Author: Gravedigger Page 12 of 16

When I was young I cherished a secret dream of becoming a civil engineer. Secret, because I knew, that with only modest ability in mathematics and no talent at all for drawing, this was clearly not where my future lay. But I longed to build bridges, I could imagine nothing more satisfying than being able to create those solid constructions which hang, as if by magic, in the air. Periodically some prosaic soul tries to explain to me the finer points of compression and tensile forces, torsion and shear, the importance of abutments and piers. But I prefer the enchantment of the unknown, the romance of the little understood; I am bewitched by the illusion of graceful weightlessness.

And no bridges hold a greater place in my affections than the hardworking Victorian bridges strung out across the Thames in London, each one with its own stories, myths, and idiosyncrasies.

In West London in 1872 William Tierney Clarke designed one of the world’s first suspension bridges spanning the river between Hammersmith on the north bank and Barnes on the south. After a boat collided with it in 1884, Bazalgette rebuilt it in cast iron, with large chains supporting its roads and walkways, using Tierney Clarke’s original pier foundations. Urban myth has it that Harrods funded the magnificent dark green and gold paintwork of Hammersmith Bridge to match their nearby furniture depository and their Knightsbridge store. It could have provided subtle and splendid advertising, but the truth is that Bazalgette chose the colours before either of the Harrods buildings were completed.

Tierney Clarke’s memorial in St. Paul’s, Hammersmith, with engraving of his original Hammersmith Bridge

with distinctive green and gold paintwork

The Albert Bridge is a pure sugar plum in pink, blue and green. Illuminated by 4,000 bulbs at night, this ethereal, highly ornamented, and richly decorated bridge stretches between Chelsea and Battersea. Once known as the “Trembling Lady” because of a tendency for its fragile structure to vibrate when subject to excessive traffic and immoderate footfall, it still carries signs at its entrances warning troops to brake step when they cross. In 1973 a proposal in The Architectural Review floated the idea of converting the bridge into a landscaped public park with a pedestrianised footpath across the river. This scheme had the backing of no lesser luminaries than John Betjeman, Sybil Thorndike, Laurie Lee, and Robert Graves, all of whom just happened to live nearby. Successful opposition from the RAC saw their campaign fronted by the unlikely figure of Diana Dors.

Lambeth’s five-span steel arches and the seven-arch cast iron structure of Westminster Bridge with its gothic detailing by Charles Barry, sport red and green paint respectively, reflecting their positions at the southern and northern ends of the Houses of Parliament where the Lords sit on red leather benches and the Commons on green. The stone pinecones surmounting the obelisks at either end of Lambeth Bridge are sometimes mistaken for pineapples, leading to fallacious claims that they were placed in tribute to Lambeth resident John Tradescant who grew the first pineapple in Britain.

More than a century after these Victorian bridges were built, the same oscillations that hounded the Albert Bridge caused the Millennium Bridge, less romantically designated “the Wobbly Bridge,” to close, only two days after it had opened, for modifications. This glorious steel “blade of light” designed jointly by the Arup Group, Foster and Partners, and Anthony Caro links Bankside and the City, connecting the Tate Modern to the glorious terminating vista of St. Paul’s. Walking across it is pure joy, but I rue the demise of the extra frisson which the oscillations provided.

The Millenium Bridge links the Tate Modern …

I am surely not the only one to take special delight in Horace Jones’ Tower Bridge linking the Tower of London and Southwark. Completed in 1894, it is the most immediately recognisable of the London bridges with its towers and rising bascules opening to let tall boats pass from the Lower Pool of London to the Upper Pool. In 1952 a relief worker raised the southern bascule before the security guard had rung the warning bell and closed the gates to traffic. The driver of a no. 78 bus found himself on the rising bascule. With great presence of mind, he accelerated, and the bus leapt onto the northern bascule which had not yet begun to rise. He later explained that he had been a tank driver during the war and that since a tank would have had no trouble in jumping the gap he decided to see if a double decker bus could do the same. A delightful short Pathe film shows a representative of the City Corporation presenting the driver with a reward, £10 and a day off work, for his quick thinking and unruffled response.

(See towerbridge.org.uk/discover/history/bus-jump and scroll down).

Seeking to pay homage to all the bridge builders, I sought out Horace Jones as their representative, and I confess to a little disappointment on locating his rather bleak, austere grave in West Norwood Cemetery.

But Horace Jones’ spirit lies not in the graveyard but in the enchantment he left for us every time the bascules of Tower Bridge rise. And for as long as their preternatural structures hover weightless in space, all the bridge builders have fitting memorials.

The Merry Cemetery:The Dacian Way of Death

By Gravedigger

On December 18, 2022

In Children, Sticky Endings

I have never shared the view that cemeteries are gloomy places but will allow that they may be tinged with sadness. In the Northern Maramures region of Romania however is a cemetery like no other: The Merry Cemetery (Cimitir Vesel) at Sapanta. Here the celebration of life takes precedence over the grief of death, and death itself is no solemn affair.

The Dacian Culture may have inspired these attitudes. Dacians, early inhabitants of these lands, believed in the immortality of the soul and for them the moment of death was one of exaltation, filled with supreme happiness in anticipation of a better life. Herodotus describes how the Dacians were fearless in battle and joyful when dying, going laughing to their graves to meet their god, Zalmoxis.

The forest of oak headstones in the Sapanta cemetery is the work of the wood carver Stan Ion Patras. Between 1935 and his death in 1977 he carved over eight hundred commemorative tablets, including his own. He painted these singular memorials in vivid, symbolic colours. Predominant is the radiant, deep “Sapanta blue” speaking of the sky, hope, freedom. Green represents life, yellow fertilility, red passion, and black death.White doves symbolise the soul and a blackbird hints at a suspicious death.

On the grave markers Patras carved portraits of the occupants and naive pictures recording their occupations.

There is a distinctly gendered division of labour:

Below the painted carvings Patras inscribed epitaphs, written in the first person, enabling the inhabitants of the graves to tell the stories of their lives. Far from lauding them or whitewashing them with virtues, the whimsical, witty doggerel records indiscretions, shortcomings, weaknesses, faults, foibles, flaws, failings, and infidelities with cheerful insouciance. Even the modes of death, drowning, drinking, and a disproportionate number of car accidents, provide a source of humour. And the soul who was murdered and buried without his head fails to disrupt the prevailing merriment:

Yet even in Sapanta I found one grave which broke with the relentless good cheer. The speaking poem of a three-year-old girl killed by a taxi read:

May you burn in hell

Taxi driver from Sibiu!

In all of Romania

You could find no other place

But here, near our house

To stop and hit me

And bring grief to my parents.

For as long as they live they will weep for me.

Three -year-old girl killed by a taxi from Sibiu

But habitually the latter day Dacians continue to greet death with equanimity; Patras’ apprentice, Dumitru PopTincu, continues his master’s work, and the burgeoning cemetery cocks a defiant snook at mortality.

The Thames is Capricious. We Escape Leptospirosis; Others are Less Fortunate

By Gravedigger

On December 4, 2022

In Children, Drowned

I had long harboured a desire to swim in the River Thames. Conscious of my own limitations, this was no ambitious plan to cover the length (over two hundred miles, I don’t think so) nor to venture into the tidal waters below Teddington Lock. The Port of London Authority strongly discourages both activities with dire warnings of powerful tides overpowering the strongest of swimmers; eddies and undertows sucking them under in seconds; danger from water traffic in the form of clippers, ferries and working boats; and the biting cold of the water leading to crippling breathing spasms.

Something more modest then, a gentle width somewhere in the Middle Reaches of the Thames. Here opinion was divided. Public Health England warned of gastrointestinal diseases from contaminated surface run off, and from water containing raw sewage routinely pumped into the river after heavy rains; the possibilities of contracting Leptospirosis or Weil’s disease from animal urine; high recorded levels of microplastics in the water; and dangers of collision with leisure traffic. Enthusiasts, by contrast, rhapsodised about an arcadian Thames: a sparkling , idyllically pastoral river with 125 species of fish, over four hundred invertebrates, and flourishing flora.

By dint of slightly overemphasising the latter perspective, I persuaded a friend to accompany me, and we took to the river at Clifton Hampden. Our respective partners, both non-swimmers and of the firm conviction that immersion, in any volume of water greater than that required to fill a decent sized bathtub, is a supreme folly, sat on the bank guarding the clothes. They wore expressions which said No Good Will Come of This.

And it must be confessed that we entered the water with some trepidation, feeling our way cautiously out into the river, wary of what lay beneath our feet, dreading that moment when the cold-water hit our stomachs, alert to the dangers from passing boats, and with mouths firmly closed. But once in the river the pleasure of swimming, pushing weightlessly through the water, took over. It was not cold, it did not look particularly polluted, and folk waved cheerfully from passing boats. Across and back, and we turned around, enthusiastic to repeat the exercise.

Cautiously we set out: I let Kay take the lead… there might be something nasty under foot

Later in the pub we regaled our sceptical partners with the delights of Wild Swimming. But there was a sobering coda. Walking along the Thames Path a few miles downriver, we paused to admire the thirteenth century flint church of Saint Bartholomew at Lower Basildon, and in the churchyard discovered the hauntingly beautiful grave of Harold and Ernest Edward Deverell. Aged fifteen and sixteen, they drowned while bathing close by in 1866. The marble sculpture of the two boys, in their old- fashioned bathing trunks, and looking far younger than their teenage years, is heart-rending.

Looking much younger than their teenage years

They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided

A guide to the church records starkly: “ One brother got into difficulties and the other went to his aid: sadly, both drowned.”

There is a small risk even in those little adventures which look quite safe on a summer’s afternoon, and the boys’ deaths were tragic. Yet too much caution renders human existence a tepid affair, with little point to life if we act in constant fear of its end.

Dusty Springfield: the Dark Side of the Sixties

By Gravedigger

On November 20, 2022

In Music Makers

I suspect that in every generation sexagenarians glance wistfully over their shoulders and peer through their rose-coloured spectacles, bringing into fuzzy focus the years of their youth, inevitably a time of hope and optimism, when everything was lighter, brighter, and more exciting. But surely this temptation has never been greater than for those of us who grew up in the Swinging Sixties. The soubriquet was not some post hoc addition, for even at the time it was in use, applied especially to Swinging London with its psychedelic fashions, Carnaby Street and Biba, and the London Sound: The Rolling Stones; The Who; The Kinks. London swung, it led the world – effortlessly.

Even in the provinces the glamour rubbed off. As I walked through the town to school each day, it was as though I were walking through a theatre with spotlights being switched on all around me. The grey-drab fifties were receding before an onslaught of colour. No more the dirty yellow smog, no more soot-stained buildings, no more bomb sites and derelict houses. Every day brought change: bomb sites were cleared, skips appeared outside empty houses, fresh paint brought shop fronts to life and boutiques mushroomed throughout the town. My previously monochrome world was transformed into a glorious technicolour environment.

After school we headed to Granny’s Garden, our favourite boutique, where the young shop assistants perused the rails of mini-skirts, skinny ribbed jumpers, lace blouses, feather boas, ponchos, PVC raincoats and velvet jackets as eagerly as we did, and no one minded how many outfits we tried on in the communal changing rooms. We would emerge in our finery and bop around the shop, casting covert glances at ourselves in the many mirrors, as the latest pop music pulsated through the building. And no one seemed to care if, as was commonly the case, we left without making any purchases.

A far cry this from the two prim department stores which had previously held a monopoly as purveyors of frocks. Their air may have been headily scented, but such a pall of silence prevailed that we had automatically lowered our voices to a whisper on entering. Middle-aged assistants guarded goods behind counters and clothes from the few racks were surrendered reluctantly with a careful counting of hangers.

Discos replaced dances: you could tell the difference because the music was louder and faster, a disco ball reflected the lights, and the over thirties gave us a wide berth.

No pop star epitomised this emergence from the chrysalis of the fifties as vibrantly as Dusty Springfield. With her abundant blond bouffant; panda-eyed with heavy black eye liner, eyeshadow, and mascara; her makeup completed with a pale pink lipstick; and all this sitting atop glittery, sparkly, frilly dresses, she was the Swinging Sixties, the glamorous girl we all aspired, hopelessly, to be. With a breathy sensuality which struck envy into our hearts, her songs accompanied us through the sixties: “ I Only Want To Be With You;” “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me;” “Son of a Preacher Man.”

And yet, and yet, if I remove my pink spectacles and turn to face the sixties head on, was it all quite so bright and shiny?

Even before Kate Millett took us by the hand in 1970 (the year of the publication of Sexual Politics) and guided us towards an understanding of Modern Patriarchy, articulating the need for a Second Wave of Feminism, jarring notes were already penetrating our consciousness.

Casual sexism labelled young women “dolly birds” or just “ birds.” Infantalising and undermining, the derogatory terms implied that an interest in clothes and makeup was incompatible with intellect. Meanwhile, even in academic schools, it was not unusual for a cohort of girls to leave at sixteen to go to secretarial college. One of my friends took this route and subsequently hosted a party peopled mainly by her new college friends and their soul mates, The Young Farmers. After one of the latter had tried, unsuccessfully, to stick his tongue down my throat, he informed me: “It’s not very attractive for a girl to have too many O-levels. Girls should concentrate on looking attractive, getting married and entertaining for their husbands.” Too my shame I was left speechless. A short-lived boyfriend, with the air of one who considers himself emancipated, opined “I approve of women working…except when the children are young of course.” A friend’s father eyeing his daughter and me ruefully, expostulated: “But what will you girls do if you meet millionaires on the tube tomorrow, and they ask you to marry them, and you have to admit that you can’t cook?” We rolled our eyes at each other: there were just too many non sequiturs there for us to engage with the question at all.

Even after the 1967 Family Planning Act, GPs were often reluctant to prescribe the pill for unmarried women. In the last weeks of school, a GP was called in to give us The Talk: oozing with self-importance, he left us in no doubt that it was our responsibility not to enflame the passions of young men who might not be able to control themselves, and concluded with pompous self-satisfaction that he had never prescribed the pill for any unmarried girl without insisting that she first return in the company of boyfriend and parents to discuss whether this course of action was wise. I wondered even then how many unwanted pregnancies his sanctimonious attitude had facilitated.

And when the Abortion Act, making abortion legal up to the point of twenty eight weeks gestation, came into effect in April 1968, there were still a lot of hoops to be jumped through and care was needed to give the right answers to the two doctors and the counsellor who had to be convinced that this course of action was strictly necessary.

Barbara Castle, then one of only twenty-four women in Parliament, was not able to get the Equal Pay Act passed until 1970, and then its implementation was delayed for a further five years.

Not so rosy then, life for women and girls in the sixties.

Nor for other minority groups: the Race Relations Act of 1965 failed to address issues of discrimination in housing and unemployment, and while the follow up legislation of 1968 may have prohibited overt racism, racist violence by far-right groups continued and casual prejudice against those with darker skins was widespread.

Similarly, it was not until 1967 that the Sexual Offences Act legalised homosexual practices between men over the age of twenty-one. For much of the sixties loving the wrong person could make you a criminal. Even after the act was passed widespread homophobia remained, breeding and cultivating a fear of coming out and facing discrimination in the workplace, bullying, and hate crime. And although lesbianism had never been illegal, the same prejudices prevailed against gay women.

And Dusty Springfield? When I discovered her grave in the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin in Henley it seemed a strange resting place for the sixties icon. For if anywhere in England was untouched by the Swinging Sixties surely it was Henley. As the bright comet of the sixties flashed briefly across the twentieth century sky, this compact little town with its smart shops, elegant houses, cosy old pubs facing the river, and famous regatta held annually since 1893, looked a prime candidate for being the one to conform to older, more staid and sober ways.

Grave of Dusty Springfield, St. Mary the Virgin, Henley

In an unusual tribute someone has left a selection of press cuttings

But if there is a marked disparity between Dusty Springfield, the embodiment of the Swinging Sixties, and the town where she rests, far more disturbing is the realisation that beneath the froth, fun, and frivolity of the sixties the dark evils of sexism, racism, and homophobia were still firmly rooted. Dusty Springfield, talented, beautiful, successful, and admired, felt obliged to conceal her sexuality, keeping her relationship with the singer-songwriter Norma Tanega quiet, and living a reclusive life for a time to avoid the scrutiny of the British tabloids. She feared the prurient media attention that would lead to loss of contracts, and her authorised biography Dancing with Demons recounts her tortured fear that it could end her career if she were exposed as a lesbian. Sadness and despair emanate from the pages of the book.

And so, despite the temptation in these gloomy days, to gaze back nostalgically at the sixties, I am resisting their lure. And if the present days lack the joyous optimism of those times, still much of the bigotry and prejudice which also characterised them, though by no means eliminated, have unquestionably declined. Swinging those years may have been, but a certain darkness lay beneath their technicolour surface.

Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, Doubleday, 1970

Penny Valentine and Vicki Wickham, Dancing with Demons:The Authorised Biography of Dusty Springfield, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2001.

“Too many died. War isn’t worth one life.”

By Gravedigger

On November 6, 2022

In Victims of war

My grandfather, Harry Manley, was the gentlest of men, and I cannot imagine what emotions he confronted and endured when, somewhere on the Western Front, he faced the prospect of killing other men. Like many of his generation he never spoke of the war. He always attended church on Sundays, so he must have attended Remembrance Services. He probably wore a red poppy, but I have no memory of it. All that I knew as a child was that the reason he walked with a limp was because he had been wounded in a long-ago event, referred to by adults, who clearly had neither the inclination nor the intention to discuss it further, as “ the war.” This was strange because “The Second War” was a frequent subject of conversation and featured regularly in heroic films and novels.

The First World War only gradually took shape in my consciousness through History lessons, and English Literature classes where a passionate teacher introduced us to the poems of Wilfred Owen.

Only in her own last years, when she began to talk a lot about her parents and childhood, did my mother share her own limited knowledge of her father’s experience. Somewhere in France or Belgium he had been wounded and was lying in a shell-hole, unable to move, when a field ambulance arrived. The ambulance was full, and from what I have read of World War I, I would take that description literally. The driver assured my grandfather that he had noted his position and would come back for him. This must have seemed a well-meant but unlikely promise: how would anyone locate one shell hole on a chaotic battlefield; fighting might resume at any time; the ambulance might be blown up and the driver himself killed. But return he did, and my grandfather was duly transferred from a field hospital to a London one. My grandmother was summoned to nurse him: staff shortages or because he was not expected to survive? Either way she arrived with determination, and skills learned in the Cottage Hospital in Ellesmere Port.

My grandfather became one of the lucky ones who not only came home but retained his calm, gentle nature. He resumed his job as a brick layer and my mother was born in 1920. But frequently throughout her childhood, she told me, bits of shrapnel would rise to the surface of my grandfather’s wound and a terrible stench would fill the house. My grandmother, ever stoical, practical, and capable, would calmly remove the offending fragments and clean away the foul stinking pus.

A postcard my grandfather sent home to his wife

A postcard sent from my grandfather to his son

My grandfather died in the 1960s, but another Harry, Harry Patch, lived until 2009, dying at 111, by which time he had found fame as “The Last Fighting Tommy.” Harry Patch refused to speak of the war for eighty years, but in 1998 he broke his silence to recall the terrible loss of so many lives and to assert the futility of war. Five years later he returned to Belgium, for the first time since the war, to lay a wreath in memory of dead friends at the spot where he was wounded, and they were killed. In 2007, his book The Last Fighting Tommy, based on interviews conducted by Richard van Emden, was published.

Harry Patch left no doubt of his reluctance to go to war: “I didn’t want to go and fight anyone, but it was a case of having to…why should I go out and kill somebody I never knew, and for what reason?”¹ I could never understand why my country could call me from a peacetime job and train me to go to France and try to kill a man I never knew.”²

Nor was he in any doubt of the consequences of non-participation: “(The officer) had his drawn revolver and I got the distinct impression… that anybody who didn’t “go over” would be shot for cowardice where they stood.”³

He drew a raw picture of the trenches: “the noise, the filth, the uncertainty and the calls for stretcher bearers.”⁴ “There was no sanitation at all and the place used to stink like hell.”⁵ “We lived with rats… When you went to sleep you would cover your face with a blanket and feel the damn things run over you.”⁶ “We were sitting in a sea of shell holes…They were half full of water and one,…well, the stench was terrible, a half-rotting body was in there.”⁷ “The bodies of wounded men who were dying… would sink out of sight in the morass. They would never be buried.”⁸ “A lad was ripped open from his shoulder to his waist, and lying in a pool of blood…he looked at us and said “shoot me.””⁹ “I saw one German… a shell had hit him and all his side and his back were ripped up, and his stomach was out on the floor.”¹⁰

Harry and the other members of his Lewis gun team had a pact; “We wouldn’t kill, not if we could help it… We fire short, have them in the legs, or fire over their heads, but not to kill, not unless it’s them or us.”¹¹

On 22^nd September 2017 Harry was wounded, the others in his team were killed. Harry wrote, “That day, the day I lost my pals, 22 September 1917 – that is my Remembrance Day, not Armistice Day.”¹²

Harry’s visceral loathing of the war he was forced to fight resounds from the pages of his book: “At the end of the war , the peace was settled round a table, so why the hell couldn’t they do that at the start, without losing millions of men?”¹³ “The politicians who took us into the war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalised mass murder.”¹⁴ “War,” he averred, “ is a calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,” and affirmed, “Too many died. War isn’t worth one life.¹⁵

Of Remembrance Day, Harry wrote, “For me 11 November is just show business… the Armistice Day celebrations on television…it is nothing but a show of military force…I don’t think there is any actual remembrance except for those who have actually lost somebody they really cared for in either war.”¹⁶

Harry Patch was determined not to have a state funeral but, as the last veteran of any nationality who had served in the trenches, he agreed to a public one. His funeral was held in Wells Cathedral with a theme of peace and reconciliation, and, in accordance with his instructions, the soldiers from Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom who accompanied his coffin were not allowed to carry their ceremonial weapons. A memorial stone beside the Cathedral Green commemorates his life.

Memorial to Harry Patch beside Cathedral Green, Wells

But Harry Patch chose to be buried at a private ceremony near the graves of his parents and brothers, in St. Michael’s churchyard in Monkton Combe.

Harry Patch’s grave is the one bearing red poppies

And that is a where I go to remember: Harry Patch; my grandfather, Harry Manley; the other men who came home to live ordinary lives; the millions, mostly young, who lost their lives or health in that pointless war; and their wives, lovers, girlfriends, mothers, sisters, and friends whose lives were forever diminished by their loss.

Harry Patch with Richard van Emden, The Last Fighting Tommy, Bloomsbury, 2018, p.59.
Ibid., p.137
Ibid., p.91
Ibid., p.74
Ibid., p.77
Ibid., pp.104-5
Ibid., pp 98-9.
Ibid., p.99
Ibid., p.94
Ibid., p.93
Ibid., p.71
Ibid., p.203
Ibid., p.137
Ibid., pp.188-9
http://news.bbc.co.uk Veteran, 109, revisits WW I trench.
Patch, The Last Fighting Tommy, p. 20

https://www.ppu.org.uk The Peace Pledge Union produces white poppies to reassert the original message of remembrance: “never again.” They are a symbol of remembrance of all victims of war, of a to challenge militarism, and of a commitment to peace.

https://www.wri-irg.org War Resisters International is a global network of grassroots antimilitarist and pacifist groups working for a world without war.

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

Author: Gravedigger Page 12 of 16

The Magic of Bridges and a Disappointing Grave

The Merry Cemetery:The Dacian Way of Death

The Thames is Capricious. We Escape Leptospirosis; Others are Less Fortunate

Dusty Springfield: the Dark Side of the Sixties

“Too many died. War isn’t worth one life.”