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

In the churchyard of the twelfth century St. Mary Magdalene in Great Elm, a parish in the hundred of Frome, is a headstone which had always fascinated me. The grave of Joseph Tanner, a printer, it urges with wit and self-depreciatory charm,

“Pray Stranger

that the forme be

resurrected

that’s put to bed with

errors uncorrected.”

Joseph Tanner was, I discovered, the last member of his family to run the firm of Butler and Tanner, printers in Frome since 1845. William Longford, a chemist, had established a press mainly for his own printing needs, notably medicine labels and advertising leaflets. He was joined a year later by William Butler, and they expanded the business printing labels for nation wide firms including Robinson’s Barley Water. When Longford retired in 1863, Butler united with Joseph Tanner. It is the latter’s descendant, another Joseph Tanner, whose grave lies in Great Elm.

In the nineteenth century, when the previously prosperous wool and cloth trade declined, Frome diversified, and chief amongst its new industries were metal working and printing. John Webb Singer’s metalworks and Cooper and Tanner’s print works were the new stars and they shone very brightly indeed. Singer’s works included casting the gigantic Boudica which stands beside Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, the figure of Justice on the top of the Old Bailey, and the statue of Alfred the Great in Winchester.

Cooper and Tanner meanwhile became the largest employer in Frome, achieving international renown in the world of book printing. In 1895 they established a four-storey factory with several hundred employees working with thirty-eight new presses to print 13.5 million sheets each year. Their commissions included printing for the publishers Chatto and Windus, and Hodder and Stoughton.

In 1907 their success precipitated a move to a larger factory in Caxton Road. Here their enormous new press nicknamed the “Dreadnought” worked day and night. It could turn out 224 sheets per revolution, though it took five days to make ready for printing. In the 1960s it was joined by the “Bristolian” which ran at a high speed and could print in half tones. For this the ink had to dry quickly and gas burners were introduced. An article in the Independent records encouragingly that “the racing paper hardly ever caught fire.”

Butler and Tanner produced the early Penguin paperbacks for Allen Lane, starting with André Maurois’ Ariel, the very first Penguin book, in 1935. They were responsible for Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Affair at Styles and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. In more recent years they produced The Gentle Author’s London Album(2013) and Bob Mazzer’s Underground (2014).

The Joseph Tanner whose grave lies in Great Elm churchyard joined the family firm in 1948 after studying at the London College of Printing. While there he produced spoof articles for the British Printer magazine, one advocating a process for turning old shoes into printing plates, and another outlining a process for leather plate making by coating a cow in photo-sensitive emulsion and driving it into a disused tunnel with negatives imposed on the coated hide. Light from the ventilated shafts of the tunnel would supposedly develop the image, and the hide could then be removed and fixed for printing. In both cases the technical detail was sufficiently convincing to elicit serious enquiries.

Yet Joseph Tanner was also serious about his trade, and when he retired he left a business, which in 1948 had still been printing from metal type mainly in black and white, at the forefront of modern colour lithography. During his fifty-five years with the company, it became the largest privately owned printer in Europe. The colour presses which he had introduced in the 1980s featured on the television programme Challenge Anneka in the 1990s when a book was set, printed, and bound in 24 hours.

But sadly, the firm ran into financial difficulties. In 2008 Felix Dennis had rescued it from administration at the eleventh hour, enabling it to continue operating until 2014 when, with its lease running out, and planning permission in place for a housing development on the site, it closed for the final time. The company’s map division, now Dennis Maps, continues to produce Ordinance Survey maps. Developers turned the site of the old factory in Caxton Road into a £45 million housing estate, “The Old Print Works,” where, their advertising boasts, the interior colours of the show homes were, “inspired by the primary colours of Penguin book jackets once produced here.”

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The Butler and Tanner Story by Lorraine Johnson, published by Frome Society for Local Study, can be obtained from the Hunting Raven Bookshop in Frome or from Frome Heritage Museum, which has a wonderful collection of documents and artefacts relating to the industries of Frome. www.fsls.uk.

And for an evocative eulogy of the firm see So Long, Butler and Tanner, https://spitalfieldslife.com May 14, 2014, where the Gentle Author describes a visit to the printing works during its last days to see the pages of his London Album coming off the press: “Everyone who loves books knows the name of Butler and Tanner…” There you will also find some lovely photographs of the old print works and its magnificent machinery.

Blood and Fire: William Booth and the Salvation Army

By Gravedigger

On December 10, 2023

In Clergy, Saints and Martyrs, Philanthropists

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without the sight and sound of a Salvation Army brass band. The steps of the most hardened atheist slow, and “Bah-humbug” dies on the misanthropist’s lips, as the first strains reach their ears. I stand with the rest of them, personally averse to religion of any sort, sickened by military uniforms of any hue, and yet completely enraptured by the cadences of familiar carols, Christmas shopping forgotten, immovable until the last notes of Silent Night fade away.

William and Catherine Booth established the Salvation Army, at first known as the East London Christian Mission, in 1865. William had resigned as a Methodist preacher in favour of working as an independent evangelist. Delivering his first open air sermon outside the Blind Beggar pub in Bethnal Green (better known today for its connections with East End gangsters, and specifically as the location where Ronnie Kray shot and murdered George Cornell) he was invited to preach in Mile End Waste, an old Quaker burial ground in Whitechapel, where he set up a tent and began his Christian mission.

Booth proclaimed that salvation was only possible through repentance from sin and an obedient faith. While the righteous might thus achieve eternal happiness, the wicked who did not believe the gospel of Jesus Christ could expect endless punishment. “Blood and Fire”, the Salvationist “war cry”, professed faith in the saving blood of Christ and the sanctifying fire of the Holy Spirit.

As its name implies, the Salvation Army adopted a quasi-military structure and government, with General Booth himself at the head of the organisation and a hierarchy of Officers and Soldiers of Christ beneath. They sport a flag, a crest, and uniforms with colour coded epaulettes denoting rank. In the early days officers could only marry others of the same rank. In 1879 they began publication of War Cry, their campaign magazine, sold widely in pubs to raise funds. And Booth was nothing if not autocratic; three of his own children left to form breakaway movements finding it too difficult to collaborate with him.

But beyond the Christian revivalism and the emphasis on the salvation of souls, Booth was also acutely aware of the poverty, destitution, and hunger prevalent in Victorian England. He summarised his mission as the Three Ss: Soup, Soap, and Salvation, to be administered in that order. The Salvationists provided hot meals, blankets, and toiletries for the homeless. They established night shelters.

Booth’s activities went beyond the alleviation of poverty: In his work In Darkest England and the Way Out he drew up a blueprint for its elimination, and promptly set about putting his plan into operation.

He set up ethical businesses including the Salvationist’s own match factory. There, red phosphorus replaced the dangerous white phosphorus used by Bryant and May which caused necrosis (phossy jaw). His factory paid workers four pence a gross instead of the usual tuppence ha’penny. The match boxes bore the mottoes Lights in Darkest England and Fair Wages for Fair Work.

In 1891 Booth bought 3,200 acres of land in Essex and established the Hadleigh Farm Colony. The young residents were provided with accommodation, a bath house, laundry, reading room, hospital, and meeting room. They learned farming, market gardening, brick making, and construction, enabling them to find jobs in the overseas colonies. By 1912 7,000 trainees had passed through Hadley Farm.

Booth was an early campaigner against child prostitution. He established special rescue homes reaching out to women working on the streets and in brothels, to alcoholics, morphine addicts, and to released prisoners.

From the 1880s the Salvation Army spread abroad, firstly to Australia, Ireland, and America, then to France, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Canada, India, New Zealand, and Jamaica. During Booth’s lifetime branches were established in fifty-eight countries. In the twentieth century the Army became involved in disaster relief work in response to the 1901 Galveston Hurricane and the San Francico Earthquake of 1906.

All this took place against a background of strong opposition to the Army. Booth was accused of being a charlatan, out to make money, and of nepotism in appointing his son, Bramwell, as his successor, and his daughter Emma as principal of the training school for women when she was just nineteen. There were violent attacks by the Skeleton Army, formed by those involved in the production and selling of alcohol which the Salvationists campaigned against. Clashes led to deaths and injuries. The Church of England was hostile, and Shaftesbury described Booth as the Anti-Christ not least for the “elevation of women to the same status as men” within the ranks of his organisation.

Yet by the time Booth “laid down his sword” opinion had swung in his favour, and a reverential attitude accompanied his funeral. 150,000 people visited his body as it lay in state for three days, 40,000 attended his funeral and 7,000 Salvationists including forty bands marched in his funeral procession to Abney Park cemetery in Stoke Newington.

Grave of William and Catherine Booth, Abney Park.

The stone that marks the grave is in the shape of a Salvation Army badge. In addition to his birth date it records that he was “Born Again of the Spirit 1845,” and sets down with supreme confidence that he “Went to Heaven 20th August 1912”

Nearby is the grave of William Booth’s son, Bramwell, who succeeded his father as General of the Army

The grave proclaims with a glorious, sonorous, orotund resonance which one can almost hear, that he was, “Born of the Spirit 1863” and “Promoted to Glory 16th June 1928”.

And a stone commemorating Robert Hoggard’s work trumpets: “He waved the Blood and Fire Flag throughout the land of Korea…To God be the Glory!”

Today the Salvation Army is an international charity with branches in 133 countries. In America it is the largest non-governmental provider of social services. Where states fail it steps into the breach. Focusing on homelessness, it provides accommodation for 3,000 people a night in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland alone, catering in different establishments for singles, the young, vulnerable women, mothers and babies, families with children, the elderly, those with mental health, drug, and alcohol issues, and those entangled in the criminal justice system. Temporary night shelters cater for rough sleepers in cold weather.

The Army runs adult day care centres and rehabilitation centres for addicts. Hadleigh Farm is now a training centre for young people with special needs who learn horticultural, carpentry, catering, and office skills, in a realistic working environment before seeking work elsewhere.

Salvationists channel humanitarian aid in response to disasters and help with refugee resettlement programmes and initiatives seeking to combat slavery and human trafficking.

Even those of us who recoil at their religious dogma cannot but respect and admire their practical philanthropy, unbounded by any fastidious qualms, engaging where many of us would draw back.

And those brass bands? The first one was set up by Charles Fry and his sons in 1878 to support Booth, acting as his “bodyguards” by distracting unruly crowds at open air meetings. They quickly became an integral part of Salvation Army worship and parades, and an instantly recognisable symbol of the Salvationists. And in December they herald the Christmas Season for Atheist and Christian alike as the emotion-charged notes of well-known carols reverberate through our city streets.

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Abney Park Cemetery opened in 1840 as a non-conformist garden cemetery when Bunhill Fields ran out of space. When it in turn reached capacity it experienced a period of neglect in the mid twentieth century until the Save Abney Park Campaign was set up by locals. Today it is a registered Historic Park and Garden and local nature reserve run by the Abney Park Trust. See www.abneypark.org for details of wildlife and nonconformist graves. And by way of contrast see https://spitalfieldslife.com 2019/06/10 on Music Hall Artists in Abney Park Cemetery.

One Date, Three Graves; Tales of Myth, Manipulation and Mescalin

By Gravedigger

On November 26, 2023

In Politicians, Writers

I do not remember where I was when I heard that the Thirty Fifth President of the United States of America had been assassinated, but I do remember the subsequent media coverage of the death, the funeral, the arrest and shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the conspiracy theories, the conjuring of Camelot, and the strange outpourings of public adulation and grief. No wonder that two other notable deaths on 22 November 1963 passed virtually unnoticed.

John F. Kennedy (1917-63) was the son of Joseph Kennedy who had amassed a fortune through stock market manipulation, property deals and bootlegging. It was trust funds set up by his father that provided Jack Kennedy with financial independence and enabled him to run his successful campaign to become president, notwithstanding an undistinguished record in the Senate. His father’s contacts, including the mafia boss, Sam Giancana, allegedly provided support following a deal with Joseph that if his son were elected he would “lay off organised crime.” Giancana’s control of the Teamsters’ Union and their votes, and judicious use of threats and fraudulent voting, helped deliver Kennedy’s narrow Presidential victory.

JFK’s time as president (1961-63) was defined by the fiascos and iniquities of a foreign policy engendered by Communist paranoia combined with arrogant Imperialism. In April 1961 he unleashed the Bay of Pigs invasion led by CIA paramilitary officers who tried to foment an uprising to overthrow Castro’s government in Cuba. They were defeated in two days. There followed the equally unsuccessful Operation Mongoose characterised by terrorist attacks on civilians, the destruction of crops, mining of harbours and farcical assassination attempts directed against Castro. Abortive efforts were made to keep this operation secret to avoid repercussions from the United Nations.

On Kennedy’s watch American involvement in Vietnam built up: military advisers were sent to the country along with political and economic support for the Diem regime whose forces were funded and trained by the CIA . Under the crude social engineering of the Strategic Hamlet Programme peasants were forcibly relocated away from Viet Cong influence and subjected to brainwashing and surveillance with no freedom of movement. In January 1962 Operation Ranch Hand introduced herbal warfare including the use of Agent Orange. This aerial defoliation not only destroyed land and ecology but also led to cancers, birth defects and other long term health problems in Vietnam.

In April 1963 Kennedy cynically recorded: “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point. But I can’t give up that territory to the Communists and get the American people to re-elect me.”

It was an abhorrent record and, although still a child in 1963 with only a hazy knowledge of the full horror of American foreign policy, I sensed something wrong in the sycophantic media coverage and the deferential tributes. Though unfamiliar with the concept of establishment propaganda, the constant repetition of the Camelot myth raised my suspicions, and the uncritical public effusions of distress seemed fabricated. So I was surprised when, years later, accompanying more worldly Politics Students on an annual trip to Washington, they invariably showed enthusiasm for crossing the Potomac to Arlington to see the Kennedy grave. Challenged, they proved themselves well informed as to the noxious nature of the Presidency yet remained susceptible to the contrived allure of the Camelot myth.

The Kennedy Grave at Arlington Cemetery, Washington. Alongside Kennedy lies Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and two of their children.

The Grave looks out across the Potomac towards the Washington Monument

The second death on that November day was that of the academic and writer, CS Lewis (1898-1963). Amongst his sizeable output of fiction and nonfiction it is his children’s books The Chronicles of Narnia, seven fantasy novels which have sold over 120 million copies and been translated into forty-seven languages,for which he is best remembered. Like most small children I was once enchanted by the world of Narnia; what imaginative child would not be thrilled at the prospect of entering a large wardrobe full of fur coats to discover a secret exit at the back leading to a magical kingdom of ice and snow, mythical creatures, and talking animals. It is a cleverly woven story of wonder, mystery, and adventure. Lewis began to write it in the 1940s when children came to his house in Oxford as evacuees from London, and the four siblings who discover the world of Narnia were based on them.

But it did not take me long to realise that behind the richly imaginative narrative lay a manipulative allegory, a Christian subtext with the lion Aslan a Christ like figure sacrificing himself to torture, suffering and humiliation to redeem Edmund who has betrayed his siblings to the White Witch. Aslan’s sacrifice vanquishes death, and he returns to life but only the trusting and unquestioning Lucy can see him; the message at the heart of this proselytising text is the importance blind faith, obedience to an authoritarian moral system, and an acceptance that there are things one is “not meant to know.”

I may not share Philip Pullman’s view that this is “one of the most poisonous things I have ever read” but alongside the Christian propaganda aimed uncomfortably at young children, there is also a pernicious defence of established hierarchies and a tacit acceptance of violence. The racist disparagement of the Calormenes, and the unquestioning acceptance of class and gender stereotypes is disturbing. The female character of the White Witch, responsible for its being “always winter and never Christmas,” personifies evil, and when Susan becomes too interested in nylons, lipstick, clothes, and boys she can no longer return to Narnia. Worse, as Pullman says, is the terrible myth that death is better than life, the idealised view of an afterlife upholding a reactionary idealised theocracy.

But just as the Camelot myth drew my students to Kennedy’s grave, so the magic I remembered in his stories enticed me to that of CS Lewis. I did not have high expectations for the graveyard of a Victorian church, located in an old quarry in an Oxford suburb, but Holy Trinity churchyard in Headington is a delightful place. I visited on the eve of springtime as the soft green shoots of snowdrops and hellebores were emerging, and it resembled more a country churchyard than a suburban one. The gnarled roots of an ancient yew circle the honey-coloured stone marking the grave of Lewis and his brother which bears a quotation from King Lear.

The Grave of CS Lewis At Holy Trinity Church, Headington

“Men Must Endure Their Going Hence”
Lewis’ mother had a calendar with quotations from Shakespeare, his father kept the leaf from the day she died, Lewis’ brother Warren had the quotation inscribed on the grave.

And I was reluctantly charmed by the Narnia window in the church

My third grave however houses someone who was aware and wary of the power of indoctrination and conditioning, the uncritical conformity which media myths and social engineering, fairy stories and brainwashing can engender.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), writer and philosopher, had published his most famous work the dystopian Brave New World in the early 1930s but it was still very popular when my school friends and I discovered it in the 60s. Eagerly we debated his vision of an establishment controlling a docile population through a combination of drugs and entertainment, maintaining economic and social divisions with neither alphas nor epsilons questioning their status but accepting a caste system, convinced that all was right with their world.

Paradoxically Huxley’s own experiments with mescalin recorded in The Doors of Perception (1954) led him to believe that the consciousness altering drug could also promote enlightenment, and that drug taking could be a legitimate expression of intellectual curiosity, removing inhibitions and increasing awareness. In the 1960s this chimed with a youth subculture seeking social change and experimenting with psychedelic drugs and the hallucinogenic power of LSD, and Jim Morrison’s rock group – The Doors – took their name from the title of Huxley’s book. (He in turn had taken it from the visionary poet and artist William Blake: “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”)

Ostentatiously clutching our copies of The Doors of Perception was as close as we came in our provincial girls’ school to the drug subculture of the sixties. And if we perceived it then as a more glamorous world than our own and lauded Huxley for his avant-garde views yet when I reread his book recently I confess that I found it dull. Worse, it contradicted the scathing indictment of mindless acceptance and unquestioning obedience which he had wrought in Brave New World. Yet though this may have been disappointing, his grave was nonetheless the one which I approached with most respect for the memory of its occupant.

Huxley is buried in the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel, at Compton near Guildford in Surrey.

Alongside him are other members of his illustrious family including his father Leonard, biographer and editor.

Jack Cornwell VC and the Battle of Jutland

By Gravedigger

On November 13, 2023

In Children, Victims of war

An exhibition at Portsmouth Dockyard in 2016 marked the centenary of the Battle of Jutland. 36 Hours: Jutland 1916, The Battle That Won The War, was a multimedia presentation chronicling the only major sea battle of World War I. On 31 May – 1 June 1916 British and German dreadnoughts blazed at each other, through the poor visibility generated by mist, cloud, a dark evening sky, and an increasing volume of smoke from burning ships caught by gunfire. But while the exhibition captured the terrifying noise of constant bombardment, and the confusion and horror of intense shellfire, the claim that this battle won the war rang hollow.

Jutland was an indecisive disaster for both navies despite both claiming a victory: the German fleet retreated, but Britain lost more ships and twice as many men, the German dead numbering 2,551 and the British 6,097. The faith which both Britain and Germany had placed in their navies, building up immoderate numbers of battleships, proved unfounded.

Britain had been confident of victory over the numerically inferior German fleet. The huge losses suffered by her “invincible navy” led to so much criticism of the naval leadership that the Admiralty considered censoring and delaying the official report on the battle.

Moreover, when Kitchener, the then popular Secretary of State for War, drowned five days later when a German mine struck the ship on which he was travelling, and when losses on the Somme numbered 19,000 on the first day of the battle on 1 July, there was a clear need to staunch declining morale in Britain.

Jack Cornwell was fifteen years old when he enlisted in the navy in 1915. He was trained as a gun sight-setter and assigned to HMS Chester which took part in the Battle of Jutland. The ship received seventeen direct hits in the battle. Many of the gun’s crew were killed instantly and others were mortally wounded. The Chester retired from the action and reached relative safety. Medical assistants sent on board found Cornwell, severely wounded with shrapnel and shards of steel penetrating his chest, standing in the shattered gun mounting. He died in Grimsby hospital two days later and was buried in a pauper’s grave. His mother arranged for his exhumation and reburial near their home in Manor Park Cemetery, East London. It was another pauper’s grave.

Two months later however, on 29 July, Jack Cornwell was exhumed again and reburied with full military honours; it was the largest public event which took place during the war. Crowds lining the streets witnessed the coffin born on a gun carriage, with a naval band, boys from Jack’s old school and others from the Chester marching behind it. The local MP, Bishop and Mayor accompanied the coffin, a bugler sounded the last post, and shots were fired over the grave.

When the official report of the Battle of Jutland had been published in early July it had included an account from the commanding officer of the Chester which described Cornwell standing alone at his post awaiting orders until the end of the action. Writers on The Daily Sketch had uncovered the reference and turned it into a front-page story with a photograph of Cornwell’s brother George dressed in a naval uniform. With other journalists they fomented public pressure for recognition of Jack’s bravery, criticising the navy for allowing a hero to be buried in a pauper’s grave.

After the military funeral, the Admiralty awoke to the possibility of boosting public confidence in the war, and providing the navy with some face-saving publicity after the disaster of Jutland, by awarding Jack a posthumous Victoria Cross. On 15 September Jack Cornwell became the third youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross, awarded for a conspicuous act of bravery. The citation read: “mortally wounded early in the action… Jack Travers Cornwell remained standing alone at a most exposed post, quietly awaiting orders till the end of the action, with the gun’s crew dead and wounded all around him. His age was sixteen and a half years.”

The court painter, Frank Salisbury, portrayed Jack standing at his post by the gun, and prints were distributed to schools accompanied by booklets entitled “Faithful Unto Death” which used his death to encourage concepts of duty and sacrifice. Six days after the award of the VC schools all over Britain celebrated Jack Cornwell Day. A Cornwell Memorial Fund was established, and fund-raising badges were sold to children for 1d each raising £18,000 to finance a ward for disabled sailors at the newly established Star and Garter Home in Richmond. Patriotic propaganda wielded the emotive story of obedience, courage, selflessness, and honourable conduct to boost flagging resolve.

In truth it is hard to imagine that the poor boy could have done other than to remain at his post. On the deck of a severely damaged ship, surrounded by the dead and dying, himself seriously injured, possibly traumatised, frightened, and shell shocked, where could he go? Probably no more or less brave than any other sailor, the strongest impression his story leaves is that a child of sixteen should not have been involved in the fighting at all, and that his memory was cynically exploited in the interests of war time propaganda, to deflect criticism of the conduct of the Battle of Jutland and to revitalize dedication to the war effort.

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From 1915 onwards stone memorials had begun to appear commemorating the war dead and serving to promote military recruitment. London’s first memorial appeared on 4 August 1916 in the churchyard of St. Botolph-without-Bishopsgate bearing the names of both Kitchener and Cornwell. A Pathe News of the time shows the Lord Mayor unveiling the cross and linking the popular ageing commander with the working-class boy hero as he reminds the assembled crowd that the cross drew together “the statesman-warrior”… and “a young, innocent and humble origined (sic) lad…cutting across all divisions of class and educational background in their sacrifice to a common cause.”

The first World War One Memorial Cross to appear in London. St. Botolph-without-Bishopsgate

Jack Cornwell is specifically remembered on the plinth,

In 1920 pupils and former pupils of schools in East Ham placed a stone marker bearing a cross and an anchor on what had become the Cornwell family grave. With Jack were his half-brother Arthur Frederick, killed in action in France in August 1918; his father who died in October 1916; and his mother who died in poverty in 1919.

Grave of John Travers (Jack) Cornwell, Manor Park Cemetery, East London

The grave carries a quotation from Ovid:

It is not wealth or ancestry

but honourable conduct and a noble

disposition that maketh men great.

The Ballad of Jack Cornwell by Charles Causley carries a less sententious and more poignant message. Here are two extracts:

The Gunnery Jacks all spoke

Their terrible words of gunpowder

And sentences of smoke.

The deck blew up like a candle,

I heard the Gunner’s Mate say,

It looks more like November the fifth

Than the thirty-first of May.

But the catherine wheels were made of iron,

The stars were made of steel,

And downward came a scarring rain

The sun will never heal.

Death came on like winter

Through the water-gate.

All I could do by the forecastle gun

Was stand alone, and wait.

………….

They gave me a second funeral,

I heard the rifles plain

And up in the wild air went the birds

As I went down again.

The great Sir Edward Carson,

First Lord of the Admiralty,

Asked men and women who grumbled

If ever they heard of me.

It was the second year of the war;

Thiepval, the Somme, Verdun.

The people were encouraged,

And the Great War went on.

Children of the Second World War

By Gravedigger

On October 29, 2023

In Children

Last week I watched Dramakarma’s production of Two Thousand Days at the Merlin Theatre. Dramakarma is a community-based project in Frome providing drama classes for young people and staging performances based on historical events in the town.

Two Thousand Days told the story of the evacuation of The Coopers’ Company’s School from Bow, in East London, to Frome in Somerset, where the school remained for the duration of World War Two.

On 3^rd September 1939 Britain and France had declared war on Nazi Germany; two days earlier Operation Pied Piper had been instigated. This undertaking, named ironically, if not inappropriately, after the menacing German folk tale, aimed to remove schoolchildren, and mothers with infants, from urban locations, where there was a high risk of enemy bombing, to safer rural areas. During the first three days of the operation one and a half million people were moved, of whom 827,000 were school age children.

The government had decided to billet the evacuees in private homes rather than special camps. The hosts in reception areas were paid a weekly allowance but fined if they refused to take evacuees. The billeters, as they were known, were identified by the space available in their homes rather than by their suitability to care for children. Unsurprisingly, while some hosts were kind and welcoming, others were resentful. For some children, the experience was an adventure leaving them with fond memories of their surrogate parents with whom they retained contact. Others were miserable, homesick, and treated with indifference.

The Coopers’ Company’s School, founded in 1536, had remained in London even during the Great Plague, but on 1st September 1939 their pupils gathered at the school, each carrying one small suitcase, an overcoat, and a gas mask. Like all evacuees they marched to the local railway station and boarded trains to an unknown destination. Only after they had arrived was the school telegraphed and a notice pinned up telling parents where their children were.

Things did not always run smoothly, and the pupils, who were supposed to have been evacuated to Taunton, somehow found themselves in the Wiltshire hamlet of Ramsbury where the residents, expecting a small number of women and babies, were faced instead with over 380 schoolboys. The cots which the villagers had decorated with pink and blue ribbons were superfluous to requirements.

After three weeks, during which they were accommodated in barns in Ramsbury and surrounding villages, the school moved to the market town of Frome. Occupying buildings previously used by Frome Grammar School which had moved to new premises, The Coopers continued in Frome for 2000 days, until 19 July 1945.

Dramakarma adapted the memoirs of pupils,* and the effervescent cast of 13- 18-year-olds brought them to life. The memories were not always happy ones, and we witnessed the agony of children waiting in the community hall to be “picked” by the billeters, then facing callous treatment: locked out of their new “homes” during the daytime, and eating separate, inferior meals from their host families.

For most of the time however the mood, in line with the published reminiscences, was upbeat. Alongside their traditional curriculum the boys learned to repair shoes, they put on plays, and developed new skills as diverse as book binding and ballroom dancing. There may have been no gas, electricity or running water in some of their billets, but there were plentiful supplies of elderberry wine, and entertainment was to be had exploring the old quarry workings and, unknown to the schoolmasters and the billeters, midnight swims in the lake at Orchardleigh. They had close encounters with herds of bullocks on the country roads, sat on boxes playing chess on the frozen lake in the harsh January of 1940, and learned to wrap a brick which had been in the fire all day in a cloth bag for warmth in bed at night.

Above all they had the most extraordinary freedom, trespassing cheerfully on the neighbouring estates, and on their bikes exploring the surrounding towns of Bath, Warminster, and Wells. When the bombing was not bad the headmaster allowed them to cycle home to London, a distance of some hundred miles, during holidays. Leaving Frome one Good Friday three lads cycled through the night without lights in the blackout, returning the following Monday. The unmitigated euphoria vouchsafed only to inadequately supervised teenagers, free to roam with their mates, radiated from the stage, and everyone came away from the production smiling.

It is a measure of the affection with which they came to hold Frome that the evacuees continued to visit the town throughout their lives, holding reunions, looking up old friends and those who had welcomed them with kindness. In 1951 they donated two teak seats, set in St. John’s churchyard, to the town. When the the seats eventually fell victim of the weather,they replaced them in 1999 with a bench made of Portland stone.

Bench donated by the Coopers’ Company’s school

Given in gratitude to the people of Frome

who generously opened their homes

to schoolchildren evacuated from London

during the war 1939-45

Twenty Old Boys and the ninety-year-old former school secretary were present at the dedication ceremony. Few of them remain now, but Richard Beer, who first arrived in Frome as a twelve year old evacuee, was guest of honour when Two Thousand Days was first performed as part of the Frome History Festival in May this year.

It isn’t a grave, but the bench serves the same purpose, remembering the boys who for 2000 days made Frome their home, and the townsfolk who welcomed them, a life time ago.

*The Coopers’ Company’s School in Frome 1939-45 edited by George S. Perry.

Joseph Tanner and the Sad Demise of the Printing Works

Blood and Fire: William Booth and the Salvation Army

One Date, Three Graves; Tales of Myth, Manipulation and Mescalin

Jack Cornwell VC and the Battle of Jutland

Children of the Second World War