The London Cenotaph, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944), was intended to be a temporary structure initially made from plaster and erected in 1919 as part of celebrations for the Allied Victory Parade. The popularity of the monument and the event saw demands to make the Cenotaph permanent. The Times newspaper on 21 July 1919 described it as follows:
Simple, grave and beautiful in design, it has been universally recognised as a just and fitting memorial of those who have made the greatest sacrifice; and the flowers which have daily been laid upon it since the [Peace Day] march show the strength of its appeal to the imagination.
Although the Times wanted it moved from its site in Whitehall, Lutyens felt that ‘no other site would give this pertinence’ and after some deliberation the Cabinet decided that it should be re-erected as a permanent memorial, and that it should remain in Whitehall. The permanent structure was unveiled on 11 November 1920 by King George V, on the same day as the funeral in Westminster Abbey of the Unknown Soldier (the tomb of the soldier killed during the war is in Westminster Abbey). These would become shrines to the fallen in all wars and the focus of national ceremonies on Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday.
The poppy and the two minute silence would become the defining symbols. The latter was prompted by a letter to the London Evening News on 8 May 1919 by an Australian journalist, Edward George Honey, who proposed a respectful silence to remember those who had given their lives. The idea was brought to the attention of King George V who issued a proclamation on 7 November 1919 calling for a two minute silence. The significance of the poppy was the result of the poem In Flanders Fields written in 1915 by the Canadian surgeon John McCrae who died in 1918.
Some cemeteries commemorate individuals whose bodies were returned such as sixteen-year-old John Travers Cornwell VC in Manor Park Cemetery. Cornwell is also commemorated on a collective memorial at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate along with the officers and men of the Honourable Artillery Company. Some companies gave recognition to their employees who died in the war such as the Prudential Assurance War Memorial in Holborn, which displays three panels bearing the names of 794 former employees who lost their lives.
Many railway stations have memorials dedicated to their employees who died during the Great War. Out of 186,475 railway workers from the railway companies of Great Britain and Ireland who served under arms during the First World War, 18,957 were killed in action or died of wounds received on active service. Many of these memorials were erected three or four years after the war. At Liverpool Street Station the Great Eastern Railway Magazine for 22 June commented on the unveiling ceremony by Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. ‘A silent audience filled the hall, the sorrowing friends of those brave men whose names are writ upon the flag-draped scrolls’. Wilson stated that ‘On this tablet are placed the names of 1,200 or 1,400 of your comrades who, doing what they thought was right, paid the penalty’. He then closed his speech with a reading from Rudyard Kipling’s poem Recessional:
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart;
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
After the ceremony Wilson returned through London from Liverpool Street Station and was assassinated by IRA gunmen. A memorial tablet was erected to him beside the Liverpool Street war memorial. There are eleven panels of names at Liverpool Street and also a circular bronze portrait of Charles Fryatt who was Captain of the Great Eastern Railway Company’s steamer Brussels. Fryatt helped to evacuate many allied troops from France in defiance of attacks from German U-Boats. In June 1916 he was captured and he was shot the following month.
At Paddington Goods Station in 1921 a Roll of Honour was unveiled during a service attended by all grades of staff of the Great Western Railway. Some 6,000 people gathered for the moving spectacle, many holding bunches of flowers that were to be laid at the foot of the memorial. At the unveiling Viscount Churchill, Chairman of the Great Western Railway, said: ‘members of the Great Western Railway Company – no fewer than 2,524 of them – gave their lives so heroically for their country’s sake’. At Euston Station 3,719 employees were remembered by a 45ft high obelisk which bears the inscription: ‘In grateful memory of 3,719 men of the London & North Western Railway Company who, for their Country, Justice and Freedom, served and died in the Great War, 1914–1919. This monument was raised by their comrades and the company as a lasting memorial to their devotion’. The main pedestrian entrance arch at Waterloo Station contains a tablet commemorating 547 employees of the London and South Western Railway who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Attitudes to death changed between 1850 and 1918. The factors contributing to this change were a decline in religious beliefs and a substantial fall in the death rate. The impact and the trauma of the First World War accelerated these changes and the Victorian culture of mourning proved inadequate in dealing with the reality of mass death in foreign fields.
11
Curious Memorials and Monuments
‘London is Stranger than Fiction’ was the title of an eccentric and rather engaging series of drawings with brief descriptive information that appeared in The Evening News in the years just after the Second World War. In these features the artist Peter Jackson regaled readers with a mass of eclectic information about London’s past which included mention of the death mask of a murderer which had grown whiskers and was housed in Scotland Yard’s Black Museum and the tombstone in Bunhill Fields Cemetery covering the remains of Mary Page who died 11 March 1728. On it was the curious inscription: ‘In 67 months she was tapped 66 times, had taken away 240 gallons of water without ever repining at her case or ever fearing the operation’.
Two other gems from Jackson’s pen include the information that in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey a stone slab stands close to the burial place of Ben Jonson (1572–1637) inscribed with the words ‘O Rare Ben Johnson’. Apart from the misspelling, the real curiosity here was that Jonson was so poor when he died that he could not afford the normal space for a grave and was therefore buried in an upright position. Second was the case of Catherine of Valois, wife of Henry V, who died in 1437 and was buried in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey. During later building work her body was removed and put on public view in an open-topped wooden box. Among those who went to see her was Samuel Pepys who recorded the experience in his diary: ‘I had the upper part of her body in my hands, and I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queene, and that this was my birthday, thirty-six years old, that I did kiss a Queene.’
It is to celebrate and be in accord with the spirit of Jackson’s idiosyncratic evocation of oddities and curiosities that this chapter concerns itself with a selection of notable or unusual memorials of death in London. Many of these are to be found within churches, others are wholly secular. Those featured here are but a tiny percentage of London’s memorials and monuments. Generally speaking, they are among the less well known or less visited of such items.
Going back to Ben Jonson, briefly. The story is told that Jonson believed that his stature as a poet merited his burial with the other worthies in Poet’s Corner and he had a chat with the Dean of the Abbey about the details. When he explained that he was financially embarrassed and could not make the financial outlay for a tomb designed to house his cadaver in the normal horizontal position, the Dean assured him that this did not have to be a problem. So it was that Jonson was indeed buried vertically. The poor man, literally, could not afford an appropriate inscription and the grammatical solecism that appears on the slab is the result of an admirer of his called Jack Young passing by and asking who it was that was being interred. Distressed by his hero’s indigence, Young immediately offered the sum of eighteen pence to have an appropriate statement carved on the stone. Unfortunately the mason involved was a little slapdash and the slab that can be seen to this
day is the result.
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was very much a man of Dorset. Much of his poetry and fiction is thoroughly imbued with his love of rural England and his concern about the changes that were being wrought in it during his lifetime. It is not surprising that he let it be known that he wished to be buried beside his first wife in the rural churchyard at Stinsford in Dorset. Stinsford features in some of his novels as ‘Mellstock’. No sooner had he died than the powers-that-be, those who always know best, decided that his literary merit was such that he deserved a place in Westminster Abbey. In the event, he was cremated and his ashes were placed in the south transept where they remain to this day. With a gesture towards Hardy’s wishes, it was decided that his heart should be buried at Stinsford. There is a persistent story that the heart never actually made it into the cosy confines of his wife’s grave. Apparently the heart was placed in a biscuit tin to await the burial ceremony. It is said that his sister absent-mindedly left the lid open and that the family cat consumed it.
In Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey is a tablet commemorating the life of Thomas Parr. His life story was written by ‘The Water Poet’ John Taylor (c. 1578–1653). He gave this work a rather verbose title: The Old, Old, Very Old Man or the Age and Long Life of Thomas Parr of Winnington in the Parish of Alderbury; in the County of Salop who was born in the Reign of King Edward IV in 1483. He lived 152 years nine months and odd days and departed this Life at Westminster the 15 November 1635 and is now buried in the Abbey.
Despite this biography not having the catchiest of titles, Taylor tells the story with a wealth of fascinating if not always strictly verifiable detail. Taylor claimed that ‘Old Parr’, as he was understandably known, was ‘discovered’ living in the West Midlands by the Earl of Arundel who described him, somewhat ungraciously, as ‘a remarkable piece of antiquity’. He immediately resolved to bring him to London and have him exhibited. He was placed on a horse-drawn litter and apparently was accompanied by his daughter-in-law. His arrival in London caused a great stir as crowds flocked to see this living prodigy and he was presented, among many others, to Charles I. Sadly the grand old man died after a couple of months, it being generally thought that London’s smoky atmosphere finished him off, contrasting as it must have with the pure air of Shropshire. The question clearly arises as to how long he might have lived had he stayed at home!
It is said that Parr married for the first time at the age of eighty. Aged 105, he did penance, clad in a white sheet, at Alderbury Church for what was described as ‘unchaste behaviour’ with one Katherine Milton. We do not know how old she was at the time. Perhaps she was a mere flibbertigibbet of eighty or so years. When Parr was 112 his wife died. Finding the life of a widower uncongenial, he married again, aged 122. His supposed age at death has always provoked controversy and his alleged sexual activity as a centenarian has, not surprisingly, led to much salacious tittle-tattle. He was examined after his death by William Harvey, the medical man famed for establishing the circulation of the blood. Harvey found Old Parr to be in exceptionally good condition for someone of his age, except for the fact that he was by then, of course, dead. Legends continued to accumulate around Old Parr. It was generally assumed that longevity ran in the family. It is said that he had a son who reached 113, a grandson who lived to be 109, a great-grandson who slipped his cable at 124 and a great-granddaughter who rather let the side down by dying at a mere 103. There is not a shred of evidence for any of this.
There are at least three other alleged centenarians commemorated in various burial places in London. The graveyard of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea contains the grave of William Hiseland. He died aged 112 in 1732. He fought at Edgehill in 1642 in the army of King Charles, in Ireland for William III and under the Duke of Marlborough for Queen Anne. St Paul’s in Covent Garden contains the remains of the comic actor Charles Macklin who, according to his memorial in the church, died aged 107 but whose coffin plate states that he was a mere ninety-seven years of age. On the exterior of the Savoy Chapel in the Strand a plaque commemorates one Thomas Britton who died in 1839 at the age of 101. In 1901 Elizabeth Hanbury died at Richmond-on-Thames and The Times newspaper gave her age as 108 years and 144 days. We can have more confidence in the truth of this memorial than the earlier ones.
All Saints is Fulham’s parish church. It stands close to the north end of Putney Bridge. The tower dates from 1440 but the rest of the church was rebuilt in the early 1880s in the Perpendicular style. It contains a number of memorials transferred from the previous church. Probably the most interesting is the Lady Margaret Legh monument. This was erected in 1605 and is one of the earliest funerary carvings depicting a seated effigy. She sits, carved in fine detail, left hand to her chest, right arm cradling a chrysom baby on whom she concentrates her petrified but clearly loving attention. To her left is another chrysom child while the sculpture also contains an hourglass, symbolic of the inexorable passing of time. A baby who died before its mother had been churched was termed ‘a chrysom child’. He or she would be shrouded in a white linen garment presented to them by the priest when he anointed them with the holy oil at their baptism. This garment was criss-crossed with diagonal strips of linen. In 1552 this practice was banned. Another notable monument is to Viscount Mordaunt. He was an avid Royalist who died in 1676 and he is portrayed, slightly ludicrously, dressed in a Roman toga and carrying a baton, such portrayal being fashionable at the time. Ten Bishops of London lie in the churchyard and an eleventh is buried within the precincts of the church.
In the past, every schoolchild in England was taught that Henry I (r. 1100–35) never smiled again after he was told that his only legitimate son, William, had been drowned in a storm at sea while returning to England from Normandy. The King had a favourite Court Jester called Rahere. Try as he might, Rahere completely failed to restore as much as a flicker of fun to the bereaved King’s countenance. The pall of gloom that hung over the court clearly affected even the previously blithe Rahere who decided to devote himself to the serious business of firstly becoming a monk and then undertaking a pilgrimage to Rome. Rahere caught malaria while abroad and, chastened by the experience and thankful to have made a recovery, he vowed to return to London and start a hospital for the poor. This is the origin of Bart’s Hospital. The present wonderfully atmospheric Church of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield is basically the chancel, the only major surviving part of a great Augustinian priory founded by Rahere. He became the first prior and he has not strayed far because when he died in 1143 he was buried within the precincts. He lies close to the magnificent tomb-chest on which he is portrayed recumbent in the habit of his order. Overlooking Rahere’s tomb is a delightful oriel window. This was added in 1515 by the then prior and was used to keep watch over the gifts in cash and kind submitted at Rahere’s tomb. Clearly even in the sixteenth century there were thieves about for whom nothing was sacred. Jester-turned-prior is a bit like poacher-turned-gamekeeper.
St Andrew Undershaft in Leadenhall Street, EC3, contains a hanging memorial to Alice Byng who died in 1616. She wears a ruff and kneels at a prie-dieu or prayer desk. What is odd about this memorial is that Alice had three husbands, not we are assured all at the same time, and they were all stationers. Why the predilection for stationers? In the same church is a monument in marble and alabaster to John Stow (1525–1605). He is shown, as in life, bald-headed and sitting writing at a table. A zealous historian, he is probably best-known for his Survey of London which was published in 1598. An inscription assures us that ‘He exercised the most careful accuracy in searching ancient monuments, English annals and records of the City of London … he wrote excellently’. Every year around the anniversary of his death on 5 April, the Lord Mayor of the City accompanied by Sheriffs and other big-wigs attends a ceremony in the church when the quill pen in the effigy’s hand, supplied by the Stationers’ Company, is renewed and a copy of his book is presented to the writer adjudged to have written the best essay on London history in the pr
evious year.
St Helen’s in Bishopsgate with St Martin Outwich has a wealth of high-quality Elizabethan and Jacobean monuments. An oddity is that to Sir Julius Caesar Adelmar who died in 1636. His name itself qualifies as something of a curio but his memorial is unusual in that it consists of a tomb-chest without a human effigy. Instead it is adorned by the representation of a legal deed with its seal broken off symbolising that he has paid the debt of Nature.
St Peter upon Cornhill, EC3, is an ancient religious site but the present church dates from 1682 when its rebuilding was completed after it had been destroyed in the Great Fire of London. It only has one monument of note. This is on the south wall of the chancel and is a circular memorial showing the heads of seven cherubs. These are a reference to the seven children of James Woodmason. They all died in 1782 in a fire in their house in Leadenhall Street when their parents had left them for a few hours to go to a ball at St James’s Palace on the occasion of the Queen’s Birthday. Several other people died in the conflagration and in fact more people died in this one house fire than in the entire Great Fire of London.
Even those who are not enamoured of the concept of monarchy cannot but be touched by the tragedy of Lady Jane Grey, the reluctant uncrowned Queen of England. She was the cat’s-paw of ambitious and unscrupulous men and paid the price for being a threat to the other main claimant, Mary Tudor. Jane was beheaded in the Tower of London early in 1554 and her father was likewise dealt with on nearby Tower Hill a few days later. He was executed for treason and it was the practice, when the axe had done its gory work, for the executioner to hold the head up to show everyone watching that the victim was definitely dead. The head survived. The Grey family had a mansion close to the Tower and it was buried there in the private chapel. Both house and chapel were eventually demolished and the Church of the Holy Trinity in the Minories was built on the site. In 1852 the head was rediscovered in a remarkably good state of preservation given the time and the traumas it had experienced. When Holy Trinity closed in 1899 the head was transferred to St Botolph’s in Aldgate. It was not on open display but, if the visitor asked politely, it could be viewed in its airtight glass container. Unfortunately for those with a liking for the macabre, about thirty years ago, the head was reburied with due reverence under a paving stone by the entrance to the church. Father and daughter finally lie in eternal rest a few hundred yards from each other.
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