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

The Sad Fate of Giro the Nazi Dog

On February 26, 2023

One of the saddest little graves in London is that of a terrier who endures a distressing notoriety as “Giro the Nazi Dog,” and whose grave marker is said to be Britain’s only Nazi memorial.

Setting aside the preposterous assumption that a dog might hold political opinions, his owner too was innocent of this slur. Giro belonged to Dr. Leopold von Hoesch who was the German Ambassador to the United Kingdom between 1932 and 1936. Von Hoesch came to London following postings in Peking, Madrid, and Paris, as the representative of the Weimar Republic. He lived at 9 Carlton House Terrace, which, as Prussia House, had been the official residence of Prussian Ambassadors since the nineteenth century. After a brief hiatus during the First World War representatives of the Weimar Republic returned to the residence in 1920. Von Hoesch was by all accounts a respected statesman, popular in Britain, and critical of the Nazi regime. He was dismayed when Hitler secured the position of Chancellor in 1933 meaning that he himself became by default the representative of the Third Reich in Britain. He was particularly censorious of von Ribbentrop, and he denounced Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland in 1936 in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties.

Giro died in the garden of the Ambassador’s residence in 1934, allegedly after chewing on a live electrical cable. He was buried in the garden but claims that he was given a funeral with full Nazi honours are entirely apocryphal.

The Ambassador himself died at the Embassy two years later of a heart attack at the age of only fifty-five, and the British government granted him an extraordinary funeral parade before his coffin was shipped back to Germany. The coffin was draped in the Nazi flag, by this time the official flag of Germany. As it left Carlton House the German embassy staff crowded the terraces outside and gave the Nazi salute. British government ministers accompanied the cortege as it moved down The Mall. The German national anthem played at Victoria Station and a nineteen-gun salute was fired at Dover as the body was transferred to a British destroyer which conveyed it to Germany. The Pathe News coverage of the event is disturbing, making for queasy watching, and although Hoesch almost certainly had clean hands, it is hard not to wonder at the wisdom and motivations of those who permitted and organised this event.

(https://wwwbritishpathe.com and search for von Hoesch funeral).

But certainly, in Berlin no representative of the Nazi Party attended von Hoesch’s funeral.

Ironically it was von Ribbentrop, of whom Hoesch had evinced a particular loathing, who replaced him as German Ambassador. A key member of the Nazi regime von Ribbentrop employed Albert Speer to “improve” the Embassy with a massive staircase made from marble donated by Mussolini, and, reputedly, a swastika mosaic on one of the floors . But two years later von Ribbentrop’s tenure was abruptly ended, and the Embassy closed. When the German Embassy reopened post war it relocated to Belgrave Square.

In the 1960s builders excavating the former Embassy garden to create an underground car park discovered Giro’s grave. They moved the stone a short distance to its present location at the top of the Duke of York Steps, beneath a tree in a small enclosure outside 9 Carlton House Terrace. The inscription reads:

GIRO

EIN TREUER BEGLEITER! (a faithful companion)

LONDON IM FEBRUAR 1934

HOESCH

Giro’s stone outside Carlton House Terrace

It is a bleak location, cold and cheerless. The large, white stucco-faced houses, adorned with pompous pillars, form terraces of unrelieved monotony and smug, dismal uniformity. Steep steps down to the Mall and the absence of people engender a dreary and sterile atmosphere. For many of the houses today are expensive, unoccupied investment properties or exclusive meeting places. It is an area without heart or soul. And poor Giro lies alone in his odd little enclosure. Far better across the Mall in the bustle of pretty St. James’s Park or a little further west in the pet cemetery of Hyde Park.

So, if you are passing, pause to greet Giro, and remember, in the implausible event that he has any political affiliation, he is not The Nazi Dog but The Weimar Dog.

Jane Austen Slipped in Quietly

By Gravedigger

On February 12, 2023

In Writers

“ Jane Austen,” whispered the volunteer guide raising a weary eyebrow, “slipped in quietly at nine o’clock in the morning without disturbing anyone.” In the Cathedral a brass band was loudly, and repeatedly, rehearsing the national anthem. The harsh, strident tones ripped and tore through the early morning quiet, the band’s amplified performance penetrating every corner of the building. Already, when we entered, our bags had been painstakingly searched by two assiduously polite but resolute police officers. Their dogs patrolled the longest nave in Europe, sniffed warily at the chantries of Bishops Beaufort and Waynefleet, eyed the twelfth century Winchester Bible with suspicion, and pawed gingerly at the Tournai font.

“Military funeral tomorrow,” our guide continued sotto voce. “The cathedral will close soon for a full rehearsal.” Waving his arm at the array of memorials which line the great stone walls, he sighed, “ All high-ranking military, clergy and politicians, and all reputedly endowed with moral excellence and effecting heroic deeds.” He looked sceptical. “ No ordinary people.” He paused. “ And they didn’t even mention on Jane’s stone that she was a novelist,” he added indignantly.

We fled the noisy, disturbed cathedral, and passing rapidly through the Cathedral Close, awash that morning with police and military personnel, vehicles, and equipment, arrived in College Street. There we paused before the house where Jane Austen rented rooms during the last few weeks of her life in 1817, having come to Winchester to be close to her surgeon.

Then, abandoning the town, we followed Keats Walk to St. Cross Hospital. When Keats stayed in Winchester in 1819 he took his daily walk across the water meadows, and it was here that he composed his ode To Autumn. Our morning too was misty, with soft muted autumn sunshine just beginning to burn through, swans moving stately on the chalk stream and herons still as statues.

At St. Cross we explored the quiet complex of medieval buildings founded in 1136 by Henry of Blois. Church, Alms-houses, and Hall are all still in use. In the Master’s garden we found glowing herbaceous borders, cyclamen pushing through the grass beneath the sycamore trees, a dappled lake with a gentle fountain.

St. Cross, church from the Master’s garden

They still offer the Wayfarer’s Dole at St. Cross, but not feeling ourselves entitled, we joined instead a group of Friends and Brothers of St. Cross for tea in The Hundred Men’s Hall. There was a woolly tea-cosy on the pot, a choice of homemade cakes, and we were introduced to the Warden. Truly I felt myself in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester.

We returned another day to the Cathedral, when only its quotidian bustle rippled the surface, to pay our respects to Jane Austen. She lies beneath a dark stone slab on the floor of the north aisle. Here Keats, with only two years to live himself, walked up and down reading his letters from Fanny Brawne. And if the site occasions sadness for the early deaths of both writers, this is mitigated by profound gratitude for the treasures they left behind.

Jane’s mere presence here in a place generally reserved for the triumvirate of senior military, clergy, and politicians, is surprising. Speculation suggests that someone in the Austen family Knew Someone who Knew Someone With Influence. Her epitaph, composed by her brother Henry, certainly makes no reference to her literary achievements focusing rather on a conventional recitation of her qualities:

In Memory of

JANE AUSTEN

youngest daughter of the late

Rev. GEORGE AUSTEN

formerly Rector of Steventon in this Count.

She departed this life in the 18th of July 1817

aged 41, after a long illness supported with

the patience and the hopes of a Christian.

The benevolence of her heart,

the sweetness of her temper,and

the extraordinary endowments of her mind

obtained the regard of all who knew her and

the warmest love of her intimate connections.

Their grief is in proportion to their affection

they know their loss to be irreparable,

but in their deepest affliction they are now consoled

by a firm though humble hope that her charity,

devotion, faith and purity, have rendered

her acceptable in the sight of her

REDEEMER

In 1872 Jane’s nephew placed a memorial brass on the wall, on the left of the grave, which acknowledged, with some understatement, that she was “known to many by her writings.”

A memorial window, financed by public subscription, joined it in 1900, but the window too is underwhelming, and Jane’s grave is overshadowed by the bombastic memorials trumpeting the achievements of the Pillars of the Establishment. But I prefer her plain black stone to these monumental, cold, white sepulchres, just as I valued the tranquillity of St. Cross above the undoubted splendour of what is undeniably one of England’s most magnificent cathedrals.

Welcome

Agatha Christie, Queen of Crime

By Gravedigger

On January 29, 2023

In Writers

The Mousetrap and I are of an age. Its first performance took place in Nottingham in October 1952, and after a short provincial tour it transferred to the West End stage the following month. It played at the Ambassador’s Theatre until March 1974 when it moved seamlessly to the larger St. Martin’s next door. WGR Sprague designed the two theatres as a pair, with The Ambassador’s opening night taking place in 1913, but that of St. Martin’s delayed by the First World War. These old fashioned, West End theatres with their plush seating, velvet curtains and polished wood fittings have always provided the perfect backdrop for Agatha Christie’s murder mystery.

Unlike the Windmill theatre, where the legendary Windmill Girls continued to perform their tableaux vivants throughout the Second World War, even at the height of the Blitz, St. Martin’s is not able to claim that “We never closed.” Covid regulations barred its opening from March 2020, but fittingly it was the first major West End theatre to reopen its doors in May 2021. For, as long ago as 1957, The Mousetrap had already become the longest running straight play in the West End. Since then, it has garnered further laurels: in 1958 it became the longest running theatrical production of any kind in the West End, outstripping the previous five-year record held by Chu Chin Chow, and celebrating with a party at the Savoy. Now the world’s longest running show, it easily eclipses even the protracted runs of the popular musicals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. On Broadway, Phantom of the Opera ran for thirty-five years, Chicago for twenty-six, and Cats for a mere eighteen, while in London Les Misérables managed thirty-seven years, and Phantom thirty-six. But The Mousetrap is now a septuagenarian, boasting over 29,000 performances, a wooden sign board at the entrance to the theatre updating the tally after every production.

Contemporaneous with the time it was written, Christie’s play is now in part a nostalgic period piece. Set at a time when rationing, poor food, coal fires, draughts, the wireless, and ugly furniture were still commonplace, the action takes place in the Monkswell Manor Guest House, a former country house, cut off from the outside world by snow.

Along the way the play has acquired its own traditions and treasured artefacts. The clock in the hall is the one remaining original prop from 1952 and has ticked above the fireplace for seventy years. The radio news bulletin is an original recording by the late Deryck Guyler, who holds the unique position of being the only person to have “acted” in every performance. Now the rest of the cast changes annually around the November date of the play’s inception on the London stage. At the end of each performance a member of the cast issues an appeal to the audience not to spoil the experience for others: “Now you have seen The Mousetrap you are our partners in crime, and we ask you to preserve the tradition by keeping the secret of whodunit locked in your hearts.” (Shame on you Wikipedia for revealing the identity of the killer.)

Over the years The Mousetrap has become part of London’s heritage. On the night of Agatha Christie’s death in January 1976 the lights were dimmed while the cast and audience stood to honour the author. No less august an organ than the Financial Times trumpets the play’s success: “The Mousetrap is to the West End Theatre what ravens are to the Tower of London. Its disappearance could impoverish us.”

I became a fan of Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries upon my graduation from the Children’s Library to Adult Fiction (an innocent term in the Chester library of the early 60s). I achieved this move only after much pestering of the librarian when I had exhausted the contents of the juvenile shelves. But my early acquaintance with the adult library was daunting, its volumes heavy, solid, and unwelcoming, long books with small print. I was steeled for an ignominious return to the adventures of Sue Barton, District Nurse, and the exploits of the Girls at the Chalet School, when I discovered Agatha Christie’s novels, and I was hooked. Hercules Poirot and Jane Marple opened a new genre of writing to me, with the added advantage that I never remembered whodunit, so could happily revisit, losing myself in the faux refined world of St. Mary Mead or travelling with Poirot to exotic destinations on the Orient Express.

Despite my early immersion in the novels, as the scope of my reading expanded elsewhere, I remained unfamiliar with Christie’s plays. Then The Mousetrap and I turned twenty-one, which seemed an appropriate time to connect, and I saw the play during its last year at The Ambassador’s. Already it was looking quaint as England had changed much during those twenty-one years. When we both reached another milestone at forty, I saw it again and the passage of time seemed shorter, for the world had changed less and the distance between the action on the stage and real life seemed no more marked than it had been twenty years earlier.

Now in its seventieth year, and with no sign of its popularity abating, The Mousetrap is engaged in a 70^thAnniversary Tour around seventy provincial theatres, beginning in Nottingham. Later this year it will open on Broadway; the famous clock, it is rumoured, will go with it. Will I go to New York to celebrate this most recent anniversary? Probably not, but I may catch it in one of the provincial theatres.

Meanwhile I dropped in on The Queen of Crime herself. She is buried in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, Cholsey, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire, where she and her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, lived for 40 years. A large ornate stone features a pair of puti, in danger of being throttled by their frilly ruffs, Agatha’s overlaid initials, and, in ornate script, a quotation from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen:

“Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas

Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.”
Edmund Spenser

“Eleanor Rigby Died in the Church”

By Gravedigger

On January 15, 2023

In Inspired and Inspiring

Before the Industrial Revolution and the opening of the great quarries in the nineteenth century, Woolton was a village. Old terraces remain in the centre and isolated sandstone houses survive, stranded on islands in the middle of today’s approach roads. Now Woolton is a smart suburb of Liverpool with large, detached houses and thirties semidetached, an abundance of coffee shops, bars, and restaurants, and the famous Woolton Picture House dating from 1926.

The parish church of St. Peter’s was built in 1886 using the same local sandstone as Liverpool Cathedral, the latter one of the last customers before the quarries closed. The church has windows by Charles Kempe and William Morris, and its bell tower is the highest point in Liverpool. When I visited it was enjoying an Open Day with a profusion old documents, photographs, maps, and local history books on display.

But my objective was Eleanor Rigby. The dark, narrative song about loneliness came out in 1966 on the Beatles’ Revolver album and on a 45rpm single, its hauntingly beautiful, pensive lyrics oddly paired with the chirpy Yellow Submarine. The origin of the name of the protagonist is disputed. Paul McCartney suggested that it was inspired by the actress Eleanor Bron, who had starred with the Beatles in the 1965 film Help, combined with the name of a store in Bristol, Rigby and Evens Ltd., which he had noticed during a visit to Jane Asher when she was performing at the Bristol Old Vic.

But in Woolton they see things differently, for it was here at the Woolton Village Fete in July 1957 that John met Paul. The day’s events included: a procession; the crowning of the Rose Queen; a fancy dress parade; a display by Liverpool police dogs; and performances in the school grounds behind the church by John Lennon’s band the Quarry Men Skiffle Group. The latter also took second billing, after the George Edwards Band (me neither), at the Grand Dance held in the church hall at 8pm with tickets priced at two shillings, and “refreshments at moderate prices.” In the hall they have marked the spots on the floor where a mutual friend introduced a sixteen-year-old John to a fifteen-year-old Paul and the latter auditioned to join the Quarry Men.

And in St. Peter’s churchyard, across which the young John and Paul frequently took a short cut, a headstone bears the name Eleanor Rigby. McCartney said that he had no recollection of ever seeing the stone, but he admitted that he could have unconsciously borrowed the name.

Personally, I was predisposed to find the origins of Eleanor Rigby here, and so I discovered was everyone else. In many churches a famed connection with the Beatles and a trail of curious fans might have elicited a chilly response. But here the wardens and parishioners extended the warm welcome at which Liverpudlians excel. In response to my question, an enthusiastic volunteer explained where the grave was, urging me to look out for Father McKenzie’s prototype as well. He explained that if I went to the edge of the graveyard I could look upon the location of the stage where The Quarry Men performed in 1957. Then he drew my attention to the additional presences in the churchyard of George Toogood Smith, John’s uncle, and of Bob Paisley – the Liverpool football manager, he explained, noting my blank expression. Cheerfully he instructed me to come back if I failed to find any of these treasures, offering to abandon his post and conduct me thither personally. In many a larger cemetery I have wished for such assistance, but here I left him surrounded by other eager visitors, while I located Eleanor Rigby with ease.

Eleanor Rigby

Died in the church and was buried along with her name

The original Eleanor Rigby worked in the City Hospital at Parkhill, married Thomas Woods in 1930, and sadly died at only forty-four of a brain haemorrhage.

Only a few graves away was John McKenzie.

Father McKenzie

Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave

John McKenzie, only a short distance from Eleanor Rigby, come on, it’s obvious they were the inspiration for the song.

Then following my friend’s directions, I also located George Toogood Smith and Bob Paisley.

George Toogood Smith, John Lennon’s uncle

St. Peter’s holds Open Days every summer to coincide with International Beatle Week. They offer leaflets with the plan of a walk incorporating Strawberry Fields and John’s childhood home, Mendips, and another of the parade route from 1957. If you doubt your ability to follow a map there is no shortage of folk eager to show you round. The church’s website has a special section on the Beatles where there is a copy of the programme from the 1957 fete. https://www.stpeters-woolton.org.uk Impossible to read it without wishing you were there.

I recommend an excursion to see St. Peter’s and meet its warm, friendly congregation. If you are lucky, your visit may coincide with a performance in the church hall by the remaining Quarry Men. But most importantly pay your respects to the original Eleanor Rigby, most assuredly the muse,whatever Paul McCartney may say, for one of the greatest Beatles songs ever.

The Magic of Bridges and a Disappointing Grave

By Gravedigger

On January 1, 2023

In Architects and Engineers

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.