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

Time to Send the Marbles Home: Melina Mercouri (1920-1994)

On January 5, 2025

You can almost hear the cicadas. With the vivid cerulean sky and the intense light, the pines and cypresses, there can be no doubt where this grave lies. Here, close to the entrance, in the most prestigious section of The First Cemetery of Athens, lie the wealthier and more known of her citizens. The grave stele by the sculptor Andreas Panagiotakis rises above the tomb of the Merkouris family, prominent politicians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; one name stands out, for her fame eclipses that of her ancestors.

Grave of Melina Mercouri, Athens First Cemetery

The faux Doric Temple behind and above the tomb of the Mekouris family is that of Schliemann (another story)

When the impossibly glamorous, smoky-voiced, Melina Mercouri died in 1994, theatres and cinemas closed. On the day of her state funeral, schools, shops, and government offices followed their example as the cortege, with 300,000 people walking behind, made its way to the cemetery.

After working in Greek theatre in the 1940s and 1950s, Mercouri had established her role in Greek cinema with Stella (1955), a retelling of the Carmen story, but it was with Never on Sunday (1960), written and directed by Jules Dassin, that she sprang to international fame. The story of Ilya, a prostitute in Piraeus, and Homer-Thrace, an American tourist and classical scholar, part romantic comedy, part asseveration of a joyful, carefree epicureanism contrasted with stagnant, patriarchal conformity, won Mercouri best actress at the Cannes Film Festival. Its theme tune by Manos Hadjidakis introduced western audiences to the bouzouki. Never on Sunday is even credited with stimulating the Greek tourist boom of the 1960s.

Mercouri went on to make films in Greece, America, and France, including Phaedra and Topkapi, before returning to a stage career on Broadway and in Greece.

Then in 1967 a right-wing military coup brought the regime of the colonels to power in Greece. For seven years, first under Papadopoulos, then under Ioannidis, the Greek Junta attacked civil liberties, ending freedom of the press, dissolving political parties, prohibiting political demonstrations, producing an index of prohibited songs, music, literature, and films. Ultra nationalistic and deeply anti-Communist, they imprisoned, tortured, and exiled their opponents. Politicised by the coup, Mercouri, who had been working in America, spent those years travelling around the world raising awareness of Greek politics and campaigning for the removal of the junta. The colonels responded by revoking her Greek citizenship and confiscating her property. Her response was succinct:

I was born a Greek, and I will die a Greek. Those bastards were born fascists, and they will die fascists.

Returning to Greece after the fall of the junta, she was a founding member of PASOK, the centre-left, Panhellenic Socialist Movement, which she represented in the Hellenic Parliament from 1977-1994. During the PASOK government of 1981-85 she became the first female Minister for Culture and Sports, and in this capacity introduced the European Capitals of Culture scheme, with Athens the first city so designated in 1985. The scheme raised the image and visibility of the cities involved, celebrating the richness and diversity of European cultures, and in its wake bringing not just cultural and social benefits, but economic benefits too with increased tourism and urban regeneration.

But there are other actors, other activists, other politicians, and Mercouri is most remembered for her battle for the return of the Elgin marbles to Greece.

Between 1801 and 1812 agents acting for Thomas Bruce, 7^th Earl of Elgin, then Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Athens, removed more than half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures, and others from the Erechtheion, the Temple of Athena Nike, and the Propylaea. Elgin took possession of twenty-one statues, fifteen metope panels, and seventy-five metres of Parthenon frieze. To facilitate their carriage from Ottoman Greece to his private museum in Britain, the metopes and frieze were sawn and sliced. Byron, in no doubt that this was an act of vandalism and looting, wrote in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage:

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best behoved
To guard those relics ne’er to be restored.
Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,
And once again thy hapless bosom gored,
And snatch’d thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!

The poet was not alone in his outrage, but in Britain in 1816 a Parliamentary Enquiry ruled that the sculptures had been acquired legally, authorised by a firman from the Ottoman government; the questionable right of an occupying power to exercise such jurisdiction was conveniently ignored. Elgin was able to sell his glypotheque to the British government and the sculptures passed to the trusteeship of the British Museum.

Following requests for their return to an independent Greece in 1836, 1846, 1890 and 1927 by ministers and representatives of the city of Athens, academics and lawyers returned to the exhaustive discussion of the legality of their removal from Greece, and the arguments roll on in the tradition of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, where questions of right and wrong are lost in a minefield of legalistic niceties.

Meanwhile the main defence for Elgin’s action focused more on the claim that the marbles had never been cared for prior to his arrival: as early as the sixth century CE the Temple of Athena Parthenos had been turned into a church and its metopes defaced by Christians eager to remove images of pagan deities. Under the Turks there was similar debasement when it was used first as a mosque, then as a gunpowder store. In 1687 Venetian artillery ignited the gunpowder leading to an explosion and extensive damage, and portions of fallen marble were removed for use as building material. Moreover, weathering and pollution took their toll, so that the marbles in the British museum were soon in a better condition than those which had been left behind, notwithstanding the damage caused by early cleaning methods using acid, oil, lard, scrapers, and silicon carbide – all accepted techniques of their time.

For Melina Mercouri however these arguments were secondary to cultural considerations. As Minister for Culture, she began an international campaign in 1981, formally requesting the return of the sculptures and listing the dispute with UNESCO. In 1983 she took part in a televised debate with David Wilson, then director of the British museum, which was a PR disaster for the latter. The cultural importance of the sculptures for Greece became more widely understood, as did the morally dubious nature of any legal arguments for their retention. At the Oxford Union, in 1986, Mercouri argued passionately that the Marbles were more to Greece than just works of art: that they were an essential element of Greek heritage, which tied directly into cultural identity:

You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness.

In government again in 1989, she initiated an international architectural competition for the design of a new Acropolis museum to display all the artefacts from the Acropolis excavation and to provide a suitable designated space for the Elgin marbles, thus invalidating the popular justification for their retention in the British Museum, and reasoning that not only would there be a worthy place for them but that they would be better appreciated in a unified display with the other Parthenon antiquities.

Work on the new museum began in the 1990s but was halted due to the discovery of sensitive archaeological finds, and the competition results annulled. Meanwhile Mercouri died in 1994. But in 2001 a new competition was announced, won by the new York architect Bernard Tschumi in collaboration with the Greek Michael Photiadis. Construction began in 2003 and was completed in 2009. Built in glass, steel, and reinforced concrete, the new Acropolis Museum stands opposite the Theatre of Dionysus, from its top floor there are panoramic views of the Acropolis. The exhibits behind the huge glass windows are integral with the landscape. The whole space is flooded with that intense Greek light. The surviving sculptures are arranged as they originally stood on the Parthenon, the frieze in its original orientation and within sight of the Parthenon.

Welcoming people at the opening ceremony of the new museum Antonis Samaras, the then Greek Minister of Culture, reminded them:

(It is) 188 years since the declaration of the Greek Independence… and 27 years since the campaign of Melina Mercouri, a duty is fulfilled, and a dream is realized!

But the dream is only half realised, for plaster copies represent the sculptures still retained in the British Museum. In 2021 UNESCO declared that the British government had an obligation to return them.

The British Museum is free to everyone, the Acropolis Museum is not; while 1.5 million people visit the Acropolis every year, six million visit the British Museum; in the British museum the sculptures can be viewed within the context of other major ancient cultures, and there is a fear that the return of the marbles would set a precedent undermining the collections of all museums of world culture. Nonetheless, public opinion has swung increasingly in favour of the return of the sculptures. Resistance by the British government and the British Museum has begun to sound a little desperate as Parliament argues that the decision is the responsibility of the trustees of the British Museum, while the latter claim that their hands are tied by the British Museum Act of 1963 which forbids them to dispose of their holdings, and only Parliament itself can amend the Act.

I am wary of Mercouri’s seductive hyperbole, and I do not believe that the sculptures belong to the Greeks, any more than they ever belonged to the British, the Turks or any other national group. But I do believe that they belong in Greece. Surely no one who has visited the Acropolis Museum and the Duveen Gallery where the Elgin marbles are housed in the British Museum can doubt this.

I have never been able to enter the Duveen Gallery without experiencing a dispiriting chill. It is, to be frank, a depressing space. A skylight runs the length of the gallery, but it is a weak, grey light which filters through; the solid masonry of the walls is oppressive; the sculptures are prisoners in this environment with all the drab, listless, lethargy of the forcibly incarcerated.

Artificial light is needed to supplement the weak, grey, natural light.

sculpture from the east pediment… all trapped in a bleak place.

Part of the East Pediment, imprisoned in gloomy surroundings.

Contrast this sterile, soulless environment with the light filled Acropolis museum. The building’s glass facades facilitate a visual connection with the Acropolis, to which it is linked via the pedestrianised street of Dionysios Areopagitou. On the top floor the rectangular hall of the Parthenon gallery mirrors the form and proportions of the original temple. Oriented directly towards the Acropolis, skylit, glass enclosed, drenched in the ambient natural light, it is irrefutably the most fitting locale for sculptures intended for the sun suffused Acropolis.

(My photographs of the Acrpolis Museum do not do it justice, so have a look at https://www .archdaily.com >Projects>categories>cultural architecture>museums>Greece)

It is time to realise Mercouri’s dream and send the Parthenon sculptures home.

If you ask me will I be alive when they come back, Yes, I will be alive. And if I’m not alive, I will be reborn.

Melina Mercouri, 1988

Merry Christmas, Henry Cole

By Gravedigger

On December 22, 2024

In Designers, Educators, Influencers

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.