The Way We Die Now - Seamus O'Mahony (£7.99 Head of Zeus)

“This is not a book of consolation: death is simply affliction and the end of our days. We are frail and vulnerable animals.” Seamus O’Mahony

One of my earliest memories is my grandfather dying. Neither I, nor he for that matter, were very old at the time; I wasn’t yet four and he had just reached sixty. Given that I was barely out of infancy I don’t remember much;  he was a big man, a painter and decorator, and in my memories is always dressed in capacious white overalls curiously free of paint stains.  I loved being tormented by him and he would lunge and grab me as I sidled past him, half in fear, half eager to be caught and folded into acres of white cotton drill from where it was impossible to escape. Once I was a prisoner he placed a chin bristling with stubble and abrasive as sandpaper next to my soft and defenceless cheek and rubbed until the side of my face was aflame and I squealed for mercy.  When he became ill he wasn’t, as he would be today, admitted to hospital. Instead he took to his bed where I was only allowed to see him once, after much pestering, ushered in by my grandmother when he was asleep, an elephantine bulk to my three year old eyes, swathed in white linen sheets and frighteningly immobile beneath the bed clothes. I didn’t ask him to see him again. My mother told me, much later, that she had been shocked when he told her that he was tired of living and wanted to die. “When our time comes, let us say our goodbyes and die as creatures,” says Seamus O’Mahoney, “if we choose to turn to the wall, to withdraw from our families and the world, then there is no shame in that. The dying have turned to the wall since the time of Isiah.” That is how I think of my grandfather dying, metaphorically turning to the wall and relinquishing life. He may well not have escaped so easily these days; “the default setting of modern medicine is full intervention,” says O’Mahony, keeping people alive in acute hospitals, intubated and on ventilator if necessary, for as long as medical science makes possible.

The Kansas-based pathologist Dr Ed Friedlander proudly sports a tattoo on his chest saying ‘no CPR’

Seamus O’Mahony, a Gastroenterologist with a literary and philosophical bent, has experience of both the Irish and the British health services. His day job is a Consultant at Cork University Hospital and with whatever spare time he has he contributes to the Dublin Review of Books. His first book challenges the medicalisation of death, expressing a deep frustration with notions like “death is something that medicine should somehow ‘sort out’”. He writes “I was, in part, prompted to write this book because my limited, strictly medical, expertise was inadequate to meet the demands placed on it by society and by my dying patients and their families. I had no answers, no profound insight. It is as difficult to advise someone how to die, as it is to advise them how to live.” He seems a deeply humane and caring man, exasperated with the system and with the expectations of patients and relatives that he should somehow be able to indefinitely defer the inevitable, the dying that comes to us all. It seems that however hopeless the situation most of us prefer to be deceived when a diagnosis or a medical crisis forces us to ask a doctor if our condition is terminal. We want to be told that there is a new treatment in America,  or hear about a doctor who is getting extraordinary results with a new drug or even about people cured by quackery like homeopathy when all the doctors had given up on them. “There is little reward, professionally or emotionally, for doctors who tell patients the truth,” says O’Mahony, “but the Lie is heavily incentivized. Nearly all families, and many patients, prefer the Lie. I try to engage with the dying patient with the intention of being honest, but the path of the Lie often looks so much more inviting. And no one has ever complained to me for taking the path of the Lie. Doctors, like their patients, are human and flawed, and the easy path of the Lie is the road commonly taken.”

 

Being dead is easy but dying is hard. O’Mahony’s sobering book is about the process of dying, when we have to cope not only with the existential anguish of our imminent demise but with the physical pain and suffering that accompanies it. He is attracted by Philippe Ariès notion of tame death as described in the French historian’s 1975 magnum opus Essais sur l'histoire de la mort en Occident: du Moyen Âge à nos jou (published in English as Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present).  Ariès argued that before the 17th century people were acutely aware and accepting of their own deaths. Death was a public event and people rarely died alone without the comfort of friends, relatives and religion. Excessive expressions of emotion were avoided in the presence of the dying; these only became normal when death became feared and shunned from the 17th century onwards. Today, O’Mahony observes, “death has become fashionable as a topic of public discussion, but, despite all the celebrity memoirs and earnest newspaper articles, it is still largely hidden. In Europe, the process of secularization has advanced so far that we will never see a return to Philippe Ariès's 'tame death'. Could we fashion a secular version of tame death? I doubt it: death is tamed by ritual, and ritual is primarily a religious phenomenon. We will never go back to a pre-Enlightenment Christianity in Europe, and secular rituals will not emerge.”

Seamus O'Mahony, the literary gastroenterologist

O’Mahoney points out that most medical practitioners, who after all should know what they are talking about, are deeply sceptical about the value of excessive and aggressive intervention of dying patients. He cites a 2003 study carried out by John Hopkins University which “examined doctors’ preferences for their own care at the end of life. Most had an advance directive. The overwhelming majority did not want cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, dialysis, major surgery or tube feeding.  They were unanimous in their enthusiasm for analgesic drugs. The uncomfortable conclusion of this study is that doctors routinely subject their patients to treatments they wouldn’t dream of having themselves. The Kansas-based pathologist Dr Ed Friedlander proudly sports a tattoo on his chest saying ‘no CPR’.”  He thinks we “need to have less lofty ambitions for death: such as a death without terror, a death without futile medical intervention, a death that is not hidden from the dying, a dying that takes place with a degree of respect and decorum.”

Seamus O’Mahony’s excellent book makes uncomfortable reading.  Highly recommended.

'The Apostle of Peace'; Henry Richard (1812-1888) Abney Park Cemetery

Since Lytton Strachey punctured the reputations of his ‘Eminent Victorians’ it is impossible to accept at face value the assessments made on their distinguished contemporaries by Victorian opinion makers.  Apparently bereft of anything resembling a flaw, of vices, of sex, selfishness, the hagiographic accounts of the lives and deaths of the Victorian great and good do not portray anything that the early 21st century would recognise as a normal human being.  It is difficult to take an interest in these starched and stuffed but completely flavourless individuals.  According to the South London Press of 25th August 1888 Henry Richard “was born Tregaron, in Cardiganshire, in 1812. His father was Ebenezer Richard, a preacher of great repute in the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist body. The son early developed an inclination to follow his father’s profession, and when he left his Welsh grammar school he was educated for the ministry in the Congregational College Highbury. At an early age became minister of the Marlborough Chapel in the Old Kent-road, which flourished under his pastorate. During his ministry there Mr. Richard threw himself heartily into the cause of peace, and entered upon the duties of secretary to the Peace Society.” His duties as secretary to the Peace Society kept him employed for the best part of 40 years. In 1868 he became the Liberal MP for Merthyr Tydfil. The paper also fondly remembered his oratorical style, claiming that “at many South London ‘Liberation’ meetings he has been listened to with keen interest. His speeches were weighted with solid fact and close reasoning. Profound earnestness was their prevailing characteristic, an attribute that does not belong to mere ear tickling oratory; but underneath this gravity of style there was in Mr. Richard a fountain of humour which now and then would bubble up in the midst his serious speeches and startle his audience into laughter. This mixture of earnestness and sedate fun made him a favourite with popular audiences, with whom he also obtained great credit for his aptitude at Scriptural illustration and quotation.”

Portrait in the South London Press

The Victorian press was much keener than todays to give detailed accounts of the death of a worthy; again from the South London Press:

The deceased, who was his seventy-sixth year….had been in failing health for some time.…  For the past two years he had been subject to angina pectoris, and had been cautioned against undue excitement. Since the rising of Parliament he and Mrs. Richard had been staying with Mr. Davies —Mr. Colman, M.P. for Norwich, being among the guests. On Monday night there was dinner party at Treborth, during which Mr. Richard appeared to be in his usual health, but shortly afterwards he complained of faintness, and Mrs. Richard was summoned. At eleven o’clock the deceased retired to bed. Dr. J. Roberts, Menai Bridge, and Dr. Richards, of Bangor, were sent for. Shortly before their arrival, however, he said that he felt very ill, and turned over and expired. The doctors certified as to the cause of death, and so an inquest was not necessary.

From his place of death in Wales Henry Richard was brought back to London to be buried. The Cardiff Times, apparently mourning a national hero, devoted almost 5000 words to his funeral obsequies  (under the headline ‘An Impressive Ceremonial’:

Mr Henry Richard resided at 22, Bolton Gardens, South Kensington, one of the quiet aristocratic-looking buildings typical of the locality, and here since last Wednesday his body has reposed. It was cased in a leaden shell, which was enclosed in a massive oak coffin, with ornate brass mountings. A large burnished plate, topped by a perforated cross, bears the plain inscription ‘HENRY RICHARD. Born April 3rd, 1812. Died August 20tb, 1888.’ The coffin was placed in the library, where its presence was a mournful commentary on the shelves of standard books and works of reference, which showed signs of the care and attention bestowed on them during his lifetime by their gifted and cultured owner. Piled high over the bier, and littered over the purple pall, which fell in graceful folds from the head of the coffin, were a very large number of wreaths and other floral tributes of affection for and respect to the memory of the deceased gentleman. These were beautiful in the extreme. The Carnarvon Reform Club sent what must be regarded as the largest and most varied wreath.

A view of the Richard monument from the Graphic of November of 23 November 1889

The newspaper was impressed by the cemetery:

A more beautiful spot than Abney Park Cemetery could hardly be found in London, for the wealth of foliage and the neatly kept flower beds formed over and around the graves contrast with much effect with the handsome and costly monuments which deck the undulating slopes. Some of these are veritable works of art, containing statuary and other pieces of sculpture of great merit. Indeed the whole appearance of this burial ground is very suggestive of a French cemetery, notably Pere le Chaise, in Paris where sedulous attention to and lavish expenditure upon the graves and tombs of departed friends is held to be of great importance, a duty imposed upon the living which by no means must be neglected… Close to the south gate of the cemetery, in the shade of some fine chestnut and yew trees, was the spot selected for the final resting-place of the departed Welsh patriot. On all sides are lying famous and well known men connected with the Congregationalist communion. Brilliant divines and prosperous laymen, members of Parliament and gifted professional men—they are all gathered in one sad and solemn brotherhood of the grave.

The service was conducted in Abney Congregational Church on Stoke Newington High Street rather than in the Cemetery Chapel:

A strong posse of police from the 18N division under the command of Inspector Holland and Sargeant Trudgett, preserved order with ease and facility , and without their services the crowd of sightseers who had collected in Church-road North could not have been restrained from filling the seats in the church or unduly pressing round the grave. Punctual to the appointed hour, the hearse and mourning coaches arrived, and the coffin, which was quite covered with the wealth of wreaths and andother flowers, was carried into the church by six bearers and placed on a large catafalque, covered with a purple cloth, which was erected in front of the lofty reading desk. The relatives of the deceased followed.  Succeeding them came representatives of the political associations and educational and other bodies with which Mr Heenry Richard was identified so prominently during life but as no regular procession was formed those present simply congregated inside the Church. Inside the chapel the scene was very awe-inspiring and, at the same time consolatory. It was something to have lived a life which was an example of the truism that “Virtue alone outbuilds the Pyramids”…. Through the stained-glass windows of the church came a soft, mellow light which toned down the sombre effect of the funeral garments of the congregation and made golden and crimson and blue diamond shaped patches on the walls and pavement.

Henry Richard’s Portland stone and pink granite memorial was paid for by public subscription and designed by Mr E.J. Physick who also carved the marble medallion attached to the front elevation. The ceremony for the unveiling in November 1889 was attended, according to the Graphic, by about 1000 people.

E.J. Physick's medallion portrait of Henry Richard - the nose appears to have lost as a result of vandalism

Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington

 

The Venezuelan electronica and hip hop musician Alejandro Ghersi, better known by his stage name Arca, lives in Hackney and found at least some of the inspiration for his latest album, according to the Guardian earlier this year, in Abney Park. He enthused about the cemetery’s ecosystem to the interviewer; “they don’t chop down a tree there if it dies,” he says “they just leave it to rot, which allows for different fungus and plants and insects to thrive there, so there’s that poetry of death being allowed around death and the organic textures of decomposition that are much more beautiful than any other kind of texture.” The cemetery’s other big attraction for the 27 year old is the gay cruising scene. He explained to the Guardian, “most of the men that cruise at Abney Park are older, from a different generation, before you could hook up with apps. It’s just so beautiful, looking someone in the eye. I have such beautiful interactions with all kinds of men that I would never meet normally, if I wasn’t there all the time.” When Alejandro is locked in an embrace with a beguiling stranger, in the undergrowth, losing himself in the poetry of sex and death, he likes to imagine that the cemetery’s occupants look on approvingly. After all Abney Park is a non conformist cemetery “where outcasts and misfits have been buried for hundreds of years” he says. English is a tricky language always waiting to trap the unwary non native speaker. Abney Park’s non conformists are not the outcasts, misfits, and outsiders Alejandro imagines; they are the Methodists, Baptists, and Salvationists whose most outrageous acts of rebellion were not to join the established Church of England. The inhabitants were probably far more pious and conventional than the average person buried at any of the other magnificent 7 cemeteries. Every other grave seems to belong to a dissenting minister, a lay preacher, missionary or philanthropist. The cemeteries most celebrated burial is the founder of the Salvation Army. No one buried there is smiling kindly at grown men engaging in sexual activity with other men in the bushes. If it were physically possible to turn in ones grave the non conformists of Abney Park would be spinning like rotisserie chickens at the shenanigans that go on above ground.  In truth the cruising these days is so discreet as to be barely noticeable and the cemetery’s once louche atmosphere has mellowed considerably. In the early nineties it could be quite an alarming place with not only the cruising but the drug taking and street drinking brigades also out in force.    

The Cemetery Chapel - Grade II listed, designed by William Hosking, built by John Jay and opened in May 1840

Stoke Newington still had a village atmosphere when the cemetery opened in 1840 in the grounds of Abney House, once the home of the former Lord Mayor of London Sir Thomas Abney. The area was revered by dissenters because of its connections to Dr Isaac Watts the poet and hymn writer.  Watts attended the Dissenting Academy in Stoke Newington and then after a short break away to live and work in London, returned to live there for the rest of his life, first in the house of the Hartopp family in Church Street where he worked as a tutor and then at Abney House to keep Sir Thomas’ widow company when her husband died. A small platform of stamped earth with a headless classical statue in the most distant corner of the cemetery remains dedicated to him; a plaque claims it was the “favourite retirement of the late Isaac Watts”.  With its strong dissenting tradition and its location on what was then the outskirts of London, Abney Park seemed the ideal site to found a non denominational cemetery when it became clear that Bunhill Fields was finally filled to capacity. It was opened by the Abney Park Cemetery Company under the auspices of the London Missionary Society in 1840. The park already had a famous arboretum and the new owners, inspired by Mount Auburn cemetery in Massachusetts, commissioned George Loddiges, a Hackney nurseryman, to lay out and plant the cemetery to increase the number of plant species on display. 2500 shrubs and trees were planted and carefully arranged around the perimeter of the cemetery in alphabetical order starting with an Acer (a maple tree) and finishing with a Zanthoxylum (the American Toothache Tree). The owners hoped the cemetery would prove to be an educational attraction as well as a popular burial site.  By the 1880’s the company shed its association with religious dissent and became a purely commercial organisation operating not only Abney Park but sister cemeteries at Chingford Mount and Hendon Park.

Isaac Watts (1674 to 1748) is actually buried in the non conformist Bunhill Fields but his statue presides over Abney Park Cemetery which was partly built on land belonging to Abney House, the home of Sir Thomas Abney

My favourite new story about Abney Park was reported in the Aberdeen Evening Express in 1885 under the headline Startling Discovery at a Grave:

On the twelfth inst. an infant, aged three months, whose parents live at Hillside Road, Stamford Hill, London, was seized with convulsions, to which it apparently succumbed. The body was conveyed to Abney Park Cemetery on Saturday for interment. While the coffin was being lowered, however, a child's cry was heard and then another, and the coffin was drawn up again. On being opened the infant was found to be alive. It was taken home, and is now recovering.

 

Tonight the Lion sleeps on Abney Parks best known memorial; the grave of Frank Bostock (1866-1912) famous menagerie owner.

A gorgeous motor-car used by a firm for advertising purposes, decked with a driver and a footman in gold laced uniforms, was speeding along Stoke Newington Road on Tuesday afternoon when the machinery suddenly gave a sharp crack and broke down. The liveried attendants were obliged to descend from the vehicle and push it slowly along from behind. A number of cabmen in the neighbourhood promptly entered into the humour of the situation, and formed themselves into a procession, one of them performing an imitation of a Dead March on an old trumpet which he had picked up somewhere. Abney Park Cemetery was not far distant. The spectacle afforded much amusement to many observers.

Reynolds's Newspaper - Sunday 03 January 1897

Autumn in the cemetery.

Influenza is still very prevalent in Hackney, Stoke Newington, Islington, and South Hornsey, and it is remarked that doctors and undertakers are the busiest men in the district, The latter, in many instances, are working night and day. During last week the staff of grave diggers at Abney park Cemetery were further increased, and the number of funerals which daily pass along Stoke Newington road  is simply enormous when the fact that the cemetery is a private one is considered. On Saturday Coroner Macdonald was informed of a sad case of suicide. The wife of Edward Smith, aged 61, was carried off by the prevailing epidemic about a week ago.  This so preyed on Smith's mind that on Wednesday he cut his throat with a razor.  He was removed to the German Hospital, and died on Friday.

Bristol Mercury - Monday 01 February 1892

An Interesting case of Longevity:  On Tuesday last the mortal remains of the late Mary Hillum, the oldest inhabitant of Stoke Newington, were committed to the grave in Abney Park Cemetery. The Rev. Jobn Jefferson, the venerable minister of Abney, Park Chapel, of which the late Miss Hillum was a mem bar, officiated, and the event brought together a large concourse of the inhabitants of the village. After reading the portions of Scripture usually selected for funeral services, the Rev. John Jefferson made a brief address on the personal history and character of the deceased. He described her to be a person of pure and simple tastes, and unaffected manners, known in the village for her good sense and earnest piety years before a large proportion of his present hearers were born. By the kind providence of God she had been spared to see her 100th year; she was, in fact, 105 years of age in February last. Hers had been a useful but not an eventful life. The house at the corner of Albion-road, in which she resided, was the only home she ever had in this world. She was born there, and there she died, and during upwards of a century-indeed, from the day of her birth to the day of her death, she had never once slept out of that house. Her journeyings to and fro in times gone by were limited to Enfield on the north, and the Elephant and Castle on the south; and in the days when she was in the full activity of life, the suburbs of London wore very different aspects to those they wear now. To the remarkable changes which had taken place during the past 25 or 30 years she was a stranger; and, as might be expected, what little she learnt by reading of the changes that were taking place only served to engender in her mind a distaste for all modern improvements.

North Wales Chronicle - Saturday 08 October 1864

199 Cemeteries To See Before You Die - Loren Rhoads (Black Dog Publishing £14.99)

A bucket list of cemeteries? It doesn’t sound like a potential bestseller but Hachette imprint Black Dog Books has lavished enormous care on the production of ‘199 Cemeteries To See Before You Die’ launching it at the start of the Christmas market publishing season, apparently confident that they have a sure fire stocking filler on their hands.  The title is great but why 199? There must be an arcane art to choosing the number of items to include on lists of this sort. No one is actually going to do, visit, read, see (or whatever) everything on a bucket list so overinclusion seems to be an accepted part of the process. 1001 is apparently a customary number for rock albums and Arabian nights. 100 seems to be appropriate for  anything expensive (like visiting exotic places) so 200 sounds about right for cemeteries which amongst all their other multifarious merits are pretty cheap places to visit, with no entrance fee (generally speaking,  though there are some dishonourable exceptions, Highgate) gift shops, or overpriced on site catering.

Loren Rhoads was the publishers inspired choice to write the book and is probably uniquely qualified for the job. Loren is a San Francisco based writer and taphophile who acquired her graveyard fixation during an enforced stopover in London with her husband in 1991. Browsing in WH Smith’s in Victoria Station she came across a copy of Highgate Cemetery; Victorian Valhalla featuring John Gay’s celebrated photos of the cemetery. On the last day of the unexpected break they abandoned plans to visit the Tower of London and set off for Highgate instead and so, as she later wrote “on a bitterly cold January day during the first Gulf War, Highgate Cemetery was where our cemetery adventures began. Since then, we’ve visited graveyards from San Francisco to Singapore, Prague to Paris, and all across the USA.” Loren’s impressive list of publications include ‘Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries’ and ‘Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel’, she is a regular contributor to a variety of magazines and for a decade edited the cult magazine Morbid Curiosity which dedicated itself to true first person accounts by ordinary Americans of life’s edgier moments. She currently edits the blog Cemetery Travel.

Loren doing what she likes best - cemetery travelling

Before we go any further, in the interests of transparency, I need own up to having written a post on Loren’s blog about the cemitério do Alto de São João in Lisbon. This led to Loren including the said cemetery in 199 Cemeteries and a request from the publisher to use one of my photos of it in the book. It can be found on page 145, reproduced the size of a commemorative postage stamp (one of the few serious editorial mistakes by the team which assembled the book, I can’t help feeling). For the publication rights to my picture I received $100 US (and yet to be paid if anyone from Black Dog is reading this) and a free copy of the book.  I also get mentioned on the Special Thanks page as someone who expanded Loren’s list of cemeteries to be included. Having said all this nothing which follows is remotely influenced by my very small and tangential involvement in the project.

This is a book aimed at the American market and so 100 of the 199 cemeteries featured are in the States or Canada and the rest of the world is represented mainly by places where Americans are likely to travel with Europe getting the lion’s share of the non US attention (62 of the remaining 99) and Africa and Australia barely getting a look in. Most of the burial places listed are cemeteries but there are a small number of churches and archaeological sites in the non US sections including Westminster Abbey, Sutton Hoo, the Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings, Petra and the beehive tomb in Mycenae. The cemetery movement in the US has almost as venerable a history as its European counterpart (Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts opened a couple of years before Kensal Green and was an influence on the design of Abney Park) and there is a glorious variety to its burial places that is probably unrivalled anywhere else in the world. There are pioneer and cowboy graveyards in the western states, large Victorian garden cemeteries in the eastern, French inspired Saint Louis and Metrairie in New Orleans, Spanish colonial and Hollywood glamour in California, there is even, uniquely, an undersea cemetery at the Neptune Memorial Reef in Key Biscayne, Florida. The book features every cemetery you would expect it to, Highgate, Brookwood, Pere Lachaise, Poblenou, Recoleta, San Michele in Isola, the Jewish Cemetery in Prague, Staglieno, Mount Auburn, Forest Hills but also many that you will never have heard of – the Merry Cemetery in Romania anyone?  

My photo of the cemetery do alto de Sao Joao in Lisbon, belatedly getting the space it deserves.

Loren’s book is full of fascinating insights into the places we create to house our dead. She doesn’t have much space to describe her chosen burial places but manages to produce lucid sketches in 200 or so words that evoke their history and ambience. At the very least she manages to whet the appetite to find out more which is probably the most you can hope to achieve in a whirlwind tour like this. 199 Cemeteries is a handsome volume, beautifully illustrated with at least one photo of each cemetery featured. It is well set out, easy to read, pleasing on the eye and like little Jack Horner’s pie, impossible to thumb through without pulling out a plum. If you know anyone with even a mild case of taphophilia 199 Cemeteries would make a great Christmas stocking filler.

Sometimes the one, sometimes the other - Charles de Beaumont, the Chevalier d'Éon (1728-1810), Old St Pancras burial ground

d'Eon's entry in the St Pancras burial register

The counter-examinations and declarations of the two sets of Surgeons respecting the sex of the late Chevalier d'Éon, reminds us of the examination of a well-known blockhead at Cambridge for his degrees, who, as the last question was asked, Whether the sun revolved round the Earth, the Earth round the Sun?” replied, as the Chirurgical Gentry might perhaps, with more propriety have done—“Sometimes the one, sometimes the other.”                                                                   Bristol Mirror - Saturday 02 June 1810

The body of the late Chevalier d'Éon, was privately interred within the parish church of St. Pancras, on Monday morning ; on the coffin was inscribed: - Charles Genevieve Louis Auguste Andre Timothe d'Éon de Beaumont, ne 17 Octobre, 1727. mort. 21 Mai  1810." The Duke of Queensbury allowed the Chevalier D'Eon an annuity of £50 to the day of his death.                                                             Lancaster Gazette - Saturday 02 June 1810

In 1913, when Havelock Ellis, the great pioneering British sexologist, turned his attention to transgender phenomena, needing a name for it but disliking the term transvestism invented by his German rival Magnus Hirschfield, he came up with the clumsy alternative sexo-aesthetic inversion. He soon realised that his 23 letter 3 word rival to transvestite was never going to catch on (“I’m just a sweet sexo-aesthetic invert, from sexo-aesthetic invertual Transylvania….” The Rocky Horror Show has a lot to thank Hirschfield for….). In 1920, casting around for a substitute, Ellis stumbled upon the details of the 18th century career of Charles Genevieve de Beaumont, the Chevalier d'Éon and came up with the much snappier Eonism.  Unfortunately transvestite was by then too well established to be dislodged even by a term coined in honour of perhaps the most celebrated cross dresser ever (except, perhaps, for James Barry).

The Chevalier as painted by Thomas Stewart

Born in 1728 in the pretty but sleepy Burgundian town of Tonnerre,  the Chevalier d'Éon was the scion of impoverished nobility, his father scraping a living as a royal official, director of the king’s dominions, and eventually becoming Mayor of the commune.  He was a bright student who was sent to study law in Paris when he was 15 and who eventually followed his father into royal service by becoming a secretary to the intendant of Paris and a royal censor of history and literature. He entered the shadowy world of Bourbon espionage, the Secret du Roi, in his late twenties and, by his own account (not always completely reliable) was sent on a clandestine mission to the Empress Elizabeth in Russia. It was during this episode that d'Éon first donned women’s clothing, disguising himself as the Lea de Beaumont and passing himself off as one of the Empress’ ladies-in-waiting. Louis XV awarded him 2000 livres for services rendered on his return to France where he temporarily hung up his petticoats and cambric frocks and instead kitted himself out in a dragoon’s uniform before setting off to fight in the seven years war. At the end of that conflict the King dispatched him to London where he helped draft the peace treaty and discovered a taste for the former enemy’s capital. A reward of 6000 livres, the Order of St Louis, the title of Chevalier and the post of chargé d'affaires at the London Embassy were d'Éon’s rewards this time. He was clearly ambitious and acted as interim ambassador when the duc de Nivernais was recalled to Paris, using the freedom from supervision to spy privately for the King. When the Comte de Guerchy was appointed as the new ambassador the humiliated d'Éon was promptly demoted to secretary.  Seething with resentment d'Éon caused endless trouble at the embassy and eventually received orders to return home.  When he refused to obey orders the British authorities were asked to extradite the stubborn secretary but they declined to involve themselves in the dispute. When the French stopped paying his salary the Chevalier retaliated by publishing reams of secret diplomatic correspondence but taking care to keep back the most damaging documents (relating to potential French invasion plans). The French suddenly became very cautious in their dealings with d'Éon even when he commenced a lawsuit against the ambassador for attempted murder. The lawsuit failed and the ambassador sued for libel; d'Éon was declared an outlaw and forced to go into hiding. Eventually the French Government reached an agreement with d'Éon, paying him a pension in return for his silence over the secret documents.

Despite strutting around town in a dragoon’s uniform it was in London that the first rumours about his true sex began to circulate, rumours quite likely started by the Chevalier himself.  18th century gentlemen loved to bet and speculation regarding the Chevaliers true sex became so rife that money started to be staked on the controversy.  Amongst others the Stock Exchange started a betting pool and the stakes were sometimes astronomical; one Da Costa bet Mr Jones £700 guineas that the Chevalier was a woman. When Da Costa felt he had sufficient evidence he demanded settlement of the bet but Wallace refused on the grounds that the evidence was unconvincing (the evidence seemed to simply be the word of other gentlemen ‘in the know’). The matter ended up in the courts where Britain’s most senior judge, Lord Mansfield, had the pleasure of hearing it. The jury found for Da Costa, effectively setting up a legal judgement that the Chevalier was indeed a woman. Lord Mansfield was unhappy with the verdict and encouraged a retrial at which he ruled that the contract for the wager was ineffective because it was not made in good faith; his issue was the matter of the Chevalier’s sex could not be resolved with a gross indecency and intrusion on his privacy. But as far as the British public were concerned d'Éon was now a woman. Astonishingly the Chevalier seemed to agree; it was from this period that he cast aside the dragoon’s uniform and started dressing and living as a woman, initially in France where he had returned in 1777 only to find himself effectively under house arrest at the family estate in Tonnerre. In France he claimed to have been born a girl and been forced by his family, who were concerned that a female heir could not inherit the estate, to pass as a male. He also claimed that the new king of France Louis XVI accepted this story but only allowed him to retain the privileges of a male if he wore women’s clothes.  One memoirist  later wrote that “the desire to see his native land once more determined him to submit to the condition, but he revenged himself by combining the long train of his gown and the three deep ruffles on his sleeves with the attitude and conversation of a grenadier, which made him very disagreeable company.”  In 1779 d'Éon published La Vie Militaire, politique, et privée de Mademoiselle d'Éon and began petitioning to be allowed to return to England. He was only granted the right to leave France and return to London in 1785. The 1789 revolution ended d'Éon’s royal pension and he lived in straitened circumstances in England until his death ending up in debtor’s prison at least once. He earned a living by taking part in fencing tournaments dressed as a woman, a sight unusual enough to guarantee sizeable crowds of punters willing to pay for the privilege.  

"The Assault or Fencing Match which took place at Carton House on the 9th of April 1787"

In his final years  the Chevalier lived with an elderly widow, Mrs Cole, at her house in Millman Street, a thoroughfare lined with small terraced houses mainly occupied by artisans and jobbing craftsmen a short walk due south from Coram Fields and the Foundling Hospital.  The Chevalier was paralysed through illness for four years before he died on Monday 21 May 1810. Mrs Cole claimed to be astonished when she came to lay out her friends body because she had never, not even for a second, suspected that he might be a man. What she discovered on lifting the dead woman’s nightdress so disturbed her that she immediately alerted the medical fraternity. On Wednesday 23 May in the tiny bedroom of the long since demolished house a group of smartly dressed men gathered around the bed on which lay the corpse of the 83 year old French (wo)man. They were a distinguished assembly, mainly but not exclusively medical men but all ‘persons of consideration’ according to newspaper reports. The group of at least 11 persons included Francis Seymour-Conway, the Earl of Yarmouth and member of parliament for Lisburn,  Rear admiral Sir Sidney Smith, Marie-Vincent Talochon (‘Le père Elisée’), a 57 year old French émigré and former  surgeon to Louis XVI who had attended d'Éon in his last illness,  Mr. Wilson, a Professor of-Anatomy, Mr  Ring and Mr Burton, two respectable  surgeons,  Mr. Hoskins, a respectable solicitor, Mr. Richardson, bookseller of Cornhill, the Hon. Mr. Lyttleton, Mr. Douglas, and  a Mr Adair. Holding onto a corner of the bedclothes was an up and coming member of the Royal College of Surgeons, Thomas Copeland who had just celebrated his 29th birthday and, despite being back less than a year from Spain where he did a stint as an army surgeon during the Peninsular War, had already published the well received study Observations on some of the principal Diseases of the Rectum.  The group watched in silence as Copeland pulled back the bedclothes and then, after pausing to glance around the room, slowly exposed d'Éon thighs and pudenda.  The lifted nightgown revealed withered thighs, a rather distended belly and, nestling between them, a perfectly formed set of male genitalia. A group of well bred British gentlemen would never do anything as vulgar as gasp in astonishment and so the assembly had to content itself with conveying their surprise by the furious raising of quizzical eyebrows.   

In a signed statement about the examination appended to a drawing of d'Éon’s cock and balls Copeland later wrote “I hereby certify, that I have inspected and dissected the body of the Chevalier D'Eon, in the presence of Mr. Adair, Mr. Wilson and Le Pere Elizie and have found the male organ in every respect perfectly formed. (Signed) T. Copeland, Surgeon, Golden-square.”  It seems the medical men were not content with just outward observation of this astonishing phenomenon; it was cut and sliced open with scalpel and scissors until learned opinion was certain that they were not dealing with something that merely resembled the male sexual organs but the genuine thing. Perhaps there was some disappointment; no doubt at least a few of the company would have been hoping for something more remarkable than an old lady who turned out to be a man, at the very least a hermaphrodite. 

Charles Turner's drawing of the Chevalier's profile based on the death mask

The following day Copeland was back at Millman Street bringing with him the Professor of Anatomy at the Duke of York’s Hospital, Joseph Constantine Carpue and a draughtsman Charles Turner. While Carpue examined the old lady’s corpse Turner set about drawing the view between her flaccid thighs and also making a death mask. Turner’s final drawing shows circumcised penis and testicles intact and without the least sign of dissection.  As Copeland signed this last draught with the declaration that he had inspected and dissected the body and dated it the previous day, then Turner, for whatever reason, decided not to show this post mortem intervention of the surgeon and drew the body as he imagined it would have looked before Copeland got to work with his scalpel. Carpue added his own statement to the drawing – “In consequence of a note from the above Gentleman (Copeland) I examined the Body which was a Male. The original drawing was made by Mr C. Turner in my presence. Dean Street, Soho, May 24th 1810.” These were not the last visitors to view the Chevalier’s corpse; according to the Morning Chronicle ““the body has been inspected by nearly 80 other gentlemen”, while the Morning Herald claimed ‘hundreds’ had been to Millman Street:

The body of this extraordinary character has undergone not only the anatomical inspection of the whole faculty, hut also many hundreds of the most distinguished Curiosi of the metropolis. Strange to say, the female visitants have exceeded those of the other sex as three to one. His Highness the Duke of Gloucester, and several other persons of distinction, were among the latter. It lies in a handsome oak coffin, covered with black cloth, and a black velvet cross on the lid, at the house of Mrs. Cole, of New Millman-street, to whose benevolent kindness and attention, the Chevalier was indebted for the principal comforts of his latter days. A cast was taken from the face on Friday. It is proposed to inter the body in St. Pancras Church-yard the day after tomorrow.

On the following Monday, the 28th May, d'Éon was buried in a private plot at St Pancras, the coffin plate stating his name as the Chevalier Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont; the burial register giving his age as 81. The Morning Advertiser alleged that “some minutia of his mortal remnants are said to have been clandestinely conveyed away, to decorate the cabinets the Medical Virtuosi.” The insults to the Chevaliers memory did not end there; exactly a fortnight later the Morning Chronicle carried an outrageous advertisement announcing that a few days hence, by subscription, could be purchased a copy of the death mask of the Chevalier “also an engraving from the Original drawing of THE BODY. The Engraving, when published, will be signed by Gentlemen of the Faculty, testifying its correctness. Published and engraved by C. Turner, No. 50 Warren-street, Fitzroy-square.”

The Chevaliers grave was one of those later cleared to make way for St Pancras station and commemorated on the Burdett Coutts memorial.

'East End Jewish Cemeteries' by Louis Berk (Amberley Books) £14.99

The often tiny Jewish cemeteries dotted around the east end are exotic vestiges of a London’s lost Mitteleuropan past.  Surrounded by high plain brick walls and tucked away on odd scraps of land, the rows of weathered headstones inscribed with Hebrew script are often completely hemmed in by blocks of flats, warehouses, schools, factories and other utilitarian buildings. Fear of vandalism ensures their doors and gates remain locked and visiting discouraged by the need to make appointments with impossible to locate officials from the synagogue.  With no burials and few visitors they quickly revert to nature; trees and shrubs grow from windblown seeds, grass and weeds flourish and foxes, birds take up residence in the hidden piece of countryside in the centre of the city. In a celebrated and evocative passage in Austerlitz W.G. Sebald describes perfectly the slightly otherworldly atmosphere of these cemeteries when the eponymous hero offers the narrator the use of his house and insists that he;

 

...should not omit.. to ring the bell at the gateway in the brick wall adjoining his house for behind the wall, although he had never been able to see it from any of his windows, there was a plot where lime trees and lilacs grew and in which members of the Ashkenazi community had been buried ever since the eighteenth century, including Rabbi David Tevele Schiff and Rabbi Samuel Falk, the Baal Shem of London. He had discovered the cemetery, from which, as he now suspected, the moths used to fly into his house.…only a few days before he left London, when the gate in the wall stood open for the first time in all the years he had lived in Alderney Street. Inside, a very small, almost dwarf-like woman of perhaps seventy years old – the cemetery caretaker, as it turned out – was walking along the paths in her slippers. Beside her, almost as tall as she was, walked a Belgian sheepdog now grey with age who answered to the name of Billie and was very timid. In the bright spring light, shining through the newly opened leaves of the lime trees, you might have thought, Austerlitz told me, that you had entered a fairy tale which, like life itself, had grown older with the passing of time…..

Austerlitz would have approved of Louis Berk’s five year project to document the changing seasons in the Brady Street and Alderney Road burial grounds. The photographer is also a secondary school teacher who has worked in Whitechapel, on Brady Street, since 2004. He was unaware of the existence of the burial ground until he was idly staring out of a second storey window at work one afternoon and realised that he was looking into a cemetery. As the place was always locked he expected never to get inside but then one day he heard contractors at work in the cemetery he knocked on the door and asked if he could look around.  The workman allowed him in and from that moment he was smitten “It was as though I had entered a country forest in the middle of Whitechapel, complete with a fox which loped down a path ahead of me. Grabbing my camera I took snapshots of headstones with intricate carvings as I wandered beneath the cool green canopy overhead.” He approached the cemetery owners, the United Synagogue of Great Britain, and asked them to allow him regular access to carry out a project to capture the graveyard over the course of a year, photographing it in every season.  His first winter on the project failed to provide weather cold enough to produce snowfall. He had to wait almost three years in fact for a suitably photogenic dusting of ice and snow. He was eventually asked by the Synagogue to photograph their older burial plot in Alderney Road.

 

 

Berk’s photographs are mainly taken on film using a medium format camera. In the spring and summer shots the graves are enclosed in a world of green; grass and flowers carpet the ground and a canopy of leaves occludes sun and sky.  In one of my favourite images across almost half the photo sycamore leaves hang like a diagonal swag of heavy curtain parting to allow a view of a row of chest tombs in the foreground and trees in the distance, evoking a closed, secret world. The trees keep the outside world at bay, the buildings that surround the cemetery are effectively invisible and although photographs are silent, the silence feels like part of the image, the trees are muffling the noise of trains and traffic in the surrounding streets.  In other pictures the trees stand like sentinels, huddling over the fragile headstones, protecting them from the elements. In the winter shots the denuded trees open up the photographic space and the cemetery becomes resolutely urban. In the backgrounds of the pictures we can blocks of council flats or the concrete towers of the Crossrail station being built a few hundred yards away. If the urban invades, so does the sky, the hemmed in space finally opening up to the sun. There is a beautiful shot of the sun rising into a sky that is a network of skeletal trees, flaring above a collection of grey headstones that look as monumental as Stonehenge from the low angle the shot is taken from. The natural world is everywhere in these images; trees, flowers, berries, a thrush perched on a headstone, fox tracks in the snow.  But they are also a matchless documentary record of the lost world of the Jewish east end, the physical traces of which continue to be eroded and destroyed and will eventually disappear altogether. If the anyone needed reminding of this one the photographs shows two Hebrew inscribed headstones, the russet coloured stone green with lichen with a block of late Victorian workers  dwellings in the background. The stones are no more; shortly after Berk photographed them a falling tree smashed both into irreparable fragments.      

 

East End Jewish Cemeteries by Louis Berk (with an introduction to the history of the cemeteries by Rachel Kolsky) is available from Amazon and directly from the author.       

 

All photography copyright 2017 Louis Berk 

The Archaeologists and the Archbishop's teeth; Arthur Richard Dillon (1721 - 1806) Old St Pancras Burial Ground

The entry in the St Pancras burial register for Arthur Richard Dillon

It is odd that a French Catholic Archbishop fleeing from anti-clerical persecution in revolutionary France took up residence in Protestant England. Even odder that he came from a notorious family of Jacobites who were close to the exiled Old and Young Pretenders. In 1806 The London Review reported the death on 5 July  “at his house in George Street, Portman Square, [of] Arthur Richard Dillon, archbishop and duke of Narbonne, primate of the Gauls, president of the states of Languedoc, and commander of the order of the Holy Ghost.”  Archbishop Dillon had been living in exile for 15 years. With no official Catholic cemetery to bury him in he was interred in St Pancras burial ground which had become the favoured final resting place for the dead émigré community.



Arthur Richard Dillon, a portrait in the Narbonne archives



The Archbishop was the youngest of the five sons of Arthur Dillon of Roscommon and Catherine Sheldon who was from a prominent English Jacobite family. Arthur the father was a Jacobite General who had been forced into French exile at the age of 21 following the defeat of the Irish Jacobites at Limerick by William of Orange. In France he became a Maréchal de camp in the French army and encouraged his sons to follow him into the military. Arthur Richard, as the youngest, was the token clergymen. He became Bishop of Evreux by the age of 32 and Archbishop of Toulouse by 37. He was what is euphemistically known as a ‘worldly prelate’. In public terms this meant he was far more interested in temporal matters like public works than spiritual ones. He was keen on engineering and sponsored various bridges, canals, and harbours within his diocese as well as creating chairs of chemistry and physics at Montpellier and Toulouse Universities.

In his private life the Archbishop was devoted to the hunt, financially extravagant and, by all accounts, the lover of his widowed niece Madame de Roche (his sister’s daughter). The celebrated memoirist of the ancient regime, Lucie de La Tour du Pin, was the granddaughter of Madame de Roche and great niece of the Archbishop. Her memoirs paint a vivid portrait of life in her grandmother’s houses; the hotel de Roche in the Faubourg St-Germain and the Château Hautefontaine. Lucie noted that her great uncle had lived with her grandmother “for twenty years without paying a sou of rent to his niece” and commented that “the archbishopric of Narbonne, which paid him 250,000 francs a year, he had an abbey which was worth 110,000; still another which was worth 90,000; and he received an allowance of more than 50,000 francs for giving dinners every day during the meetings of the States. It would seem that with such an income he should have been able to live honourably and at his ease, but nevertheless he was always in financial difficulties.” She also remarked that he spent as little time as possible on his official duties in the provinces, preferring to return as quickly as possible to the Faubourg St-Germain “in order to live en grand seigneur at Paris and as a courtier at Versailles.” Lucie passed discretely over the exact state of relations between the Archbishop and her grandmother but did say that he was “dominated and influenced” by her and even that he “feared my grandmother too much.”
 



The Archbishop's teeth

Following the revolution the Archbishop fled France and the guillotine with his niece and in 1792 took up residence in London in a series of relatively modest rented houses until his death in 1806. His body lay undisturbed through the first set of exhumations from St Pancras when a large part of the burial ground was taken over by the Midland Railway Company for the mainline into St Pancras. He was not so lucky in 2006 when a team of archaeologists working for the firms Giffords and Pre-Construct were given a year to exhume 1,500 bodies that were buried in the way of a proposed Channel Tunnel Rail Link platform. The Archbishop was discovered inside a lead lined and lavishly engraved coffin. Sitting securely in his skull was a pair of almost perfectly preserved Sèvres porcelain false teeth complete with gold springs. The dentures were of exceptional quality and are believed to be the work of the Parisian dentist Nicolas Dubois de Chémant. The Archbishop’s remains were sent briefly to East Finchley Cemetery before arrangements were made to repatriate them to France. In 2007 the Archbishop was reinterred, with great ceremony, in the Narbonne Cathedral. His dentures however remained in England. They were put on public display on World Smile Day in October 2006 at the Museum of London. In 2008 they found a permanent home in the Cobbe Museum. 
Archbishop Dillon  is one of the 'illustrious dead' commemorated on the Burdett Coutts sundial in St Pancras Gardens.