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

When I realised that my hotel in New Delhi lay only a few hundred yards from the Nicholson Cemetery, and that I had a couple of hours free time before dinner, I determined to seek out John Nicholson. My street plan had already shown itself to be fallible, so hesitantly I sought precise directions from our guide. I was uncomfortably aware that a scion of the East India Company, convinced of his own superior race and with a reputation for excessive violence even amongst his fellow officers, would be rightly loathed in India. Clumsily I attempted to make clear that my interest in graves was not necessarily at odds with an abhorrence for their occupants. I quoted William Dalrymple’s view that Nicholson was “an imperial psychopath.”

Our guide was at once delighted by my desire to visit Nicholson and incensed by Dalrymple’s description and my perceived ignorance of the courage and manly virtues of the soldier hero. Giving me precise directions to the cemetery, he expressed his dismay that so few English people today have heard of Nicholson and advised me to read Charles Allen’s Soldier Sahibs as a corrective to my nescience.

John Nicholson (1822-57) was an Anglo-Irish military officer with the East India Company. Initially formed as a trading organisation, the Company gained control over large parts of the Indian subcontinent using its own army. When Nicholson arrived in India in 1839 the Company was expanding its political and military influence. Nicholson welcomed military action as an opportunity to advance his career. He took part in the first Anglo-Afghan War (1838-42), and the first and second Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845-46 and 1848-49). During the latter, the Company annexed the Punjab and the North-West Frontier.

After the Second Sikh War Nicholson was appointed as District Commissioner in Rawalpindi in the Punjab. An incident from this time illustrates his approach to maintaining law and order: confronting a recalcitrant robber chieftain, he ran him through with his sword and cut off his head which he displayed on his desk. Then inviting the other headmen in the district to call on him he pointed to the head advising them to ponder their fate if they were tempted to crime.

In 1852 he became Deputy Commissioner of the Bannu area which he ruled like a despot. Persistently he punished and humiliated those whom he perceived as showing disrespect to the colonial government. When one Indian leader in a visiting deputation spat on the ground in front of him, Nicholson had the man forced to the ground, obliged to kneel, and lick up his own spittle. When an imam outside a mosque failed to greet him with a customary salaam Nicholson had the man brought before him to publicly humiliate him by shaving off his beard.

The First Indian War of Independence, 1857, still referred to in some English texts as The Indian Mutiny, was far more than a rebellion by the sepoys in response to the introduction of beef and pig fat to grease the cartridges of the new Enfield rifles. The war had deeper underlying causes: the relentless annexation of territory, specifically the recent conquest of Awadh, by the British; the increasing Imperial arrogance and the harsh treatment of Indians by comparison with the eighteenth century integration; British proposals to abolish the Mughal court and impose British law and control in Delhi; the decline in sepoys’ pay and promotion opportunities; the General Enlistment Act obliging Indian soldiers to serve abroad; Christian proselytising by missionaries which was undermining the Muslim and Hindu way of life with an evangelical drive for conversions witnessing the forced closure of madrassas; harsh taxes and profiteering from native resources while the bulk of the Indian population lived in poverty.

For the British however this was a mutiny, and the East India Company army was full of violent, racist officers outraged that British rule was being challenged. There was a general contempt for India and Indians, the British were on a god given mission to rescue a backward, inferior country via evangelical Christianity and Imperialism. The atrocities committed by the sepoys, killing not just British officers, but women and children, provided an excuse for reprisals and brutal vengeance. Sepoys were bayonetted and fired from cannon; old people, women and children were burned to death in their houses. The right to revenge was after all enshrined in the bible.

For Nicholson more than anyone it was obvious that the mutiny should be crushed at once before it “spread like smallpox.” There is little doubt that Nicholson enjoyed the war. God, he was confident, was on the side of the British. As commander of a Moveable Column, he swept across the Punjab, terrorising rebels into submission, hanging their leaders without court martials. Convinced that hanging was insufficient punishment he made clear that he would have preferred to flay alive, impale, or burn his victims. He gave his troops a free hand with prisoners, unconcerned when they engaged in vicious torture.

In Jalandhar he entered the British mess tent to announce dramatically, “I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I have been hanging your cooks.” He had been told that the soup prepared by the regimental cooks was poisoned, and when they refused to taste it, he force fed it to a monkey who expired. All the cooks were hanged without trial.

For Nicholson, the end came at the siege of Delhi. The sepoys had captured Delhi, declared the aged Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II their leader, and massacred the Christian population. The assault on the city was under the command of Nicholson. His troops breached the walls of the Red Fort, but as he moved along the inside of the wall between the Kabul Gate and the Burn Bastion a sepoy shot him from the roof of a nearby house. A week later however Delhi was taken by the British. The Muslim population was massacred. Nicholson died nine days later in hospital. Zafar died in exile. The marble structures in the Red Fort were demolished and a British barracks erected.

Distant view of the walls surrounding the Red Fort from the minaret of the Jama Masjid

One of the gates in the walls of the Red Fort

Few of the marble structures in the Red Fort remain today,

but those which still exist are exquisite,

unlike the British barracks which replaced them.

A new graveyard had been prepared, and a white marble slab plundered from Zafar’s Moonlight Garden in the Red Fort was placed over Nicholson’s grave. The inscription reads:

The Grave

Of

Brigadier-General

John Nicholson

Who

Led the Assault at Delhi

But fell

In the Hour of Victory

Mortally wounded

And died September 23, 1857

Aged 35

Grave of John Nicholson, Nicholson Cemetery, Delhi

The white marble slab was appropriated from the Red Fort

For the most part the Victorian public were in thrall to the ruthless, seemingly invincible men who had taken Delhi. There was hysterical adulation of them, but especially of Nicholson, “The hero of Delhi” and “The Lion of the Punjab.” Eulogies described him as the bravest and the best, noble, tender, modest, heroic, honourable, just, patriotic, steadfast.

“As long as an Englishman survives in India, the name of John Nicholson will not be forgotten” wrote Viceroy John Lawrence. Henry Newbolt wrote the vile Ballad of John Nicholson; one verse will suffice to give the flavour:

Have ye served us for a hundred years
And yet ye know not why?
We brook no doubt of our mastery,
We rule until we die.”

Field Marshall Roberts asserted that Nicholson was a military genius who gave up his life in defence of his country, an odd claim given that Nicholson was trying to prevent Indians from defending their country.

Yet some of Nicholson’s superiors regarded him as dangerously out of control. For even by the standards of his times Nicholson’s actions and attitudes were extreme. He ignored orders, forced his men beyond their capabilities, and extended punishment to those outside his jurisdiction. John Lawrence, later the Viceroy of India, suggested that he was too keen on confronting and humiliating Indian leaders, flogging them on any pretext even when he lacked authority.

Recent writers have been distinctly less adulatory describing Nicholson as a violent bully, a racist, a religious bigot, arrogant, boorish, a man who loathed India and its inhabitants – whom he thought ignorant and barbarous, a gloomy Calvinist, a brute, a war monger, a torturer, a man convinced that he belonged to a superior race, … an Imperial psychopath.

Today Dalrymple’s pithy epithet resonates true. And if this is so in England, why was my guide in India so defensive of his memory? Surely no Indian could do other than loathe the man?

The historian, Thomas Macaulay, (1800-1859), wrote of the divine mission of the officers of the East India Company to expand their territory along the North-West Frontier. He further urged them to create between themselves and “the swarming millions”:

A class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.

My guide had attended Mayo College, the so-called Eton of the East, established in 1873, with precisely that intention. Had its powerful propaganda had been so depressingly successful, in shaping the views of this otherwise highly intelligent, educated, knowledgeable man? Like all Imperialist organisations the British Empire has much to answer for and its evil influence is not easily eradicated, still lingering on where we might least expect it.

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

For a superb telling of the events of 1857 see:

William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857. Bloomsbury, 2006.

And for a gripping but more defensive account:

Charles Allen, Soldier Sahibs: The Men who made the North-West Frontier. John Murray, 2012, first published 2000.

Perdita, Mary Robinson, the Life of a Georgian Lady.

By Gravedigger

On March 30, 2025

In Actors, Influencers, Writers

The village of Chawton in Hampshire is best known today for its association with Jane Austen. Her brother inherited a sixteenth century manor house in the village. He stayed there only occasionally, but his mother and sisters became permanent residents in the former bailiff’s cottage and visited Chawton House whenever he was in residence.

Jane Austen’s mother, Cassandra, and her elder sister, Cassandra Elizabeth, are both buried in the churchyard of St. Nicholas in the village.

Graves of Jane Austen’s mother and sister, St. Nicholas churchyard, Chawton

But I did not visit Chawton in search of the Austens. In 1992 Chawton House, by then in poor condition, was sold to an American businesswoman, Sandra Lerner. She restored the house and established a research library and study centre with the rather cumbrous title The Centre for the Study of Early Women’s Writing 1600-1830.

The contents of the library include Sandra Lerner’s own extensive collection of early and rare editions of women’s writing. Regular exhibitions highlight different writers: the centre is currently presenting Mary Robinson, more commonly known as Perdita.

Mary was born to a well-heeled family in Bristol in 1758, but her father lost his money following an ill-advised investment in a whale fishery in Labrador. When he returned from Canada, he left his wife and children to live with the mistress whom he had brought back to England. Mary’s mother moved to London with her children and set up her own school. There, Mary, who had received a better education than most girls of her generation, started teaching at the age of fourteen. Her father, however, despite deserting his family, resented this public acknowledgement of their poverty and forced the closure of the school.

Mary had always been attracted by the theatre and through connections of her mother secured an introduction to David Garrick. Impressed by her abilities, he began to train her: she was to play Cordelia to his Lear. Meanwhile however she had met Thomas Robinson, an articled clerk purportedly expecting an inheritance. She agreed to marry him, possibly under pressure from her mother, who was acutely aware of the dangers of a stage career at a time when “actress” was often a euphemism for prostitute.

The marriage was not a success. The inheritance did not materialise. Married at fifteen, Mary had a child at sixteen, and at seventeen, along with her husband and child, was housed in the Fleet prison for debt.

The debts had piled up as both Thomas and Mary had pursued a recklessly extravagant lifestyle. There was an expensive address, an open top carriage, clothes, jewellery, evenings at Ranelagh and Vauxhall gardens, and for Thomas the races, gaming houses and brothels. Quintessential Georgians, in stark contrast to their gloomy Victorian successors, they had an infinite capacity for living in the moment, ever hopeful that their fortunes would turn tomorrow, combined with an unattractive habit of tapping other people for “loans.” Detention in a debtors’ prison was an experience so widespread that it often seems to have served as little more than a rite of passage for large numbers of Georgians.

When it came to survival in the Fleet, however, Mary proved herself to be of superior mettle to Thomas. She accepted work, which he had refused, copying legal documents, and she published her first volume of poetry.

After Thomas was discharged from the Fleet, the playwright and theatre manager Sheridan encouraged Mary to return to the theatre. With characteristic generosity Garrick came out of retirement to tutor her again, and Mary made her stage debut as Juliet at Sheridan’s Drury Lane theatre.

Her subsequent stage career was an enormous success; particularly popular were her performances in the “breeches roles,” cross dressing as Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It. At the same time, she published her second volume of poetry.

In 1779 Sheridan revived Florizel and Perdita. This was Garrick’s adaptation of the final two acts of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, the story of Prince Florizel and his love for the shepherd’s daughter Perdita, who of course turns out to be a princess.

The Prince of Wales, later George IV, came to see the play and promptly declared himself “head over heels in love” and “blinded by passion.”* One of his most unappealing characteristics was his capacity for self-deception. For the previous six months he had been declaring his love for his sisters’ governess, Mary Hamilton, threatening to commit suicide if she rejected him. Before he left for the theatre that night, he had sent her a letter declaring his undying love. When he returned, a second letter abruptly reduced Mary Hamilton to the status of a friend to whom he confided his new passion. In his letters to Mary Hamilton, he had called her Miranda and signed himself Palemon, now he began to write love letters to Mary Robinson calling her Perdita and signing them Florizel. Originality was alien to him.

Though Mary Robinson was flattered, she was not a fool. She held out against his blandishments and a welter of letters (her biographer notes that Palemon had penned a letter every three days to Mary Hamilton, “establishing a pattern he would far surpass when taking the name of Florizel.”**) reminding him that if they were to have a “public attachment” she would have to abandon her career and be financially dependent on him. After six months he sent a bond promising to pay her twenty thousand pounds when he came of age, and she retired from the stage to become his mistress.

As Perdita, Mary enjoyed her fame although it was tinged with notoriety, and she was frequently caricatured in the press. She spent lavishly and conducted a simultaneous affair with Lord Malden. When predictably the prince moved on, as he soon did, first to Elizabeth Armistead, then via Grace Dalrymple Eliot to Maria Fitzherbert, she was left seriously in debt. But she had held on to that slew of letters, which she now threatened to publish, and while denying that her motive was mercenary, negotiated a payment of five thousand pounds for their return. Moreover, she still held the bond.

It is hard to see her as a complete victim, though she did try to present herself as such, for in many respects she and the prince were cut from the same cloth, notwithstanding his greater advantages. Her capacity for self-dramatisation was congruent with his. Once she had secured the money, she sat for her portrait with Gainsborough who portrayed her as a pensive, abandoned beauty, clutching a miniature of the prince. Then she purchased a new carriage and headed for Paris.

In Paris she was welcomed as a celebrity, found new lovers, made the acquaintance of Marie-Antoinette, and returned to London bearing the latest fashions. Perdita introduced the white muslin shift dress, high-waisted and tied with a silk sash, which became known as the Perdita chemise, and which quickly replaced the paraphernalia of hoops and stays. All those Jane Austen heroines who appeared a few years later in their muslin frocks were, like everyone else, following the trend set by Perdita. No modern-day influencer can compare with Perdita as a leader of fashion: there were Perdita hats, gowns, handkerchiefs, stockings. Where Perdita led, society followed.

The prince may have wearied of her, but Perdita was at the height of her fame and popularity. She was painted by Hoppner, Reynolds, and Romney. There was an expensive new address, carriages, appearances at the theatre, opera, pleasure gardens and parks. Everywhere she met with admiration and emulation. Though there was always salacious gossip about her, she had learned to orchestrate the press to her advantage.

She continued her long running affair with Lord Malden and began new affairs with Banastre Tarleton, recently returned from fighting for the British in the American War of independence, and with Charles James Fox, the Whig MP. When the affair with Malden ended, she secured another annuity. Tarleton meanwhile ran up gambling debts and she “borrowed” money from Fox on his behalf.

But then things began to go badly for Perdita. Hearing a rumour that Tarleton had fled for the continent to escape his creditors, she set out in pursuit of him. While travelling she contracted rheumatic fever resulting in severe arthritis which gradually deprived her of the use of her legs. She was only twenty five years old. When the prince came of age Perdita should have been able to cash the twenty-thousand-pound bond, but Florizel prevaricated, eventually agreeing to an annuity of £500 in lieu – it was seldom paid. As she ran into financial difficulties, combined with lameness and some loss of her looks, the press increasingly pilloried and denigrated her.

With considerable fortitude, she reinvented herself as a poet, novelist, and playwright. Her early poems were influenced by the effusive, flowery, writings of the Della Cruscans and her early novels were gothic money spinners, but Mary was writing for money, and she was successful.

Later she moved to narrative poetry much admired by Coleridge, and the Monthly Review dubbed her “The English Sappho.” Her novels ridiculed the hypocrisy of fashionable society and incorporated political themes of inequality and discrimination. Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed them with enthusiasm.

By the time Tarleton left her, Mary had become an independent woman of letters. She corresponded with William Godwin discussing liberty and reason. Under Wollstonecraft’s influence she adopted feminist causes, critiquing women’s exclusion from parliament, double sexual standards, and prohibitions on physical exercise for women. She condemned domestic drudgery, advocating a university for women and their right to own their own property.

After her death Mary’s writing fell from fashion, yet while the early work was sentimental, the analysis of misogyny in her later work anticipates both the first and second waves of feminism. In “A Letter to the Women of England, on the injustice of mental insubordination” she elucidated the male disdain for intellectual women:

There are but three classes of women desirable associates in the eyes of men: handsome women: licentious women: and good sort of women. The first for his vanity; the second for his amusement; and the last for the arrangement of his domestic drudgery. A thinking woman does not entertain him; a learned woman does not flatter his self-love by confessing inferiority***

In her memoirs Mary presented herself as a victim of male deceit and contempt. There was some truth in this, but Garrick and Sheridan both recognised her talent, while Coleridge and Godwin accorded her respect and praise. Mary was far more than a victim: she was clever, talented, shrewd, and as capable of self-deluding sophistry as the more unattractive men in her life. And if she is remembered today more as an actress, fashion icon, and mistress, than for her writing, she herself played a key role in the spinning and promoting of her early celebrity.

Mary Robinson was only forty-three when she died of heart failure and was buried in the churchyard at Old Windsor. Only two people attended her funeral. Yet when I visited the tomb the flowers beside it indicated that, two hundred and twenty five years after her death, Perdita, Mary Robinson, still has her admirers.

Tomb of Perdita, Mary Robinson, Churchyard of SS Peter and Andrew, Old Windsor

The lettering here is clear but that on the sides of the tomb is very worn. One side bears a sonnet by her friend Samuel Jackson Pratt, and the other an epitaph which she wrote herself.

*Quoted in Paula Byrne, Perdita, the Life of Mary Robinson, Harper Collins, 2005, p.110, p.113.

**ibid. p.116

***ibid. p.170

For details of Chawton House and the exhibition on Mary Robinson see https://chawtonhouse.org

Hoppner portrait of Mary Robinson at Chawton House, the more famous Gainsborough is in the Wallace Collection.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and 164,440 other members of the GMC

By Gravedigger

On March 16, 2025

In Medics

Just in time for International Women’s Day on 8th March an article in The Guardian newspaper cited figures produced by the General Medical Council revealing that, with 164,440 women licensed to practise medicine in the United Kingdom, the number of female doctors had for the first time exceeded the number of males. Women now make up 50.04% of the nation’s doctors.

In 1865 there was only one female doctor on the medical register of the GMC: Elizabeth Garrett.

Born in 1836, Elizabeth Garrett had been educated at home and at a private boarding school for girls. She recorded her dissatisfaction with both her governess and her teachers, complaining particularly of the absence of science and maths teaching, although her sisters remembered that they received a sound grounding in literature and languages. After school and a tour abroad, Elizabeth returned home where for nine years she pursued her own studies alongside her domestic duties.

In 1859 she met Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to qualify as a medical doctor in the USA. Blackwell was in London to give a series of lectures on “Medicine as a Profession for Ladies.” In a biography of her mother Louisa Garrett Anderson describes a conversation a year later between her mother, her mother’s younger sister, Millicent Garrett, and their friend Emily Davies. She quotes Davies:

It is clear what has to be done. I must devote myself to higher education, while you (Elizabeth) open the medical profession to women. After these things are done, we must see about getting the vote. You are younger than we are Millie, so you must attend to that.*

The conversation may be apocryphal, but Emily Davies went on to establish and become Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge for women students, while Millicent Garrett Fawcett led the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies between 1897 and 1919.

Elizabeth Garrett faced implacable opposition from the British medical establishment, but she had several advantages on her side: she was clever and determined, she came from a wealthy family, and her father, a successful businessman in Suffolk, was unusually supportive of his daughters’ education and of their aspirations.

Unable, as a female, to enrol at a British medical school Elizabeth took up a position as a surgery nurse at Middlesex hospital. Despite protests from the male students, she was permitted to use the dissecting room and to attend chemistry lectures. With financial support from her father, she employed a tutor to mentor her in anatomy and physiology, securing certificates in those subjects along with chemistry and pharmacy.

Despite this evidence of her commitment and ability, the medical schools continued to reject her applications.

Undeterred, Garrett continued to study with private tutors and professors, and applied to the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries seeking to exploit a loophole in their charter preventing them from excluding students from their examinations on the grounds of sex. Nonetheless they did attempt to reject her application, backing down only when her father threatened to sue them. In 1865 Elizabeth Garrett obtained her licence from the Company. Though not a medical degree, the licence did qualify her to practise medicine, and her name appeared on the register of the GMC. The Worshipful Company took immediate steps to amend their regulations, disallowing anyone privately educated from sitting their examinations in the future.

Yet though she was now qualified Garrett could still not, as a woman, hold a post in any hospital. This time her father’s backing enabled her to open her own practice and a dispensary for women and children which became The New Hospital for Women and Children.

In 1870 she finally obtained a full medical degree from the faculty of medicine in Paris which was beginning to admit women.

Members of the medical patriarchy did their best to discourage other women from following her example. In 1874 the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley claimed that education for women led to over exertion which would reduce their reproductive capacity and render them liable to nervous and mental disorders.** Edward Hammond Clarke asserted that:

Higher education in women produces monstrous brains and puny bodies, abnormally active cerebration and abnormally weak digestion, flowing thought and constipated bowels.***

According to these physicians the trinity of menstruation, pregnancy and menopause rendered women frail, unstable and unsuitable for public life.

Garrett responded that the danger for women came not from education but from boredom in the home.

In 1874 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (she had married in 1871) cofounded the London School of Medicine for Women (later the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine) where she lectured. Here women were prepared for the medical degree of London University whose examinations were opened to them from 1877.

Garrett Anderson retired to her old family home Alde House, in Aldeburgh in 1902. She is buried in the family grave in the churchyard of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

Family grave of the Anderson family, SS Peter and Paul, Aldeburgh

Newton and Louisa Anderson, Elizabeth’s parents, and some of her eleven siblings are buried here

While lauding the achievements of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and the other early pioneers, I had reservations about the triumphalist tone of the newspaper article: it seemed an old and long settled battle to be reviving. But days later a letter appeared in the same newspaper from an emeritus professor at St. George’s Hospital Medical School describing a study he had published with a colleague in 1985 showing that secret quotas still existed in all the London medical schools limiting the number of women admitted to study medicine. The use of discriminatory practices only ceased in the UK in 1988 as a result of this study. **** Not such an old battle then, and as Professor Collier points out, it still took forty years to achieve today’s gender balance.

*Louisa Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson:1836-1917, Faber and Faber, 1939

**Henry Maudsley, Sex in Mind and Education, Fortnightly Review, Volume 15, April 1874

***Edward Hammond Clarke, Sex and Education, 1875

****Joe Collier, Guardian letters page, 10 March 2025

Shepton Mallet, Home of James Allen, The Snowdrop King

By Gravedigger

On March 2, 2025

In Gardeners

Wool was the backbone of the economy in Medieval England. From the fourteenth century, the Lord Chancellor, while in council in the House of Lords, sat on The Woolsack, a symbol of England’s wealth. Supposedly, this was a wool bale, although when the seat came to be restuffed, six hundred years later in 1938, it was revealed to be filled with horsehair. The replacement was duly made with wool.

The wool trade peaked in southern England between 1500-1714, providing a generous revenue for the government, which reciprocated briefly by passing a law in the 1570s supporting the industry by enforcing the wearing of woollen caps to church on Sundays.

The wool towns prospered, and with them rose magnificent parish churches, clothiers’ and merchants’ houses. Somerset’s wool towns were not the richest, that distinction went to Suffolk, but there was no doubting their affluence.

Shepton Mallet’s very name echoes its original source of wealth: scoep and tun, sheep and farm. In the eighteenth century there were some fifty mills, spinning, weaving and dying wool, in and around Shepton.

But by the end of that century the southern wool towns were in decline, losing out to the steam powered production of cloth in the north. Surrounded by steep hills and waterpower Leeds became the major wool town.

The population of Shepton Mallet plummeted as unemployment and poverty engendered emigration. By 1801 there were only 5,000 people in the town, and the population remained at that level until the 1950s.

There were partial revivals of the town’s fortunes. For a while it developed a trade in silk and crepe: the silk for Queen Victoria’s wedding dress was produced there. But cheaper imports and changing tastes in fabrics meant that the respite was brief.

In the mid-nineteenth century two railways arrived, a branch of the East Somerset Railway in 1859, and one of the Somerset and Dorset in 1874. Shepton became a centre for storing Farmhouse Cheddar Cheeses while they matured, and then distributing them. “The Strawberry Line” carried strawberries from Cheddar to London and Birmingham. But the Beeching cuts of the 1960s closed these lines and ended the trade.

In 1864 the Anglo-Bavarian Brewery in Shepton was the first to brew lager in England, but it closed again in 1921.

James Allen grew up against this background of a precarious economy. He was born in 1830 at Windsor Hill Farm, just outside Shepton Mallet, where his family operated a corn mill. Such was the poverty in Shepton, that in the Bread Riots of 1842 desperate, starving men, unable to pay for both rent and food, threatened to burn down the mill. James’ older brother persuaded them to leave, promising flour to those who came from Shepton Mallet the following morning, and the mill was spared.

Windsor Hill Farm, birthplace of James Allen

Windsor Hill Farm. 80% of the water from the spring which rises behind the house goes underground to supply the town, the remaining 20% today running across the garden once powered a mill

Later the family moved to Highfield House in the town and into the business of storing and distributing cheese.

Highfield House, former home of the Allen Family, backs on to the yard where cheeses were stored.

Though Shepton was poor, the Allen family prospered, and their affluence enabled James to pursue his interest in horticulture. He was entirely self-taught but, a passionate galanthophile, he became the first person to breed new varieties of snowdrops from the wild. During his lifetime around five hundred cultivars were produced; he was personally responsible for over a hundred of them. He grew all the species known at the time, crossing and raising hybrids from seed, achieving fame as The Snowdrop King.

After his marriage to Ellen Burt the couple moved across the road from Highfield House to Park House. There he continued his experiments, also breeding narcissi, lilies, a wood anemone, Anemone nemorosa Allenii, and a lavender, Scilla xallenii.

Sadly, the fungal infection Botrytis, followed by an attack of narcissus fly, blighted Allen’s remarkable collection of snowdrops, destroying most of them. But two of his cultivars survive, the exquisite Merlin, with its completely green inner flower segments, and Magnet with its long pedicel causing the flower heads to bob in the breeze.

The Allen family had a prominent role in the town’s affairs, and were generous benefactors, contributing to public works including the town cemetery which opened in 1856. The latter was built with Anglican and Non-Conformists sections and a separate chapel for each; the Allens themselves had converted to Non-Conformism which had a strong following in the town and throughout the West Country.

Their wealth and philanthropy, combined with James Allen’s considerable fame in Victorian England, ensured him a prime spot in the cemetery when he died in 1906. He was buried in front of the nonconformist chapel, with an obelisk above him, and surrounded by a circular bed of spring flowers.

Like many Somerset towns Shepton Mallet has never recovered its early prosperity. Today its high street is rundown, empty units like missing teeth alternate with charity shops, and small business ventures have a rapid turnover. Yet Shepton Mallet is undefeated, and last month I attended its Annual Snowdrop Festival.

The festival was founded ten years ago to celebrate James Allen and to support regeneration of the town by raising its profile and attracting visitors. Volunteers from the town’s horticultural society open their own gardens in the summer, raising money to buy bulbs for the Shepton snowdrops project. Every autumn they plant more bulbs. Since they began, they have planted more than 500,000 bulbs around the town at roadsides, roundabouts, and in public spaces, with special attention to parts of the town where flowers are not so commonly seen.

At the February half term, the festival features plant sales, poetry and photography competitions, painting and craft workshops for children, puppet making and storytelling, gardening talks and heritage walks…and a snowdrop themed fashion show.

I joined a walk, and we set out for Windsor Hill Farm, where James Allen was born. Its gates were open, a brasier lit on the patio, and the current owners had prepared tea and cakes, iced with green and white snowdrops, to welcome us.

We walked along one of the two great railway viaducts, the previously overgrown track now cleared by volunteers for cycle routes and footpaths. This work is ongoing and several of my fellow walkers were involved, all adamant that there can be no greater joy than to rise early on a weekend morning for a communal attack on the brambles.

One of the railway viaducts,brambles cleared from the old track, welcomes walkers and cyclists

On through the lower part of the old town with the sudden surprise of the lovely old merchants’ houses and the chapel where James Allen married, and his children were baptised.

At Park House again the gates were opened to us, the owners pointing out the locations where James Allen grew his various cultivars. Stripping back layers of ancient wallpaper when they moved in, they had discovered outlines on the wall probably indicating the presence of an indoor greenhouse, a feature much loved by the Victorians. They are currently scrutinizing Allen’s handwritten notes and correspondence held by the Royal Horticultural Society to see if they can confirm this.

We finished our walk beside James Allen’s grave. The original obelisk fell into disrepair and had to be dismantled on safety grounds, but in 2022 a perfect replica was unveiled during the festival.

In Memory of James Allen, The Snowdrop King

You do not have to wait until next February to make the acquaintance of James Allen. You can download the Shepton Mallet Heritage Trails at any time. There, alongside the story of the Snowdrop King, you will discover that no lesser an authority than Pevsner claims that the medieval church boasts the finest oak wagon-roof in England; that Shepton Mallet is home to England’s oldest prison (1627), which housed national records including the Magna Carta during World War II, and the Kray twins when they went AWOL from national service in the fifties.

Former home of Magna Carta and the Kray Twins

Shepton, you will learn, is the birthplace of Babycham, in 1953 the first alcoholic drink to be aimed specifically at women, and the first to be advertised on commercial television in Britain.

Everyone of a Certain Age remembers the babycham advert. The newly spruced up deer now lives next to the cafe at Kilver Court.

Then there is the Amulet theatre, built in the 1970s and highly rated by the Brutalism Appreciation Society, an enthusiasm admittedly not shared by everyone. And, my favourite, The Rock Flock Roundabout, where the model sheep may sport party hats, green and white scarves, easter bonnets or santa hats depending on the time of year.

…and the rest of the flock at Rock Flock Roundabout

Gavrilo Princip – Still One of My Heroes

By Gravedigger

On February 20, 2025

In Activists, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

In the 60s and 70s all our secondary schools followed the same history curriculum. We began with Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain and made our way systematically through England’s vicissitudes from 55 BC up to 1914, skimming the extreme edges of classical antiquity and contemporary history. The former was held to be the remit of the classics department, and of the latter we did not speak. My history teacher justified this on the basis that objectivity was impossible without a certain distance; my youthful cynicism judged it more likely a reluctance to engage with criticism of the status quo.

In those final history lessons in the fifth form, as we edged towards the First World War, I developed a wild enthusiasm for Gavrilo Princip. This can certainly not have been the intention of my history teacher, a firm supporter of law and order, who would without doubt have been an apologist for the Austro-Hungarian Empire against the upstart Serb from Bosnia.

But to me Princip was a romantic hero, striking a blow against Austria’s occupation of Bosnian territory in 1878 followed by its aggressive annexation in 1908. Young Bosnia was a revolutionary movement seeking to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia-Herzegovina and to establish an independent state. The political assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the representative and heir of an unelected ruler at home and a foreign oppressor in Bosnia, was entirely justified. Princip was a freedom fighter.

If there had been posters of Princip for sale in English provincial towns in 1968, one would undoubtedly have adorned my bedroom wall alongside Che Guevara.

Two years ago, I visited a museum with the cumbersome designation Museum of Sarajevo,1878-1918. The dates mark the period of Austro-Hungary’s occupation, and it was from outside this building that Princip fired the shots which killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Until the collapse of Yugoslavia it had been called the Young Bosnia Museum, and Princip and his fellow members of Young Bosnia had been glorified as revolutionary idealists. Outside the museum a footprint was set into the cement to mark the spot where Princip stood to take aim at the Archduke, and there visiting Yugoslav schoolchildren used to pose for photographs.

The Museum of Sarajevo 1878-1918, located in a former delicatessen beside the Latin Bridge, formerly called the Princip Bridge.

Today a discreet sign set into the pavement marks the place where Princip stood. Formerly Yugoslavian children would pose for photographs standing in Princip’s footsteps

Today, the museum’s approach is more subdued. It records the history of resistance to Austro-Hungarian oppression, and the assassination. There are clothes, photographs, and weapons on display, and two uncomfortable looking waxworks of the archduke and his wife. But the tone is factual, and the historic significance of the museum’s location is not stressed.

For the recent history of the former Yugoslavia has cast a shadow which has led to the past being rewritten in some of the former constituent republics. Under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic ethnic cleansing of Croats took palace in those parts of Croatia controlled by Serbia. Milosevic’s ultra nationalism, his irredentist and revanchist attempt to seize Bosnia for the Serbs, combined with Radovan Karadzic’s genocidal massacre at Srebrenica, and the brutal siege of Sarajevo, have cast the Serbs in an ugly light.

And Princip has become a polarising figure: while still a hero in Serbia, he is now perceived in Croatia as a Serbian nationalist terrorist rather than a liberty loving revolutionary. He is even held responsible for the First World War rather than his actions being understood as a catalyst and excuse for further Austrian aggression.

There is no commonly held view in Bosnia. Two different versions of the truth are expounded alongside each other. School texts in predominantly Bosniak and Croat areas describe Princip as a Belgrade backed terrorist, while the children of Bosnian Serbs are taught that his cause was a just one, seeking liberation from colonised serfdom.

It is unwise to rewrite the past in the light of the present. It is true that in 1914 there was in Serbia a desire for a union of southern Slavs under Serbian hegemony, and that the Bosniaks and Croats had no desire for this greater Serbia. But Princip was no Milosevic or Karadzic, his loathing for Austrian oppression was legitimate. At his trial he argued,

I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free of Austria.

Asked why he had shot the archduke he replied,

People suffer because they are so poor and because they are treated as animals. I am the son of a peasant; I know how people live in the villages and that is why I wanted revenge.

Princip risked his life for a revolutionary ideology of social justice. Austrian rule was feudal and oppressive, political opposition brutally suppressed. Moreover, the Serbian government was not involved in the assassination, and the members of Young Bosnia were drawn from all three ethnic groups in Bosnia: the Bosniaks, the Bosnian Serbs, and the Croats.

The museum, located in predominantly Bosniak Sarajevo, displays understandable discretion. But I was happy to see that Princip’s grave in the Holy Archangels Cemetery in Sarajevo still receives care. At the time of the assassination, Princip was only nineteen, a year too young to be subjected to the death penalty, so he was given the maximum sentence of twenty years in an Austrian military prison. There, chained to a wall in solitary confinement, he died of TB in 1918. In 1920 he and his comrades were exhumed and reburied below the Vidovdan Heroes Chapel. Today there are flowers on the grave, and it bears a quotation from the Montenegrin poet, Petrovic-Njegos,

Blessed is he who lives forever; he did not die in vain.

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Gavrilo Princip – Still One of My Heroes