Chapter Twelve
Covent Garden
The Garden, the Murder and the Man in White Gloves
Why is Covent Garden called Covent Garden?
In brief: Covent Garden developed from Convent Garden, the cultivated land belonging to Westminster Abbey. Everyday speech shortened convent to covent before the name passed to the district and station.
Transport context: London Underground station.
After the last train, Covent Garden station changes profession.
By day it receives the world in batches. Lift doors open and release families, theatre parties, shoppers, dancers, waiters beginning a shift and visitors who have mistaken proximity on the map for ease of movement underground. They arrive in the ticket hall with the compressed impatience of people who have travelled only one stop. Outside, James Street carries them towards the Piazza as efficiently as a channel carries rain.
At night the station belongs to its staff.
The gates are shut. The lifts cease their rising and falling. Air moves along the platforms with no passenger to feel it. A station built to process crowds becomes, for a few hours, an arrangement of empty corridors, tiled walls and doors whose purpose is less obvious when no one is using them.
In November 1955, according to the story later told, a foreman ticket collector named Jack Hayden is working below ground when he sees a man where no passenger should be.
The stranger is tall and formally dressed. His clothes appear old-fashioned. He has a pale or grey face and wears light gloves. Hayden speaks to him. The man does not answer. He turns away and disappears behind a partition, or towards the emergency stairs, depending upon which version of the account one follows.1
There are further reports. Another employee is said to have been frightened badly enough to ask for a transfer. A station foreman with an interest in spiritualism becomes involved. A sketch is compared with photographs of a Victorian actor who has been dead for nearly sixty years.
The name proposed for the figure is William Terriss.
This is the point at which a history may surrender to a ghost story. It is also the point at which a ghost story should be made to show its papers.
The murder of William Terriss is documented. The actor existed; his fame was real; his death was violent. The later sightings at Covent Garden station are testimony, retelling and folklore. They cannot be verified in the same manner. Even the explanation commonly offered for the haunting—that Terriss regularly visited a bakery on the station site—appears to have no contemporary evidence behind it.2
The distinction does not spoil the story.
It tells us what kind of story it is.
A city makes ghosts from fact, fear and geography. The dead man supplies the face. The station supplies the darkness. Memory performs the rest.
Long before the ghost, long before the actor and long before the railway, there is a garden.
It lies west of the walled City, between the roads that will become St Martin’s Lane and Drury Lane. The land belongs to the Benedictine Abbey of St Peter at Westminster. It covers about forty acres and is enclosed by an earth or mud wall, thatched along the top. The earliest surviving document referring to it is attributed to the reign of King John.3
The garden is not ornamental in the later sense. It must work.
There are orchards, pasture, meadow and arable ground. Apples and pears go to the monks’ table; cherries, plums, medlars and nuts probably grow there too. Barley, hay, vetches and straw are sold when there is a surplus. Trees blown down in storms become income. Animals graze. A keeper accounts for the produce, or fails to account for enough of it and attracts suspicion.
The place is the convent garden: the garden of the convent at Westminster.
Speech wears away a word as feet wear stone. Convent Garden becomes Covent Garden. The missing syllable is not a mystery, and no covenant is involved. The name begins as a description of land use. It survives because London later forgets almost everything the description referred to.
No monk now gathers pears beneath the Piazza.
The Abbey does not keep the garden for ever. In 1536 Henry VIII takes possession of it, several years before the formal dissolution of Westminster Abbey. The land passes through royal hands and, in 1552, is granted to John Russell, Earl of Bedford. The Russell family will retain an interest in the estate for almost four centuries.4
For a time the ground remains open. London is nearby but not yet complete. This is land on which the city is thinking of building.
In the 1630s the fourth Earl of Bedford begins to develop it. Inigo Jones provides designs for a church and for houses arranged around a great open Piazza. The scheme is among the earliest important exercises in planned urban development beyond the old City. It introduces London to a new kind of space: continental in inspiration, ordered in appearance, profitable in intention.5
The houses are meant for people of consequence. The square is broad. St Paul’s Church stands at its western end. Arcades shelter the ground floors. The architecture implies control.
London accepts the implication and then behaves as it pleases.
Traders begin selling fruit and vegetables in the open space. In 1670 the market receives a royal charter. What begins as a convenience grows into an organism. Carts arrive before dawn. Porters carry baskets and crates. Cabbages, onions, apples, flowers and herbs move through the square. The produce is perishable, so the work is urgent. The streets are narrow, so the work is obstructive. The market feeds London while repeatedly preventing London from passing through it.6
The Piazza’s first wealthy residents withdraw. Taverns, coffee houses, lodging houses, theatres and brothels gather around the trade. Covent Garden becomes respectable in architecture and unruly in use. It is a place where a duke may own the ground, a costermonger command the street and an actress determine the evening’s traffic.
The district learns to perform.
The Theatre Royal opens in Drury Lane after the Restoration. A theatre on the east side of the Piazza develops into the institution now known as the Royal Ballet and Opera. St Paul’s becomes the Actors’ Church, not because actors are especially obedient parishioners, but because the theatre world has settled around it. Playhouses, rehearsal rooms, taverns and theatrical lodgings make the neighbourhood a second city whose working day begins when clerks elsewhere are preparing to go home.7
The market and the stage share certain requirements. Both depend upon timing. Both trade in appearances. Both are brutal towards failure.
By the nineteenth century the old arrangement is overwhelmed by its own success. In 1828–30 Charles Fowler replaces the confusion of central stalls with a formal stone market building. Glass roofs are added later. Flower markets and subsidiary halls spread into neighbouring streets. But architecture cannot solve the problem of volume. Carts jam the approaches. Refuse accumulates. At dawn the district belongs to commerce; by evening it must prepare itself for pleasure.
This is the Covent Garden into which William Terriss comes as a famous man.
The Man He Had Helped
His real name is William Charles James Lewin. Before the theatre claims him, he tries other lives: the merchant navy, tea planting in Assam, medical work, sheep farming in the Falkland Islands and horse breeding in the United States. The attempts are varied and not uniformly successful. On stage, however, uncertainty becomes an asset. He can appear to have lived more lives than one man reasonably should.8
Terriss is handsome, athletic and especially effective in heroic roles. He works with Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. Audiences know him as Robin Hood, Ivanhoe and the man who enters in time to prevent disaster. His popularity earns him the nickname Breezy Bill.
Richard Archer Prince belongs to the less fortunate part of the profession.
He is an actor too, but work has become irregular and grievance more dependable. Terriss has tried to help him. He has found him small parts and given him money. Assistance, however, can become humiliating when the recipient believes he deserves equality. Prince comes to think that the famous actor who has helped him is also the man preventing his success.9
On the evening of 16 December 1897, Terriss approaches the private stage door of the Adelphi Theatre in Maiden Lane. He is due to appear in Secret Service. The public entrance is elsewhere; this is the working threshold, used by people who know the building from behind.
Prince is waiting with a knife.
He stabs Terriss three times.
The actor is carried inside. Jessie Millward, his long-standing stage partner, is with him when he dies. He is fifty years old. The evening’s performance is cancelled.9
The murder shocks London partly because it reverses the logic by which audiences know Terriss. On stage, danger is announced by music, scenery and plot. The hero understands the role assigned to him and survives until the proper moment. In Maiden Lane, there is no rehearsal and no agreed ending.
The theatre’s machinery can produce a convincing death every night.
It cannot undo a real one.
Prince is arrested. At his trial he is found guilty but insane and is detained at Broadmoor. The case has the structure of melodrama—the failed actor, the benefactor, the grievance, the stage door—but none of melodrama’s moral tidiness. Help has not purchased gratitude. Fame has not provided protection. The curtain cannot be lowered quickly enough.
Terriss is buried at Brompton Cemetery. A plaque in Maiden Lane records the murder. Stories arise that his ghost haunts the Adelphi Theatre, where an apparition has at least a geographical reason to appear.10
Covent Garden Underground station does not yet exist.
It opens a decade after his death.
The Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway has begun running through central London in December 1906. Covent Garden station opens in the following spring, at the corner of Long Acre and James Street. Its architect is Leslie Green, whose stations give the new electric railway a recognisable face: steel frames clad in glossy ox-blood faience, broad semicircular windows and the name of the station set into the building itself.11
Green is creating corporate identity before London commonly uses the phrase. A passenger who cannot remember the railway company can recognise the red station. Below ground, coloured tile patterns distinguish one stop from another. The design is decorative, but also practical in a system serving passengers who may not read English easily, or at all.
Covent Garden lies deep enough to require lifts. A spiral staircase coils around the shaft for emergencies and for those who mistake a warning for a challenge. It has 193 steps. The railway still advises passengers to use the lifts.12
The journey from Leicester Square is exceptionally short. A train has scarcely gathered conviction before it must stop again. Yet Covent Garden station acquires its own necessity because the district above attracts people in numbers that make distance irrelevant.
Market workers use it. Theatre audiences use it. Shoppers, performers and tourists follow. The railway carries the name farther than the monks, the Bedfords or the market traders could have imagined.
By the time the ghost story emerges in the 1950s, the station already possesses all the necessary scenery.
There are tiled passages in which footsteps travel farther than their owners. There are lifts that leave an attendant alone between arrivals. There is an emergency staircase curving out of sight. After closing time, a man can disappear around a corner without first becoming supernatural.
Then there are the white gloves.
They matter because they are needless. A coat protects against cold; a hat belongs to weather or fashion. White gloves suggest ceremony, evening dress, performance. They turn an unidentified man into someone who has arrived from another social world. Once the staff connect the figure with a murdered Victorian actor, every detail begins to cooperate.
This is how identification works in a ghost story. It proceeds backwards from recognition.
The accounts reported in 1955 and early 1956 speak of a tall, distinguished figure appearing in staff areas and on the emergency stairs. Later retellings give Hayden repeated encounters. A séance is said to have produced part of a name and a reference to murder. Photographs of Terriss are brought forward; staff identify him as the man they saw.1
None of this proves that William Terriss walks beneath Long Acre.
It proves that by the mid-twentieth century his murder remained available to local memory, and that an empty Underground station could give that memory a body.
The bakery explanation comes later: Terriss supposedly visited premises that once occupied the site. It is neat, which is usually a reason for caution. The station stands some distance from the Adelphi, the place most securely connected to him, and was built after his death. Folklore dislikes an unexplained commute. It supplies the bakery to pay his fare.2
The wholesale market above ground, unlike the ghost, becomes impossible to ignore.
By the twentieth century its traffic has overwhelmed the historic streets. Lorries replace many carts but do not require less space. Proposals to move the market are discussed for decades. In November 1974, the fruit, vegetable and flower trade finally transfers to Nine Elms.13
Covent Garden loses the activity that has defined it for three hundred years.
For a moment the area appears vulnerable to comprehensive redevelopment. Roads might be widened. Old buildings might be cleared. Instead, after determined opposition to demolition, the market halls are restored and adapted. Shops, cafés, restaurants and performance spaces occupy a district once organised around wholesale produce.
The market becomes a place where visitors buy things rather than a machine for feeding the city.
This transformation is sometimes described as preservation. It is also replacement. The buildings remain, but the hours, smells and labour change. No porter shoulders a basket of cabbages through the Piazza at four in the morning because a tourist would find the scene picturesque.
The name survives another disappearance.
First the convent garden ceased to be a convent garden.
Then the aristocratic square ceased to be aristocratic.
Then the wholesale market ceased to be wholesale.
Covent Garden has remained itself by repeatedly becoming something else.
The station participates in the same trick. Its ticket hall has been modernised, its lifts replaced and much of its tiling renewed in replica, yet Leslie Green’s ox-blood façade still announces continuity. People emerge beneath a name more than eight centuries old and walk towards a district arranged largely for the present.
Most do not come seeking a ghost.
They come for the Piazza, the Royal Opera House, street performers, restaurants, shops and the London Transport Museum. The station can become so crowded that walking from Leicester Square is sometimes the more comfortable approach. A place once designed to handle market produce now handles visitors with similar problems of congestion.
The Weary Traveller should nevertheless take the lift.
At street level, turn towards the Piazza. St Paul’s Church stands at the western side, its churchyard holding memorials to actors and theatre people. The market buildings occupy the centre. Beyond them are streets whose names—Floral Street, Maiden Lane, Long Acre—carry fragments of former work and former geography.
Then walk south-east towards the Strand and find the rear of the Adelphi Theatre in Maiden Lane. The plaque marks where Terriss was attacked.
The distance is useful.
It prevents the easy illusion that every part of the story happened at the station. Terriss died near the theatre in 1897. The station opened in 1907. The alleged sightings began more than half a century later. History places these facts apart. Folklore draws a corridor between them.
Return after dark, when the crowds have thinned but not vanished. The red tiles of the station shine under electric light. Inside, passengers wait for the lifts. Some choose the stairs and encounter, step by step, the consequences of optimism.
No announcement mentions William Terriss.
No sign warns of a man in white gloves.
That is proper. A railway must distinguish operational information from legend more firmly than a book is required to do.
Yet the ghost story belongs here, not because it has been proved, but because it reveals how London uses its Underground. Below ground, ordinary uncertainties acquire depth. A draught becomes breath. A distant footstep loses its owner. A figure glimpsed at the end of a passage arrives already halfway to the past.
Above ground, Covent Garden performs for visitors.
Below ground, it performs for itself.
The convent has gone. The garden has gone. The old market has moved. The murdered actor never entered the station said to contain his ghost.
Still the name descends in the lift, passes through the tiled corridors and waits upon the platform.
The next station is Covent Garden.
The doors open.
Among the living, there is room for one more passenger.
Notes and Sources
The Underground sightings are folklore rather than independently verifiable events. A detailed modern reconstruction cites a Sunday Dispatch report of 15 January 1956 concerning alleged appearances to station staff and a report sent within London Transport: Haunted Britain, “The Ghost of William Terriss — A Covent Garden Haunting”. Later retellings differ in dates and details; the chapter therefore treats the claimed encounters as reported testimony, not established fact.↩ ↩
Haunted Britain, “The Ghost of William Terriss”. The often-repeated claim that Terriss habitually visited a bakery on the future station site has not been supported by contemporary records located by the author of that investigation. The station was built after Terriss’s death.↩ ↩
Survey of London, “The Bedford Estate: Covent Garden and the seven acres in Long Acre”, British History Online. The convent garden covered about forty acres between St Martin’s Lane and the road now called Drury Lane. Its earliest documentary reference is attributed to the reign of King John; medieval accounts record orchard, pasture, arable and meadow use and the sale or consumption of produce.↩
Survey of London, “The Bedford Estate: Covent Garden and the seven acres in Long Acre”. Henry VIII took possession on 1 June 1536. After passing through the hands of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, Covent Garden and Long Acre were granted to John Russell, Earl of Bedford, on 28 May 1552.↩
Survey of London, “The Bedford Estate: From 1627 to 1641”, and Historic England, “Royal Opera House”. The estate was developed in the 1630s around an open Piazza, with designs by Inigo Jones for St Paul’s Church and houses on the north and east sides. The scheme was a formative example of planned expansion beyond the City.↩
Westminster City Council, Covent Garden Conservation Area Information Leaflet, and Historic England, Changing London: Covent Garden Saved. A small produce market developed in the seventeenth century and was regularised by a charter granted in 1670. Charles Fowler’s central market building was constructed in 1828–30.↩
Historic England, “Royal Opera House”, and Survey of London, “Covent Garden Theatre and the Royal Opera House”. The district’s theatre history developed after the Restoration, alongside the market and the planned Piazza.↩
The Royal Parks, “William Terriss (1847–1897)”, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Adelphi Theatre Calendar entry for William Terriss. Terriss, born William Charles James Lewin, pursued several occupations before establishing a successful acting career, becoming especially popular in heroic and romantic roles and known as “Breezy Bill”.↩
The Royal Parks, “William Terriss (1847–1897)”. Terriss was stabbed three times at the Adelphi Theatre stage door on 16 December 1897 by the out-of-work actor Richard Archer Prince, whom Terriss had previously assisted. Prince was declared insane and detained at Broadmoor.↩ ↩
The Royal Parks, “William Terriss (1847–1897)”. Terriss is buried in Brompton Cemetery; a green plaque at the Adelphi’s stage-door side records the fatal attack. Reports that he haunts the Adelphi are part of the theatre’s folklore.↩
Historic England, “Covent Garden Underground Station”. The station was built in 1906 for the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway and opened to passengers in 1907. Leslie Green’s design used a steel frame faced in ox-blood faience, large arched openings and distinctive tiled interiors. The façade is Grade II listed.↩
Visit London, “Covent Garden Underground Station”. Access is by lift or an emergency spiral staircase of 193 steps; visitors are advised to use the lifts.↩
Historic England, Changing London: Covent Garden Saved. The wholesale flower, fruit and vegetable market moved from Covent Garden to Nine Elms in November 1974. The historic district and central market buildings were subsequently conserved and adapted rather than comprehensively demolished.↩