Fiddler's Heights was the name of the now bombed-out pub that stood in Bow, London. It was founded in the late 17th century by the eminent philanthropist and renowned loony Arnold J. Fiddler, the finest and most unpopular fiddler of his day, who decided that his talents required a building sufficiently fiddly to house them. The subsequent building was initially known as Fiddler's Cove, and was branded an "emporium of entertainments for the gentle and gentry classes". Fiddler's Cove quickly became a popular local haunt for other fiddlers to come and have a fiddle about with each other without the general public pouring judgment and disapproval upon them, and all the inconveniences that brought.
Soon word spread of this fiddling to all the fiddlers across Europe; as Arnold played his tune, other fiddlers - Dutch, Irish, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Prussian, Flemish and more - used inane folk ditties as their currency as they paid for passage across the English Channel. Arnold welcomed them all with as much gaiety and laughter as had come from the European villages that had finally got shot of 'em.
Fiddler's Cove, quickly inundated with dispossessed European fiddlers, all in requirement of housing, food and wine, underwent a period of expansion. Ten new storeys were built to accommodate the immigrants, who were by now attempting to organise themselves into orchestra. As the building grew, it became known as Fiddler's Heights. For a while, against the backdrop of nauseating rootsy waltzes and the like, all seemed well among the fiddling community.
As the fiddlers' numbers increased, it became clear that a mutinous schism was growing in the self-contained community; led by the talented but unhinged Irish music-hall impresario and virtuoso fiddler, Jack "the *******" O'Hara, a group calling itself The Free Fiddlers, attempted to usurp Arnold as the manager of Fiddler's Heights, stating that fiddlers ought not to be segregated from the rest of society, and they should be free to gambol in the fields, picking heather and shearing sheep and eating curry and writing translations of Goethe and mending watches and drinking steaming hot cups of ice cream.
Arnold, in a fit of fiddling, signed power of attorney over to his son, Tim-Bob. In his last-documented act of sanity, Arnold send Tim-Bob to Bulgaria to save him from the violent tendencies of O'Hara and his growing army of dissatisfactants. Over the last two years of his life, Arnold tried hard to keep The Free Fiddlers contained in the uppermost three storeys of the Heights, with the more moderate fiddlers fiddling in the floors below.
It worked, unto his death, when O'Hara decided to arm himself with his finest fiddle and played a 78-hour medley of traditional Belgian folk tunes, holding the rest of the fiddlers to ransom.
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In the second world war Fiddler's Heights was tragically bombed out of existence by the Luftwaffe. The eminent upwing cultural historian, Professor Donald McBatty of Fingringhow University, called the bombing "arguably the greatest and most charitable act of cultural work undertaken by the Third Reich."
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Trouserland
