Venture to the end of the Met line to find a life-saving cockatoo.
If you've been to the Cheshire Cheese pub in central London, you'll probably have met Polly, the parrot notorious for terrorising punters with his foul mouth beak — and now enshrined forevermore in a glass case above the front bar.
Travel to the northern end of the Metropolitan line, however, and you'll discover a parrot who used its voice for an altogether more noble cause: saving the lives of people asleep inside a burning hotel.
It was 4.30am on the morning of 14 December 1935, when a blaze broke out in the lounge of the historical Crown Hotel in Amersham. No guests were staying at the time, but various staff members were sleeping, and they'd soon owe their lives to Joey, a white sulphur-crested cockatoo belonging to the landlord.
"The screechings of a cockatoo more than 100 years old gave the alarm on Saturday morning, when fire destroyed the Crown Hotel," reported the Oban Times and Argyllshire Advertiser. Stirred awake, the hotel chef, a Mr Rochester, rescued two hotel maids, lifting them out of an upstairs window, while the manageress, Mrs Horner, ran barefooted to the nearby house of the fire brigade superintendent.
Having successfully woken the hotel up, Joey flew to safety, although two of the landlord's pet cats — including a Persian cat said to be an 'inseparable companion' of Joey's — weren't so fortunate, and were later found dead. All the human inhabitants, however, were accounted for, and though the hotel suffered extensive damage, it was restored and reopened.
Joey lived on for another year/a few more years depending on which museum account you read, passing away at the ripe old age of 118. The feathered fire alarm was afforded the same gilded treatment as the aforementioned Polly of the Cheshire Cheese, stuffed and displayed in a glass case above the hotel bar, where he presided over the punters for many years, before being donated to Amersham Museum.
If we're being totally transparent, Joey's life-saving alarm-sounding may have been over-exaggerated for the papers. In a report published a week or so later, Mrs Horner claimed she'd actually been woken by the sound of crackling, and the sight of flames. But let's not allow that to get in the way of a good story.
Cockatoos aside, Amersham Museum — which is set inside a medieval hall house — will interest Londoners with its displays on Metroland, those sunlit suburban uplands, which this area became home to from the 1920s. Though technically in Buckinghamshire, by dint of being a pastoral stroll from the Tube (through woodlands, then steeply undulating fields), Amersham Old Town is an uncomplicated day trip from anywhere inside Greater London.
Meanwhile, if you head through 'new' Amersham, you'll discover the bewitching reliquary of self-playing instruments that is Amersham Fair Organ Museum. And don't forget to stop off at the half-sized Metropolitan line steam train en route. Everything in Amersham, it would seem, errs towards the quaint.
All images by Londonist, unless otherwise stated.
