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

I first encountered Jeremy Bentham (1745-1832) in my O-level history class. Miss Brown expounded briefly upon Utilitarianism, adding “Bentham is a philosopher of whom you would approve, Josephine.” She was right: while her conservative values made Bentham anathema to her, I warmed to his radical, democratic view that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number…is the measure of right and wrong.”

Bentham had reasoned,

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

The greatest happiness principle consisted in the predominance of pleasure over pain.

JS Mill later distinguished between higher and lower pleasures, asserting that human happiness could not be reduced to mere sensual pleasure and that it was better to be an unhappy Socrates than a happy pig:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

But for Bentham it was essential that the principle applied to all individuals equally. All pleasures, intellectual or physical, were accorded equal weight in his ethical calculations.

He measured individual pain and pleasure by the “felicific calculus” taking account of their intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, purity, extent and productive nature.

Yet this universal hedonism would not result in selfish and thoughtless egoism, for people would realise that their own interests were inextricably linked with the interests and good of others and adapt their behaviour accordingly.

And if this failed then there might be recourse to the Pannomion, Bentham’s codified philosophy of law. He challenged Blackstone’s traditional commentaries on the law with their antipathy to reform, arguing that “judge made laws” should be replaced with rational statues enacted by democratic legislation. For Bentham, all law was a restriction on liberty, inculcating pain rather than pleasure. Limited legal control by state could only be justified if it clearly promoted individual and community well-being:

Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils: In making this choice what ought to be the object of the legislator? He ought to assure himself of two things; first that in every case the incidents which he tries to prevent are really evils; and secondly that if evils they are greater than those which he employs to prevent them.

Rejecting concepts of natural law, inherent human rights, divine commandments, social contracts and other legal fictions as “nonsense on stilts,” he espoused legal positivism. Laws were just social constructs created by legislators for the protection and advantage to society, and as such they could be altered in response to changes in society.

In his own time, Bentham advocated changes in the law to give women equal rights, including suffrage, the right to public office and the right to divorce on the same terms as men; to de-criminalise homosexuality; to make slavery a crime; and to protect animals from unnecessary suffering.

A political radical, he reasoned that better law making would come through constitutional reform making government more accountable and open. A wider franchise, a more representative democracy, a more transparent government with greater checks on its power, and freedom to criticise government were essential.

And if the law were broken? Punishment clearly involved the infliction of pain and should only be used “so far as it promises to exclude some greater evil.” Like the laws, punishment should be designed to achieve more good than harm, and while penalties should outweigh the immediate advantages arising from crime, the punishment should ultimately benefit both society and the individual.

Bentham opposed capital and corporal punishment. He sought to redesign and reform prisons.

His brother, supervising Potemkin’s factories in Russia, had designed a system whereby a circular building at the centre of a larger compound enabled a small number of managers to oversee the activities of a large workforce. Shutters on the central building ensured that the workforce did not know when they were being observed and this encouraged self-regulation.

Bentham adapted this model for use in prisons, designing a central, circular, shuttered tower, the Panopticon, with the prisoners’ cells facing inwards around its circumference. All the prisoners could be observed at various times by one person: not knowing whether they were being watched or not would ensure elective self-policing.

Bentham’s Panopticon has been tainted by the association of constant surveillance with violation of privacy and totalitarian control, but the Panopticon was designed purely for criminals. Moreover, it was only part of a wider proposal, according to which there would be no locks on cell doors, and prisoners would be free to move around the prison attending workshops and educational facilities which were at the heart of Bentham’s plan. Meaningful work and rehabilitation would see

morals reformed…health preserved…industry invigorated… instruction diffused…public burthens lightened.

The latter was effected by the decreased cost of prisons with fewer warders required. Finally, the issue of “who guards the guards” would be resolved by regular inspections guaranteeing humane management of the Panopticon.

There were always right-wing critics of Bentham: those who favoured law and government based on tradition rather than reason, and who were ever alert to the danger that, once enfranchised, “the masses” might pose a threat to the existing social order and hierarchy.

These disparagements aside, there are flaws in Bentham’s philosophy: the practicalities of quantitative measurement by the felicific calculus and of effective inspection of prisons; his overly sanguine view of democratic government; the possibility of the pleasures of one generation having a negative impact on the next; the obvious danger to minorities. Bentham wrote copiously throughout his life refuting criticisms with varying degrees of success. If I no longer swallow the greatest happiness principle with quite the enthusiasm of my sixteen-year-old self, nonetheless, there remains a compassionate decency at its core.

Yet what charms me most about Bentham is the manner of his leaving. A convinced atheist, committed to the separation of church and state, he was adamantly opposed to Christian burial. At a time when it was illegal to provide anatomists with bodies save those of criminals who had been hanged, Bentham left instructions that his corpse should be made available for dissection in the interests of medical research.

Following this his skeleton and his head were to be preserved as an “auto-icon” which would be his memorial. His instructions were specific: the skeleton would sit in his favourite chair wearing one of his suits padded out with hay. His mummified head would be placed on top and the whole displayed in a wooden cabinet.

This did not go entirely to plan: Bentham’s head was desiccated using an air pump over a bath of sulphuric acid, the result was macabre, especially when two cobalt glass eyes were added. A wax head fitted with his own hair was substituted while the original head sat at his feet. This would, no doubt have delighted Bentham whose instructions regarding his remains may well have been designed to cock a snook at religious sensibilities about life and death.

He would have been gratified too that the auto-icon found a resting place at University College, London, “the godless institution in Gower Street,” established in line with his own beliefs to provide university education for those of all religions and none, unlike the older universities which still enforced the Test Acts.

The auto-icon has always evoked affection at UCL and inspired the urban myth that he attends meetings of the college council casting a deciding vote, always in favour of the motion, when the votes of other council members are equally split. In July 2013 at the final council meeting of the retiring provost, Malcolm Grant, the myth became reality when Bentham was removed from his box and sat in council, recorded in the minutes as “present but not voting.”

After his original head was stolen and held to ransom by a rival college in 1975 (although not as the rumours said used as a football nor discovered in a left luggage locker on a Scottish railway station) it was put away for safe keeping in the strong room of the college records department. Recently the auto-icon has been moved to a new glass display case. Visitors are welcome and he remains a popular attraction.

Jeremy Bentham in his original wooden cabinet

Forde Abbey, Dorset which Bentham rented as his summer residence, and where he hosted fellow philosophers, radicals, and reformers including James and John Stuart Mill, Joseph Hume, and David Ricardo

A more conventional memorial: Bentham’s bete-noire, William Blackstone (1723-80) lies in his family vault in Saint Peter’s, Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

Laskarina Bouboulina, (1771-1825),Heroine of the Greek Revolution

By Gravedigger

On June 14, 2026

In Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

Meet Bouboulina, a handsome woman, as befits a revolutionary heroine.

Bouboulina, painting in the National Museum of Athens

Commensurate with her position as a celebrated freedom fighter, Bouboulina has a colourful history.

She was born Laskarina Pinotsi, in a Constantinople prison where her mother was visiting her father. Stavrianos Pinotsis, an Arvanite (Greek of Albanian origin) sea captain from Hydra had been incarcerated by the Ottomans for his part in the abortive Orlov Revolt. He died soon after his daughter’s birth and her mother returned to Hydra, later moving to Spetses where she married another veteran of the Orlov Insurgency.

Bouboulina grew up in Spetses, enjoying a more physically active childhood – sailing, swimming and riding – than might have been expected for a girl of her times. She married first Dimitrios Yiannouzas in 1788, then Dimitrios Bouboulis in 1801. Both were sea captains and both drowned in battles against Algerian pirates. This left Bouboulina a very wealthy widow.

Unusually, but consistent with her position as a woman of Arvanite descent, Bouboulina took over her husbands’ fortunes, their businesses, and their ships. She acquired more land, cash, and vessels, building up her own merchant fleet.

Defending her capital required steely resolution. The Ottomans sought to confiscate her assets on the grounds that her husband had fought on the Russian side in the Russo-Turkish war. Bouboulina travelled to Constantinople to defend her rights. Enlisting the aid of another woman, the Valide Sultan (the Sultan’s mother) Natsidil Sultan, she retained her property.

In 1820 two of her stepsons, in a dispute over their inheritance, instigated her excommunication by the Patriarch Gregory V. If this was designed to intimidate her into surrendering control of her wealth it was unsuccessful.

Bouboulina supported the Filiki Etaireia, an underground organisation, modelled on Carbonarist and Masonic lines, preparing Greece for revolution against Ottoman rule. The organisation did not admit women but along with others, like Manto Mavrogenous and Marigo Zarafoupoulo, Bouboulina financed ships and smuggled weapons and ammunition to revolutionaries.

Against Ottoman regulations she ordered the construction of the Agamemnon, the first modern warship in Greece, bearing eighteen cannons. She bribed Turkish officials to register it as a smaller trade ship. On 3rd April 1821, twelve days before the Greek Revolution was officially declared, she raised the flag of the revolution on the mast of the Agamemnon. Spetses became the first island to fly a revolutionary flag.

The Spetses Flag of the Revolution, now in the Spetses museum.The cross above the half-moon representing the Ottoman Empire indicates that the latter will be overthrown by the Hellenic navy (the anchor) and army (the lance) commanded by prudence (the snake) and wisdom (the owl – unfortunately obscured by a reflection of the electric light.)The flag bears the legend ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑ H ΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ, FREEDOM OR DEATH.

Modern version of the flag flying in Spetses

Bouboulina gave command of the Agamemnon to her son Yiannis Yiannouzas. They sailed together with eight other ships from Spetses to take part in the naval blockade of Nafplion.

Bouboulina at the siege of Nafplion, Spetses museum.

When Turkish forces hoping to raise the blockade rode towards Nafplion, the Greeks joined battle with them outside Argos. Yiannis Yiannouzas was killed and beheaded. Bouboulina collected her son’s remains, executed three Ottoman prisoners during the funeral ceremony, and sent back word to Spetses,

My son is dead, but Argos is ours.

In May, Bouboulina began a blockade of Monemvasia with the Agamemnon. The Turks surrendered in July.

In September with Tripolitsa about to fall to the Greek troops of Kolokotronis, she entered the city on a white horse. Remembering the assistance which the Valide Sultan had given her she was determined to save the lives of the women of the harem of Hourshid Pasha. Through her intervention and diplomacy, she negotiated a deal to exchange them for Greek ecclesiastical leaders. Drawing her own sword in defence of the women, she warned the disaffected Greek soldiers that they could take the women’s jewellery but not harm them: “whoever attempts to do so will have to pass first over my dead body.”

When the Ottomans surrendered Palamidi castle in Nafplion in November 1822, and the first Greek government was established there, Bouboulina moved into a house in the town. She continued to finance the revolution, spending most of her fortune providing weapons and support for the families of revolutionaries. She married her daughter, Eleni, to Kolokotronis’ son Panos.

When the civil war began in 1824, Bouboulina supported Kolokotronis and the old executive of the Provisional Administration against the new executive. As a result, this heroine of the revolution was arrested twice and briefly imprisoned accused of witchcraft and heresy. Her house was confiscated and she was expelled from Nafplion. She returned to Spetses.

Yet despite her support for Kolokotronis, when his son Panos was killed in the second civil war, she would not allow her ally to choose another husband for her daughter. Rather than let him organise another marriage for a strategic alliance she took her daughter home demanding the return of her dowry (unsuccessfully).

A final drama unfolded when Bouboulina’s son Georgis Yiannouzas eloped with Eugenia Koutsi, whose family had betrothed her to a man she disliked. Bouboulina’s sympathies lay with the couple, but the Koutsis family felt their honour had been compromised, or perhaps sought to avoid an alliance with a now impoverished family. Assuming the couple were at Bouboulina’s house the Koutsis family arrived there. Bouboulina confronted them and was shot in the forehead as she stood on the balcony of her house.

Bouboulina’s house on Spetses where she was shot.

She was buried in the family vault in the church of Agios Ioannis, and in 1928 the casket with her bones was moved to the church of Agios Nikolaos. When the Spetses museum was established in 1939 the casket was moved again.

Casket and portrait of Bouboulina in the Spetses museum.

I did not think the casket looked big enough for a complete skeleton but those with more experience of these matters tell me otherwise.

How accurate is this story of Bouboulina? Honestly, I have no idea. The accounts I read were contradictory even over minor details. And it is impossible not to wonder if the philhellenes, who published many of the early accounts, were impartial when they recorded the exploits of the woman whom they revered.

Did she save the women of the harem of Tripolitsa from compassion or did realpolitik dictate that they were worth more alive than dead? Elsewhere in the town there was butchery and looting. It was the norm on both sides, unlikely that Bouboulina was an exception. After the fall of Nafplion she may well have used her position on the commission charged with redistribution of property for personal gain. That too was a norm.

It was more than two hundred years ago, and I like the romantic story of Bouboulina in the same way that I like the story of another maritime national hero, Francis Drake. That is not to be blind to uncomfortable evidence, but this is a blog, not an academic treatise. And I am certain that for the courageous Bouboulina the words on the revolutionary flag – Freedom or Death – were no empty rhetoric.

The Elegies and Odes of Thomas Gray (1716-1771)

By Gravedigger

On May 31, 2026

In Poets

Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard was an instant success when it was first published in 1751 and ensured his popularity throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century. Although he published only thirteen poems in English, he was offered, and turned down, the position of Poet Laureate in 1757.

He became known, along with Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair and Edward Young, as one of the Graveyard or Churchyard Poets. Their work, like the religious revival of the day, was essentially melancholy, characterised by meditations on mortality, lost innocence, disillusionment, fate. They were perfectly in tune with the Age of Sensibility, focusing on the transience of life, on emotions, nature, the individual, on loss, grief, and suffering. Even Gray’s Ode on the Spring quickly establishes itself as a memento mori, with the vibrant spring day he describes not a symbol of renewal but a reminder that life is short and soon succeeded by death.

If this sounds unduly bleak it is well to remember that life in the eighteenth century was precarious. Gray was the only one of twelve siblings to survive infancy. He had sent the Ode on Spring to his closest friend Richard West in a letter which was returned unopened for West had died at the age of only twenty-four.

Gray’s poetry is little read today although even in my parents’ generation primary school children still learned sections of the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by rote and quite surprising people could unexpectedly declaim its stanzas. Even today persons who may be entirely unfamiliar with the poem unknowingly reproduce it for many of Gray’s memorable aphorisms have passed into common parlance.

The poem opens with a lyrical evocation of the English countryside and rural life, the painterly detail and mellifluous tones conjuring a tranquil scene:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Gray then reflects on the people buried in the churchyard. Celebrating the lives and work of the unknown villagers, he reminds the rich and powerful of the transience of their achievements, that their end will be the same:

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Moreover, he reflects, given the opportunity the obscure villagers may have been capable of great things. He imagines

Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast,

The little tyrant of his fields withstood,

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.

But he ruefully acknowledges,

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Yet the very obscurity of the villagers also proscribed their crimes, for they were

Forbade to wade thro’ slaughter to a throne

but remained

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.

Contemplating the “frail memorial(s)” and “uncouth rhymes” on the rustic graves, Gray empathises with the universal yearning to be loved and remembered.

He imagines someone contemplating his own grave and inquiring about his life, and ends with his own epitaph, describing himself as an obscure and melancholy poet, hopeful of an afterlife. I find the epitaph less successful than the rest of the poem, and it did not exist in the earliest version which had instead reemphasised the inevitability of death, returning to the theme of its levelling influence, and advising resignation and stoicism:

But through the cool sequester’d vale of life

Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom.

Even for a graveyard enthusiast Gray can be overly morbid with his constant reminders that the legacy of day is night, and his emphasis on mortality and finality. Yet he did occasionally exhibit a lighter side. His tragi-comic Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes, written on the request of Horace Walpole when his cat Selima died, is a witty description of the feline’s demise, a prey to unseemly desire:

A whisker first and then a claw,

With many an ardent wish,

She stretched in vain to reach the prize

What female heart can gold despise?

What cat’s averse to fish?

…

Again she stretch’d, again she bent

…

Eight times emerging from the flood

She mewed to every watery god,

Some speedy aid to send.

No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred

…

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,

Know one false step is ne’er retrieved,

…

Not all that tempts your wandering eyes

And heedless hearts is lawful prize;

Nor all that glisters, gold.

Following his own death Thomas Gray was buried alongside his mother at Saint Giles, Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, in the churchyard made famous by his poem.

A plaque on the church wall advises of the location

In 1799 a five metre high and monumentally ugly memorial was erected in a field adjoining the churchyard. John Penn commissioned it to form part of the vista from his new mansion at Stoke Park although he claimed it was erected to honour Thomas Gray.

Inscription on the monument. Other panels bear quotations from the poems.

There is also an extraordinarily bombastic memorial in Westminster Abbey which I can never pass without a cringe of embarrassment. The verse on it reads

No more the Grecian Muse unrivall’d reigns

To Britain let the Nations homage pay.

She felt a Homer’s fire in Milton’s strains.

A Pindar’s rapture in the Lyre of Gray.

Gray, I suspect, would have cared little for these grandiose memorials, preferring his own modest grave in the churchyard. He might even have been tempted to respond to the overblown language with a few satiric verses.

John Betjeman, more than just a National Treasure

By Gravedigger

On May 17, 2026

In Activists, Poets

John Betjeman’s passions encompassed Victorian gothic architecture; steam trains; the English countryside and seaside; provincial towns and country churches; and the cosy, banal miscellany of buttered toast, Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, Liberty lampshades, and Hillman Imps. Often sentimental and nostalgic, his accessible verses guaranteed him a place in the pantheon of National Treasures. Academics and scholars could be dismissive: he was rejected for the position of Poet Laureate in 1967 on the basis that his work was “lightweight,” * and that he was a mere “mere songster of tennis lawns and cathedral closes.” ** And as a teenager in the 1960s, eager to embrace sophistication, I was a little ashamed of liking his poetry as much as I did.

But Betjeman was not just, as he is sometimes presented, a compound of cuddly whimsy and quirky charm. He cultivated fogeyism and winsomeness, but his work can be wry, mocking and satirical. Pathos jostles with a sardonic wit in his poems. He can be very funny; he engages with misfortune and adversity. He can also be a terrible snob and rather unkind. But neither his poetry nor his campaigning can be dismissed as “lightweight.”

Listen to a few extracts from a small selection of his poems:

For exuberant joyful absurdity nothing can equal A Subaltern’s Love Song:

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,

Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,

What strenuous singles we played after tea,

We in the tournament – you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy

With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,

I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn…

But remember too the wistful and understated poignancy of In a Bath Teashop with its restrained economy of detail bearing a wealth of humanity and tenderness:

“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another

Let us hold hands and look.”

She, such a very ordinary little woman;

He, such a thumping crook;

But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels

In the teashop’s inglenook.

The autobiographical blank verse poem Summoned by Bells captured the tragic brevity of childhood with a pithy:

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells

And sights, before the dark of reason grows.

Betjeman allegedly regretted the publication of Slough, feeling that he had been unkind towards the town and its inhabitants, when it was uncontrolled industrialisation not the place itself which he abhorred:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough

It isn’t fit for humans now,

There isn’t grass to graze a cow

Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens

Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,

Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,

Tinned minds, tinned breath…

Moreover, two years after he published those verses real bombs fell on England giving an unintended ugly twist to the poem.

In Westminster Abbey, written in 1940, for all its jaunty rhythm, Betjeman tackles darker themes of religious hypocrisy and racism:

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans.

Spare their women for Thy Sake,

And if that it is not too easy

We will pardon Thy Mistake…

Keep our Empire undismembered

Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,

Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,

Honduras and Togoland;

Protect them Lord in all their fights,

And, even more, protect the whites.

Business Girls exhibits a tender empathy with the newly emancipated but poorly paid women of the mid twentieth century. And there is a hint that their independence came at too high a price, in part forced upon them by the carnage of the two World Wars:

From the geyser ventilators

Autumn winds are blowing down

On a thousand business women

Having baths in Camden Town…

Early nip of changeful autumn

Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,

At the back precarious bathrooms

Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions

Business women lie and soak,

Seeing through the draughty skylight

Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there poor unbelov’d ones,

Lap your loneliness in heat.

All too soon the tiny breakfast,

Trolley-bus and windy street!

How to Get on in Society is a wonderful spoof on faux genteel manners and pretensions:

Phone for the fish-knives, Norman

As Cook is a little unnerved;

You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes

And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?

The frills round the cutlet can wait

Till the girl has replenished the cruets

And switched on the logs in the grate…

(Pete Sarstedt’s 1969 hit Where do you go to my Lovely? which employed a similar technique, always reminded me of this poem. The song came out a mere fifteen years later but the list was very different, for lifestyle and societal ambitions had changed a great deal in that time.)

In 1973 Betjeman wrote and narrated Metroland, a television documentary focused on the suburbs of NW London. Between 1915 and 1933 the Metropolitan Railway had built houses adjacent to the line heading out of London through Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. They coined the slogan “Live in Metroland,” and produced a brochure promoting their Tudorbethan properties. The fulsome marketing language played on middle class aspirations, advertising spacious homes with gardens and garages in an idealised environment surrounded by trees and nature, but within easy commuting distance of the City.

Betjeman liked suburbia, and his commentary, delivered partly in verse and over an old black and white film shot from an MR train, sounds superficially like an unqualified homage to commuter towns, reflecting the MR’s own celebration of the comfortable suburban life of ladies who lunch, and their car washing, lawn mowing, golf playing husbands. But if there is affection in his portrait, it is tinged with regret, for Betjeman is conscious of the irony that in offering former city dwellers a quasi-rural retreat, the frenzy of construction destroyed the very countryside it promoted. When he looks out at the end of the MR line he reflects, “Grass triumphs. And I must say I am rather glad.”

Moreover, though Betjeman is broadly comfortable with semi-detached houses and golf courses, he cannot resist a snobbish aside worthy of Nancy Mitford when he describes Neasden as “The home of the gnome and the average citizen.” There was an acidity never far below the surface in Betjeman’s work; he had previously parodied the aspiring inhabitants of suburbia in Middlesex:

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens

Runs the red electric train,

With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s

Daintily alights Elaine…

National Treasure maybe, but Betjeman is neither lightweight nor cuddly. He is too self-consciously clever and sharp for that. Yet those very attributes make him a better poet than he is sometimes credited with being.

Then alongside Betjeman the poet is Betjeman the campaigner, and again his work is far from that of a good natured, bumbling dabbler.

A founding member of the Friends of Friendless Churches, he edited and wrote part of the Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Simon Jenkins in his own England’s Thousand Best Churches recalls Betjeman’s tireless campaigns to save redundant churches, and reminds us of our debt to

Three ghosts (who) inhabit all English churches. They linger in every arcade, peep from every gallery and flit across every monument. They are those of John Betjeman, Alec Clifton-Taylor and Nikolaus Pevsner.

Betjeman’s enthusiasm extended to secular architecture. A railway enthusiast and champion of Victorian architecture when it was unfashionable, he led the unsuccessful fight to save the Euston Arch, the doric entrance to the station which was demolished in 1961.But his influence and determination were instrumental in saving the most spectacular of all the Victorian railway stations – St. Pancras and its adjacent Midland Grand Hotel.

The work of George Gilbert Scott, 207 metres long and seventy metres wide, supported by 850 cast iron pillars and covered by an arched glass ceiling, the train shed at St. Pancras station is the acme of high Victorian secular architecture. When it opened in 1876 the hotel was the first to have electric lifts, “ascending chambers”, flushing lavatories, and revolving doors. In the 1890s the Ladies’ Drawing Room became the first Ladies’ Smoking Room in London. But when it closed in the 1930s it still had only five bathrooms for three hundred bedrooms. It became railway offices, then after bomb damage during the war it stood empty. In the 1960s both the station and the hotel were scheduled for demolition.

Their survival was ensured after Betjeman led the fight to prevent their destruction and they became grade 1 listed buildings in 1967.But the station was in decline as more of the north bound trains made Euston their terminus, and the hotel remained empty. In the 1990s English Heritage restored the exterior, and organised tours enabled us to see the magnificence which lay within beneath the layers of dust and dirt.

Salvation came in the form of Eurostar which since 2007 has operated out of St. Pancras. The station was renovated, and in 2011 the hotel reopened with 244 rooms – en suite – and sixty-eight apartments. The breathtaking grand stair once again curves up beneath the cerulean ceiling spangled with gold stars.

Betjeman died in 1984, too soon to see the magnificently restored station and hotel, but his statue stands, gazing up in delighted wonder at the glass ceiling of the train shed – and conveniently located for the champagne bar. Raise a glass to him when you travel this way; he saved something splendid for us all.

Statue of Betjeman gazing up at the glass ceiling of the train shed, Saint Pancras

Ceiling of the train shed, Saint Pancras

And you can visit his grave in Saint Enodoc’s churchyard in Trebetherick, Cornwall. Both St. Enodoc and Trebetherick, where he had spent childhood holidays, feature in his poems.

The fine lettering and decoration on the black slate are the work of the stone mason Simon Verity. In his introduction to English Parish Churches Betjeman praised the elegance of the stone carver’s craft, ubiquitous in graveyards until the middle of the nineteenth century, with letters and decoration deep cut into local stone. Sadly he contrasted it with the modern “machine made letters inserted into white Italian marble.”

It’s a beautiful location, near the sea, the old church partially sunk into the sand dunes, but… church and churchyard are surrounded by a hideous golf course. To reach them you must cross the sterile links, pass golfers in their pastel leisure-ware, and risk being hit by their flying balls. But Betjeman would not have minded; he loved golf and particularly liked to play on a seaside course.

*Helen Gardner, Merton Professor of English, Oxford

**Lord Goodman, Chairman of the Arts Council.

Betjeman was appointed Poet Laureate when the position fell vacant again in 1972.

Grigoris Lambrakis – Zei

By Gravedigger

On May 3, 2026

In Activists, Medics, Politicians

The Old Theatre lay at the heart of the LSE: forum for the larger undergraduate lectures, arena for visiting speakers, and stage for febrile student union meetings. But on Thursday evenings politics ceded ground to culture when Film Soc. screened its weekly offering. And it was there, with singular surprise, that I first encountered applause in response to a film. In the provinces of my childhood, we had always hastened to exit the cinema before the credits rolled to avoid the then ubiquitous playing of the National Anthem. Free from that constraint a more leisurely exit prevailed but I had never witnessed an audience remaining seated, engaged in prolonged clapping long after the screen went blank.

The plaudits came from a group seated together near the front of the theatre. “It’s the Greek students,” my companion apprised me. It was 1970 and the film was Costa-Gavras’ “Z,”released the previous year.

“Z” began with an arresting content warning: in lieu of the habitual disclaimer, it informed the audience,

Toute resemblance avec des evenements reels, des personnes mortes ou vivantes n’est pas le fait du hazard,

And in case this lacked sufficient clarity it confirmed the intentional similarity to real events with determined capitalization,

Elle est VOLONTAIRE.

The film was based on the political novel of the same name by Vassilis Vassilikos published in 1967, an account of the murder of Grigoris Lambrakis and the subsequent investigation into his assassination.

Grigoris Lambrakis (1912-1963) was born in Kerasitsa, a village in the Peloponnese, and studied medicine in Athens. He was a champion athlete, holding the Greek record for long jump for twenty-three years, winning gold medals in the Balkan Games, and participating in the controversial 1936 Olympic Games.

During the Axis occupation of Greece, 1941-44, he worked in his brother’s clinic where they sheltered partisans and supplied them with false identities. During the famine of those years, he set up the Union of Greek Athletes who held competitions to raise money to fund food banks for the starving population.

Throughout the Civil War years which followed the withdrawal of the Axis powers Lambrakis treated the wounded on both sides of the conflict. For this he was accused of “anti-national activity” by the conservative, monarchist government and spent six months in the Goudi prison in 1948.

During the 1950s while specialising in gynaecology and endocrinology, Lambrakis operated a free weekly clinic for patients unable to afford medical care.

So far, a clever, talented, decent man living his life and doing what good he could along the way, principled and with a certain courage. Then in the 1960s came a significant shift in focus: Lambrakis became committed to radical social and political change.

Something had been rotten in the state of Greece since the mid-1930s: an unpleasant amalgam of domestic dictatorships and foreign oppression. In 1935 the monarchy had been restored by a rigged plebiscite. George II then facilitated the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas. Between 1941 and 1944 the Axis occupation, the collaborationist government under Rallis, and the British blockade reduced the country to starvation. More than 200,000 people died in the famine.

In 1944 it was understood that the Communist EAM/ELAS, whose members had been at the heart of national resistance against the occupying powers of Nazi Germany and Bulgaria, would be given a significant voice in the new government, and that the collaborationist Security Battalions would be put on trial. This did not happen. Instead, Churchill, who combined hysterical anti-Communism with a crazed desire for British hegemony, sent troops under General Scobie to escort the Greek government in exile home from Egypt.

Back in Athens, Scobie ordered the EAM/ELAS forces to disarm, while supplying the anti-Communists with ammunition. A mass protest in central Athens was met with police opening fire and in a savage assault killing twenty-eight people. The Battle for Athens, thirty-seven days of fighting, ensued with the British troops and right-wing nationalists ranged against the Communists. The defeat of the latter when the British flew in extra troops was followed by the White Terror of 1945-6 with arrests, torture, exile and murder of leftists. The Greek Civil War continued until 1949 with an estimated 150,000 dead.

Throughout the 1950s, repressive right-wing regimes were funded and supported by America, where a morbid fear of Communism ran even deeper than in Britain. These successive governments connived with the extravagantly funded monarchy to maintain a stranglehold on the constitution. Former partisans and dissidents were sent to re-education camps on remote islands; censorship was rife; the power of trade unions was limited and trade unionists imprisoned; the power of the army and police went unchecked.

Against this background Lambrakis stood for the Hellenic Parliament in 1961 as an Independent member for Piraeus under the umbrella of the United Democratic Left (EDA), the only legal left-wing organisation since the civil war. His platform was one of peace and democracy, his aim to eliminate all trace of fascism at home and to free Greece from the foreign presence supporting it.

In his pre-election address he told his audience,

Dear friends we are running for election with two pursuits: peace and democracy. We want peace so that no missile bases will be established on Greek soil and we can have friendly relations with our Balkan neighbours. We want real democracy… to put an end to arrests, forced exile…and to have the most beautiful achievement of the Greek people finally recognised: our heroic national resistance against Italian and German fascists and their local collaborators.

Lambrakis opposed Greek involvement with NATO and reliance on American economic aid, sought to close the US missile base near Thessaloniki, and fought the establishment of nuclear bases in Crete. He established the Committee for International Détente and Peace in Greece and attended international pacifist meetings and demonstrations.

In April 1963 he joined the march organised by CND from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Aldermaston to London. The Bertrand Russell Youth Committee for Nuclear Disarmament led by a law student, Michael Peristerakis, planned another march from Athens to Marathon later that month, differing from the marches in western Europe in that it was a demonstration for social change, democracy, and the right to freedom of expression as well as disarmament. In a perfect, though undoubtedly unintended, illustration of the need for these reforms the Karamanlis government and the police banned the march. Despite a display of intimidation thousands of marchers ignored the official ban; 2,000 were arrested and three hundred injured. Only Lambrakis, claiming his parliamentary immunity, was able to reach Marathon, walking alone holding the same banner he had carried at Aldermaston bearing the nuclear disarmament symbol and the word “Greece.” But when he tried to complete the return march, parliamentary immunity failed him and he too was arrested.

For Lambrakis the battle for the release of political prisoners was part of the same struggle as that for pacifism: peace and civil rights were inexorably linked. Over 1,000 political prisoners arrested at the end of the Civil War remained incarcerated. Antonis Ambatielos, a trades unionist and member of the Greek resistance had been arrested and sentenced to death in 1947, his sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. To draw attention to his case and that of other political prisoners, Lambrakis made a statement to the British press during a visit there by Queen Frederica. Pointing to the undemocratic and unconstitutional interventions of the reactionary queen in parliament and government, and her resistance to the desire of the Greek people for democracy, freedom, and the release of political prisoners, he issued a prescient warning,

I wish to warn the queen that with her attitude she is leading the throne to a sure demise.

The resulting publicity resulted in the cause of the Greek prisoners being taken up by British Labour MPs and an international conference calling for an amnesty of all Greek political prisoners was held in Paris.

In May 1963 Lambrakis attended an anti-war meeting in Thessaloniki despite having received death threats. In full view of a large police and military presence a pickup van drove towards him and a passenger in the back of the truck delivered blows to his head. Five days later he died of his injuries.

Over half a million people attended Lambrakis’ funeral despite attempts by the government to limit the turnout. The letter “Z,” an abbreviation for the Greek “Zei,” He Lives, appeared on buildings and hoardings in Greek cities.

The Investigating Prosecutor, Christos Sartzetakis, was pressured by the government to return a risible false narrative of a traffic accident. He refused, emphasising the culpability of high-ranking police officials, members of the paramilitary and of the repressive para-state apparatus who initiated the attack.

The assassination contributed to the fall of the Karamanlis government, and the electoral victory of Papandreou’s Centre Union in November brought some reforms with the release of political prisoners, wealth redistribution, economic liberalisation and education expansion.

In 1964 a new political organisation, the Lambrakis Democratic Youth, was formed with Lambrakis’ friend Theodorakis as its first president.

Yet change was limited, and after King Constantine engineered a split in the Centre Union Papandreou resigned heralding political instability, and a series of short-term weak governments. Nonetheless in the elections scheduled for May 1967 the Centre Union confidently expected to emerge as the largest party and to be able to rule in coalition with the United Democratic Left. But precisely four years after Lambrakis’ march to Marathon, on April 21^st, 1967, the military Junta seized power claiming instability (nothing new) and the threat of an anarcho-Communist takeover (from the Centre Union?) as justification… Both the monarchy and the CIA have always denied that they lent their support to the coup.

Leading politicians and political activists were arrested, the constitution suspended and martial law declared. Political opponents were imprisoned and tortured. Amnesty International estimated that over 10,000 people were arrested and imprisoned within the first few days of the regime, and six months on more than 2,000 had been subject to torture. Political parties were suppressed, military courts established, civil liberties collapsed, freedom of assembly outlawed, surveillance introduced, the press censored.

The Investigating Prosecutor who had identified the agents responsible for Lambrakis’ death found himself in prison, while all charges against the perpetrators were dropped. Against this background Vassilis Vassilikos published “Z.” It was promptly banned in Greece as was the subsequent film with soundtrack by Theodorakis who was exiled. Even possession of Lambrakis’ scientific papers became an offence.

At the end of the film before the credits there is a list of some of the things banned by the Junta, they include: long hair for men, miniskirts, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Chekov, Pinter, new maths, the peace symbol, Sociology, the letter “Z.” The absurdity amused us, but must have appeared less than humorous to the Greek students.

The Junta fell in 1974 under the impact of internal splits, student protests, and the ill-fated attempt to invade Cyprus. The country transitioned by free vote to a Presidential Parliamentary democracy, the Hellenic Republic, with an independent judiciary, press and trade unions.

Since 1982 the Athens Classic Marathon has been dedicated to Grigoris Lambrakis.

Jeremy Bentham and the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number

Laskarina Bouboulina, (1771-1825),Heroine of the Greek Revolution

The Elegies and Odes of Thomas Gray (1716-1771)

John Betjeman, more than just a National Treasure

Grigoris Lambrakis – Zei