"Shakespeare never went to Venice, Homer never went to Troy, Dante never went to Hell"; Christopher Logue (1926-2011) Kensal Green Cemetery

“Astounding. I bought this volume this morning for thirty pence from a charity shop in West Norwood - never having heard of Christopher Logue - and consumed it in the space of one afternoon and evening. Great to feel again - after too long - the quickening that great writing can put into your step, your imagination and your heart. Bought me to tears as I finished the first section at two o'clock in Brockwell Park. Nine o'clock now and I have (for the first time) finished the whole thing and - with gratitude - discovered that there is MORE of this guys 'translation' of Homer to read. A great day; thank you Christopher Logue...”

Amazon review of “Cold Calls”

Christopher Logue spent 40 years working on his adaptation of the Iliad. My copy of “Kings”, his version of Book’s I and II, cost me a derisory 29 pence though I did have to spend a couple of quid on postage and packing. It was a 20 year old second hand copy but it was in almost pristine condition apart from what I assumed at first glance was a previous owners name scrawled proprietarily across the title page. A second glance revealed the signature to be ‘Christopher Logue’ and when I turned the page to the edition notice it told me that “This revised text first published in a signed limited edition in 1992 by…Turret Books, 42 Lambs Conduit Street.” If a 30 pence copy of “Cold Calls” and a 29 pence signed limited edition of “Kings” don’t constitute irrefutable evidence that Christopher Logue is our most undervalued writer, I don’t know what does.

Logue photographed at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969 (he really did get everywhere)

He was born in Portsmouth and was educated in Catholic schools in Portsmouth and Bath. By his own accounts he had a wayward childhood and a delinquent youth; he told an interviewer from the Paris Review that he stole “money from my mother’s purse, or my father’s pockets, things from shops—semipornographic magazines, expensive toys, and sweets—and then I would be caught and punished. Once I was taken to a juvenile court. When the time came for me to appear, my father came with me with his retirement certificate—he was a civil servant, working in the post office for forty-five years—wrapped in brown paper under his arm. He unwrapped it and showed it to the magistrates. I felt incredibly proud of him, and terribly ashamed of myself.”

His explanation of how he came to be a poet was simple; it was down to Miss Crowe, his elocution mistress. “As a child I had a deep voice. People would comment. My mother wanted me to be a priest or an actor, but seeing that there wasn’t much chance of the priesthood, she plumped for acting and sent me for elocution lessons. Miss Crowe was an attractive woman. I used to sit on the floor and look up her skirt—and that’s how I became a poet.”

As Cardinal Richelieu, about to be shot by Louis Quatorze in "The Devils" 

After leaving school he eschewed university in favour of the army. When they wouldn’t let him join the commandos he enlisted in the Black Watch where his posh accent got him dubbed ‘Charlotte’ by the other squaddies. He served in Palestine and managed to earn himself a 16 month prison sentence and a dishonorable discharge by stealing six army paybooks; “It was an act of spiteful masochism,” he said later “I had … illegally, obtained six army paybooks, which were also identity documents. I announced to everyone in my tent that I planned to sell them to the Jews. I knew no Jews. I hardly knew what the word Jew meant. But I identified with those my side was against.” After leaving the army he returned home and lived on National Assistance or worked as a park keeper and dentist’s receptionist until he could earn a living as a poet. In 1951 he went to Paris, fell in love with a Brazilian girl and published his first book of poems a couple of years later.

In the bath with a friend

He had a rather colourful life; he was on the first Aldermaston march with Bertrand Russell, served his second prison sentence, just a month this time, in open prison for taking part in a sit in in Parliament Square in 1961, and collaborated with Arnold Wesker to bring art to the workers on the factory floors. He worked with Lindsey Anderson at the Royal Court Theatre, recorded an album of Pablo Neruda translations with a jazz backing with George Martin when the producer wasn’t required by the Beatles, and wrote the famous Pseud’s Corner and True Stories columns for Private Eye (“The Journal of the American Library Association has announced the publication of Playboy Magazine in a Braille edition.” 5 June 1970). He appeared as an actor in several films, his parts included Cardinal Richelieu in Ken Russell’s “The Devils” and a spaghetti eating maniac in Terry Gilliam’s “Jabberwocky.” In his younger days in Paris he wrote two books under the name Count Palmiro Vicarion for the Olympia Press, a pornographic secret agent novel called “Lust” and  a “Book of Bawdy Ballads (“Acknowledgements: Many poets have helped me collect this book. I would like to thank in particular Madame Desiree Noblock of London and Mr. Gregory Kont of Bayswater.” A typical offering; There was a young man from Nantucket,  Whose p***k was so long he could suck it,  He said with a grin,  As he wiped off his chin, “If my ear were a c**t, I could f**k it.”).

Logue married the historian Rosemary Hill in 1985. His Portland stone gravestone was designed by his friend the architectural critic Gavin Stamp and made by Stephen Lane of the Stone Arts & Crafts Company. The verse is a stanza from one of Logue’s own poems ‘O come all ye faithful’:

Those who are sure of love

Do not complain

For sure of love is sure

Love comes again

When Rosemary married Gavin in 2014 I’m sure he didn’t complain. 

Her grave is dug; Stéphane Mallarmé and Harriet Smyth (1838 -1859) Kensal Green Cemetery

If I hadn’t been kneeling down, trying to take a photo of the colonnades reflected in a puddle, I probably would never have noticed the newish plaque on the grave next to the path; ‘Harriet Smyth 1838 – 1859 Friend of the young Stéphane Mallarmé Une larme sur sa tombe, ce n'est pas trop pour tous les sourires angeliques qu'elle nous donnait!’ The French translates as “a tear on her tomb is not too much for all the angelic smiles she gave us!” I was intrigued.

Harriet Smyth was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in 1838, the daughter of Thomas Sheppard Smyth and Harriet Delatre. Her father was English, born in Uttoxeter, and was described as a gentleman and a graduate of the University of Oxford. Her mother was born in Canada to English parents; Harriet’s grandfather was Colonel Philip Chesneau Delatre, a British army officer who had served in Ceylon and then moved to Canada on resigning his commission, where he became President of the Niagara Harbour and Dock Company. Harriet’s mother was close to her older sister who had married Robert Sullivan, an Irishman who become a successful business man in Canada and was the second ever Mayor of Toronto. The couple had nine children but Harriet was closest to her cousin Emily. In the late 1850’s the two families were in the habit of travelling to France to pass the winter at Passy, then an elegant suburb of Paris. In Passy they made the acquaintance of a neighbour, Fanny Desmoulins, who was Stéphane Mallarmé’s grandmother. The two girls became friends with the young Mallarmé; Harriet was four years older than the future French poet (though he seemed to be under the impression that they were the same age, 17), Emily a year younger. Harriet was probably already sick with the tuberculosis that was soon to kill her and in February 1859 Mallarmé also became severely ill (his anxious father thought he might die) but had recovered enough by April to be sent to Passy to convalesce with his grandmother.  A year or so later Mallarmé wrote out a list of the key events of his short life in the back of a notebook he had entitled entre quatre murs – between four walls. One of these key events, written in English rather than French was "April 1859 I passed a night with Emily." No one is sure what Mallarmé meant by this – was he suggesting that he had lost his virginity to the 16-year-old Canadian? The subject was never mentioned again but whatever had happened between the two was seen by the young poet as being of unusual significance. 

Harriet and Emily soon returned to England with their families. Harriet must have been desperately ill by this time as she died on the 11 July at the house the Smyth family were renting in West Kensington, 9 Edith Villas, W14. She was 21. The family placed a short notice in the Morning Post and arranged a funeral. She was buried at Kensal Green on 15 July. At some point in the next few weeks news of Harriet’s death reached Mallarmé in Passy. The young poet was already obsessing over death, he had lost his mother at the age of 5, his sister in 1857 and then just before Christmas his aunt Herminie. That summer his grandfather was ill and left to his own devices Stéphane made a gloomy pilgrimage to the cemetery of Père Lachaise to see the grave of the poet Béranger and wrote the first of his Tombeaux poems, the most famous of which are his elegies for Gautier, Poe, Verlaine and Baudelaire. When he heard of her death, he also wrote two poems for Harriet Sa fosse est creusée (Her grave is dug) and Sa tombe est fermée (Her grave is closed). The poems are generally regarded as juvenilia;

Elle donna partout un doux souvenir d'elle!
De tout... que reste-t-il? que nous peut-on montrer?

Un nom!... sur un cercueil où je ne puis pleurer!
Un nom!... qu'effaceront le temps et le lierre!
Un nom!... couvert de pleurs, et demain de poussière
Et tout est dit![i]

Harriet’s story had been largely forgotten until Declan Walton, a retired UN diplomat, once deputy director-general of food and agriculture, took an interest in Mallarmé’s early poems and was moved by his elegies to the 21 year old and the story of their friendship. With the help of the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery Declan found and restored Harriet’s grave in 2013 and paid for the plaque that commemorates her friendship with Mallarmé. He also wrote an articule for the French academic journal Études Stéphane Mallarmé; Du nouveau sur quelques poèmes de jeunesse Mallarmé et les demoiselles Smyth et Sullivan (New Insights into Some Youthful Poems of Mallarmé and the Misses Smyth and Sullivan.) Declan himself died in April 2020. So it goes.

---

[i]

She gave everywhere a sweet memory of her!
Of everything... what's left? what can you show us?

A name!... on a coffin where I cannot cry!
A name!... that time and ivy will erase!
A name!... covered in tears, and tomorrow in dust
And all is said!

The shot I was taking when I noticed Harriet's grave

 

This extravagant journey: Steve Peregrin Took (1949-1980) Kensal Green Cemetery

I'm taking this extravagant journey
Or so it seems to me
I just came from nowhere
And I'm going straight back there

The Buzzcocks - Boredom 

Failure is often more interesting than success.  When Steve Took achieved a fleeting form of fame in the early 1970’s he was already a has been, a man whose moment had passed, who would spend what little time he had left to live watching his friends and acquaintances become household names whilst he slipped into obscurity. He was born Stephen Ross Porter in Eltham in 1949 and in 1967 answered an ad in the International Times for a drummer. The advertiser was Marc Bolan and the group he was planning to form was called Tyrannosaurus Rex. Adopting the name of a hobbit from Lord of the Rings Bolan and Took became a duo recording three folk inspired albums that met with limited success. Took moved to Ladbroke Grove and began to make the acquaintance of the hipsters, druggies and drop outs that formed the W10 scene in the late 60’s and early 70’s, one of them being Syd Barrett. Playing second fiddle to Bolan in Tyrannosaurus Rex rankled with Took and after the recording of their third album, Unicorn, he began to pester Bolan to sing and perform some of his own material. The two fell out and Took was sacked from the band just before their 1969 tour of the US. 

With Took out of the band and a new partner, Mickey Finn, Bolan shortened the name of the group to T. Rex and within a year became a seventies rock legend. Took suddenly found himself well known, his part in the founding legend of T. Rex was widely reported, but unable to capitalise on his new semi celebrity status. He formed and broke up a succession of bands including Shagrat and Steve Took’s Horns or performed with nascent versions of acts that were to become better known like the Pink Fairies. He worked with Rob Calvert and Nik Turner from Hawkwind, formed shortlived bands with Larry Wallis from the Pink Fairies and Mick Farren from the Deviants, recorded demos and talked to record companies but failed to sign a deal or release any music. When punk exploded in 1976 his Ladbroke Grove hippy friends somehow survived being washed away to oblivion, his friend Lemmy from Hawkwind forming Motorhead and Larry Wallis becoming a performer and producer for Stiff Records, but Took was well and truly finished. By 1980 he was living in his girlfriend’s council flat in Westbourne Park Road.  On Sunday 26 October he bought morphine and magic mushrooms for himself and his girlfriend and the pair injected the morphine that evening. Took died next day, choking to death on a cocktail cherry. His death certificate records the cause of death as asphyxiation.

In the late 80’s and early 90’s some of Took’s unreleased demo tapes were cleaned up and released on CD. They didn’t sell well, a few die hard Bolan fans probably indulging their curiosity. It isn’t surprising, they aren’t musical masterpieces. Spotify cruelly exposes the utter indifference met by Took’s music; Shagrat, his venture with Larry Wallis, has a mere 186 monthly listeners. His album ‘Crazy Diamond’ released as Steve Peregrin Took, 60 monthly listeners. And Steve Took’s Horns, just 11. T. Rex currently has 3.6 million monthly listeners. 

Not seeing 'Death' in Toronto; Mount Pleasant Cemetery

There were two things I wanted to do on a recent trip to Toronto; the first was to visit Mount Pleasant Cemetery, the second to see an exhibition called ‘Death; Life’s Greatest Mystery’ at the Royal Ontario Museum. The exhibition, initially organised by and shown at the Field Museum in Chicago, explores “death through culture, science, and art, with an examination of the diversity of cultural practices and the myriad ways death is observed in the natural word” according to the Royal Ontario’s chief curator. There were no problems visiting the cemetery but the exhibition closed after being open for just one day. When I tried to buy a ticket the admission staff were cagey, telling me that an unforeseen issue had led to the closure of the exhibition until further notice. As we were only there for a few days that was my chance to see it gone. Only later did I find out what had been the problem; a Palestinian American artist, Jenin Yaseen, had staged a sit in at the museum in protest at “censorship and alteration” of one of her paintings which features in the exhibition. The museum had promptly closed the exhibition, presumably in an effort to minimise adverse publicity. This didn’t work of course as the story was soon all over social and traditional media and within 24 hours the museum had backed down and reinstated Yaseen’s work, uncut. 

What was all the fuss about? Yaseen says that two days before the exhibition was to open senior museum staff invited her, and three of her collaborators, to a Zoom call to discuss changes they wanted made to the display they had worked on which showed Palestinian burial practices. The museum was concerned that the display had become politically sensitive following the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October and the subsequent Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Amongst other changes the museum wanted to remove the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘exile’ and wanted to crop part of an image of Yaseen’s painting which showed two Israeli soldiers and a traditional Palestinian embroidery motif symbolising burial and death. The four were told that if they did not agree to the changes the whole display would be pulled along with a display concerning Jewish burial rites “to be fair to both sides”. Yaseen and her collaborators flew to Toronto from Michigan the following day and attended the opening of the exhibition. Unhappy at the changes they decided to stage a sit in. The Museum’s ham-fisted attempt to avoid controversy had spectacularly back fired. The story was now all over the media and the museum quickly capitulated and reinstated the original display. But not quickly enough for me to see the exhibition, alas. 

What struck me most forcibly about Mount Pleasant Cemetery was how immaculately kept it is. Its lawns are closely cropped, its paths rut free, its trees well maintained and its memorials almost miraculously well preserved. There were no areas taken over by wilderness, no collapsed trees, no impenetrable thickets of bramble and dog rose and no notices warning that memorials are liable to topple over and kill the unwary. No historic cemetery in London is this well looked after. Luckily our unkempt and neglected burial grounds have acquired an aura of romantic abandon that helps disguise the truth that they are shockingly neglected. Mount Pleasant was opened in 1876, its gardens and landscape designed by Henry Adolph Engelhardt. The 200-acre site was laid out with more than 12 miles of carriage drives. The legal status of the cemetery is controversial – it is owned and run by the Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries, an organisation which says that it is an independent non-profit corporation. Others disagreed and said that the cemetery group is a public trust and the property of the citizens of Ontario, as a result of the original founding law passed in 1826. A six year legal campaign sought to bring the cemetery group back into the public sector and in 2019 a judge agreed with the campaigners, designated the group a trust and ordered that the directors be renamed trustees.

There are fewer interesting graves than you might expect in what is probably Canada’s premier cemetery. Ones that caught my eye were Harry Judson Crowe (1928) with its half-naked warrior resting on one his sword and one knee, and the memorial to Thomas Moor Junior and Isaac Hughes who died fighting against the Métis people of the District of Saskatchewan in the North-West Rebellion of 1885. The memorial in the form of a bench flanked by two semi naked women on the Cutten grave is pretty memorable. It is Mount Pleasant’s mausoleums which are most spectacular. Department store founder Timothy Eaton built an enormous Greek revival temple guarded over by two life size bronze lions. Most famous of all is the Massey family’s Romanesque tower built in 1891 to a design by EJ Lennox, the architect responsible for many of Toronto’s landmark buildings (including the Old Town Hall and Casa Loma).

I am NOT dead! Thank God, I was never in better health; John Ternouth (1796-1848) Kensal Green Cemetery

Sculptor John Ternouth's grave in Kensal Green was probably sculpted by himself

One can only wonder how sculptor John Ternouth came to hear the news about his own death. Did he stumble unsuspectingly on the ghastly fact as he perused the morning newspaper over his breakfast? Was he blithely unaware of his own demise until grieving relatives and stunned friends began to call at the house to express their shock and give their condolences to his wife? Was he out and about conducting the normal business of his Saturday when his attention was drawn to an ashen faced acquaintance, literally rooted to the spot and looking like he had seen a ghost, stuttering the words “but John, I thought you were dead….”? Ternouth was a sculptor who had been commissioned to produce one of the four bronzes that stand on the plinth of Nelson’s column. Although it was reported widely, and in identical words, it seems likely that the original story was printed in The Daily News on Saturday 24 October 1846;  

Nelson Column in Trafalgar-square.—By the death of Mr. J. Ternouth, the sculptor, another delay has occurred in the completion of this long-deferred debt of gratitude to the great hero Trafalgar. Mr. Ternouth, our readers will remember, was one of the four artists entrusted with the modelling of the bronze bas-reliefs for the base of the column. He had made his design, and sent it in to the Woods and Forests for approval, before the retirement of Lord Lincoln from the head of that department; and nothing has been done, we are assured, to further the completion of the monument since Lord Morpeth's appointment, and this not from any dislike or disinclination the part of his Lordship, but simply from the circumstance that his time has been fully employed on matters of greater and more immediate moment. The designs for the four great battles, St. Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, are yet without official sanction; but this delay, we trust, is only temporary. A new artist should be nominated at once succeed Mr. Ternouth, or to complete his design, if fit for its purpose, and sufficiently advanced to be available. Mr. Ternouth had worked in the studio of Sir Francis Chantrey, was a gentleman of modest and affable manners, and of some talent in his art.

Ternouth's design for the fourth plaque on Nelson's Column

Several other London newspapers took up the story including the Morning Post, The Express, The Globe, The Sun and Lloyd’s Weekly Advertiser. By the following Tuesday retractions of the story were starting to appear in the press, beginning where it had started, with the Daily News;

Fine Arts. The Nelson Column and Mr. Ternouth.— In our paper of Saturday it was stated that another delay had occurred in the completion of the column, in consequence of the death of Mr. Ternouth. We have great satisfaction in contradicting this piece of misinformation on the very best authority. Last evening, we had the pleasure of a visit from Mr. Ternouth, who was, to all appearance, in the best possible health, and certainly—considering the peculiar circumstances of his visit—in best humour.

Mr Ternouth also called upon several other newspapers, including the Morning Post, handing in a letter which they also printed on Tuesday 27 October; Sir, —I am sure I need not to apologise for requesting you to insert in your paper of to-morrow morning a direct contradiction to the paragraph in this day’s paper, headed “Nelson Column," stating that l am dead thank God, I never was in better health. I am, Sir, your obedient servant, JOHN TERNOUTH. 9, Lower Belgrave-place, Pimlico. The editor added that he could “vouch, judging from appearances, that he is, happily, in the enjoyment of most excellent health” and was excusing the error on the grounds that the offending news item had been copied from another paper!  By the following week, apparently forgetting that his paper had also misreported Ternouth’s premature demise, the editor was twitting the Builder, which in that week’s issue “speaks of ‘the death’ of Mr. Ternouth.” Proudly adding, as though it was the fruit of some serious piece of investigative journalism rather than a correction letter received from the aggrieved party, that his own paper “of the 27th instant gave proof under Mr. T.’s own hand (In refutation of the rumour) that “he never was in better health in his life.” The rumour of Mr Ternouth’s death seemed not to be going away, the minute the lie was given in one quarter, it rose again hydra like, in two others.

On the 7th November Mr Ternouth wrote to the most august publication of them all, The Times, complaining that a “report of my death having been most industriously circulated by several of the London daily newspapers.” Would the Times “permit me to contradict the same through your valuable columns and refute the account, which has been circulated to the alarm of my friends, coupled with a feigned regret that the occurrence might tend to retard the completion of the Nelson monument.” A week later the Athenaeum was treating the whole affair as a joke “the long slumber which has fallen on all the proceedings connected with the Nelson Column is lending, not unnaturally, to rumours of the deaths of parties concerned in the works. Mr. Ternouth;, the sculptor, has written to say that he is not dead; and we give him the benefit of his assertion-but yet, we are of the opinion that the inference of his death was a fair one,” they commented caustically.

Like stopped clocks, which continue to register the correct time at least once, sometimes twice, a day, and unlike most other misreported facts, premature reports of a subject’s death inevitably come true.  Mr. Ternouth lived barely two years longer. In December 1848 he caught Typhus and finally died. This time the newspapers did not bother to report his death. His last great work, his Nelson at the battle of Copenhagen was finally fixed in place on Nelson’s column on 26^th November 1850 by which point the proud artist had been buried in Kensal Green for over two years. 

Newcastle fans turn their back on Ternouth's Nelson as they pose for the camera's just before losing the FA cup final to Liverpool, 3-0. in 1974

Père Lachaise without the visitors; Zadie Smith on Kensal Green Cemetery and the search for Eliza Touchet

With nothing to do and nowhere to go, I took my regulation walk through the streets like my fellow-Britons, but with the small difference that my eyes always remained above shop level: trained upward to the eaves and the cornices and the chimneys. Toward the nineteenth century, in other words, which is everywhere in North West London, once you start looking. I began haunting the local graveyards. I found William Ainsworth’s grave and Eliza Touchet’s grave, and could point on a map to the unmarked pauper’s grave of the Tichborne Claimant, as well as the corner of King’s Cross where Bogle breathed his last. It was 2020 outside but 1870 in my head.

Zadie Smith: On Killing Charles Dickens  (The New Yorker, July 2023) 

In a writer so tied imaginatively to the area of London she grew up in, and where she still lives, it is inevitable that Kensal Green Cemetery finds its way into Zadie Smith’s fiction. In ‘On Beauty’ the Belsey family attend Carlene Kipps’ funeral at the cemetery but daughter Zora is more interested in carrying out a literary tour of the graves of dead writers (though she is under the misapprehension that she will find Iris Murdoch here) than she is in the interment of a family friend. Kensal Green “is what La Cimetière du Père Lachaise would look like if nobody knew it was there or went to visit it,” Smith says. Her latest book, ‘The Fraud’ features the cemetery even more heavily; based around the Tichbourne Claimant case, of the four principal protagonists two are buried in Kensal Green, the books narrator Eliza Touchet, and her cousin William Harrison Ainsworth, the third, Andrew Bogle, is buried next door in St Marys Catholic Cemetery and the fourth, Arthur Orten, the notorious Tichbourne Claimant himself, is buried in an unmarked grave in Paddington Cemetery, a 15-minute walk away. Other characters are, or were, buried here including W.M. Thackeray and George Cruikshank. During the course of the novel Eliza, who was housekeeper to her cousin and lived with him at the now demolished Kensal Lodge on Harrow Road, takes a walk in the cemetery where she is eventually to be buried herself, and reflects on some of the memorials to past acquaintances.  

I’m spending the morning with Zadie Smith, and she’s taking me to a cemetery. It’s Kensal Green Cemetery, to be exact, the largest one in London. (The interred include Thackeray and a few minor royals which, Smith informs me, is the sign of a “respectable” graveyard.) “Ready to get our legs stung?” she asks, as we veer off the gravel path and plunge into thick undergrowth. I’m more concerned about Smith, who is dressed in denim dungaree shorts, a black tank top – “Walmart,” she says apologetically – and Palmaira sandals that look pretty time-worn. Will the literary establishment forgive me if I let one of its finest living novelists trip over an overgrown tombstone and sprain her ankle?

Zing Tseng in Vogue 23 August 2023

The Fraud is a fascinating book and I was intrigued by Eliza Touchet, who was very real but is now completely forgotten.  Only a biography of Dickens as extensive as Edgar Johnson’s finds space to mention her in passing when discussing Dicken’s friendship with Harrison Ainsworth; “Ainsworth, who was separated from his wife, had taken a pleasant dwelling named Kensal Lodge, on the Harrow Road near the village of Willesden. Here the widow of a cousin, Mrs. Eliza Touchet, a clever, sarcastic, fascinating talker, who was twelve years Ainsworth's senior, acted as his hostess…” Although fantastically successful at the time (his novel ‘Jack Shepherd’ outsold ‘Oliver Twist’) Harrison Ainsworth was a once famous author whose 39 novels are now all out of print and whose reputation is that of a talentless hack. If Ainsworth was a better writer, then Eliza Touchet could be as famous as say, Ellen Ternan. Smith rescues Eliza from anonymity, building her whole fictional edifice around her. Closet taphophile that she is, Smith first attempted to connect with Eliza by seeking out her grave in Kensal Green, where her modest memorial lies just a hundred yards or so away from Ainsworth. In an article written for the New Yorker in July this year Smith says she found Eliza’s grave but when she was interviewed for Vogue by Zing Tseng in August she takes Tseng to Kensal Green where the journalist says “we are valiantly attempting to find the graves of Eliza Touchet and William Harrison Ainsworth.” They don’t find them it seems; close to the end of the article, as an aside, Tsing says “we’ve given up on our cemetery quest and retired to a nearby bench to recover from the heat.” In the postscript to the novel itself Smith says;

Mrs Touchet – a woman always partly phantasmagoric – extends herself far beyond her earthly span here: in reality, she died before her cousin, on the 4th of February 1869… She too is buried in All Souls. Kensal Green, although her grave is entirely obscured by a huge, impassable, spiky thicket of bramble.

The plan for Square 156 showing the position of Eliza's grave

Enthused by the book I was keen to find Eliza Touchet’s grave. The General Cemetery Company’s records say she is buried in grave 10481. Henry Vivian Neal, once head guide at the cemetery and author of several books on it, told me that she was in Square 156 and provided me with a detailed map of the burials to help me locate it. Whilst he was out and about he even checked the plot for me “Went to the cemetery this pm – the Eliza Touchet plot is marked by a substantial dog rose – so, Zadie Smith was right - not much to see,” he told me. Would anyone mind if I pruned the dog rose? I asked. Not at all he told me. And so I lugged a weighty pair of heavy duty loppers to the cemetery, all the way from East London, determined to rescue Eliza, like the prince in Sleeping Beauty hacking his way through the forest of thorns to rescue the somnolent princess. Once I was in front of the dog rose it was immediately obvious that there was no headstone hidden amongst the tangle of thorns and whipcord branches. I was disappointed and rather surprised. Would Ainsworth, a hugely successful novelist, have let is cousin be buried without a memorial? Despite Eliza’s unflattering portrait in the book, I just could not believe that he would be such a miserable bastard. I checked and rechecked the site on the grave plan and eventually realised that Eliza’s grave should be to the right of the dog rose. But that plot carried a memorial for a married couple called Salmon.  On the plan Eliza is to the right of the Salmon’s, not the left – was the plan wrong. I puzzled over this for some time, walking around the grave, checking and rechecking the names on adjacent graves. Eventually the penny dropped; if I pulled away the grass at the side of the Salmon memorial, there was another grave beneath, a ledger stone. Someone has put the Salmon's kerbed headstone on top of Eliza’s grave, completely hiding it. 

Eliza's grave covered by the salmon's headstone and kerb, Eliza's ledger stone just visible at the bottom

The Salmon headstone was inscribed to Albert Charles Salmon ‘who passed away 27th Dec 1939 aged 48 years’ and ‘In loving memory’ of his wife Florence May Salmon ‘who passed away 28th July 1988, aged 92’. To allow Florence to rejoin the husband from whom she had been separated for almost 50 years cemetery staff would have had to lift the kerb and headstone from the grave so that they could dig a new shaft down to just above Albert’s coffin.  The memorial would have been winched out of the way; handily Eliza’s grave had a flat ledger stone and as she had been buried a hundred years earlier there were unlikely to be relatives to object to the cemetery workers putting the Salmon’s memorial on top of it. No doubt after Florence’s funeral the intention would have been to put the headstone and kerb back onto the Salmon’s grave. But for reasons unknown, perhaps they just forgot, it never happened and for the last 35 years the Salmon’s have been smothering Eliza while their own grave was being colonised by the dog rose. Poor Eliza, doubly forgotten in death, even her grave obscured. Cousin William’s much grander memorial, a little further down the path, is unlikely to find itself so easily eclipsed. 

Eliza takes a walk in the cemetery – her she is at the Soyer monument;

On a melancholy whim, she turned back and retraced her steps, passing through the gates of All Souls. The dead stay where they are, at least. More join them, but that is the only change. She took a seat on the first bench that presented itself, and, looking up, grimaced at the twenty-foot monument before her, unchanged, except for a growth of ivy around its preposterous foot-long dedication: TO HER. When she had lived beside this graveyard, and taken her morning constitutionals here, she had liked to pretend that the her in question was Frances. ….. they had known the lady, not well, but they had met her. Emma Soyer the painting prodigy….  Later she had married the head chef at the Reform club – he was the Soyer; before that she was plain Emma Jones – and so, like Mrs Touchet, had found herself in possession of a dubious French name… another one of Samuel Johnson’s dogs, paintbrush in paw… 

And here, her thoughts on the headstone for Dicken’s sister-in-law Mary Hogarth;

She stood up and looked about for a sadder story than her own to cheer her. She did not have to go very far. Only a few hundred yards to the left lay the tragic Hogarth girl. Dead without issue. Dead without making art or books or any kind of name for herself. Dead before womanhood had even come to claim her:

Mary Scott Hogarth
Young beautiful and good
God in His mercy numbered her among
His angels at the early age of seventeen 

Only Dickens, though Mrs Touchet sourly. Only he could imagine those first two adjectives as having any possible relation to the third. Sentimentalist, And never more so than on this subject of his dead sister-in-law. The heaving tears he’d shed at this young woman’s graveside! The animal moan as they lowered the coffin! An inconvenient, revealing grief, unnatural and unmanly. He’d cried more than his wife.

“Thackeray! That pig-nosed moralist!” Eliza rants. When she isn’t reminding us of his porcine snout, she calls him “the worm Thackeray.”    His offense? The sentence “It seems to us that Mr Cruikshank’s illustrations really created the tale, and that Mr Ainsworth, as it were, only put words to it.” Thackeray published ‘An Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank’ in the Westminster Review in 1840. As well as the one sentence Eliza takes objection to, Thackeray spent 5 pages extolling Cruickshank at Ainsworth’s expense. 

Thackeray's monogram on his grave

The rift between George Cruikshank and Ainsworth was even deeper than that between him and Thackeray. Cruickshank came to genuinely believe that he was not only suggested the plots of Ainsworth’s most successful works but that the reason for the success in the first place was his own illustrations. In 1872 Cruikshank published a pamphlet entitled ‘The Artist and the Author’ in which he claimed to be the true author of not only work by Ainsworth but also by Dickens! Eliza also dislikes Cruickshank for being one of the men who regard her as one of Samuel Johnson’s dogs; “the antipathy was mutual,” she admits. She tells Ainsworth’s daughters that “he drinks too much, and for another, he has a jaundiced view of the world. You should pray for him.”  Cruikshank’s memorial in the cemetery declares that he was ‘for 30 years a total abstainer and ardent pioneer and champion by pencil, word and pen of TOTAL abstinence from INTOXICATING DRINKS.’ But to Eliza “Cruikshank was always a terrible drunk”.

The Mysterious Thea Canonero Altieri (1910-2006) Kensal Green Cemetery

 

What do we know about Thea Canonero Altieri? Not very much. We have her dates of birth (21.06.1910) and death (29.10.2006) and so know that she was 96 when she died. We know her death was registered in Camden. We know she is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery and that she has an unusual memorial with the Italian epitaph, ‘Al di la delle stelle ci sei tu.’  We know the epitaph is almost certainly a quote from the song “Al di la”, Italy’s 1961 Eurovision song contest entry sung by Betty Curtis. Betty’s real name was Roberta Corti and she died in June 2006. Perhaps Italian radio stations played her back catalogue in homage to the dead singer and evoked someone’s dim memory of an old, obscure Eurovision entry? We are probably safe deducing that Thea was Italian and that she was a nonna and that is probably everything we can know with any certainty.  Perhaps she only came to England late in life, to be cared for by her family? Apart from her death I couldn’t find any record of her. Altieri is a reasonably rare surname in London but attempts to trace any possible relatives in North or West London also drew blanks. I found a 1992 article in the now defunct ‘Bedfordshire on Sunday’ free newspaper about a Fiat/Lancia garage in Bedford called Auto Valley Services run by a pair of brothers called Giovanni and Pasquale Toriello and their partner Tony Altieri. The figure on the grave is generally supposed to be based on the Spirit of Ecstasy, the bonnet mascot of the Rolls-Royce. Tony was in the motor trade, has the same surname… it is all a bit tenuous.  I am not alone in my failure to discover anything about Thea; Sheldon from the Cemetery Club couldn’t come up with anything concrete either.

This isn’t the only spectacular modern grave in London where we know nothing about the occupant. One of my favourite graves is the Vassallo memorial in the East London Cemetery in Plaistow. We know very little about the occupant except her name, Angelina Celestina Vassallo, her date of death, the 1st March 1981 and the fact that she was 65 when she died – all information gleaned from the inscription on the grave.  That is a huge amount of information compared to what we know about the occupant of the Amos grave in the City of London cemetery in Manor Park. We have the single name Amos, with no indication if it is a surname or a first name, and that is it. The grave is rather fine with a sculptured lurcher and side panels featuring a hare and a jaunting car and the large headstone a cockerel. There is also an unusual amount of poetry on the reverse of the headstone but no solid information about the deceased, just a series of enigmatic clues. 

The memorial of Angelina Celestina Vassallo in The East London Cemetery in Plaistow

The Amos grave in the City of London Cemetery in Manor Park

The famous cemetery gates; Lavender Hill Cemetery, Enfield

Anyone alive and watching TV in the early 1970’s witnessed Lavender Hill Cemetery’s brief moment in the national spotlight when it featured in all but one of the 74 episodes of the ITV comedy ‘On the Buses’, as the Cemetery Gates that were the terminus of Stan and Jack’s number 11 bus route. DiamondGeezer, though clearly not a fan of the comedy classic, paid a visit just to see the gates in 2021. His account is worth a read. Members of the ‘On the Buses’ fan club also make pilgrimages to the location. I literally haven’t seen the programme since it came off air 50 years ago in 1973; as a prepubescent I loved it but I strongly suspect that now, even through the soft focus of nostalgia, I would find it unwatchable.

Meller and Parsons in London Cemeteries say “this is a well-maintained cemetery on an undulating site, The planting is now mature and sombre coniferous trees surround the entrance.” They single out a hand full of memorials as being of some interest, failing to mention the one spectacular monument in the cemetery, and can’t find a single notable to list as being buried here. The cemetery clearly failed to inspire them. Their down beat assessment is a little unfair; it is one of the many minor cemeteries in London but there is much of interest to see here and the setting is pretty.  The Enfield Burial Board was formed in 1870 in response to the usual crisis of capacity for burials in the local churchyard, St Andrew’s. The newly formed board acquired land at the top of Lavender Hill, appointed Thomas J. Hill to build the two gothic chapels (one CoE, the other for non-conformists) and opened the new cemetery for business in 1872. Judging from the reports on the meetings of the Burial Board in the Middlesex Gazette, things ran smoothly at the cemetery, with only minor mishaps to enliven Board meetings. In 1901 ‘the Clerk reported that some fencing at Lavender Hill Cemetery had been damaged by a horse and cart belonging to Mr. Walker with whom arrangement been had made for the necessary repair.’  In 1910 ‘it was formally reported by the Clerk that about 14 feet of the metal forming part of the lightning conductor on the Lavender Hill Chapel had been stolen one-night last week. The Board directed that the damage should be made good forthwith.’  In 1908 the Gazette’s reporter stifled a yawn and perked up when there was ‘an application for permission to inter the body of a child with that of a grandparent in an adult space of a nonpurchase grave. After discussion the Board declined to accede to the request, being opposed to the using up of adult spaces for burial of children.’ But that was as exciting as it got. 

Although they mention the Bosanquet chest tomb as being one of the better memorials Meller and Parson’s neglect to mention that James Whatman Bosanquet (1804–1877) was a well to do banker who had a sideline in biblical and Assyrian chronology and wrote several books on the subject. Also buried here is Joy Gardner, the 40-year-old Jamaican who suffered cardiac arrest at her home in Crouch End in July 1993 during an immigration raid by the Metropolitan Police. Gardner was restrained, in front of her 5 year old son, with handcuffs and leather straps and, most notoriously, 13 feet of adhesive tape wrapped around her head.  After suffering cardiac arrest and respiratory failure she was taken to the Whittington Hospital where she died 4 days later. Three police officers stood trial for manslaughter but were acquitted of the charges. The case aroused huge controversy. Benjamin Zephaniah wrote a poem called ‘The death of Joy Gardner’;

They put a leather belt around her
13 feet of tape and bound her
Handcuffs to secure her
And only God knows what else,
She’s illegal, so deport her
Said the Empire that brought her
She died,
Nobody killed her
And she never killed herself.
It is our job to make her
Return to Jamaica
Said the Alien Deporters
Who deports people like me,
It was said she had a warning
That the officers were calling
On that deadly July morning
As her young son watched TV

A war graves headstone commemorates Royal Navy Cook Neil Goodall who died aboard HMS Sheffield on the 4th May 1982 when he was just 21. HMS Sheffield was on her way to the Falklands when she was holed by an Exocet missile fired by the Argentinian Air Force.  A serious fire broke out but as the ship’s fire fighting systems had been damaged by the missile the captain eventually gave the order to abandon ship. Sheffield was towed for several days HMS Yarmouth but high seas and the hole in her hull eventually caused her to sink. The bodies of the 20 crew members who were killed by the attack were still on board and sank with the ship. The wreck is now a designated war grave.   

Another memorial mentioned by Meller and Parson’s is ‘Heinreich Faulenbach’s grave marked by a bronze plaque on a substantial granite vault.’ In 2007 the Edmonton Hundred Historical Society published an occasional paper by Pat Keeble and Robert Musgrove entitled ‘Who was Heinreich Faulenbach?; a case study in family and local history research.’  Copies of the paper are in the university libraries at UCL, Cornell and Stanford but not, unfortunately on-line. I can’t find out anything about Heinrich (or Henry) Faulenbach other than he may have been the owner of a trimming warehouse in the City of London. So the question of who Heinreich (or Heinrich, or Henry) Faulenbach was remains a mystery. 

Lavender Hill’s most impressive monument belongs to the Lucena family. It is not mentioned at all by Meller and Parsons and seems to have been virtually unknown until it featured in Richard Barnes book on sculpture in London cemeteries. Meller and Paron’s missed it I suspect because it probably heavily overgrown for many years. The oldest photos I can find of it date from 2015 and although undergrowth has been cleared away the memorial itself still has Ivy suckers all over it. It must have been some find the council workmen who cleared the site.  The story of the Lucena family is fascinating, particularly that of Anne Maria Lucena, the housemaid who married her employer, became an extremely wealthy woman and was murdered by her son-in-law. I have already dealt with the story at length here, so won’t go into now.  I did however some across this account of Anne Maria’s funeral in the Middlesex Gazette of Saturday 11 January 1908 under the headline ‘The Hampshire Tragedy’ which I think is worth reprinting in full:    

FUNERAL AT LAVENDER HILL. The terrible New Year's Eve tragedy at "Velmead," Fleet, Hampshire, when the late Major Coates Phillips made such a furious attack on the house party, resulted in the death of a lady who was at one time a well-known Enfield resident. Mrs. Lucena, the mother-in-law of the assailant, had, since the divorce decree terminating the marriage of her daughter, lived with Mrs. Phillips either at South Kensington or at the latter’s house at Fleet, near Winchfield. Until after her husband’s death in 1876, she resided in Enfield, and the family were amongst the first to purchase the right of sepulture in Lavender Hill Cemetery. 

It was, therefore, decided, upon a fatal termination of the revolver shot wound, that the remains should be interred here. On the conclusion of the inquest., last Monday, the remains, enclosed in wood and lead shells, with an outer massive casket of polished oak, were given into the care of the undertaker, Mr. James Oakley, of Fleet and Farringdon street, and removed to London. On Wednesday the body was conveyed in an open hearse to Enfield, accompanied by Mr. Field, Mr. Oakley's City manager, the mourners—for the most part nephews and nieces- being met at the G.N. station. The weather was in accord with the sadness of the event. Rain descended copiously, and a gusty westerly wind swept across the cemetery. This notwithstanding, there were about 300 spectators to witness this closing phase of the tragedy. The Vicar of Enfield, the Rev. R. Howel Brown, officiated in the Cemetery chapel and also at the vault, which had been opened by Mr. C. Eaton, mason. Mr. W. J. Matthews, Clerk to the Burial Board, attended; and several police were present to repress any unseemly display, which, however, was altogether absent. On the contrary, the hundreds of on-looker s were evidently animated by feelings of sympathy and commiseration with the mourners, amongst whom were: Mr. T. H. Gardiner (of the firm of Messrs. Jackaman, Gardiner and Smith), family solicitor; Mr. F. Radian, Mr. Stephen Benn and Mrs. Benn of Ealing; Mr. C. Augustus Benn, of Eggars Hill, Aldershot; Mr. E. Purser, Old Windsor; Mr. A. Purser, Slough; Mr. A. W. Perry, and several lady relatives. Mr. and Mrs E. P. Morgan, of Windmill Hill, were also present.

Mrs. Phillips was physically unfit to undertake the long journey, and the ordeal of the funeral; but she sent a very handsome wreath. Floral tributes were also sent by "Bertha," the grand-daughter, Lady and Mrs. Humphreys, the servants at " Velmead" and Cheniston House, Kensington, Mr. Henry Smith (the solicitor who so narrowly escaped being killed at the time of the attack), Miss Ouchterlony ("With best love"), Mr. F. W. Behan, Mrs. W. Lang, Dr. Sunderland (of Cavendish Place), Mr. C. Benn, Mrs. C. A. Breay, "Alfred and Ada," "Edmund and Tot," Mrs. A. L. Martin, Mrs. J. A. Benn and family, Mrs. and the Misses Ouchterlony, and the family solicitors. 

The monument of the mysterious Heinreich Faulenbach

The silver breastplate bore upon it the simple inscription: ANNE MARIA LUCENA, Died 4 Jan., 1908, Aged 65 Years.  Although it is many years ago since the Lucena family resided in Enfield —Mr. Lucena died in 1876—widespread interest was aroused in the locality on the personality of the victim of this terrible tragedy becoming known to local residents. Especially was this so in the case of the older inhabitants of this district who have a vivid recollection of the family when they resided at the house now known as West View, Windmill Hill; and gossip and stories, almost forgotten, have been fully rehearsed here during the past, week. In this connection we might cite one anecdote which is said to be characteristic of Mr. Lucena, who was a solicitor by profession. Back in the 70s there were two very well-known men in commercial circles in the Town—the Brothers Young. Fred. Young was a butcher, and his place of business was at the Pent House, now occupied by Messrs. Stansfeld. The story goes that a dog belonging to Mr. Lucena had carried off a leg of mutton from Mr. Young's premises, and the tradesman hit upon what he conceived to be a shrewd way of presenting the subject of compensation to the owner of the dog.  "Sir," said he to the lawyer one day, “f you were a butcher, and a dog came into your shop and stole a leg of mutton, what would you do?" "Why, I should charge the owner of the dog the value of it, of course," replied Mr. Lucena. Taking the hint, it is said that Mr. Young lost no time in sending in a bill to his "legal adviser" for the value of the joint, accompanied by an intimation that his animal it was that had played the thief. But in lieu of the desired remittance the tradesman received a very different reply —no other than an amount, thus: "To advice on a point of law, 6s. 8d. value of mutton, 5s. 4d.; balance due, 1s. 4d. Please remit at once." We are not aware if there was ever a settlement. 

The Bosanquet chest tomb with the Anglican chapel in the background

The Lucena family grave in Lavender Hill Cemetery is located easily by what is undoubtedly the most handsome monument within those grounds. Mr. Lucena, dying at his house on Windmill Hill in 1876, was buried in a very spacious vault, some 10 ft. in depth and 12 ft. wide, massively constructed and enclosed by substantial ironwork. On a foundation of granite there stands a marble base surmounted by figures said to represent the family at the time of the father's decease. The central figure is that of a woman seated, contemplating a book, while at her knees are the two children, a boy arid a girl. The former holds a dog, which is a memorial of an animal greatly petted by the family in their happier home life at Enfield. Flanking the group is an angel figure on each side. with outspread wings, one grasping a cross, the other an anchor; and above the seated adult figure they hold a wreath. The whole of this statuary is of Italian marble, and it is said that the cost of the memorial was from £2,900 to £3,000. A tragic incident occurred during its erection here. One of the large atones used as a slab suddenly fell, while in an upright position, and killed one of the workmen. 

In the appended copy of the inscription carved on the marble, the reader will not fail to be struck, in the light of the recent tragedy, by the aptness of the Scriptural text. It will be noted, too, that the son's remains have, for some years past, been deposited within the vault. The inscription reads thus: “In Loving Memory of STEPHEN LANCASTER LUCENA, ESQ., Who died 13 June, 1876, In his 72nd Year. This monument is erected by his widow. STEPHIN LANCASTER LUCENA, Son of the above, Who died 4th May, 1900, Aged 34 Years. ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’" Although Mrs. Lucena had ceased to reside in Enfield, she retained considerable property in the locality; and we understand that only a few weeks before the sad at Velmead she was in the Town on business connected with her properties. On that occasion she appeared in good health, and conversed pleasantly with some local residents.