Month: September 2022

The Lost Children of Holcombe

On September 25, 2022

A long track winding through a farmyard leads to the Norman church of St. Andrew’s at Holcombe in Somerset. The medieval village surrounding the church disappeared after the plague of 1348 when survivors moved to the new village a mile away. The congregation continued to use the church until 1885, when a new church was consecrated in the village, and today the churchyard still receives burials. The old church, built of coursed rubble with a slate roof, is now under the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, and witnesses only three or four services a year. But we obtained the key from the pub in the village, and viewed the box pews, the gallery, the carved hat pegs, the painted panels bearing the ten commandments in gold lettering, and the inverted Anglo-Saxon inscription on the recycled stone in the porch.

Inverted Anglo-Saxon inscription on recycled stone in porch

Walking through the Holcombe Valley and along the streams, gathering blackberries, we caught glimpses through the trees of the tower at Downside Abbey. Returning to the graveyard we could not have witnessed a more tranquil scene, the leaves of ancient trees brushed by the soft autumn sun of a late afternoon, the older stones leaning companionably towards each other in the shadows, younger more upright ones sporting flowers.

But amidst this pastoral idyll, I found the most poignant of tombstones. A marble cross and five lambs mark the grave five children.

The inscription reads:

“In loving memory of

Bessie Pole, aged 10, Clifford Pole, aged 8

And Thomas Pole, aged 7.

Also Eveline Long, aged 11

And of Ewart Long, aged 8

Who were drowned in a pond in this parish

By the insecurity of the ice, Dec. 20 1899”

In the 1950s I was part of the last generation of children who grew up relatively free from adult constraints, roaming unhindered and unsupervised with my friends wherever we chose from dawn to dusk and beyond. So I can easily imagine those children on that December day more than half century earlier, cheeks glowing, noses pink, muffled against the cold with coats, scarves, and hats, excited by the raw December weather, one of the younger ones dropping a glove and pulling the wet wool back on with exclamations of disgust. Then, enticed by the frozen pond, daring each other to step out onto it. One of the bolder spirits, moving gingerly at first, testing the ice, then, confidence increasing, jumping on it, and calling to the others. In turn they would have stepped onto the ice, following one another to the centre, and set about constructing a slide which would grow smoother as each one slithered over it laughing and shouting with delight. Then the sudden crack of the treacherous ice, the loss of balance, contact with the icy water, the panic and frightened screams, thrashing in the freezing pond as the ice broke up all around, struggling in vain to escape the danger, reaching out for the safety of dry land. And silence. No doubt people saw them, heard them, tried to save them but the bitter water was quick and cruel.

Hundreds of us enjoyed the same pleasures on hundreds of ponds, it was part of the ritual of winter, a memory treasured in later, staider years. Sometimes the ice gave way, a momentary panic ensued, but seldom with any great harm done, usually with no greater repercussions than freezing feet and wellingtons full of water. Then at home the clandestine attempt to dry out the wet socks in front of the fire before a parental eye caught sight of them.

But no providence protected these five children, a malevolent and arbitrary fate plucked them away to a cruel death .

Over a hundred years later flowers and toys still appear on the grave and visitors fall silent when they read the epitaph.

I am surely not the only one imagining the ghostly figures on the pond, opening my mouth to call out a warning, but the words stopped as the waters close and silence ensues. Despite the warm afternoon we are all chilled by the random brutality of the grave’s story.

And yet the fates are not done, for on the other side of the grave is another plaque:

“Also of

Harcourt Morley Long,

Who was drowned at Kilmersdon Common

July 27, 1894 aged 14 months

And was buried in this churchyard.”

The words come like a physical punch. Tragedy lies at the heart of the beautiful Holcombe churchyard and no pious words can gainsay it.

An Unfortunate Encounter with The Rocket

By Gravedigger

On September 11, 2022

In Executive, Legislative and Judiciary, Sticky Endings

Trains have always been my preferred mode of transport. On the roads, whether passenger or driver, I anticipate disaster: from the BMW hovering impatiently too close to my rear bumper; from the aggressive driver overtaking on a double white line with hand on horn; from my own nervous lane changing; from poor visibility, black ice or imagined faulty brakes. On boats a different problem assails me: a poor sailor, I have been immoderately ill on the short passage halfway across the Bristol Channel from Ilfracombe to Lundy Island. I have no fear of flying, but quail at the dispiriting queues at passport control and the sweaty removing of shoes and belts at security, followed by the long hours in airless airport lounges, surrounded by fretful people and the depressing acres of lurid duty free where the scent of a hundred sickly perfumes clogs the air.

But trains offer only delight, from the aimless progress of old diesels ambling slowly cross country pulling in at stations where, in homage to Adlestrop, no one leaves and no one comes, to the sleek inter-city expresses pulling grandly out of London stations. My memories of trains are entirely happy.

In childhood the smell and sound of steam trains filling the station meant a day trip to North Wales. We settled into our compartment where the seats were upholstered like sofas, sepia photographs of seaside towns decorated the walls, and sagging rope luggage racks hung above our heads. I struggled to release the stiff leather strap which secured the carriage window and, when it fell open with a heavy thud, hung out engulfed in a cloud of smoke, inhaling the scent of burning coal and steam, waiting for the sea to appear.

On eastern European trains, I always experience a special frisson of excitement, fantasising about being a spy in Cold War days, woken at borders by men in black leather coats with hard faces and hats pulled down over their eyes demanding to see my papers, questioning my motives for travel, and removing me from the train at gun point on a trumped-up excuse of wanting the correct visa. At this point I let the fantasy fade.

And nothing can equal the romance of a sleeper. Over supper in the dining car fellow travellers urgently impart tales of their lives as though anxious to purge themselves of memories before we reach our destination. Cocooned in my bunk on Amtrak, cradled by the gentle rocking of the train, I remember fighting sleep to gaze out at an unknown, black Appalachian night, illuminated only by the occasional soft lights of an isolated home, and listening for the melancholy whistle of the train. I would have happily journeyed on to eternity.

William Huskisson was less fortunate in his experience of trains. Statesman, financier, and MP, we remember him more as the world’s first railway passenger fatality. As MP for Liverpool, and a keen advocate of the railways, he was present in 1830 at the opening ceremony of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world’s first passenger service drawn by steam locomotive. He and other dignitaries travelled on a train pulled by the Northumbrian and driven by George Stephenson. When the train stopped to take on water Huskisson was amongst those who ignored advice not to descend. He walked along to the Duke of Wellington’s carriage and stood talking to the Prime Minister. A train pulled by the Rocket, George Stephenson’s locomotive, approached on a parallel track. While others resumed their seats, hastened across the track to safety, or stood still close to the stationery coaches as the other train passed, Huskisson dithered. Twice he began to cross the track but scuttled back. Then he tried to climb into Wellington’s carriage, but the heavy door swung outwards, he fell onto the track and the oncoming locomotive mangled his leg.

With the injured man on a makeshift stretcher, Stephenson raced the Northumberland, flat out at 40mph, breaking the world speed record, to Eccles. There a surgeon attended Huskisson, but the injury proved fatal, and he died later that night.

But if the wide reporting of this incident alerted the public to the dangers of the railways, ironically it also fostered awareness of their potential. The publicity afforded by the dramatic death, the breaking of the speed record, and Huskisson’s magnificent funeral, when 69,000 people lined the route, raised the profile of rail travel, drew attention to the new high speed railway line, and proved instrumental in inaugurating the Age of Railway Mania.

Huskisson was buried in St. James Cemetery in Liverpool. One of the most romantic of cemeteries, it lies below the Anglican Cathedral but long predates the latter having opened in 1829, just in time for Huskisson. This gothic enclave lies in a former stone quarry with the cathedral towering above it on a rock outcrop. Steep, winding, stone paths designed for horse drawn funeral carriages and enclosed by high stone walls lined with old gravestones lead through a dark tunnel into the graveyard. My last visit was on a sunny evening in mid-summer, but for the full spine-tingling, preternatural experience you should descend into this phantasmagorical world on a late afternoon in November as the light is dying.

The red sandstone cathedral rears above the cemetery on St. James Mount

Huskisson’s grave lies at the centre of the former quarry marked by a circular mausoleum modelled on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.

Huskisson’s grave at the centre of the old quarry

Huskisson’s grave is modelled on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates

Small consolation perhaps for Huskisson but he does have a record number of memorials, mostly commissioned by his devoted widow Emily. There is a plaque in Eartham church near his home, a statue in Chichester Cathedral where he is resplendent in toga, and three identical statues of him sporting the robes of a Roman Senator in Pimlico Gardens at Millbank, in Duke Street, Liverpool, and in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Beside the track at Parkside outside Newton-le -Willows where the accident occurred a marble memorial tablet is a replica of the vandalised original now in the National Railway Museum in York and you can find another replica on Newton-le-Willows station. But his greatest memorial is surely his inadvertent contribution to the success of the railways.

Have mind of Huskisson when next you travel by train.