Courtesy of Wikipedia. Author Mrs Ellacot. 17 September 2014. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Most people know that Cleopatras Needle on Victoria Embankment is pretty old – it dates from about 1450BC – but has it got anything to do with Cleopatra? A big no to that one.
Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt wasn’t born till about 1400 years later. So how come an ancient Egyptian obelisk ended up on the side of the Thames in rainy old London? Answer is it was a given to us by Egypt’s ruler in 1815 as a thank-you gift for helping defeat the French at the Battle of the Nile.
The mammoth task of bringing it to these shores nearly met with total disaster when the ship towing the obelisk, which was encased in an iron cylinder nicknamed the ‘Cleopatra’ (now you see) floundered in a storm in the Bay of Biscay. Six crewmen drowned.
Amazingly the Cleopatra didn’t sink and was found floating in the bay a few days later. It was rescued and towed the rest of the way to Britain.
The original intention was to site it in Parliament Square, but they were worried that the pavement wasn’t strong enough to support it, so it ended up on the Embankment.
It’s said to be haunted. If you put your ear to the monument, you can supposedly hear the screams of the drowned sailors. And just to add weight to the haunted theme, an apparition of a naked man has been seen leaping into the Thames beside the needle.
And oh yes, buried under Cleopatra’s needle is a 19th century time capsule, which has amongst other things, 12 portraits of Britain’s then most beautiful women, which included Queen Victoria. Well, who was going to argue?
Finally the Sphinxes guarding Cleopatra’s needle. Not that old at all comparatively speaking. They were created in at an iron works in Pimlico in 1881. Their job is to guard the obelisk but were placed facing inwards instead of out by mistake, so pretty lousy security guards.
In 1917 during the first world war, 3500 years of history nearly came to a sticky end when a German Zepelin airship dropped a bomb nearby, leaving serious damage to the pedestal of the obelisk and to the west Sphinx. Deliberately left unrepaired, it just adds to the history rather than diminishes it.