Cemeteries are Museums of People! History beneath our feet. Blogs, tours & talks curated by City of Westminster Tourist Guide & historian Sheldon K. Goodman
Graveyards. Cemeteries. Spooky, No? Well, No, they’re not. Burial Grounds are like libraries – admittedly, Libraries of the dead – beautiful spaces which are now cradles for nature, heritage and remarkable stories that time has faded from common knowledge. Thousands, no – millions of people have ended their stories in these remarkable grounds and this blog seeks to highlight them and the places wh
ere their mortal remains shall lie forever. In May 2013, Cemetery Club was founded: an appreciation society that celebrates these often overlooked and misunderstood places. Stories can be found here: stories of heroes and villains, inventors and actors, people who once lived, laughed, loved and cried.
Painted as part of the Dutch Golden Age of painting in the 1640s, whilst it ably represents objects of power and wealth - the lacquer box, the luxurious silk scarf, the manuscript - the painter’s inclusion of a skull acts an anchor and reminder to the inescapable truth that death comes to us all.
Paintings like this and more on my tour this Saturday around The National Gallery at 1:30pm! A drink in Halfway to Heaven afterwards.
Can we have a very slow clap for the moron who decided to torch the crypt of St. Michan, Dublin where five 800 year old mummies resided? The vaults also contained notable Dublin dead from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Although they weren’t affected by the fire, firefighters had to douse the vault with a foot’s worth of water - therefore destroying remains which have rested peacefully here for eight centuries.
Why can’t people leave things alone?
This photo of a beautiful tomb in Agramonte Cemetery in Porto has nothing to do with this post, other than the fact that it’s a beautiful cemetery and another reminder of how the European cemeteries are generally better than ours in Blighty.
After five months of uncertainty, I’ve had confirmation that a rather odd growth downstairs isn’t something to be immediately worried about. The concern of it has hobbled me over the past few months, and some days I’ve felt like I’ve been wading through a quagmire as the C word has been bandied around.
Discovered during a routine ultrasound for something else, while I’m grateful to the NHS in dealing and monitoring with it so quickly, it really highlights how there should really be a male screening programme for testicular cancer. While it’s been confirmed it’s likely not cancer, I’m not out of the woods yet. The growth hasn’t grown over the past five months but it will need to be watched to see what it ends up doing.
Hearing from my consultant this morning has been a huge relief. I feel like I’ve been treading water while my mental health has taken a bit of a knocking, so now I can hopefully get back into cemetery-bothering and that it will ultimately turn out to be nothing.
Male followers of all ages: check your balls.
Happy birthday, Cemetery Club! Eleven years of cemetery bothering! 🎉 ⚰️ 🪦
The grave of Ricardo Menon in Montparnasse Cemetery, . The assistant to artist Niki de Saint Phalle, Menon sadly died of HIV/AIDS in 1989.
The pair held a close bond. He would help her in the studio when her arthritis prevented her from doing things, such as washing and cleaning. She was very aware of the disease ravaging the community - she was very involved in fundraising and awareness. In 1986 she published the book, ‘AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands’ in English and later in French, German, Japanese, and Italian.
Menon’s death left her distraught, and he wasn’t the last of her friends to succumb to the virus. He reminded Niki of a cat, so she created this memorial for him. She created another sculpture for another friend who also lost their lives to that dreadful disease in the form of a bird. 🐈 🪦
This coming Saturday!
Death in The British Museum will be running once more (before it takes a little break).
Explore a prestigious and problematic museum through its deathly objects! A nice preamble before Eurovision. 🎟️ £25!
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/death-in-the-british-museum-tickets-848164662337?aff=oddtdtcreator
I have long, *long* wanted to see Ellen Terry’s beetle dress. The iconic costume that she wore playing Lady Macbeth at the Lyceum Theatre in December 1888. The painter, John Singer Sargent, attended the opening night and was so taken with Terry’s performance and clothing that he immediately wanted to paint her.
Normally, the shimmering green garment is in Smallhythe, the time capsule rural retreat Ellen called home for decades, but it’s now on loan to Tate Britain as part of its exhibition looking at Sargent and how he captured fashion. It’s incredible to think clothing from some of his subjects who lived over 120 years ago still exists, and for the first time since their wearers were painted they have been reunited with their canvases/ offering a ghostly echo of their sitters.
The exhibition will be the basis for this week’s blog, funnily enough. Excellent stuff.
New tour alert! On Saturday 15th June 2024 I’ll be exploring some beautiful paintings in The National Gallery, exploring death represented in art! Featuring works by John Constable, Frans Hals, William Hogarth and more! 1:30pm kick off, pint in Halfway 2 Heaven afterwards Ticket link in bio!
The grave of Joseph Croce-Spinelli and Théodore Sivel is one of the most beautiful sculptures to be found in Père Lachaise.
Ballooning was all the rage in the 1870’s and Spinelli, Sivel and a third man by the name of Gaston Tissandie were attempting to break the altitude record. They’d already bested the longest voyage in a balloon the previous month where they’d set off from Bordeaux to Paris, arriving after twenty-two hours.
in 1875 they tried to reach 28,000 ft but encountered problems when they reached 26,000 ft, where the air became too thin to breathe. Descending faster than they ascended, their crumpled bodies were found with blackened faces and bloody mouths. This tomb was unveiled three years later, sculpted by Alphonse Dumilatre. Dumilatre shows them holding hands, which is what they were doing when their bodies were found.
Old Oscar.
The poster boy for 19th century homosexuality, but it’s easy to forget his social standing protected him from the worst of the homophobia that say, a working class docker who had the same desires, would have encountered. The upper class had wiggle room to be ‘out’. Of course Oscar pushed the envelope and it all came crashing down as he locked horns with the Marquis of Queensbury in court in the 1890s.
His tomb - and second place of rest - was sculpted by Jacob Epstein at his studio on the Chelsea Embankment. and then loaded onto a ship to Paris, where it was brought to Pére-Lachaise. So scandalous was the sculpture, that initially it was kept under a canvas cover for two years before being finally displayed in 1914. French authorities also slapped a £120 fine on it as they didn’t consider it a work of art and charged import duty on the value of the stone.
Now it has a screen around it to protect the Derbyshire stone from lipstick kisses, but people still offer tokens which they place over the barrier. Flowers, train tickets and a condom, from my visit last week.
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Potato promoter Parmentier!
Placing a spud at Antoine-Augustin Parmentier’s grave: he recommended the use of a 🥔 as a foodstuff, publishing “The Chemical Examination of Potatoes” in 1774. He was aware of their highly nutritious value (mainly from having eaten them as prisoner of war at the hands of the Prussians) and even held lavish parties (which had Benjamin Franklin at one of them) with potato-based recipes to promote their eating!
Remarkably, potatoes were banned under French law until 1788 as they were believed to cause leprosy and were seen as a lowly vegetable. Parmentier also worked on the first inoculation program for Smallpox and has a metro station in Paris named after him.
A quick thought after a visit to the Paris Catacombs.
Not a single skull I saw had teeth. Not one. Now I assume this is because they’ve been taken historically. As you enter there is very clear signage instructing people to leave all that you see well alone: look but don’t touch. People have clearly done so in the past and some of the displays, such as skulls arranged in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, have vanished. Perhaps teeth were an easy thing to pilfer?
A thin layer of mortar keeps the bones in place but from the gaps left behind, it’s clear a substantial number of remains have been nicked over the years.
I also wonder if there’s any kind of conservation programme. The bones in some place have moulds and other growths on them - parts of the cave network where they are are damp. Is anything done to preserve the remains? Or are they left to slowly crumble?
The grave of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, better known as the sculptor behind Libertas, the Roman goddess - better known as The Statue of Liberty.
He sculpted the angel on his tomb himself. What’s perhaps not so well known is that the figure was recycled from an earlier project for Egypt, where Bartholdi was asked to create a figure at the entrance of the Suez Canal. The project was too costly, so it was rehashed, with tweaks, in the States!🗽
Researching some graves ahead of my visit to Pére Lachaise this weekend and I happened across this… the bronze effigy of former President of France Felix Faure, who *allegedly* died whilst being fellated in 1899.
The exact cause of his death was a stroke, but the circumstances around it has been much debated.
Towards the end of his tenure he was embroiled in The Dreyfus Affair: an antisemitic scandal that divided France. Alsatian soldier Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of leaking state secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was Imprisoned on Devil’s Island in French Guiana for 5 years before a retrial happened in 1896.
An early culture war, you could argue. Writer Émile Zola penned an open letter to Faure in L’Aurore newspaper, highlighting some very dodgy and suspicious evidence that led to Dreyfus’ conviction. Faure was of the belief that justice had been served and that further inquiry wasn’t needed. Zola was charged with libel and fled to England.
In itself, the term ‘J’accuse!’, which Zola used as the headline to his words, became common in public declarations of accusation, such as when Robert Oppenheimer was seen as a security risk to the Atomic Energy Commission, or in Doctor Who, in the second episode of Christopher Ecclestone’s series where the last human, Cassandra, deceivingly accuses the Adherence of the Repeated Meme of the events leading to shenanigans in board the viewing platform that observed the Earth’s final moments before the Sun supernovas.
The whole scenario likely put incredible strain on Faure. That he died whilst being intimate with Marguerite Steinheil, who was his actual mistress, was likely a a rumour started by political opponents but (again, allegedly) when he breathed his last she was seen to be in a state of undress.
Steinheil would go on to achieve notoriety of her own - as if potentially be embroiled in your lover’s undercrackers when he died wasn’t enough - being J’accused for the murder of her mother and husband in 1908. She was acquitted. She went on to write an autobiography in 1912 that must have been dynamite to read at the time.
Sculpted by Saint Marceaux, the bronze oxidised likeness of Faure shows him wrapped in French tricolour. When it was unveiled, one or two commentators stated how inappropriate the memorial was, considering how he allegedly died.
‘A masterpiece of the mock heroic’. A true death blow(ie).
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