The Sewing Machine, the Umbrella and the Operating Table; a rainy afternoon in Buffalo

 

I had few, if any, preconceived notions about Buffalo; in all honesty, until relatively recently I didn’t even know where it was. If I had been asked to guess, I would have fallen into the obvious trap of assuming it had been named after Bison bison, the American buffalo, and gone for somewhere on the great plains, in Kansas, Dakota or Wyoming. I would never have guessed upper New York state, virtually on the Canadian border. All the authorities agree that the city took its name from Buffalo Creek (now upgraded from 'creek' to 'river' along the majority of its course) but there is still some controversy about how the creek acquired its name.  Some say the French originally referred to it as le beau fleuve (the beautiful river) or le rivière au boiblanc, names then corrupted by local non-French speakers to ‘bow-flo’ and ‘bo-blow’ and eventually anglicised to Buffalo. Others believe that it is a corruption of the original name bestowed by the indigenous Seneca people of the area, or a corruption of a mistranslation by Mohawk or Iroquois translators of the Senecan name during the negotiations for the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. No one seems to give much credence to the idea that Buffalo is named after the bison even though it is generally acknowledged that herds of them once roamed the area; in 1718 the Governor General of New France, Philippe de Rigaud, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, noted that ‘Buffaloes abound on the south shore of the Lake Erie, but not on the north.' And in October 1911 the Times & Democrat of Orangeburg, South Carolina reported  that ‘a herd of ten thousand buffalo used to visit a lick near Onondaga lake, NY…. Settlers killed 700 there in one year. In 1730 the last buffalo east of the Alleghenies was killed. In 1897 the last wild buffalo in the country, outside the preserves, was killed. Goodbye, bison.’ So why the reluctance to accept the obvious explanation that Buffalo was named after the majestic American bison? Who knows. 

Why did we visit a city we knew nothing about? Because of its proximity to Toronto, a city we paid our second visit to a couple of weeks ago. We thought it might make an interesting side trip as it is just a hundred miles or so away; a two-hour journey on the slow GO train from Union Station in Toronto that crawls around the rim of Lake Ontario to Niagara Falls. From there you can pay a dollar toll in US Mint coins (no debased Canadian dollars allowed) and a $30 dollar I-94 entry fee (and don’t forget to apply in advance for your $40 ESTA) and cross into the United States on foot, across the Rainbow Bridge. There are fine views of the Falls from the bridge and in the middle, you can straddle the border and leave your left limbs in Canada while your right limbs stand in the States. Once you have dealt with the formalities at US Customs and Border Protection, Buffalo is just a short but dispiriting Uber ride away down interstate 1-90, the Niagara Thruway, crossing back over the Niagara River to Grand Island, with its Amusement Park and golf course closed down for the winter, then back over again onto the left bank of the river and down into Buffalo, skirting the shore of Lake Erie. Downtown Buffalo came into view under an overcast sky as we slowed down to exit the freeway; I could see a clutch of interesting looking buildings scattered around the city centre, a hulking art deco red sandstone skyscraper topped by a Moorish dome, a beaux-arts white tower, a neoclassical two towered skyscraper topped by two large brass statues and various neo-gothic spires and turrets. 

The Uber drove us away from downtown, up Michigan Avenue to our hotel, through a bleak landscape of shops, lots and religious buildings; tire shops, body shops, used car lots, low rise office blocks with outsize parking lots, endless weed covered vacant lots, converted factories, a boarded-up Baptist church, the concrete spire of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints and the steeply pitched roofs of the Church of St John the Baptist. The gloomy view from our eighth-floor room looked out over the roofs of the Roswell Park Cancer Centre, back towards a now distant downtown. The horizon was a slate grey straight line that it took me a few seconds to realise was Lake Erie. The only sign of activity was a gang of roofers on the flat roof of the hospital manoeuvring rigid 6-foot square grey tiles into place.  A sudden fierce cloud burst sent them scurrying for cover from the driving rain. Half an hour later we were again in a taxi heading back down Michigan Avenue when the late afternoon sun broke through the clouds, pouring golden light onto downtown. By the time the taxi dropped us off at the bottom of Pearl Street the light was beautiful; we wandered down Pearl Street admiring the Liberty Building in the distance, pausing at the intersection with Church Street to admire the Guaranty building on the corner and the Old Post Office to the east and Old Erie County Hall to the west.  On wet pavements, plastered with autumn leaves, reflecting a wounded sky of bruised blacks, greys and yellows, bleeding reds, and scar tissue pinks and whites, we made our way down the diagonal of Niagara Street to Niagara Square, the McKinley monument and the extraordinary Buffalo City Hall.

President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo on the 6th September 1901 and died of his infected wound 8 days later. The position of being President was truly dangerous in the second half of the 19th century, there were 9 of them in the 36 years between Lincoln’s death 1865 and McKinley’s in 1901 and a third of them were assassinated whilst in office, James A. Garfield being the third man. Whether this period represents the apogee of political violence in America, or the nadir of presidential security, is a moot point.  McKinley was in Buffalo visiting the Pan-American Exposition. He was a popular president; in 1898 he had declared war on Spain triggering a short global conflict between an emerging superpower and an imperial power on its last legs. In just five months the Spanish army and navy were humiliatingly routed in the Pacific and the Caribbean and Spain was forced to hand over sovereignty of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the US and to allow them to establish a protectorate over Cuba. When the public queued up to greet President McKinley at a public reception in the Exposition’s Temple of Music, one of those in line was a 28 wireworker and would be anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz was born to Polish parents in Detroit in 1873. He had been drawn to socialism following the economic crash of 1893 when living in Cleveland and the rolling he worked for had closed down. He struggled to make a living in the difficult economic conditions of 1890’s America and in 1898 he went to live with his father on a farm in Ohio and became a recluse. If he was alive today Czolgosz would be one of those individuals who sleeps in the day and spends all night in his bedroom surfing the internet and stoking his resentment at the injustices of the world. When he finally abandoned his self-imposed exile from the world in early 1901 it was to try and insinuate himself into the most extreme political activists of the period, the anarchists. He was not entirely successful in this; his blatant desire to be involved in some sort of political extremism made him an object of suspicion to the very people he wanted to join. Ironically, just a few days before he murdered McKinley, the radical newspaper Free Society issued a warning about Czolgosz to its readers, “The attention of the comrades is called to another spy,” the paper said, “he is well dressed, of medium height, rather narrow shoulders, blond and about 25 years of age… His demeanor is of the usual sort, pretending to be greatly interested in the cause, asking for names or soliciting aid for acts of contemplated violence. If this same individual makes his appearance elsewhere the comrades are warned in advance, and can act accordingly.”

As he stood in line to greet the President, Czolgosz was hiding a .32 calibre Iver Johnson revolver beneath a handkerchief. When he reached the front of the line, he slapped away McKinley’s extended hand and shot him twice at point blank range in the stomach. One of the bullets ricocheted off a button and lodged itself in McKinley’s jacket, the other wounded him severely in the lower abdomen. As Czolgosz readied himself to pull the trigger for a third time the man behind him in the queue struck him roughly in the neck and knocked the gun out of his hand. Other members of the crowd surrounded Czolgosz and began punching and kicking him so vigorously that the wounded McKinley felt obliged to step in and ask them to go easy on him. At first McKinley’s doctors thought that the President’s injuries were non-fatal but within a few days he had developed gangrene in the wound and by the 14th September he was dead. A grand jury indicted Czolgosz with first-degree murder on September 16th and he went on trial at the State Courthouse in Buffalo on the 23rd. Czolgosz, who not only refused to co-operate with the prosecution but also with his own defence team, pleaded guilty to the charges against him but was overruled by the Judge who insisted that a not guilty plea be entered to allow the full trial to go ahead. The prosecution case just took two days to deliver, the defence a mere 27 minutes, the time it took Czolgosz’s lawyer to deliver a half-hearted plea for clemency to the jury and judge, claiming that his client was insane. The jury took even less time to deliberate; they were back in the courtroom less than half an hour after being dismissed to consider their verdict. Czolgosz was executed at Mount Auburn penitentiary on October 29th 1901, by being given three shocks of 1800 volts in the electric chair. Before being buried an autopsy revealed that he had had bad teeth and chancroids on his genitals, most likely the result of a sexually transmitted disease. A death mask was taken and his body was buried in the prison cemetery after sulphuric acid had been poured into his coffin to ensure that it decomposed quickly. His clothes and possessions were burnt in the prison incinerator. 

The McKinley monument in the centre of Niagara Square is a 69-foot-high obelisk of marble from Italy and Vermont, standing on a 24-foot-high base, which bears an inscription saying ‘this shaft was erected by the State of New York to honor the memory of William McKinley, twenty-fifth President of the United States of America.’ After a list of his political achievements the inscription carries on, ‘William McKinley died in Buffalo September 14, 1901 victim of a treacherous assassin who shot the President as he was extending to him the hand of courtesy.’  There are four lions surrounding the base, each 12 feet long and weighing 12 tons, they were sculpted by Alexander Phimister Proctor of New York City and based on Sultan, a Barbary lion who, along with a  female named Bedouin Maid, was presented to the Bronx Zoological Park by Nelson Robinson in 1903 (just three years before the zoo put the Congolese pygmy Ota Benga on display in the same cage as an orang-utan). The monument cost $190,000 to build and was dedicated on September 6, 1907, the 6th anniversary of the shooting. Over 100,000 people turned out in a heavy downpour to see the dedication service.

The imposing hulk of the City Hall stands in front of the McKinley monument, a 32 storey Art Deco skyscraper completed in 1931 to replace the Old Erie County Hall which stands a few hundred yards away on Franklin Street. The Old County Hall is an impressive building in its own right, designed by Andrew Jackson Warner and completed in 1875, it is pure Victorian Gothic, four storeys with a 270 foot clock tower with a spired roof and louvered belfry sporting four allegorical classical figures representing Commerce, Agriculture, the Mechanical Arts and Justice. The Old County Hall draws its authority from the past but the City Hall was thrillingly modern at the time it was built, like something out of Fritz Laing’s Metropolis. The cost of building the new City Hall, apparently calculated to the last cent, is always given, with suspicious accuracy as $6,851,546.85. The architects were George J. Dietel and John Wade and the builder the John W. Cowper Company. According to Buffalo City Council what the architects aimed for in their design of the building “was to accomplish in stone, steel and glass what the ancient Greeks did in stone and timber.” The building is littered with symbolic art works, inside and out, from the 10 columned portico at ground level with its frieze by Albert T. Stewart showing a central figure based on Michelangelo’s Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel, flanked on either side by figures representing Buffalo’s commercial, industrial and cultural life, right up to the Moorish inspired octagonal drum and glass dome which tops the 398 foot high structure. The glass roof of the dome and the exterior of the tower were illuminated at night, floodlights within the dome turning the tower into a glowing beacon. External floodlights at ground made sure that the building made its presence felt day and night, dominating the skyline and the shoreline of Lake Erie.  

There are two buildings which dominate downtown Buffalo, City Hall being one, and the 100-meter-tall Liberty Building being the other. Completed in 1925 for the Liberty Bank (which had been forced to change its name by world events in 1918, it was originally the German American Bank but World War One tarnished the brand name by association with the Hun).  The neo-classical office block with its distinctive two towers topped by 36-foot-high states of Liberty facing East and West, enjoyed a short reign as Buffalo’s biggest building until City Hall was completed 6 years later. The architect was English, Alfred Charlkes Bossom, born in 1881 the son of a stationer from Islington who was a pupil at   St. Thomas's Charterhouse School, in the City, and studied architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the Royal Academy of Arts.  As a 23-year-old newly qualified architect Bossom decided to seek his fortune in the US and went to work for Carnegie Steel in Pittsburgh. He became a very successful architect specialising in the construction of skyscrapers and in 1910 he married the daughter of a New York banker. He returned to England in 1926, determined to educate his sons in the English public school system. He abandoned architecture for politics and was elected MP for Maidstone in 1931. His private life took a tragic turn when his wife and eldest son were killed in an air crash in 1934. He remained in office until 1959, long enough to encounter the conservative candidate for the neighbouring constituency of Dartford in the 1950 and 1951 general elections, Margaret Roberts and her fiancée Denis Thatcher. When the couple married in 1951 the wedding reception was held at Bossom’s Chelsea home. He became something of a mentor to the newly married Mrs Thatcher, supporting her attempt to win the Orpington by-election in 1955 and to win the conservative candidacy for the safe seat of Finchley in 1958. Bossom stood down as an MP for the general election of 1959, in which Mrs Thatcher was finally elected to the Commons, but was a life peer. His son Clive later served as Mrs Thatcher’s Parliamentary Private Secretary when she became a junior minister in the Treasury in 1966.  

Standing on the corner of the intersection of West Huron Street and Main Street you get a wonderful view of the ‘Goldome’ building, the 1900 Buffalo Savings Bank, and the 1912 Niagara Mohawk Building, now generally known as the Electric Tower.

The Lost Memorials of London; the shrine of St Erkenwald, Old St Pauls Cathedral

St. Erkenwald (c630-693) founder of Barking abbey, Abbott of Chertsey and Bishop of London, once a great English saint, is now almost forgotten. His magnificent shrine stood behind the high altar in Old St Pauls and, according to Walter Thornbury in Volume 1 of Old & New London (1878) was “a source of wealth and power to the cathedral”;

Foremost among the relics were two arms of St. Mellitus (miraculously enough, of quite different sizes). Behind the high altar—what Dean Milman justly calls "the pride, glory, and fountain of wealth" to St. Paul's—was the body of St. Erkenwald, covered with a shrine which three London goldsmiths had spent a whole year in chiselling; and this shrine was covered with a grate of tinned iron. The very dust of the chapel floor, mingled with water, was said to work instantaneous cures. On the anniversary of St. Erkenwald the whole clergy of the diocese attended in procession in their copes. When King John of France was made captive at Poictiers, and paid his orisons at St. Paul's, he presented four golden basins to the high altar, and twenty-two nobles at the shrine of St. Erkenwald. Milman calculates that in 1344 the oblation-box alone at St. Paul's produced an annual sum to the dean and chapter of £9,000. Among other relics that were milch cows to the monks were a knife of our Lord, some hair of Mary Magdalen, blood of St. Paul, milk of the Virgin, the hand of St. John, pieces of the mischievous skull of Thomas à Becket, and the head and jaw of King Ethelbert. These were all preserved in jewelled cases.

Little is known about Erkenwald’s early life. He is said to be of royal descent, of the house of King Offa, though as there were two King Offas, one in Essex, one in East Anglia, both areas lay claim to him, as does Kent and Lincolnshire. He is also said to have studied under Archbishop Mellitus of Canterbury, who was a member of the Augustinian mission sent by the Pope Gregory to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons in 596 (this may seem unlikely as Mellitus died in 624 but this was, after all, the age of miracles so no one can be sure). In the year 666 Erkenwald founded the Abbey of Chertsey in Surrey for men and Barking in Essex for women. His sister, the equally saintly Ethelburga was made Abbess at Barking and a third saint, Hildelith was brought in to instruct Ethelburga. In 675 Erkenwald was created Bishop of London by Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury with the encouragement of King Sæbbi of Essex.  Sæbbi was also later made a saint but Theodore was never elevated to sainthood, perhaps because a long running dispute over theological doctrine with Saint Wilfred which Erkenwald spent much time and energy trying to resolve. The two men were eventually reconciled shortly before Theodores death and Erkenwald is seen as a central figure in the unification of the early English church. He repaired a Roman gate in London’s walls, which is still known today as Bishopsgate, and he contributed significantly to the construction of the first St Pauls. In 691 Bishop Erkenwald, and his successors, were granted the manor of Fulham by Bishop Tyrhtilus of Hereford, now the site of Fulham Palace, the official residence of the Bishops of London from the 11th century until 1973.

St Erkenwald as depicted in the Chertsey Beviary

The miracles of St Erkenwald began in a small way when he was still alive. He was in the habit of preaching regularly to the wild woodsmen of Hertfordshire from a two wheeled horse drawn chariot. When one of the wheels of the chariot came off, Erkenwald was not thrown to the ground as you would expect, because a miraculous invisible wheel took its place, allowing the chariot to run on smoothly. But it was at his death that miracles began in earnest, as documented in the 12th century Miracula Sancti Erkenwaldi by Arcoid, a canon of London and the anonymous Vita sancti Erkenwaldi. Erkenwald’s death at Barking Abbey in 696; literally took place in the odour of sanctity, those present at his expiry said “a most marvellous fragrance and sweetest odour filled the cell where he lay”, the air aromatic with the scent of civet musk, ambergris and sandalwood. The monks of Chertsey and the Canons of St Paul’s both claimed the body of the saint. While they argued a group of commoners from London placed the corpse on a bier surrounded by lit candles and set off for the capital. Before they could cross the river Roding they were caught by the Chertsey monks and the St Paul’s canons and a vicious squabble broke out. Suddenly dark clouds rolled across the sky and a storm broke out. A squally wind blew out the candles on the bier and the river inexplicably burst its banks, rising rapidly until the monks, canons and commoners were standing in a lake of water that came up to their knees. Someone shouted that they all needed to pray to the Lord and beg forgiveness. As the prayers began the rain stopped, the wind died, the clouds departed, the candles on the bier relit themselves and the waters retreated leaving a clear path across the bed of the river. Taking it as a sign from God the entire crowd set off for London, pausing only at the river Lea to marvel at a second miracle when the waters of that river also parted, Red Sea like, to allow them to cross into Tower Hamlets and onto St Pauls. 

The old gate tower in Barking; all that remains of Barking Abbey where St Erkenwald died. 

Erkenwald is credited with many other miracles, the usual restoring health to the sick, liberty to prisoners, sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and making the halt and lame walk again. If he was in a good mood his response to anyone failing to show him due deference and respect would be to visit a sickness upon them until they repented and prayed for forgiveness, like the man who prevented his wife celebrating his feast day or the painter who violated his festival. If he was in a less forgiving mood his response to anyone who desecrated his shrine or his memory was sudden death, including a man who scorned his feast day and a ‘drunken buffoon’ who went to sleep inside his shrine. And when St Pauls was destroyed by fire in 1087 the saints tomb remained miraculously untouched by the flames. His most celebrated miracle is detailed in the 14th century alliterative poem St. Erkenwald, probably written by the anonymous poet who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poem recounts how a magnificent ancient marble tomb inscribed with golden runes was discovered during the construction of Old St Pauls. When the tomb is opened a perfectly preserved body dressed in sumptuous robes is found. When Bishop Erkenwald is summoned to see the extraordinary sight, he falls to his knees and begins to pray. As he performs a mass over the body it begins to moves, animated by a ‘goste-lyfe’ and miraculously holds a conversation with the saint, telling him that he lived during the reign of King Belinus (before the Roman conquest of Britain), and that he was a judge but not just any judge, he was that rarity, a just judge, famed for his wise and impartial judgements. As a righteous pagan his soul is trapped in Limbo, unable to be received in heaven. St Erkenwald weeps to hear this, his tears splash the corpse, baptising him and making him eligible to progress to heaven. As the righteous pagan’s soul is received into paradise, his mortal remains crumble to dust before a crowd of astonished onlookers.

In Shrines of British Saints (1905) James Charles Wall tells us that “Londoners were justly proud to have in their midst the entire body of their third bishop, Erkenwald; and the chapter of the cathedral church of St. Paul looked upon it as their greatest treasure. The bishop’s body had been buried in the crypt, and as we learn from the Nova Legenda Angliæ, the vault above the tomb was decorated with paintings.”  On the 14th of November, 1148, the saints body was moved to a new position behind the high altar to stand side by side with the shrine where the two arms (one shorter than the other) of St. Mellitus resided. The feretory, the portable shrine in which the saints remains were kept, was made of wood, covered with silver plate and decorated with images and 130 precious stones. In 1326 Bishop Gilbert de Segrave oversaw the removal of the remains to a new shrine, the one drawn by Weneclas Hollar 300 years later for William Dugdale’s History of St. Pauls (1658). The cathedrals records show that senior churchmen personally paid for the shrine to be enriched; canon Walter de Thorpe left all his gold rings and jewellery to be used on the shrine, bequeathing £5 to pay for the work and William de Meleford, archdeacon of Colchester, gave £40 to ornament the shrine, enough money to pay for three goldsmiths to labour on it for an entire year. The shrine was surrounded by a bronze covered iron railing 5 feet 10 inches high. The railing did not prevent the shrine being looted during the reformation. The saints were removed for safekeeping but have since been lost. The shrine itself survived until the Great Fire of London in 1666 when Old St Paul’s was razed to the ground.

Remembering the dead, post-mortem photography; the Rosi memorial, Kensal Green Cemetery

 

It doesn’t matter how much time you spend in a particular cemetery, there is always something that you haven’t seen, that you have somehow missed or overlooked. Sometimes these overlooked things are quite astonishing and, to make it worse, are hiding in plain sight.  In a post on Instagram The Architecture of Death (excellent pictures, check him out) posted a photo of a photo, a post-mortem photograph of a baby in a coffin, which sits on a memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery. Although the practice of photographing the recently dead was relatively common in the mid 19th century, post-mortem photos in cemeteries are extremely rare; I certainly don’t recall ever having seen one before, not in the UK.  But this isn’t a hangover from Victorian times, this photo was taken in the late 1920’s and was only placed on a grave in the 1970’s.

The post-mortem photo is on the grave of Giovanni and Almira Rosa who, according to the inscription on the grave, were born in Grondola, a hamlet (current population 102) near the town of Pontremoli in Tuscany in 1893 and 1900. There are no English marriage records for Giovanni Rosi and Almira Fenocchi and so they must have married in Italy, shortly before they emigrated to London. They aren’t on the 1921 census and there is no English record for their eldest daughter Divina who was born in 1921. Their second daughter Elia was born in England, in 1923, so the Rosi’s arrived in the UK between 1922. Their third daughter Lida was born in 1925 and then, probably to Giovanni’s delight, he and Almira finally had a son, Nilo, the following year. Devastatingly Nilo died the following year at the age of just 11 months. The picture taken of the dead infant was possibly the only photograph the family had of him. He was buried, almost certainly in a common grave, in St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green.

Giovanni and Almira went on to open a café at 98 Wardour Street in the 1930’s. As his daughters grew up they helped their parents in the café – their occupation is given as café assistants in the 1939 Register. When Italy entered the Second World War Giovanni was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. He was lucky, there were three Rosi’s (Guglielmo, Lodovico and Luigi) from Grondola, Pontremoli on the Arandora Star in 1940, bound for an internment camp in Canada, when it was sunk by a German U-boat with the loss of 805 passengers and crew. 486 Italian internees died (and, ironically, 175 German prisoners of war) including Guglielmo and Luigi Rosi who, given the tiny size of Grondola, were very likely related to Giovanni. While Giovanni was interned, Almira and her daughters kept the café going in wartime London.

Giovanni died in 1960 and was initially buried elsewhere, perhaps St Mary’s. When Almira died in December 1971 the family purchased two adjacent roadside plots in Kensal Green. Almira was buried first, on the 13th December 1971 and then, on the 8th July 1972, after being exhumed, Giovanni was brought to the cemetery and reburied with his wife. The memorial will date from 1972 and shows Saint Anthony of Padua holding the infant Jesus. There are photographs of Giovanni and Almira on the headstone and the three daughters took the decision to commemorate their brother Nilo, including his details and the only photo they had of him, at the bottom of the headstone. The Rosi’s unmarried daughter Elia was buried in the adjacent plot in 2016.   

Friend of China, Enemy of Oppression; Augustus Frederick Lindley (1840-1871) Kensal Green Cemetery

The epitaph on the grave of Augustus Frederick Lindley, in Kensal Green Cemetery, notes that he was a friend of China and an enemy of oppression. Although Lindley died in March 1873, the headstone is relatively modern, a rough-hewn pink granite slab bearing the signature of local stonemasons J.S. Farley but paid for by a research association of Beijing based academic historians, and unveiled in August 1981, by a representative of the People’s Republic of China. The inscription, in English and Mandarin, reads:

Augustus
Frederick
Lindley
3. February 1830
29 March 1873
Friend of China
Enemy of Oppression

献给呤唎
中国人民之友
北京太平天国历史研究会
一九八一年八月

[Dedicated to Lindley
A friend of the Chinese people
Beijing Taiping Rebellion History Research Association
August 1981] 

The Chinese may not have forgotten Lindley but the British, who barely deigned to notice him when he was alive, have let him slip into complete obscurity since his death. Although he had aristocratic and establishment connections in his background, he was illegitimate, almost certainly raised in hardship, if not complete poverty, and perhaps unsurprisingly became something of an outsider in adulthood. In mid nineteenth century England he was that very rare thing, an anti-imperialist. 

He died young, he was only 33, at his home in Upper Vernon Street, (now Prideaux Place), just off Percy Circus in Clerkenwell. He spent significant amounts of his short adult life in China and South Africa and already published 3 book, with a fourth, 'Adamantia: the truth about the South African diamond fields', already printed and about to be dispatched to bookshops. He married, for the second time, in September 1872 and left an estate worth less than £600 to console his grieving widow for a marriage that lasted a mere six months.  Although only Lindley's name is on the memorial he is not buried alone. In fact, it is not really his grave. The plot was originally purchased five years earlier by his sister Lucy and her husband, the reverend William Elisha Faulkner, to bury their young son Frederick, who had died, according to the cemetery's burial records, at the age of two years and seven months in 1868. The following year, the Faulkner's had the grave reopened again, this time to receive the body of their daughter Alice who had died in infancy. Fifteen years later, in 1891, Lindley's 78-year-old mother, Lucy Garrett was also buried there. It is difficult to believe that the Faulkner's would not have raised a headstone to commemorate their two children and Lucy's brother and mother. But if there ever was a headstone, it has long gone, and been replaced by the modern marker, which reflects the interests of the Chinese historians and only remembers Lindley and not his family.   

The natural harbour at Whampoa

Lindley was a prolific author of journalism and books based on his own experiences, but he was extremely reticent about revealing anything to do with his own background. In particular his early life has hitherto been a complete mystery and in his voluminous writings he says nothing about his origins or family. We know that at 13 he became an apprentice in the merchant navy, being indentured to John Somerville of Seaton Sluice on the 19th May 1853, for service on SS Colonist, registered at Sunderland. In 1857, when he was 17, he qualified and was registered as a second mate in the merchant service.  In 1859 he arrived in Hong Kong on the S.S. Emeu. Within a year he had abandoned his career in the merchant navy and opted for a life of freebooting adventure, taking a position on a trading steamer smuggling specie to the Taiping rebels in Shanghai.  and becoming involved with Marie, who was, says Lindley “the daughter of a rich Macanese, who was principal owner of one of the Whampoa docks, and was also Portuguese consul at that port. Her mother was dead, and her father had determined to compel her to marry a wealthy Chilianian half-caste; in fact, everything was arranged for the marriage to take place in ten days time. She hated the fellow, in spite of his dollars, which, it appeared, was her father's idol, and was resolved to suffer anything rather than submit.” Lindley saved her from her arranged marriage, with no ulterior motive of course, but gradually found himself succumbing to the lovely Marie, who “could scarcely number sixteen summers,” (Lindley was himself only 19 at the time) and even though she was “rather darker than the generality of Macao women: her complexion was a beautifully clear deep olive, the skin delicately soft.” Listing her physical charms, Lindley struggles to rise above cliché; her hair is as “dark as the raven's wing”, her nose “Grecian”, her “richly coloured” mouth “studded with teeth of pearly whiteness” and her figure “petite” and “lithe”. Her behaviour too, in Lindley’s description, is as formulaic as her appearance, being one of “those warm, impassioned temperaments of the East” to whom “love becomes as necessary as life itself”. Jealousy reduces her to “a fiery little piece of impetuosity”, and when Lindley deliberately provokes the green-eyed monster, she tries to stab him with a stiletto (alas she does not succeed). Clearly Marie adored him and after rescuing her not once, but twice, from the clutches of the dastardly ‘Chillinian’ (Lindley presumably meant ‘Chilean’) Manoel Ramon, and then subjecting her to a long, enforced separation, when he has to fulfil his duties as a naval commander for the rebels, Lindley marries her in the rebel capital Nanking, in a “quiet solemnization, with only a few friends present.”

Marie, Lindley's first wife

Lindley had no luck with matrimony, his first marriage was nearly as brief as his second. Rather recklessly he takes Marie with him on a naval expedition in the middle of the rebellion and the couple find themselves in the middle of a night attack by imperial naval forces. Outnumbered and outgunned Lindley gives the order to abandon their large fighting junk and board a smaller, faster lorcha, a boat with a western style hull and junk sails and rigging. After successfully transferring to the lorcha “I was just turning to my dear wife to hurry her below,” Lindley writes, “when a volley of musketry was poured in by the troops on board the attacking vessels. I saw my faithful friend and companion, L--, fall to the deck, but almost at the same moment, struck by a spent ball, I became senseless. I know not what period may have elapsed, but when at length I was restored to consciousness, it was but to realize the exquisite bitterness of my loss. Close to where my best and long-proved friend had fallen, lay the lifeless form of my well-loved wife, pierced by a flight of bullets.”  You would imagine that losing your spouse under such circumstances would be a traumatising event but Victorian men were made of sterner stuff, no further mention is made of Marie and Lindley carries on with his adventures as though nothing had happened. It is hard to believe that anyone, even a 19th century man. could be quite so emotionally stifled. It makes me wonder whether Marie really existed or whether she was just a figment of Lindley’s imagination.

Lindley’s short and tragic relationship with Marie is just a sub plot in his book, ‘Ti-Ping Tien-Kwoh: The History of the Ti-Ping Revolution' (1866). the work for which he is still remembered and held in such high esteem by Chinese historians of the Taiping Revolution.  The rebellion of the Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping was probably the bloodiest civil war ever seen with estimates of the dead ranging between 20 and30 million. Lindley took the side of the Taiping rebels against the imperial Qing dynasty, putting him at odds with most eminent Victorian, Major-General Charles George Gordon, of Khartoum fame, who was leading a force of imperial troops and helping to secure the eventual victory of the Emperor. In his book Lindley is very critical of the role of the British in China and in particular of General Gordon (Gordon is mentioned 97 times in the book, poor Marie, that fiery little piece of impetuosity, just 48). Although he almost certainly exaggerated both his role and his importance in the rebellion it seems certain that Lindley did became a naval commander for the rebels and took part in the Battle of Jofoolzo in 1863, the battle during which he claims Marie was killed. Lindley retuned to London in 1863 where he started to write and publish numerous books, starting with his book on the Taiping Rebellion in 1866 and followed by ‘The Log of the Fortuna: a cruise in Chinese Waters’. In 1868 he travelled to South Africa intending to prospect for gold in the Transvaal. No gold was discovered but he again found himself in an imperial dispute, this time between the British and the Boer's Orange Free State over diamond mines in Griqualand. Once back in England Lindley wrote two books 'After Ophir, or, A Search For the South African Gold Fields' and 'Adamantia: the truth about the South African diamond fields', which took the side of the Boers. He married Helen Amy Butler in September 1872 but was dead just over 6 months later. 

We know very little about Lindley’s grandfather, Captain William Lindley of the Westmorland militia, other than he was born in 1770 and made a very good marriage, in Ireland, with Harriet Murray in 1790. William’s background was obscure but Harriet’s lineage was aristocratic; her maternal grandfather was the 3rd Earl of Dunmore and her paternal great grandfather the 1st Duke of Atholl. William and Harriet had four children, three boys one girl, but their marriage foundered when William was unfaithful and the proud Harriet refused to countenance his adultery. Rather unusually for the time, and almost certainly with the backing of her powerful family, she sued her husband for divorce whilst she was living in Scotland. It appears that the couple were separated at the time, with William living in Westmorland in pursuit of a position in the county militia but the writ of divorce was served on him whilst he was visiting Scotland. He engaged a solicitor who submitted a defence challenging the relevancy of the divorce proceedings but, tellingly, not disputing the allegation of adultery itself. The defence was dismissed by the Commissaries of Edinburgh and Harriet’s ‘oath of calumny’ accepted. She received her divorce. William made four attempts to get the court to reverse the decision, all unsuccessful. Harriet remarried a year later but William disappears from the records. 

Lindley's certificate of competency, Second Mate, awarded when he was 17. 

William and Harriet’s eldest son, Augustus Frederick Lindley, was born 1796. He is the father of our Lindley. There were early indications that bad blood ran in the family when Lindley’s uncle Drummond, William and Harriet’s second son, was transported to Australia at the age of 22. Drummond’s crime was stealing a silver purse containing a £1 note from Mary Ellison, a prostitute. Drummond’s defence was that she had stolen his pocketbook and the theft of her purse was retaliation. Despite invoking his good education and aristocratic lineage in a later plea for clemency, the 7-year sentence of transportation was not commuted and Drummond never returned to England. The young Augustus meanwhile was doing his best to show that he was a chip off the old block. Just like his father he managed to hook himself a scion of the aristocracy for a wife; he was 33 when in 1830 he married the 43-year-old spinster Mary Muray, whose father was Alexander Murray, 7th Lord Elibank, and mother Mary Montolieu, the daughter of the Baron de St Hypolite. Augustus was clearly preying on the 43-year-old virgin for either her connections or her money, probably both as the marriage was childless and how Augustus earned a living has never been very clear. He was an officer in the 2nd Royal Lanarkshire Militia but this was either unpaid or a not very lucrative position. He later claimed to have been resident in Jamaica for many years, doing what we do not know, and also said that he had been “for may years confidential clerk to mixed British and foreign commission office.” He didn’t always pay his bills on time; in 1839 a solicitor pursued his debt to a wine merchant through the sheriff’s court and around the same time an Edinburgh grocer was also chasing him through the courts for an outstanding account. 

Like his father Augustus also had an eye for the ladies and in the late 1830’s he met Lucy Richardson, a young woman in her early twenties, a music teacher and later organist at St Botolphs Aldersgate. Their son, named after his father, was born in 1840 and baptised at St Georges Hanover Square. In the 1841 census Lucy has changed her surname to Lindley, without having married Augustus senior, and is living in Cheyne Row, Chelsea with her one-year-old son. We know that the relationship with Augustus continued because Lucy was pregnant again and later in the year gave birth to a daughter, Lucy Augusta Lindley. In the 1851 census Lucy and the 11-year-old Augustus are living in Crescent Place, St Pancras, a street that has either been renamed or has disappeared but must have been in the area of Marchmont Street on the south side of Euston Road, as in the census returns it falls between Margaret Row and Burton Street, which are both in the immediate vicinity. Lucy’s profession is now given as an organist/pianist but her 10-year-old daughter is not listed as living with her. Instead of being with her mother she is a boarder in the rather large household of Eliza Puxon, a Bacon Dryer, of Glasshouse Yard in the parish of St Botolph’s, Aldersgate. Was Eliza Puxon known to Lucy Lindley through the church where Lucy was the organist? At the next census in 1861 Lucy Augusta was back living with her mother but not for long; on the 21st August she married William Elisha Faulkner, then a clerk but later a clergyman, at St John the Baptist in Clerkenwell. Three years after her daughter Lucy Lindley, still using the surname of the father of her two children but now calling herself a widow, married Mark Brown Garrett, a surgeon and apothecary, at St Marks, Myddleton Square in Islington. Just a few months before the marriage Garrett was brought before the Police magistrate at Thames Police Court for assaulting Robert Roche, the courts gaoler.  According to the report in the Sun (London) of Saturday 26 January 1861, Garrett had struck Roche with his fist in the armpit in a quarrel over some blank forms for outdoor relief that the doctor wanted to collect from the magistrates. In court Roche made it clear that he and Garrett had known each other for some time and that he thought Garrett had a grudge against him for refusing to release Garrett from gaol 16 years earlier. Inspector Beare of K Division of the Metropolitan Police backed up Roche’s evidence and added that Garrett had called him a swindler and a scoundrel. When the magistrate asked if Garrett also had an aversion to Beare for any reason, Beare said that he did, because he had locked him up in Poplar Police Station for assaulting a toll collector. Garrett was clearly a man with a short temper, hopefully he did not lose it too often with his wife. Garrett died at the age of 59 in 1871 and Lucy shortly afterwards moved into the Royal Medical Benevolent College in Epsom where she lived as aa charitable pensioner until her death in 1891.    

And what happened to Augustus Frederick Lindley senior? His wife Mary died in October 1854, living just long enough to possibly hear of her husband fathering another son with a woman called Mary Ovenstone, though the paternity case in the Sheriff Court in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, wasn’t brought against him until 1857. Porr Mary would also have known about the sentence of 9 months hard labour her husband had received in 1851 for swindling £50 from a clergyman’s widow. Even worse, the fraud had arisen as a revenge on the widow for stopping Augustus from seeing her daughter. The case was reported widely in the newspapers; this is from the British Army Despatch of 31 October 1851:

EXTRAORDINARY CASE OF OBTAINING MONEY BY FALSE PRETENCES. At the Somerset Sessions, Augustus Frederick Lindley, a person apparently between 50 and 6O years of age, was charged with obtaining, by false pretences, the sum of £50. from Mrs. Jane Williams. It appeared that the prosecutrix, who was the widow of a clergyman, resided at Orient Villa, Taunton, and her family consisted of a daughter and servant. The defendant had also resided for some time in that town. He had married a person of some position in society, but his own status was not very certain, though he was believed to be a gentleman by birth and education. After some time he made the acquaintance of prosecutrix's daughter, and the daughter introduced him to prosecutrix, when a close intimacy sprang up. He was constantly visiting the house. In the course of the present spring or summer, the attention of Mrs. Williams was drawn to the circumstance that defendant's attentions to her daughter were too serious and marked for a married person. Of course she felt anxious about the matter, and accordingly she wrote him a letter, and afterwards verbally told him that she wished the acquaintance to be discontinued. During the acquaintance, Mr. Lindley appeared to have acquired a most extraordinary influence over the daughter, and their intimacy still continued against the wish of her mother. The breaking off, however, of the acquaintance gave rise to feelings of revenge, and for the purpose of gratifying them he bethought himself of an ingenious expedient. It appeared that Mrs. Williams, not living in any style of pretension, had some articles of plate, none of which bore armorial bearings of herself or family; but, some years ago, at a sale, she purchased a teapot, which bore the crest of somebody else; and for this she was liable to duty. Mrs. Williams had not returned this in her schedule, and defendant thought it a good opportunity of venting his ill will by bringing her in for the serious penalties which the law renders persons liable to for making incorrect returns. The defendant gave information to the Board of Inland Revenue that the prosecutrix had made herself liable to penalties for the evasion of the duty. On receiving a communication from the Inland Revenue office, Mrs. Williams became frightened and sent for the prisoner to consult him. He informed her that she was liable to £150. to be paid to the commissioners, and £150, to be paid into his own pocket. He also told her that he would be liable to a penalty of £50 for giving false information if he did not proceed with the matter, and he asked for this £50 to send to the commissioners, and clear himself from the liability. She gave him the £50. On making known the circumstance to her friends, they advised her to apply to him for the £50, and, as he refused to give it up, the present proceedings were instituted. The chairman, in a most impressive address to the prisoner, concluded by stating that "the sentence of the Court was, that he be confined and kept to - hard labour in Wilton Gaol for nine calendar months." The prisoner, who seemed deeply to feel his situation, then left the dock, and was shortly afterwards removed in a fly to Wilton House of Correction.

It appears that Augustus did not serve his full sentence; criminal records show that he made a request for clemency from the Queen because of his ill health and that after medical investigation he was released early.  Neither his ill health nor his criminal record stopped his promotion to Captain in the Royal Lanarkshire Militia in 1855. Shortly afterwards he seems to have moved to Jersey where he died on the 9th December 1857 and was buried in the  Mont à L'Abbé Old Cemetery.

Whatever happened to the heroes? Monuments to the war dead in St Paul's Cathedral

Like Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral is not a place you pop into casually. Unless you have an invitation to a Royal Wedding, are attending a memorial service for a recently departed member of the great and the good or you can convince one of the security staff that you actually want to go in and worship, then the cost of entry is £26. The Church of England may be the 8^th biggest landowner in the country (200,000 acres) but they have 16,000 churches, 43 cathedrals and 2 archbishops to look after and, quite frankly, not enough comes from the rents and the Sunday collection boxes to meet the cost of maintaining their portfolio of historic buildings. So when the number of people wanting to see an historic cathedral reaches critical mass, barricades and ticket booths appear and the tourists have to pay a steep fee to gain entry.  Charges are nothing new; St Paul’s has been charging for admission since 1709, though it only cost two (old) pence to get in at that time. The last time I was at St Paul’s must have been in the late nineties when it cost about a fiver to get in.

I was surprised by the number of funerary memorials there were in the Cathedral. I simply did not remember there being so many. Many of them, the impressive ones, date from the early 19^th Century and commemorate the high-ranking army and navy officers who died in the Napoleonic wars. Composed in the heroic, neoclassical mode, they feature life-size, or larger than life-size, figures, many of them, male and female, semi naked, bare breasted, and with superb musculature, representing the final moments of the deceased’s life, sometimes on death beds, sometimes on the battle field.  The deceased die in the arms of their comrades or are received by gloriously Valkyrie-like Angels; these memorials are positively pagan, ‘pro patria mori’ celebrations of death in combat.   

One of the most eye catching is the monument to Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, the first Baron Collingwood. A semi naked Collingwood, eyes closed, lies on a funeral barge, gripping his sword, supported over by an angel in a diaphanous robe. A river god, old father Thames perhaps, disports in the water by the barge with two naked putti clambering over him. The memorial was raised by public subscription and was made by Richard Westmacott the second, best known for his statue of Achilles in Hyde Park (in commemoration of the Duke of Wellington) and the pediment on the façade of the British Museum. Collingwood was born in 1748 in Newcastle to a landowning family who had lost most of their estates when Collingwood’s great grandfather had become a Jacobite and took part in the 1715 uprising to put the Old Pretender on the British throne (for which crime he was eventually hanged at Liverpool). Collingwood joined the Royal Navy at the age of 12 and rose through the ranks from midshipman to lieutenant to captain to rear admiral, admiral and finally commander in chief of the Mediterranean fleet following Nelson’s death. He fought in the American and French Revolutionary Wars and was present at many of the most famous naval engagements of the time including Cape St Vincent and Trafalgar.  Despite his many opportunities to die in battle, he actually succumbed to cancer in 1810. In agonising pain and knowing that he was seriously ill and almost certainly dying, when his pet dog Bounce fell overboard and drowned in late 1809, the dispirited Collingwood requested to be relieved of his command in late 1809. The Naval authorities prevaricated and initially refused his request. By February 1810 Collingwood could no longer walk and the Naval authorities had to finally recognise that their supreme field commander was about to die. He was given permission to return home but died of cancer on board HMS Ville de Paris, off Port Mahon in Menorca, as he sailed for England. His body was returned to England and taken by barge up the Thames to Greenwich Hospital before finally being interred beside his former commander, Lord Nelson in the crypt of the cathedral.

Down in the crypt, close by Nelson’s tomb (Nelson’s second-hand black marble sarcophagus was originally made for Cardinal Wolsey, but the Cardinal managed to disgrace himself with Henry VIII and was buried in an unmarked grave in Leicester Abbey. George III thought it would make a suitable tomb for Nelson) is the memorial for Admiral George Brydges Rodney, 1st Baron Rodney, who died in retirement in 1792. His memorial was originally upstairs in the nave of the cathedral but at some point, he was moved downstairs, upstairs being reserved for more illustrious deaths, such as that of Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby who died in 1801. The monument is another of Richard Westmacott’s masterpieces and shows a wounded Abercromby being lifted from his horse and is flanked by two superb sphinxes. Abercromby was commanding the British forces against the French at the Battle of Alexandria in 1801 when he was struck in the thigh by a musket ball. Badly wounded, he refused to relinquish command or accept medical attention until the battle had been won. He was cheered from the battle field by his troops but his surgeons were unable to remove the musket ball from his leg. Infection set in and he died seven days later and was buried at Fort St Elmo in Valletta, Malta. 

Close by Abercromby’s memorial is the monument to Sir John Moore, his second in command at the Battle of Alexandria. The monument, by John Bacon the younger, shows Moore expiring on the battlefield at A Coruña in 1809, after being "struck in his left breast and shoulder by a cannon shot, which broke his ribs, his arm, lacerated his shoulder and the whole of his left side and lungs." He did not die immediately but remained conscious throughout the remainder of the battle. He told his aide-de-camp, Colonel Paul Anderson "You know, I always wished to die this way, I hope the people of England will be satisfied! I hope my country will do me justice!" His final words were to Charles Banks Stanhope, "Remember me to your sister, Stanhope." He was buried in his military cloak on the ramparts of  A Coruña and later a fine tomb chest was erected in his honour by the leader of the Spanish forces. 

The memorial to Captain George Blagdon Westcott of the Majestic is by Thomas Banks and shows the soul of Westcott in a classical tunic being received by an angel on the deck of his ship. Westcott died at the Battle of the Nile in 1798. The Majestic collided with the French ship Heureux and became entangled in her rigging. Westcott was hit by a musket ball in the throat and killed. Westcott was from Honiton in Devon and was of rather humble origins, his father was a baker. Nelson visited Honiton in 1801 and visited Westcott’s mother, writing to Lady Hamilton “Captain Westcott's mother – poor thing, except from the bounty of government and Lloyd's, in very low circumstances. The brother is a tailor, but had they been chimney-sweepers it was my duty to show them respect.” Also by Thomas Banks is what was the first war memorial raised in St Paul’s, to Captain Richard Rundle Burges of HMS Ardent who died at the Battle of Camperdown in October 1797. Banks shows a near naked Burgess, his modesty preserved by a strategically placed piece of cloth tossed over his shoulder and ending just above his crotch, being received by a bare breasted angel. At the Battle of Camperdown Burges’ ship had singlehandedly engaged the much bigger Dutch flagship, Vrijheid, in what became the single bloodiest combat of the battle. Over a hundred men died on the Ardent, including Burges who was sliced in half by chain shot within the first ten minutes of the engagement.  

Tempus fugit; Sally Mann 'What Remains' (Bulfinch Press, 2003, out of print) & 'Hold Still; A Memoir with Photographs' (Penguin Modern Classics, 2024 £14.99)

As for me, I see both the beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as well. And I see them at the same time, at once ecstatic at the beauty of things, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means "beauty tinged with sadness," for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.

Sally Mann, ‘Hold Still; A Memoir with Photographs.' 

For a visual artist straddling the 20^th and 21^st centuries, photographer Sally Mann is remarkably rooted in her native soil. Born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1951, she has lived in Rockridge County for all her life apart from a spell at school in Vermont when she was a teenager. She married Larry Mann in 1970 and the couple raised their three children in the house they built on a farm bought on impulse by Sally’s medical practitioner father in the late 1950’s. Her work is rooted in history, in place, in family, in community but is not constrained in any way by the idyllic surroundings of the Shenandoah valley because her themes are the eternal verities, life and death, light and darkness, love, loss, memory and the unremitting flight of time.  She acquired public notoriety in 1992 with her exhibition and third monograph ‘Immediate Family’. A cover article for the New York Times Magazine focussed on photographs Mann had taken of her children naked in the arcadian surroundings of the family farm. The author, Robert Woodward, claimed Mann had been told that “no fewer than eight pictures she had chosen for the traveling exhibition could subject her to arrest” for displaying indecent images. Her work was denounced as child pornography, often by people who had never seen it, and whilst the controversy made ‘Immediate Family’ a publishing sensation and Mann a celebrity, it was damaging to her reputation and brought with it much unwanted attention. 

Surprisingly perhaps further controversy did not ensue when Mann published ‘What Remains’ in 2003, a book which features photographs of decomposing corpses taken at the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Facility, more generally known as the Body Farm. Regarding ‘What Remains’, Blake Morrison noted in the Guardian “her point being that death is not an end, that nature goes on doing its work long after the body has become a carapace. When her exhibition of that title opened in Washington in 2004, most reviewers got the point: "But not the woman in the New York Times, who freaked out and called the photos gross." Mann was surprised to see an art critic using the vocabulary of a 10-year-old, but not by the underlying prejudice: "There's a new prudery around death. We've moved it into hospital, behind screens, and no longer wear black markers to acknowledge its presence. It's become unmentionable."

In the introduction to her book Mann says that her ‘kids chalk up my “death thing” to genetics, blaming it, along with other things I do, on my father.” Robert S. Munger, her father, was a GP, who for four decades ‘labored over his great masterwork…exploring the iconography of death in art.’ He was, she says, ‘even for the time,..an uncommonly direct man. Not for him the euphemisms of death – it was a dead body, not “remains,” nobody “passed,” there was no “eternal rest.” People died and that was it.’ He died himself in 1988, suffering from cancer he committed suicide with an overdose of Seconal. His death ‘laid me flat for almost a year. Now, many deaths later, I am as perplexed by the experience as ever. Where did all of that him-ness go? All that knowledge, the accretion of experience from a remarkable life, the suffering – his and others’ – he had borne, the beauty, life’s own rapturous visions?” He died on the couch in the family living room and Mann took a famous picture of him post mortem, lying in his red robe, wild flowers laid on his chest and circling his wrists.    

‘What Remains’ is split into four sections; the first ‘Matter Lent’ begins with a quote from the 17th century French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

All things summon us to death: nature, almost envious of the good she has given us, tells us often and gives us notice that she cannot for long allow us that scrap of matter she has lent…she has need of it for other forms, she claims it back for other works.

In the pages that follow, Mann explores the physical processes by which the matter lent to us during our lives is returned to the natural world after our deaths. She draws us gently into the theme beginning with the decayed remains of her pet greyhound Eva, who died one Valentines Day and for whom Mann ‘wept noisily’. “And yet,” she says “I was still curious about what would finally become of that head I had stroked, oh, ten thousand times, those paws she so delicately crossed as she lay by my desk, rock hard nails emerging from the finest white hair.” So with the help of a friend, Mann buries her much loved Eva in a metal cage on the farm and a few weeks later disinters her to find “what looked like a stick drawing of a sleeping dog; her bones, punctuated by tufts of indigestible hair and small cubes of adipocere, appeared like a constellation in a rich black sky.” The first photos of Eva show her hide; presumably Mann’s friend, who ‘didn’t bat an eye’ at what she asked him to do, had skinned Eva for her, before helping to bury the greyhound. A series of Mann’s darkly sensuous images then show us the teeth, claws and bones of the dead dog. Then a quote from the poet Galway Kinnell (lamenting the barrenness of embalming and its prevention of decomposition) stands opposite a tenebrous landscape of leaves and grass in which a tiny sluglike old-fashioned shroud, tied neatly at both ends, shines luminously white. We are on the body farm. These are not documentary photographs but beautiful as they are, there is no attempt to disguise the subject matter. Bodies bloated with the post mortem gases produced by the corpses intestinal flora, skin split as it swells, skin being sloughed off, faces reduced to eyeless sockets and bared teeth. One photo shows a face apparently enveloped in mist; I thought it must be a spider’s web. In ‘Hold Still’ Mann reveals that the face was in fact a mass of writhing blow fly maggots (she provides a graphic colour image to confirm it), the gauzy film that veils it in the final black and white photograph was produced by a long exposure which reduced the motion of the insects to a fine blur.     

The section ‘December 8, 2000’ records the day a 19-year-old police fugitive broke onto the Mann family property. When cornered by the police he hid himself behind a tree within sight of the Mann’s house, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Later Mann photographs the landscape where the suicide took place, the tracks left by the police cars in the meadow grass, the space around the tree where the body lay. “Death has left for me its imperishable mark on an ordinary copse of trees in the front yard,” Mann says, “But would a stranger, coming upon it a century hence, sense the sanctity of the death-inflected soil?” The next section, ‘Antietam’, answers that question. It is a series of landscape photos taken on the site of the Battle of Antietam, in Sharpsburg, Maryland where in 1862 the armies of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Union General George B. McClellan, fought on the bloodiest day in American history, with 22,727 men dead, wounded or missing.  Mann’s photos, all apparently taken at night, may be darkly foreboding and dramatic but we know that this has everything to do with her artistic vision and little to do with the actual landscape. The final section ‘What Remains’ begins with a quote from Mann’s beloved Ezra Pound;

What thou lovest well remains
the rest is dross
What thou lov’t well shall not be
reft from thee 

It continues with 20 portraits of her children, cropped images of their faces. What remains is the love? It sounds trite but it isn’t, the series portraits grows more distorted with each shot, one is faded out except for a pair of lips, in others there are scratches and marks in the negatives, or the print is so dark the face resembles a skull with huge black sockets and the blanched skin looking like bone. What remains? Nothing. Love. Memory, The body. It all goes, it all ceases to exist.   

In 2015 Mann published a 570 page memoir called ‘Hold Still’ and last year Penguin reissued it in paperback as one of their Modern Classics series. There is plenty of stiff competition out there but this book is one of the best autobiographies I have ever read. Mann is as talented a writer as she is a photographer. She may not have moved very far from Lexington and even now spends most of her time at home but her life is fascinating from her feral childhood (her description) to her stately old age (she is now 74, though you wouldn’t guess it to see her). The book seems blisteringly honest; she does not shy away from or make excuses for her relatively privileged upbringing. There is a fascinating account of Gee-Gee, Virginia Carter, the black nanny who brought up Mann and her siblings and to whom she felt closer than to her own mother. Her portrait of Carter and the belated realisation of the difficulties a black woman living in Virginia would have faced are compulsive reading. As is her own and her husband’s family history (her mother-in-law murdered her husband and then committed suicide). This isn’t a straight forward memoir; some readers have felt short changed because they felt Mann doesn’t reveal enough of her personal life, others feel that she doesn’t focus enough on her work and others feel that the non-linear narrative is distracting. Despite all this it was a best seller in the US. I think it is a wonderful book, I love the meandering form, I love its willingness to grasp thorny issues, quite frankly I love everything about it. The woman is a genius and don’t let anyone tell you any different.