Author: Gravedigger Page 1 of 18

1960s planning law led to the expansion of Newtown in Powys, formerly Montgomeryshire, but the heart of the stolid little market town remains huddled in a bend of the river Severn, impervious to the late twentieth century developments which stretch beyond it. The main street is a cheerful jumble of Victorian redbrick and arts and crafts timbers; there are three museums, a contemporary art gallery, and a theatre. And outside the ruined church of St. Mary on the south bank of the river I found a jewel. For there, against a backdrop of ivy-draped stone walls, sat a splendid contrivance of wrought iron swirls and twists, as though an exotic Parisian fantasy from the Belle Epoque had been dropped into the unpretentious Welsh town.

It is the grave of Robert Owen (1771-1858), variously acclaimed as The Father of British Socialism, a Capitalist Paternalist, and the Inspiration of the Co-operative Movement.

Owen was born in Newtown, leaving school at ten years old to become an apprentice draper in Lincolnshire. After working in London and Manchester he opened and managed his own mill. In 1799 he bought the New Lanark Mill in Scotland. There 2,000 people, five hundred of them children, were employed in cotton spinning.

Conditions in cotton mills were harsh: workers, including children, worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, the machinery was dangerous, discipline brutal, and wages low. Orphans and young children from poor families were often not paid at all, receiving only basic food and a place to sleep. By this exploitation of labour mill owners accrued substantial profits and accumulated great wealth.

Owen’s approach was different. He and his partners, who included Jeremy Bentham, chose to limit themselves to a 5% return on their capital. Owen transformed the factory, introducing the eight-hour day, and campaigning for its introduction elsewhere under the slogan

Eight Hours Labour, Eight Hours Recreation, Eight Hours Rest.

Setting an example in his own mill, Owen campaigned for the introduction of child labour laws, outlawing the employment of children under ten years old. He increased wages, improved working conditions and housing, and reformed the truck system. Under the latter workers had received their pay in tokens which could only be used in the owners’ truck shops where high prices were charged for shoddy goods. Owen did not abolish the system, but his shops sold quality goods at just above wholesale price, passing on savings from bulk purchases. With the profits returned to the community, Owen’s shops were the forerunners of the Co-operative Movement later established by the Rochdale Pioneers.

Espousing the philosophy that character is not inherent, but formed by environment, Owen sought to provide a sound physical, moral, and social background for the children of his workers. At New Lanark he funded schools, including the first nursery schools in Britain for four- to six-year-olds, with a curriculum which included dancing and music.

For Owen’s workers there was the opportunity for adult education, with lectures and concerts. There was recreation on the allotments and free health care.

New Lanark was not perfect: Owen was an autocrat, his workers constantly subjected to his scrutiny, he even inspected their houses for cleanliness; the work was still hard, monotonous, and dangerous; and the Silent Monitor was an alienating presence located above each machinist. The monitor was Owen’s own invention, a four-sided block with each side painted a different colour, it was turned to represent the quality and quantity of the worker’s output.

Nonetheless New Lanark flourished, more efficient than other factories, the output reflected the better working conditions, and it achieved an international reputation. It was a reputation which Owen hoped would appeal to the self-interest of other capitalists, illustrating to them that if they extended the same care to their workers as they did to their machines they might be rewarded with greater productivity.

By the 1820s Owen had embraced the more radical ideals of Utopian Socialism. Moving to the United States, he expended his by now considerable fortune to buy up an existing town of 180 buildings and several thousand acres in Indiana. He renamed the town, previously owned by a religious group which had relocated, New Harmony. In this experimental socialist Utopia, he pursued his belief that a clean, safe environment founded on moral values and equal opportunities would foster mutual respect in a prosperous society. To this end, he poured money into schools and libraries, established communal kitchens and dining rooms, promoted scientific research and the arts.

Yet New Harmony was as spectacular a failure as New Lanark had been a success, and after two years the community was dissolved.

Accounts for the failure vary. There were disagreements within the community and suggestions that some of its members were parasitic upon others, exploiting goodwill to their own selfish advantage. In common with other self-contained communities of the time New Harmony foundered in the absence of members with practical skills. Josiah Warren, the American Philosophical Anarchist who had joined Owen at New Harmony, later rejected Owenism suggesting that self-preservation and the desire for personal property would always prove stronger instincts than commitment to the common good.

Marx, while agreeing that the working class were creating the wealth from which they were not benefitting, did not share Owen’s view that a Socialist utopia within existing society would prove its superiority over time. He reasoned that it was not possible to circumvent international capitalism with small scale communes. The overthrow of the capitalist system could only come via a revolutionary party independent of all capitalist influence.

Owen returned to London with his fortune dissipated, but his beliefs untarnished. No longer wealthy, but increasingly radical, he dedicated the rest of his life to political propaganda in support of trades unionism, the Co-operative Movement, better housing for workers, legislation to improve wages and working conditions, the abolition of child labour, aid for the unemployed, free co-educational schools, the abolition of corporal punishment, equal opportunities, the establishment of libraries and museums, and secularism. He spoke tirelessly at public meetings, churned out pamphlets and periodicals… and died penniless.

Towards the end of his life, he had returned to Newtown seeking to be buried near his parents. There were protests at the prospect of such a dangerous radical and avowedly non-Christian individual being buried in sacred ground. But by good fortune the thirteenth century church of St. Mary, having served five hundred years as the parish church of Newtown, had been abandoned two years previously after repeated flooding when the winter Severn burst its banks. With his congregation relocated to the new St. David’s, the rector proved amenable to Owen’s burial beneath the south wall outside the nave of the old church.

Forty years later Owen’s friend and fellow reformer, George Jacob Holyoake, revisited the grave to find it neglected and decaying. He exerted his influence on the Co-operative Union to restore the tabletop slate tomb and erect the ornate Art Nouveau iron railings, awash with foliage and neo-classical symbols, around it. The tomb bears the Co-op motto

Each for All, and All for Each

and a quotation from Owen himself

It is the one great and universal interest of the human race to be cordially united and to aid each other to the full extent of their capabilities.

At the dedication ceremony in 1902 Holyoake reminded the assembled trade unionists that

Due to Owen – Knowledge is Greater; Life is Longer; Health is Surer; Disease is Limited; Towns are Sweeter; Hours of Labour are Shorter; Men are Stronger; Women are Fairer; Children are Happier.

No mean achievement.

Today a public garden has been created. It runs from the riverbank, through the now roofless church whose walls are lined with old gravestones, surrounds Owen’s tomb, and spills on towards the town in a summer riot of grasses and flowers.

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

By Gravedigger

On July 20, 2025

In Dramatists

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. Helen Dawson had chosen a copy of the play as a literary prize when she was in school. When she married Osborne she gave it to him, inscribed, “And back to you.” I have no idea of the significance of the particular quotation, although it does sound like 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.

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

Author: Gravedigger Page 1 of 18

Robert Owen: Capitalist, Political Philosopher, Social Reformer.

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

Paul Julius Reuter: Truth in News

Happy Families? Connubial Bliss? True Stories?

The Partisan Necropolis, Mostar: A Tale of Two Cities