A
few months ago I had an hour to kill waiting for my daughter who had an
interview at Westminster College on the Grays Inn Road. With nothing better to
do I wandered aimlessly around the nondescript side streets bounded to the
south by Theobalds Road and to the North by Guildford Street. There was little
to attract my attention until on Lambs Conduit Street I spotted the premises of
A. France & Son, funeral directors. The shop fronts of undertakers are generally
rather disappointing – the art of window dressing has passed the profession by
and for the most part funeral directors premises try to look as professional
and non descript as a solicitors or accountants office. A. France & Son have been in business since
the late 18th century and have been at their current premises since 1898. Their window display draws on their rather distinguished
history and features a dusty model of HM Victory, some old prints of Nelson’s
funeral and a miniature model of the admiral’s state coffin which was produced by the
firm in 1805. A note, dated 2005, attached to the replica of the coffin told me
that it was one of a limited edition made from oak from HMS Victory produced by
the model maker Lucy Askew.
For
some reason I immediately wanted one of those replica coffins and was furious
with myself for only stumbling across it years after it had probably been sold
out. Still, that is what ebay is for and at the first opportunity I googled ‘replica
Nelson’s coffin’ hoping to find a second hand one for sale. The search brought
up Lucy Askew’s website which still had details of the coffin and said they
were for sale at £100 a piece. I emailed Lucy hoping she still had one or two
coffins left as she hadn’t removed the details from her website. The next day Lucy confirmed “Yes I do have a
Nelson's coffin for you. I still have some of the Victory oak I bought back in
2005 and I occasionally make up a small batch of coffins as and when people
want them. I wonder if you are the same David Bingham who bought one from me
some time ago? I am now up to number 228, though numbers 94-98 were never taken
up for some reason so you could choose one of these if you prefer. I never
thought I'd make so many!” I immediately
placed an order and told Lucy that “intriguingly I am not the same David
Bingham who has already bought a coffin from you. It’s not that common a name
and so quite surprising that two of them would go for a niche item like a model
coffin.”
It
only took a few days for my 8cm black and gold coffin to arrive in its tasteful
presentation box lined with satin, along with a certificate of authentication
for the Victory oak and an In Memoriam booklet containing a ‘collection of
newspaper reports, eye-witness accounts and contemporary images of Nelson's
extraordinary state funeral, and captures the astonishing outpouring of public
grief which followed the news of Nelson's victory and death at Trafalgar two
hundred years ago.’ I had had it sent to the office and was so thrilled with it
that I reinforced my reputation amongst my colleagues for being slightly odd by
showing it to anyone I thought might take even a passing interest in it.
Someone produced a magnifying glass to allow us to read the minutely worded
inscription on the coffin plate – engraving in writing far too tiny for my naked
eyes to decipher even if I held it just a few inches from my face. Lucy Askew politely emailed to ask if I had
received my coffin and mentioned that ‘strangely I had another order for a
coffin yesterday from an American professor (not called David Bingham) who had
also spotted it in Messrs. France, Lamb's Conduit street. They have had it in
their window since I gave it to them in 2005, but I haven't had an order for
ages. There must be something in the air!’ |
| Nelson's funeral cortege approaches his final resting place at St Paul's. |
I
am drawn to the coffin because it is a coffin rather than because of any association
with Lord Nelson but the old Sealord has found himself in the news again in the
last couple of weeks. The journalist
Afua Hirsch wrote a comment piece in the Guardian of 22 August arguing, in the
wake of the controversy in the US over Confederate statues, that we need a
similar purge of proslavery and white supremacist icons in the UK and suggested
that we start with Nelson’s column. She
claimed that Nelson “used his seat in the House of Lords and his position of
huge influence to perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation
organised by West Indian planters, some of whom he counted among his closest
friends.” She says that “the enormous contribution of black people in Britain
at the time – especially activists and writers who were slaves themselves – has
no equivalent site of glory, in London or anywhere in the country” but that “the
colonial and pro-slavery titans of British history are still memorialised:
despite student protests, Oxford University’s statue of imperialist Cecil
Rhodes has not been taken down; and Bristol still celebrates its notorious
slaver Edward Colston.” Hirsch is a seasoned controversialist – she will be
under no illusions about the chances of toppling Nelson from his pedestal in
Trafalgar Square but the UK’s refusal “in our inertia, arrogance and
intellectual laziness” to face up to the legacy of its colonial past infuriates
here and she points out that in the US at least these matters are being
debated.
Hirsch
had already allowed the ‘topple Nelson’ proposal a dry run on Twitter and so would
have been aware of how much heat her possibly tongue in cheek proposition could
potentially generate. Even so she must have
been surprised and gratified at the scale of it; the piece appeared Guardian
on-line published her piece at 06.00 BST on 22 August, opened it for comments
at 08.00 and closed it again at 9.20 after 1070 separate comments had been
made. When the Guardian readers stopped talking the newspapers took over with
the usual suspects, the Mail, Express, Sun, Mirror etc all weighing in to condemn
the ‘revisionist’ Hirsch for daring to contemplate meddling with British
history. There is not much of a debate going on in all this discussion – the commentary
is all pretty much one sided and Hirsch’s proposal is uniformly ridiculed. The
strength of the reaction to Hirsch’s suggestion makes it abundantly clear that
the past is integral to the British view of the present and the dead crucial to
our understanding of the living. Would anyone seriously argue that the material legacy of our imperial past, the
statues, buildings, street names and so on do not represent imperial propaganda? Was not glorification of the
empire was the whole point in putting them up in the first place? And if that
is the case how should we approach these relics of the past in the Britain of
today?
 |
| Nelson toppled - illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck for Afua Hirsch's article in the Guardian |