My Lord Archbishop a wencher? Gilbert Sheldon (1598-1677), Minster of St John the Baptist, Croydon

“Among other discourse, my cozen Roger told us a thing certain, that the Archbishop of Canterbury; that now is, do keep a wench, and that he is as very a wencher as can be; and tells us it is a thing publickly known that Sir Charles Sidley had got away one of the Archbishop’s wenches from him, and the Archbishop sent to him to let him know that she was his kinswoman, and did wonder that he would offer any dishonour to one related to him. To which Sir Charles Sidley is said to answer, “A pox take his Grace! pray tell his Grace that I believe he finds himself too old, and is afraid that I should outdo him among his girls, and spoil his trade.” But he makes no more of doubt to say that the Archbishop is a wencher, and known to be so, which is one of the most astonishing things that I have heard of.”   Samuel Pepys “Diary Monday 29 July 1667.”

Pepy’s cozen Roger was always good for a bit of scurrilous gossip. He was not particularly scrupulous about his sources though and his stories were often slanderous and sometimes just plainly ridiculous.  Gilbert Sheldon, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was the subject here of cozen Roger’s gossip, appears to have lived a fairly blameless life and, far from being a ‘wencher’, was so uninterested in women that he never even married.  

Sheldon was born in Staffordshire in 1598 and was educated at Oxford. He became involved in the church and politics, was a Royal Chaplain to Charles I and was well known as a prominent Royalist in the run up to the Civil War. During the Protectorate he lost his church livings and survived on the generosity of friends and supporters until the Restoration in 1660 when Charles II made him Bishop of London. He became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1663 and Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 1667.  He opposed Charles II’s proposed Declaration of Indulgence which sought to extend religious freedom to Catholics and it is said he once refused to give the King communion because of his majesty’s libertine lifestyle. He was one of Christopher Wren’s earliest architectural patrons – Sheldon commissioned and paid for the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford and chose Wren as the architect. He died in 1677 and is buried in the Minster of St John the Baptist in Croydon.

Sheldon’s spectacular funeral monument is by Jaspar Latham (died 1693) a master mason who worked with Christopher Wren. Only four funerary monuments by him are known but the other are not in the same class as this one. The reclining figure of the bishop was once set against a grand architectural backdrop decorated with putti and garlands but this was destroyed in the church fire of 1867. Miraculously the bishop survived along with the chest tomb decorated with a relief panel of skulls and bones and winged hourglasses.  

The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford

Latham worked with Sir Christopher Wren as a mason contractor on the rebuilding of St Mildred Poultry and on St Paul’s Cathedral for which, in the 1680’s he received almost £10,000 in regular payments for masonry and carved ornaments. He fell out with Sir Christopher in 1689 when he was working for Wren at Hampton Court and part of the building works he was responsible for as mason collapsed killing two workmen and injuring 11 others.  The comptroller of works William Talman tried to blame Wren for the accident and Latham joined him. The furious architect dispensed immediately with the mason’s services at both Hampton Court and St Pauls and objected ‘against Mr Latham for a madman.’

Gilbert Sheldon’s ghost is supposed to have haunted the church following the fire of 1867 which destroyed his monument. He was generally seen moping sorrowfully around the nave at “about a quarter to six in the evening.” He kept this up until 1960 when the monument was restored and has not been seen since. 

Dr Lutherburgo Humbugo, healer of housebreakers - Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812), St Nicholas Churchyard, Chiswick

In the churchyard of St Nicholas in Chiswick the artist, stage designer, inventor, mason, mystic, faith healer and kabbalist Philippe De Loutherbourg lies buried with his second wife Lucy, once reputed to be the most beautiful woman in England. Their striking chest tomb was designed by Sir John Soane and is now grade II listed. The west facing inscription for de Loutherbourg himself has been obliterated by weathering but the east facing inscription to Lucy is still clearly legible.

Philippe de Loutherbourg was born in 1740, the son of the court painter of Darmstadt in Germany. His father had ambitions for him to become an engineer and his mother a Lutheran minister and he was educated, in Strasbourg, with a future in the church in mind. But his parent’s dreams of respectability were to be thwarted by a wayward streak in their son that would never allow him to settle into bourgeois respectability (despite his love of money).  Philippe wanted to follow his father into the arts and badgered his family into moving to Paris to allow him to study painting. In France the family lost what little control they had over the young Philippe who became, in his own words, “a freethinker and a hothead.” The 21 year old took up with an older but beautiful widow, Barbe Burlat who drew him into a reckless adventure to fleece a married, retired Captain of the East India Company, Antoine de Meyrac.   The ageing but besotted Meyrac agreed to pay Barbe 600 livres to become his mistress. Further gifts, jewellery, expensive wines, luxurious carpets, silk stockings, followed but the promised consummation of the affair failed to materialise. When the furious and frustrated Meyrac refused to part with any more cash Philippe threw him out of Barbe’s house and barred his way back in with a drawn sword. Just a few days later Philippe himself married Barbe. The couple’s outrageous behaviour   became notorious and started to threaten the glorious strides Philippe was making in his artistic career.

Philippe in his 30's.

His first exhibited painting had drawn praise from no less a figure than Denis Diderot. The encyclopaedist did much to promote Philippe’s career although his praise was never totally unqualified and he did not approve of the young artist’s relationship with Barbe or his pronounced mercenary streak. The Meyrac scandal did not stop Philippe being elected to the Académie Royale but Barbe herself finished his Parisian career when she filed for a writ of separation of her property from his alleging he had used up her dowry and then sold her house to finance his gambling, had run up huge debts, had slept with numerous whores and servants and had physically abused, once so severely as to cause a miscarriage. Philippe did not hang around to answer these charges; he simply helped himself to his wife’s remaining jewellery and fled to London to start a new life, leaving the heavily pregnant Barbe and their four children behind.  

Within a year of his arrival in London Philippe was exhibiting his paintings at the Royal Academy. A friend introduced him to David Garrick who, immediately impressed by this imposing foreigner, took him on as the chief stage designer at Drury Lane at a salary of £500 a year. His productions transformed the English stage, setting new standards of illusion, exchanging a single, often crudely daubed, stationary backdrop for moveable painted flat and drop scenes with integrated scenery, perspective and lighting effects. He took a restlessly experimental approach to his work in the theatre culminating first with a pantomime ‘The Wonders of Derbyshire’ in 1779 which realistically represented the scenery of the Peak District on stage and then, in 1781 when he had left Drury Lane for good after quarrelling with Garrick’s successor, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, with his invention of the Eidophusikon.

The Eidophusikon

In February 1781  Philippe held the opening night of the Eidophusikon at  his new house in Lisle Street, Leicester Square.  This was a novel entertainment in which, according to contemporary newspaper accounts “various imitations of Natural Phenomena, represented by moving pictures,” were recreated upon a small stage:

“ Here, for a fee of five shillings, around 130 fashionable spectators sat in comfort to watch a series of moving scenes projected within a giant peephole aperture, eight feet by six feet. The darkened auditorium combined with skilful use of concealed and concentrated light sources, coloured silk filters, clockwork automata, winding backscreens and illuminated transparencies created a uniquely illusionist environment.[18] Audiences watched five landscapes in action. Dawn crept over the Thames at Greenwich; the noonday sun scorched the port of Tangier; a crimson sunset flushed over the Bay of Naples; a tropical moon rose over the wine-dark waters of the Mediterranean; and a torrential storm wrecked a ship somewhere off the Atlantic coast. Between scenes, painted transparencies served as curtain drops, and Mr and Mrs Michael Arne entertained the audience with violin music and song.” (Iain McCalman “The Virtual Infernal.”)

One visitor to Lisle Street was the 21 year William Beckford.  In December 1781 he was planning a spectacular 3 day Christmas party for which, on the strength of the theatrical sets and  the Eidophusikon, he commissioned de Loutherbourg to supply the illusions that would transport him and his guests from an English midwinter in an 18th century Palladian mansion in Wiltshire to a magical oriental fantasy world. Beckford wrote to his 34 year old mistress Louisa, (who was married to his cousin) urging him to come to “Fonthill, where every preparation is going forwards that our much admired ….. Loutherbourg …. in all the wildness of his fervid imagination can suggest or contrive – to give our favourite apartments the strangeness and novelty of a fairy world. This very morning he sets forth with his attendant genii, and swears…that in less than three weeks…[to] present a mysterious something that the eye has not seen or heart of man conceived (his own hallowed words) purposely for our own special delight and recreation.”

The young William Beckford

There are no detailed descriptions of the Christmas spectacular created by de Loutherbourg, but Beckford was pleased with the result. “I seem even at this long distance,” he later wrote “ to be warmed by the genial artificial light that Loutherbourg had created throughout the whole of what appeared a necromantic region, or rather, one of those fairy realms where K[ing]s’ daughters were held in thrall by a powerful Magician – one of those temples deep below the earth set apart for tremendous mysteries…at every stage of this enchanted palace tables were swung out covered with delicious consummations and tempting dishes, masked by the fragrance of a bright mass of flowers, the heliotrope, the basil and the rose – even the splendour of the gilded roof was often masked by the vapour of wood aloes ascending in wreaths from cassolettes placed low on the floor in salvers and jars of Japan. The glowing haze, the mystic look, the endless intricacy of the vaulted labyrinth produced an effect so bewildering that it became impossible for anyone to define exactly where at the moment he was wandering…It was the realization of a romance in all its fervours, in all its extravagance. The delirium in which our young fervid bosoms were cast by such a combination of seductive influences may be conceived but too easily.”

Beckford’s most favoured guest at these Christmas revels was the thirteen year old Viscount William Courtenay, son of the Earl of Devon, with whom he was besotted. Louisa unashamedly helped her young lover seduce the even younger ‘Kitty’ Courtenay. Beckford later fondly reminisced (calling him ‘she’ in apparently timeless high camp fashion) “does she love to talk of the hour when, seizing her delicate hand, I led her, bounding like a kid to my chamber?” The scandalous affair remained secret for a further 3 years but in 1784 Beckford’s letters to Kitty were intercepted by the boy’s uncle who advertised them in the newspapers and forced Beckford to flee the country for several years of self-imposed exile while the resulting contretemps died down.  The most immediate and enduring effect of de Loutherbourg’s three day Christmas fantasia was to inspire Beckford to compose one of English literature's minor masterpieces,  his oriental fantasy ‘Vathek; An Arabian Tale.’

The second Mrs de Loutherbourg, Lucy Paget 

Guiseppe Balsamo, Count Cagliostro

In 1773 de Loutherbourg met Lucy Corson (nee Paget) a beautiful young widow (at 28 she was 5 years younger than him) from Kingswinford in Staffordshire. Although he appears never to have been divorced from Barbe he married Lucy at St Marylebone Church in May the following year. His bride was considered by some to be the most beautiful woman in England. Despite her money the marriage seems to have been a love match; the couple lived together until de Loutherbourg’s death in 1812 and were buried together when Lucy died in 1828. Lucy seems to have shared her husband’s interest in all aspects of the occult from mesmerism to the kabbalah. In 1787 the pair both fell under the sway of the Italian occultist Giuseppe Balsamo who was paying a second visit to London under his better known alias of Count Cagliostro. The two were both Masons and it is probable the brotherhood brought them together. The London visit was a difficult one for Cagliostro and he departed unexpectedly in May for Switzerland leaving his wife Seraphina behind in the care of the de Loutherbourgs. Once the Count was settled in Switzerland  he sent for Seraphina and Philippe and Lucy accompanied her after being promised a programme of physical rejuvenation that would restore them to the physical and sexual prowess of their youth. In the Swiss town of Bienne where the de Loutherbourg’s moved in with the Cagliostro’s there were immediately problems between the two couples. The promised programme of rejuvenation was slow to start and there was no sign of a loan made by de Loutherbourg to Cagliostro in London being repaid. Adding to these tensions Philippe developed a ‘leering interest’ in Seraphina (who did not reciprocate, being much more interested in her husbands young secretary) and Lucy appears to have contracted a unreciprocated passion for Cagliostro himself. The two husbands eventually quarrelled and the de Loutherbourg’s moved out. Philippe immediately launched a court case for the return of the 170 louis he had loaned Cagliostro. As tensions increased Philippe challenged Cagliostro to a duel who responded sarcastically that he only fought with arsenic. Philippe armed himself with pistols, powder and ball and went around the town telling everyone that the moment he set eyes on the Count he was going to shoot him like a dog. Cagliostro demanded protection from the authorities but when it wasn’t forthcoming quickly enough he began accusing the mayor of Bienne of being in league with de Loutherbourg to destroy and the townspeople of being mean and treacherous. The pair finally parted on the worst possible terms and de Loutherbourg sought belated revenge in a pair of satirical caricatures of the Count.

Philippe and Lucy de Loutherbourg by John Hoppner

In 1788 the de Loutherbourg’s returned to London and Philippe shocked the artisitic establishment by announcing that he was abandoning painting to dedicate himself to mystical pursuits including the study of the kabbalah and working as a faith healer with Lucy from their house in Hammersmith Terrace. The pair claimed that by means of the  influxes that, according to Swedenborg, flow from Heaven to Earth  they could affect miraculous cures. The poor were admitted to the de Loutherbourg’s clinic by free ticket; Mary Pratt, an admirer of the couple, wrote a pamphlet A List of a Few Cures performed by Mr and Mrs De Loutherbourg, of Hammersmith Terrace, without Medicine in which she  claimed that 2000 people had been cured by them in just a few months "having been made proper recipients to receive divine manuductions". Eventually the numbers trying to gain admission to the clinic were so high that riots broke out amongst those waiting to be cured and the de Loutherbourg’s had to abandon their attempts to heal the London mob. He returned to art and confined his mystical pursuits to a more sedate circle of friends and acquaintances.

Philippe died on 11 March 1812 and Lucy on 28 September 1828. 

Further reading

Almost all the information in this post has been drawn from the fascinating work of Professor Iain McCalman of the University of Sydney:

"The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro."

"Mystagogues of revolution: Cagliostro, de Loutherbourg and Romantic London." 

"The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime."  
            

The man who launched the Great Railway Bazaar - James Joseph Berkley (1819-1862), Camberwell Old Cemetery

Berkley's monument in Camberwell Old Cemetery was paid for by public subscription

James John Berkley, born in Holloway in 1819 and dead in Sydenham at the age of 42 spent the best part of a decade in India building the first 20 miles of India’s celebrated railway network from Bombay to Tanna. He was most celebrated for the impressive feat of taking the railway into the Western Ghats but was dead before the first section of line was officially opened in 1863. Berkley trained and worked with eminent engineers such as George Bidder and George Stephenson both of whom recommended him for the job of Chief Resident engineer with the Great Indian Peninsula Railway. Ill health drove him back to England and an early death.

Berkley's railway over the Bhore Ghat incline

He left behind a young widow and five children; his youngest daughter was born posthumously.  At the Annual meeting of the shareholders of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway held at the London Tavern in  October 1862 Sir William Tite MP addressed his colleagues on the loss of their Chief Engineer he “was anxious to make a recommendation, that an acknowledgment should be made of their appreciation of Mr. Berkley’s services, that gentleman's death being, as he believed, mainly attributable to the influence of the Indian climate while engaged in carrying out the works on their line The directors proposed to erect a stone tablet to Mr. Berkley’s memory on the Bhore Ghat incline, hut he thought t it would be only just that they should make some provision for Mr. Berkley’s five young children. Mr. Berkley had insured his life, but he had not lived long enough to make adequate provision for those dependent upon him, and he proposed that the meeting should authorise the board to pay over to Mr. Berkley’s executors 1000/. for the benefit of his family.”

Berkley’s son, James Eustace, also became a railway engineer. In 1896 newspapers reported scandalous details of his divorce. The jury granted the wronged husband £1500 damages from Captain Hawkes but the plaintiff gallantly agreed not to enforce if Hawkes married the divorced Mrs Berkley:

DIVORCE SUIT. £1,500 DAMAGES. Divorce Division Thursday

James Eustace Berkley, railway engineer, living in India, obtained a decree nisi, and costs, in an undefended divorce suit, in which Captain Hawkes who was formerly stationed at Secunderabad, where petitioner and his wife resided. In 1894 respondent came to England on a visit to her mother. Co-respondent also visited England at the same time, and Mrs. Berkley wrote to her husband stating that she had met Captain Hawkes, with whom they had become acquainted in Secunderabad, and that she had been out fishing with him in his yacht. Subsequently she wrote stating that she had misconducted herself with Hawkes. By consent the jury awarded the petitioner £1,500 damages, but Mr. Berkley agreed not to enforce payment, provided Captain Hawkes carried out his intention of marrying the respondent within six months.



Berkley's portrait on his funeral monument

Thief snatches Freud's ashes - Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Golders Green Crematorium

Sigmund Freud’s mortal remains had been on more or less constant public display in the Columbarium at Golders Green crematorium since 1939, without any mishap. On New Year’s Eve 2013 butterfingered thieves broke into the crematorium apparently intent in stealing Freud and his wife and the 2300 year old Greek urn that housed their ashes. No sooner had they laid their hands on the prize then it slipped from their grasp and smashed on the tiled floor of the columbarium. They fled leaving the crematorium staff to sadly sweep up Sigmund and Martha in a dustpan and brush on New Year’s day 2014. Detective Constable Daniel Chandler of the Metropolitan Police described the attempted theft as despicable, “leaving aside the financial value of the irreplaceable urn, and the historical significance of to whom it related, the fact that someone set out to take an object knowing it contained the last remains of a person defies belief."

Freud came to London in June 1938, fleeing the Nazi occupation of Vienna. The 82 year old Psychoanalyst was doubly loathed by the National Socialists for being Jewish and for his views on psychology. The regime harassed him, banning and burning his books and arresting members of his family and leaving the sick old man no choice but to flee the country with as many members of his family as he could take with him. His sisters, who remained behind, perished in the death camps.

Freud in Paris en-route to England with Anna

Freud had been mortally sick for 15 years by the time he arrived in London. His addiction to smoking cigars left him with a malignant oral epithelioma that was first diagnosed in 1923. His doctor and friend, Felix Deutsch, lied to the worried Freud about the tumour in his mouth but shared the secret with a select circle of psychoanalysts including Ernest Jones. When Freud eventually discovered the deception he was furious, demanding to know “Mit welchem recht?”— “With what right?” Deutsch resigned his position as Freud’s personal physician to Dr Max Schur. Before arriving in London Freud went through more than 30 operations (one of which left him deaf in one ear), subjected himself to crude X-ray and radium therapies and was forced to wear an unpleasant denture like prosthesis to keep his oral and nasal cavities separated. This device stopped him from eating and speaking normally. None of the treatment halted the advance of the tumour eating away at his mouth and jaws or stopped Freud smoking (even though he tried many times). Freud adored his pet Chow Lün but the dog was so distressed by the stench of necrotic bone coming from his jaw that it howled and refused to stay in the same room. His daughter Anna nursed him through his final months in London but on September 21 1939 he could no longer stand the pain and begged his doctor to remember a conversation that had had many years earlier “My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it's nothing but torture and makes no sense anymore.” After discussing the situation with Anna, Schur give Freud an immediate 25 mg injection of morphine and followed it up with another high dose 12 hours later. Freud went into a coma and died at 3 am on the 23 September and was cremated at Golders Green 3 days later.   

Freud photographed in London shortly before his death

Bexleyheath Cemetery, London Borough of Bexley

The cemetery was opened in 1879 by the Burial Board for the new town which had grown up in Bexley on the ancient route of Watling Street, the London to Dover Road.  It is a small cemetery, just 5½ acres, behind Christchurch on the High Street. It is neat and well kept but with very few really interesting memorials.



Cromwell Fleetwood Varley, Victorian business man and the cemeteries most notable inhabitant



The Littlehales memorial for the wife of a local doctor



James Bullen who died at the age of 12 in 1965

"What a lark we had...!"; Dudley Wilmot Carleton, 4th Lord Dorchester (1822-1897), Kensal Green Cemetery

DEATH OF LORD DORCHESTER

The death occurred on Tuesday from pleurodynia, after a few days illness, of Lord Dorchester, at his residence in Berkeley-square, London.  Dudley Wilmot Carleton, fourth Baron Dorchester, in the peerage of Great Britain, was the eldest son of the late Rev. the Hon. of Richard Carleton (who was the youngest son of the first baron), by the daughter and co-heir of Mr. Eusebius Horton, of Catton Hall, Derbyshire. He was born in 1822, and entered the Coldstream Guards in 184L He served with his regiment in Canada. and in the Crimean campaign from September, 1854, to October, 1855, being present at the battles of  Balaclava and Inkerman, and the siege and fall of Sevastopol, for which services he obtained the medal with three clasps, the 5th Class of the Medjidie, and the Turkish medal. He commanded or the 1st Battalion of the Coldstream Guards from 1866 until he retired from the Army in 1868. He married, in 1854, the Hon. Charlotte Hobhouse, the daughter of the First Baron Broughton (extinct), and in 1875 he succeeded his cousin in the title.  Lord Dorchester left no son, and the peerage is now extinct.

Liverpool Mercury Thursday 2 December 1897

Lord Dorchester photographed in 1861

Dudley Wilmot Carleton, the fourth Lord Dorchester, was the son-in-law of John Cam Hobhouse, the "dogged, faithful Hobhouse" who was Lord Byron's closest friend.  Carleton and his wife Charlotte are buried in Hobhouse's vault in Kensal Green and share his memorial. Lord Dorchester was a professional soldier and as a young man had that robust sense of fun that makes the English upper classes such a sore trial to their social inferiors. In 1843 the billiard hall keeper Horatio Smith brought the now 21 year old toff to court for an incident which had taken place two years earlier when the then 19 year old soldier had trashed Smith's Windsor billiard rooms and also given him a good thrashing simply because he refused to let them set up a table for French hazard. Carleton's defence counsel was Serjeant Charles Carpenter Bompas who had served Charles Dickens as the model for Serjeant Buzfuz in "Pickwick Papers." The story is from The Era of 5 February 1843:

ASCOT HEATH GAMING: SMITH V. CARLETON.

The plaintiff in this case, Horatio Smith, who was described as an ivory turner, but who, it appeared, kept billiard-rooms at Windsor, brought the action, in the Court of Common Pleas, against Dudley Wilmot Carleton, Esq., formerly an officer in the 60th Rifles, but now in the Coldstream Guards, to recover compensation in damages for a violent assault committed on the 8th of June, 1841 (one of the Ascot race days), at Windsor. The damages were laid at £500. Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, with whom was Mr. T. V. Lee, appeared for the plaintiff; and Mr. Sergeant Bompas, with Mr. Carrow, for the defendant. It appeared from the learned counsel for the plaintiff and the witnesses, among whom were a brother of the plaintiff, (who stated he had been a barman, not a potboy, but now for amusement travelled to various races, &c., having no connection with any gambling booths), a rather dingy-looking, not very prepossessing person, having a crooked nose, and a sort of raven croak, a resident of Windsor, some police-constables and others, that about half-past twelve on the night in question the defendant, with about thirty others, several officers of the Life Guards and other regiments stationed at Windsor, were then mostly intoxicated, and wished to have a bank made for French hazard, which being objected to, they tore the cloths of and destroyed the billiard and roulette tables, and also the cues and maces. They smashed the lamps, looking-glasses, and windows, and tore the window curtains. The plaintiff endeavouring to quell the disturbance was struck by defendant with a knobbed stick, knocked down and struck several times afterwards, and then dragged into the road several yards. The following day defendant said, "What a lark we had last night. Are there any more windows to break? for we shall come and give you another turn tonight to finish the job for you." The plaintiff had bumps on his head, and was otherwise bruised. Mr. Sergeant Bompas addressed the jury at some length in mitigation of damages. The learned Judge summed up, and the jury after half an hours deliberation, returned a verdict for plaintiff, damages £10. The trial lasted nearly five hours, and the court was much crowded throughout.

Charlotte, Lady Dorchester, taken in 1860

The power of the footnote: the cannibal legend of Johann Zoffany (1733-1810) St Anne's, Kew

Zoffany's grave in St Anne's churchyard, Kew

Once patronised by royalty, high society and the Georgian literary and artistic establishment, Johann Zoffany’s reputation declined in the 200 years following his death to the point where he was considered little more than a minor portrait painter. His star had sunk so low that in 2010 Tate Britain humiliatingly cancelled a scheduled exhibition of his works because they did not believe there would be enough public interest to justify it. Two years later the Royal Academy (of which Zoffany was one of the original members) felt that the tide of public opinion had turned sufficiently for them to risk putting on an exhibition of his portraits and conversation pieces called ‘Johan Zoffany – Society Observed.’ And the reason for the renascent interest in this hitherto obscure Anglo-German painter? A footnote in a book in which Zoffany otherwise merited only a couple of mentions.

 

Early Zoffany self portrait as David with the

head of Goliath

The book was William Dalyrmple’s “White Mughals” and the footnote, on page 289, reads “The Frankfurt-born Zoffany (1734-1810) lived in Lucknow for two and a half years, staying much of the time with Claude Martin. On his way back to England (where he had settled in the 1750’s) he was shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands. Lots having been drawn among the starving survivors, a young sailor was duly eaten. Zoffany may thus be said with some confidence to have been the first and last Royal Academician to become a cannibal.” Dalyrmple’s footnote is unsourced and the story of Zoffany’s anthropophagic adventure was apparently little known. If Dalyrmple did not have such an impeccable reputation as a scholar many may have suspected that he had made the story up.  True or not it was a good story and by the time of the 2012 exhibition at Tate Britain was so well known that the headlines on print and on-line reviews of the exhibition could not resist alluding to it; the Daily Telegraph “Johan Zoffany: The lovable artist who ate a sailor” for example, or Bloomberg’s “Cannibalism, Bigamy Spice Up Zoffany London Show.”

 

Zoffany was born Johannes Josephus Zaufallij in Frankfurt in 1733. As a 17 year he walked to Rome where he became the pupil of the fellow German artist Mengs (Zoffany’s earliest known self-portrait, of himself as David leaning casually on the head of Goliath and showing the pebble that felled the Philistine in his hand was attributed to Mengs until the 1980’s when thorough cleaning of the picture revealed Zoffany’s signature).  He spent 12 years in Italy before returning to Germany just long enough to contract an unhappy marriage and taking off for London shortly afterwards. With little or no English he lived in straightened circumstances in Drury Lane and perhaps would have starved to death if someone had not introduced him to the clockmaker Stephen Rimbault for whom he produced painstakingly detailed landscapes on clock faces. He was later taken into the studio of Benjamin Wilson, a painter, where he outshone his master and came to the attention of David Garrick. He was eventually introduced to the Royal Family who were delighted with the charming and urbane painter who like them spoke German. He became a great royal favourite. Always restless Zoffany’s wanderlust took him back to Europe, to Vienna and Italy, almost drove him to the South Seas with Captain Cook in the company of Sir Joseph Banks (he withdrew from the expedition, along with Banks, because of inadequate shipboard accommodation) and spent the best part of three years in British India. It was on this last trip that the cannibalistic episode supposedly took place.

 

The newspapers of the time noted Zoffany’s return from India – the Oxford Journal for example, on 22 August 1789; “Zoffany, the Painter, arrived a few Days since from India with more Wealth than Health. — He sailed from Calcutta in an Imperial Ship, but put himself on Board the Sir Eyre Coote, at St. Helena.” No mention of shipwrecks and cannibals though. Zoffany’s second wife happened to be a girlhood friend of Mrs Papendiek, Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe to Queen Charlotte and one of the late eighteenth century’s most incorrigible gossips. She knew the Zoffany’s well, was a neighbour of theirs in Chiswick and mentions them frequently in her memoirs “Court and private life in the time of Queen Charlotte." Mrs Papendiek remembered Zoffany’s return from India – he appeared at her house for a concert by the mulatto violinist George Bridgetower. “No one else in any way peculiarly remarkable was at this meeting except Mr. Zoffany, who surprised us at dinner. He had only recently returned from India, whither he had gone so many years before. We could but be rejoiced at his return, although sorry to see him so changed. For during the voyage home he had been seized with an attack of paralysis, from which he certainly never thoroughly recovered.”

In their 1920 privately printed book (limited to 500 copies) “John Zoffany, R.A.: his life and works 1735-1810,” Lady Victoria Manners and G.C. Williamson draw very heavily on Mrs Papendiek’s account of Zoffany’s return from India, quoting in full her account of the Bridgetower evening. The authors break off in the middle of Mrs Papendiek’s account to interpolate an incident apparently never publicly revealed before and which is related “according to the traditions in the family, which are said to rest upon fact…” The incident is the first account in print of the Zoffany cannibal legend and is presumably where William Dalrymple came across it. The Manners/Williamson version of the story reads:

Of that journey home we have heard of but one incident, and that relates to a terrible experience the travellers had in the Indian Ocean. The vessel was wrecked and the passengers escaped in boats, but that in which Zoffany was, came short of food, and according to the traditions in the family, which are said to rest upon fact, lots were cast on the boat as to who should be killed; and eventually one sailor, who was in a very weak state, either succumbed to his injuries or was put out of his misery and the others had to eat his flesh, roasted in some primitive fashion, in order to keep themselves alive.

Whether this horrible occurrence took place on the boat, or on an island is not clear, but it is generally said to have happened on one of the Andaman Islands; and it is stated that the experience had such an effect on Zoffany that he from that time had a melancholy cast of countenance, and was very different in every respect from the jovial, enthusiastic, gay man he had been in India.

A late self portrait by the alleged anthropophage surrounding himself with various memento
 mori including the skull, hour glass and a book on the brevity of life and the longevity of Art 

The East London Cemetery, Plaistow

East London Cemetery opened in 1872 and until recently (when it was taken over by Dignity) continued to be owned by the original founding company – the East London Cemetery Company.  The cemetery is still very much in use and many of the best monuments are of very recent date, the impressive Vassallo memorial, Tommy Lawrence, a giant dartboard and a moving memorial of a young boy with a football. Elizabeth Stride, Jack the Ripper’s third victim is buried in the cemetery as a number of First World war German spies who were executed in the Tower of London. There is a monument to the 38 people who died the day the HMS Albion was launched at the Thames Ironworks in 1898 and the grave of one of the many families who died aboard the Princess Alice in 1878 is marked with a granite obelisk. The Alnwick Mercury of Saturday 21 September 1878 describes their funeral at the cemetery:

Sunday afternoon a concourse estimated at about 5000 persons, assembled in the vicinity of the East London Cemetery, Plaistow, to witness the interment of a family of five, who perished by the recent calamity on the Thames. They were: Mr. George Davies. 41 years of age, Limehouse; Elizabeth Davies, his wife, aged 51; and George, 17; Thomas, 13; and Emily, 12, sons and daughters. The bodies were taken to their last resting place in five hearses, and were accompanied by between twenty and thirty mourning coaches and private carriages, which conveyed, in addition to the relatives of the deceased, many members of the Masonic body, to which Mr. Davies belonged. Flags floated half-mast high on Limehouse and Stepney steeples, and on other buildings, and various other places on tbe route manifestations of sympathy were displayed, the procession being joined by many who accompanied on foot. The entrance to the cemetery was kept by mounted police, and only those Immediately concerned were admitted within the grounds during the reading the Burial Service, which was performed by the rector of Limehouse. the conclusion the public were allowed to view the vault in which the unfortunate family was interred.

Impressive semi-public funerals for the victims of disasters were a feature of East End life in the late 19th and early 20 th centuries. Not everyone who attended these events behaved with the decorum one would expect. At the funeral of a family killed in a house fire in Bethnal Green a pickpocket was arrested according to the Chelmsford Chronicle  of Friday 07 January 1898:

On Tuesday  John Scott, 22, a costermonger, was charged with stealing a purse containing three farthings, in the East London cemetery, Plaistow.—W hen the victims of the Bethnal Green fire were being Interred Constable Hartridge, 533K, was on duty in plain clothes. He saw the prisoner and others acting suspiciously. Scott put his hand under a Mrs. Tilley’s cape, and turned sharply away. Having ascertained that Mrs. Tilley had lost her purse, the constable followed the prisoner, who threw the purse over a fence.—Remanded for a week.

Flowers left on graves were sometimes a temptation for people in straitened circumstances:

On Monday, at West Ham, Mary Barber, 77, lodging 86 Whitwell Road Plaistow, was charged with stealing some flowers and wreath ribbon, from a grave the East London Cemetery at Plaistow. It was stated that when told she would be charged, the old lady said,  “You can do what you like with me. You can cook me and eat me, but you'll find me deuced tough!"  The defendant was said have only 5 shillings a week from the parish for her support. Asked if she would go to the Workhouse, the old lady said she would sooner not, but eventually she consented to go, and was then discharged with a caution.  (Chelmsford Chronicle - Friday 26 August 1904)

Flowers were also the target of three women thieves according to Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper on Sunday 06 July 1884

Ann Amelia Rogers, 21, of 17, Church-street, Poplar; Winifred Hutchins, 27, same address; and Amelia Gamble, 38, all married women, were charged with being concerned in wilfully damaging a grave at the East London Cemetery, Plaistow, by destroying roses thereon to the amount of 2s., on the 30th ult. The prisoners were seen by the grave- diggers and two ladies to go to one of the graves and pluck six roses from a rose tree growing thereon and destroy the tree. Three of the roses they placed upon the grave of a friend of the prisoner Rogers;  each carried one away in her breast. Mr. Phillips remarked that it was a mean and despicable theft; anything more despicable he could not imagine. He fined each defendant 10s., and 5s. costs.





Memorial to First World War German Spies shot in the Tower of London and buried in the cemetery 



The Vassallo monument



The Vassallo monument

Peace to his ashes! Sir William Rawlins (1753-1838) St Botolph's Churchyard, Bishopsgate

Sir William Rawlins was a man who had very definite ideas on what he wanted for his funeral and he made sure that clear instructions were left in his will: “I desire that … my body may be placed in a lead coffin and that it be interred in the vault belonging to me in Bishopsgate Churchyard .….. That my funeral may be a walking procession and that it commence from my own house down Liverpool Street to the Catholic Chapel to turn on the lefthand up Bloomfield Street to the end of New Broad Street then through the Iron Gates up the said street to Bishopsgate Church Yard. I also desire that the entrance to my vault may be enclosed with good sound and solid brick work so as to prevent the further use thereof by any person whatever, and I also desire that a respectable mausoleum or tomb may be erected over the said vault of well manufactured polished Haytor Granite with designs of scientific excellence which may do honor to the artist whom my said executors hereafter named may think proper to employ. It is also my wish that a cast iron railing may be erected round my said tomb and to be at least five feet ten inches high and to be well painted four times in oil.”

Sir William Rawlins as a young man

He also had very definite ideas about how he should be remembered. According to the London City Press on Saturday 20 August 1859: "The late Sir William Rawlins, KT…… was very desirous to be held in remembrance by the Ward which he had represented and resided in many years. He, therefore, by a codicil to his will ….dated 18th of April, 1838, directed his executors to set apart a sufficient sum out of his personal estate as would produce a clear annual income of 15l., in the name of the Alderman of the Ward, the Deputy, and two others of the Common Council of the Ward of Bishopsgate Without (only), upon trust to keep his vault, then already built, and his tomb or mausoleum, and the iron railing, for which he had entered into a contract with Mr. Samuel Grimsdell to erect to his memory, at a cost of 315l., according to a plan of which he had approved, in good repair and condition......”  

Sir William’s will also included provision to pay for a “respectable” biannual dinner to be held on 24 July (his birthday) for the Alderman and the Common Council of the Ward of Bishopsgate Street Without, “the testator directs that, previous to dining, the tomb and railing shall be inspected, and the necessary orders given for the repairs and embellishments required; and that the codicil read at each dinner, in order that the same may be preserved fresh remembrance.” Each council man who attended both the inspection and the dinner was to receive a fee of one guinea.  According to the London City Press the eleventh biennial dinner was held on Monday 25 July (Rawlins will stipulated that if July 24 the dinner should be held on the following Monday) “at which Mr. Alderman W. T. Coneland, Esq., M.P., presided, supported in the vice-chair by W. H. Pilcher, Esq., Deputy. There were also present: R. Ashby, T. S. Owden, M. and J. Richardson, Esqs., Common Councilmen of the Ward of Bishopsgate Without, and who duly performed the functions of their office, as directed by Sir William Rawlins. The Alderman, after dinner, proposed the standing toast, "The pious memory of Sir William Rawlins." After the healths of the Alderman and Deputy, and several other toasts, the gentlemen departed, with the idea that "it's well to be remembered;" and so Sir William thought. Peace to his ashes! say we.”

Sir William in old age

When St Botolph’s churchyard was cleared of tombstones and other memorials Sir William’s trust fund for the upkeep of his rather splendid memorial seems to have been an obstacle to its removal. Apart from a handful of gravestones used as paving slabs and the Rawlin’s memorial the entire churchyard was emptied and converted to a garden. The initial £500 investment lasted until 2013 when the parish council used the last of the money to refurbish their last remaining churchyard memorial. The then Alderman of Bishopsgate, Neil Redcliffe, lead the Common Councilmen and local business leaders in a final inspection of the tomb and a graveside toast to Sir William before launching an appeal for funds for future restoration work. 

Sir William was born in Bridgecomb, Berkshire in 1753, the son of a farmer. At the age of 17 he became apprenticed to a London weaver but three years later was turned over to an Upholder and eventually gained the freedom of the Upholders Company. He became a successful business man and benefactor of the church and local schools who dabbled in politics. This dabbling cost him a couple of months in Newgate in 1805. He had become Sheriff of London in 1801 and after his term of service was knighted. In 1805 he and his fellow Sheriff Robert Cox were indited for election fraud in getting Sir Francis Burdett elected as MP for Middlesex. They were accused, and found guilty, of accepting at least 300 fictitious votes and thereby securing Sir Francis’ seat. Sir William went on to found the Eagle Insurance Company (later Eagle Star) and died in 1838 at the age of 84.