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

Trains have always been my preferred mode of transport. On the roads, whether passenger or driver, I anticipate disaster: from the BMW hovering impatiently too close to my rear bumper; from the aggressive driver overtaking on a double white line with hand on horn; from my own nervous lane changing; from poor visibility, black ice or imagined faulty brakes. On boats a different problem assails me: a poor sailor, I have been immoderately ill on the short passage halfway across the Bristol Channel from Ilfracombe to Lundy Island. I have no fear of flying, but quail at the dispiriting queues at passport control and the sweaty removing of shoes and belts at security, followed by the long hours in airless airport lounges, surrounded by fretful people and the depressing acres of lurid duty free where the scent of a hundred sickly perfumes clogs the air.

But trains offer only delight, from the aimless progress of old diesels ambling slowly cross country pulling in at stations where, in homage to Adlestrop, no one leaves and no one comes, to the sleek inter-city expresses pulling grandly out of London stations. My memories of trains are entirely happy.

In childhood the smell and sound of steam trains filling the station meant a day trip to North Wales. We settled into our compartment where the seats were upholstered like sofas, sepia photographs of seaside towns decorated the walls, and sagging rope luggage racks hung above our heads. I struggled to release the stiff leather strap which secured the carriage window and, when it fell open with a heavy thud, hung out engulfed in a cloud of smoke, inhaling the scent of burning coal and steam, waiting for the sea to appear.

On eastern European trains, I always experience a special frisson of excitement, fantasising about being a spy in Cold War days, woken at borders by men in black leather coats with hard faces and hats pulled down over their eyes demanding to see my papers, questioning my motives for travel, and removing me from the train at gun point on a trumped-up excuse of wanting the correct visa. At this point I let the fantasy fade.

And nothing can equal the romance of a sleeper. Over supper in the dining car fellow travellers urgently impart tales of their lives as though anxious to purge themselves of memories before we reach our destination. Cocooned in my bunk on Amtrak, cradled by the gentle rocking of the train, I remember fighting sleep to gaze out at an unknown, black Appalachian night, illuminated only by the occasional soft lights of an isolated home, and listening for the melancholy whistle of the train. I would have happily journeyed on to eternity.

William Huskisson was less fortunate in his experience of trains. Statesman, financier, and MP, we remember him more as the world’s first railway passenger fatality. As MP for Liverpool, and a keen advocate of the railways, he was present in 1830 at the opening ceremony of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world’s first passenger service drawn by steam locomotive. He and other dignitaries travelled on a train pulled by the Northumbrian and driven by George Stephenson. When the train stopped to take on water Huskisson was amongst those who ignored advice not to descend. He walked along to the Duke of Wellington’s carriage and stood talking to the Prime Minister. A train pulled by the Rocket, George Stephenson’s locomotive, approached on a parallel track. While others resumed their seats, hastened across the track to safety, or stood still close to the stationery coaches as the other train passed, Huskisson dithered. Twice he began to cross the track but scuttled back. Then he tried to climb into Wellington’s carriage, but the heavy door swung outwards, he fell onto the track and the oncoming locomotive mangled his leg.

With the injured man on a makeshift stretcher, Stephenson raced the Northumberland, flat out at 40mph, breaking the world speed record, to Eccles. There a surgeon attended Huskisson, but the injury proved fatal, and he died later that night.

But if the wide reporting of this incident alerted the public to the dangers of the railways, ironically it also fostered awareness of their potential. The publicity afforded by the dramatic death, the breaking of the speed record, and Huskisson’s magnificent funeral, when 69,000 people lined the route, raised the profile of rail travel, drew attention to the new high speed railway line, and proved instrumental in inaugurating the Age of Railway Mania.

Huskisson was buried in St. James Cemetery in Liverpool. One of the most romantic of cemeteries, it lies below the Anglican Cathedral but long predates the latter having opened in 1829, just in time for Huskisson. This gothic enclave lies in a former stone quarry with the cathedral towering above it on a rock outcrop. Steep, winding, stone paths designed for horse drawn funeral carriages and enclosed by high stone walls lined with old gravestones lead through a dark tunnel into the graveyard. My last visit was on a sunny evening in mid-summer, but for the full spine-tingling, preternatural experience you should descend into this phantasmagorical world on a late afternoon in November as the light is dying.

The red sandstone cathedral rears above the cemetery on St. James Mount

Huskisson’s grave lies at the centre of the former quarry marked by a circular mausoleum modelled on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.

Huskisson’s grave at the centre of the old quarry

Huskisson’s grave is modelled on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates

Small consolation perhaps for Huskisson but he does have a record number of memorials, mostly commissioned by his devoted widow Emily. There is a plaque in Eartham church near his home, a statue in Chichester Cathedral where he is resplendent in toga, and three identical statues of him sporting the robes of a Roman Senator in Pimlico Gardens at Millbank, in Duke Street, Liverpool, and in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Beside the track at Parkside outside Newton-le -Willows where the accident occurred a marble memorial tablet is a replica of the vandalised original now in the National Railway Museum in York and you can find another replica on Newton-le-Willows station. But his greatest memorial is surely his inadvertent contribution to the success of the railways.

Have mind of Huskisson when next you travel by train.

Three Ladies Who Did Not Go Gentle

By Gravedigger

On August 28, 2022

In Sticky Endings

“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and “Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death” are two of my favourite poems about death.

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

thundered Dylan Thomas.

A more light-hearted Roger McGough pleaded,

“when I’m 104
& banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
& fearing her son
cut me up into little pieces
& throw away every piece but one”

Alas, despite extensive trawling of graveyards, I have never uncovered such a beguiling epitaph. Yet, a select few have eluded what McGough stigmatised as a “clean & inbetween the sheets” death. Let me introduce you to three eighteenth century ladies whose colourful demise ensured that they did not “go gentle.”

Hannah Twynnoy was allegedly the first person killed by a tiger in England. Her story reads like the inspiration for one of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales. In 1703 the animals from a travelling menagerie were housed in the rear yard of the White Lion Inn at Malmesbury. Hannah, a servant there, ignored repeated warnings not to tease the animals and persistently taunted the tiger. Tiring of this treatment, the latter escaped his cage and mauled her to death. The epitaph on a stone in Malmesbury Abbey Churchyard records her fate:

In bloom of Life
She’s snatched from hence,
She had not room
To make defence;
For Tyger fierce
Took Life away.
And here she lies
In a bed of Clay,
Until the Resurrection Day.

As a tribute to Hannah in 2003, on the 300^th anniversary of her death, Malmesbury girls named Hannah under the age of eleven each laid a single flower on her grave. My own sympathies lie wholly with the tiger.

In Bunhill Fields Dame Mary Page draws more attention than the luminaries, Blake, Bunyan, and Defoe, with whom she shares a resting place. In 1728 she sought medical advice for a swelling of the abdomen. Her physician diagnosed a form of dropsy. The inscription which was carved upon her tomb chest at her own request describes the excruciating treatment she received:

  IN 67 MONTHS SHE WAS TAP’D 66 TIMES,
  HAD TAKEN AWAY 240 GALLONS OF WATER
  WITHOUT EVER REPINING HER CASE
  OR EVER FEARING THE OPERATION.

Unfortunately, the treatment was clearly not successful. Current medical opinion favours the suggestion that the poor lady had Meigs’ syndrome, a form of ovarian cancer.

F J Baigent and J E Millard in “A History of the Ancient Town and Manor of Basingstoke” tell the story of Alice Blunden, “a fat gross woman (who) had accustomed herself many times to drinking brandy.” In 1764 she imbibed a large quantity of poppy water, a herbal tea, which can function as a narcotic inducing a coma. She fell into a deep sleep from which she could not be wakened, and an apothecary pronounced her dead. Her relations, considering that “the season of the year being hot and the corpse fat, it would be impossible to keep her,” buried her without delay in the Holy Ghost Cemetery. A few days later boys playing nearby heard “groans and dismal shriekings” and a voice crying “Take me out of my grave.” When the coffin was opened “ the corpse puffed up as it had been a bladder and the joiner had made the coffin so short that they were fair to press upon her and keep her down with a stick while they nailed her up.” The body bore signs of self-inflicted injuries as Alice had sought to escape. Since there was now no sign of life, they returned Alice to her grave until the coroner could be summoned next day. Disinterred for the second time she had “torn off a great part of her winding sheet, scratched herself first in several places, and beaten her mouth so long that it was all in gore blood.” This time the coroner pronounced her definitely dead, and Parliament fined the town for its negligence. Alice appears in a bronze panel decorating the Triumphal Gateway, erected in 1991 at the Top of the Town leading into the old town of Basingstoke, where she hammers for all eternity on her coffin lid in a moonlit churchyard.

Mrs. Blunden hammers on her coffin lid for all eternity

No One Does Death Like The Habsburgs Do Death

By Gravedigger

On August 14, 2022

In Dynasties

From an obscure castle in Switzerland in the eleventh century the Habsburg tentacles reached out across Europe and across the centuries perpetually grasping more territories. By dint of war, election, inheritance, skilful politicking, but most of all through judicious marriage, and shored up by the almost continuous presence of a member of the House of Habsburg as Holy Roman Emperor from 1438-1806, they expanded their holdings. In 1272 the Germans elected Rudolf I as their king, and his sons became Dukes of Austria in battle. In the fifteenth century Maximilian I acquired the Netherlands through marriage to Mary of Burgundy. A particularly auspicious marriage with Joanna of Castile, combined with his sister’s marriage to Joanna’s brother, enabled Philip I to claim Spain and its colonies for his son Charles V. Under the latter Habsburg power reached its apogee in the sixteenth century. In 1521 Charles’s brother Ferdinand had married Anna, the daughter of Vladislav II , King of Bohemia and Hungary, and his sister Mary had married Vladimir’s son Louis II. The marriage contract had stipulated that Ferdinand would succeed to the Hungarian and Bohemian lands if Louis died leaving no legitimate male heir. When Louis died at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526 the territories duly passed to Habsburg rule.

To preclude rival dynasties from emulating their tactics and to secure their position the Habsburgs, when not marrying into new possessions, intermarried. But this successful strategy came at a price and their consanguineous unions brought a range of physical and mental disabilities, miscarriages, still births, neonatal deaths, and the famous Habsburg Jaw, a protruding lower jaw with a bulbous lip, and Hapsburg Nose, long with a hump and hanging tip. Between 1516 and 1700 88% of marriages in the Spanish branch of the Habsburg family were consanguineous: where most people have sixteen great great grandparents, Charles II of Spain had only nine. His mother was the niece of his father, his grandmother was also his aunt. Known as el Hechizado (the Bewitched) the poor man was short, lame, had congenital heart disease and epilepsy, suffered from depression, was impotent, and so developed was his Hapsburg Jaw that he struggled to eat and speak. Extended periods of ill health dogged his life and when he died in 1700 leaving no heirs Habsburg rule ended in Spain with a Bourbon victory in the War of Spanish Succession.

In the Austro-Hungarian territories of central and eastern Europe however the Habsburgs clung to power into the twentieth century. Maria Theresa survived potential disaster, despite the loss of Silesia to Prussia, and defended her right to inherit the rest of the Habsburg lands in the War of Austrian Succession. In 1804 Francis I, although forced to accept the demise of the Holy Roman Empire under pressure from Napoleon, declared himself instead Emperor of Austria and in 1867 established the Dual Monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Hungary as a nominal co-equal in response to Hungarian nationalism and growing Austrian weakness. Franz Joseph’s attempt to reverse declining fortunes and increase Habsburg territory with the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 however proved disastrous. Serbia, closely related geographically and ethnically to these territories, was outraged. Serbian nationalism was inflamed and in 1914 a Serbian nationalist movement the Black Hand sought the removal of Austria-Hungary from Bosnia Herzegovina and the formation of a southern Slavic state. Under their influence a group of Bosnian Serbs assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, nephew and heir of the Emperor Franz-Joseph. Austria-Hungary responded by declaring war on Serbia and through systems of alliances Germany, France, and Britain were drawn into war. By 1918 the Empire had collapsed in defeat: the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Slavs all declared their political independence; Austria and Hungary sought to determine their own future. Karl I of Austria, IV of Hungary, the grandnephew of Franz-Joseph who had succeeded him in 1916, refused to abdicate, still believing himself the rightful Emperor, but Austria and Hungary became republics, and the Habsburg Law of 1919 banished the Habsburgs until they renounced all claims to the throne. Karl went into exile in Madeira and spent his remaining years trying to restore the monarchy, making two unsuccessful attempts to regain the Hungarian throne in 1921 . At his death in 1922 his son Otto, raised by his mother to see himself as the rightful heir, became the pretender to the throne, making several attempts to promote Habsburg restoration in the 1930s. Not until 1961 did he reluctantly renounce his claim.

Given such tenacious seeking and clinging to power in life, the Hapsburg way of death did not surprise me. In the stygian gloom of the Kaisergruft, the Imperial crypt beneath the Capuchin church in Vienna, scions of the House of Habsburg lie entombed. Established under the terms of the will of Anna of Tyrol in 1617, she and her husband the Emperor Matthias were the first incumbents. Since then, they have been joined by the bones of almost 150 other Habsburgs. Before entry into this grandiose burial chamber the Habsburg organs are removed as part of the embalming process for display before the funeral. Between 1654-1878 the mortal remains were then dispersed between three separate crypts: the heart placed in a silver urn went to the Herzgruft, a burial chamber in the Augustinian church in Vienna; entrails in copper urns went to the Duke’s crypt in the catacombs of Saint Stephen’s cathedral; and the bones were first placed in a wooden coffin lined with silk, black with gold trim for rulers and red with silver trim for others, which was then enclosed in a metal coffin with two locks. One key was kept by the Capuchin guardian of the crypt and the other in the Treasury of the Hofberg Palace. The baroque metal sarcophagi in the sprawling crypt are embellished with secular emblems of power, and although there is a tradition of battering the face of the corpse to make it appear more humble in the sight of god and an elaborate ritual whereby the funeral cortege abases itself before being granted entry to the church, these bombastic tombs speak of a dynasty unwilling surrender power even in the face of death.

Anna of Tyrol and Emperor Matthais, founders of the Kaisergruft

Detail: Death’s head with Imperial Crown – Charles VI

Detail: woman in mourning veil – Elisabeth Christine, wife of Charles VI

Maria Theresa, the only woman to rule the Habsburg dominions in her own right, and her husband Francis

They appear to be sitting up in an enormous bed

with a plump putti holding a starry wreath above them

Joseph II, the Habsburg for whom I feel some affection. Believing in the power of the state directed by reason, he attempted through Enlightened Absolutism to promote liberalising, modernising reforms. These included: religious toleration, secularisation of church lands, marriage to be a civil contract, abolition of serfdom, censorship largely suspended, limitations to child labour, abolition of death penalty, abolition of domestic monopolies, elementary education compulsory for girls and boys, and promotion of medical improvements.
Many of his reforms met with resistance, not least his introduction of “the economy coffin” which could be reused: made of wood, it was fitted with a flap which could be opened to allow the body to drop into the grave. This carried the additional advantage that the corpse would decay more quickly and the grave could be reused. This practical measure was abandoned in the face of outraged opposition but Joseph did succeed in moving cemeteries out of town to avoid polluting ground water.
His own copper coffin is markedly plainer than those of the other Habsburgs.

Elisabeth of Bavaria, aka Sisi, wife of Franz Joseph, famous for her extreme dieting and two hours of hair care per day; any hairs that fell out during this operation had to be presented for her inspection in a silver bowl. Assassinated by an Italian anarchist in Geneva. Her body was returned to Vienna.

Maximilian of Mexico: younger brother of Franz Joseph I , he was placed on the Mexican throne with the backing of Napoleon III and Mexican conservatives who sought to overthrow the liberal republican government of Benito Juarez. When Napoleon III withdrew his support and abandoned his Imperialist designs in Mexico under pressure from the American government Maximilian’s troops were defeated in the civil war and he was sentenced to death by court martial. His body was returned to Vienna.

Crown Prince Rudolph, son of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth of Bavaria. Died in a murder/suicide pact with his mistress Mary Vetsera at his hunting lodge in Meyerling. Declared mentally unbalanced in order to be allowed a church burial. Mary was not the first mistress to whom Rudolf had proposed a suicide pact. Her body was discreetly whisked away.

Franz Ferdinand, assassinated at Sarajevo. There is only a plaque in the Kaisergruft as he is buried with his morganatic wife at Artstetten Castle. Marriage to a lady-in-waiting was out of line with standard Habsburg policy.

Karl I, again there is only a memorial in the Kaisergruft. Exiled to Madeira, he is buried there.

Not The Kaisergruft. Karl I is buried in the Pilgrimage Church of Nossa Senhora do Monte in Madeira.

And after a morning in the company of the Austrian Habsburgs it’s time for coffee and cake in the Cafe Central.

The Fair Maids, the Knight Templar, the Diarist and his Wife

By Gravedigger

On July 31, 2022

In Writers

The church at Norton Saint Philip boasts a clock by Vulliamy and Frodsham dating from 1848. It is not the oldest church clock in Somerset, but it is one of the few still wound by hand. Twice a week clock winders winch up three weights in a pulley system and as they descend the clock strikes the hour, the half, and the quarters. Every sixth week we take our turn on the clock winding rota, climbing the narrow spiral staircase up the tower to a point where we look down on the bell ringers but up to those charged with care of the flagpole.

The base of the tower at the west end of the church is not its most attractive feature: here behind closed doors spare chairs are stacked, vases and watering cans jumble together, notice boards superfluous to current requirements lean drunkenly against the walls, plastic boxes spill electrical odds and ends, and what looks suspiciously like a hostess-trolley lurks in one corner. It has in truth a desolate air, the few memorials lining the walls have known better times and they look down disconsolately on the dusty impedimenta. But these memorials are the survivors: they were moved from the floors of the nave, chancel, and aisles to the tower walls during Gilbert Scott’s reconstruction of the church in the 1840s, when others disappeared entirely. And high on the north wall are the sisters whom I always greet: two small female heads, crudely sculpted with flicked up hairdos reminiscent of Millicent Martin on TW3 in the mid-sixties, they are roughly attached to the wall.

They have no words of their own but beneath, in a shabby frame, a faded notice recalls a quotation from the diary of Samuel Pepys:

At Philip’s Norton I walked to the
Church, and there saw the Tombstone
whereon there were two heads cut,
which the story goes and creditably,
were two sisters, called the Fair Maids
of Foscott, that had two bodies upward
and one stomach and there lie buried.

Pepys and his wife visited Philip’s Norton in June 1668. Foscott, now Foxcote, is a hamlet a few miles from Norton and when Pepys saw the tomb the effigy of the conjoined twins was cut in stone in the floor of the nave. Later the Somerset Historian John Collinson recorded in the third volume of his History and Antiquities of the County of Somerset published in 1791 that “In the floor of the nave…are the mutilated portraitures, in stone, of two females, close to each other, and called, by the inhabitants, the Fair Maids of Foscott, or Fosstoke, a neighbouring hamlet, now depopulated. There is a tradition that the persons they represented were twins, whose bodies were at their birth conjoined together” and, he adds gruesomely, “that they arrived at a state of maturity; and that one of them dying the survivor was compelled to drag about her lifeless companion, till death released her of the horrid burden.” Today nothing remains of the tombstone save for the heads, the rest probably destroyed during Gilbert Scott’s restoration.

Pepys also noted that while in the church he “there saw a very ancient tomb of some Knight Templar, I think.” The latter still lies in the south aisle but is now identified as a lawyer of the fifteenth century wearing a barrister’s gown. More loved than the Maids he is often in receipt of tribute, near disappearing beneath greenery at Christmas and well supplied with apples at harvest.

Just a year after this visit Pepys himself had cause to erect a memorial: his wife, Elisabeth, died and he had a marble bust of her installed at Saint Olave’s in the City of London where he was a regular worshipper calling it “our own church,” and which was later described by Betjeman as “a country church in the world of Seething Lane.” Elisabeth’s bust was positioned on the north wall of the sanctuary so that Pepys could see her from his pew in the gallery, and in 1703 he was buried next to her in the nave. His own memorial on the wall of the south aisle faces hers, and from their elevated positions they receive their many admirers.

Not so the Fair Maids, a little lonely these days in their tower with only the clock winders, flower arrangers, bell ringers, and flag hoisters passing busily beneath them as they go about their business. So, if you are in Somerset, follow Pepys’ example: come to this country church in Norton Saint Philip and visit my friends the Maids, say hello to the lawyer too, and listen to the hand wound clock striking the quarters.

Daniel Defoe

By Gravedigger

On July 17, 2022

In Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries, Writers

A year on from the first Covid lockdown I turned to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year to compare notes. His plague year was very much like ours: the first signs in Holland and rumours regarding the possible origins in Italy or the Levant, mirrored our own experiences watching Italy and Wuhan. The gradual spread from St. Giles and the West End to Cripplegate, Clerkenwell, and the City reflected our monitoring of Covid hotspots. The flight of the court and the well-heeled to their second homes was familiar; likewise, the first deaths and the sudden desolation in the streets with shops closed, Inns of Court shut up, theatres, alehouses, and diners all dark. Attempts to control wandering beggars resembled our own government’s sudden concern to house the homeless. The sick were either sequestered and died apart from their families or whole households were shut up in their homes, as happened in our hospitals and care homes. When Defoe bemoaned the lack of enough “pest houses” he might have been speaking of our own shortage of Covid wards leading to the construction of the Nightingale hospitals. Quack medicines appeared, just as hydroxychloroquine and the possibility of injecting bleach into our veins to wash out our lungs found favour in certain quarters in the twenty first century. Defoe recorded people moving to live on boats in the Thames or to camp in Epping Forest, and similarly at the height of Covid caravans and camper vans occupied green sites, sometimes received sympathetically by locals, at other times not. During the plague year the government forbade movement to second homes once people were sick, but some went against the rules; no need to labour the parallels. Daily and weekly recording of illness and death rates confirmed that then as now, the poor, living in overcrowded conditions with inadequate ventilation and unable to avoid the breath of others, sickened more than the wealthy. It became apparent that asymptomatic people could carry the plague. There were disruptions to trade and the closure of ports. As the plague intensified people rushed to stockpile provisions and there were shortages; they soaked their money in vinegar there being no contactless cards to replace cash. The poorest in the community found themselves out of work, unable to purchase food or pay for their lodgings. Charity, like our foodbanks, stepped in to supplement the parish relief which like our universal credit proved inadequate. Servants were redeployed as nurses, sextons, gravediggers. In Defoe’s London burials took place before sunrise and after sunset and neighbours and friends could not attend church funerals; when people died in the streets their bodies were removed in deadcarts to mass graves. Similarly in our own times government regulations limited numbers of mourners requiring them to be socially distanced, and as morgues and mortuaries became overwhelmed in 2020 contract workers wearing hazmat suits dug mass graves on Hart Island off the Bronx in New York. When, at last, the death rate began to decline JPs issued certificates of health to permit travel anticipating our own vaccine passports. Then as people became careless the rate rose again. Plus ça change…

There were differences, not least the greater presence of religion in Defoe’s Britain: sects, fortune tellers, and astrologers flourished; Solomon Eagle stalked the streets, naked with a pan of burning charcoal on his head, calling on the populace to repent; though some clergy fled, others kept their churches open; and when the plague ended Defoe gave credit for the recovery to god. Conversely there was less respect for the medical profession and far from clapping for carers Defoe wrote of nurses finishing their patients off and stealing their goods. And while, notwithstanding some fear of interspecies transmission, pet ownership increased during lockdown, Defoe’s London witnessed the wholesale killing of cats and dogs.

Defoe was only five years old in 1665 and the vivid “eyewitness account” which he recorded originated with his uncle Henry Foe, supplemented by Defoe’s own meticulous research. A man of many talents – merchant, spy, novelist, poet, political pamphleteer, and activist – Defoe’s life was a rollercoaster of excitement, achievements, and disasters. In 1685 he participated in the Monmouth rebellion against James II but escaped retribution in the Bloody Assizes, and when William III came to power became a secret agent in the pay of the latter. His poem The True Born Englishman defended William against racial prejudice, reminding xenophobic readers that they were all descended from immigrants. William’s death and the succession of Queen Anne led to the persecution of nonconformists and Defoe’s arrest in 1703 for pamphleteering, political activity and producing satires directed against high church Tories. Prior to his removal to Newgate, he was placed in the pillory for three days but his poem Hymn to the Pillory putatively resulted in the pillory being garlanded, flowers rather than rubbish thrown at him, and his poem sold in the streets. With the death of Queen Anne and the fall of the Tories he was able to resume work for the Whigs. Over five hundred works have been attributed to Defoe: away from the world of politics, these include Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain and of course A Journal of the Plague Year. No stranger to the debtor’s prison during his life he died, as he had often lived, in debt.

Defoe was buried in the Non-Conformist Cemetery at Bunhill but the original stone which marked his grave was struck by lightning and the headstone broken in 1857. James Clarke, the editor of Christian World, a children’s newspaper, encouraged his readers to donate 6d. each for a new memorial, setting up two rival subscription lists, one for girls and one for boys. An obelisk, raised in 1870 bore the inscription:

THIS MONUMENT IS THE RESULT OF AN APPEAL
IN THE CHRISTIAN WORLD NEWSPAPER
TO THE BOYS AND GIRLS OF ENGLAND FOR FUNDS
TO PLACE A SUITABLE MEMORIAL UPON THE GRAVE
OF
DANIEL DE-FOE
IT REPRESENTS THE UNITED CONTRIBUTIONS
OF SEVENTEEN HUNDRED PERSONS.

Samuel Horner, a stonemason from Bournemouth, erected the obelisk and took the original stone home with him, selling it as part of a general load from his yard. It became part of the paving of the kitchen floor at Bishopstoke Manor Farm until the farm manager, Frederick Stiles King, moving to a new house at 56 Portswood Road in 1883, took the stone with him, where it remained in his front garden for over 60 years. Charles Davey acquired it in 1945 and thirteen years later gave it to Stoke Newington library. There it lived in a glass case in the entrance lobby, an appropriate final resting place as Defoe had lived in Stoke Newington from the age of fourteen while he attended the Dissenting Academy under Charles Morton at Newington Green. But when I arrived at the library in search of the stone there was no sign of it. Happily, the librarian knew of its whereabouts: having been vandalised several times it had been moved to more secure premises in the delightful local history museum in Hackney where, beside a bust of Defoe and backed by a wall display of the famous pillory, it keeps company with other Hackney radicals, revolutionaries, and immigrants, not to mention a Saxon longboat and a complete reconstruction of a pie and mash shop.

An Unfortunate Encounter with The Rocket

Three Ladies Who Did Not Go Gentle

No One Does Death Like The Habsburgs Do Death

The Fair Maids, the Knight Templar, the Diarist and his Wife

Daniel Defoe