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

Three Ladies of the Crimea

On December 7, 2025

In 1853 the Ottoman Empire was in decline and Russian expansion threatened the balance of power. British and French armies united with the Turks fighting the Russians in Crimea. WH Russell’s journalism, Roger Fenton’s photography, Tennyson’s poetry, and the paintings of Elizabeth Butler, Robert Gibb and Harry Payne fostered a jingoistic enthusiasm for the war in Britain such that Alma, Balaklava, and Inkerman still feature as street names today.

Against this background Florence Nightingale emerged as a national heroine, venerated by Victorians as The Lady with the Lamp.

Nightingale (1820-1910) was born into a wealthy British family. She believed, as significant numbers of Victorians did, that she was called by god to serve others. Her decision to realise this through nursing was strongly, and unsurprisingly, opposed by her family. “Nurses” at this time were not far removed from the caricature of Sarah Gamp presented by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit: untrained, incompetent, negligent and often drunk. Hospitals were filthy places with straw spread on the floors, as it might be in an old butcher’s shop, to soak up blood.

Nightingale however managed to acquire some medical training at a Lutheran religious community in Germany where the deaconesses worked with the sick. In 1853, through social connections, she was appointed Superintendent of the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street.

In 1854 Sidney Herbert, the Secretary of State for War, who knew Nightingale well, appointed her to lead a staff of thirty-eight women volunteer nurses at the military hospital in Scutari. Here she found the wounded being treated in horrific conditions with shortage of medicines, hygiene neglected, overworked staff, overcrowding, lack of ventilation, poor nutrition, and rampant infections. Ten times as many soldiers were dying from typhus, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery as from battle wounds.

Five days after her arrival the injured from the battles of Balaklava and Inkerman appeared at the hospital. Nightingale instituted practical measures: cleaning, hand washing, bathing patients, improved nutrition.

The improved hygiene may have reduced the death rate, but the latter remained high until the British Government set out a sanitary commission. Realising that the hospital was built over defective sewers and patients were drinking contaminated water, they flushed out the sewers and improved ventilation. The mortality rate then fell substantially, but not as dramatically as reported at the time since the government concealed accurate figures to avoid criticism.

Meanwhile the media of the day romanticised and arguably exaggerated Nightingale’s achievements. William Russell in The Times:

She is a “ministering angel” without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.

A portrait of her with her lamp appeared in The Illustrated London News and Henry Wordsworth Longfellow immortalised her in Santa Filomena, a sentimental and moralising poem which enjoyed great popularity:

Lo! In that house of misery

A lady with a lamp I see

Pass through the glimmering of the gloom

And flit from room to room.

Lytton Strachey, a man not given to hyperbole, nor to bad poetry, nonetheless praised Nightingale in his book Eminent Victorians which debunked other nineteenth century heroes. His more judicious reasoning suggesting that her achievements were as admirable as her personality was intolerable. The Lady with the Lamp was stubborn and opinionated, he claimed, but these qualities were needed to realise improvements at Scutari.

Although she is most remembered for her time in the Crimea, Nightingale’s achievements when she returned home after the war were greater. In 1860 she set up the first secular training school for nurses at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. She insisted on autonomous nursing leadership with matrons having full control of their staff, to the chagrin of doctors who saw their authority threatened. The hierarchical structure which she instituted, influenced by her contact with the army, undoubtedly alienated some potential nurses. Yet the teaching hospitals transformed nursing into a respectable, and respected, profession.

Nightingale turned her attention not only to the sanitary design of hospitals but also to working class homes. Working with the sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick she produced statistical models highlighting the causes of mortality. Their mutual commitment to adequate drainage reduced the death rate. A pioneer statistician, Nightingale produced the so called rose diagrams, a type of pie chart, summarising their research in a form which could be quickly understood and used to put pressure on government to introduce reforms.

Nightingale was lauded by the press, received awards and decorations including the Order of Merit, and offered a burial in Westminster Abbey which in accordance with her prior request her family declined. She is buried in St. Margaret’s churchyard, East Wellow, Hampshire near her family home.

The rather stark grave of Florence Nightingale bears only her initials and dates of birth and death

Statues of Nightingale and Sidney Herbert flank the Crimean War Memorial at Waterloo Place in London

But Nightingale was not the only woman whose fame rested largely on her activities in the Crimea. Mary Seacole (1805-1881) was born in Jamaica where her mother ran a boarding house and convalescent home for military and naval staff. She was also a “doctress”: a woman who treated the sick with traditional Caribbean and African herbal medicines. Seacole worked alongside her mother, sometimes providing nursing assistance at the British Army Hospital.

In 1851 while visiting her brother in Panama she helped to treat victims of an outbreak of cholera. Spotting a business opportunity in Panama, where gold prospectors were passing to and from California, she opened the British Hotel and Restaurant to cater for them.

Seacole travelled to England initially to deal with investments which she had acquired in gold mining businesses. She then applied to the War Office to join the second contingent of nurses going to the Crimea, but the full complement had already been secured. She appealed to the trustees of the Crimea Fund, established to support the wounded in Crimea, for sponsorship to travel there but was refused. Seacole suspected a lack of appreciation of her skills as a doctress and an element of racism in this refusal:

In my country, where people know our use, it would have been different; but here it was natural enough…that they should laugh, good-naturedly enough, at my offer….Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? (1)

Seacole used her own resources to travel to Crimea where she opened the New British Hotel at Balaclava in 1855 aiming to provide food and accommodation for sick and convalescent officers. The French chef, Alexis Soyer, who had come to Crimea to help improve the diet of British soldiers, advised her to concentrate on a food and beverage service as the officers slept on their ships or in camp.

For the duration of the war, Seacole combined a successful catering business with medical aid to the wounded. She served officers in the British Hotel and sold provisions near the British camp. After supplying food and drink to spectators who came to view the battles from Cathcart’s Hill, she would head for the battlefield to nurse the casualties.

WH Russell wrote:

She was a warm and successful physician, who doctors and cures all manner of men with extraordinary success. She is always in attendance near the battlefield to aid the wounded and has earned many a poor fellow’s blessing. (2)

“Mother Seacole” as she became known to the soldiers.

out of the goodness of her heart and at her own expense, supplied hot tea to the poor sufferers (wounded men being transported from the peninsula to the hospital at Scutari) while they are waiting to be lifted into the boats…She did not spare herself if she could do any good to the suffering soldiers. In rain and snow, in storm and tempest, day after day she was at her self-chosen post with her stove and kettle, in any shelter she could find, brewing tea for all who wanted it, and there were many. (3)

But Seacole did much more than provide tea; equipped with lint, bandages, needles, and thread she tended to the wounds of soldiers, prepared medicines, and performed minor surgery. (4)

When the war ended and the soldiers left Crimea, Seacole faced financial difficulties with provisions she could no longer sell and creditors demanding payment. But such was her celebrity and popularity that when she returned to England a fund supported by many military men was set up on her behalf.

Mary Seacole continued to travel and in 1857 published her autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.

In 1860 she had converted to Catholicism, and when she died, she was buried in St. Margaret’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green.

But while Nightingale’s fame endured after her death, Seacole was all but forgotten for a century, until in 1973 her grave was rediscovered and restored by the Jamaican Nurses Association. A memorial service was held on the centenary of her death in 1981.

..newly restored and easily located amongst the grey stones which surround it

In the 21^st century Seacole has achieved more prominence, and since 2007 she has featured on the national curriculum alongside Florence Nightingale.

And then there is Mary Anne Bulkley (1789-1865), more commonly known as James Barry, army surgeon and Inspector General of Military Hospitals, whose passion for improved sanitation rivalled that of Nightingale, and whose emphasis on the importance of good diet surpassed that of Seacole.

Barry was born in Cork and assumed male identity in 1809 when she entered the medical faculty of Edinburgh university, where she would not at that time have been admitted as a woman. She came close to being banned from taking her final exams, not on the suspicion that she was a woman but that her delicate appearance indicated that she was underage. Only the intervention of an influential family friend secured her graduation.

She went on to qualify in surgery at St Thomas’ and Guy’s Hospital and became an army surgeon. Her career was marked by remarkable success and frequent promotions with postings all over the empire, interspersed with violent clashes with fellow surgeons, military officers and officials leading on one occasion to a duel, followed by arrest and demotion.

In Cape Town she became the Colonial Medical Inspector, and it was there that she performed one of the first successful Caesarean sections.

Throughout her career she was concerned with the welfare of the poor and underprivileged, and of rank-and-file soldiers. And from this sprang her obsession with clean water, spotless wards, sterile instruments, improved sanitation, and healthy diet.

Though her professional skill was never in doubt, she earned a reputation for being tactless, impatient, argumentative, imperious, and opinionated.

During the Crimean war she ran a hospital for convalescent soldiers in Corfu, as always putting emphasis on the paramount importance of hygiene, clean hands, and instruments. The hospital had some of the highest recovery rates of the conflict.

Soon after, in 1859, Barry was forcefully retired on the grounds of old age and ill health.

She had left instructions that there should be no examination of her body after death, that she should not be washed, but buried in the clothes she died in wrapped in her bedsheets. Nonetheless her landlady summoned a woman to lay out the body. On discovering that Barry was a woman the latter approached DR McKinnon, Barry’s own physician, hoping to be paid for her silence. When McKinnon refused saying that Barry’s sex was none of his business, she took her story to the press.

There resulted the prurient speculation which McKinnon, and others who had known of Barry’s sex, had sought to avoid. Fortunately, as McKinnon pointed out, there was no family to be distressed by this.

Barry was buried in Kensal Green but when I visited recently the grave looked a little forlorn and forgotten. It features in the cemetery guide produced by the Friends of Kensal Green but is not easy to find and was more overgrown than I remembered from earlier visits.

Barry does not feature on the national curriculum.

And Did The Three Ladies of the Crimea Ever Meet?

Nightingale and Seacole did meet in Scutari, when Seacole was en route to Crimea, and sought a bed for the night. Seacole recorded that one of Nightingale’s colleagues had rebuffed her thinking she sought to join their group, and she inferred that racism was at the root of the rebuttal. But later when Seacole was packing up to leave Crimea she told Soyer,

You must know, M Soyer, that Miss Nightingale is very fond of me. When I passed through Scutari, she very kindly gave me board and lodging.

When Soyer related this to Nightingale, she replied,

I should like to see her before she leaves, as I hear she has done a deal of good work for the poor soldiers. (5)

And yet, Nightingale did not want her nurses associating with Seacole, as she wrote to her brother-in-law, that although

She was very kind to the men and, what is more, to the Officers -and did some good, (she) made many drunk.

She added that Seacole kept “a bad house” in Crimea and that,

I had the greatest difficulty in repelling Mrs. Seacole’s advances, and in preventing association between her and my nurses (absolutely out of the question!). Anyone who employs Mrs. Seacole will introduce much kindness – also much drunkenness and improper conduct. (6)

Relations between Nightingale and Barry were even more fraught during their one recorded meeting. When Barry visited the hospital at Scutari in her role as Inspector General of Army Hospitals she was not impressed by the standards of hygiene and lectured Nightingale on the subject in the presence of her subordinates. For Nightingale who prided herself so much on the improvements which she had made in hygiene at Scutari this must have been particularly galling. After Barry’s death Nightingale wrote, in a letter fairly dripping with rage, and with a wild assortment of personal pronouns in parentheses,

I never had such a blackguard rating in all my life – I who have done more than any woman – from this Barry sitting on (her) horse, while I was crossing the Hospital Square, with only my cap on, in the sun. (He) kept me standing in the mist of quite a crowd of soldiers, commissariat servants, camp followers, etc etc, every one of whom behaved like a gentleman, during the scolding I received, while (she) behaved like a brute. After (she) was dead, I was told (he) was a woman. I should say (she) was the most hardened creature I ever met. (6)

There is no record of Seacole and Barry ever meeting.

And Today?

There are arguments that Seacole’s knowledge of medicine, her skills and her contribution to nursing surpassed those of Nightingale (7) whose work has been more critically reviewed in recent times. Yet others defend Nightingale’s achievements passionately, regarding Seacole as little more than a kind-hearted businesswoman. (8). The erection of a bronze statue of Seacole outside St. Thomas’ Hospital in 2016 proved controversial since the hospital is associated particularly with Nightingale.

Bronze of Mary Seacole placed outside St. Thomas’ Hospital in 2016

What is certain is that soldiers in the Crimea had reason to be grateful to both The Lady with the Lamp and to Mother Seacole – and to James Barry too.

Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands
The Times, 20 September 1855
National Library of Jamaica, Mary Seacole
Mark Bostridge, Ministering on Distant Shores in The Guardian, 14 February 2004
Alexis Soyer, Soyer’s Culinary Campaign, Routledge 1857
Letters in Wellcome Institute
Jane Robinson, Mary Seacole: The Black Woman who Invented Modern Nursing. Mark Bostridge, Ministering on Distant Shores
Lynn McDonald, cofounder Nightingale Society

WH Smith, Newsagent, Bookseller, Stationer.

By Gravedigger

On November 24, 2025

In Shopkeepers

In my childhood, in the 1950s and 1960s, WH Smith was an essential presence on every high street. It supplied some of my favourite items: books, comics, stationery. And in Chester the shop itself had a romantic allure. Housed in a black and white, half timbered, mock Tudor building, it advertised its presence only with a swinging sign suspended from ornate iron brackets and discreet lettering above the entrance.

Foregate Street, Chester, in the 1950s, WH Smith is housed in the black and white building on the right hand side

The lettering, designed by Eric Gill in 1903, was common to all branches of WH Smith at the time, and the hanging sign featured at many branches. Designed by Septimus E Scott in 1905 these signs were usually made of enamelled steel and featured a newsboy brandishing a newspaper with a tray of books and papers in a basket. Some branches had “boy lanterns” where the image was on glass illuminated from within.

Swinging sign designed by Septimus E Scott

“Boy lanterns” were illuminated from within

In Chester newspapers, magazines and comics occupied the front of the shop, an enticing display spread across a huge counter, the smell of warm printers’ ink hanging in the air above, competing with a chilly blast coming in from the street, for during working hours the shop front stood completely open, and it is winter in my memory.

Deeper inside the shop behind swing doors was the cosy stationery department: a wellspring of fountain pens, Quink ink, pencils graded from 9B through HB to 9H, crayons, pencil sharpeners and rubbers, rulers and protractors, pencil cases, and notebooks. Basildon Bond writing paper and envelopes jostled for space with the more exotic airmail stationery, tissue thin with blue and red borders, and the severe brown envelopes favoured by businesses.

But the greatest delight lay at the top of the broad, creaking L-shaped stair whose dark timbers clung to the panelled walls and whose banister gleamed with polish. For this led to a room where leaded lights in mullioned frames punctuated the panelling, and shelves and tables overflowed with books. Here hardcovers held sway, and it required several months pocket money or a birthday windfall to effect a purchase from the generously stocked children’s section. But I could browse for hours undisturbed, benefitting from the dappled light which discouraged older eyes.

The truth is that though nicely bound and with attractive dust jackets the quality of the literature was not always high; librarians and teachers would have disapproved of the complete set of Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers stories which I coveted. But from its beginnings WHSmith had catered without pretension for popular taste alongside respectable literature.

Henry Walden Smith and his wife Anna had established a newsvendors shop in London just before their son was born in 1792. Anna’s husband died when their son was only a few weeks old, but she continued the business and the son, William Henry (1792-1865) duly took over, renaming the shop WH Smith.

William Henry expanded the business and began sending London newspapers to rural towns by mail coach. He invented Smith’s Peculiar Slipknot which enabled packers to draw the string around the newspaper parcels as tightly as if it had been done by machinery. Every morning at 5am he would be outside his shop in the Strand, in his shirt sleeves, sorting and tying, priding himself on being the quickest packer.

Sometimes there was a delay in the publication of newspapers, and the mail coach would leave without them. William Henry built a light cart with fast horses and employed drivers to pursue the Mail when this happened. When news broke after publication, he sent messengers on horseback carrying printed slips with updates for customers in provincial towns.

Newspapers carried a stamp duty and were expensive. In 1821 William Henry opened a Reading Room at his premises in the Strand where for a daily fee “gentlemen” were invited to read the news more cheaply.

The second William Henry (1825-1891) joined his father in the business just as the railways began to supplant the mail coaches. Unregulated stalls had mushroomed at railway stations selling buns, books, and beverages, often of dubious quality. To raise the standard, and their own income, railway directors invited tenders for holding official stalls. William Henry’s bid was successful; he obtained the exclusive right to sell books and newspapers on the London and Northwestern Company’s stations and established his first stall at Euston in 1848. In 1850 he opened stalls on platforms in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. As the railways expanded so did his business. By 1862 he had a monopoly with stalls on the stations of every railway company in England.

He moved into publishing, producing the “railway novels,” also known as “yellow backs,” * or “mustard plaster novels.” These cheap books bound in yellow board covers, with adverts at the back helping to cut production costs, were the precursors of paperbacks. They covered popular genres of crime, suspense, and romance, undemanding literature suitable for wiling away a train journey, although there were also cheap reprints of Dickens and Shakespeare.

William Henry began lending books from his railway stalls; for a small fee books could be borrowed at one station and returned at another. A circulating library in the Strand followed.

Meanwhile he had benefitted from the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers and from his position as the sole distributor of the Times as circulation increased during the Crimean war.

William Henry had never employed workers on Sundays or distributed Sunday newspapers, but he made an exception when the list of killed and wounded at the Battle of Alma came through late on a Saturday night. On the Sunday morning, he opened his railway bookstalls to allow soldiers’ relatives to check the lists.

His son, William Frederick Danvers Smith (1868-1928), inherited the business and was responsible for the proliferation of high street stores in the early twentieth century. From 1905 the railway companies had demanded higher rents for the station stalls. So, William Frederick moved the focus of the business to shops, often located on approaches to the station to capture the passenger trade. Circulating libraries operated within the shops.

These were the shops that were still flourishing in the 1950s and 1960s although by then most of the circulating libraries had gone, rendered obsolete by the growth of public libraries. It was during this time that the statistician Gordon Foster, hired by the firm, originated the nine-digit code for referencing books which became accepted as the International Standard Book Numbering, ISBN, in 1970.

But in the 1970s, though still successful businesses, the shops began to lose their unique character as they were modernised. In many towns this meant plate glass, crude signage, and cheap fittings. As a listed building the exterior of the Chester branch was protected, but inside the beautiful staircase was ripped out to make more floor space, the panelling disappeared, the newspapers were removed from their glorious display area and shunted into a corner of the airless new shop floor, and the book room was lost to storage.

Yet in one branch, at Newtown in Powys, something special happened. For here instead of being updated the shop was restored to its appearance when it had first opened in 1927, with a small museum upstairs where the former circulating library had been. Tiles, light fittings, and oak shelving emerged from storage, and although not housed in such an attractive building, the shop in Newtown had the same old-world charm that I remembered in the Chester store.

But from the late twentieth century onwards WHSmith, faced with competition from budget shops, supermarkets and online traders, became run down and shabby. The quality of merchandise declined. In February 2025, all the high street stores were sold to the private equity firm Modella capital. Some remain open, fictitiously renamed TG Jones, to give the false impression that it is still a family business. Other branches have been closed, including, in an act of supreme vandalism, the Newtown shop, where the delightful old fixtures and fittings have been removed and the building is on the market as a “development opportunity.”

RIP WHSmith

WH Smith and his descendants lie appropriately beneath a tomb with an open book on top

*Not to be confused with the French yellow novels of the 1890s. WH Smith had a puritanical streak, and nothing salacious reached his bookstalls.

To appreciate what has been lost with the closure of the Newtown shop see, The WH Smith Museum: Hidden Gem in Newtown, Powys. H18-PDW

Battlefield Crosses: Returned From The Front

By Gravedigger

On November 10, 2025

In Victims of war

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,

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.

* https://meltonoldchurch.co.uk >world-war-1-crosses

** https://www.deddingtonhistory.uk >world wars

*** https://cheltenham-battlefield-crosses.org

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.

The Wall of Grief and Love: National Covid Memorial

By Gravedigger

On October 26, 2025

In Victims of Pandemic

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 29^th, 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.

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.

*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.”

****Later extended to 250,000

Lucian Freud, 1922-2011, “Everything is Autobiographical.” Life and Art.

By Gravedigger

On October 12, 2025

In Artists

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