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

The Tale of Charles and Mary Lamb

On July 7, 2024

A particularly pretentious estate agent, more than usually given to hyperbole, is currently offering for sale the “former home of Charles and Mary Lamb.” The sixteenth century Clarendon Cottage located on the quaintly named Gentleman’s Row in Enfield was never the Lambs’ home, but they spent their summer holidays in the then rural location between 1825-27. The house they actually bought in Enfield in 1827 was The Poplars at Chase Side.

The siblings were born and spent their early lives in the Inner Temple where their father was employed as a lawyer’s clerk. Charles (1775-1834) became a clerk to the East India Company, a job he held for twenty five years, alongside publishing poetry and prose. His sentimental poetry, even The Old Familiar Faces, the most celebrated of the poems, is little read today, but the Essays of Elia still have their admirers. Familiar to a far wider audience however are Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Designed to introduce children to Shakespeare’s plays they are clear, readable prose summaries, which nonetheless retain much of the Shakespearian language, while leaving out subplots, violence, and sexual references. The approach is reverential, reflecting Lamb’s strange belief that the plays should be read rather than staged to avoid misinterpretations. Charles tackled the tragedies and Mary the comedies, although they were all originally published under Charles’ name. The history plays they avoided. The Tales were published and sold by William Godwin and his second wife who specialised in juvenile literature, also publishing a children’s version of the Odyssey and volumes of poetry for children. And, despite their limitations, the Tales were an immediate best seller and have never been out of print.

Moreover, the Lambs held a weekly salon attended by literary figures including Southey and Coleridge with whom Charles had been at school. Through Coleridge they became friends with Wordsworth although the latter clashed with Charles who did not share his romantic fascination with nature and the countryside. In a letter to Wordsworth Charles wrote,

Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you Mountaineers have done with dead nature. The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the tradesmen, and customers, coaches, wagons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness about Covent Garden, the very Women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself, a pantomime, a masquerade. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much Life.

How then did Charles Lamb come to buy a property in the former market town of Enfield in Middlesex, reduced to little more than a village surrounded by green meadows in the years that he lived there, far from the sounds, shops, and entertainments of London? A family tragedy lies behind this, the penultimate of many moves which the siblings made.

Both Charles and Mary had periods of mental illness throughout their lives, Mary’s the more severe and more likely to lead to aggression. Charles had spent six weeks in an asylum in 1795. Mary meanwhile was caring for their senile father and incapacitated mother, while supplementing their income with dress making. One day she lost her temper with her young apprentice, treating her roughly. When her mother reproached her, Mary responded by stabbing and fatally wounding her with a kitchen knife. Following their mother’s death Charles took responsibility for his sister, refusing to have her committed to a public mental institution. She was released into his care, and they remained together for the rest of their lives, she caring for him during his bouts of drinking, he for her during her recurring illness. The burden must have been considerable: when they travelled, they took a straitjacket, and Mary was periodically confined to an asylum. Yet it was during the early years of the nineteenth century that their writings became successful, their financial position improved, they expanded their literary and social circle, and established their salon.

But with Charles’ drinking and Mary’s madness they were not popular tenants, often subject to malicious gossip, and easily evicted from their accommodation. They moved from Holborn, back to the Inner Temple, to Covent Garden, and to Islington, before Charles decided that although he would miss London, rural Enfield with its fresh air and quiet would be better for Mary’s health.

Their final move from Enfield in 1833 was to Bay Cottage, Church Street, a private asylum in the nearby village of Edmonton where Mary was the sole patient. Her brother moved into the cottage with her, but following a fall a year later, he developed a streptococcal infection in a cut and died. He was buried in All Saints churchyard, Edmonton where his stone bears an epitaph composed by Wordsworth at Mary’s request. Mary lived on until 1847 when she was buried beside her brother.

The cottage in Edmonton, today bearing a blue plaque and renamed Lambs’ Cottage, still stands, as does the fifteenth century church. And lingering in the precincts of the verdant churchyard I found it easy to imagine that the stout tower and the graves drowsing under a mantle of ivy still lay at the heart of the village which Charles and Mary knew.

But it is long since the sprawl that is Greater London engulfed both Enfield and Edmonton. After the railways and the trams reached the former villages in the 1840s industrialisation followed and they became part of the conurbation of north London. New housing in the interwar period led to their merging with other towns to form the London Borough of Enfield. So, in the end Charles Lamb was surrounded by his beloved London albeit an outer suburb, not the glamourous, raucous heart of it that he loved so much.

By the 1970s the industry and manufacturing had gone again, and today estate agents try, with dubious veracity, to reinvent the small conservation areas in the tired, rundown suburbs as the villages they once were, enlisting the help of famous names to make their properties seem more desireable.

The Plucked Flowers and Great Dreams of Smallcombe

By Gravedigger

On June 23, 2024

In Children

Lying at the end of Horseshoe Lane, a private road winding out of the town between Widcombe Hill and Bathwick Hill, Smallcombe Garden Cemetery appears surprisingly rural and far from the bustle of Bath. Surrounded by gentle slopes and the oak, ash, and lime trees of Smallcombe Woods, the only signs of human habitation are a farm and cemetery cottage.

Opened in 1855 the cemetery closed to burials in 1988 and was left to decline until The Friends of Smallcombe undertook its care in 2014. Since then, they have restored walls and paths, with a new footway linking the cemetery to National Trust land and the Bath Skyline Walk, and carried out research, recording the histories of some of the occupants with whom they have a personal connection or interest. [email protected]

The care The Friends have offered is discreet, and Smallcombe remains seemingly undisturbed save for the birdsong and the whispered passage of foxes and deer. The animals are almost tame, hardly startled when they observe infrequent visitors, mildly inquisitive, moving away cautiously but without haste. Graves laze through the seasons, comfortable, companionable, and undisturbed, graced in spring and summer by wildflowers and by the vibrant berries of autumn and winter.

But one grave here unsettles me. Beneath a statue of an androgenous child, it records the deaths of twin babies:

“WHO PLUCKED THESE FLOWERS?

I, SAID THE MASTER, AND THE

GARDNER HELD HIS PEACE.”

In loving memory of

our darling twins

Phyllis

Born June 17th, 1903

Died June 23rd, 1903

Victor

Born June 17th, 1903.

Died June 17th, 1903

“THEY FOLLOW THE LAMB

WITHERSOEVER HE GOETH.”

It was a popular epitaph on the graves of children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, expressing acceptance that young lives taken by god were his to take. It is impossible not to wish that the grieving parents found consolation in erecting the sad memorial and believing the resigned words.

Yet the death of the babies was not even the end of the pitiful story: the reverse side of the stone records another death, an elder son who like thousands of other young men died in the meaningless carnage of the First World War. The parents’ gentle acceptance was unshaken, for the words read:

Also

Of our beloved eldest boy

John Hay Maitland Hardyman,

D.S.O.M.C. Youngest Lieut. Col.

In the British Army

Born September 28^th, 1894

Killed in Action

August 24^th, 1918

“YOU WERE OUR PRIDE,

WE DREAMED GREAT THINGS

OF YOU. GOD INTERVENED, AND SO

OUR DREAMS CAME TRUE.”

O Grand and Blessed Death,

Quite ready for the call.

He heard his captain’s voice.

Life’s Battle Fought,

Life’s Victory Won.

The soldier thus received

His welcome and his crown.

Certain that all religions are but myths and fallacies, such conviction and gentle forbearance in the face of such cruel and arbitrary deaths seems strange to me. And were I to believe in some omnipotent being, I could only be repelled and angered by the terrible masterplan or capricious action of a careless god who played so needlessly and mercilessly with young lives.

Thomas Cook and the World’s First Package Tour

By Gravedigger

On May 26, 2024

In Dynasties, Inventors, Industrialists and Innovators, Work and Play

At last, the sun is out, the days are warmer and longer, and the holiday season beckons. Nothing raises my spirits so much as a packed suitcase, and the prospect of a journey. Ideally an eager lover should meet me at an exotic train station or airport, but a local guide with my name spelled out on a handheld sign will do. Indeed, I will happily descend into the bowels of an unknown metro or abandon myself to the hustling taxi drivers who swarm like locusts awaiting disorientated travellers. The destination and the transport do not even have to be glamorous: bags in the back of the car, the bossy lady from Google Maps issuing terse directions as I miss the correct exit from the roundabout for the third time, I will advance on the most unprepossessing of English towns, firm in my conviction that there are at least Ten Interesting Things to See in any previously unexplored location. Hearing me say this, a friend once challenged me with her hometown of Middlesbrough; honestly, it could not have been easier.

No surprise then that one of my heroes is Thomas Cook (1808-1892), the man who established the world’s first package tour. Born in Derbyshire, he moved to Leicester in his twenties and established a business as a bookseller and printer. He joined the Temperance Movement and organised his first excursion in 1841, hiring a train and carriages from the newly established Midlands Counties Railway to transport temperance campaigners from Leicester to a rally in Loughborough. Four hundred and eighty-five people made the round trip of twenty-two miles in third class open tub cars. They paid one shilling each which also covered the cost of a meal and the services of the band which accompanied them. Over the next four summers Thomas Cook coordinated similar expeditions to Nottingham, Derby, Birmingham, and Liverpool for members of Temperance Societies and Sunday Schools.

In 1846, expanding to include trips for the general public, he inaugurated his first tour of Scotland, a little blighted by the absence of restaurant and lavatory facilities on the train. Then followed tours of Wales and Ireland. Joseph Paxton, the architect of the Crystal Palace, encouraged him to arrange day trips from Yorkshire and the Midlands to the Great Exhibition in London, and in the course of 1851 he transported 150,000 people to the event in Hyde Park.

Cook opened his Temperance Hall and Hotel in Leicester in 1853. The hotel incorporated his tourism office and his family accommodation. The Temperance Hall offered entertainment to rival the ubiquitous public houses, with concerts, lectures, magic lantern shows and readings, the latter on occasion performed by Charles Dickens.

In 1855 came the first excursion abroad with a “grand circular tour” through Belgium, Germany, and France. Cook negotiated reduced rates and customised schedules with railway companies in return for block bookings. He provided a package of travel, accommodation, and food, personally planning the routes and escorting the trips.

By 1868 Cook had introduced “hotel coupons” which independent travellers could exchange for meals and accommodation at any hotel on “Cook’s List”. In 1874 came “circular notes”, a popular form of traveller’s cheque, the first ones specifically exchangeable for Italian lira at a predetermined rate.

Having brought mass tourism to Italy, for which present day Venice may not thank him, he moved on to America where his “circular tickets” facilitated travel on 4,000 miles of railways.

Cook’s travel office began to sell guidebooks, luggage, telescopes, and suitable footwear for more ambitious expeditions. By 1869 he had hired two steamers to transport his tourists up the Nile. So popular were these tours that the Nile was dubbed “Cook’s Canal.”

His experimental Round the World Tour of 1872 was so successful that it became an annual event. Cook had taken the Grand Tour out of the hands of the very wealthy, opening the world to an ever-widening demographic.

The Cook family grave lies in Welford Road cemetery, Leicester.

It incorporates individual tablets remembering: Cook’s daughter, Annie Elizabeth Cook, who unfortunately died in a bath in 1880 having inhaled poisonous fumes from a water boiler; his wife Marianne Cook, died 1884; and Cook himself who died in 1892.

Annie Elizabeth, Marianne and Thomas Cook

Above the tablets it bears a conventional epitaph from Isaiah 40, 6-8,

“All Flesh is Grass,

The Grass Withereth

The Flower Fadeth

But the Word of our God shall stand Forever.”

But far more arresting is the lichen covered open book at the foot of the upright stone:

Thomas Cook

Pioneer of Travel, Founder of the

World’s Largest Travel Organisation.

First Excursion

Leicester to Loughborough 1841

Round the World 1872

He Brought Travel to the Millions.

Elsewhere in the cemetery is the grave of John Jason Cook who took over the firm from his father.

John Jason Cook, son of Thomas Cook, who took over the family firm

But as the growth of online booking rendered their high street travel agents redundant, and low-cost airlines undercut their prices, Thomas Cook’s agency went into liquidation in 2019 after 178 years of trading. The repatriation of the 155,000 people on Thomas Cook holidays abroad was described by one newspaper, with technical accuracy but more than an element of hyperbole, as “Britain’s biggest peacetime repatriation.”

Yet travel and tourism live on and embracing my suitcase and the spirit of Thomas Cook I am taking a holiday. The blog will be back on 24^th of June. And if you have free time over the summer, Leicester, The Birthplace of Tourism, merits a visit… and it has more than Ten Interesting Things to See.

The Titanic: a Gold Pocket Watch, Contentious Commemorations, and Graves

By Gravedigger

On May 12, 2024

In Drowned, Music Makers

Last week at an auction room in a small Wiltshire town a watch was sold for £1.175 million.

Henry Aldridge & Son in Devizes hold biannual sales of Titanic memorabilia and, at six times the expected figure, this represented the highest price ever paid for a single item.

The gold pocket watch was once the property of John Jacob Astor, but its value lay not in the gold nor in its ownership, but in the fact that it was found when Astor’s body was recovered from the Atlantic seven days after the sinking of the Titanic.

In April 1912 the RMS Titanic set out on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. Built in the Harland and Woolf shipyard in Belfast, and registered in Liverpool, the headquarters of the White Star Line, it was the largest and the most luxurious ship ever to sail. The opulence of the First-Class accommodation and public rooms was not extended to the hundreds of emigrants who travelled steerage, but even there the quality of the cabins was superior to the open dormitories common on most liners. The ship was described as unsinkable having sixteen watertight compartments on its underside which could be electronically closed if water entered them. Even if four of the compartments were flooded by a head on collision the liner was expected to remain afloat.

On the late evening of 14 April, the Titanic collided with an iceberg which damaged the ship’s plates below the waterline and five of the watertight compartments were breached. The ship began to founder and two hours and forty minutes later it sank. There would only have been enough lifeboats to accommodate one third of the passengers and crew had the ship held its full complement. As it was there were only places for half of them and in the disorganised evacuation the boats were launched barely half full. Of 2,240 people on board,1,517 people died from drowning or hypothermia.

The official inquiry into the disaster found that regulations on numbers of lifeboats that ships had to carry were out of date and inadequate; the captain had failed to heed ice warnings; the lifeboats had not been properly filled; the collision resulted from the ship steaming at too high a speed in a dangerous area. But it concluded that since all these were standard practice and not previously shown to be unsafe, the incident was an Act of God. New safety measures were recommended but no negligence was found.

The sinking of the Titanic has commanded extraordinary and enduring fascination. Immediately there were novels, poems, songs, art works, postcards, commemorative plates, and a silent film Saved from the Titanic starred the actress Dorothy Gibson who had in reality been one of the surviving passengers. Other badly flawed but high grossing films which followed in 1953 and 1997 served to increase the Titanic obsession.

The discovery of the wreck on the ocean bed in 1985 led to exhibitions of recovered artifacts and expeditions in submersibles for tourists to view the wreckage. One of those submersibles, Titan, itself imploded in 2023 killing everyone on board.

There are at least five Titanic museums and experiences in the USA, others in Canada, Ireland, and Britain. In South Africa, the businessman Sarel Gaus, and in Australia the billionaire Clive Palmer, abandoned grotesque plans to build full sized replicas of the Titanic when faced with prohibitive costs. In Sichuan in China a rusting hulk is all that remains of a similar project designed to be a floating hotel.

The centenary of the disaster in 2012 was commemorated with radio programmes, postage stamps and, with questionable taste, restaurants offering Titanic Themed Dining Experiences recreating the final dinner served in the first-class restaurant.

The Titanic Experience in Belfast, located on the site where the ship was built, also opened in 2012.

Located in the Harland and Woolf shipyard

The site where the ship was built, seen from the windows of the museum

Whether spawned by nostalgia for an age of luxury, the wealth of social history provided by the extensive reportage and collected artefacts, or by a degree of schadenfreude in the face of arrogance and hubris, Titanic mania shows no sign of abating.

But what of the victims and survivors? Only three hundred and thirty-seven bodies were recovered. One hundred and nineteen, mainly third-class passengers and crew, were buried at sea, and a further one hundred and fifty in Halifax, Canada. Only fifty-nine bodies were claimed and repatriated.

Most of the lost crew came from Southampton where seven hundred red dots marked on a floor map of the city in the museum identify the addresses of those who died. None of their bodies were brought back because White Star wanted to charge freight fees which families could not afford. At Southampton Old Cemetery there are sixty graves with Titanic associations, but all the names were added retrospectively when widows or other family members were buried.

Similarly, Ernest Thomas Barker, a saloon steward, buried at sea, is named on a family grave in Highgate East.

In Romsey Abbey, a memorial remembers Bob Ward, engineer.

In Belfast, a memorial outside the City Hall commemorates twenty-two men from Belfast who died in the disaster.

Memorial to Titanic victims from Belfast: an allegorical representation with Death holding a laurel wreath above the head of a drowned sailor

A memorial garden established around the sculpture at the centenary houses bronze plaques naming all the victims.

Liverpool has a handsome memorial to the ship’s engineers at the Pierhead, and in the Philharmonic Hall a plaque to the ship’s orchestra.

Memorial to Titanic stokers and engineers, Pierhead, Liverpool

In Eastbourne in 1914 the opera singer Clara Butt unveiled a tablet opposite the bandstand on the seafront commemorating John Lesley Woodward, the cellist in the orchestra. Woodward, whose body was not recovered, had previously played at The Grand Hotel in Eastbourne.

St. Giles Hill Cemetery in Winchester houses the grave of William Arthur Lucas, a seaman who survived the sinking, served in the First World War, but shot himself in 1921 on a train from Leeds to Kings Cross. He died in the Royal Free Hospital, the coroner returning a verdict of suicide while insane. Also remembered on the stone is his brother-in-law Montague Vincent Mathias, another seaman who perished on the Titanic and whose body was never identified. Gertrude Mathias (nee Lucas) commissioned the stone for her brother and husband.

Grave of brothers in law, Lucas and Mathias, who respectively survived and drowned when the Titanic sank. St. Giles Hill Cemetery, Winchester.

It is hard to distinguish the names for the grave is worn and covered in lichen

It is not uncommon to find graves where people are defined by their association with the Titanic, either as victims or less commonly survivors. But Albert Titanic Chadwick buried in Sherston, Wiltshire is neither. When I first saw his grave, I thought that he must have been born, and possibly christened, on the Titanic on the very day before it sank. But there were no Chadwicks on the ship, and the strange middle name remains a mystery. For all the bizarre souvenirs on sale in the aftermath of the disaster, it still seems extraordinary that anyone would name their child after such an event.

“Calm After Storm, Sinking of the Titanic.” Albert Titanic Chadwick, Church of the Holy Cross, Sherston, Wiltshire

Two graves hold men who have been cast respectively as villain and hero of the maritime tragedy.

The chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay, was one of only 20% of the men on board who survived, but his reputation suffered. He was vilified in both the American and the British press for leaving the ship when there were still women and children on board. An inquiry into the sinking concluded that he had helped other passengers before leaving himself on the last lifeboat on the starboard side twenty minutes before the ship sank and he was exonerated from blame.

Ismay kept a low profile for the rest of his life but has a conspicuous grave in Putney Vale cemetery in London. The unusual design by Alfred Gerrard, is composed of three stones representing the prow, mast, and stern of a ship.

The upright stone represents the prow of a ship and the chest tomb the mast

The upright stone representing the prow bears an inscription taken from the Epistle of James 3,4:

Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds,

yet are they turned about with a very small helm, whither so ever the governor listeth.

The chest tomb representing the mast bears scrimshaw like decoration with sailing ships and a compass.

Scrimshaw like designs on the chest tomb

On the top of the tomb is an extract from Psalm 107, verses 23-24:

They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters,

These men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.

A stone seat carved with plants and a verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning represents the stern of the ship.

-The little birds sang East, the little birds sang West

And I smiled to think of God’s greatness flowed around our incompleteness,

Round our restlessness, his rest.

No controversy surrounds the memory of Wallace Hartley, and in his hometown of Colne in Lancashire, his reputation could not stand higher. He led the orchestra whose members stood on deck continuing to play amongst the chaos of the evacuation, attempting to maintain calm as the lifeboats were loaded. As the ship sank, survivor accounts describe them playing the hymn “Nearer, My God, To Thee.”

None of the eight band members survived, only three of their bodies were found. Hartley’s body was not found until two weeks after the sinking, by which time news of the quiet courage and dignity of band’s last performance had spread. Wallace Hartley was returned to England and his father took the body from Liverpool to Colne where 40,000 people lined the route of the funeral procession.

In the Keighley Road Cemetery above Colne on a grey, windswept hillside a broken column symbolises a young life cut short, and above a carved violin and the music score of Nearer my God to Thee, is a simple epitaph:

In the town centre a handsome memorial bust is flanked by a model of the Titanic planted around with blue and white flowers representing waves and icebergs.

There may not be any gold pocket watches on display in Colne, but they have a romantic local hero of whom they may be justly proud.

Grace Darling, Local Heroine: the Lady with the Oar

By Gravedigger

On April 28, 2024

In Philanthropists

In the early days of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution there were no women crews, not least because of the widely held suspicion that it was bad luck to have women crewing boats. But women always provided support, working to get the lifeboats afloat, and after an anxious wait recovering them from the water and readying them for the next launch. The women who lived along the coasts knew the dangers of the sea.

Grace Darling was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper on Longstone Island, one of the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland. On the night of 6 September 1838, the merchant ship the Forfarshire was carrying sixty-two people, crew and passengers, from Hull to Dundee. When its boilers failed the captain stopped the engine, and in a storm the boat drifted and foundered on the rocky island of Big Harcar. Almost immediately the ship broke in half and one half sank. In the early hours of the morning Grace spotted the wreck and survivors on the rock.

Believing that the weather was too rough for the lifeboat to be able to put out from the mainland at Seahouses, Grace and her father took a wooden rowing boat, a four-man Northumberland cobble, along the leeside of the islands, rowing over a mile through gale force winds and a churning sea. While her father clambered onto the rock to help the survivors on board Grace held the cobble steady, rowing backwards and forwards to prevent it being smashed on the reef. Then they made the slow, punishing journey back to the lighthouse.

The lifeboat had set out from Seahouses, Grace’s brother William Brooks Darling, a fisherman, one of the crew. Arriving after Grace and her father had rescued the nine survivors, they found only the bodies of two young children and an adult who had died of exposure.

So severe was the weather that the lifeboat crew too returned to the lighthouse. There everyone was obliged to remain for three days before it was safe to return to shore.

The Victorians were prone to hero worship although the cynosures of their admiration were usually pugnacious men expanding the empire and building colonies. Women generally found favour only in a passive role as “the Angel in the House,” but Grace’s courage and strength captured the popular imagination, helped no doubt by the fact that the shy, retiring, and modest young woman did not disturb the gender stereotype of women as caregivers.

Grace became a national celebrity, by all accounts uncomfortable in the role, finding herself expected to sit for portraits and feeling obliged to answer the tsunami of letters requesting locks of her hair or scraps of material from her dress. There were also the thank you letters to write in response to the strange gifts proffered by her admirers: the Duke of Northumberland sent a silver teapot, surely of little use in the lighthouse. Boats were even hired locally to take the curious out to Longstone Island to look at her.

The Longstone Lighthouse on a calm summer’s day

Four years later, having contracted tuberculosis, Grace died at the age of only twenty-six, in the place of her birth, her grandparents’ cottage in Bamburgh on the mainland. The unwelcome adulation, or exploitation, continued: soaps, chocolate bars and a rose were named after her. Wordsworth, then Poet Laureate, wrote a tribute; Grace Darling is not one of his finer works.

Grace is buried in St Aidan’s churchyard in Bamburgh, in the family grave. A few yards from the grave an elaborate canopied Victorian funerary monument was erected with a life size stone effigy of Grace holding an oar. Made of Portland Stone it quickly became weathered and was replaced as early as 1885 when the original was moved into the church. There she lies beneath a memorial stained-glass window. In the latter, again clutching an oar, she symbolises Fortitude, an unlikely tall figure with an abundance of blond hair: Grace was small and dark. She is flanked by Charity holding a heart and Hope with an anchor.

Darling Family Grave in St. Aidan’s Churchyard, Bamburgh

Funerary monument to Grace Darling with life size figure, St. Aidan’s, Bamburgh

The original effigy, moved into the church in 1885

Charity Fortitude Hope

Grace Horsley Darling Born 24 November 1815 Died 20 October 1842

The Wreck of the Forfarshire 7 September 1838

After visiting the church and the graveyard, I crossed the road to the Grace Darling Museum established in 1938, passing her birthplace identified by a plaque. In the museum I viewed, amongst other things: the cobble; clothing which had belonged to Grace; her locket; and an account of her story in Japanese. Here too was the original family gravestone, for this had also weathered and been replaced.

Original Darling family gravestone, now in the museum, with another stained glass image of Grace

I was beginning to feel that the small village of Bamburgh was overdoing it a little, in danger of reducing itself, and Grace, to a theme park. Then a party of primary school children entered the museum, buoyed up on a wave of seamless chatter, fingers and noses pressed to the glass display cases. Finally seated on the floor, barely fidgeting and almost silent under the eye of their teacher, they waited for the museum guide to speak to them. She told them the familiar story of Grace Darling’s bravery; it was a new story to them, but local children, they knew the temper of the sea on their coast and the dangerous rocky islands which pierce it, and they grew quiet and round-eyed.

The RNLI maintains the museum believing that the values of charity and concern for others which lie at the heart of Grace’s story, are mirrored in the selfless altruism which motivates lifeboat crews today, and they hope through telling the story to inspire others to support their work.

Bamburgh is no theme park. It is an ordinary village, albeit huddled beside an extraordinary castle, located on a spectacularly beautiful part of the Northumberland coast. But for all its beauty the sea can be cruel and capricious, and Bamburgh has a very special story to tell about a very brave woman who epitomised the fortitude, tenacity, and generosity of spirit which has inspired RNLI crews for two hundred years.