The Ravenmaster. Christopher Skaife

Kitchen tavern was one, shut down by the Duke of Wellington long ago. The Tower has always been full of people, inside and out, and the Ravenmaster’s storeroom just sort of fits here, right in the thick of things, behind its own ancient black door, like an old apothecary’s shop.

      On my keyring, like all the other Yeoman Warders, I keep a whistle, to alert the others if there’s a problem. Plus I have a little skull-and-crossbones memento mori – you can’t work with ravens and not develop a bit of a taste for the macabre – and a small wooden raven totem pole, which I keep as a kind of talisman.

      Now, let me open up the storeroom and show you the Ravenmaster’s inner sanctum.

      7

       Biscuits and Blood

      I like to keep the storeroom neat and tidy at all times, the result no doubt of a lifetime in the military. When you join the army as a young recruit you’re taught everything, and I mean everything. You learn how to clean your teeth and how to make your bed and tie your boots, how to iron and fold your clothes. Above all, you’re taught never to just leave stuff lying around. It’s drilled into you. You survive by following routines and procedures. A place for everything and everything in its place. No excuses.

      So, in the storeroom there’s the fridge, the freezer, the sink and the counter tops, all kept spick and span. Raven calendar on the wall, obviously, and our daily diary underneath it, so the whole team can keep up to date and log what’s happening with the birds. There’s the fishing net on its shelf, used for raven-catching purposes, if a bird is injured and needs immediate veterinary attention. Chasing a raven around the Tower in full view of the public, fishing net in hand, like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – believe me, that really is an experience. The first-aid kit: you certainly know if you’ve had a nip from a raven. Scales for weighing the birds, which we do once a month. Chopping boards and equipment for preparing the meals. Rubber gloves. Leather falconry gloves. Metal gauntlets – which I do not recommend for handling the ravens, because they do sometimes like to try to crush your fingers, and picking metal out of flesh is never nice, as I can testify. A couple of wooden boxes to carry sick birds to the vets we work with at London Zoo. There’s also an old plastic KerPlunk, which we like to use for the ravens’ entertainment. (In KerPlunk: The Raven Edition, the challenge for the birds is to remove the straws in order to win a dead mouse which we place in the tube, ready to fall down and be eaten. Good clean raven fun. Munin is the reigning champion.) I also keep a jar full of raven feathers in the storeroom, kindly donated by the ravens once a year during their moult, and which I occasionally like to distribute to deserving/well-behaved/lucky visitors. If I’m doing a Tower tour, for example, and I discover that a couple are recently married or engaged, I like to give them a pair of feathers – a primary and a secondary, since without one the other is no good. I’m an old romantic at heart. Sometimes people request feathers for use as quills, or for medicinal purposes, or for musical instruments, though exactly which musical instruments or for what medicinal purposes I’m not entirely sure, or indeed whether raven feathers make particularly good quills.

      As the Ravenmaster you get used to fielding all sorts of bizarre requests and questions from the public. No, you cannot buy the birds. No, you cannot sponsor them. And no, you cannot borrow them. They belong to the Tower – or the Tower belongs to them. In case you’re interested, here are the top five questions that people tend to ask us Yeoman Warders, and the sort of answers we like to give:

      1. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

      Usually asked by our American visitors, who – may I say – are unfailingly charming and polite. Alas, in British English we tend to rather crudely refer to what Americans call the bathroom as the ‘toilet’, and to us a bathroom is the place you go to have a bath, so we tend to reply, ‘Why, sir, do you need a bath?’

      2. ‘Where are the instruments of torture?’

      Answers to this one vary from Yeoman Warder to Yeoman Warder, but they tend to go along the lines of ‘Try working here every day and you’ll soon find out.’

      3. ‘Where was Anne Boleyn executed?’

      This one demands the obvious answer, ‘Somewhere around the neck area, sir.’

      4. ‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’

      Some Yeoman Warders like to use this question as a prompt to tell the classic tales about the boy princes, the headless apparitions, Sir Walter Raleigh on the battlements, and all the other chain-rattling Victorian nonsense. My preferred response tends to be something like, ‘No, sir, but we certainly keep plenty of spirits in our clubhouse.’

      5. ‘Who built the Tower?’

      The Tower was built over the course of several centuries (though the medieval defences are essentially unchanged), so this question can elicit all sorts of responses, ranging from the patriotic ‘As well to ask, sir, who built the spirit of the Great British people!’ to ‘Well, we haven’t quite finished it yet, but we’re getting there,’ to a fully comprehensive explanation of the major enlargements and extensions to the building undertaken by Edward III and Richard II during the fourteenth century, to the confusing but accurate ‘1075/1078/1080, depending on which historical sources you consult.’ I prefer to explain that the Tower was founded by William the Conqueror and that the building of the great White Tower in stone was probably supervised by the Bishop of Rochester, Gundulf of Bec, who is not to be confused with Gandalf the Grey.

      To be honest, the answers all rather depend on what day of the week it is, but basically, if you keep setting ’em up, we’ll keep knocking ’em down.

      Anyway, as I was saying, that’s basically the storeroom. Except, of course, for the dog biscuits. Bag upon bag upon row upon row of dog biscuits, all neatly lined up on the shelves. When people ask if they can come and see the ravens, or if there’s a group who want to come and talk to me about them, I have one simple request and requirement: that they bring with them a bag of dog biscuits. This is absolutely non-negotiable. I like to think that our ravens have the best diet of any birds in the world, a proper varied diet which keeps them strong and healthy. But everyone deserves a treat now and then, and the ravens love a nice dog biscuit soaked in blood. To prepare biscuits in blood, you simply place the dog biscuits into a container filled with blood and leave to soak for at least an hour – the longer the better. Et voilà! Bon appétit!

      Rats are also a bit of a treat for the birds. I buy them in bulk from a specialist supplier and store them in the freezer. Then I get out as many as I need the night before, defrost them in the fridge, and prepare them in the morning. A nice fat rat’ll do a raven all day. A raven’s preferred method of engagement with a dead rat, or indeed with a live mouse if they get hold of one, is perfectly straightforward: foot on, claws in, beak engaged, guts first, then the rest stripped bare, leaving just the skin. All that usually remains is what looks like a mini rat-skin rug, which I like to bag up for the Tower foxes so there’s no waste.

      A raven’s formidable claw. (Courtesy of the author)

      The ravens get through about a ton and a half of food a year. Their diet mostly consists of chicken, lamb and pig hearts, liver, kidney, mice, rats, day-old chicks, peanuts in their shells, the occasional boiled egg, and some fish, steak chunks and rabbit (with the fur left on). Anything else they want, they steal from the bins and from the public, or they just go out and kill it. Most of the meat I get from Smithfield Market. If you’ve never been to Smithfield Market, you should go before it’s too late. It’s one of the great old London institutions, a proper wholesale market, but also open to the public, and always under threat of being re-developed and turned into swanky offices and fancy restaurants. Smithfield is not for the faint-hearted. I was a regular for about a year before any of the traders deigned to actually give me a nod, never mind speak to me. You can get amazing bargains, though only