It is unusual to see a Roman Catholic priest buried with his wife (Clotilde Bienes) or the first line of his obituary draw attention to his four children. The brief details given in the Catholic Herald's obituary make it clear that he was an unusual priest in many respects:
Fr Nigel Bourne,
a priest of the Northampton diocese and father to four children, has died at
the age of 83. Fr Bourne was ordained in Rome on Easter Monday, 1975 at the age
of 69 after a distinguished career as a civil engineer. Fr Bourne's Spanish
wife Clotilde had died ten years earlier.
While working in
Spain on the Santander-Mediterranean railway in the late 1920s, he met his wife
and before their marriage in 1933 converted to Catholicism. He became involved
in the Spanish Civil War on the Nationalist side and was placed on a hit list
by the workers' committee which took over his company in Madrid. He later
worked with refugees fleeing the second World War in Spain on behalf of the
British government.
After his
ordination Fr Bourne worked in the Northampton diocese until he reached
retirement age at 75 when he moved to the southern coast of Spain, returning
occasionally to the diocese as a supply priest. He is survived by two daughters
and a son. He published an autobiography in 1985, ‘Padre-An Unusual Common Man.’
The
penniless and obscure Betsi Cadwaladr was buried in 1860 in Abney Park
Cemetery, either laid above, below, or sandwiched between, three complete
strangers in a pauper’s grave dug deep enough to take four cheap coffins. There
were probably not many mourners at her funeral and no marker or memorial was
erected over the burial spot.The headstone now over her
grave is new, put up in 2012 by the Royal College of Nursing and a Welsh Health
Board that had adopted her name and proclaimed Betsi a Welsh national heroine. Not everyone was
pleased to see the obscure Betsi Cadwaladr, or Elizabeth Davies as she was also
known, launched into posthumous celebrity. In Wales there were dark mutterings
accusing the former nurse of having worked as a prostitute in the Liverpool
Docks; in January 2012 the Welsh Daily Post felt obliged to defend her honour
against her detractors and calumniators, retorting that there was no evidence
that she had ever sold herself on the streets of Merseyside.
There
isn’t much hard evidence about most of Betsi’s life. We know she was born in
the tiny village of Bala in Merionethshire, Wales, just one of 16 children of
the Methodist preacher Dafydd Cadwaladr. Her poor exhausted mother died when
she was 5 and Betsi ended up working as a maid to a local family. At the age of
14, yearning for wider horizons she climbed out of a bedroom window and walked
to Chester. Everything we know about Betsi from this point in her life until
she went to the Crimea to work as a nurse for Florence Nightingale, we know
from a highly coloured and highly suspect autobiography Betsi later wrote with
the help of the Celtic bardess, Ysgafell (otherwise known as Jane Williams),
and published in 1857. Betsi spent most of her working life in service in households
in Chester, Liverpool and London. In Liverpool she changed her name to
Elizabeth Davies because, she claimed, the English struggled to pronounce
Cadwaladr. Her Liverpool employers took her all over the continent; she saw the
celebrated Mrs Siddons act in Edinburgh, visited Vigo, Saragossa, Seville,
Granada and Madrid in Spain, in Paris she saw Louis XVIII ‘come into the city’,
was in Belgium at the time of Waterloo, saw Napoleon in Vienna, Vesuvius in
Naples and was disappointed by Rome. She returned to Liverpool to become secretly engaged
to Captain Thomas Harris of the Perseverance who was drowned two days before
the wedding when his ship went down at Black Rock in a thick fog with the loss
of all hands except for a ship’s boy (odd that such a disaster rated not a
single mention in the newspapers of the time).
Betsi in later life, at the time her autobiography was published
In
1820 she worked as nanny to the family of Captain S. and voyaged with them on
the Iris to the West Indies. The following year she took up employment as a servant
to Captain John Foreman and his wife and travelled with them on their ship the Denmark Hill.Betsi made an eventful voyage to Van
Dieman’s land with the Foremans and their 180 passengers, including a terrible
storm in the Bay of Biscay, another storm near the Cape of Good Hope which
stripped the ship of three of its masts, the rescue of the 430 crew and
passengers of the Thetis which had sunk
after being struck by lightning, detours to Madras and Calcutta where she
watched open mouthed as living babies were thrown into the Ganges, a visit (inadvertent)
to an opium den and a sighting of the Emperor in China, stays in Australia and
New Zealand, witnessing an earthquake in Peru and encountering rattlesnakes in
Chile.
Eventually
she returned to London where she took up a post with Mr G., a lawyer of Birchin
Lane. It was while she was in this household that she supposedly met the
Kembles, Charles Kemble the actor being an old school friend of the lawyer.
Betsi was taken up with the theatricals that took place in the house, though as
a servant she was never allowed to join in. One day when she thought she was
alone (it is worth pointing out that
this appears to have taken place in the mid 1830’s when Betsi would have been well
into her forties) she picked up a poker and brandishing itlike a sword began to declaim a lengthy speech from
Hamlet. Charles Kemble caught her in the game and said that he had not seen anyone with such a
capacity for tragic acting since his “poor sister” (Mrs Siddons of course) and
offered Betsi £50 a night to act for him.
As
well as all this Betsi had at least 20 proposals of marriage, including two
from Mr Barbosa of Sydney who had sent messages that “he would never marry
anyone unless he could marry me.” Existing portraits give no hint of the
alluring woman she must surely have once been to attract so much attention from
the many bachelors she encountered in the course of her life and travels. She
was also left a fortune in the will of another employer, Mr H. In fact Mr H.
left his entire fortune to Betsi apart from a house left to his sister; all his
household furniture, “manythousands in
money, [….] several houses in F___ Street, […] an estate in Wiltshire, […] a farm in
Hertfordshire, […]several farms at H_____, and other property.” All this was left
to her with the strict injunction not to let his relations have anything at all
to do with his affairs. Betsi felt this was not right and told Mr H.’s sister.
In short order Betsi found herself deprived
of her inheritance worth £4000 a year. But she shrugged the setback off philosophically
and applied to work as nurse in Guy’s Hospital, a career change that was
eventually to take her to the Crimea…..
"I did not like the name Nightingale. When I first hear a name I am very apt to know my feelings whether I shall like the person who bears it." Betsi Cadwaladyr on Florence Nightingale
“…as a result of
reading one of William Howard Russell’s newspaper accounts from the Crimean War
of the suffering of the soldiers, she volunteered in 1854 for nursing service
in the Crimea. ..... She joined a party of nurses and ‘Sisters of
Mercy’ under a Miss Stanley and eventually reached Scutari. This was the main
British Hospital and was under the control of Florence Nightingale.
Strong-willed Betsy did not like Florence Nightingale and was angry at being
made to mend old shirts and sort rotting linen instead of being allowed at the
centre of the action, the Crimean peninsular. She therefore left for the
hospital at Balaclava and immediately set to work to treat the infested wounds
of the soldiers. She nursed the men for six weeks before being put in charge of
the special diet kitchen. Being an excellent cook she made sure that the
soldiers had good food produced from the best ingredients. However, overwork
and ill health meant that she was forced to return to Britain, leaving with a
recommendation from Florence Nightingale for a government pension. However, her
comments on affairs in the Crimea are extremely scathing and she had little
good to say about Florence Nightingale.”
“Dr.
Diplock, coroner for West Middlesex, held an inquiry on Friday afternoon, at
the Crown Hotel, High-street, Kensington, respecting the death of Nagayori
Asano, a native of Japan. Mr J. Z. Lawrence, solicitor, 165, Queen
Victoria-street, identified the deceased, and stated that be was a Japanese,
and had resided in London for the purpose of studying for the English bar. Deceased
was twenty-one years of age. Witness heard he held high rank in Japan. Maria
Smith, a cook, deposed that she resided at 21, Philbeach-gardens, South
Kensington, where the deceased had lodged. On Friday morning witness entered
his bedroom, and there saw him in the bed, with a wound in his head and a
pistol lying by the side of his face. The deceased was unconscious, but lived
for four hours. The Coroner: Did you know of any special trouble to cause him
to shoot himself? Witness: No, nothing. The Coroner Did you hear a report?
Witness No. Mr. Lawrence (recalled) said deceased had suffered from
melancholia. He was not in debt to witness's knowledge. Mr J. A. Owles, surgeon,
said that deceased died from a bullet wound, which, in witness's opinion, was
self-inflicted. The jury returned a verdict of "Suicide whilst of unsound
mind." The body, which has already been embalmed, is to be temporarily
interred in a vault and afterwards conveyed to Japan. It was incidentally
stated that the deceased held the rank of prince in his own country.”
Reynolds
Weekly, January 2nd 1887
Nagayori’s
father, Nagakoto Asano was an important political figure in Japan who supported
the restoration of power from the Shoguns to the Emperor in the 1860’s. The
Shoguns had been in effective control of Japan since 1192 and the Emperor
reduced to a largely symbolic role. In the political upheaval caused when the
Shoguns were unable to resist the United States' forcible opening of Japanese
markets to foreign trade, the Emperor Kōmei asserted himself as the supreme
political power in Japan. Nagakoto Asano was the Lord of the Hiroshima Shinden
who helped negotiate the handover of power from the Shogunates to the Emperor.
He became one of the most important political figures in Imperial Japan.
Supporters of the Emperor were at once modernisers, who wanted to see Japan
join the modern world and learn from Westerners and, at the same time, deeply
traditional, wanting to preserve Japanese culture and convinced that their country
was destined for supremacy on the world stage. Nagakoto lived a long life, dying at the age of 92
in 1937 just before the political path he had followed all his adult life
reached its final destination in the Second World War. The urge to modernise was
no doubt the reason Nagayori was sent half way around the world to train in a foreign
system of law in a barbarian capital. The young man obviously felt lost and
miserable in what must have been an utterly alien environment; why else would
he have killed himself? His embalmed body never made it back to Japan, instead
it was buried at Brompton Cemetery amongst the barbarians he probably despised
and detested. Probate records reveal he left an estate worth £213, a very healthy
amount for a law student, and that administration of the estate was granted to
Nagayuki Asano of 37 Bleinheim Crescent Notting Hill, “the lawful attorney of
Oka Asano Widow the relict now residing in Japan.” Was the attorney a relative? And it is a surprise to see that the 21 year old student was married.
Nagakoto Asano as a young man, perhaps not much older than his son was when he killed himself.
The night before Joyce McQueen
was due to be cremated at Manor Park Cemetery her husband Ronald and the couple’s
children had to decide whether to postpone the funeral to give them time to organise
a double interment. Joyce and Ronald’s youngest son Lee (better known to the
world at large as Alexander McQueen, haute couturist) had been found dead at his home
in Mayfair after apparently hanging himself in a fit of depression brought on by
his mother’s death. They probably had no real choice but to go ahead with Joyce’s
funeral as planned; if Alexander had committed suicide they may have had to
wait some time for his body to be released by the coroner.
Alexander and Joyce McQueen taken at the time of their Guardian interview in 2004
Much
is made of Alexander McQueen’s Scottish ancestry; his father is often described
as Scottish, he wore full Scottish regalia in the McQueen tartan when he
received his CBE in 2003 and his ashes were scattered on the Isle of Skye.
Ronald was actually born in Stepney, a stones throw away from Whitechapel where
his father Samuel had been born in 1907. Whitechapel borders on Spitalfields
where Samuel’s father Alexander was born in 1875. Spitalfields is a short
distance from Aldgate where Alexander’s father, also called Alexander, was born in 1849. Alexander of
Aldgate’s father was from Plumstead and his grandfather from, Shadwell. Joyce McQueen (nee Deane)
was born in Hackney and later traced her own ancestry back to the Huguenots of
Spitalfields Alexander McQueen IV was therefore
at least a seventh generation East Ender on both sides of the family.
Joyce
and Ronald married in Stepney in 1953, and must have spent at least some time
in South London because Alexander, the youngest of their six children, was born
in Lewisham. They moved to the Carpenter’s Estate in Stratford when Alexander
was a baby and brought their children up in Newham. Ronald worked as a black
cab driver. By all accounts he and Alexander were not close, though how much can
you trust media stories and Alexander’s own self-mythologising? Alexander claimed
he was the pink sheep of the family despite being exceptionally close to his
mother. He liked to strike bad boy poses – when he worked as a Savile Row
tailor he claimed to have embroidered the words ‘I am a cunt’ into the sleeve
lining of a suit he tailored for Prince Charles and his graduation show at Fashion
college was supposedly inspired by Jack the Ripper. He effed and blinded even
in mixed or cultivated company just like East Ender’s are supposed to but
wealth and celebrity and assumed braggadocio could do nothing to buoy him up when
his mum died. It is difficult to imagine how hard it must have been for Ronald
to lose his wife of 57 years and his youngest son within a week of each other. It
was probably why he only managed a couple more years himself.
The
McQueen’s striking monument in Manor Park Cemetery, sculpted by Cambridge based
master carver Andrew Tanser was designed by the McQueen’s grandson, textile
designer Gary James McQueen. Tanser was also responsible for Alexander’s
memorial stone on Skye.
“On the 14th of March, at a
quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think.
He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found
him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep, but forever.”
Friedrich Engels
On
17 March 1883, three days after his death, the funeral cortege of the 'best
hated and calumniated man of his times' wound its way up from the Marx family
home on Maitland Park Road in Kentish Town to Highgate cemetery where the dead
philosopher was to be buried with his wife Jenny, who had died two years before.
The funeral of one of the most renowned men who has ever lived was famously
attended by a mere eleven mourners; his daughters Eleanor and Laura, his two
son-in-law’s Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue, Engels (of course, who also
organised and paid for it as well as deliveringthe celebrated oration) and a number of socialist colleagues and
admirers. The leader of the German Social-Democratic party made a speech in
German, Longuet said a few words in French, two telegrams from workers parties
in France and Spain were read out and Engels made his speech. And that was it,
the sum total of the exequies. The funeral party made its way back to Kentish
Town and the gravediggers heaped earth onto the coffin. A few days later a
stone mason would have come and added Marx’s name to Jenny Marx’s simple
headstone. A week after Marx’s funeral the family was back at the grave to bury
his five year old grandson Harry Longuet.
The
authorities may well have been heartened by the poor turn out for the funeral;
it would have been easy to assume that Marxism was a spent force even before
the man himself had died. On the
anniversary of his death however 5000 people (the official estimate) took part
in a demonstration organised by the Communistic Working Men’s Club (London).
The plan was to march from Tottenham Court Road to Highgate Cemetery where
addresses in German, French and English were to be made over Marx’s grave. The
directors of the cemetery objected to the rally being held there and the
procession, accompanied by a marching band, was forced to convene on a plot of
waste ground next to the cemetery where the protestors peacefully listened to the various
speeches. The grave gradually became a place of pilgrimage for socialists and
communists of every stripe. In 1903 Lenin led a solemn delegation of Bolsheviks,
who were attending a pre-revolutionary conference in London, to the grave. No
doubt there were more speeches.
The old grave is shown in this British Pathé newsreel from 1948
The
numbers of visitors and the veneration in which they held Marx both increased
over the years. The mean appearance of the grave started to shock many. At the
1923 Socialist Annual Conference Charles McLean prefaced a dull report to the hall with an
account of a trip he had taken to see the grave at Highgate. “He had some difficulty
in finding It” reported the Burnley News “it was only after an hour's search
that he was able to stand at the foot of the grave.” He deplored the poverty
stricken character of the memorial “an old withered wreath, which appeared to
have been lying there for years, and an old flower-pot with a scarlet geranium
in bloom, were all that commemorated the memory of that great figure…..some
day, he felt, there would be international pilgrimages to Highgate
Cemetery—just as there were pilgrimages to Mecca by the Moslems. He hoped he
would live see the day when the memory of Karl Marx would have greater meaning.”
The Soviets were appalled. If the British wouldn’t look after Marx, they would.
By the end of the 1920’s The Soviet Government were applying pressure to HM's Government to allow them permission to exhume
Marx and remove him to Moscow where the plan was to lie him in state next to
Lenin in Red Square. To bolster their application they had even tracked down
115 descendants of Marx’s in East Germany who had signed a petition supporting the
removal of their famous ancestor from the capitalist west. The pressure was resisted and the request refused.
In
the greatest secrecy possible one cold night in November 1954 five grave
diggers met at the cemetery gates at midnight and after erecting a canvas screen
around the burial plot and firing up their oil lamps they started the grim work of exhuming
the four coffins from the Marx plot (as well as Marx, Jenny and their grandson
Harry, the faithful family servant Helena Demuth had also been buried there,
apparently at the insistence of Jenny Marx herself). The four coffins were
gingerly carried to a newly excavated grave on a site next to the main path
where a cedar tree had been felled to make way for it. It was two years before
the new memorial was unveiled by Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the
Communist Party of Great Britain. A massive sculpted head of the man himself,
made by Laurence Bradshaw, stands on a 12 foot high granite plinth with gold
lettering.
The unveiling of the new memorial by Harry Pollitt in 1956.
It
was probably the more humble aspect of Marx’s old grave (and the fact that it
was hard to find) that saved it from the unwanted attentions of those who
violently disagreed with his politics. In total contrast the provoking new
memorial was almost an incitement. Right wing vandals have spent the last 60
years clambering over the graveyard walls in the dead of night to daub
swastikas and slogans (including “I love Eichmann”) over the slumbering philosopher.
In 1970 person or persons unknown tried to blow the monument up. The sophisticated
plan involved sawing off Karl’s nose and then emptying bolts, fireworks and a
mixture of weedkiller and sugar into the hollow head. The plot was foiled when
many hours of sawing revealed that the nose was solid and therefore no easy route into
the empty space inside the brain cavity. The bombers had to detonate their device on the ground
next to the memorial. They managed to cause £600 worth of damage but the
hacksaw had done more to deface the bust than their bomb. Since the end of the
cold war things had quietened down but in 2011 another unwanted amateur paint
job drew the ire of leading left winger Tony Benn and the chairwoman of the
Highgate Society, Catherine Budgett-Meakin.
Unused footage shot by British Pathé in 1968 of the Soviet Ambassador laying a wreath at Marx's new grave
While working in
Spain on the Santander-Mediterranean railway in the late 1920s, he met his wife
and before their marriage in 1933 converted to Catholicism. He became involved
in the Spanish Civil War on the Nationalist side and was placed on a hit list
by the workers' committee which took over his company in Madrid. He later
worked with refugees fleeing the second World War in Spain on behalf of the
British government.
