One of the advantages of a fictional version of real events is that there are no spoilers, so even before I finished This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson, I knew that Darwin made it back safely, arriving in Falmouth after five years at sea. A plaque at Fish Strand Hill commemorates the event.

He wasn’t particularly impressed, spending less than three hours in the town before catching the mail coach to London. His diary entry for 2 October 1836 says that:

So Darwin didn’t like Falmouth, and as a reader I definitely didn’t like him, especially when I discovered that on visiting the Galapagos, after discovering the giant tortoises, he and the crew captured dozens of them, took them aboard and ate them over the months that followed on their voyage. A tortoise who escaped slaughter was named Harry (later revealed to be Harriet) and taken to Australia where she died in 2006 aged 176.

The novel has some big characters in it, especially Darwin and the Beagle’s captain, Robert Fitzroy. The pair became great friends and then fierce enemies, falling out about religion and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Fitzroy was a pioneering meteorologist who believed that it was possible to predict the weather, an idea that was as controversial at the time as Darwin’s beliefs in the origin of the species. He went on to work for the civil service, established a small weather forecasting unit and during his lifetime saved thousands of sailors’ lives as a result of accurate storm warnings.

Ship owners hated him, because ships waiting in ports for storms to pass cost money. Fishermen loved him and he had a fan in Queen Victoria who once sent a request to his home for a shipping forecast for a crossing to her home on the Isle of Wight. He died aged 60 after taking his own life, penniless and under-appreciated. His unit was shut down for a short while, then revived to become what is now the Met Office.

One of the other key characters in the book is the ship herself. The Beagle is described at various points as plucky and adventurous. Her resilience becomes a symbol of the bravery and dedication of the men who served on her.

By Royal Navy standards she was tiny, and after an initial voyage to South America, she was refitted (including many upgrades made at Fitzroy’s own expense) before making the trip that formed the basis of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle memoir.

In his novel, Harry Thompson paints the picture as HMS Beagle leaves the port at Rio de Janeiro:

HMS Beagle in Tierra del Fuego, by Conrad Martens, the ship’s artist

It made me wonder what happened to her after her adventure with Darwin. She made one more scientific voyage surveying the Australian coast, before transferring to anti-smuggling patrols on the Essex coast. Having been one of the smallest vessels on the high seas, she was one of the largest in the Thames estuary and was soon blocking the river and obstructing oyster fishermen, so she was beached in a mud dock. There she sat for 20 years, seeing out her days as a watch vessel, before being bought for scrap in 1870, towed up the Thames and broken up in East Greenwich.

Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, but although the Beagle is remembered as one of the most important ships in history, she doesn’t have a similarly significant resting place. Yet some ships do have their own graveyards. One of the most extensive is on the banks of the Severn. Its origins lie in a riverbank collapse in 1909 which put the structure of the nearby Gloucester and Sharpness Canal at risk. The solution was to create a barrier between the estuary and the canal. At regular intervals until the 1970s, barges, schooners and other boats were towed out on the tide, pushed up onto the shore and beached, with holes drilled in their hulls to allow silt to build up.

The site now forms the largest ships’ graveyard in mainland Britain and is known as the Purton Hulks. I have been there at low tide, and it is a desolate and ethereal place.

The graveyard perfectly embodies the Japanese concept of wabi sabi, often described as ‘finding beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness’.

The hulks create a giant land sculpture, merging human and industrial history with the natural landscape. Iron has rusted to a colour palette that blends with the lichen that covers rotting wood. Sand and marram grass hold the ‘corpses’ in place.

In some areas the boats, many deposited in the 1950s, are piled on top of one another. Elsewhere, the remains are skeletal, bare nails and wood puncturing the skyline.

In 1999, a local historian Paul Barnett undertook a research project that found 86 vessels beached along the shore. He has made it his passion to catalogue them and the marine artefacts found there. He also formed the Friends of Purton, a society dedicated to the research and protection of this and other ships’ graveyards. A short film, The Accidental Museum, features him and the special place that captured his imagination.

The vessels and the service they gave in their working lives are venerated through plaques erected by the Friends.

Some memorials give potted histories of the boats, glimpses of the journey that brought them to their final resting place.

This one resonated with me because my family come from County Waterford. Some of them were sailors, and others were lost at sea. On the Quay in Waterford City stands a memorial to one of its worst maritime disasters in the 20^th century.

My great uncle Walter Cullen was a cattleman and regularly sailed on the SS Coningbeg, which made a twice weekly, 16 hour voyage carrying passengers, livestock and cargo between Waterford and Liverpool. It could hold up to 600 cattle. Just before Christmas 1917, it was torpedoed without warning by a German U boat off the coast of Wales. My great uncle perished along with other cattlemen, the crew and a handful of passengers. Two days earlier, her sister ship the SS Formby had also been torpedoed. There were heartbreaking scenes on the Quay in Waterford as families waited in the freezing cold for news about their loved ones, information that didn’t come through until after Christmas.

My aunt Chris in Waterford at the memorial to her uncle Walter

There is drama in sinkings and shipwrecks and a romanticism about old, abandoned boats. When I visited the Purton Hulks, I felt that every snippet of information about an individual ship could form the basis for a whole novel. Since then, whenever I see wrecks, like this beautiful pair resting together on the shores of Salen Bay on the Isle of Mull, I stop and wonder about the journey that brought them there.

When I was in Falmouth I remembered seeing lots of rotting hulls a few years ago on a walk along the Penryn River. So I went back for another look, but apart from the odd example, hidden in the trees, I was surprised to find that many had gone.

Since the Beagle’s day, boats are bigger, more complex structures. The Purton Hulks were beached for a purpose, but many boats are now just abandoned, essentially fly-tipped at the end of their lives, left to leak oil, diesel, toxic paints and microplastics into the ocean.

An organisation called Wreck Free Fal and Helford is now campaigning to stop this. Small wrecks have been cleared from local rivers and nearly 60 tonnes of boat waste removed. They are looking at schemes like they have in France which offer free scrappage. It works on the principle that the cost of disposal should be spread over the boat’s lifetime, not left to the last owner who might not have the money to dispose of it responsibly.

It would mean fewer photogenic boats for me to capture, but that’s a small price to pay for safer, cleaner rivers. I can sate my enthusiasm for the romanticism of wrecks between the pages of a book. Perhaps I’ll read Moby Dick next…

It is the world’s most visited necropolis and now easily accessible by metro, but when it opened in 1804, its rural location meant that nobody wanted to be buried there. A marketing strategy was needed. When in doubt, wheel in a celebrity, in this case Moliere. As an actor as well as a writer, he was prevented from having a religious burial when he died in 1673. Instead he was interred at night, in an unmarked grave, at CimetièreSaint-Joseph, a burial ground for unbaptised infants. During the French Revolution, what were thought to be his remains were moved to the Museum of French Monuments. This closed in 1816 and an opportunity arose. A year later, Moliere was moved to Pere Lachaise.

Most historians agree that there is little evidence that anything remained of Moliere by then, but why let the truth get in the way of a good story? The strategy worked, and Pere Lachaise cemetery thrived. It now contains 80,000 graves.

The cult of celebrity persists, two centuries later. Like most people I have followed the familiar trail around the famous memorials. Jim Morrison’s grave is tatty and strewn with rockstar detritus - alcohol, joints and chewing gum. Oscar Wilde’s tomb is covered in lipstick kisses, lately on Perspex barriers erected to protect it. Edith Piaf is venerated in the more traditional and respectful fashion with heaps of flowers.

On my last visit, my plan was to do something different, to wander randomly and see what stories I stumbled upon. In a corner in the eastern part of the site, I came across a set of figures. It was an artwork by Basque sculptor Casto Solano, in memory of over 11,000 Jewish children deported from France between 1942 and 1944.

This monument was unveiled in 2017 by the then mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. These representations of Jewish children are faceless, shapeless, nameless. They are not on the celebrity tourist itinerary.

As I walked along the path I realised I was in Division 97 of the cemetery, full of memorials and sculptures dedicated to victims of the Nazis during World War Two. They went on, and on. A memorial to those deported to Bergen Belsen, using the symbolism of railway tracks and footsteps:

Another distressing sculpture to those who perished at Auschwitz, depicting emaciated bodies:

The memorials and sculptures are graphic and heart-rending. It was sombre to see them bathed in the warmth of autumn sunlight. It was a perfect day, with a sense of the season turning, the natural order of things. Yet before me stood evidence of horror, fear and betrayal.

After I came back from Paris, I thought of these monuments again when I read Jane Rogoyska’s excellent book Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War, which was shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. The eventual winner was Lyse Doucet, who co-incidentally also wrote a book about a hotel, The Finest Hotel in Kabul.

Rogoyska anchors her story around the Hotel Lutetia on the Left Bank, but it is really a story about France’s role in World War Two and about life in Paris as a result. The Lutetia was a meeting place for Europe’s artists and Jewish exiles fleeing Germany in the 1930s. During the War it was requisitioned as a headquarters of the Nazi occupation. Post-war, it was a transit point for the assessment and re-settlement of survivors of concentration camps.

When Jews, intellectuals and dissidents fled to Paris in the face of antisemitism and the Nazi threat in Germany, they were welcomed by the French liberal establishment but viewed with great suspicion by the general population. Outside the gates of Pere Lachaise is a large monument, stretching metres along the fence, to the fallen of World War One. It is a physical reminder that during the 1930s, Germans in France were seen as the enemy within.

These exiles in Paris often lived in penury, having left their previous homes, jobs and status behind. They gathered around the Hotel Lutetia as a focus for support and dissent against the Nazis. It had a reputation as the place to be. Charles de Gaulle would spend his honeymoon in the Suite Amour (the Love Suite). James Joyce completed Ulysses there. Samuel Beckett was a frequent visitor.

Then came the Nazi invasion of Paris in 1940. Hitler famously visited the city soon after, for his one and only visit, a whirlwind tour of a couple of hours with the architect Albert Speer. This generated possibly the most bizarre tourist snaps imaginable.

The Lutetia was taken over and commandeered as a Nazi HQ. The attitude of its staff, famed for their excellent service, is a metaphor for the approach of the French authorities to the German Occupation. Apart from concealing their most valuable vintage wines behind a false wall in the cellars, they seamlessly adapted to the new regime, serving their German masters. Jane Rogoyska covers this period in fascinating detail, and it serves as a metaphor for the wider collaboration of the French government.

The hotel is now part of the Mandarin Oriental group, and that era is summarised on its website in two sentences:

This marvellous example of corporatespeak glosses over what the ‘solemn period’ included, just months after the Nazis invaded Paris. There were mass roundups and arrests and deportations of foreign and stateless Jews to transit camps.

The French police sent people to camps like Drancy, which were holding stations for onward transit to the concentration camps of eastern Europe. One of these was James Joyce’s closest friend and personal assistant Paul Léon, who went from Drancy to Auschwitz and was being marched to nearby Birkenau when he kept falling down, so a Nazi guard shot him dead.

There were about 175,000 resident or refugee Jews in Paris when the Nazis invaded in May 1940. Keen to be compliant and to stay in the city, they followed new rules to register their addresses and wear yellow Star of David badges. This made it even easier for the French police to identify them when the roundups began. People were held for days without food and water in places like the local sports arena, before being deported via Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

By mid 1943 there were only 60,000 Jews left in Paris, the rest having fled or been deported. The Germans then began to deport Jewish residents of orphanages, nursing homes, and hospitals. By the time the Allies liberated Paris in 1944, at least 50,000 Parisian Jews, most of them foreign-born, had been deported and murdered.

Many Jews joined the French Resistance, alongside French comrades. The heroes of the Resistance are also remembered in the cemetery at Pere Lachaise.

Very few expatriate writers and artists were prepared to stay in Paris or to get involved in the Resistance. Many fled or made their accommodation with the new order. Writer Simone de Beauvoir spoke for many of them when she said that ‘il fallait survivre’ (it was necessary to survive) to live quietly under Occupation.

James Joyce, already very unwell by this point, left for Zurich where he died in 1941. His friend and countryman, the young Samuel Beckett, made a different choice. He later said that ‘I preferred France in war to Ireland at peace’, referring to his home country’s neutral stance. Beckett had visited Germany in the 1930s and seen how the Nazis operated. When they invaded Paris, he decided that ‘you simply couldn’t stand by with your arms folded’.

With his French partner, Beckett joined a Resistance cell called Gloria in 1941, translating and typing reports about activities and troop movement into English to be smuggled to London. The cell was betrayed a year later and many of his colleagues were deported to concentration camps.

Beckett and his partner narrowly avoided the Gestapo and walked south for six weeks to Avignon, where they stayed until the war ended. Afterwards the French Government awarded him the Croix de Guerre. He later moved to a small village east of Paris and started work on Waiting for Godot.

When I saw the memorials in Pere Lachaise, they conjured the classic images we all have of the Holocaust – the trains, the camps, the gas chambers. Reading Hotel Exile emphasised that most Jews killed in World War Two didn’t die this way. The mass shootings forced labour and systematic deprivation in ghettos that took so many lives were enabled by the creeping encroachment of formal and informal antisemitism - the petty restrictions, the systematic legal barriers, the localised social opprobrium. One of the themes of the book is the choices that people make in order to remain in a place that they consider home – to stay or flee, to fight or surrender, to support or betray?

The European Union reported this year that a growing majority of Europeans consider antisemitism to be a problem in their country and less than half think that the Holocaust is sufficiently taught in school. Almost seven out of ten think that the conflicts in the Middle East have an influence on the perception of Jewish people in their country.

These are toxic times, and complex issues. Perhaps we need to take the advice of Estragon in Waiting for Godot:

I have walked past this place in London countless times, without realising it was here. Like other people working in Southwark, I was always busy – working with important organisations, lunching with senior people, hanging out in the fashionable spots around Borough Market. Now I’m just a visitor, seemingly without role or purpose, yet able to finally give time and attention to the layers of stories that were scattered at my feet all along.

I am in Crossbones1 Graveyard, a post-medieval burial ground, once a place of rest for 15,000 souls. To enter is to leave the street full of hot sweaty tourists and workers and step through a portal into a meditation on life and death. I look up and see the tip of the Shard. Do the people up there, drinking cocktails and eating lunch, ever look down and think: what is that odd little corner, flanked by railway lines and old factories?

Crossbones is almost invisible, as were its occupants. I only found out about it after reading Peter Ross’s excellent book A Tomb With a View. Purely by chance, I also spotted a webinar by Dr Lucy Coleman Talbot, an anthropological archaeologist, volunteer and advocate for the graveyard, who wrote her PhD on Crossbones. I have used a couple of her slides to illustrate this article.

Crossbones, also known as St Saviour’s Burial Ground, originally had another name.

A survey of London by John Stow at the end of the 16^th century talks of a churchyard for single women.

As Stow implies, churchyard is a misnomer, as there is no place of worship here, although St Saviour’s Church, which eventually became Southwark Cathedral, is a stone’s throw away. This wasn’t a consecrated site, and Southwark, despite housing Winchester Palace, the London residence of the Bishop of Winchester, was not a god-fearing place.

The Bishop owned an area known as the Liberty of the Clink, outside the jurisdiction of the Crown and City of London authorities. This gave him the right to licence activities forbidden elsewhere –theatre, bull and bear baiting and prostitution.

For centuries, the area was a popular destination for entertainment and vice despite being a poor, violent slum. Theatres like the Rose and the Globe, homes to Marlowe and Shakespeare, flourished, as did brothels, or ‘stewes’ as they were known. Prostitutes were called Winchester Geese because of the connection to the Bishop’s rights over the district. To be ‘bitten by a goose’ was a euphemism for contracting a sexually transmitted disease.

Hogarth depicted the area in his engraving of Southwark Fair in 1733.

It’s hard to imagine scenes like this as I stand in Crossbones today. At its centre stands an elegant weeping cedar. A handful of respectful visitors wander round a garden fragrant with rosemary. An apple tree reaches over a small pond, a dragon fly teetering on its branch, a frog just visible under the water. The heat is brutal and there are tables and chairs in the shade for people to take refuge and reflect on what they are seeing, and what remains unseen. These gardens have been planted since 2015 and won a Britain in Bloom award in 2025.

Having started life as a women’s graveyard, by 1769 Crossbones had become a general pauper’s cemetery for the local area, a district scarred by poverty and diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Charles Dickens came to Southwark as a child in the early 19^th century when his father was imprisoned at Marshalsea Debtors Prison. The nearby St. Saviour’s Union Workhouse in Mint Street is the likely inspiration for the scene in Oliver Twist where Oliver asks for more food, and impressions of the area influenced many of his other books. When we use the word Dickensian, a place like Southwark is probably what we are seeing in our mind’s eye.

Like many city graveyards, Crossbones was closed in 1853 because it was ‘completely overcharged with dead’. Further burials were deemed ‘inconsistent with a due regard for the public health and public decency’.

What followed has become a recurring narrative. The land was sold for redevelopment in 1883, but following objections, the sale was declared void by the Disused Burial Grounds Act 1884. There have been other structures and businesses on the site over the years including a schoolhouse, a baker’s, a timberyard and, briefly, a fairground.

Local people have consistently campaigned for the site to be respected and preserved, and some remains were moved to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey (opened by the London Necropolis Company in 1849 and the largest cemetery in the UK. It’s on my list to visit and write about).

Fast forward to 1989, nearly four centuries after Stow’s survey, and Transport for London bought land including the derelict Crossbones site as part of its work on the Jubilee Line extension. Working with the Museum of London, it conducted an archaeological dig on one small section and found piles of human remains on top of one another.

Based on the density of burials within this small, excavated area, the Museum has estimated that as many as 15,000 people are buried there.

Of 148 graves, nearly a third were of foetuses and newly born babies, and a further 11 per cent were under a year old. Most of the adults were women, many suffering from diseases like smallpox and TB. Among them was the skull of an 18th-century teenage girl with lesions caused by syphilis. A sculpture of the Crossbones Girl, or Elizabeth Mitchell as she has been named, is now on display in the graveyard.

Even after the excavations, Crossbones is still constantly under threat of redevelopment. However, the renewed interest in what it represents has meant that it has formed a special place in the hearts of local residents, academics, artists and activists.

In the 1990s, a man called John Constable (sometimes known as John Crow), took a large amount of LSD, wandered the streets of Southwark, and claimed to have had a vision of The Goose, the spirit of a medieval sex worker buried at Crossbones. He went on to write The Southwark Mysteries, a series of poems and mystery plays performed at the Globe Theatre and Southwark Cathedral in 2000.

He was also part of a wider group who formed Friends of Crossbones in 1996 to campaign to preserve the graveyard and raise awareness of its historical and cultural significance. The land is still owned by Transport for London but thanks to the campaign is now leased to the Bankside Open Spaces Trust (ironically, they also manage the ruins of Winchester Palace).

In 2015, Andrew Dunn, the Dean of Southwark Cathedral, lead a procession to conduct ‘an act of Regret, Remembrance, Restoration’ to give the graveyard its first Anglican Blessing. This is repeated every year on the 22 July.

The Friends of Crossbones have done extraordinary work. Volunteers open the graveyard regularly, maintain the site and explain the history to visitors. I am there on a Friday which is gardening day and it is full of volunteers watering and tending the space.

Crossbones is unlike any burial ground I’ve visited. It’s home-grown, defended against the odds, loved and nurtured. It has been recast as a place of remembrance and reinvention – of the space and the individuals who tend it. It is interesting that many volunteers and visitors have been drawn to it post-Covid. Since those dark times we are all searching for greater connection and community. Crossbones was a dumping ground for people who had no place in ‘polite’ society – the outcast dead. Now it has been adopted by eccentrics, outsiders, individualists. A place where anyone can put their own stamp on death – and life.

The place is a palimpsest (a word from ancient Greek, via Latin, from palin ‘again’ + psēstos ‘rubbed smooth’). Its history has been preserved, the shame of its original occupants erased, and the site born again as a place of hope and possibility.

I am not expecting to find graves and there are none. Instead there are memorial gates full of handmade tributes to the people who were buried here and to those who have passed since. A vigil is held on the 23^rd of every month at 7pm at the gates, which includes a minute’s silence and the reading of poems, songs, and personal testimonies.

There are artefacts and installations like La Catrina, gifted by the Mexican Embassy in London in 2021. Literally translated as ‘The Elegant Skull’, this is the classic symbol of the Mexican Day of the Dead tradition.

A small coffin, in the shape of a syringe, reflects the Ghanaian tradition of ‘fantasy coffins’, symbolic caskets that represent the lives and professions of those who have died. Commissioned by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine in collaboration with the Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons, it commemorates the dedication of health care workers during Covid 19 but also represents the belief that no one should die for want of basic healthcare.

Local bereaved parents in Southwark asked for a space in the garden, and a local stone artist created some Mizuko Jizo statues. These reflect the Japanese tradition of mourning the loss of children and unborn babies. Offerings can be made, and the bonnets and bibs symbolise love energy life and protection.

In such a unique, rediscovered spot, it’s easy to think that the graveyard has a secure future, but there are challenges ahead. The Liberty of Southwark project looms. I don’t know if its name is a nod to the Bishop of Winchester’s Liberty of the Clink, but this is a very 21^st century commercial proposition, a mixed workspace and housing development which gained planning approval in 2024. The Friends of Crossbones have secured a lease on their space (only 30 years so far) and are part of the steering group guiding the development. As part of this, they have developed a Living Manifesto.

Central to this is the principle of Uncommon Respect:

I love that the dead now have their own Manifesto, and hope that the energy that the Friends have devoted to this special place sees off the latest encroachment of developers. We need the anarchic spirit of Crossbones to live on for centuries to come.

I was shocked by the amount of damage. Enormous trunks had fallen across paths, toppled graves and come perilously close to the twin chapels, one still in use for ceremonies and the other now the graveyard workers’ store and toolshed. Luckily these historic structures had somehow remained intact.

As I picked my way around, detouring past closed sections, I was astonished at the huge amount of debris, fallen branches and shrubbery, now collected into piles. Some trees that hadn’t come down stood limbless and forlorn.

Many graves had been broken. Memory might have played a trick and perhaps they had always been like that and I hadn’t noticed before. But the damage seemed more widespread. The force of nature had sliced headstones, flattened Celtic crosses and given the final push to memorials that were already weakened by ivy or age.

When I wrote about this cemetery last year, I called the piece All is impermanence, but I was relieved, in the face of the destruction, to find a solid familiarity, walking past well-loved monuments and rehearsing their stories in my mind. As always, the place was bursting with life. Everything had reappeared as it does every Spring. The primroses were everywhere, the daffodils were taking their leave as the bluebells were arriving, tiny violets poked through the grass.

No-one knows how many trees were lost in Cornwall during Storm Goretti, but the figure is thought to run into thousands. We often think of trees as timeless, outliving us, adding a ring of growth each year, spanning the generations, like the 800 ancient yews that exist in the oldest churchyards in England and Wales. These are so treasured that the charity Caring for God’s Acre holds Love Your Yew Week every February.

Victorian cemeteries in particular are places of managed decline. There is a constant tension between those who believe that any graveyard should be tended and those who embrace their derelict charm - the weathered stones, the lichen, the brambles – and enjoy the haven for wildlife that they have become.

This is Falmouth Town Council’s approach, with a management plan that only cuts the grass twice a year to encourage pollinators, installs nest boxes for birds and uses wood from fallen trees to create log piles to encourage insects and nesting places for small creatures. The trees, which include native species such as beech, ash, oak and sycamore, are inspected regularly for their health and for any risk to the public.

One of the weakest trees in Falmouth cemetery is the Monterey Pine. These are native to California (the name, from Spanish, means Mountain King) and were brought to the UK in the 1830s by botanist David Douglas (after whom the Douglas Fir was named). Fast growing into tall, sculptural shapes, they were popular in Victorian times for landscaping parks, estates and the new garden cemeteries. Many were planted in the temperate South West. They reach maturity in 30-40 years but only have a lifespan of 80- 100 years.

The pines in Falmouth Cemetery have been there since the 1850s and are now living on borrowed time. Last summer, one of the most beautiful examples, known locally as the T Rex tree because of its distinctive shape, collapsed due to the stress of the hot, dry weather. People mourn the loss of trees. The death of the T Rex tree made the local news.

Elsewhere, cemetery trees are succumbing to disease. Visitors to Brompton Cemetery in Chelsea, one of London’s ‘Magnificent Seven’ Victorian graveyards, are seeing the site as it would have originally been viewed, because of the loss of 40 holm oaks. These giants, planted as saplings in 1840, have had to be felled due to an outbreak of a sap-sucking pest, Nidularia pulvinata, which is slowly killing them.

Local people are distraught and the cemetery manager has described the death of the trees as ‘devastating’. The only saving grace is that it will lead to a replanting programme which future generations of visitors can enjoy.

How do we mark the loss of a tree? They can have their own memorials too. Brighton, where I live, is home to the UK’s National Elm Collection, which has been infected with Dutch Elm Disease over the last 40 years. Two treasured specimens, planted together in 1613 in the reign of James I in Preston Park and known as the Preston Twins, have lived for over 400 years. In 2019, one was diagnosed with the disease and cut down. Thanks to the commitment of a tree surgeon, and the imagination and tenacity of artist Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, the dead tree was preserved in a stunning piece of artwork, the Gilded Elm. It now sits, reunited with its living twin, in a section of Preston Park very close to the pet cemetery which I wrote about earlier this year.

The artist Hadzi-Vasileva has said:

‘The trees may be lost, but they need to live in our memory, knowledge, and experience.’

Writer, musician and storyteller Karine Polwart was engaged as an artist in residence by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh to mark the loss of its oldest tree, a 200 year old palm. Like the Monterey Pine, it was a stranger to UK shores and is believed to have arrived as cargo on a ship in Leith, transported in a small portable greenhouse to protect it from the salt air.

The renovation of the garden’s Victorian Palm Houses meant that all plants had to be moved. The 60 ft palm Sabal mexicana, was one, outgrowing its surroundings and having to be pruned regularly to avoid breaking the glass roof. Eventually, after 40,000 plants were moved, the palm, too old and frail to move, sat alone, like a stubborn tenant refusing to move house to allow a modern redevelopment. The senior managers of the gardens agonised about what to do. Eventually, after much soul searching, and even more passing of the buck, they reluctantly decided that the tree would have to be felled.

Simon Allan, the horticulturist who had looked after the tree for a decade, told the BBC that he couldn’t bear to watch it being chopped down, and was glad he was going on holiday.

Karine Polwart made a BBC radio documentary telling the story of her time as artist in residence. She composed what she describes as:

‘a parting glass’ work…and a hymn to gardeners and grieving’.

It’s called Windblown, in reference to the tree’s arrival in Edinburgh, and you can listen to a section of it here. It’s a poignant and fitting legacy for a mighty tree.

Cemeteries are places of death and loss but also, as they return to nature, of growth and renewal. I will mourn the passing of each Mountain King and embrace the fact that their fallen remains will give shelter to birds, mammals and the occasional human looking for a place to sit and reflect on memory and history.

Do you have a favourite tree that you mourn?

Carol

We came home with severe dog withdrawal symptoms, and that’s how Rufus the miniature schnauzer came into our lives.

Dog owners will tell you that their pets give them unconditional love. With Rufus, there was always one condition – you did what he wanted. Schnauzers were originally bred to be ratters, and he had a terrier stubbornness that meant he ruled our lives with an iron paw.

Schnauzers like to bark – it’s part of their DNA. I once sat opposite a Japanese woman on a train who was entranced by Rufus sitting on my lap. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘a mini shouter’. He barked at her, of course.

He was also a terrible scavenger, and this was to be his undoing. After a local food festival, he found a pile of uneaten sausages and chowed down with gusto. He was very sick and a trip to the vet confirmed pancreatitis. This was the first of five bouts of this very painful disease.

Our fabulous little dog was one of life’s stoics, but the debilitating effects of pancreatitis eventually caught up with him after 14 years. I had often wondered how pet owners are supposed to know when ‘it’s time’ to let their beloved animal go. Yet when that moment comes, somehow, you just know.

I thought of dear Rufus as I wandered round Brighton’s pet cemetery, a beautiful spot tucked away inside a flint walled garden next to Preston Manor, an Edwardian house now open to the public. The cemetery was created by the Thomas-Stanford family who lived there and were enthusiastic pet owners. Many local people don’t even know it exists, and it is thought to be the only one of its kind in Sussex.

The cemetery dates from the 19^th century, when the significance of dogs as pets increased during Queen Victoria’s reign. She was a high profile and enthusiastic pet owner. She owned one of five Pekingese puppies retrieved from the looting of the Summer Palace in Peking during the Second Opium War of 1860. The dog was so small she travelled back to England in a military cap, was duly presented to the Queen and named, without a hint of irony, Looty.

In richer households particularly, dogs moved from being perceived as working animals to being considered as family members, cherished in life, having their portraits painted and memorialised in death. In the courtyard of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, there are memorials to two dogs, one of whom was the pet of Sir Henry Cole, civil servant and inventor, who helped set up the V&A itself (and invented the first commercially produced Christmas card).1

The cemetery at Preston Manor contains the remains of 16 dogs and 4 cats. The tiny gravestones are barely visible now, obscured by foliage and worn smooth by age. Yet they tell us so much about social history, the lives of animals, and the relationships they had with their human companions.

The most striking is the headstone to Tatters, who died in 1884.

The inscription is faint now, but says:

An epitaph like that is a challenge to anyone, and local researcher Paula Wrightson has discovered the story of Tatters2. Far from being insignificant, he was a much loved pet. He belonged to Diana and Lily Macdonald, teenagers within the Thomas-Stanford household. They are thought to have rehomed him from a local animal shelter, The Sussex Temporary Home for Lost and Starving Dogs. There is now a PDSA pet hospital on the same site.

The change in status to animals as pets went hand in hand with a focus on animal welfare and cruelty in the Victorian period, tackling everything from strays to cockfighting and bear-baiting. The shelter in Sussex would have taken its lead from Battersea Dogs’ and Cats’ Home, which started as a small refuge in 1860. By 1885, Queen Victoria had agreed to be its patron and by the end of the century it was taking in over 40,000 animals a year.

So Tatters was almost certainly a rescue mutt. However, he was important enough to appear in a watercolour by Lily Macdonald, The Church From the Lawns, in the year he died. Here he is, sitting patiently at Diana’s feet at the edge of the tennis court.

He’s not the only dog to be immortalised in a painting. In the graveyard, Tatters rests alongside other treasured canine companions such as Peter, a Scottish terrier, who is remembered by the words:

The artist perfectly captured that personality.

Peter lies next to Fritz, a dachshund who apparently barked at everyone. The family asked a doctor to prescribe nerve pills for him, with no improvement. He’s probably in a special noisy area of dog heaven, along with the mini shouters.

The memorial to Soot is the stuff of Victorian melodrama.

It reads:

Soot was a black poodle with a white patch on his chest. At some point in his life, he was stolen. This must have been traumatic for the family and they searched for him, finding an all black poodle at Leadenhall Market in London. Further examination revealed that this dog’s chest hair was white at the roots and that his patch had been dyed to disguise him. It was their beloved Soot. He came back home and lived happily until the poisoning incident, which would be another heartbreaking tale, but we know nothing more about the circumstances.

The most revered dog at Preston Manor, Kylin, arrived at Preston Manor as a puppy in 1909. A Pekingese, she was owned by Ellen Thomas-Stanford, described by her son as ‘a terrific snob’. This high status dog would have accorded perfectly with Ellen’s world view. Queen Victoria’s Looty had started a trend to own a breed which, in China, could only be owned by those of royal blood.

An American travel writer in 1912 described the lives of pekes in the Forbidden City:

That same year, a peke was one of three dogs that survived the sinking of the Titanic, smuggled onto Lifeboat 3 under the clothing of its First Class passenger owners. No steerage for these pets.

Kylin was 15 when she died in 1924 and like her Chinese counterparts, she was venerated. She was Lady Thomas-Stanford’s favourite and loved nothing better than playing a complicated game of throwing and retrieving her dog biscuits in the hall of Preston Manor. She was painted by Arthur John Elsley in 1917, complete with biscuit.

Her owners adored her but Kylin, on the whole, couldn’t be bothered with humans. She loved other dogs, especially Jock, another mutt. Proof that dogs, unlike humans, aren’t snobs. Lady Thomas-Stanford captured them together in this photograph, which apparently was used on the cover of menu cards for Preston Manor.

Jock, remembered as ‘Stout of Heart and Body’, is buried in the graveyard along with Kylin.

Eight years after Kylin died, Preston Manor passed from the Thomas-Stanfords into the ownership of Brighton Corporation. No more dogs were buried there, but the graveyard is still used occasionally as a resting place for cats who ‘worked’ for the council, including Sammy the Town Hall Cat and George The Pavilion Cat. George originally lived in a nearby restaurant but wandered into Brighton Pavilion one day in 1965 and never left. Named after King George IV, he was known to sleep in Queen Victoria’s bed and was treated like royalty by staff and visitors, until he passed away due to kidney trouble in 1980.

George’s story reminded me of how adept animals are at seizing an opportunity. Why should he live on restaurant scraps when he could eat like a King? Why should Ruby languish in an animal shelter in Spain when she could jump into a car and be free? She went on to have the best of lives, until one day, many years later, Matt found her one morning, lying peacefully in a corner of the garden in the sunshine. She is buried there.

Rufus was cremated. When we received his ashes, we had a small amount made into two glass beads by a local company, so we could each wear one. After nine months of intense grief, Ernie came into our lives, small in stature but mighty in personality. We love him just as much and we still think of Rufus every day.

Grieving for our pets is part of the contract we make with them, in exchange for the love they give to us during their relatively short lives. It’s a very small price to pay.

The workshop staff down tools, prick up their ears. The mailroom crew push towers of envelopes aside. The drivers look suspicious. It must be something really important to pause production at this time of year.

‘I am delighted to welcome our newest appointment,’ booms the boss. ‘Don’t be shy, lad,’ he adds, gesturing behind him. ‘Come forward and meet the team.’

The new recruit shuffles to the front.

Immediately, he hears someone whisper, ‘what’s with that nose?’

‘It’s the colour of the boss’s suit’, says another.

‘And as round,’ sniggers a third.

He can feel the laughter swirling round his head like a snowstorm. The job advert said this was a friendly, inclusive working environment, but he knows how these things go down.

‘Rein it in guys!’ shouts the boss. ‘I know what you’re thinking. No one wants a new team member so late in the day. Especially a tight knit bunch like you,’ he says, pointing at the drivers.

‘Bottom line is, we’re under pressure. Amazon are slaying us this year. We have to reduce our costs. So… the vehicle lights have to go’.

The drivers let out a collective gasp. ‘The forecast is fog, for the busiest night of the year,’ says Donna, thunderstruck. ‘We’ll be flying blind. You’re putting our safety at risk’.

‘That’s the point,’ says the boss. ‘We’ll put this new one in the front as navigator and you’ll have better visibility than ever. Plus we can show the world how we’re reducing our carbon footprint. We’ll go down in history!’

Donna frowns, turns to her colleagues, sees them nodding. ‘Makes sense’, she concedes. ‘Let’s give it a try’.

She approaches the newbie. ‘What’s your name kid?’ she asks. ‘You can call me Rudy,’ he answers shyly.

‘Come on then,’ says Donna. ‘I’ll introduce you to the others. But remember,’ she warns him. ‘When we get there, any carrots get split nine ways, OK? And the old guy gets all the milk and biscuits’.

That’s all for 2025 - thanks for subscribing and reading my work!

Carol

In short, I went from hero to zero in the space of a few seconds. You never know what life will throw at you.

So, to make up for lost time, let me tell you about two fascinating and heroic men, whose lives were interwoven during a fateful voyage.

I am in Falmouth for a couple of weeks. Storm Bram swept through last week, and the wind on the seafront was so strong it nearly knocked me off my feet. I watched a ship moored in the bay as the waves roiled around it and thought of the crew below decks. The next day, it was as though the storm had never happened – blue skies, sunshine and a calm sea. It prompted me to make a visit to one of my favourite cemeteries and return to a memorial that I had found years before.

Falmouth Cemetery seemed to have forgotten that it was winter. I caught the garlicky scent of three-corned leek, usually a sign of Spring. The pine trees were full of birdsong – not just from the expected robins but also from chaffinches, blue tits and goldcrests. The sun was setting on Swanpool, the brackish lake that lies at the foot of the cemetery. The light and warmth were at odds with the date, less than a fortnight away from the shortest, darkest day of the year.

Tucked away at the back of the old cemetery, overlooking the lake, is a memorial to Henry Philip Creese, born in Falmouth in 1867. His father was a coastguard and before coming to Falmouth had worked in Mayo on the west coast of Ireland. They returned to Ireland as Henry grew up and did an engineering apprenticeship at Harland and Wolff in Belfast. He went on to marry and have children and worked for the White Star Line on their transatlantic liners.

Engineers were the highest paid members of a ship’s crew and kept the engines, generators and other mechanical plant running. Henry, now based in Southampton, would have been making a good living for his family. Returning in April 1912 from a stint on RMS Olympia, then the largest cruise liner in the world, he signed up with a new ship for his next voyage on Unfortunately for Henry, that ship was RMS Titanic.

Eight days later, he and all his fellow engineers were among the nearly 700 crew members drowned when the ship hit an iceberg. His body was never found. Evidence to the subsequent inquiry shows Henry’s bravery. The engineers stayed below decks after the collision, trying to keep the pumps working and the boiler from exploding, and maintaining lights and power. Their action is thought to have delayed the sinking for over an hour and allowed most of the lifeboats to be launched.

I thought of Henry earlier in the year when I went to Cobh in West Cork. At the time, I wrote about the story of Irish emigration but the Titanic story is also a part of Cobh’s history.

The Titanic Experience tourist attraction is housed in the original offices of the White Star line. The ship never docked at Cobh (then called Queenstown), and instead was moored offshore, with passengers ferried in by tender. One of these was Francis Browne, a trainee priest. He had been given a ticket on the maiden voyage as a present from his uncle. Like Henry, he would have boarded at Southampton. However, his gift only covered him for a ticket to Cobh. During the trip from England to Ireland, he was befriended by a rich couple, who offered to pay his passage onward to New York. His superiors would have none of it and told him to disembark in Cobh and get back to his studies.

Not only did that instruction save his life, but it also gave the media a rich source of material when the Titanic sank. Francis was a skilled photographer and took many photos of life onboard. As Henry Creese was a deck engineer, they may even have crossed paths at some point. After the sinking, Francis’s pictures were sold and used around the world. This one of a child playing on deck, is one of the most famous. The subject, Robert Douglas Speddon from New York, survived the disaster.

An extraordinary story, but only one in Francis’s rich life. Before his Titanic fame, he was a university classmate of James Joyce in Dublin and is immortalised as ‘Mr Browne the Jesuit’ in Finnegan’s Wake. During World War One, he went to Europe as chaplain to the Irish Guards and served at The Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres. He was wounded five times and received the Military Cross and the Croix de Guerre for gallantry and devotion to duty.

After the war, Browne travelled all over Ireland and the world as part of his ministry. He took photographs along the way, of everything from small town Irish life to cattle stations in Australia and street scenes in Naples. He died in 1960.

The negatives of an estimated 42,000 photographs taken on his travels were packed away in a trunk in the Irish Jesuit archives and forgotten, until another priest opened it 25 years later. What he found was a body of work compared by an archivist to the photographs of Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau but produced decades before them.

Francis Browne is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. There he lies among people like Brendan Behan, Michael Collins and Christy Brown. I feel another trip to Ireland coming on….

This tiny island, despite being only 400 metres from the mainland, feels like another world. The jetty is lined with cars - bumpers hanging off, battered, rusted. Think Mad Max meets the Banshees of Inisherin. They wouldn’t be roadworthy anywhere else but are serviceable enough to get around a place with one main road.

The first Irish Census of 1841 found 358 people living on Heir Island, mostly making a living from farming and lobster fishing. Famine and emigration took a toll on a community that once had a school and a post office, but today those buildings have been restored into holiday homes. The summer population is around 150, supported by a couple of restaurants and a B&B. In the winter, 14 permanent residents live here.

It’s a precious place to spend a morning. I’ve heard Achill Island off the Galway coast described as ‘Ireland in Miniature’. Heir Island could be ‘Ireland in Miniscule’, because despite being less than two miles long and a mile wide, it packs in unspoilt beaches in sheltered bays, craggy cliffs and moorland glowing with heather.

The one thing Heir Island never had was a church. Services and burials were held over on the mainland. Despite this, I’m here to visit a graveyard that has existed for centuries.

The children’s graveyard, Gort Na Cill in Irish, is an example of a cilleen, an unofficial resting place. There are around 1,500 of them across Ireland, although this is an underestimate. The word is derived from the Irish cill, meaning a church. So a cilleen is a little church, or, you could say, a lesser church. An unconsecrated place. A final destination of last resort for the unwanted.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of heaven and hell. Theologians believed that ever since Eve’s temptation of Adam in the garden of Eden, everyone was born with original sin. ‘Blame the woman’ is a recurring theme in this story. Freedom from sin comes through baptism, so anyone not baptised was condemned to hell. In the 12^th century, St Tomas Aquinas, one of the Catholic church’s leading scholars, came up with the concept of Limbus Infantum, a separate category for unbaptised children. They would be spared hell but instead exist in Limbo. Pain-free, but still an eternal purgatory.

The Catholic Church refused to bury unbaptised children in consecrated ground. Emer Dennehy, one of the academics whose research on cillini has been so important in uncovering this practice, cites an Irish proverb1 which translates as:

For centuries, women in Ireland have been expected to get married, not to refuse sex with their husbands, and to produce children. Any women having a baby outside marriage would be publicly vilified by the Church, shunned by their own communities and refused medical treatment if they ever managed to get to a hospital. John Boyne’s brilliant novel The Heart’s Invisible Furies, opens with a vivid account of a woman fleeing her home in West Ireland after just such a public shaming.

The concept of marital rape wasn’t recognised in Ireland until 1990, and contraception wasn’t widely accepted and available until then. Divorce wasn’t legalised until 1996. It took until 2019 for abortion to be allowed. While many cillini are in ancient sites, the history of Irish women’s emotional trauma extends into the 21^st century.

Cillini were a response by Irish communities to where to place those children the Church had rejected. Although most are made up of the graves of unbaptised infants, they were also used to bury others barred from consecrated ground – murderers, heretics, people who had taken their own life, strangers. They were also used at times of severe distress, such as plague or famine. The Heir Island cilleen is said to contain the bodies of two shipwrecked sailors.

Locations varied according to circumstance and local custom. They could be as near as just over the walls of a churchyard and as far away as across the sea. Often, the strictures of the Church were overlaid with folkloric and pagan beliefs about spirits, fairies and the afterlife. Oilean na Marbh (The Island of the Dead) in Donegal was felt to be a good spot because evil spirits wouldn’t cross water. The graveyard, only accessible at low tide, holds the remains of 500 souls.

An extraordinary documentary, in Irish and English, tells the story of Oilean na Marbh. I took the title of this article from the words of one contributor to the film who calls Limbo: ‘the hem of the curtain between heaven and hell’. The rituals that surrounded the death and burial of these unwanted babies were heartbreaking. There was no wake, women were excluded, burials were made by men, after dark, who might mark the spot with a stone, if at all. The film recounts that one woman believed her womb was haunted by the baby that had been lost.

Sitting on a bench in the Heir Island graveyard, I can’t reconcile the beauty of this place with what it represents. The field drops away to the sparkling bay beyond. The bushes are heavy with blackberries, rose hips, wild fuchsia. The high pitch of oystercatchers carries on the breeze. It’s a perfect day.

Yet buried in front of me is the memory of immeasurable loss, the terror of mothers who believed they would never be reunited with their babies in the afterlife, the shame of women who faced the twin judges of the Church and their own community. I walk round the stones and think of the nameless souls they represent.

No-one really knows how many cillini there are in Ireland, or when the practice began or ended, because there are no headstones with dates to reference. In 1824, the Ordnance Survey (OS) of Ireland recorded field monuments which included these graveyards, although they could only list those known to exist or captured in folk memory. Research suggests that they date from the post medieval period.

The Irish government brought in a law requiring the registration of all births and deaths in 1863, and around this time the Catholic Church eased its views on baptism. Some cemeteries allowed unconsecrated sections for unbaptised children and adults. Emer Dennehy estimates that most cillini went out of use between the middle of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.

The seminal work on the subject is a 1939 paper by Seán Ó Súilleabháin, a folklore collector and archivist. His aim was to capture the history, yet burials were still taking place when he was doing his work. Irish poet Derry O’Sullivan spoke of his stillborn brother’s burial in 1943 in his beautiful poem Glaoch ar Liombó, (Stillborn 1943: Calling Limbo). He writes of the baby being taken unwashed, wrapped in newspaper, in an orange box in place of a coffin:

The cilleen on Heir Island was still in use in the 1960s. By 1969, The Catholic Church introduced a funerary rite for unbaptized children and in 2007, the Vatican finally dismissed the concept of Limbo entirely.

Women suffered unimaginable pain though the strictures of the Church. It is heartening that the work to validate cillini and all they represent has been mostly taken forward by female community activists and academics. They have found that while some are lovingly maintained, others have been lost due to depopulation, family lines dying out and land redevelopment. In places like Heir Island and Oilean na Marbh, plaques have been erected and masses are said annually to respect the dead. The grounds have been blessed and consecrated. Despite the pain inflicted by the Church, religion is still important in these places.

The graveyards have also inspired a range of artists such as Tommy Weir, whose photographic exhibition ‘Cillín’ features ghostly, otherworldly pictures that give a sense of the nighttime activity that took place in them. Writer Una Mannion, wrote a poem for the exhibition. In A landscape for forgetting, she describes cillini as ‘underneath spaces, ground to forget, beyond words or maps’.

Now is the time to remember them. While I’m at the Heir Island site, a robin comes to rest on the cross. I move forward to take a photograph, it flies away, then returns. In Celtic and Christian mythology, this bird is known as a spiritual messenger, connecting the living and the dead. I get my photo. It’s an inadequate capture of a moment, a desire for connection with this place. The message from modern Irish society is that those buried here are loved and treasured, and that the sins of the past weren’t committed by women and children.

We knew there were two sites in Hoop Lane, the Crematorium that I wrote about last time, and, opposite, the Jewish Cemetery.

In fact, it would be more accurate to say that there are three sites, because the Jewish Cemetery is split in half. Walking in under the arch of the central prayer hall, known as an Ohel, we notice that the grounds are marked by signs for two distinct areas – WP and SP.

WL refers to the West London Synagogue, which opened its first burial ground in the Balls Pond Road in Islington in 1843. By 1896 it had opened this bigger cemetery in Hoop Lane on what had been farmland in the hamlet of Golders Green. Half of the site was then sold to the Sephardic Jewish community, an arrangement that continues to this day.

The prayer hall was finished a year later.

Beyond the prayer hall is a bowl of pebbles, allowing visitors to honour the Jewish tradition of leaving stones on graves as a mark of respect.

On a peaceful, sunny afternoon, we’re two of a handful of visitors and the office is shut, as no burials are scheduled. There’s no map or guide to notable graves. A man mowing the grass helps us make sense of the seemingly random numbering and lettering system in the West London section.

We pick our way carefully and respectfully between the graves, shoes sinking into soft, spongy grass, as we search for the people we’ve come to see. This place is stuffed full of achievement - writers, artists, doctors, judges, politicians, Holocaust survivors. The praise is effusive. Headstones describe the departed as exemplary, cherished, devoted, accomplished, beautiful, stylish, sparkling.

One headstone that we’re looking for bucks this trend, and we nearly miss it. A woman who had a short life, dying at the age of 42. A wife. Unless you recognised the name, you would never know that she was one of the most accomplished musicians of the 20^th century.

Jacqueline du Pre made her concert debut aged 16 and converted to Judaism tomarry conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim when she was 22. They enjoyed a decade as a golden couple in the music world during the 1960s. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the early 1970s and eventually gave up performing, although she continued as a teacher until she died.

After her death, her instruments were bought by the Louis Vuitton Foundation and loaned to other musicians. French-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma, also a child prodigy, currently plays on her 1712 ‘Davidov’ Stradivari. He has described Jacqueline du Pre as: ‘a meteorite, the ultimate shooting star, whose life and energy came out through her playing.’

I can’t help feeling that her headstone deserves an epitaph like this.

The next grave we find also has a very simple monument, considering that her boss once described her as ‘the first British journalist to attain the Instant Recognition status previously enjoyed by film stars’.

The boss was Hugh Cudlipp, editor of the Daily Mirror, talking about his star columnist, Marjorie Proops.

The daughter of a publican, she was born Rebecca Marjorie Israel. She started using her middle name after being called ‘Becky the Jew Girl’ at school, and her father changed their surname to Rayle in response to the anti-semitism they faced in Hackney in London. Starting out as an illustrator, she moved through the fashion world and into journalism, including spells at the Daily Mirror and the Daily Herald, where she ended up answering letters when the paper’s agony aunt Mary Marshall died. She went back to the Mirror in 1954 and stayed there for the rest of her career, her retirement staved off by the fact that she never admitted her true age to anyone.

The Daily Mirror was the working person’s paper. My parents read it every day and we grew up on a diet of campaigning journalism, popular culture, racing tips, cartoons, and Dear Marje. It’s easy to dismiss these columns now, but at a time of limited sources of information and an unlimited amount of social judgement, this is where people turned to for advice on life matters – sex, marriage, divorce, sexuality, abuse, anxiety.

Credit – mirrorpix

Proops had it all - empathy, gravitas and style. As well as working with a psychologist to dispense appropriate advice, she also used her position and insight into the human condition to campaign for change, particularly in areas such as contraception, sex education and sexuality. Keith Howe, a writer on Gay News, remembers meeting her in the 1970s to talk about the campaign to lower the age of consent for gay men, and describes her as one of a handful of ‘sympathetic straights’ at the time.

There’s a lovely detail on Marjorie’s grave – an open book at the foot of the plot. The inscription is very worn, but just visible: Dear Marje – I have a problem.

The simple nature of her headstone, with no mention of her husband of 53 years, Stanley Proops (‘Proopsie’), gives us a clue to the fact that Marjorie herself had a problem. Her marriage was a sham, and for many years she had an affair with a colleague at the Daily Mirror. Her husband and her lover died within four years of each other, and only then did she reveal the turmoil of her personal life, including the fact that she found her husband repulsive.

Naim Attallah, chairman of Quartet Books, interviewed her in 1992, four years before she died. In an extraordinarily frank conversation, she discussed the fact that she spent years trying to solve other people’s problems while struggling with her own: ‘I’m still immensely aware of that irony. It is very difficult for people to solve their own problems because we make excuses for ourselves, we can’t accept the fact that we’re as awful as we are, that we’ve behaved as badly as we have. It’s very hard to pass judgement on yourself.’

What Marjorie was describing was something that has been termed The Solomon Paradox by psychology professor Igor Grossman. We all know that people would travel a long way to hear the wisdom of King Solomon, third ruler of the Jewish Kingdom. However I didn’t know that his personal life was a mess – he was a terrible father and husband and was obsessed with his own wealth and status. The Solomon Paradox highlights the tendency we all have to offer advice to others, while being unable to apply it to our own lives.

One of Marjorie’s neighbours in the Hoop Lane cemetery was an equally adept observer of the human condition, yet seemed lucky enough to have a much happier life. When writer Jack Rosenthal died of cancer in 2004, aged 72, his friend Colin Schindler wrote in his Guardian obituary that ‘In a profession that is often noted for its backbiting, Jack had an Olympian stature. He never, to my knowledge, provoked anything but undiluted admiration from his peers and warmth and love from everyone else’.

Born in 1931, Rosenthal attended the Manchester Jews School before being evacuated to Lancashire in the Second World War, an unhappy experience that inspired his BAFTA-winning play The Evacuees. He went to Sheffield University and worked in advertising before joining Granada Television as a trainee in research and promotions, aged 25.

His career break came some years later when he got the chance to write a script for Coronation Street, which aired as Episode 30 in March 1961. It included a line for Ena Sharples (played by Violet Carson):

"Folk round 'ere know nowt. One walk down t'canal bank and they think they're charting the Ganges."

He met his wife Maureen Lipman while writing for the show (she was acting in a theatre in Manchester at the time) and she said of him that: ‘I think Jack would credit his ability to write dialogue down to his family dynamic - working class, Jewish, very poor and very northern. He would credit Coronation Street with giving him the platform for what he did.’

He remained part of a core group of writers on Coronation Street until 1969. Watching snippets of his work is a joy, for example in this clip of Ena, Minnie and Martha in the laundrette in 1962. They are doing nothing, and yet the script tells us everything we need to know about the dynamic between this famous trio of characters. ‘coloured lingerie is all the go,’ says Minnie to Ena, when a red sock is seen in her white undies wash.

With a talent like that, how could Rosenthal not go far? He had an ear for the conversation of the common man and set his dramas in workplaces, homes, and local communities, writing about dustbin men, fire fighters, politicians and taxi drivers. Like Marje’s columns, his work reflected on big themes such as family life, relationships, loneliness and alienation with warmth and a deftness of touch that was never patronising. He was one of the giants of social realism in drama.

His play Another Sunday and Sweet FA, directed by Michael Apted, won the TV Critics' Circle Best Play of the Year Award in 1972. It’s another example of nothing and everything happening in the story of a referee at an amateur football game. Of the main character, Eric Armistead, Rosenthal commented that: ‘life is an Immorality Play. Right never triumphs over wrong. Good never vanquishes evil. No one knows the meaning of 'fairness'. Which is why he's a Sunday morning referee - hoping that in his own small way, in a foreign field that's forever Manchester, he and his whistle might change the world.’

Once again, the programme sings with Rosenthal’s dialogue. ‘What we're about to witness is called a football match,’ Mr Armistead tells the team captains. ‘Not the beginning of World War Three, not the destruction of the human race. A football match."

Over the course of his career Rosenthal won numerous awards including BAFTAs for his TV plays The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy, and another for Spend Spend Spend, based on the life of Pools winner Viv Nicholson. He won a Golden Globe for the film Yentl,co-written with for Barbara Streisand, and was awarded a CBE for services to drama. Sue Vice, Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, has written a book about him which credits him for influencing modern TV drama and comedy in shows such as The Royle Family, The Office and Friday Night Dinner.

Rosenthal wrote for Play for Today, alongside peers such as Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter. Just this week, Channel 5 announced plans to revive the format, which ran on the BBC from 1970 to 1984, ‘to give young writers, actors and producers from lower-income backgrounds a way into TV, helped by established talent’. If Rosenthal was still alive, he would have been a superb mentor to this next generation.

We finished our visit to Hoop Lane by crossing over to the other half of the cemetery. Sephardic jews originate from the Iberian peninsula, where the tradition was to lay headstones horizontally as the ground was often too unstable to support an upright marker. This makes for an unusual sight.

Compared to the crowded, busy and fascinating West London section, there is something about the flatness of the graves, and the limited information on each headstone that is disconcerting. Sephardic burials are simple, and there is little we can glean from the stones, especially as some of the embossed letters have dislodged. Time and the elements have disrupted epitaphs. Words, so important to writers like Proops and Rosenthal, become ephemeral here.

They look like moored boats, says Kathy of the graves. Afterwards she wrote this poem, and I’ll leave you with her words.

Hoop Lane

Like a marina, the grey expanse of horizontal graves

on the Sephardic side spreads to the east -

boats moored in a static sea of gravel

where there’s no rise or fall.

Close up, some of the epitaphs have gaps

where letters have come loose - lost characters

a jumble on the stone. Unscrambled they might

spell out different lives - reincarnation as a metaphor.

Holes for the pins where they were once secured

a braille no hand can read.

© Kathryn Daszkiewicz 2025

‘Do you fancy visiting Marc Bolan’s grave?’

So here we are, at midday on a humid summer’s day, Pret sandwich bags in hand, at Golder’s Green tube station in London. It’s a short walk to Hoop Lane, a gravehunter’s dream. On the North side is Hoop Lane Cemetery, a fascinating Jewish burial ground which I’ll write about soon. On the south side is the Golder’s Green Crematorium, last resting place of Marc Bolan, frontman of T Rex, who died in 1977.

Kathy and I met 25 years ago, on an Arvon course run by Carol Ann Duffy. We shared a room and bonded immediately, not just over poetry , but in mutual loathing of our roommate. We shared a room, were both early risers and went to bed at a reasonable hour. Our other sharer would come to bed very late, thrash about noisily, then fall asleep, snoring at a volume and intensity that could wake the dead. Kathy and I formed a bond that has never been broken. Over the years we’ve discovered lots more in common, including a love for Marc Bolan.

Over lunch under a yew tree, on a bench in the Jewish Cemetery, we discuss how we’d like to leave this world. I favour a woodland burial. I like the idea of gently rotting into the earth. Kathy can’t bear the idea of being stuck in one place and wants to be cremated and have her ashes scattered.

Cremation now accounts for nearly 80% of funerals, but it was slow to take off as an alternative to burial. A Victorian doctor, Sir Henry Thompson, set up the Cremation Society in 1874 to promote it at a time of population growth and continued pressure on cemeteries, even after the development of the Garden Cemetery movement. The Society built the UK’s first crematorium in Woking in Surrey in 1879, and by 1902 had built the first in London at Golders Green.

Part of my aversion to cremation is the soulless nature of every crematorium I’ve visited as a mourner. The chapels and gardens have a municipal feel that makes death seem functional, transactional, suppressing the solemnity and symbolism of the occasion. As we cross the road, I’m keeping my expectations low.

The Grade II listed Golders Green Crematorium is about to scatter my perceptions over its immaculately landscaped 12 acres.

Its striking red-brick, Romanesque building was designed by Sir Ernest George, who was cremated here. It houses three columbaria (repositories for funerary urns), offices, chapels, a memorial hall and a stunning 240 foot cloister.

We start in the West Memorial Court, where the original plaque to Bolan is close to one for The Who’s drummer Keith Moon. He went to Bolan’s funeral in 1977 and died of a drug overdose less than a year later. They are separated by a memorial to Steve Conway, now unknown but once described as ‘Britain’s Bing Crosby’. The line between legacy and obscurity is sometimes very thin.

Going into the West Memorial Court is like entering a celestial Green Room of British talent. The memorials are crowded together on the warm brick. Musicians like Moon, harmonica player Larry Adler and saxophonist Ronnie Scott jostle for position alongside entertainers like Bud Flanagan, Hughie Green, Bernie Winters, Norman Vaughn and Barbara Windsor.

‘What if all these people came back for a day? That would be one hell of a party’, I say to Kathy. ‘Yes’ she replies, ‘but can you imagine the egos?’. She’s got a point. We move on.

The gardens are lush, beautifully landscaped, and packed with history. People are remembered with simple plaques and stone monuments or by roses, shrubs and trees lining the paths. We look for people on the list of Notable Memorials – is Joyce Grenfell scattered on that part of the lawn? Is Sean O’Casey under that cedar tree? Where did they put Joe Orton?

We take a break in a tranquil space in the centre of the grounds, with Japanese maples, benches, an ornate bridge, and a lily pond full of jumping fish.

We sit and discuss when we first heard of Bolan, and what he means to us. I can’t remember when I first came across him as a rock phenomenon but it could only have been via two routes – Top of the Pops on TV, and the teenage magazine Jackie. I loved the music but it was more than this – it was his androgyny that attracted me, something he had in common with my later rock idols like David Bowie and Patti Smith. I wasn’t alone. Boy George cites him as a major influence, claims to have been at his funeral (although he was a 16 year old nobody at that point) and has a tattoo of Bolan on his left arm (Bowie is on the right arm). ‘They represented a kind of bohemian existence’ he says, ‘that I—at that point—could only imagine living.’

Marc was one of the key figures in what became known as Glam Rock. There were a lot of wannabes – beefy guys in bad makeup and wigs in bands like Sweet and Slade. Marc was the real deal. Girlie and gorgeous, petite, stars in his hair. Boyish and confident, brimming with sexual energy.

Journalist Charles Shaar Murray reviewed one of Bolan’s concerts for Cream Magazine in 1972 under the title Hello I’m Marc Bolan. I’m a superstar. You’d better believe it.1 Of the gig, at Wembley’s Empire Pool, he writes that ‘by the time I reach my seat I find a clump of little girls – very young, subteenyboppers – in and around it. When I request them to move, they glance at one another and then unanimously shake their heads…I’ve never been to a gig remotely like this.’

Neither had I. Reader, I was one of those girls, aged 14. I still have the ticket.

It’s great to read the review, even if Murray is sniffy about T Rex and says that ‘only Bolan’s unmistakable voice distinguishes it from a church hall support band’. I can’t recall any of the songs he played. All I can remember is standing precariously on one of the venue’s fold up plastic seats and screaming at the top of my lungs from the minute he came onstage to the moment he left.

‘The sound of T Rex’s audience is something new and frightful to me,’ said Murray. ‘Iwannit-Iwannit-Iwannit. Gimme,gimme,gimme’, they yell.’ Yep, that was me, and thousands of others.

Charles Shaar Murray interviewed Bolan later and didn’t like him, describing him as sitting there ‘like a little jewelled snake…a tiny, elegant steamroller, riding over all obstacles’.

It’s a view of him that persists – consummate performer, a bit of a shit human being. Kathy disagrees. She reminds me that while Bolan may have been difficult to his bandmates and friends, he was good to his fans, always giving value with his double b-side songs on his singles.

Marc Bolan and I are birthday twins, born exactly 10 years apart. He would have been 24 when I was yelling at him at Wembley. I once celebrated our joint birthday by going to see the tribute band T Rextasy. I was really only there to hear the hits, and remember being bored when singer Daniel Z said ‘now we’re gonna play the b-side to Jeepster’.

I didn’t realise then that the song, Life’s a Gas, had been part of a limited edition promotional disc for the Electric Warrior album, or that poor Marc had the misfortune of having to sing it with Cilla Black on her BBC TV show in 1973.

Kathy loves everything about T Rex (including the b-sides) and being a poet, she is drawn to the lyricism of Bolan’s music, going back to his days with percussionist Steve Peregrine Took when they were called Tyrannosaurus Rex and had a psychedelic/hippie/folk sound.

That all changed with their breakthrough hit Ride a White Swan in 1970. So next, we visit the most striking memorial to Bolan in the gardens. The bench is opposite a rose bed where his parents are commemorated, along with Bolan under his birth name, Mark Feld.

Kathy has brought a bunch of lavender from her garden, and we leave it on the bench, along with a handwritten note from her.

After our visit, Kathy writes a poem about why she left this token of appreciation. She’s let me share it here:

The Son and the Star

Since I was twelve, I’ve known his favourite colour

so thought that I might bring an amethyst.

Or pick loosestrife or toadflax from the verge

as, after all, he was a flower child.

I settle for some lavender – home-grown

which will not droop or die

wrapped in brown paper to survive the train,

tied in the very yellowest of ribbons.

Words from the early songs have stayed with me.

I copy down two lines from Root of Star:

a jewel of frost that was lost

in days of dreams when we were free

and lay this tribute on the wooden bench

whose back rest is the spread wings of a swan

close to the rose bed with its simple plaque

where Phyllis, Simeon, and their younger son

rest in the earth. Marc, with a K

and the surname he was given at his birth.

© Kathryn Daszkiewicz 2025

You can check out more of Kathy’s amazing poetry on her website. She has a new collection coming out very soon.

Root of Star was on the 1970 album T Rex, the first under the band’s new name, and the first to explicitly signal the rock direction for Bolan. Check out the guitar on the album cover. It was his ‘Dylan goes electric’ moment.

Bolan soon ditched the folkie clothing for satin and sequins. The period that followed was incredibly successful for him and over the next three years he had a run of eleven UK top ten singles, including four at No 1 – Hot Love, Get It On, Telegram Sam and Metal Guru.

As part of my research, I find an interview that Bolan did around that time on Russell Harty’s TV chat show. He comes across as polite, intelligent and engaged with the audience. He is appreciative of his fans and talks about selling 100,000 records a day and imagining each individual person going into the shop to buy one. He’s also sanguine about fame - ‘if I’m a dustman tomorrow – tough’.

At the end of the interview Harty asks him: ‘Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think, in 20/30 years I’m going to be 50 or 60?’. Bolan replies, serious, thoughtful: ‘I don’t think I’ll live that long.’

In September 1977, a couple of weeks short of his 30^th birthday, Marc Bolan died in a car crash in Barnes, South West London, after a night out with his girlfriend Gloria Jones, who was injured in the accident. She recovered and is now living in Sierra Leone, where she is building The Marc Bolan School of Music and Film.

As well as the numerous memorials to him here in Golders Green, there are two at the crash site. Bolan’s son with Gloria Jones, Rolan, who was only two years old at the time of the accident, unveiled the bust of his father at the 25^th anniversary of his death.

Bolan’s funeral at the Crematorium was attended by many of his musical contemporaries, including Elton John, Keith Moon and David Bowie. The cover of the Daily Mirror for that day shows Rod Stewart being led away in tears. The centrepiece of the tributes was a white swan, 5ft tall and 4 ft long, made of chrysanthemums.

Bolan’s influence on those that followed has been huge. Four years after his death, journalist Barney Hoskyns2 saw Prince play in New York’s Ritz Ballroom and said it was ‘like seeing Marc Bolan and Jimi Hendrix in the same body.’

In 2022, a group of musician fans recorded a tribute album and made a film called AngelHeaded Hipster: The Song of Marc Bolan and T Rex. The line up included Nick Cave, whose version of Cosmic Dancer is particularly compelling.

Other artists in the tribute included Joan Jett, Beth Orton, U2, Elton John and Marc Almond, who, also born plain Mark, changed the spelling of his name to reflect his obsession with Bolan. His first number one hit in 1981 was his version of Tainted Love, a northern soul classic originally recorded by Gloria Jones in 1964.

After our visit, we sit over tea and cake back in Golders Green and talk about 16 September 2027, which will be the 50^th anniversary of Bolan’s death. There will be big gatherings at The Crematorium and in Barnes. Yet our pilgrimage, on a quiet Monday afternoon, has been perfect - two good friends walking and talking about youth, music, poetry and legacy.

Two days later, the streets of Birmingham are lined with Black Sabbath fans paying tribute to Ozzy Osborne. They are crying, inconsolable. It may be inexplicable to outsiders, but fans know that our musical idols hold a special place in our hearts and imaginations. They are part of the narrative of our lives.

As part of a recent trip to Cork, I caught the train to Cobh (pronounced Cove). The short journey winds down an estuary, where the River Lee, the lifeblood of the city, flows into Lough Mahon in Cork Harbour. The place names are evocative - Little Island, Fota, Carrigaloe – and the landscape is a mixture of watery retreats for herons and egrets next to houses and industrial units. Cobh itself was once known as Queenstown, in honour of Queen Victoria. It was renamed in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence.

People visit here for one, or all, of three reasons. They want to see the last calling point of the Titanic in 1912, or to learn about the rescue of passengers from the Lusitania in 1915. Or, like me, they want to understand its importance as a major emigration hub for the Irish in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

The stories attached to the shipping disasters are fascinating, and I may write about them some other time, but I was here to learn about emigration. The scale of the human traffic through Cobh is overwhelming to contemplate. It was the departure point for 2.5 million of the six million Irish people who left for North America between 1848 and 1950.

My father, and three of his brothers, were emigrants in the 1950s – three to England, including my dad, and one to the USA. I remember his sister telling me how, after they left, in quick succession, the house seemed empty and quiet and that she felt very lonely. By this point, most emigrants had the option of returning home for visits and holidays, as dad and his brothers did over the years that followed.

The peak of the exodus through Cobh was a century earlier, during the famine years. This was a one way journey driven by hunger, desperation, and the prospect of work on the other side.

The prospect of better paid work must have seemed mesmerising to those cowed by poverty and lack of opportunity. The emotional cost, however, was high. The Heritage Centre in Cobh contains stories of something I hadn’t come across before, the phenomenon of the ‘American Wake’. Like the traditional wake for the dead, this was a ritualistic farewell to a member of a close knit community, in this case leaving on foot, by pony and trap or by train, rather than in a coffin.

Standing on the dockside, I thought again of my aunt and the sadness she felt saying goodbye to her brothers. How must it have felt, a hundred years earlier, arriving in Cobh after this kind of heartbreaking send-off, taken from the National Folklore Collection:

The exploitation of migrants is as old as time, and criminals and traders in Cobh were quick to see the opportunities. A report on the state of the lodging houses in Queenstown in 1881 found four or five people in a bed, others on the floor and over 25 people in one tiny room.

In the same report, a doctor reported that ‘when the beds in the lodging houses are full an itinerant musician is introduced to attract the attention of ‘the sleepers’ who are encouraged to rise and join the dance in which those who have been unable to obtain sleeping accommodation are engaged. And when this ruse has succeeded in getting those in bed to vacate their places, the beds are then occupied by those who first commenced the dancing, so that the same bed or floor place may be occupied by different persons during the night.’

Once on board, conditions would be grim. At the height of the famine crisis, the demand for ships was so high that leaking and unseaworthy vessels were brought into use. These became known as ‘coffin ships’, and many never made it to their destination.

According to Cobh’s Heritage Centre, during the second half of the 19^th century, Irish emigrants were typically single and unskilled, and aged between 15 and 24. I was surprised to find that almost as many women as men made the journey. The first person to be processed through the new bureau of immigration on Ellis Island in New York in 1892 was 18 year old Annie Moore, along with her younger brothers. They are commemorated by a memorial on the dock.

Another memorial on the quay commemorates a social reformer called Charlotte Grace O’Brien, who campaigned for better support for emigrants, particularly women, who were exploited the over-priced, dangerous boarding houses in Cobh, on board ships and in the slums of New York. She established her own boarding house for women and girls, and wrote an influential article called Horrors of the Immigrant Ship for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1881. This forced the shipping companies to improve sanitary conditions, including ending the practice of steerage passengers sharing sleeping quarters with horses.

I was on the quay in Cobh to stand in the footsteps of my aunts’ uncles, my three great uncles, Michael (Mikey), Thomas and Walter (Waltie). They were three of five surviving children of my great grandparents, Alice Goggins, a milk vendor, and David Grant, a cattleman. Waterford’s port at that time was a hub for the cattle trade.

The three boys joined around 7,000 people who emigrated from Waterford to the USA in the early part of the 20^th century. Almost 110,000 had gone before them since 1851. I don’t know if they had an American Wake, but I have no doubt that their send off from the railway station would have been highly emotional. They would have travelled to Cork and then made the same train journey that I’d just taken.

Mikey worked as a messenger in Waterford before emigrating, aged 17, in 1905. Thanks to the History Centre at Ellis Island, it is straightforward to track arrivals.

His record tells us that he travelled on SS Baltic, one of the ships making the regular journey from Liverpool, via Ireland, to New York. The Baltic had new wireless technology and was one of the ships to pick up the distress signals from the Titanic seven years later, but it was too far away to intervene.

The 1910 US census shows Mikey living in Manhattan. He had a family there and died in 1966 (aged 78).

His brother Thomas emigrated four years later in 1909, aged just 14, on the SS Majestic, at that stage the largest ship in the world. Its manifest suggests he went to stay with Mikey in New York, who may well have paid for his ticket. Remittances were a huge part of the emigrant experience. In the second half of the 19^thcentury, the equivalent of £46m was sent back to Ireland from emigrants to America. Thomas was later drafted by the US Government and served in WW1 in France.

Waltie followed four years later, in 1913. I wonder what it felt like for a 17 year old to leave home, arrive in Cobh, and board a ship a year after the Titanic disaster? My aunt, a child at this point, remembers Waltie leaving. He also lived in New York City and had a family, one of whom later became a police officer.

All three brothers would have boarded their ships from the original pier at the White Star offices, which is still in place. Cobh remains a working port, and Saga’s Spirit of Adventure was docked a stone’s throw away. Coaches line the dockside to take visitors, often Americans and Canadians, for trips to the West of Ireland. Some will be tracing their Irish heritage from people who boarded right here.

Conditions on board ships had improved substantially by the time Mikey, Thomas and Waltie made the journey, partly as a result of the work of campaigners like Charlotte Grace O’Brien. They didn’t have to sleep with horses, but would have travelled third class. The Heritage Centre has photographs of the interiors of transatlantic vessels in that era. This was second class on a ship called the Saxonia.

Fairly reasonable for someone making a journey of up to a week. In contrast, this was third class on the Lusitania.

Before leaving Ireland for the last time, Mikey, Thomas and Waltie would have followed an emigrant tradition and walked the steep path up to St Colman’s Cathedral to take Mass. Nicknamed the Emigrants’ Cathedral, this Neo- Gothic beauty, like the tickets of many travellers, was funded largely on remittances from abroad. It is the tallest church in Ireland and also one of the costliest. It took 50 years to complete and was finished in 1919.

The spire was erected in 1911 and for anyone leaving after that date, it would have been the final landmark they saw before leaving Cobh.

Did teenage Waltie turn to look at this as he said goodbye to his homeland forever?

This week has been Love your Burial Ground Week, run by the charity Caring for God's Acre, so I visited the graveyard at St Wulfran’s Church in Ovingdean, a village between the eastern edge of Brighton and the much larger settlement of Rottingdean.

I went on a warm summer morning, just me and the dog, walking up the lane just as a runner was coming off the South Downs. I have done that many times, passing the church without stopping and heading towards the sea and the Undercliff Path leading back to Brighton.

St Wulfran’s is mentioned in the Domesday Book as an ecclesiola or ‘little church’, and although dating from Norman times, was probably built on the site of a Saxon church. Its door is shaded by a 1000 year old yew. This, like the other trees nearby, was alive with the trill of wrens, tiny birds with a mighty song.

Like the wren, this small graveyard punches above its weight, holding the remains of souls spanning ten centuries and more. It is divided into old and new sections, the newer part still a working cemetery.

The earliest recorded burial is 1606, although there would have been interments here from the 10^th century. A guide to St Wulfran’s says that gravestones only became popular after the Reformation. Even then, they were only for the rich, who also liked to be buried within churches so that their remains would not be disturbed.

Public Health law in the 1850s saw the development of garden cemeteries outside towns, like the ones in Brighton and Falmouth. This also put a stop to burials within churches. Yet many people still didn’t like the idea of their final resting place being in what was, in the early days, essentially a field. As Brighton churchyards were closed to new burials, residents other than Ovingdean parishioners opted to be buried here.

The most famous is Magnus Volk, whose modest grave belies his vision and achievements.

Born in Brighton in 1851 and buried in Ovingdean in 1937, Volk was an inventor and engineer. If he was still alive, he would probably be deeply insulted now to be compared to someone like Elon Musk, but he rivalled Trump’s erstwhile friend for entrepreneurial zeal, including building several electric cars.

Magnus Volk on his electric dog cart, 1897

In 1883, Volk built a transit system that is now the oldest operational electric railway in the world, transporting people from Brighton Pier along towards the Marina during the season. The Heritage Railway Association voted it Railway of the Year last year.

I’ve been on the Volks Railway many times, but if I could travel back in time I would ride on his invention that was, quite literally, ‘out there’. Not content with the reach of his electric railway, he wanted to extend it to Ovingdean and beyond. The small matter of a set of cliffs made this impossible, so Volk decided to go out instead of up. He invented the Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway, which carried a train called Pioneer along rails on the seabed, and which quickly became known as the Daddy Long Legs.

Combining vision, engineering, financial acumen and tremendous perseverance in the face of challenges, Volk opened his Seashore Railway in 1896. Almost immediately, it was damaged by a storm which also destroyed Brighton’s Chain Pier. He managed to get it open again for the following summer and in 1897 it carried nearly 45,000 passengers. Visual and performance artist Luciana Haill has completed a project where she imagines what it would have been like to be on the Daddy Long Legs and her video gives a sense of the excitement of riding the waves.

Unlike Musk, Volk wasn’t a self-saboteur, but other forces conspired to close the attraction in 1901 – adverse weather, technical glitches and the local council’s insistence on building sea defences along the route. If you stand at Brighton Marina at low tide, as I did this week, you can see all that remains of his vision – the bases of the rails. They still survive all the way to Rottingdean.

Volk is the star attraction in this graveyard, but even more interesting and intriguing are three women buried here. Tucked away against a wall at the front of the churchyard is Helena Normanton, born in 1882 and buried along with her husband, in 1957.

She had a rough start in life when her parents separated, and her father died. Her mother brought up her two daughters alone and moved to Brighton to run a boarding house.

Helena caught the legal bug when she was 12 and went with her mother to a solicitor’s appointment. When her mother didn’t understand the legal advice, Helena explained it, leading the solicitor to remark, ‘quite the little lawyer’.

Her mother died six years later, and Helena supported her sister, ran the boarding house, trained as a teacher and then graduated with first class honours in history from London University. When her application to become a trainee barrister at the Middle Temple was refused, she took her case to the House of Lords. A year later, legislation was passed that allowed women to enter the profession, and her legal career began.

She became the first woman to join an Inn, practice at the Bar, appear in the High Court and at the Old Bailey. Although she never became a judge, she was one of the first two female KCs in England and Wales.

Helena married in 1924 and in doing so, scored another first. Do you notice anything unusual about her headstone?

When Helena married, she kept her own surname. In doing so, she became the first British married woman to have a passport in the name she was born with.

She did change her name once – to Cowdray Browne, a pen name she used to write a romantic detective novel. This supplemented her income from legal work, along with writing true crime books with titles such as The Trial of Norman Thorne: the Crowborough chicken farm murder. She broke the glass ceiling and paved the way for many women to follow, but even ‘quite the little lawyer’ didn’t make anywhere near as much money as the men.

Helena’s grave is unassuming, but you can’t miss the ornate and imposing family tomb to the Jex-Blake family as you come into the cemetery.

The Jex-Blakes were a very wealthy family. Sophia Jex-Blake, born in 1840 in Hastings, is acknowledged on the tomb for her death in 1912, but is buried elsewhere, for reasons that will become apparent.

Like Helena, Sophia refused to accept the barriers put in the way of women’s advancement. In 1869 she applied to study medicine at Edinburgh University and was told that it couldn’t make arrangements, ‘in the interest of one lady’. So she advertised in national newspapers and recruited six more applicants, and eventually, ‘the Edinburgh Seven’ as they were known, were admitted to the medical school.

During their studies, the Seven were subjected to insults and obscene letters from men and when they came to sit their anatomy exams, an angry mob of 200 male students protested, in what became known as the Surgeons’ Hall Riot.

Although this attracted national coverage and led to more support for the women, including from scientists like Charles Darwin, the University and the courts eventually decided that the women couldn’t graduate as they shouldn’t have been admitted in the first place.

Most of them went abroad and graduated at European medical schools, including Sophia, who qualified in Berne in Switzerland in 1877. During this period the Medical Act was passed, allowing women to enter the profession.

Sophia set up the London School of Medicine for Women before she qualified and after graduating, practised as a doctor and set up another Women’s School of Medicine in Edinburgh, along with a Women’s Hospital there.

The wealthy Jex-Blakes were not in favour of Sophia’s campaigning or her desire for a ‘salaried’ job. They wanted her to settle down and get married. She responded very delicately by recording in her diary that:

In fact, all Sophia’s significant relationships were with women, including with Octavia Hill, the social reformer, to whom she wrote heartfelt letters. After giving up medicine in 1898, she retired and moved to Sussex, where she lived with Dr Margaret Todd.

Photograph of Margaret Todd taken around 1916. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Margaret had trained at the Edinburgh School of Medicine set up by Sophia and was also a novelist, writing under a male pseudonym. When Sophia died, Margaret was executor of her estate and wrote her biography, in which she never mentioned her own role in her partner’s life. She died a few years later in 1918, and they are buried together in the churchyard in St Denys in Rotherfield, East Sussex.

The third woman I came to see proved to be elusive. I knew she was buried with her husband, Major Wilfred Brown, that her grave was behind the church and that the lettering on her headstone was hard to read. So hard that I couldn’t find it.

She is another of those remarkable women, like Adelaide O'Keeffe, who has left a very feint imprint on Brighton’s history. Unlike Adelaide, I couldn’t even find a picture of her. All that exists are photos of a café she ran in Ovingdean, just around the corner from the church.

Her name was Mimi Brown, and she was an Austrian refugee and aunt of historian Eric Hobsbawn. She opened the Old Vienna Café just after World War One, and ran it until she died in 1973.

The café was a favourite stopping off point for people walking on the South Downs. Very little is known about Mimi and what there is has been captured by the website MyBrightonandHove, which has some recollections of young women who worked there.

One remembers that: ‘Mrs Brown made the most wonderful apple strudel. I remember watching her roll out the filo pastry and telling me that when you could read newspaper print through it, it was thin enough.’

This girl also recalls that Mimi had geese running loose when the café was closed, because she believed that they were better than guard dogs. ‘They had other uses too If we got too many customers in the café, and we were running short of Apfel Strudel or cream, Mimi would let the geese out and they would chase the customers away.’

The Old Vienna was more than just a café. Mimi also had a series of wooden sheds for rent. These ‘chalets’, each with its own Viennese name, were wallpapered and kitted out with beds, sinks, cookers and kettles. The tenants seemed only to be men.

One girl remembers them as ‘a lot of actors who used to come down from London.’ Another says that: ‘She rented out the wooden chalets to single men, some of whom were quite peculiar. One day, one of them ran amok with a large knife and I was told to run to the telephone box and call for the police. That was great excitement for Ovingdean. Luckily, no one was hurt’.

It is probably not a stretch to assume that Mimi offered a rural sanctuary in her chalets for gay men from Brighton, London and beyond. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 partially decriminalised homosexuality, but only for adults over 21 in private places. This wasn’t a legalisation of gay sex. In the decade after the Act was passed, the police doubled down on other offences, and prosecutions for offences such as gross indecency tripled. Her great nephew, responding the memories shared on the website, said that ‘I think she was definitely a pioneer in Brighton, being a centre for ‘sexual freedoms’. Mimi would probably be pleased to know that St Wulfran’s now advertises itself as an inclusive church.

I’d love a trip back in time to meet Mimi and try some of her legendary Apfel Strudel. She sounds like a woman who had a full life. She also ran spiritualist evenings attended by ‘celebrities’ and would make charms and tell fortunes. I feel like I have unfinished business with this lady. I am going to find her grave and track down more information about her.

Mimi was in her eighties when she died, and the council demolished the café soon afterwards. The plot is now a house and hosts the only restaurant in Ovingdean, the Wild Flour Pizzeria. I have no idea whether their pizza dough is thin enough to read a newspaper through, or whether they set geese on their customers at busy times, but I’m sure that the spirit of Mimi is keeping an eye on the operation.

I was in Manchester to go to a gig at the Factory International arts centre, and I never miss the opportunity to visit an old cemetery. I’m not miserable like the Sage of Salford, so I was grateful for sunshine on the day I visited, but soon realised that I’d come in at the wrong end of the site to find the grave I was looking for. The Southern Cemetery, opened in 1879, is now one of the largest in Europe.

Over 365,000 souls rest here, and I was overwhelmed walking among them as parakeets screeched in the trees above me. Perhaps a newcomer to Manchester might have felt like this in the late 19^th century, arriving to look for work in the factories and textile mills and realising what a tiny speck of disposable humanity they were in vast, smoke-belching Cottonopolis.

I was the only living soul around, apart from the parakeets, so I headed towards a weathered, sandstone building which turned out to be the gothic East Chapel, one of six structures listed by Historic England. From there, and with the aid of a basic map I’d downloaded, I found my bearings.

The Southern Cemetery is rated ‘Outstanding’ by Britain in Bloom, and is more manicured than other graveyards which date from the 19^th century. After some aimless wandering, with the soundscape changing from squawks to the gentler song of thrushes, I came across the original Victorian section.

It’s the only part of the cemetery that has been left to grow wild and was covered in bluebells. There is a sense of the scale of life and death in the city. The Garden Cemetery approach was designed to cope with overcrowding in churchyards, yet here the graves are crammed together. Manchester was home to the vast majority of the cotton industry in the UK and its population increased by 500% between 1800 and 1850. The mortality rate was 50% higher than the national average. TB and cholera were big killers.

Near to the Victorian section is the grave of one of the era’s eminent Mancunians, John Rylands, who made millions from textiles. An industrialist and philanthropist, he was buried here in 1888.

He’s not who I had come to see. I was looking for a relatively new resident, born in Salford and as worthy of the title of Eminent Mancunian as Rylands, for different reasons. A short walk away lay Anthony H Wilson, who died in 2007 of a heart attack, aged 57.

Photo credit: Simon King

I first came across Tony Wilson in 1976, when he appeared on my television screen presenting Granada’s So It Goes. I had never seen anything like it. There were only two TV shows about pop music back then. You could watch Top of the Pops, with its appalling miming, terrible dancing and gurning Radio One DJs, or tune in to The Old Grey Whistle Test, where beardy Bob Harris could barely disguise his distaste at some of the acts he was having to present. The Guardian lists the appearance of the New York Dolls on the show as one of its 50 key events in the history of indie music. Admittedly they were miming too. Harris described it as ‘mock rock.’ A certain Stephen Morrissey may well have been watching. He went on to be president of the Dolls’ fan club.

Photograph: David Warner Ellis

In the midst of this cultural desert, Tony Wilson reached out his hand and said, ‘It doesn’t have to be like this. Come with me.’ In a world before music videos and the internet, So It Goes was the only place a 17 year old like me could actually see the performers I was reading about in the New Musical Express, my only lifeline to another world. Wilson was intelligent, urbane and witty and his show featured acts like the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and cultural commentators like journalist Clive James.

It was groundbreaking, yet only ran for two seasons. Wilson, perhaps fittingly for a cultural catalyst, was hoist by his own petard. He showed live footage from Iggy Pop’s show at Manchester Apollo which opened with Iggy yelling ‘I love fucking Manchester, I love it,’ and then delivering what we would now rate as a classic performance. I don’t remember seeing it in 1977, but it was too much for the Granada bosses and they cancelled the third season of So It Goes. You can watch the footage, and the interview Tony Wilson did with Iggy, here.

Wilson went on to present shows about music and politics, to co-found Factory Records in 1978, and coin the phrase ‘Madchester’ to describe the area’s musical and cultural ethos. A century after the city was defined by dark satanic mills, profit and disease, it was reinvented as the home of indie music, acid house and ecstasy.

The "Madchester" wordtype, as it appeared on the Madchester Rave On EP for the Happy Mondays. It was subsequently adopted as a "logo" for the Madchester cultural movement.

Wilson went on to open The Hacienda nightclub in 1982. Although the building no longer exists, Historic England named it as one of the 100 places that tell the remarkable story of England and its impact on the world. It sits in the top ten alongside places like Shakespeare’s birthplace, Abbey Road studios and the Bronte parsonage in Yorkshire.

Ben Kelly, who designed the interior of the Hacienda, gave an insight into how Tony Wilson’s brain worked when he wrote an account of the opening night of the club1:

‘Tony Wilson in his infinite wisdom, had the northern comedian Bernard Manning as one of the opening acts. He was a very large, overweight, crude, vulgar northern comedian who ran a big and successful club called the Embassy Club, a cabaret place, and he had a reputation in the north of England. He came onto the stage and took a look around – and I don’t know if he even started his first joke – but the audience were rather taken aback with Bernard Manning being there, and he just looked at me and said “I’ve played some fucking shitholes in my time, but this beats the lot of them,” and walked off stage and handed his money back! And a cheer went up. It was chalk and cheese and it was like Tony had put the most unlikely person into the spotlight knowing that some fireworks were going to go off, and they did.’

Kelly, together with Peter Saville who designed many of Factory Records’ album covers, went on to design Tony Wilson’s headstone. His casket had already been given a Factory catalogue number - FAC 501. The headstone was installed, three years late, in 2010.

The memorial is a very simple, beautiful piece of polished black granite that is so shiny you can’t take a photograph of it face on without seeing yourself reflected back.

The grave sits in a row between John Howarth, Justice of the Peace, who died in 1926, and a physician, john Wilson Hamill, who died in 1917. Quite the picture of Mancunian respectability.

One of the reasons Wilson’s family wanted him laid to rest here in the Southern Cemetery was that other people from the Factory era are buried here too. Martin Hannett, who produced many of the records on the label, died in 1991, aged 42, of heart failure. Rob Gretton, manager of Joy Division and New Order, died in 1999, aged 46, of a heart attack. TB and cholera are a thing of the past, but life expectancy hadn’t really improved much since Victorian times for the 24 hour party people.

There is a dedication on Tony Wilson’s grave from a novel, The Manchester Man, written three years before the southern cemetery opened:

‘Mutability is the epitaph of words

Change alone is changeless

People drop out of the history of life as of a land

though their work and their influence remains.’

Tony Wilson had an enormous influence on me. We have so much to thank him for – the music certainly, but also his sense of passion about people and places. He threaded music, culture and politics together as deftly as a worker operating a loom in the cotton mills. A century after John Rylands, he reinvented what it meant to be an entrepreneur and a Mancunian.

Poet Mike Garry said that ‘when Anthony H Wilson died in August 2007, I knew the world would never be the same. Tony Wilson built the modern Manchester.’ So much so that the new arts venue, Factory International, is dedicated to his legacy.

His spirit is captured perfectly in a poem called Ode to St Anthony written by Mike Garry and set to music by Joe Duddell. It was released as a single in 2015 with all profits going to the charitable fund of Christie Cancer Hospital, where Wilson died. A video, made by Soup Collective, features a range of Wilson fans and colleagues, including Iggy Pop.

After leaving his grave, I passed a much newer addition to the group of people buried here. Andy Rourke, bassist of the Smiths, was laid to rest here in 2023 after dying of cancer aged 59.

Like other members of the band, he’d had a stormy relationship with Morrisey and was sacked by him, via a handwritten note left on his car windscreen, in 1986. He was reinstated a few weeks later and shortly afterwards, the band released their third album The Queen Is Dead. Track 5, Side One is Meet Me At The Cemetry Gates:

So we go inside, and we gravely read the stones
All those people, all those lives.

My trip to The Hague was different. It has never been on my radar. I knew nothing about the city. So when a group of friends doing the parkrun Alphabet challenge1 suggested we go there to do Zuiderpark parkrun, I said yes. A weekend mooching in The Hague was going to be a pleasant by-product of the main plan.

Reader, we did not do the parkrun. The event, on Saturday morning, was cancelled at the last minute. We could have gone to nearby Delft to run there, but, like Lemony Snicket, we were thwarted by a series of unfortunate events. These included missed trams, unreliable Ubers and a serious amount of faffing.

What we did, over the weekend, was walk the equivalent of a marathon distance and drink in the sights and sounds of a city that slowly revealed itself to us. We became not runners but flaneurs, people who saunter around observing society.

I knew that the Netherlands was a colonial power in Asia and founded the Dutch East India Company. From visiting the Mauritshuis, I now know there was also a Dutch West India Company. Johan Maurits built a house in the centre of The Hague in the 17^th century while he was governor general of the Dutch colony in Brazil. The house was nicknamed The Sugar Palace because Maurits’s income came from the sweet stuff. In his time as governor, 24,000 enslaved people were brought from Africa to Brazil to work on the sugar cane plantations.

The Mauritshuis is now a small, but world class museum and many people come here for one reason – to see The Girl With a Pearl Earring. More specifically, to queue in front of equally impressive artworks from the Golden Age of Dutch painting while looking at their phones, and then to take a selfie in front of Vermeer’s masterpiece before leaving, barely glancing at the other paintings in the room.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring is a ‘tronie’ – an imagined figure, not a portrait of a real woman. There was a portrait of an actual girl that entranced me more - Girl By A Highchair, painted by Govert Flinck. A strange little girl stands by a table with sweet treats, another nod to the sugar story.

It was commissioned by the girl’s parents. I wondered whether they liked the finished work, though I imagine you don’t complain if it’s painted by one of Rembrandt’s star pupils. It’s an eerie portrait. The eyes of The Girl With a Pearl Earring are said to follow you round the room. The Girl By A Highchair is more likely to follow you round in your nightmares if you look at her for too long. During the Second World War, some treasures from the museum were spirited away or hidden in basements to keep them out of the grasp of the Nazis. This portrait wasn’t one of them.

Another distinctive building was the headquarters of the Netherlands Bank, now an upmarket hotel.

Someone told us that it may have been the inspiration for Gringott’s Bank in Harry Potter, although if I had a pound for every time someone had claimed that a place had inspired JK Rowling, I’d have enough money to buy a bank. Apparently the vintage safes have been retained in the hotel rooms and the old vault in the basement is now a cocktail bar. I was drawn to the door and its promise of a portal to another world.

Not far from the Mauritshaus is a very different type of building. Built in 1959 by the Hungarian American Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, it was once the American Embassy. It’s now called West Den Haag and is a centre for arts and cultural events.

It will also be the home of the Escher Museum, dedicated to the work of the Dutch graphic artist. The building was one of Breuer’s first and is described as a symbol of Pax Americana, two words that wouldn’t be applied to the USA just now. I absolutely loved its brutalist style and trapezium-shaped windows.

On the Saturday that we were there, a huge flower market took place in front of the old embassy to mark Koningsdag, the celebrations of the birthday of Willem Alexander, King of the Netherlands since 2013. The festivities started on the Friday night when the city was filled with sound stages hosting different types of music.

Everyone was dressed in orange and many were swigging Heineken, which surely only the Dutch still believe is probably the best lager in the world. The Hague was packed with people in high spirits but there was no edge, maybe due to the cloud of cannabis smoke that hung in the air.

The Saturday was all about the markets. King’s Day is the one day of the year where you can sell goods on the street without a permit or having to pay tax. People set up impromptu stall selling their old goods, orange cakes and drinks, or artisan products.

I was amazed that people were allowed to set up anywhere, including right outside the Royal Palace. Apparently members of the Dutch royal family have been known to buy from the flea markets and the former Queen Beatrix once bought a lamp here.

My favourite place to browse in The Hague was a gorgeous bookshop called Bookstur, just along from the Royal Palace.

It had that unbeatable combination of books, coffee and outside space, along with nooks where you could sit for a while, play chess or just read.

Many of the books for sale had beautifully designed covers, like this volume of poetry I bought to take home. If someone puts that much effort into their shop, the least you can do is buy a book.

There’s so much more I could say about The Hague – the friendly people, the spotless streets, the beach which is a tram-ride from the city centre, the fact that there are more bicycles than cars.

Before I went away I had been reading a book called Tender Maps by Alice Maddicot where she examines our emotional and creative responses to place. She says that for us to truly travel, we should think of places ‘as companions, not destinations’. I never had The Hague on my destination list, but over the course of a weekend it was like meeting a new friend and discovering, by exploring mutual interests, that you like each other a lot.

I’d go back to The Hague and spend more time with my new companion. Apart from anything else, there is still the matter of that parkrun Z to achieve…

I wrote about The Museum of the Mind in South London a few weeks ago, when I visited the exhibition of Charlotte Johnson Wahl's paintings. I wanted to write more, because it had a deep effect on me.

It’s not an easy place to reach. I got off the train at East Croydon, sat at the bus stop among scrawny pigeons pecking at empty food wrappers, and waited for the SL5, a creaky old bus that loops round suburban Croydon and Beckenham. I got off right outside the Royal Bethlem Hospital, which sits on a large, sprawling site housing the museum and a range of NHS mental health services.

This is the fourth home of the Royal Bethlem. Established in Bishopsgate in the City of London as a priory in 1247, it moved to Moorfields in 1676 and again in 1815 to Southwark, to what is now the site of the Imperial War Museum. It relocated to Beckenham in the 1920s. During the lifetime of the NHS, it merged with the Maudsley and is now the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust.

This was the ‘Bedlam’ of public imagination, a scene shown in The Madhouse, in 1734, the last painting of William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress series. The fictional Tom Rakewell dies in the Royal Bethlem.

This dystopian world is a long way from the current site, a series of low rise buildings set in landscaped grounds. The Museum, opened in 2015, is in an art deco building in the middle. The entrance is flanked with cheerful primulas, planted in neat rows.

The low key nature of the Museum, and its suburban location, adds to the charm. It’s run by volunteers, one of whom greeted me. She was explaining the history of the two imposing statues on either side of the grand staircase, when a woman came over and interrupted her. ‘Can you tell me – my husband wants to know actually – were there more mad people in those days or are there more now?’ she demanded.

The volunteer hesitated, then gently started to explain that definitions of what we understand to be ‘madness’ have changed over the centuries. The woman, impatient, interrupted again and said, ‘oh well, I suppose we’re all mad really,’ and wandered off to find her husband.

This is a place of acceptance, so the volunteer and I exchanged the briefest of smiles and she carried on telling me about the statues. Made by Caius Gabriel Cibber in Portland stone, they stood at the gates of the Royal Bethlem when it was in Moorfields. They were never officially named, but were known as Raving and Melancholia, the binary nature of mental health diagnoses at that time. You were either manic, or miserable.

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the Royal Bethlem was one of the ‘sights of London’, and public visits were allowed. The governors hoped they would increase understanding of their work. As I made my way up the sweeping staircase, I passed one of the collection boxes used to encourage visitors to support the upkeep of the hospital.

A ticketing system was later introduced, to try and filter out those that had simply come to gawp at the ‘lunatic poor’. In Hogarth’s portrait, the well-dressed ladies reflect the fact that such visits were treated as a social occasion, an entertaining day out. Unrestricted public access was finally banned in 1770.

The museum itself is small, bright and airy, with seating areas looking out over the grounds and walls decorated with Rorschach ink blots, representing the personality test designed to provide insight into patients’ minds.

The tone in places felt a little too upbeat to my cynical ear, knowing how broken mental health services are in this country. There was discussion of appropriate terminology, sections on the concepts of recovery and how patients are now more involved in their own treatment and record-keeping.

Some of it felt ghoulish, and yet compelling. I chose not to take photos of items of restraint like straightjackets, manacles and a wire mesh contraption to deter masturbation. It felt voyeuristic to look at, let alone photograph, pictures of Victorian patients looking deranged. There are descriptions and artefacts related to treatments such as bleeding and purging and the use of insulin coma therapy and ECT (electroconvulsive therapy, still in use in some circumstances).

I wondered, does the cover story of visiting a museum give us permission to gawp at the lunatic poor, just in a more respectable form?

There are interactive exhibits. A short film invites visitors to make a decision on the line between freedom and constraint. The scenario, performed by actors, is of a young woman with depression and suicidal thoughts who is currently a voluntary patient at the hospital. She begs to be allowed home for the weekend and assures the clinicians that she’s feeling much better after taking medication. Her parents are against the idea. Should she be allowed to go home? Yes or No?

I pressed the No button with the force of someone playing WhackAMole. This exhibit invited in a ghost from my past. I lost a friend a few years ago when she disappeared while on ‘day release’ from the mental health unit where she was being treated for a series of psychotic episodes. Her body was found days later, washed up in the sea. I had seen her between bouts of hospitalisation, and she didn’t seem to be improving. Her death was followed by an inquest which recorded an open verdict and concluded that the mental health trust’s services were ‘sluggish’.

The result of the poll flashed up on the screen. I was surprised that only 59% of people agreed with me. There was no information on what the ‘real’ outcome would have been, because this was a fictional scenario and because there are no absolutes. Ultimately, we put our trust in professionals to make the decisions.

My friend was an artist, although she didn’t paint while in hospital. There are many examples in the Museum of the work of artists who were patients here at the Maudsley, like Charlotte Johnson Wahl. Victorian painter Richard Dadd was held in the ‘criminal wing’ at the Royal Bethlem after killing his father in 1843. He had been convinced that his father was the devil in disguise.

Artist Louis Wain, born in South London in 1860, became famous in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries for his anthropomorphised cat pictures, which appeared in print, books, postcards and popular media.

Despite his talent and fame, he was an eccentric and a poor businessman, and ended up in poverty after World War One, and seriously mentally unwell. He lived at the Royal Bethlem for a while in the 1920s. He had many fans, including Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and writer HG Wells, who said that:

‘He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.’

The Museum staged an exhibition of his work in 2021, to coincide with the release of a film about him, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, starring Benedict Cumberbatch (with a cameo of HG Wells played by Nick Cave).

The links between creativity and mental health are explored throughout the Museum.

There is an excellent set of photographs from an exhibition by Brian Moody held in 2002 called 1 in 4, a reference to the fact that a quarter of the population will have a mental health issue at some point in their lives. One of his subjects was the poet and critic Al Alvarez, who attempted suicide and later wrote about it in his book The Savage God.

It was the photo next to Alvarez’s that summoned another ghost from my past. The picture and the accompanying text told the story of Emma, diagnosed with schizophrenia in her university years. The symptoms and behaviours she described – paranoia, stripping naked, being convinced that she was God, and then that she was possessed by the devil –were utterly familiar to me. She could have written the script for the trauma that engulfed a close friend of mine after she left university at the end of the 1970s, only a few years after Charlotte Johnson Wahl was a patient at the Maudsley.

We were a tight knit group of friends from school days, and we had never encountered mental illness in this raw form. This was mania, raving like the Cibber statue, red in tooth and claw. She was sectioned many times in the local ‘mental hospital’ as everyone called it, a place that we had walked past every day on our way to school but was completely unknown to us. I visited her there a couple of times and found it frightening and alien, our own local version of Bedlam. She was druggily content there, for a while at least.

Our support, sincere at first, well-meaning but hopelessly ill-informed, gradually drained away. If she was trapped in her own psychosis, we were bewildered, lost in our response to it. We all walked away eventually – her friends, her boyfriend, her family. Her behaviour was impossible to bear. Too extreme, unknowable.

Emma’s story, and the memories it uncovered, made me move to a corner of the museum where seats look out through full length windows over the peaceful gardens. I needed to take some deep breaths. When I visit the museum of my own mind, that section is a dark place, full of guilt and confusion. It’s impossible to overstate how little we knew about mental health. No-one talked about it in those days. We had no vernacular and no factual understanding. We were ill-equipped by virtue of age, time and circumstance.

Later in life my friend married and had a child, but she was never free of her illness. She rang me once to tell me that she was pregnant, only to have her young teenage daughter take the phone from her and say to me, in a kind, patient and resigned voice, ‘don’t worry, mum’s not pregnant, she’s just making it up again’. She died in her 50s of heart problems, shortly after returning from a visit abroad to see her daughter who was now grown up and settled overseas.

At her funeral, her younger sister, who looked just like her, walked through the door. It was as if the earlier version of our friend, the one we loved and understood, had been resurrected. We were mourning not just the woman we’d lost, but the girl she had been before the disease took hold.

The writer and performer David Sedaris wrote an essay called The Spirit World, about his sister Tiffany, who was diagnosed as bipolar and eventually took her own life. In his first draft, he left out a significant detail. In his second draft, which became the published version, he revealed it1. He hadn’t spoken to Tiffany in years when, ‘she came to a show I did in Boston and she came to the stage door, and I had the stage manager close the door in her face.’

He talked about how difficult her behaviour was, and how he felt he couldn’t recover enough from a conversation with her to continue on tour for another month. He never saw or spoke to her again before she died. He said that he got two types of response from readers when the essay was published. The first was: ‘I don’t ever want to read your books again – you’re a monster.’ But just as many contacted him to say: ‘I have a Tiffany in my family, and I know exactly what you mean’.

My friend was a Tiffany. I thought about this after I left the museum and sat in the café, which wasn’t a museum café but just the canteen for patients and staff at the Maudsley. There was probably a Tiffany there. There are many around us every day - in mental health facilities, in Accident and Emergency Departments, in police cells, on the streets. Is the treatment better now than it was in the 1970s and 80s?

Are we now more knowledgeable and compassionate? Or do we still, if we can, walk away from the bedlam?

I hadn’t thought about my friend for years and yet that day she stood before me, like an AI-reconstructed entity. Proof that the Museum of the Mind is a profound and special place.

The Museum of the Mind is free, and open to the public Wed – Sat. The current exhibition is called Crisis Point and is an artistic perspective on the intersection of mental illness and the criminal justice system.

I don’t remember exactly why I became a Lockdown cliché, but I know when it happened. I started sea swimming in April 2020, probably driven by boredom and frustration, like many other people back then. Maybe I took a look at the sea and thought – Boris Johnson, you’re not taking that away from me too.

Most years, I would have a dip from July onwards and stop around September. Some years, I didn’t go in at all. That year, I thought I’d just start a bit earlier. In spring 2020, the weather was gorgeous –a flat, calm sea shimmered in the sun. The water looked inviting, seductive.

Do you want to know what it felt like at that time of year? Songwriter Jimmy Webb once wrote a song called The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Substitute the word ‘sea’ for ‘moon’. That’s how it felt. Cruel. Glacial. The water had lured me in, only to make my blood freeze, my skin burn with cold, my feet go numb.

So far, so painful. I just needed to acclimatise, I told myself. Being a runner, I applied a training logic to swimming – keep at it, do a little more each time, and you’ll improve.

I started swimming regularly, extending the amount of time I was in the water each time, then getting out, throwing on my coat over my wet costume, and walking home. Soon I was feeling lightheaded, finding it difficult to complete basic tasks once I got back. Getting a spoon out of the drawer to eat my breakfast was beyond my mental capability. I was shivering for the rest of the day.

When you run, your body makes a decision – shut down major functions like digestion to allow all the blood to flow to your legs. When you swim in cold water, the body makes a different choice – focus on keeping your core warm by shutting down circulation to your skin. Once you get out, this cold layer starts to affect your core, so you feel colder ten minutes after your swim than you felt during it. It’s called afterdrop1.

You can find out about this phenomenon in two ways. By being sensible and reading about it before you begin swimming in cold water, or by giving yourself hypothermia and wondering why you’ve put all your clothes on back to front.

I had chosen the experiential learning route. I don’t recommend it.

Eventually I learnt the basics: don’t stay in the water for too long. Get undressed quickly. Wear lots of warm layers. Sip a hot drink to heat your core from within. Move around.

What followed was what you’d get if you drew a picture of a sea swimmer during Lockdown. You could draw one, even if you’ve never been near the sea, because we were everywhere, including all over the media, along with the first-time paddleboarders, kayakers and all the other stereotypes spawned in those manic times.

Yes, your picture of me is accurate – a woman of a certain age in a Dryrobe and a bobble hat, sipping a flask of tea on the shore after an invigorating dip.

I had the gear, I’d joined the tribe, temporarily at least. Having got through the challenge of spring swimming, my plan was to enjoy the warmer water of summer and then stop, probably around my birthday at the end of September. My friend Clare, an experienced sea swimmer, was enthusiastic. ‘September is the best month,’ she said. ‘The sea is at its warmest.’ Great, I thought, I’ll finish on a high.

‘So enjoy it’ she continued, ‘and then…’

Why is there always a ‘then?’

‘When October comes around, say to yourself - just one more swim. If you say that every time you go in, you’ll gradually acclimatise to the change in water temperature. You’ll be swimming into next Spring before you know it.’

I love Clare. She is a source of much joy and wisdom. But on this matter, I knew she was categorically wrong. I’d endured the April baptism of cold water, but I hate the winter, and I hate the cold. I have friends who say, ‘just throw on another layer!’ as an excuse for not turning up the central heating. They are masochistic Spartans whose homes should not be visited between November and May. I even hate lukewarm coffee and food.

In that moment, it seemed rude to tell Clare just how wrong she was, especially as we were bobbing about in the waves in July. We dried off on the beach and had a glass of fizz and she told me how she’d seen a dolphin the day before. Life was good.

After my birthday on the last day of September, the weather was still warm, and the sea remained delightful.

An earworm burrowed its way into my head: ‘just one more swim’.

Damn you, Clare. Thank you, Clare. For here I am, the person who hates the cold, having swum all year round now for five full years. It turns out that the ‘just one more swim’ mantra is a bit like the excuse people make when they are trying to give up smoking, or drinking. I’ll just have one more hit of the drug then I’ll stop. I’ll definitely stop.

I didn’t stop, and now I am addicted to sea swimming. I discovered the joys of neoprene gloves and boots and the camaraderie of Brighton’s amazing Salty Seabirds community.

I realised how serious it had all become when early one January morning, when the sea conditions were so calm that I had swum for ten consecutive days, I was on the beach with friends, getting dry round the fire. A group of people on the Promenade, wrapped up in their coats and hats, were looking across the beach, pointing. We turned and followed their gaze. What had they seen? A seal? Someone in trouble in the water? It was only when there was nothing to see that we realised they were looking at us. We were the talking point. A bunch of women crazy enough to be in the sea in the middle of winter.

Psychologists call it the normalisation of deviance.

Since those heady days of Lockdown and its immediate aftermath, some of my original group of swimming friends have fallen off the All Year Round Wagon. Returning to normal work hours, illness, pressures of life – sometimes there are just too many other demands. And any extended break from the water, especially in winter, does make you question whether this is a sensible life choice.

My solution is to get back in as soon as I can after any brief layoff. It’s always worth it. Over the last five years, I have had so many wonderful experiences.

I’ve swum at sunrise, which is better in winter because it arrives at a sensible hour, and it always makes you feel it has been worth getting up. I’ve swum at sunset, when the sea is soft and ripples like sheets of gold silk. I’ve swum in darkness with the only light coming from the full moon. I’ve gone into the water in the rain, the snow and in a ‘fret’ – a sea mist that holds you within an ethereal bubble. I’ve learnt about the tides and their relationship to the moon’s cycle.

My favourite swim so far was one November when it felt like summer, the tide was low, and the sun was setting in the west as the moon rose in the east. Starlings, Brighton’s treasured winter guests, were murmurating2 over Brighton Pier. The beach was full of people enjoying the unexpected warmth and watching the free show, the birds wheeling and turning as I swam beneath them. The world seemed a joyous, magical place full of spectacle, connection and love.

Swimming in the sea is always a talking point with people. To borrow the old joke about vegans – how do you know someone is a sea swimmer? Don’t worry, we’ll tell you. So, I’ll finish with some of the things that people say to me most often, and what I say in reply.

‘I’ve heard it’s very good for you.’

I am a naturally sceptical person, and I doubt most of the claims made about the benefits of cold water immersion. Does it boost your immune system? I know swimmers, including myself, who’ve had colds, Covid and assorted bugs. The only physical change I can point to, and I have no scientific evidence to back this up, is that the flare up in the arthritis in my hands, which used to happen every winter, has stopped. The biggest benefit for me is for my mental health. The endorphin high after a sea swim is a powerful natural drug. It’s why I’ve become a dealer, sidling up to people on the beach in October and whispering: just one more swim…

‘Aren’t you worried about sewage?’

Not really. Yes there is sewage pumped into the sea, and it’s a disgrace. But the sea in Brighton and Hove is still relatively clean. I take sensible precautions like avoiding the water after heavy rainfall as run off from the roads can flow into the sea. I swim with my head up, because the pleasure for me is watching and listening to what’s going on around me – the colours on the water, the cry of the herring gulls. We have a natural phenomenon called the ‘May bloom’ which some people mistake for sewage. It’s an algal rot when tiny organisms die and make the sea turn brown and smell like an unappealing vegetable soup. It passes. And is followed by the jellyfish…

‘Do you wear a wetsuit?’

I’ve tried it, but the cost/benefit analysis fails. The amount of time getting in and out of the wetsuit versus amount of time in the water doesn’t add up. In the winter I have gloves and boots and a game changing neoprene swimsuit from Finisterre that keeps me snug.

‘Ooh you’re brave!’

I’m not, it’s just swimming.

‘Ah, you’re a wild swimmer.’

There is no wild swimming, there’s just swimming.

‘You must be mad!’

I am, but not because I go swimming.

‘Are you going to enter a triathlon?’

I’d rather be stung by a thousand jellyfish.

I was in Falmouth’s Victorian Cemetery, a sacred and natural space that began my fascination with graveyards. I lived just around the corner when I moved to the town in 2019, and I could see it from my house. I don’t live there anymore, but every time I go back, I visit the Weeping Woman, the most striking sculpture in this burial ground.

From the minute I walked through those gates for the first time, I knew I had to find out more about this place.As I did my research, I dug deeper into the history of Victorian cemeteries in general, and this one in particular. I was an outsider in Falmouth and through the graveyard, I made friends, with other cemetery enthusiasts. Together, we gave free walking tours. We were astonished when over fifty people turned up for the first one. Everyone loves to hear lost stories.

We’d talk about people like Henry Philip Creese, an engineer who went down with the Titanic, and William Bilkie, the last mail coach guard in Cornwall until the arrival of the railway put an end to his job. We’d stand at the spot of the unmarked graves of the children who died at the Royal Cornwall Home for Destitute Little Girls and imagine what their short lives would have been like.

There was always one story everyone wanted to hear the most. Who was the Weeping Woman? What’s the significance of the stones? And the harp? Why is she here?

It’s quite the tale. The statue represents the grief that Ellen Odette Cuffe, Countess of Desart, felt on the loss of her husband William, after he died on his yacht off the coast of Falmouth in 1898. She commissioned the sculpture and visited his grave every year until she passed away in 1933. The inscription reads: ‘They were together in their lives and in their deaths they shall not be divided’.

Ellen’s maiden name was Bischoffsheim, and she was Jewish, born in London to a wealthy German father.

Despite dying in Dublin, she was determined to be buried with her husband in Falmouth, and the funeral was conducted in accordance with her religion. The placing of stones is a show of respect when visiting a Jewish grave.

The harp is a reference to Ellen’s connection to Ireland. The Cuffe family were Anglo-Irish aristocracy and on the death of William, the 4^th Earl of Desart, Ellen returned to the family seat in Kilkenny. She was a member of the Gaelic League, championing the preservation of the Irish language. She founded a hospital, a library, a theatre and developed housing for workers. She was the first Jew to serve in the senate of the Irish Free State in 1922, despite opposing suffrage for women and saying that ‘women should not compete against men in work or play’. Luckily she had long since moved out of the family home, Cuffesgrange, because it was burnt down by the IRA, which refused to recognise the Free State, in 1923.

As well as Ellen’s work in Ireland, she was part of a committee that rescued and resettled 300,000 Jewish women and children driven out of Russia in the early 20^th century. When she died, she left £1.5m to charity.

The Weeping Woman drew me to this place when I arrived in Falmouth and I walked in the cemetery almost every day with my dog, dear Rufus, now departed himself. It was a place of connection with my new friends, and a source of intellectual stimulation as I learned more about the rituals and iconography surrounding death in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. At the bottom of the cemetery sits a row of World War One graves.

In contrast to the wildness of the rest of the site, this section is in pristine condition, maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I learned that the uniform headstone, with typography designed by Leslie MacDonald Gill, younger brother of Eric Gill, was a symbol of shared sacrifice. This simplicity contrasts with the ostentation of the Victorian graves all around them, of which the Cuffe grave is the most grandiose example.

When I visited the cemetery ten days ago, it was as though nature had given me one of those photographs that pop up on social media as a memory of a particular time. I was transported back to March 2020. The graveyard was dressed in its Spring bling, carpeted in primroses, violets and daffodils, with a few delicate first bluebells of the season poking their heads through. The breeze brought the scent of three cornered leek, the spicy fragrance of alexanders1, the salt tang of the sea. The trees were full of chaffinches, nuthatches, wrens and thrushes.

Who could forget how, five years ago, the arrival of Covid coincided with the best Spring in years? It was a blessing in the darkest of times. I know people who have fond memories of that period. Being furloughed, having time to appreciate their homes, their families, nature. For me, it was torture. As a libertarian and a lockdown sceptic, I bridled against every restriction. I hated the dreaded evening broadcasts outlining further curbs on our freedom, the daily incantation of the death toll, the queues outside supermarkets, the eerie silence of the streets, the fear in people’s faces as they crossed the road to avoid others on their daily allotted walk, the suspicion about who was in a local area, and why. I had a conversation with one woman, a teacher, who told me in all seriousness that she thought the army should be posted on the border between Devon and Cornwall to keep ‘outsiders’ away. It was enough to make me want to weep.

The cemetery though, was a sanctuary. Nothing changed there, apart from gentle, imperceptible passage of Spring. It was as quiet and empty as it had always been. I walked at dawn when the grounds were shrouded in mist and the resident buzzard swooped silently from tree to tree.

At dusk I’d go there with my partner and Rufus, and he’d lie down and warm his old bones as we watched the sun go down behind the brackish lagoon called Swanpool at the bottom of the hill.

One day I looked out of our bedroom window, and I could see, in the modern cemetery across the road from the Victorian graveyard, the dystopian scene of a long row of newly dug plots, ready to receive what the council believed would be an influx of the dead. It never happened.

If cemeteries have a message for us, it is that all is impermanence. I could visit the graves of the people I had got to know through the walks and through my research and hold this thought in my mind. Around the corner from the row of well-tended Commonwealth War Graves is an unkempt section which holds the graves of other soldiers, including some with inscriptions in Arabic, and a monument to Ben O’Rorke, an army padre who, having survived the whole war in the service of his flock, died on Christmas morning, 1918.

Half a decade on, and already that Lockdown seems like a far more distant memory. It’s a scrap of time compared with the 35 years Ellen Cuffe spent returning to the Weeping Woman to visit her husband. It’s a heartbeat compared to the 150 years that some souls have spent resting here.

Then, as in Victorian times, and as it is now, the cemetery is peaceful, timeless, sharing stories, hiding stories, holding our collective memories of key moments in history. Telling us what matters, what should be remembered, what can be forgotten and that, ultimately, this too shall pass.

It’s the voice of Charlotte Johnson Wahl, and I’m standing in the Museum of the Mind, looking at a picture she painted in 1974 while she was here, a patient at the Maudsley Hospital.

I read about her last year and was interested that she was Boris Johnson’s mother. A superficial reason, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to have the flippant and inappropriate thought that being his mum would make anyone a little crazy. I was intrigued enough to want to learn more about her.

The Museum of the Mind, opened in 2015 by Grayson Perry, is housed in an unremarkable 1930s building in South London, with neat rows of primulas flanking the entrance. This site, part of the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, is the fourth home of the Royal Bethlem Hospital, first established in 1247 as a priory in Bishopsgate in the City of London. By 1403 it had six ‘insane’ patients and has cared for mentally ill patients ever since.

The main museum is fascinating, and I’ll write more about it soon. This time, I’m here to see an extraordinary collection of Charlotte’s work. The exhibition is called What It Felt Like, and the painting of the same name shows the artist bent over, cowed, trapped at the edge of the frame. Disembodied arms surround her, hands touching her, fingers pinched, while her hand is holding her hair.

Charlotte was a self-taught artist from the age of five. Before and after her hospitalisation, she painted portraits of famous friends and family. She painted throughout her eight month stay and when she left, the hospital staged an exhibition, where many pieces were sold. The curator of that exhibition, hospital archivist Patricia Allderidge, went on to found the Museum of the Mind. Now, half a century later, the Museum has staged this retrospective, bringing her work to new audiences.

The style is almost pop art, bursting with a 1970’s colour palette. She said that her Maudsley style was very distinctive and that later she could instantly recognise if she painted a picture there. The vibrancy is a counterpoint to the pain and distress she is conveying.

The words that I hear on entering the gallery come from an interview with Charlotte in 2015, when she was in a car on her way to visit the Maudsley.

Her experience at the hospital was a long way from the positive messaging about modern day treatment in the rest of the Museum. It’s brave and honest of the Maudsley to be prepared to highlight it. This is not a tale of therapeutic kindness.

A self-portrait shows her hunched, ears tucked into her shoulders, eyes closed, mouth turned downward in defeat, arms clutching her chest, her knuckles white. Hands are a repeated motif throughout her work. She was diagnosed with ‘obsessive-compulsive neurosis’, which we would probably now call OCD. She had a phobia about dirt and would obsessively wash her hands to the point that they bled.

In the interview, Charlotte describes her treatment as ‘repressive’ and adds that ‘even normal people’ would object to it. The consultants, who she called The Firm, recommended ‘exposure and response prevention’ therapy. She was forced to endure the very things she feared. They would put dog faeces on her shoe and make her walk around with it all day. They dabbed honey, or urine, on her hands and sent her off for the morning to paint. She was prevented from washing her body, or her hands, regularly. Patricia Allderidge later described it as ‘patient abuse’.

Ask And Get No Reassurance shows multiple hands growing out of her hands, which are covered in droplets which could be the urine or honey she talked about. A third hand, presumably of a doctor or nurse, is beckoning her. At one point she was made to move to a different room to paint, which caused her horror. Phobia 1 was her response, showing her body covered in insects.

Charlotte also had to attend group therapy sessions, which she hated, fearing that ‘anyone might probe and attack’ the tenderest parts of her consciousness. In Morning Group there is sense of enforced intimacy - the group pressing in on the viewer, limbs crushed together, crowding the frame.

Her work rate was incredible. She produced 80 paintings while she was here - more than two a week. She wasn’t the first artist at the Maudsley to paint during her stay, but this goes way beyond the practice of art as therapy. This is art as compulsion. I have a sense that the work grounded Charlotte and allowed her to exert some element of control in the midst of personal turmoil and brutal treatment.

Charlotte couldn’t bear to sit at a table if it had crumbs on it, so in her painting Canteen With No Food she simply takes the food out of the picture entirely. It depicts patients crowding round, hands and arms reaching across empty tables. The writer Jilly Cooper bought this at the first exhibition.

There is pain and distress in the work, but also a strong streak of humour and defiance, which I love. Phobia 1 and other paintings show her thumbing her nose at the staff in a powerful ‘Fuck You’ artistic gesture.

Her gift to the hospital when she left was called It Hasn’t Worked, which now hangs in the permanent exhibition. How’s that for a review of her stay?

The most poignant work in the exhibition relates to Charlotte’s family. She was in her early 30s when she was at the Maudsley, with four children aged between two and nine years old. She had followed her husband Stanley Johnson to Washington, New York and back to England and while she was hospitalised the family moved to Brussels, so visits were rare and clearly very emotional. These paintings show a mother and a family in turmoil – sad, broken, disjointed. In Johnson Family Hanged by Circumstance, children with blond mops of hair hang from a washing line. Charlotte herself looks upward in anguish. Don’t Be Sad shows her crying, reaching out an arm to one child while others stand downcast or tumble on the floor. A figure who is clearly Stanley Johnson, looks away, sideways, at the viewer.

One of the most striking portraits is of her husband, titled Stanley Towards The End. We don’t know what end she is referring to – her stay or their relationship. Standing in front of it, I see a cold-eyed dandy, his outfit perfectly toned, the suit with the wide lapels of the time, a smart wristwatch visible above his cuff. The wording Bruxelles is visible in the corner of the painting. The impassivity in his face tells me that he is a subject here, not a partner.

The most evocative painting for me is Shake Her Down, Talk to Her…Oh, Just Leave Her! The title alone tells a story of fear and frustration. Charlotte is at the top of a tree in autumn, once again trying to exit the scene. In the opposite corner her children at the bottom of the tree, stretching to reach her. Elsewhere adults, one with a bag, perhaps family or clinicians, walk away.

As she made clear in her gift to the Maudsley, the treatment didn’t work. Once discharged, she went back to Brussels and had private treatment which eventually helped her to deal with her phobias. She was asked in the 2015 interview whether she felt stigmatised for being mentally ill, and she replied, ‘yes, terribly. In those days it wasn’t in the least bit talked about.’ However she was immensely courageous in exhibiting her work after her discharge, because it was the first time that the Maudsley had held an exhibition by a named patient.

Charlotte went back to her family, and Stanley, until they divorced in 1979. Around three years later she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, yet she carried on painting throughout the rest of her life and went on to marry historian Nick Wahl and live in New York. She died in 2021 aged 79.

Before I leave, I watch the short film again. It’s no longer a disembodied voice. It belongs to someone who has allowed me to step inside a fragment of her life, share her fears and be inspired by her talent, resilience and humour. I wonder why she was returning to the Maudsley in 2015. Perhaps it was for the opening of the Museum.

The final part of the film shows the car pulling up outside. You can see from the expression on her face that, 40 years later, this was still a place that terrified her.

The film ends there. The final frame tells us that she decided not to go in.

Carol

I’ll come back to the rest of the Museum of the Mind in my next post. I’d love to know what you think of Charlotte’s work, so please comment below.

The exhibition is on until 29 March 2025 and is open to the public Wed – Sat. The bookshop also stocks the catalogue.

Museum of the Mind

You can check out more of her work here

Thomas MS Highflyer was buried here in 1870.

Thomas was an eight year old African boy, rescued in 1866, along with others, by Thomas Malcolm Sabine Pasley, the captain of HMS Highflyer, a Royal Navy ship in the British Anti-Slave Trade Squadron. Most of the slaves were taken to Sierra Leone and freed, but Thomas and two other children stayed on the ship and spent a further two years at sea. A church missionary newsletter explains this as: ‘three of the boys – bright black little fellows – interested some of the young officers and they kindly undertook to care for them and adopt them’.

After the voyage, Thomas came to Brighton to live with retired Sussex coastguard Henry Thompson and his wife Eliza who, according to accounts at the time, treated him like a son. He was baptised as Thomas MS Highflyer, in honour of his rescuer, went to primary school and learned to play cricket.

Thomas’s grave, like so many others here, was neglected until it was discovered by someone walking in the cemetery. They alerted the Brighton Black History Project1 with a message on Twitter. In 2018, a campaign led by Bert Williams MBE, co-founder of the Project, highlighted the story and renovated the grave. The headstone was taken away, restored and reinstated at a ceremony attended by dignitaries and special guests. This photo from the Project’s website shows the group involved in the restoration.

Compared to the graves of Eric Stenbock and Adelaide O'Keeffe, which I wrote about in earlier posts, Thomas’s memorial is more well known, yet I’m surprised how difficult it was to find. His resting place is past the original North and South gothic chapels of the Extra Mural Cemetery, up some steep steps and along a muddy track behind the public toilets.

I had three initial reactions when I began reading about Thomas. The first was relief that he had been rescued and met with such kindness when he got to Brighton.

The second was sadness about how alien his new life must have felt to him.

The same missionary newsletter which told of the child’s ‘adoption’ by the crew, goes on to describes how ‘Tommy’, aboard ship, was ‘devoted to his young master’ and when he arrived in England was taught how to clean boots and shoes, wait at table and ‘be a little servant’. At primary school, it reported, ‘it was hardly to be expected that Tommy should not be felt and stroked by a number of curious playmates who wished to find out for themselves ‘whether it will come off’.’

My third reaction – curiosity – was based on the time and the manner in which he had been liberated. The date of his rescue – 1866 – was over half a century after slavery was abolished in Britain and its colonies in the Caribbean. The vessel from which he was liberated was a dhow, not a traditional slave ship. One of the other rescued boys had been named Bob Dhow.

I studied the Atlantic slave trade as part of my university degree, and thought I was well-informed. Thomas’s story has taught me that I only had half the picture.

Britain had set up an anti-slavery naval squadron after the abolition of slavery in 1807. It patrolled the West Coast of Africa to supress the illegal Atlantic trade and held captured vessels and carried out prosecutions in a court in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Over fifty years, it seized around 1,600 ships and freed 150,000 slaves.

What surprised me is that slavery continued on the East Coast for nearly a century after it was abolished in Britain. Trade out of Zanzibar had existed for at least a thousand years, feeding the need for labour on clove and coconut plantations on the island, or in French plantations in Mauritius, and meeting the demand for concubines and household slaves in countries around the Persian Gulf, like Oman.

There are no accurate records of how many slaves were traded on the East Coast, but one researcher2 suggests that estimates at the upper range, of around 25 million slaves, are double that of the Atlantic trade.

A new Anti-Slavery Naval Squadron for East Africa was set up after a treaty in 1873 which aimed to stop trafficking between mainland Africa and the archipelago around Zanzibar. This built on previous treaties which had been unsuccessful. Even then, illegal smuggling continued until a further treaty in 1897 and the end of slavery in 1909.

It wasn’t a popular posting for sailors, because of the dangers involved. The diary3 of Henry Binstead, an officer on the HMS Owen Glendower, recorded that:

'...many large whales and sharks are about us, the latter is owing to the number of poor fellows that have lately been thrown overboard - many of our own crew are very sick and the decks are crowded with black slaves who are dying in all directions.'

The 1873 treaty came about, in part, because of the work of Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingston. His book Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, published in 1857, had alerted the British public to the existence of the Arab slave trade along the east coast.

As Livingston continued his travels, he recorded the horrific conditions in his journals4:

‘27th June, 1866.—Today we came upon a man dead from starvation, as he was very thin. One of our men wandered and found a number of slaves with slave-sticks on, abandoned by their master from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young.’

This photograph by Alfred Swann shows what slaves sticks involved:

Thomas Highflyer was probably moved to the port in similar conditions. The failures to eradicate the trade may also explain why Captain Pasley decided to keep him and the other boys on board, after releasing the others in Freetown in 1866. The risks of being re-trafficked would have been very high.

The dhow from which Thomas was captured would typically have had an Arab and Swahili crew, who themselves were usually slaves, or indentured workers who had to give up part of their wage to the slavers. This photo shows conditions on a captured dhow.

We don’t know what Captain Pasley found when he rescued Thomas, but the commander of HMS Daphne, another ship in the squadron, painted a grim picture of conditions:

‘…on the bottom of the dhow was a pile of stones as ballast, and on these stones, without even a mat, were twenty-three women huddled together—one or two with infants in their arms—these women were literally doubled up, there being no room to sit erect; on a bamboo deck, about three feet above the keep, were forty-eight men, crowded together in the same way, and on another deck above this were fifty-three children. Some of the slaves were in the last stages of starvation and dysentery.’5

Thomas died two years after arriving in Brighton, aged only 12. He had TB, possibly exacerbated by weakened health from being kept in conditions like this. A sick little boy, a curiosity to well-meaning people, he ended his days, as the Missionary Society reported, in ‘a cemetery on an English hillside, thousands of miles from the country in which he was born and from the blue waters in which his chains had been broken and he had been made free.’

David Livingston died three years later, in 1873, also far from home, in a village on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. His heart was buried there and his body brought back to London. On his grave in Westminster Abbey there is an inscription that reads:

‘All I can add in my solitude, is, may heaven’s rich blessing come down on everyone, American, English, or Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world.’

A noble sentiment, but one that doesn’t tell the whole story. One of the drivers for the 1873 Treaty had been Livingston’s account of an horrific massacre of over 300 slaves, mostly women, in 1871 in Nyangwe. The massacre, which he recorded in a sketch in his journal, was the result of a complicated feud between rival slave traders.

Livingston was there on one of his final journeys of exploration. At the beginning, he had written that: ‘The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild unexplored country is very great.’

This pleasure, however, ultimately trumped morality, because he was by now dependent on the patronage of the very slave traders he had once despised. Sick, isolated and with much of his equipment and possessions having been stolen, he was helped by one person in particular - Tippu Tip, aka Hamed bin Muhammed bin Juma bin Rajad el Murjebi, a notorious Afro-Omani trader. This picture of him is in the museum in Stone Town, Zanzibar, near the site of the central slave market.

Very rich, and by all accounts polite and exceedingly helpful to Europeans, Tippu Tip resupplied Livingston’s party and guaranteed safe conduct on the next stage of his journey. Livingston wrote that: ‘the sights I have seen.. are so nauseous that I always strive to drive them from memory.’

Given his moral compromises, perhaps this was the only way he could live with himself.

I laid a bunch of flowers on Thomas’s grave before I left. A small boy and a world renowned explorer, both caught in the web of slavery that entangled Africa in the 19^th century. His short life and death have taught me so much.

Carol

I hope you’re enjoyed reading this series on Brighton’s cemetery. I’ll return to my story hunts around graveyards soon and in the meantime will be posting some different material - about art, mental health and the coming of Spring - over the next few weeks. Thanks for reading and if you’re not yet subscribed, you can do so for free here

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The state of Victorian cemeteries divides opinion, among the public and those who now have to manage them. Some see their dereliction as a sign of disrespect for the dead. Others accept the decay for its own beauty and welcome these places as a haven for wildlife. There is even a conservation charity, Caring for God’s Acre, devoted to preserving them.1

Above the disused chapel, I passed the grave of John Rastrick, who built the London to Brighton railway line. More accurately, I navigated around it. This 15 ton slab of Cornish granite, designed to represent a giant railway turntable, is so wide that in 1856, one of the entry walls to the cemetery had to be taken down to allow 20 horses to drag it into position. Generations of his family are buried with him. It is the physical embodiment of all that the Extra Mural Company hoped to achieve.

If Rastrick is impossible to ignore, the next person I was searching for proved impossible to find. I was looking for Adelaide O’Keeffe, who died in 1865 and whose presence here was rediscovered in 2021 by a distant relative, writer and historian Lynda O’Keeffe.2 Lynda, a resourceful woman, came armed with garden implements and, with the help of a cemetery worker who she described as ‘a kindly man’, found and uncovered the plot.

Adelaide was born in Dublin in 1776. The family were wealthy Catholics, and her life was comfortable and uncomplicated until her protestant mother had an affair with an actor. After that, her life was never the same again. Her father, John O’Keeffe, sent her to a convent in France when she was seven years old and brought her back just before the French Revolution.

By this time John, a successful actor himself, was blind, after progressively losing his sight after he fell into the River Liffey in Dublin.3 He switched to writing operas, farces and poetry. By all accounts talented and flamboyant, he championed gender equality, female authorship and the abolition of slavery.

Adelaide, at the age of 12, became his amanuensis, a word that in Latin translates as ‘slave at hand’. She was his full time secretary and carer until he died 45 years later. Despite an itinerant life devoted to her father’s needs, she found the time to write 11 novels and poetry collections. Today, to the extent that she is remembered, it is for her poetry for children. Her most famous work is a poem called The Butterfly:

The Butterfly, an idle thing,
Nor honey makes, nor yet can sing,
As do the bee and bird;
Nor does it, like the prudent ant,
Lay up the grain for times of want,
A wise and cautious hoard.

My youth is but a summer's day:
Then like the bee and ant I'll lay
A store of learning by;
And though from flower to flower I rove,
My stock of wisdom I'll improve
Nor be a butterfly.

John O’Keeffe was talented, but also anxious and a depressive and by the time he died in 1833 in Southampton, he was poor and forgotten. Only four people came to his funeral. Adelaide was 57, single, and penniless. She only wrote one further novel and a poetry collection after her father’s death. She drifted around the south west and southern England, living on handouts from the Royal Literary Fund.

The 1861 census lists her as a boarder in Brighton, along with a number of women over half her age. She died four years later, aged 89. Her headstone is impressive but there’s no evidence about who came to her funeral or paid for the burial and headstone.

There are no images of Adelaide. However, there is a portrait of her father, as this account from a friend describes:

‘In changing her residence, Miss O’Keeffe always carried her father’s portrait about with her from place to place, – in loving remembrance of his memory and of her happy home; and she was much gratified when, about twelve months prior to her death, it was taken by the Government for the National Portrait Gallery and placed among those whom the country “has delighted to honour”.’

This tender recollection glosses over Adelaide’s financial situation, and the note on the National Portrait Gallery’s website paints a heartbreaking picture:

‘[The painting] has never been out of the possession of Mr Keeffe and his daughter. She has always taken it about with her since his death and now, having no settled home and feeling extra luggage a trouble, being in her 85^th year, she presented it to me last autumn…the great age and increasing infirmities of the poor old lady induced me to put a price upon it (£50) and I shall, of course, immediately hand it over to her’ (letter to HG Hine, 1863)’

Three years on from Lynda’s visit, I couldn’t find any trace of Adelaide’s grave at all. I had been in email contact with Lynda who gave me a rough idea of the location, but the whole area was carpeted in thick, deep ivy. This evergreen plant, a favourite in Victorian cemeteries for its suggestion of immortality, is slowly choking gravestones and paths in all these old graveyards. I walked around trying to sense solidity under my feet, but I couldn’t find it. The ivy kept grasping my boots and pulling me to a stop. I had flowers for her, but I realised that I needed to bring something long and strong and sharp, to penetrate the undergrowth and hear the ring of hard stone underneath.

Frustrated, I went round to the cemetery office, a small flint building back at the entrance to Woodvale Cemetery. When I explained who I was searching for, a council worker looked up the plot on the computer and said he’d come round and help me find the grave. As we were walking back he said, ‘someone else came looking for this grave a few years ago’, and I realised that he was Lynda O’Keeffe’s ‘kindly man’, who turned out to be Seb, the cemetery manager.

He took me back to the area where I had been looking, just behind some obelisks marking graves on a main path, but he had no more luck than me. After fifteen cold, dispiriting minutes, we had to admit defeat. I let Seb go back for his lunch and laid the flowers on the blanket of ivy where we had been standing. I felt desperately sad that Adelaide was buried again in death as she was in life.

When I got home I looked again at Lynda’s photo of Adelaide’s headstone. It was about the size of her father’s portrait. I thought of her carrying it around all those years, as she got progressively older and poorer. How much of a veneration was it, and how much of a burden? When she parted with it, did she feel relief to be finally free of the weight of her father’s legacy? Or ashamed that she inspired the pity that led to payment?

Adelaide is not mentioned in any women’s history of Brighton that I have read, yet what a selfless, talented and resilient person she must have been.

Finally, I appreciate you taking the time to read this, and thanks to everyone who read my first article about Brighton’s Extra Mural Cemetery a fortnight ago. I am so pleased there are so many ‘graveyard crawlers’, as one reader put it, out there. Keep the comments and recommendations coming, I am learning so much!

Next week I’ll write about one more outsider to Brighton who found his final resting place here.