A tale of two coffins; James Moore (1849-1935) & Ivy May Hamilton (1922-1966) Kensal Green Cemetery

Not many people visit the KGC catacombs these days but anyone lucky enough to get the chance always sees this pair of coffins with their immortelles. Why the coffins were not tucked away into a vault but left standing out in a corridor no one was really sure. The assumption was that they were temporarily deposited in the catacombs waiting for either a grave to be prepared in the cemetery or awaiting transportation to another cemetery. Had they just been forgotten about? Both coffins turn out to have very different stories, both are fascinating.

A year ago, the cemetery was visited by Ron Carlson, the CEO of PBD Inc, a Chicago based corporate design firm who, in his spare time, flies light aircraft and records YouTube videos about cemeteries under the name Faces of the Forgotten. His video of KGC featured the catacombs and the two coffins including a lingering closeup of the name plate on the coffin on the left. One of Ron's subscribers, HazelOwl7893, otherwise known as Hazel Mahan (we think) went to the trouble of searching the name on the coffin plate on Google and was excited to discover that it belongs to James Moore (1849-1935) who, according to Wikipedia was "an English bicycle racer. He is popularly regarded as the winner of the first official cycle race in the world in 1868 at St-Cloud, Paris, although this claim seems to be erroneous. In 1869 he won the world's first road race Paris–Rouen sponsored by Le Vélocipède Illustré and the Olivier brothers' Michaux Bicycle Company. Moore covered the 113 km (70 mi) in 10 hours and 25 minutes. He was one of the first stars of cycle racing, dominating competition for many years."

According to the parish register of St James Bury St Edmunds, Moore was born on the 14^th January 1848 and baptised on Christmas Day 1850 along with two of his siblings, his older brother Alfred and his younger sister Matilda.  On the Civil Registration Birth Index though his birth is registered in the first quarter of 1849. In the 1851 census his father James, a blacksmith, declares him to be two years old on the 30th March, which would indicate that the 1849 date is correct. There were two other, older sisters, Selina aged 8 and Mary Ann aged 6. When James was four the family moved to Paris. Some accounts say his father was French but on the 1851 census James senior states his birthplace to be Cambs. It was an unusual move for a Suffolk farrier to make but Moore was to spend most of his life in France and spoke English with a French accent. The family moved to 2 Cité Godot-de-Mauroy, then in the 1st arrondissement of Paris. Their near neighbours, at number 7, were Pierre Michaux and his son Ernest who in around 1861 developed the pedal powered velocipede, the forerunner of the modern bicycle.  James’ first machine was bought from the Michauxs as a birthday present in 1865. It was initially used to run errands for his father but in 1868 he joined the Veloce cycling club and took part in what was the first official bicycle race meeting in the world at St-Cloud, although there is some dispute if the race Moore won was actually the first race of the meet.

James Moore pictured in old age posing with the Michaudine velocipede with which he won the St-Cloud bicycle race in Paris on 31 May 1868. The shot was probably taken in the back garden at 56 Wildwood Road, NW11, Moore's home at the time of his death. Note the curious kitchen maid watching the proceedings from the scullery window.

Moore’s racing career was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War in which he served in the ambulance corps during the 1870 Siege of Paris. When the war ended, he continued to compete in bicycle races, winning five international championships between 1873 and 1877, but he also took a keen interest in horse racing, working at the Maisons Lafitte the French horse-riding centre. He later studied veterinary science at either Cambridge or at the Royal Veterinary College in London, depending on which source you read, and opened a horse stud in Normandy. He married Julie Cécile Mabille in Boulogne in 1887 and the couple went on to have at least one child, also called James.

Details of his later life are patchy and often contested but we know that by 1935 he was living in London at 56 Wildwood Road in Hampstead Garden Suburb (last sold in in 2004 for £1.85 million, current estimated value £3.5 million, so a very substantial property). He died there on the 17th July that year. Under the heading 'Burial Mystery' his Wikipedia article will tell you that "the location of Moore's grave is not known. His grandson, John, said: 'The odd thing is that my father was such a good story-teller but he couldn't or wouldn't tell me where my grandfather was buried. It was as if there was some unfinished business, some sort of mix-up, something I never understood. It's a mystery.' Moore believes the site may be near the Welsh Harp reservoir – also known as Brent Reservoir – in north London.” It appears that somehow, the family seem to have forgotten that on the 20^th July, 3 days after James Moore died, the undertaker stored his coffined body in the catacombs at Kensal Green. The burial register states quite clearly that this is a 'temporary deposit' but the coffin was never collected and remains there to this day.

Excerpts from the burial registers at Kensal Green Cemetery showing James Moore

HazelOwl7893 and Ron Carlson have tried to update the Wikipedia entry on James Moore to clear up the 90-year-old 'burial mystery' but their amendments are swiftly removed by someone who apparently wishes the mystery to remain unresolved. Even worse other YouTubers and FindaGravers have muscled in to try and claim credit for the discovery. Hazel is absolutely right, this is the coffin of James Moore and this is confirmed in the cemetery records. Other people speculated that the second coffin may belong to James' wife Julia Cecile Moore (nee Mabile) but this is definitely not the case; there is no record of Julia being buried in the cemetery or, indeed, of dying the UK and we suspect that she may have returned to France just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

When we were recently in the catacombs my friend Meriel was able to read the corroded nameplate on the second coffin; “Ivy May Hamilton Died 2nd September 1966 Aged 44 Years”. The next day she messaged me, “The coffin next to your cyclist, James Moore, is for Ivy May Hamilton – she was murdered in 1966! She has a will which is how I know it’s her as the address matches…” The cemetery burial records show that her coffin was placed in Catacomb B on the 24th September 1966. Probate records give her address as 166 Bravington Road and the value of her estate as £6362. The circumstances surrounding her death were reported in the Kensington Post on 7th October 1966;

Rent dispute ended in death, court told

During a dispute with his landlady over the nonpayment of a week's rent, a West Indian carpenter stabbed her with a chisel, inflicting a wound which resulted in her death two days later in hospital, alleged Mr. Arthur Flavell, counsel prosecuting at Marylebone Court on Thursday.

John Augustus Wills, 52, of Mozart Street, North Kensington, was committed in custody for trial at the Old Bailey charged with the murder of Miss Ivy Hamilton of Bravington Road, Paddington. Mr. Flavell said the defendant lived in a rear ground floor room at the house In Mozart Street with a Miss Eileen Davies. On learning that the building was to be the subject of a compulsory acquisition by the local authority, he decided to request a rent book and a written Notice to quit from Miss Hamilton. These would. he thought. better his chances of obtaining alternative council accommodation. To induce Miss Hamilton to visit him he deliberately failed to pay a week’s rent.

At about 9.15 p.m. on August 31, said Counsel, the landlady went to the defendant’s room and spoke to him and Miss Davies. Miss Hamilton's sister, Elaine, and two other relatives, all tenants of the house. stood at the door. An argument developed during which Miss Hamilton demanded payment of the previous week's rent and told Wills be would have to leave. He said that all he wanted was a rent book and a proper notice to quit, but she walked out, with the intention of going to Harrow Road Police Station to make a complaint

Mr. Flavel said Miss Hamilton set off on foot with two of her relatives, closely followed by Wills and Miss Davies who were also heading for the police station. On the way, a police car pulled up and the argument resumed in the presence of the officers. They were all advised to return home, but Wills went on to the police station where he rejoined Davies, who had walked ahead. A police officer advised them to go back to the house and wait outside.

They returned home, he said, and entered their room. Miss Hamilton followed them in and the argument broke out again. She became violent, pushing him on to the bed. Miss Davies tried to get out, but was prevented from doing so by two or three other tenants standing at the door. Wills managed to get up off the bed and got Miss Davies out. She left the house and telephoned the police.

Shortly afterwards, Miss Elaine Hamilton was standing outside the defendant's room when she heard her sister scream from inside. She ran in and found her sister lying on the bed with Wills standing over her holding a chisel. She shouted at him and he turned and stabbed at her with the chisel, catching her shoulder. Elaine called out to another tenant, Mr. Tyrrell, who struggled with Will. When the police arrived. the injured woman had been carried into the hallway.

Mr. Flavell said Miss Hamilton was taken to Paddington General Hospital with a stab wound in her chest. An operation was performed at 1.45 am the next morning, but she died on September 2 from bronchial pneumonia resulting from the wound. Acting Det.-Insp. Kenneth North said he questioned Wills at the police station and told him Miss Hamilton was critically ill in hospital. The defendant said: "She came at me for the rent. I told her I would pay her rent. but I wanted a rent book. She shouted at me for the rent and wouldn't give me a rent book. She hit me in the face. They all hit me." When asked who else had been present, he said: "My wife, but they hit her and punched her. One got a pan from the stove. The children, her niece and another girl, came at me. I fell on the bed and took the chisel from the table. She had her hands round my throat. I pushed her away. The chisel went into her. I didn't stab her—l pushed the chisel." The Officer said that later, after he had been told of Miss Hamilton's death, Wills said: "Why is there so much ignorance? Why did She come to me for the rent? Why didn't she give me a rent book? Why so much ignorance?" Wills pleaded not guilty and reserved his defence.

John Wills went on trial at the Old Bailey in 1966. Interestingly the jury acquitted him not just of murder but also of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

We know Ivy Hamilton was born in approximately 1922 and that electoral records show her living at 15 Mozart Street, W10 with her sister Elaine from 1961. In 1966 she moved around the corner to 166 Bravington Road but Elaine stayed on at Mozart Road until 1969/70. At this point the house would finally have been compulsorily purchased by Westminster, it was the plan to do this that had set in train the events that led to Ivy’s death. The house, along with the rest of Mozart Street that lay to the west of Lancefield Street was demolished to make the way for a new council estate, the Mozart Estate. The place has a bad rep, known as ‘Crack City’ and notorious for rival gangs from Harlesden, Kilburn and Ladbroke Grove fighting ‘postcard wars.’ But according to Big Zuu, who grew up there, there is another side to the story:

The media seems to focus a lot on the bad side of Mozart, all the things that come with gang culture – knife crime, drugs etc. It’s not about that. There’s so much more to the area. It has a mad sense of community which I think you only fully understand when you live there. It’s taught me that it’s okay to be myself. You don’t have to try and fit in anywhere, just be you.

What heaps of unmeaning stone and marble! A visit to Westminster Abbey

In the opposite transept to Poet's Corner stands a monument which is among the most renowned achievements of modern art, but which to me appears horrible rather than sublime. It is the tomb of Mrs. Nightingale, by Roubillac. The bottom of the monument is represented as throwing open its marble doors, and a sheeted skeleton is starting forth. The shroud is falling from his fleshless frame as he launches his dart at his victim. She is sinking into her affrighted husband's arms, who strives with vain and frantic effort to avert the blow. The whole is executed with terrible truth and spirit; we almost fancy we hear the gibbering yell of triumph bursting from the distended jaws of the spectre. But why should we thus seek to clothe death with unnecessary terrors, and to spread horrors round the tomb of those we love? The grave should be surrounded by everything that might inspire tenderness and veneration for the dead, or that might win the living to virtue. It is the place not of disgust and dismay, but of sorrow and meditation.

Washington Irving - The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819)

Usually quoted as an encomium, Irving’s description of Louis-François Roubiliac’s memorial to Joseph and Elizabeth Nightingale as “among the most renowned achievements of modern art” is in fact mordant sarcasm. The American was not a fan of the French Sculptor’s overwrought composition which shows Joseph Gascoigne Nightingale trying to protect his swooning young wife from a predatory death. Elizabeth Nightingale died on 17th August 1731 after the shock of a lightning strike caused her to go into premature labour. Her baby survived. The memorial was commissioned by the Nightingale’s son William following the death of his father in 1752; however, William never saw the monument completed as he died in 1754 and Roubiliac did not finish it until 1761. It is a little surprising that the author of ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ did not find the memorial in sympathy with his gothic sensibilities, but it is quite astonishing to find that the otherwise puritanical John Wesley loved it. In his journal for the 16th February 1764, he notes “I once more took a serious walk through the tombs in Westminster Abbey.   But there was one tomb which showed common sense: that beautiful figure of Mr. Nightingale endeavoring to screen his lovely wife from death. Here indeed the marble seems to speak, and the statues appear only not alive.”

A few years later, in February 1771, Wesley is back in the Abbey and once again drawn to Roubiliac’s memorial:

Monday, 25.--I showed a friend, coming out of the country, the tombs in Westminster Abbey. The two with which I still think none of the others worthy to be compared are that of Mrs. Nightingale, and that of the Admiral rising out of his tomb at the resurrection. But the vile flattery inscribed on many of them reminded me of that just reflection

                                 If on the sculptured marble you rely,
                                    Pity that worth like his should ever die.
                                    If credit to the real life you give,
                                    Pity a wretch like him should ever live

In February 1893 Archdeacon Frederic W. Farrar, then the Dean of Westminster contributed to the Christian magazine Good Words his views on the depiction of Death in the Abbey, singling out Robiliac for particular censure:

The early tombs in Westminster Abbey were like radiant phantoms with blue and vermilion, and gold, and glass mosaic, and lustrous enamels, and floral sculpturings, and Angels with outspread wings. In these death was not presented as a thing revolting and abhorrent, nor was any prominence given to the mere accidents of corruption and decay.  The tombs of a later age become wildly different. The skull and cross-bones—most futile, most conventional, most offensive of all ‘decorations’ - appear for the first time on the unfinished tomb of Anne of Cleves. After that we get, with increasing frequency, the ridiculous nudities of weeping children, and the females who sit under willows and clasp urns to their breast. The attempt to force into prominence the fact that death is a thing for which to weep and the angel of death a king of terrors culminates in two tombs in the Chapel of St John the Evangelist. One—with the inscription Lacrimis struxit amor—is spotted all over with imaginary teardrops falling from an eye which is carved above it! The other is the tomb of Lady Elizabeth Nightingale, of which Barke disapproved, but which is usually regarded as Roubiliac’s masterpiece, and which Wesley is said to have considered the finest monument in the Abbey, as showing “common-sense among the heaps of unmeaning stone and marble.” Considered merely as sculpture the contrasted figures of the dying wife and the startled, agonised husband are undeniably fine and skilful, but nothing can be more repellent or less like the feeling with which the early Christians regarded death than the revolting skeleton who issues, with his javelin, from the dark tomb below. Such allegory is preposterous jumble of the material and immaterial. The “Death,” as Allan Cunningham says, “is very meanly imagined—the common dry bones of every vulgar tale.” Apparently Roubiliac’s imagination could not rise above this fleshless anatomy, for he repeats it on the tomb of General Hargrave in the nave. Here Time is breaking the arrow of a crowned skeleton across his knee. But how different is this bony Grotesque from the vague and awful magnificence of Milton’s imagination:—  What seemed his head, The likeness of a kingly crown had on...                           

Louis-François Roubiliac is generally thought to have been born in Lyon in either 1702 or 1705. He was the son of a silk merchant who moved his business and family to Frankfort in 1710. He trained in Dresden but in 1730 after failing to secure the Prix de Rome and the opportunity to study in Italy he moved to England. After a brief spell at Thomas Carter’s stone yard in Shepherd Market he accepted a position as assistant to the successful sculptor Henry Cheere. In 1838 he had his first solo success with a statue of Handel commissioned for Vauxhall Gardens by Jonathan Tyers who was so pleased with the seated figure of Handel in modern dress, (now in the V&A) that he asked Roubiliac to provide the centrepiece sculpture for the temple dedicated to Fleeting Life and Inevitable Death at Tyers Surry estate, Denbies.  Now sadly lost, this stucco monument to Tyer’s friend Lord Petre, the botanist and gardener who had died at the early age of 29, was Roubiliac’s first foray into his full blown Death mode. An angel was shown blowing the last trump and causing a stone pyramid to crumble. Inside the pyramid a corpse threw aside its shroud and prepared to rise from the dead with an expression of ecstasy and bewilderment on its cadaverous face. Echoes of this piece are to be seen in the Nightingale and Hargreave memorials in Westminster Abbey.  Sepulchral memorials were in fact Robiliac’s main source of income; he received his first commissions for a monument in Westminster Abbey in 1745 and went on to complete five others there. He died penniless in 1762 and was buried in the churchyard at St Martins in the Fields. 

Dutton Cook in his Art in England of 1869 draws a vivid picture of Roubiliac’s supposed eccentricities:

Roubiliac — a thin, olive-skinned Frenchman, with strongly-marked, arching eyebrows, mobile features, and small, sharp, dark eyes—liable at all times to fits of abstraction, attacks of inspiration. He will drop his knife and fork while at dinner, sink back in his chair, assume an ecstatic expression: the fit is on him; he must abandon his meal and hurry away at once to lock himself in his studio, and place upon record the superb idea which has so inconveniently visited him. His companions make allowances for him: men of genius are often thus. At other times he is absorbed in meditation upon his art: address him, and he makes no reply, fails to hear. While engaged upon his statue of Handel, he decides that the great musician must have possessed an ear of exceeding symmetry, and searches everywhere for a model. He scrutinizes the ears of all his acquaintances. Suddenly he pounces upon Miss Rich, the daughter of the Covent Garden manager. 'Miss Rich,' he cries, 'I must have your ear for my Handel!' In Westminster Abbey he permits himself to be 'discovered'—to use an appropriate theatrical term—lost in contemplation of the kneeling figure at the north-west corner of Sir Francis Vere's monument. His servant, having thrice delivered a message, without receiving a word in reply, finds his arm suddenly seized, and his master whispering mysteriously in his ear, while he points to the statue: 'Hush! hush! he vill speak presently!' At another time he invites a friend to occupy a spare bed at his house, gives him his candle, and bids him good-night. Presently the friend is heard crying aloud in great excitement and alarm; the bed is already occupied: the dead body of a negress is laid out upon it. 'I beg your pardon,' says the artist, 'I quite forgot poor Mary vas dere. Poor Mary! she die yesterday vid de small-pox. She was my housemaid for five, six years. Come along; I vill find you a bed somevhere else.' All this was but acting up to the idea Mr. Roubiliac had formed of the abstractedness and eccentricity of genius.

I found this story about Roubiliac and the Nightingale memorial in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News of 16 July 1898:

The story is told of Roubiliac that when he was engaged at Westminster Abbey erecting his famous monument to Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale, he was found one day by the Abbey mason gazing intently on a knightly figure supporting the canopy over the statue of Sir Francis Vere. As the man approached, the sculptor laid his hand on his arm, pointing to the figure, and whispered, "Hush! hush! he vil speak presently!"

On 30 March 1826 the distinguished architect and pioneer of the study of medieval gothic architecture, Lewis Nockalls Cottingham wrote a letter to the editor of the Representative lamenting the state of Westminster Abbey and concerned that the ecclesiastical authorities were considering allowing the general public unfettered access to the edifice. “I recollect visiting this building a few years since, when it was a common thoroughfare,” he wrote “and remarking how slight a protection the iron cages, which then enclosed the tombs and statues, were against the constant depredations committed by the careless and mischievous.” He told the newspaper that he could provide ‘a hundred instances’ as evidence why the church should remain shut to the common visitor, monuments he said, “are nearly destroyed; in several instances the heads, fingers, and toes of the figures are broken off. The sanctity of the place was daily violated, and the stones which covered the mortal remains of a Pitt and a Fox trodden on with as much indifference as common pavement. Surely, in a country which boasts of so much taste and refinement of feeling, something should be done to preserve the most interesting of its monuments from premature ruin.” His feeling was that an entrance charge should be levied, and quite a stiff charge, not less than 15 pence. One and three! That would have been quite a hefty entrance fee in the 1820’s. Perhaps almost the equivalent of the £31 it currently costs to buy a basic ticket to the Abbey. Despite the price the place was still full when I visited earlier this week. There is, for anyone interested in funerary monuments, far more to see than you can take in in one visit. The estimate is that around 3600 people are buried here, all of them either prebendaries of the Abbey or the great and the good of the Kingdom. No one ordinary in interred here, you have to be royalty, aristocracy or ridiculously famous. I found it a bit overwhelming; too much to see and too many other people in the way. Let me leave the last words to Washington Irving:

It seems as if the awful nature of the place presses down upon the soul and hushes the beholder into noiseless reverence. We feel that we are surrounded by the congregated bones of the great men of past times, who have filled history with their deeds and the earth with their renown. And yet it almost provokes a smile at the vanity of human ambition to see how they are crowded together and jostled in the dust; what parsimony is observed in doling out a scanty nook, a gloomy corner, a little portion of earth, to those whom, when alive, kingdoms could not satisfy, and how many shapes and forms and artifices are devised to catch the casual notice of the passenger, and save from forgetfulness for a few short years a name which once aspired to occupy ages of the world's thought and admiration.

Monument to Mary Beaumont, Countess of Buckingham, and her 1st husband Sir George Villiers   (died 1606). St. Nicholas' chapel, Westminster Abbey

Elizabeth Russell (died 1601) rests her foot on a skull and is not dying, but sleeping, according to the latin tag on the memorial