Life on the Lam; Bruce Reynolds (1931-2013) Highgate East Cemetery

 

Have you seen Bruce Richard Reynolds? He's a man you must detain.
He's wanted for the robbery of the Glasgow / Euston train.
Age thirty-two, height six foot one, eyes grey and his hair is brown
Apprehend Bruce Richard Reynold, he is wanted by The Crown. 

Nigel Denver – Have you seen Bruce Richard Reynolds (1966)

A robber is a bandit, an outlaw, a desperado. A thief is a tea-leaf. A robber ends up at the Old Bailey – the London Palladium of the nation’s courts – and gets a ten stretch. A thief appears before the beak at Old Street magistrate’s court and gets three months. A robber takes the girlfriend off to Longchamp for the weekend. A thief goes home to the wife in Upminster. So why did Bruce Reynolds, a main player in this country’s robbery of the century, choose to call his book The Autobiography of a Thief?

It was, he says, a bit of homage to Jean Genet. The Thief’s Journal was being translated into English just as Bruce and Buster and Charlie were driving £2,631,684 in mail bags to Leatherslade Farm on 8 August 1963, with Tony Bennett singing ‘The Good Life’ on the radio. When Buster Edwards hanged himself last year and I rang Bruce Reynolds for a comment (an explanation, if there can ever be such a thing) he referred me to Alvarez and The Savage God.

Duncan Campbell ‘Tea Leafing’ London Review of Books 19.10.1995

Bruce Reynolds was clearly no ordinary crook, very few of whom while away the tedious hours in their prison cells admiring the collected works of the Jean Genie or leafing through Al Alvarez’s treatise on suicide. When he died in 2013 The Guardian’s report on his funeral made much of the fact that he was being buried just a hundred yards or so away from Karl Marx, “near the tomb of the man who once pronounced, in words doubtless echoed by the robbers, that "the true law of economics is chance’”. As I stood in front of his grave I was struck more by the fact that he is buried directly in front of the plot belonging to William and Alice Shand-Kydd, who died in 1936 and 1929 respectively, than his proximity to Marx; it is an odd coincidence that the mastermind of 1963’s great train robbery now rests next to a family with connections to both royalty and one of the 1970’s great criminal scandals. William and Alice were the grandparents of half-brothers Peter (1925-2006) and Bill Shand-Kydd (1937-2015). Peter is best known for his affair with Frances Ruth Roche, the then young wife of John, the 8th Earl Spencer and then for marrying her following her acrimonious divorce from her infuriated, cuckolded husband. Whilst married, Frances had given birth to five of Earl Spencer’s children, including of course, Diana, Princess of Wales. Peter’s half-brother Bill was, according to his obituary in The Independent a “bon viveur … a businessman, an adrenaline-fuelled sportsman, womaniser, gambler, successful jockey and racehorse breeder”, who also happened to be the brother-in-law of John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan, the notorious murderer who disappeared in 1975 after attempting to kill his wife but mistakenly killing his children’s nanny instead. It is difficult for a member of the aristocracy to commit a violent crime without it sounding like the solution to a game of Cluedo (‘It was Lord Lucan, with the lead pipe, in the basement kitchen’); a title somehow manages to both trivialise and glamorise what appears to have been a particularly nasty case of domestic violence, albeit the victim was the ‘wrong’ woman, Sandra Rivett, rather than Lady Lucan. After the murder Lord Lucan left a blood-stained note for his brother-in-law, apparently disclaiming responsibility for it; in it he explained that on "a traumatic night of unbelievable coincidence" he had been driving past the house where his family lived, as he often did when harassing his wife, when he noticed, through the basement window, an unknown aggressor attacking her, in the dark. He stopped his car and went into the house, less perhaps to assist his estranged spouse than to assert his sole right to practice violence on her person, only to find himself, after chasing off the attacker, accused of being the assailant! Bill Shand-Kydd was one of the close group of Lucan’s friends and associates that are suspected of helping him evade the police investigation by disappearing, apparently into thin air. Lady Lucan herself purported to believe that her husband had committed suicide "like the nobleman he was" (wishful thinking perhaps) but everyone else thought he was living under an assumed name in some obscure corner of the globe. In a further irony, on Christmas Eve 1974 the Australian police arrested a man they were convinced was Lord Lucan but, when the toffee nosed pom they had in custody was forced to drop his trousers, he did not have one of the aristocrats distinguishing features, a 6 inch scar on his inner right thigh. Further investigation revealed that the man they had arrested was in fact John Stonehouse, the Labour MP who had faked his own death on Miami Beach a month earlier and was also on the run. 

Bruce, looking more like Michael Caine than Michael Caine, in 1963 with John Daly, the only member of the gang to be acquitted at trial, along with their wives. 

Many rungs down the social ladder from the Shand-Kydd’s he may have been but Bruce Reynolds, who was himself very familiar with the highs and lows of being on the run, now occupies a slightly better plot in the cemetery and has a much better gravestone. He was born in 1931 at Charing Cross Hospital and brought up in south and east London, though in the suburbs of Putney and Gants Hill rather than in the gangster heartlands. His mother died when he was 4 and his father, who worked on the production line at Fords in Dagenham, remarried; Bruce didn’t get on with his step mum by all accounts and was keen to leave home at the earliest opportunity. An attempt to join the navy when he was 14 failed because of his poor eyesight and he spent his teenage years working in various odd jobs and making the acquaintance of various young rogues who were to induct him into a life of crime. This started with breaking into shops and factories and moved onto jewellery thefts from country mansions and robbing a bookie on his way home from White City Greyhounds.  Spells in borstal, Wormwood Scrubs, Wandsworth and Durham cemented him into a career of villainy but his intelligence and ambition lifted him out of petty crime and into the big time of armed robbery.  His first masterminded heist, a security van robbery at Heathrow Airport in 1962, netted £62,000. The loot from his first train robbery, on a Royal Mail train at Swindon, was a disappointing £700. His next adventure was the big one, a 15-man gang headed by Reynolds brought the Glasgow to London mail train to a halt in Buckinghamshire in the early hours of the morning on the 8th August 1963 and successfully made away with £2.3 million in cash (worth around £50 million today). The gang was unarmed and under instructions to use no unnecessary violence; a couple of workers in the mail carriage were gently coshed to get them to cooperate but the train driver was hit in the head and face with a metal bar with more force than seemed strictly necessary. 

Ronnie and Bruce celebrate Ronnie's 70th birthday with their sons Michael and Nick

Reynolds spent 5 years on the run following the great train robbery, moving from Kensington to France, Canada and Mexico with his wife and young son, in an effort to stay one step ahead of the law. The police were breathing down his neck for the entire time; the first member of the gang to be picked up was Roger Cordrey, who was arrested just six days after the heist. Others followed in short order including Ronald Biggs and Charlie Wilson. The 25-year sentences handed out by the courts for the robbery caused some consternation, and not just amongst the robbers. When Biggs and Wilson managed to escape from prison in 1964 Graham Greene wrote to the Daily Telegraph saying: "Am I one of a minority in feeling admiration for the skill and courage behind the Great Train Robbery? More important, am I in a minority in being shocked by the savagery of the sentences?" How proud that must have made Reynolds as he continued to move around the globe in his efforts to evade the police. By 1968 he had spent almost all of his £150,000 share of the profits from the robbery and was back in England looking for further criminal opportunities. He was arrested in Torquay on the 8th November and, like the others, received a 25 year sentence. In the event he served less than half of this and was released from Maidstone gaol on the 1st June 1978, just in time to hear the dreadful ‘No one is innocent’ single released by the Lydonless Sex Pistols and recorded in Rio de Janeiro with his old mucker Ronnie Biggs on vocals.  

Nick Reynolds best known death mask, on Malcolm McLaren's grave in Highgate 

Whilst in prison Reynolds' marriage had collapsed and once released his notoriety made going straight difficult. He took up drug dealing and by 1980 was back in Maidstone prison on a three year sentence for supplying amphetamines. Once released he took whatever legal opportunities his criminal past afforded him, acting as a consultant on the film Buster, writing his autobiography in 1995, and becoming, as he put it himself “an old crook living on handouts from other old crooks.” When the handouts stopped, he found himself living on Income Support in a small flat in Croydon. In his final years he ruefully summed up his life:  

I got what I wanted out of life, what I considered a good life. I wanted to live a life like Hemingway. When I was in Mexico the people I knew were bullfighters and motor racing drivers. But when you're in the position where you can do anything it no longer has the same attraction. You realise it's all tinsel to a degree. I only ever wanted to live in a place that I felt comfortable in, which, ironically I suppose, is about the size of a cell. 

Reynolds died in February 2013. His first funeral took place on a dull grey March day in at St Bartholomew the Great in West Smithfield. The press photographers present inevitably focussed their lens on the gangster element in the crowd of mourners, Ronnie Biggs of course (who, confined to a wheelchair, and left speechless by a stroke, still managed to steal the show by sticking two shaky fingers up at the gawping pressmen) Kray associate Chris Lambrianou, Freddie Foreman, Dave Courtney (not quite the real thing perhaps) and various anonymous men, built like proverbial brick shithouses and squeezed into dark suits and black raincoats, one of them sporting two gold plated bullets and a knuckle duster strung on a belcher chain around a neck as thick as an ox’s. According to the Guardian “The funeral was organised by Reynolds' son, Nick, who was a diver with the Royal Navy during the Falklands war and is now a sculptor and a musician with the Alabama Three, creators of the theme tune of The Sopranos. He had wanted to get away from the old-style gangster's send-off, so there was to be no floral tribute in the shape of a mailbag, no playing of Frank Sinatra's version of My Way. Instead, there were tales from friends, music from the band and the church's own magnificent choir.”  Reynolds' two grandson’s read poems as did John Cooper Clarke; Clarke’s was self-penned, of course, and entitled ‘Lines Upon the Death of Mr Bruce Reynolds.’ There were tributes from the actors David Thewlis and Ray Stevenson, and the author Jake Arnott, and music from Fauré, Irving Berlin and Nick’s band The Alabama Three. 

The second funeral took place five months later at Highgate Cemetery when Reynolds' cremated remains were buried, along with those of his wife Angela, on a sunny 8th August, the 50th anniversary of the great train robbery.  Once again Ronnie Biggs (who was celebrating his 84th birthday that day), Freddie Foreman and the sons of some of the other train robbers were present. Jake Arnott read a passage from Reynolds' autobiography and Mr Seggs, one of the Alabama Three, sang ‘Too Sick to Pray'. The highlight of the ceremony would have been the unveiling of the memorial featuring Nick Reynolds' death bust of his father and the words C'est la vie (Reynolds response to DI Tommy Butler’s “Hello Bruce, it’s been a long time” when he was arrested in Torquay in 1968).  As well as being a musician Nick Reynolds is an artist who has developed a profitable sideline practicing the ancient art of creating death masks. Highgate has several examples of his work including his most famous, Malcolm McLaren.  

For anyone interested in Nick Reynolds' work I would recommend Hayley Campbell's book 'All the Living and the Dead'  which devotes a very interesting chapter to him. 

Nick Reynolds at Highgate Cemetery with another of his death masks

Communing with the dead; Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, Malet Place, WC1

I thought that an exhibit of a complete human skeleton sitting upright in a giant earthenware pot, would leap out at me when I visited the Petrie Museum.  The museum is small, just two upstairs rooms in an old stable block on Malet Place in the UCL campus, just across the road from the Gower Street Waterstones. Despite its small size it still took me two complete circuits to locate UC14857, as the museums pre-dynastic Egyptian pot burial is officially known.  Part of the problem locating him is that he is placed inconspicuously in a side case at floor level making him easy for an adult to overlook, but at just the right level to startle small children.  To properly examine him anyone over three feet high has to crouch or squat by his glass case.  UC14857 is the mortal remains of a man buried in two large pots about 6000 years ago at what is now the village of Badari in Upper Egypt. Information about the exhibit is printed on a laminated card left propped up against the vitrine; if it had been placed inside the case anyone wanting to read would probably have to get down on their hands and knees to see it. The card says:

The village of Badari is now used to refer to a distinct predynastic civilisation called Badarian. Badarian sites were found by the Egyptian Ali Suefi in 1923 and published by English archaeologists Guy Brunton and Gertrude Caton-Thompson. It is thought to span 4400–4000 BC and is the earliest farming culture in Middle Egypt.

Brunton and Caton-Thompson described this as 'a large double pot burial, in excellent condition, of an adult female'. It is displayed in the position that it was found at North Spur Burial (59). The Petrie Museum also displays other items from Badarian civilisation, including black-topped pots and jewellery, that were often buried as funerary goods.

The skeleton was repaired after damage during World War Two, though some material was further damaged in 1985. In 1995, gynaecologist Mark Broadbent identified the skeleton as male on the basis of pelvis and femur length. He also thought the man was over 6 foot tall. 

This detail about gender and height helps transform the museum object into a real person who lived and breathed. Attitudes to the display of human remains in museums, whether skeletal or preserved (such as mummies), have changed over the last 20 years. Some people find such displays offensive or uncomfortable, while others think they are useful in explaining the past. Should we display the burial in this way?

Crouched in front of the glass, no more than a couple of feet away from UC14857's empty eye sockets, I do my best to reach out across the 6000 years that separate us, I try to connect with him, to humanise him, to visualise the man he once was. I fail dismally. My imagination lets me down and he stubbornly remains an articulated skeleton, a reassembled collection of bones, sitting in a pot. I know nothing about this man, and I know nothing about his world. I don’t know how he dressed, what he looked like, what sort of house he lived in, what he ate, did for a living, how he got on with his neighbours, whether he was married or a father. And I know nothing of the Badari culture to place him in any sort of social context. No real surprise then that I can’t conjure him up in my imagination.

There are more exhibits from Badari in the museum. I was surprised to see that many of them consisted of fine flint tools like scrapers and arrow heads, bone implements like needles and polished pebble beads. I assumed from what I saw that this was a neolithic culture, which seemed astonishing just a thousand years before the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt and the start of the first Pharaonic dynasty.  A bit of further research later revealed that the Badarian culture was Chalcolithic, it belonged to the Copper Age. None of the many objects sitting in their display cases helped me feel any closer to UC14857. Do many people find the sight of skeletons in museums offensive? I really struggle to understand why.

I decided to leave Badari man in peace and had a look at the rest of the exhibits. I was very taken with a display of a couple of hundred or so Shabti figurines, all densely packed into one large case. Apparently, the idea for showing so many of these small clay figurines together originated with Flinders Petrie himself, the display is meant to show the development of Shabtis over time. Shabti (also known as ushebtis or shawabtis) are figurines made from clay or carved in wood or stone that were buried with the dead to act as servants in the afterlife. The bright blue ones are made from faience, a glazed non-clay ceramic material, composed of crushed quartz or sand, with small amounts of lime and either natron or plant ash. The colour comes from a copper rich glaze applied before they were fired. They are very common objects and even now you can buy them for as little as £250.

Also interesting were the examples of funerary stelae, upright monuments set up above tombs. These look exactly like cemetery headstones, often with a curved top edge and carrying images and inscriptions, including the name of the dead. There is no connection as far as I know between the design of 17th century headstones and these ancient stelae, they alighted on the same basic design by chance.

The objects that impressed me most, and which quite unexpectedly gave me my moment of connection with the past were half a dozen Acheulean handaxes. These objects are far more ancient than anything else in the museum, they were made in Egypt almost half a million years ago not by modern humans but by Homo Erectus, our direct ancestors and the longest-lived homo species, they survived for at least two million years, In contrast modern man evolved around 300,000 years ago and we will be lucky if we don’t wipe ourselves out in the next couple of hundred. Hand axes are hefty tools, skilfully knapped from flint or chert, pointed at one end with chipped, sharp edges but smooth at the other to sit in the palm of the hand. No one can be sure exactly how they were used but it seems likely that butchering carcasses, cutting wood and digging were some of the activities they were handy for. I find it difficult not to imagine them being used to bash the brains out of some hapless foe but if Homo Erectus survived for two million years, maybe they weren’t as violent to each other as Homo Sapiens are? After all, very few other species are quite as blood thirsty as we are. It was staring at these ancient objects that I had my sudden moment of temporal vertigo, that half a million years collapsed in on itself and I had a clear vision of a callused hand with thick, strong fingers, and a dark-skinned muscled forearm gripping the hand axe. Maker or user I don’t know, but I felt closer to the hand that had once, 500,000 years ago, held that axe than I did to that member of my own species, the skeleton in the pot burial.

 

'Mummified; The Stories Behind Egyptian Mummies in Museums' - Angela Stienne (Manchester University Press, £20)

 

α My name is... 
                β what does it matter?
          α My country is…
                β And what does that matter either?
          α I am of noble birth…
                β What if you came from the working-class?
          α When I died my reputation was high…
                β What if it had been low?
          α And I now lie here.
                β Who are you and to whom are you telling this? 

                                                              Sepulchral Epigram
                                                     attributed to Paulus Silentiarius 

“The Egyptian mummy is both dead and alive: physically and in the collective consciousness. And yet, so many see Egyptian mummies today and forget about the crucial part: an Egyptian mummy is a corpse. Behind their astonishing preservation, their fine wrappings and ornate cartonnage, behind the beautifully rendered mask, from the golden ones to the Fayum portraits, when we peer at ancient Egyptian mummified bodies, we stare at death.”                                                                                                                                                                                                      Angela Stienne

In January media outlets of every stripe were reporting, as CNN put it, that “some museums in Britain are now using words other than "mummy" to describe their displays of ancient Egyptian human remains. Instead, they are starting to adopt terms such as "mummified person" or to use the individual's name to emphasize that they were once living people.” The Sun, who were one of the first newspapers to pick up on the story, ran it under a typically provocative headline; MUMMY'S A CURSE Woke museum chiefs stop calling embalmed Egyptian dead ‘mummies’. The Daily Mail’s version was Don't use the word 'MUMMY'... it's offensive to ancient Egyptians: Museums stop using age-old expression out of 'respect' for 3,000-year-old dead. Where the tabloids lead these days, the broadsheets seldom fail to follow; The Times reported that “Museums are removing the word “mummy” from labels that describe human remains in their Egyptian exhibitions because it is deemed “dehumanising” and has a colonial past.” It is not difficult to imagine the comments the story provoked amongst readers; “Does anyone have a real job nowadays, or is everyone just paid to worry about how someone might be offended? Although if you're worrying about offending someone who died 3,000 years ago, I fear you've watched one too many Tom Cruise movies”, was the most popular reader comment in The Times. 

Paul Dominique Philippoteaux’s 1891 painting shows the mummy of an ancient Egyptian priestess being unwrapped before members of the French Egyptology Society

The title of Dr Angela Stienne’s book tells you immediately which side of the debate on mummies she is on. The book is an extremely well-argued polemic for not only making changes to the way we describe mummified persons but for rethinking the way human remains are displayed in museums. Dr Stienne is French but has studied and worked in the UK for a number of years and ‘Mummified’ engages equally with both French and British cultural history. Her history of Western engagement with the Egyptian mummy focuses largely on the two centuries that have passed since the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon’s grande armée of soldiers and scholars in 1798. Her central argument is that popular and scholarly engagement with mummified remains shows “a fundamental lack of respect for their status as the remains of human being.” There is, she says a “core idea that bodies could be poked at, studied and made fun of as innocent entertainment – a pretend innocence that masked a political reality. The French and English were colonisers, and colonial activity only makes sense when the colonisers consider themselves superior to the people whose lands and cultures they have decided to control.”

Dr Stienne points to the European fascination with ‘otherness’ and cites the examples of the public displays of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, and Julia Pastrana, the Mexican 'wolf-woman', to argue that “the viewing of real people, dead or alive, in fairs, shows and national exhibitions was not just a morbid curiosity inherited from the anatomy museum: in the nineteenth century, this began to carry an insidious political message. It was to be understood that some people were not just different – they were inferior. And in this sordid display of racism and othering, the Egyptian mummy became a powerful took of persuasion.” She sometimes takes her arguments in unexpected directions. In a chapter entitled ‘The (White) mummy returns’ she moves from a discussion on Flinders Petrie’s involvement, with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, in the creation of eugenics to Erich von Däniken’s batty theories that aliens built the pyramids. Despite being discredited both types of thinking, she argues, are as prevelant today as they ever were; “the alien trope is a recurring one, and yet few realise how rooted it is in deep racism and the exclusion of Egyptians from their own narrative” she says. Because there is widespread incomprehension that ancient peoples may have possessed skills and knowledge that we do not possess today there is “the pervasive idea that civilisations evolve and progress and that therefore we are entirely superior today in skills and intelligence to people who lived before”.  

The good doctor contemplates the conundrums in displaying human remains

While Dr Stienne is clear sighted about the past her vision regarding the future is slightly more clouded. Something needs to change in the way human remains, including mummies, are displayed and she looks at some recent developments and initiatives that have tried to tackle the issues she has raised. But she clearly does not find these completely satisfactory; her own fascination with mummified remains seems to stop her from accepting what seems the logical conclusion of her arguments, that if it is fundamentally disrespectful to put human remains on public display then museums should repatriate the remains in their collections to their place of origin, where they should be buried again. Instead, she says we are faced with the ‘mummy conundrum; a displaced body that forces us, from within its glass case, to bear witness to a body that is dead, and yet has survived incredible times’ and which represents ‘the rare opportunity, to go and visit death, time after time.’ She argues that ‘these silent bodies are an invitation to have new conversations. Perhaps this is an imperfect future: one where we share uncomfortable conversations but also moving stories”. In her Epilogue she tells us how moving she found the 2021 Pharaoh’s Golden Parade where with great ceremony the Egyptian government moved 22 Royal mummies from their then home in the old museum in Tahrir Square to their new home at the national Museum of Egyptian Civilisation.  She also approved of the respect and solemnity with which Ramses II was received in France when he was sent to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris to be treated for a dangerous outbreak of parasites, brought by military plane and received by the Republican guard and senior officials and then driven to the Place de la Concorde to see the obelisk that was raised in Luxor during his own reign but has stood in Paris since 1836.  

Luckily as well as being a polemicist Dr Stienne is a story teller, and not only that, a story teller that is in love with her subject to boot. She mixes her own personal experience in with her narratives of mummies and whether you agree or not with her arguments her book is always interesting and informative. Personally, I think there are limits to the respect that we owe the dead. I don’t think anyone has the right to demand that future generations treat their mortal remains as though they are sacred. Anyone who hasn’t fully decomposed after a couple of hundred years is fair game for archaeologists as far as I am concerned. This a very good book which has received shockingly few reviews. Highly recommended.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gangsters, the most inebriated woman in the world, flatulent Lord Mayors and Olaudah Equiano; Chingford Mount Cemetery, Old Church Road, E4

 

Chingford Mount was opened as a non-conformist burial ground by the Abney Park Cemetery Company in 1884 when the 32 acres of the company’s first cemetery in Stoke Newington were starting to become a little overcrowded.  “Forty-four years ago-on the 28th May, 1840 the Lord Mayor of London opened the burial-ground at Abney-park,” reported Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper on 25 May 1884, “with the marvellous growth of the Great City, so rapid have been the funeral marches to the grave, that its thirty acres are being swiftly swallowed up. Accordingly, the limited company to which the ground belongs has secured a fresh estate of seventy-eight acres, and thirty-three of them having been enclosed for the purpose of sepulture, another Lord Mayor yesterday opened what is to be known as Chingford Mount Cemetery. It occupies a fine position on the first hill beyond the valley of the Lea, and is approached by good roads from Clapton, Tottenham, and Walthamstow. A grand avenue of elms opening on the ivy-covered ruins of old Chingford church forms a picturesque feature of the locality.” The tree lined avenue is still there, the original elms have gone and been replaced by London planes.

The cemetery was formally opened by the flatulent Sir Robert Fowler, twice Lord Mayor of London, in a ceremony which he enigmatically described as “sad and interesting”. (Frank Harris demolished Sir Robert’s reputation in ‘My Life and Loves’. The learned mayor was described in the first D.N.B. as “a perfect storehouse of quotations from orators and poets, Greek, Roman, and English” but Harris characterises him as “a large man who must have been five feet ten at least in height and much more in girth” who at a society dinner “ate like an ogre…. smacking his lips and hurrying again to his plate, intent on cutting and swallowing huge gobbets of meat while the veins of his forehead stood out like knotted cords and the beads of sweat poured down his great red face!” The result of the gourmandising was an attack of fetid flatulence that drove the hostess, “as pale as death”, from the dining room in search of fresh air.)  According to Lloyds Weekly “After the chaplain, the Rev H. Varley, had read some appropriate passages of Scripture, Dr. Llewelyn Bevan delivered an address, referred to burial customs in ancient times, and pointing out how the harsh restrictions with respect to those who had died unbaptised, who had committed suicide; or were ex-communicated, had led to the divisions which were now to be found in " God's Acre." We have only to look back a hundred years to find a tax on burials, the impost being levied on a sliding scale, by which four shillings was paid for a "common person," and as much as fifty pounds for a duke. Wise reforms have stayed man's tyranny from being carried down to the grave, but there is ample room for improvement in our burial customs. Would not the opening of this new cemetery afford a timely opportunity for the introduction of more simple ways for showing reverence for the dead?”  Chingford certainly offered a simpler, and cheaper, way of burying the dead; fees at Abney Park were 20 shillings for a child and 40 shillings for an adult and a private cost £3 3 shillings, but at Chingford children could be buried for a little as 4 shillings and adults from 10 and private graves started at £1 1 shilling. Further enticement to use Chingford were Sunday burials, banned at Abney Park, but available there from 1887; “this concession to the wishes of many East End residents is evidently already fully appreciated, especially by working-class people and middle-class traders, many of whom find exceedingly inconvenient to leave their employment and business during the week-days in order to attend the funerals of their deceased relatives,” said the  Hackney and Kingsland Gazette of 2 March 1887, “these are times when East-enders can ill afford to lose day’s wages, even for so needful a purpose; and the Sunday interments, which, as above stated, have already commenced, will sure to prove a great boon to the bereaved.”

There are no outstanding monuments at Chingford Mount, Dr Llewelyn Bevan would be pleased to note that simplicity became an indelible feature of the cemetery. Meller and Parsons in London Cemeteries praise the trees rather than the memorials, “some of them are magnificent,” they say, especially the avenue of planes. The cemetery was used for a couple of mass reinterments following closure of burial grounds elsewhere. In the late 1930’s Ram’s Episcopal Chapel was scheduled for demolition;

Over 200 years ago, shortly after George II became King, an Irishman disagreed with the churchwarden of Hackney (London) parish church. He wanted to occupy pew 13. They refused to let him do so. Mr. Stephen Ram, banker, son of Sir Albert Ram, of Dublin, therefore, built his own church some few hundred yards away. Every Sunday since then services have been held, but Ram's Episcopal Chapel, Homerton, is now a dangerous structure, and it to be demolished. (Beeston Gazette and Echo - Friday 22 July 1938)

The burial ground of the chapel was emptied of its occupants who were all reburied in Chingford.

In 1898 The famous Whitefield Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road was demolished and rebuilt on a larger scale. This meant removing the bodies from the burial ground, including that of John Whitefield’s wife Elizabeth. The St. Pancras Gazette of Friday 24 January 1908 ran a story commemorating the 10th anniversary of the new tabernacle;

The rebuilding of the chapel in 1898 necessitated the removal of a large number of coffins and human remains, under a license issued by the Home Secretary. In excavating underneath the back part of the chapel, extensive vaults were found. These had at various times been cleared out, and the coffins placed in three large brick chambers in the rear, which were then bricked up. One of them had been thus closed for 65 years, and another for over 40 years. On opening those chambers 200 coffins were found, of all sizes and in all conditions. They had been placed in piles one upon another, and those towards the bottom were in many cases crushed out of shape.

The front part of the chapel enclosed a large piece of ground, in which many graves and brick vaults had been made. Some of the wooden coffins discovered here were very sound, but contained nothing but bones in nearly every instance. One iron coffin was found quite intact except for rust. Here also was discovered the mummified body of a woman, resembling marble in appearance, and as hard, but very light in weight, apparently having undergone some system of embalming. There was no plate remaining on the coffin.

The coffin of Mrs Whitefield (1768) was quite sound. It was made of solid cast lead, half an inch thick, with the handles and plates soldered on. It was exceedingly heavy. The whole of the coffins and remains were placed in large packing cases, close upon 300 in number, and reinterred at Chingford Mount Cemetery, Mrs Whitefield's being placed in a separate grave.

The lead coffin containing the remains of the Rev. A. M. Toplady (1778) was discovered in an earth grave as sound as when first deposited there. Being at an unusual depth it was not removed, but remains under the floor of the new basement hall encased in concrete, the exact spot being marked by a suitable tablet.

The last resting place of Olaudah Equiano, the one-time slave who became a writer and abolitionist, was a complete mystery until 2018 when Professor Vincent Carretta of the University of Maryland discovered his burial entry in the register of Whitefield’s Tabernacle. According to the register he was buried on 6 April 1797 in the chapel burial ground. Unless his coffin was missed during the clear out of 1898 then his mortal remains are now buried in a mass grave in Chingford Mount. 

The most famous graves in the cemetery belong to the Kray Family; twins Ronnie and Reggie, their brother Charlie, mother Violet and Reggie’s first wife Frances who committed suicide in 1967 at the age of 23. The Kray’s are of course England’s most famous gangsters; small time petty crooks who used violence and intimidation to become big time crooks and who became national celebrities as night club owners when crooked landlord Peter Rachman sold them a gaming club in Knightsbridge, Esmeralda’s Barn in the early 1960’s. When they weren’t hobnobbing with celebrities at their club, intimidating their rivals or extorting money out of anyone with a business interest in the West and East Ends, they were indulging hubris by killing anyone who got on their nerves, most famously George Cornell at the Blind Beggar in Whitechapel, allegedly for having called Ronnie a “fat poof”. Then there was Frank ‘the mad axeman’ Mitchell who the Krays sprung from Dartmoor prison in December 1966 but killed when he became a tiresome nuisance. And finally Jack ‘the hat’ McVitie who Reggie stabbed to death at a party in Evering Road in Hackney. McVitie was a member of the Kray gang and his death caused disquiet in the ranks – they must have all wondered who might be next. The answer was no one – Scotland Yard arrested the twins in May 1968 and they spent the rest of their lives behind bars becoming national anti-heroes in the process.   

In 1898 one Jane Cakebread was buried at the cemetery. According to the South Wales Daily News of 10 December “The funeral of this notorious old lady was mournful in its desolation at Chingford Mount Cemetery on Friday morning. The body of the woman whose name was known to many thousands of persons in all parts of the country was consigned to the grave with but one mourner, and he was Mr Thomas Holmes, the North London Police Court missionary, who had for years striven to do her good in life. He carried with him a simple wreath of flowers, and placed it reverently upon the coffin, which bore the plain inscription Jane Cakebread died Dec. 3, 1898. Aged 64." And why was 64-year-old Jane Cakebread notorious? Because she was, according to the London newspapers, the most inebriated woman in the world. She had an astonishing 281 convictions for drunkenness or disorderly conduct and spent almost 12 and a half years in total behind bars because of her alcoholism. When imprisoned she would sing her favourite hymns or recite portions of the Bible.  Her memory was sharp; she could quote two chapters from the Book of Job.   She prayed on her knees, only to rise from those prayers and spew obscenities.  Lady Henry Somerset tried to save her by taking her into her temperance home. Cakebread created chaos and was thrown out after three weeks. At her next court appearance Lady Henry suggested to the magistrates that the inebriate needed a psychiatric assessment. Her response when she was removed to Hackney Infirmary was to try and bite one of the guards and to kick Dr Gordon, the medical officer in the chest, breaking two of his ribs. She was eventually confined to an asylum where, deprived of liberty, fresh air and gin, she died.   

A better-behaved ‘old’ lady had been buried at the cemetery in 1887. This account is from Aberdeen Press and Journal of Thursday 24 February;

DEATH OF "MOTHER KETTLE." - Mrs Flanders, alias "Mother Kettle," whose face was familiar to thousands of men, women, and children, who have of late years visited Epping Forest, died a few days ago, and at the end of last week her remains were interred in Chingford Cemetery. The deceased, who was said to be the only licensed female driver of public conveyances kept for hire, could always be seen during the summer months in charge of a waggonette drawn by a pair of horses, in good condition, and well harnessed, and she knew all the favourite spots in the Forest. She was specially pointed out to the Queen when Her Majesty opened the Forest, and "Mother Kettle" was very proud of the distinction with which she had been honoured. Deceased was only 52 years of age.