The enduring influence of Sir Thomas Browne; 'A Cabinet of Rarities' Erik Desmazières (Thames & Hudson 2012 £35)

When the funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes; and, having no old experience of the duration of their relicks, held no opinion of such after-considerations.

Sir Thomas Browne - Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk (1658) 

When Thomas Browne was born James I was on the throne and Shakespeare was still alive. He is a difficult writer; his arcane subject matter, Latinate vocabulary and long serpentine sentences can sometimes make his prose impenetrable. In the Oxford English dictionary, he has 775 entries crediting with him with the first use of a word in English; alchemical, ambidextrous, coexistence, computer, continuum, disruption, hallucination, holocaust, therapeutic, and transgressive are amongst the many words he is said to have coined.  He is cited in the OED over 6500 times, which include 4131 entries in which his writing is the earliest evidence of a word used in the language. He perhaps never intended to be a published author; his first book initially came out in an unauthorised edition based on a manuscript that was circulating amongst his friends. Although he survived to a what was a ripe old age for someone born at the beginning of the 17th century, he had been preoccupied with mortality, the impermanence of life and the prospect of death, since his youth. That first published book was a pirated version of the Religio Medici, written when he was in his early thirties; “If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; we live with death, and die not in a moment,” he wrote, rather desolately, for a man in the prime of his life.

Despite spending most of his long, relatively uneventful life in Norwich, Browne was a Londoner, born in the parish of St Michael-le-Querne in Cheapside in 1605. His father was a well to do mercer who died when he was 8. His mother remarried within six months of her husband’s death, to Sir Thomas Dutton. He was educated at William of Wykeham’s foundation in Winchester and Broadgates Hall at the University of Oxford, graduating in 1627 and going to the continent to study medicine at the Universities of Padua, Montpellier and Leiden, where he was awarded a medical degree in 1633. After a short stint in West Yorkshire Browne settled in Norwich to practice medicine, in 1637.  He married Dorothy Mileham in 1641 and the couple had 10 children. When the Civil war broke out Browne was a staunch Royalist living in a town largely loyal to Parliament. He did the sensible thing, kept his views to himself and lived his life as quietly as possible during the tumult of the war and Commonwealth. He was knighted by Charles II on a Royal visit to Norwich in 1671. John Evelyn, one of Browne’s correspondents, was in the royal entourage and took the opportunity to visit; he wrote admiringly in his diary that Browne’s "whole house and garden is a paradise and Cabinet of rarities and that of the best collection, amongst Medails, books, Plants, natural things". He published just four books in his lifetime, the Religio Medici (authorised version) in 1642, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Beliefs in 1646, an early attempt to combat superstition and widely accepted but false ‘facts’, Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk, and The Garden of Cyrus, or The Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, and Mystically Considered, both published in 1658. 

To be gnawed out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking bowls, and our bones turned into pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations….

Sir Thomas Browne - Hydriotaphia

According to William Stukeley Sir Thomas "dyed” on his 77th birthday, the 19th November 1682,“after eating too plentifully of a Venison Feast." He and was buried in the chancel of the church of St. Peter Mancroft in the centre of Norwich, just a few yards from his house. There he remained, quietly decomposing, for 150 years until 1840 when the sexton, George Potter, was preparing the ground for a new grave for the vicar’s recently deceased wife. The gravediggers were excavating a trench in front of the altar when a pickaxe hit a piece of buried metal. This turned out to be the brass plate on a lead which had split neatly in two from the force of the blow. The inscription on the plate named the occupant of the lead coffin as Dr Thomas Browne hoc luculo indormiens, corporis Spagyrici pulvere plumbum in aurum convertit (sleeping in this grave, by the dust of his alchemic body he changes the lead to gold).  In a letter to the Athenaeum dated September 5thh 1840 Thomas D. Eaton, one of the churchwardens gave an account of what happened next:  

On a closer inspection, the coffin, quaintly described above as having been " transmuted into gold" by the potent dust" of the mighty "alchymist," was found to have been literally converted into a carbonate of lead, which crumbled at the touch, disclosing the bones of its illustrious tenant. There is no truth whatever in the report pretty widely circulated, that the "features remained entire." The flesh had returned “to earth as it was," but the hair of the beard was in good preservation. A portion of this was compared with its representation in an oil painting of the knight, suspended in the vestry, and the colour of the original corresponded exactly with that of the copy. Now we have the testimony of Sir Thomas Browne himself, that ''teeth, bones, and hair give the most lasting defiance to corruption." The skull was sound, and still contained a mass of brain. Unhappily for the phrenologists, the forehead was narrow, low, and receding; whereas that part appropriated to the animal propensities was unusually large. It may he right, perhaps, to add, that the venerable bones thus fortuitously exposed were seen by few, and were reverently handled. After having slept undisturbed for more than century and a half, it was reasonable to presume that they had become incorporated with the soil; no sort of blame therefore could reasonably attach to the selection of their resting place for another occupant. I have thus given the true particulars of a circumstance which I should not have made public, had not erroneous reports gone abroad respecting it. 

One of the ‘few’ who were summoned to see Browne’s bones was local antiquary Robert Fitch, a man later described as one “whose ‘acquisitive complex’ was abnormally developed even for an antiquary.” Shortly after Fitch had visited the coffin plate was noted as missing. Fitch strenuously denied having removed and claimed that the plate was in the possession of the sexton George Potter. Potter denied having taken the plate or having it in his possession. Accusation and counter accusation were made but the plate was not found; not until 1893 that is, 53 years later, when Robert Fitch died and his heirs found the coffin plate in his desk drawer. His shamed faced executors returned the plate to the church. So much attention had been focused on the hue and cry raised over the coffin plate that seemingly no one had noticed that an even bigger trophy had been removed from the grave – Browne’s toothless skull. This reappeared much sooner than the missing coffin plate; by 1845 it was in the possession of a certain Dr. Lubbock who donated it, along with a lock of hair also said to belong to Browne, to the Norwich Hospital where it stayed on public display until the 1920’s. George Potter, the sexton, was (and still is) generally claimed to have been responsible for removing the skull from the grave and then hawking it around Norwich trying to sell it to the highest bidder. Canon Frederick James Meyrick, who was responsible for the campaign that led to the return of the skull to the church in 1922, did not believe George Potter’s to be the guilty party. The Canon, who had a rather snappy writing style for a man of the cloth, wrote an account of the affair entitled ‘Thomas Browne; the story of his skull, his wig and his coffin plate’ which was published in the British Medical Journal on 06 May 1922. “Now the sexton in 1840, when the grave was ‘knav’d,’ was a most worthy and loyal servant of the church,” he wrote, “The sexton of 1840 was a man of considerable means, for he could afford to present the church that he served with such fidelity with a beautiful oak door.” Canon Meyrick’s money was on Robert Fitch; “Did the antiquary, who was the only man who claimed to have seen the skull and who most certainly ‘borrowed’ the coffin plate, also ‘borrow,’ with or without the churchwarden’s consent, the skull?” he asks rhetorically before answering his own question, “it looks like it.” 

Canon Meyrick campaigned long and hard for the return of the skull to the church and on 16 January 1922 the Westminster Gazette reported:

SIR T. BROWNE'S SKULL TO BE REINTERRED BY THE CHURCH.  The controversy between the authorities of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital and of St. Peter Mancroft Church regarding the disposal of the skull of Sir Thomas Browne, the famous seventeenth-century Physician and philosopher, ended on Saturday by the decision of the governors of the hospital to hand the skull back to the church, from which it had been taken seventy years ago. The board of management of the hospital recommended that the skull he handed back on condition that it be interred reverently, and not exposed to public view. Canon Merrick, vicar of St. Peter's, suggested that this first condition was like asking a hospital doctor to perform an operation, and adding, "Don't be drunk when you do it." The skull would be interred reverently as a matter of course. Ultimately the governors agreed by a small minority to return the skull to the church unconditionally. Canon Meyrick said that whether it was the skull of the great philosopher or of a poor peasant, it had been entrusted to the church till the end of Time.

Before reburying it in the church, Canon Meyrick sent the skull to the Royal College of Surgeons to be weighed and measured and have a cranial cast taken. On 4 July 1922 it was reinterred in the chancel, Meyrick duly recording the fact in the burial register noting in the address column ‘Norfolk & Norwich Hospital Museum’ and recording Browne’s age as 317. 

Browne’s baroque prose style has garnered many literary admirers over the years including Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Herman Meville, Edgar Allen Poe, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Borges and, most recently, WG Sebald. The admiration is often leavened with an undercurrent of condescension; some of Browne’s “most pleasing performances,” said Dr. Johnson, “have been produced by learning and genius exercised upon subjects of little importance.” Coleridge considered him a man with “a little twist in the brains” while Melville described him as “a crack’d angel.” Chesterton wrote that he was “a man who reverences small [things], who reduces himself to a point, without parts or magnitude, so that to him the grass is really a forest and the grasshopper a dragon.” Jorge Luis Borges, without even a hint of irony, considered him as the best writer of prose in English and said in an interview “When I was a young man, I played the sedulous ape to Sir Thomas Browne. I tried to do so in Spanish.” Browne is a writer’s writer and it is unusual to find him influencing an artist. But the French lithographer and printmaker Erik Desmazières seems to have often had his imagination fired as much by writers as by other visual artists. His 2012 book Le Miroir des Vanités (published in English as A Cabinet of Rarities by Thames & Hudson) is, as the English subtitle puts it, an examination of the “antiquarian obsession and the spell of death”, taking as its starting point Sir Thomas’s posthumously published Musaeum Clausum (also known as the Bibliotheca Abscondita).  

Erik Desmazières was born in the Moroccan city of Rabat in in 1948. His father was a French diplomat and he spent his childhood moving between Morocco, Portugal and France. Following family tradition, he studied political science at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and after graduating began working for the French civil service.  His heart was not really in his career and at night classes he studied drawing and printmaking. In 1975 he gave up his job and devoted himself full time to his art. Under the influence of Albrecht Dürer, Giambattista Piranesi, Jacques Callot and Maurits Escher his prints are finely executed, highly detailed, often hyper realistic but with fantastical elements. His has illustrated limited editions of Borges ‘The Library of Babel’, Kleits ‘The earthquake in Chile’, Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ and, in 2009 Browne’s ‘Musaeum Clausum’ (the closed museum).  Desmazières only produced a handful of images for the published book but the subject matter clearly fired his imagination and he went on to produce the dozens that appear in A Cabinet of Rarities.  

In The Common Reader Virginia Woolf wrote that Browne’s mind was ‘one of the finest lumber rooms in the world — a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns' horns, and magic glasses full of emerald lights and blue mystery’. This propensity to jumble together the most disparate objects is seen strongly in the ‘Musaeum Clausum’ and which Desmazières draws on so productively in his book. The ‘Musaeum Clausum’ is a tract that reflects Browne's fascination with collecting and cataloguing curiosities, antiquities, and natural objects. A Borgesian note is struck by the fact that all the objects described in the work are invented including a picture of “an Elephant dancing upon the Ropes with a Negro Dwarf upon his Back”, “a large Ostridges Egg, whereon is neatly and fully wrought that famous Battel of Alcazar, in which three Kings lost their lives”, and “the Skin of a Snake bred out of the Spinal Marrow of a Man.” Desmazières wonderful images draw on Browne iconography, his version of the famous photo of Browne’s skull posed on top of a copy of Religio Medici and the painting of Browne and Lady Dorothy in the National Portrait Gallery. There are countless visual mediations on death and decay and three extraordinary fold-out panoramas of a Scarabattolo (influenced by a painting by Domenico Remps?) a representation of Rembrandt’s famous Kunstkammer and a phantasmagoric Wunderkammer with all manner of fish, snakes, walrus and crocodiles suspended from the ceiling of a cavernous room lined with glass cabinets crammed full of urns, vases, coral, stuffed monkeys and birds, mummies, figurines, clocks, shells and other marvellous objects.  

The amputee army of angels; Putney Vale Cemetery, Stag Lane, SW15

I was rather shocked to see that I had taken these photos on 17 September 2014, almost 9 years ago. Where does the time go? I remember one boring afternoon as a child, when the hours were crawling tediously by, asking my grandmother why time went so slowly? It only goes slowly when you are young, she told me, the older you get the faster time goes. I didn’t understand what she meant then, but I do now. No doubt you have heard the expression life is a rollercoaster? That is because you spend the first half of it slowly ascending that incline, barely looking at the view, impatient to be at the top and start the fun of the descent. And when you reach the top, the descent is over in seconds, gone by so quickly that you can’t tell if the feeling in the pit of your stomach is anxiety or excitement. And then you are dead! So much for the fun of the fair. Anyway, no one is interested in my existential angst are they? Putney Vale cemetery is why we are here…

On the north-west edge of Wimbledon Common, on the other side of the busy A3 from Richmond Park, Putney Vale isn’t easy to get to by public transport, with no stations nearby (the closest, Southfields, is a 40-minute walk away) the only way to get there is by a meandering bus journey from Putney, Wimbledon or Kingston. In this affluent corner of South West London anyone who can afford to be buried at Putney Vale won’t be using public transport. A standard grave (40-year lease) plus burial costs at least £8711, though there are discounts if you are a resident of the London Borough of Wandsworth. The cemetery also has a crematorium for which the fees are much more affordable, £690 including a 45-minute service in the chapel, though if you don’t mind being incinerated first thing in the morning, a pre 10am slot with a 20-minute service is a bargain at £342. This cemetery has cachet; “the hard marmoreal glitter of Putney Vale, built on fields that had been farmland since medieval times,” say Meller and Parsons in London Cemeteries, “was, and probably still is, one of the most popular cemeteries south of the river, having superseded the once fashionable West Norwood and Nunhead.”

The cemetery opened in 1891 and proved such an immediate success, that it was extended in 1909 and then again in 1912, and now covers 45 acres. At Putney Vale we see a late flowering of Victorian monumental masonry dating from just before the turn of the century through to the 1920’s and beyond. There are plenty of famous names buried here, archaeologist Howard Carter, who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen and died in 1939 (and whose grave, to my everlasting embarrassment, I have never been able to locate), Russian prime minster Alexander Kerensky who lost his position in the Bolshevik Revolution and died in exile in London in 1970, and Jacob Epstein the New York sculptor who created the Art Deco flying angel on Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Paris but who is himself buried under a rather dull rock (he died in 1959). I have already covered the graves of J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line who was rescued from the Titanic, Colonel Alexander Gordon, who has an Egyptian style mausoleum (which featured on a Judas Priest albim cover), Percival Lea-Wilson, who was murdered by the IRA (and has only himself to blame) and Antonio de Vasconcellos who held his 26th birthday party on the pleasure steamer the Marchioness the night that she was sunk by the Bowbelle.    

Its relatively remote location and, for many years, the easy accessibility on public footpaths from Wimbledon Common led to an unusual amount of vandalism in the cemetery. The angels look like they have all been invalided out of the army of heaven after fighting the last battle of the Book of Revelation. There is barely a single one who has not suffered at least a single amputation, many are double amputees forlornly holding up the stumps from missing arms or hands. A figure of Christ with open arms has also been left completely armless. The best tombs are on the perimeter road that runs from the chapel and crematorium, round the southern boundary and ends at the Ismay memorial. Meller and Parsons say that the monuments range from the ‘sublime’ (the Gordon Mausoleum) “to the ridiculous, exemplified by the flower strewing angels in the blue and orange tiled loggia on Caroline Lyons’ tomb (1924)…. Granite, marble, limestone and bronze jostle in frenzied commemoration of wealthy residents from Wimbledon, Putney and Streatham.”   

When the cemetery opened it stood close to the rifle range once used by the National Rifle Association for its annual meetings. These stopped in 1889 but the ranges continued to be used by army volunteers with fatal consequences for gravedigger John Ingram who was hit in the back by a stray bullet whilst digging a grave on Tuesday 22nd May 1894. This is the story as told by the Surrey Independent and Wimbledon Mercury in that week’s Saturday edition;

On Tuesday afternoon an accident occurred at Putney New Cemetery, Kingston Vale. It appears that a gravedigger named John Ingram. residing at the Plain, Wandsworth, was digging a grave in the cemetery, when he was struck in the back by a bullet, which penetrated his shoulder blade and embedded itself in his right lung. His cries for help soon brought aid, and he was removed to the Putney Police Station, where he was seen by Drs. M'Geoagh and Orr. Upon their advice he was removed to the West London Hospital. The medical men hold out no hope of Ingram's recovery. The cemetery is situated at the rear of the Wimbledon Common rifle ranges. and the injured man was working with his back to them. At the time of the accident a squad of men from the Civil Service Volunteer Corps were practising. and it is supposed that it was a stray bullet from one if their rifles that struck Ingram. Some time ago, upon the representations to the ranger by the inhabitants around the Common, many of the ranges were closed, and it is understood that the Duke of Cambridge only assented to the present use of range in question for the sake of the metropolitan volunteers. The accident to Ingram terminated fatally, the unfortunate man succumbing to his injuries in the hospital on Wednesday morning. The deceased man, who was only thirty-three years of age, and resided at 78 Point Pleasant, Wandsworth, was in the employ of Mr. Williams, of High -street. Putney, the contractor to the Putney Burial Board. It appears at the time of the accident three corps were shooting at the ranges, namely the 12th Middlesex, the 25th Middlesex and the 4th Surrey, but from inquiry which has been instituted it cannot be stated by which of the three corps the shot would have been fired.

Questions were immediately raised in Parliament by John Cumming Macdona the MP for Rotherhithe and responded to by the Home Secretary, Herbert Asquith (a textbook politicians answer - “I understand that a military inquiry, ordered by the General Officer commanding the Home District, has been made, and I have no doubt that the result of the inquiry will receive the careful consideration of the Military Authorities with a view to the prevention of further accidents.”) By July the Surrey Comet was reporting that the Putney Burial Board was seeking an injunction in the High Court to stop the commander of the various volunteer regiments from allowing his amateur soldiers practising their shooting on the common. Whether the injunction was granted or whether the volunteer regiments gave up of their own accord, there was no further shooting practice next to the cemetery.

An Ash from the Ashes of the Ash? The resurrection of the Hardy Tree, St Pancras Gardens

 

If the Hardy tree could talk, would it be telling us that “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”? It certainly looked like it would photosynthesise no more following its collapse on Boxing Day last year.  The untimely demise of the Hardy tree, generally attributed to the pathogenic bracket fungus Perenniporia fraxinea, was widely reported in the media over the Christmas holidays, but were we all being too hasty in mourning the passing of the ash? When I strolled through St Pancras Gardens earlier this week, I was surprised to see a healthy four-foot-high shrub growing out of the tombstones that used to surround the Hardy tree. The council still has a seven-foot-high security fence surrounding the site so it is impossible to get up close. I’m no expert but peering through the fence it looked to me like there is a of bunch of ash saplings sprouting from a piece of the supposedly dead tree, just as they would grow from a coppice stool.  Which can only mean the tree is not dead. Ash is a very robust species and can survive in very difficult conditions and through apparently catastrophic injury. The fact that the tree ever took root amongst a barren arrangement of tombstones, its roots moulding itself like tentacles around the headstones, is testament to that. Will the saplings survive the bracket fungus that must still be infecting the roots? Will the council leave the saplings to grow and try form themselves into a new crown? Or will they ruthlessly prune it back? Let’s pray that they the Hardy Tree a chance to resurrect itself if it can; that will be heartening to be see, a minor miracle of resilience.

Felo de se, à la mode; Coq d'Argent, 1 Poultry, EC2

 

Why do certain locations acquire sudden popularity as places to do away with yourself? The phenomenon is not new; ‘certain spots in London have become popular with suicides,’ observed Walter Thornbury in 1878, ‘yet apparently without any special reason, except that even suicides are vain and like to die with éclat.’ The judgement seems a little harsh, and ‘éclat’ seems a strange word to describe the attitude of desperate people who take their own lives. Anyone committing suicide in public in the UK (rather than killing themselves in the privacy of their own home or in the anonymity of a hotel room) is likely to one of three methods, throwing themselves in front of a swiftly moving heavy object like a train, throwing themselves from a height, or drowning themselves. In London this makes the underground system the most popular place to try to die – a 2017 study by Martin & Rawala found that there were 644 attempted suicides on the tube network between 2000 and 2010, though thankfully only a proportion of these were successful (132 actual deaths between 2004 and 2010). Around 25 people a year kill themselves in the Thames, mostly by jumping off one of the city’s bridges but many more potential jumpers are talked down. The City of London Police, who deal with most incidents, have suggested that anti-suicide nets are fitted to bridges to catch suicides in mid plunge but as far as I am aware this hasn’t happened yet. A suicide prevention fence has however been built on the Hornsey Road bridge in Archway from which jumpers land, not in the Thames, but on the busy Archway Road, the A1, 80 feet below. Official figures show that 5 people committed suicide here between 2003 and 2017. Ironically Martin & Rawala’s research reveals that Archway was the 5th most popular underground station for attempting suicide; any would be suicide frustrated by the fences on the bridge doesn’t have far to go to find an alternative venue to end everything.   

The bridges over the Thames have a long tradition of suicides

As with the Archway Bridge, the most celebrated suicide spots are not necessarily the most popular, perhaps just the most spectacular. In Thornbury’s day the spot to die in, in the Square Mile at least, was the Monument. As it is a 200-foot plunge from the viewing gallery to the pavement at Fish Street Hill, throwing yourself over the waist high wall in the gallery meant certain death. There were six, well publicised, suicides at the Monument before the city corporation took preventative measures and encased the viewing platform in an unbreachable iron cage. Clusters of felo-de-se have caused concern about copycat suicides since Goethe had the eponymous hero of ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ put a bullet through his head in the novel’s finale and earnest young men across Europe donned yellow trousers and followed suit. In 1974 American Sociologist David Phillips produced statistical evidence to prove that the suicide rate increased after any well publicised suicide – a phenomenon he dubbed The Werther Effect (but otherwise often known as ‘the power of advertising’); subsequent studies have confirmed that the link exists. Luckily suicides generally receive much less media attention than murders, but not always. Suicides occurring in noteworthy locations or involving unusual methods of self-destruction are more likely to gather media attention and the publicity may then generate further suicide attempts, creating a suicide hotspot. This is what seems to have happened at Number 1, Poultry between 2007 and 2016, an address less than ten minutes’ walk away from the Monument, when 6 successful suicides, each generating more publicity than the last, gave the address a reputation as a magnet for those desperate and hopeless enough to want to end it all.

A map of London from the early 1600's showing St Benet Sherehog on St Pancras Lane

1 Poultry lies almost at the heart of the City of London and has been in almost continual occupation since the Roman’s founded Londinium in 47CE. It was the site of the church of St Benet Sherehog which stood here, just to the north of the junction of St Pancras and Sise Lanes, from its foundation in around 1080 until it was burnt down in the Great Fire of 1666. James Elmes in A Topographical Dictionary of London and its Environs (1831) says:

ST. BENNETT'S, SHEREHOG, the church-yard of, is opposite to Size (formerly St. Sythe's) lane, on the south side of Pancras-lane, Bucklersbury. In the year 1323, it went by the name of St. Osyth's, subsequently corrupted to Sythes, and next to Size, from its being dedicated to a queen and martyr of that name. But she was divested of the tutelage of this church by Benedict Shorne, a fishmonger of London, who rebuilt and otherwise benefited it. He dedicated it to the saint whose name he bore, and his surname, being corrupted into Shrog, became, subsequently, Sherehog.

There is some dispute about Elme’s etymology which most sources now saying that because the church was once in the centre of the old wool district the name comes is more likely to come from “shere hog”, meaning a ram castrated after its first shearing (apparently sheep can be hogs or rather ‘hoggs’, not just pigs). Debris from the fire and subsequent building buried the church and its graveyard for over 300 years until archaeologists at the Museum of London excavated it in the 1980’s following the demolition of the old Victorian Mappin and Webb building and the erection of the monstrosity that currently occupies the site. The excavations revealed 42,000 fragments of pottery, 800 coins, 54,000 animal bones and the well-preserved churchyard containing the bones of hundreds of former Londoners (all carefully removed and preserved at the museum) and funeral monuments dating back to the Middle Ages. The oldest was a Purbeck Marble headstone bearing the Latin inscription ‘+HIC : IACET : IN : TUMULO : CONIUX : ALICIA : PETRI (In this tomb lies Alice the wife of Peter), possibly dating back as far as 1190. The site continued to be used a burial ground even after the fire. Amongst the more recent burials uncovered was the chest tomb of John Maurois, from London’s Huguenot community, who was buried on 21 January 1674.

The tomb of John Maurois excavated by MOLAS (note the skull and femur)

In 1861 work started on the building of Queen Victoria Street, which runs from Blackfriars to Bank, cutting a Hausmann style diagonal swathe through the old city neighbourhoods and leaving a triangular site at 1 Poultry. In the late 1950’s Peter Palumbo and his father began quietly acquiring the various buildings that made up the site. Palumbo always had major plans for the redevelopment of the area; he commissioned the modernist American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design a new building for the site in 1962. Palumbo obtained planning permission to build Mies’ design for free-standing, bronze-clad, 19-storey rectilinear tower in 1969 but final approval was held back by the City Corporation until most of the site had been acquired. By the time this happened, in 1982, the Corporation had done a complete volte-face and was now opposed to the scheme. A two-year public enquiry then followed with Prince Charles weighing in with the view that it would be “a tragedy if the character and skyline of our capital city were to be further ruined and St Paul’s dwarfed by yet another giant glass stump, better suited to downtown Chicago than the City of London”. Palumbo lost his battle to build Mies’ tower and the City Corporation lost its battle to save the existing buildings. Palumbo was allowed to level the site and he revenged himself by commissioning James Stirling to design the current building. Some people are fans; architectural writer Owen Hopkins wrote that “1 Poultry occupies the wedge-shaped site formed as Poultry and Queen Victoria Street converge at Bank. The apex of the wedge is one the most arresting architectural sights in London, looking out across the interchange like the prow of a ship. It comprises a tall archway topped by a sharp wedge of glazing, with a stone cylinder and transverse viewing deck above.” Others are less enthusiastic. Jonathan Meades wrote that Stirling’s "buildings, like their bombastic maker, looked tough but were perpetual invalids, basket cases."  In 2016 the Department for Culture, Media and Sport accepted advice from Historic England on an application from the C20 Society and gave grade II listed status to 1 Poultry, making it the most modern listed building in the UK.

The Coq d’argent restaurant, opened in 1998 by Sir Terence Conran, occupies the top floor of the building, its name punning on the location and the name of the architect (Coq = Poultry, d’argent = Stirling). The restaurant has a famed roof space whose “outdoor terraces and gardens provide a verdant oasis in the heart of the Square Mile” according to the Coq’s  website. Fay Maschler, reviewing the Coq shortly after it opened for the Evening Standard, was impressed by neither the food nor the ambience of Sir Terence’s diner (‘"Very Ramada Inn," said my companion as he tackled his roast pork with a piece of crackling that he claimed was closer in spirit to a toenail than to roasted skin’) but she agreed that “It is without question a dramatic location, made the more so by precipitous drops into the six-storey central well and bizarre protrusions beyond the building's edge that give the feeling of walking the plank. In the copious publicity Sir Terence is quoted as saying that he feels sure City workers will automatically think of Coq d'Argent as the place to celebrate a great deal.” Uncannily prescient, she then added, “It might also serve a function in darker times…” May 2007 and the start of the financial crisis were certainly darker times but whether they were a factor in the decision of 33-year-old city worker Richard Ford to kill himself, we will never know. Reporting of the Leytonstone man’s death was not extensive and no details of his personal life were given; what interest there was centred around the place and manner of his death rather than the motivation for the irrevocable act that ended his life. At 11.40am on Tuesday 29 May Richard Ford, dressed for the office in a suit and tie, took the lift to the roof garden of the Coq d’argent and very shortly afterwards fell 7 storeys onto the roof of a number 73 bus on Queen Victoria Street. Paramedics had to use ladders to climb onto the roof of the bus where they found Mr Ford already dead. A road worker who had witnessed the incident said “I turned around and saw him falling through the air coming down on his side. He hit the roof of the bus and it made a sickening thud. He hit it head first.” There was insufficient interest in the story for anyone from the news media to attend the inquest.

The roof garden of the Coq d'argent by Thomas Alexander Photography

It was two years before the next suicide from the Coq d’argent. On Sunday the 5th July, just a couple of days before his 25th birthday, stockbroker Anjool Maldé visited the restaurant at midday dressed in his favourite Hugo Boss suit, bought a glass of champagne, paying in cash, then wandered out into the empty roof garden and, still holding the glass, climbed over the railing and jumped from the roof. Maldé had brought up in the quiet market town of Yarm near Stockton-on-Tees  and gone to St Peters College, Oxford to study Geography. Before joining Deutsche Bank he came second in the UK Graduate of the Year awards.  His best friend told the inquest that Maldé was convinced he would soon become the youngest vice-president of Deutsche Bank. Instead when he was accused of posting a prank comment on a financial careers website, pretending to be someone else, his bosses at the bank suspended him while his computers were examined. Whilst he protested his innocence the Google email account which sent the spoof message also sent emails to the bank client involved, offering to pay £500 to charity to 'make the matter go away' and saying the sender was 'feeling suicidal'. The City of London coroner Paul Matthews recorded a verdict of suicide at the inquest in February 2010.

On 4 September 2012, 29-year-old Rema Begum from Manor Park in Newham, was the next to kill herself.  In December the previous year she had lost her job at the British library after falling out with one of the managers and had subsequently been diagnosed with depression. Her problems began to multiply; a close relative died and she struggled to deal with her grief and then her parents began to receive anonymous letters about her lifestyle. The poison pen letter writer culled details of her personal life from Facebook and told her parents that she was drinking alcohol and seeing non-muslim men. The day before she died she had been discovered in her bedroom at home by her parents with a rope around her neck. They had taken her to A&E at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel where she had convinced staff that she was just attention seeking and not seriously suicidal. The hospital discharged her with a referral to a mental health unit. In the early evening of the 4th September she had taken the lift up to the terrace bar at the Coq d’argent and bought herself a glasss of white wine. At around 6.30pm she put down her handbag and glass, placing a note carefully beneath it. Diners watched her climb over the railings and onto a ledge and then fall 80 feet to the pavement. Commuters heading for Bank Station only saw her hit the ground a few feet from the tube entrance. She was killed instantly. At the inquest her psychiatrist told the coroner, Paul Matthews once again, that she felt guilty for not living her life “according to her family values and religion” and felt she would be “punished for leading a bad life”.  

An aerial view of outdoor area of the Coq d'argent at 1 Poultry

The next suicide occurred less than a month later on 11 October 2012 when 46-year-old investment analyst Nico Lambrechts killed himself at lunchtime, calling his wife but giving her no indication of what he was planning, and then pushing a table from the restaurant up against a wall to help him climb over it and throw himself into the central atrium of the building. He landed amongst shoppers and diners in the ground floor shopping centre. A married man with three children who lived in a £2 million pound house in Surrey, Mr Lambrechts had recently moved jobs from Merrill Lynch to a smaller company who were planning to relocate him back to his native South Africa. Work related stress, financial issues caused by his difficulty getting his salary transferred from South Africa to the UK and the imminent relocation were cited at the inquest as the likely reasons for taking his own life. Following this fourth suicide Coq d’argent announced that they would be installing a 6 foot fence on the perimeter of the roof to prevent any further suicide attempts. They also called in the Samaritans to train their staff on suicide awareness and created a hot line for staff to put any potential jumpers through to the charity. None of these preventative measures stopped 39-year-old Wilkes McDermid killing himself three years later.

Wilkes McDermid was a successful, full time, blogger, writing about London’s street food scene. Originally working in finance, initially at Blomberg and later at Calypso Technology, he was born in Luton to Chinese parents, and had been William Chong before he changed his name by deed poll. There had been a previous suicide attempt in 2012; on boxing day he had flown to South Africa with the intention of throwing himself off Table Mountain but, as he later wrote in his blog, strong winds, fog and the proliferation of tourists on the mountain meant he was unable to see his plan through.  Wilkes was a regular at the Coq d’argent. On the morning of Sunday 8th February 2015 he posted details of his ‘final’ meal on Twitter ("There seems to be a fascination on 'final meals' with many people on line" he wrote), a 400g ribeye steak at Hawksmoor in Spitalfields (presumably eaten the day before) and in the afternoon posted another tweet saying ‘Final message... thank you everyone’ with a link to a post on his blog explaining his reasons for committing suicide. He then went to the Coq where he drank a beer and smoked a cigar before throwing himself from the parapet onto the street. His final blog entry read (in part):

The reason for my death is simple. I have concluded that in the realm of dating and relationships the primary characteristics required for men are as follows.

• Height: above 5ft10
• Race: huge bias towards caucasian and black
• Wealth: or other manifestation of power

From my observations and research it appears that you need two of the three criteria for success with very few exceptions. What does this mean it means that it’s “game over” for me. By choosing to depart early, all I am doing is to accelerate the process of natural selection whilst saving myself a great deal of long term pain in the process.

On the 17th January 2016, 29 year old Mike Halligan from Dublin became the sixth and final person to kill themselves at the Coq d’argent. Mr Halligan was a Vodaphone sales rep and made a special journey to London to kill himself and can only have chosen the Coq because of the publicity surrounding the other suicides. He travelled to London on via the Dublin-Holyhead ferry and the train to Paddington on Saturday 16th January and spent the day on his own in the city. On the Sunday he visited the Coq at around 2.50pm and ordered a meal. He quietly ate his food and at then at 4.04pm he left his table, scaled the six-foot security fence on the terrace and threw himself from the roof. He hit the ground in front of a group of tourists who were on a walking tour. One of the group, Fabian Graimann told the inquest “We had just been talking about the fact that Monument was a place where suicides took place. I saw him climb over the railings facing the direction of the Royal Exchange. He then shuffled along the outside of the bridge facing my direction. As he reached the end he jumped forward off the bridge.” A Metropolitan Police Sargeant who had been put in charge of the investigation into Mr Halligan’s death told the coroner that there were various unsent text messages on his phone;  “I am bored of life and the future possibilities disinterest me. It’s nobody’s fault. Nothing could have been done to change it.” Another said: “I am not made for this world.” While the final message read: “I have cracked.”

Since 2016 there have been no further suicides at 1 Poultry.