|
Many famous people have trodden England's pleasant pastures green, and nearly as many now lie somewhere beneath them. Cemeteries and chapels throughout the country are full of history - if you like, a 'living' history - reflecting the conflicts, diseases and attitudes of the day.
Most visitors to London take time to stroll through Westminster Abbey
which is now home to past kings, queens, poets, politicians and the movers
and shakers of their day and it is a 'must do' on the tourist trail.
There you'll find the last resting-place of such notaries as Sir Thomas
Crapper, father of the flush toilet and contributor to the English language…
Charles Darwin, testament to the fact that even the fittest don't survive…
and in Poet's Corner, the likes of Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens and
T.S. Eliot. The centrepiece to the Abbey is the grave and monument to
its founder, Edward the Confessor, who died in 1066, almost a millennium
ago.
One famous leader who was buried with great pomp and ceremony in the
Abbey, in 1658, was England's first and only dictator, Oliver Cromwell.
He no longer resides there however. Two years after he was laid to rest,
public opinion turned against him and he was disinterred and dragged through
the streets of London where his head was bludgeoned from his torso and
impaled on a spike on the roof of Westminster Hall.
The mummified head sat there for a quarter of a century until it was dislodged
in a violent gale and landed in the street. A sentry discovered it and
immediately saw a commercial opportunity - he sold it. And so, the gruesome
trophy changed hands a number of times until it fell into the possession
of one Canon Wilkinson. The Canon delighted in displaying Oliver's noggin
at dinner parties - the spike still firmly lodged through the skull providing
a user-friendly handle. When the Canon died, his son offered the head
to Sydney Sussex College in Cambridge, Cromwell's alma mater, and that's
where it's buried today. An oval plaque to the left of the chapel entrance
reads:
Near to the place was buried, on 25 March 1960, the head of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Fellow Commoner of this college 1616 - 1617.
Wherever you go in England you'll find cemeteries full of interesting
reading. In Golder's Green you'll find Sigmund Freud, his ashes in a Grecian
urn the neurologist owned and admired… Sherlock Holmes's creator,
Arthur Conan Doyle is now in the Village Cemetery in Minstead, Hampshire
after being originally buried in Windesham Estate, Crowborough, Sussex.
His headstone was a slab of British oak with the inscription:
Steel True, Blade Straight
William Shakespeare's remains have never been moved and nor will they.
His epitaph in the Holy Trinity Church, Stratford upon Avon reads:
Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare!
Blest the man that spares these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones
In Highgate Cemetery in London you'll find Karl Marx, below a bust of
the political theorist on a granite base 12ft high. The inscription in
gold lettering reads…
Workers of all lands, unite.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways;
The point is to change it.
But it's the graves of the ordinary people that can give the most insight and pleasure… for example, in Streatham Churchyard there's…
Here lies Elizabeth, my wife of 47 years, and this is the
first damn thing she ever done to oblige me
In Falkirk in Scotland…
At rest beneath this slab of stone
Lies stingy Jimmy Wyatt
He died one morning just at ten
And saved a dinner by it
In Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, the last resting-place of a man who was
hanged for stealing sheep …
Here lies the body of Thomas Kemp
Who lived by wool and died by hemp
And the grave of one William Wilson in Lambeth, London…
Here lieth W.W.
Who never more will
Trouble you, trouble you
In Battersea, London…
Owen Moore
Gone Away
Owin' more
Than he could pay
In Kent you can find a curious epitaph to four wives, whose ashes were
mixed up when their urns were blown over in a gale…
Stranger pause
And shed a tear
For Mary Jane
Lies Buried Here
Mingled in a most
Surprising manner
With Susan, Joy
And portions of Hanna
On the grave of an elderly spinster who died in Shrewsbury, Shropshire
in the early 1800's…
Here lies the body of Martha Dias
Who was always uneasy and not over pious
She lived to the age of three score and ten
And gave that to the worms she refused to the men
In West Grinstead, Sussex, a coroner who hanged himself…
He lived
And died
By suicide
A music teacher in Cornwall…
Stephen and time
Are now both even
Stephen beat time
Now time's beaten Stephen
A dentist from Edinburgh…
Stranger, tread
This ground with gravity
Dentist Brown is filling
His last cavity
In the churchyard of St Stephens, West Putford…
Here lies the landlord Tommy Dent
In his last, cosy tenement
And finally, Abraham Newland, Cashier of the Bank of England, wrote his
own epitaph, perhaps one that is apt for some bankers today…
Beneath this stone old Abraham lies
Nobody laughs, and nobody cries
Where he has gone and how he fares
Nobody knows and nobody cares
Now, if you think wandering cemeteries and taking time out to sniff the plastic roses and have a good read is a bit morbid, think of poet John Gay's epitaph in Westminster Abbey…
Life is a jest and all things show it
I thought so once and now I know it
©2002-2006 TravelMatch
Ltd. Please read Copyright
Disclaimer.
|
|
 |
|