Forgotten London: Mother Red-Cap

From The Lore of the Land, Westwood & Simpson, 2006:

A Camden Town pub now called the World's End was formerly a famous coaching inn, the Mother Red Cap. It got its name because it was built on the site of an old cottage, the home of notorious seventeenth-century fortune-teller known either as Mother Damnable or Mother Red Cap. ... According to the account in Samuel Palmer's History of St. Pancras in 1870 (itself based on an older pamphlet), her parents were suspected of practicing black magic and were hanged for killing a girl by witchcraft ... She was strikingly ugly, kept a huge black cat, and like many who practiced magic for a living, she enhanced her reputation by eccentricities of dress - in her case the red bonnet which gave her the nickname ...

Allegedly the Devil came to claim her when she died, and this was witnessed by hundreds of people who gathered at her deathbed. The Lore of the Land says this could as easily have been one of the bystanders playing a prank, perhaps trying to scare the old woman to death. If so, it worked.

A coaching inn, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a waypoint. Before railways became the new mode of travel, if you went by road then you probably went by coach or at least horse, which meant you needed places to stop and rest your horse along the way - or, if you were a coach, swapping out the tired nags for fresh ones. Typically they provided accommodation, food and drink, and some became notorious as highwayman haunts. After all, how better to find out which coaches carried wealthy passengers or important packages than to spy out the goods at the inn?

A typical coach could manage perhaps 15 miles at a stretch (on good Roman roads) before needing to stop, so the coaching inn network spread like spider silk along the main roads, fifteen miles or so apart. Like society, inns and coaches were divided socially; the best class of passenger rode on top of the coach, the less wealthy were inside, and there were less well-appointed coaches for those who could only afford third class travel. Equally the inns split their accommodation into first, second and third class, with separate bars and lounges for different classes of traveler. If you were the poorer sort of passenger then you might be expected to share a bed, never mind a room, with one of your fellow unfortunates. 

The coaching inn was built around a courtyard, with stables, and that meant constant noise as different coaches arrived at different times of the day or night. Sleep was almost impossible, though if you got one of the rooms facing out rather than into the courtyard you probably had a better time of it.

Red Cap is not an uncommon English pub name, suggesting that the story isn't unique to Camden - and nor, probably, is Mother Damnable. Either that, or there's a host of Mothers Damnable out there, which isn't entirely surprising. 

Borrowing from the Two Nerdy Girls blog which in turn got its information from The English Inn Past and Present:

No definite system of planning seems to have been adhered to through the centuries for inns other than to provide a yard around which were grouped sets of lodgings and a further yard for stabling and wagons ... The old inns of London consisted in the main of a block facing the street with an entry to a courtyard within, the front part of the house being reserved for sitting-rooms and eating parlours. The problem of the Georgian buildings was to provide easy ingress though an arched entry for coaches, which made their way out through a gate in the further yard.  To right or left of this entry, which varied according to circumstance, there was generally a large room where coach passengers could dine; to the left was the coach office and a passage connecting with the bar and the coffee room.  The drawing room was on the first floor.  This arrangement was generally followed in all parts of the country.

It's not clear when Mother Red Cap changed its name to the World's End. Presumably it was still known as Mother Red Cap in 1870 when Samuel Palmer was writing about it. The website isn't clear (though that Underground live music venue is worth noting for scenario ideas), and I'm going to cross my fingers and say it probably happened in the 1980s when the site was redeveloped. There is one source that says it happened in the 1990s, for what it's worth, and also claims it was a notorious house of terror in the early 1800s. Certainly all records indicate there was an inn of one kind or another on that site since the 1690s.

The great thing about a scene backdrop like Mother Red Cap is it can be used in pretty much any of Gumshoe's established settings, from Night's Black Agents to Bookhounds to Fear Itself, Trail and Esoterrorists. It's been there throughout. In Night's Black Agents, for instance, in a Dracula Dossier setting it can be a place of interest from the Victorian age start of the Dracula story right to the modern Edom period. 

Moreover if the story about Mother Damnable's parents is to be believed then there's reason to think occult activity was significant well before it was an inn, suggesting it might have been some kind of ritual site or locus point. In Trail terms, a potential Fane. Added to that are the hints it might have had a bad reputation as an inn, at least in the early 1800s, and that Devilish visit when Mother Damnable died. "What haunts this seemingly innocent spot?" the players may ask. The answer may be more than they can cope with. 

So after all that, what have we?

An inn, in London, which has been visited by the Devil himself. A place where not merely a witch but a family of witches gathered, and which has been a London landmark for close on 400 years. A pub which is now a live music venue with two bars and a mezzanine level.

Scenario Seeds:

Gaslit (Bookhounds): The Mother Red Cap has had many famous or notorious customers over the centuries, one of them being Charles Dickens. A Hounds would-be patron (capable of bringing much-needed cash to the shop) is potty over Dickens and is convinced that a séance at the Red Cap would bring the great man back for a chat. He expects the Hounds to arrange this - after all, aren't they supposed to be expert in all things mystic? Whether they are or not, they soon hit a snag; yes, allegedly Dickens did live very near the Red Cap - when he was ten. Not exactly drinking age, even in the early 1800s when standards were lax. However if the Hounds probe a little further they do discover an odd Victorian shadow, very like Dickens, haunting the gaslit recesses of the old Red Cap. Whatever it is, it seems to know an awful lot about Dickens, but it only appears after midnight in the public bar. Its signature is remarkably like the great man's, which will please the Hounds forger no end ...

Coach and Four (Trail/Fear, 1970s): Camden was a nexus for trade, when the canals were still viable, and grand warehouses sprang up around the lock. When the canals failed the lock died, and with it went trade, leaving the warehouses to rot. In the 1970s a group of entrepreneurs banded together to create what we now know as Camden Market, but they find their efforts blocked by what people say is the Devil, come back to the Red Cap in search of old Mother Damnable. Or at any rate, in search of something ... A pack of Bleeders (Unremitting Horror) have set up shop at the Red Cap, and its sanguinary efforts are attracting attention. Peculiar thing; for whatever reason, the Bleeder attacks coincide with the sound of a coach and horses, as though a coach was trotting into the old Red Cap's yard.

Operation DAMNABLE: According to an article in Folklore magazine, written by one of the participants in the Highgate Vampire feud, a feral vampire haunts the World's End. The author references the Red Cap link and its devilish history, but claims that the more recent vampiric infestation is the work of Satanists. Ordinarily this would vanish into the murky dark from whence it came, were it not that a Russian attached to the embassy recently turned up beaten senseless outside the World's End. Probably just a night out on the town which ended badly, of course. Yet that same Russian was retrieved from the hospital by her embassy remarkably quickly ... and nobody knows where she is now. Even the Russians don't know, or that's what they say.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!