I was lucky enough to secure
tickets for Cemetery Club’s recent sell out tour of Hampstead Cemetery. Having failed to catch Sheldon and Sam
locally at Tower Hamlets I had no choice last Saturday but to make the long
haul out on the Jubilee line to Fortune Green Road, West Hampstead to see the
eagerly anticipated new tour ‘Stories
from the Stones’. This is my third
cemetery tour; the other two were both of Highgate, one in the early 1990’s and
the other a couple of years ago, both undertaken out of necessity rather than
desire because the Friends of Highgate Cemetery won’t let you into the western
half unless you join a guided tour. I rather resent being shepherded around
places I would rather explore under my own steam but I like the Cemetery Club’s
blog and I liked Sheldon when I saw him speak a couple of months ago at
Greenwich University and so I was happy to park the prejudices of a lifetime
and allow myself to become, temporarily, a sheep in his flock.
 |
| Sheldon filling us in on Andrew Fisher, former Australian PM. |
According to the brief
biographical data on the Cemetery Club website Sam works in the entertainment
industry by day but devotes her nights to cemeteries (perhaps they don’t put it
quite like that…. free time is perhaps what they call the hours when she is not
at work). She was a guide at Highgate
for 12 years (she definitely wasn’t the guide on my last tour there though,
unfortunately) and is a blogger and independent researcher whose focus is “quirky
characters, Victorian mourning customs and social history, particularly social
history pertaining to London’s dark underbelly.” Her guiding and cemetery
partner Sheldon is a qualified City of Westminster Guide who drudges in HR by
day but “by night his passion is the past, our changing landscape and what went
before us.”
The tour started at 1.30 sharp
which meant that I missed the first grave as I was five minutes late. Sam and
Sheldon took turns showing us noteworthy resting places and interesting
memorials and the group trailed after them around the cemetery like ducklings
following their mother. Sheldon was on
first but I missed almost everything he said and so have no idea who he was
talking about. Sam then took us of down the main path towards the chapel and,
after pausing to note the Frankau memorial and the Egyptian themed tomb of
James ’Pasha’ Wilson, introduced us to Frederick
Hengler a circus proprietor and riding instructor to the Royal Family (whose
father Henry worked for Andrew Ducrow) which lead on to a fascinating
digression about the attempts of the British navy to train sea lions for
military uses during the Second World War (the link being the sea lions and
Hengler being someone who once worked for his son Charles if I understood the
story correctly). Sheldon ushered us on
a few yards to admire the tomb of the euphoniously named Archduke Mikhail
Mikhailovich, a grandson of Tsar Nicolas 1st of Russia whose attempts to find a
wife to please his mother Sheldon managed to turn into a comedy. 10 yards away
lies Fred Gaisberg, American born musician and artistic director of HMV in the
very earliest days of recorded music.
 |
| Sam at the grave of the Short Brothers (with a leprechaun behind her?) |
During the next hour and a half
we became acquainted with the last resting places (and these are just the ones
I remember) of a plethora of the great and good; Banister Fletcher the
architect, Florence Upton creator of the Golliwog (I find myself strangely
fascinated by this woman, I may return to her at a later date), Joseph Lister the pioneer of antiseptic
surgery, Kate Greenaway the illustrator, Sebastian de Ferranti electrical
engineer on the fledgling London Underground, Dame Gladys Cooper, actress (Rex
Harrison’s mother in ‘My Fair Lady’ and later star in three episodes of the
legendary ‘Twilight Zone’), the Short brothers, aviation pioneers (Horace, I think, was the one who was
kidnapped and worshipped by cannibals), Alan Coren, the TV pundit, Dennis Brain the French
horn player, Andrew Fisher, Australian premier, and Arthur Prince
ventriloquist. We weren’t able to see some of
the graves up close – as in most London cemeteries Hampsteads grave markers stand
at crazy angles threatening to topple over or collapse into the vaults beneath
them. We were a large group (it really was a sell out tour) and allowing a herd
of curious taphophiles to blunder around a closely packed patch of crumbling
masonry could only have led to disaster. Instead Sam dispatched Sheldon to pick
his way between the headstones and point to the one under discussion.
The hour and a half went very
quickly – Sam and Sheldon are knowledgeable, enthusiastic and entertaining
guides and it was a pleasure to accompany them around the cemetery. The finale
to the visit was provided by Sheldon whose studious exterior appears to conceal
a suppressed exhibitionist waiting for any excuse to burst out. The grave of
Marie Lloyd provided the pretext. Sheldon firstly apologised for having to
perform acapella and without a costume as he had originally planned to be accompanied
by a friend on the banjo and wearing some frothy lace concoction; the friend
had begged off and he had had second thoughts about the dress. He then launched
into Miss Lloyd’s classic ‘When I take my morning promenade.’ His delivery was,
at the beginning, affected by a degree of nervousness; hardly surprising when
singing in a cemetery in front of a crowd of strangers who were all probably
slightly uncomfortable and not really sure what was going on.
Since
Mother Eve in the Garden long ago
Started
the fashion, fashion's been a passion
Eve
wore a costume we might describe as brief
Still
every season brought its change of leaf...
By the
end of the first chorus the nerves were rapidly falling away, half way through
the second verse there were the first signs of bodily movement that had turned
by the middle of the second chorus into the definite shaking of an invisible
dress apparently gathered up by the hem to reveal a shapely calf and ankle. By
the end of the third chorus he had the audience joining in:
When
I take my morning promenade
Quite
a fashion card, on the Promenade
Oh!
I don't mind nice boys staring hard
If
it satisfies their desire...
Now
that is a truly impressive
achievement.
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