Copyright

4th Estate

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This Ebook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Historic Royal Palaces Enterprises Ltd 2018

The right of Historic Royal Palaces Enterprises Ltd to be identified as the copyright-holder of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

Map © Richard Wells

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Source ISBN: 9780008307929

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008307905

Version: 2018-08-10

Dedication

To the ravens of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London

And to the memory of Martin Harris

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

1 Silhouette

2 Ravenmaster

3 The Rules

4 Roll Call

5 Bird Life

6 Tower Green

7 Biscuits and Blood

8 The Menagerie

9 Black Birds

10 The Raven Spreads His Wings

11 The Great Escape

12 Resistance to Interrogation

13 Citizens of the World

14 Double-Hatting

15 The Story

16 Application

17 Speaking in Ravenish

18 Bird Brains

19 Ravenology

20 The Legend of the Ravens at the Tower

21 Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

22 My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black

23 Birds and Books

24 Death and the Raven

25 The Ghosts of My Life

26 And So to Bed

27 Great Traditions

28 Sentinels of the White Tower

29 Rising Above

Appendix: Ravenmasters Since 1946

Acknowledgements

Suggested Reading

About the Publisher

1

Silhouette

0530. Autumn. First light over London. I’m up and out of bed before the alarm. I get dressed in the dark and head straight out the door. No time even for a cup of tea. There’s always that niggling concern that something might have gone wrong overnight. And if things go wrong, things can go badly wrong.

I can already hear the lorries and the white vans and the early-morning commuters coming into town. Tower Bridge Road, Fenchurch Street, London Bridge. There’s that hum – the sound of the City awakening.

I hurry up the stone spiral staircase by the Flint Tower, the London skyline bright with lights and winking behind me. I see the old Port of London Authority Building, which is now home to a fancy hotel, but was once responsible for the comings and goings of ships all the way up and down the Thames. Behind that stand the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie and the Gherkin, the big new skyscrapers with their funny little nicknames.

Past the Chapel and the Waterloo Barracks and out onto Tower Green and there’s that proper morning smell of London, that mixture of exhaust fumes, the river, fresh-ground coffee, and the beautiful sweet incongruous smell of fresh-cut grass on Tower Green. Tower Bridge is hunched up ahead, with HMS Belfast reliably anchored on the river to the south.

There’s no one around in the Tower, just me and the shadows of a thousand years of history.

I call out, and at first there’s nothing but silence. I call out again. There’s always that moment of fear as I scan the skyline. But then I see her: perched on one of the rooftops of the Tower buildings, a silhouette against the blue-grey dawn.

‘Good morning,’ I say.

And a good morning it is.

The ravens are at home in the Tower.

I can breathe easy again – the kingdom is safe for another day.

2

Ravenmaster

I have what is often described as the oddest job in Britain.

Odd? Maybe.

The best? Definitely.

My name is Chris Skaife and I am the Ravenmaster at the Tower of London.

My official title is Yeoman Warder Christopher Skaife, of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and member of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary, which is generally believed to be the oldest formed ‘Body of Men’ in the world still in existence, dating back to the reign of King Henry VII sometime after the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. All of us Yeoman Warders are former soldiers, male and female, with at least twenty-two years of unblemished service. We are the ceremonial guardians of the Tower of London. In principle we’re responsible for looking after any prisoners at the Tower and safeguarding the Crown Jewels. In practice, we act as tour guides and as custodians of the rituals of the Tower. We live right here, in the Tower. They say that every man’s home is his castle: for us, it’s literally the case.

How can I begin to explain the Tower to you? It was built as a fortress and a Royal Palace, but it’s also been a prison, an arsenal, and the site of the Royal Mint and the Royal Armoury. One of the great early English historians, John Stow – who grew up about half a mile from the Tower – summed it up best in his Survey of London, published in 1598: ‘This Tower is a citadel to defend or command the city; a royal palace for assemblies or treaties; a prison of state for the most dangerous offenders; the only place of coinage for all England at this time; the armoury for warlike provision; the treasury of the ornaments and jewels of the crown; and general conserver of the most records of the king’s courts of justice at Westminster.’ That just about covers it. These days we welcome around three million visitors every year.

There are plenty of famous places for tourists and locals to visit in London. There’s Westminster Abbey, there are the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace, Kew Gardens, Hampton Court Palace, the British Museum, the Imperial War Museums, the V & A, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum. The list goes on and on. If you’re the sort of person who wants to see a nice Baroque interior then off you can go to a Hawksmoor church, or if you fancy a nice bit of post-war Brutalism there’s the Royal Festival Hall. If you’re looking for a good view you can go to Hampstead Heath or Primrose Hill, or up to the top of the Shard. You’ve got your theatres and your concert halls and your restaurants and cafés. But in my opinion – my humble opinion – the Tower remains without a doubt one of London’s great attractions.

Why? Well, there’s the obvious fact that we’re one of the first attractions. When William the Conqueror defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings back in 1066 he decided he needed a sign of his triumph, a monument to his great power and strength, and so sometime around the late 1070s work began on the White Tower, the biggest and boldest building ever undertaken in England. The Tower was intended as a symbol of power and remains so today: in my opinion the finest example of statement architecture in the country. London may be forever reinventing itself, but the Tower remains. Much of the old City was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. Since then, Newgate Prison has gone. Old London Bridge has gone. The great warehouses around St Katharine Docks have gone. Even during my time at the Tower, London has been transformed: the Shard, the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie; Crossrail; the Docklands Light Railway; the gentrification of the East End. Yet right in the middle of it all we still have the Tower. It has seen it all, done it all, been part of it all. It has incredible architecture. Pageantry. A bloody history of murder and torture. And – of course – it has the ravens.

We currently have seven ravens at the Tower. As the Ravenmaster I’m the person responsible for their safety, security and welfare. I look after the ravens – and the ravens look after us. Without the ravens, so the legend goes, the Tower itself will crumble into dust and great harm will befall the kingdom.

This book will attempt to answer some of the most common questions I get asked about the Tower ravens. Why are there ravens at the Tower in the first place? Where do our myths and superstitions about the birds come from? How do I care for them? What do I feed them? Who gets to name them? What happens to them when they die? How and why do they stay at the Tower?

What this book is not – I should state clearly at the outset – is a scientific study. I am not a scientist, though over the years I’ve been fortunate to meet with and assist the many scientists who have come and studied our birds and who have written about them in academic journals and reports. Despite my many years of experience looking after the ravens, I don’t have any official bird-related credentials or qualifications. I am not a professional ornithologist. I’m really just an average guy with a greater-than-average amount of luck who has been fortunate enough to have spent a large part of my life with some of the most famous birds in the world as they go about their daily business. This book is about my life and work with the Tower ravens, and what it takes to be the Ravenmaster.

I was born and brought up in Dover, in the county of Kent, in the south-east of England. My earliest memory is of when I was barely a toddler, climbing out onto the ledge of our living-room window. I was right there, ready to go, before I was pulled back in. An early bid for freedom. There was another time, a few years later, when I climbed a big old gnarly tree until I was positioned right above our neighbours’ greenhouse – and then I jumped. I wanted to see what would happen. What happened was that I went straight through the glass. I’ve still got the scars to show for it.

By the time I was about fifteen I was bunking off school and going to the woods or up to the local hills as part of a little gang of kids. We kept ourselves busy by lighting fires, drinking cider, stealing stuff, and generally mucking around. We had our sheath knives to build dens and make arrows and we would break into old storerooms and garages to see what was there – just getting up to mischief. We’d buy fireworks and put bangers in car exhausts or fire them out of old plumbing pipes. We stole a couple of motorbikes and took them up to the hills to go scrambling. We tried to steal a Ford Anglia, but it had a flat battery and we were swiftly caught by the police. I remember getting a thick ear for that.

I wasn’t a bad kid, but I wasn’t the best.

This was 1981. If you switched on the TV it was all the Yorkshire Ripper this, and the Hunger Strikers that, and the Brixton and Toxteth riots, and the National Front were marching, and Enoch Powell was sounding off about a race war, and AIDS was becoming a global crisis, and unemployment figures were skyrocketing. Thatcher was in power. The IRA were bombing and killing soldiers and civilians. It was what you might call a bit of a difficult period in British history.

And there we were, at the beginning of a new decade, boys and girls about to leave school and ready for some adventures of our own.

My parents were getting concerned. I was drinking, smoking, going to parties, sneaking out to sleep up in the hills, getting into fights with other gangs. What was to be done with me?

And then one day an Army Careers Adviser visited the school. It happened to be one of the days I was actually attending classes.

Like many kids back then I had spent a lot of my childhood re-enacting the Second World War, playing with toy soldiers, staging fights and battles with my mates, the Allies versus the Nazis, all that sort of thing, reading the old 1970s war comics, The Victor and Warlord and Battle. There was Dad’s Army on TV, of course, as well as Kojak and The Six Million Dollar Man, and Kung Fu and Planet of the Apes – it was all goodies and baddies and tough guys and fighting. So when the Army Careers Adviser gave us his talk and handed out his leaflets about joining the army – a life full of adventure, a life of goodies and baddies and tough guys and fighting – I thought it seemed like a pretty good idea. I took the leaflets home and talked to my parents, who probably thought, well, if it’s not that, he’s going to end up in jail.

I went with Mum to the old Army Careers Information Office in Dover, which was just a little red-brick hut really, tucked away at the base of the cliffs, by the eastern dock and the ferry terminal, and there was this portly old recruiting sergeant sitting in there and you could see he was bored out of his mind, and all you had to do was a basic literacy and numeracy test and then sign on the dotted line and take the Queen’s shilling and you were in, more or less. So I did.

It was the best decision I ever made.

Off I went to Deepcut Barracks to do a fitness test, interviews, a general-knowledge test. I was asked if I wanted to learn a trade, because my test results were that good. I may have been a messer, but I wasn’t stupid. I could have trained as an engineer, or even a veterinary nurse. I could have learned a proper trade, but by that time the Falklands War had started and I just wanted to learn to fire a gun and be a soldier and get on with it. So I chose to go in as a good old-fashioned regular soldier. I left school, my parents took me to Dover Priory train station, I waved goodbye to them, and I joined the army as a boy soldier, the Junior Infantry Battalion at Bassingbourn, on 18 June 1982, which as it turned out was just a few days after British forces had recaptured Stanley from the Argentinians, and the Falklands War was over. I was sixteen and a half. That was the beginning of almost twenty-five years in the military – a full-service career which took me all over the world and eventually to the Tower of London and into the lives of my friends, the ravens.

I’m very lucky to have had two careers: as a soldier and now as a Yeoman Warder. As a soldier I saw the best and worst of what humans are capable of. As the Ravenmaster I’ve been granted a privileged insight into the lives and behaviour of some of the world’s most extraordinary non-human creatures. One of the things I’ve learned from the ravens is that they’re surprisingly like us: they are versatile, adaptable, omnivorous, they are capable of great cruelty and great kindness, and on the whole they manage to get along with one another. In learning about the ravens, I have discovered a lot about what it means to be a human: I’ve learned to listen, to observe, and to be still. The ravens have been my teachers and I have been their pupil.

There’s a photograph of me as a young boy on a school trip to London. Trafalgar Square. We’d come up from Kent on the train for the day. It was a real treat – London Town! I’m kneeling, wearing flared trousers and sporting a bowl-cut hairstyle – this was the 1970s, after all – and I am concentrating on feeding the pigeons. You can see from the photo that I am completely and utterly absorbed. You can see the expression on my face, me thinking, what are those birds about?

That fascination is with me still. My hope is that in reading this book you too will become fascinated.

The author in Trafalgar Square, on a 1970s school trip to London. (Courtesy of the author)

3

The Rules

I am, as far as I’m aware, only the sixth Ravenmaster ever to have been appointed at the Tower. Before that, caring for the ravens was part of the job of the Yeoman Quartermaster. Like a lot of our great traditions in Great Britain, the role and indeed the title of Ravenmaster is in fact a recent invention. The story goes that when Henry Johns was appointed Yeoman Quartermaster just after World War II, some of the old Yeoman Warders used to joke that he was raving mad – so keen was he on caring for the birds – and so he affectionately became known as the Raving Master instead of the Quartermaster. It wasn’t until John Wilmington took over from Henry Johns in 1968 that the more sane-sounding title of Raven Master became official, and not until some years later – doubtless due to some clerical error in a back office somewhere – that the Raven Master became known as the Ravenmaster.*

I lead a team of Yeoman Warders here at the Tower who assist me in caring for the birds. They are known as the Ravenmaster’s assistants. I call us Team Raven. Together we are responsible for looking after the ravens 365 days a year. There’s never a day when there’s not a Yeoman Warder on duty responsible for the ravens. They are possibly the most cared-for – and certainly the best-loved – birds in the world.

There are a few simple rules about caring for the Tower ravens that have been passed down to me over the years by my illustrious predecessors, and which I in turn like to pass on to my assistants. The theory goes that if you follow these rules you’ll remain safe around the ravens, and they’ll remain safe around you.

DO NOT hurry the ravens.

DO NOT attempt to change the pecking order.

DO NOT try to cut corners.

DO remain calm at all times.

DO allow the ravens to follow the same routine every day.

DO prepare for chaos if you break any of the above rules.

It goes without saying that I have failed to observe these rules many times – and that the job of Ravenmaster is in fact rather more challenging and complex than following a few basic rules.

As Ravenmaster you have to be able to think on your feet. Over the years I’ve had to deal with bird-on-bird attacks, bird-on-human attacks, human-on-bird attacks, stolen goods, snatched food, biohazard concerns, security problems, disease, death, and tragedy. On a daily basis my job involves dealing with children, tour guides, VIPs, journalists, amateur historians, professional historians, bird-lovers, and all the other assorted visitors to the Tower. By my calculation, in the height of the summer, when our visitor numbers are at their peak, I am photographed about three or four hundred times a day, every day: I reckon the ravens and I have probably featured in someone’s family album in every country in the world. For the love of ravens I’ve nearly drowned, I’ve very nearly fallen off tall buildings, and many’s the time I’ve had to risk my reputation and stick my neck out to try to do what I think’s best for the birds. And it’s not as if they’re exactly grateful. They are not my pets. They do not do tricks. They do not ride unicycles. They do not speak Latin. They don’t necessarily do what I tell them to do – which can be more than a little embarrassing. There was the time one of our ravens affectionately pecked a cameraman on the back of the leg during a television interview about the Tower, for example: that caused a bit of a commotion. They do not perform on cue. The Tower ravens are big, powerful, unpredictable creatures, with a savage bite, who roam freely about the Tower and who have the ability to fly off at any moment if they so desire.

So, you have been warned. You know the rules. Now it’s time to meet the ravens.

* For a full list of Ravenmasters, see the Appendix.

4

Roll Call

As I mentioned, we currently have seven ravens at the Tower. We always have a minimum of six – as decreed, according to legend, by Charles II. These are our magnificent seven.

Munin

Female

Entered Tower service 18 May 1995

Current age: Twenty-three (age on arrival: six weeks)

Presented by Mrs Joyce Ross

Named by Ravenmaster David Cope

Raven Munin is currently the oldest serving raven at the Tower.* Named after one of Odin’s ravens in Norse mythology, she has led what you might call a colourful life.

She is incredibly intelligent – she can solve scientific tests in record time. She is also tough and she is brave: she loves to get as high up around the Tower as she possibly can, which has caused me no end of problems, having to clamber up after her. She’s broken her wing twice and is now permanently on medication to treat her arthritis. She’s had three partners during her time with us – two of them now dead – and so is affectionately known to me and my assistants as the Black Widow.

I’ll be honest: Munin and I have something of a troubled relationship. Basically, she doesn’t like me. In fact, sometimes I think she actually hates me. She’s certainly been giving me the runaround for years. Research suggests that ravens can recognise human faces, and I can only assume that I did something horrendous in my early days as the old Ravenmaster’s assistant and Munin has never forgiven me.

If you ever visit the Tower, you can easily identify Munin because she’s the bird who hops off in the opposite direction whenever she sees me. After many years of niggling, tussling and negotiation, I would describe ours as a relationship of mutual grudging respect.

Merlin/Merlina

Female (but thought male for the first five years of her life)

Entered Tower service May 2007

Current age: Twelve (age on arrival: one)

Place of origin: Somewhere in Wales

Presented by Anne Bird, Barry Swan Rescue Centre

Named by previous owner and officially still known to the Tower as Merlin (renamed Merlina by Ravenmaster Chris Skaife)

Merlina – or Merlin, as she was first known – was found by the side of a road in Wales. She was adopted by a family of bird-lovers who built her an aviary and looked after her until she became too difficult to handle. She is not a bird suited to a quiet suburban life. Her caretakers gave her to the Swan Rescue Centre in Barry, Wales, where she quickly became renowned for throwing tantrums, mimicking other birds, and randomly squawking out a primitive ‘Hello’ and ‘Thank you’ at passersby. After she refused to have anklets placed on her and withdrew all cooperation in her interactions with her carers, the Rescue contacted us at the Tower in desperation. And here she has been, perfectly happy, ever since.

Unlike my relationship with Munin, Merlina and I are close. Very close. Indeed – after many years – she has bonded with me and two of my assistants and is always very friendly towards us. She is not, however, friendly towards anybody else – including our fellow Yeoman Warders.

Over the past few years Merlina has become quite a celebrity. She has her own dedicated followers on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. She receives gifts and cards and letters from well-wishers and has appeared countless times on television and in newspaper and magazine articles. She likes playing with sticks while rolling on her back, doing forward rolls, calling out to the crows to come and play with her, stealing stuff from unsuspecting members of the public, playing in the snow, playing dead, drinking water out of the fountain, washing crisps if she doesn’t like the flavour, emptying the bins on the endless hunt for food, hunting mice, and stalking pigeons.

Merlina could fly off to a new life if she so desired, but due to the nature of our bonding, and with a bit of careful flight-feather trimming, we’ve managed to keep her here at the Tower. She is our most free-spirited bird; she’s also my closest friend among the ravens.

In many ways, Merlina is a bit of a loner: she refuses to socialise with any of the other ravens. I think of her as the Tower Princess. If another raven goes anywhere near her, she hops along to find me to seek my protection, often bringing me little treats to share, usually rotten meat or rats’ tails. Her favourite activity is to sit with me in the Bloody Tower sentry box and fall asleep while I gently stroke her feathers. Whatever you do, do not try this if you visit her. Not if you value your fingers.

Erin

Female

Entered Tower service 2006

Current age: Twelve (age on arrival: six weeks)

Place of origin: Yatton, Somerset

Presented by Mr Martin Harris

Named by Ravenmaster Derrick Coyle

It’s said that ravens mate for life, but in my experience Raven Erin’s partnership with Raven Rocky is a rather more complex process than is often assumed by us humans. What I can say is that Erin and Rocky like to perch together, fly together, walk together, and preen together. They’re a classic couple in many ways – and in this partnership, it is Erin who most definitely wears the trousers.

Erin may be one of our smallest ravens, but she is by far the noisiest. She likes nothing better first thing in the morning than craawing and cronking at the top of her voice and annoying the residents of the Tower. She’s not, shall we say, a bird who is backward in coming forward. She will chat away forever, is extremely boisterous, and loves to pester the other ravens. One of her favourite games is to invade another bird’s territory, pick a fight, cause all sorts of commotion, and then suddenly back off. With Erin, I often find myself having to assume the role of policeman. If she’s on Tower Green, for example, squawking at Merlina, I’ll intervene with a wag of my finger, tell her to move along, and then off she goes.

Erin and I are not exactly close, but we get along fine. We have a few volunteers at the Tower who like to assist with our work with the birds, and over the years Erin has befriended one or two of them, whom she graciously allows to feed her the occasional nut or biscuit.

Many of our American visitors like to point out that the name Erin is Irish, though I like to point out in return that it is in fact a Hiberno-English derivative of the Irish word ‘Éirinn’, meaning Ireland, and no, she’s not from Ireland. She’s from Somerset. The naming of the ravens can sometimes seem nonsensical – and indeed paradoxical and ironic, as is the case with Erin’s partner, the wonderfully though inappropriately named Rocky.

Rocky

Male

Entered Tower service July 2011

Current age: Ten (age on arrival: three)

Place of origin: Yatton, Somerset

Presented by Mr Martin Harris

Named by Ravenmaster Chris Skaife

Traditionally our ravens were named after the person who presented them to the Tower. Thus, Raven Edward, who was presented to the Tower around 1890 and who was named after Colonel Edward Treffry from the Honourable Artillery Company. Or one of my favourites, the legendary Raven Edgar Sopper, presented in 1923 and named after Colonel Sopper. All of our ravens these days are bred outside the Tower by a small number of recognised breeders, and acquired by the Tower as and when we need them, so our naming practices have had to change. We once had a Ronald Raven, for example, so named by viewers of the children’s television programme Blue Peter. We’ve had ravens named Cedric, Sandy, Mabel, Pauline, and – in tribute to the character played by Tony Robinson in the TV comedy Blackadder – Baldrick.

Rocky is in fact named after the former Ravenmaster, Rocky Stones, and not after the boxer played by Sylvester Stallone, which is probably for the best because Rocky is most definitely not a fighter. Admittedly he does have a distinctive short fat beak, which makes him look a bit as if he has a broken nose and is about to land a heavy punch on you. He’s big and he likes to swagger around, and he does his best to protect Erin when she gets into trouble, but he’s really a very shy, sweet-natured sort of a bird. In fact, he’s a bit of a softy. He follows Erin around like a little puppy, is completely uninterested in me or in the public, and likes nothing more than to spend his time snuggling up to her, though how on earth he puts up with her incessant squawking I have absolutely no idea.

Jubilee II

Male

Entered Tower service May 2013

Current age: Five (age on arrival: six weeks)

Place of origin: Yatton, Somerset

Presented by Mr Martin Harris

Named Jubilee by popular demand

Jubilee II started out his life at the Tower as a stand-in. In 2012, in honour of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Tower authorities thought it might be a nice idea to give Her Majesty a raven as a present. We’d keep it here on her behalf and look after it for her. Shortly after presenting the bird, I went away on holiday to the United States. No sooner had my flight landed than I received a frantic phone call from one of my colleagues.

‘Chris, there’s a bit of a problem.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Two ravens have died.’

‘Which ravens?’

‘Jubilee and Gripp.’

‘Died?’

‘Killed.’

‘Foxes?’

‘Foxes.’

‘So you’re telling me I’ve just come all this way to the US on holiday and the Queen’s new raven has been killed by a fox?’

‘Yep. Sorry, mate.’

It was not a great start to my long-awaited holiday, but fortunately we were able to acquire two replacement ravens, whom we named Jubilee II and Gripp II.

Jubilee II is currently Munin’s partner. I say currently because when Munin dies I might try to pair Jubilee II with Merlina. Merlina has recently started to allow Jubilee II to spend a little time with her on Tower Green, which is very unusual. Merlina, as I have said, is not a bird who usually tolerates the company of other ravens. There’s a bit of an age difference between Merlina and Jubilee II, but they seem to get on, and I can certainly see why. Jubilee II is very much the strong, silent type: well-behaved, well-groomed. Perfect boyfriend material. I think of Jubilee as a knight of the Tower.

Gripp II

Male

Entered Tower service May 2013

Current age: Five (age on arrival: six weeks)

Place of origin: Yatton, Somerset

Presented by Mr Martin Harris

Named by Ravenmaster Chris Skaife

Gripp is the opposite of Jubilee: tiny and rather frail. We assume that Gripp is male – but I rather fancy that he is in fact a she. It wouldn’t be the first time that one of our male birds turned out to be female. As I have mentioned, Merlina started out life as Merlin, and there have doubtless been other examples of mistaken identity during the history of the Tower ravens. The sexing of birds is notoriously difficult, even for vets, never mind for Yeoman Warders. Ravens not only lack external sexual organs, like most species of birds, but the male and female are almost identical in appearance, and there are no great differences in behaviour. It’s not as if the males have brighter plumage or different feather patterns, or wattles or combs or crests or leg spurs that might help you distinguish them from females. To the untrained eye, the only noticeable difference is that the male ravens tend to have a slightly longer middle toe and a thicker bill; but then again, we’ve had female birds before with great thick bills, and measuring the difference in ravens’ toes is not a hobby for the faint-hearted. Handling the birds can make them extremely stressed at the best of times, so really the only way to determine Gripp’s sex would be to take a feather and have it DNA tested. Since Gripp seems perfectly happy as s/he is, and because we treat all the birds equally here at the Tower anyway, whatever their gender, there seems little point in putting him/her through the stress. So, for the moment Gripp remains a he – a rather timid and shy he, admittedly, who requires a little bit more looking after than some of the other birds. I have a bit of a soft spot for him, and don’t like to see him being picked on or bullied by the others.

Harris

Male

Entered Tower service May 2016

Current age: Two (age on arrival: six weeks)

Place of origin: Yatton, Somerset

Presented by Miss Lori Burchill

Named by Ravenmaster Assistant Shady Lane

Harris is the youngest and the biggest of our current birds. You can tell he’s young – if you can get close enough – because the inside of his mouth is pink. The raven mouth turns black as the bird ages, in much the same way as our hair turns grey. Harris will be counted as a juvenile for about three years before coming into full maturity, though he’s already started displaying signs of adult behaviour. Just a couple of weeks ago he spent three days up on the rooftops of the Tower, checking things out, only returning to be with the other ravens because he was hungry. I fancy he’s going to keep me rather busy in the years to come.

Harris is named after Martin Harris, a breeder who presented us with more than a dozen ravens during his lifetime – including most of our current birds – and who was a real character, and greatly loved by all of Team Raven.

Harris was in fact hatched on the very day of our old friend Martin’s funeral, which I attended down in Somerset with my deputy Ravenmaster, Shady Lane, both of us in full uniform. I can well remember driving down a few weeks later to collect the new little birdling, which was a bittersweet moment for us all, and we decided there and then to name the bird after Martin, as a reminder of the many people who love the ravens and who have been involved in their well-being.

I hope and trust that Harris has a long and happy life ahead of him.

* The longest-ever serving raven at the Tower was James Crow, who entered service around 1880 and didn’t pass away until 1924, making him an incredible forty-four years old. Ravens in the wild would be lucky to live into their teens or twenties. We would of course never name a raven James Crow these days – times, thank goodness, have changed.

5

Bird Life

Having met the ravens, you’ll probably be wanting to get a sense of their living arrangements.

It’s perhaps easiest to visualise where we all live at the Tower if you imagine a series of concentric circles. Right in the centre is the ancient White Tower; and then there’s the Inner Ward, which is enclosed by a massive wall with thirteen towers; and then there’s the narrow Outer Ward, protected by a second wall with six towers facing the river and two bastions on the north front. And then there’s the moat, which is now a dry moat. There’s no water in the moat. Most of us Yeoman Warders live right on the edge, facing the moat, but the ravens are slap-bang in the middle of things. They’re based in a purpose-built, state-of-the-art enclosure on the south side of Tower Green, in the Inner Ward. It is the perfect spot, sheltered but warm and sunny, at the centre of the life of the Tower but just tucked away enough to give them some privacy. It’s on the site of what was once the Grand Hall, which we think was probably where Anne Boleyn was imprisoned before her execution in 1536.

Living here at the Tower, for both the birds and the Yeoman Warders, is just like living anywhere else – apart from the fact that we have arrow slits for windows, our walls are forty feet high, and we’re locked in at night.

I suppose I’m used to this sort of thing. I lived in some pretty unusual places during my time in the army. I spent plenty of nights bivouacked in the jungle, and under the stars in the fields of South Armagh. I lived in Cyprus, among the orange trees and the olive groves, and up high in the mountains in the Balkans. When you’re a soldier you get used to roughing it – you’re at home everywhere and nowhere. The Tower is as peculiar and unexpected a place to live as anywhere.

There are about 140 residents here at the Tower. As well as the Yeoman Warders and their families, the Constable of the Tower lives here, the Resident Governor and Deputy Governor, the chaplain, the doctor, the Operations Manager, the Chief Warden, the head of Visitor Services, and the manager of the Fusilier Museum. We may share our home with millions of visitors every year, but we’re a little community just like any other. We even have our own club, the Yeoman Warders Club, the Keys, which must be one of the most exclusive clubs in the world since it’s only open to Tower residents, staff and invited guests.

Some people would find living in the Tower intolerable. You’re basically living in the middle of London, in a prime tourist destination, with the public continually passing through. It’s like a fishbowl. It’s certainly not for everyone. But for me, from the moment I arrived, it felt like coming home.

When I was young we lived in the shadow of Dover Castle. Dover sits facing France across the Channel, and is the traditional entry point for visitors from abroad. Home of the famous White Cliffs, Dover is what some people like to think of as the back door into England. I like to think of it as more of a grand entrance. Who knows how much I might have been influenced as a child, looking up at the old Norman castle, floodlit at night, the trains fuming into the station, the endless comings and goings of the ferries? Growing up in Dover I became accustomed to living in a place where people were continually passing through, tourists and travellers on their way in and out of England, and maybe I even had a dim sense of living in a place of great historic importance. I may have come a long way from Dover, but in some ways I haven’t come far at all.

As I have mentioned, most of us Yeoman Warders live in the walls on the outskirts of the Tower, in the Casemates, the outer battlements. The ravens live in the very shadow of the White Tower, a building that dominates the whole of the Tower of London even today, a symbol as much as it is a building, built centuries before the ‘starchitects’ and their skyscrapers that surround us now. Decades in construction, the White Tower was begun by William the Conqueror around the late 1070s, with the object of protecting London and impressing the populace, as well as controlling the approach to the City by river. Work on the White Tower was continued by William’s son William Rufus, and was eventually finished by Henry I around 1100, at which point Henry promptly imprisoned his chief minister, Ranulf Flambard, in the newly completed building, though Flambard soon escaped, climbing down a rope having plied his guards with drink. You can certainly try that with the Yeoman Warders today. It won’t work. But it’s certainly worth a try.

When I started as Ravenmaster the ravens were kept in rather cramped night boxes, constructed in the 1980s and built into the old inner walls of the Tower. There was nothing really wrong with the night boxes. They were definitely an improvement on how the ravens were housed before then. According to an article in Country Life magazine in December 1955, some of the Tower ravens were ‘locked in the basement of a house overlooking the Green and others were confined to a cage hung on the side of the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula’. Remnants of these rather primitive sleeping quarters remain today – and indeed are still in use by Merlina, who refuses to sleep with the other ravens, preferring her own company and a private night box behind an old lead-lined window on the ground floor of the Queen’s House on Tower Green, where she graciously allows the Constable of the Tower and his family to live.

The window of Merlina’s night box originally opened into the large basement of the Queen’s House, where coal was once stored, and which was first used to house ravens in 1946, when two ravens named Cora and Corax were put up there, perched on a pile of coal. We certainly don’t keep our ravens in coal bunkers any more. (One of the only times in recent history when the ravens have been kept inside at the Tower was during the avian flu virus in 2006, when tens of millions of birds worldwide died, and millions more were slaughtered to prevent the flu spreading. At that time we removed the ravens for their own safety to the upper Brick Tower, on the advice of the vets at London Zoo.)

The old night boxes just didn’t feel right to me. Ravens are wild birds who should be able to perch outside. They need to be able to fly back and forth. Like humans, they need freedom. But they also need protection. I strongly believe that if we’re going to continue to keep ravens at the Tower we have to make it as welcoming for them as possible, an environment that, if not entirely natural, is at least a place where they have room to roam in safety. So, soon after I had taken up the post of Ravenmaster, I discussed with the staff of Historic Royal Palaces – the independent charity that looks after the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace, Kew Palace and Hillsborough Castle – the possibility of constructing some sort of large enclosure that would offer the birds protection at night but that we could leave open during the day, thus enabling them to continue to roam freely outside and socialise with one another but also to enjoy some privacy. (I don’t like the word cage, by the way. I don’t even like the word aviary. They’re words that imply capture and containment. I always refer to the ravens’ night-time quarters as the enclosure.) Historic Royal Palaces was as keen as I was to make improvements to the birds’ living arrangements.

The raven enclosure at the Tower. (Courtesy of the author)

It took us about two years of research and consultation with London Zoo and Historic England and many other experts to get the design and development of the enclosure exactly right. Obtaining the planning permission alone was quite a feat. Just because we’re the Tower doesn’t mean we can make up our own rules. We had to obtain all the same planning permissions as anyone else. You can perhaps imagine the look on the face of the poor planning officer when our Planning Service Application arrived on their desk: ‘Erection of new cages and night boxes for Ravens, HM Tower of London.’ The important thing was to get the build right for the ravens, not just for the Tower or for my benefit or for the benefit of visitors; it needed to be something that the birds would want to use as a base.

The enclosure is made out of oak and a special fine wire which flexes if the birds should accidentally fly into it, to prevent them from getting injured. A tragic entry in the Tower Orders – the records of day-to-day activities at the Tower – for 18 April 1975 notes that Raven Brora was ‘Discovered entangled in wiring of the raven’s cage. Because of injuries had to be destroyed.’ It was of the utmost importance to me when designing the enclosure that this kind of terrible accident could never happen again.

One of the main requirements when we were planning the enclosure was that it had to be absolutely fox-proof. Even now, I’ll often arrive in the morning to signs that foxes have once again attempted to dig under the wire to get at the birds. They have no chance: I made sure that the wire goes straight down into the concrete and hardcore foundations. But you’d be amazed where foxes can get in. They can squeeze through the smallest gap – I’ve seen them manage to slip through gaps just a few inches wide, and once they’re in they’re in, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. We’ve lost many a raven to foxes over the years. They sneak in under the drawbridges, crawl through the gutters, and trot down secret passageways. Sometimes I think my job title should be the Fox- and Ravenmaster: I’m engaged in a continual battle just trying to keep them apart.

The enclosure has separate areas inside for each bird or pair of birds to sleep in, and big sliding doors that allow me to open up the entire space so that they can come and go as they please. Each bird has its own perches and a large night box within the enclosure. All of this might sound straightforward, but it took a long time to work out the design, based on careful observation of the birds’ behaviour.

As I said, the enclosure is really only for night-time. The birds are out flying or walking around during the day, all day, every day. Very occasionally I keep them in the enclosure if they need looking after – if they’re sick, or if they just need a break. Being on show to the public every day can be exhausting, as we Yeoman Warders know only too well. Sometimes you just need to take a little time off to be by yourself and to relax and recharge. I’m always looking for signs of stress in the birds. If I sense that they need a break for whatever reason, I keep them in. I’ve been living and working with them for such a long time now that I can tell when something’s not right, the same as you can tell if your loved ones need some extra attention. You just know. The Tower is a community – and the ravens are an essential part of that community.

6

Tower Green

Now that you have a good sense of where we all live, you’ll probably want to know about our daily routine.

The Ravenmaster’s basic duties and responsibilities can be summarised thus:

1 Clean and prepare the ravens’ water bowls for the day.

2 Clean the ravens’ enclosures and remove any food they’ve discarded from the night before.

3 Check each raven closely for any health issues.

4 Feed the ravens, administer any medicines, such as worming tablets, monitor their food intake.

5 Release the ravens from the enclosures for the day.

6 Watch the ravens’ movements as they make their way to their territories, checking and recording any wing or leg damage.

7 Monitor the ravens throughout the day, ensuring the safety of both them and the public, and dealing with any issues arising.

8 Return the ravens safely to their enclosures at night.

9 Prepare food for the morning.

10 Final check before lights out.

In theory that’s it. Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it? In practice, though, it’s a little bit more complicated.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s begin at the beginning. I’m up and out onto Tower Green at the crack of dawn. My first call of the day, every day, is to check on Merlina, since she mostly likes to stay out at night, up on the rooftops. Merlina is the only raven who does this. The other ravens all return to the enclosure on the south side of Tower Green. Merlina simply refuses to do so. She treats the rooftops around Tower Green as a penthouse suite – a place to retreat to and from which to contemplate the world. Once I can see her silhouette and I can hear her call, I make sure that the whole area around Tower Green is safe and clear from debris or anything that might harm the birds. Then I proceed to fill the water bowls.

This might sound silly, but I love filling the water bowls. It’s one of the highlights of my day. I scrub and refill them daily. There are plastic bowls in the raven enclosures and six stone bowls dotted around the Tower’s Inner Ward where the ravens spend their days. I like the simple act of refilling the bowls, the sound of it, the smell of it, the clarity of the water. It’s a ritual for me. It’s my quiet time. This is when I get to clear my head and think about the day. They say that getting up and out early in the morning into the fresh air, no matter what the season, is good for your mental and physical health. All I can say is that I’ve been up and out early in all seasons every day for my entire working life, and so far so good.

There’s one water bowl up on the north side of Tower Green, by the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. It’s believed that there may have been a place of worship there for over a thousand years, predating even the White Tower. Some even claim that this is one of the nation’s ancient holy places, our own little central London Glastonbury or Stonehenge. Legend has it that there was once a spring of fresh water up at Tower Hill, the site of a sacred mound, and you get druids turning up these days in their costumes to celebrate the Spring Solstice, though I’ve never been tempted myself. According to Celtic legend, around here is also where the head of Brân the Blessed, the king of England in Welsh mythology, was buried. Brân means ‘raven’, and he’s supposed to have been buried not far from the ravens’ current enclosures, which seems appropriate. (Bran is also of course the name of a character in the A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels by George R.R. Martin, and its famous television adaptation Game of Thrones. But more about Mr Martin and the ravens later.)

I’ve heard it said that the name of London derives from Lugdunum, from the Celtic lugdon, meaning town of ravens – mind you, I’ve also heard that London comes from Llyn-don, Laindon, Karelundein, Caer Ludd, Lundunes, Lindonion, Lundene, Lundone, Ludenberk, Longidinium, and goodness knows what else. History and prehistory, legends, fables and stories, they’re everywhere here. I sometimes think that the Tower is just a vast storehouse of the human imagination, and the ravens are its guardians.

Anyway, I refill the bowl by St Peter ad Vincula, where generations of Tower residents have been baptised – not in the ravens’ water bowl, I might add – and married and, most famously, buried, including Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, and Lady Jane Grey, the uncrowned queen of only nine days. Quite a few of them were also executed near the Chapel, or within the walls of the Tower – Anne Boleyn, of course, and Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey, Margaret Pole, Robert Devereux – so it’s certainly a church with a colourful history, though I’ve always thought the historian Thomas Macaulay was a bit down on the place in his 1848 History of England:

In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth … Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul’s, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities; but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.

It’s not that bad! I rather like the Chapel. It’s our parish church, after all, with a chaplain to guide and direct our spiritual lives and a fine choir and organists to lead the worship and uplift our spirits. Though to be honest I prefer to say my prayers outside, with brush and bucket in hand.

Fresh water sorted, brush and bucket safely stowed, every morning I then make my way to unlock the storeroom where I keep all of the food and equipment needed to aid me in looking after the ravens. I walk under the archway of the Bloody Tower onto the old cobbles of Water Lane (so called because this is where the water of the Thames used to lap up against the walls of the Tower). Water Lane is part of Edward I’s Outer Ward, which was created during his big expansion programme in the thirteenth century. It was reclaimed from the river by sinking thousands of beech piles into the Thames mud. I like having the storeroom here. I’ve always thought that back in the day Water Lane would have been full of wheelers and dealers, and duckers and divers coming in and out of the Tower and the old pubs that used to be here – the Stone Kitchen tavern was one, shut down by the Duke of Wellington long ago. The Tower has always been full of people, inside and out, and the Ravenmaster’s storeroom just sort of fits here, right in the thick of things, behind its own ancient black door, like an old apothecary’s shop.

On my keyring, like all the other Yeoman Warders, I keep a whistle, to alert the others if there’s a problem. Plus I have a little skull-and-crossbones memento mori – you can’t work with ravens and not develop a bit of a taste for the macabre – and a small wooden raven totem pole, which I keep as a kind of talisman.

Now, let me open up the storeroom and show you the Ravenmaster’s inner sanctum.

7

Biscuits and Blood

I like to keep the storeroom neat and tidy at all times, the result no doubt of a lifetime in the military. When you join the army as a young recruit you’re taught everything, and I mean everything. You learn how to clean your teeth and how to make your bed and tie your boots, how to iron and fold your clothes. Above all, you’re taught never to just leave stuff lying around. It’s drilled into you. You survive by following routines and procedures. A place for everything and everything in its place. No excuses.

So, in the storeroom there’s the fridge, the freezer, the sink and the counter tops, all kept spick and span. Raven calendar on the wall, obviously, and our daily diary underneath it, so the whole team can keep up to date and log what’s happening with the birds. There’s the fishing net on its shelf, used for raven-catching purposes, if a bird is injured and needs immediate veterinary attention. Chasing a raven around the Tower in full view of the public, fishing net in hand, like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – believe me, that really is an experience. The first-aid kit: you certainly know if you’ve had a nip from a raven. Scales for weighing the birds, which we do once a month. Chopping boards and equipment for preparing the meals. Rubber gloves. Leather falconry gloves. Metal gauntlets – which I do not recommend for handling the ravens, because they do sometimes like to try to crush your fingers, and picking metal out of flesh is never nice, as I can testify. A couple of wooden boxes to carry sick birds to the vets we work with at London Zoo. There’s also an old plastic KerPlunk, which we like to use for the ravens’ entertainment. (In KerPlunk: The Raven Edition, the challenge for the birds is to remove the straws in order to win a dead mouse which we place in the tube, ready to fall down and be eaten. Good clean raven fun. Munin is the reigning champion.) I also keep a jar full of raven feathers in the storeroom, kindly donated by the ravens once a year during their moult, and which I occasionally like to distribute to deserving/well-behaved/lucky visitors. If I’m doing a Tower tour, for example, and I discover that a couple are recently married or engaged, I like to give them a pair of feathers – a primary and a secondary, since without one the other is no good. I’m an old romantic at heart. Sometimes people request feathers for use as quills, or for medicinal purposes, or for musical instruments, though exactly which musical instruments or for what medicinal purposes I’m not entirely sure, or indeed whether raven feathers make particularly good quills.

As the Ravenmaster you get used to fielding all sorts of bizarre requests and questions from the public. No, you cannot buy the birds. No, you cannot sponsor them. And no, you cannot borrow them. They belong to the Tower – or the Tower belongs to them. In case you’re interested, here are the top five questions that people tend to ask us Yeoman Warders, and the sort of answers we like to give:

1. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

Usually asked by our American visitors, who – may I say – are unfailingly charming and polite. Alas, in British English we tend to rather crudely refer to what Americans call the bathroom as the ‘toilet’, and to us a bathroom is the place you go to have a bath, so we tend to reply, ‘Why, sir, do you need a bath?’

2. ‘Where are the instruments of torture?’

Answers to this one vary from Yeoman Warder to Yeoman Warder, but they tend to go along the lines of ‘Try working here every day and you’ll soon find out.’

3. ‘Where was Anne Boleyn executed?’

This one demands the obvious answer, ‘Somewhere around the neck area, sir.’

4. ‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’

Some Yeoman Warders like to use this question as a prompt to tell the classic tales about the boy princes, the headless apparitions, Sir Walter Raleigh on the battlements, and all the other chain-rattling Victorian nonsense. My preferred response tends to be something like, ‘No, sir, but we certainly keep plenty of spirits in our clubhouse.’

5. ‘Who built the Tower?’

The Tower was built over the course of several centuries (though the medieval defences are essentially unchanged), so this question can elicit all sorts of responses, ranging from the patriotic ‘As well to ask, sir, who built the spirit of the Great British people!’ to ‘Well, we haven’t quite finished it yet, but we’re getting there,’ to a fully comprehensive explanation of the major enlargements and extensions to the building undertaken by Edward III and Richard II during the fourteenth century, to the confusing but accurate ‘1075/1078/1080, depending on which historical sources you consult.’ I prefer to explain that the Tower was founded by William the Conqueror and that the building of the great White Tower in stone was probably supervised by the Bishop of Rochester, Gundulf of Bec, who is not to be confused with Gandalf the Grey.

To be honest, the answers all rather depend on what day of the week it is, but basically, if you keep setting ’em up, we’ll keep knocking ’em down.

Anyway, as I was saying, that’s basically the storeroom. Except, of course, for the dog biscuits. Bag upon bag upon row upon row of dog biscuits, all neatly lined up on the shelves. When people ask if they can come and see the ravens, or if there’s a group who want to come and talk to me about them, I have one simple request and requirement: that they bring with them a bag of dog biscuits. This is absolutely non-negotiable. I like to think that our ravens have the best diet of any birds in the world, a proper varied diet which keeps them strong and healthy. But everyone deserves a treat now and then, and the ravens love a nice dog biscuit soaked in blood. To prepare biscuits in blood, you simply place the dog biscuits into a container filled with blood and leave to soak for at least an hour – the longer the better. Et voilà! Bon appétit!

Rats are also a bit of a treat for the birds. I buy them in bulk from a specialist supplier and store them in the freezer. Then I get out as many as I need the night before, defrost them in the fridge, and prepare them in the morning. A nice fat rat’ll do a raven all day. A raven’s preferred method of engagement with a dead rat, or indeed with a live mouse if they get hold of one, is perfectly straightforward: foot on, claws in, beak engaged, guts first, then the rest stripped bare, leaving just the skin. All that usually remains is what looks like a mini rat-skin rug, which I like to bag up for the Tower foxes so there’s no waste.

A raven’s formidable claw. (Courtesy of the author)

The ravens get through about a ton and a half of food a year. Their diet mostly consists of chicken, lamb and pig hearts, liver, kidney, mice, rats, day-old chicks, peanuts in their shells, the occasional boiled egg, and some fish, steak chunks and rabbit (with the fur left on). Anything else they want, they steal from the bins and from the public, or they just go out and kill it. Most of the meat I get from Smithfield Market. If you’ve never been to Smithfield Market, you should go before it’s too late. It’s one of the great old London institutions, a proper wholesale market, but also open to the public, and always under threat of being re-developed and turned into swanky offices and fancy restaurants. Smithfield is not for the faint-hearted. I was a regular for about a year before any of the traders deigned to actually give me a nod, never mind speak to me. You can get amazing bargains, though only if you’re there by about 5 a.m. at the latest, and you’re prepared to buy in bulk. Whatever you do, don’t ask for a single lamb chop. Tell the lads there that I sent you. They’ll probably tell you where to go, but nonetheless, it’s a start. And once you’re there you might as well nip into the Hope for a pint, or La Forchetta for a cup of tea and a fry-up.

(Personally, I don’t like to eat until I’ve fed the ravens in the morning. This is not out of politeness. I don’t know if you’ve tossed many rats to a raven, or if you’ve ever had to clear up yesterday’s mauled meat leftovers, but from my experience you really don’t want to be doing so while digesting an early-morning bacon sandwich. Trust me, it’s best to go with a bowl of porridge once the job is over and done with.)

To be honest, I’d probably prefer if the birds were all vegetarian, but ravens, like a lot of us humans, are meat-eaters. There’s a theory that we Yeoman Warders got the nickname Beefeaters because as members of the royal bodyguard we were permitted to eat as much beef as we could from the king’s table. There are plenty of other theories about the origin of the nickname, but whether any of them are conclusive evidence I don’t know. Frankly, we all prefer to be called Yeoman Warders anyway.

Given a choice, I fancy that many of the ravens, like many of us, would probably survive on junk food. Merlina in particular is very partial to a crisp – or as Americans like to call it, a potato chip. She watches out for any little crisp that a young visitor might drop, and she’ll take it to one of the water bowls and give it a good rinse, softening it up for consumption. She has a particular ability to be able to spot a tube of Pringles from the other side of Tower Green, hop right up to an innocent member of the public, steal the whole tube, hop off with it, pop off the lid, and cram as many crisps into her mouth as she possibly can before being noticed. This is worth bearing in mind if you’re thinking of visiting the Tower and bringing a snack with you. Remember: ravens are opportunists, and will happily steal anything from you if and when the chance arises.

I have spent almost as many years now standing at my post on Tower Green watching the ravens getting into scrapes as I spent getting into scrapes myself in the army, and I can safely say that to watch a raven at work scavenging food is to witness something very much like a military operation. As a soldier you’re taught all sorts of drills and standard operating procedures to prepare for battle and to analyse your options when engaged on a mission. In military terms this is how we might describe one of Merlina’s typical sandwich-snatch operations:

MISSION: To steal a ham sandwich from a visitor sitting on a bench.

PLAN OF ATTACK: Sneak up from the rear with stealth and cunning, hide under the bench until the target puts down the sandwich, then remove the prize by pulling at it through the bench slats until in full possession. Then hop off.

ACTIONS ON: If detected on the approach to the bench, look innocent and peck at the ground.

ACTIONS ON: If member of the public isn’t putting the sandwich down, jump on the bench and scare them until they drop it.

ACTIONS ON: If unable to tug the sandwich through the bench slat, pull harder and store as much as you can in your mouth at the same time.

RE-ORG: Hop to the Ravenmaster for protection while you’re being chased by the angry visitor.

Whatever their personal snacking habits, I always feed the ravens twice a day in the enclosure, once in the morning and then sometime in the afternoon. Feeding them in the enclosure allows me to monitor what they’re eating. In the past the Ravenmasters preferred to put the food out around the Tower, but the problem was that a seagull might take a nice juicy piece of ox liver, say, that was intended for a raven, have a little nibble on it, and then casually drop it on a visitor from a great height. I’ve seen it happen more than once, and believe me, it is not a pretty sight. These days the ravens have come to expect to find food in the enclosure, and because they know they’re going to be fed safely there, they’re happy to roam around all day. It also encourages them to go back to the enclosure as the light fades. It’s a win-win.

In preparing the food, it’s important of course that we follow basic health and safety requirements. I am an absolute stickler for proper hand-washing procedures. Plus, I like the smell of all the antiseptic stuff. I can remember when I’d just started work at the Tower and the old Ravenmaster, Derrick Coyle, would walk into our guardroom, the Yeoman Warders’ Hall, and I could smell the antiseptic on him. It always reminded me of my childhood. The smell of my mum scrubbing up in the hairdressing salon where she worked, the smell of a day having been properly completed, or just begun. The smell of cleanliness, of preparedness, of a job well done.

Once I’ve distributed the food to the birds I leave them in the enclosure for an hour or so before letting them out. The great thing about ravens – unlike, say, us humans – is that they’ll only eat until they’ve had enough, and then they like to go off and exercise. Anything they don’t use they’ll cache.

And speaking of caching, the next thing I do every morning is take care of the foxes.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in a life dealing with animals, it’s this: there are always foxes to be taken care of.

8

The Menagerie

As Ravenmaster, I see myself as responsible for all the wildlife in the Tower – including the foxes. What I’ve tried to do here over the years is to create a balance between everyone’s competing needs: the ravens, the foxes, the Yeoman Warders, the visitors. We all share the environment of the Tower, and my job is really about finding ways to enable us to live in harmony together. Most of the time all it requires is a little bit of forethought and some careful husbandry. If you leave food lying around, for example – guess what? – the foxes come in where you don’t want them, and they can cause absolute havoc. In the old days we’d just catch and cage them and take them away for extermination, but my feeling is that they have almost as much right to be here as the rest of us.

In order to maintain our modest little ecosystem, every morning after I’ve fed the ravens I take any scraps of food to the fox cache. A cache is a hiding place for ammunition, food, or indeed treasure of any sort. In the army we were taught to set up caches in evasion and recovery operations, storing food and water, medical items, communication equipment, that sort of thing. I decided to set up the fox cache a few years ago when I realised that the best way to manage the foxes in the Tower was to try to think like a fox. It’s that old military thing: know your enemy. With foxes you have to understand that they really just want to come and fill their bellies, and then they’re happy, and they’ll leave you alone. So I found a special place where I can deliver food to them every day, which keeps them contented and well away from the ravens’ enclosure. Job done.

(And how did I know the best place to leave the food for the foxes, you might ask. Well, I probably know every nook and cranny in the Tower, every rooftop and gutter, every walkway, every staircase, every little crack and fissure. Wherever it is, however high or low, however inaccessible, I’ve been there, found the ravens hiding there, found something they’ve hidden there, or found a foxhole or a nest or a den or a warren. Visitors are always asking about hidden tunnels in the Tower. All I can say is that I’ve never discovered any – and I’ve been looking for years.)

The Tower throughout its history has always been full of all sorts of animals. These days a lot of those animals are the cats and dogs and other pets of the Yeoman Warders – you’d be surprised how many of us are out early in the morning walking our dogs in the moat. Apart from the ravens and the foxes there are also the various squirrels, seagulls, pigeons, sparrows, starlings, kestrels, blue tits, crows, mice, rats, and even the odd pair of Egyptian geese that like to stop over and drink from the ravens’ water bowls. The Tower is an eighteen-acre green oasis in the middle of London, after all. We have a breeding pair of kestrels in one of the arrow slits opposite my house in the Casemates, who have been resident now for many years; we have four different kinds of bats; and every year when Traitors’ Gate is full of water we usually get a duck family settling in with their ducklings. Two magpies, who I call Ronnie and Reggie Kray after the notorious 1960s London gangsters, like to visit the ravens’ enclosure looking for scraps of leftover meat, and seem to have been accepted by them – perhaps on the threat of violence, who knows.

Until relatively recently, though, most of the animals in the Tower would have been the exotic beasts presented by the rulers of faraway lands to the kings and queens of England. For more than six hundred years the Tower was a sort of zoo, or at least a storehouse for rare creatures of all kinds, which were an entertainment and a spectacle for visitors. In a sense, the ravens are another chapter in the great Royal Menagerie story, and the Ravenmaster is a keeper of one of the world’s few single-species open-air zoos.

The term menagerie – which I like to use to refer to all of us who live and work together in the Tower – derives from the French, and refers to an aristocratic or royal collection of captive animals. As every schoolchild knows, when William the Conqueror invaded in 1066 he ordered that a series of fortresses be built around England to protect his barons from the threat of invading armies and civil dissent – among which fortresses the Tower is only the most famous and the most long-standing. According to the Domesday Book, the Normans founded nearly fifty castles in the twenty years after landing at Hastings, a building programme unprecedented in English history, and which makes even the current property boom in London seem not so much a bang as a whimper. What’s perhaps less well-known is that William’s son Henry established England’s first menagerie at his manor house in Oxford, building a big wall to contain his collection of lions, camels and porcupines. This small royal zoo was eventually moved to the Tower around 1204, during the reign of King John, and formed the beginning of the Royal Menagerie.

There have always been famous animals who have called London home. When I was growing up it was the giant pandas Chi Chi and Ching-Ching and Guy the gorilla at London Zoo. Earlier in the twentieth century there was Winnie, the female Canadian black bear who would give her name to young Christopher Robin Milne’s teddy bear, the inspiration for Winnie-the-Pooh. And back in the nineteenth century there was the mighty Obaysch, the first hippo in Europe since the days of the Roman Empire, who caused a sensation: Queen Victoria came to watch him swimming in Regent’s Park, and compared him to a porpoise. But before all of them there were the animals of the Tower, the bigger and stranger the better.

There was a ‘white bear’ – a polar bear – for example, who was a gift from King Haakon IV of Norway to King Henry III in 1252, and who was kept tethered at the riverside with a huge collar and a long rope, allowing him to fish for food in the Thames. I like to imagine the look on the faces of anyone who happened to be sailing up or down the river when they saw a big white bear swimming past. In addition, in 1255 Louis IX of France gave Henry III an African elephant. Just getting it to London must have been a logistical nightmare. According to one eyewitness, ‘the people flocked to see the novel sight … The beast is about ten years old, possessing a rough hide rather than fur, has small eyes at the top of its head, and eats and drinks with a trunk.’ Again, what a sight, to have seen an elephant at the Tower back then – I would compare it today to seeing a Tyrannosaurus rex suddenly poking its head over the battlements.

Like any great collection, the Royal Menagerie just grew and grew. By the time Edward I came to the throne, an official position had been created known as Keeper of the Lions and Leopards, later renamed the Master of the King’s Bears and Apes. By the 1300s all the animals in the Tower had to be moved outside to the main western entrance, which was later named the Lion Tower, for obvious reasons.

An ‘Extraordinary and Fatal Combat’ that took place at the Royal Menagerie at the Tower in December 1830. The lion died of its injuries. (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

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