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 Gurdian “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 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, Virgina 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.