“At St Anne’s, a
rather remarkable drawing reveals that Hawksmoor toyed with the idea of placing
a pair of pyramids atop the church’s east end. A lone pyramid standing in the
churchyard is often said to have been one of those intended for this purpose.”
Owen
Hopkins ‘From the Shadows: The Architecture and Afterlife of Nicholas Hawksmoor.’
“From the
padlocked gates of another Hawksmoor masterpiece, St Anne’s. Here, it’s not
just, as has been the case for many years, that the doors of the church are
closed; I mean the grounds, benches, gravel walks, stacked gravestones, are
forbidden to us. No sanctuary. Every point of access secured. You can press
your face against the bars, like James Mason in Haggerston Park, or John
Rokesmith in Our Mutual Friend, when he came up against this same ‘great iron
gate’ and saw himself as ‘a spirit that was once a man’. The white pyramid
depicted by Hablot Browne in his engraving of the churchyard is beyond our
reach. The author of sensationalist ‘yellow peril’ fictions, Sax Rohmer, had a
particular interest in this pyramid. It was known to his evil genius, Fu
Manchu, with his fiendish plots and intimacy with London’s riverine quarters,
its extensive subterranea. A panel in the pyramid gave entry to a network of
underground tunnels.”
Iain
Sinclair ‘The Olympics scam.’
Iain
Sinclair’s 40 year obsession with the Limehouse pyramid started with ‘Lud Heat’
in 1975 and continued right up his most recent book, ‘The Last London’ in 2017.
All his writings between are littered
with references to the pyramid in the churchyard of St Anne’s including ‘Light’s
Out For the Territory’, ‘Liquid City’ (which includes an excellent Marc Atkins photo of it) and ‘Ghost
Milk’. In ‘Lud Heat’ he sets out the
theory that 8 churches built by Nicolas Hawksmoor along with a number of obelisks
and pyramids (St Anne’s foremost amongst them) dotted around east London form a
sacred geometry of power lines in the shape of an ancient Egyptian Hieroglyph; “Eight
churches give us the enclosure, the shape of fear; ... erected over a fen of
undisclosed horrors, white stones laid upon the mud and dust". This ‘enclosure’ covers the ancient city and
its Roman temples dedicated to Mithras, its plague pits and cemeteries, its
prisons and places of execution and the scenes of its most notorious crimes,
the Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1811 and the Whitechapel murders, the Jack the
Ripper killings, of 1888. Peter Ackroyd later exploited Sinclair’s outré theory
to much greater commercial effect in ‘Hawksmoor’ and Sinclair never seems to
have got over the shock of seeing Peter Ackroyd and Melvyn Bragg resplendent in
pinstripe suits, posing in front of the Limehouse pyramid on the South Bank
Show and discussing Ackroyd’s stratospheric sales figures and his critical and
popular acclaim (he was more forgiving though of his friend Alan Moore’s use of
the Hawksmoor black legend in ‘From Hell’). The St Anne’s pyramid features on at least two
cover designs for ‘Lud Heat’.
Despite
all the portentous omphalos symbolism invested in the pyramid I had always
assumed that it was merely a standard monument, a hyper inflated grave marker,
and that it would carry an inscription recording whose memorial it was. Not untypically of churchyard and cemetery pyramids
it even has a coat of arms complete with what looks like a unicorn; high social
status goes hand in hand with being buried inside or beneath pyramids, from the
pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the landed gentry of the 18th century
and the haut bourgeoisie of Victorian England .
But the only inscription, engraved above the armorial crest, are the
mysterious words ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’. Some accounts claim these were once also
carved in Hebrew characters further down the pyramid and many see all this as
evidence that it is somehow linked to the Masons. The pyramid is built of Portland Stone and in
pristine condition would have been almost white, like St Anne’s itself, but it
is now weathered and covered in a velvety layer of dark green moss. Whatever
the pyramid is, it is not a memorial. It doesn’t seem likely to be a secret
masonic symbol either. Most commentators
think the pyramid was part of Hawksmoor’s original design for St Anne’s and was
perhaps intended to top the tower. It
isn’t really big enough to cap the tower but possibly it was meant to be set up
on some other part of the building. Hawksmoor certainly liked to idiosyncratically
incorporate eclectic classical elements into his buildings, the portico based
on the Temple of Dionysus at Baalbeck and the stepped tower of St George’s in
Bloomsbury and the six copies of a Roman sacrificial altar that top the tower
of St George’s in the East are examples. And he liked pyramids – he designed and
built one at Castle Howard for the Earl of Carlisle in 1728, the year after
work was finished at St Anne’s. It does seem likely then that the pyramid was
made for Hawksmoor for use as an architectural feature but that he then had
second thoughts and with no where better to put it, it ended up in the
churchyard.  |
| The pyramid as photographed by Marc Atkins for 'Liquid City'. |
On
Good Friday (29 March) 1850 Hawksmoor’s masterpiece was completely gutted by
fire (and to add insult to injury many newspaper accounts of the blaze credited
Sir Christopher Wren with being the architect). At 7am that morning a man
called William Rumbold, whose job was to light the stoves and see to the
heating of the church, let himself into the building as usual and got on with
lighting the furnaces in readiness for the holiday services. At half past eight
he noticed a strong smell of burning and when he went outside into the
churchyard he saw smoke billowing from the roof. He immediately ran to the
house of the beadle George Coningham which was only a hundred yards or so away
in Church Lane. The two men ran back to the church, Coningham pausing only briefly
to ask someone to call the fire brigade, where they climbed to the belfry and
rather recklessly opened a door from the organ loft into the roof space. They
were immediately beaten back by flames and smoke. With no other means of
raising the alarm both men grabbed bell ropes and began to toll the church
bells to attract attention. The Reverend George Roberts soon arrived on the
scene along with the residents of the immediate neighbourhood and with no fire engine
and no water the vicar and a party of gentlemen decided the only thing to do
was to try and save as much of the church furniture and parish records as they
could. The party managed to save all the
registers and had just removed the large central chandelier outside when the
burning roof collapsed into the nave and
stopped any further efforts at salvage. It was only at this point that Fire
Chief Braidwood and his officers finally appeared, probably to stand open
mouthed for a few moments as they watched the conflagration completely destroy
the church. Chief Braidwood sagely announced that there was no hope of saving
the church interior and set his men to plying their hoses over what was left
standing of the building. At 9.15 the four clocks in the church tower stopped
moving and the flag pole at the top of the steeple fell into the burning nave.
The fire raged on for a further two hours watched by a growing crowd of curious
EastEnders. According to the Illustrated London News:
Nothing could be
more complete than the destruction of the interior fittings of the church. The
oak pews and gallery were entirely consumed; the organ stood for some time,
until the pipes were gradually melted by the intense heat. The altar windows,
of painted glass, representing the Sermon on the Mount, was soon destroyed; as
were all the monuments and hatchments upon the walls, except tablet to the
memory of a lady named Blyth: this memorial, to the left of the altar, was but
slightly injured. When the body of the Church took fire, the flames speedily
communicated through the organ loft with the belfry the woodwork in which
having been consumed, the bells, one of which is of very large size, fell
through, and was only prevented from reaching the ground by a very strong stone
arch beneath the bell-tower….The galleries are destroyed, scarcely a mark of
their former existence being discernible; and, notwithstanding the remains of
the roof, galleries, and pews are all contained within the four walls, the mass
of rubbish scarcely rises couple of feet above the floor of the Church. The two
beams forming the support of the pulpit are almost the only pieces of timber
left in an erect position, and these are charred by the fire that a touch would
crumble them. The six magnificent pillars supporting the roof—three on each
side—are reduced to shapeless masses of calcined stone. In several places, the
iron girders forming the roof have broken through the brick arches on which the
floor of the Church rests, and penetrated the vaults.
The Illustrated London News April 6 1850
The
Illustrated London News mentions one other singular detail which is missing
from all the other accounts of the fire that I have read. It mentions, merely
in passing, that “while the fire was raging on Friday, a funeral took place in
the churchyard.” What an extraordinary picture this presents! An illustration
in the paper shows the building ablaze, the roof collapsed, every window broken,
the tower engulfed in flames and thick black smoke billowing up into the March
sky. Tiny firemen with ineffective hoses fight futilely to contain the inferno
and in the churchyard there is barely a vacant inch of turf as crowds of
curious onlookers prop themselves up against headstones or lean over chest
tombs as they watch the unfolding mayhem. In the midst of all this someone
actually conducted a burial service? Asked people to move out of the way while
pall bearers who must have struggled to tear their eyes away from the
conflagration somehow manoeuvred a coffin to a freshly dug grave? If there were
any relatives didn’t they object to the timing of the service? It seems
scarcely credible but it is true.
 |
| Page 132 of the Burial Register for St Anne's Limehouse showing the Good Friday burial of Evan Smith |
The burial register shows one burial taking
place on 29 March 1850. The ceremony was not conducted by the Reverend George
Roberts (who had carried out the previous two burials on 24 March) presumably
because he was otherwise engaged saving the parish records and the chandelier.
The officiating clergyman was Thomas Stevens (“Hey, George old man, did you by
any chance manage to save the burial register?” “I certainly did Thomas old
fruit, I’m sure its here somewhere.” “Excellent, chuck it here can you, if I
don’t bury that old sailor from Gravesend I’m going to have to refund his
daughter the ten shillings and I spent it last night at the Prospect of Whitby.”)
The deceased was the 65 year old Evan Robert Ferguson Smith who intriguingly
had died at Gardner’s Terrace Hotel in Gravesend. I presume he died whilst
staying as a guest at James Gardner’s establishment rather than keeling over in
the saloon bar as a result of one too many rum and waters and acute cirrhosis.
He was probably buried in Limehouse rather than over the other side of the
river in Gravesend because he had relative there. The Terrace Hotel still
stands today at 46 The Terrace, DA12, though you can no longer drink yourself
insensible there or pay to crash out in one of its rooms as it is a private
residence nowadays rather than a pub. The ghost of Evan Smith is still sometimes
seen loitering in the old tap room trying to cadge a bottle of pale ale.
No comments:
Post a comment