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

A cold, wet January morning was not the best time to enter Llandrindod Wells. The town looked tired: the streets mean and unwelcoming; shops closed or empty of customers; a few wan pedestrians moving sluggishly, inadequately protected against the relentless rain.

It had not always been like this, for Llandrindod Wells has mineral springs, and the advent of the railways in the 1860s led to an economic boom as wealthy visitors arrived with their servants from South Wales, the Midlands and the Northwest of England. From May to mid-October, they drank the chalybeate waters.

Hotels and boarding houses, shops, theatres, parks, gardens and boating lakes opened to serve them. Rock Park, a woodland area traversed by paths, waterfalls and bridges fell steeply to the river where the Victorian spa buildings, bath house and pump room, were located. Here the orchestra played while the patrons sipped tea to take away the taste of their sulphur and saline elixirs.

It all ended with the First World War when refugees and wounded soldiers were billeted on the hotels. By the 1920s and 1930s the fashion had swung away from spas and instead holiday makers sought seaside guesthouses and lodgings. The final blow came with the closure of the Mid-Wales railway line in the 1960s. The lights went out, the musicians packed up their instruments, the grand hotels closed or were converted to flats and offices.

Yet there are always hidden gems in what may at first look an unprepossessing environment, and I have a partiality for small run-down towns nestled in a time warp. So as my umbrella directed its runoff down the back of my neck, I made a perambulation of the town in the footsteps of those early spa visitors. And there is a worthy array of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, all balconies, brickwork, and bay windows. Moreover, even when the town had passed its heyday two magnificent art deco garages, Pritchards and the Automobile Palace, had opened to service the new motorcars, even though the latter were only passing through.

I was less enamoured with Rock Park; I have never shared the Romantics maudlin enthusiasm for gloomy woods, and the forsaken spa buildings looked pitiful.

So quickly back to the town and the Metropole Hotel, opened in 1872 as Coleman’s, and famed for receiving an unwelcome guest in the form of a lioness in 1889 when Wombwell’s Menagerie was exhibiting on the lawns opposite. In 1911 Elizabeth Miller bought up the cutlery, china, and carpets from the defunct Metropole Hotel in Cromer; since all the items bore an “M” monogram she renamed her hotel to match them. The hotel survived requisitioning in both world wars, replaced its stables with garages, boasted an outdoor pool in the 1930s, and through the decades exercised a protean capacity to reinvent itself and survive where others failed.

Today its income is bolstered by the conference and wedding trade. And, as I discovered when I settled into its “sun lounge,” a conservatory-like structure running the length of its façade, it is an extremely popular spot with the ladies of the town for morning coffee. It is an accommodating place where the friendly staff are pleased rather than otherwise if you explore the public rooms and staircases admiring the older fixtures and fittings.

A poster advertised forthcoming “Dinner-Dances;” with accommodation included, they were breath-takingly cheap. I have never been to a dinner-dance, I thought they vanished in my childhood. They sound at once quaint and glamorous. Having a “date” – another term which I had thought disappeared half a century ago until it reappeared in the rebarbatively coy “date-night” – is obviously a prerequisite. If you can rustle one up, I recommend that you head for the Metropole at the next opportunity.

But in the absence of date, dinner and dance, I sought the object of my visit to Llandrindod Wells, the National Cycle Museum. You do not have to be a cycling aficionado to love this museum. It has a wonderful collection of vintage cycles: from an 1818 hobby horse, through a selection of transitionals and velocipedes, a wooden tricycle, penny farthings, a sociable, tandems, shop bikes, police bikes, and ice cream carts. Sleek modern racing bikes and carbon fibre models compete for attention with trophies and badges recalling past races and cycling clubs. Old photographs trace changing fashions in cycling apparel.

But I was in quest of one particular artefact: the gravestone of Maurice Selbach.

Selbach had no connections at all with Llandrindod Wells. His origins were more exotic. He was born in Paris in 1889 to an American engineer father of German descent and a Polish Countess mother, Marguerite Kossakowska. They moved to London during his childhood.

Selbach was a successful amateur cyclist, specialising in long distance time trials. He broke records for Lands’ End to London and for London to Bath and back, and for the 100-mile tandem trial. He turned professional in 1922 after cycling in the Anerley 12 Event* on a day when he was meant to be at work. His boss was competing in the same race, and as Selbach overtook him an angry shout advised him that he was sacked.

Riding for the French Louvet team in the Paris-Roubaix race in 1923, Selbach was the first rider to represent Britain in a major continental road race.

After his success in the six-day cycle race at Olympia the same year his fellow American Gordon Selfridge set up a display in one of his shop windows with Selbach’s bike surrounded by stars and stripes and union jacks.

In 1924 when Selbach retired after fourteen years as a competitor, he opened a business in south London, designing and producing bicycles to the highest standards. Selbach bikes were distinguished by their advanced level of technological innovation. Cycling buffs speak in hallowed tones of his use of tapered tubing and roller bearings in quality frame building, and of the Selbach crownlite alloy bolt-on calliper brake. They recall his design of the first curved seat tube for a tandem. In short, in the 1920s and 1930s, a Selbach was the nonpareil of lightweight bikes.

Selbach was also a fan of American cars: he owned several and used his Buick to deliver his bicycles to London customers. But he continued to cycle to work, and one morning in 1935 as he tried to overtake a truck, his front wheel caught in a tramline. Selbach crashed into the truck and fell under its wheels. He died on the way to hospital. He was buried in Streatham cemetery in South London beneath a delightful headstone bearing his portrait, a sculpted bicycle leaning against a milestone, and the words

He died as he lived, a cyclist.

But in the 1990s there were plans to clear the cemetery for commercial development. Two local cycling enthusiasts, reluctant to see the memorial disappear, acquired the stone, and with the agreement of Selbach’s daughter and grandson, persuaded the National Cycle Museum to transport it to Llandrindod Wells. And there it is today, surrounded by potted greenery, amidst all the bikes, including two Selbachs, and biking memorabilia.

Selbach’s gravestone, surrounded by potted greenery, in the National Cycling Museum

… and note the bird which has descended from the foliage to perch on the grave

Next July (2027) the Tour de France Grand Depart Stage 3 will pass through Llandrindod Wells, Selbach is surely looking forward to it.

_____________________________________________

*For fascinating detail on the history of the Anerley Bike Club and the Anerley 12 Event see anerleybc.org/history-1881

The National Cycle Museum, run by lovely volunteers, and located in the former Automobile Palace is well worth a visit.

http://www.cyclemuseum.org.uk

Josip Broz Tito -Brotherhood and Unity in Yugoslavia

By Gravedigger

On September 6, 2026

In Politicians, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

In the mid-seventies I travelled twice on the Road of Brotherhood and Unity. Otherwise known as the Autoput, this was the inland route across Yugoslavia, stretching 734 miles along the backbone of the country from the Austrian border at Jesenice in Slovenia to the Greek border at Gevgelija in North Macedonia. Construction of the road, much of it carried out by volunteer youth brigades, had been initiated by Tito in 1947 to connect the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and North Macedonia not just physically but also culturally, as a symbol of the unity of the different ethnic groups.

Despite being heavily used, the road remained a two-lane highway with no central reservation and was in poor condition. Much of the traffic was in a similar state. Alongside the lorries, ramshackle coaches and ancient cars carried young travellers on limited budgets from northern and western Europe to Greece and Turkey, and in the opposite direction ferried Turkish, Greek and Yugoslavian Gastarbeiter to West Germany.

The journey was long, and there were few facilities along the way. In summer it was hot, vehicles lacked air conditioning and mosquitoes feasted on exposed flesh. Unroadworthy vehicles broke down and blocked the highway. Eager to put the Autoput behind them drivers went without sleep or breaks for dangerously prolonged periods, and accidents were common. Carcasses of wrecked and burnt-out cars lay in the fields. Those cars which had decent acceleration raced past the others, overtaking using the opposite lane whenever an opportunity arose on the crowded road.

My first experience of the highway was in one of those recklessly accelerating cars, the second time I was on the Magic Bus, travelling from London to Athens. Like every passenger who made that journey I remember two drivers who performed an elaborately choreographed manoeuvre as they periodically changed places while the bus was still moving. The trip was meant to take three days, carrying our food with us and sleeping on the coach, but strikes and a fuel distribution issue left us stranded at a petrol station somewhere in Yugoslavia, sitting by the roadside for an additional half day. For the rest of the journey the drivers tried to make up the lost time.

Yet despite the sweat, the dirt and the discomfort, what I remember most is the camaraderie on the bus and the romance of the road as we journeyed through what still seemed a rather exotic country, the land where the Partisans defied fascism with their ideals of brotherhood and unity.

That road is easier to travel today: in 2019 a four-lane national motorway was completed. But it is no longer called the Road of Brotherhood and Unity, and it no longer crosses one united country. Instead, it is called the A2 in Slovenia, the A3 in Croatia, the A3 and the A1 in Serbia and the A1 in North Macedonia. Even more prosaically it goes by its European designations forming parts of the E62, E70 and E75, respectively. For Yugoslavia fell apart, collapsing into inter-ethnic wars in the 1990s.

Yugoslavia, the Kingdom of South Slavs, had emerged following the collapse of Austria-Hungary in World War I. The highly centralised state came under the control of the Serbian monarchy which enjoyed considerable leverage having supported the Allies in the war and on account of its military strength. The non-Serbian nations suffered two decades of marginalisation and discrimination.

When the Nazi Germany, assisted by Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded and occupied Yugoslavia in 1941, the king and government fled. The Axis powers exploited warped nationalism to establish puppet governments, the fascist Ustase in Croatia and Bosnia and the royalist para-fascist Chetniks in Serbia.

But in that occupied, divide land something remarkable occurred. The Yugoslav Communist Party which had been outlawed since 1920, able only to operate an underground network, emerged from obscurity. A party with only 12,000 members in 1941 created the most formidable anti-fascist force in Europe: the Partisans. Committed to the liberation of Yugoslavia and the establishment of a communist state which treated all ethnic groups equally, the Partisans liberated their country virtually unaided by the Allies or Russia.

In marked contrast to the collaborators, they adopted the slogan Brotherhood and Unity. The partisan brigades included Serbs, Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians, Bosnians, and Kosovan Albanians; there were Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians, Muslims, Jews and Atheists; there were men and women, for the partisan ideals also included women’s rights and gender equality. From their strategic heartlands in the mountainous regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro, spreading to Croatia and Slovenia, the multi-ethnic partisans fought the invaders and collaborators. The most effective resistance movement in occupied Europe, they forced a German retreat and took back power in Yugoslavia.

The same idealism informed the post war organisation of the country. Elections led to the victory of the Communist Party, the king was deposed, and a federal republic established. Brotherhood and Unity remained the guiding principle: poor nations were to have the same rights as middle-income ones; everyone was free to express their own culture but expected to be tolerant of others. A country previously susceptible to ultra nationalism was to be united around a common Yugoslav goal.

Moreover, Yugoslavia pursued a successful policy of Non-Alignment, exploiting east west antagonism to her own advantage. Economic reforms introduced a unique, decentralised form of market socialism, with worker self-management.

There was economic growth; the spread of literacy and education; health care improved. Women were encouraged to work; abortion and contraception were legal.

Yugoslav citizens could travel and work abroad. Foreigners could travel freely within the country, and from the 1960s they were not just passing through Yugoslavia on the Autoput but holidaying on the Adriatic coast and islands.

Yet in the last decade of the twentieth century Yugoslavia fractured and collapsed into violent and brutal wars.

Economic crises drove the breakup: inflation, unemployment and foreign debt pushed Yugoslavia into recession in the late 1980s. Strikes, and the uncovering of corruption followed. Resentment grew in the wealthier republics of Croatia and Slovenia whose populations felt they were paying too much into the federal budget to support the poorer territories.

The fall of Communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union meant that western powers no longer had a motive to help Yugoslavia with its debts. The IMF imposed austerity measures. And without support from the Communist bloc the power of the Yugoslav Communist Party to hold the federation together was weakened.

Against this background atavistic national, cultural and religious divisions re-emerged.

The reformed 1974 Constitution had given the republics more autonomy, reducing the power of central government where Serbia had continued to hold a dominant position. It was a dominance which some Serbs did not wish to surrender. When the constituent republics went further and sought to secede inter-ethnic wars resulted.

Slovenia voted for complete independence in 1990, followed by Croatia a year later. The Serb controlled Yugoslav People’s Army moved against them, supported in Croatia by the Serb minority there who had a legitimate fear of Tudjman’s openly anti-Serb nationalist government. The Croatians had an equally reasonable suspicion that desire for a Greater Serbia rather than a federal Yugoslavia dominated Milosevic’s thinking. The war lasted four years during which Serbs shelled civilian areas of Split and Dubrovnik, and their paramilitaries were responsible for the Vukovar hospital massacre.

In 1992 Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence. The Serb response was to declare a separate Republic of Serb people, the Republica Srpska, within Bosnia-Herzegovina. From this base between 1992-95 Serbs under Radovan Karadzic conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing, massacring and raping Muslim Bosniaks. They laid siege to Sarajevo, bombarding it for four years. At Srebrenica they murdered 8,000 men and boys, an act declared genocide by the International Court.

The Kosovan Albanians, who made up 77% of the population of Kosovo, had since the 1980s been demanding that the Serbian province of Kosovo should be a full constituent republic. As these demands increased in the 1990s, Milosevic responded with an aggressive Serbian nationalist agenda: there were growing restrictions on use of the Albanian language; Albanian media were silenced and schools were closed; and Albanians were dismissed from public office. When the newly formed Kosovan Liberation Army conducted acts of sabotage against the Serbian security forces retribution was brutal. Two thousand civilian and KLM combatants were killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced between1998-99. A United Nations Supreme Court found that there had been a systematic campaign of terror including murder and rape conducted against the Albanian population.

Economic factors, the fall of Communism and the rise of nationalism ripped Yugoslavia apart and the subsequent wars left 140,000 dead, 130,000 casualties, 2.4 million refugees and an ugly record of war crimes, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. A long way from the Brotherhood and Unity ideals of the partisans, a long way from the carefree days when the Magic Bus bumped and trundled along the Brotherhood and Unity Highway.

And perhaps there was one more factor contributing to the collapse of Yugoslavia. For without subscribing to the great men theory of history, it is impossible to deny that Josip Broz Tito was a major unifying force in Yugoslavia and that ethnic tensions started to grow after his death in 1980.

Tito was born in 1892 in present day Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a young man he was active in the Metal Workers Union. In 1913 he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army for compulsory military service. Captured by the Russians during World War I, he became a prisoner of war but escaped and after the October Revolution joined a Red Guard unit in Omsk. In 1920 he returned home and joined the Communist Party in the newly formed Yugoslavia.

After the CPY was declared illegal in 1921, he continued to work for the party, was arrested and lost his job. He became a professional revolutionary, writing and organising strikes, and as a result was imprisoned. In 1934 he was elected to the Politburo and became a full time official of the Comintern while continuing to organise strikes in the shipyards. After recruiting volunteers for the International Brigades in Spain in 1936, he became General Secretary of the CPY.

When the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia, it was Tito who called on people to unite against the occupation. As Commander in Chief of the Yugoslav Partisans, he organised and directed them, and personally commanded brigades in Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia.

After the war Tito served as Prime Minister (1943-63) and President of Yugoslavia (1953-1980). Despite Yugoslavia being a founder member of the Cominform Tito became the only leader during Stalin’s lifetime to defy Soviet hegemony leading to the Tito-Stalin split and Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the organisation in 1948. Assassination attempts organised by Stalin,

I will shake my little finger and there will be no more Tito,

all failed. Tito wrote to the Soviet leader,

Stalin. Stop sending assassins to murder me. We have already caught five, one with a bomb, another with a rifle… if this does not stop, I will send one man to Moscow and there will be no need to send another.

Tito was a founding member, and the first Secretary General in 1961, of the Non-Aligned Movement.In addition to establishing useful ties with developing countries, his policy enabled Yugoslavia to receive aid from America and, after Stalin’s death, from the Comecon as well.

Justifiably, the political, economic, and foreign policies of post war Yugoslavia– independence from Moscow, workers self-management, market socialism, foreign policy neutrality, federalism and unity – were collectively known as Titoism, and his death removed a powerful influence for overcoming divisions and holding the republics of Yugoslavia together.

Although the wars have ended, the revival of nationalism has rendered Tito a polarising figure across the countries which once made up Yugoslavia. The complex where he was buried was closed to the public during the wars. It has since reopened but it no longer has a twenty-four-hour guard of honour.

Tito was buried, as he wished, in the House of Flowers: a winter garden which he had built near his home in Belgrade, and where he had an office looking out over the city.

The river boat down the Danube docks in Belgrade, and while my fellow tourists headed for the fortress, Saint Sava, and the Tesla museum, I visited Tito.

Tito’s tomb in the House of Flowers, Belgrade

Tito’s third wife, Jovanka, lies in a smaller tomb alongside.

It was a sad visit, for it was not just Tito’s grave, but that of Yugoslavia and of all the fine hopes of the brave Partisans.

Forever and ever my friend the wind

By Gravedigger

On August 23, 2026

In Music Makers

There was a Dutch lady, a Belgian lady and an English lady, all of a certain age. Their car moved swiftly along the narrow coastal road handling the bends with confidence. The scent of thyme arrived on the warm air through the open windows. Far below the iridescent sea shimmered turquoise caressing the shore, mutating into a deeper blue which saturated the pelagic expanse.

The heat was soporific, but their driver was alert and disinclined to silence: what music would they like? Demis Roussos suggested one of them, half joking. “Siri,” the driver doted on his voice activated stereo, “play Demis Roussos,” and the unmistakeable soaring high tenor gave them My Friend the Wind.

In a trice all three women were singing along, and, as far as the constraints of their seatbelts permitted, dancing in time to the music.

Siri, unfortunately, did not know any other songs by Demis Roussos but the women were happy with this one on repeat. Every day on the afternoon excursions following their Greek lessons, they put in the same request until their teacher forbade more than one rendition per day. Reader, they sulked.

What was the attraction? Well, it was the music of their youth, and particularly of their early summer holidays in the Mediterranean.

Born in Alexandria in 1946, Demis Russos had returned to Greece with his parents ten years later when they lost their property following the Suez crisis. In 1967, along with Loukas Sideras and Silver Koulouris, he joined Vangelis to form Aphrodite’s Child, a progressive rock and psychedelic pop band. When the military junta came to power in Greece, rock and “foreign” music were discouraged, and the band moved to Paris. Touring Europe they achieved cult status particularly with their final album, 666, which came out in 1972.

But by then they had disbanded and both Vangelis and Roussos had embarked on solo careers. In 1971 Roussos enjoyed his first big solo success in the Netherlands and Belgium with We Shall Dance. His popularity spread rapidly throughout Europe: Forever and Ever was a hit in Germany, Norway and Austria in 1973, and in 1975-6 he entered the British charts. He knew why:

The reason for my big success in England was that the Brits. had started wanting to go on holidays to Greece and Spain. My music came out on time. It was romantic Mediterranean music addressed to those people.

Ouch, were we being patronised? Almost certainly. For this music, unlike Roussos’ early output with Aphrodite’s Child, was undeniably kitsch: a sentimental, middle of the road, commercial sound, calculatingly tailored to the western European market.

And we knew it. In 1977 Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party appeared to massive acclaim, first at the Hampstead theatre and then as the BBC’s Play for Today on television. It satirised a society infested with materialism and sexism. But its most scathing strictures were reserved for the meretricious taste endemic in 70s suburbia, whether it was in clothes, furniture, art, food, or music.

Dennis Potter hated the play, finding it cruel and snobbish:

A prolonged jeer, twitching with genuine hatred about the dreadful suburban tastes of the dreadful lower middle classes.

Leigh denied contempt, defending his play as a tragicomedy, a lamentation over the insecurities and vulnerabilitie of his characters, rather than a sneer.

Whatever the truth the play has proved enduringly popular, and everyone remembers Beverley showing off Stephen Pearson’s Wings of Love, while forcing “little cheesy pineapple ones on cocktail sticks” onto her guests. But above all Demis Roussos’ Forever and Ever is forever and ever associated with a tipsy Beverley attempting to seduce a squirming Tony.*

Roussos ceased to be so successful in Britain as his association with package holiday pop began to miscarry. Not that he needed the British market: he continued to tour and release new material in Europe, Latin-America, the Middle East and Japan. Throughout the 1980s and 90s he remained popular in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

And in Greece? Memory tells me that his romantic Mediterranean sound was enjoyed there too in the seventies, even while Greeks were quick to point out that this was not real Greek music, and to draw attention to the authentically Greek sounds of entechno, laiko, and rebetiko, lauding Theodorakis, Zabetas and Bithikotsis.

As for the ladies in the car, they espouse Noel Coward’s dictum:

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Moreover, they know that context is all and those songs carry them back to when they were younger, fitter, and could dance all night without even “a little cheesy pineapple one on a cocktail stick” to sustain them.

Demis Roussos died in Athens in 2015 and is buried in the First Cemetery.

*Mention the song to any British person who remembers the seventies and they will recall Abigail’s Party. Mention the play and they will start singing Forever and Ever. Ironically, it was not Demis Roussos but Jose Feliciano whose music featured in the original stage version. The BBC substituted an artist recorded on a British label to avoid breach copyright if they sold the televised version to the US. But since then, no one has ever performed the play without the assistance of Demis Roussos.

Peccavi: Charles James Napier and Catherine Winkworth

By Gravedigger

On August 9, 2026

In Colonialists, Educators

Trafalgar Square: the home of Nelson’s column, Landseer’s lions, Lutyens’s fountains, and, when the British begin to feel that Really Things Have Gone a Bit Too Far, a stage for political demonstrations. The National Gallery provides the backdrop. There are also four plinths which formerly aroused little interest, indeed prior to the millennium one of them had stood empty since money for statues ran out in 1841. In 1999 the Royal Society of Artists inaugurated the Fourth Plinth Project and since then a new artwork has appeared on the plinth every two years.

Here are my three favourites:

In 2010 Yinka Shonibare presented us with his Ship in a Bottle, a replica of Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, its sails decorated with African patterns.

When Ship in a Bottle completed its two year tenure in Trafalgar Square it moved to a permanent home outside the Greenwich museum.

Hans Haacke’s Gift Horse, a skeletal, riderless bronze horse, based on an etching by Stubbs found in the National Gallery, appeared in 2015. An electronic ribbon linked by tickertape machine to the London Stock Exchange was tied to its front leg.

Haake’s horse, focusing on the links between power, money, and history.

The Invisible Enemy Should not Exist, created in 2018 by Michael Rakowitz, recalled 7,000 objects looted from the Iraq museum or destroyed at archaeological sites across the country by ISIS. It is dominated by the Lamassu, which stood at the Nergal gate entrance to Ninevah. The reconstruction was made from 10,500 recycled date syrup cans, mirroring the recycled cannon used for the reliefs at the base of Nelson’s column.

The Lamassu is a deity with a human head, the body of a bull or lion, and the wings of an eagle.

Overlapping date syrup containers; the syrup was a major export from Iraq before the war.

Last time I visited the Square, I inspected the other three plinths. They bear undistinguished statues of George IV, Major-General Henry Havelock and Charles James Napier respectively. But the latter reminded me of a more dramatic, albeit equally ugly, image of Napier which lies outside the garrison church in Portsmouth where he was buried.

Stretched out on his back, an uncomfortable looking Napier clutches his sword.The plinth bears the names of the battles in which he participated.

Napier was buried inside the church which was extensively damaged by bombing during World War II.

As a young man Charles James Napier (1782-1853) took up a commission in the British army. He fought in the Peninsula War (1808-14) and the War of 1812 against the United States. From 1822-30 he was military resident in Cephalonia. Between 1839-41, as the chief of troops in the north of England, he was responsible for the violent suppression of the Chartist demonstrations.

When he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the army of the East India Company Napier seized the opportunity for self-aggrandisement and military glory. The East India Company already had direct or indirect control over much of the Indian subcontinent. In the Sindh province however the Amirs of the Talpur dynasty still held nominal control although the passage of “friendship” treaties had left them paying tribute to the British, providing a base for their troops and military hardware, and supplying them with auxiliary forces.

By 1842 the British were seeking to expand their influence in the area developing trade routes along the Indus river and securing their defences against Russian attack through Afghanistan. The Talpurs opposed this, and there was increasing hostility towards the East India Company, but the disaffected Amirs were divided and lacked a professional army.

Napier shifted British policy from a combination of diplomacy and bullying, to outright aggression. He pushed the Amirs into open conflict by imposing a new treaty forcing them to cede territory and by marching on and destroying the desert fortress of Imamgarh.

On the grounds their alleged disloyalty, Napier then received orders that the “rebel” forces of the Amirs should be put down. He had easy victories at the battles of Meanee and Hyderabad. But Napier went further, exceeding his mandate to suppress the rebels, and in a ruthless and unauthorised campaign he subjugated Sindh, conquering the whole province. He knew that his action was neither legal nor moral,

We have no right to seize Sindh. Yet we shall do it,

but used the habitual spurious and hypocritical justification for colonial expansion,

and a very advantageous, humane and useful piece of rascality it shall be.

Advantageous and useful it undoubtedly was for the East India Company and for Napier himself. The military conquest of Sindh paved the way for further annexations of the Punjab, and Napier became the first Governor-General of Sindh.

Even in Britain however Napier’s conduct was controversial: he faced criticism for his barbaric action, quest for personal glory and for exceeding his authority. Nonetheless he received a knighthood and later there was widespread public mourning and a military tribute at his funeral.

Moreover generations of Latin teachers in British schools delighted in elucidating Napier’s putative wit in a telegram which he allegedly sent home informing his superiors of his conquest. “Peccavi,” it read.

There was no telegraph in the Subcontinent until the 1850s.

But in Manchester in 1843 there was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl called Catherine Winkworth. She coined the pun, substituting “I have sinned” for “I have Sindh” in the supposed dispatch to highlight the immorality of Napier’s assault on the territory. Amused, and in sympathy with her view, her teacher suggested that she forward her witticism to Punch magazine, where it was erroneously credited to Napier.

Catherine Winkworth (1827-1878) studied under the Unitarian William Gaskell. As a young woman she belonged to the circle of Manchester Liberals whose commitment to a more equal society led to their support for free trade, the repeal of the Corn Laws, pacifism, a free press, the separation of church and state, and opposition to slavery.

In adulthood she was known for her translations of German hymns and her support for higher education for women. After moving to Bristol, she became a founder and governor of girls’ schools including Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Red Maids’ School, and Clifton High School for Girls.

She died suddenly of heart disease while in Savoy, but there is a monument to her memory in Bristol Cathedral.

This pious memorial is devoid of puns. A suitable epitaph for a middleaged German hymn translator perhaps, but giving no hint of the smart,witty, radical young girl from Manchester.What a pity.

Marc Chagall: “the light of freedom… and the colours of love”

By Gravedigger

On July 26, 2026

In Artists

Entering Chichester Cathedral through the west door the impact of John Piper’s controversial altar tapestry is immediate. Symbols of the Trinity, the four evangelists and the four elements cavort in bold, arresting colours, noisily clamouring for attention.

Altar tapestry by John Piper.
(Universal Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

The presence of the tapestry and other twentieth century art in the eleventh century cathedral is attributable to Walter Hussey. In earlier centuries the church had been a major patron of the arts, and Hussey regretted that contemporary painting, music, sculpture and drama were little encouraged by the ecclesiastical hierarchy of his day. As vicar of St. Matthews in Northampton, he had set about rectifying this, commissioning works by Benjamin Britten, Henry Moore, Michael Tippett and Graham Sutherland.

When he became Dean of Chichester in 1955 his scope was increased, and the cathedral boasts an enviable collection of modern art. This was supplemented by Hussey’s personal collection which he left to the city, today located in the Queen Anne townhouse known as the Pallant Gallery. My personal favourite amongst the cathedral treasures is Hussey’s final commission, a stained-glass window by Marc Chagall based on psalm 150: “Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.”

The eleventh century Chichester cathedral

The vibrant window contrasts with the sombre fabric of the cathedral. Unusually for stained-glass by Chagall the dominant colour is red, but the animals, birds, and human figures playing harps and trumpets are familiar.

Chichester is one of only two locations in England with stained-glass by Chagall, and fond though I am of the cathedral window there is no question that the glass in an otherwise unremarkable church in neighbouring Kent far eclipses it.

Henry and Rosemary d’Avigor-Goldsmid commissioned Chagall to design a window for All Saints church, Tudeley, in memory of their daughter who had died in a sailing accident. When Chagall arrived for the dedication of the east window in 1967, his response was immediate,

C’est magnifique! Je les ferai tous.

Over ten years he designed eleven more windows as a gift to the family and the community; the last one was installed in 1985 just before his death. All Saints became the only church in the world to have all its windows designed by Chagall.

East window of All Saints, Tudeley. Crucifixion and drowning

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was born in Vitebsk, NE Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. From 1906 he attended art school in Saint Petersburg for four years, before moving to Paris where he began to produce paintings of life in Vitebsk. Life in the town had been hard; Chagall was one of nine children whose father was employed hauling barrels of herring. Chagall compared the work to that of a galley slave:

My heart used to twist like a Turkish bagel as I saw my father lift those weights.

Worse, there was always the fear of pogroms against the Jews.

But the paintings he produced do not emphasise the hardship, they are not realistic, objective portrayals. For Chagall was motivated at least in part by a tender desire to record and celebrate Jewish traditions and modes of living which were disappearing. The dream like paintings of snowy streets, wooden houses, fiddlers, circuses, acrobats, and ghostly figures floating in the sky led Picasso to wonder:

I don’t know where he gets those images from; he must have an angel in his head.

In 1914 Chagall went home to marry Bella Rosenfeld in Vitebsk. The most romantic pictures come from the years following his marriage. In The Birthday (1915) a couple kiss as they drift through the air. The Promenade (1918) shows him holding onto his wife’s hand as she flies above.

Chagall had not intended to remain in Vitebsk but with the closure of borders in World War I, he was unable to return to Paris and spent the years until 1923 between Vitebsk, Moscow and Petrograd. There he taught, illustrated books, and produced murals alive with dancers, fiddlers and acrobats for the State Jewish Chamber Theatre.

After his return to Paris, he worked and travelled extensively but in the 1930s Nazi campaigns against modernist, “degenerate” art began. Paintings, including those of Chagall, described as

green, purple and red Jews shooting out of the earth, fiddling on violins, flying through the air…representing an assault on Western civilisation

were confiscated from museums.

Yet even after the German invasion Chagall and his wife remained in Vichy France, slow to perceive the danger and unable at last to afford the passage to America. They were rescued in 1941, following their arrest and loss of citizenship, by the American journalist Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee who helped anti-Nazis and Jews, especially artists and intellectuals, to escape.

Chagall lived in New York until 1948 when he returned to France, seeking the “lumière – liberté” of the Cote d’Azur. There he experimented with ceramics and sculpture alongside his painting. Malraux, a great admirer of Chagall, commissioned him to paint the ceiling of the Paris opera in 1963, avowing

Chagall has looked at our world with the light of freedom and seen it with the colours of love.

And after a visit to Chartres in the 1950s Chagall began to produce stained glass with intense colours refracted by the light. For the Hebrew University’s medical centre in Jerusalem, he designed twelve windows representing the twelve tribes of Israel earning breathless praise from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard:

Chagall reads the bible and suddenly the passages become light.

The art historian Jean Leymarie in his commentary on the windows concurred:

The essence of the Jerusalem windows lies in colour, in Chagall’s magical ability to animate material and to transform it into light. Words do not have the power to describe Chagall’s colour, its spirituality, its dazzling luminosity…it is simultaneously jewel-hard and foamy, reverberating and penetrating, radiating light from an unknown interior.

Other windows followed: the peace window in the Secretariat building of the United Nations in New York; at Saint Stephen’s Mainz, a widow symbolising Jewish-German reconciliation; windows in the Fraumunster church in Zurich, in Metz cathedral, at the art institute in Chicago, in Reims and in Tudeley.

Chagall’s art defies description. It has been linked with Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism, and Expressionism, but ultimately it is unique. The paintings blend the real and the fantastic, at once whimsical fairy tales, romantic fantasies, dreams, and representations of the wonder and joy of the quotidian and the commonplace. And, as with the stained-glass, it is the colour and the light which leave us breathless. Picasso was confident that

When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour is…His canvasses are really painted, not just tossed together. Some of the last things he has done in Vence convince me that there has never been anyone since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has.

Chagall is buried in the multi-denominational cemetery of St. Paul de Vance, bathed in the light and colour of the south of France, but maybe still dreaming of Vitebsk.

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Marc Chagall: “the light of freedom… and the colours of love”