Thirty minutes from sundown; time travel in the Anglican Chapel, Kensal Green Cemetery

My friend Meriel and I were showing a visitor the catacombs at Kensal Green just before Christmas. When our visitor left, we went back down to the vaults to check on some memorial tablets stored there. Standing underground in the dark, surrounded by hundreds, thousands of corpses, even though they are hidden from sight in lead lined coffins, is a disquieting experience. When your vision is limited to a little circle of torchlight, the silence and the darkness become almost tangible, pressing in on you and threatening to extinguish your light source. The longer you loiter down there, the more oppressive the atmosphere becomes. Insanely I suggest we go look for a coffin that had been broken open, exposing the skeleton. Thankfully Meriel refuses point blank to entertain the notion and shortly afterwards we leave, locking the iron grill at the entrance and climbing the dank stairs spattered with pigeon guano, back up to the Anglican Chapel. It is odd that from time to time one of the pigeons that roosts on the pediment of the building manages to find its way inside. No one knows how. Once in they are apparently unable to find their way back out again. They lurk high in the stairwell that leads down to the catacombs, frantically trying to escape in a flurry of beating wings whenever anyone enters the building. Eventually they weaken and die and fall to the stone flagged floor of the chapel from where one of the cemetery company’s employees are sent to shovel the corpse up and dispose of it. 

Surveyor John Griffith's original drawing of the proposed Anglican Chapel

Built in 1835-36, despite recent works the Anglican Chapel is in a parlous state, internally and externally. Originally the intention was to build the architectural centrepiece of the cemetery in the gothic revival style, after the architect Henry Edward Kendall won a competition run by the nascent General Cemetery Company in 1831, to design a chapel and a gatehouse. But the chairman (and main financial backer) of the GCC, the banker Sir John Dean Paul, was no fan of the new gothic style and overturned the decision of the competition judges. He insisted on a neo-classical design and instructed the cemetery company’s surveyor John Griffith to come up with it. Griffith was an accomplished draftsman but as an architect he was bereft of original ideas. With his chairman peremptorily demanding new designs, the surveyor did what any intelligent individual with little or no original talent does, he plagiarised. And the architect whose work he plagiarised? Henry Edward Kendall. Griffith produced a beautiful set of drawings for the new chapel that were straight from Kendall’s design for the Spilsby Session House in Lincolnshire. Without a doubt Kendall noticed the theft of his design, but, as he had kept the 100-guinea prize from the architectural competition, he swallowed his contempt for Griffith and kept his own counsel.   

Anglican chapel ceiling, photo by John Haines

Griffith’s chapel may not be entirely original but it is still a beautiful building. As I locked the door to the catacomb stairwell behind Meriel, the late afternoon winter sun illuminated the great stained-glass window but did little to pierce the gathering gloom. The chapel isn’t large, roughly 25 by 30 feet and is cruciform in shape, but the ornate ceiling is high, a plasterwork vault painted blue and dotted with gold stars, topped by a lunette, supported on pendentive arches. Griffith took his ‘inspiration’ for the ceiling and general layout of the chapel from John Soanes now demolished Princes Street vestibule of the Bank of England, possibly after a nudge by his banker chairman. The original window, of painted glass, was destroyed by a bomb blast in the Second World War. It was replaced in 1951 by a window designed by Antoine Acket a Dutch artist who worked for Wainwright & Waring of Croydon, manufacturers of architectural metalwork and stained and leaded glass. Acket’s design is rather kitsch, showing blue robed angels with purple wings fluttering around Christ like a flock of parakeets, plebian worshippers at his feet, including a couple of alarming children, a boy with a bicycle and a girl with a skipping rope, who have the haggard faces of dissolute 40 year olds, and flanked by an orange robed St Peter holding the keys to heaven and a shrouded Lazarus with skin of opalescent blue, presumably due to cyanosis. Christ himself, holding up his hands to demonstrate his stigmata, is depicted with a halo inside a mandorla, that looks unnervingly like a giant red vulva.  

Most of the original fixtures and fittings have long gone, except for the hydraulic catafalque, which stands shrouded in white cloth in the centre of the chapel. Dating from 1837 and restored in the nineties back into working condition, the black and gold catafalque served two purposes. Firstly, it was a bier; bearers deposited coffins on it at the start of funeral services with the head facing the altar. At the end of the service the top of the catafalque, which is on rollers, can swivel around so that the bearers can take up the coffin ready to leave the chapel, without having to execute a tricky manoeuvre to turn the coffin around in the relatively tight space available. Secondly it served as a hydraulic lift for anyone being deposited in the catacombs and at the end of the service, mourners would watch as the catafalque sank beneath the floor taking the coffin and the deceased with it, and a pair of metal doors clanged shut behind it. The disused chapel is now used as a lumber room, storing various odds and ends from around the cemetery that have no better home.  Meriel and I decided to explore the miscellaneous contents, as we are intrigued by the memorials, tightly packed into wooden cases and protected with PVC foam, that are gradually being restored by students at City and Guilds London Art School in Kennington. Dozens of these are stacked against the south wall of the chapel, most of them too heavy to move, waiting for the day when the building is restored and the memorials can be returned to the walls of the colonnades where they belong. 

There are also two or three bigger pieces stored in the chapel, a couple of angels culled from graves, which stand sentinel at the entrance and the stone figure of a sleeping child resting its head on a pillow which was removed from the grade II listed tomb of Frederick Thomas Yates. Frederick, the son of Frederick and Stella Yates was baptised at St Margaret's Westminster on the 21st November 1835. His father was a solicitor and the family lived right in the heart of Westminster, on Great George Street, where Parliament Square now stands. Frederick Thomas died of croup in December 1839 and was buried at Kensal Green that month.  He had probably just turned four at the time of his death. His parents erected a fine memorial over the vault which housed their dead son, a Portland stone sarcophagus with the Carrara marble effigy on top. The statue of the sleeping child was removed from the tomb some time ago for safekeeping and is kept on a trolley in the chapel.

The object that really caught our attention was one that we had never seen before and which seemed not to belong there; an old bureau style desk sitting incongruously amongst some old broken pews. Some of the drawers were open to show dozens of old maps. The maps seemed to be of various places abroad, and seemingly had no connection with the cemetery. The one on top showed the area around the towns of Moers, Kempen and Krefeld in Westphalia, northwest of Düsseldorf and close to the Dutch border. It wasn’t a recent map, it only took a little research to establish that it was almost certainly printed in the 1930’s. Moers was written old style as Mors and, most tellingly Krefeld is called Krefeld-Uerdingen. Originally Krefeld and Uerdingen were two separate conurbations but in time, as each expanded, they merged into one another though retaining their separate names. In 1929 they officially became the Stadt of Krefeld-Uerdingen but in 1940 the Nazi administration shortened the name and it became, then and ever since, Krefeld. In 1941 the town deported 1131 Jews from Krefeld, Duisburg and Kempen to Šķirotava Railway Station near Riga, later to become Jungfernhof concentration camp. They were transported in freezing conditions with no drinking water for more than two days and on arrival on the 8th December, were shot in the Rumbula forest massacre along with 24,000 Latvian Jews. These 1930’s German maps, would have been invaluable in 1943 when the RAF heavily bombed Kempen and Krefeld, starting a firestorm in the eastern part of Krefeld that destroyed much of the town centre (On 3 March 1945 US troops occupied Krefeld. Henry Kissinger was a private in the Intelligence unit stationed in the town and the units only fluent German speaker. With no else able to communicate with the city administration the U.S. Army decided to put Private Kissinger in charge of running the occupied town, his first ever taste of political power.

The next map we looked at also seemed to belong to the 1930’s or 40’s, El Djem in Tunisia. The town is famous, of course, for the spectacular amphitheatre built around 238 AD in the Roman city of Thysdrus by Proconsul Gordian (who later, very briefly, became Gordian II, Emperor of Rome for 22 days, the shortest reign of any Roman Emperor, in 238, the Year of the Six Emperors). The amphitheatre is big, second only in size to the Colosseum in Rome, with capacity for 35,000 spectators to view the gladiatorial combats and chariot races that were staged there. During the Tunisia campaign in World War II German soldiers took shelter in the amphitheatre making it a target for the RAF who bombed it, seemingly without causing irreparable damage. El Djem became the location of serious fighting during the North African campaign, firstly to destroy a railway bridge on the line to Tunis (the allies tried for weeks to destroy the bridge by aerial bombardment, without success, and eventually had to send in paratroopers to finish the job) and to capture the Luftwaffe airfield just outside the town. So here we had another 1930’s map showing a key location in WWII military campaigns. What were they doing here? Why would they be in the cemetery, let alone the chapel? Meriel held the torch while I took photos but we should have examined the other maps. Would they also show WWII battlegrounds? The December sun was sinking fast and we had to get the chapel key back to the cemetery office. As we left through the door to the old vestuary I saw something odd propped up against a cupboard door. A spear. With my mind still full of El Djem it seemed obvious to me that I was looking at a hasta, a heavy seven-foot-long Roman iron tipped spear, not designed to be thrown but used by legionaries as a thrusting weapon. The iron tip was rusted quite badly and the shaft was filthy. Why would there be a Roman spear in here? I asked Meriel. There was clearly something strange going on, old maps that don’t belong in the cemetery and now ancient objects from locations on the maps. Were we on the site of a wormhole, a time travel portal? Brompton Cemetery claims to have one with far less evidence for it than we have here. Meriel held the spear in her hand for a moment and eyed it appraisingly before giving it back to me. I’m no expert, she said, but that looks a lot like a piece of an old iron tomb railing to me...