Grave Stories - Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

I loved the Grandes Dames of Oxford Street. Of course, when I arrived in the city in 1970, I explored Carnaby Street and King’s Road, delighting in the brash, new boutiques with their loud pop music, communal changing rooms, and startlingly rapid turnover of fashions, but it was Oxford Street that captured my heart. The magnificent stately department stores, with their classical and art deco architecture, occupied whole blocks. Though damaged in the war years, they had pieced themselves back together, freshened up, and faced the world with impassive self-assurance. Their ornate entrances bore sculptures above the doors, the window displays rivalled any art gallery, and when you entered the air was heady with the combined scents of the perfume counters.

So confident were these great ladies that they scorned to scrabble after the very commerce which fed them. For they chose to make Saturday their early closing day. Coming from a typical provincial town where Wednesday, dead space in the middle of the week, was early closing day and shops fairly burst with customers on Saturday afternoons, I was astonished. From 1pm on Saturdays until Monday morning, at the very time when potential customers had the freedom to visit and had just received their weekly pay packets, dignified, superior Oxford Street chose to close its doors, and the normally thronged pavements grew quiet.

The very names of these unruffled purveyors of finery filled me with delight: Marshall and Snellgrove; Bourne and Hollingsworth; DH Evans; Selfridges; John Lewis; but the one I loved best was Peter Robinson. This magical store situated on the north-east segment of Oxford Circus, stretching east along Oxford Street and north into Regent Street, lay at the very beating heart of the twentieth century agora. Its eponymous founder, a farmer’s son from Yorkshire, had opened a drapery shop in 1833. In 1840 he established a second store in Regent Street: The Court and General Mourning House Store, aka “Black Peter Robinson’s.” There he kept a coach permanently parked outside with a black clad coachman and two lady fitters, similarly attired, seated inside, ready to speed to the home of any recently bereaved widow.

In 1850 Peter Robinson expanded his Oxford Street drapery to sell ladies’ clothes and accessories. During that decade he promoted one of his drapery assistants to the position of silk buyer and in 1864 offered him a partnership, but John Lewis preferred to open his own Oxford Street premises.

Peter Robinson died in 1874 leaving the Regent Street branch to his eldest son Joseph and the Oxford Street store to his second son, John Peter. The latter bought out his brother in 1895. As fashions and social attitudes changed Black Peter Robinson’s declined while the Oxford street shop flourished. But when John Peter died none of his children wanted to take on the running of their inheritance and it became a limited company, “run by accountants” in the scornful words of Gordon Selfridge.

But Selfridge was unfair, for Peter Robinson’s went from strength to strength; when Burton’s Tailoring, the most successful menswear store of the day, bought up the company in 1946, they not only retained the name but opened more branches alongside their own businesses. And in 1965, in the Oxford Circus basement, they opened Top Shop. This was an inspired move with Top Shop rivalling the upstart boutiques by catering specifically for the under twenty-fives, while the main store continued to serve its older clientele. The buyers employed by Top Shop in the ensuing years were peerless, all with a consummate eye for fashion.

During my first term in London, I bought two long-cherished garments at Top Shop, and I can still recall occasions when I wore them. There was the dark red velvet maxi-dress with the white lace bodice and the pearl buttons on the sleeves. I wore it to formal dinners and twenty-first birthdays, to sit on the hard benches in the gods at Covent Garden, and to rock concerts at the Roundhouse. Then there was the purple hooded maxi-coat with the cream lining whose first outing was to the theatre on my nineteenth birthday, and which enveloped me on a memorable, misty, romantic January night while being “walked home” from a dance at UCH to my student residence. Alas, the coat was later to succumb to an unfortunate encounter with the wheels of a luggage trolley on Euston station.

As a result of these sublime purchases, I ended my first term term with my first overdraft. The solution was obvious, and I spent the Christmas vacation working at Oxford Circus. The hours were long, that early closing day abandoned during this busy time, and evening opening extended. The crowds were intense, the bright shop lights were hot, and I left every evening feeling as though my eyes had been boiled…and I loved every minute of it. The other girls were fun, the supervisors a source of amusement, and the holiday shoppers good tempered.

I was “on jewellery,” and it was the year of the stars and the moons. I guarantee that any girl who walked down Oxford Street that December will remember them: ordinary hair clips with a little diamante star or moon attached to the end. It required but little skill to conceal the clip so that the stars and moons shone out like diamond confetti. Every morning before we arrived sack loads of these desirable items had been delivered. By midmorning we would have sold out, and desperate customers, undaunted by any thoughts of hygiene, were more than eager to remove those with which we had adorned our own hair. When this last source was exhausted, we assuaged their disappointment with the assurance that there would be more deliveries soon, and so there were, supplies arriving at frequent intervals throughout the day. How many thousands of stars and moons must have graced London’s Christmas and New Year parties.

The other must-have artefact that year was a mirror set in a pink plastic sphere, supported on a purple plastic base; Top Shop had widened the meaning of accessories. While girls bought their own stars and moons, boyfriends had clearly understood that the most felicitous Christmas present they could proffer would be a pink and purple mirror. Our jewellery counter stood just inside the store’s main entrance, and anxious young men, coming to a halt in front of us, would try to convey by word and gesture what they sought. Their relief was palpable when, understanding their requests, we pointed them towards the basement. Having no Significant Other that Christmas, I bought my own mirror – at staff discount. It was never a very practical object, its use limited to the tortuous application of mascara and lipstick, but it provided a cheery presence sitting on my desk or a convenient shelf through a succession of student halls and shared flats.

What I did not realise at the time was that my beloved department stores, facing increasing rents and rates, changing consumer tastes, increased labour costs, and competition from chain stores, were already in decline. Most of them would disappear in the coming decades. Marshall and Snellgrove merged with Debenhams when they both faced financial difficulties, rebranding as Debenhams in 1974. Nonetheless it went into liquidation and closed its doors in February 2021, finally broken by the growth of online sales and the impact of Covid. Bourne and Hollingsworth had already closed in 1983. DH Evans, purchased by Harrods in 1954, was rebranded as House of Fraser in 2001 but closed in 2022.

And Peter Robinson? In 1974 the Burton group split Peter Robinson from Top Shop, and the Oxford Street store became known as Top Shop and Peter Robinson. By the end of the seventies the Peter Robinson name had disappeared entirely, with the shop rebranded as Top Shop and Top Man, the latter a branch of Burton’s tailoring. In the 1990s Topshop became all one word, expanded to fill the entire store, and branches peddling fast fashion proliferated in the provinces and abroad. For a time, it was hugely popular, but I had long since ceased to find its clothes exciting or attractive. On the contrary by then I was aware of a certain malaise permeating the formerly vibrant British high streets, hiding behind the facades of cheap and garish outlets trading in dubiously sourced garments. Arcadia bought up the Burton group in 1997, but by 2010 they too had begun shutting stores as online shopping increased, in 2020 they went into administration, and the last of the Topshops, including the Oxford Circus branch, closed their doors.

Nike and Vans occupied the empty building. O Peter Robinson, your beautiful store was filled with trainers. But worse is to come, for now the trainers too have moved on, and, the ultimate indignity, the Swedish flat pack furniture giant, Ikea, is scheduled to move in later this year.

I had not visited Oxford Street for many years, but on a recent trip to town, with an hour to spare, I walked from Tottenham Court Road to Marble Arch. It was not a cheerful peregrination. Only two of the glorious department stores remain: Selfridges and John Lewis maintain a dignified if somewhat subdued presence at Marble Arch. The rest of the street hosts dreary chain stores and vacant, shuttered store fronts, punctuated by an extraordinary number of souvenir shops offering tourist tat – union jack tea towels, policemen’s helmets, fridge magnets of king Charles, plastic models of tower bridge, – and gaudy American style candy stores. Both the latter are allegedly fronts for the sale of illegal goods and money laundering, and police raids regularly seize counterfeit and unsafe items. And at Oxford Circus I contemplated a sorry shell, once Peter Robinson’s glorious shopping mecca. Boarded up, grubby and unloved, even the beautiful lamps which once graced its exterior shrouded in plastic, it was a pitiful spectacle.

NIKETOWN reads the depressing sign above the entrance to the former Peter Robinson at Oxford Circus.
Boarded up, grubby and unloved, even Nike have now moved on.

VANS claimed the Oxford Street entrance but they too have moved on leaving boarded up windows.

Bourne and Hollingsworth has fared little better…

… it is now the Plaza Shopping Centre, housing O2, Next, Victoria’s secret and Costa Coffee.

Depressing neon strip lights behind the facade on the upper floors, but the letters B and H dating from the store’s remodelling in art deco style in 1928 reveal the building’s pedigree.

I made my way to Highgate Cemetery wondering how Peter Robinson would feel about the demise of the magical world of department stores. When he died, he left over a million pounds in his will, around £113.5 million in today’s money, so it was no surprise to find him, with his wife and youngest son, Walter, in a large family tomb in one of the most expensive locations in Highgate West, between the Circle of Lebanon and the terrace catacombs. Yet it was not a welcoming nor an attractive grave, built of a cold granite and stone, lying close to the cemetery wall, and overshadowed by a gloomy evergreen.

But Peter Robinson died a phenomenally successful Victorian businessman, the grave was probably to his taste, and there is no reason to imagine that the store I knew in the 1970s would have been any more congenial to him than the prospect of another Ikea blighting the land is to me. I suspect he would have been appalled by Top Shop, the stars and moons, the pink and purple plastic mirrors invading his elegant shop. Maybe he is best left with his memory of it as it was in his day, as I am with my memory of it fifty years ago and almost a hundred years after his death: holding fast to its old fashioned, restrained glamour while simultaneously incubating an exotic and beguiling parvenu in its basement.

In Loving Remembrance

of

Peter Robinson

of Womersley House, Crouch Hill,

and of

Oxford Street and Regent Street, London.

I no longer have the red velvet dress and the purple maxi-coat, nor the stars and moons, nor the pink and purple plastic mirror, but at the back of a drawer, I found the mirror’s cousins – ear-rings from Top Shop at Peter Robinson.

Mary Anning Rocks; A Story of Passion and Purpose

By Gravedigger

On October 13, 2024

In Scientists

Mary Anning (1799-1847) was one of ten children born to Richard Anning and his wife Molly at Lyme Regis, a small coastal town in Dorset. Only two of the children, Mary, and her brother Joseph, survived to adulthood, and Mary herself came close to death when she was fifteen months old. Three women, one of them holding Mary Anning in her arms, were sheltering from a storm. When lightning struck the tree beneath which they were huddled it killed the women instantly. Mary was rushed home and revived in a bath of hot water. Until then a sickly child, she reputedly flourished thereafter.

But Mary’s family were poor, and the price of food was high. Richard Anning, a cabinet maker, supplemented his earnings collecting marine fossils from the beach with the assistance of his children. Nineteenth-century Lyme Regis was already a tourist resort, and like other families in the town, they sold their “curios” to visitors. Anning’s father died in 1810, leaving the family with debts. Joseph was apprenticed as an upholsterer, and Mary, sometimes still aided by her brother, continued to augment their income, gathering and marketing her finds from a table outside their home.

The Jurassic fossils came from the Blue Lias – alternating limestone and shale – cliffs to the west and east of Lyme. Winter storms rendered these cliffs unstable resulting in landslides which exposed the fossils, frequently depositing them on the foreshore. The work of collection was dangerous, for it had to take place before the tide washed the fossils away and meanwhile the risk of more rock falls remained high. In 1833 Mary Anning’s beloved dog, Tray, was killed in one such landslide which just missed Mary herself. There was added danger when the tide turned, for a high tide could reach the base of the cliffs.

Ammonites were the most common find, but rarer vertebrate fossils sold at a higher price. In 1811, when she was only ten years old, Mary discovered the first Ichthyosaurus, “fish lizard”, skeleton. Over several months she engaged in the painstaking and skilled work of digging out the 5.2 metre skeleton from the rock. In 1823 she found the first of two plesiosaurs, “sea dragons,” and in 1828 a pterosaur, a “flying dragon.”

Not only did Mary Anning have an unusual talent for discovering fossils and consummate skill in uncovering them, she also studied her specimens with a keen scientific eye. Though virtually uneducated, she had learned to read and write only at Sunday School, she consumed scientific literature, dissected fish to help her understanding of the anatomy of fossils, wrote about and illustrated her finds. When she noticed that chambers in belemnite fossils contained dried ink which resembled the ink sacs of modern squid and cuttle fish, she concluded that belemnites, like modern cephalopods, used ink for defence. Her exquisite drawings, and hypotheses advanced the new sciences of geology and palaeontology. In 1826 she opened her own shop in Lyme Regis, attracting fossil collectors and geologists from Europe and America, who came to buy specimens and draw on her knowledge.

When they were both teenagers and he was living in Lyme, the geologist Henry De La Beche had accompanied Mary Anning on fossil hunts. His famous watercolour Duria Antiquior portraying life in prehistoric Dorset was based on her findings. William Buckland, an Oxford lecturer in geology, also collected fossils with her, and it was to him that she wrote with her suggestion that what were then called bezoar stones were the fossilised faeces of ichthyosaurs. She had observed bezoar stones in the abdomens of ichthyosaurus skeletons. When she broke the stones open, she discovered fish bones and scales. Buckland seized on her suggestion renaming the bezoars as coprolites.

Roderick Impey Murchison, director of the newly formed Geology Society, and a founder of the Royal Geographical Society, corresponded with Anning. Palaeontologist Georges Cuvier credited her with providing evidence for the new Theory of Extinction. At this time even some reputable scientists believed that the earth was only a few thousand years old and discounted the possibility that any species could evolve or become extinct, or that new species could appear. Anning’s work showed that many species had disappeared, and that these fossils did not come from creatures still living in other parts of the world; the plesiosaur for example was quite unlike any other living creature. Extinction Theory predated Darwin’s Origin of the Species by forty-eight years.

But Mary Anning was working class and female so seldom received credit for her discoveries in the papers and lectures which drew on her expertise. Her scientific descriptions were published without acknowledgement. Nor, as a woman, was she eligible to join the Geological Society. When her specimens were displayed in museums, they bore the names of the collectors who had bought them, not that of the woman who had uncovered, dug out, cleaned, prepared, fixed, identified and drawn them. Nor was the recompense for those fossils great, and Mary Anning was rarely at a safe remove from poverty. Only in 1835 did she finally receive an annuity from the British Association for the Advancement of Science for her contributions to geology.

Mary Anning died of breast cancer in 1847, aged forty-seven. She was buried in St. Michael’s churchyard, Lyme Regis.

Grave of Mary Anning, St Michael’s Churchyard, Lyme Regis

The inscription on the grave, more clearly visible following recent removal of some of the lichen, commemorates Mary’s brother Joseph and three of his children who died in infancy as well as Mary who predeceased him by two years.

Today the Lyme Regis museum stands on the site of Mary Anning’s former home and fossil shop. The Natural History Museum in London showcases her Ichthyosaur, Plesiosaur and Pterosaur. The Oxford Museum of Natural History houses the partial skeleton of a young Ichthyosaur, and the Bristol museum is home to her Temnodontosaurus skull.

In 2018 eleven-year-old Evie Swire determined that Lyme Regis should, albeit belatedly, honour Mary Anning. With the assistance of her mother, Anya Pearson, she set up a crowdfunding campaign, with the inspired appellation Mary Anning Rocks, to raise money for a statue to celebrate the exceptional woman who had contributed so much to the fields of geology and palaeontology. Unveiled in May 2022, it is a beauty. Denise Dutton designed the bronze working with sketches provided by local schoolchildren. Mary carries her work tools and basket; Tray runs at her heels; her skirt is decorated with ammonites, one falls through a hole in her pocket, others lie at her feet. Yet this is no sentimental, whimsical representation: Mary Anning’s features are strong, every sinew is strained as she strides resolutely towards the sea at Black Ven where she made many of her finds. Mary Anning has a purpose. Mary Anning has a passion.

Her achievements may have been inadequately acknowledged in her lifetime, but there can be no doubt that today Mary Anning’s talents and scholarship are recognised, she is respected, and loved. For this statue must be the most popular in England. Mary’s basket is frequently filled with offerings of shells, fossils, flowers. No one seems able to pass beside her without some gesture of recognition and affection. Last time I was in Lyme, I stood on the slope which runs from the churchyard to the promenade, looking down at Mary and Tray. In the space of a few minutes children stopped to pat Tray; a group of young girls conducted a minute examination of the ammonites on Mary’s skirt; a young man paused unselfconsciously to kiss her hand; a couple encircled her with their arms; and numerous photographs were taken. And from the seashore came the faint ring of tapping hammers as Mary Anning’s followers sought their own ammonites. There can be no doubt: Mary Anning Rocks.

Mary Anning often receives flowers from her admirers

Blue Lias cliffs to the east of Lyme Regis. Every year they are eroded by winter storms exposing fossils

Winter days, when storms bring the Blue Lias crashing to the ground, are the optimum time for fossil hunting but the dangers from landslips are considerable. Most amateur fossil hunters wisely confine themselves to low tide in the summer months.

Even in summer the beach at Black Ven can yield marine fossils

Mary Anning and Tray stride towards Black Ven

William Cobbett and the Great Need for Parliamentary Reform

By Gravedigger

On September 29, 2024

In Politicians, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries, Writers

Of course I did not have high expectations of the new government. Labour in name only now, the party has moved, save for brief anomalies under Michael Foot and Jeremy Corbyn, steadily further towards the right since the post war years of the Atlee government. Blair jettisoned the party’s socialist past when he rewrote Clause Four, ending the historic commitment to common ownership of industry, passively accepting the results of Margaret Thatcher’s contemptible sale of shares in privatised utilities. With equal passivity the Starmer government has accepted the results of the 2016 referendum on the EU despite the lies told by the Johnson administration to promote Brexit. There is little sign of any attempt to tackle inequalities of wealth and income, save a half-hearted commitment to end the use of offshore trusts to avoid inheritance tax. Blair lied in Parliament and to the public, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, to justify his decision to invade. The current Labour government has been at best equivocal over Gaza: in an early interview Starmer argued that Israel had the right to cut off necessities of power and water in Gaza. 146 countries recognise the existence of Palestine – Britain is not one of them. 137 member states of the United Nations recognise Palestine – Britain is not one of them. Instead, Britain is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council apart from the USA not to support Palestinian membership of the UN. Starmer was even slow to join countries calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and will not suspend arms exports to Israel. Indeed, arms sales around the world continue to be a pivotal part of the British economy as much under Labour as under Conservatives. In relation to asylum seekers Starmer voices the same “stop the boats” rhetoric as his recent Tory predecessors, only choosing to send them to Albania instead of Rwanda for “processing.” It was not anyone’s enthusiasm which brought this government to power but antagonism to fourteen years of Tory rule, a low turnout, the collapse of the SNP in Scotland, and Farage’s Reform Party taking votes from the Conservatives.

But if all this is enough to drive the iron into anyone’s soul, it is sometimes the relatively trivial which leaves us spluttering with incoherent rage. Having pledged to run a government of high standards, and end cash for access scandals, the Prime Minister, his wife, the deputy prime minister and the chancellor have been accepting freebies from the Labour peer Waheed Ali (appointed a life peer by Blair in 1995). It began with “Passes for Glasses” when Waheed was revealed to have unrestricted access to Downing Street after buying the prime minister £2,485 worth of spectacles. Then followed revelations of £107,145 spent by Waheed on Starmer’s wife’s clothes, £40K on tickets for him to watch the Arsenal football team, and £4k for tickets to a Taylor Swift concert…Starmer declares all this to be perfectly legal since he declared the gifts, albeit belatedly, but even his own MPs have found it morally questionable. Nor did it help when he whined that the security issue meant that he would never be able to go to an Arsenal game again unless he accepted corporate hospitality in a private box. But the utterly risible last word (or probably not) came from Foreign Secretary David Lammy suggesting that the freebie clothes were justified because the Starmers sought to look their best when representing the UK on the world stage.

Anyone incensed by this level of hypocrisy and political idiocy, can do no better than to spend a little time in the empathetic company of the furious, irascible William Cobbett (1763-1835). For no one does splenetic fury like Cobbett, he is never rendered speechless with indignation. Cobbett had little interest in politics beyond England, he was no citizen of the world, but he more than made up for his narrowness of focus with the passion he brought to bear on the question of rural poverty. By the time he published his Rural Rides in 1830 he could not write a paragraph without a vitriolic outburst expressing his utter contempt for those responsible, most notably successive Whig and Tory governments, for the proletarianization of agricultural workers.

William Cobbett did not begin life as a radical. Indeed, as a young man he was conservative to the point of being reactionary, and his later views developed in an idiosyncratic, unsystematic way. The son of a farmer and publican, he received little formal education and began work as a ploughboy before, desiring to see the world, he joined the army and found himself between 1784-1791 in New Brunswick, Canada. He used the time to study English and French grammar. Seeing his senior officers appropriate some of the pay of the common soldiers, he began to question authority, and on his return to England published his first pamphlet exposing their peculations and charging the officers with corruption. In The Soldier’s Friend he described the low pay and harsh treatment of the enlisted men. Then, fearing that he was about to be indicted and imprisoned in retribution, he fled to the USA. And during this period the most unattractive side of Cobbett emerges. He became a rabid British loyalist, an anti-Jacobin critical of Jefferson’s support for the French revolutionary government, a supporter of war against the Franco-American alliance. He denounced democracy and reviled his radical compatriot, Tom Paine. Cobbett was unashamedly xenophobic and bigoted, critical of any country which rivalled Britain, outrageously antisemitic, with a deep-seated loathing of Irishmen and of abolitionists like Wilberforce. When his writing came to the attention of the Tory Prime Minister, William Pitt, he was welcomed back to England, and in 1800 Pitt offered to subsidise his writing as an apologist for the Tory government and a polemicist against radicalism. How then did this monster come to be admired by Karl Marx, Michael Foot, EP Thompson?

Well, he changed: while many people move politically to the right as they grow older, Cobbett moved the other way. At first supporting Pitt, he was nonetheless incorruptible, refusing Pitt’s offer, and publishing his own views in his one-man weekly paper, The Political Register*, produced from 1802 until his death in 1834. And those views became very antiestablishment as Cobbett looked around him at the state of England in the early nineteenth century and saw corruption, cruelty, venality, and injustice. The Register, dubbed Cobbett’s Twopenny Trash by his detractors, a designation which he enthusiastically embraced, became increasingly critical of the war with France, the military, the church, big landowners, rotten boroughs – the “Accursed Hill” as he refers to the notorious rotten borough of Old Sarum – and, the spawn of those rotten boroughs, the Parliament and government at Westminster.

For his pains Cobbett found himself in Newgate prison between 1810-12 after being convicted of sedition. Between 1817-19 he fled to the USA again to avoid a further incarceration as radicals like himself were rounded up. This was a very different Cobbett from the man who had vilified Tom Paine, and when he returned to England, he brought Paine’s bones with him. Paine, once a hero in the USA, had become an outcast on account of his negative views on organised religion. He died in poverty, and his grave had been neglected until Cobbett sought to make amends for the injustice, he had done him. Cobbett wanted to build a mausoleum and memorial for Paine with money raised by public subscription, but Paine’s bones met with the same lack of respect in England as in the USA and the appeal failed. Cobbett kept the bones until his death when they were lost.

Meanwhile Cobbett’s radical beliefs coalesced around the plight of agricultural workers and small farmers. Cobbett loved the rural England he had known in his childhood and youth. He yearned for a golden age when every farmer brewed his own beer and fattened his own hog; when farmers lived, worked, and ate alongside their labourers. But Cobbett was no mere nostalgic dreamer, for alongside his journalism he was a practising farmer. His knowledge of agriculture, crops and soil was encyclopaedic. And between 1821-1826, travelling on horseback round the counties of southern England, he built up a portrait of rural life. He studied the farms, the fields, the crops, the animals, he talked to the farmers and the farm labourers. He visited the markets and fairs. Cobbett published his findings in Rural Rides. He had an emotional link to the countryside and his vivid prose is lyrical and romantic, but it hard hitting too. For Cobbett did not like what he found.

Farm workers had sunk into poverty, their families were starving. Who was to blame? Cobbett was a good hater, a one-man protest movement, and he turned the full force of his anger on those whom he held responsible.

The Enclosures, begun by kings seeking to extend their hunting grounds, and completed following the 1801 General Enclosure Act, which enabled big landowners to enclose land without a Parliamentary Act, left agricultural workers deprived of common lands and grazing. Small farmers could no longer afford to pay their labourers properly.

Then came the “tax-eaters”: after the Napoleonic Wars, Parliament abolished income tax, replacing it with increases in indirect taxes to pay the interest on the national debt. These taxes fell on necessities for which there was an inelastic demand: salt, hops, malt, tobacco, sugar, beer, and tea, shifting the burden of taxation from the middle classes to the poor, with small farmers paying proportionally more tax than higher economic groups and unable now to pay their labourers at all. Their fields were neglected, and crops went ungathered. The decline in production caused higher prices for food. Small farmhouses and labourers’ cottages, whole hamlets, and villages, fell into disrepair. Big “bull-frog” farmers gradually swallowed up the smaller ones. Rapacious landlords evicted tenants. The “bullfrog” farmers, unlike those of old, no longer fed and lodged their workers, for it was cheaper to pay them wages: wages which were inadequate for their basic needs. And such former agricultural labourers who were now unable to find work on the land at all were employed by the parish at stone breaking to build new roads for the benefit of those big farmers and landlords.

Cobbett was not convinced of the need to service the national debt, and he loathed the stockbrokers and jobbers, bankers, financiers, and fundholders, parasites who took everything and produced nothing. Moreover, he noted that taxes were also being used to support the “deadweight”, the “half timers”, army officers on half pay but with no duties, and the standing army which in peace time was used, not against a foreign threat, but against impoverished people seeking redress as at Peterloo:

One single horseman with his horse costs 36s. a week…that is more than the parish allowance to five labourers’ families at five to a family…so the one horseman and his horse cost what would feed twenty five of the distressed creatures… take away the army which is to keep distressed people from committing acts of violence and you have, at once, ample means of removing all the distress and all the danger of acts of violence.

Adding to the “deadweight” were the tax gatherers themselves, the sinecurists with their government jobs, and Anglican parsons. Cobbett did not care for parsons, “sponging clergy”: they took the revenues of their livings, subsidised with tithes and the rent from glebes, but were absentee clergymen, not even living in the parish. Nor did he care for those who issued religious tracts “which would if they could make the labourer content with half starvation.”

And then there were the Corn Laws, restrictions on importing corn and other foodstuffs to protect landowners’ interests, raising the price of bread for an already impoverished population. Potatoes, cheaper than bread under the impact of the Corn Laws, were a particular anathema to Cobbett, as was tea, replacing beer as cottage brewing declined. Potatoes were in Cobbett’s view “debilitating fare” and “soul degrading.” Tea was “a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a maker of misery for old age.” His own preference was for the traditional three Bs – bread, beer, and bacon, and he would regularly set off on his rides with a bacon sandwich in his coat pocket for breakfast. Frequently the bread and meat would be handed over to a hungry soul whom he met along the way.

The Trespass Act and Game Laws, protecting the hunting rights of landowners, also raised Cobbett’s ire. For they forbade the “poaching” of wild animals, even rabbits, on the landowners’ estates thus depriving the local community of food they desperately needed. Moreover, mantraps were set to catch the “poachers” and punishments included imprisonment and transportation.

Cobbett hated the middlemen too, the dealers and shopkeepers who had replaced the old country fairs and markets, and who produced nothing but added to the cost of living.

He yearned for a return to cottage technology independent of wage labour and the capitalist market which saw the accumulation of capital in ever fewer hands. Big farmers and landlords were “conspirators against labour,” capitalist agriculture had proletarianized the farm workers,

Is a nation made rich by taking the food and clothing from those who create them and giving them to those who do nothing of any use? Why should the people work incessantly when they now raise food and clothing and fuel and every necessity to maintain five times their number?

While the poor creatures that raise the wheat and the barley and the cheese and the mutton and the beef are living upon potatoes, all the good food is conveyed to the tax- eaters in the Wen!

In Cobbett’s view London was a sebaceous cyst, a Great Wen, which along with lesser wens was encroaching onto the countryside, and he detested it.

But above all Cobbett hated the Establishment, “The Thing,” which presided over all this, the political, economic, military and church elites, taking the surplus value of the countryside and manipulating the markets to their own advantage. Misgovernment, the unreformed Parliament was the ultimate source of all evil. In the end he hated the Whigs even more than the Tories because their hypocrisy was the greater.

William Cobbett warned that rural poverty would lead to riots, and he defended agricultural labourers who organised public protests. He endorsed the rick burning and machine breaking of the Swing Riots in the 1830s. For why should the near starving labourers “live on Damned potatoes while the barns are full of corn, the downs covered with sheep, and the yards full of things created by their own labours.”

But whilst fully supportive of direct action, Cobbett worked for Parliamentary reform as the ultimate remedy for economic problems: he advocated the abolition of rotten boroughs and the extension of the franchise, so that radicals could be elected to Parliament where they could raise wages, repeal the Corn Laws, lower taxes, and reverse enclosures.

Following the Great Reform Act 1832, Cobbett was elected to a newly created seat in industrial Oldham. His support for the Reform Bill had been a compromise because it still left his beloved agricultural workers without the vote. In Parliament he sought to represent both his northern constituents and the southern agricultural workers. Sympathetic to the Luddites and deeply appalled by the Peterloo massacre, outraged by conditions in the factories, he nonetheless thought that the best recourse was a return to the land and self-sufficiency within an agricultural economy. And if this sounds a little odd today, we should remember that rural workers in 1835 were still the largest occupational group in England.

Cobbett, along with Hume and Wakley, maintained agitation in Parliament, first for the release and then for the pardon of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. He fought the brutal 1834 Poor Law Amendment which replaced outdoor payments with indoor relief: to save money all financial support for the poor was withdrawn and they were discouraged from seeking any help since their only recourse under the new system was to the workhouse, where children were separated from their parents and wives from their husbands.

But his time in Parliament was short lived; he died in 1835 and was buried in St. Andrew’s churchyard in Farnham, the Surrey town where he was born. The following year John Russell announced an official pardon for the Tolpuddle Martyrs. The Poor Law system was not officially abolished until 1948.

Located in St. Andrew’s Churchyard, Farnham, Surrey

It may be impossible not to smile at Cobbett’s dyspeptic outbursts against tea, potatoes, and the Great Wen. And he was no revolutionary, he had no problem with hierarchy so long as workers were fed, accommodated, had their fairs, sports, and harvest homes; his belief in noblesse oblige sits a little uncomfortably today. In the words of GDH Cole, “he was a conservative in everything except politics,” but what a magnificently angry, opinionated, choleric thorn in the side of the self-serving establishment he was.

******************

From 1803 Cobbett was also the first person to collect and publish all parliamentary debates in Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates. His printers were Luke Hansard and his son Thomas, who also did work for the House of Commons. In 1812 Cobbett, overwhelmed with fines for seditious behaviour, sold the publication to the Hansards who renamed it. “Hansard” remains the title of the official record of parliamentary proceedings although the family connection ended in 1889.

Memorial to Luke Hansard, Many Years Printer to the House of Commons, St. Giles in the Fields, London

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William Cobbett, Rural Rides, Penguin Classics, 2001. First published 1830.

Dylan Thomas: Poems of Life, Death, and Mortality.

By Gravedigger

On September 15, 2024

In Writers

Last week I attended the memorial service of a dear friend and former colleague. A Welshman with a great love of literature, he had shared his passion with his children, and they read extracts from two of his favourite books: Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley and Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood.

During the summer holidays, some years ago, my friend and I had gone together one day to Laugharne, the small town where the river Taf flows into Carmarthen Bay, and where Dylan Thomas lived from 1949 until his death in 1953. It is believed to be the inspiration for Llaregub, the village in Under Milk Wood. We visited the Boathouse, with its views out over the estuary, where Dylan and his wife Caitlin had lived; the old garage near the house which he had turned into a writing shed; Browns Hotel, where he spent so much time drinking that he used the bar’s telephone number as his own; and the graveyard of St. Martin’s church where he is buried. And there my friend spoke from memory his favourite lines from the “play for voices,” Reverend Eli Jenkins’ morning verses:

Dear Gwalia! I know there are

Towns lovelier than ours,

And fairer hills and loftier far,

And groves more full of flowers,

And boskier woods more blithe with spring

And bright with birds’ adorning,

And sweeter bards than I to sing

Their praise this beauteous morning…

…A tiny dingle is Milk Wood

By Golden Grove ‘neath Grongar,

But let me choose and oh! I should

Love all my life and longer

To stroll among our trees and stray

In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,

And hear the Dewi sing all day,

And never, never leave the town.

And his sunset poem:

… every evening at sun-down

I ask a blessing on the town,

For whether we last the night or no

I’m sure is always touch and go.

We are not wholly bad or good

Who live our lives under Milk Wood,

And Thou, I know, wilt be the first

To see our best side, not our worst.

O let us see another day!

Bless us all this night, I pray,

And to the sun we all will bow

And say, good-bye – but just for now!

The radio play was Dylan Thomas’ last work, completed only months before his death in New York in 1953. Recounting twenty-four hours in the life of the town and its inhabitants, it reads like a fairy tale, at one moment all bawdy, exuberant Chaucerian humour, the next tender, melancholy and lyrical. The torrent of language and imagery, the alliteration and assonance, is unequalled. And the grace and humanity of the acknowledgement that “we are not wholly bad or good” is a sentiment which I know appealed to my friend whose inclination was always to see the best side of anyone.

The transience of life, death, and mortality, were recurring themes in the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and while Eli Jenkins prayed for another day, an earlier poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, published in 1933, described death as part of Life’s Cycle:

And death shall have no dominion,

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though loves be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

Physical bodies may perish but they become one with the cosmos, moving into a future beyond death as part of a life force, embedded in plants or the sun, at one with the wind and the moon, with nature, the stars and the sea, so that death is a union rather than a division, in fact life only gets meaning from death, with death a guarantee of immortality.

In his 1946 collection of poems, Deaths and Entrances, Thomas returned to the same theme with his Poem in October, recounting the walk he took on his thirtieth birthday: “It was my thirtieth year to heaven.” As he describes his physical walk along the shore and up the hill, the seasons shift, and he recalls his childhood and youth. Ageing then is not a matter of getting older and mourning for a lost youth, not a one-way journey to death, but a chance to revisit the past and be enriched by it, rediscovering a child’s sense of wonder and an intimate connection with all of nature and life. Life is impermanent but humanity and nature are woven together, and individuals ultimately become part of the natural order.

But it is another of Thomas’ poems, the villanelle, Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, containing a rather different message, which is frequently read at funerals and memorials.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Published in 1951, the poem is commonly interpreted as a call to defy death and not to waste any opportunities, live life as best you can before it is too late. Moreover, although death is inevitable, life is precious and worth fighting for, death should not be accepted passively or in a spirit of resignation, rather we should resent and abjure death, resist our fate, and fight to live. But if the poem were merely flailing against the inevitable it would be an odd choice for funerals when it is too late for resistance or indeed for correcting life’s errors and omissions. The burning anger, the rage, is surely that of those who are left behind when those they love die. In the last stanza Thomas drops the discussion of mortality in general and the poem moves to his father’s imminent death, and a more personal expression of grief. Here is the personal despair, the desperate visceral plea, – don’t go, don’t leave me:

And you my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Different poems speak to different people: though I admire the writing, I am uncomfortable with the sentiments of And Death Shall Have No Dominion and Poem in October, for they sound like sophistry to me, desperate attempts to deny death without recourse to conventional religion, but no more credible than the latter. I prefer the frank and simple honesty of Eli Jenkins, who for all his belief, longs and begs for one more day. And it is with the hopeless rage at the dying of those we have loved that I empathise most strongly; it may be a little odd to ask people, when they are old or ill, tired and wanting to rest, to keep up the fight, a little selfish, but understandable.

Dylan Thomas himself was only thirty-nine and on his fourth reading tour in the United States when he died from a cocktail of bronchitis, pneumonia, emphysema, and asthma exacerbated by heavy drinking- though his widely quoted claim to have “just drunk eighteen straight whiskies” was questionable. His body was shipped home to Wales to be buried in the churchyard at Laugharne.

Grave of Dylan Thomas, St. Martin’s churchyard, Laugharne

Caitlin Thomas, remembered on the reverse side of the same cross.

The estuary at Laugharne viewed from the Boathouse where Dylan Thomas lived

Afterthought

If too much reflecting on death has engendered a little despondency, let me cheer you up with the response of Kenneth Tynan, not a man who was easily impressed, to early critics of Under Milk Wood. He delineates the charges made against the play: “that it approaches sex like a dazzled and peeping schoolboy. And that Llaregub, so far from being a real village, is a “literary” village that Thomas had adorned with a false moustache of lechery – “Cranford” in fact, with the lid off… To all these accusations Thomas must plead guilty. Yet we, the jury, rightly acquit him. He talks himself innocent: on two dozen occasions he gets past the toughest guard and occupies the heart.” Tynan went on to praise the “manic riot of his prose,” and, in quite a manic riot himself, continued, “He conscripts metaphors, rapes the dictionary, and builds a verbal bawdy-house where words mate and couple on the wing, like swifts. Nouns dress up, quite unselfconsciously, as verbs, sometimes balancing three-tiered epithets on their heads and often alliterating to boot.”

Kenneth Tynan on Under Milk Wood: a true comedy of errors, reprinted in The Observer 28 February 2014, originally published 26 August 1956.

Gods of Small Things:Thomas Carr, Thomas Gadd Mathews, Robert Recorde, Richard “Stoney” Smith, Jethro Tull, Frederick Wolseley

By Gravedigger

On September 1, 2024

In Inventors, Industrialists and Innovators

With which inventions do you associate the above names? None of them appear on those ubiquitous lists of A Hundred Inventions which Changed the World, but they all made a significant impact in their own spheres.

Thomas Carr (1824-74)

Thomas Carr was responsible for The Disintegrator. A catalogue from the London Exhibition of 1862 describes this wonderfully named machine as “capable of pulverising various unfibrous materials, whether hard or soft, such as artificial manures, coprolites, zinc ores, rock asphalte, peat, cement, and fire clays.” Between fifty and two hundred tons per day of these materials could be reduced to a granular powder. Different size machines were sold around the world to grind guano rocks, bone, chemicals, and to pulp fruit.

While coarse grinding machines served the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, Carr wrote with particular affection of his grain milling machine:

“The Disintegrator is Contrasted with and Proved to Bear No Resemblance Whatever to Other Mills, Ancient or Modern…it is the Most Novel Discovery and Invention in Mills, the Most Versatile in its Applications, and for Many Purposes the Most Efficient Also, Since the Invention of the Flour-mill Stones Upwards of Thirty-three Centuries Since.” (Thomas Carr, Grain Milling, 1866.)

Circular discs of metal were set face to face and studded with alternating circles of projecting bars. The discs rotated in opposite directions and the grain passing through was shattered and reduced to flour. Carr estimated that one of his machines could do the work of twenty-seven pairs of millstones.

Thomas Carr is buried in Arnos Vale Cemetery, Bristol. At the base of his grave marker is a stone reproduction The Disintegrator.

Grave of Thomas Carr in Arnos Vale, Bristol

Thomas Gadd Matthews (1802-1860)

Also in Arnos Vale lies Thomas Gadd Matthews, another man with an enthusiasm for grinding things down. In 1840 he took out a patent for a machine which reduced wood, bark, and leaves to the fine powder used by dyers and tanners. His most successful product was made from indigo leaves imported from the West Indies. His customers boiled and fermented the powder he supplied to obtain the dyes used in the manufacture of clothing, particularly in the production of naval uniforms.

This must have been lucrative, for in addition to a house in Bristol and a summer villa in Portishead, Matthews bought shares in the newly formed Bristol General Cemetery Company and had a grade 2* listed tomb built there for himself and his wife. Since he was a member of the Church of England while she was a Congregationalist, the tomb was built straddling the consecrated and the unconsecrated parts of the cemetery so that they could be buried together but according to the rites of their respective churches.

Tomb of Thomas Gadd Matthews, Arnos Vale

The tomb straddles the consecrated and unconsecrated sections of the cemetery to accommodate the differing religious affiliations of Matthews and his wife

Robert Recorde (1510-1558)

Robert Recorde was a Welsh physician and mathematician.

In 1557 he wrote The Whetstone of Witte, a treatise on algebra, while composing which he invented the equals sign. He realised that he could avoid the constant repetition of the words “is equal to” by replacing them with two horizontal parallel lines, chosen “bicause noe 2 thynges can be more equalle,” for if necessary, they could be drawn all the way around the globe and still not join together.

But in addition to practising medicine and teaching mathematics, Recorde had also acted as Controller of the Royal Mint. In this capacity he refused to divert money to support English troops engaged in suppressing the Western Rebellion, a rising in Cornwall and Devon against the Enclosures, the poll tax on sheep, religious change, and the threat to the Cornish language. As a result, William Herbert, the first Earl of Pembroke, accused him of treason. When Recorde in turn accused Herbert of malfeasance in his role as Commissioner of the Mint, Herbert conducted a successful libel suit and Recorde was faced with a massive fine. Unable to pay it he was arrested for debt and died in the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark.

His burial place, probably an unmarked, communal grave, is unknown but there is a memorial to him in St. Mary’s church in his native Tenby.

The equals sign was not generally adopted until after 1700.

Memorial to Robert Recorde, St. Mary’s, Tenby

Richard “Stoney” Smith (1836-1900)

I came across Richard “Stoney” Smith serendipitously in Highgate. As his gravemarker details, he came from Stone in Staffordshire, later moving to Macclesfield in Cheshire, and then to London. Born in the Mill House, he became the third generation of his family to work as a flour miller.

Traditionally the wheatgerm had been discarded when making flour to prevent the bread from going rancid. Stoney perfected a method of steam cooking the wheatgerm, to prevent rancidity, without destroying its nutrients. He then blended it back into the flour, resulting in a brown bread rich in vitamin B from the germ, with a unique nutty taste, and without the grittiness of other wholemeal breads.

In 1887 he trademarked his new product as Smith’s Patent Germ Flour. He launched a national competition to find a new name for it – perhaps the connotation of “germ” seemed ill advised in association with a food product. The £25 prize which he offered for the winning entry was won by an Oxfordshire schoolmaster who proffered “Hovis” from the Latin phrase hominis vis (strength of man).

Such was the popularity of Hovis loaves that by the 1930s pubs and teashops frequently displayed signs advertising “Teas with Hovis.” The company coined the catchphrase “Don’t just say Brown, say Hovis,” as part of a successful advertising campaign. Even more profitable was the nostalgic television advert launched in 1973: set in the early twentieth century, a boy pushes a delivery bike laden with Hovis loaves up a steep cobbled hill as Dvorak’s New World symphony, rearranged for brass, reaches a crescendo. The loaves delivered, the boy free wheels back down the hill as a voice-over, the boy in old age, reminisces:

I knew baker’d have the kettle on and doorsteps of hot Hovis ready. ‘There’s wheatgerm in that loaf,’ he’d say, ‘Get it inside you boy, and you’ll be going up that hill as fast as you came down.’

The advert ends with the aphorism, “Hovis, as good for you today as it has always been.” Repeatedly voted the nation’s favourite advert, it was digitally remastered and rereleased in 2019 once again boosting sales while delighting its many fans. Sad that Stoney was not around to see it.

The inscription reads: After years of patient investigation he patented on 6th Oct. 1887 his improved treatment of the wheatgerm and broken wheat which made the manufacture of Hovis bread possible.

Although the famous Hovis advert was supposedly located in a northern town, it was actually shot in Shaftesbury in Dorset. The boy pushed his bike up the steep incline of Gold Hill, now often described locally as Hovis Hill.

Shaftesbury has embraced the association, capitalising on it to with a giant Hovis money box at the top of Gold Hill raising money for local charities

Jethro Tull (1674-1741)

Jethro Tull is probably the most well-known of these inventors, forever rubbing shoulders with Turnip Townshend in school texts on the Agricultural Revolution, and further immortalised by the eponymous rock band. The latter were given the name by their agent, a history graduate, just at the time when they were finding fame with a week’s residency at London’s Marquee club.

At his Berkshire farm, the original Jethro Tull invented the mechanical horse drawn seed-drill, acclaimed as the first agricultural machine with moving parts. Seed had for centuries been broadcast by hand leading to much waste. Tull devised a system whereby the seed was stored in hoppers, and fed by rotating, grooved cylinders into a funnel which directed it into furrows at the correct depth and space. The furrows were dug by a drill plough moving in front. A harrow moved at the rear to cover the seed. Later Tull also devised a horse drawn hoe to remove weeds and loosen the soil around crops preventing compaction.

Tull’s gravestone, in St. Bartholomew’s churchyard, Lower Basildon, Berkshire, is a replacement for the original, but it too has become difficult to read on account of the lichen. Fortunately the delightful bas relief of a horse drawn seed drill can still be distinguished.

To the Memory of
JETHRO TULL,
Pioneer of Mechanised Agriculture,
Author of Horse-Hoing Husbandry.
Baptised in this Church
30th March 1674
Buried here 9th March 1740

Frederick Wolseley (1837-1899)

When he was seventeen years old the Irish born Frederick Wolseley left home for Australia where he worked on a sheep station near Melbourne. Subsequently he acquired extensive properties of his own, and in 1884 he took out a patent for his invention, the first sheep shearing machine. The device had a power source originally driven by a horse gin, later replaced by a stationary engine, which was connected by belt, pulley and drive shaft to the handpiece held by the shearer. It clipped wool relatively quickly, and at its full length, doubling or tripling its value. And while traditional shears had clipped the fleece it into small pieces Wolseley’s machine removed the whole fleece. From the sheep’s point of view, it had the added advantage of reducing the number of cuts they received. Wolseley established the Wolseley Sheep Shearing Company in Sydney, and opened a branch in Birmingham, England.

Herbert Austin joined Wolseley’s company as chief engineer, taking over the management of the company when Wolseley resigned owing to ill-health in 1894. Two years later Austin began to design cars alongside the sheep shearing machines to stabilise a business at risk of seasonal fluctuations. This sideline was soon abandoned in Australia, but Austin purchased the car building activities of the business and moving to England established the Austin Motor Company at Longbridge near Birmingham. There he produced some of Britain’s first cars, still bearing the Wolseley trademark, so that for most of us the name is more associated with the car than with Wolseley’s own invention. In 1922 the incomparable Austin 7 also emerged from Longbridge, but that is another story.

Wolseley visited England for cancer treatment in 1894, and never returned to Australia. Dying in Surrey in 1899 he was buried at Elmers End Cemetery in SE London.

Frederick Wolseley, Elmers End, SE London. Reflections in the shiny black marble give the grave a rather spooky appearance

The enthusiasm of the Wolseley enthusiasts is somewhat misplaced, for it was Austin who developed the cars albeit under the Wolseley trademark.

Gods of small things only maybe, but they have all left their mark.

Mourning Peter Robinson and the magic of stars and moons

Mary Anning Rocks; A Story of Passion and Purpose

William Cobbett and the Great Need for Parliamentary Reform

Dylan Thomas: Poems of Life, Death, and Mortality.

Gods of Small Things:Thomas Carr, Thomas Gadd Mathews, Robert Recorde, Richard “Stoney” Smith, Jethro Tull, Frederick Wolseley