Always funny, but without being vulgar - Charles Herbert 'Clifton' Barritt (1869-1929), Hampstead Cemetery

You might imagine that an funerary monument in the form of a life size pipe organ could only cover the grave of a church organist or a classical musician with a soft spot for Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.  There is some evidence Charles Herbert Barritt (1869 – 1929, more generally known as Clifton Barritt) knew how to play a medley on the concertina but nothing to indicate that he was an organist. Clifton seems to have spent most of his life as a vaudevillian and music hall entertainer and his last years as a London publican.

Born in Manchester Clifton was already treading the boards in his early twenties. A notice in a Belfast newspaper describes an appearance at the Carnmoney Masonic Hall in September 1892;

Mr Clifton Barritt, who has already, obtained honourable distinction in Manchester and other English cities as a musical and humorous entertainer, secured fresh laurels by his really able rendering of a number of songs and sketches written 'and composed by himself. He succeeded in keeping his audience convulsed with laughter from beginning to end. "A Penny Buys the Article" and "At the Pantomimes" were amongst his best performances. Mr. Barritt is quite a young man. and a short time will, no doubt, suffice to bring him into prominence as a successful and talented humourist.

At Folkestone's Victoria Pier Clifton finds himself fifth on the bill to the Blue Viennese Band conducted by Herr Wurm, the renowned contralto  Miss Jessie Goldsack,  tenor Elliston Webb and harpist and vocalist Clare Palmer. 

Local newspaper notices chart a ten year career that took Clifton from Ulster to the Isle of Man, Reigate to Grantham and all points in between, Hastings, Skegness, Bedford, Aylesbury, Folkestone, Loughborough…..there seems hardly a pier or Free Trade, Masonic or Town  Hall stage that did not feature Clifton’s mellow baritone or perfect comic timing at sometime between 1892 and 1904. At the annual dinner of the Higham Ferrars Athletic Club in February 1902 a concert was held of which Clifton was “the chief artiste.” At the Aylesbury Printing Works Institute New Years Gathering on January First 1903 “Mr. Clifton Barritt was seen to advantage in his musical sketches, his imitations of farmyard animals, etc.. being particularly clever….. “ On St Patricks Day 1904 at Mr Cross’s Concerts in Manchester “the concert was interspersed with humorous; sketches of equally Irish extraction, by Mr Clifton Barritt.”

His best notice was featured in the Sussex Agricultural Express of 17 October 1903 for a concert held in Uckfield Public Hall; 

Mr. Barritt was responsible for the comic element. He showed how songs of the ephemeral type could be arranged by Sousa, Mendelssohn, and Wagner but was at his best in his imitations. He successively imitated a rusty phonograph, a violoncello (using Elgar's "Saint d'Amour), a clarinet, banjo, and finally two instruments together, the mandolin and cornet (in "Whisper and I shall hear' ). Again he showed "The charge of the Light Brigade' could be recited by people afflicted with various eccentricities. has a fund of racy anecdotes, and is always "funny without being vulgar."

This madcap eventually rejected his nomadic existence wandering the provinces of England and settled down. His eldest son Robert was born in 1900 and perhaps the presence of a child in his life made him decide to make Robert’s mother Hannah Harriet Law (known as Hattie according to the gravestone) an honest woman, though he took his time, not marrying her until 1906. The couple had two more children, Chilton and Constance, once Clifton had given up the stage. We know he was the publican of the Savoy Palace a pub in Savoy Street WC1 in 1911 because the whole family is on the census return for that year along with a potman, two barmaids and a children’s nurse. He went on to become the publican at the Blue Posts at the St Pancras end of  Tottenham Court Road from 1915 until his death in 1929 when his wife Hannah took over the running of the business. Clifton died at the age of 60 on 21 July 1929 at 71 Ladbroke Grove, W11 leaving a not inconsiderable legacy of  £11,631 3s 10d to Hannah.

 

In the bar at the Blue Posts - 1940 by Bayes.

St Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery, Leytonstone



“A scruffy closely packed cemetery sited on the edge of the Central Line. Few trees and the lack of coherent landscaping contribute to its desolate appearance. It was opened to cope with the nineteenth century population explosion in Hackney which increased from 18,000 in 1861 to 125,000 in 1875. The tombstone names indicate the Roman Catholic status of the cemetery, most are Irish, Italian, and Polish. 168,000 burials have been recorded and to cater for the continuing demand the land is being reclaimed by adding a six feet deep layer of earth over old graves.”

Meller & Parsons – “London Cemeteries.”

It was opened in 1868 and is one of only two Roman Catholic cemeteries in London (the other being a sister cemetery in West London, St Mary’s, Kensal Green).  Buried somewhere here are Mary Jane Kelly, one of the Ripper's victims, Timothy Evans who was convicted and hanged for the murders at 10 Rillington Place but subsequently pardoned when the real murderer was discovered to be John Christie, and four of the five nuns who were killed in the wreck of the Deutschland in 1875.  

On 31 May 1896 Lloyds Weekly Newspaper reported on the funeral of the three children of an Irish dock worker, Patrick Sullivan, killed by smoke at a house fire in Aldgate.

“Yesterday the three little girls who were suffocated at 4, Little Somerset Street, AIdgate, were buried at the Roman Catholic cemetery at Leytonstone. The children were named as Katherine Sullivan, aged six; Johanna, aged three, and Ada Mary, aged one year and six months. A representative of Lloyd's saw the bodies in their coffins, and beyond a discolouration over the upper lip of the eldest child there were no indications of violent death. There was a profusion of flowers in the humble room, the gifts of neighbours, and Mrs. Brown, the florist of Globe-road, Mile-end, sent three beautiful floral crosses, with a kind note to Mrs. Sullivan. Each coffin lid, in addition to the name of deceased, had a raised white metal cross. For some time be- fore the procession started both Little Somerset - street and Mansel - street, alike exceedingly narrow, were blocked with spectators. The coffins were laid on an open car, and the flowers piled on its roof. Two coaches followed containing parents and relatives. The cortege reached Leytonstone without incident. At the cemetery the chaplain met the bodies, which were carried into the pretty little chapel, and at the altar and afterwards at the grave went through the Office for the Dead. There was a large assembly at the cemetery.”



In 1895, in an incident similar to a better known one at Kensal Green Cemetery, 38 year old Joseph Dennis, an undertaker's assistant “dropped dead in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Leyton, on Thursday last, whilst carrying a corpse to the grave. Lawrence Doyle stated that he was one of the mourners at the funeral. The deceased was one of the bearers, and had gone some yards towards the grave when witness saw him give a lurch and become unsteady. Witness rushed forward just in time to prevent the coffin falling, as the deceased fell forward on the gravel. The medical evidence showed that death was due to sadden failure of the heart.”




Tapped 66 times of 240 gallons of water - Dame Mary Page (1672-1728), Bunhill Fields

Sir Gregory Page was a wealthy London merchant and shipwright and the M.P. for Shoreham in West Sussex.  He inherited his fathers brewery in Wapping but made his fortune in the East India trade, eventually becoming a director of the East India Company. He died  an immensely wealthy man in Greenwich in 1720 leaving his eldest son £700,000 and his wife and other children £100,000. He was buried in Greenwich but his ‘relict’ (i.e. wife who survived her husband) Mary Page, daughter of Sir Thomas Trotman of London is buried at Bunhill Fields, though like her husband she also died at Greenwich. The couple married in 1690 when he was 21 and she was 18 and they had four children, two girls and two boys. Her rather plain chest tomb is famous for the following inscription: 

Here Lyes DAME MARY PAGE,

Relict of Sir Gregory Page, Bart.

She departed this life March 4 1728, 

in the 56th year of her age.

And on the other side:

In 67 months she was tap'd 66 times

had taken away 240 gallons of water 

without ever repining at her case 

or ever fearing the operation.

240 imperial gallons converts to about 1,100 litres. Her contemporaries believed she suffered from dropsy but she is now widely acknowledged as being the first recorded case of Meigs syndrome (“In medicine…is the triad of ascites, pleural effusion and benign ovarian tumor (fibroma),” according to Wikipedia….)

A Living Colossus; the Surprising Irish Giant - Charles Byrne (1761-1783), the Hunterian Museum, London

HRH visits Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, at the Hunterian museum. The tiny skeleton  standing next
to Byrne belongs to Caroline Crachami  the Sicilian Fairy.

“June 1.  At London, aged 22, Byrne, the famous Irish giant. His death is said to have been precipitated by excessive drinking. His body was carried to Margate, in order to thrown into the sea, agreeable to his own request; he having been apprehensive that the surgeons would anatomise him. Byrne, in August 1780, measured exactly 8 feet; in 1780 he had gained 2 inches; and after his death he measured 8 feet 4 inches.”

The Scots Magazine, June 1783

“The whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor departed Irishman and surround his house just as Greenland harpooners would an enormous whale.”

The Morning Herald, June 1783

Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, died of grief and gin at the age of 22 after his pocket was picked of his £700 life savings when he was out boozing on the London streets. £700 was a lot of money in 1783 and Byrne had amassed his small fortune exhibiting himself in freak shows. He was born in Drummullan in County Tyrone in 1761 the offspring of a mixed marriage between an Irish father and a Scottish mother. At the age of 20 a local huckster, Joe Vance, convinced his parents to let him start showing Byrne at local fairs and then travelled with him to London via Scotland (at Edinburgh “he alarmed the watchmen at the North Bridge one morning by lighting his pipe at one of the lamps without even standing on tiptoe,” according to the 1922 edition of the DNB).

In London he was a great success, exhibiting himself at Cox’s museum, living next door in an apartment with custom built furniture, above the cane shop in Spring Garden Gate. He was on show from 11am to 3pn and 5pm to 8pm six days a week and became, briefly, the talk of the town, visited by everyone from the King and Queen and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. By November 1782 London was beginning to lose interest; Byrne moved from Cox’s in Charing Cross to the Hampshire Pig in Piccadilly and reduced the entrance fee to 2 shillings and six for Ladies and Gentlemen and 1 shilling for children and servants in livery. Byrne’s allure was further reduced when a rival Irish Giant, Patrick Cotter threatened to remove to London from his home in Bristol and then, even worse, a pair of 7 foot 2 Irish identical twins, the Knipes, also pitched up unexpectedly. The original Irish giant took to drink and was relocated again to Cockspur Street in Charing Cross where the price of admittance was reduced to 1 shilling for all.      

Charles Byrne in the company of the Knipe twins and various dwarfs and Lord Monboddo

In April 1783 disaster struck when Byre took himself on a “lunar ramble and was tempted to visit the Black Horse, a little public house facing the Kings Mews.” By the time he got home, and when it was too late to do anything about it, Byrne found that he had been robbed of the £700 in banknotes that he carried around with him under the impression that no one would dare to steal from a giant. The loss devastated him and made him drink even more. To add to his woes he had developed a serious cough which showed all the signs of being consumption. He managed to stagger on through May but died at Cockspur Street on the first of June.

Byrne's skull

Several noted collectors of anatomical curiosities had shown an interest in acquiring his body but Byrne was horrified at the thought of being butchered and displayed after his death. He left instructions that he was to be buried at sea in a lead coffin. John Hunter bribed one of Byrnes associates £500 to get the body for him. Byrnes friends seem to have been a mercenary lot – during the wake they displayed his corpse in its eight foot coffin to all comers for 2 and 6 (note that in death he commanded the same fee as at the height of his fame). At an overnight stop on the way to the Kent coast at Margate Byrne was removed from the coffin and dispatched back to Hunter in London whilst the empty casket was filled with rocks to imitate the weight of the dead man. Whilst the rock filled coffin was being dropped into the sea from fishing boat Byrne was back on his way to London where Hunter carefully sectioned his corpse before boiling it in a large copper vat to remove the flash.

Campaigners are currently trying to get the Royal College of Surgeons to surrender Byrne's skeleton in order to fulfill his last wishes and bury him at sea. In December 2011 Len Doyal, emeritus professor of medical ethics at Queen Mary, University of London, and Thomas Muinzer, a lawyer at the School of Law, Queen's University, Belfast, wrote to the British Medical Journal calling for the skeleton to be buried at sea "as Byrne intended for himself". Dr Sam Alberti, director of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, rejected the call, saying "The Royal College of Surgeons believes that the value of Charles Byrne's remains, to living and future communities, currently outweighs the benefits of carrying out Byrne's apparent request to dispose of his remains at sea.”

Charles Byrne's wake from the University of Warwick website

Exquisite corpse – Marchesa Luisa Casati (1881-1957), Brompton Cemetery

“Quite suddenly and simply by chance, I once met a bizarre lady while taking tea with some friends in London. She arrived wearing black velvet from head to foot, her mouth painted blood red, and carrying a very tall umbrella with a decorated handle. And, you must understand, this ensemble was being worn in the middle of the day. This picturesque ruin of a woman was very tall and thin, and gave the impression of formidable strength. It was then I was introduced to the Marchesa Luisa Casati for the first and last time. She had made her entrance into that room looking wonderful and saying very little. She wasn’t beautiful—she was spectacular. Here was a woman possessing a presence one would never forget.”

Quentin Crisp

 

Luisa Casati in Paris,
photographed by Man Ray

Once fabulously wealthy and a member of all the most elite European social and artistic circles,  the Marchesa Luisa Casati lived in London after the war in relative poverty, moving from one rented flat to another and only just keeping one step ahead of her creditors. Her belongings once filled mansions and townhouses across the continent but were now reduced to a tattered collection of frocks and fripperies; a stuffed lions head, a broken cuckoo clock, a fragment of finger, supposedly a relic of St Peter, amongst other worthless junk. She dressed only in black, someone once described her late London outfits as resembling 'the plumage of a shabby raven'. She rummaged in the bins outside the Chelsea Palace Music hall and came away with scraps of monkey fur,  fabric and feathers to tart up her outré costumes. Because she could no longer afford kohl she ringed her eyes with boot polish. Towards the end of her life all her old friends were dead but she stayed in touch with them through séances conducted in her flat. In time she came to believe she had powers of telepathy and stopped contacting even her living friends, preferring to rely on thought transference to communicate.

Another Man Ray portrait of the Marchesa

When she died of a stroke in 1957 Harrods handled the funeral arrangements, laying her out in their chapel before the interment at Brompton Cemetery. Her funeral finery consisted of her best black dress, a leopard skin coat that had seen better days and a new pair of false eye lashes. An old friend for former days, a stuffed pet Pekingese, joined her in the coffin. The day of the funeral was unseasonably cold and there were few mourners Her memorial is modest for a woman who once amassed debts amounting  to millions of dollars and her name is misspelled Louisa as though she were English.

 

Luisa by Augustus John

Luisa Amman was born in January 1881 in Milan, the youngest daughter of a father who, when he died in 1896, reputedly left the 15 year old Luisa and her older sister the richest women in Italy. She married Camillo, Marchese Casati Stampa di Soncino in 1900  and became the Marchesa Luisa Casati. The couple had one child and then lived apart until the Marchese died in 1946. Luisa became a celebrated society hostess, muse and patron to innumerable artists, the lover of Gabriele d'Annunzio, an eccentric and femme fatale. She commissioned portraits or sculptures of herself by Giovanni Boldini, Paolo Troubetzkoy, Romaine Brooks, Augustus John (whose judgement on his patron was “Luisa Casati should be shot, stuffed and displayed in a glass case”), Kees van Dongen, and Man Ray. Before the First World War she took up residence in at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice where she held fabulous parties with gold painted servants, mechanical birds in gilded cages, a pride of white peacocks and a pair of cheetahs with jewelled collars that she took for walks along the canal side. According to one of her biographers  “for a summer of drug abuse on the island of Capri, she packed a wardrobe of black Morticia gowns, dyed her hair green, and paraded through the village streets with a crystal ball, followed by a retainer in gold body paint.”

 

 

Her clothes were as eccentric as their owner and she has become something of a fashion icon, influencing designers such as John Galliano and Alexander McQueen and even has a fashion house, Georgina Chapman and Keren Craigs ‘Marchesa’, named after her. High living destroyed Luisa’s fortune and by the 1930’s she had debts amounting to $25 million dollars. She was forced into bankruptcy and the houses, villas, paintings, jewels, exotic animals, and haute couture were all sold off to pay her debts. Her only daughter had married into the British aristocracy and  a penniless Luisa had to live in London as the only alternative to starving in Paris, Rome or Milan.   

Barbe Maria Theresa Sangiorgi (1834-1893), Brompton Cemetery

“Sculptural interest: a marble tomb featuring a sculpture of a youth strewing flowers on the grave, finely sculpted in a dramatic and emotive fin-de-siècle style rarely seen in English cemeteries * Historic interest: the portrait medallion and the wording of the dedication, as well as the style of the monument itself, express the Italian identity of those commemorated and reflect the cosmopolitan character of late-C19 London….The monument would not look out of place in the famous Cimitero Monumentale Di Staglieno in Genoa, but it is highly unusual in an English context.”

 

English Heritage

Barbe Maria Theresa Sangiorgi was the widow of Auguste Kettner a Frenchman who allegedly had been Napoleon III’s chef during the second empire (but before the Emperor was forced to live in exile in the suburbs of south-east London at Chislehurst).   In 1867 Kettner opened a modest restaurant in what was then Church Street (now Romilly Street) in Soho.  According to Nathaniel Newnham-Davis in his “Gourmet’s Guide to London” (1914), it “was the first small restaurant that dared to show its kitchen to all comers at a time when the kitchens of most foreign restaurants were places of horror.” The restaurant was discovered and publicised by a correspondent of The Times and became successful enough for Kettner to expand by leasing 3 neighbouring properties and knocking down party walls to create a large public dining area and converting the upstairs into private dining rooms.  “In 1877 two events of great importance to M. Kettner happened,” says Newnham-Davis, “he wrote his ‘Book of the Table’ and he died….”  Kettner’s ‘Book of the Table’ was in fact written by the journalist Eneas Sweetland Dallas with Kettner’s name used as a marketing device.  The name of the restaurant was so established that there was no question of changing it following Kettner’s death; in fact it is still open today, at the same address under the same name.  

Barbe Kettner seems to have continued running the business alone following her husbands death but “when her days of mourning had passed,“ says Newnham-Davis, she “married M.  Giovanni Sangiorgi, who became her partner in the business, a kindly man who keeps a watchful eye on the restaurant.”  The couple married in Edmonton in April 1880.

Giovanni was, according to his naturalisation certificate of 1883 a “native of Imola in the Kingdom of Italy, of the age of 34 years, a Restaurant keeper and is married but has no children.” Giovanni would have been 31 at the time of the wedding, Theresa a wealthy widow of 46 so it is perhaps not surprising there were no children.  By the time of the 1891 census the couple were living in Church Street with Giovanni’s aged parents and his younger sister Giacomina.

 

Barbe died in 1893 leaving a fortune of £10, 431 7 shillings and 6 pence solely to her husband. The restaurant received a good deal of unexpected publicity in 1895 at the trials of Oscar Wilde. Kettner’s was a favourite restaurant of Wilde’s and he frequently entertained friends and acquaintances in the private dining rooms on the first floor. These friends were often good looking young men, and included Bosie, Alfred Taylor (who was convicted of sodomy along with Wilde and sentenced to two years hard labour), the Parker brothers, William and Charles (who were male prostitutes), and Sidney Mavor (who may also not have been averse to charging for his favours at the time but later became a C of E clergyman). Any notoriety seems to have only added to the allure of Kettner’s and it continued to do very good business and attract a very exclusive clientele including Edward, Prince of Wales, who entertained Lillie Langtry in another pf the first floor private dining rooms.  In 1897 Giovanni made the shrewd business move of forming a company to control the restaurant and floating it on the stock exchange. The adverts for the stock release show that the owners of the company hoped to raise £50,000 in £1 shares and £30,000 in debentures which would have released very tidy sum in ready cash to Giovanni. He died at the age of 62 on May 10, 1909. His body was shipped to Lugano in Italian speaking Switzerland for interment but his sister Giacomina added his details to Barbe’s monument even though he had chosen not to be buried with her.  

1930's advert for Kettner's.

"The Lately Discovered Depredations at Lambeth Burial Ground" - grave robbing south of the river 1794.

A shadow of its former self - Lambeth (or Paradise Row) burial ground in Lambeth High Street

“At a short distance from the church is another burying ground, belonging to the parish; it is divided into the upper, middle, and lower grounds. It is very much crowded, and the tomb-stones are deeply sunk in the earth; the state of the ground has rendered it necessary to discontinue the practice of interment. Bones are scattered about, and a part of the ground has been raised. The neighbourhood is thickly populated; the soil is very moist, and water flows in at the depth of four feet.”

                                              

Gatherings from Graveyards, George Alfred Walker (1839)

The Lambeth burial ground, sometimes known as Paradise Row burial ground stands on Lambeth High Street a quarter of a mile away from St Mary’s church. The ground was opened in 1705 as an overspill graveyard, enlarged in 1814 and closed in 1853. It is now a public park with gravestones lined up against the boundary walls. Much of Lambeth was a poor area with a high mortality rate and frequent interments. This made the burial ground a target for resurrection men who supplied the anatomists of Guys and St Thomas’ Hospitals with their raw material. On the night of 18 February 1794 several grave robbers were disturbed in their work in the burial ground. They escaped but next morning, according to newspaper reports, “great numbers of the parishioners repaired to the ground, and having learnt that such thefts had often been practised, were so alarmed at the apprehension of their deceased relatives having suffered such a fate that they were determined to dig up their graves, and try whether they were there or not.”       

The Parish Officers did their best to dissuade the crowd from reopening en masse the graves of their relatives but people were determined to discover the truth. Pickaxes, spades and shovels were produced and more than a hundred coffins were summarily exhumed and examined. Only a fraction of the coffins contained corpses – around 10 or 12 according to the newspapers, who added “the whole neighbourhood, during the day, was one scene of anxiety, grief and lamentation.”  The incident was considered so shocking that a few months later a general meeting was held by the representatives of the London Parishes in the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand to consider the “lately discovered Depredations in Lambeth Burial Ground.” The minutebook of St Thomas’ parish in Bermondsey gives a full and detailed account of the meeting:   

" . . . It appeared, that the robberies of the said Burial Grounds, were discovered by three men being disturbed as they were conveying from thence five human bodies in three sacks, in the night of the 18th of February last.

That in consequence of such discovery, people of all descriptions, whose relations had been interred in that Ground, resorted thereto, and demanded to dig for them; which being refused they in great numbers forced their way in, and in spight of every effort the Parish Officers could use, began like mad people to tear up the ground; at the same time, charging the Officers and every one that offered them any opposition, with being privy to the robberies, and in general terms threatening them: thus circumstanced, the Parish Officers finding nothing but down-right force, (and that of more strength than the civil power) could prevent the populace, and fearing to bring on a riot (which in its effects might produce the most serious consequences) after having used every effort, short of force, were necessitated to give way, and let the people go on in their searches; by which a great number of empty coffins were discovered, the corpses having been stolen from them; great distress and agitation of mind was manifest in every one, and some, in a kind of phrensy, ran away with the coffins of their deceased relations; and the generality of the populace were so ripe for mischief, that they attacked a house with stones and brick-bats, upon the bare suspicion that the occupier had been concerned in, or privy to the robbery of the ground, and it was with difficulty they were prevented from demolishing it.



Resurrection men at work - by Phiz

To restore order, and discover the offenders if possible, a large reward was offered, and the committee aforesaid appointed; by whose enquiries, it was found that the Grave Digger, and three other persons were the robbers, and that the bodies had been conveyed away in a coach to different people for various purposes, as was made appear to them by informations upon oath; the material parts of one of which informations being now read, showed, that within the knowledge of the informant, eight surgeons of public repute, and a man who calls himself an Articulator (and by hand-bills openly avows the trade, exclusive of others of less note) are in the constant habit of buying stolen dead bodies, during the winter half year; in whose service the following fifteen persons are generally employed, namely, Samuel Arnot, alias Harding; John Gilmore, Thomas Gilmore, Thomas Pain, Peter McIntire, alias Mc Intosh, James Profit, Jeremiah Keese, Moris Hogarty, White, a man called Long John the Coachman, John Butler, John Howison, Samuel Hatton, John Parker; and Henry Wheeler, whose depredations have extended to thirty Burial Grounds that the informant knows of; and that grave diggers, and those intrusted with the care of Burial Grounds, are frequently accessory to the robberies, and receive five shillings per Corpse for every one, that with their privily is carried off, by which means many hundreds are taken from their grave annually.

That with the Surgeons and with the men above alluded to, there is a set price for dead bodies, Viz. for an Adult, two guineas and a Crown, and for every one under age, six shillings for the first foot, and nine per inch for all it measures more in length; that the bodies thus procured are used here in various ways, and the flesh by some burnt, by others buried, and by others the informant did not know how it was disposed of; that some bodies are prepared and made into Skeletons, and sent to America, and the West Indies; and many with the flesh on, or made into Skeletons, are sent into different parts of the Kingdom.

By another informant upon oath, the whole of which was also now read, it appeared that the aforesaid Articulator, makes the most wanton use of some that fall into his hands, substituting human skulls for nail boxes, and having the Skeleton of a Child, instead of a doll, for his own child to play with.

The Chairman 'also acquainted the meeting, that from other evidence (which though not yet upon Oath yet such as may be relied on) information is given that experiments have been tried and perfected, whereby human flesh has been converted into a substance like Spermaceti, and candles made of it, and that Soap has also been made of the same material."

 

No rest for the wicked; Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) original interment Westminster Abbey, head now buried Sidney Sussex College Chapel, location of body unknown

Cromwell's coffin plate up for grabs at Sothebys.

Oliver Cromwell’s gilt copper coffin plate was sold yesterday at Sotheby’s in London for £74,000. The plate had originally been placed inside the inner lead coffin in which Cromwell was buried, the Order Book of the Privy Council for September 1658 details the arrangement, “his Highness Corps being embalmed, with all due rites appertayneing thereunto, and being wrapped in Lead, There ought to be an Inscripcion in a plate of Gold to be fixed upon his Brest before he be putt into the Coffin. That the Coffin be filled with odours, and spices within, and Covered without with purple Velvett, and handles, Nayles, and all other Iron Worke about it, be richly hatched with Gold."  The plate was removed by James Norfolk, Serjeant of the House of Commons when he supervised the disinterment of Cromwell’s corpse in 1661 for his public ‘posthumous execution’. Norfolk handed over the corpse but kept the coffin plate as a souvenir.

The Protector died on 3 September 1658:

 

….. about four of the clock in the afternoon.  I am not able to speak or write; this stroke is so sore, so unexpected, the providence of God in it so stupendous, considering the person that is fallen … I can do nothing but put my mouth in the dust, and say, It is the Lord; and though his ways be not always known, yet they are always righteous, and we must submit to his will.

John Thurloe to Henry Cromwell on the death of his father

 

Cromwell’s death may have come as a shock to those closest to him but they should not have been surprised.  He had been ailing for some time, suffering from tertian ague (probably some form of malaria) and the grief of losing his favourite daughter to cancer on 6 August. On August 17 he was seen out riding by the Quaker George Fox who later commented “I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him.” By September 3 he was dead. The Lord Protector had refused the crown when it had been offered to him but in death he was treated like Royalty. The Venetian envoy reported that “at Whitehall they are now preparing for the funeral of the late Protector, which will take place with extraordinary pomp and magnificence…”

 

Cromwell lying in state at Somerset House

The funeral arrangements were, ironically, modelled on those of James 1. The body was embalmed and then taken to lie in state in Somerset House where thousands of silent, solemn citizens filed past the elaborate catafalque. The funeral procession took place on 23 November, a wooden effigy standing in for Cromwell who, despite the embalming, had started to decompose and been buried in Westminster Abbey 13 days before in a private ceremony.  The cortege was headed by a carriage adorned with plumes and escutcheons and drawn by six horses draped in black velvet. Soldiers dressed in new red coats with black buttons lined the route and only ticket holders were allowed anywhere near the procession which took seven hours to travel little more than a mile. Anyone who was anyone in the protectorate followed the hearse, down to the Protectors household servants. After a ceremony in the Abbey the catafalque and effigy stood on public view for many weeks.

 

The ostentation of the funeral provoked mixed reactions. John Evelyn reported that it was “it was the joyfullest funeral that ever I saw, for there was none that Cried, but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking & taking tobacco in the streets as they went”. Cromwell was succeeded as Protector by his son Richard but the regime lasted less than a year and by 1660 the English had invited Charles II to become their king. One of the first royal acts was to order the trial of 12 surviving regicides who were convicted and then hung, drawn and quartered as traitors. Newly Royalist Parliament also ordered the posthumous execution of three deceased regicides Cromwell, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton. Cromwell’s remains were removed from the middle wall of the Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey and taken to the Red Lion Inn in Holborn, where he was joined by Ireton and Bradshaw. On the morning of January 30 1661, the anniversary of the execution of Charles the First, the three corpses, in open coffins, were taken to Tyburn where they were hung in public view until the late afternoon. As the light began to fade the bodies were taken down and beheaded – it took eight blows to separate Cromwell’s head from his body. The bodies were thrown into a pit at Tyburn and the heads impaled on spikes on twenty foot poles and raised above Westminster Hall. There the heads remained until the late 1680’s.

The 'Wilkinson' head photographed in the late Fifties

Cromwell’s head went missing in around 1688 when a storm snapped the pole on which it was impaled and the head fell into the grounds of Westminster Hall. A sentry found it and hid it in the chimney of his house, ignoring the considerable reward that was offered for its return. No one knows what happened to the head after this until it reappeared in 1710 in the Cabinet of Curiosities owned by Claudius Du Puy who put it on public display. Du Puy boasted to a German visitor that he could get 60 guineas for the head if he wished to sell it. On Du Puy’s death in 1738 the head passed through various hands; a failed comic actor named Samuel Russell used to produce the head and pass it around at drunken revels, the clumsy hands of the carousers causing “irreparable erosion of its features”. The Hughes Brothers put it on public display in Bond Street and charged two shillings and sixpence to see it but the venture was a failure as many potential customers simply did not believe that it was the head of Cromwell.     



One of the ferocious head hunters
of Sidney Sussex College

In 1815 one of the Hughes’ descendants sold the head to Josiah Henry Wilkinson who astonished the novelist Maria Edgeworth by producing it one morning at breakfast “not his picture—not his bust—nothing of stone or marble or plaster of Paris, but his real head”. On the other hand Thomas Carlyle point blank refused to see it or to believe that the head could be Cromwell’s “it has hair, flesh and beard, a written history bearing that it was procured for £100 (I think of bad debt) about 50 years ago...the whole affair appears to be fraudulent moonshine, an element not pleasant even to glance into, especially in a case like Oliver's.” There were other candidates to be the authentic head of Cromwell – a skull in the Ashmolean museum in particular made strong claims to the one and only genuine article. The distinguished physician George Rolleston examined both heads and thought that the Ashmolean skull was a fake, a verdict concurred with by later investigators who pointed out that it had been pierced from the top, not the bottom, and that there were no vestiges of skin, flash or hair as would be expected from an embalmed head. In 1960 a descendent of Wilkinson’s presented the head to Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge where Cromwell had been a student. On March 25 1960 the head was finally reburied in the college chapel inside an airtight container with just a few witnesses. The burial was only made public in October 1962 and a plaque now marks the approximate spot, the exact location remaining a closely guarded secret.



Sharkbait - snatched from the Jaws of Death, Sir Brook Watson (1735-1807), St Mary the Virgin, Mortlake

Worryingly the parish clerk at Mortlake was not sure if he was christening or burying the parishoners.

Brook Watson, was a wealthy and influential merchant who was an Alderman of London, an MP for the City for 9 years, Lord Mayor of London in 1786 and a director of the Bank of England. He was born in Plymouth in 1735, his father was a Hamburg merchant from Hull who according to some sources was unfortunate in business. He certainly left his son penniless and orphaned by the time he was nine and with no relatives in either Plymouth or Hull willing to take him in he was packed off to a distant relative called Levens who was living in Boston Massachusetts. By the age of 14 Brook has been sent to sea in a merchant vessel in which Levens owned an interest. It was whilst on this ship when visiting Cuba that the reckless young man decided to take a swim in Havana bay and was attacked by a shark. In later life Brook commissioned the American artist John Singleton Copley to commemorate the event in the celebrated painting ‘Watson and the Shark’ (now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington).



John Singleton Copley's celebrated recreation of the moment of Watson's rescue from the shark 

When Copley’s painting was shown at the Royal academy in 1778 it caused a sensation as can be seen in the following account from a contemporary newspaper:   

The following is the Narrative on which the very extraordinary Picture now exhibiting at the Royal Academy, painted by Mr. Copley and numbered 65, is founded: BROOK WATSON, Esq; an eminent Merchant, now resident in the City of London, being at the Havana, when a Youth, in a Merchant-Ship, amusing himself one Day by swimming about it, whilst it lay at anchor, and being at the Distance of about two hundred Yards from it, the Men in the Boat, who were waiting for the Captain to go on shore, were struck with Horror on perceiving a Shark making towards him as his devoted Prey. The Monster was already too near him for the Youth to be timely apprized of his Danger; and the Sailors had the afflicting Sight of feeing him seized and precipitated down the Flood with his voracious Assailant, before they could put off to his Deliverance* They however hastened towards the Place, where they had disappeared, in anxious Expectation of seeing the Body rise. In about two Minutes they difference- covered the Body rife at about a hundred Yards Distance, but ere they could reach him, he was a second Time seized by the Shark and again sunk from their Sight. The Sailors now took the Precaution to place a man in the bow of the Boat, provided with a Hook to strike the Fish, should it appear within reach, and repeat its Attempt at seizing the Body. In less than two Minutes they discovered the Youth on the Surface of the Water, and the Monster still in eager Pursuit of him ; and at the very Instant he was about to be seized the third Time, the Shark was struck with the Boat- Hook, and driven from his Prey. This is the Moment the ingenious Artist has selected from the distressing Scene, and has given the affecting Incident the most animated Representation the Powers of the Pencil can bestow. Suffice it to say, in regard to the singular Fate of Mr. Watson, the Shark seized him both times by the right Leg ; in the first Attack, all the Flesh was stripped off the Bone from the Calf downwards; in the second, the Foot was divided from the Leg by the Ankle. By the Skill of the Surgeon, and the Aid of a good Habit of Body, after suffering an Amputation of the Limb a little below the Knee, the Youth, who was thus wonderfully and literally saved from the Jaws of Death, received a perfect cure in about three Months. 


Sir Brook Watson in 1803
by Robert Deighton

Whilst the Cubans treated Brook and his damaged leg in hospital the merchant man on which he worked, sailed and left him stranded in Havana. Once he was well enough he managed to beg a passage back to Boston only to find that Levens had quit the place leaving him ‘friendless, penniless and a cripple’ as one account puts it. The landlady of the boarding house where he had lodged with Levens reluctantly put him up but immediately made arrangements get him off her hands by apprenticing him to a tailor. Luckily for Brook Captain John Huston of Nova Scotia was lodging at the house, took a liking to the spirited young man and offered him a place in his store in Chignecto. Canada at the time was divided between the English and French and there was constant tension between the settlers and the troops of the two nations that eventually erupted into open warfare. Brook soon showed himself able and intelligent and apparently barely handicapped by his missing leg. Working for Huston he became involved in victualing the British military and became a favourite of General Monckton the British commander. He soon demonstrated his bravery when a herd of British cattle crossed the river Missiquash at low tide and found themselves marooned at high tide on French held territory where they were likely to be impounded and lost forever. No one amongst the citizenry or soldiery was willing to risk crossing the river to try and get them back except one legged Brook. He stripped and swam across the river and, dressed just in his wet drawers, was rounding up the straying cattle to drive them back across the river when a party of French fusiliers appeared demanding to know what he was doing on land belonging to the King of France. Hopping on his one good leg, dripping Brook told them that he had no business with the King of France or his land and his only concern was to take care of the English cattle. The admiring soldiers let Brook and the cattle return across the river unmolested.



Brook Watson in 1788 by
James Bretherton

In 1759, at the age of 24, Brook moved to London and set himself up as a Quebec merchant. He made himself hugely successful over the coming years and travelled frequently between Canada, America and London. He became one of the original committee of the Corporation of Lloyds of London in 1772 and served as chairman for 10 years. When unrest broke out in the colonies Brook remained firmly loyal to the British crown. It wasn’t always clear to those on the other side where his sympathies lay and the rebel William Dunlap called him a traitor and accused him of "ingratiated himself with many leading Americans, obtained as much information on their designs as he could, and transmitted it to his chosen masters." Returning from a trip to Canada in 1775 he was entrusted with the care of the rebel Ethan Allen who had been taken prisoner leading an American attempt to seize Montreal. Allen later wrote bitterly that he was “was put under the power of an English Merchant from London, whose name was Brook Watson: a man of malicious and cruel disposition, and who was probably excited, in the exercise of his malevolence, by a junto of Tories, who sailed with him to England ..."

Brook served as Commissary General to the army based in North America and commanded by Sir Guy Carleton in the 1780’s. When he returned to London he embarked on a political career that was to occupy him until his death, first as an Alderman, then as an MP and senior Government functionary. He had married Helen Campbell in 1760 but the couple had no children and when he died in 1807 there was no one to inherit the baronetcy he had been granted in 1803 for services rendered to his country. The title passed to his grand nephew by special remainder and his wife was granted a £500 annual pension by a grateful government. Debrett’s describes the crest of Brook’s coat of arms “Issuant from waves, a demi Neptune proper, crowned Or, mantled Vert, the dexter arm elevated, the hand grasping a trident Or in the attitude of striking, the sinister arm supporting a shield Argent, repelling a shark in the act of seizing its prey proper.” And on the shield itself the lower leg that Brook lost in Havana harbour over 50 years previously is represented by “a canton Azure charged with a human leg erect and erased below the knee proper.”

Brook Watson's coat of arms with his severed leg and Neptune defending him against a shark

 

The poet, the muse and the abortionist; Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), Ladywell and Brockley Cemetery & Adelaide Foltinowicz (1878-1904)

When fin de siècle poet Ernest Dowson died Oscar Wilde wrote "poor wounded wonderful fellow that he was… I hope bay leaves will be laid on his tomb and rue and myrtle too for he knew what love was." When I called on him in Ladywell Cemetery only dandelions, ragwort and thistles were choking his rather modest grave. The memorial was restored in 2010 after a facebook campaign – the vase that would have topped the pedestal originally  was missing but a new stone was added at the foot of the grave inscribed with two stanzas from one of his best known poems:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Dowson was born at Lee in Kent in 1867, the son of Alfred Dowson, the owner of a dry dock at Limehouse but also the friend of Robert Browning and Robert Louis Stevenson.  Due to delicate health he had an irregular education which included 5 terms at Queens College , Oxford which he left in 1888 without taking a degree. For the next few years he combined working as a supervisor in the dry dock with writing poetry and immersing himself in the London literary scene. His poetry was, according to T.S. Eliot, the product of the most gifted and technically perfect poet of his age. On the literary scene he knew Oscar Wilde (to whom, unlike many, he stayed loyal after his trial and imprisonment), W.B. Yeats, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley and Paul Verlaine. As well as poetry he translated many French novels including Zola’s La terre and Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses. The memoirs of his friends painted Dowson as an archetypal  poète maudit of the fin de siècle, smoking hashish, swilling absinthe and roistering with professional ladies. In his Autobiographies Yeat’s said of him ‘sober he looked on no woman, drunk he picked up the cheapest whore.’ Ezra Pound, who only knew him by reputation wrote in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley that “Dowson found tarts cheaper than Hotels.” Dowson himself didn’t help matters with remarks in private letters like “absinthe makes the tart grow fonder.”

In 1895 Dowson’s father died of an overdose of a sleeping draught of choral hydrate. The circumstances in which he died were ambiguous and many thought he had committed suicide. Six months later his mother left no room for doubt when she hung herself at the family home. Dowson was soon struggling to run the dry dock which he left in the hands of the family solicitors. They were extremely parsimonious with any money the business was making and Dowson found himself in financial difficulties and on a downward spiral of drink, poverty and ill health. In early 1900 the writer R.H. Sherard was drinking in the Bodega in Bedford Street when Dowson tapped him on the shoulder. Of late Dowson had generally been unkempt and scruffy but Sherard was startled at how ill he looked “it was if a being from the grave were standing by my side” he wrote later. Dowson told him a story of being driven from his sick bed by his landlord’s threats and demands for money. Sherard took him home to the upstairs half of a modest terraced house in Catford where he was living with his aristocratic wife Marthe whilst researching one of the journalistic exposes for which he was famous (published in 1901 as The Cry of the Poor). Dowson lived with Sherard for six weeks before dying in Marthe’s arms on 23 February. The funeral was held on 27 February and was described in a note by Herbert Horne one of his friends:

The Mass was said at the Catholic chuch in Lewisham, at 11 o’clock, and the body afterwards interred in Ladywell Cemetery in a triangular plot of ground just beyond the two chapels, which had recently been reserved for Catholics. The coffin-plate was inscribed: Ernest Christopher Dowson, Died 23 February 1900, aged 32 years. Beside his uncle, Mr Hoole, & a few relatives, Moore who collaborated with him, Sherard at whose house at Lewisham he died, & his wife, Jephson, Teixeira de Mattos, Mrs Plarr, Bennett, Swanton, Pawle & another actor friend & myself were present.



Dowson as sketched by Charles Edward Conder in the late 1890's.

Most definitely not present at the funeral was the woman Dowson had loved for over a decade, Ellen Adelaide Foltinowicz. Dowson first mentions Adelaide in a letter to his friend Alan Moore dated 7 November 1889; “I am dining to-night with Samuel at a Polish Pot au Feu in Sherwood St, Glasshouse St. Soho. I discovered it. It is cheap; the cuisine is fair; I am the whole clientele, and there is a little Polish demoiselle therein…..whom it is a pleasure to sit & look at.” The Polish demoiselle was 11 years at the time of this first meeting. Over the next two years after a day at the dry dock Dowson adopted a routine of starting his evenings in the Cock Tavern on Shaftesbury Avenue with a glass or two of absinthe where he would jot verses on scraps of paper or meet friends.  At seven he would go to ‘Poland’ to dine where he would linger on after eating until the rest of the clientele, mainly Polish and French workmen, had gone. Once the restaurant was quiet Adelaide would join him at his table and they would chat or play cards until her mother called her to bed at 10 o’clock. Adelaide’s parents do not seem to have been alarmed by Dowson’s interest in their daughter. His feelings for the intelligent and vivacious girl gradually deepened but he was aware that his behaviour might be misinterpreted. In August 1891 the newspapers were filled with the grim details of the abduction of the 16 year old Lucy Pearson. Dowson’s reaction to the story was repugnance and horror “this beastly thing has left a sort of slimy trail over my holy places” he wrote to Alan Moore. Mistrust of Dowson’s motives is probably even stronger today than it was in the 1890’s.  Bernard Richards, in his entry for Dowson in the Dictionary of National Biography states that he “regarded his unsatisfied love” for Adelaide “as something like Keats's for Fanny Brawne. Through the letters and poetry there runs a strong current of paedophilia, which has an erotic strain; but it is tempered by a humane and romantic appreciation of the freshness and generosity of children not yet tainted by the manners of society.”

Dowson certainly developed strong romantic feelings for Adelaide which continued as she grew and lasted until his death. Some of his most famous poetry was directly inspired by his unrequited love.  In 1893 Adelaide’s father became ill; worried that he would lose her forever with the death of the father and the inevitable changes to the Foltinowicz household that would follow Dowson blurted out a proposal to the 15 year old. She said she was too young and could not even think about it whilst her father lay dying. The matter was never raised between them again. Dowson continued in his devotion even when she became engaged to another man, Augustus Noelte, a tailor who had once worked in her father’s restaurant. At the beginning of 1897 took a room above the restaurant in Sherwood Street to be close to Adelaide. She married Noelte on September 30 that year at the Bavarian Chapel in Westminster. Dowson could not bear to be there but he ensured that the ever dependable Alan Moore attended on his behalf and gave the happy couple his present. The Noelte’s moved to 30 Comeragh Road near Hammersmith and had two children, Bertha and Amelia born in 1899 and 1900 respectively. Adelaide’s mother, who was living with them, died in 1900 and the couple moved back to Sherwood Street soon after. She seems to have lost contact with Dowson by the time of his death in Catford.

 


Bromley Road, Catford in 1895 with St Laurence's church in the distance

Adelaide died three years after Dowson at the age of 25 on 13 December 1903. The cause of death was septicaemia due to an abortion carried out in June. She had never recovered from the procedure and must have suffered immensely over the six months it took her to die. Following an inquest into her death, a woman called Bertha Baudach, was arrested in January and charged with manslaughter. The Cheltenham Chronicle of 23 January 1904 carries the following account of her arrest:

Bertha Baudach, a German woman, living in Drumrig Street, Euston-Road, was charged at Marlborough-street Thursday, under warrant issued the 6th instancet. Mr. Troutbeck for Westminster, with the manslaughter of Adelaide Ellen a young woman, 19 Sherwood-street, W1, by means of an illegal operation. Detective Sargeant Clarke, of the C Division, deposed that on Wednesday evening, with Sergt. McArthur and another officer he went to 2 Euston-square, and there saw the prisoner in a back room on the ground floor, concealed behind some clothing hanging on the door. He explained why he was there, and told her she would be accused of manslaughter. She refused to leave her hiding-place, and when dragged from beneath the clothes struggled violently for about ten minutes with the three officers. An effort was made to read the coroner's warrant to her, but that could not be done, as she continued her violence. Eventually she had to be carried to a cab waiting outside, and was driven Vine-street. During the struggle she exclaimed, "Kill me! Let me die now. I would rather die than go with you and go through what I have been through before!" When the warrant was read she answered, ''All right. I have been to Bant, in Germany, and only came back yesterday." During the struggle a wig she wore with a view to disguising herself came off. The magistrate directed a remand.

Bertha had form. In 1894 she had had a narrow escape when she and another woman, Louisa Greenleaf, appeared at the North London Police Court charged with causing thedeath of Mary Jane Keen by performing an illegal operation at Bertha’s house in the Ball’s Pond Road. On their solicitors advice neither woman gave evidence and they were acquitted when the medical witnesses said they could not find any evidence that an abortion had been performed. The following year Bertha was back in court and this time she was not so lucky. This time the forty five year old was charged, along with Otto Huster (38) with ‘feloniously using a certain instrument with intent to procure the miscarriage of one Martha Elizabeth Cole.’ Martha Cole did not die but Bertha was found guilty and sentenced to five years penal servitude. Huster was given 12 months hard labour.

In March 1904 Bertha was charged with the manslaughter of Adelaide Noelte at the Central Criminal Court. There are few details of the case in the official ‘Proceedings of the Old Bailey’ apart from the names of the accused, the victim, the judge and the counsel for the prosecution and the defence. Instead there is a terse one line description “the case being one of causing abortion, the evidence is unfit for publication.” There had been some suspicion, according to a slightly fuller account of the trial in the News of the World, of a Joseph Kaiser who boarded with the Noelte’s, who helped nurse Adelaide once became sick and often gave her her medicine but there was not enough evidence to charge him. Bertha was found guilty of causing Adelaide’s death and sentenced to seven years penal servitude.



Late Victorian satirical postcard