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Merry Christmas, Henry Cole

On December 22, 2024

Henry Cole (1808-1882) combined administrative skills with a practical flair for production and design. Between 1837-40 when he worked as an assistant to Rowland Hill, these twin talents became apparent. He played a key role in the introduction of the Penny Post and was responsible for the design of the world’s first postage stamp, the Penny Black.

Under the pseudonym of Felix Summerly he created his own award-winning designs, including a tea service produced by Minton. But it was his organisational talents which were truly breath taking. In 1851 Cole proposed an International Great Exhibition of Culture and Industry to celebrate, and to stimulate the improvement of, modern manufacture and decoration. He sought to promote international trade, providing a platform for British products; British manufacturers were to get the best locations at the exhibition. Despite opposition from Parliament, and the press doubting the success of his venture, he launched his scheme, and under his management it became an enormous success, the first in a series of World Fairs.

Joseph Paxton designed the massive glasshouse, the Crystal Palace, in which the Great Exhibition was held at Hyde Park. The prefabricated structure with a cast iron frame was an engineering triumph. Within it more than a million objects were displayed, with sectors showcasing raw materials, machinery, manufactured goods, and fine arts. A massive pink glass fountain stood in the centre. William Morris found the latter in bad taste, but the public loved it.

Exhibits included the entire process of cotton production, electric telegraphs, steam powered machines, a lighthouse, locomotives, scientific tools, microscopes, barometers, surgical instruments, kitchen appliances, an early adding machine, an umbrella which doubled as a weapon, a neo-gothic medieval court designed by Pugin, Indian textiles, musical instruments including a folding piano, silks, porcelain, tapestries, majolica. From glass vitrines the Koh-I-Noor diamond and the eighth century Tara Brooch flaunted their mystique. Who would not have wanted to be there amid the extravagant opulence and exciting new inventions? Everyone did: in the sixth months of the exhibition six million people, a third of the population, visited. The railways offered discounted tickets and Thomas Cook arranged one of his earliest excursions, bringing 150,000 people from the North and Midlands.

The Crystal Palace witnessed the first international chess tournament, and played host to the first modern pay toilets, use of the latter priced at one old penny, bringing a new coy euphemism into the English language. Canny businessman that he was, Henry Cole persuaded Schweppes, the world’s first soft drink company, to sponsor the exhibition, and organised a tempting line in souvenirs with stereoscopic cards, fans, and plates. A huge financial as well as a popular success, the exhibition made a profit of £186,000, around £34 million in today’s money.

This enabled Cole to embark on his next great project, the founding of the South Kensington Museum for Education in Applied Art and Science. With the profits of the Great Exhibition, he organised the purchase of land in South Kensington, supervised the building works, and became the first director of the museum from 1857-73. It subsequently became the Victoria and Albert museum, specialising in decorative arts and design, while the Science and Natural History museums became independent entities. Always concerned with the educational function of the collections, Cole also helped to develop the Royal Colleges of Art and Music, and the Imperial College of Science and Technology.

Under Cole’s guidance the Victoria and Albert Museum became a magnificent show case for outstanding designs of furniture, textiles, glass and metal work, and ceramics. Determined to instruct people in superior design and good taste, Cole also set up a Gallery of False Principles, displaying what he perceived as bad designs. These included fabrics and wallpapers with naturalistic images of foliage and flowers, which he considered excessive and illogical ornamentation. Their failings were spelled out on their labels, and alongside them sat “correct” versions. The Gallery proved popular and caused much amusement, but the display was closed after two weeks following complaints from manufacturers whose work was pilloried there. But the memory of the intended lesson lives on, for Charles Dickens, more sentimental and sympathetic towards anyone who might like something pretty, satirised Cole’s judgment in Hard Times when the Utilitarian School Board Superintendent visits Gradgrind’s schoolroom:

Now, let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a room with representations of horses?’

After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, sir!’ Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, sir!’—as the custom is, in these examinations.

‘Of course, No. Why wouldn’t you?’

A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, Because he wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would paint it.

‘You must paper it,’ said the gentleman, rather warmly.

‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind, ‘whether you like it or not. Don’t tell us you wouldn’t paper it. What do you mean, boy?’

‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact? Do you?’

‘Yes, sir!’ from one half. ‘No, sir!’ from the other.

‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. ‘Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’ Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.

‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the gentleman. ‘Now, I’ll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?’

There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.

Sissy blushed, and stood up.

‘So you would carpet your room—or your husband’s room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you?’ said the gentleman. ‘Why would you?’

‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl.

‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?’

‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy—’

‘Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. ‘That’s it! You are never to fancy.’

‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’

‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman. And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.’

The girl curtseyed, and sat down. She was very young, and she looked as if she were frightened by the matter-of-fact prospect the world afforded.

Yet, notwithstanding a little pomposity and a common weakness for conflating his own taste with good taste, Cole gave us something very precious in the V and A. It is magical at any time but especially in winter when the rainbow colours of the textiles and costumes, the gleam and shine of the jewellery and metalwork, triumph over the prevailing gloom of the December skies. I choose a few favourite objects to visit, perhaps Shah Jahan’s winecup or Tipu’s tiger, the carved oak facade of Paul Pindar’s sixteenth century house or the Hereford screen, or Dale Chihuly’s extravagant glass sculpture, before heading for the refreshment rooms.

The V and A was the first museum in the world to have a catering service, and what sublime trio of rooms they are. Ensconced in the warmth with a cup of tea and a bun, surrounded by the magnificently eclectic décor featuring ceramics, stained glass, panelling and enamelling, in the Gamble, Poynter or Morris Room, all is right with the world. I could go into semi-hibernation here, sleeping at night in the Great Bed of Ware, by day wandering the labyrinthine corridors from one gallery to another, taking my meals in the refreshment rooms, emerging to the garden court only in Spring. There to meet with the spirit of Jim, Henry Cole’s Yorkshire terrier, who accompanied his master on his daily site inspections as the museum buildings rose from the ground, and who is buried somewhere here in the garden.

Memorial to Jim, on the wall of the garden court. He is buried somewhere in the garden

And at this time of year, I remember Henry Cole for something else, because in 1843 he designed and produced the first Christmas card. Depicting three generations his family raising a toast, with representations of charity and almsgiving around the margins, it is surely an image with which Dickens would have sympathised.

When I was a child our living room filled with cards at Christmas, for my grandparents came from the days of extended families and had a wide circle of friends. We strung the cards in loops across the chimney breast, and cascading down the walls. More jostled on the mantlepiece. Others surrounded and concealed the fruit bowl on the sideboard with its seasonal cargo of tangerines wrapped in tissue paper which when rolled into a cylinder and lit would float magically and weightlessly up to the ceiling. The post came twice a day: cards fell through the letterbox before I left for school, and a second pile arrived in the afternoon, saved for me to open when I came home.

Now there are fewer cards each Christmas, my grandparents long gone and my own contemporaries beginning to slip away. Moreover, the world has changed. Christmas greetings arrive by email. It is an easier way to communicate, quicker, more immediate, and very much cheaper. For in the 50s and 60s not only were boxes of Woolworths cards in the reach even of a child’s pocket money, but so were stamps. And if an envelope contained no other enclosure than a card, and if the flap were tucked in rather than sealed, then an even cheaper stamp would guarantee delivery. Today the annual purchase of books of stamps offers a sharp lesson in inflation, “How much?” we gasp in horror. Yet I cannot resist the pleasure of choosing and writing cards, and while it is nice to receive the emails, I am glad when friends still send those cheery, colourful, paper greetings which nudge each other on my bookshelves basking in the reflected lights of the tree.

So, thank you Henry Cole for the Victoria and Albert, and for Christmas cards. When I first visited your grave in Brompton, it looked a little sad and neglected, but last week I was not your only visitor for someone had taken ivy and plaited a Christmas wreath for you. Merry Christmas, Henry Cole.

Crouching Lions, Intriguing Graves: Three Unusual Tombs

By Gravedigger

On December 8, 2024

In Animals, Entertainers

There are hourglasses, skulls, extinguished torches, broken columns, urns, anchors, arches, open books, angels, cherubs, lambs, clasped hands, myrtle and oak leaves, ivy, lilies, doves, swallows, trumpets, sheaves of wheat, fingers pointing upward or downward, rope circles, burning flames. The symbols commonly found on graves arouse little curiosity for their meanings are well known. Less obvious is the significance of a life-sized crouching lion atop a tomb. Yet I am familiar with three such lions, seemingly benign presences dozing above their occupants, casting the occasional contemptuous glance at the lesser memorials scattered beneath their eminence.

“Gentleman” John Jackson (1769-1845)

In Brompton Cemetery lies “Gentleman” John Jackson, Bare Knuckle Boxing Champion of England. The cognomen reflected his background, his father was a wealthy builder at a time when most pugilists came from the poorer classes. Moreover, John Jackson combined an urbane manner with refined speech and stylish dress. Though a keen amateur boxer, in his early days he worked with his father, and being tall and muscular, was also in demand as an artists’ model for sculptors and painters including Thomas Lawrence.

Remarkably, his fame in the ring was based on only three public matches, one of which he lost. In 1788 he defeated William Fewtrell in Birmingham. A year later he was beaten by George “the Brewer” Ingleston when he slipped on a wet stage breaking a bone in his leg. He offered to be strapped to a chair to continue the fight if his opponent would do the same, but Ingleston refused. He did not fight again until 1795, but it was this final match against the reigning champion, Daniel Mendoza, which assured his fame. Such was his public profile following the bout that he was able to retire from the ring and open a successful Boxing Academy in Bond Street, where he numbered Byron amongst his pupils. The latter described him as “The Emperor of Pugilism.”

In 1814 Jackson helped to establish the Pugilistic Club which regulated prize fighting, exposing crooked behaviour like match fixing, and introducing new rules limiting fights to fists alone with no kicking or hair holding – this last ironic since Jackson had won his match against Mendoza with precisely that expedient, grabbing his opponent’s long hair in one hand while delivering his blows with the other.

Nonetheless, Jackson was a popular figure, organising exhibitions by other boxers to raise money for charities. The lion, symbolising skill and strength, was erected on his tomb in Brompton Cemetery and paid for after his death by friends and admirers.

Tomb of “Gentleman” John Jackson, Brompton Cemetery

The lion, symbol of skill and strength, looks benign today

John Jackson and Elizabeth, his niece and adopted daughter

George Wombwell (1777-1850)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries boxing matches often took place at fairs, and my second lion sits on the tomb of a frequent visitor to those fairs, but in a different capacity to Jackson. George Wombwell worked as a shoemaker, until the day he bought two boa constrictor snakes on the London docks for the considerable sum of £75. He soon found that he could make more money exhibiting them in taverns than he could making shoes. Scouring the docks he bought more exotic animals from ships trading with Africa, Australia, and South America. He established Wombwell’s Travelling Menagerie, touring the country to exhibit at fairs. Soon he was travelling with fifteen wagons housing giraffes, gorillas, bears, elephants, lions, monkeys, panthers, tigers, and zebra. A brass band travelled in front; garish posters announced their arrival.

The menagerie proved extremely popular at all levels of society, for Wombwell not only profited at the fairs but was also a favourite at the royal court, appearing three times before queen Victoria and her consort. At his death he left three travelling menageries managed by himself and other family members.

Apologists for Wombwell point out that the concept of animal rights was alien to Victorians, that it is a questionable exercise to judge the behaviour of one era by the norms and values of another. But it is difficult to comprehend how anyone could fail to be repelled and saddened by the sight of wild animals imprisoned in cages. Wombwell’s defenders argue that the shows were educational, and indeed the early ones were accompanied by lectures in natural history, and it is understandable that people were fascinated by their first sight of these creatures in the days before ubiquitous natural history documentaries.

The lectures however were soon superseded by animals trained to perform tricks. One of the most egregious displays involved lion baiting with a pack of bulldogs for which tickets were sold for between one and five guineas. When the docile lion Nero failed to be provoked Wombwell replaced him with the more aggressive Wallace whom he had bred in captivity, and who promptly mauled the dogs. Even his contemporaries were prompted to raise questions of animal cruelty, but Wombwell’s only response was that the lions were unharmed and that he would never be so foolish as to risk damage to such valuable pieces of property. Of the dogs he did not comment.

Often the poor creatures in the menagerie died even without being subjected to these torments, for indigenous to hot climates they were ill suited to survival in Britain.Wombwell may have spent a great deal on veterinary care, but his motive was always economic. He was an inveterate entrepreneur able to turn any situation to his advantage. One year at Bartholomew Fair his elephant died enabling his rival Atkins to display a sign advertising “The only live elephant in the fair.” Wombwell responded immediately with a notice proclaiming, “The only dead elephant in the fair.” The latter proved the greater attraction for people could poke and prod the poor carcass as much as they wanted; meanwhile Atkins’ menagerie was deserted.

Wombwell also sold dead animals to medical schools and taxidermists, and specimens can still be found in the zoology museums of Cambridge and Aberdeen, and in Norwich castle and museum. He donated Wallace to the natural history museum in his native Saffron Walden where he remains on display.

Wisely, Wombwell himself, who is buried in Highgate West, chose to rest under a statue of the more compliant Nero.

Tomb of George Wombwell, Highgate West Cemetery

Frank C. Bostock (1866-1912)

Frank C. Bostock was a great grandson of George Wombwell, born into the travelling show, Bostock and Wombwell, run by his parents. After their death, his older brother took over the show and Frank toured Europe and America with his own travelling menagerie. At Coney Island he established Bostock’s Arena, where audiences numbered 16, 000 a day between 1894-1903.

His animals were claimed by his admirers to be healthy and long-lived, and his entertainments were supplemented by educational talks about habits and habitats, but animal welfare organisations raised concerns about the animals’ living conditions. Nonetheless Bostock became known as “The Animal King” on account of his skill in training wild animals. His supporters wrote of the close bond he had with his animals and of his high standards in care and training, introducing “positive reinforcement.” The photographs of him seated surrounded by a dozen or more lions are appealing, but it seems unlikely that their training was very humane, the more so since he is credited with the realisation that lions are intimidated by upturned chairs which can therefore be used to control them. Nor does the fact that he introduced the first boxing kangaroos speak of a man much concerned with animal wellbeing.

Moreover, Bostock had a cavalier attitude towards human safety. When he returned to England, he set up another show, “The Jungle,” at Earl’s Court, before touring the country. In Birmingham one of his lions escaped and entered the sewers at an open manhole. It made its way roaring under the city causing widespread panic. Bostock’s response was to smuggle out a more biddable second lion in a covered cage and pretend to find and recapture the original lion. The latter facilitated his deception by ceasing to roar. Bostock was hailed as a hero and the publicity increased his takings that evening. Worried about the possible consequences of the free ranging lion however Bostock confessed his deception to the police the next day. They supplied five hundred armed men to assist its recapture, and at midnight, to keep the danger secret from the public, the expedition set out. They chased the lion with shouts and fireworks until it became trapped in a hole in the sewer and Bostock was able to regain possession of it.

Bostock popularised circus shows and amusement parks across America, Australia, Europe, and South Africa. He produced animal training manuals which, disturbingly, are still in print. He completed the transformation begun by his ancestor George Wombwell in democratizing menageries, where previously they had been the prerogative of the wealthy and aristocratic at locations like Versailles and the Tower of London.

I like Bostock’s tomb in Abney Park Cemetery which echoes that of Wombwell, and bears my third crouching lion, but I have little sympathy with his legacy.

Tomb 0f Frank Bostock and his wife Susannah, Abney Park Cemetery

Bostock’s lion also appears to be snoozing

The tomb also bears a confident assumption of the resurrection

Newport Rising! John Frost and the Newport Chartists

By Gravedigger

On November 24, 2024

In Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

“You should come to Newport in November,” urged the lady on the Chartist bookstall at Tolpuddle, “You’ll love it.” In the height of summer, Tolpuddle was putting forth its chocolate-box best: a Dorset village of plump thatched cottages, a riot of flowers in the gardens, tea and cakes served outside the village hall, pints drunk in the pub’s beer garden, and Songs of Praise being recorded in the twelfth century church. Newport, I knew, had been a major port in the nineteenth century for the export of coal from the South Wales Valleys, but the decline of the docks had begun in the 1920s, and whenever I had viewed Newport from the train the river Usk had looked bleak and deserted, brown water flanked by huge, oozing, brown mudbanks.

The Newport I had often seen from the train

This in November, one of the darkest and dampest of months? But the lady on the bookstall was adamant, enticing me with words as seductive as the Sirens’ honeyed song: “Torchlit Procession” and “Chartist Uprising.”

For Tolpuddle and Newport have a radical history in common: Tolpuddle has the agricultural labourers persecuted for attempting to form unions, and Newport has the greatest of the Chartist uprisings seeking political reform. And both host festivals to remember and celebrate those who gave their lives and their freedom to advance democracy.

Chartism rose out of bitter disappointment with the 1832 Reform Act. The latter had adjusted the boundaries of Parliamentary constituencies, removing political corruption in the form of rotten boroughs in the pockets of local aristocrats, and creating new constituencies in the cities of the industrial revolution. A very modest extension of the franchise however still left the right to vote dependent upon a substantial property qualification: only one fifth of adult males could vote and women were specifically barred. The working class had been betrayed by the middle class.

The London Working Men’s Association, and in Wales the Carmarthen WMA, were founded in 1836, and in 1838 the WMA drew up the six points of the Peoples’ Charter: a secret ballot, votes for all men over 21, payment for MPs, equal size constituencies, no property qualification for MPs, and annual parliamentary elections.

Chartism, the first mass movement driven by the working class, flourished as its members sought to implement their goals by constitutional means, believing that representation in Parliament as well as being a democratic right would also furnish them with an agency to alleviate their economic distress. Circulating Chartist papers and periodicals, they held meetings in the East Midlands, the Potteries, the Black Country, Glasgow, the north of England and the valleys of industrial South Wales where Chartism gained widespread support in the iron and coal mining villages. At contested elections Chartists gathered at the hustings where their candidates won by a show of hands but were disqualified from standing in the actual election. In 1839 they took their first national petition, signed by 1.3 million working people, to Parliament. MPs rejected the petition, and Chartists, including the leading orator Henry Vincent, were arrested and imprisoned for making “inflammatory speeches” and using “seditious language.”

Against this background, attitudes hardened and there was rioting. John Frost, a former mayor of Newport, planned the Newport Rising. Sources differ as to whether this was a peaceful protest petitioning for the release of imprisoned Chartists or an armed uprising with the aim of taking the town as the first step towards a nationwide rising. Surely both objectives must have existed in the minds of different men. Of the 10,000 who marched from the valleys of S.E. Wales, some were carrying homemade weapons. They marched through heavy rainstorms during the night of 3^rd November 1839 seeking to converge on Newport from three directions at dawn on the morning of the fourth. The column from the west was led by John Frost, that from Blackwood by Zephaniah Williams and that from Pontypool by William Jones.

In Newport the authorities, informed of the marches by government spies, had already arrested local Chartists, and imprisoned them in the Westgate Hotel. Armed soldiers were also concealed in the hotel. When the first marchers arrived, they surrounded the hotel demanding the release of their comrades. No one knows for certain who fired the first shot, but when the soldiers with their superior arms opened fire, they killed more than twenty men, injuring around fifty. The Chartists were forced to retreat.

Ten of the dead were buried in unmarked graves in the churchyard of St. Woolos parish church, now Newport Cathedral. Two hundred Chartists were arrested and twenty-one charged with high treason. The three leaders were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, the last time this sentence was passed in England and Wales. Nationwide protests and petitions, combined with the fear of uprisings elsewhere – there were attempted risings in Sheffield, the East End of London and Bradford – led to the sentences being commuted to transportation for life.

In November 2018, on the anniversary of the rising, the first Chartist Festival was launched. Newport Rising! celebrates Chartism and seeks to inspire action and engagement in democratic processes to promote positive change, as part of the ongoing struggle for liberty, humanity, and equality. There is music, film, performances, workshops, a Chartist Convention with historical and academic talks, a radical book fair, and… A Torchlit Procession Through The Streets.

And so I went to Newport in November, 185 years after the Chartists marched into town, and it was glorious. On the Saturday evening, following music, fire and speeches in Belle Vue Park, a momentary stillness and quiet witnessed the lighting of the first torches, and, as the flame was passed on, a 2,000 strong procession began to wind around the serpentine paths, pouring out into the streets and down Stow Hill with torches blazing, to the Westgate where more speeches and music culminated in an exuberant, joyful rendering of the Welsh National anthem. The people of Newport did their Chartist ancestors proud.

Two days later, on the anniversary of the original march, primary school children paraded around the town with their hand made Chartist banners, and in the evening a ceremony was held in St. Woolos churchyard where a plaque honours the ten Chartists buried there. Again, there were speeches and readings, in Welsh and English, before everyone laid a flower on the memorial. For those of us unfamiliar with the tradition, the organisers, with the gracious and generous spirit of inclusivity which epitomized the celebrations, had brought extra red roses.

Stone in Saint Woolos churchyard dedicated to the memory of Chartists shot at the Westgate Hotel, Newport

Preparations have been made for the evening ceremony

What Happened to the Chartists after the Newport Rising?

Two more Chartist petitions were presented to Parliament. In 1842 a petition with over three million signatures was again rejected by Parliament. There were riots, strikes, and arrests. In 1848 a mass meeting of Chartists was held on Kennington Common in London, but the government prohibited the planned procession to Parliament to present a third petition. Fearful of demonstrators being killed and wounded if soldiers opened fire, O’Connor cancelled the procession; he and other Chartist leaders walked alone with the petition. This third petition was also rejected.

But the Chartists had sown the seeds of change and by 1918 five of the Charter’s demands had been enabled. The Reform Act of 1867 extended the vote to some working men; the secret ballot was introduced in 1872; payment of MPs came in 1911; and full manhood suffrage at twenty-one, plus a vote for women over thirty and subject to a property qualification, was achieved in 1918.

The three leaders who had been transported from Newport were pardoned in 1856. William Jones remained in Australia where he worked as a watchmaker. Zephaniah Williams remained in Tasmania where he mined coal. John Frost returned from Tasmania but went to live in Stapleton in Bristol where his wife and children had moved. He continued to publish articles about reform until his death in 1877 at the age of ninety-three.

In the 1980s Newport historian Richard Frame learned from Frost’s will that he had requested to be buried in the grave where his son, who had died in 1842, lay in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Horfield, Bristol. Frost had buried his wife, who died only a year after his return, in the same grave. Frame located a badly weathered and partially buried stone bearing the name of Frost’s son, Henry Holman Frost. Newport Council paid for a new headstone of Welsh slate with a granite surround. It bears a quotation taken from a letter which Frost wrote to Lord Tredegar;

“The outward mark of respect

paid to men merely because

they are rich and powerful…

hath no communication

with the heart”

The original headstone is in Newport museum along with other artefacts from the Newport Rising.

New headstone for John Frost, Holy Trinity, Horfield, Bristol

Remains of original headstone with name of John Frost’s son, Henry Holman Frost, just discernable. Newport museum.

Reproduction of wording on original headstone, Newport museum.

And in Newport now?

The Newport Rising Hub is open at 170 Commercial Street, Tuesday-Saturday 10am -4pm

www.newportrising.co.uk

There you will find an exhibition of radical history, leaflets on the Chartist trail, books and other Chartist merchandise, and details of more events in Newport.

Fabian Ware: Remembering the Dead of the Great War

By Gravedigger

On November 10, 2024

In Buried in Foreign Fields, Victims of war

The woman crouched beside the white grave marker was Australian. The name on the stone was of a much younger man. “He would have been my great uncle,” she explained. “No one from my family has ever been able to come before. I am the first one to visit him.” She planted a poppy cross and a small Australian flag beside the grave, remained with him for a while, and took photographs for her family. None of those still living had ever met him, he never had a wife or children of his own, his nieces and nephews had been born after his death, but they knew that he had been killed in action at Messines Ridge and they knew exactly where his grave lay in Kandahar Farm Cemetery.

More than 416,000 young men from Australia enlisted in the First World War. They travelled more than 9,000 miles from home to serve on the Western Front, at Gallipoli, and in the Middle East. 60,000 of them died.

The tragedy of war is often dressed up as something glorious, a great cause, bolstered by jingoism and propaganda, so that names like Agincourt and Mafeking, Waterloo and Trafalgar, remote events, worm their way into the national psyche carrying a certain glamour, obscuring the horror that lies behind them. But the First World War was something different. No one speaks of Passchendaele, the Somme, or Gallipoli in anything but sombre tones.

Technological advances in warfare – the use of submarines, aeroplanes, poison gas, machine guns, artillery shells – distinguished this from previous conflicts. Earlier wars had been the business of professional armies, but this time conscription increased the scale of the slaughter. Estimates put the number of civilian and military casualties at forty million, between fifteen and twenty-two million deaths, and twenty-three million wounded. Over four years, deaths came from injuries, from starvation, and from disease, from tetanus, gas gangrene and the influenza pandemic.

Yet despite the carnage and chaos of that war the lady from Australia was able to find her great uncle’s grave without difficulty.

In previous wars the bodies of wealthy, aristocratic and upper middle-class officers had been shipped home, where monuments and statues were raised above them. Those of ordinary soldiers were buried haphazardly and anonymously, or left to rot. At Waterloo scavengers pillaged from the dead, selling relics to visitors. Burials were in shallow pits and when the bodies proved too many and the stench too great, they were burned. Later their bones were dug up and used to filter sugar or ground up for use as fertiliser. It might have been the same in this war were it not for Fabian Ware.

Before the war Fabian Ware (1869-1949) had been a schoolmaster, inspector of schools, examiner for the civil service, a journalist and editor. In 1914, when war broke out, he attempted to join the British Army, but at forty-five he was deemed too old for active service, and instead joined a mobile ambulance unit working for the British Red Cross. There was at this time no official system for recording burials. Individual soldiers were attempting to mark the graves of their fallen comrades, but the graves were often lost as another battle raged, the markers disappeared, and those who remembered their location were themselves killed. At the same time the Red Cross was overwhelmed with queries regarding the whereabouts of burial places. Ware began to make notes on the location of graves and persuaded the Red Cross to fund more durable markers. By 1916 the organisation had sent 12,000 photographs of graves marked with wooden crosses to the men’s families.

Understanding that families and friends would want to visit the graves after the war, Fabian Ware extended and formalised his work with the establishment of a special unit, the Army Department of Graves and Enquiries, to mark and record the location of the graves of all soldiers from Britain and the Dominions, not just on the western front in France and Belgium, but in all the theatres of war. The task of course was impossible, in the violence and turmoil of war many bodies went unburied.

But the breadth of Ware’s work was extraordinary. He negotiated with every country where British and Commonwealth soldiers died to obtain land in perpetuity for cemeteries. He raised money to buy the land. Not only did he succeed in France and Belgium, in Italy, Serbia, Greece and Egypt, but even in Gallipoli, a sensitive task since Britain had invaded Turkey.

Ware was committed to the principle that officers and men should be buried side by side, that all ranks should be treated equally, and that there should be no distinction of race or religion. These moral standards were not easily effected.

When Will Gladstone, grandson of the former Prime Minister, was killed in France his family had his body exhumed and shipped home, notwithstanding a ban on exhumations because of health hazards. Ware pushed for the ban to be enforced more strictly not only because of the sanitation issues but also because he believed that there should be fellowship and equality in death. Since very few of the bereaved families could afford the cost of repatriation, Ware determined that no more bodies should be returned. His democratic ideals led him into conflict with aristocrats used to their own wishes prevailing. Princess Beatrice claimed that it dishonoured “a hero of the royal blood” (her son) to bury him alongside others. The Countess of Selbourne declared that “This conscription of bodies is worthy of Lenin.” Twenty-seven further bodies were returned to Britain, but most families abided by the rules.

In 1917, under the direction of Ware, the Imperial War Graves Commission (later the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) was established, to ensure the care of the graves after the war. Ware began collaborating with a team of architects- Edwin Lutyens, Reginald Blomfield, and Herbert Baker – to design more permanent memorials to replace the wooden crosses in the cemeteries. These new grave markers were to be of a uniform design, chosen to accommodate those of all faiths and none. Each simple white Portland stone bore the man’s name, rank, army number, regiment, and date of death. When it was not possible to identify the body, the wording read “A soldier of the Great War known unto God.”

The Commission worked with meticulous attention to detail: the top of each stone was curved to allow rainwater to run off; the planting schemes around the graves were the work of Gertrude Jekyll, with a floribunda rose, the Remembrance Rose, set to the side of each stone, and low growing herbaceous plants to the front so that the inscriptions were not obscured, and soil splashback was prevented when it rained.

An appropriate religious symbol might be engraved on the stone if desired, and families could choose a personal epitaph to a maximum of sixty-six words at a cost of three and a half pence per letter. This met with justified criticism for only the relatively wealthy could afford this, and, despite Ware’s democratic ideals, it is noticeable that there are more epitaphs on the graves of officers than on those of ordinary soldiers.

Moreover, the wording of the epitaphs sometimes proved a sensitive issue, and the Commission reserved the right to veto any inflammatory inscriptions likely to cause “political upset.” While most families chose poetry, classical and biblical references, personal tributes, or poignant details – “An only son killed in action on his way to his leave and wedding” – others were more contentious. On the grave of a deserter, Albert Ingham, the inscription, “Shot at dawn, one of the first to enlist, a worthy son of his father,” carried an implied criticism of military commanders and political leaders. It was a deserved reproof, for there had been brutal executions of deserters, suffering from shell shock and mental collapse after seeing their friends slaughtered. Those executed included boys who had lied about their age to join up; one, Herbert Burden, was still too young to have officially joined his regiment when he was shot by a firing squad. But in a country where women were still handing out white feathers to men not in uniform, where there was still fervent militarism, and where deserters were not officially pardoned until 2006, the Commission showed unusual empathy in accepting the epitaph.

Similarly, deviating from the official stance, the representatives of the Commission usually accepted reflections on the futility of war, although, regrettably, they proscribed “A noble son sacrificed for capitalism.” They requested an alternative suggestion from the parents who submitted, “His loving parents curse the Hun.” And while it is impossible not to sympathise with the anger and hurt of the parents, it should be remembered that the Commission’s task was a delicate one, for by this time as well as seeking to commemorate the dead, they were hoping that the graves, in bearing witness to the horror of war, would promote peaceful settlements of future conflicts.

Kandahar Farm Cemetery, where the Australian lady found her great uncle.

Kandahar Farm Cemetery: when the stones lie so close it was not possible to individually identify the bodies of men who died together, they were buried together but with individual headstones.

Reservoir Cemetery: sometimes it was not possible even to know the regiment.

Essex Farm cemetery: a soldier remembered by his Canadian family

Essex Farm Cemetery:the cemeteries accommodate all faiths and none

In addition to the individual graves, Lutyens had designed the War Stones or Stones of Remembrance, bearing the wording “Their Name Liveth for Evermore,” for all cemeteries housing 1,000 or more graves. The abstract secular design chosen to be suitable for all denominations, emphasising equality of remembrance, provoked the ire of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of the Church of England who complained that this was a pagan monument and demanded a cross or other Christian symbol in its place. In a patient response that was ill-deserved the Commissioners compromised with the addition of a Cross of Sacrifice, designed by Blomfield, in every cemetery with more than forty graves.

Reservoir Cemetery with a Stone of Remembrance and a Cross of Sacrifice

By 1927 there were five hundred cemeteries, by 1937 there were one thousand eight hundred and fifty. The largest is at Tyne Cot near Passchendaele in Belgium, where there are 12,000 graves, more than 8,000 of them unidentified. And away from the battle sites, in church yards in Britain, Canada, USA, India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, Commonwealth graves record the deaths of wounded soldiers after they had been discharged and sent home.

One of the most agonising tasks for the Commission in the aftermath of the war was the continued search for bodies. The front-line areas were searched at least six times, and where there had been particularly intense fighting up to twenty times. Between 1918-21 200,000 bodies were recovered. In 1937 between twenty and thirty were still appearing every week when farmers ploughed their fields. They are still unearthed today: in Belgium there are around fifty reburials each year.

54,896 soldiers who were never found or identified are remembered on the Menin Gate in Ypres, where local buglers sound the Last Post every evening. At Thiepval a memorial commemorates 72,337 men with no known graves who died in the battles of the Somme. A third memorial at Tyne Cot bears a further 34,887 names.

A small section of Tyne Cot, some of the 12,000 graves and part of the memorial wall.

It was always Ware’s hope that the memorials would help people to realise the cost of war and so prevent future wars. He worked with others raising memorials to French and German soldiers, hoping to unite in common remembrance and international understanding. Speaking at annual Remembrance Day ceremonies, he advocated the avoidance of armed conflict as a means of settling international disputes, but stone masons were still at work on the Menin Gate when Germany invaded Belgium in 1940.

Fabian Ware continued his work for the CWGC until a year before his death in 1948 when he resigned due to ill health. He is buried in the churchyard at Amberley in Gloucestershire. His headstone is in the WGC style. Beside a memorial plaque in the church is one of the original wooden grave markers which he brought home and presented to the church. It bears the legend “Unknown British Soldier.”

Grave of Fabian Ware at Amberley in Gloucestershire

Memorial plaque to Fabian Ware in the church at Amberley in Gloucestershire

He inspired the foundation of the

Commonwealth War Graves Commission,

which erected the memorials and maintains the cemeteries

on the battlefields of the First and Second World Wars

Above the memorial plaque is an original wooden grave marker for an unknown British soldier

The young men who lie in the Commonwealth War Graves and whose names appear on the memorials lost everything: their hopes and ambitions, their dreams, their lives. No one could bring them back, and those who had loved them would never see them again. With the cemeteries and memorials, raised through his compassion and diplomacy, Fabian Ware offered the only comfort he could: the knowledge that those young men did not lie alone and neglected, that they would always be remembered, their graves cared for and waiting, no matter how long it might be until someone came to visit them.

But those acres of white stones failed in their second purpose, for their message of Never Again remains unheeded.

Mourning Peter Robinson and the magic of stars and moons

By Gravedigger

On October 27, 2024

In Shopkeepers, Work and Play

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.