General György Kmety, 1813-1865, Kensal Green Cemetery

The Kmety Obelisk in Kensal Green Cemetery

Hungarian General György Kmety's funeral took place in Kensal Green on Monday 1st May 1865. The newspapers reported that the General was buried in the morning “in the presence of a numerous assemblage of private and personal friends. The procession consisted of two mutes in silk robes, state lid of feathers, hearse surmounted feathers, drawn by four horses with feathers and velvet trappings, ten mourning coaches, each drawn by two horses with feathers and velvet trappings. The private carriages of his Excellency the Turkish Ambassador, the Earl of Ducie, Lord Dufferin, Count Svtaray, and a number of carriages of the ambassador's suite and the friends of the late general, followed…… The brass engraved plate on the lid of the coffin bore the following inscription: —'General George Kmety (Ismail Pacha), of the Imperial Turkish and the late Hungarian Armies. Born May, 1813, in Hungary; died in London April 25, 1865.'" (Dublin Evening Mail 03 May 1865).



General Kmety with his troops during the Crimean War

The General was born in 1813 in Pokoragy, a village now on the Hungarian-Slovack border. His father, a protestant clergyman, died when he was four and his mother took him to live with her uncle, also a clergyman. He was a bright youngster who did well enough at school to be sent to the Protestant Lyceum in Pressburg and to win a scholarship to a German University. Unfortunately a clerical error awarded his place to another student with the same name. “This disappointment so much chagrined the youth that he went to Vienna and turned soldier,” said the General’s obituary in the London Standard. In 1848 Kmety joined the Hungarian revolution as a Captain and ended it as a General after distinguishing himself in several engagements. With the failure of the revolution and under sentence of death he fled to the Ottoman empire and joined the army as Ismail Pasha (though he never converted to Islam). He was instrumental in modernising the Ottoman Army and served with his old comrade Józef Bem (one of the leaders of the 1848 revolution in Hungary) who had become a Muslim and been rewarded by being made the Governor of Aleppo. When Bem died in 1850 Kmety moved to London where he kicked his heels for a couple of years and relieved the tedium of civilian life by entering into a public squabble with another Hungarian General, Artúr Görgey who had published a book trying to justify his controversial leadership during the revolution. When the Crimean War broke out Kmety raced back to Constantinople and rejoined the Ottoman Army. He became famous serving under the British commander, General William Fenwick Williams, at the heroic siege of Kars where only cholera and starvation eventually forced the gallant garrison to surrender to the Russians. He retired in 1861 and returned to London where he died four years later.    

Kmety by Károly Brocky (or Charles Brocky as he became known), a fellow Hungarian exile and member of the Royal Academy

 

Henry Taylor, Pallbearer, killed by a coffin 1872, Kensal Green Cemetery



An artists recreation of the terrible accident from the Illustrated Police News of 9 November 1872 

For the unfortunate Henry Taylor fate dotted the i of irony when he was killed on pallbearing duties in Kensal Green by the coffin he was carrying.

"KILLED BY COFFIN. Dr. Lancaster held an inquest Saturday evening at the University College Hospital, London, on the body Henry Taylor, aged 60. The evidence of E. J. Heading, undertaker's foreman, and others showed that on the 19th inst. deceased, with others, was engaged at a funeral Kensal-Green Cemetery. The Church service having been finished, the coffin and mourners proceeded in coaches towards the place of burial. The day being damp, the foreman directed the coaches with the mourners to proceed to the grave by the foot-way, and the hearse across the grass towards a grave-digger, who was motioning the nearest way. The coffin was moved from the hearse and being carried down a path only three feet six wide, by six bearers, when orders were given to turn, so that the coffin, which was what is known in the trade as a four pound leaden one, should head first. While the men were changing, it is supposed that deceased caught his foot against a side stone and stumbled ; the other bearers, to save themselves, let the coffin go, and it fell with great force on to deceased, fracturing his jaws and ribs. The greatest confusion was created among the mourners who witnessed the accident, and the widow of the person about to be buried nearly went into hysterics. Further assistance having been procured the burial service was proceeded with, while deceased was conveyed to a surgery, and ultimately to the abovementioned hospital, where he expired on the 24th inst. The jury recommended that straps should be placed round coffins, which would tend to prevent such accidents. Verdict—accidental death. "

 

Illustrated Police News - Saturday 02 November 1872

Jonathan Tyers, 1702-1767, St Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey

Jonathan Tyers - his entry in the burial register for St Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey. The impatient parish clerk did not blot his entries on the facing page and when the register was closed the wet ink stained the older entries making them almost indecipherable in places.

Jonathan Tyers was born in Bermondsey in 1702, the son of a woolstapler and fellmonger (a dealer in wool, skin and hides).  He worked in the family business until his mid twenties when he obtained a lease on New Spring Gardens in Kennington, a run down pleasure garden first mentioned by Samuel Pepys in 1662 which had become little more than a “rural brothel” by the time Tyers took over the management. The young man turned out to be a talented entrepreneur and he transformed the fortunes of Vauxhall (as New Spring Gardens would eventually become known) from a shabby place of sexual assignation to a smart pleasure garden that attracted the patronage of royalty and the cream of 18th century society. It could attract huge crowds to its tree lined walkways illuminated at night by thousands of lamps; 12,000 turned up to hear a rehearsal of Handel’s Firework Music in 1749.  James Boswell, musing on its success wrote, “Vauxhall Gardens is peculiarly adapted to the taste of the English nation; there being a mixture of curious show, — gay exhibition, musick, vocal and instrumental, not too refined for the general ear; — for all of which only a shilling is paid; and, though last, not least, good eating and drinking for those who choose to purchase that regale.”



Jonathan Tyers with his family, a portrait of around 1740 by Francis Hayman

The hugely successful Tyers bought Denbies,an estate in the hills of Surrey, close to Dorking. To general surprise he set about creating another garden, but this one was private and so different in spirit to New Spring Gardens that the Harlequin Magazine later called it “Anti-Vauxhall”. The centre piece of the garden was an 8 acre wood which he named Il penseroso, after Milton’s vision of poetic on Melancholy, which contained a temple dedicated to Fleeting Life and Inevitable Death. Its centre piece, now sadly lost, was a stucco monument to Tyer’s friend Lord Petre, the botanist and gardener who had died at the early age of 29. The monument by Louis-Francois Roubiliac must have been as magnificent as his famous memorial for the Nightingales in Westminster Abbey An angel was shown blowing the last trump and causing a stone pyramid to crumble. Inside the pyramid a corpse threw aside its shroud and prepared to rise from the dead with an expression of ecstasy and bewilderment on its cadaverous face.  

Other highlights of the temple were a statue of a white raven, lecterns supporting chained copies of Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ and Robert Blair’s ‘The Grave’ and a hidden clock that chimed every minute, “forcibly proclaiming the rapid march of time” to remind listeners of their mortality.  

Near to the temple a gateway led to the Shadow of the Valley of Death, a walkway which led to another building whose entrance was formed by two stone coffins on top of which were the real skulls of a prostitute and a highwayman.  A long inscription beneath the prostitute’s skull started:

 

Blush not, ye fair, to own me! - but be wise,

Not turn from sad mortality your eyes;
Fame says (and Fame alone can tell you how true)
I –once- was lovely, and belov’d like you.

And below the highwayman’s skull:

Why start? – the case is yours – or will be soon;

Some years, perhaps – perhaps another moon;
Life, at its utmost length, is still a breath,
And those who longest dream, must wake in death.

Inside, in an alcove at the rear just behind a statue of Truth trampling on a mask were two paintings by Francis Hayman, now lost (except for engraved copies), comparing the deaths of a good and a bad man. The good man reclines comfortably in his bed with a beatific look on his face as he awaits the genial bearded figure of old father time whilst, the bad man starts up in his chair in terror as a ghastly skeleton calls to take him to an eternity of damnation.



"The Bad Man at the hour of his Death," an engraving by Thomas Chambers after Francis Hayman's painting 

 

After Tyer’s death in 1767 his family sold off Denbies. The new owners were not keen on a garden full of memento mori and dismantled the buildings and either sold or, more likely, destroyed their contents. Tyers was interred in the vaults of St Mary Magdalen in Bermondsey.

 

St Mary Magdelan, Bermondsey where Jonathan Tyers lay in the vaults.   

 

Reginald Alfred Alabaster, 1922-1944, Barkingside Cemetery

In loving memory of our dear boy

Reginald Alfred Alabaster  R.A.F.V.R.

Killed in action 11 September 1944 aged 21 years

 

Had you known this boy of ours

You would have loved him too

You would have liked his smiling eyes

His spirit fine and true

A merry soul he made you feel

That life was good indeed

A gay warm hearted fellow

A plain and simple creed

He believed in England

And he loved her faithfully

Didn’t talk about it much

But died to keep her free

He left a happy memory

With everyone he knew

Had you known this boy of ours

You would have loved him too.

We don't know which one of Reginald Alabasters bereft parents wrote his epitaph, his father Alfred Thomas Alabaster or his mother Emily Cynthia. For some reason the date of his death on the headstone seems to be wrong – he almost certainly died on 14 September rather than 11th.  He was based at RAF Leuchars in Fife and was a crew member in 206 squadron on the Liberator bomber BZ961. At 2.00pm on Wednesday 13 September 1944 two Liberators, BZ961 and EB887, took off from Leuchars to go on a routine anti submarine patrol a couple of hundred miles northeast of the Faroes.  When the 12 hour patrol ended the two aircraft were ordered to divert to Tain on the Cromarty Firth because of poor weather conditions in Leuchars. The EB887 landed at 3.40am and Reginald’s BZ961 at 4.15am. The exhausted crews rested until the afternoon of the 14th and then started to think about flying back to Leuchars. Weather conditions were still bad but one of the crew of the EB887 was about to get married on Saturday and was obviously anxious to get back to base as soon as possible. A civilian meteorologist, Jack Davidson, who worked for the Air Ministry was due to go on leave. He too was keen  not to spend his precious leave kicking his heels in the highlands. He wanted to get home to Edinburgh and begged a lift from the crew of the BZ961. The crews of the two aircraft eventually decided to risk the poor weather and make an attempt to fly to Leuchars.  The EV887 left Tain first, at 6.40pm, followed shortly by the BZ961.  The EV887 arrived at Leuchars in low cloud (barely 100 feet above sea level) and poor visibility. Because of the high ground to the west of the runway the pilot made his approach from the east, over the sea. It took him three attempts to get his plane down.  The crew were barely out of their aircraft when they heard the BZ961 approaching the runway. To their horror the plane overshot the runway and flew on about 3000 yards before crashing into Lucklaw Hill. They heard the sound but the mist stopped them seeing anything  of the explosion except the sudden red glow in the grey evening fog. All 11 of the crew, including Reginald, were killed instantly as was Jack Davidson the meteorologist who had only wanted to get back to his family in Edinburgh.  

The Air Ministry later wrote to the families of the dead crewmen:

"It was the opinion of the investigators that the pilot should have turned back to RAF Tain in view of the weather conditions. The 206's squadron commander was also deemed irresponsible for permitting the aircraft to return, in view of the weather conditions of low cloud and poor visibility. The AOC-in-C considered the accident due to the failure of the pilot to return to RAF Tain and the failure of the aircraft to receive a wireless telegraphy message issuing this instruction. The CO of 206 Squadron was particularly responsible for permitting the flight in the first place."

Apparently the shape of the plane was still visible in the turf of Lucklaw Hill well into the 1960’s. The hillside itself was covered with wild pansies and  later disappeared into the workings of the famous red felsite quarry at Balmullo.  

Consolidated B24 Liberator bomber

Mae Amos, 1910-1937, Ilford Cemetery, Buckingham Road

It doesn’t take much to stand out at the very dull Buckingham Road cemetery in Ilford. Mae Amo’s ballerina (a portrait of Mae herself?) is distinctive enough to catch the eye as you wander around acres of dull generic late 19^th and early 20^th century headstones. The headstone describes Mae as being the Principal of an eponymous School of Dance but according to Ben Thompson's memoirs  lessons were conducted in the front room of Mae’s parents house:

“It turned out that one of Dad’s work-mates had a daughter who ran a dancing school from her family home only a short cycle ride away from our house……. The dance teacher, called Mae Amos, was a thoroughly nice person. She was lively and outgoing and treated us pupils as equal conspirators. We took our lessons, individually, in the front room of her house; in the back room kitchen she kept a sister of about the same age as herself and a mother. She pressed along with our instruction so that all her pupils would be able to perform in some way or other at the show which she put on annually at a local hall for the benefit of the parents…..”

Mae died at the age of 27 but apart from her headstone and Mr Thompson’s memoirs I can find no trace of her.

 

Richard Honey & George Francis, slain 14th August 1821, St Paul's Churchyard, Hammersmith

Here lie interred the mortal remains of

Richard Honey, Carpenter,

aged 36 years, and of

George Francis, Bricklayer, aged 43 years,

who were slain on the 14th August, 1821, while attending the

funeral of Caroline, of Brunswick,

Queen of England

The details of that melancholy event

Belong to the history of the country

In which they will be recorded

Together with the public opinion

Decidedly expressed relative to the

Disgraceful transactions

Of that disastrous day

Deeply impressed with their fate

Unmerited and unavenged

Their respective trades interred them

At their general expence

On the 24th of the same month

to their memory.

Richard Honey left one female orphan.

George Francis left a widow and three young children.

 

Victims like these have fallen in every age

Stretch of pow'r or party's cruel rage

Until even handed justice comes at last

To amend the future and avenge the past

Their friends and fellow-men lament their doom

Protect their orphans, and erect their tomb.

“Harris I am not well, pray get me a glass of brandy,” were George IV’s first words at being presented to his future bride, the German princess Caroline of Brunswick.  Lord Malmesbury introduced the pair and later described what had happened. Caroline had knelt before the then Prince of Wales who raised her to her feet and embraced her before wordlessly retreating out of earshot and begging the footman to fetch him a brandy. Apparently equally unimpressed Caroline turned to Malmesbury and speaking in French told him that the prince was rather fat.

Queen Caroline in 1820

It was a bad start to what became a disastrous marriage. Unbeknown to Caroline,  George was already secretly married, to Maria Fitzherbert, and had also just acquired a mistress, Lady Jersey. During the marriage ceremony on 8 April 1795 in St James Palace, George was visibly drunk. As regards the wedding night, George wrote to a friend that "it required no small effort to conquer my aversion and overcome the disgust of her person." Caroline claimed George was so drunk that he "passed the greatest part of his bridal night under the grate, where he fell, and where I left him." Both agreed that despite mutual repugnance and George’s overindulgence in alcohol they managed to have sex twice that night. The following night they managed another loveless coupling but that signalled the end of their sex life. Caroline gave birth to a daughter 9 months later which George refused to believe was his. Three days after his daughters birth George made out a new will leaving all his money to Mrs Fitzherbert and one shilling to Caroline. George was a notorious philanderer but Caroline appeared to feel herself equally free to see whoever she pleased and rumour linked her with Admiral Sir Sydney Smith and George Canning amongst others. Hypocritically George, who had a string of mistresses, appointed a special commission to investigate his wife’s alleged adultery and refused to let her have access to her daughter. In 1814 Caroline went into exile in Italy where rumour linked her with a man she had hired as a servant, Bartolomeo Pergami. She continued to live in Italy until 1820 when her father-in-law died and her husband became King. After being snubbed by the Pope Caroline decided to return to England to assert her rights as a Queen. George ordered his ministers to get rid of her and they offered her an annuity of £50,000 if she promised to stay away from England. She refused the offer. George demanded a divorce and applied pressure on his ministers to change the law to allow him to annul the marriage. His behaviour scandalised the general public with whom he was deeply unpopular. When Caroline returned to England riots broke out in support of her and the Guards in the Kings Mews mutinied. George finally persuaded the peers to pass a law denouncing Caroline as an adulteress. Caroline is reputed to have remarked that he had indeed committed adultery – with the husband of Maria Fitzherbert. As for the general public – almost 800 petitions with over a million signatures were produced in her favour. Nothing George or his ministers could do seemed likely to dent her popularity. When she tried to attend the coronation the doors of Westminster abbey were famously locked against her whilst inside her husband made cow eyes at his latest mistress, the Marquise of Conyngham.

Queen Caroline's funeral procession

Three weeks later Caroline, at the age of 53, was dead. Inevitably there was speculation that she had been killed on her husband’s orders. It had been Caroline’s wish to be buried in Brunswick (beneath a tombstone with the epitaph ’Here lies Caroline, the injured Queen of England’) and on 14 August her funeral cortege set off from Brandenburgh House in Hammersmith to transport her coffin to Harwich. The authorities, mindful of public reaction, wished to travel north of London avoiding the city and any potential trouble but huge crowds took to the streets and barricaded all available routes north, forcing the funeral cortege through Westminster. In heavy rain the procession reached Hyde Park where the soldiers of the Royal Guard tried to repeatedly force a way northwards through an increasingly belligerent crowd. Stones and clods of mud were hurled at the soldiers. A magistrate sanctioned them to use force and fifty shots were fired from pistols and carbines into the crowd. Two men died, George Francis a bricklayer at the scene and Richard Honey a carpenter a few hours later. At their inquest the jury returned a verdict of “wilful murder against a life guardsman unknown,” in the case of Francis and manslaughter for Honey. No one was ever prosecuted.  

George Cruikshank's caricuture of the death of Honey & Francis

Joseph Denison, c1726-1806, Bunhill Fields

Non conformists in matters of religion were often conventional when it came to anything else. The desire not to stand out in a crowd is evident in the rows of plain headstones of almost identical proportions that mark the graves of Bunhill Fields where ostentation and ornamentation were obviously frowned upon and there are few large tombs or monuments. Merchant banker Joseph Denison’s grand neo-classical, Portland stone pedestal tomb suggests that he had a streak of worldly pride that trumped the desire to remain inconspicuous.  There is some obscurity about his origins but we know that he came from Leeds, was born in the mid 1720’s and was probably from a mercantile background. Accounts of his life which claim that he was a “parish boy ignorant of reading and writing who made his way from Yorkshire up on foot” are unlikely to be true considering that once in London he  became a clerk in the  counting house of Mr Dillon an Irish Catholic merchant (whose business eventually failed forcing him, in one of those neat reversals of fortune usually only found in fiction, to take a job in the counting house of his former clerk Joseph Denison whose career was, and remained, in the ascendant). “At length he entered into business for himself,” says Dodsley’s Annual Register, summing up his life in the year of his death, 1806,”and by unabated industry and the most rigid frugality, worked himself into very high credit, and an increasing fortune.” As well as his house in London he bought, in 1787 the estate of Denbies in Surrey once owned by Jonathan Tyers, and in 1782, from the Duke of Leeds for the huge sum of £100,000 the east Yorkshire estate of Seamere near Scarborough. 

Joseph Denison married twice, his first wife, Sarah Sykes was from Salford and, according to Dodsley’s, “very assistant to his prosperity,” helping with his bookkeeping and looking after his affairs when he travelled away on business. Sarah died young and the marriage was childless.  His second marriage, to Elizabeth Butler of Southwark, was even shorter. After a mere three years of matrimony, during which she produced  three children, a son and two daughters, Elizabeth died in 1771 at the age of 32 leaving her young family to be brought up by their father.
 

Portrait of Elizabeth Denison-Conyngham with her eldest child.

Joseph’s son  William Joseph, became the senior partner in his father’s business and an MP. In business he was extraordinarily successful leaving an estate worth £2.3 million to his nephew when he died in 1849. Anna Maria his youngest daughter made a decent marriage to Sir Robert Lawley, later 1^st Baron Wenlock. His eldest daughter Elizabeth married an Irish peer Henry Conyngham, Viscount Conyngham, in 1794. By all accounts an attractive woman in her youth, Elizabeth had a number of admirers and lovers including  the then Tsarevitch  of Russia, the future Nicholas 1. Her greatest and most famous conquest though was of the notorious philanderer George IV. Lady Conyngham  supplanted Lady Hertford in the King’s affections in 1820 and she more or less lived openly with him as his unofficial queen (with her real husband made Lord Steward of the Kings Household and promoted to Marquess as reward for his complaisance) until his death in 1830. The obese King was apparently besotted with his equally rotund 50 year old (and mother of five) mistress and would be constantly "kissing her hand with a look of most devoted submission.” During the Kings Coronation when his rightful Queen, Caroline of Brunswick was denied admission to Westminster Abbey turned away from the door by the Royal Guards, George made himself ludicrous by ‘nodding and winking… and sighing and making eyes’ at Lady Conyngham. She lived with him at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton where George developed chronic alcoholism and left his mistress looking “bored to death and never speaking” at interminable formal dinners according to Charles Greveille.

"The guard wot looks after the sovereign" - Lady Conyngham as the butt (of all jokes)

The Kings disrespectful subjects found an endless source of mirth in the ridiculous figures of two overweight elderly people apparently being in love:     

‘Tis pleasant at seasons to see how they sit,

 First cracking their nuts, and then cracking their wit,
 Then quaffing their claret - then mingling their lips,
 Or tickling the fat about each other’s hips.

 and another example:

 ‘Give the devil his due, she’s a prime bit if stuff,

 And for flesh she’s got conscience enough,
 He’ll never need pillows to keep up his head,
 Whilst old Q and himself sleep and snore in one bed.

When George died in 1830, The Times declared that ‘there was never an individual less regretted of his fellow creatures than the late king’. Henry Conyngham died in 1832 in Kent, alone again as Lady Conyngham had moved discretely to Paris where she lived for the next thirty years. She only returnined to England to die at the age of 92 and be buried with her husband in Kent at St Mary's, Patrixbourne.  

Sources:

Dictionary of National Biography

Dodsley's Annual Register Volume 48

George IV's Royal Visit to Ireland
 

William (1757-1827) and Catherine (1762-1831) Blake, Bunhill Fields

William Blake in youth, drawn by Catherine
 

Blake died in such poverty and obscurity that his burial in Bunhill Fields was largely unnoticed and on borrowed money, nineteen shillings for an unmarked grave, the body nine feet down, stacked on top of three others, and eventually followed by four more. The headstone was erected later and only approximately in the areas they were buried.

 

He married Catherine Sophia Boucher on the 18th  August 1782 at St Mary’s in Battersea. Friends said they lived their married life in ‘uninterrupted harmony’ though there were stories of Blake upsetting his wife by planning, perhaps not entirely seriously,  to “add a concubine to his establishment in the Old Testament manner.” The poet “gave up the project because it made Mrs. Blake cry." Their friend Thomas Butts liked to recount how he came across the pair of them sitting naked in their garden at Lambeth reciting passages from ‘Paradise Lost’ in character as Adam and Eve.

 

 

Catherine made the most of the time she spent with her husband because, as she once told some visitors who came looking for him “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company. He is always in Paradise.” On his deathbed in 1827, "one of the very last shillings spent was in sending out for a pencil," with which he then proceeded to draw a portrait of his wife "Stay, Kate! Keep just as you are -- I will draw your portrait -- for you have ever been an angel to me." "Just before he died "His Countenance became fair," wrote a friend later, "His eyes Brighten'd and He burst out into Singing of the things he saw in Heaven." Even death did not separate them, according to contemporary accounts she "saw Blake frequently after his decease: he used to come and sit with her two or three hours every day …he advised with her as to the best mode of selling his engravings." When she died witnesses said she was "calling continually to her William, as if he were only in the next room."

Laurence Sterne, 1713 – 1768, St George’s Field Burial Ground

Sterne's original headstones photographed in St George's Field around 1905

“He had boasted in "Tristram Shandy" that his preference would be to die in an inn, untroubled by the presence and services of his friends; yet when, in his London lodgings, he began to realize that death might be near, he pined for his daughter Lydia to nurse him. Only a hired nurse and a footman stood by Sterne's deathbed. The latter had been sent to inquire after the health of the famous author, and, being told by the landlady of the house to go upstairs and see for himself, he reached the death-chamber just as Sterne was passing away. Putting up his hand as though to ward off a blow, he ejaculated, "Now it is come," and so died. The story goes that even as he was dying, the nurse was busy possessing herself of the gold sleeve-links from his wrists.”

Henry C. Shelley “Untrodden English Ways.”

 

The author of “The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” was never really a Londoner. He was born in Ireland and raised there and in Yorkshire where he spent most of his adult life. His careers as clergymen and professional author afforded him plenty of opportunity to travel and he visited London often but he was never really part of the capitals Augustan literary scene which may have partly accounted for Dr Johnson’s rather dismissive  attitude towards him (What do you think of  ‘Mr Sterne Dr Johnson? “Licentious and dissolute in conversation Sir.” But a great author don’t you think? “Nothing odd will do long, ‘Tristram Shandy’ did not last.”). Sterne was in London overseeing the publication of his second novel “A Sentimental Journey” when a dose of flu proved too much for a constitution undermined by years of suffering with consumption and he died at his lodgings at 41 Old Bond Street on the 18^th March 1768. He was 54 years old.

Sterne was buried at St George Hanover Square’s new burial ground just off the Bayswater Road. According to one early edition of his work he was buried with “no bell tolling”, accompanied by just a pair of mourners in a hurried ceremony in what was generally considered to be a paupers burial ground. One of the reasons for making little fuss when interring corpses at St George’s Field was that being relatively out of the way made it popular with body snatchers. Shortly after Sterne’s funeral the rumours started. Sterne’s body had been taken from the grave two days after the burial and sold to a University anatomist for dissection. Some said it was to Dr John Parsons at Oxford, others claimed it was Dr Charles Collignon at Cambridge. Whether it was Oxford or Cambridge all accounts say that the body was already being dissected when someone recognised the corpse as being the deceased author; in some versions it was a student, in others a friend of the anatomist who dropped in to pay him a visit, in others a member of the public who was paying to see a public dissection. Edmond Malone the Shakespearian scholar gossiped with  a correspondent “a gentleman who was present at the dissection told me he recognised Sterne’s face the moment he saw the body…” Sterne’s corpse was discretely returned to St George’s Field sans head according to some who reckoned that Dr Parsons or Dr Collignon hung onto the skull as a souvenir. When the Mason’s paid for a headstone to be set up over Sterne’s grave some years later no one was sure where exactly his body was buried. And so the inscription stated “Near to this place lies the body of….” and the headstone was set up close to the wall in what seemed a likely spot.

In the late 1960’s when the church authorities decided to sell of St George’s Field for redevelopment the Laurence Sterne Trust asked for permission to remove the headstones and remove them to Coxwold in North Yorkshire. They also asked, and were given, permission to search for Sterne’s remains. Several skulls were excavated in the vicinity of the headstones one of which, very unusually, had had the top of the cranium carefully sawn off apparently in a dissection. Dissected bodies are very unlikely to end up back in a burial ground as they would simply be disposed of as rubbish once the anatomist had finished with them. Could  the stories of Sterne’s body being snatched actually be true? The dissected skull and bones associated with it were exhumed and reburied in Coxwold churchyard.  

Sir Joshua Reynolds portrait of the author as a young clergyman

Joshua Compston, 1970-1996, Kensal Green

“The funeral was his greatest production. Hundreds of people turned up. I think most of them were there just to make sure he was dead and properly buried. He was 50% brilliant and 50% stupid. I think now we would realise that he was high functioning autistic but people didn't understand that then. So he just annoyed them….But he was obsessed with William Morris and his ideas, and he just wanted to make the world a better place.”

Daniel Coffield

Joshua Compston died of an overdose of ether and alcohol at the age of 25 after spending an evening at the Serpentine Gallery at the opening of a posthumous exhibition by Jean-Michel Basquiat (who died in 1988 of a heroin overdose at the age of 27). He was born in Putney, his father Christopher was a high court judge and his step mother an exhibition organiser at the Tate Gallery, and educated at St Edwards, a public school in Oxford, and the Courtauld Institute. Whilst at the Courtauld he campaigned for the Institute to pay more attention to living artists and began the Loan Collection which borrowed and hung pieces of contemporary art in the Institutes seminar rooms. “In a 1991 press release for the collection, Compston claimed that this was the first exhibition of contemporary art staged at Somerset House since the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1836.”

"Reading his obituaries you could be forgiven for remaining unsure what exactly he was: "a fun-loving revolutionary", says one, "an exuberant showman" another. He was "a catalyst in British contemporary art", an "energetic impresario", an inventor and orchestrator of "happenings". The Guardian's Richard Gott paints Compston as a revolutionary. To the art critic Louisa Buck, he was "a kid, a pain in the arse who pissed off a lot of people ... a frustrated artist who made a lot of noise through a gang of talented, pushy, wey-faced rude kids; Compston was having a bit of fun and often laughing behind our backs."

independent.co.uk: a-final-party-for-arts-unlikely-hero

After graduation he opened his gallery Factual Nonsense at 44 Charlotte Road in Hoxton. He was amongst the first wave of artists and entrepreneurs to set up shop in what was later to become the über trendy area of Shoreditch. His happenings have become legendary. In 1993 he staged the ‘Fete Worse Than Death” at the corner of Charlotte Road and Rivington Street; Gary Hume dressed up as a Mexican bandit selling tequila slammers. Damien Hirst dressed as a clown and renting out his spin painting machine to produce instant artworks (signed by himself) at either £1 or 50p a go or, alternatively, showing you his polka dot painted testicles for the same price. Tracey Emin was either palm reading or selling  kisses depending on which source you believe (some even claim you could get a lot more than a kiss for your money as the dusk settled on the carnival but that sounds just too good a story to be true). Then there was “A demure evenings drinking with Sara and Tracey” (Lucas and Emin)  and “The Hanging Picnic.”  

“Joshua Compston ………was buried with all the fuss and shenanigans usually accorded a pharaoh or a brave and true conqueror of great panoramas of giant stuff. “Joshua’s funeral, it kind of looked a bit like one of the Kray twins funerals. It was a lot of people.” His coffin was painted with a William Morris pattern and bottles of wine were stashed by his body as crowds of people thronged the East End as Joshua made the journey from Factual Nonsense to his final resting place. “I found the funeral quite strange,” says Andrew Wilson. “I remember thinking, who are all these people? It was a sort of circus and it was, almost, dare I say it, one of the most successful events that he inspired in a sense, but he didn’t benefit from it at all.”

fluxmagazine.com/

Compston’s tomb was designed and carved, from a 3 ton slab of Portland stone, by his friend the artist and cartoonist Zebedee Helm. On his website he says that it took him six months to produce; “The mauseleum (sic) can be seen at Kensal Green Cemetry (double sic) in West London, where it was said to be the most flamboyant addition in over a hundred years. Being a large cemetry (triple sic) it is however almost impossible to find.” The man may not be able to spell and may not know what a mausoleum is but the tomb is impressive and very much a worthy addition to the cemetery’s stock of idiosyncratic and eye catching monuments. It should be much better known than it is. Helm’s claim that it is hard to find is not true either – it lies on a path a short distance behind William Mulready’s grandiose  neo-renaissance stone catafalque.