The Curse of Cleopatra’s Needle

Tags

Cleopatra, Cleopatras Needle, curse of the mummy, curses, Egyptian curses, Egyptian Obelisk, Embankment, London, London lore, sites, Thames, tourism, tourist sites

PART ONE: HOW IT ALL BEGAN!

_{Cleopatra’s Needle, London. Public Domain, ^{https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=735816}} 

If you stroll along the Victoria Embankment between Victoria Embankment and Temple underground stations, you will see a large obelisk flanked by two sphinxes jutting out into the sky. Cleopatra’s Needle is a distinctive landmark in London and a popular tourist spot but few people take the time to understand its history and the supernatural stories which surround it.

The Obelisk of Thutmose III

Although the obelisk in London is associated with Cleopatra, in reality its only connection to the famous Egyptian is that she moved it to Alexandria in 12 BCE, her royal city and set it up in Caesareum – a temple built in honour of Mark Anthony[1]. The obelisk was in fact carved over 1000 years before Cleopatra came to power. Hewed out of red granite from the quarries of Aswan and dedicated to Pharaoh Thutmose III[2], the obelisk was erected in the city of Heliopolis in around 1450 BCE. Two hundred years later inscriptions on the side lines of the shaft were carved out in honour of Rameses the Great commemorating his military victories[3].

A Gift for Great Britain

^{Lieutenant-General Sir James Alexander, c1880.
_{By Stephencdickson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66156088}} 

In 1819, the Albanian Ottoman governor and ruler of Egypt and Sudan, Muhammad Ali gave the obelisk as a gift to Great Britain. The obelisk was seen as a fitting monument to commemorate the British victories over Napoleon in the Battle of Nile (1798) and the Battle of Alexander (1801)[4]. Unfortunately, the cost of transporting the 224-ton obelisk proved too much and plans to bring it over to Great Britain were dropped. The subject was again unsuccessfully revisited in 1822 and 1832.

In 1867, Lieutenant-General Sir James Alexander read a paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh outlining his ideas for bringing the obelisk to Britain[5]. In 1875, Alexander visited Egypt to assess its condition. On his trip he met with the civil engineer and Egyptology enthusiast Mr John Dixon who had already been researching the obelisk. At the end of 1876, Dixon and Alexander consulted with Sir William James Erasmus Wilson, a distinguished anatomist, who agreed to contribute £10,000 to the endeavour. Dixon accepted full responsibility for any other expenses incurred as well as transportation logistics. With a firm plan and the permission of the then Khedive Ismael Pasha, Dixon set about drawing up blueprints for a ship strong enough to hold the obelisk[6].

^{The iron cylinder barge, Cleopatra. Victoria and Albert Museum Collection.}

The Cleopatra

The ship, Cleopatra, built to transport the obelisk was ingenious in its design. The cigar-shaped iron cylinder (around 92 feet long by 16 feet wide) which encased the granite monolith was constructed around it, with the sheets of metal riveted together. A bridge was built to shelter the crew. Once the iron case was complete, it was towed to the dry-dock of the Egyptian Admiralty and converted into a ship. Here the internal ballast rails, stern and rudder were added[7].

A crew of eight Maltese sailors led by Captain Carter were hired to steer the Cleopatra whilst the Olga, a steam ship was engaged to act as a tow ship under the command of Captain Booth[8]. On 21 September 1877, the Cleopatra and the Olga left Egypt bound for Falmouth.

The Deadly Bay of Biscay

Initially the journey was uneventful but on the 14 October as the ship entered the Bay of Biscay, the weather took a turn for the worse. The violent storm whipped up the sea causing the iron rails to break loose. At 9.20pm the Cleopatra signalled to the Olga that they were in trouble and a small boat manned by six volunteers were sent over to assist them[9]. Tragically, the crew of the Cleopatra were unable to secure the ropes flung to them and the small boat drifted away, swallowed up by the rough water. Having not heard from the Cleopatra, Captain Booth was under the impression that she was safe. It was only when a few hours later he received a second distress signal asking for the Olga to pick them up, that he realised the seriousness of the situation. The Olga managed to pull up alongside the container ship, collect the crew and cut the tow-rope[10]. An attempt was made to find the six men but to no avail, the boat had disappeared. The names of the men who drowned were William Askin, Michael Burns, James Gardiner, William Donald, Joseph Benton and William Patan (their names are inscribed on the base of the Needle)[11]. Thinking the obelisk lost, the Olga returned to Falmouth.

Incredibly a few days later, the container ship was spotted still afloat proving Dixon’s faith in his design correct, “its buoyancy and sailing qualities have been shown to be of a high order by one of the severest tests to which a vessel, likely to encounter ocean storms can be exposed”. The Cleopatra was picked up by the English steamer ship, Fitzmaunce and brought into the port of Ferrol. After a short and tricky negotiation (the captain of the Fitzmaunce had placed a lien for salvage on the container[12]), the steam ship Anglia was sent to bring the monolith to Britain. On the 21 January 1878, the obelisk arrived at Gravesend (school children in Gravesend were given the day off to welcome the Cleopatra[13]). Even at this stage, the obelisk’s final home had not been decided. Many sites were suggested but in the end the decision was made by the two men who had paid for its journey, Sir Wilson and John Dixon[14]. In September 1878, the obelisk was at last installed to cheers from the crowds and the 68 feet (21 metres) monolith became Cleopatra’s Needle.

_{The Cleopatra hits storm weather in the Bay of Biscay.
Victoria and Albert Museum Collection.}

PART TWO: THE CURSE OF THE OBELISK

Cleopatra’s Needle has developed a strange reputation. A reputation which probably stemmed from the idea that Egyptian objects are by their nature cursed and the tragic story of its journey to Britain.

The Suicidal Lady

For some unknown reason the site of Cleopatra’s Needle has become a popular suicide spot. On two separate occasions, a policeman was approached by a distressed woman urging him to come to the banks of the River Thames to prevent someone from jumping into the water. As the policeman reach the area of the needle, they see the same woman, who had just stopped them, leap into the river[15].

The Phantom Sailor

Unearthly laughter has been heard coming from the Needle at night. This eerie sound has been linked to the ghost of a naked man who has been witnessed on a number of occasions, running from out behind the obelisk and throwing himself into the River without making a splash[16]. The first sighting of this apparition occurred a few weeks after the installation of the obelisk leading many people to believe it was in fact the ghost of one of the sailors who died in the Bay of Biscay.

An Egyptian Curse

_{Aleister Crowley. Unknown author, Public domain, via
Wikimedia Commons} 
 

As with many Egyptian artifacts some believe the obelisk is cursed and that the soul of Rameses II has been imprisoned inside the granite.

There is a very odd tale relating to the obelisk and Egypt which may or may not have any basis in truth and which is closer to a horror than ghost story. In 1880, a Miss Davies, aged 27 from Pimlico, was wandering along the Embankment when she felt herself being unwillingly pulled towards the site of the Needle. As she got closer to the obelisk, she heard unearthly laughter and losing control of her legs she flung herself into the water. Luckily for her, she was saved by a vagrant. She was taken to hospital to recover. Although physically healed, she experienced terrifying nightmares in which a tall woman with a white face and black almond eyes wearing red robes appeared. As the woman opened its mouth, she revealed sharp pointed teeth and the flesh from her face is ripped off[17]. Miss Davies believed her ordeal to be caused by the obelisk. The description of the woman’s appearance conjures up the image of an Egyptian priestess or member of the Egyptian nobility.

The Crowley Connection

Another unsubstantiated story regards the occultist Aleister Crowley. It is said that Crowley performed dark sorcery one dark night at the base of the obelisk in order to release Rameses’ trapped spirit. The ceremony involved the feeding of animal blood to a human skeleton. Crowley was unsuccess and It is said that Rameses mockingly laughed at Cowley’s failure[18].

The Ill-fated Needle

Many believe that the curse of the obelisk lead to it being bombed in an air-raid during the First World War. At midnight on Tuesday, 14 September 1917, the obelisk was hit disfiguring the pedestal[19]. After the war ended, it was decided not to repair the bomb damage – the scars having become part of its history and its cursed legend.

A Haunting Time Capsule?

When the obelisk was erected, a time capsule was inserted into the pedestal. This capsule contains many objects including 12 photographs of the best looking women of the day,  box of hairpins, a box of cigars, tobacco pipes, a set of imperial weights, a baby’s bottle, toys, a shilling razor, samples of cables used in the erection of the obelisk, a portrait or Queen Victoria, a written history of the transportation of the obelisk and a map of London[20].

Could the time capsule contain objects which are themselves haunted? Is that what is responsible for the ghostly stories associated with the obelisk?

The Guardian Sphinxes

Lastly, there are the sphinxes. The sphinxes (as well as the pedestal) were sculptured by the English architect, George John Vulliamy[21]. As with the pedestal, the sphinxes were damaged by the same bomb. It has long been said that the sphinxes were accidentally placed the wrong way round. Logically, they should have been facing outwards, symbolising protection for the obelisk, but maybe the sphinxes were positioned correctly. Maybe their role was not to stop harm from coming to the obelisk but rather to prevent anything from getting out!

^{Inward facing sphinx, showing shell damage from World War I. This file is licensed under the 
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Subject to disclaimers.} 

Final Word

The history of Cleopatra’s Needle is a fascinating and sad one and the obelisk itself is very beautiful. Personally, I highly doubt that there is any Egyptian curse on it. Egyptian curses became fashionable after the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun and are now a mainstay of films and books but it is a mystery as to why the site has become a magnet for those with a desire to commit suicide. Does the obelisk have some sort of power or magnetic pull? I have visited it on numerous occasions at all times of the day and night and have never felt any particular draw to it but if you are brave enough there is a legend that if you want a particular question answered you should look at the pyramidon at the top and say the words “I call spirits from the vasty deep”[22]. Maybe you will receive an answer from the spirit of the obelisk!

Cleopatra’s Needle from across the Thames. Lenora 2022

Bibliography and Further Reading

Brier, Bob (Dr), Cleopatra’s Needles: The Lost Obelisks of Egypt, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

Sir Erasmus Wilson, Cleopatra’s Needle: With Brief Notes on Egypt and Egyptian Obelisks, London: Brain & Co, 1877

---

Notes

[1] THROUGH THE ARCHIVES: Cleopatra’s needle arrives in London from Egypt From the News Letter, January 24, 1878, https://www.newsletter.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/retro/through-archives-cleopatras-needle-arrives-london-egypt-3103696

[2] Cleopatra’s Needle: The Story Behind Three Awe-Inspiring Obelisks, https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/cleopatra-s-needle-story-behind-obelisks-007051

[3] Sir Erasmus Wilson, Cleopatra’s Needle: With Brief Notes on Egypt and Egyptian Obelisks

[4] Cleopatra’s Needle: The Story Behind Three Awe-Inspiring Obelisks

[5] Cleopatra’s Needle: With Brief Notes on Egypt and Egyptian Obelisks

[6] Ibid

[7] Cleopatra (cylinder ship), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_(cylinder_ship)

[8] William Penman Lyon, Cleopatra’s needle, London: The Book Society, https://books.google.co.il/books?id=RoYDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA5&dq=cleopatra%27s+needle&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjt77DGuLnvAhUIrRQKHdICBYoQ6AEwA3oECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=london&f=false

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid

[11] Cleopatra’s Needle, https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Cleopatras-Needle/

[12] William Penman Lyon, Cleopatra’s needle

[13] THROUGH THE ARCHIVES: Cleopatra’s needle arrives in London from Egypt

From the News Letter

[14] Dr Bob Brier, Cleopatra’s Needles: The Lost Obelisks of Egypt

[15] Cleopatra’s Needle and Haunted Victoria Embankment in London, http://hauntedearthghostvideos.blogspot.com/2012/05/cleopatras-needle-and-haunted-victoria.html

[16] Cleopatra’s Needle, https://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/hauntings/cleopatras-needle/

[17] Cleopatra’s Needle Exorcism, https://www.wattpad.com/331285523-voodoo-creepypasta-1-cleopatra%27s-needle-exorcism

[18] Cleopatra’s Needle, https://topicaltens.blogspot.com/2014/09/12th-september-cleopatras-needle.html

[19] Cleopatra’s Needle, London, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra’s_Needle,_London

[20] Cleopatra’s Needle and Haunted Victoria Embankment in London

[21] George John Vulliamy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_John_Vulliamy

[22] The London Obelisk: Cleopatra’s Ghosts, https://glennashton.blogspot.com/2010/12/the-london-obelisk-cleopatra-ghosts.html

A haunting tale for Halloween: The Stockwell Ghost

Tags

ann robinson, catharine crowe, domestic servants, Hauntings, hoax, London, Old Jeffrey, poltergeist, stockwell ghost, Wesley

Astonishing Transactions at Stockwell

Kennington Common and Church 1830. Image Source: Vauxhall History online.

In the eighteenth century Stockwell was a rural hamlet in Surrey, repleat with rolling fields and shady lanes flanked by hedgerow. It boasted less than a hundred dwellings mainly centred around a village green, upon which flocks of sheep ambled whilst sparrows and yellow hammers sported in the skies above.  It was a veritable rustic idyll.

Mrs Golding was an upstanding and well-regarded member of the community, a lady of independent fortune who lived alone, but for her maid, Ann Robinson. Her house was situated close by the Tower public house.  A more respectable and unremarkable old body it would have been hard to find.  However on twelfth night, Monday 6 January, 1772, her unobtrusive life was suddenly cast into turmoil.

Mrs Golding’s peaceful forenoon was rudely shattered when her young maid servant, a girl of about twenty, and employed little more than a week, burst into the parlour to exclaim that the kitchen was being turned upside down by hands unseen.  Alarmed, Mrs G accompanied the girl to the aforesaid chamber and to her utter astonishment was witness to the following events:

‘Cups and saucers rattled down the chimney – pots and pans were whirled down the stairs, or through the windows; and hams, cheeses and loaves of bread disported themselves upon the floor as if the devil were in them.’ [1]

While the astounded old lady contemplated the strange turn of events, things escalated –

‘a clock tumbled down and the case broke; a lantern that hung on the staircase was thrown down and the glass broke to pieces; an earthen pan of salted beef broke to pieces and the beef fell about’ [2]

Image Source: La Vie Mysterieuse in 1911.

Soon the cacophony of chaos had drawn quite a crowd. But although Mrs Golding and her neighbours may have feared the devil was at play in her pantry, nevertheless she was also sensible enough to consider that the house may be about to come tumbling down about their ears, and hastily summoned Mr Rowlidge, a carpenter, to inspect the building.  His assessment was that the weight of an extra room added to an upper floor was occasioning the disruptions and that immediate evacuation was required.  Mrs Golding fled fainting to her neighbour, Mr Gresham, for shelter.  She left Mr Rowlidge and his associates to retrieve her remaining possessions – and her maid, who had repaired to an upper chamber.

Mr Rowlidge and his companions urgently impressed on the young woman the need to vacate the property, yet Ann repeatedly ignored their entreaties. Eventually the young woman sauntered downstairs, with such an air of unconcern that it quite amazed Mr Rowlidge and his companions.

In the house next door, Mrs Golding was in a dead faint. Such was her violent reaction to the sudden calamity that it was misreported that she had expired, and her niece, one  Mrs Pain, was summoned from her home at Rush Common close to the nearby settlement of Brixton Causeway.

Image source: unknown.

Of the witnesses present, one was a surgeon, Mr Gardner of Clapham.  He was called upon to practice his art on the trembling Mrs Golding by letting her blood.  Mr Gardner intended to examine the blood later, so it was left to rest in a basin.  The congealing mass was too tempting to the disruptive spirit in attendance upon the unfortunate Mrs Golding, and the jellied lump of blood was observed to spring from the basin, which itself then shattered upon the ground.

The bouncing blood did not bode well, soon the many valuables transported from Mrs Golding’s and stowed in Mr Gresham’s parlour were under supernatural attack. China stored on a sideboard came crashing down, shattering a pier glass placed beneath it.  Pandemonium soon reigned in the Gresham household – as it had done in Mrs Golding’s.

In terror, Mrs Golding fled to another neighbour, Mr Mayling, for respite.  Deciding that her neighbours had been put too much trouble by the devilish commotions, she quickly departed Mr Mayling’s house to that of her niece at Rush Common.  If Mrs Golding had hoped the strange events had ceased, she was to be disappointed.  During dinner, the maid was sent back to Mrs Golding’s house and later reported all was quiet there.  Things were less quiet at the Pain’s – at 8pm:

“a whole row of pewter dishes, except one, fell off a shelf to the middle of the floor, rolled about a little while, then settled, as soon as they were quiet, turned upside down; [..] two eggs were upon one of the pewter shelves, one of them flew off, crossed the kitchen, and struck a cat on the head, and then broke to pieces.” [3]

The Domestic Cat by Thomas Bewick.

Other items soon flew about – a pestle and mortar, candlesticks, brasses, glasses and china, a mustard pot jumped about, even a ham, hung on the chimney, and a flitch of bacon, all went flying.  There were many witnesses, family and friends alike, many of whom were so afraid that they fled in terror, fearing witchcraft or the devil was at work.

And during all of this tumult, one person one person carried on as if nothing was amiss.  Ann Robinson.  Ann continued to flit between the kitchen and parlour wherever the family was.  She just would not sit still.   Hone reports in his Everyday book that she:

“advised her mistress not to be alarmed or uneasy, as these things could not be helped.”

Following this strange advice, Mrs Golding and the Pain’s began reconsider Ann’s apparent sang froid.  

At 10pm the services of a Mr Fowler were called upon, he was asked to sit with the ladies but fled at 1am, being so terrified by the goings on.  Mrs Pain fled to bed, Mrs Golding paced amidst the ruins of her possessions.  By the early hours of the morning, unable to withstand the destruction any more Mrs Golding left her niece and went to the timorous Mr Fowler’s.   Ann returned to the Pain’s to help Mrs Pain retrieve the children from a barn to where they had been evacuated.  Hone reports that all was quiet at Mr Fowler’s, until Ann returned.

Image source:

Once again, a litany of destruction ensued – candlestick struck lamp, coals overturned and Ann informed Mr Fowler that such events would pursue Mrs Golding wherever she went.  Terrified, Mr Fowler bid his neighbour leave, but first he entreated her to:

“consider within herself, for her own and the public sake, whether or not she had not been guilty of some atrocious crime, for which Providence was determined to pursue her on this side of the grave.” [4]

This slight to her good character – that her travails must be divine punishment for a crime she had committed irked Mrs G and she soon gave short shrift to Mr Fowler’s admonitions and declared:

“her conscience was quite clear, and she could as well wait the will of Providence in her own house” [5]

Unsurprisingly, when she returned home, her supernatural attendant accompanied her – a box of candles was overturned, a table danced, and a pail of water mysteriously seethed and boiled.

For Mrs Golding and Mr Pain her nephew-in-law, the evidence was stacking up against the unflappable Ann.  A trap was set.  Ann was to go on an errand back to Rush Common.  During that time, about 6 -7am on Tuesday morning, all paranormal activity ceased.  Upon her return she was dismissed on the spot as the cause of the diabolical destruction.  As if by magic, all disruption ceased and Mrs Golding was never again to suffer such travails.

Stockwell ghost: poltergeist or hoax?

At the time, the Stockwell ghost was almost as notorious as the Cock Lane Ghost of the 1760’s.  Interest was so great that the main witnesses, Mrs Golding, John and Mary Pain, Richard and Sarah Fowler and Mary Martin, the Pain’s maid, even went so far as to publish a pamphlet a few days after the events, on 11th January 1772: An authentic, candid, and circumstantial narrative of the astonishing transactions at Stockwell … Surry … the 6th and 7th … of January, 1772 …  

The Cock Lane Ghost, artist unknown. Image source: Wikimedia.

The curious thing about the Stockwell haunting is that so many people considered it to be genuine, even after the main witnesses began to express their doubts, it was reported that even years later, many locals attributed events to the supernatural. [6] And this in the eighteenth century: the century famed for the Enlightenment and for thinkers such as Hume, Diderot and Voltaire who to tried to take God out of the equation by presenting a ‘disenchanted’ world free from religious superstition.  However, in tandem with this new rationalistic world view, came an enthusiastic popular religion in the form of Wesley’s Methodism, and Wesley himself claimed to have experienced a poltergeist called ‘Old Jeffrey’ at the family home Epworth Rectory.  And of course, old superstitions die-hard.

Faced with chaotic, frightening and inexplicable events, many apparently rational people will question their view of the world before looking for more prosaic explanations.  In fact, many ‘sober’ and respectable persons attended Mrs Golding, ostensibly to express their sympathies for her not inconsiderable financial losses, but also with an undoubted air of rubbernecking at someone else’s misfortune.  Many came away terrified and convinced of the diabolical origin of the disturbances and some no doubt, like Mr Fowler, questioned what the respectable Mrs Golding had done to bring down Providence’s displeasure. As seen with the Cock Lane Ghost, there was an enduring popular belief that ghosts often returned in order to right a wrong or uncover a crime.[7]  Mrs Golding stood to lose much more than just her china and plate, she stood to lose her good character.

Eighteenth Century Servant Girl. Image Source: Life takes lemons blog.

Poltergeist activity is often associated with young girls.  Anthropological studies suggest the are an expression of inter-personal conflicts or domestic violence within kin-groups.[8]  In the case of young servant girls, away from home and family, perhaps in a restrictive or oppressive environment, it is understandable that some found it tempting to rail against the power imbalance between master (or mistress) and servant.  The historical record certainly provides many examples of young servants perpetrating hoaxes on their employers.[9]

Even if one gives Ann the benefit of the doubt and attributes her sang froid and comment that such things were normal, to the fact that the poltergeist was attached to her and perhaps for her it was normal, it seems fairly clear that the young Ann Robinson was faking it (in order to clear the house for an illicit liaison).  The pamphlet points the finger of blame strongly in her direction, whilst stopping short of making an outright accusation, claiming rather to be simply recounting events as they happened (even maids can get litigious). However,  all doubt must have been dispelled several years later when Ann finally confessed to her part in orchestrating events.   Her confession was made to one Reverend Brayfield and was reported by William Hone, in his Everyday Book of 1825:

‘She had fixed long horse hairs to some of the crockery, and put wire under others; on pulling these the ‘moveables’ of course fell [..] Ann Robinson herself dexterously threw many of the things down, which the persons present, when they turned around and saw them in motion or broken, attributed to unseen agency’

19th century kitchen maid. Image source: unknown.

It is worth noting that not everyone was convinced by this confession: Catherine Crowe, famous for introducing the term poltergeist into the English language in her 1848 work The Night-side of Nature, was convinced the phenomena was real.  But she was in the minority.

Ann may well have been a simple serving-maid, but many of the middle and upper class writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century believed that servants were routinely committing similar dastardly deeds, and pulling the wool over their unsuspecting employers eyes.[10] All of which suggests that the ‘umble folk had a pretty good grasp of basic psychology, allowing them to tap into popular fears to get the better of their betters.

The god-fearing folk who witnessed events at Stockwell were often so terrified that they would refuse to look upon the shattered items for fear of what devilish imps they might see – thereby giving the nimble and nefarious Ann further opportunity to create mayhem, even going so far as to add a paper of chemicals to a pail of water to make it ‘boil’.

If not for the ultimate callousness and meanness of the trick – Mrs Golding was an elderly lady and she was badly frightened as well as suffering considerable financial loss – young Ann was clearly a force to be reckoned with.  One wonders if she ever repeated the tactic on future employers – or if her descendants can be found employed in todays popular Halloween entertainment, the Haunted House.

Happy Halloween

 

Sources and Notes

Crowe, Catherine, 1848, The Night-Side of Nature:

https://archive.org/stream/nightsideofnatur02crowiala#page/240/mode/2up

Davies, Owen, 2007, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts [7] [8] [9] [10]

Hone, William, 1825: The Everyday Book: [2] [3] [4] [5]

https://archive.org/stream/everydaybookorgu01hone#page/30/mode/2up

MacKay, Charles, 1852, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: [1] [6]

https://archive.org/stream/memoirsextraord13mackgoog#page/n248/mode/2up

http://vauxhallhistory.org/stockwell-ghost/

 

Enon Chapel – Dancing on the dead in Victorian London

Tags

body bugs, burial, Burial Act, Burial reform, Cemeteries, churchyard, crypts, dancing on the dead, Enon Chapel, George Graveyard Walker, London, Mr Howse, open sewer, pyramid of bones, vaults, Victorian

Slums, sewers, corpses, a corrupt clergyman, a pyramid of bones, and …dancing on the dead. Sometimes the Victorian’s failed, quite spectacularly, to live up to their prim and proper reputation.

Bunhill Fields burial Ground, London.

London’s burial grounds: a mass of putrefaction

London in the mid nineteenth century had a problem: a burgeoning industrial and commercial centre with a population pushing at 2.5 million living souls, it also had an ever growing population of the dead. Inner city burial had been carried out in London for centuries -it has been observed that London, even today, is one huge grave, if you only know where to look. But by the mid nineteenth century fears of disease spread by the miasma from inner city graveyards and a fashion for wealthier people to be buried in suburban cemeteries, meant that London’s remaining inner city burial grounds were often terribly overcrowded and unsanitary. One such place, the ‘Green Ground’ on Portugal Street, a burial ground for the nearby workhouse, was described by George Walker as:

‘[A] mass of putrefaction’ and ‘The soil of this ground is saturated, absolutely saturated, with human putrescence,’ the author noting that ‘The living here breathe on all sides an atmosphere impregnated by the odour of the dead.’ [1]

It was not uncommon for gravediggers to chop into or even discard earlier burials in order to cram new ones into overcrowded graveyards:

‘What a horrid place is St Giles Churchyard! It is full of coffins up to the surface. Coffins are broken up before they are decayed, and bodies are removed to the “bonehouse” before they are sufficiently decayed to make removal decent’

So reported the Weekly Despatch in September 1838.

No wonder that women rarely attended burials. Yet these places were often the only resort open to the poor. One scandalous case that provided a catalyst for a change was the infamous Enon Chapel….

Dudley Street Slums, London, 1872. Image source Public domain [?]

Enon Chapel – undercutting the competition

Close to the Strand, on the west side of St Clement’s lane, an insalubrious neighbourhood was to be found. Accessed via a narrow court, Carey Street offered slum housing and overcrowding to the poorest of the poor. It was here in 1822, that an enterprising and cynical Baptist minister, Mr W Howse, founded his ministry: saving souls and selling burials. Enon Chapel itself, fitted into this down at heel locale, sited, as it was, above an open sewer which ran though its vault.

Image by Hogarth. Public domain [?]

As many scholars have noted, prior to the Anatomy Act of 1832, fear of the resurrection men was strong. Burke and Hare had yet to set up their fearsome murder trade north of the Border, but before them were others, stealing fresh corpses from graveyards for the anatomists table. This popular fear may have been one of the factors in Mr Howse’s calculations in setting up his burial business at Enon. It had a vault. At barely 59 feet by 12 feet it wasn’t a large vault, but Mr Howse was an enterprising individual and knew how to spin a profit from almost nothing. In 1823 Enon was licensed for burials.

Burials in the vault at Enon Chapel were a mere 15 shillings. This compared very favourably to the competitors – close by at St Clement Danes it cost £1.17s2d for an adult burial, and £1.10.2d to bury a child – and that only covered a churchyard burial.[2] At a time when poor families would often have to warehouse their dead in their homes until they had saved enough for burial, Enon Chapel had a clear advantage over the competition: offering both secure and, more importantly, affordable burials.

Things went well for Mr Howse for a number of years, if people marvelled at how capacious the tiny vault was, nobody asked any awkward questions. Even when worshippers retched into their hankerchieves or fell unconscious at the noxious stink that was rife in the chapel, especially in warm weather, they said nothing. It may have been harder to ignore the long black flies that emerged from the decaying coffins, or the ‘body bugs’ that would infest worshippers hair and clothes, and neighbours of the chapel noted that meat, if left out, would putrefy within an hour or two. By the 1830’s rumours were beginning to circulate, but still nobody suspected the true scale of the horror beneath their feet.

A Modern Golgotha uncovered

In 1839, following some concerns with goings on at Enon, the Commissioner of Sewers inspected the open sewer under the Chapel with the view that it should be covered or vaulted. However, their investigations took a grusome turn when they discovered human remains, some of them mutilated, discarded in the sewer – whether by design or accident, it was not clear. Oddly enough, despite the sheer horror of this discovery, the remains were not removed and burials did not stop. Mr Howse continued his profitable venture burying up to 500 people a year in the vault until his death in 1842. In total around12,000 people were buried in a vault measuring only 59 feet by 12.

In part, he appears to have managed to cram so many corpses into so limited a space because he discarded the coffins (he and his wife used them for firewood).  This would no doubt have increased the stench exponentially – Julian Litten, in his book The English Way of Death, notes that intramural vault burials usually required a triple encasing for the corpse, in both wood and soldered lead, so as to ensure that the coffin was water-tight and air-tight [3].  Discarding the outer shell of the coffin, Howse disposed of the occupants in deep pits filled with quicklime to help the bodies decompose.

It was also said that extensive building work, such as at Waterloo Bridge, allowed Howse to secretly remove upwards of sixty cart loads of decomposed human remains for use as landfill and bone-meal in the building trade; other remains were unceremoniously dumped in the Thames. It said that it was not uncommon to find a disembodied skull rolling down the streets around Enon Chapel.[4]

Dancing on the dead

Contemporary image of Enon Chapel’s notorious ‘Dancing on the Dead’. Image Source: Wellcome Images.

When Howse died in 1842, burials ceased and Enon Chapel was closed. The new tenant, Mr Fitzpatrick, took up residence in 1844. Despite making the surprising discovery of a large quantity of human bones buried under his kitchen floor, he was not put off, and simply reburied them in the chapel. Later tenants, a sect of Teetotallers, went one better. In the true spirit of Victorian enterprise, combined with a large and profitable dash of Victorian ghoulishness, they reopened Enon Chapel for dances using the great marketing tagline of  ‘Dancing on the dead’:

‘Enon Chapel – Dancing on the Dead – Admission Threepence. No lady or gentleman admitted unless wearing shoes and stockings’

Who says teetotallers don’t know how to have fun!

The Poor Man’s Guardian, somewhat disdainfully, reported on these events in 1847:

‘Quadrilles, waltzes, country-dances, gallopades, reels are danced over the masses of mortality in the cellar beneath”

The dances seem to have been very popular, proving that even the Victorian poor, many of whom may have known people interred beneath them, had a dark sense of humour. That, or a pragmatic view of their own mortality and the fleeting nature of pleasure.

George ‘Graveyard’ Walker

George ‘Graveyard’ Walker. Image source: Wellcome Institute.

Not everyone appreciated this grim humour.  George ‘Graveyard’ Walker, a surgeon whose practice was in the vicinity of Enon Chapel, and who had a side-line as a public health campaigner, was Not Amused. And with good reason, he had had the misfortune to have viewed Enon Chapel vault in all its gory glory, first hand. In his book, Gatherings from grave yards, a survey of 47 London burial grounds,  published in 1839, Walker described it thus:

‘This building is situated about midway on the western side of Clement’s Lane; it is surrounded on all sides by houses, crowded by inhabitants, principally of the poorer class. The upper part of this building was opened for the purposes of public worship about 1823; it is separated from the lower part by a boarded floor: this is used as a burying place, and is crowded at one end, even to the top of the ceiling, with dead. It is entered from the inside of the chapel by a trap door; the rafters supporting the floor are not even covered with the usual defence – lath and plaster. Vast numbers of bodies have been placed here in pits, dug for the purpose, the uppermost of which were covered only by a few inches of earth….Soon after interments were made, a peculiarly long narrow black fly was observed to crawl out of many of the coffins; this insect, a product of the putrefaction of the bodies, was observed on the following season to be succeeded by another, which had the appearance of a common bug with wings. The children attending the Sunday School, held in this chapel, in which these insects were to be seen crawling and flying, in vast numbers, during the summer months, called them “body bugs”..’ [5]

As well as a genuine disgust at the way material gain had trumped over moral and religious scruples at Enon Chapel, Walker, and many others at that time, considered the proximity of these putrefying burial grounds to human habitation to be injurious to public health.  It was believed that, similar to sewage, badly overcrowded burial grounds were giving off a deadly graveyard miasma. Walker, himself, had a flair for the dramatic, describing the miasma as ‘the pestiferous exhalations of the dead’.

This miasma was believed to cause diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Gravediggers and those living close by cemeteries were at particular risk, but the threat was to the population as a whole.

Victorian Image showing a slum court, with the living and the dead side by side.

The public scandal of Enon Chapel and its ilk, along with the tireless campaigning of philanthropists such as George Walker and reformer Edwin Chadwick, led to a Parliamentary Select Committee being set up in 1842. The committee was tasked to look at improving London’s overcrowded and unsanitary burial places. The law took it’s time, but pressure from Walker and The National Society for the Abolition of Burials in Towns eventually forced the government into action. The Burial Act of 1852 would seal the fate of London’s overcrowded inner city burial places, allowing the government to close them down. It also and allowed the creation of suburban garden cemeteries such as Highgate and Brookwood. Cemeteries that were designed as much to be enjoyed by visitors, as to bury the dead.

Roll up, Roll up – for the gravest show on earth!

There was to be one last macabre act in the tale of Enon Chapel. In 1848 Walker purchased the Chapel with the promise that he would give the inhabitants of the vault a decent burial, at his own expense, at Norwood Cemetery. This philanthropic gesture however, was somewhat marred by Walkers morbid sense of theatre. Rather than discretely disinterring the bodies and having them respectfully removed to their final resting place, he chose to open the event to the public. To drum up interest he had attendants strolling up and down the street holding skulls, a sure fire way to entice in the average Victorian death lover. And the public came in their droves – upwards of 6000 came to tour Enon Chapel and to view the immense pyramid of bones unearthed by Walker.

A Pyramid of Bones. Image source: John Sullivan public domain.

Despite criticism, Walker defended his approach in a typically Victorian way, he emphasised that the spectacle was educational (the same argument used by Madame Tussaud to elevate her Chamber of Horrors to a moral level) and he wasn’t precisely selling tickets – but he did accept contributions from visitors. Less educational and more sensational was the highlight of the Enon tour. Visitors came face to shrivelled face, with the long-dead proprietor Mr Howse. ‘A stark and stiff and shrivelled corpse’ identified by his ‘screw foot’ [6]

A case of poetic justice, the greedy speculator responsible for the desecration of so many of the deceased, found his own final resting place disturbed in the most unseemly way.

Footnote – it’s all in a name

It is interesting to note, as Catherine Arnold does in her fascinating book Necropolis, London and its dead, which I would highly recommend, that if you look beyond the traditional explanation for the name Enon (the place near Salim where John the Baptist baptized converts), a far darker etymology emerges. Arnold points to Hitchcock’s Bible Names Dictionary which provides one possible meaning for Enon as ‘Mass of darkness’ – how very, very apt.

Enon Chapel is long since gone, the London School of Economics sits on its site now and the bones of the dead lie in an unmarked communal grave at Norwood.

If you want to find out more about London’s hidden dead, see the excellent and funny You Tube video by Caitlin Doughty and Dr Lindsay Fitzharris at the end of the sources section)

Sources and notes

Images by Lenora unless otherwise credited.

Arnold, Catharine, Necropolis: London and its dead, 2007 [1] [2] [4]

Cochrane, Alex

http://www.unofficialbritain.com/enon-chapel-death-horror-and-dancing-in-victorian-london/

Fitzharris, Dr Lindsay

https://thechirurgeonsapprentice.com/2014/06/17/public-health-victorian-cemetery-reform/

Gibbon, Andrea,

https://writingcities.com/2015/04/08/the-deathly-surprise-on-portugal-street/ 

Jackson, Lee

http://blog.yalebooks.com/2014/10/31/dirty-old-london-graveyards/ [6]

Jackson, Lee

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/22/death-city-grisly-secrets-victorian-london-dead

Litten, Julian, ‘The English Way of Death, the Common Funeral since 1450’,1992 [3]

Valentine, Carla,

http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/enon-chapel-londons-victorian-golgotha

Walker, George Alfred, Gatherings from Grave Yards, Particularly Those of London: with a Concise History of the Modes of Interment Among Different Nations, from the Earliest Periods. And a Detail of Dangerous and Fatal Results Produced by the Unwise and Revolting Custom of Inhuming the Dead in the Midst of the Living,     1839 [5]

Find out where the secret burials of London are with Caitlin Doughty and Dr Lindsay Fitzharris:

 

Echoes of the past: Bethnal Green Tube Station

Tags

air raid shelters, air raids, Bethnal Green, ghosts of london, ghosts of the london underground, government cover up, haunted london, London, Sir John Anderson, the blitz, tube disaster, tube stations, world war two, WWII

The Spirits of the Underground

The lawn

Is pressed by unseen feet and ghosts return
Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn
The sad intangible who grieve and yearn

T.S. Eliot

It is often said of London that it is the most haunted city on earth and nearly every place in the city seems to have its own ghost story. At night when you wander around the streets of London with the buildings both old and new towering over you and the shadowy dark narrow alleyways it is not surprising that the mind can sometimes play tricks. It is not only the places above ground which have become the haunts of the spirit world but also the world underneath. Throughout the maze of tunnels and stations which have witnessed countless murders, suicides and fatal accidents many have claimed to have seen something that they could not rationally explain.

The ghost of a faceless woman has been seen walking behind people in the tunnels at Hyde Park Corner; at Farringdon Underground Station people have seen the spirit of Anne Naylor (also known as the ‘Screaming Spectre’) a 13 year old girl whose murdered remains were dumped on the site in 1758[1]; the spirit of the actor William Terris who was stabbed in December 1897 in the Strand and who used to visit a bakery on the site which is now Convent Gardens Station has been often seen dressed in his frock coat and hat walking on the platform; the Black Nun of Threadneedle Street, Sarah Whitehead has been seen at Bank Station and the transparent form of a woman was watched stroking the hair of an electrician in Aldgate Station shortly before he received a 20,000 volt electric shock from which he emerged pretty much unscathed[2].

At Bethnal Green Tube Station at night tube workers and users have claimed they have heard the screams and cries of terrified souls in fear and anguish. A famous story recounts how a man working late at the station had just watched the last tube leave, turned off the station lights and headed back to his office to finish off his reports when he heard the sounds of children sobbing. The sobbing grew louder and louder and was joined by women’s voices screaming in panic and other noises which he could not identify. The whole episode lasted between ten to fifteen minutes. Terrified he ran out of his office and headed for the exit[3]. It is believed that he had heard the ghostly replay of the last few minutes of life of over a hundred people who suffocated to death at the station on the 3 March 1943.

A Campaign of Terror

The term ‘the Blitz’ was given by the British Press to Hitler’s bombing campaign between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941 which aimed at demoralising the people of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Although it actually refers to the UK wide bombing of cities such as Glasgow, Belfast, Portsmouth, Swansea, Hull, Bristol Sheffield, Liverpool etc. all of which suffered horrendous damage and loss of life it is images of London (out of the 43000 civilians killed during this period over a half were in London as well as one million houses destroyed) and in particular the devastation to the East End which has become synonymous with the Blitz!

A Personal Connection

For me the Bethnal Green Tube disaster has a more personal connection. My mother’s family came from the East End and my grandmother and her two sisters remembered growing up and living in the area with deep affection. Living close to Bethnal Green Tube Station they often used it as a place of safety during the worst of the bombing. Night after night during the Blitz my family would make their way to a shelter to wait for the all clear signal. One day when the expected warning siren went off, my grandmother along with her sisters and mother started to make their way to the shelter only to have one of my great aunts change her mind and refuse to leave. Tired of spending her nights in the unpleasant conditions of the shelter she decided to take her chance and remain above ground. My great grandmother frightened for her daughter’s safety sent my grandmother up to their bedroom to reason with her. Eventually after a lot of arguing my great aunt was finally persuaded to leave and relieved, they all made their way to the shelter. When they returned the next day their house was gone.

The bomb had gone straight through the centre of my great aunt’s bedroom, the room that she had been stubbornly sitting in only a few hours ago. My family lost most of their possessions including all our photographs but at least they were all alive, it could have been so much worse. Bombed out they were relocated to Epping which at the time was just a tiny rural village with very few amenities. Nowadays people would think it quaint and charming but for my family born in the vibrant, busy and crowded East End it was like being exiled to the wilderness of outer Mongolia. For them as for countless others Bethnal Green Station was a life saver but on one terrible occasion it became a death trap!

A Place of Safety

For some unknown reason one of the most important policy makers for the home front during the war Sir John Anderson seems to have developed a deep aversion to the use of tube stations as shelters despite them having played an invaluable role in the First World War. Maybe he had a bad experience, maybe he had a phobia of being so far underground or maybe he was just concerned at the danger of having such large numbers of people concentrated in so few places. Whatever the reason his policies eschewed the use of the tubes in favour of smaller shelters dispersed around the city.

A back-garden with Anderson shelters.

In January 1924, Anderson then chairman of the Air Raid Precautions Committee of Imperial Defence ruled out the use of tube stations in all future conflicts and on the 20 April 1939 Anderson now Lord Privy Secretary in his report on war shelters refused to reconsider his earlier position. His arguments included the risk of the spread of diseases due to the lack of toilet facilities; the possibility of injury or death from people falling on to the lines and; most bizarrely of all that people would develop a ‘deep shelter mentality’ and feel so safe they would never want to leave (according to my great aunts that was never a realistic concern)[4].

At first the Government’s position was workable as the light bombings during the summer of 1940 meant that the public shelters were not heavily used but as the bombing intensified general opinion began to turn. Ignoring growing public unrest Anderson (now promoted to Minister of Home Security) dug his heels in and issued a joint report with the Ministry of Transport on the 17 September 1940 to warn people not to use the tubes as shelters except in emergencies. Despite all the policies, warnings and reports people used their own judgement and ignored them. Over the night of the 19/20 September determined Londoners took the matter into their own hands and from 4pm onwards hundreds of people in an act of mass disobedience grabbed their bedding and food and flocked down into the tube stations. Faced with a civilian rebellion on such a massive scale, the Government finally caved in and formulated a ‘deep shelter extension policy’[5]. The policy included converting 79 stations including Bethnal Green Tube Station into suitable accommodation with bunks fitted to accommodate about 22000 people, first aid facilities, chemical toilets, 124 canteens and the recruitment of Shelter Marshals as well as reinforcing the underground flood walls.

20:27 – The 3 March 1943

Although the Blitz was considered over by the beginning of May 1941 London still suffered from intermittent raids. To the amazement of the Government Londoners were well informed about British war strategy paying particular attention to the RAF bombing campaigns which would mean German retaliation.

On the evening of the 3 March 1943 Londoners calmly got ready to spend another night in the shelters. Many had the procedure down to a fine art, sending a member of the family down to a ‘bundle shop’ i.e. left luggage store to collect bedding to be taken down to the shelter whilst other members grabbed food and gathered up the children.

Bethnal Green Tube Station had been fitted out in the same style as the other station. To enter the station you would first go down 19 steps to a landing and then another seven to the ticket hall. From there you would take one of the escalators 80 feet down to the platform. There was room for about 7000 people with bunks for 5000 and the remainder having to find a space where they could. In addition the Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green responsible for the running of the shelter had even built a hospital and a library.

The siren went off at 20:17 in the evening and people started to make their way through the darkness which was described as like “running through ink”[6] to the station. At first everything was pretty much normal at Bethnal Green Tube Station. People started to walk calmly down the 19 steps to the landing taking care as it had been raining and the steps were slippery. Suddenly ten minutes later everyone heard a loud noise which was unlike anything they had ever heard before. Startled and confused a woman with a small child at the bottom of the steps fell. An elderly man behind her lost his balance and fell on top of the woman. This started a horrifying and unstoppable domino effect with people piling on top of each other. Those entering the station were unable to see what had happened at the bottom and continued to push forward making a bad situation even worse as people were lifted off their feet and carried downstairs by the force of the crowd behind. The whole episode lasted only 15 seconds at the end of which all anyone could see was a huge pile of bodies, ten deep, arms and legs entangled with those at the bottom crushed to death “The stairway was converted from a corridor to a charnel house in 10 to 15 seconds”[7]. The people already settled in the shelter were completely unaware of the tragedy which was unfolding above them.

The stairs at Bethnal Green Tube station

A Terrible Sight

PC Thomas Penn who was bringing his wife to the shelter luckily arrived too late to be caught up in it but tried to assess the damage. He crawled down over the bodies finding 200 people at the bottom trapped in a small space. He then crawled back out to send a message for help and crawled back down to try to help those trapped. He fainted twice.

People arriving at the scene joined in the rescue attempt. The injured were taken to hospital whilst the bodies were laid out on the pavements. The dead were later taken to the local mortuary at Whitechapel hospital and when that become overcrowded were brought over the road to St John’s Church. The police surgeon told the coroner that he had been amazed that of the 300 people involved not one was found with fractured ribs.

It took a while for the scale of what had happened to sink in. 62 people had been injured; 173 had been killed, 27 men, 84 women and 62 (one casualty died later in hospital from injuries sustained during the crush). The woman who had been at the front of the group survived but her child did not. The youngest to be killed was Carol Geary she was only five months old. The loss of life was horrendous and not a single bomb had been dropped.

The disaster affected everyone involved; those who had been trapped, the rescuers and of course the families who lost their loved ones. For many what they had gone through, seen or heard haunted them and left scars that never healed. One survivor’s daughter recounted how her mother once told her that “every night of her life when she laid down to sleep she heard the cries and screams of everybody”[8].

A Government Whitewash

The news about the disaster at Bethnal Green began to circulate but fearful of the outcome of any investigation and worried how it will affect public morale, government officials decided that the best course of action would be pretty much to hush it up. The press were censored and not allowed to report on the incident for two days and even when they were finally free to print their articles they were forbidden to reveal the actual location of the disaster. Despite trying to brush it under the carpet somehow the Nazis heard about Bethnal Green and decided to use it for their own propaganda purposes claiming that it had been their bombs which had been responsible for the deaths.

The official enquiry

Initially the idea of an investigation was dismissed as being unnecessary with officials agreeing with Sir Laurence Rivers Dunne that it “would give the incident a disproportionate importance and might encourage the enemy to make further nuisance raids”[9]. Eventually a short statement was read out in the House of Commons which simply stated that precautions would be taken in the future to prevent anything like it happening again.

Falling on Death Ears

In his book Rick Fountain presents damning evidence against the Government and their policy towards Bethnal Green Tube Station. He discovered letters from Bethnal Green Council to the Local Civil Defence sector of the Government sent shortly before the disaster. These letters shed new light of what was happening behind the scenes. In one letter the council asked the Government to approve plans to alter the entrance to the tube station to make it safer to avoid a bottleneck. The request was refused. Two more letters were written by the Borough Engineer to the Government asking them to approve changes to the station’s entrance and also the staircase including the erection of crash barrier to slow down the movement of the crowds. Both times the Government said no and that a crash barrier was a waste of money.

The day after the disaster, all the changes were implemented.

The letters were hidden under the Official Secrets Act.

The Government placed all the blame on the Council.

Safety measures being put in place, after the disaster.

A Lucky Escape

So what about the strange noise that had startled everyone in the shelter? Most agree now that the sound was the firing of 60 rockets from an anti-aircraft battery gun by the Royal Artillery in Victoria Park. It was a new defence weapon which had never been heard before and should never have been tested in a built up area. One eyewitness, Babette Clarke had missed her bus and so narrowly avoided being inside the shelter, she said “As they went up they whistled like the bombs did as they came down and that’s what caused the pushing because people thought it was bombs coming down”[10].

A Sort of Justice

It was only at the end of the war that the Government faced by mounting public pressure finally agreed to answer questions about what actually happened that night. The Minister of Home Security Herbert Morrison quoted from a secret report – so an investigation had been carried out. Maybe the Government was worried that one day they would be held accountable. The report cited inadequate lighting (the stairway was only lit by one 25 watt bulb), shortage of supervisors and lack of handrails as being contributory factors but stated that it was the “irrational behaviour of the crowd[11]” which was most to blame. He stated that the report was originally suppressed as they had been worried that no one would believe the findings.

War Cabinet report

Not everyone agreed with the report’s conclusions. The Shoreditch Coroner Mr W.R.H. Heddy along with other officials stated that testimonies given from witnesses confirm that whilst people were “anxious and hurrying” there was “nothing to suggest any stampede or panic or anything of the kind”[12]. The decision to hold the inquiry in secret was also condemned. For me personally it makes a lot of sense. My grandmother and great aunts often told stories about having to find shelter quickly wherever they were when the sirens went off and the impression I got from them was that it was another part of their lives at the time. Although annoying and unpleasant and at times inconvenient, it was what you had to do and you just did it.

I also feel that blaming the shelter wardens for not being on the scene quickly enough to stop it happening was really unfair. They were doing a difficult job in dreadful circumstances. They were also really short of manpower since everyone who was fit was being called up for military service. Accusing these men who (along with so many others) put their lives at risk on a daily basis of being responsible for such a terrible tragedy was in my opinion a travesty of injustice.

A number of lawsuits were made looking for compensation including the well-documented ‘Baker v Bethnal Green Corporation’ brought by a bereaved widow. The decision was made in her favour. A number of similar cases followed. By the beginning of 1950s over £60000 had been paid out.

Finally a Fitting Tribute

If you are going down the steps to Bethnal Green tube station from the south east entrance you will probably not notice a small plaque attached to the overhang above the step where the first woman fell. It is easy to miss and during the weekly rush hour thousands of people pass under it never giving it a second thought. If you do pause for a moment and look you will read the dedication:-

 

It is hard to comprehend that such a small memorial could be sufficient to remember an event of such magnitude and loss for the tight knit Bethnal Green community and that it was only in 2013, on the 70^th anniversary of the disaster that finally the names of those killed were officially recognised. Up until then the memorial service which is held annually at St John’s Church was always taken up with reading out a list of the names. In recent years some amazing people have wanted to change this. In 2007 ‘The Stairway to Heaven Memorial Trust’ (a link to their website can be found below) was established to raise money for the installation of a much more fitting tribute to commemorate the disaster. Designed by local architects Harry Patticas and Jens Borstlemann the memorial bronze staircase will contain 173 points of light, one for each of the victims.

Afterthought

Why has it taken so long to be acknowledged? It seems to me that it was simply guilt and embarrassment on the part of the Government. In October 1940 Winston Churchill broadcasted on radio this uplifting message “He [Hitler] hopes, by killing large numbers of civilians, and woman and children, that he will terrorize and cow the people of the mighty imperial city…Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, or the tough fibre of the Londoners”[13]. It must have been tough to have to admit after praising the fortitude and courage of Londoners that it was in fact the British Government’s lack of concern for their safety and refusal to take simple measures to protect them that had resulted in an incident which saw the biggest single loss of civilians in the UK in the Second World War.

All I know is that I owe a debt to Bethnal Green Tube Station which protected my family through one of the worst periods in London History but also ironically I owe some thanks to that bomb which destroyed their home but meant that my family was not in that shelter on that fateful day.

Memorial to the Bethnal Green disaster, Stairway to Heaven.

Notes

[1] Anne Naylor’s Ghost: http://seeksghosts.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/anne-naylors-ghost.html

[2] Ghosts of the London Underground: http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=135129

[3] Bethnal Green Tube Station: http://www.hauntedrooms.co.uk/product/bethnal-green-underground-tube-station-london

[4] Air raid shelters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-raid_shelter#Underground_.28tube.29_stations

[5] ibid

[6] Stairway to Heaven Memorial Trust: http://www.stairwaytoheavenmemorial.org/

[7] East end memorials: http://eastend-memories.org/the_bethnal_green_underground_disaster/bethnal_green_underground_disaster.html

[8] Woman Campaigns for Tube memorial: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/mobile/england/london/7905147.stm

[9] The Bethnal Green Tube Shelter Disaster: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/09/a795909.shtml

[10] Bethnal Green Tube disaster marked 70 years on: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-21645163

[11] East end memorials: http://eastend-memories.org/the_bethnal_green_underground_disaster/bethnal_green_underground_disaster.html

[12] Bethnal Green Tube Station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethnal_Green_tube_station

[13] Every man to his post 1940: https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/every-man-to-his-post.html

Bibliography & Images

Image credits are shown in the alt text of each image.

Anne Naylor’s Ghost: http://seeksghosts.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/anne-naylors-ghost.html

Ghosts of the London Underground: http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=135129

Every man to his post 1940: https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/every-man-to-his-post.html

Deep Level Shelter Tunnels: http://underground-history.co.uk/shelters.php

The underground at war: http://www.nickcooper.org.uk/subterra/lu/tuaw.htm

The Bethnal Green Tube Shelter Disaster: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/09/a795909.shtml

Bethnal Green Tube Station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethnal_Green_tube_station

Air raid shelters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-raid_shelter#Underground_.28tube.29_stations

Bethnal Green Tube disaster marked 70 years on: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-21645163

World War II Bethnal Green Tube disaster ‘avoidable’: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-17250158

Woman campaigns for Tube memorial: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/mobile/england/london/7905147.stm

East end memorials: http://eastend-memories.org/the_bethnal_green_underground_disaster/bethnal_green_underground_disaster.html

The Bethnal Green Tube tragedy saw 173 people crushed to death – making it the war’s worst civilian disaster. But why was it censored from history?: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-521490/The-Bethnal-Green-Tube-tragedy-saw-173-people-crushed-death–making-wars-worst-civilian-disaster-But-censored-history.html

History house – Britain’s greatest wartime civilian tragedy: http://www.historyhouse.co.uk/articles/bethnal_green_disaster.html

Bethnal Green Underground Tube Station, London: http://www.hauntedrooms.co.uk/product/bethnal-green-underground-tube-station-london

Haunted London Underground: http://www.londonparanormal.com/underground/

Rick Fountain: Mr Morrison’s Conjuring Trick: The People of Bethnal Green (deceased) v The Crown Paperback, 2012

 

Scratching Fanny the Ghost of Cock Lane

Tags

Anglicanism, Cock Lane, Dr Johnson, Elizabeth Parsons, fraud, Ghosts, Hauntings, London, Methodism, Richard Parsons, Scratching Fanny, William Kent

English Credulity or the Invisible Ghost 1762, artist unknown.

Scratching Fanny the ghost of Cock Lane was the veritable wonder of the age, or at least a Grub Street media sensation for a few months in 1762. This was a tale with sex and subterfuge, debts and defamation; of a man accused of murder from beyond the grave and a household turned upside down by poltergeist activities. Methodists and Anglican’s went head to head on the existence of the paranormal; celebrities flocked to witness the phenomena even the famously irascible lexicographer Dr Johnson became involved.    As QI quite pithily put it ‘The Age of Reason was put on hold for a few months'[1]

Flatmate wanted – apply Cock Lane

19th Century illustration of Cock Lane

Richard Parsons and his family lived in a house on Cock Lane, a shabby chic area of Smithfield, London. To his neighbours Parsons was a respectable church clerk; however he also liked a bit of a tipple and was not terribly good with money.  That his best friend James Franzen ran the local boozer, the Wheatsheaf, probably didn’t help keep Parsons either sober or in funds.

Fate it would seem was being kind the day that Parsons path crossed that of a genteel couple in need of lodgings.  A deal was struck, and Mr William Kent and his wife Frances moved in to Cock Lane.  Fate must have been in a really good mood that day because it also turned out William Kent was a usurer and readily loaned 12 Guineas to the insolvent Parsons, to be paid back 1 Guinea a month thereafter.  What could possibly go wrong…

Secrets and lies

Detail from a Canaletto painting. Source, internet.

At first Parson’s and Kent must have got on, because Kent soon confided in him that he and his ‘wife’ Frances, Fanny, were not actually married – Kent had been married a few years earlier to her sister Elizabeth Lynes. They kept an Inn and later a Post Office in Stoke Ferry in Norfolk; when Elizabeth had a difficult pregnancy Frances had moved in with them to help out.  Elizabeth died, swiftly followed by the child, but Frances stayed on for a while as a housekeeper.  Soon the grieving husband was seeking solace with his supportive sister-in-law.  Things got quite hot and heavy.  Kent even traveled to London to seek advice on the prospect of marrying Frances, but Canon law at the time would not allow it.

The lovers would seem to have been thwarted. Kent moved to London in an attempt to remove himself from temptation, but Fanny was having none of it and wrote a stream of passionate letters to him.  Kent swiftly succumbed and they soon were living together in London, and masquerading as man and wife (which an offense at the time).  The Lynes family, it seems, were far from happy about this liaison. Parsons, it would seem, was now privy to some quite sensational information about this genteel young couple cosily cohabiting under his roof.

cobblers

Image from http://dickbalzer.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/ghost-projection.html

The first installment of the haunting began in 1759 when William Kent was out-of-town.  Fanny was pregnant and wanted company in Kent’s absence so Parson’s 12-year-old daughter Elizabeth stayed with her, sleeping in the same bed.  It was at this time that both heard strange knocking and scratching noises coming from the wainscot.  Initially Mrs Parson’s attributed the noise to the cobbler next door but when the noises continued on a Sunday – when he was not at work – the inhabitants of Cock Lane began to wonder if more sinister agencies were at work….

The situation took a dramatic turn when James Franzen, land lord of the Wheatsheaf and boozy buddy of Parsons turned up at Cock Lane one day to visit the absent Parsons.  He was the reluctant witness to a spectral glowing figure in white shooting up the stairs.  Parsons who (rather conveniently, to my mind) had been coming home at the same time, corroborated the story.

Messengers from beyond

In the eighteenth century the rising tide of Methodism was creating a very populist version of Christianity that was Very Enthusiastic, people actually Got Excited at meetings, Methodists even entertained the idea of spiritualism and messages from beyond the grave.  Just the kind of anti-establishment shenanigans that would smack of Popish superstition to any right-minded mid-eighteenth century high church Anglican.

It in the spirit of the age, therefore, that Mr Parsons began to look for reasons why the ghost was pestering his family.  Surely it had an important message to impart to the living?  The theory was soon put forward that it was Kent’s first wife Elizabeth, returned from the grave to accuse her faithless spouse of murder!

Is it worth mentioning that at about this time, Parson’s had defaulted on his debt to the accused Mr Kent?…And their relations cooled still further when Mr Kent instructed his solicitor to sue Mr Parsons for the recovery of that debt…who would be surprised if Mr Parson’s tongue was soon wagging about that supposedly respectable couple who were actually living in sin…

Fanny Scratching

19th Century illustration of the room where the haunting took place.

The Kent’s moved out, but their troubles were not over.  The heavily pregnant Frances succumbed to smallpox and died on 2 February 1760.  She laid to rest in the vault of St John Clerkenwell.  Even though they were not married they had made their wills in each others favour, so Fanny’s not inconsiderable funds passed to William Kent, much to the chagrin of her family.  Kent was making enemies…..

In January 1762, at about the same time that Kent’s solicitor successfully recovered the debt owed by Parsons, Cock Lane was again the centre of supernatural phenomenon.  Subsequent lodgers had been chased off by nocturnal knockings and scratching sounds.   The young Elizabeth Parsons was reportedly subject to fits and convulsions.  The family was at their wit’s end.

Mr Parsons called in John Moore a local rector, follower of Methodism and sympathetic to the idea of spirits.  It was soon diagnosed  that the spirit now haunting Cock Lane was that of Fanny Kent herself come to accuse William Kent of her murder. Through a series of seances it was established that William Kent had poisoned her Purl (an herbal drink) with arsenic and this, not smallpox, had killed the unfortunate Fanny.   There were plenty of people ready to believe this allegation – Fanny’s sister Anne, for one.  Still niggled at the terms of Fanny’s will Anne claimed that the coffin procured by William Kent had been screwed tightly down so that nobody could tell if signs of smallpox were present on the body.

Grub Street scoop

Despite the eighteenth century’s fondness for reason and general air of enlightenment, there was still nothing folk liked better than a good ghost story.  A ghost story based on a sex scandal and an allegation of murder was even better, add in a hysterical prepubescent girl as the focus of the haunting and you were on to a winner.

Parsons was not slow to cash in, holding nightly seances for a paying crowd.  Soon Cock Lane was the destination for sensation hungry Londoners, noble and commoner, credulous and skeptical alike.  Thanks to Grub Street and the tireless self promotion of Richard Parsons and his supporters, poor Frances went down in history as ‘Scratching Fanny’.

Horace Walpole by Joshua Reynolds

Horace Walpole, effete and often acidic observer and pronounced skeptic, witnessed the Cock Lane haunting, as did Oliver Goldsmith and various members of the nobility.

William Kent, only found out what was going on through the sensationalist media reports that abounded and would probably have disagreed with the saying that ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’.   Horrified, he swiftly called upon John Moore, Parsons firm supporter, and was able to impress Moore as a respectable and honest man (and one not afraid of litigation).

Kent and his supporters even attended the seances in order to deny the allegations against him.  At one such seance on the 12 January, Parsons 12-year-old daughter Elizabeth, the focus of the haunting, was publicly undressed and put to bed in front of a group onlookers, while another relative, Mary Franzen, ran about the room calling for Fanny to come forth.  When this failed to entice the spirit, Moore cleared the room and was able to persuade the reluctant spirit to attend before allowing the onlookers back in.  During the subsequent communications Kent felt compelled to defended his innocence against the ghost’s accusations exclaiming ‘Thou art a lying spirit…thou art not the ghost of my Fanny.  She would never have said such a thing.'[2]

The Media sensation caused by the Cock Lane Haunting, heightened by nightly seances held for throngs of onlookers, was not just jolly spectral japes, it had created a dangerous public mood.   The mob wanted blood – Kent’s blood.

Who you gonna call?  A lexicographer – obviously

Dr Johnson, by Joshua Reynolds

With the skeptics and the believers skirmishing in the press and the angry mob howling for Kent to be hanged for murder, the Mayor of London, Sir Samuel Fludyer, was forced to take action.  The veracity of the ghost would be tested by a specially selected Committee lead by Rev Stephen Aldrich, vicar of St John’s Clerkenwell.  Perhaps  it’s most famous member was the legend that was Dr Samuel Johnson, compiler not just of A dictionary, but of THE dictionary.  Surprisingly enough Samuel Johnson for all his enlightenment credentials, was actually rather interested in ghosts, and in fact, was ribbed mercilessly for his involvement in the Cock Lane Haunting for some time afterwards.  Nevertheless he left a vivid account of the Seance held on 1 February 1762:

‘On the night of the 1st of February many gentlemen eminent for their rank and character were, by the invitation of the Reverend Mr. Aldrich, of Clerkenwell, assembled at his house, for the examination of the noises supposed to be made by a departed spirit, for the detection of some enormous crime.  About ten at night the gentlemen met in the chamber in which the girl, supposed to be disturbed by a spirit, had, with proper caution, been put to bed by several ladies.  they sat rather more than an hour, and hearing nothing, went downstairs, when they interrogated the father of the girl, who denied, in the strongest terms, any knowledge or belief of fraud.  The supposed spirit had before publickly promised, by an affirmative knock, that it would attend one of the gentlemen into the vault under the Church of St. John, Clerkenwell, where the body is deposited, and give a token of her presence there, by a knock upon her coffin; it was therefore determined to make this trial of the existence or veracity of the supposed spirit.  While they were enquiring and deliberating, they were summoned into the girl’s chamber by some ladies who were near her bed, and who had heard knocks and scratches.  When the gentlemen entered, the girl declared that she felt the spirit like a mouse upon her back, and was required to hold her hands out of bed.  From that time, though the spirit was very solemnly required to manifest its existence by appearance, by impression on the hand or body of any present, by scratches, knocks, or any other agency, no evidence of any preternatural power was exhibited.  The spirit was then very seriously advertised that the person to whom the promise was made of striking the coffin, was then about to visit the vault, and that the performance of the promise was then claimed.  The company at one o’clock went into the church, and the gentleman to whom the promise was made, went with another into the vault.  The spirit was solemnly required to perform its promise, but nothing more than silence ensued: the person supposed to be accused by the spirit, then went down with several others, but no effect was perceived.  Upon their return they examined the girl, but could draw no confession from her.  Between two and three she desired and was permitted to go home with her father.  It is, therefore, the opinion of the whole assembly, that the child has some art of making or counterfeiting a particular noise, and that there is no agency of any higher cause.’ [3]

The Mystery Revealed, 1762, attrib Oliver Goldsmith.

In February further tests on the Parsons child were carried out, some produced characteristic knockings and scratching, but as soon as measures were taken to ensure Elizabeth’s hands and feet were in view, all supernatural phenomena ceased.  She was also observed, on one occasion, hiding a small piece of wood about her person.  Some felt that this action was precipitated by the girl being warned her father would be sent to Newgate prison if the ghost was not proved to exist.  It was concluded that Elizabeth’s actions had been carried out at the instigation of her father.

With the publication of the snappily titled “The mystery revealed; containing a series of transactions and authentic testimonials: respecting the supposed Cock-Lane ghost: which have hitherto been concealed from the public.” (attributed to Oliver Goldsmith) debunking the haunting as a hoax, things were looking bleak for the Cock Lane Ghost.

One final macabre turn happened on 25 February when Kent, accompanied by a group, had Fanny’s coffin opened in order to put paid to rumours that her body had been removed to prevent the ghost from knocking.  The body was definitely still there and John Moore was so horrified he was moved to print a public retraction.

Kent strikes back

Vindicated by the Commission and with the ghost pronounced a hoax, Kent now sought legal redress.  After all, the episode had publicly damaged Kent’s reputation and ultimately, had the ghost’s supporters been vindicated, could very well have cost him his life as well.  The Five people were charged with conspiracy including Richard Parsons and John Moore.  Moore and another of the accused paid Kent a considerable sum in compensation and avoided jail.  Parsons was not so lucky and after three stints in the public pillory, during which the Gentleman’s Magazine reported that the crowd treated him kindly and even raised a subscription for him, he was sentenced to two years in prison. [4]  Elizabeth was not charged, and seems never to have been visited by the ghost again.

Hogarth puts the Cock Lane Ghost in the pillory

Postscript

It was reported in the mid-nineteenth century that an artist, J W Archer, visited the vault at St Johns and was shown an unmarked coffin said to be that of Scratching Fanny.  Upon opening the casket he is said to have found the well-preserved body of a handsome woman, with no visible mark of smallpox.  Sounds a bit suspicious right?  Arsenic, after all, is said to preserve corpses  (it was even used to embalm bodies in the nineteenth century until it was discovered to be highly dangerous) [5]. Maybe there was some truth in the allegations….? Kent certainly got through a lot of wives – he was onto number three before Fanny was cold in the grave, and he always seemed to end up with the money….  who knows.  However, call me skeptical, but J W Archer was producing illustrations for a book called ‘Memoir so extraordinary popular delusions’ by Charles Mackay which included the story of the Cock Lane Ghost….perhaps it was all just a bit of marketing hype?

All in all, it would seem to me that perhaps Horace Walpole got to the heart of the matter when he summed up the Cock Lane Haunting as:

“a drunken parish clerk set it on foot out of revenge, the Methodists have adopted it, and the whole town of London think of nothing else.” [6]

Hang on..did I just hear a scratching noise……?

Sources & notes

Kelly, Ian, ‘Mr Foot’s Other Leg’, 2012, Picador

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cock_Lane_ghost [4] [5]

http://www.hauntedisland.co.uk/famous-hauntings/ghost-of-cock-lane-london

http://www.grcollia.com/the_haunted_library/2014/08/scratching-fanny-the-cock-lane-ghost-part-i.html  (parts i – iv) [2] [6]

http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2012/01/04/its-the-250th-anniversary-of-the-cock-lane-ghost/

http://qi.com/infocloud/ghosts [1]

http://edisoneffect.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/body-preservation-and-arsenic-it-was_20.html [5]

The Bone Hill of Finsbury Square

Tags

Bunhill Fields, bunyan, Burial Grounds, Cemeteries, Daniel Dafoe, Graveyards, history, London, non conformist, William Blake

Bunhill Fields Burial Grounds, London

Bunhill Fields is sited in the Finsbury area of North London, a short walk from Old Street tube station.  Twice in recent months I have found myself meandering through the clutter of tombstones, monuments and ancient trees.

Although the burial ground really took off as a non-conformist cemetery from the seventeenth century onwards,  the origin of the name goes back to earlier times.  Originally known as bone hill, the site may have been used for burials as far back as the Saxon period. It is also possible that the gruesome name came about much later.  During the mid sixteenth century St Paul’s was clearing out its overflowing charnel house and in the somewhat pragmatic manner of the time the excess bones were dumped on nearby fenland until they formed, one imagines, a very gruesome looking hill.

Although the cemetery was remodeled in the nineteenth century, you can still get a feel for how jumbled and cramped together London Cemeteries were before work began to alleviate pressure on London’s overcrowded urban cemeteries with the opening of the likes of Highgate Cemetery and Brookwood in the mid-nineteenth century.   Bunhill Fields saw its last burial in January 1854 – it is estimated that over 120,000 people were buried in the burial ground during its existence.

Famous incumbents

Susannah Wesley, via Wikimedia

Bunhill fields attracted some quite famous individuals as a nice place to go whilst awaiting the final trumpets (or what ever the individual’s own particular brand of religion specified).  John Bunyan (1628-1688), author of The Pilgrim’s Progress; Daniel Defoe (1660 -1731) author of Robinson Crusoe and the naughty novel Moll Flanders;  Susannah Wesley (1669 -1742), the Mother of Methodism; and William Blake (1757-1827), visionary poet, painter and keen nudist (!) all took their final rest in Bunhill.

Amongst the gnarled old trees and scattering of wild flowers are not only notables and famous literary and non-conformist figures. There are many equally unique and extraordinary individuals..

Most of the graves are fenced off to protect them, however you can still get close to some of the larger monuments.  Here are a few of my photo’s of some of the more famous monuments:

Tomb of John Bunyan

Detail from John Bunyan’s tomb – the Pilgrim

 

Monument to Daniel Defoe

William Blake’s simple headstone

 

And the not so famous….

Amongst the many notable individuals, there are of course may thousands of ordinary individuals whose bones lie in Bunhill Fields….and one has to spare a thought for the suffering and fortitude of some of these unfortunate individuals such as Dame Mary Page, relict of Sir Gregor Page Baronet, who slithered off this mortal coil on March 4th 1728 at the age of 56, her epitaph reads:

Dame Mary Page, whose epitaph reads ‘In 67 months she was tapd 66 times and had taken away 240 gallons of water without ever repining at her case or ever fearing the operation.’

One wonders if Dame Mary actually wanted her demise commemorated in quite so detailed a manner!

The Bone Hill Today

Today the old burial ground is protected landscape, filled with wildflowers and ancient trees and patrolled by the ubiquitous grey squirrels that abound in English park lands.  Here are a few more of my pictures for you to enjoy…

Inscription on the gateway to Bunhill Fields

A row of impressive tombs

A piece of wilderness in the heart of the city

Daniel Defoe monument

Dame Mary’s monument – I wonder if they considered a fountain…

Before cemeteries like Highgate and Brookwood opened in the 19C, it was standing room only in city graveyards.

 

The squirrels of Bunhill

 

 

 Sources

Images – all images copyright Lenora and Haunted Palace unless otherwise credited.

http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/green-spaces/city-gardens/visitor-information/Pages/Bunhill-Fields.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunhill_Fields

 

 

Dick Turpin, Boudica, Hangman’s Hill and the Suicide Pool: Tales from Epping Forest

Tags

Boudica, Dick Turpin, England, Epping Forest, Folklore of Epping Forest, highwaymen, history, London, Suicide Pool

Image by John Leeming/Wickimedia Commons

Epping Forest together with Hainault and Hatfield forests are all that is left of the ancient woodland known as the Forest of Essex.  Originally covering 60,000 acres, the remaining 6,000 acres of woodland with its ancient oak and beech trees, open heath, bogs, ponds and grasslands stretches for 12 miles from Manor Park in the East of London to just north of Epping in Essex, on a ridge between the valleys of Lea and Roding.

The forest has been a refuge for people escaping the plague and the bombing of London during the Second World War.   Although much of its history and folklore has been lost over time, the stories that do survive often reveal a darker more unpleasant side (such as the rumoured satanic rites at the Church of the Innocents at High Beech and the failed case of alleged satanic human sacrifices in 1991) which contrasts sharply with the mysterious beauty of the place.

A forest fit for royalty

Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting lodge by Claire Ward via Wikimedia Coommons

The forest is first mentioned in connection with royalty in the 12^th century, when an edict by Henry III allowed commoners to gather wood and foodstuffs, graze livestock and turn pigs out for mast.  Only the king was allowed to hunt.  It is believed that in 1543 Henry VIII commissioned the building of structure in Chingford known as the Great Standing which enabled the king and courtiers to watch the chase.  The timber-framed building was renovated in 1589 and its name changed to the Queen Elizabeth Hunting Lodge, although it is debatable if she ever actually visited the lodge.  In the 19^th century local landowners requests to enclosure about 550 hectares of land ignited mass protests.  Led by Thomas Willingale, the fight to protect commoners’ rights including lopping for firewood and grazing of cattle was successful and resulted in the passing of the Epping Forest Act of 1878.  In 1882, after seven centuries of royal patronage, Queen Victoria declared the forest to be “the People’s Forest” and control passed into the hands of the City of London Corporation where it remains to this day.

Dick Turpin: Butcher, thief, highwayman and forest dweller

Dick Turpin, by The Complete Newgate Calendar Volume III [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

One of the most famous names associated with the forest is Dick Turpin.  Time has merged fact and fiction creating a legend of a gentlemen highwayman, gallant and noble who died a courageous death.  The reality was very different.  Stories on his early life vary but one accepted version is that Richard Turpin moved to Buckhurst Hill (Bucket Hill) in 1725 with his wife Elizabeth to open a butcher shop.  Somehow Turpin became involved with deer thieves known as the Essex Gang led by Samuel Gregory.  Possibly Turpin disposed of the deer meat as the butcher’s shop would have been a perfect cover.  After a number of the gang were caught, the remaining members along with Turpin took to robbing isolated farmhouses, torturing the female occupants if they refused to cooperate.  The notoriety of the gang became such that a notice for their capture was placed in the London Gazette. The Gazette described Turpin as “a tall fresh coloured man, very much marked with the small pox, about 26 years of age, about five feet nine inches high”*.  In February 1735 the youngest of the Essex Gang, John Wheeler was arrested.  Under interrogation, Wheeler revealed the names of other members of the gang, who in turn were seized.  Somehow Turpin escaped and turned to the highway robbery which he became famously associated with.

Along with Matthew (Tom) King and Stephen Potter, Turpin was responsible for a number of robberies along the roads around and in the forest, instilling fear and panic amongst the locals.  In April 1737 King and Turpin stole one horse too many, the owner reported the theft to Richard Bayes, the landlord of the Green Man at Leytonstone.  Bayes tracked the animal to the Red Lion at Whitechapel and laid an ambush for Turpin and King.  In the shoot-out that followed King was killed and Turpin again evaded capture and went to ground in the forest.  Despite the man hunt that followed Turpin managed to survive undiscovered in his dugout for a couple of weeks but on the 4 May his luck finally ran out.  Thomas Morris a servant of one of the keepers stumbled across the hideaway. Turpin surprised, shot and killed Morris with his carbine.  Under the assumed name of John Palmer and with a £200 reward on his head, Turpin fled north and his association with the forest ended, at least whilst he was alive.

The location of Turpin’s cave is not exactly known and several sites have been put forward including Wellington Hill at High Road.  In the 19^th century the location of the hideaway was believed to have been found and became a popular tourist attraction.  After his death some people believed that the spirit of Turpin returned to his old hunting ground and numerous sightings of a ghost wearing a tricorn hat riding a horse have been reported in the forest.

Boudica’s last stand

Boudica by John Cassell (Internet Archive) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The revolt of Boudica, leader of the Iceni tribe is well documented by historians.  No-one really knows why she and her daughters have become associated with the forest as the tribe inhabited an area mostly falling within the county of Norfolk and there is no historical or archaeological evidence to support the theory.  The only tenuous link is through the Trinovantes and Catuvellauni tribes (who joined the Iceni in the war against the Romans) whose adjoining territory border falls within the area. The myth goes that Boudica and her followers’ last stand against the Romans took place in the forest.  Realising that there was no hope of victory, Boudica and her daughters took poison rather than risk falling into Roman hands.  Two Iron Age hill forts have been identified as possible contenders for the Iceni camp: Ambresbury Banks and Loughton Camp.  Rumour has it that at night three phantom women can be seen walking along the road near the camps.

Ambresbury Banks, image by Stephen Craven via Wikimedia Commons

Hangman’s Hill

On a slip road at High Beech, a very strange phenomenon occurs.  If you park your car at the bottom of the hill at night, turn the engine and the power off, the car can be seen to roll slowly uphill.  Local legend has it that the car is being pulled towards an ancient tree by a hangman’s noose.  The tree itself is believed to be the site of a hanging either of an innocent man who was mistakenly convicted or of three witches. Scientists call these places either magnetic or gravity hills, an optical illusion due to the layout of the surrounding area, which tricks the brain into thinking that it is going uphill rather than downhill.  Only two such places exist in England.  Although this seems a logical answer, many who have tried it found the atmosphere unnerving and sinister and are convinced that they were walking uphill. Supernatural or geological? The only way to find out is to have a go yourself.

The Suicide Pool

Blackweir Pond, Epping Forest, by Stephen Craven via Wikimedia Commons

The Irish author, Elliott O’Donnell wrote in his book “Haunted Britain” about a pool in Epping Forest which is home to unearthly presences, some very miserable and others evil.  O’Donnell never revealed the location of the pool but the belief in its existence remained ingrained in local folklore.  One story goes that about 300 years ago a young couple embarked on a dangerous and forbidden relationship, meeting secretly at a beautiful pool. The girl’s father found out and in a fit of anger he killed her at the pool, on hearing of his lover’s murder, the boy committed suicide at the same spot. After that, no birds were heard, no animals ever seen there and the water became dank.  People with no inclination committed suicide at the pool including a woman in 1887 and a young servant, Emma Morgan who killed both herself and her child. In 1959 a competition was held in the magazine “Essex Countryside” to find the exact whereabouts of the pool.  One writer claimed to know its location of the pool but refused to reveal the details.  She wrote that the place was evil beyond measure,

“The suicide pool is deep in the heart of the forest, far from any road…It is dank, evil and malignant, with an atmosphere unpleasant beyond description.  It doubt if the sunshine ever penetrates through the surrounding trees; if it did it would never lighten the black waters”**

In 2012 as a tribute to the Olympics, the folk singer Ruairidh Anderson composed a series of songs (Songs from the Howling Sea) based on specific legends from the London boroughs hosting the games.  His ballad “The Call of her Song” was inspired by the legend of the Epping Forest Suicide Pool and can be heard on YouTube.

“A Walk in the Forest”

John Clare, by William Hilton

Despite its dark history, the forest itself can rival anywhere for beauty.  This is best summed up by the poet John Clare who was treated at Dr Matthew Allen’s private asylum in High Beech for severe depression in the late 1830s.  In a letter to his wife, he remarked that he considered the countryside the finest he had ever seen. Whilst a patient he wrote a number of poems including a “A Walk in the Forest”,

“I love the Forest and its airy bounds

Where friendly Campbell takes his daily rounds

I love the breakneck hills – that headlong go

And leave me high and half the world below

I love to see the Beech Hill mounting high

The brook without a bridge and nearly dry

There’s Bucket Hill – a place of furze and clouds

Which evening in a golden blaze enshrouds”

 

 

 

 

Notes

* London Gazette no. 7379, February 1734

** Loughton and District Historical Society, newsletter 185, March-April 2010

 

Sources and Further Reading

Epping Forest, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epping_Forest

Epping Forest Then and Now, Winston G. Ramsey (Editor)

Dick Turpin, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Turpin

Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman, James Sharpe

The Queen Boudica Gallery, http://www.sheshen-eceni.co.uk/boudica_info.html

Boudica, Vanessa Collingridge

Haunted Britain, Elliott O’Donnell

Songs from the Howling Sea by Ruairidh Anderson, http://songsfromthehowlingsea.com/tag/london-songs/ or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4jSrC-8iMk

Clare: Everyman’s Poetry, John Clare

John Clare Society, http://johnclaresociety.blogspot.co.uk/

Highgate Cemetery, Part One: City of the Dead

Tags

Highgate Cemetery, London, Victorian Cemeteries, Victorian Death

History

Jacobs Island London Slum c1840

There was something rotten in the heart of London in the first half of the nineteenth century.  As the population in the capital grew at an alarming rate from just 700,000 in 1750 to 1.6 Million by 1831 so too grew the numbers of the dead that the city had to accommodate.  By the 1830’s London’s graveyards were as packed as its slums with corpses disposed of in shallow graves in burial grounds that were crammed in between taverns and shops; bodies were often quick-limed so plots could be reused; the stench of the charnel house must have hung over many districts of the metropolis.

Entrance to Highgate Cemetery

So great was the risk to public health that parliament was forced to act.  Between 1833 and 1841 legislation was passed creating the ‘London Cemetery Company’ (1836) to oversee a ring of park-like cemeteries encircling London – ‘The Magnificent Seven’ – thereby freeing up more space for the living and improving sanitation in the city.

17 Hectares of the Ashurst Estate set on a wooded hillside above Highgate Village formed the basis for Highgate Cemetery and the cemetery was opened for business on 20th May 1839, with its first burial (of Elizabeth Jackson) following only a few days later.

That Highgate Cemetery became such a fashionable place to spend eternity was largely thanks to the work of entrepreneur and architect Stephen Geary and James Johnstone Bunning who created Highgate’s distinctive Victorian Gothic architecture that appealed to the Victorians penchant for death.  The landscaping was completed by David Ramsay and gives the cemetery a naturalistic park-like feel.   It was a fashionable day out in its heyday.

Many famous people chose to invest in Highgate and also to be buried there: Julius  Beer the newspaper magnate built the magnificent mausoleum for his 8-year-old daughter Ada; other dead luminaries include Christina Rossetti the Victorian poet;  Elizabeth Siddal wife and muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti the Pre-Raphaelite artist; Charles Cruft of dog-show fame; Michael Faraday, scientist.

Terrace Catacombs

Many families chose to purchase vaults or a place in the Terrace catacombs (made up of 55 family vaults, the catacombs could hold 825 people). In the 1830’s the going rate for a fair-sized plot was £3.  It costs a little more these days…

The Cemetery holds 170,000 people interred in 53,000 graves.  So popular (and profitable) was the cemetery that it had to be expanded and in 1856 the East Cemetery was opened.  The Karl Marx memorial is possibly the most notable monument in the East Cemetery – certainly the most controversial if the bomb attacks in the 1960’s are anything to go by.

Things didn’t go so well for Highgate Cemetery in the twentieth century – two wars and differing attitudes to death and burial saw the once meticulously maintained cemetery fall into disrepair and fall prey to vandalism and desecration.  In 1975 The Friends of Highgate Cemetery was founded  and to this day they have maintained and carried out extensive restoration of the monuments and graves.  They also conduct excellent tours in the West Cemetery – and this will form the basis of my next post.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_London#Population

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highgate_cemetery

http://www.highgate-cemetery.org/index.php/history