Necropolis: London & it's Dead (20 page)

A reclusive Duke, an Australian claimant, a missing fortune and an exhumation: these sound like the elements of a classic Sherlock Holmes story, but are all factors in the real-life affair of the Druce Scandal, which rocked British society for over a decade. This bizarre sequence of events began in 1864, when a Mrs Anna Maria Druce, of Baker Street, London, claimed that if her husband’s coffin at Highgate Cemetery were opened, it would be found to be empty. Anna, widow of Mr Thomas Charles Druce, had become convinced that her husband, far from being the former proprietor of the Baker Street Bazaar furniture store, was in fact none other than William John Cavendish Bentinck Scott, the late 5th Duke of Portland.

The Duke was an eccentric aristocrat who spent most of his time hiding away on his Nottinghamshire estate, Welbeck, which featured fifteen miles of secret tunnels and an underground ballroom. The Duke only travelled to London in strictest secrecy, leaving Welbeck by an underground tunnel, in a black carriage which was loaded onto the railway train at Worksop Station, and unloaded again in London so that he could be driven to his house in Cavendish Square.

Backed up by Druce’s daughter-in-law and a grandson from Australia, Mrs Druce claimed that the Duke had embarked on a secret double life as a shopkeeper, reaching Baker Street by way of a secret passageway between his house in Cavendish Square and the furniture store. Tiring of the strategy, he had faked the death of his alter-ego, Druce, and returned to Nottinghamshire. Anna
maintained that Druce was not dead after all, and that the coffin would be filled with lead.

When the Duke died in 1879, Anna Druce laid claim to the title and lands of the Portland family for herself and her son. The dispute raged for years, until the body was finally exhumed in 1907. The coffin contained ‘a shrouded human figure, which proved to be that of an aged, bearded man’. This was good enough for the Home Office. The claimants were not legally liable, although two witnesses were sued for perjury and a third fled abroad. It also emerged that Anna Druce had been confined to an asylum since 1904.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet, buried his wife Lizzie Siddal at Highgate in 1862. Lizzie’s story is one of the many tragic tales which give the cemetery its unique character. After their daughter was stillborn, Lizzie fell into a state of profound depression and overdosed on laudanum. Rossetti buried a notebook of his own unpublished poetry with her, only to regret the decision two years later. Already in a state of profound depression, Rossetti was walking in Scotland with a friend when they encountered a small bird, a chaffinch, on the path. The bird did not fly away, but remained still, even when Rossetti picked it up. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ he asked, shaking with emotion. His friend, George Scott, suggested with characteristic Caledonian logic that it was a tame bird which had escaped.

‘Nonsense,’ Rossetti replied. ‘I can tell you what it is. It is the spirit of my wife–the soul of her has taken this shape. Something is going to happen to me!’
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When they returned to the house, the men were told that someone had rung the great bell at the door, but when it was answered, there was nobody there. Scott, about to venture another rational explanation, was astonished when Rossetti turned a ferocious look on him and rushed upstairs to pack. Within hours, he was heading back to London, determined to retrieve the notebook. Rossetti had already persuaded the Home Secretary, a fan, to waive the
exhumation order. He stayed at home in a state of agonized suspense while his friends went to the cemetery. They had been told what to look for: ‘the book in question is bound in rough grey calf and has red edges to the leaves. This will distinguish it from the Bible, also there as I told you’.

A fire was built near the family grave, the coffin raised to the surface, and the book removed. A doctor was on hand to ensure that it was saturated with disinfectant, and he dried it carefully, leaf by leaf. Lizzie’s body looked quite perfect by the glow of the fire. When the book was lifted, there came away with it a strand of red-gold hair.

Tom Sayers (1826–65), the celebrated bare-knuckle fighter, has a tomb bearing the image of his famous dog, Lion. Born into poverty in Brighton, Sayers left home at thirteen and arrived in London eager to learn a trade. Apprenticed to a bricklayer, he was noted for his speed and dexterity and worked on the new London and North Western stations of King’s Cross and St Pancras. According to his biographer, Alan Lloyd, his first big fight was against an Irishman of six foot three, whom he had antagonized on the building site. With a crowd of supporters, they met on Wandsworth Common to settle the argument, with Tom fighting barefoot. The Irishman’s boots becoming clogged with mud, he slowed down and Tom slipped under his guard. Bricklaying had toughened his hands, and his large knuckles were exceptionally sharp. After two and a half hours he laid the Irishman out with a classic upper-cut to the jaw.

This was the start of a career as a prize fighter, which included a clash with Heenan, another Irishman. The fight lasted forty-two rounds and over two hours. Sayers was only five foot eight and weighed in at eleven stone. He was already suffering from tuberculosis when he engaged in this bitter bout on 17 April 1860, in a field in Farnborough, watched by a crowd of 12,000. But nobody ever beat Tom. Sayers retired only when his supporters got up a petition and raised £3,000 for him, on the condition that he never fought again. A national hero, he was the subject of Staffordshire
figurines and ballads. In 1865, 100,000 mourners followed Sayers’s funeral cortège, when he succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine. Lion headed the procession, black crêpe tied around his collar. Behind him trundled the carriages of the aristocracy, after which, one observer noted, came the ‘slow-eyed, great-jawed multitude from the East, clattering over the gravel walks, trampling with their clinkered boots over delicate marble slabs, and playing leap-frog with every sepulchral monument of a convenient height in their way’. Later in the day, the proceedings degenerated into scenes of ‘riotous behaviour’.
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Such was the public reaction to Sayers’s death that cheap mementos went into mass production. Even
The Times
mourned the passing of ‘the Ultimus Romanorum of the prize ring’. A campaign to build a huge marble statue to his memory was announced on the front page–which was quite something, considering the authorities were trying to suppress prizefighting at the time.

Sadly, the plans came to nothing, and Tom had to wait until 2002 to receive official recognition, when his former home at 257 Camden High Road finally got its Blue Plaque, unveiled by Henry Cooper, Britain’s most famous heavyweight boxer.

There is another lion at Highgate: Nero, the stone lion lazing above the tomb of George Wombell, a Victorian menagerist who began his career importing snakeskin for bags and shoes before realizing he could make far more money from exhibiting exotic animals to a fascinated public.

Long after Keats and Shelley roamed Swain’s Lane, Highgate Cemetery continued to be associated with writers. Charles Dickens’s wife and daughter were buried here, as were Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf, and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who earned the disapproval of Christina Rossetti (younger sister of Dante Gabriel), for living openly with a married man. A tortured soul, who never lived with any man, married or single, Christina Rossetti devoted her life to charitable work at Highgate Penitentiary, campaigning to raise the age of consent to sixteen to
protect against child prostitution. In ‘Remember’ (1862) she was also responsible for some of the most haunting lyrics in Victorian poetry, lines appropriate to the elegant melancholy of Highgate Cemetery:

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of your future that you plann’d:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.
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Another literary name is that of Mrs Henry Wood, a Victorian popular novelist who, once the object of derision for the immortal line: ‘Dead!…and never called me mother!’ is now regarded in critical circles as a prototype feminist. Born Ellen Price in 1814, the daughter of a Shropshire glovemaker, Wood was a semi-invalid, confined to bed with curvature of the spine for most of her life. After an unhappy marriage to Sir Henry Wood and an abortive attempt to emigrate to Australia, Wood supported her family through journalism, sending twenty-four short stories to
Ainsworth’s
magazine and receiving little payment in return. Then, following a mystery illness during which she was convinced she was going to die, Mrs Wood completed her first novel,
East Lynne
. The magazine editor Harrison Ainsworth hated it, but in 1861,
East Lynne
made Wood a best-selling author at the age of forty-six. A prolific writer, she completed over forty novels, although she was far from politically
correct. An anti-trades’ union novel,
A Life’s Secret
, caused riots, with protesters storming her publisher’s offices in Paternoster Row and threatening to put the windows out. According to her son, Wood predicted her own death, telling the family: ‘My work is almost done. It is certain I can write no more.’ And then, apparently, she laid down her pen.

At her own insistence, Wood died alone in the early hours of 10 February 1887, while her family waited anxiously in the next room. Crowds of readers turned up to the funeral at St Stephen’s Church, St John’s Wood. Her son described the day as ‘bright and beautiful, one of the finest and warmest days that ever dawned in February. The day itself was soft, sunny and seemed a reflection of the brightest spirit who was ever laid to rest.’

Wood had a sixteen-carriage cortège, headed up by an open carriage drawn by four black horses. The coffin was piled with snow-white wreaths of hothouse flowers. Wood was buried beside her husband, with a headstone of red Aberdeen granite modelled on the tomb of Scipio Africanus and engraved with the words:
THE LORD GIVETH WISDOM
. ‘If one was allowed to pursue one’s former occupation in heaven,’ she had said, ‘I want to go on writing books forever in the next world!’

Derided as an author of sensationalist potboilers, Wood received grudging respect from one obituarist. After remarking that she was a careless writer and incorrigibly inaccurate both grammatically and legally, he admitted that Wood provided a ‘faithful, realistic rendition of middle-class life, free from the pretensions of social superiority and the intellectual disdain that characterizes the middle-class portraiture in
Middlemarch
’. As to that famous, much-derided quotation? Wood never wrote it. The exclamation ‘Dead!–and never called me mother!’ appeared in a dramatized version of
East Lynne
, but not in the novel itself.

Another best-selling author lies buried at Highgate. Fresh flowers continue to mark the catacomb where gay icon Radclyffe Hall, author of
The Well of Loneliness
, lies buried with her partner, Mabel
Batten. Born Marguerite, Hall (1880–1943) named herself John from childhood, and preferred to dress as a boy. She idolized her father, ‘Rat’, a cheerful philanderer, but hated her drunken, violent mother, who beat her when she found ‘John’ in bed with one of the maids. Hall’s first affair was with Mabel Batten, a former mistress of Edward VII, immortalized by John Singer Sargent in his 1897 portrait ‘Mrs George Batten Singing’, now in Glasgow’s Art Gallery at Kelvingrove. Hall later took up with Mabel’s cousin, Lady Una Troubridge.

When
The Well of Loneliness
was published by Cape in 1928, the novel was banned within days by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir George Stephenson, under the Obscene Publications Act, a move authorized by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. It was deemed that the book would ‘tend to corrupt the minds of young persons if it fell into their hands, and its sale is undesirable’. Sir Chartres Biron, Chief Magistrate at Bow Street Magistrates Court, condemned the book for describing ‘unnatural practices between women of the most horrible and disgusting kind’, while the
Sunday Express
went one better and declared: ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this book!’ An attempt to publish the title in New York met with a similar response, although the ban was eventually lifted after an appeal.

Hall died in 1943, and was buried alongside Mabel, who predeceased her in 1916. The tomb, in the Lebanon Circle, bears an inscription from Una: ‘And if God choose, I shall but love thee better after Death.’ Una planned to join Hall and Mabel in the tomb, but was buried in Rome, in 1963, before her desire to be buried in Highgate was known.
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Highgate Cemetery’s most famous inhabitant is Karl Marx, who managed to cause controversy long after his death. Demonstrations arranged to mark the centenary of his birth in 1918 were banned by the Home Office, and only those carrying wreaths were admitted. In 1924, the Russian Communist Party petitioned the Home Office to remove his remains to Russia. This was opposed by the British
Communist Party, which claimed Marx belonged to the world, not just to Russia. Marx’s grave was moved from the south of the New Ground in 1954, and the distinctive grizzled head was sculpted by Lawrence Bradshaw and unveiled in 1956.
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