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

An Angry Young Man: John Osborne (1929-1994)

On July 20, 2025

My English teacher had been at the opening night of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, and more than a decade later conjured for us the consternation of the audience when the curtain rose on a squalid flat and its slovenly inhabitants.

Beyond the classical canon, British theatre audiences were used to the escapism of the so-called “well-made plays,” genteel country house dramas from the pens of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan. On stage a tastefully furnished drawing room would open via French windows onto a garden beyond, and cut-glass accents would deliver brittle, witty dialogue punctuated by pauses for audience appreciation.

Kitchen Sink Painters like Osborne’s contemporary, John Bratby, had already brought a new category of social realism to art, celebrating the everyday lives of ordinary people. Their canvases featured shabby prams parked in overgrown gardens; washing hanging in backyards surrounded by broken bicycles, chairs, and discarded beer bottles; wretched kitchens with chip friers, overflowing rubbish bins, and, of course, grimy kitchen sinks.

Osborne was the first of the Angry Young Men who brought working class anti-heroes to the stage in the late fifties and early sixties. The Kitchen Sink Dramas, located in cramped, low income, domestic environments, addressed issues of alienation, provincial boredom, alcohol abuse, crime, adultery, pre-marital sex, and abortion. They brought regional accents to the stage, and a radical, anarchic howl of rage against middle class privilege and a smug, autocratic Establishment.

Reviews of Look Back in Anger were mixed. The majority disliked Osborne’s play and dubbed it a failure, but notable exceptions were the theatre critics Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson. Tynan, whose vitriolic reviews had castigated what he dubbed the Loamshire plays of Rattigan and Coward, eulogised Osborne’s work:

I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.

His fervour proved prescient; the play transferred successfully, and a film version followed. When I first saw a production in the 1960s, I was enthralled, fascinated by every detail; still today I seldom contemplate a pile of ironing without remembering Jimmy Porter and Alison.

Osborne’s success continued with The Entertainer (1957). Again premiered at the Royal Court, it was a more overtly political play set against the background of the Suez crisis. The dying music hall tradition, eclipsed by rock and roll, cinema, and television, mirrored the declining influence of the British Empire supplanted by the growing ambit of the USA. Laurence Olivier played Archie Rice, the bitter, failing music hall performer, a role he repeated in the film version in 1960.

More successes followed for Osborne with Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964) and A Patriot for Me (1965).

But by the 70s Osborne had abandoned his early socialism, impassioned attacks on the monarchy, and support for CND, espousing instead conservative prejudices, bigotry, and nostalgia, even supporting Enoch Powell. He wrote for the right-wing Spectator and moved to the Shropshire countryside where he played the role of country gentleman. Returning to the Church of England and becoming a drum-beater for Anglican ritual, he approximated to a blimpish caricature of one of the stereotypes in the despised Loamshire plays.

Hindsight is a cheap skill, but looking back at Osborne’s work it seems obvious now that the conservative strain was there from the beginning. Look Back in Anger is largely autobiographical; Osborne’s alter ego Jimmy Porter is angry, but his anger is not that of constructive, political protest, but rather a whining, shouty, resentful outpouring of bile directed against a world which does not provide him with the opportunities and rewards he feels are his right.

When the play was revived at The Almeida last year, I reread it but decided not to see it again. It is a misogynistic rant. Where I remembered working class rage, I found toxic masculinity, dated and unpalatable. His autobiography reveals him in an equally sour light: vicious in his attitude towards his mother and his daughter whom he threw out when she was only seventeen; abusive towards four of his five wives- although, in fairness, they seemed able to reciprocate- jealous of their successes and presuming that they should give up their own work to tend to his needs.

Of course, Osborne was not alone in his misogyny; an unsubtle clue to the ubiquity of that persuasion in the 50s and 60s lies in the genre designation Angry Young Men. Apart from Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction and Poor Cow, the writing of angry young women was not visible.

And yet, although his repugnant attitudes are dated, and his writing sometimes shrill, Osborne can also be witty, perceptive, and clever, and the audience shock when the curtain went up on that first production at the Royal Court was one of the defining moments of twentieth century theatre. Moreover, his early kitchen sink realism opened the way for other working-class dramas, novels, films, and television. Those of us who grew up in the sixties still remember the high quality of ITV’s Armchair Theatre and the BBC’s Wednesday Play: who will ever forget Jeremy Sandford’s Cathy Come Home directed by Ken Loach?

Osborne is buried in St. George’s churchyard in the village of Clun in Shropshire beside his fifth wife Helen Dawson. The quotation on his grave

Let me know where you’re working tomorrow night – and I’ll come and see you

is spoken by Archie Rice in The Entertainer. It is his final interaction with the audience before leaving the stage, and as well as a farewell, I suspect it carries the unspoken, bitter question, “do you think you could have done any better?”

The quotation on Helen Osborne’s grave

-My feet hurt

-Try washing your socks

is an exchange between Cliff and Jimmy in Look Back in Anger, and I have no idea of its significance unless it is an expression of the disdain which both Osbornes could exercise towards other people.

But they are, undeniably, an attractive pair of graves.

Paul Julius Reuter: Truth in News

By Gravedigger

On July 6, 2025

In Journalists

Until the 1980s Fleet Street was a metonym for the national press. Giant printing presses rumbled in the basements of the newspaper offices to which reporters filed domestic and international news. The street held a magical, romantic sense of urgency. Late at night vans collected the packaged newspapers and raced them to mainline stations where they were loaded onto trains to be dispersed in the early hours of the morning at provincial halts throughout the country.

Fleet Street’s association with printing and publishing began in 1500 when William Caxton’s former apprentice, Wynkyn de Worde set up a printing press beside St. Bride’s church. Others followed, and the presence of the presses stimulated the publication of newspapers in the same street. In 1702 the first London daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, appeared. The repeal of the newspaper tax in 1855 heralded the great days of newspaper publishing, and for the next hundred- and thirty-years major newspapers made Fleet Street their headquarters.

Reuters News Agency joined them there. Paul Julius Reuter (1816-1899) had begun his working life as a bank clerk but moved into book publishing. In 1848 he had produced radical pamphlets in support of the revolutions. Following the conspicuous failure of the revolution in Berlin, he judged it politic to move to Paris where he worked for the Havas news agency, before founding his own agency in Aachen.

Aachen and Brussels were the terminal points of the German – French/Belgian telegraph line, but there was a seventy-six-mile gap in that line. Reuter used forty-five homing pigeons to bridge the divide. The pigeons, carrying financial news from the Paris Stock exchange, could complete in two hours a journey which took the train six hours.

When the telegraph line was laid in Britain in 1851, Reuter moved to an office near the London Stock Exchange, setting up a specialist financial news agency supplying information on securities, commodities, stock prices and currencies to Continental Exchanges. Now he supplemented the telegraph lines with two hundred carrier pigeons. When undersea cables were laid, he expanded his service to other continents.

In 1863 Reuter erected his own telegraph link from London to Crookhaven in SW Ireland; ships coming from America would throw cannisters containing news into the sea to be retrieved by Reuters employees and telegraphed to London. Since this was quicker than waiting for the ships to dock in London, national papers began to subscribe to Reuters Agency which diversified to provide a general news service in addition to its financial speciality.

Reuter had early established a reputation in the financial world for accuracy, rapidity, and reliability. When he expanded his service, his aim was to provide “Truth in News” with the same exacting standards of expeditious, concise, accurate reporting. His agency was the first in Europe to report Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, and the surrender of the south in the American Civil War.

After Reuter’s death the success of his agency continued: it was the first to report the Relief of Mafeking (1900); the Great War Armistice (1918); the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun (1923); the assassination of Gandhi (1948); Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin (1956); and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990).

Reuters moved from its original office to Fleet Street in 1939 to be in greater proximity to the newspapers who used its service. But less than fifty years later modern technology was leading to the replacement of hot metal printing by digital. In 1986 the News International owner Rupert Murdoch moved production of the Times and the Sun to cheaper manufacturing premises in Wapping. In doing so he also sought to break the power of the print unions, the NGA and SOGAT; all the print staff were dismissed and fresh staff brought in to operate the presses using computer aided technology.

As other newspapers followed, Fleet Street ceased to be synonymous with printing and publishing. In 1989 The Daily Express was the last newspaper to be printed there. Reuters was the last news agency to leave, moving to Canary Wharf in 2005. On the day they left a service was held in St. Bride’s, formerly the journalists’ church, in whose shadow Wynkyn de Worde had setup his printing press, and where he is believed to be buried.

Reuters lives on, today employing 2,500 journalists in two hundred locations worldwide. Its founder, Paul Julius, was buried in West Norwood Cemetery in south London, one of the Big Seven Victorian cemeteries, known in his day as the Millionaires’ Cemetery. With no small irony, given his passionate commitment to accuracy in reporting, Reuter’s own grave bears a misspelling of his name. In 2002 the agency placed a plaque beside the grave, ruefully acknowledging the error.

Grave of Paul Julius Reuter, West Norwood Cemetery.

A plaque placed at the foot of the grave ruefully acknowledges the error, adding “this mistake is ironic since accuracy has contributed to the enduring success of the news agency which he founded.”

For more on Fleet Street see https://symbolsandsecrets.london Fleet Street Legends, 22 February 2018

Happy Families? Connubial Bliss? True Stories?

By Gravedigger

On June 22, 2025

In Behind the Epitaph

At Apollonia in ancient Illyria, present day Albania, we had visited the Roman baths and theatre, the Byzantine church and the museum, and now our guide drew our attention to a particular gravestone.

CAECILIA L F

VENVSTA BYLLID

CVM LARTIDO NAISSO

MARITO SUO HIC SITA EST

CVMQVO ANNIS XXXXII

SINE QVERELLA SANCTISSIME VIXIT

For a while we were all preoccupied, trying to match dimly remembered school Latin to the words on the stele. Our guide was confident: “Here lies Cecilia alongside her husband, a couple who never quarrelled in 42 years of marriage,” he announced.

A doubtful silence ensued as we pondered the questionable veracity of this claim. The cynical feminist in me considered that the apparent harmony might only indicate that Cecelia had judged it politic to keep her opinions to herself.

“If it is true, it must have been a very dull marriage,” averred one of our group with such conviction that we considered the matter closed. But our guide, I sensed, was disappointed by our failure to take Cecelia’s amicable conjugal relations at face value and our reluctance to be charmed, as he was, by the story the stone told.

We never know if truth lies behind the wording on grave markers, especially those of private individuals where the epitaph is often their sole record. Moreover their “truth” can be a protean construct.

On the other side of Europe, in the Hampshire village of Minstead, another grave, at first sight, bears witness to another affectionate relationship. The rigors of the British climate have weathered the soft stone, but it is still possible to read it.

Sacred

To the Memory of

Thomas White

Who died 31^st Oct. 1842

Aged 81 Years.

A faithful friend, a Father dear,

A Husband lies buried here.

In love he lived, in love he died,

His life was craved but God denied.

But it is strikingly clear that a word which once preceded “Husband” has been carefully expunged. The story goes that originally the epitaph described a “faithful Husband,” but after his death village gossips advised Mrs. White of her husband’s infidelities, and she took a chisel to the erroneous adjective.

Moral: Epitaphia semper cum grano salis accipite.

The Partisan Necropolis, Mostar: A Tale of Two Cities

By Gravedigger

On June 8, 2025

In Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

Mostar’s inhabitants regarded it as an old soul that connected the two parts of the city together through a simple and friendly gesture.

Writing of the Stari Most, the bridge designed in the sixteenth century by the Ottoman architect Hajrudin, destroyed during the Bosnian war in 1993, and reconstructed in 2004, Arna Mackic continued,

Due to the city’s current extreme segregation…the connection has disappeared. The old bridge is no longer a connection but rather a separation of the city.*

Though there are still pock marked buildings and roofless carcasses with trees growing through them, the centre of Mostar today is picture-book pretty. Cafes are packed with tourists, their attention focused on the bridge in the hope of witnessing a high dive. Yet there is a dark underside to the town; the segregation of which Mackic speaks remains and is exemplified in the two schools under one roof policy, whereby Croats and Bosniaks enter by separate doors, attend segregated lessons with different teachers, and learn different versions of history and religion.

Leaving behind the riot of souvenir shops and ice cream parlours, I walked to the western outskirts of the city in search of something else. During World War II, Mostar had been known as the Red City on account of its particularly strong resistance to the Nazis. In 1965 the Serbian architect, Bogdan Bogdanovic, who had himself been a Yugoslav Partisan, designed and supervised the construction of the Partisan Necroplis to honour the 810 Yugoslav Partisans – Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, and Jews – from Mostar who had fought against the Axis powers occupying Yugoslavia and against Ustasa, the fascist organisation operating a Nazi puppet state in Croatia.

The necropolis is set on a hillside overlooking the city and Bogdanovic designed it to mirror the town, explaining that “the two cities” would forever

look each other in the eyes: the city of the dead antifascist heroes, mostly young men and women, and the city of the living, for which they gave their lives.**

Speaking of the purity of their motives and their self-sacrifice, he sought to give the young Partisans, who were mostly aged between eighteen and twenty-five, something beautiful:

I thought that the fallen Mostarian antifascist fighters, all still boys and girls so to say, have the right, at least symbolically, to the beauty of dreams…Their small superterranean city overlooked, as I had promised their families, the heart of old Mostar and the then still existing bridge built by the great architect Hajrudin, once the most beautiful and daring stone bridge in the world.**

The City of My Friends, as Bogdanovic called it, was built by stone masons from Korcula in Croatia, assisted by voluntary youth brigades. Often, they worked through the night to avoid the heat of the day, and something magical emerged. Five terraces built into the side of the hill are reached by stone staircases. On the top terrace a cosmological sundial features the sun, planets, and moon. From beneath this a fountain once cascaded down the hillside to a pool at the base of the hill, symbolising the Neretva river flowing through Mostar and the tears of the Partisans. Domestic herbs – rosemary, lavender, cistus, sage – were planted.

There was deliberately no religious, nationalist, socialist or war imagery, no symbols of any ideology, the memorial was to honour all victims of fascism. Abstract stone grave markers, which have been likened to felled trees symbolising fallen youth, were laid on the terraces, each one commemorating a partisan. The stones bore only a name, age, and place of birth and death.

Tito was present to celebrate the completion of the memorial, and as Bogdanovic had intended, it became not just a necropolis but a loved and much used park, a picnic place, a playground:

The lilting, heathen character of the Partisan Necropolis could not remain unnoticed. Its terraces were quickly seized by children, whose playful voices echoed in a choir…sometimes until deep in the night.**

In an interview in 2009 the architect recalled,

Once a girl from Mostar told me that her parents had conceived her in the Partisan Necropolis. For me it was the most beautiful thing that could have happened there.***

Bogdanovic spoke out strongly against the nationalism which tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, he was subject to defamation and physical attacks which led him to self-imposed exile in Vienna.

During the Bosnian war, between 1992-95, the memorial was severely damaged. After the war it suffered neglect, malicious vandalism, and deliberate acts of desecration. Bogdanovic wrote from Vienna in 1997,

the only thing I could still wish for is…the right to, as honorary citizen of Mostar, create a secret niche to the left of the entrance gate, to accommodate my future urn. However, it now seems like I will not be in the company of my friends that way: the gravestones have cold-bloodedly and sadistically been crushed in a stone grinder. All that is left of my original promise is that the former city of the dead and the former city of the living still look at each other, only now with empty, black, and burned eyes.**

Bogdanovic died in Vienna in 2010. He was cremated there and his ashes returned to Belgrade where they were buried in the Sephardic cemetery next to his monument to the Jewish victims of fascism.

Partial repair and reconstruction of the Partisan Necropolis took place in 2005-2006 but later it was again subject to rubbish dumping, and destructive defacement. Overgrown and littered with beer bottles, it was described as a dangerous place, host to drinking and drug taking, and people were advised against visiting. In 2022 nationalist graffiti and swastikas, Ustase symbols, slurs against Bosniaks, and vilifications of Tito appeared, and the grave markers were again deliberately smashed. A British newspaper article in June 2023 reported,

When anti-fascists visit the site to lay flowers they need police protection, as there have been clashes with right wing groups on commemoration days… It can be dangerous even to talk about the necropolis now, never mind to visit it.****

And yet I had visited the Partisan Necropolis less than a month before that article was published. There were no signs to guide me and the unmarked approach from the road lay across an unpromising, scrubby expanse where a couple of cars appeared abandoned rather than parked. It was hot, silent, and uninviting. But beyond the inauspicious lower gateway, any sense of unease dissipated. Two men were determinedly scything the overgrown vegetation, and twenty metres above me I could see the terraces reached by worn paths winding through the trees. It was like entering an ancient site dominated by a great theatre.

Weeds grew through the pathways, the fountain and pool were dry, and the stone grave markers still lay smashed on the terraces. But the evil graffiti had been removed and the entire site cleaned of debris.

In two hours walking around and sitting in the sunshine, I encountered few other people: a couple of other tourists, two local people walking their dog, a small group of teenage boys. For all the desecration caused by the despicable attacks, it remains a beautiful place, albeit a quiet, melancholy beauty today, with none of the joyful, exuberance of its early days. Sead Dulic describes it:

This is our statue of Liberty, our triumphal arch, out Taj Mahal. It is a celebration of life and Mostar. It was built as a city of the dead mirroring the city of the living for a city that lost so much.*****

The fountain was shaped as four layered gears, symbol of a driving force. The Necropolis overlooks old Mostar

Grave markers placed on the terraces have been scattered, crushed, and broken

Again “the gravestones have cold bloodedly and sadistically been crushed”

They have been likened to felled trees symbolising fallen youth

Each stone bears only the name, age and places of birth and death of the Partisan

Mostar may still be a city divided. Fascist groups may wreak repeated destruction on the stones of the Partisan Necropolis and mount ugly, violent attacks on their political opponents. But though bruised and battered the Necropolis is still there, still treasured, still embodying the memory of the Partisans, their bravery, their self-sacrifice. Visit them if you are in Mostar, however short your time there, for despite Bogdanovic’s late despair, their necropolis remains not just a memorial to their courage and ideals but an inspiration and encouragement, a symbol of hope for a better world.

And although Bogdanovic’s ashes may lie in Belgrade, if there is such a thing as a spirit, his is surely here alongside his comrades.

*******

*Arna Macki, The Partisan Necropolis: Mostar’s Empty Stare, 6 October 2015, https://failedarchitecture.com>the-partisan-necropolis

**Bogdan Bogdanovic, The City of My Friends, translated by Arna Mackic and reprinted in The Partisan Necropolis.

***Quoted in Mostar, Spomenik Database, https://spomenikdatabase.org >Mostar. There is also more information about the architecture of the necr0polis and some wonderful photographs here.

****Chris Leslie, Protecting Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Anti-Fascist Legacy, 2 June 2023, https://www.theguardian .com>Protecting Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Anti-fascist Legacy

*****Sead Dulic, theatre director and head of the National Association of Anti-Fascists, quoted by Chris Leslie, above.

Rosa, My Beloved Deux Chevaux

By Gravedigger

On May 26, 2025

In Inventors, Industrialists and Innovators

My first car was a Deux Chevaux, and it was love. It was a hasty purchase. I had taken my first teaching job in the Kent town of Ashford and rented a cottage in a village six miles away. There was no bus service. With days to go before term started, I handed over £50 to an American tourist on Crystal Palace Camp Site. He had been travelling around Europe, and when we first met, Rosa was adorned with several months’ worth of his washing.

I called her Rosa after Rosa Luxemburg and Rosa Parks. She had a 602cc engine, rectangular headlights with halogen globes, a gear stick which came horizontally out of the dashboard with a handle curving upwards, a canvas roll back sunroof, and four doors. Also, a selection of scratches, dents, and rips in her upholstery; Rosa had seen life.

André Citroën’s brief in 1948 had been to produce a low cost, low fuel consumption car with simplicity of maintenance. It was to be capable of transporting four people and 50kg of farm goods to market at 50km/hour. Given the lack of good, paved roads in France at the time, it was further suggested that the car should be able to cross a freshly ploughed field with a full basket of eggs on the passenger seat without breaking them.

The motoring journalist LJK Setright lauded

the most intelligent application of minimalism ever to succeed as a car,*

and described it as a vehicle of

remorseless rationality.**

Peter Elsworth was less complimentary asking,

Does it come with a can opener?***

My Rosa came with a left-hand drive, and she registered her velocity in kilometres. This, combined with some powerful rattles, gave a satisfying delusion of speed. Her stickers affirmed her commitment to saving the whales and advancing nuclear disarmament. We became part of a special club, tooting and waving to our fellow 2CVs and their drivers, whether peering through a wet windscreen behind furious wipers or exulting in the sunshine with the roof rolled down. And together we learned that braking on icy roads is not a clever idea.

We took a summer holiday in Brittany where Rosa indulged her Gallic temperament, regularly stopping without warning. She revelled in the attentions of her fellow countrymen whose national pride required them to huddle around her engine discussing her symptoms until they coaxed her into life again.

By the time we caught the ferry home she was running as smoothly as a Deux Chevaux can…provided she was given a push start. The deckhands on Brittany Ferries took this in their stride, and we rolled on and off the ferry in style. With markedly less charm the British customs officer demanded that her engine be switched off while he inspected the contents of her boot, but he backed down when advised that he too might find himself obliged to push.

After a couple of years in Kent, Rosa and I moved on to an eccentric girls’ boarding school then housed at New Wardour Castle in Wiltshire. The staff rivalled the girls for delinquent behaviour. After driving my head of department to the pub one evening, Rosa’s headlights failed on the return journey. My head of department had no intention of walking home. “Just drive very slowly,” he ordered, and producing a ridiculously small torch he hung out of the window attempting to shine it in our path as we inched along the narrow lanes.

When I bought my first flat in Bath, I had no need of Pickfords, I had only to load Rosa up three times and we had conveyed everything I owned to our new home.

Rosa’s insouciant disregard for double yellow lines sometimes caused problems

Rosa had always liked to park in front of a stately pile, and in Bath she was particularly partial to The Circus and The Royal Crescent. But she had not been young when we met, and now she was growing old. I had to keep a steak hammer in the glove compartment, for on cold mornings the key would not turn in the ignition until I hammered on the ignition box. Yet Rosa still smiled and preened when having watched this performance other motorists would come over to see if we needed help or the loan of “proper tools.”

Rosa always liked to park in front of a stately pile,

even when she had to share that space with others.

Rosa’s ultimate pleasure: parked in The Royal Crescent, on a yellow line with a nervous passenger

As the last MOT loomed, we both knew that it would be fatal. We were not surprised when the garage mechanic listed the reasons: rusting floor, failing brakes, bald tyres, dodgy electrics. My Rosa had come to the end of the road.

There have been other cars but only Rosa ever held my heart, and years later in Paris I made a special visit to Montparnasse Cemetery to thank André Citroën for the joy he gave me by producing the most magical little car ever.

Grave of André Citroën, Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris

*LKJ Selright, Drive On! A Social History of the Motor Car, Granta, p.173

**LKJ Selright, The Spirit of Motoring, Past, Present and Future, in The Daily Telegraph, December 27, 2003

***Peter Elsworth in The New York Times.