Friday 24 March 2023

'She first deceased, he for a little tried, to live without her, liked it not, and died.' John and Margaret Whiting (died 1681 & 1680) St. Bartholomew the Great, EC1

 

John and Margaret Whiting lived a stone’s throw away from the church of St Bartholomew the Great, in Long Lane. We don’t know what he did for a living but he was well to do; he paid rates of £44 a year in 1661 for a house with seven hearths. The Whitings ‘lived lovingly together in holy wedlock’ for 40 years and had 12 children, all baptised at the church. When Margaret died in 1680 the Burying in Woollen Acts of 1666, 1678 and 1680 (passed to boost the struggling English wool industry) were very much in force, requiring the dead to be buried in woollen shrouds in coffins with woollen linings. The act allowed the destitute to be buried naked but otherwise an affidavit was required from a Justice of the Peace to confirm that the law had been complied with before the parish sexton could allow a body to be interred. Failure to comply with the law drew a fine of £5. Despite this Margaret was buried in a linen shroud on 15th April 1680, presumably upon payment of the £5 penalty. John died at the age of 74 the following year and was buried on the 20th July, also in a linen shroud, for which his executors paid £2 10s. to the churchwarden for the use of the poor.

The Whitings have a marble monument in the centre bay of the north ambulatory of the church. The tablet is inscribed;

Neare this place lye buried the bodies of
John Whiting and Margaret his
wife who lived lovingly together
in holy wedlock in this parish 40
yeares and upward and dyed in peace
the said Margaret dyed on Easter
day 1680 in the 61st yeare of her age and He
dyed the 16th day of July 1681 being 74 yeares
old having had issue 12 children John
Rebecca and Sarah onely surviving.
Johannes in memoriam optimorum parentum hoc monumentum posuit.

The last two lines of the inscription are the most famous:

Shee first deceased, Hee for a little Tryd
To live without her, likd it not and dyd.

The lines are an adaption of an epitaph written by the poet Sir Henry Wotton for his nephew’s widow, though never used and printed in 1654 in the Reliquiae Wottonianae under the title Upon the Death of Sir Albert Morton's Wife;

He first deceased; she for a little tried
To live without him, liked it not, and died.

What Sir Henry did not know at the time he penned this homage to female fidelity was that his nephew’s widow was, a mere two months after her husband’s death, already planning to remarry, to Sir Edward Harwood an English army officer of the Puritan persuasion.  Only her own death prevented the new match. 


Wednesday 15 March 2023

A fortune lost and a fortune found; Hanwell and the great Westminster Cemetery Scandal of 1986.

As the dead don’t vote and they don’t pay rates they are generally of little interest to ambitious local politicians. But in 1986 the then leader of Westminster Council, Dame Shirley Porter, was much exercised by the problem of the city’s deceased, who whilst serving no discernible, useful purpose were costing the Highways and Works Committee of the City Council almost £400,000 a year to maintain in their bone-idle, eternal rest. Her efforts to resolve this problem cost the ratepayers of Westminster £4 million pounds but made small fortunes for several off shore investment companies.

Dame Shirley was the daughter of Jack Cohen, the barrow boy from Upper Clapton who became the nation’s favourite grocer, when he founded Tesco in 1931. Bright and ambitious Shirley found a position in the family firm was closed to her because her dear old dad thought that a woman’s place was in the home. When she married Leslie Porter in 1949 her father gave her new husband a job, and eventually a seat on the board, but Shirley was told to bring up the children and look after the house and to forget about making money or pursuing a career. When the children grew up she took up volunteering, becoming a magistrate in 1970 and then a Conservative councillor for the Hyde Park ward in Westminster in 1974. She became well known in local conservative circles for her campaigns to clean up Westminster’s streets (inspired by an official visit in 1976 to Leningrad and Moscow of all places; she recruited schoolchildren to march at the Lord Mayor's Show, shouldering brooms as though they were assault rifles, and goosestepping to the tune of ‘Pick up your litter and put it in the bin’) and to license sex shops in Soho. Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the 1979 general election galvanised Dame Shirley’s political ambitions and by 1983 she had managed to get herself elected Leader of the Council and had embarked on her mission to reduce excess bureaucracy and slash public spending. The Westminster dead were not going to be allowed to rest in peace for much longer.  

The council owned three large out of borough cemeteries at Hanwell in Ealing, and East Finchley and Mill Hill in Barnet. With a combined area of almost 100 acres the three cemeteries contained the bodies of around 175,000 former Londoners. As the cemeteries filled up, burial numbers dropped off and income from fees began to significantly reduce. When privately owned cemeteries become unprofitable, they generally are allowed to quietly return to nature but the Westminster cemeteries were well maintained by a small army of ground staff and a supporting bureaucracy. This was costing the boroughs ratepayers over £400,000 a year. Even worse the distance of the cemeteries from the borough they ostensibly served had, over the years loosened their appeal as final resting places to people actually living in the borough. Locals had taken over as the major customers and Westminster was underwriting the costs of what were effectively burial grounds for the residents of Ealing and Barnet.  As far as Dame Shirley was concerned, the situation was intolerable; why should the well-heeled residents of Mayfair and Belgravia be subsidising cemeteries to bury the rate payers of W5, EN5 and N20? Approaches to Ealing and Barnet Council’s failed; they were not interested in taking on the responsibility.

As far as Dame Shirley could see, there was only one possible solution, to this intractable problem; privatisation. But who would want to buy a cemetery that was losing money? To make the sale more palatable to potential buyers it was decided to competitively price them. After much debate it was decided that 5 pence per cemetery was about the right price. To sweeten the deal three lodge houses, a plant nursery, 12 acres of grazing land, a foreman’s flat and a car park were added as extra’s, priced at 70 pence. So the whole lot, 100 acres of cemetery plus the extras, was going, going, gone for the princely sum of 85 pence. But there a last-minute hitch, the council were unable to evict a cemetery worker from the lodge at East Finchley and had to withdraw it from the sale. They refused to drop the sale price from 85 pence though; instead, they paid the buyer £70,000 in compensation.  On the day the sale completed, the purchaser, Bestwood Property Ltd. (registered in Cyprus) paid Westminster 85 pence and the Council paid Bestwood £70,000. Bestwood hung onto their new purchase for less than 24 hours before selling it on to another off shore company, this one controlled by controversial developer John Whybrow (later jailed for fraud in an unrelated case) for £1.25 million. Within a few hours Whybrow had sold the cemeteries on again for £1.75 million. The sales continued, the car park, the nursery and the grazing land were all sold off for redevelopment, the lodges and flat as residential properties. Upkeep of the cemeteries came to a complete halt as Westminster had failed to give itself the powers to oblige the new purchasers to maintain their new investment. Disgruntled relatives of the deceased formed WAR – the Westminster Association of Relatives – and began pressurising the council to buy back the cemeteries. The Westminster Labour party complained vociferously and brought in the District Auditor. By 1990 the District Auditor had determined that the sale of the cemeteries was unlawful and the council had no alternative but to repurchase them from their latest off shore owners. In 1990 the council paid £4.25 million just for the cemeteries, the 15 pence part of the original sale. The additional items, the lodges, car park, plant nursery and even the crematorium at East Finchley were all gone for good.    

Not content with having caused the Cemetery scandal Dame Shirley went on to involve herself an even murkier controversy involving the selling off of publicly owned assets, this time council flats in the ‘homes for votes’ scandal, an attempt to gerrymander in marginal wards of the council to make them more likely to vote conservative. When the District Auditor found the sale of homes to be illegal Dame Shirley and five other councillors were surcharged £31.6 million. The battle over the surcharges went through the courts; the original decision was overturned by the court of appeal in 1999 but reinstated by the House of Lords in 2001. By then the amount owed in surcharges had risen to £43 million but Dame Shirley had long gone, she resigned from the council in 1993 and moved to Israel taking her £70 million pound fortune with her, promptly redistributing it amongst her family in secret trusts and off shore accounts to keep it out of the clutches of the ratepayers of Westminster. In 2004 she reached agreement with Westminster to repay just £12 million of the £43 owed.        

Today Hanwell Cemetery is firmly back under the control of Westminster Council. The cemetery lodge on Uxbridge Road is still a private residence. It was designed by borough architect Robert Jerrard, and Meller and Parsons describe it as “a very substantial house, the largest lodge in London, which carries a high relief sculpture of St George above the main door.” It was last sold in October 2018, according to Rightmove, for £1,110,000. Apart from this there is little trace of the cemetery's turbulent recent past. Once you are in through the gates and past the lodge the first thing you see is the impressively large, neoclassical Arama Mausoleum which was apparently built in 1989, right in the middle of the cemetery scandal. This is the last resting place of the mysterious Leon Andre Arama, who was born in Marseilles on 12 Dec 1919 and died in Nice on 16 Jan 1987. I can find out very little about Leon or his family other that he joined the free French Army in Tangier in January 1943. Presumably after the war he moved to London and was extremely successful in whatever career he followed; mausoleums of this size are very expensive. Other than that, I have been able to discover absolutely nothing about him.

The cemetery was originally opened in 1854 as a new burial ground for St. George’s, Hanover Square. When General William Steuart donated land for a new church in Hanover Square in 1721, the plot was too small to accommodate a church yard. The new, very fashionable, parish was obliged to acquire a burial ground in Mount Street, a ten-minute stroll away from the church in the direction of Hyde Park. This soon filled up and by 1765 the vestry bought land for a second burial ground half an hour away, to the north of Bayswater Road. Both grounds were closed on public health grounds by the passing of the Metropolitan Internment Act of 1853 and in 1854 the Burial Board of St George’s opened a spacious new ground 9 miles away on the Uxbridge Road in Hanwell. Meller and Parson’s say that “there is, as you would expect from a wealthy borough, a sense of opulence about the cemetery which is still very well maintained,” but add that “surprisingly few” of the 100,000 or burials here “have been commemorated by remarkable monuments…. Stone angels in every imaginable posture are the favourite unimaginative motif, frequently adorning tombs of the innumerable retired colonial gentry, soldiers, planters and missionaries who are buried here.”

In the middle of the cemetery is a large memorial, unveiled in 1950, to 200 civilians who died in the blitz during the second world war. The most famous name on the memorial belongs to Al Bowlly the singer. Bowlly was born in 1898 in Lourenço Marques, the capital of the Portuguese colony of Mozambique (now renamed Maputo) to a Greek father and a Lebanese mother. He was brought up in South Africa and began a professional career in the mid 1920’s in a band that toured the colonies in Rhodesia, India and the East Indies. By 1929 he was in London and in a four-year period he recorded over 500 songs including ‘Love is the sweetest thing’, ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ and ‘Midnight, the Stars and You’. For a while it looked like Bowlly was going to be a hige star but problems with his voice disrupted his recording and performing and his popularity slowly began to wane. On 16 April 1941, he had been performing at the Rex Cinema in High Wycombe. He took the last train home to his flat at 32 Duke Street in St James, and was killed at ten past three in the morning when German parachute mine exploded outside his flat, blew his bedroom door off its hinges and across the room giving him a fatal head injury. He was buried with little ceremony in a mass grave at the cemetery. When I visited someone had left a framed photograph of the singer above his name on the memorial.

A story from the York Herald of Saturday 19 June 1875. There are longer versions of the same story in other newspapers but all the most interesting details are present in this shorter verion. The thing that caught my eye was the accusation of using dead babies as pillows for the heads of adult corpses to avoid having to pay the cemetery a burial fee. The allegation was made by a rival undertaker who seems to have also paid for the prosecution but that does not necessarily mean the story was not true:

Extraordinary Disposal of Dead Bodies. — Thomas Cocks, an undertaker, was charged at the Westminster Police-court, on Monday, "with unlawfully procuring, to be buried, the body of the deceased child of Frederick Harvey, as if it had been still-born." The child only lived six hours, and the defendant agreed to bury the body in a proper manner for 18s. A coffin was sent to the house, and the corpse taken away, but a grave certificate could never be obtained, and nothing was known of the interment at the Hanwell Cemetery. It was suspected that the body had either been disposed of for anatomical purposes or used as a pillow for the head of a dead adult. The undertaker, in reply, said he did not attend the funeral personally, and he supposed his men had "squared" the grave-diggers to bury the body as that of a still-born child. Summonses for 27 similar cases were granted against the undertaker, and one against the manager of the cemetery, after which the inquiry was adjourned. It was elicited in the course of the inquiry that an opposition undertaker was supplying the principal portion of the funds for the prosecution.

Tuesday 7 March 2023

Behold London Forever; Peter Jackson (1922-2003) Highgate West Cemetery

Surely the eye-catching headstone of illustrator Peter Jackson in Highgate Cemetery was designed by himself? The author of “London Is Stranger Than Fiction”, a comic strip which ran in the London Evening News every Wednesday from 1949 to 1980, was, according to his obituary in the Independent “a man of many talents – antiquarian, artist, author, bookbinder, broadcaster, sculptor – but his passion was London. For more than 50 years he was a magpie pecking away in antiquarian bookshops and salerooms. Prints, maps, drawings, books, ceramics, medals, playbills and ephemera associated with London were bought, catalogued and put in files or carefully mounted and stored in cabinets in his large house in west London.”

Peter Jackson at home with his collection in 1991, from the Illustrated London News

His biography makes him sound like a character from Michael Moorcock’s ‘Mother London’; he was born in Brighton on the 4th March 1922, where his father was the manager of the local Gaumont picture house. He was educated at Hove High School which he left at the age of 16 to move to London, working as a messenger boy for Gaumont British. When called up for the army in World War II he was rejected as medically unfit because of his poor eyesight. Instead, he worked by day as a window dresser for British Home Store and at night as an air raid warden for Civil Defence. Somehow he still managed to find time to study at the Willesden School of Art (and to become the last pupil of the great Italian illustrator Fortunino Matania). After the war he became a full-time illustrator, adapting classic novels, Ivanhoe, The Three Musketeers and the Hunchback of Notre Dame amongst others, as comic strips for serial publication in newspapers.  In 1948 the editor of the Evening News was looking for someone to produce a cartoon strip in the style of Ripley’s Believe it or Not, based on curious and little known facts about London. Jackson sent in a few drawings and was summoned to Carmelite House to see the editor. He was asked if he knew anything about London history and he responded with disarming candour "Erm, nothing at all, I'm afraid." Despite this he was given the job on a three week trial  that turned into a 31 year run and which made London into a lifetime’s obsession. In an interview with the Fulham Chronicle he told them that “when I started I knew nothing about London. I ransacked the shelves of public libraries to learn about the strange and curious in London. Then they put a piece in the paper asking people to send in their London stories and I was given the job of sorting through them.” Things changed quickly; when his first collection of ‘London Is Stranger than Fiction’ strips were published in book form in 1951 the introduction claimed that “He will work for days on research into a single cartoon incident, poring over old books in the British Museum or following a trail on an ancient map through the labyrinth of modern London.”

London is stranger than fiction for 5 July 1950 included the mummified head of Holy Trinity Minories

Jackson became a great collector of London related material. In an article in the Illustrated London News of 01 September 1991, his friend Denise Silvester-Carr said that “for 40 years he has been a magpie pecking away in antiquarian bookshops and salerooms. Prints, maps, drawings, books, ceramics, medals, playbills and ephemera associated with the history and topography of London have been bought, catalogued and now mellow in files, yellow on bookshelves or are carefully mounted and stored in cabinets on four storeys of his ivy-clad Victorian house…. Very little has escaped his attention or collection. Curators and department heads from national museums cast covetous eyes at the 25,000 prints when they come to inquire about missing links in their holdings.” His collections yielded several books on London, two of them produced in collaboration with an old colleague, Felix Barker the theatre critic of the Evening News; London: 2,000 years of a city and its people (1974) and A History of London in Maps (1990). Alone he authored books on London Bridge, Walks in Old London and George Scharf's London.

After a lifetime as a bachelor, he unexpectedly married Valerie Harris in 1995 at the age of 73. He died on 2nd May 2003.

And on 20 September 1950 we get a quiz about the Bligh memorial