Amid the stone grave markers and memorials which flank the cloister of Salisbury Cathedral are seven wooden crosses.
Towards the end of the First World War, The War Graves Commission began to replace the wooden markers, which soldiers had fashioned for the graves of their comrades, with permanent memorials of Portland stone. The original battlefield crosses were offered to the fallen soldiers’ next of kin. But since few people could afford the cost of collecting or shipping the crosses home the majority were burned and the ashes scattered over the burial grounds. The crosses in Salisbury Cathedral were amongst the 10,000 which were returned from the front.
This cross marked the place where Lt. JPM Carpenter, Son of the Archdeacon of Sarum, was killed Near Flers at the Battle of the Somme and Was afterwards moved to his grave in Bullecourt cemetery.
This cross marked the grave in Cairo cemetery of Captn. Charles Basil Mortimer Hodgson 3rd Queens Royal West Surrey Regt. Died in hospital in Cairo April 1st. 1918 Of wounds received in Palestine. Husband of Mary Alice Carpenter, Daughter of the Archdeacon of Sarum
This cross Marked the grave in Port Said cemetery of Cap. Christopher Ken Merewether Who died in hospital at Port Said Dec. 20th 1917 Of wounds received in action in Palestine Aged 27 Only child of Canon Wyndham AS Merewether
This cross was placed over the grave of Colonel Frank A Symons C.M.G D.S.O: M-B: Army Medical Service Who was killed in action at Athies April 30th 1917 Buried in Saint Nicholas cemetery, Arras, May 1st
This cross marked the resting place In Belgium, of No. 318 Gnr. GAK Buskin 1st. Field Artillery Brigade Australian Imperial Force Killed in action 3rd November 1917
This cross marked the grave in the Military cemetery, Caudry, France of Capt. Guy Dodgson, Herts. Regt., who died Of wounds in casualty station, Nov. 14th. 1918 Youngest son of the late Henley F Hodgson And Mrs. Hamilton Fulton
Capt. Francis (Toby) Dodgson (brother of Guy Dodgson) This cross is a replica of the battlefield cross which marked the spot where Toby fell at CONTALMAISON – BATTLE OF THE SOMME 10 July 1916 The original cross was stolen from these cloisters in 2015
Typically, the crosses were entrusted to Cathedrals and parish churches. There are collections at Melton Old Church in Suffolk* and at Saint Peter and Paul, Deddington in Oxfordshire**. In Cheltenham two hundred and thirty crosses were placed in Soldiers Corner in the Bouncers Lane cemetery, where, one hundred years on, 90% of them had disintegrated. The remaining twenty-three were rescued and a small museum opened to house them in a former gravediggers’ hut in 2024. ***
At Saint Andrews, Mells in Somerset, a very grand memorial to Edward Horner incorporates his cross into a plinth designed by Lutyens bearing a bronze sculpture conceived by Munnings.
Memorial to Edward Horner, St. Andrews, Mells. Bronze by Munnings, plinth by Lutyens, text by Gill.
The cross is fixed into the back of the plinth
With characteristic sensitivity, Fabian Ware, founder of the War Graves Commission, brought home a cross which had marked the grave of “an unknown British soldier” and gifted it to his parish church at Amberley in Gloucestershire.
Cross which marked the grave of an unknown British soldier, now in Amberley church, Gloucestershire
At first, I mistook the wooden marker housed in St. Bartholomew’s church at Orford Ness in Suffolk for another of the battlefield crosses, but then I read the inscription,
Hier ruht in Gott P.O.W. Josef Obert
Josef Obert was one of thirteen German Prisoners of War in Orford who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 less than three weeks after the Armistice. He was buried in the churchyard with the other POWs and in the 1960s they were re-interred when the Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery was established in Staffordshire.
In 2014 Obert’s original grave marker was found in the sexton’s shed and placed on the church wall. A biographical note records that he was born in 1891, the illegitimate child of Anna Obert, and was present at Verdun and the Somme before being listed as missing in combat. He was unmarried and had no children. The bleak little notice and Obert’s wooden cross record the same tragedy as the British crosses: the heartache of a life barely begun, curtailed by a too early death.
See also https://thereturned.co.uk Returned from the Front is a project seeking to provide a definitive list of all extant World War I crosses and grave markers, their location and information about those whose graves they marked.
I am one of those extremely fortunate people for whom the time of Covid is now a fading memory, a temporary disruption of everyday life which was easily weathered with “a garden and a library.” Retired, mortgage paid off, with no dependants, no relatives in hospitals or care homes, and living in the countryside, I could not have been in a more privileged position.
My memories of the first lockdown which began in the spring of 2020, are of early morning walks under a cerulean sky, banks of primroses, and the scent of wild garlic. From the fields the skylarks rose on a cloud of song. Bluetits and sparrows squabbled noisily over the bird bath. The blackbird sang his heart out from daybreak to twilight, and later the baby blackbirds made the garden their playpen, weaving a path between the rosemary bush and the lavender, opening their beaks wide when they thought their parents might be in the offing but at other times quite capable of grubbing around for themselves. The swifts arrived early and every evening there was a magnificently choreographed ballet in the sky. By day, the house martins dipped and swooped.
Cherry blossom vied with the froth of forget me nots, and flax-blue fields. I revived a school days interest in botany, identifying gloriously named wildflowers: campion, tufted vetch, hedge parsley, stitchwort, speedwell, woundwort, cranesbill, bugle, notch leaf scorpion weed, birds foot trefoil, orange hawkweed, lady’s bed straw, bachelor’s buttons, ox-eye daisies…I watched the barley grow from tender young shoots to the proud, golden stalks harvested in July .
I thought often of my grandparents, for the peaceful countryside, without cars or planes, must have resembled life in their day. Wild animals grew tamer: I met deer and hares no longer hiding in the woods and fields but ambling along the lanes stopping only a few feet away, staring a while, before turning unhurriedly away.
Only the ambulances made an occasional wild, screaming passage through the village and the air ambulances hung ominously in the sky. Aware of their good fortune villagers displayed rainbows in their windows, taped thank-you notes to their refuse bins, and set up roadside placards thanking all key workers.
I read a backlog of books from my shelves and renewed old friendships as emails spread like ripples in a pond. Someone taught me to use WhatsApp, though I failed to graduate to Zoom. I tidied cupboards and polished floors.
As lockdown regulations eased, we marvelled at the still almost empty buses passing through the village towards Bath, ghostly presences out of an Edward Hopper painting. We made short car journeys for walks and picnics in the neighbouring county and joined socially distancing but ebullient queues for our first Covid inoculations.
But it was not so easy for everyone. Some people were isolated and lonely; others confined to overcrowded inner-city flats. Domestic violence increased. Education was disrupted. Hospital patients and care home residents died alone and confused as visits were prohibited. Funerals were curtailed.
By 2025 Covid had caused more than seven million confirmed deaths worldwide, with estimates suggesting more than five times that number. It was ranked as the fifth deadliest pandemic in history. *
In the United Kingdom alone by May 2023 227,000 deaths had been recorded as caused by Covid. Yet not all of those deaths were inevitable. In 2015 the government National Risk Register had calculated that there was between a one in twenty and a one in two risk of pandemic flu in the UK within five years, but there had been no investment in masks, ventilators, or gowns. Instead, NHS spending had been run down.
Following the first outbreaks of Covid, The World Health Organisation declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in January 2020, but in Britain the government response was slow and ineffectual. It did not participate in the EU scheme for bulk buying ventilators, relying instead, and against specialist advice, on the ill understood principle of herd immunity. In April government ministers took the decision to remove older people from ventilators if the supply ran out, providing them only for those more likely to survive. When they finally ordered more, the supplies which they procured from non-specialist producers proved unsuitable for patients in intensive care and were withdrawn from use following feedback from clinicians.
After a similar initial failure to combat the shortage of personal protective equipment, leaving NHS staff exposed and in danger, controversial contracts were hastily established with inflated prices paid to middlemen. Those with contacts in the Commons and Lords could make applications via a favoured VIP lane to supply PPE. Money went to people with no experience in the field, newly established companies made high profits…and many of the gowns, gloves and masks supplied, after considerable delays, failed to comply with health care standards. Clothing which had cost £4 billion had to be burned because it was useless being of inferior quality and not sterile.
Care workers were overstretched and vulnerable. In some care homes dedicated staff were living in to avoid spreading Covid, and working twelve hour shifts seven days a week. Yet despite advice from the WHO government ministers were slow to introduce test and trace measures. Too late, and in a now a familiar pattern, £ 33.5 million was finally spent on inaccurate anti-body tests which were shown to return false negatives.
Meanwhile government ministers and their staff broke lock down rules, travelling, socialising and even holding parties at Downing Street during the lockdown period.
Families for Justice, a support group for bereaved families, began to push for a public inquiry into preventable deaths from Covid. ** At the same time the campaign group Led by Donkeys*** were pursuing the government’s mishandling of the Covid crisis, and the lack of transparency over the procurement of equipment.
The two groups came together in 2021 to create a memorial for those who had died of Covid. This was to be created by the bereaved themselves, and as well as an act of remembrance, it was to serve as an instrument of rebuke.
Following discussions and searches the participants chose a site and a symbol. A long concrete wall borders the footpath on the south bank of the Thames between Lambeth bridge and Westminster bridge. It stretches for five hundred meters and faces directly onto the Houses of Parliament on the opposite bank. On this wall they decided to paint red hearts, each one representing someone who had died because of Covid.
The Covid Wall stretches along the Thames from Lambeth bridge to Westminster bridge
Each heart represents someone who died of Covid
The work looks spontaneous, but the planning was meticulous involving testing different paints and pens and using computer modelling to determine the size of the hearts. As a grass roots, people led initiative, calling the government to account, it was important that the site was claimed without any attempt to seek official permission. The wall was listed, painting hearts on it was technically criminal damage, the volunteers who painted the first hearts knew that they risked arrest. To minimise the chances of this, they made their activities look as official as possible: setting up A-boards explaining that this was the National Covid Memorial Wall, volunteers wore matching tabards bearing the insignia NCMW. They gambled on the hope that once the first hearts were on the wall, and the atmosphere clearly one of respect, it would be difficult to oppose their activities.
In the early morning of March 29th, 2021, socially distanced volunteers, most of them from bereaved families, painted the first hearts on the wall. An appeal to the public for help swelled the number of volunteers to 1,500, and over ten days they painted 150,000**** hearts working shifts of two or three hours.
At first there were just the hearts, then people began to write names in the hearts. As news of the wall spread, the group received requests from people unable to visit themselves and added more names on their behalf.
Names appeared in the hearts
There never was any police intervention. It would have been hard for the police to stop them, from the beginning their position was unassailable. There was a moment of concern when one of a group of police waiting for their Covid inoculations at St. Thomas hospital lent over the wall, but it was only to request a heart for a neighbour who had died.
Working quickly, quietly, and respectfully the volunteers completed their Wall of Grief and Love. It is a perfect location, a quiet, pedestrian path lined with plane trees, beside the river in central London. Today the hand drawn hearts with their poignant contents, are a permanent memorial for the individuals who died, a reminder of the scale of the pandemic, and a place for community reflection.
The Friends of the Wall are volunteers who repaint and rewrite the hearts and their contents as they fade and remove any graffiti. For there is no need for any further political statement: from the terraces of the Houses of Parliament the view across the river is of the wall, and the red hearts of remembrance reproach and shame a government whose cavalier attitude cost so many lives.
Looking across the river from the wall
A wall of rebuke as well as remembrance
*Wikipedia – List of epidemics and pandemics.
**The group was to be instrumental in securing the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.
***Led by Donkeys is a campaign group established in 2018 and initially involved in campaigning against Brexit. The day before we left the EU, they projected a video onto the white cliffs of Dover showing two veterans of World War II talking of the EU as a peace project, their sadness at leaving, and their hope that one day we would rejoin. At midnight they projected the EU flag, and as midnight passed this disappeared leaving a solitary star facing Europe across the Channel with the message “This is our star. Look after it for us.”
Led by Donkeys’ focus is on holding government to account, drawing attention to lies and hypocrisy, pushing progressive ideas, and helping groups with less campaign experience. They take their name from a phrase originally attributed to Chabrias in classical antiquity but popularised in Britain during World War I to describe soldiers led by incompetent and indifferent leaders as “Lions led by donkeys.”
I was in search of someone else when I stumbled across Lucian Freud in Highgate West. There had been a storm the night before and the flat-topped grave was still wet, with a mix of early autumn leaves ripped from their trees and plastered to its surface, some already a yellowed gold while others retained the vigorous green of mid-summer. But it was the surface of the grave itself which arrested my attention and held me entranced, for beneath the leaves it seemed suffused with a lambent radiance, a lustrous turquoise glow.
It was, no doubt, a trick of the spectrum, a refraction of the autumn sunlight caught in the damp surface of the stone, or a malfunction in my eye to brain co-ordination. When I returned later the surface of the grave was a uniform grey and so it appeared in my photographs, but for a fleeting time I had been bewitched, mesmerized by the glowing colour.
It was felicitous that such a phenomenon offered itself at Freud’s grave for his paintings have a magical luminosity. His early works are surreal depictions of people, animals and wilting house plants often in strange juxtaposition, and his description of cyclamen as divas,
They die in such a dramatic way. It’s as if they fill and run over. They crash down; their stems turn to jelly, and their veins harden.*
reveals a mastery of words as well as paint.
The later portraits must rank amongst the greatest of the twentieth century. The figures in his paintings emerge from sombre backgrounds of muted interiors, bare floorboards, stained mattresses, and the heaped sheets which he bought from rag and bone sellers to wipe his brushes after each stroke.
Against these stark, inhospitable backgrounds his often-naked figures burst from the canvas. Their flesh is impastoed, textured, highly coloured, vibrant, and disturbing. These unsentimental portraits are of his friends: the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the benefits supervisor Sue Tilley; his fellow painters: Bacon and Auerbach; and his family: wives, children, and lovers. Nothing is romanticised and when relationships deteriorated this was mirrored in the paintings, which, as he repeatedly claimed, were all autobiographical,
Everything is autobiographical, and everything is a portrait.*
My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings.*
The subject matter is autobiographical. It is all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement really.*
But his biographers have supplemented Lucian Freud’s painterly autobiography, and if the manipulation of light playing on his grave seemed appropriate, the wording on the stone seemed odd. Beloved Father and Grandfather?
This does not sound like Freud whose failings as a father are well documented. He acknowledged fourteen children, others have estimated more, but did not live with any of them. His son David McAdam Freud described the absent and distant Lucian with wry understatement as “hardly father material.” Frank Paul states that the longest time he ever spent with his father was when he sat for his portrait. The portraits of his daughters while classed as affectionate by some critics are considered intrusive and inappropriate by others. When his daughter Annie would not let her own daughter sit for Large Interior, London 11 (After Watteau) Freud’s response was spiteful and ugly.
His personal relations do not make Freud any less talented an artist. The arguments about great art versus morally problematic artists are well rehearsed. Without defending the indefensible, it may be possible to separate the art from the artist. Moreover, Freud’s personal failings were petty and selfish, not evil, he was not a Gaugin or an Eric Gill. Yet when I reflected upon the strangely unconvincing epitaph, I liked his paintings a little less.
*Quotations from William Feaver, Lucian Freud: Life into Art, Tate Publishing 2002.
See also Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist, Vintage Publishing, 2013
I used to smile when I passed the grave of Sarah Fletcher in Dorchester Abbey.
First there was the singular rubric, accompanied by an exclamation mark, clamouring for attention: “Reader!” In the mid nineteenth century exclamation marks were commonly known as Shriekmarks or Screamers, and that is how they always appear to me. Worse, as F Scott Fitzgerald suggested, they can sound like people laughing at their own jokes, though that is surely not the case here.
Next came the hyperbole, typical of eighteenth and nineteenth century epitaphs, enumerating the lady’s unqualified virtues:
A Young Lady, whose artless Beauty,
Innocence of Mind, and gentle Manners,
Once obtained her the Love and
Esteem of all who knew her.
But it was always the next sentence, making Sarah sound like an absurd antagonist in a Jane Austen novel, which amused me most:
But when Nerves were too delicately spun to
Bear the rude Shakes and Joltings
Which we meet with in this transitory
World, Nature gave way: She sunk
And died a Martyr to Excessive
Sensibility.
But when I learned Sarah’s pitiable story, I was ashamed of my heartless mockery. Sarah had discovered that following a series of infidelities, her husband Captain Fletcher, was planning a bigamous marriage to an heiress. With impressive resolution she arrived at the church in time to stop the ceremony; the heiress returned to her parents and Captain Fletcher to his ship. Unhappily, Sarah’s fortitude then deserted her, and she hanged herself from the curtain rail of her four-poster bed.
I want to tell her: Sarah, he wasn’t worth it, why didn’t you just walk away? But of course, that was not an option for women in 1799. The Married Women’s Property Act did not pass into law until almost a century later in 1882. Until then marriage made husbands and wives one person under the law, and that was not a romantic union. For it meant that any property or other assets the wife brought to the marriage were surrendered to the husband, anything she subsequently acquired in the form of income or belongings was legally his. She could not own anything in her own right or even jointly.
And effectively there was no divorce, for until 1857 the latter could only be obtained through a personal act of Parliament. This prohibitively complex and costly procedure was made even more difficult for women who had to provide evidence of grounds in addition to those of adultery. In 1857 there were only four divorces in the whole country, and they were all requested by men.
If she had broken away from him Captain Fletcher could have left Sarah destitute. And given his conduct there is no reason to believe that he would have acted otherwise.
Yet it was surprising to find Sarah buried in the Abbey, for another brutal law of the day prohibited the burial in consecrated ground of those who had killed themselves. Bodies of suicides were usually buried at a crossroads, commonly with a stake driven through the heart. Not until 1882 was it legal to hold a Christian service for anyone who had taken their own life.
Sarah’s body was able to be buried in the abbey church only because at the inquest,
“the derangement of her mind appearing very evident…the jury…found the verdict – Lunacy.” *
Sarah was not responsible for her actions. We cannot know if that verdict was motivated by a compassionate desire to allow her a church burial, but the words on the grave now make sense as a delicate euphemism.
It is not clear who was responsible for placing the stone and deciding the wording. Perhaps her parents, for Sarah was only twenty-nine years old, and they could still have been alive. If she chose not to return to their home, the possibility arises that she killed herself not because she feared impoverishment, but because she still loved the errant Captain Fletcher. The tragedy is no less either way.
It is strange, in the circumstances, that Captain Fletcher is named on the grave. I suspect it was a bleak attempt by the family to conceal the suicide, the lunacy verdict, and the sorry circumstances which prompted both, beneath a veneer of respectability and normality.
Unable to share in the hope expressed in the final lines on the stone, that “her Soul meet that Peace in Heaven which this Earth denied her,” I no longer smile when I pass her grave.
Sussex was the first county that I ever visited in the south of England. In the mid-sixties the south was still a quite different place from the north. True, we did not think of ourselves as northerners in my home county of Cheshire. Surrounded though we were by The North, The Midlands, Wales, and Liverpool, we perceived Cheshire as a misplaced bit of the home counties. Heavy industry, serious pollution, abandoned bombsites, and slum dwellings were the preserve of other, more stereotypically northern counties. Cheshire was dairy farming, the determined gentility of Knutsford and Wilmslow, and well-heeled housewives shopping in the Chester Rows.
Nonetheless a singular difference was apparent to me on that first trip south. Everything was cleaner and smarter, lighter and brighter, the air was fresher, the people were better dressed, the shops more elegant. There was an air of confidence, a swagger of prosperity and modernity. It was as though the sun had come out at the end of a bleak winter or a light had been switched on in a dark room.
In Chichester, the white limestone of the Cathedral contrasted with the dark red sandstone of the Chester I knew. There was an exciting scattering of coffee shops with real coffee; at home, the height of sophistication was a frothy coffee in a Perspex cup at a Wimpy bar. In Brighton, The Lanes burst with colour: greengrocers with Mediterranean fruits and vegetables which had not yet reached us in the north, vied with clothes shops with outrageously coloured and styled fashions.
Today the contrast is less apparent, and conceivably my memory exaggerates the erstwhile difference. I was doubtless influenced by an unusually sunny August, and by meetings with poised and stylish French children on English home holidays.
Nonetheless I still have a great affection for Sussex, not only for memories of a youthful, golden summer, but because it really is a very pretty county. I am particularly fond of Bosham with its the elegant houses, magnificent harbour, spectacular tidal range, and picturesque Anglo-Saxon church.
Of course, Holy Trinity church is surrounded by a picture book perfect churchyard, a gentle paradise of flowers, birdsong, and ancient stones. And there, despite the unhappy story attached to it, rests one of my favourite graves. Although the grave dates from 1759, the carved script, in a charming mixture of calligraphy, is still clear. Perhaps that lack of pollution and the milder southern climate which I noted on my first visit, combined with high quality engraving, has ensured its longevity.
The stone bears witness to the memory of Thomas Barrow, who was master of a sloop called the Two Brothers. It records his tragic misfortune:
In Memory of
Thomas, Son of Richard and Ann
Barrow, Master of the sloop Two
Brothers who by the Breaking of the
Horse fell into the Sea and Drown’d.
October the 13th 1759 Aged 23 years
Having little knowledge of things maritime, the reference to the horse confused me until I discovered that a horse is an additional footrope hung at the extreme end of the yardarm where the main rope is too tight to stand on. The shorter rope hangs down low enough for sailors to stand on while they are furling the outermost edges of the sails. It is usually thinner and more unstable than the other ropes, and as it is necessary to step off the main footrope to get on to it, it is usually the preserve of more experienced sailors like Thomas. *
Above a rough sea and pounded by storms from the north, the horse broke, and poor Thomas fell to his death. A bittersweet little carving illustrates the tragedy. In the centre is the sloop, below the rumbustious waves, and above a winged putti with distended cheeks representing the north wind. A tiny figure is clearly visible falling from the broken horse.
Below a dramatic yet poignant verse proclaims,
Tho Boreas’s Storms and Neptune’s waves
have toss’d me to and fro
Yet I at length by God’s decree
am harboured here below
Where at an Anchor here I lay
with many of our Fleet
Yet once again I shall set Sail
my saviour Christ to meet.”
And who reading his story could fail to wish that Thomas might “once again set sail”?
*If this is as unclear to you as it was to me, search for “Flemish horse(rigging)” on https://en.wikipedia.org where there is not only a helpful photograph and a diagram, but an explanation that all footropes were once known as “horses”, with this, the most dangerous one, known as a Flemish horse because the latter were considered the most unruly of equines.
