“God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen.”
And so she has, if the age of our current monarch is any indication. But little did we realise, when we were enthusiastically rendering our then National Anthem (and occasionally wondering why the Brits sang the same one at the Olympics as if they didn’t have one of their own) that God might have had a little help from six crow-like ravens – in the Tower of London.
According to British tradition, a minimum of six British ravens must reside in the Tower, or not only will our gracious monarch fall, but the monarchy itself, along with the Tower. Currently there are seven ravens, the six required by Royal Decree, and a spare.
I’m not sure who is the spare, but the seven are named Jubilee, Harris, Grip, Rocky, Erin, Poppy and Merlina. Jubilee and Grip joined the conspiracy, as a bunch of ravens is called, in 2012 - Jubilee to commemorate the Queen’s Jubilee, and Grip (actually Grip the Third), both to commemorate the bi-centenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, and to replace his predecessor Grip the Second, who was eaten by an urban fox in the grounds of the tower, setting the monarchy teetering on the brink.
Grip the First and his partner Mabel were the only two to survive the Luftwaffe attacks in the London Blitz, which must have started a frantic search for replacement guardians of the Sovereign. Mindful of the superstition surrounding the birds, Winston Churchill hastily ordered the number to be urgently restored.
Merlina appears to be the favourite of the current Royal Raven Keeper Christopher Skaife, an ex-machine gunner. He clips her wings less severely than the other six, so she is allowed to fly out of the grounds. She is so well bonded with her keeper, that she (so far) always comes back.
The Tower Ravens are all captive bred. All are officially enlisted as soldiers of the Kingdom. As with soldiers they can be dismissed for unsatisfactory conduct. A special decree in 1986 declared, “On Saturday 13 Sept Raven George, who enlisted in 1975, was posted to the Welsh Mountain Zoo for conduct unsatisfactory.” George had been found guilty of “attacking and destroying TV aerials.” Signs also warn tourists that ravens bite.
Apart from the two killed by anti-monarchy foxes in 2013, the kidnapping of Royal Raven Mabel just after World War II remains an unsolved crime. Another, called Grog, escaped in 1981 and was last seen loitering outside a local pub. I kid you not – this is all part of the history of the Tower of London.
The most durable of all the Tower ravens lived to be 44. The superstition regarding the health of the monarch and the Tower ravens can only be traced back to its first mention in the 1880s. Experts believe though that it has its origin in ancient Celtic superstition about the supernatural powers of ravens. According to the ancient Christian story of Noah’s Ark, a raven was the first bird sent out to look for dry ground.
The three Tower Ravens called Grip were named after the original Grip, a pet talking raven of the British writer Charles Dickens (7.2.1812 - 9.6.1870). Grip was a favourite of the Dickens’ family, though he is reported to have had an annoying habit of biting the children’s ankles. Nevertheless it was the children who suggested to their father that because the repertoire of the talking bird was so impressive, Dickens should make him a character in his next novel. That novel turned out to be Barnaby Rudge, which appeared in 1841, just a few months before Grip died. Apparently the bird had an addiction not for sniffing, but for eating, house paint. He’d strip pieces off the wall, or drink the pure stuff out of open paint tins. In the end it killed him.
Here the story of Grip the raven takes a fascinating twist. Charles Dickens sent his novel in which Grip the talking raven knocked at the door, to his literary friend and contemporary in America, Edgar Allan Poe (19.1.1809 – 7.10.1849) to review. Poe liked the book but thought the raven was so impressive he should have played an even more direct role in the plot. Several years later, his own career in the doldrums, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a poem of 108 lines entitled “The Raven”, based on Dickens’ bird Grip, about a raven knocking on a sleeper’s door, “a mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man’s slow fall into madness.”
The poem is written in rollicking verse, evidenced in its famous opening lines, “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary …” with each section ending with the raven’s same reply, “quoth the raven, Nevermore!” Not so familiar in Australia, Poe’s “The Raven” is considered by some literary critics to be “the most famous poem ever written”, which is quite a big call, and was the making of Poe’s career. Poe died mysteriously at the age of 40, in 1849, just four years after he wrote the poem. So two of the world’s literary giants were inspired by the same bird, Grip.
After Grip drank too much paint in 1841 he was stuffed in more ways than one. Following a craze initiated by King George IV of England who had his pet giraffe stuffed,
Dickens had Grip taxidermied and mounted in his office.
When Dickens died, the stuffed Grip was bought at auction by a collector of Edgar Allan Poe artifacts, named Richard Gimbel. In 1971 Gimbel’s collection of literary landmarks was donated to the Free Library in Philadelphia USA.
There, to this very day, if you go up to the third floor, you can still see Grip, “the chatty raven who contributed more than any other single bird to English literature.
Perched on a log, preserved with arsenic, frozen inside his shadow box, he stands as a strange piece of history.”
Or you could go to the Tower of London and meet his living namesake, one of the six who guards the Queen.
