Necropolis: London & it's Dead

CATHARINE ARNOLD
read English at Cambridge and holds a further degree in psychology. A journalist and academic with a particular interest in death and crime, Catharine’s previous books include the acclaimed novel
Lost Time
.

Further praise for
Necropolis
:

‘An elegant saunter through the land of the dead’

Jad Adams,
Guardian

‘Catharine Arnold conjures up an appalling vista of endless grinning skulls stretching back into prehistory…[It] works as a handy one-stop-shop for all things morbid from the fate of Cromwell’s skull to the Necropolis Railway, post-mortem photography and beyond…The big set-piece with which Arnold ends her story is, of course, the overwrought funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. Though by the time we get there, it starts to look less like a bizarre aberration and more a natural extension of all the eccentric, moving and ingenious ways Londoners have faced down the spectre of death’

Suzi Feay
, Independent on Sunday

‘There has always been a certain relish in recounting the decay of flesh…That is why
Necropolis
is deeply pleasing: it satisfies the desire for wayward knowledge, being a compendium of death in all its forms…If you wish to go on a pilgrimage down these gravel paths and among these white sepulchres, this book should be your guide’

Peter Ackroyd,
The Times

‘Much of Catharine Arnold’s account of London’s relationship with its dead carries [a] guiltily pleasurable charge of macabre interest…Where Arnold’s account really beguiles is in its eccentric social detail, from the various mourning fashions in the late Victorian age
to the medical consultant Francis Seymour Haden’s enthusiasm for wickerwork caskets’

Sinclair McKay,
Daily Telegraph

‘Stitching archaeological discovery and architectural detail to anecdote and cultural commentary,
Necropolis
paints London as a city “drained by death”…This book offers a fascinating ramble through the cadavers of London’s history, with the irresistible draw of finding out more about what lies under our pavements’

Anna Metcalfe,
Financial Times

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2006
This edition first published by Pocket Books, 2007
An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © 2006 by Catharine Arnold

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.

The right of Catharine Arnold to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
Africa House
64–78 Kingsway
London WC2B 6AH

www.simonsays.co.uk

Simon & Schuster Australia
Sydney

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-84739-493-4
ISBN-10: 1-84739-493-0

For my parents
In Memoriam

Contents

   
Acknowledgements

   
Introduction

1 A Pagan Place:
Celtic Golgotha and the Roman Cemeteries

2
Danse Macabre: London and the Black Death

3
Memento Mori: The Theatre of Death

4 Pestilence:
Diary of a Plague Year

5
Et in Arcadia Ego
:
A Vision of Elysian Fields

6 Gatherings from Graveyards:
The Dead are Killing the Living

7 Victorian Valhallas:
The Development of London’s Cemeteries

8 Great Gardens of Sleep:
Death Moves to the Suburbs

9 The People Who Invented Death:
The Victorian Funeral

10 The Vale of Tears:
The Victorian Cult of Mourning

11 Up in Smoke:
The Development of Cremation

12 Our Darkest Hours:
World War and the Decline of Mourning

   
Notes

   
Bibliography

NECROPOLIS

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped me in the creation of this book, taking time and trouble to give me their advice and sources for further reference. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the following: Jean Pateman and the Friends of Highgate Cemetery; Ron Woollacott and the Friends of Nunhead Cemetery; Robert Stephenson and the Friends of Brompton Cemetery; Roger Arber of The Cremation Society of Great Britain; Henry Vivian-Neal and the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery; Stephen White; John M. Clarke; Brookwood Cemetery Society; the Reverend Dr Peter Jupp; Andrew Gordon and Edwina Barstow at Simon & Schuster; Joan Deitch; Dr Sarah Niblock; Simon Cadman; Sarah Crichton and Guy Martin of Brooklyn, New York, for assisting with my American research; the British Library; the University Library, Cambridge; the Hallward Library, University of Nottingham; the Museum of London; the Victoria and Albert Museum; Vanessa Dale; my agent, Charlie Viney; and last but not least, my family, particularly my husband, whose constant encouragement and support sustained me throughout writing
Necropolis
.

Introduction

When Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral after it had been destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666, he made an astonishing discovery. As Mrs Isabella Holmes reveals in her marvellous book of 1898,
The London Burial Grounds
:

Upon digging the foundation of the present fabrick of St Paul’s, he found under the graves of the latter ages, in a row below them, the Burial-places of the Saxon times–the Saxons, as it appeared, were accustomed to line their graves with chalk-stones, though some more eminent were entombed in coffins of whole stones. Below these were British graves, where were found ivory and wooden pins of a hard wood, seemingly box, in abundance, of about six inches long; it seems the bodies were only wrapped up, and pinned in wooden shrouds, which being consumed, the pins remained entire. In the same row, and deeper, were Roman urns intermixed. This was eighteen feet deep or more, and belonged to the colony, where Romans and Britons lived and died together.

Wren’s discovery reminds us that London is one giant grave. So many generations have lived and died here within such a small span–pagan, Roman, mediaeval, Victorian–and left intriguing traces of their lives: like the skulls of Romans, murdered by
Boudicca, recovered from the Thames, and the clay pipes of plague victims, discovered during excavations for the Piccadilly Line. In fact, the tunnel curves between Knightsbridge and South Kensington stations because it was impossible to drill through the mass of skeletal remains buried in Hyde Park. London, from six feet under, is not just Cobbett’s ‘Great Wen’, it is the city a horrified young Thomas Carlyle dubbed ‘the Great Maw’!

Death provides a fascinating mirror through which to view London, as it has grown and changed. This book does not claim to be an exhaustive survey of every burial ground; for that, we must turn to Isabella Holmes, who chronicled every cemetery in London, and to Hugh Meller’s excellent
Gazeteer
. The intention is to examine how London has coped with its dead from the pagan era to the present day, and the men and women who have played a part, from the mysterious Roman lady of Spitalfields to Graham Greene and his experience of the Blitz; from the cortège of Queen Elizabeth I to the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, 400 years later; and from the Dickensian horrors of the overcrowded inner-city churchyards to the Victorian Valhallas of Kensal Green, Highgate and Brompton.

My own interest in graveyards began in childhood, when I used to walk home from school through Nottingham’s Rock Cemetery, with its magnificent marble angels and sandstone catacombs. When I moved to London, and longed for green tranquil spaces, I spent weekends exploring the great Victorian burial grounds. The word ‘cemetery’ derives from the Greek
koimeterion
or ‘dormitory’, and these ‘great gardens of sleep’ seemed tranquil indeed.

Each had its unique appeal: the grandeur of Brompton, designed as an outdoor cathedral; Kensal Green, with its elegant Neo-classical tombs; and, most fascinating of all, Highgate–last resting-place of Karl Marx and poor Lizzie Siddal, the Pre-Raphaelite muse who was exhumed so that her husband could recover the book of poetry buried with her.

Highgate was the inspiration for
Necropolis
. I was sitting in a café
at the top of Highgate Hill one bright May morning, sipping coffee and watching the world go by, when a laden hearse drove straight past my window, reminding me that the great cemetery lay but a few steps away. From planning to write about Highgate, I began to explore the places which inspired it, including Paris’s Père Lachaise, and those that followed, such as Green-Wood, in New York. But London seemed peculiarly suited to a narrative about the dead. As I roamed the cemeteries, and examined dusty tomes in silent libraries, I realized that London possesses a Dickensian aura of mystery, a pervasive melancholy…

Writing
Necropolis
has enhanced my vision of London as a city of ghosts: famous and infamous, they dart along like shadows. The shade of Virginia Woolf flickers through Bloomsbury; forgotten scribblers materialize on Fleet Street near the Wig and Pen; and at Westminster, I sense the phantoms of a thousand Scottish soldiers, interned by Cromwell after the Battle of Worcester in 1651, and buried in the plague pits near the Houses of Parliament.

Meanwhile, we have carved out a place for ourselves among the dead; the glittering pinnacles of commerce rise along the skyline, their foundations sunk in a charnel house; and the lost lie forgotten below us as, overhead, we persuade ourselves that we are immortal and carry on the business of life.

Catharine Arnold
January, 2006

1: A PAGAN PLACE

Celtic Golgotha and the Roman Cemeteries

High above London stands one of the city’s oldest burial grounds. The Bronze Age tumulus on Parliament Hill Fields predates Kensal Green and Highgate cemeteries by over 4,000 years. This tumulus, which dates from around 2,400
BC
, is characteristic of the peaceful, remote spots where the earliest Londoners went to join their ancestors, although the city, as such, did not yet exist. The region was merely a series of rudimentary villages, inhabited by tribes who survived by farming and fishing in the marshy land around the tidal river.

The tumulus is a reminder that, since time immemorial, humans have demonstrated a universal propensity to bury their dead, to mourn their passing and to mark their passage into the next world with a series of mortuary rituals and religious ceremonies.

The earliest form of interment, during the Neolithic period (4,000–2,500
BC
), consisted of long barrows. These were vast walk-in burial chambers covered by mounds of earth. Today, those barrows which remain are grassy mounds, but at the time they were decorated with stones or cobbles and had elaborate wooden entrances, sealed with massive rocks which could be rolled away
when the occasion demanded. Used and adapted over the centuries, these communal barrows contained large numbers of ‘crouched inhumations’ (bodies buried in the foetal position).
¹