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- Herausgeber: The Robson Press
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Ann Treneman, the award-winning Times writer best known for her incisive parliamentary sketches, has branched out - to graveyards. In this riveting book she takes you to the most interesting graves in Britain. You'll meet the real War Horse, the best 'funambulist' ever, Byron and his dog Boatswain, Florence Nightingale and her pet owl Athena, prime ministers, kings and queens, highwaymen, scientists, mistresses, the real James Bond and, of course, M. Then there are writers, painters, poets, rakes and rogues, victims, the meek and mild and the just plain mad. This unique book is made up of a hundred entries, each telling the story of one or more graves. Some are chosen for who is in them, others for the grave itself. Some of the entries are humorous, some are poignant, but all tell us something about the British way of death. At times absurd, at times astounding, in Finding the Plot Ann Treneman provides an entertaining guide to the Anglo-Saxon underworld.
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CONTENTS
GEOGRAPHICAL GUIDE TO GRAVES
INTRODUCTION
Iknow what you are thinking. You want to know, as did almost everyone else who I have told about this book, how I got the idea for it and how I picked the graves. So first, the idea. In my day job, when I’m not running around cemeteries, I am the political sketchwriter for The Times and, just before the 2010 election, I was chatting to an MP named Tony Wright who is, unlike some politicians, one of the good guys. He was standing down as Labour MP for Cannock Chase and we started talking about Birmingham. Did he know, I asked, that the inventor of the phenomenally successful board game Cluedo had lived in Bromsgrove? I had done a story on the man, with the marvellous name of Anthony E. Pratt, and had tracked down his grave which, at the time, also seemed under threat from the Brum mole population. ‘Ah,’ said Tony, ‘that’s interesting; I don’t think anyone has ever written a book about the best graves in Britain.’
‘Hmmm,’ I said, ‘well maybe that would be fun.’
It is now almost four years later and, though it’s been fun, it’s also involved a lot of what I call ‘graving’ (not to be confused with gravy, by the way), which I think should be a new verb.
So how did I choose them? The first was easy. That was Cluedo inventor Mr Pratt. So then, only ninety-nine to go. I learned, pretty quickly, that there actually had been many books published on famous graves, though none in this format. I talked to just about everyone I met about their favourite graves (I am sure you can see how popular I was making myself). Plus there were my personal quirks and favourites. I also looked through books and, feeling a bit like some sort of intrepid Victorian explorer, made my way through the extraordinary database of 4,500 British graves listed by the website Find A Grave. These were my basic rules for choosing:
The list had to be eclectic and everyone on it had to be interesting. I mustn’t let my personal obsessions intrude too much though readers will be able to discern some obvious ones (step forward James Bond).I had to include iconic, historical and architectural graves. So I had one for the Beatles (Eleanor Rigby) and the great plague (the Hancock family in Eyam). There are also graves that I chose purely for what they looked like, but I soon found that people with interesting graves were exactly that themselves.They couldn’t be too depressing or upsetting. I put very few recent graves in my list and I thought long and hard about those that I did. For instance, I figure that Philip Gould, the political strategist who died in 2011 and wrote a book about his experience of dying, would actually want to be on the list. I was also wary of murder victims. This book is about lives, not deaths.The graves had to be accessible, if only for a few days a year. This ruled out the likes of the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore, which has been closed for years but, as a way of doing Queen Victoria, I did the grave of her servant (and who knows what else), John Brown.The graves should, in general, not be expensive to visit. There were a few exceptions. I had to include at least one grave each in the great soaring necropolises of Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s. I don’t begrudge the small fee to enter the likes of Highgate or, indeed, the charge for Newstead Abbey, where the grave of Byron’s dog resides in full glory. About half of the graves should be in or around London. This was both practical, in the sense that I think many readers will be visiting London, and sensible because I think that per square mile London has the most interesting dead people of anywhere in the world.I had to visit them. This might sound basic but you’d be surprised how easy it is to convince yourself that this would not be necessary. In a perfect world, for instance, the island of Iona would be on this list. But I just didn’t have the time to go and swim out there (that’s a joke).Now, looking over the 100, I think I have stuck to my rules overall. I must admit that, as I look over the list, I remain intrigued by every name but I can also see some faults. God, there are a lot of Victorians (but then they were the ones who invented the modern-day cemetery). And I have failed in some areas of geography (Edinburgh, among others, please forgive). Indeed, the one thing that I know as I write this introduction is that everyone who reads this book will want to add a grave or two. I considered quite seriously leaving the last of the 100 slots blank for you to fill in. But then I found Fred in deepest Beckenham (Frederick York Wolseley was the last grave I did) and I knew I couldn’t leave it blank.
Ann Treneman London July 2013
Jean François Gravelet or ‘Blondin’, Kensal Green Cemetery
CENTRAL LONDON
JEREMY BENTHAM
AUTO-ICON
15 February 1748–6 June 1832
South Cloisters, University College London, London WC1E 6BT
Philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham stares out at you, looking as if he is just about to say something rather important. He sits in his wooden cupboard, wisps of his (real) grey hair curling out from under his wide-brimmed straw hat. A lacy shirt flounces from his waistcoat. By his side is his walking stick and, on a little table, his small spectacles. In front of him, on the floor, three decals of X-rayed feet walk away from his cupboard, a modern addition of which he would have approved.
It’s a strange thing, really, a dead man in the cupboard, but here it doesn’t seem all that odd. As I stand there, observing him observing me, a group of students arrive, noisy and chattering.
‘Would you take our picture with Jeremy?’ one asks. ‘We’ve just finished our exams!’
The six students, all about twenty, giggle as they group around Jeremy, arms around each other’s shoulders. Right in the middle, staring out, very much part of the fun, is a 181-year-old man. He is, at that moment, quite literally the picture of happiness.
But then happiness was his raison d’être. For Jeremy (I feel we are on first-name terms) is the father of the philosophy of utilitarianism, whose fundamental precept is that the greatest happiness for the greatest number determines what is right or wrong. His ambition was to create a ‘Pannomion’, a complete utilitarian code of law. He spent years working on his vision of a prison building called the Panopticon. Born wealthy, he was a child prodigy who trained as a lawyer but never practised, instead spending his life criticising how the legal system worked. His many students included John Stuart Mill. He was a man ahead of his time and University College London claims him as its ‘spiritual father’ in that, like Bentham, its policy was (and is) to admit all, regardless of race, creed, wealth or political belief. An obsessive writer who almost never finished anything himself, Jeremy, who died at the age of eighty-three, left behind 30 million words, most of which reside not that far from his skeleton, and are still being organised.
‘Auto-icon is a word I have created,’ he wrote. ‘It is self-explanatory.’ Jeremy’s vision was that we would all become Auto-icons, thus doing away with burials. He wrote:
In general, in the present state of things, our dead relations are a source of evil – and not of good. The fault is not theirs but ours. They are nuisances – and we make them so: they generate infectious disease; they send forth the monster Typhus to destroy; we may prevent this. Why do we not prevent it?
He explains that in his will he had left his body for dissection, but that afterwards the head would be preserved – he was enthusiastic about a Maori process of mummification. The idea was that, eventually, everyone would embrace Auto-iconism. He wrote:
Our churches are ready-provided receptacles for Auto-icons, provided for all classes, for rich and poor. There would no longer be needed monuments of stone or marble – there would be no danger to health from the accumulation of corpses – and the use of churchyards would gradually be done away with. It would diminish the horrors of death, by getting rid of its deformities: it would leave the agreeable associations, and disperse the disagreeable. Of the de mortuis nil nisi bonum, it would be the best application: it would extract from the dead only that which is good – that which would contribute to the happiness of the living. It would set curiosity in motion – virtuous curiosity. Entire museums of Auto-icons would be formed.
That was the vision. The reality is that today most people think Auto-icons are something to do with cars. Indeed Jeremy is the only Auto-icon that I know. He was originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southward Smith. His experiment at mummification, using the Maori methods of placing the head under an air pump over sulphuric acid and drawing off the fluids, was successful – but gruesome. Jeremy’s real head looks distinctly scary and so it was decided to give the Auto-icon a wax head, with his own hair.
Jeremy went to ‘live’ at UCL in 1850. For some years, his real head was displayed in the same case – between Jeremy’s feet – but students from rival institutions kept stealing it, holding it hostage. The head has now been locked away. Jeremy himself would never want to be locked away. Indeed it is said that he sometimes attends UCL board meetings (where he is listed as ‘present – not voting’). What struck me, when I visited him, was that just by existing, he has provided much happiness to those who live with him every day. And that, of course, was the idea.
WILLIAM FRANKLIN
SON OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
1730 (date unknown)–17 November 1814
The Hardy Tree, Old St Pancras Churchyard, Pancras Road, London NW1 1UL
WILLIAM HEWSON
MEDICAL PIONEER
14 November 1739–1 May 1774
St Martin-in-the-Fields (grave lost), Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 4JJ
Plus his bodies under Benjamin Franklin House, 36 Craven Street, London WC2N 5NF
If this story weren’t true, I wouldn’t believe it. It involves six men – four famous, two illegitimate – and a very tall, thin house built in 1730 at 36 Craven Street in London. Indeed my story begins with a trip to that house, now a museum, and the only surviving home on any continent of Benjamin Franklin, the brilliant polymath and American Founding Father, who lived there as a lodger on and off from 1757 until 1775. He was extraordinarily engaged in life, fascinated by everyone and everything, printer, diplomat, revolutionary and inventor of the Franklin stove, the lightning rod, the glass harmonica and, of course, bifocals. As you negotiate the steep steps, the walls painted now, as then, in a shade called Franklin Green, it is quite hard to imagine that Ben once sat gloriously naked by the large first-floor sash windows, ‘air bathing’. It wouldn’t happen today.
For some of his time there, he would have been accompanied by William Franklin, his illegitimate but acknowledged son. William was born in 1730 in Philadelphia, his mother unknown. But he was raised by Ben and his common-law wife, Deborah Read. They were never able to marry for the simple reason that she already was – or could have been. It seems that Ben had proposed when he was just seventeen, and she fifteen, but this was rejected by her father. So instead she married another man who promptly ran off to Barbados with her dowry and never returned, thus tying her to him for life.
The Franklins, father and son, spent a great deal of time in London (Deborah, afraid of sea travel, never visited). William got his law degree and had his own illegitimate son named, somewhat confusingly, William Temple Franklin. In 1763 Ben managed, via contacts with the British government, to have his son appointed as Lieutenant Governor of New Jersey, a role that he relished but which, in the end, would be the undoing of him and his father.
Ben kept up an exhausting pace, both intellectual and physical. He really was one of those people who could never let anything be. (In 1768, while at Craven Street, he developed a new phonetic alphabet which got rid of c, j, q, w, x and y. As you do.) His main role may have been as a colonial agent, mediating between Britain and America, but he was a whirlwind of activity and endeavour – writing, debating, experimenting, eating, drinking, entertaining the likes of Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, and in general living life to the full. It sounds a slightly crazed household, with his landlady Margaret Stevenson and her daughter Mary (who was known as Polly) making up what seems almost another family for him. Things got even busier in 1770 when Polly married William Hewson, a medical pioneer, surgeon and anatomist whose outstanding work on blood means he is now sometimes called the ‘father of haematology’. With Franklin’s help, Hewson set up an anatomy school and lecture theatre at Craven Street.
What this actually entailed would have remained buried history if it were not for the fact that, in 1997, a restoration project was embarked on at Benjamin Franklin House. And guess what they found in the back garden? ‘Stop Press! Bones found at No. 36! Stop Press!’ cried the newsletter. And not just any bones but 200-year-old ones from at least ten human skeletons, some of which were children. The police were notified. A report from the London Evening Standard in February 1998 notes: ‘Most of the bones show signs of being dissected, or cut, while one skull has been drilled with several holes, suggesting it was used for early experiments in trepanning – a surgical procedure to remove bone from the skull. The main suspect in the mystery has emerged as Dr William Hewson.’ It goes on to note the bodies would have been snatched from local graveyards, an illegal practice for which the penalty was death or deportation. Mr Hewson and his students were thought to have carried out the ‘experiments’ in the basement kitchens.
At Craven Street today you can stand in the basement and look down through a ‘window’ into the ground. This is the burial pit where, in total, 1,200 pieces of bone were found. There are display cases of skulls with holes drilled into them. It really is quite surreal. I tried to imagine the scene in the 1770s. There was Benjamin Franklin, almost electrocuting anyone crazy enough to help him with his electricity experiments, and there was William Hewson, smuggling in bodies, carving them up, and digging deep in the back garden to bury them. What a place! And, of course, there is every chance that Franklin, pathologically curious, attended these dissections. But then, in 1774, at the age of thirty-four, Hewson cut himself while dissecting a putrid body, contracted septicaemia and died. He was buried in St Martin-in-the-Fields church, just around the corner on Trafalgar Square.
All of this and war too! The next year Benjamin Franklin would return to the Colonies, giving up on peace with England. By this time, in May 1775, the war had started. Benjamin would become a deeply respected and loved Founding Father, his kindly face as famous now as it was then. But a story that is much less known is that his illegitimate son, still serving as Royal Governor in New Jersey, stayed loyal to the King. William Franklin was deposed in 1776, imprisoned in Simsbury Mines, a cavern seventy feet underground, before he fled to New York, which was still occupied by the British. There he became a royalist guerrilla, launching raids into neighbouring states. When the British troops left, William Franklin left with them. He settled in London and never returned.
He and his father were never reconciled. Ben was uncompromising in his position that a Loyalist should not be given amnesty or compensation. He left William nothing in his will except for some territory in Nova Scotia, noting that, if Britain had won the war, he would have had nothing to leave him anyway. He dedicated his autobiography to him but then never mentioned him in it. It seems there is no bit of this tale without a twist, for Benjamin Franklin had found out about his (illegitimate) grandson William Temple and brought him, at the age of thirteen, to Philadelphia to live with him. Later, William Temple would return to England to live with his father (and, of course, have his own illegitimate daughter!).
Benjamin Franklin died in 1790. William, who remained a leading Loyalist in London and never tired of the idea of reconciling with the States, died in 1813 at the age of eighty-two. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says he was buried in St Pancras Old Church Cemetery. So I went to St Pancras to find him: it is a gem of a place, tucked away around the back of the British Library and the railway station. The church, possibly dating from the fourth century, is simple, small and intimate – a true joy. The churchyard is more a park with a smattering of graves to break up the landscape. I dragooned someone named Tim, a volunteer guide, and we zoomed round, looking for William Franklin’s grave.
We found several others on the way. In a neat bit of fate, it turns out that Charles Dickens had a link to this place. He identified this graveyard by name in A Tale of Two Cities as the location of bodysnatching to provide corpses for dissection at medical schools! It was here that Jerry Cruncher and his son came ‘fishing’, armed with a spade. Shades of William Hewson, in every sense. And among the graves we did find was that of William Jones, headmaster of Wellington House Academy, who died in 1836. The gravestone identifies him as ‘master of a respectable school’. That, of course, is not how Dickens, a day pupil there, remembers it, calling him ‘by far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know’. Mr Jones was also ‘one of the worst-tempered men perhaps that ever lived’. Mr Creakle, the ferocious headmaster in David Copperfield, was based on William Jones.
A main attraction of this graveyard is what is now called The Hardy Tree, a strange sight in which the roots of a giant ash tree have grown up between what seems like hundreds of old gravestones. It turns out that Thomas Hardy, before he was a writer, was an architecture student. In the 1860s, the railway line was due to be built over part of the churchyard, and Hardy’s firm was given the job of exhuming the bodies and moving the gravestones. This he did, planting the tree as a sign of life among so many dead. It is believed that among these stones, packed round, hugging this tree so tight, is the tombstone of William Franklin.
So let’s take stock. Our first death was William Hewson, who was buried in St Martin-in-the-Fields but whose grave has now been lost (though there is a fascinating series of tombstones which have been saved through the ages on display in the crypt). It seems that William Franklin’s grave is also lost, with his stone probably moved to the Hardy Tree. And his illegitimate son, William Temple, who became Benjamin Franklin’s literary executor, is buried at Père Lachaise in Paris. So we are left with many bodies and no epitaphs (except for the deeply unexceptional Mr Creakle, I mean Jones). But this feels like a tale in need of an epitaph and so I bring you instead some words from Ben, who famously said: ‘I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.’
His grave in Philadelphia at Christ Church burial ground has just names and dates – a strange state of affairs for this most loquacious of men. So here then is this mock epitaph, composed when he was young:
THE BODY OF B. FRANKLIN
PRINTER;
LIKE THE COVER OF AN OLD BOOK,
ITS CONTENTS TORN OUT,
AND STRIPT OF ITS LETTERING AND GILDING,
LIES HERE, FOOD FOR WORMS.
BUT THE WORK SHALL NOT BE WHOLLY LOST:
FOR IT WILL, AS HE BELIEV’D, APPEAR ONCE MORE,
IN A NEW & MORE PERFECT EDITION,
CORRECTED AND AMENDED
BY THE AUTHOR.
HE WAS BORN ON JANUARY 6, 1706.
DIED 17…
It seems a fitting end to an extraordinary tale.
HORATIO NELSON, 1ST VISCOUNT NELSON
ADMIRAL AND HERO
29 September 1758–21 October 1805
St Paul’s Cathedral Crypt, St Paul’s Churchyard, London EC4M 8AD
We do not know whether we should mourn or rejoice. The country has gained the most splendid and decisive Victory that has ever graced the naval annals of England; but it has been dearly purchased. The great and gallant Nelson is no more. The Times, 6 November 1805
Even now it is thrilling to read about the Battle of Trafalgar, where Nelson took on the French and Spanish, his twenty-seven ships to their thirty-three, making the decision to attack in the middle of the night, sending a message to his fleet: ‘England expects that every man will do his duty.’ By 1 p.m. on 21 October 1805 Nelson was shot and by 4.30 p.m. he was dead, having requested that his possessions be given to Lady Hamilton, his lover and the mother of his only child, Horatia.
His return to England was, in itself, epic. His body was placed in a cask of brandy and lashed to the Victory’s mainmast. When the ship reached Gibraltar, the body was transferred to a lead-lined coffin filled with wine. ‘We pickled him!’ crowed the guide at St Paul’s Cathedral as he embarked on the story of Nelson’s death and funeral. Rather fittingly, the dispatch to London about England’s greatest naval victory (and the death of England’s greatest admiral) was carried on board HMS Pickle.
It took another month for HMS Victory to make it from Gibraltar to England, where an autopsy was performed (and the deadly musket ball retrieved). Nelson’s body was placed in another lead coffin filled with brandy. Then, on 21 December, he was placed in another coffin, made of wood from the main mast of L’Orient, a French ship destroyed in the Battle of the Nile, which had been given to Nelson years before. This coffin was then placed in another made of lead and then another of wood (I think this is his fifth coffin, if you don’t count the first cask, making it the Russian doll of coffins). The multi-coffin was collected from HMS Victory, which was moored in the River Medway and taken up the Thames to Greenwich, arriving on 25 December, where it was kept in a private room for another eleven days. It wasn’t until 4 January that the coffin was moved to Greenwich Hospital’s Painted Hall where he lay in state for three days, with an estimated 100,000 people filing past.
Nelson’s body then went, by barge, up the Thames, followed by a two-mile procession of boats, a funeral flotilla the likes of which we have never seen. He was taken to the Admiralty in Whitehall and the funeral was held the next day, 9 January. The funeral procession from Whitehall to St Paul’s included royalty, ministers, high-ranking military and 10,000 soldiers. The service was attended by 7,000 people including thirty-two admirals and 100 captains, plus seamen from HMS Victory. The service itself ran from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. when the coffin (how many layers I am not sure) was placed in the black marble sarcophagus that had been originally made for Cardinal Wolsey, who was Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII before falling from favour. His deathbed had remained unused for centuries. Finally, with Nelson, it found someone monumental enough.
It was the grandest of funerals and, today, it remains the grandest of graves. In the magnificent crypt, this sarcophagus takes pride of place – even Wellington’s tomb, nearby, is plainer – and floats on a mosaic floor with a nautical theme, entwined with dolphins and sea serpents. There is also, above the crypt, in the south quire aisle of St Paul’s, a white marble memorial to Nelson, his amputated arm covered by a cloak, as he looks out to what must be the horizon. This was finished in 1818. Down the Strand, in Trafalgar Square, Nelson’s Column wasn’t finished until 1843. Truly, Nelson as hero is impossible to avoid if you live in London. And yet, set against this, Nelson as man is easy to miss.
There is a huge contrast between his death and that of his beloved mistress. Their relationship, which resulted in their daughter Horatia (I think that name certainly gave the father away) being born 31 January 1801, was the scandal of his age. Nelson left his wife, Fanny, and lived openly with them, much to the upset, not to say fascination, of all. It was his dying wish that they be looked after but, with him now installed as the nation’s hero beyond parallel, they were not. Indeed Emma was not even given permission to attend the funeral. The government lavished money and honours on Nelson’s brother and family. Emma floundered, falling into catastrophic debt that ended with her and Horatia going to prison, after which they fled to Calais to escape more creditors. Emma died, aged forty-nine, in poverty, in France, a sad end for one of the most famous (or, in her case, infamous) women of her time. Her grave, at the Eglise de St Pierre in Calais, was lost during the First World War.
But what of Horatia? Her life, in comparison to that of her celebrated parents, was decidedly ordinary. But then, by the time she was fifteen, she had lived in prison and run away to France with a woman whom she never really believed was her mother, not least because Emma always insisted she was merely a guardian. After Emma’s death, Horatia returned to England, disguised as a boy to escape arrest for her mother’s debts in France. But upon arrival at Dover, she was taken in by Nelson’s sisters and her life changed completely. She married a neighbour, a clergyman named Philip Ward, and they lived quietly in rural Norfolk and then Kent, and had ten children.
She ended up in the north-west London suburb of Pinner, of all places, where she had moved after her husband’s death to be near her son Nelson. (Another son was named Horatio while a daughter was Horatia.) She is buried in Paines Lane cemetery and I did visit her grave, a raised slab, on a frozen day in December. Her epitaph reads: ‘Here lies Horatia Nelson Ward, who died March 6, 1881, aged 80, the beloved daughter of Vice Admiral Lord Nelson and widow of the above named Reverend Philip Ward.’ It is quiet here, as it would be, and as far away as possible from the pomp and circumstance of St Paul’s.
POSTMAN’S PARK: THE MEMORIAL TO HEROIC SELF-SACRIFICE
Established 1900
City of London, King Edward Street (or St Martin’s Le-Grand), London EC1A 7BX
It was a short and evocative paragraph that ran in The Times newspaper on 5 May 1885 about the funeral of Alice Ayres, who had died in a fire in Union Street, Borough. Her coffin, it said, had been carried by sixteen firemen, who relieved each other in sets of four. The service was ‘impressive’, with twenty girls in white from the village school. ‘It had been arranged that these young people should have followed the coffin and sing at the graveside but this was unfortunately prevented by a severe hailstorm.’ A large ‘assemblage’ of people from the village (where she had grown up) attended. The coffin bore the inscription: ‘Alice Ayres, died April 26, aged 26’.
This story caught the eye of George Frederic Watts, the celebrated Victorian painter. His portraits had made him rich but this was a man who wore his morality on his smock sleeve, liberally donating his money to good causes and his paintings to galleries that were, themselves, free. His work often highlighted the evils of Mammon and the conditions of the poor. He also was against the killing of birds for their feathers to adorn hats and was president of the Anti-Tight Lacing Society, which, in the age of the wasp waist, when women regularly suffered fainting fits, fought for the right of women to loosen their corsets. But back to Alice Ayres. On 5 September 1887, Mr Watts wrote to The Times, his letter appearing under the headline: ‘ANOTHER JUBILEE SUGGESTION’. It began:
Sir – among other ways of commemorating this 50th year of Her Majesty’s reign, it would surely be of national interest to collect a complete record of the stories of heroism in everyday life. The roll would be a long one but I would cite as an example the name of Alice Ayres, the maid of all work at an oil-mongers in Gravel-lane, in April 1885, who lost her life in saving those of her master’s children.
He told Alice’s story. About how, as flames were seen in the building, a young woman appeared at an upper storey window. The crowd, holding up some clothes to break her fall, entreated her to jump. Instead she went back and reappeared, dragging a feather bed which she threw out the window. She went away again, this time returning with a child of three in her arms, whom she threw to safety so she landed on the mattress. Twice more she did this with older children. But when her turn came to jump she was too exhausted and, instead of the mattress, landed on the pavement. She was taken to St Thomas’ Hospital, where she died.
Mr Watts continues: ‘It is not too much to say that the history of Her Majesty’s reign would gain a lustre were the nation to erect a monument, say, here in London, to record the names of these likely to be forgotten heroes.’ He ended: ‘The material prosperity of a nation is not an abiding possession; the deeds of its people are.’
He wanted to build a wall inscribed with the names of his everyday heroes in Hyde Park but it did not happen. He harrumphed that, if he’d proposed a racecourse round the park, then it would have. He and his wife Mary lobbied tirelessly for the project, redrafting their wills to pay for it. But it would take until 1900 for the plan to become real, with Watts paying £700 to build a 50ft-long wooden loggia, with a tiled roof, to house 120 memorial tiles, designed, at first by William De Morgan, in the little green space that is Postman’s Park in the City of London. Watts was eighty-three and too ill to attend.
The memorial is still there now, and how the beautiful tiles fascinate, lined up on the wall, each with its tale to tell. The park itself is one of those marvellous surprises in which London specialises, a manicured jewel of a place, with its trees providing shade and its benches a place to munch a lunch. This is the former burial ground of St Botolph’s Aldersgate Church and tombstones are stacked round the edges. But it is the memorial that attracts an endless stream of visitors, many of them tourists, who have come to marvel at ordinary people who died doing extraordinary things.
This is what the tile for Alice Ayres says: ‘Daughter of a bricklayer’s labourer who by intrepid conduct saved 3 children from a burning house in Union Street Borough at the cost of her own young life. April 24, 1885.’ And here is the tile for John Cranmer of Cambridge, aged twenty-three: ‘A clerk in the London County Council who was drowned near Ostend whilst saving the life of a stranger and a foreigner.’ (I quite like the addition of ‘a foreigner’, which seems very British.) The names and the tales line up: the stewardess who went down with the sinking ship in 1899, the seventeen-year-old who died trying to save a child from a runaway horse in 1888, the daughter who refused to be deterred from making three attempts to climb a burning staircase to save her aged mum in 1900, the man who saved a ‘lunatic woman’ from suicide but was himself run over by the train. I looked for a long time at the tile for Sarah Smith, pantomime artiste, who died of injuries received when attempting in her inflammable dress to extinguish the flames which had enveloped her companion.
There is space for 120 tiles but only fifty-three existed when Mary Watts died in 1938. Extraordinarily, in 2007, another tile was added. ‘Leigh Pitt, reprographic operator, aged 30, saved a drowning boy from the canal at Thamesmead but sadly was unable to save himself. June 7, 2007.’ The Diocese of London has said that it will consider further names to be added. What a good idea.
THE UNKNOWN WARRIOR
1914–1918
Westminster Abbey, 20 Dean’s Yard, London SW1P 3PA
The ceremony of yesterday was the most beautiful, the most touching, and the most impressive that in all its long, eventful story this island has ever seen… ‘The Quick and the Dead’, The Times, 12 November 1920
The idea for a grave of the Unknown Warrior came from a military padre, the Reverend David Railton, who served in France in 1916. Later he would write about how, one night at dusk, when he had just returned from the line, having laid to rest a fallen comrade, he happened upon a small garden in Erkingham, near Armentières, with a grave. At the head was a rough cross of white wood on which was written, in black pencil: ‘An Unknown British Soldier’. ‘It was dusk and no one was near, except some officers in the billet playing cards. I remember how still it was. Even the guns seemed to be resting. How that grave caused me to think. Later on, I nearly wrote to [Field Marshal] Sir Douglas Haig to ask if the body of an unknown soldier might be sent home…’
In 1920, now back from France and a vicar in Margate in Kent, Reverend Railton did write that letter, this time addressed to the Dean of Westminster Abbey, who in turn wrote to the government, which agreed. Thus, on the night of 7 November, four bodies were exhumed from the four main battle areas in France: the Aisne, the Somme, Ypres and Arras. They were brought to the chapel at St Pol, each wrapped in a Union Jack. The officer in charge pointed to one. The others were reburied.
The next day the body began a journey, taken first to Boulogne and placed in a coffin of English oak. On 9 November, British troops took over guard duties from the French and the body crossed the Channel on the destroyer Verdun. It arrived at Dover to a 19-gun salute and began making its way, by train, to London. This is what the Mail wrote: ‘The train thundered through the dark, wet, moonless night. At the platforms by which it rushed could be seen groups of women watching and silent, many dressed in deep mourning.’ On the morning of 11 November, the body was put on a gun carriage, pulled by six black horses, the procession watched in silence by what The Times, in its report, called a multitude. ‘Pity for this plain man who had done his full duty, more than once filled the eyes of the onlookers with tears – an outbreak of emotion very rare with English crowds.’
The King was the chief mourner, the twelve pall-bearers captains of land, while sea and air and 100 VCs provided the guard of honour. ‘Such a guard as no monarch ever had,’ notes the paper’s report. The body was buried in earth brought from a French battlefield. The burial service, in the abbey, was spoken over one body that was, in fact, everybody who had died in the Great War. ‘Those who heard them felt that they were uttered also for all the hundreds of thousands, his comrades in death as in life, who rest in far-off graves from Flanders to Mesopotamia, or who sleep their last sleep beneath our guardian seas.’ The last words were Kipling’s Recessional which includes the refrain: ‘Lest we forget – Lest we forget!’
When I visited Westminster Abbey, I did not know which grave I would choose. I wanted to find one special one and I had thought it might be Charles Darwin, though, as I walked by the statue of William Wilberforce, with its novella of an inscription, I was tempted to pick him. Then there was Handel, looking rather camp it must be said, with his Messiah. More than 3,000 people are buried in the abbey, including five kings and four queens, and there are 600 tombs and monuments. So many fine words about the great and the good that you could spend all day reading them. But it was the grave of the Unknown Warrior that moved me – its simple black floor-slab, surrounded by poppies and, when I visited, adorned by two wreaths from the Korean embassy. Every official state visit starts here. On the pillars nearby are Reverend Railton’s flag, which had covered the coffin on its final journey, and a bell from HMS Verdun. On the grave it says: ‘They buried him among the kings because he had done good towards God and towards his house.’ This, out of all the 3,000, is the most famous grave here.
ATHENA
OWLET
5 June 1850–1855
Florence Nightingale Museum, St Thomas’ Hospital, Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7EH
Karl Marx, Highgate Cemetery
LONDON: NORTH AND WEST OF THE THAMES
DR JAMES BARRY (BORN MARGARET ANN BULKLEY)
FIRST FEMALE DOCTOR AND SURGEON
1799 (date unknown)–25 JULY 1865
Kensal Green Cemetery, Harrow Road, London W10 4RA
The grave is plain, grey and weathered. It says that Dr James Barry was Inspector General of Hospitals and that he died in 1865, aged seventy. But beneath this stone lies the body of a woman who hid her true sex for most of her life in order to pursue a medical career that was, at the time, forbidden to females. It is generally thought Dr Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman doctor, but actually it was Dr James Barry.
