Necropolis: London & it's Dead (36 page)

Odd how often I think with what is love I suppose of the City: of the walk to the Tower: that is my England; I mean, if a bomb destroyed one of those little alleys with the brass bound curtains & the river smell & the old woman reading I should feel–well, what the patriots feel.
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One of the worst civilian casualty incidents of the war occurred at Bethnal Green Underground Station.
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By March 1943, the Blitz had been over for two years, but air raids were still an everyday occurrence for East Enders, since the docklands remained a key target for German bombers. Bethnal Green Underground Station, one of the few deep-level stations in the East End, was an obvious place for a huge public shelter. It could hold up to 7,000 people and contained 5,000 bunks. People would gather nearby when an air raid was due. They were expecting retaliation after a successful raid on Berlin on 1 March.

About 500 people were already in the shelter when the sirens went off at 8.17 p.m. Bombers had changed their tactics from slow, heavy aircraft to faster craft, so people had less time to get inside the shelter. Knowing this, the residents rushed out of cinemas and jumped off buses. They came from everywhere–and in less than ten minutes, an estimated 1,500 people had made their way into the entrance. Because of the blackout, they had only one 25-watt bulb to guide them. It had been raining, and the steps were wet. At 8.27 p.m., a nearby anti-aircraft battery fired off sixty rockets. It was a new gun, with an unfamiliar sound. Rumours were already circulating of deadly new flying bombs, and fear turned to panic.

As the crowd surged forward down the slippery steps, a woman holding a baby fell near the bottom of the first staircase. A man tripped over her, and a tragic human domino effect began. Hundreds of people fell within fifteen seconds. Unaware of what was happening, more people surged into the shelter. PC Thomas Penn, escorting his pregnant wife to the shelter, arrived as the disaster was unfolding. He crawled over the massed bodies to the bottom of the nineteen steps and found two hundred people in a space the size of a small room. He climbed back and called for help, before returning to try to extricate people.

Despite all that could be done, one hundred and seventy-three people died: twenty-seven men, eighty-four women and sixty-two children. A further sixty-two were taken to hospital. The woman who had originally fallen survived: her baby did not. One eyewitness, a boy whose father made a last-minute decision to head for another shelter, almost lost his sister: ‘She came in late, thought the ground was very soft but she was on the top of bodies and the wardens pulled her from the top. In our class at school two brothers were both killed, their sister, their mum and dad and their gran. Three generations wiped out.’ Like the direct hits at Bank and Balham, the disaster was hushed up by the authorities, for fear of damaging public morale.

One inevitable consequence of the war was the expansion of Brookwood’s military cemeteries. The Commonwealth sections were extended, and French, Polish, Czechoslovakian, Russian, Belgian and Dutch plots created for the graves of Allied casualties. The Free French section, marked by two crosses of Lorraine, featured different styles of memorial which testified to the colonial elements of the French forces: as well as crosses, headstones bore the Star of David, and appeared in the form of a Moorish arch. There was a Moslem section, and plots for Italian and German prisoners of war, and a plot that commemorated fourteen members of the Turkish Air Force. By 1945, over 4, 220 casualties from both world wars were buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission section.

During the Second World War the cemetery was extended for the burial of members of the US armed forces who had died in England. Burials commenced in April 1942, and by August 1944, over 3,600 bodies had been laid to rest. An isolated plot behind the Chapel was used for the burial of nineteen American servicemen executed at Shepton Mallet prison for various offences during the Second World War. These graves were unmarked. After the war, the bodies were transferred to a ‘dishonoured’ plot in the American Military Cemetery at Oisne-Aisne in France.
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The Brookwood Memorial commemorates nearly 3,500 men and women of the forces of the British Commonwealth ‘to whom the fortune of war denied a known and honoured Grave’. These include personnel who died at sea, in the campaign in Norway in 1940, as members of the raiding parties that set out from the United Kingdom or as special agents with Allied underground. Designed by Ralph Hobday, the memorial is made of Portland stone, and the names are carved on panels of green slate. These include Violette Szabo (1921–45), the first woman to be awarded the George Cross, whose life was immortalized in the film
Carve Her Name With Pride
. A Londoner, Violette volunteered for the Special Operations Executive after her French husband was killed in North Africa.
Parachuted into Occupied France, she did valuable work for the Resistance prior to D Day. Captured on her second mission, Violette was tortured by the Gestapo but refused to betray her comrades. In January 1945, she was shot. A year later, Violette’s young daughter collected her posthumous George Cross from the Palace.

At Tower Hill, the memorial to the Merchant Seamen was extended. Nearly 4,786 merchant ships were lost during the Second World War. The number of merchant seamen who gave their lives totalled nearly 32,000. The Atlantic was the chief battleground. In the worst year, 1942, four-fifths of the total merchant-ships losses occurred in the North and South Atlantic. Conveys making their way to Russia round the North Cape were vulnerable to attack, since they passed within range of occupied Norway. In the Mediterranean, convoys to Malta ran the gauntlet of sea and air attacks on an increasingly heavy scale. In home waters, losses throughout the war accounted for more than one quarter of the total, due to enemy mines, submarine and light surface craft activity and air attacks.

When the time came to commemorate the men of the Merchant Navy who lost their lives during the Second World War and have no known grave, it was decided to combine the new memorial with the existing one to create a complete whole. Sir Edward Maufe achieved this by designing a semi-circular sunken garden adjoining the original memorial. This created enough wallspace to record almost 24,000 names without building high walls on Tower Hill. The inscription is guarded by sculpted figures representing an officer and seaman of the Merchant Service. Other stone sculptural figures represent the Seven Seas, and there is a central pool of bronze, engraved as a mariners’ compass, and set to Magnetic North. The memorial was unveiled by Elizabeth II on 5 November 1955.
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After the war, London’s great Victorian cemeteries went into terminal decline. Vandalism and neglect completed the destruction
started by the Luftwaffe, and family plots were abandoned as the younger generation moved out to the suburbs, reluctant to return to Kensal Green or Highgate and tend the graves. The tightly-knit working-class communities of the East End, which had perpetuated the Victorian funeral tradition, were broken up, as residents of bombed-out squares and terraces were moved to distant estates.
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The war had irrevocably changed attitudes towards death. As Peter Jupp notes, whilst in 1938, one in ten Londoners wanted a ‘proper funeral’
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, by 1945 the war had ‘made grief both more public and more private. Grief was increasingly something the family wanted to keep to itself’.
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Once again, the dead were banished from the city, but not to ‘God’s acre beautiful’ or the delightful memorial gardens envisaged by Loudon. It was impossible to visualize families promenading through soulless municipal cemeteries, with their strict regulations for monument design, so that gravestones would not impair the performance of industrial mowers. No wildflowers blew in these dispiriting places; no weeping angels stretched out their wings imploringly; no mausolea waited to open their doors to the next generation.

At Highgate, the pinnacles of the magnificent Tudor entrance became so dangerous that they had to be dismantled. The chapels at Nunhead were never rebuilt after bombing; wanton destruction across London left monuments in ruins, trashed by vandals and stripped of valuable bronze and lead. Questions were asked in the House about the future of Highgate Cemetery, and rumours circulated that it might be sold off to a property developer. The imposing gates of Highgate Cemetery’s Western Ground were locked for ever in 1973.

Within a generation of death being on everyone’s lips, whether at the hands of bomber crews or on the battlefield, it had become the great unmentionable topic. Far from dying contentedly surrounded by a circle of family and friends, the terminally ill were airbrushed out of existence, removed to hospitals, never to be seen again. When London began to swing, Victorian cemeteries were grim reminders of mortality, fit only for film locations and the attentions of local hooligans.

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And then, suddenly, rescue arrived in the form of Sir John Betjeman. A writer, Victorian enthusiast and architectural expert, Betjeman spearheaded the conservation movement in Britain, campaigning for endangered buildings with such books as
Ghastly Good Taste
. Portrayed by the cartoonist Searle as an aesthete version of
The Avengers
’ John Steed, Betjeman galvanized the heritage industry.

In 1975, the Friends of Highgate Cemetery was formed. Dedicated to clearing brambles and opening access to graves, the organization subsequently obtained the freehold of the Cemetery and began an impressive programme of restoration. London’s other Victorian cemeteries soon developed passionate ‘Friends’, a trend which was echoed nationally. A growing interest in genealogy and local history sent visitors back to the cemeteries, tracing ancestors or intrigued by the anecdotes of those buried there. Volunteers and preservationists responded in kind, with programmes of tours and lectures. Kensal Green, for instance, hosts an annual ‘Day of the Dead’ when visitors may view the catacombs and coffin lift, admire parading hearses and even buy jam made from the cemetery’s fruit bushes. The event, almost mediaeval in its acceptance of death, also echoes the Victorian sentiment of cemetery tours as a satisfying day out.

As well as attitudes towards death, attitudes towards burial have changed. The Socialist author Paul Foot was buried at Golders Green in a cardboard coffin in 2004. Attitudes towards mourning reflect this change. For example, the announcement of the death of Sheila Gish, the actor, contained this injunction: On Miss Gish’s request, no black to be worn, please (unless of course it’s your best colour).’
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Natural burial grounds, which recall the earliest pagan cemeteries, have been developed where the body is committed to the earth in a simple shell and the memorial consists of a tree. There are now 200 of these woodland meadows in the UK, inspired by concerns about the environmental consequences of conventional burial and cremation. Crematoria have been blamed for at least 16 per cent of the UK’s total mercury emissions, as well as carbon monoxide and dioxins. Conventional burial also means that formaldehyde from embalmed bodies will leak into the soil and contaminate nearby water supplies. In 2004, Haringey Council’s proposals to dig up parts of Queen’s Wood and Highgate Wood for woodland burial plots was a response to the perennial problem of overcrowding in London cemeteries.
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From a culture in which it was not permitted to report suicides or mention the word ‘cancer’ in national newspapers, we now live in a confessional age. Stricken writers record their own decline, meeting the eternal deadline with a dying fall. The terminal illnesses of celebrities are closely monitored; beds of flowers and candles appear at the spots of disasters in apparent spontaneous outpourings of grief. This phenomenon first appeared in Britain after the Hillsborough Stadium football disaster in 1989, but earlier manifestations elsewhere in the world include the shrine which materialized on the spot where John Lennon was shot in 1980 and the reaction to the demise of Eva Peron and Princess Grace of Monaco. Mainland Europe has long had a Roman Catholic tradition of roadside shrines, and now, in Britain, improvised roadside shrines spring up at the site of every murder and fatal accident. Death is even marked in cyberspace: there are now internet memorial sites where we can post a message and sign a guestbook to register our grief.

At some point at the end of the twentieth century, it appears that the stiff upper lip gave way to the bleeding heart. Explanations include a concept of ‘Americanism’, for which read ‘emotional literacy’, embracing alternative forms of spirituality and the rise of therapy. At its most extreme, this reaction peaked in the public response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Diana’s death was announced on the last day of summer: 31 August 1997. Within hours of the news of the tragic car crash, crowds had gathered at Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace in a display of collective grief. Carpets of flowers appeared, accompanied by letters, cards and candles. Within a week, there were fifteen tonnes of tributes. The scene was replicated up and down the land. This appeared to be a public impulse, unlike the national mourning ordained by the Earl Marshall for Prince Albert or Queen Victoria. Strictly speaking, as the ex-wife of a
peer, Diana was not in line for a heraldic funeral. However, in her capacity as the ‘Princess of Hearts’, Diana’s funeral represented a political opportunity. There were plans to rename Heathrow Airport after Diana; along with the prediction that Elton John’s ballad, ‘Goodbye England’s Rose’ would still top the charts at Christmas (it didn’t). Like that of the Duke of Wellington in 1852, Diana’s death was the pretext for an elaborate display of national sentiment from a new Government. Within hours, she had earned another soubriquet: the ‘People’s Princess’. And her funeral was very much the ‘People’s Funeral’, watched on television by thirty-one million people in Britain, and two and a half billion around the world.