¡Las lágrimas son agua y van al mar! - Frank Besson (1895-1915) Dardanelles

I have previously written about Marthe Josephine Besson’s memorial in Highgate Cemetery, the French born business woman who ran the Besson musical instrument manufactory in Paris and London after the death of her father. Marthe married a Frenchman, Adolphe Fontaine, who worked at the French embassy in London, had a daughter with him but then became embroiled in a scandalous relationship with a Spaniard who worked for her. When she fled the country with her lover in 1895 Adolphe accused her of stealing bonds and share certificates from him to the value of £35,000 as well as plate and furniture. He followed her around Europe denouncing her to the local authorities wherever she stayed and eventually had her arrested in Seville by Scotland Yard who brought her back to London to face trial. The charges against her were eventually dismissed and once the blaze of publicity caused by the court case was over she disappears from public view.

Richard Barnes new book “The Art of Memory – Sculpture in the Cemeteries of London” features the Besson memorial and cites my previous post as a source. He drops the revelation that Marthe had another child in 1896. I had completely missed this despite there being an inscription on the Besson memorial itself; “Also in Loving Memory of Frank Besson Fl. Lieuy. RN who was killed in the Dardanelles 20th Dec. 1915 aged 20 years.”  Barnes suggests that Frank is the son of Señor Alcaraz. It seems likely – probate records show Frank’s real name was Francisco and he never used the name Fontaine. I have been unable to trace any birth records for him in the UK (though there is a slight chance that a Male Besson, registered in Hackney in 1896 is Frank) which suggests that he was possibly born abroad, perhaps in Spain or France and that this is where Marthe must have been from February 1896 when the charges made against her by her husband were finally dropped. Marthe reappears again in UK records in 1904 when she shows up in the electoral register in Westminster.  Did Marthe join her Spanish lover, Señor Alcaraz on the continent as soon as the courts freed her? Frank’s date of birth on his pilot’s license was 16 Dec 1896 which would mean that Marthe became pregnant in March. It all seemed to be fitting together nicely when I came across a puzzling fact; newspaper reports of Marthe’s discharge from the courts in February 1896 say that Señor Alcaraz was dead. The Scotsman of 15 Feb for example tells us that: 

  

Mrs Besson, who was in tears and attired in deep mourning, was discharged...... Madame Besson told a reporter who asked her whether it was correct that her lover, Macais D'Alcarez, had committed suicide at Seville, that the report had been corroborated at the Spanish Consulate. She also showed her lover's portrait, and spoke in the warmest terms of his qualities, saying that he was knighted by the Queen of Spain in January last year, and was a chef d'administration in Madrid.

File card from the records of the Royal Aero Club showing when Frank obtained his aviators certifcate

There are a couple of other anomalies. The Besson memorial gives Frank’s age as 20 when he died on 20 December 1915. If he was born 16 December 1896 it would have been his 19th birthday four days before he died. The 1911 census gives his age as 16 but if 1896 is his correct date of birth he would only have been 15. Was Frank’s real date of birth 16 December 1895? If it was he was born in the middle of the court battle between Marthe and Adolphe, and his father appears to have committed suicide at about the same time as he was born. The relationship between Marthe and Señor Alcaraz appeared to be on an intimate footing by February 1895 according to evidence given by Marthe’s charlady at her trial and reported in The Worcestershire Chronicle on Saturday 21 December; 

Matilda Hunt, married woman, said she worked for the prisoner as a charwoman to the end of July last. About February last the prisoner said something about a visitor and at her directions she got a bedroom for him.—Prisoner (excitedly): We are not the divorce court; I admit I had a sweetheart there! That has nothing to do with the case; it is only blackmail." —Witness continuing said the man who arrived was called by the prisoner "Antonio." He occupied the room next to Madame's bedroom, and she had seen him coming out of Madame's bedroom. One afternoon she went into Madame's bedroom and saw the two in bed together. The witness, with great reluctance, and only after being cautioned by the magistrate that he would commit her, gave this part of her evidence.

Inscription on the Besson memorial

It was therefore entirely feasible for Marthe to have become pregnant in March. Her decision to flee to the continent in the autumn with Señor Alcaraz also makes more sense, she would have been very visibly pregnant by then. No newspaper reported Marthe being pregnant during her trial but many reported that after the court session on Saturday 14 December the case was adjourned until the following Thursday. At that session Marthe did not appear and unusually it was the counsel for the prosecution that explained her absence to the court:

Mr. Horace Avory, who appeared for the prosecution, said that he was informed that Madame Besson had, since the last hearing of the case, been confined. He had received a medical certificate to that effect, and he had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the information. She would not be able to attend the court for four weeks, and he asked that the case might be adjourned for that time.—The Magistrate consented to this course, and the ease was adjourned for a month. (Lisburn Herald, and Antrim and Down Advertiser 28 December 1895)

Many newspapers make reference to Marthe’s confinement but none mention her having the baby. It seems likely though that Frank was born on 16th December 1895. There are no further mentions of her recent pregnancy or the birth of her son in the newspaper accounts of the trial when it recommenced in January 1896. On the 14th February Marthe’s husband gave her an unexpected Valentine’s – he dropped the criminal case against her. His counsel explained his reasons to the court “having regard to all the circumstances of the case, and having explained that the proceedings were never instituted from any vindictive motive, but simply to protect himself and recover possession of his child — and in this M. Besson had been successful — he desired to withdraw from the criminal proceedings, leaving the serious matters of dispute between the parties to a civil Court, where proceedings were now pending.”

Portrait of Frank Besson from  the Daily Mirror 20 May 1916

Marthe was now free of the criminal proceedings but her life was in tatters. She was probably not heartbroken about the breakdown of her marriage but having to surrender her daughter to Adolphe’s custody must have been a bitter blow. Her fortune was intact but her lover had committed suicide in Spain without waiting for the outcome of the trial in London. And she was now a single mother of a fatherless baby boy. As her good name and reputation were destroyed going abroad must have seemed the only option. She was almost certainly away from London until 1904 when she returned to live at 5 Russell Mansions in Southampton Row. Frank must have come back with her. When she died in 1908 he became the ward of the 35 year old Mary Reavley; the 1911 census confirms both of them living at 71 Harvard Court, Honeybourne Road, Hampstead along with 17 year servant Florence Knights.

Frank attended Westminster School from May 1910 to Christmas 1914. He was in Rigaud’s House and official school records concentrate on his athletic prowess as a cricketer, footballer, sprinter and gymnast who made up ‘in strength and energy for what he lacks in style.’ The Westminster School website says that “his obituary in The Elizabethan noted that ‘he possessed boundless energy and the divine gift of enthusiasm. His tastes were all for mechanical science and adventure, and before the war he had already designed to join the Air Service.” Before he finally left the school in December 1914 he delivered a talk to the school’s Scientific Society on ‘Theories of Aviation.’ Just a month later he was putting theory into practice having joined the Royal Navy’s airborne division and been sent for flight training at the Grahame-White School in Hendon. He passed his aviators certificate in a Grahame-White biplane on 23 January 1915 and was sent off to join his regiment. We know that he served at Dunkirk in August 1915 and was then sent to the Dardanelles to serve in the Gallipolli campaign. He died on 20th December 1915, four days after his twentieth birthday, when his plane was shot down by the Turks and landed in the sea. Newspapers reported him as missing in action – his death was not confirmed until April 1916 when his observer, who had been fished from the sea by the Turks and taken prisoner, was released and confirmed to the British military authorities that Frank had drowned when the plane went down. His body was never recovered. As well as the inscription on his mother’s grave he is one of the 8515 names from the Great War commemorated on the Chatham War Memorial. Probate records give his name as Francisco Besson, his address as 3 Harvard Court, West Hampstead and value his estate at £1246 14 shillings. 

A Wight seaplane at Dunkirk in 1916, these planes were also used in the Gallipoli campaign  and it is almost certainly in one of these that Frank Besson died. 

Silence - A Figure For A Tomb: Harry Dwight Dillon Ripley (1864-1913) St Marylebone Cemetery, East Finchley

DEATH OF MR. H. DILLON RIPLEY.—the death occurred at The Spinney (formerly known as  ‘Crelash’), Little London, Horeham Road, on Saturday evening of Mr. H. Dillon Ripley, at the age of 48 years. The deceased gentleman had been in failing health for the past three months, but was able to get about, and was out of doors even a few hours before his death, which was from heart failure. He leaves a widow and a little boy, about four years of age. Mr. Ripley came from New York, and his London address was 22 Sussex Place, Clarence Gate. He came to Crelash  about four years ago, and made extensive alterations there, both to the house and grounds, employing a  large amount of labour. He was a liberal subscriber to charities and institutions, and only last year gave the handsome bronze trophy for the best hunter at the Cross in Hand Horse Show to replace the one which had been won outright. He was also supporter of the local Unionist cause. His remains were conveyed to London by motor hearse on Monday for interment.

Sussex Agricultural Express - Friday 14 February 1913

Harry Dwight Dillon Ripley was the grandson of American railway magnate Sidney Dillon, President of the Union Pacific Railroad who died in 1892 leaving an enormous fortune which included two trust funds for his grandson worth almost a million dollars. Ripley never had to earn his living, instead dedicating himself to a quiet life of drink and dissipation, initially in his home town of New York and in London where he moved in the late 1890’s following the death of his mother. In London he met Alice Louisa Reddy, born in Walworth in 1870, the eldest daughter of John Reddy a tailor. Alice is often described as an ‘Anglo-Irish actress’ but I haven’t been able to find any trace of her professional career. She married Ripley in St Marylebone in 1899, she was 29 and Ripley 35. The couple lived at 22 Sussex Place in the Nash terraces in the outer circle of Regents Park and later acquired a country place in Sussex, the Spinney.

After 9 years of marriage Alice disconcerted her husband’s family by producing a male heir, ostensibly ending any chance of the million dollar trust fund returning to the collaterals. When Ripley died in 1913 his son was only four but his family seized on a badly written clause in his will to try and deprive him and his mother of any share of the trust funds. Within a few months of her husband’s death Alice took herself to New York and settled in at the Waldorf Astoria with her son, determined to fight the family trustee’s for her son’s money. Like her deceased husband Alice liked a drink and every evening she would leave her five year old son in the hotel, her jewels stuffed under his mattress to thwart burglars, while she sought out the high life in the bars and nightclubs of Manhattan. At one point in her stay she misplaced her son for three days and was forced to call in the police for help; she had left him in the safekeeping of friends but couldn’t remember which ones. She eventually won her case in the American Courts and Dwight was dubbed by the newspapers The Million Dollar Baby. The pair returned to England where Dwight was rather neglected by his mother who preferred the company of a long line of suitors in London and at the Spinney to that of her son. She died a decade later, in July 1923, leaving the 14 year old Dwight, according to Douglas Chase, to remember “her chiefly for her boyfriends and appetites, or, as he put it in a scathing limerick her ‘carousing and feasting/and brain like a bee-sting’”. She was buried alongside Ripley in East Finchley cemetery. The newly orphaned Dwight was sent to Harrow in loco parentis where he met the love of his life, Rupert Barneby. The pair became celebrated botanists and art patrons, eventually making their life together in the USA. 

In Finchley Cemetery Sir William Reid Dick’s impressive bronze sculpture on the grave of ‘Harry Dwight Dillon Ripley of New York, USA’ stands just a few yards away from the famous bronze sculpture on the Thomas Joseph Tate memorial. Ripley had first commissioned the Scottish sculptor to produce a portrait of the young Dwight and a relief portrait of his grandfather Sidney Dillon. In 1911 he asked the artist to create a bronze trophy in the form of a knight crusader which he was to donate to the local agricultural show as the Dillon Ripley trophy for horse jumping in 1912. The trophy was won outright by a Mr Arthur Blinks of Hawkhurst on Little Lady in 1923 when he came first in the show jumping for the third time (having previously won it in 1912 and 1922). When Alice Ripley returned from the US in 1914 with the Dillon trust funds safely in her name she paid Reid Dick £500 for a copy of his latest work Silence – Figure for a tomb which had just been exhibited at the Royal Academy. It was a large amount of money – enough for Dick Reid to marry on. 

'The Work of the Dead' by Thomas W. Laqueur (Princeton University Press £27.95)

“The past is very present to me and has been for a very long time. I first became aware of this quite intensely when I was a teenager, because of the First World War. You see, I think that the dead are with us.”

Berger’s father, Stanley, served as an infantry major in the trenches during the 1914-18 war and was awarded the Military Cross. He remained in the army for a further four years until 1922, organising war graves for the British dead. It was Berger’s mother, Miriam, a working-class woman from ­Bermondsey, London, who helped him to return to civilian life.

“What I’m talking about now is a very ancient part of human awareness. It may even be what defines the human – although it [was] largely forgotten in the second half of the 20th century. The dead are not abandoned. They are kept near physically. They are a presence. What you think you’re looking at on that long road to the past is actually beside you where you stand.”

“I think the dead are with us”:John Berger at 88 – Philip Maughan, New Statesman  11 June 2015

Weighing in at just under three pounds Thomas W. Laqueur’s latest book is a serious and hefty piece of scholarship.  Its sheer bulk forced me to read it slowly and carefully being far too heavy to lug around on public transport and read on the journey to and from work. In fact the Berkeley professor may well be the least London Underground friendly authors ever. His previous magnum opus ‘Solitary Sex – A Cultural History of Masturbation’ probably ranks with ‘The Nigger of the Narcissus’ as one the titles you would least want fellow commuters to spot you perusing on the Central Line. But every cloud has a silver lining and being forced to consume ‘The Work of the Dead’ at a stately and contemplative pace is no bad thing.  Its 550 densely packed pages survey the culture of mortal remains from the 17th century to the present day. Some have criticised Laqueur’s overly narrow focus; the book concentrates on Europe and the USA and even within those narrow parameters London and Paris come in for the lion’s share of attention.  For me Laqueur succeeds brilliantly at what he sets out to do. In his Introduction he tells us that:

“The history of the work of the dead is a history of how they dwell in us – individually and communally. It is a history of how we imagine them to be, how they give meaning to our lives, how they structure public spaces, politics, and time. It is a history of the imagination, a history of how we invest the dead – again, I will be speaking primarily of the dead body – with meaning. It is really the greatest possible history of the imagination.”

   

He starts his explorations of the meaning of mortuary culture with an account of when “almost two and a half millennia ago, the outrageous Diogenes (ca. 412-323 B.C.E) told his students that when he died he wanted his body to be tossed over the wall where it would be devoured by beasts.” To the famous (or infamous) Cynic  a corpse was an empty vessel, a worthless shell to be discarded with the rubbish or treated as carrion (when Alexander the Great met the philosopher he found him contemplating a pile of human bones. “I was looking for the bones of your father,” Diogenes told the Macedonian “but I am having trouble distinguishing them from the bones of his slaves.”) “This book is about how and why Diogenes was right,” Laqueur says, “but also existentially wrong, wrong in a way that defies all cultural logic. It is about why the dead body matters.”  

The book takes us from the transformation of the parish churchyard from the recipient of the anonymous parish dead (for centuries churchyards had few or no permanent grave markers) in the late 17th century to a place where the dead were commemorated with every more elaborate memorials.  It guides through the revolutionary years of the enlightenment and the new thinking about life, death and immortality that marked the birth of the modern world. There are innumerable fascinating disquisitions, none more so for than the controversies surrounding the deaths of the atheistical philosophers Hume and Voltaire. We look at the development of the cemetery,  the rise of the cremation movement, and the 20th obsession with naming and memorialising the dead (after the Great War, the Holocaust and Vietnam).  In a book packed with detail and containing hundreds of narratives  Laqueur handles his material deftly and somehow contrives a coherent structure to hold it all together and tell a story which is larger than the sum of its parts. A wonderful book; highly recommended.

The tomb of Diogenes of Sinope

PS.  Diogenes cynical students and followers failed to follow the master’s precepts and far from throwing his body over the city walls for the jackals to devour they built him an elaborate tomb at Corinth. A pillar of Parian marble was placed over his grave with the image of a dog carved on it. The dog is a visual pun (the genitive form kynos of the word for dog suggests cynic) and a chthonic symbol, a dog being the Greek guardian of the underworld.  It is relatively easy to view our own dead bodies as little more than rubbish but much more difficult to adopt the same attitude to the bodies of the people we care about, even for a cynic.            

A Melancholy History of Suicidal Leaps; the Monument, Fish Street Hill, EC3

‘Certain spots in London have become popular with suicides, yet apparently without any special reason, except that even suicides are vain and like to die with éclat. Waterloo Bridge is chosen for its privacy; the Monument used to be chosen, we presume, for its height and quietude. Five persons have destroyed themselves by leaps from the Monument. The first of these unhappy creatures was William Green, a weaver, in 1750. On June 25 this man, wearing a green apron, the sign of his craft, came to the Monument door, and left his watch with the doorkeeper. A few minutes after he was heard to fall. Eighteen guineas were found in his pocket. The next man who fell from the Monument was Thomas Craddock, a baker. He was not a suicide; but, in reaching over to see an eagle which was hung in a cage from the bars, he overbalanced himself, and was killed. The next victim was Lyon Levi, a Jew diamond merchant in...... The third suicide (September II, 1839) was a young woman named Margaret Meyer. ... The October following, a boy named Hawes, who had been that morning discharged by his master, a surgeon, threw himself from the same place...The last suicide was in August, 1842, when a servant-girl from Hoxton, named Jane Cooper, while the watchman had his head turned, nimbly climbed over the iron railing, tucked her clothes tight between her knees, and dived head-foremost downwards.....Suicides being now fashionable here, the City of London (not a moment too soon) caged in the top of the Monument in the present ugly way.’                            

Walter Thornbury, 'Old and New London: Volume 1' (London, 1878)

Officially six people have committed suicide by leaping or falling from Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke’s 202 foot memorial to the Great Fire of London, the Monument. Walter Thornbury in ‘Old and New London’ lists six deaths but discounts one Thomas Craddock who he believes died accidentally toppling over the parapet trying to see a caged eagle. The Monument website says six, ignoring Thornbury’s first victim ‘William  Green’ as the accidental death, and adding a baker known only as Leander. Whatever the correct number the tally is remarkably small for what was London’s highest suicides leap from its official opening in 1677 until 1843 when the viewing platform was enclosed in an iron cage to prevent any further acts of self destruction. 

It took 73 years of being open to the public for it to occur to anyone that throwing yourself from the top was a surefire method of doing away with yourself. According to contemporary newspaper reports one George Green, (not William Green as Thornbury and the Monument website call him) fell to his death in June 1750; the Ipswich Journal reports that “about Four o’clock in the Afternoon, a Man, wearing a white Waistcoat and a green Apron, went to the Top of the Monument, and attempting to walk round the Rail, fell from thence Into the Street and dashed his Brains out. There were found In his Pocket eighteen Guineas. He was carried to St. Magnus  Church in order to he owned.” The Coroner’s Inquest brought in a verdict of accidental death after hearing that “the Way of his falling was this: In the Iron Gallery there is a live Eagle to be seen, for which it is customary to pay a penny but the person not being there to shew it. it being kept in a Wooden Cage, he, in projecting his body too far over the Rails, to look in at the back Pair of the Box, which is open to the Iron-work, lost his Hold, fell against the Top of the Pedestal, and from thence against one of the Posts in the Street, whereby the Top of his Skull was laid quite open, and the other Parts of his Body were very greatly shattered.” (Ipswich Journal 30 June 1750). Further reports raised doubts as to whether this really was an accident; “The Man who threw himself off the Monument was one Green, a Weaver, who had been delirious for some Time, under the Care of his Mother, who going out, desired a Neighbour to look after him, and she leaving him to himself, he took that opportunity and dressed himself and went out and Committed the above rash Action.”  Thornbury has clearly attributed the mode of Green’s death to the second suicide Charles Craddock.

Charles Craddock (not Thomas, as Thornbury calls him or John, as he is known to the authors of The Monument’s official website) was a baker who threw himself from the viewing platform in July 1788. According to the Oxford Journal, reporting on the Inquest,  “the poor Man had been melancholy for some Time preceding his perpetrating this rash action, and on Thursday last he went to see the Monument, and continued thereon near two Hours, and until he was fetched down by the Man who shews it. He afterwards told a Person he had put his Leg over the Rail, with intention to get over; and another Person he had told, that if a Person wanted to destroy himself, the Monument afforded a fine Opportunity. He was seen on the Outside of the Railing of the Gallery, and to look down with great Earnestness before he threw himself off. The Jury found their Verdict, Lunacy.” Intriguingly The New London Magazine apparently reported another suicide that same month "Yesterday morning, about eleven o'clock, an unfortunate man, dressed like a decent tradesman, and seemingly between fifty and sixty, rather tall, went up the steps of the Monument, and when there he put his legs over the rail of the gallery, and threw himself down. He fell within the iron palisades at the bottom; both his arms and both his legs were broken, and his head was crushed to pieces. His name is Elliott; he was an attendant in the new gaol, Borough; and jealousy was the cause of the fatal act." Two suicides in the same month should have caused a sensation; the absence of any sort of stir probably means that this was a case of mistaken identity, Charles Craddock being wrongly named as the jealous gaol keeper Eliot.  

    

Lyon Levy was a wealthy 50 year old Jewish diamond and pearl merchant who lived in Haydon Square in the Minories with his wife and eight children. One cold January morning in 1810 Levy visited the Monument after stopping at the Bank a coffee house, and after walking several times round the outside of the iron railing, according to the Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser “sprung off and in falling, the body turned over and over before it reached the ground. When near the bottom, it came in contact with one of the griffins which ornament the lower part of the building. A porter, with a load on his back, narrowly escaped the body of the deceased, which fell a few paces from him in Monument-yard.” The Bury and Norwich Post gave a more graphic account of the jeweller’s death, he was, they said “dashed to pieces on the spot. His fall was broken by his pitching on some of the projecting figures, but he lighted at last on his head, in Monument-yard, and expired without a groan. A convulsive motion of the shoulders was all the appearance of life the body exhibited when approached immediately after the fall. His head was terribly shattered, and the brain protruded at different parts. The face was so much disfigured, that the unfortunate man was with difficulty recognized.” He left no note but was known to have got himself into financial difficulties as the result of a risky commercial speculation. It was also stated that his mother had been confined to a private lunatic asylum before her death and that he may therefore have been subject to hereditary insanity.

The mysterious baker of Reading, Leander, also killed himself in 1810. These few bare facts are recorded in William D. Reider’s “The new tablet of memory; or Recorder of remarkable events, complied and alphabetically arranged from the earliest period to the present time” of 1841 but I cannot trace any newspaper account of this suicide.

On 14 September 1839 The Spectator reported on what was to become the most celebrated Monument suicide; “The death of a young woman named Margaret Moyes, who was killed by leaping or letting herself fall from the top of the monument, excited a painful interest in the Metropolis on Wednesday. During the whole of that day, numerous incorrect reports or the occurrence and its causes were circulated. An immense number of persons, principally females, crowded round the Monument, (though the body was removed in the course of the morning,) to view the scene of this shocking act of self-destruction.” The journal went on to report the grim details of her death as reported at the inquest. Moyes paid six pence for admission at 10am, asking Thomas Jenkins, the door keeper, if two women and a man had already gone up as she was with them and they were supposed to be waiting for her. He told her that there no other visitors and she ascended the 311 steps to the viewing platform alone. A few minutes later he “heard a body falling. He went to the door, and found the deceased lying with her legs across the door-way, and her head pointing towards Fish Street Hill. Her left arm was several feet front the body, and a good deal of blood flowed, He found a rope, with a large knotted loop at one end, tied to the railings of the gallery: she must have concealed the rope about her person. Her bonnet and veil with a waistband and pair of gloves, were lying in the gallery, near the door.” What was the rope for? None of the newspaper accounts which mention it feel the necessity to explain so its use must have been obvious to contemporary readers but not to me. A post mortem was carried out by Mr Charles Croft, surgeon of Fish Street Hill, who told the inquest “I have examined the body. The left arm is cut off; and there is a fracture of the skull, and of the spine, and left thigh. The fracture of the skull was a compound one, sufficient to cause death; but I think the immediate cause of death was fracture of the spine. I did not examine the body internally, but I did externally; and from that examination I am of opinion that she could not have been pregnant. I think she must have been dead before she reached the ground, on account of so little blood having flowed from the body."

The untimely death of 21 year old Margaret Moyes excited much public sympathy, because she was a respectable young woman, because she was by all accounts attractive and because of the pathos of her home life. Her mother was dead and her father, a baker, was bed ridden, seriously ill and expected to die at any time. Margaret had been nursing him in his final illness at the family home in Hemlock Row, St Martin-in-the-fields and was, unsurprisingly gloomy about the future faced by herself and her five siblings once he was dead. Before taking her final walk to the Monument Margaret had written a last message to her family in a memorandum book which she left on the mantelpiece where it was sure to be found – “You need not expect to see me back again, for I have made up my mind to make away with—Margaret Moyes." A 15 year old boy, Robert Donaldson Hawes, who was the son of a Chelsea coachman, had studied at St Anne’s school in Brixton and was about to be sacked from his job as a household servant for a surgeon, took a particular and apparently morbid interest in Moyes’ suicide. He frequently spoke about it to the other servants and also openly fantasied about killing himself by jumping from a height and threatened to throw himself out of the surgeon’s windows. Barely a month after Moyes suicide Hawes was dismissed from his job for ‘lethargy’ and the next morning, 18 October 1839, the committed a copy cat suicide. At the inquest Thomas Jenkins the Monument doorkeeper was back in court to describe the last moments of the second suicide. He told the Coroner “on the afternoon of Friday last, about ten minutes after five o'clock, the deceased came in at the Monument at the same time as a respectably-dressed man and woman, whom he accompanied to the top. A few minutes afterwards two young females, apparently from the country, came in and went up, and almost directly after them two other females, who also went up. The two latter soon came down, and when the man and woman did so asked them how many persons were still up stairs, wishing to ascertain, it being near locking-up time. They answered there were only two females and a young lad. About ten minutes afterwards I heard a noise as of something falling, and on going out I saw it was the deceased, who had fallen from the top. At that moment the two females came down, and without asking said, "We have left only a lad up stairs;" to which 1 replied, Poor fellow, he is already down." 

The voices demanding that the City authorities do something to prevent the Monument being used for suicide which followed the death of Margaret Moyes, became deafening following the death of Robert Hawes. The Common Council responded by closing the building for a period but when it was reopened no preventative measures appeared to have been taken. Inevitably there was a further death; in August 1843 another young women plunged to her death. According to the Sussex Advertiser “The deceased was on Friday night recognised as the servant of Mr Rowbotham. residing at No 9, Buttersland-street, Hoxton. Her name is Jane Cooper, and she had been missing from her situation since Thursday morning, and Rowbotham having heard of the accident, came down to view the body, and immediately recognised her. An examination was made last evening by Dr Thomas Elliotson and Mr Croft, in the presence of several other gentlemen, by direction of the Coroner, when it appeared that both legs had sustained a compound fracture, and the feet were also much dislocated, the left shoulder was almost torn from the body, and the back of the skull presented a frightful fracture. The features were in no way mutilated, and the deceased was a well-looking young woman, somewhat inclined to corpulency. She was about five feet high, and habited in the customary manner of domestic servants. It is the opinion of Dr. Elliotson and several other medical men, that she is not pregnant, though a difference on this point exists which will doubtless be cleared before the inquest is held. No cause is yet assigned for the rash act. It is a melancholy reflection, that this is the third time life has been sacrificed in the same dreadful manner within three years. The utter uselessness of appointing a sentinel to the gallery must now be apparent to every person; and if the Monument be not altogether closed against the public, some better means of prevention must be adopted than at present exist. Amongst the most useful appears to be that of allowing no person to ascend, unless accompanied by some friend; but the matter will doubtless be carefully discussed by the Committee, after the excitement of this catastrophe has passed away. Mr Bleaden Chairman of the Commercial Steam-packet Company, who is the present responsible lessee of the Monument, states that Fletcher is a man in whom he had great confidence, and his omission to watch narrowly the movements of the deceased, creates much surprise in the minds of all who knew him.”

Following the death of Jane Cooper the authorities took belated action and closed the Monument while an iron cage was constructed around the viewing platform. This has been replaced several times, mostly recently in 2008, and there have no further deaths at the famous landmark.

There were no more suicides after the Common Council installed the iron cage on the viewing platform 

The Pall Mall Monkey and the Bengal Hospital; the Boodles and Mitfords of Chipping Ongar, Essex

Essex is full of dead Londoners. Ongar used to the be the most easterly station on the Central Line until it closed in 1994 but long before the underground existed the temptations of London lured its more ambitious inhabitants away from the sleepy market town to seek their fortune in the capital. The churchyard of St Martin’s contains an impressive 18th century table tomb with cherub heads at the corners which covers the burial vault of the Boodle family.  The vault was built for two brothers; John and Edward Boodle who we believe were originally from Shropshire. John Boodle, a surgeon and apothecary who practiced in Ongar, and his unmarried younger brother Edward, who established the world famous Boodle’s Club in St James, are both here, along with John’s son Edward who was a partner in the law firm that eventually became Boodle Hatfield and which can still be found today in the Blackfriars Road in Southwark. The vault also contains other Boodle relatives and a sprinkling of Mitfords; the two families were close and intermarried over three generations. The Boodles seem to have been a convivial family but the Mitfords were a quarrelsome and litigious lot who fell out dramatically with each other.

The Boodles were almost certainly from Shropshire originally. Parish records show that an Edward Boodle was the third son of John Boodle of the Three Tuns, Oswestry, Shropshire, and was baptized at St Oswald’s Oswestry on 14 October 1722. Boodle is as common a surname in Shropshire as it is an unusual one in Essex but by the mid 1700’s there was an established colony of Boodles at Ongar including Edwards older brother John.  After an early career shrouded in obscurity we know Edward Boodle went into partnership with William Almack in London in the early 1760’s. The two had leased adjacent properties at 49 and 50 Pall Mall and were running them as gaming clubs. Almack’s eventually became Brooks when it moved to St James in 1777. While Edward Boodle was alive his club remained at Pall Mall, only moving to St James Street under new management after his death. 

They took their gambling seriously during the Regency

William Hickey gives one of the few intimate portraits of Edward Boodle in his celebrated memoirs:

“Robert Mitford . . . was a near relation of the Mr. Boodle who from having squandered away a handsome fortune was reduced to the necessity of accepting the management of one of the fashionable gaming houses in Pall Mall which bore his name, being called ‘Boodle's’, and to this Mr. Boodle I was introduced by Mitford, after which introduction I spent many a jovial night at his house. At the time my acquaintance with him commenced he was nearly sixty years of age, and notwithstanding he had lived very freely, had still a good constitution, and was of a remarkably cheerful disposition. He was never happy unless he had a parcel of young people about him. I made one of upwards of a dozen who usually supped twice a week in Pall Mall, where he gave us as much champagne, burgundy and claret as we chose, the table being covered with every variety in the way of eating. Nothing delighted him more than sitting out the boys, as he called it. Indeed, his head was so strong that he generally succeeded in so doing, and when he perceived his young guests began to flag, or become drowsy, he would get up, lock the door of the room, and putting the key in his pocket, strike up the song of "'Tis not yet day" etc. His companionable qualities were extraordinary, and I certainly have passed more happy and jovial nights in his back parlour in Pall Mall than in any other house in London.”

For a man who ran such a famous club Edward managed to keep a very low profile. There are few mentions of him in the press, an exception being a story in the Kentish Gazette of Saturday of 08 April 1769;

“Sunday night the waiter at Mr. Boodle's in Pall-Mall dressed up a monkey belonging to their master in a sailor's habit then rubbed his head with pomatum and powdered it. The monkey getting loose ran to the top of the house, and made his Way the fourth house from his dwelling; then he went down a chimney into a room where a man was employed to sit up with a dead child; upon the man's seeing him and his dress, and hearing him begin to chatter, he ran out greatly frightened, crying out, the Devil is come down the chimney," and left poor pug in his uniform dance about the room at his pleasure.”

On 8 February 1772 Edward Boodle died at his house at 49 Pall Mall and was interred in the family vault in Ongar. His will mentions no wife or children and so suggests he never married. He left his estate to his sisters Margaret and Jane with his brother John as sole executor. On 13 February a general meeting of the members was held at Boodle’s to decide who should take over the club. It was unanimously resolved that 'Ben Harding shall succeed the late Mr. Boodle in the House and Business, and shall be supported therein.' It was Ben Harding, vintner of St Anne’s, Westminster, who in June 1782 tabled a resolution to members 'That Harding do take Mr. Kenney's House in Saint James's Street for their Use'. The club moved to the new premises the same year and has remained there ever since.

On page 350 of his memoirs William Hickey provides further details of the acquaintance who had introduced Edward Boodle to him, Robert Mitford:

“This winter Robert Mitford's father died, leaving to his eldest son, who had acquired a large fortune as Commander of the Northumberland East Indiaman and retired from the service, thirty thousand pounds, and a like sum to Robert, with the succession to the business, which was said to yield a clear profit of upwards of three thousand pounds a year. The young coxcomb condescended to accept the shop, but being ashamed that his fine acquaintances should know that he was in trade, he rarely made his appearance in Cornhill, took a splendid house at the West end of the town, kept a dashing equipage, became a member of the Cocoa tree and other clubs, gambled, lost, and in less than three years was completely ruined, and a commission of bankruptcy being issued against the Woollen Draper's house, he was reduced to the necessity of going out an adventurer to India. He died broken hearted at Madras soon after his arrival there.”

Robert’s father (also called Robert – and we are shortly to meet a nephew, also called Robert, and also two John’s – the Boodle’s had no monopoly on lack of imagination when it came to choosing Christian names), was a city merchant who baptised his children at St Dunstan’s in the East and had a house was in Hampstead. He had marred a Boodle, Elizabeth, and his eldest son, John, was to marry another, Sarah, the daughter of Edward Boodle the lawyer. The families were clearly close. Robert Mitford the elder made his fortune in trade, primarily as a wool draper but also engaged in the East India trade. The later was so lucrative that his eldest son John made his fortune there and made it early enough for his family to leave the family business to his younger brother. It was a serious error of judgement. Robert the younger set up home in fashionable Great Portland Street and ignored the drapers except to make frequent raids on its cash reserves. By July 1784, less than a decade after inheriting a business that made £3000 a year, Robert was bankrupt. Hickey thought that the bankruptcy drove Robert to taking his chances in India and that he died shortly after arriving there; we know from a court cas that he died in 1790 leaving a wife and a child.  Robert’s elder brother John had married twice, the first time to a Boodle, Sarah and the second to a woman called Mary Allen. Both of John Mitford’s wives pre-deceased him and both were buried in the Boodle vault in St Martin’s churchyard. A slate panel on the north side of the monument commemorates them “In Memory of Mrs SARAH MITFORD, Wife of JOHN MITFORD Sometime of this Parish Esq. She departed this life December 8th 1776 Aged 31 Years. Also in Memory of Mrs MARY MITFORD Second Wife of JOHN MITFORD who Departed This life June 4th 1784 27 years.”

The Boodle tomb, St Martin's, Chipping Ongar

John Mitford had two children with Mary, two sons, the elder, John born in 1781 and the younger, Robert, born in 1784. John studied at Tonbridge Grammar School in Kent and Oriel College Oxford before becoming ordained as an Anglican clergyman and becoming vicar of Benhall in Suffolk. In addition to being an East Anglian cleric he pursued a parallel literary career for which he based himself at permanent rented lodgings in Sloane Street in Chelsea. He published the first complete works of Thomas Gray and was for many years a regular contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine and eventually became the editor. John also married a Boodle, Augusta, eldest daughter of Edward Boodle the lawyer; “The marriage was not attended with happiness,” the original edition of the DNB tersely says. John died in 1859 after he collapsed on a London Street with an attack of paralysis. He was taken back to Suffolk to die and was buried in his parish at Stratford St Andrew.

Robert Mitford the younger also went to Tonbridge Grammar School with his brother but at the age of 16 was sent to Bengal to take up a career in the Colonial civil service. He started a Writer, a clerk, in Kolkata and Bihar. In 1804 he married Elizabeth Ann Pattle but his marriage proved to be no happier than his brothers. In 1816 became Collector of Taxes at Dhaka and after four years applied, and was appointed to the Dhaka Provincial Court of Appeal and Circuit as its Second Judge in 1822. He remained in post until 1828, when he retired after thirty years service in India and returned to England. In London his marriage collapsed when he took up with a French woman called Mary Appoline. The relationship caused a rift with his brother which never healed. He died in Paris, on holiday with Mary, in 1836.

The state of relations between Robert and his family can be seen from the new will he had made on 21st July 1835, the opening salvo of which was: “The will late made by me was destroyed in consequence of circumstances in my family which have totally changed the nature of the relations as they had previously subsisted and by a necessary result any disposition towards the parties in the respect of their succession to the property real and personal of which I may be found to be possessed at the period of my decease.” The will makes it clear that John Mitford is to inherit nothing from his estate and that his wife is only to receive an annuity. It refers to a £10,000 loan made to John for the education of his only son, a loan which according to Robert had not been used for the purpose it had been granted or repaid. Robert refers to John’s ‘evil habits and propensities’ and claims he has illegitimate offspring.

Boodle Cherub, St Martin's, Ongar

The will also makes unusually detailed provision for the interment of Robert’s mortal remains: “In the event my demise at an early period I direct and enjoin the said executors and administrators hereunto to purchase and prepare for the ultimate deposit of my body and also for the removal and deposit of the remains of my parents and sister now lying interred in a vault in the church yard of Chipping Ongar in Essex ‘The Mount’, that is contiguous surrounded by a moat, that I understand to be the property at present of a Mr Evans on the summit they will be pleased to cause the erection and construction of a suitable and handsome as well as durable monument planting the and sides and summit of the mount with cedar and cypress trees in a manner that may render it ornamental to the town the expenses whereof for the purchase the of the monument &c &c are to be met and provided for out of the surplus property.” There is no evidence to show that Robert’s father (who died at Richmond) or his sister are buried in the Boodle vault but as their actual place of interment is not known then it is a possibility that they too are in that rather crowded space. The rest of the estate was left to the Government of Bengal to use for charitable purposes to benefit the native population of the colony. His servants had been given an extra six months wages but the family got nothing. Of course it all ended in litigation.

Mitford’s widow contested the will. The first difficulties for Robert’s executors had come trying to carry the provisions of the will relating to his burial. The plans to convert the picturesque remains of a Norman motte and bailey castle lying behind Ongar church, a huge earthworks surrounded by a water filled moat known as the Mount came to nothing. Mr Evans, the owner, proved unwilling to sell the Mount in order to have it converted to the setting for a Mausoleum for Robert and the members of his family he had still been on good terms with (i.e. the dead ones). Robert’s body presumably went into the Boodle vault to jostle with everyone else. His widow Elizabeth started a case in the Court of Chancery which hinged upon technical arguments about whether there were ‘proper parties’ to receive the charitable bequest (and which also argued that the clause about the mausoleum on the Mount were illegal because it was not consecrated ground) but which was obviously intended to scupper Robert’s intentions and ensure she and her son received the bulk of the estate as next of kin.  She was to be sorely disappointed the case dragged on until 1842 but the court eventually decided in favour of Robert and his executors – the will was valid and the bulk of his estate was to be used to benefit the natives of Bengal. There were further legal challenges from another relative which thwarted the execution of the will for another six years until that case was finally dismissed in 1848. In 1854 the Government of Bengal built a hospital for the use of the residents of the city of Dhaka with Robert’s money and named it the Mitford Hospital in honour of its benefactor. The hospital still stands today; probably no one who uses it realises it owes it origins to a family squabble over a French mistress.   

The Mitford Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh

"Immortal Rich! how calm he sits at ease, mid snows of paper, and fierce hail of pease"; John Rich (1692-1761), St John the Baptist, Hillingdon

The entries for December 1761 in the burial register for St John the Baptist, Hillingdon

Mr Aldridge, the parish clerk at St John the Baptist, Uxbridge Moor, recorded 7 burials in December 1761. Four of them were children, no ages given and three recorded with just their first names and noted as being the son or daughter of the Hills, Hodges and Smiths of the parish. The fourth, and saddest, buried on the 28th is a “child dropt i’th Ch(urch) yard; name unknown.” Henry Philips was buried on the 13th (truly an unlucky day for him) and Hannah Weeden, widow, on the 4th. Hannah’s no doubt modest funeral would have been easily eclipsed by the other interment taking place that cold winter day, that of the 69 year old John Rich for whom the parish clerk, dazzled by his celebrity, broke with tradition and recorded more than the bare fact of his name “John Rich, Esq Comedian of Covent Garden Theatre.” It is the only entry for the entire year where the deceased was considered worthy of the honorific Esquire and no other entry in the entire register gives an occupation. Rich’s grave is marked by the churchyard’s most splendid tomb. The epitaph reads “"Sacred to the memory of John Rich Esq. Who died November 26th. 1761 Aged 69 Years. In him were united the various virtues that could endear him to his family, friends and acquaintance: Distress never failed to find relief in his bounty, unfortunate merit a refuge in his generosity. Here likewise are interred Amy, his second wife, with their two youngest children, John and Elizabeth, who both died in their infancy."    

In his pantomime role as Lun

John Rich was born in 1692, his father, Christopher, was an attorney turned theatre manager who died in November 1714 leaving his two sons in possession of the newly rebuilt but as yet unopened theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. John, still dressed in mourning, took to the stage himself on the opening night in December to deliver a prologue to Farquhar’s ‘The Recruiting Officer’. According to the D.N.B. “for the next forty-seven years Rich implemented his father's vision, first as manager at Lincoln's Inn Fields and later at Covent Garden, where he opened a lavish new theatre in 1732. He distinguished himself as the originator of English pantomime, introducing elaborate scenery and extravagant costumes into his productions, and he became the most celebrated comic dancer of his age.” He is best remembered for staging ‘The Beggar’s Opera’, the greatest commercial success of the eighteenth century stage, taking on John Gay’s opera when it had been turned down by the rival theatre at Drury Lane and from which he is said to have made £9000 in two years, the equivalent of millions today. The unparalleled success of the production gave rise to the immortal quip that it ‘made Gay Rich and Rich Gay’ though in truth Rich would have already been rich but Gay undoubtedly made him richer.

Rich’s prototype of the pantomime would not be recognised by that name today. Between the scenes of a serious (and apparently often dull) classical epic drawn from Ovid or some other similar source Rich interspersed comic scenes based on Italian Commedia dell’arte. Rich himself played a character he called Lun who was based on Harlequin. A Victorian newspaper account gives the flavour of the English pantomime.“One of the best of Rich's productions was his ‘Catching the Butterfly,’ declared by the chroniclers of the time to be "a most wonderful performance." His harlequin hatched from an egg, by the heat of the sun, was such an attraction that crowds waited under the piazza of Covent Garden from mid-day till evening for admission to the theatre. Rich's harlequin never uttered a word, but his gesticulations and expressions in dumb show were such as to provoke roars of laughter or the shedding of tears at his will. A writer of the time says " from the first chipping of the egg, his receiving of motion, his feeling of the ground, to his quick harlequin trip round the empty shell, through the whole progression, every limb had its tongue, and every motion a voice." Amongst the literati Rich’s pantomime was less well received. Henry Fielding lambasted it in Tom Jones:

“That most exquisite entertainment, called the English Pantomime …..consisted of two parts, … the serious and the comic. The serious exhibited a certain number of heathen gods and heroes, who were certainly the worst and dullest company into which an audience was ever introduced; and (which was a secret known to few) were actually intended so to be, in order to contrast the comic part of the entertainment, and to display the tricks of harlequin to the better advantage… So intolerably serious, indeed, were these gods and heroes, that harlequin ……was always welcome on the stage, as he relieved the audience from worse company.”

 Hogarth, who was supposed to be his friend, caricatured Rich as the performing Dalmatian dog that had appeared in his version of Perseus and Andromeda in "Rich's Procession" showing taking over his new theatre at Covent Garden 

His undoubted successes at Covent Garden failed to impress some of his contemporaries; John Genest called him “ill qualified for his situation” and said that he was without “talents adequate to the proper management of a theatre.” Charles Dibden summed him up (and dismissed him) as “the vainest and most ignorant of all human beings.” Scurrilous stories were retailed about his illiteracy, his eccentricity and his general ignorance. He could not or would not remember names and to the irritation of his associates in the theatrical world insisted on using alternative versions of them calling Tate Wilkinson ‘Williamskin’ or ‘Whittington’, David Garrick ‘Griskin’ and the writer Samuel Foote ‘Footseye’. When even those names failed him he simply called everyone ‘mister’. He was said to treat writers brusquely and with little respect. When one author demanded the return of his rejected play script Rich couldn’t find it but offered the writer the choice of any of the other large number of rejected manuscripts sitting in his drawer saying “A thousand to one but it may be better than yours mister.” He could be fairly short with his actors too. When one performing the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy from Hamlet failed to impress Rich told him “Toby may be a very good dog Mister but Toby will not do for me.  You need not trouble yourself any farther Mister.”

By 1755 he was wealthy enough to be making the King lavish and unusual presents.  According to the Derby Mercury of June 6 “Yesterday being the Birth-Day of his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, a Pleasure Barge, built by John Rich, Esq; and presented to her Royal Highness, was launched in the Gardens at Kew, and named the Augusta. It is formed in an entire new Taste, and made to imitate a Swan swimming; the Representation is so Very natural, as scarcely to be distinguished from a real Bird, .except by the Size of it. The Neck and Head rise to the Heighth of eighteen Feet; the Body forms a commodious Cabin, neatly decorated, and large enough to accommodate ten Persons, and the Feet are so artfully contrived as to supply the Place of Oars, which move it with any Degree of Velocity. The Novelty of the Design, and the Elegance of the Execution, afforded a very particular Pleasure to the Royal Family, who were present, and the rest of the Spectators.”

John Rich and his many cats interviews the Irish actress Peg Woffington

Rich married three times; his first wife, Henrietta Brerewood he married on 7 February 1717 in St Clement Danes. They had one son, John, who was born on 3 May 1720 and was buried on 28 February 1721. Henrietta died in 1725. His second wife, Amy, was the mother of seven of his children: two sons and five daughters. She died ‘of a Hectick fever’ on 26 November 1737 and was buried in the churchyard at St John’s where Rich later joined her.  His third wife was Priscilla Wilford, a minor actress in the Covent Garden Company under the stage name of Mrs Stevens who, it was rumoured, had been a barmaid and, when her theatrical career failed to ignite, became Rich’s housekeeper. Rich married her on 25 November 1744. The new Mrs Rich fell under the influence of Methodism and became a religious enthusiast and made Rich’s life a misery. Tobias Smollett commented "The poor man's head, which was not naturally very clear, had been ordered with superstition, and he laboured under the tyranny of a wife and the terror of hell-fire at the same time."

The Place of Skulls; St John the Baptist, Hillingdon

Thomas Smith, late of this parish

Like many other churchyards which had for 500 years or more been plenty big enough to contain the bodies of all its deceased parishioners, St John’s was forced to expand its burial ground in the early nineteenth century. In still rural Uxbridge the church was able to acquire land adjacent to the exiting churchyard, something generally not possible in more crowded central London. Population growth perhaps played some part in increasing demand for burial space but the main reason the extra space was needed were the unexpected 18^th century fads for coffins and gravestones. Up to the 17^th century most Englishmen (and women) had been buried in shrouds directly into the ground, coffins being a relative rarity. A body in a coffin takes considerably longer to decompose than a body in a shroud and therefore prevents further burials in the same ground.  Once relatives knew that their dead would remain undisturbed they began wanting to mark the spot of the interment and the fashion for grave markers developed. Within a few decades coffins, gravestones and altar tombs gradually occupied all of the available space in churchyards forcing vestries to acquire land for burials.  

St John’s purchased a plot adjacent to the church for new burials in 1819. The existing churchyard remained largely untouched and so is a fascinating example of an eighteenth century burial ground with barely a Victorian intrusion to be found. It has many headstones dating from the early 1700’s almost of which are decorated with memento mori, though there are a few with cherubs. Most of these early gravestones are made from sandstone and have weathered badly, though some are still in relatively good condition. There are also an unusually large number of chest or altar tombs the most famous of which belongs to the one time owner of the Covent Garden Theatre John Rich (died 1761). 

Here lyes the body of Bertram  Hanington who departed this life June ye 22 1705

A more sophisticated execution of the motif from 1745

Elizabeth, wife of Richard Edmands

Edward Taylor, 1725

18th century altar tombs at Uxbridge