fortress ‘Königsberg’.
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Königsberg, ‘King’s Mountain’, was named in honour the Czech King Ottokar II of Bohemia.
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The name is a little bizarre, as the city and the surrounding region had no mountains to boast of.
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It’s a bit like calling my home seaside town of Bournemouth, ‘Alpine Heights’.
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Name aside, over the next 700 years, Königsberg would become a major trading hub, the capital of East Prussia and later part of the Kingdom of Prussia.
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The city gained a reputation as a centre of culture and learning. The philosopher Immanuel Kant was born and died there, professing to never have travelled more than ten miles from the city.
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Under German rule, Königsberg had become a major industrial centre with a population of over 300,000. However, Hitler’s invasion of Poland, 1 September 1939, was about to change that.
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The city was heavily damaged by the Royal Air Force between 26-30 August 1944. By January 1945, once the outcome of the war was inevitable, the Allied and Soviet armies were in a race to claim as much of Nazi-occupied Europe as possible.

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By April, Soviet forces had captured Königsberg. Having already annexed Lithuania, the Oblast fitted neatly into the USSR’s expanding jigsaw puzzle.
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Hitler had intended for Königsberg to become the showroom of German culture in the east, the poster boy for his Thousand-Year Reich.
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Instead, the Soviets moved in, expelled the German population and replaced them with some fairly disgruntled Soviet citizens.
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​The would-be beacon of German civilisation had become something rather different: a Soviet watchtower looming over the West.
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​The Soviets later renamed the city ‘Kaliningrad’ in July 1946, after Mikhail Kalinin, the delightfully long-winded Chairman of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet, who had died the month before.
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The naming was as obtuse as for Königsberg; Kalinin had no connection with Kaliningrad.
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Perhaps Stalin approved of the name as a particularly insensitive provocation towards the Poles. After all, Mikhail Kalinin had been one of six signatories to the order for the execution of 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940.
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By the time the USSR collapsed in 1991, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had already declared independence. However, Kaliningrad Oblast remained unaffected.
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Kaliningrad had become a Russian exclave nestled in the northeast of Europe.

And that’s how Kaliningrad remains today.
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Friday…

Lynette Fromme was born in 1948 in Santa Monica, California. Despite growing up in a conventional middle-class family, she suffered from depression and other emotional demons throughout her adolescence.
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Lynette had shown great early promise as a dancer, but life would take a different course. She later described her parents as “military tyrants” to the point that her father forced her out of the family home in her late teens.

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A period of experimenting with alcohol and drugs followed.
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After a couple of years, Lynette was feeling utterly alone in the world. One afternoon, while walking along Venice Beach, she was approached by a charming young man who had just stepped off a bus.
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After Lynette and ‘Charlie’ had chatted briefly, he started to walk away, supposedly calling back to her, “Your parents threw you out, didn’t they?”
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Lynette took the bait. She followed him.
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Charming Charlie turned out to be Charles Manson, the infamous cult leader who, in the late 1960s, lured his followers - usually young women - into committing a series of brutal murders.
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For the next few years, Lynette helped recruit new members, managed day-to-day operations and acted as spokesperson for the group. She was now fully part of the Manson Family and had become one of Manson’s most devoted followers.
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The predatory owner of the ranch where the Manson Family lived, George Spahn, gave Lynette the nickname ‘Squeaky’ based on her reaction to his wandering hands.
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When the cult leader Manson was locked up in 1971, Lynette moved with a friend to Sacramento to be close to him in Folsom Prison, twenty miles to the northeast.
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Fifty years ago this Friday, 5 September 1975, the seriously unhinged Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme left her home, dressed in a red robe and carrying a Colt .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol.
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At this stage in Fromme's life, two passions drove her: devotion to Charles Manson and her self-appointed mission to save California’s redwoods from car fumes - hence the red robe.
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Lynette would make a statement to the world about her beloved redwoods by assassinating the 38th President of the United States, Gerald Ford, who was passing within 15 minutes of her apartment that day.
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She positioned herself to confront the President as he shook hands with the well-wishers who had gathered in Sacramento’s Capitol Park.
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Just two feet away, Squeaky drew her pistol and aimed straight at Ford’s chest. Then, just as her finger tightened on the trigger, an alert Secret Service agent, Larry Buendorf, lunged forward.
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With barely a squeak, Lynette was dumped to the ground and arrested. As the bungling assassin was carted off into custody, she was heard to say, “It wouldn’t go off, can you believe it!”.

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As it happens, although the gun was loaded, Fromme couldn’t have killed the President anyway; she hadn’t worked the slide on the pistol to load a bullet into the chamber ready to fire.
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It was one of the most incompetent assassination attempts in American history, though Sara Jane Moore would give it a run for its money just 17 days later on the same beleaguered President Ford.
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Lynette would spend the next 34 years behind bars. She was released in 2009, more than two years after President Ford had died from natural causes.
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Today, Fromme leads a low-profile existence with her partner in Oneida County, New York. She is 76 years old.
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Charles Manson was put behind bars in 1971 and remained incarcerated there until his death in 2017.

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Question of the Week

He was born in Tel Aviv 80 years ago today, 31 August 1945, while the world was still picking through the rubble of war.
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At the age of three, he told his mother he wanted to be a violinist.
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He contracted polio when he was four years old, requiring him to walk with the aid of crutches and leg braces for the rest of his life.
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He has become one of the world’s great classical violinists.
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Who is he?

And Finally…

Ten days ago, I headed to London following my favourite route; less than two hours on the train to Waterloo, then that delightful walk out of the station across to the South Bank, up onto the east Golden Jubilee Bridge, over the Thames and into Charing Cross Station.
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From there, it’s a two-minute walk before you are standing in the heart of London, Trafalgar Square.
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To the south of the square, those four lions, designed and sculpted by Sir Edwin Landseer, have jealously guarded the base of Nelson’s column since 1867. Horatio stands watch high above, surveying London as if still on the poop deck of HMS Victory herself.
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To the north, the imposing facade of the National Gallery dominates the view.
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I was forty minutes early for my meet-up - time to soak up some culture, so into the National Gallery I went.
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You might remember a few weeks ago I mentioned one of my favourite paintings, ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ by the great British painter J.M.W. Turner.
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The H.M.S. Temeraire was the ship that saved the honour of Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, when she rammed the French ship Redoutable just before her crew attempted to board the Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
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Turner’s painting depicts the last journey of the Temeraire in 1838 as she is towed up the River Thames by a steam tug, to be broken up at Rotherhithe.
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He depicts the tug in dark, vivid colour with steam billowing from her chimney, while the Temeraire drifts in ghostly white, a nostalgic symbol of sail giving way to steam.
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Well, imagine my surprise as I wandered into Room 34 and there was The Fighting Temeraire in all her glory. I’d had no idea she even lived at the National Gallery.

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As an art newbie (well, I’m only 61), I won’t embarrass myself by trying to adequately describe the sensation of seeing a master in the flesh, so to speak. All I’ll say is that it must be akin to an out-of-body experience, a dreamy, drifting euphoria where time stands still.
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I had several more out-of-body moments in my forty-minute visit. Constables, Van Goghs, Canalettos, da Vincis, Raphaels, Michelangelos….. the list is endless.
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Beyond the popular masters, another painting grabbed my attention: Henri Rousseau’s Surprised! (or Tiger in a Tropical Storm, 1891). The painting is one of his many jungle scenes, entirely imagined I believe, as he never left France.
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A crouching tiger bares its teeth in dense foliage, perhaps startled by a storm, claws at the ready. The scene looks more like a collage of pressed leaves from someone’s back garden than a genuine jungle.
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Perhaps the appeal of the painting is the fact that so many questions are left unanswered: Why is he scared? Is he hunting prey? If so, where is it? Is that a snake or his tail? What is he walking on?

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The secrets in the painting make more sense when you learn about Rousseau’s personal life.
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He spent most of his working life as a customs officer in Paris, not even picking up a paintbrush until he was in his forties. As such, Rousseau had no formal training and approached his painting with the freedom and imagination of a schoolchild let loose on a canvas for the first time.
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​Rousseau's paintings are dreamscapes, they are painted from his imagination.​
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At first, critics sneered at Henri’s work. But in time, artists like Pablo Picasso began to recognise the genius in what had been dismissed as ‘childish’ and ‘amateurish’.
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A growing number came to see something magical in Rousseau’s unfettered imagination - the ability to capture wonder through apparent simplicity.
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Reading about Rousseau’s tragic life - five of his six children died in infancy - I wondered whether his ‘childlike’ imagination sprang from grief. Perhaps he felt connected to his lost children by seeing - and painting - the world through their eyes.
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Despite the best efforts of Picasso and others, Rousseau lived in poverty until he died from a leg infection 115 years ago this Tuesday, 2 September 1910.
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Today, Henri Rousseau’s paintings hang in the great museums of the world.

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Talk to me...

I am lucky enough to receive some great feedback about The Breezer from readers. We're all curious and find a wide range of historical characters and events fascinating.
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But occasionally, a specific subject will resonate all the more.
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If you have any areas of history that resonate with you, I would love to dig deep and include them in future Breezers.
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Just drop me an email at steve@battingthebreeze.com and let me know.
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Thanks, Steve

Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!

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Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

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P:S: Incidentally, I am always keen to receive your feedback to help me continuously improve this newsletter and the podcast. Just hit reply to this email and...... let it rip! I respond to every email that I receive.

Question of the week… answer

The violin virtuoso from Tel Aviv is Itzhak Perlman.
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Perlman has proved that physical limitations need not restrict ambition to play music.
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Perlman has wowed audiences worldwide for 70 years. His 1979 recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with The Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy remains my gold standard for classical music.
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He has won 16 Grammy Awards and performed for US President Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth II at the White House during her state visit in 2007.

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But Perlman’s greatest legacy may be his tireless work making classical music - sometimes stuffy and intimidating - accessible to children from all backgrounds.
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I still harbour hopes of seeing the maestro play live. If anyone would like to fly me out to America to watch one of his performances, feel free to email me anytime. He is 80 years old, so don’t dilly dally.
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Happy birthday Itzhak Perlman.

Out of Curiosity
Itzhak Perlman was born on the same day as another musical virtuoso of a different kind - Van Morrison, the “cantankerous” singer-songwriter from Northern Ireland, best known for Moondance and Brown Eyed Girl.