The
thing about social media is that when you are talking you can never be sure who
is listening. A few years ago I wrote
about Elias Ashmole on a photo I’d posted on Flickr of the Tradescant’s tomb in
St Mary’s Churchyard, Lambeth:
In “London’s
Dead” author Ed Glinert claims that there is a tradition that Elias Ashmole
offered himself up for execution in place of Charles I “as those that ordered
Charles’s execution were all Freemasons and no Mason could execute his Grand
Master, Charles I, the two men swapped over and Ashmole allowed himself to be
executed while Charles I lived out the rest of his days as Ashmole.” As I can’t
find any trace of this rather outlandish theory on the web I can’t help
wondering if Glinert isn’t pulling our leg here.
I
was taken to task by Ed Glinert himself (who presumably had been googling
himself):
Ed Glinert here.
Of course there's nothing about Elias Ashmole swapping with Charles I on the
Internet! This is a Masonic legend and the Masons, being a secret society,
don't spread their secrets over the Web. I'm not saying it's true, just that
it’s a well-known legend within Masonic circles. The Web is not the be-all and
end-all of history.
That
was me told. In actual fact the hypothesis, legend or whatever it is that
Charles I was spared execution by switching places with Ashmole doesn’t seem to
have been a masonic secret at all, or not one that they were keen to keep to
themselves; The Worshipful Brother
Vice-Admiral Bertram Mordaunt Chambers CBE went public with the story in
January 1929 with an article in the Daily Express headlined ‘Was Charles I
Beheaded’.
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| Abney Park Cemetery by Marc Atkins |
‘London’s
Dead: a tour of the capital’s dead’ was originally published by Harper Collins
in 2008 but never seems to have been reprinted or put out as a paperback or. It
is a compendium of material relating to death in London; stories of public
executions, plagues, bizarre deaths, terrorist attacks, accounts of graveyards
and cemeteries, myths and legends, the deaths of famous people and much more.
Because it is supposedly a tour Glinert’s material is arranged geographically
rather than chronologically or thematically which makes for a rather disjointed
read. The print is large and well spaced
which means that there are rather fewer words than you would expect in a book
of 320 pages and it never does more than skim he surface of its subject. In
fact the whole thing has a rather perfunctory feel to it, as though the author
has no real enthusiasm for the project. Or perhaps it was just rushed. ‘London’s Dead’ isn’t bad; the subject is interesting
and Glinert couldn’t write a truly dull book even if he tried. But this should
have been a great book, not only is Ed Glinert a better writer than he shows
himself here (‘East End Chronicles’ or ‘The London Compendium’) but the
photographs in it were taken by the great Marc Atkins.
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| The Isaac Watts Memorial at Abney Park Cemetery by Marc Atkins |
Atkin’s
was an inspired choice as photographer – his wonderful photos of London taken wandering
the streets with Iain Sinclair on the journeys that went into ‘Lights Out for
the Territory’ were later published in the superb ‘Liquid City’ (just
republished by Reaktion Press – buy it).
Atkin’s photos, taken in Bunhill Fields, Nunhead, Abney Park, Brompton,
Mortlake and Kensal Green, are little masterpieces with
muted, autumnal colours and striking compositions that are both true to the
spirit of the locations they were taken in but somehow more austerely beautiful. What a huge disappointment that these
wonderful pictures only appear in the book as small, smudged, dark, monochrome
illustrations punctuating the text. What a wasted opportunity! It’s lucky that
you can see the originals on Marc Atkin’s website, check out the whole set
there.
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| Ninhead Cemetery by Marc Atkins |
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