Extraordinarily Close to the Dear Departed

Right: Angel and friend, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

Today was the annual Open Day at Brompton Cemetery, a Victorian necropolis with more than 200,000 residents, all of whom were unobtrusively present for the games, handicrafts, organ music, face-painting, and bouncy castle, as well as tours related to various interests. “This is tree number 26 – lovely cones…” I overheard on my way past the sparsely-attended Cemetery Trees tour. I am not making this up.

I invested £2 in the once-a-year opening of the Brompton Catacombs (or catacoombs, as one says locally). I had walked over from the neighboring borough of Hammersmith and Fulham under glowering skies – the perfect light for photographing graves – so I barely squeaked in to the tour.

Apparently there was a certain amount of status involved with where Victorian ladies and gentlemen were interred, and when the Brompton Cemetery opened for business in 1841 they offered, in addition to earth burial, the option of spending eternity on a shelf. This had been popular on the continent, and the cemetery planners seemed to think it was going to take off like a house afire. Plans were made for enough catacomb space to store around 100,000 customers at luxury prices, but in the end less than 500 bodies ended up in Brompton’s upscale burial suites, and the remaining catacombs were never excavated.

Our guide led a dozen hardy 21st century folk down a stairway and into a narrow brickwork hallway lined with shelves holding coffins in various states of decomposition. Lest that word conjure images of rotting Victorians, you’ll probably want to be reassured that each body was first put into a plain wooden coffin, which was then placed in a 9-lbs-per-square-foot lead box, and hermetically sealed by a plumber. Sometimes a lighted candle was left inside to assure a vacuum after sealing, and disinterred catacomb corpses have been found to be perfectly desiccated and quite well-preserved even after more than a century.

The lead coffin was in turn covered by one of wood or metal which might be decorated with brass fittings or upholstered in leather or cloth and sometimes further embellished with fancy pins. These were not mere burial caskets meant to lie unseen, these were the post-mortem boudoirs of departed loved ones, meant to be visited regularly by entire families with rugs and picnic hampers. It is these outer coverings that are in some cases moldering away to dust and ruin, exposing the lead cases beneath, with the plumber's diamond-shaped markings attesting the coffin had been properly sealed.

But even with the brick walls whitewashed as they would have been in the 19th century, and with tiny skylights – now covered over – admitting a bit of natural light, the atmosphere in the Brompton catacombs cannot have been conducive to a pleasant visit. The hallway is too narrow, the floor too damp, the dead too close for comfort. Although unworried by cold or rain, a visiting family might not have felt at home there, cheek to jowl with not only their own dear departed, but everyone else’s as well. Visits, I’m thinking, would have been brief and to the point, unlike the long summer-afternoon picnics common at ground-level gravesites. The great Brompton Catacomb scheme went belly-up.

Brompton Cemetery covers about 16.5 hectares (41 acres), and if you’re wondering how you get more than 200,000 graves into that space, the answer is, use the Y axis. Graves purchased to hold families were dug up to 24 feet deep, then filled in and re-excavated as each family member’s turn came to move in. Gravestones were filled in progressively as the plot filled.

On my way out the skies over London stopped threatening and started delivering. I was sodden when I reached home, at least partly from stopping to get the picture above, of an angel whose job it is to hold a succession of pigeons heavenward for eternity.

Boudicca Country

Right: Boudicca and her daughters, Westminster

Earlier this month I went to visit Carolyn White and John Thurgood, who starred in a blog entry from last year, Touching the Mystery. The occasion was the celebration by three expatriate Yanks and one good-natured Briton of American Independence Day (John prefers to call it “Good Riddance Day”), complete with Carolyn bravely grilling burgers and yes, Boca Burgers ™ under the patio roof in a pounding Suffolk rain. East Anglia is, John assures me, a veritable desert compared to the rest of England, but with the summer we’ve been having there’s no way to tell they get less rainfall than any other part of the island. Dineen Edwards joined us for our cool and rainy cookout (and in), and as the three of us overwhelmingly outnumbered our one Brit, victory was again assured for the Yanks.

In between celebrating quaint holiday customs of the colonials, we spent a couple of days driving about in the wonderful countryside of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire, and visited even more lovely English villages than last year, including Lavenham, the best-preserved medieval village in the country. Some people here still live in 700+-year-old houses half-timbered with trees that predate the come-lately U.S.A. by half a millennium, and sometimes painted that particular English pink that originally resulted from adding ox blood to white plaster.

Along the way from somewhere to somewhere else we passed The Devil’s Dike, an earthwork stretching over 60 miles of East Anglian countryside, reputed to have been built by Boudicca while defending Norfolk from Romans. Every British schoolchild knows about Boudicca, though she’s largely unknown to Yanks except through various fictional depictions, the latest being Manda Scott’s excellent historical/fantasy series beginning with Dreaming the Eagle. East Anglia is Boudicca country, former home of the Eceni, the British tribe Boudicca was either born to or married into.

In 61 CE, when the Romans had barely begun to make a Roman province out of Brittania, Boudicca raised a formidable army of Eceni and Trinovantes, and burned the Romans’ British capital, Camulodunum (now Colchester) to the ground, taking no prisoners. She then moved on to deal with Londinium, a center of trade, finance, and taxation much as it is today. The attacks were timed to take advantage of a Roman action against the Druids in Swansea, so when Caius Suetonius Paulinus, the provincial governor, rode from Wales to Londinium to check the situation and found 100,000 angry blue Britons two days’ journey from Zone 1, he said whoever wanted could come away northwest with him, but he wasn’t sticking around. The result, which Suetonius and his inferior forces could certainly not have averted, was the first Great Fire of London, and the slaughter of all its remaining inhabitants.

Boudicca’s third target was Verulamium, a former Cattauvallani city these days known as St. Albans. She did to that place what she’d done to Colchester and London. By the time the ashes cooled the death toll for all three cities was around 70,000, and among other things the Romans had lost an entire legion – the IXth – to a rebel ambush. Boudicca excelled at ambush and surprise attack, and had gained much from the Roman assumption of military superiority.

But now Suetonius knew where she was and where she was headed – straight for him and the forces he had led into the west against the Druids. He now had the luxury of choosing his battlefield, which is something you should never let Romans do. He took the high ground just southeast of Towchester with his relatively small but technologically-superior army and waited with his back covered. Boudicca’s forces marched uphill into a slaughter that cost 80,000 rebel lives, a lesson Robert E. Lee should have heeded at Gettysburg.

Boudicca is said by Tacitus (writing 50 years after the fact) to have taken poison to avoid death at Roman hands, though no-one knows for sure what happened to her other than that she doesn’t seem to have died on that battlefield. Her grave, reputed to hold the majority of the treasures of the Eceni, has never been found. Suetonius made sure there would be no repeat of this rebellion with an ethnic cleansing of the Eceni and Trinovantes that left what is now Norfolk almost entirely unpopulated. It would take a thousand years for that part of the country to recover enough to become an important part of British economy and culture.

But recover it has, from Romans and Saxons at least. More recently they’ve had to co-exist with the U.S. Air Force, who at least don’t charge them taxes or burn their villages. It’s a lovely part of the world, and my visit next year is scheduled to include a trip to the coastal regions, which are reputed to be well worth a look. Meanwhile archeologists are still looking for Boudicca’s treasure in north-west Norfolk, which has already yielded more Iron-Age precious metal than any other part of the island. The present dig has already produced some historically-significant finds in the heart of Boudicca country, and the next few years may see the discovery – just possibly – of the lost treasure-trove of Britain’s warrior queen.