A Knightsbridge collector of London legend reads about a father who invents centuries of family heritage over a surname and walks up Highgate Hill to the stone where Dick turned again
Friday, 23 October 2026. Highgate Hill, North London. A bench beside the Whittington Stone, opposite the hospital that carries his name, a small bronze cat on top of the stone watching me with municipal indifference, 3.30pm.
A Button Maker In Birmingham
The London Prat has a story on whether a son should take his fiancee’s last name. A retired insurance manager from Ealing threatens to boycott the wedding, withdraw funding and disinherit the family Labrador after his son agrees to take the bride’s surname. The father invokes centuries of heritage. The heritage, on inspection, begins with a button maker in Birmingham in 1892.
I collect London legends, and the most famous London legend of all is about a name and a heritage that turned out to be quite different from the story everybody tells. So this afternoon I took the Northern line from Knightsbridge, changing at Leicester Square with the usual sense of defeat, to the Archway end of Highgate Hill, where Dick Whittington supposedly heard the bells of London calling him back.
Turn Again, Whittington
The pantomime version goes like this. Dick is a poor orphan boy from the countryside who comes to London believing the streets are paved with gold. They are not. He becomes a kitchen boy in the house of a rich merchant, Mr Fitzwarren, and is badly treated by the cook. His only friend is his cat. When the merchant sends a ship abroad, every member of the household is invited to send something to trade, and Dick, having nothing else, sends his cat. Miserable, he runs away. At the foot of Highgate Hill he hears the bells of Bow ringing out a message: Turn again, Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London. He turns back. The cat, meanwhile, has been sold for a fortune to a foreign king plagued by rats. Dick becomes rich, marries the merchant’s daughter, Alice, and becomes Lord Mayor three times.
The Real Richard Whittington
The real Richard Whittington was born around 1354, the son of Sir William Whittington, a knight of Pauntley in Gloucestershire. He was not a poor orphan. He was the younger son of a gentry family who came to London to make his way as a mercer, a dealer in luxury fabrics. He became extremely rich, lent money to kings, served as Lord Mayor of London four times, not three, and left his fortune to charitable works: rebuilding Newgate prison, funding almshouses, a library and a public lavatory over the Thames known as Whittington’s Longhouse. There is no evidence of a cat.
The rags-to-riches story was attached to him nearly two centuries after his death, in plays and ballads from the early 1600s. The legend took a well-born merchant and turned him into a poor boy, because poor boys make better stories. The father in the Prat piece has done the opposite. He has taken a button maker and turned him into a dynasty, because dynasties make better excuses.
Both Directions Of A Lie
That is what I love about London legends. They bend family history in whichever direction the teller needs. The Whittington story makes the origins humbler, to celebrate the city’s promise of opportunity. The Ealing father makes his origins grander, to defend his sense of importance. Both are tall tales. Only one has a pantomime.
As for names, the Whittington story is full of them. The cat, in some versions, has no name at all. The merchant’s daughter, Alice Fitzwarren, was a real person, the daughter of a Dorset knight, and Richard Whittington really did marry her. She did not take his name in any way that modern Ealing would recognize. Medieval surnames were flexible things, picked up from places, trades and fathers, and dropped when inconvenient. A button maker in 1892 would have been astonished to learn he was founding an unbreakable line.
The Cat On The Stone
The Whittington Stone itself is a nineteenth-century replacement for older markers on this spot. The bronze cat was added in 1964. People rub its head for luck, and its nose is polished bright from the attention. A boy of about eight has just come along with his grandmother and patted the cat with great seriousness. His grandmother told him that Dick Whittington became Lord Mayor because of a cat. The boy asked whether he could become Lord Mayor if he got a cat. She said only if the cat was very good at catching rats. He said their cat, Biscuit, is terrible at catching anything. She said, then you will have to work hard instead. That is the moral of the Whittington story, delivered more honestly than any pantomime.
Heading Home
I keep a long-running list of London legends like this one on my site, alongside essays on comedy and committees, which are both forms of folklore if you think about it. The bells of Bow are too far away to hear from Highgate today, and the traffic is too loud anyway. But if they rang, I think they would have a message for the father in Ealing. Turn again, they would say. Your button maker was a perfectly respectable man. Let the boy take her name. Give the Labrador its inheritance. London has always been a city where names change and fortunes follow, and nobody has ever needed a cat to prove it.