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

William Golding and Human Evil

On March 8, 2026

The BBC recently commissioned a four-part adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It has provoked particular interest here in the West Country, for when Golding published it in 1954, he was teaching at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. In the opening sequences of the production the boys stranded on the island are wearing Bishop Wordsworth’s school uniform… the school authorities must be convinced that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Now elderly men, former pupils have appeared on local news channels speculating that the writer took inspiration from the behaviour of boys in his classroom, though no one has laid claim to have been the role model for Jack or Roger.

The Guardian critic, Lucy Mangan, after praising the acting, skewered the essential weakness of the production with an acuity worthy of her much-missed predecessor, Nancy Banks-Smith:

It falls victim to the modern curse of psychology. All the main characters are explained by a neat backstory. Jack comes from a loveless household. Ralph’s alpha maleness is tempered by compassion because he comes from a secure home, but his mother is ill. Simon is mentally fragile because his abusive father plays mind games with him and his mother…It reduces the elemental power of the story, along with its point, which is how much evil there is in a man and whether it can be overcome. This is the question. Not how much therapy he needs.

Since its publication Lord of the Flies has seldom been far from a school syllabus. No surprise, for it is of a manageable length; well written but in accessible prose; all the main characters are adolescents; the story is gripping; and there is endless scope for discussion of symbols, allegories, irony, and inherent human depravity. A cornucopia for teachers and pupils alike.

When we were introduced to the book in our early teens my schoolmates and I were passionate about it, delighted to chew over its themes, self-consciously cynical in our discussions of humans’ inherent capacity for savagery and the fragility of social norms.

Golding wrote the book as an antidote to Ballantyne’s Coral Island, a once popular children’s adventure story advocating Christianity and the humanising influence of British colonialism. For Golding there was nothing there to admire or glorify; beneath the thin veneer of civilization, he believed, lay inherent human depravity, a selfish and violent desire for power, and a herd mentality where individuals could quickly descend into barbarity under evil leadership, and ostensibly decent people reveal murderous sociopathic instincts.

Golding’s focus on the dark side of humanity was influenced by the rise of fascism in the 1930s and by the violence and atrocities of World War Two. Later he wrote:

“My book was to say: you think the war is over and an evil thing destroyed. You are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.”

The book ends with a naval officer chiding the boys for their “unBritish” behaviour while, in an obvious parallel, his own warship anchored in the bay embodies an aura of menace. “Irony,” we all wrote in capitals in the margins of out texts.

Yet, on an adult reading, it is not the most subtle of works, and we might crave a little optimism, but our current international landscape affirms its timeless relevance.

Following the success of Lord of the Flies, Golding retired from teaching and moved to the Wiltshire village of Broadchalke. He produced twelve more works of fiction, novels of the human condition, achieving cult status in the second half of the twentieth century.

Rites of Passage, the first novel in his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth won the Booker Prize in 1980. Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989) completed his story of a voyage to Australia in the early nineteenth century. It is one of my favourite novels both for the harrowing descriptions of the twelve-month voyage in the cramped wooden ship, and for the vivid portraits of the passengers drawn from the whole spectrum of society.

Golding evokes the creaking timbers, the thick air, the foetid atmosphere, the decks streaming with seawater, the darkness, and the claustrophobia so vividly one might retch alongside the exhausted, nauseous emigrants.

Through his motley protagonists he exposes patronising class and gender systems, pretension, power, privilege, arrogance, self-delusion, vanity, and double standards. His trenchant prose can engender in one paragraph an amalgam of sympathy, pity, loathing, irritation, and contempt for with any one character.

Again, he exposes the fragility of civilisation and the ease with which social constraints can collapse to be replaced by casual cruelty, this time amongst adults. Some critics have interpreted the closing chapters of Fire Down Below as a “happy ending,” with Edmund Talbot, having developed self-knowledge, determined to do good in the future. But I suspect this is a misreading of Golding’s conclusion. No one will do good in a rotten borough, and Talbot remains insensitive, self-absorbed, shallow, and pompous. Never more so than in his obtuse response to Zenobia’s message, “Tell Edmund I am crossing the bridge,” which carries even more poignancy than Charles Summers’ tragic death.

Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 for novels which with “realistic narrative…illuminate the human condition in the world today.”

He is buried under a yew tree in Holy Trinity churchyard, Broadchalke. The inscription on the stone has not been deeply incised but can still just be read:

Grave of William Golding and his wife Ann Golding

Remember with love

William Golding

1911-1993

Ann Golding

1912-1995

It is the star to every

wandering barque

The quotation is from one of Shakespeare’s most famous and beautiful love sonnets, number 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring barque

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

So perhaps Golding’s personal life was happier than his social and political weltanschauung might imply.

Golding’s grave, Holy Trinity churchyard, Broadchalke, Wiltshire

William Golding, Rites of Passage, Faber and Faber (1980).

Close Quarters, Faber and Faber (1987)

Fire Down Below, Faber and Faber (1989).

Josephine Butler and The Contagious Diseases Act

By Gravedigger

On February 17, 2026

In Activists

My admiration for the work of Josephine Butler (1829-1906) is tempered by an uncomfortable aversion to the religious beliefs which kindled and stoked her extraordinary achievements.

Butler grew up in a conventional, albeit liberal, middle-class family with strong religious principles, political connections, and social awareness. Her father was an active supporter of Catholic emancipation, the abolition of slavery, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and reform of the Poor Law.

But, at the age of seventeen, the then Josephine Grey had a religious crisis; becoming disenchanted with the Anglican church she began speaking directly to god in prayer, an intimacy which became the basis of her life and vocation. And this is where, as an atheist, I begin to feel a little uneasy: for a Victorian lady conformity to the social norms of church attendance is unsurprising but developing a hotline to god is disturbing.

When in 1852 she married George Butler, an academic and Anglican clergyman, she wrote that they often

prayed together that a holy revolution might come about and that the Kingdom of God might be established on the earth.

Although offended by her husband’s fellow dons speaking of

a moral lapse in a woman…as an immensely worse thing than in a man

she chose not to voice her views on the subject but

to speak little with men, but much with god.

Yet after the death of her daughter Eva, and her own problems with depression, she

became possessed with an irresistible urge to go forth and find some keener pain than my own, to meet with people more unhappy than myself.

Since the Butlers had now moved to Liverpool this was not difficult, and her activities immediately surpassed the conventional charitable works expected of clergy wives: she began visiting the workhouse where she sat in the cellars, picking oakum with the women while discussing the bible and praying; she established a hostel for women who had been seduced and abandoned, and helped them to find work; she offered shelter in her own house to prostitutes in the terminal stages of venereal disease.

But it was in 1869 that Butler’s most innovative work began. The Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 sought to reduce the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, particularly in the army and navy, by maintaining a supply of uninfected prostitutes. To this end the police were authorised to detain any women who were suspected of prostitution – no evidence was needed. Any unattended woman from the age of twelve could be apprehended. Police powers were frequently misused against women whose only crime was poverty.

The women were then subjected to an invasive medical examination, which Butler described as “surgical rape.” If they were found to have venereal diseases they were sent to a lock hospital, one of the old leper hospitals, called after the locks or rags which covered the lepers’ lesions. Incarcerated in these institutions, more like prisons than hospitals, the women had no means to support their children and were unlikely to obtain employment on release. If women refused the examination, they were subjected to a three-month prison sentence or hard labour.

There was no enforced examination of their male clients who were exonerated from any responsibility. The Acts, as Butler made clear, were there to protect male health rather than to eliminate venereal diseases.

Butler established The Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, the first politically focused campaign organised and led by women. She toured Britain, speaking at scores of meetings, arguing that the Acts were discriminatory on grounds of both sex and class for they

not only deprived poor women of their constitutional rights and forced them to submit to a degrading internal examination, but they officially sanctioned a double standard of sexual morality, which justified male sexual access to a class of “fallen” women and penalised women for engaging in the same vice with men.

No surprise that Butler met with opposition from pimps, brothel keepers, clergy, and politicians. At one meeting cow dung was thrown at her, at another the windows of her hotel were smashed, at a third threats were made to burn down the building. She was disowned by friends and acquaintances, for it was not acceptable for a respectable woman to speak publicly on sex and prostitution. There were personal attacks by journalists and MPs. The London Daily News thundered

Women like Mrs. Butler are so discontented in their own homes that they have to find an outlet somewhere… and take pleasure in a hobby too nasty to mention.

For James Elphinstone MP, Josephine Butler was

worse than a prostitute.

Another newspaper vilified her as

an indecent maenad, a shrieking sister, frenzied, unsexed, and utterly without shame.

And a Royal Commission set up in 1871 defended the one-sided nature of the legislation:

There is no comparison to be made between prostitutes and the men who consort with them. With the one side the offence is committed as a matter of gain; with the other it is an irregular indulgence of a natural impulse.

The statement could not have substantiated more palpably Josephine Butler’s accusation of double standards.

It was not until 1886 that the noxious Acts were formally repealed, largely because of her relentless campaign. As one MP told her,

We know how to manage any other opposition in the House or country, but this is very awkward for us, this revolt of women.

Meanwhile Butler had toured France, Italy and Switzerland meeting women conducting similar campaigns. There she had become aware of the “white slave trade,” of girls as young as twelve being kidnapped or bought, and trafficked from England to the Continent, where they were sold as prostitutes. Alongside Florence Soper Booth and William Stead she became involved in her second great campaign, to expose child prostitution and the associated trade.

To publicise their cause Stead famously purchased a thirteen-year-old girl, Eliza Armstrong, from her mother for £5 and took her to a safe house in Paris. He then published a series of articles describing what he had done and exposing the extent of child prostitution. Butler followed this with speeches in London calling for greater protection of the young and the raising of the age of consent. Ironically both Butler and Stead faced police questioning following this audacious testimony and Stead was charged with abduction and imprisoned for three months.

Nonetheless in 1885 the age of consent was raised to sixteen and the procurement of girls for prostitution by drugs, intimidation, fraud, or abduction made a criminal offence.

Butler had traditional views on the importance of chastity for both men and women although this was informed as much by the lack of birth control and the risks of childbirth, as by a moral stand. Moreover, in the aftermath of the reforms of 1885 and 1886 she spoke out against the purity societies like the White Cross Army who sought to increase the prosecutions of brothel keepers and ban indecent literature… including information on birth control. She derided

the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force,

and sounded a warning:

beware of purity societies…stamping on vulnerable women.

Knowing that women with no income and nothing else to sell would sell themselves she joined the fight for the training, higher education, and access to a wider range of jobs for women. She was instrumental in setting up the Married Women’s Property Committee which successfully pressured Parliament to get rid of the legal doctrine of coverture whereby when a woman married her property passed to her husband.

It is impossible to overestimate the achievements of Josephine Butler. Her work to eliminate sexual double standards, child prostitution, and the white slave trade, complementing the battles for the vote, education, and employment opportunities, brought not just concrete economic, political, and legal change, but was a precursor of the second wave of feminism, attacking the invisible power structures rooted in attitudes and prejudices.

She displayed enormous courage in addressing such unpopular causes. It is invidious to make a comparison, but if the suffragists encountered opprobrium for being so unfeminine as to demand the vote, how much more was Josephine Butler denigrated for daring to discuss prostitution and contagious diseases in polite society.

So how can I have any reservations about this woman? It is the religion. The social historian Sarah Williams argues convincingly that religious faith and spirituality grounded Butler’s activism and that her radical sense of justice was informed by her inner life of prayer. Suffering drove her grief for others, prayer was the basis of her vocation, and a part of her action to transform society. Similarly Judith Walkowitz considers Butler’s biography of Catherine of Siena (1878) an “historical justification for her political activism.”

The mystic Catherine of Siena, allegedly worked among the sick and the poor, helped bring peace to the Republics of Italy and encouraged the return of the Papacy from Avignon. Catherine’s reported lifestyle however is frankly creepy: it involved rigorous fasting, at one time an attempt to survive on the Eucharist alone; giving away other people’s possessions; drinking pus to overcome her disgust at the sight of patients’ sores; and having visitations from Jesus inviting her to drink his blood, and more… let’s not go there. She is hardly a great advertisement for political action informed by religious belief.

And the difficulty with anyone who believes that they have a direct line to any omnipotent god lies in the danger of their beliefs being a matter of faith, convictions not open to question or reason. This may not be a problem when they are doing good, but Josephine Butler’s beliefs were not always sound. There was her arrogant assumption that Britain had a mission to make converts to Christianity across the globe, and her endorsement of British Imperialism:

looked at from god’s point of view England is the best, and the least guilty, of the nations.

This led her to a position of apologist for British action in the Second Boer War. She did not acknowledge an abhorrent battle over the Witwatersrand gold mines, to which neither Boers nor British had any legitimate claim. Instead, she bought into the jingoism which claimed that the Boers were not fit to govern, and that the British were protecting the native South Africans. Her claim that British military manoeuvres were the “work of the holy spirit,” is the more repellent in the light of the British concentration camps where 100,000 Boer civilians, mostly women and children, were kept in appalling conditions, and where 26,000 died.

Yet though, like everyone, she may be a flawed personality, and I may be alienated by her dogmatism and piety, there can be no doubting her courage, determination, and singular successes in improving the lives of working class women and girls. So, when I was in her native Northumberland, I sought her grave in Saint Gregory’s churchyard in Kirknewton to pay her the huge respects she undoubtedly merits.

Grave of Josephine Butler, Kirknewton, Northumberland

For more on Josephine Butler see Sarah C. Williams When Courage Calls: Josephine Butler and the Radical Pursuit of Justice for Women (2024)

Brought Down by a Whirlwind, a Highwayman, and a Biddax

By Gravedigger

On February 1, 2026

In Sticky Endings

The Whirlwind

Despite its location in the rather ordinary town of Reading, and the encroachment of some ugly modern architecture at its boundaries, the graveyard surrounding Saint Laurence church has a quiet charm. To one side is the pretty Hospitium of Saint John, once the pilgrims’ dormitory of the twelfth century abbey. In Spring there are daffodils, primroses, and cherry blossom, and it is an agreeable place to be. Nonetheless Henry West would undoubtedly have preferred not to have arrived there quite so early in his life.

Saint Laurence churchyard, Reading, an agreeable place to be

In 1840 the Great Western Railway, engineered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, arrived in Reading. This was its terminus until a year later when it reached Bristol. The building of the line had not been without tragedies: men had died making the sixty feet deep, two mile long cutting at Sonning. But by March the track was complete. Six days before Reading station was due to open Henry West, a twenty-four-year-old carpenter, was working on the roof of the station lantern. A freak whirlwind tore off a section of the roof, and Henry West was killed.

The horizontal wooden grave board which denotes his burial place was erected by his fellow workmen. A wooden marker of this type is relatively unusual but, softer and more muted than the more common stone markers, it seems an appropriate choice for a young man.

Of course, timber weathers more rapidly, and the grave board was renewed by Henry’s brother in 1862, and by his niece in 1924, until in 1971 the town council took responsibility for it.

IN MEMORY OF HENRY WEST
Who lost his life in a WHIRLWIND at the GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY STATION, READING
on the 24th of MARCH 1840 Aged 24 Years

The wooden grave board amongst the stone grave markers

After detailing his age and the circumstances of his death, the board bears a verse:

Sudden the change, in a moment fell and had no time to bid my friends farewell,

Yet hushed be all complaint, ’tis sweet, ’tis blest, to change Earth’s stormy scenes for Endless rest,

Dear friends prepare, take warning by my fall, so shall you hear with joy your Saviour’s call.

It is not a sentiment which I can share, I think a young man of twenty-four might have favoured a few more stormy scenes, but perhaps it offered some consolation to his friends and family.

The Highwayman

Chew Magna in Somerset provides a more rural but far from rustic setting. Despite a population of little over a thousand, the village boasts four pubs, one with a Michelin star, a seafood restaurant and bar, a café, a wine shop, a delicatessen, a butcher, a small supermarket, a bakery, florist, gift shop and pottery. Large period houses line the high street. There is nothing new about this affluence: the Bishops of Bath and Wells established a summer palace here, and Chew Magna grew rich on the medieval wool trade. Later Bristol merchants built their houses here. No surprise then that there were always rich pickings for those on the wrong side of the law.

In Saint Andrew’s churchyard, William Fowler’s headstone recalls the violent death of the thirty-two-year-old farmer at the hands of a highwayman. Like pirates and smugglers, highwaymen tend not to be so romantic in reality as they are in stories. In 1814 William Fowler was shot on Dundry Hill as he returned home from Bristol. Following an inquest held in the Pelican Inn, Benjamin Bennett was found guilty of his murder and imprisoned in Ilchester gaol.

William Fowler’s headstone reads,

Sacred

To the Memory of

Mr. WILLIAM FOWLER

of this Parish, who was

Shot by an Highwayman

on Dundry Hill

June 14^th, 1814

Aged 32 years

Also of GRACE his wife

Who died Augst. 25^th 1839

Aged 55 years

Little else is known of William Fowler although Chew Valley Films have produced a short film, Death on Dundry, dramatizing the incident, and a follow-up detailing the recent restoration of the grave.*

The Biddax

More is known of Richard Roskruge, buried in the churchyard of Saint Anthony in Meneage in Cornwall in 1797. As his stone recalls he was killed by a blow to his head with a biddax, which sounds disturbingly like a plot line in Midsomer Murders.

THIS STONE

Is dedicated to the Memory of

Richard Roskruge

who was

Killed when in the Execution

of his Office as Surveyor of the

Highways by a Blow on his Head

with a Biddax. 14^th August

1797 aged 66

Years

Roskruge had been appointed as Surveyor of Highways by the parish. Parishes were designated with keeping their roads in good repair, and to this end every man owning land valued at more than fifty pounds was required to provide labour and tools for six days every year. The Surveyor was responsible for organising this, and it did not make him popular.

Indeed, it led to a quarrel with John Rashleigh, a neighbouring farmer who was responsible for the biddax, a Cornish name for a pickaxe or mattock, attack. Roskruge did not die immediately and was able to identify his attacker who he claimed, “had a corrosive (a grudge) against him.” Rashleigh however fled the scene and was never caught or charged.

Roskruge’s widow chose his epitaph:

Ah! Rueful Fate! Beneath in dust I lie,

Doomed by a cruel ruffian’s hand to die:

By a merciless blow he struck my brain so sure

That death ensued and lo! I am no more.

But this is not what we see on the grave, for the vicar, Reverend Polwhele, persuaded her to accept the more conciliatory:

Doomed by a neighbour’s erring hand to die

For him my spirit breaths from heaven a sigh,

O! while Repentant Prayers the dead atone,

Be mine to waft them to the Eternal Throne.

Thirty years later Roskruge’s wife was buried beside him; there was only just space to squeeze her name on at the base of the stone, so sadly there are no more edifying verses.**

*The film can be seen on YouTube, Death on Dundry, Chew_Valley_Films.

**For more detail see: “A discourse preached at the parish church of Manaccan in consequence of two melancholy events on the 27^thAugust 1791,” a sermon which the vicar had printed. The second melancholy event was a violent storm four days after the murder.

https://www.cornishbirdblog. >the-murder-of-richard-roskruge

John Pitt, An Old Man Full of Years

By Gravedigger

On January 18, 2026

In Noted for Longevity, Saints

For blog number one hundred, let me introduce you to John Pitt. When he died he was one hundred and one years old, and he had lived in three centuries. Admittedly this is a tenuous link. Moreover I know little else about him. I did however take some trouble to track him down in the churchyard of Saint Juthware and Saint Mary, in the village of Halstock in Dorset. The village has a population of only 420, is surrounded by working farms, and accessed by tortuous lanes. Following recent storms, the latter were flooded last week. Faced with small lakes of uncertain depth my normal, rational reaction would be to retreat, but since this would have meant reversing down long, narrow, winding tracks with the added possibility of running into a tractor or hedge trimmer, I took a deep breath, metaphorically closed my eyes, and ploughed on. I weathered the waters but would undoubtedly still be making futile circuits of the Dorset byroads were it not for the wonders of google maps and satellite navigation.

So here he is, John Pitt born in Halstock in 1799. He worked as a shoemaker. In 1823 he married Tryphena Garrett, and after her death married again to a widow, Mary Tucker, in 1865. He died in 1901 in Sherborne Workhouse, a cruel but still common destiny in the early twentieth century for those who outlasted their working lives. His gravestone was erected by public subscription, perhaps by parishioners impressed by his longevity.

The carved ivy leaves found at each point of the cross on the upper part of the stone were a popular symbol of immortality. Today they are being superseded by the real thing, which I had to peel off to decipher the inscription on the base.

His epitaph reads:

IN
MEMORY OF
JOHN PITT
NATIVE OF THIS PARISH
BORN JAN. 26. 1799
DIED JAN. 20. 1901
HE DIED IN A GOOD OLD AGE, AN
OLD MAN FULL OF YEARS

The quotation is from Genesis 25, 8. I looked it up. It refers to the death of Abraham, who, according to the previous verse, lived to be 175 years old, thus outclassing John Pitt, and embroiling biblical scholars in serpentine conjectures.

While paying my respects to John Pitt, I had become curious about the identity of the church’s titular saint, Juthware. The earliest records of her existence come from the fifteenth century Sherborne Missal and John Capgrave’s Nova Legenda Angliae, but they place her in the eighth century. Various retellings of her life mix grim fairy tale tropes with the prurient enthusiasm of Christian hagiography for virgin martyrs.

According to these stories, Juthware was a pious girl with a jealous stepmother. After the death of her father Juthware began to suffer chest pains due to her sorrow and the austerities to which she subjected herself with prayer and fasting. Seizing her chance, the wicked stepmother began to spread rumours, telling her son that his half-sister was a fallen woman bearing an illegitimate child. To make this convincing, she slaughtered a lamb, fed its carcass to the wolves in the woods, then led her son to the bloodied remains telling him that they were Juthware’s child.

Meanwhile she had feigned sympathy with her stepdaughter, advising her to apply a poultice of two soft cheeses to ease the pains in her breasts. As Juthware walked to church the cheeses melted and seeped through her clothing, enabling her stepmother to claim that it was breast milk.

Convinced by this calumny, her stepbrother beheaded Juthware outside the church. But milk rather than blood flowed from her wounds, and she picked up her head, walked into the church, and placed the head on the altar as an offering to god. A spring of pure water burst forth where the head had fallen.

Juthware’s relics were translated in the tenth century to Sherborne Abbey where they were venerated until they were destroyed at the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Today she is celebrated in the east window of the former abbey, now a parish church.

She was also remembered when around 1700 a public house opened in Halstock bearing the name Ye Quiet Woman, and with a painted sign of Juthware with her head tucked under her arm. Thomas Hardy took the name for his fictional public house in The Return of the Native.

The pub closed only in the 1990s after almost three hundred years. Although the name is offensive, I regret that I never saw it. But at least, with the aid of Hardy’s novels, I can imagine John Pitt in its dimly lit, smoky interior, sitting on a wooden bench near the fireplace, supping his ale amongst the reddlemen, furze cutters, shepherds, tranters, carriers, and charcoal burners who peopled the village.

Gainsborough and Zoffany: an Excursion to Kew and Brentford

By Gravedigger

On January 4, 2026

In Artists

It took me some time to cross the South Circular, a vicious road which hurtles from its junction with the North Circular and the M4 at Chiswick, across the Thames via Kew Bridge, and south through Kew and Putney, before veering on a wild course east through Clapham, Dulwich, and Lewisham, to end at the Woolwich ferry. In what was once the hamlet of Kew it severs Kew Green in two, leaving Saint Anne’s church, which originally sat in the centre of the green, stranded in the western half. Saint Anne’s was built in 1714 as a chapel of ease and has been extended several times, but my purpose in manoeuvring across the A205 was not to see the church but the raised churchyard which surrounds it on three sides, and in particular the graves of two eighteenth century painters: Gainsborough and Zoffany.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) and Johan Zoffany (1733-1810), both founder members of the Royal Academy, were phenomenally successful in their lifetimes. They had little else in common, apart from fortuitously ending up in the same burial ground: Gainsborough had requested burial there to be close to his friend and fellow artist Joshua Kirby, and Zoffany was resident in the parish, living on the opposite side of the river at Strand on the Green. In Britain Gainsborough’s star has never faded, but Zoffany’s reputation has been more inclined to fluctuation.

Grave of Gainsborough, St. Anne’s, Kew. It has been restored twice, in 1835 and 2012

With Gainsborough are his wife and nephew, Gainsborough Dupont, who was his sole assistant

“His Widow caused this Tomb to be erected as a Memorial of her Affection”

With Zoffany are his wife and grand daughter, Laura, who died at nine months: “This lovely bud so young so fair called hence by early doom. Just came to show how sweet a flower in Paradise would bloom.”

Born in Sudbury, in Suffolk, Gainsborough studied art in London. On his return to Ipswich, he enjoyed a very modest success with his landscapes and small head portraits of local merchants and squires. Only when he moved to Bath in 1759 did his fame and popularity grow, resulting in lucrative commissions from a stylish clientele in the fashionable spa town. His portraits became larger with life-size, full-length paintings of prominent social figures: actors, playwrights, musicians, and aristocrats.

Thomas Gainsborough, *Mr. and Mrs. William Hallett, The Morning Walk*. The National Gallery.
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Thomas Gainsborough, *Mrs. Mary Robinson (Perdita)*.
The Wallace Collection.
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Gainsborough, *Queen Charlott*e. The Royal Collection.
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

But Gainsborough was inclined to be cantankerous, and he was soon complaining that he was “sick of portraits” and yearned to indulge his real passion for “landskips.” (sic)

After settling in London in 1774, he began to integrate his sitters into landscapes. And gradually the figures shifted to the margins until, in his later years, the sitters disappeared entirely, and he returned to the pure landscapes which gave him most satisfaction. Oddly, unlike his youthful works, these were rarely painted from nature but completed at night by candlelight with model landscapes set up in his studio, using stones, twigs, leaves, and mirrors.

Thomas Gainsborough, *Mr. and Mrs. Andrews*.
( pushed to the edge of the landscape)
The National Gallery
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Gainsborough, *Landscape, Suffolk.*
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

And in the Victoria and Albert museum is his strange “showbox”: sometimes Gainsborough painted landscapes with oils on glass, and backlit them with candles in the dark box to be viewed through a magnifying lens.

Gainsborough is credited as a founder member of the British landscape school, and, with Reynolds, as the dominant British portraitist of the late eighteenth century. But I have never been able to summon much enthusiasm for his work. Faced with grey powdered wigs, elaborate fussy hats and dresses, the stiff poses of his sitters, combined with the sludgy colours of the landscapes, I generally find the dogs the most attractive components of the portraits. And when, as with the famous Blue Boy, Gainsborough’s work reveals the influence of Van Dyck in both costume and technique, I find the effect positively weird.

Thomas Gainsborough, *The Blue Boy.*
The Huntington, San Marino, California.
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Zoffany’s work is so much more fun: a merry-go-round of swirling colours; wry, risqué, full of satirical allusion. And his life was as flamboyant as his paintings. Of Hungarian and Bohemian origins, he was born in Frankfurt and when he was seventeen, he walked to Rome to study art. Ten years later he was in England where David Garrick became his first major patron. His depictions of Garrick both in his theatrical performances and with his family secured Zoffany’s fame. Like Gainsborough he was in demand for portraits of actors, musicians, scientists, and society. In 1764 he was taken up as a court painter, joining the expatriate German community around George III and Queen Charlotte.

Johan Zoffany, *David Garrick as Jaffier in Venice Preserved*.
Holburne Museum.
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

He combined the exuberance of his painting with a meticulous attention to detail. Commenting on the latter, the art critic Christopher Hussey described him as “the Jane Austen of English painting,” which is apposite only so long as it applies only to his representation of teacups and saucers.

Zoffany espoused the genre of conversation pieces, adapting it specifically to produce theatrical conversation pieces, filling his huge canvasses with large casts of instantly recognisable actors.

Similarly, in The Academicians of the Royal Academy, artists jostled with models and works of art. At the request of the Royal household, he worked for five years on the Tribuna of the Uffizi, but here he came to grief for the bigoted and prudish Charlotte was shocked to recognise two notorious “finger twirlers”, a derogatory term for homosexual men, in the crowded gallery. There were no more Commissions from Charlotte.

Johan Zoffany, *The Academicians of The Royal Academy*. Royal Collection. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The two women members of the Royal Academy, Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman, appear only as portraits on the wall; women were barred from life classes on the grounds of “propriety.”

Johan Zoffany, *The Tribuna of the Uffizi.*
Royal Collection, Windsor Castle
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Unperturbed Zoffany set out for India, the paintings he produced there providing a wonderful insight into what William Dalrymple has described as the intermixing and mingling of people, culture and ideas in eighteenth century India before racial prejudices, arrogant imperial policies, and an ugly desire for British control swept all this away in the nineteenth century. Dalrymple uses a detail from Zoffany’s General William Palmer and Family for the cover of his book White Mughals; in the painting Palmer and his wife, the Mughal Princess, Bibi Faiz Bakhsh appear with their children and her sisters. In Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, Zoffany portrays a fight between the prize cockerel of the royal family of Awadh and that owned by East India Company men, a painting in which he and his friends also featured.

Johan Zoffany, *Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match*.
Tate Britain
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

He painted an altar piece of the Last Supper for Saint John’s church in Kolkata, using local merchants as models for the apostles, a Greek Orthodox priest as a model for Jesus and, more controversially, the Police Magistrate Blaquiere for Saint John. Blaquiere who had feminine good looks and enjoyed cross dressing, had frequently used female disguise in successfully apprehending bandits, but he was unpopular with some Europeans because of his indifference to Christianity and his sympathy for local religions and customs. It was however Zoffany’s modelling of Judas on William Tulloh, an auctioneer with whom he had fallen out, which landed him with a lawsuit.

As he sailed back to England, Zoffany was shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands. Dalrymple comments drily,

Lots having been drawn among the starving survivors, a young sailor was duly eaten. Zoffany may thus be said with some confidence to have been the first and last Royal Academician to become a cannibal. *

Back in England Zoffany produced a second notorious altarpiece featuring the Last Supper, this a commission from Saint Anne’s at Kew. He used fishermen from Strand on the Green as models for the disciples, modelled Peter on himself and John on his wife. Again, it was Judas who landed him in trouble; he had modelled the latter on his lawyer, who was also a churchwarden at Saint Anne’s. The church authorities refused to pay for the finished work, and he donated it instead to Saint George’s church in Brentford.

In search of the altarpiece, I crossed Kew Bridge and made for Brentford High Street, but Saint George’s had closed, being converted first into a music museum in 1963, and then, after a period of dereliction, and a delay owing to the discovery of graves under the nave, into “an exciting new gated development” with “upscale serviced apartments” in 2017. The altarpiece had been moved to Saint Paul’s, also in Brentford, where it has been relegated to a position high on the wall of a side chapel. And although I am amused by the story of its provenance, I have to admit that it is a very disappointing work. Sadly, I too would have consigned it to a dark corner.

Zoffany’s Last Supper altarpiece, St. Paul’s, Brentford

Detail: the red headed Judas on the right of the picture was modelled on Zoffany’s lawyer

But I found consolation in an excellent coffee and cake in the very welcoming Spire Café in Saint Paul’s church. Highly recommended should you find yourself in Brentford.

*William Dalrymple, White Mughals, (2002) p. 268