If you came to the Show this year, you will remember being menaced by two heavily-armed wicker giants. They are Gog and Magog, the traditional guardians of the City of London, and they first walked at the head of the Lord Mayor’s procession around five hundred years ago. Queen Elizabeth I will have seen the figures at Temple Bar when she visited the city, and perhaps even Henry V on his return from Agincourt.
The old giants were carnival figures standing 14 feet high and made from ‘wickerwork and pasteboard’. They must have towered over the sixteenth century crowds, and between outings they stood guard at the Guildhall. There were many repairs and reconstructions due to time, rodents and finally the Great Fire, until eventually in the early 18th century they were replaced with wooden statues: more durable, but sadly no longer light or mobile enough to lead the Lord Mayor’s procession. The statues remained at the Guildhall until they were destroyed in the blitz and replaced yet again.
p(caption). The hair was tricky: it had to be convincing, but in the same style as the wicker bodies, and it had to be light enough not to overbalance the head. Here Bunty Ball and Harriet Middleboe put the finishing touches to Magog’s coiffure.
Olivia Elton Barratt is a Basketmaker who is given to having ideas. They tend to be the sort of idea that leaves a person floating down the Thames in a coracle of her own construction, and this was one of the bigger ones: wouldn’t it be great to recreate the ancient giants and see them walking the city streets again? She had nursed the plan for years, and when she learned that she would become Prime Warden of the Basketmakers’ Company in 2006 she decided it was time to put it into practice.
p(caption). The hands were trickier still, and eventually the team decided not to make them in wicker. Here Hilary Mayne tries on the leather versions for size.
This was not a small undertaking. The new figures are fourteen feet tall, just like the originals, and that means the basketmaker needs a ladder just to work on their legs. They are made from willow, which has to be soaked and mellowed before it can be worked, so the first job was to build a soaking tank the size of a small swimming pool. The willow itself was immediately donated by Musgrove Willows of Westonzoyland in Somerset, and the tank was set up in an old threshing barn in Essex where a team of volunteers would end up working for 18 weekends to complete the figures.
p(caption). Olivia Elton Barratt, on the right, sweeps up at the end of another long day. With her are Jan Barker and Mally Gower.
Their work ranged from weaving round and round the great barrel chests – simple but painstaking work with very careful shaping – to engineering complex joints and picking out tiny details of leaves and hair. The figures have lifelike hands, stern but kindly faces (the result of many experiments) and size 56 feet. They disassemble for transport into head, torso and legs and are held together by a cunning armature of pipes and joints that makes them light enough to carry and strong enough to survive the rough and tumble of public procession. Their construction was meticulously planned and then constantly reinvented, and the finished figures were finally dressed and armed in line with tradition: kilts and sashes, roman sandals, helmets and for Magog a spear and shield, for Gog a flail and a yew longbow.
p(caption). Kay Johnson, who kindly allowed her barn to fill with giant body parts over nine months
There are many remarkable things about the new giants but perhaps the most extraordinary of all is that the project didn’t cost a penny. It was a proper labour of love from the start: nobody was paid, all the materials and workspace were donated and dozens of people gave up their free time, travelled across the country and worked hard for many weekends. Olivia says that the hardest part of the whole project was the first: standing up in front of the Court of the Basketmakers’ Company and suggesting that they build giants that she had no idea how to pay for. “I was terrified”, she says, “but they didn’t say, ‘go home you silly woman’. They said ‘good idea’ and thought of ways to do it.” There followed nine months of hard work, during which she says “it only rained on us once”, which may tell us more about how much they had to concentrate than what the weather was like.
p(caption). Packing and moving the figures was a delicate job carried out with great care by the soldiers of 100 Troop.
Finally, just before the 2006 Lord Mayor’s Show, a heavy truck from the 100 (Yeomanry) Regiment of the Royal Artillery picked its way down the narrow lane to the courtyard where the finished giants stood. They were dismantled, wrapped in great quantities of bubblewrap, driven away and reassembled on a grey and chilly pavement outside the Museum of London. Olivia says she looked up at them, looming once again over the streets of the City, and “literally wept on the shoulder of a past Prime Warden of the Company”. He was “kind enough not to mind”.
p(caption). If you would like to see the giants between Shows, they currently brush the ceiling of the Royal National Hotel in Russell Square. They should eventually move back to the Guildhall, but at the moment there’s too much building work going on.
The giants will be back at the front of the Lord Mayor’s Procession this year, drawn as always by the Society of Young Freemen, connecting the Show to its origins in mediaeval pageantry and standing at the head of a line of guardians that runs all the way back to pre-christian London. Gog and Magog have looked out over Londoners for centuries and thanks to Olivia Elton Barratt, her Company and the Association of Basketmakers they still do.