The Monument in London’s Pudding Lane, the site of the origin of the Great Fire of 1666, was designed by Sir Christopher Wren. For 150 it was emblazoned with the falsehood that the fire was started by Papists. I don’t know what profits Papists were supposed to have gained from the conflagration but I believe Wren made a bob or two from it. If you want his monument, says the inscription on his tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral, “look around you.” In fact the inscription is in Latin, a subject, which like history, ha been binned. For the curious it in fact says “ Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.”
Fleet Street is in sight of the steps of St Paul’s and for long hosted the greatest gathering of liars this side of Hell, where Satan, the Father of Lies, is reputed to rest when not directing British Propaganda.
The old British Press Council, once, very reluctantly, upheld a complaint of mine about a lie in THE TIMES. Barely was the ink dry on the Council’s adjudication when, all on the same morning, THE DAILY MAIL, THE DAILY EXPRESS & THE DAILY STAR repeated the lie, which had been spread by Margaret Thatcher, the Rev Ian Paisley, James Kilfedder and others. In fact Sir Humphrey Atkins wrote the piece in the Daily Mail. Harold Evans was Editor of the Times when it published and sought to defend its lie. He was later knighted. So influential are the British media in Ireland that Peter Barry, when Minister for Foreign Affairs, repeated it, perhaps in ignorance.
I’ll return to lying monuments and monuments to liars in other blogs.
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