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.
Last week at an auction room in a small Wiltshire town a watch was sold for £1.175 million.
Henry Aldridge & Son in Devizes hold biannual sales of Titanic memorabilia and, at six times the expected figure, this represented the highest price ever paid for a single item.
The gold pocket watch was once the property of John Jacob Astor, but its value lay not in the gold nor in its ownership, but in the fact that it was found when Astor’s body was recovered from the Atlantic seven days after the sinking of the Titanic.
In April 1912 the RMS Titanic set out on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. Built in the Harland and Woolf shipyard in Belfast, and registered in Liverpool, the headquarters of the White Star Line, it was the largest and the most luxurious ship ever to sail. The opulence of the First-Class accommodation and public rooms was not extended to the hundreds of emigrants who travelled steerage, but even there the quality of the cabins was superior to the open dormitories common on most liners. The ship was described as unsinkable having sixteen watertight compartments on its underside which could be electronically closed if water entered them. Even if four of the compartments were flooded by a head on collision the liner was expected to remain afloat.
On the late evening of 14 April, the Titanic collided with an iceberg which damaged the ship’s plates below the waterline and five of the watertight compartments were breached. The ship began to founder and two hours and forty minutes later it sank. There would only have been enough lifeboats to accommodate one third of the passengers and crew had the ship held its full complement. As it was there were only places for half of them and in the disorganised evacuation the boats were launched barely half full. Of 2,240 people on board,1,517 people died from drowning or hypothermia.
The official inquiry into the disaster found that regulations on numbers of lifeboats that ships had to carry were out of date and inadequate; the captain had failed to heed ice warnings; the lifeboats had not been properly filled; the collision resulted from the ship steaming at too high a speed in a dangerous area. But it concluded that since all these were standard practice and not previously shown to be unsafe, the incident was an Act of God. New safety measures were recommended but no negligence was found.
The sinking of the Titanic has commanded extraordinary and enduring fascination. Immediately there were novels, poems, songs, art works, postcards, commemorative plates, and a silent film Saved from the Titanic starred the actress Dorothy Gibson who had in reality been one of the surviving passengers. Other badly flawed but high grossing films which followed in 1953 and 1997 served to increase the Titanic obsession.
The discovery of the wreck on the ocean bed in 1985 led to exhibitions of recovered artifacts and expeditions in submersibles for tourists to view the wreckage. One of those submersibles, Titan, itself imploded in 2023 killing everyone on board.
There are at least five Titanic museums and experiences in the USA, others in Canada, Ireland, and Britain. In South Africa, the businessman Sarel Gaus, and in Australia the billionaire Clive Palmer, abandoned grotesque plans to build full sized replicas of the Titanic when faced with prohibitive costs. In Sichuan in China a rusting hulk is all that remains of a similar project designed to be a floating hotel.
The centenary of the disaster in 2012 was commemorated with radio programmes, postage stamps and, with questionable taste, restaurants offering Titanic Themed Dining Experiences recreating the final dinner served in the first-class restaurant.
The Titanic Experience in Belfast, located on the site where the ship was built, also opened in 2012.
The Titanic Experience, Belfast
Located in the Harland and Woolf shipyard
The site where the ship was built, seen from the windows of the museum
Whether spawned by nostalgia for an age of luxury, the wealth of social history provided by the extensive reportage and collected artefacts, or by a degree of schadenfreude in the face of arrogance and hubris, Titanic mania shows no sign of abating.
But what of the victims and survivors? Only three hundred and thirty-seven bodies were recovered. One hundred and nineteen, mainly third-class passengers and crew, were buried at sea, and a further one hundred and fifty in Halifax, Canada. Only fifty-nine bodies were claimed and repatriated.
Most of the lost crew came from Southampton where seven hundred red dots marked on a floor map of the city in the museum identify the addresses of those who died. None of their bodies were brought back because White Star wanted to charge freight fees which families could not afford. At Southampton Old Cemetery there are sixty graves with Titanic associations, but all the names were added retrospectively when widows or other family members were buried.
Similarly, Ernest Thomas Barker, a saloon steward, buried at sea, is named on a family grave in Highgate East.
In Romsey Abbey, a memorial remembers Bob Ward, engineer.
A memorial in Romsey Abbey
In Belfast, a memorial outside the City Hall commemorates twenty-two men from Belfast who died in the disaster.
Memorial to Titanic victims from Belfast: an allegorical representation with Death holding a laurel wreath above the head of a drowned sailor
A memorial garden established around the sculpture at the centenary houses bronze plaques naming all the victims.
Liverpool has a handsome memorial to the ship’s engineers at the Pierhead, and in the Philharmonic Hall a plaque to the ship’s orchestra.
Memorial to Titanic stokers and engineers, Pierhead, Liverpool
Lifesize sculptures on the memorial
In Eastbourne in 1914 the opera singer Clara Butt unveiled a tablet opposite the bandstand on the seafront commemorating John Lesley Woodward, the cellist in the orchestra. Woodward, whose body was not recovered, had previously played at The Grand Hotel in Eastbourne.
St. Giles Hill Cemetery in Winchester houses the grave of William Arthur Lucas, a seaman who survived the sinking, served in the First World War, but shot himself in 1921 on a train from Leeds to Kings Cross. He died in the Royal Free Hospital, the coroner returning a verdict of suicide while insane. Also remembered on the stone is his brother-in-law Montague Vincent Mathias, another seaman who perished on the Titanic and whose body was never identified. Gertrude Mathias (nee Lucas) commissioned the stone for her brother and husband.
Grave of brothers in law, Lucas and Mathias, who respectively survived and drowned when the Titanic sank. St. Giles Hill Cemetery, Winchester.
It is hard to distinguish the names for the grave is worn and covered in lichen
It is not uncommon to find graves where people are defined by their association with the Titanic, either as victims or less commonly survivors. But Albert Titanic Chadwick buried in Sherston, Wiltshire is neither. When I first saw his grave, I thought that he must have been born, and possibly christened, on the Titanic on the very day before it sank. But there were no Chadwicks on the ship, and the strange middle name remains a mystery. For all the bizarre souvenirs on sale in the aftermath of the disaster, it still seems extraordinary that anyone would name their child after such an event.
“Calm After Storm, Sinking of the Titanic.” Albert Titanic Chadwick, Church of the Holy Cross, Sherston, Wiltshire
Two graves hold men who have been cast respectively as villain and hero of the maritime tragedy.
The chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay, was one of only 20% of the men on board who survived, but his reputation suffered. He was vilified in both the American and the British press for leaving the ship when there were still women and children on board. An inquiry into the sinking concluded that he had helped other passengers before leaving himself on the last lifeboat on the starboard side twenty minutes before the ship sank and he was exonerated from blame.
Ismay kept a low profile for the rest of his life but has a conspicuous grave in Putney Vale cemetery in London. The unusual design by Alfred Gerrard, is composed of three stones representing the prow, mast, and stern of a ship.
The upright stone represents the prow of a ship and the chest tomb the mast
The upright stone representing the prow bears an inscription taken from the Epistle of James 3,4:
Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds,
yet are they turned about with a very small helm, whither so ever the governor listeth.
The chest tomb representing the mast bears scrimshaw like decoration with sailing ships and a compass.
Scrimshaw like designs on the chest tomb
On the top of the tomb is an extract from Psalm 107, verses 23-24:
They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters,
These men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
A stone seat carved with plants and a verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning represents the stern of the ship.
-The little birds sang East, the little birds sang West
And I smiled to think of God’s greatness flowed around our incompleteness,
Round our restlessness, his rest.
No controversy surrounds the memory of Wallace Hartley, and in his hometown of Colne in Lancashire, his reputation could not stand higher. He led the orchestra whose members stood on deck continuing to play amongst the chaos of the evacuation, attempting to maintain calm as the lifeboats were loaded. As the ship sank, survivor accounts describe them playing the hymn “Nearer, My God, To Thee.”
None of the eight band members survived, only three of their bodies were found. Hartley’s body was not found until two weeks after the sinking, by which time news of the quiet courage and dignity of band’s last performance had spread. Wallace Hartley was returned to England and his father took the body from Liverpool to Colne where 40,000 people lined the route of the funeral procession.
In the Keighley Road Cemetery above Colne on a grey, windswept hillside a broken column symbolises a young life cut short, and above a carved violin and the music score of Nearer my God to Thee, is a simple epitaph:
Grave of Wallace Hartley in Colne
In the town centre a handsome memorial bust is flanked by a model of the Titanic planted around with blue and white flowers representing waves and icebergs.
Memorial to Wallace Hartley in Colne
Wallace Hartley
Model of the Titanic
There may not be any gold pocket watches on display in Colne, but they have a romantic local hero of whom they may be justly proud.
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 footWild SwimmingReturn Journey…… With Mouths Firmly ClosedIt was so nice, we did it twiceA Triumpal Return
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.
The grave at Lower BasildonLooking 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.
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.
Old St. Andrew’s church and graveyardInverted 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.
Flowers and toys left at the grave
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.
