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

Against the east side of the church of Saint John in Frome, where bushes encroach onto the graveyard, I noticed a strange, shabby, neglected tomb. It was covered by a stone canopy abutting the church wall, and visible only through windows cut into two sides the stone. Even this view was partially obscured by iron bars painted the functional shade of blue favoured by municipal authorities in the vicinity of public swimming baths and water features. Peering through I discerned cracked tiles crudely decorated with bishops’ mitres. More thick iron bars straddled the tiles like a cage, marking the shape of the tomb beneath. On top of the cage lay a bishop’s crozier and mitre, also of metal, crudely fabricated and coated with peeling paint. Soil debris, bird droppings, and weeds growing through the tiles completed the picture of decrepitude.

More bars mark the shape of the tomb beneath

The remains of Anglican bishops are generally cosseted in their cathedrals, so this scruffy outlier came as a surprise.

On the far side of the tomb, I found an inscription:

May the here interred Thomas, Bp of Bath and Wells,

and uncanonically deprived for not transferring

his allegiance, have a perfect consummation of blisse

both of body and soul

-of which God keep me always mindful.

(Bishop Ken’s epitaph ordered by himself.)

I liked the rolling language of his phrases although the conflation looked grammatically suspect. Even more, I was intrigued by the resentment which Bishop Ken carried to his scruffy grave, as he recalled an unforgiven slight arising from his own principled stand. I hoped for an amusing tale of strife and discordancy amongst the episcopacy, perhaps a scandal or a schism.

In the Bishops’ Palace beside Wells Cathedral there was little sign that there had ever been any drama. In the long gallery Bishop Ken’s sizeable portrait occupied a prominent position amongst others who had held office in Bath and Wells.

Bishop Ken’s portrait in the long gallery of the Bishops’ Palace, Wells

The written guides described the occupant of the diocese from 1685-1688 in anodyne language: a Bishop of simple lifestyle, a supporter of unspecified worthy causes, showing compassion for the needy by regularly inviting twelve poor parishioners to share his Sunday lunch,* and an enthusiastic hymn writer.**

His first brush with authority had come in 1687 when James II issued The Declaration of Indulgence. The Declaration suspended laws enforcing conformity to the Church of England: it allowed people to worship as they saw fit and ended the requirement to take communion in the Anglican Church in order to obtain public office. Seven bishops, including Ken, refused to proclaim The Declaration. They were sent to the Tower and charged with seditious libel. Marches and riots in the City made it clear that they enjoyed widespread support. They were subsequently acquitted.

The Declaration, ostensibly proclaiming religious tolerance, was a crude political tactic. James had no interest in religious pluralism. Since he had succeeded his brother in 1685, he had pursued a policy of promoting Catholics, from whom his chief supporters were drawn. The inclusion of Dissenters in the Declaration was a transparent attempt to win their support in a political alliance against Anglican Parliamentarians.

For James had shown no compunction in persecuting Dissenters. The Presbyterian Covenanters in Scotland had refused to take the Oath of Supremacy reasoning that no mortal king but only Jesus Christ could be head of the church. They refused to pray for the king or attend their parish churches. Instead, they held open air meetings at field conventicles. For this they had been excluded from all public offices and fined. On coming to power James had instigated new penal laws passed by the Scottish Parliament under pressure from him, subjecting both Covenanter preachers and their hearers to the death penalty and the subsequent confiscation of their property. Suspects were brutally tortured to extract confessions.

The Declaration of Indulgence was just the latest in a series of attempts by James to re-establish a monarchy unchecked by Parliament. To this end he had been appointing his own supporters to the highest offices at court, in the church, and in the universities. Lords Lieutenant vetted potential members of Parliament to pack the chamber with loyalists. Local government was purged to produce a docile electoral machinery. James enlarged the standing army using his dispensing power to appoint his Catholic supporters to command regiments. He demanded that Parliament vote large sums of money to maintain these forces. When the members refused, he prorogued Parliament.

James had embarked on an arbitrary rule, suspending Habeas Corpus, introducing a centralised, autocratic, militarised state. He sought a ruling from the law courts that he had the power to dispense with Acts of Parliament, and when judges questioned this undermining of the rule of law, they were dismissed.

It was clear then that the Declaration of Indulgence was a cynical ploy to wrest power from any future Parliament by packing it with the King’s own supporters, facilitating his exercise of absolute power, reviving the Divine Right of Kings as God’s appointees to rule as they saw fit. Any tolerance would be dependent on the King’s capricious decision making. It was ascendancy, not toleration which James sought.

But it was not any legitimate objection to autocratic power and arbitrary rule which motivated Ken and his fellow bishops; indeed, Ken upheld the Divine Right and had backed the King against Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685. Far more likely it was the well-founded fear that their own privileges would be eroded which prompted their opposition.

Neither side emerges with credit from this spat, both struggling to ensure that in their own interests their preferred religious faction had control of the government. And certainly, neither the bishops nor the king questioned the dubious legitimacy of any theocratic influence on the legislature.

But this crude attempt to buy the support of the Dissenters irrevocably undermined any remaining credibility which James may have had. On the very day that the Bishops were acquitted, the Immortal Seven (six nobles and a bishop) wrote to William of Orange inviting him to England and suggesting that he bring a small army with him. As William landed at Torbay, James fled, throwing the Great Seal, used by monarchs to signify assent to state documents, into the Thames as he went.

If he thought that disposing of the latter would incapacitate any alternative government, James was wrong. He was considered to have abdicated and Parliament invited William and Mary to take the throne. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was imminent.

And it was at this point that Bishop Ken had his second altercation with the establishment. Since he believed in the Divine Right of Kings and had sworn allegiance to James, Ken reasoned that it would be breaking his oath if he swore allegiance to William while James was still alive. So, he became one of six Bishops, known as the non-jurors, who refused to swear allegiance to the new king and were subsequently removed from office. Once again, I suspect, he may have been influenced by a desire to protect his Anglican privileges, this time against a Calvinist threat.

Ken’s friend Lord Weymouth provided him with a home and an annuity at Longleat- whose grandeur eclipses that of any Bishops’ Palace – for the next twenty years. In 1703 Queen Anne invited Ken to resume his bishopric; but even though both James and William were now dead he refused, though he did accept the £200 pension which Anne offered.

Before his own death in 1711 he had requested to be buried in the nearest parish church “within my diocese,” and written his epitaph. So, there he is in St. John’s churchyard, Frome: a man of integrity and principle, or a conservative with narrow views and a petulant, querulous disposition, depending on your point of view.

And the Glorious Revolution? There was no overthrow of the status quo, no fundamental change in the class system. William himself had an ulterior motive, seeking an alliance against French expansion which he considered a threat to the independence of the Netherlands. Certainly, the subsequent Bill of Rights (1689) heralded a degree of Parliamentary democracy, with the powers of a constitutional monarch limited by Parliamentary sovereignty. Absolute monarchy and any concept of the Divine Right of Kings was superseded by the notion of a social contract between rulers and ruled. It became illegal for any monarch to suspend the law or to make royal appointments, to levy taxes or to maintain a standing army in time of peace without the consent of Parliament. Elections were to be free, the life of Parliaments and the interval between Parliaments to be limited. An independent judiciary, freedom of press and speech, and greater religious toleration were written into law. At the very least it was an improvement, and no one had to die for it. Further steps towards democracy followed slowly over the centuries, and sometimes people did die for them. Yet well into the twenty-first century we still tolerate the anomaly of an unelected head of state and an unelected second chamber where twenty-six Anglican bishops still have an automatic right to sit and vote.***

**********

*He shared his lunch with the poor but unlike Dom Helder Camara he never questioned the origins of their poverty. “When I gave food to the poor they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor have no food, they called me a Communist,” Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian Prelate, in Essential Writings edited by McDonough, 2009.

**Those of us who attended school in the sixties when a provision of the 1944 Education Act still made a daily act of worship mandatory can recall Awake My soul and with the Sun and Praise God from whom all Blessings Flow from morning assemblies.

***Republic is committed to the abolition of the monarchy, its replacement with an elected head of state, and a more democratic political system. For details of activities and events see https://www.republic .org.uk

Robert Owen: Capitalist, Political Philosopher, Social Reformer.

By Gravedigger

On August 3, 2025

In Political Theorists, Philosophers and Economists, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

1960s planning law led to the expansion of Newtown in Powys, formerly Montgomeryshire, but the heart of the stolid little market town remains huddled in a bend of the river Severn, impervious to the late twentieth century developments which stretch beyond it. The main street is a cheerful jumble of Victorian redbrick and arts and crafts timbers; there are three museums, a contemporary art gallery, and a theatre. And outside the ruined church of St. Mary on the south bank of the river I found a jewel. For there, against a backdrop of ivy-draped stone walls, sat a splendid contrivance of wrought iron swirls and twists, as though an exotic Parisian fantasy from the Belle Epoque had been dropped into the unpretentious Welsh town.

It is the grave of Robert Owen (1771-1858), variously acclaimed as The Father of British Socialism, a Capitalist Paternalist, and the Inspiration of the Co-operative Movement.

Owen was born in Newtown, leaving school at ten years old to become an apprentice draper in Lincolnshire. After working in London and Manchester he opened and managed his own mill. In 1799 he bought the New Lanark Mill in Scotland. There 2,000 people, five hundred of them children, were employed in cotton spinning.

Conditions in cotton mills were harsh: workers, including children, worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, the machinery was dangerous, discipline brutal, and wages low. Orphans and young children from poor families were often not paid at all, receiving only basic food and a place to sleep. By this exploitation of labour mill owners accrued substantial profits and accumulated great wealth.

Owen’s approach was different. He and his partners, who included Jeremy Bentham, chose to limit themselves to a 5% return on their capital. Owen transformed the factory, introducing the eight-hour day, and campaigning for its introduction elsewhere under the slogan

Eight Hours Labour, Eight Hours Recreation, Eight Hours Rest.

Setting an example in his own mill, Owen campaigned for the introduction of child labour laws, outlawing the employment of children under ten years old. He increased wages, improved working conditions and housing, and reformed the truck system. Under the latter workers had received their pay in tokens which could only be used in the owners’ truck shops where high prices were charged for shoddy goods. Owen did not abolish the system, but his shops sold quality goods at just above wholesale price, passing on savings from bulk purchases. With the profits returned to the community, Owen’s shops were the forerunners of the Co-operative Movement later established by the Rochdale Pioneers.

Espousing the philosophy that character is not inherent, but formed by environment, Owen sought to provide a sound physical, moral, and social background for the children of his workers. At New Lanark he funded schools, including the first nursery schools in Britain for four- to six-year-olds, with a curriculum which included dancing and music.

For Owen’s workers there was the opportunity for adult education, with lectures and concerts. There was recreation on the allotments and free health care.

New Lanark was not perfect: Owen was an autocrat, his workers constantly subjected to his scrutiny, he even inspected their houses for cleanliness; the work was still hard, monotonous, and dangerous; and the Silent Monitor was an alienating presence located above each machinist. The monitor was Owen’s own invention, a four-sided block with each side painted a different colour, it was turned to represent the quality and quantity of the worker’s output.

Nonetheless New Lanark flourished, more efficient than other factories, the output reflected the better working conditions, and it achieved an international reputation. It was a reputation which Owen hoped would appeal to the self-interest of other capitalists, illustrating to them that if they extended the same care to their workers as they did to their machines they might be rewarded with greater productivity.

By the 1820s Owen had embraced the more radical ideals of Utopian Socialism. Moving to the United States, he expended his by now considerable fortune to buy up an existing town of 180 buildings and several thousand acres in Indiana. He renamed the town, previously owned by a religious group which had relocated, New Harmony. In this experimental socialist Utopia, he pursued his belief that a clean, safe environment founded on moral values and equal opportunities would foster mutual respect in a prosperous society. To this end, he poured money into schools and libraries, established communal kitchens and dining rooms, promoted scientific research and the arts.

Yet New Harmony was as spectacular a failure as New Lanark had been a success, and after two years the community was dissolved.

Accounts for the failure vary. There were disagreements within the community and suggestions that some of its members were parasitic upon others, exploiting goodwill to their own selfish advantage. In common with other self-contained communities of the time New Harmony foundered in the absence of members with practical skills. Josiah Warren, the American Philosophical Anarchist who had joined Owen at New Harmony, later rejected Owenism suggesting that self-preservation and the desire for personal property would always prove stronger instincts than commitment to the common good.

Marx, while agreeing that the working class were creating the wealth from which they were not benefitting, did not share Owen’s view that a Socialist utopia within existing society would prove its superiority over time. He reasoned that it was not possible to circumvent international capitalism with small scale communes. The overthrow of the capitalist system could only come via a revolutionary party independent of all capitalist influence.

Owen returned to London with his fortune dissipated, but his beliefs untarnished. No longer wealthy, but increasingly radical, he dedicated the rest of his life to political propaganda in support of trades unionism, the Co-operative Movement, better housing for workers, legislation to improve wages and working conditions, the abolition of child labour, aid for the unemployed, free co-educational schools, the abolition of corporal punishment, equal opportunities, the establishment of libraries and museums, and secularism. He spoke tirelessly at public meetings, churned out pamphlets and periodicals… and died penniless.

Towards the end of his life, he had returned to Newtown seeking to be buried near his parents. There were protests at the prospect of such a dangerous radical and avowedly non-Christian individual being buried in sacred ground. But by good fortune the thirteenth century church of St. Mary, having served five hundred years as the parish church of Newtown, had been abandoned two years previously after repeated flooding when the winter Severn burst its banks. With his congregation relocated to the new St. David’s, the rector proved amenable to Owen’s burial beneath the south wall outside the nave of the old church.

Forty years later Owen’s friend and fellow reformer, George Jacob Holyoake, revisited the grave to find it neglected and decaying. He exerted his influence on the Co-operative Union to restore the tabletop slate tomb and erect the ornate Art Nouveau iron railings, awash with foliage and neo-classical symbols, around it. The tomb bears the Co-op motto

Each for All, and All for Each

and a quotation from Owen himself

It is the one great and universal interest of the human race to be cordially united and to aid each other to the full extent of their capabilities.

At the dedication ceremony in 1902 Holyoake reminded the assembled trade unionists that

Due to Owen – Knowledge is Greater; Life is Longer; Health is Surer; Disease is Limited; Towns are Sweeter; Hours of Labour are Shorter; Men are Stronger; Women are Fairer; Children are Happier.

No mean achievement.

Today a public garden has been created. It runs from the riverbank, through the now roofless church whose walls are lined with old gravestones, surrounds Owen’s tomb, and spills on towards the town in a summer riot of grasses and flowers.

An Angry Young Man: John Osborne (1929-1994)

By Gravedigger

On July 20, 2025

In Dramatists

My English teacher had been at the opening night of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, and more than a decade later conjured for us the consternation of the audience when the curtain rose on a squalid flat and its slovenly inhabitants.

Beyond the classical canon, British theatre audiences were used to the escapism of the so-called “well-made plays,” genteel country house dramas from the pens of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan. On stage a tastefully furnished drawing room would open via French windows onto a garden beyond, and cut-glass accents would deliver brittle, witty dialogue punctuated by pauses for audience appreciation.

Kitchen Sink Painters like Osborne’s contemporary, John Bratby, had already brought a new category of social realism to art, celebrating the everyday lives of ordinary people. Their canvases featured shabby prams parked in overgrown gardens; washing hanging in backyards surrounded by broken bicycles, chairs, and discarded beer bottles; wretched kitchens with chip friers, overflowing rubbish bins, and, of course, grimy kitchen sinks.

Osborne was the first of the Angry Young Men who brought working class anti-heroes to the stage in the late fifties and early sixties. The Kitchen Sink Dramas, located in cramped, low income, domestic environments, addressed issues of alienation, provincial boredom, alcohol abuse, crime, adultery, pre-marital sex, and abortion. They brought regional accents to the stage, and a radical, anarchic howl of rage against middle class privilege and a smug, autocratic Establishment.

Reviews of Look Back in Anger were mixed. The majority disliked Osborne’s play and dubbed it a failure, but notable exceptions were the theatre critics Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson. Tynan, whose vitriolic reviews had castigated what he dubbed the Loamshire plays of Rattigan and Coward, eulogised Osborne’s work:

I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.

His fervour proved prescient; the play transferred successfully, and a film version followed. When I first saw a production in the 1960s, I was enthralled, fascinated by every detail; still today I seldom contemplate a pile of ironing without remembering Jimmy Porter and Alison.

Osborne’s success continued with The Entertainer (1957). Again premiered at the Royal Court, it was a more overtly political play set against the background of the Suez crisis. The dying music hall tradition, eclipsed by rock and roll, cinema, and television, mirrored the declining influence of the British Empire supplanted by the growing ambit of the USA. Laurence Olivier played Archie Rice, the bitter, failing music hall performer, a role he repeated in the film version in 1960.

More successes followed for Osborne with Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964) and A Patriot for Me (1965).

But by the 70s Osborne had abandoned his early socialism, impassioned attacks on the monarchy, and support for CND, espousing instead conservative prejudices, bigotry, and nostalgia, even supporting Enoch Powell. He wrote for the right-wing Spectator and moved to the Shropshire countryside where he played the role of country gentleman. Returning to the Church of England and becoming a drum-beater for Anglican ritual, he approximated to a blimpish caricature of one of the stereotypes in the despised Loamshire plays.

Hindsight is a cheap skill, but looking back at Osborne’s work it seems obvious now that the conservative strain was there from the beginning. Look Back in Anger is largely autobiographical; Osborne’s alter ego Jimmy Porter is angry, but his anger is not that of constructive, political protest, but rather a whining, shouty, resentful outpouring of bile directed against a world which does not provide him with the opportunities and rewards he feels are his right.

When the play was revived at The Almeida last year, I reread it but decided not to see it again. It is a misogynistic rant. Where I remembered working class rage, I found toxic masculinity, dated and unpalatable. His autobiography reveals him in an equally sour light: vicious in his attitude towards his mother and his daughter whom he threw out when she was only seventeen; abusive towards four of his five wives- although, in fairness, they seemed able to reciprocate- jealous of their successes and presuming that they should give up their own work to tend to his needs.

Of course, Osborne was not alone in his misogyny; an unsubtle clue to the ubiquity of that persuasion in the 50s and 60s lies in the genre designation Angry Young Men. Apart from Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction and Poor Cow, the writing of angry young women was not visible.

And yet, although his repugnant attitudes are dated, and his writing sometimes shrill, Osborne can also be witty, perceptive, and clever, and the audience shock when the curtain went up on that first production at the Royal Court was one of the defining moments of twentieth century theatre. Moreover, his early kitchen sink realism opened the way for other working-class dramas, novels, films, and television. Those of us who grew up in the sixties still remember the high quality of ITV’s Armchair Theatre and the BBC’s Wednesday Play: who will ever forget Jeremy Sandford’s Cathy Come Home directed by Ken Loach?

Osborne is buried in St. George’s churchyard in the village of Clun in Shropshire beside his fifth wife Helen Dawson. The quotation on his grave

Let me know where you’re working tomorrow night – and I’ll come and see you

is spoken by Archie Rice in The Entertainer. It is his final interaction with the audience before leaving the stage, and as well as a farewell, I suspect it carries the unspoken, bitter question, “do you think you could have done any better?”

The quotation on Helen Osborne’s grave

-My feet hurt

-Try washing your socks

is an exchange between Cliff and Jimmy in Look Back in Anger. Helen Dawson had chosen a copy of the play as a literary prize when she was in school. When she married Osborne she gave it to him, inscribed, “And back to you.” I have no idea of the significance of the particular quotation, although it does sound like an expression of the disdain which both Osbornes could exercise towards other people.

But they are, undeniably, an attractive pair of graves.

Paul Julius Reuter: Truth in News

By Gravedigger

On July 6, 2025

In Journalists

Until the 1980s Fleet Street was a metonym for the national press. Giant printing presses rumbled in the basements of the newspaper offices to which reporters filed domestic and international news. The street held a magical, romantic sense of urgency. Late at night vans collected the packaged newspapers and raced them to mainline stations where they were loaded onto trains to be dispersed in the early hours of the morning at provincial halts throughout the country.

Fleet Street’s association with printing and publishing began in 1500 when William Caxton’s former apprentice, Wynkyn de Worde set up a printing press beside St. Bride’s church. Others followed, and the presence of the presses stimulated the publication of newspapers in the same street. In 1702 the first London daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, appeared. The repeal of the newspaper tax in 1855 heralded the great days of newspaper publishing, and for the next hundred- and thirty-years major newspapers made Fleet Street their headquarters.

Reuters News Agency joined them there. Paul Julius Reuter (1816-1899) had begun his working life as a bank clerk but moved into book publishing. In 1848 he had produced radical pamphlets in support of the revolutions. Following the conspicuous failure of the revolution in Berlin, he judged it politic to move to Paris where he worked for the Havas news agency, before founding his own agency in Aachen.

Aachen and Brussels were the terminal points of the German – French/Belgian telegraph line, but there was a seventy-six-mile gap in that line. Reuter used forty-five homing pigeons to bridge the divide. The pigeons, carrying financial news from the Paris Stock exchange, could complete in two hours a journey which took the train six hours.

When the telegraph line was laid in Britain in 1851, Reuter moved to an office near the London Stock Exchange, setting up a specialist financial news agency supplying information on securities, commodities, stock prices and currencies to Continental Exchanges. Now he supplemented the telegraph lines with two hundred carrier pigeons. When undersea cables were laid, he expanded his service to other continents.

In 1863 Reuter erected his own telegraph link from London to Crookhaven in SW Ireland; ships coming from America would throw cannisters containing news into the sea to be retrieved by Reuters employees and telegraphed to London. Since this was quicker than waiting for the ships to dock in London, national papers began to subscribe to Reuters Agency which diversified to provide a general news service in addition to its financial speciality.

Reuter had early established a reputation in the financial world for accuracy, rapidity, and reliability. When he expanded his service, his aim was to provide “Truth in News” with the same exacting standards of expeditious, concise, accurate reporting. His agency was the first in Europe to report Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, and the surrender of the south in the American Civil War.

After Reuter’s death the success of his agency continued: it was the first to report the Relief of Mafeking (1900); the Great War Armistice (1918); the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun (1923); the assassination of Gandhi (1948); Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin (1956); and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990).

Reuters moved from its original office to Fleet Street in 1939 to be in greater proximity to the newspapers who used its service. But less than fifty years later modern technology was leading to the replacement of hot metal printing by digital. In 1986 the News International owner Rupert Murdoch moved production of the Times and the Sun to cheaper manufacturing premises in Wapping. In doing so he also sought to break the power of the print unions, the NGA and SOGAT; all the print staff were dismissed and fresh staff brought in to operate the presses using computer aided technology.

As other newspapers followed, Fleet Street ceased to be synonymous with printing and publishing. In 1989 The Daily Express was the last newspaper to be printed there. Reuters was the last news agency to leave, moving to Canary Wharf in 2005. On the day they left a service was held in St. Bride’s, formerly the journalists’ church, in whose shadow Wynkyn de Worde had setup his printing press, and where he is believed to be buried.

Reuters lives on, today employing 2,500 journalists in two hundred locations worldwide. Its founder, Paul Julius, was buried in West Norwood Cemetery in south London, one of the Big Seven Victorian cemeteries, known in his day as the Millionaires’ Cemetery. With no small irony, given his passionate commitment to accuracy in reporting, Reuter’s own grave bears a misspelling of his name. In 2002 the agency placed a plaque beside the grave, ruefully acknowledging the error.

Grave of Paul Julius Reuter, West Norwood Cemetery.

A plaque placed at the foot of the grave ruefully acknowledges the error, adding “this mistake is ironic since accuracy has contributed to the enduring success of the news agency which he founded.”

For more on Fleet Street see https://symbolsandsecrets.london Fleet Street Legends, 22 February 2018

Happy Families? Connubial Bliss? True Stories?

By Gravedigger

On June 22, 2025

In Behind the Epitaph

At Apollonia in ancient Illyria, present day Albania, we had visited the Roman baths and theatre, the Byzantine church and the museum, and now our guide drew our attention to a particular gravestone.

CAECILIA L F

VENVSTA BYLLID

CVM LARTIDO NAISSO

MARITO SUO HIC SITA EST

CVMQVO ANNIS XXXXII

SINE QVERELLA SANCTISSIME VIXIT

For a while we were all preoccupied, trying to match dimly remembered school Latin to the words on the stele. Our guide was confident: “Here lies Cecilia alongside her husband, a couple who never quarrelled in 42 years of marriage,” he announced.

A doubtful silence ensued as we pondered the questionable veracity of this claim. The cynical feminist in me considered that the apparent harmony might only indicate that Cecelia had judged it politic to keep her opinions to herself.

“If it is true, it must have been a very dull marriage,” averred one of our group with such conviction that we considered the matter closed. But our guide, I sensed, was disappointed by our failure to take Cecelia’s amicable conjugal relations at face value and our reluctance to be charmed, as he was, by the story the stone told.

We never know if truth lies behind the wording on grave markers, especially those of private individuals where the epitaph is often their sole record. Moreover their “truth” can be a protean construct.

On the other side of Europe, in the Hampshire village of Minstead, another grave, at first sight, bears witness to another affectionate relationship. The rigors of the British climate have weathered the soft stone, but it is still possible to read it.

Sacred

To the Memory of

Thomas White

Who died 31^st Oct. 1842

Aged 81 Years.

A faithful friend, a Father dear,

A Husband lies buried here.

In love he lived, in love he died,

His life was craved but God denied.

But it is strikingly clear that a word which once preceded “Husband” has been carefully expunged. The story goes that originally the epitaph described a “faithful Husband,” but after his death village gossips advised Mrs. White of her husband’s infidelities, and she took a chisel to the erroneous adjective.

Moral: Epitaphia semper cum grano salis accipite.

Bishop Ken: Uncanonically Deprived but hoping for a Perfect Consummation of Blisse

Robert Owen: Capitalist, Political Philosopher, Social Reformer.

An Angry Young Man: John Osborne (1929-1994)

Paul Julius Reuter: Truth in News

Happy Families? Connubial Bliss? True Stories?