Brompton Cemetery

Well, I’m off on my first official walkabout and it’s raining. Chucking it down, in fact – just my luck! I’m hoping this will result in some atmospherically gloomy shots of the cemetery rather than every photo turning out too dark – we’ll see.

Click on photos to enlarge them

Today I’m going to Brompton Cemetery – sounds like a morbid choice, but this is one of my favourite places in the whole of London. It’s a huge (39 acres) Victorian cemetery with some truly amazing monuments – I like to bring my charcoals here and it’s a dream come true for an artist or photographer. No drawings today, though – far too wet. 

Back in the 19^th century inner-city burial grounds were becoming dangerously overcrowded so seven new cemeteries were built in a ring around what was then the edge of London. These were known as the ‘Magnificent Seven’. One of these was Highgate Cemetery and another was the one I’m visiting today. Brompton Cemetery opened in 1840 and originally served West London and Westminster.

The main entrance to Brompton Cemetery is on Old Brompton Road – best tube station is Earls Court. You can also enter from the South, getting the District line to West Brompton, but I think the impact is greater when you go through the big main gates and see that great central avenue stretching away towards the great grey dome of the chapel.

Off we go, then. Leave Earls Court by the Warwick Road exit, hang a left and then it’s a straight line to Old Brompton Road. The cemetery wall is dark brick and mossy, arched like a viaduct to form windows barred with black iron railings and through these you can see a great grey-green sea of gravestones. Follow this for a minute or two and you’ll come to a huge square gatehouse made of golden stone.

Insert cliché here...

I last visited this cemetery in early January and it was *freezing*. It might be wet today but at least it’s warmer. Last time I came here to sketch and I had to keep breaking off to do laps of the graveyard with my hands shoved deep in my pockets, waiting for my fingers to thaw out so I could wield a charcoal stick with any degree of control. What a difference 6 weeks makes – the trees are still wintry and bare but the first spring flowers are starting to appear – there are bluebells, daffodils and snowdrops scattered among the graves, almost startlingly bright against the weathered shades of black and grey. This is probably my cue to say something clichéd about the beauty of new life springing up in the midst of death...  maybe not.

Emmeline Pankhurst's grave

Brompton Cemetery is organised like a great open-air cathedral. You have the wide central avenue running all the way down to the domed chapel (based on the basilica of St Peter’s in Rome, apparently) and another one running east-west, plus lots of other little side paths. The main avenue is flanked by tall, bare trees with gnarled, lumpy trunks and blunt-ended, chopped branches poking at a miserable grey sky. As I write, a weak sun is fighting its way through the clouds but it is still drizzling steadily. 

When I last came here the paths were bordered by neatly-swept heaps of dead leaves but these are all gone now. Among the trees the paths are lined by straight rows of square grave plots, covered in grass and enclosed by a low kerb or pillars linked by chains. Behind these a great expanse of stones stretches away on either side. One of the monuments on the left-hand side of the avenue is particularly noteworthy – a tall red Celtic cross engraved with a woman marks the grave of Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the suffragettes.

There is an amazing range of monuments here, all crammed in together and overgrown. Celtic crosses stand beside orthodox ones, angel statues (which this Dr Who fan found thrillingly creepy!) and cherubs weep and there are also obelisks, broken columns and sarcophagi standing on slabs of dark red marble. Best of all are the fantastic family mausolea which with their sloped roofs, pointed windows, arched doorways and crosses on top could be mistaken for small chapels.

Family Mausolea

This cemetery is huge. Barely a third of the way in and the traffic noises fade away to a distant murmur and you are left with just the sound of the wind and birdsong. It’s very odd to find somewhere so still in London, you find your ears straining against the stillness. The best thing about the persistent rain is that I’ve pretty much got the cemetery to myself today, other than the odd cyclist or dogwalker (and the squirrels, the rooks and the pigeons). Last time I came here Chelsea were playing at home and as Stamford Bridge is right beside the cemetery there were hordes of blue-shirted fans swarming along the central avenue. Much more atmospheric today – top tip: check it’s not a match day when planning your walkabout.

I’ve come here today to take photographs and there are so many great subjects here. Although the graves along the paths are organised in regimented rows, the further back you go the more crowded and higgledy-piggledy they become. Some are even oriented at 90 degrees to the others so that they face south, as if to use up every inch of available space. Far back from the main avenue many of the monuments are overgrown and broken, covered with ivy.

I’d like to add that I’ve just missed out by a fraction of a second on a great shot of a rook perched on a gravestone – very Edgar Allen Poe. Or possibly a bit too self-consciously ‘look at me, I’m so Gothic’ – probably for the best that it flew just as I pressed the shutter, on reflection...

I love Victorian gravestones – they are so ostentatious and showy, they are brilliant to draw. And they always have a terribly stoic little inscription, ‘thy will be done’, ‘show me how to go’, or the quintessentially stiff-upper-lip words on poor Mary Ann Hobbes’ stone, which praised her for having ‘patiently endured protracted and intensely acute suffering’. Better still for the student of history, these gravestones often tell you so much more than just the deceased’s name and date of birth and death. These monuments often record their occupation – and, bizarrely, all their past addresses – and sometimes you get an intriguing insight into the lives of the characters who lived in West London 200 years ago.

There was a London doctor (d.1870) who went out to Mexico (what must his life have been like?), Alexander Robert Campbell Johnson (d.1888) ‘served many years in China under HM Foreign and Colonial Offices [and] died at San Rafael Ranch, Los Angeles’ and Thomas Chenery (d.1884) was Professor of Arabic at Oxford and a member of the Old Testament Revision Society. 

Joseph Bonomi, archaeologist

Joseph Bonomi led an even more interesting life – his epitaph describes him as a ‘sculptor, traveller and archaeologist’ and his gravestone has some beautiful engravings in an Ancient Egyptian style. Yet the same stone also hints at a terrible family tragedy – the names of four children are also listed, aged 5, 4, 2 and 8 months, all of which died within the same week. What disaster befell this adventurer’s household?  If nothing else these monuments make you acutely aware of how precarious life was during Victorian times; I came across another stone where one Joseph Crookes outlived his wife, three sons, two daughters and ‘six children who died in infancy’. It’s horrifying really.

But some individuals you stumble across are memorable for more positive reasons. Chevalier Frederick Hafner, ‘Director of Continental Journeys to the Late King Edward VII when Prince of Wales’ has an amazing array of honours and titles to his name, all proudly spelt out on his gravestone.  Knight of this, knight of that... while Joseph Julius Kanne’s stone bears an inscription stating that it was erected by Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales to commemorate 40 years of work by ‘one of Her Majesty’s most devoted servants’. William Howe Hennis’ stone records that he fought at Waterloo in 1815. He survived the battle and lived to 76. I also came across the grave of Tom Foy (d.1917), a Yorkshire music hall comedian.

Devoted Servant Joseph Kanne

Up at the south end of the cemetery you come to two raised colonnades, cloistered walkways built of yellow brick and golden stone, which stand over the catacombs. By now the rain was getting pretty insistent so I stopped to shelter among the columns as my notebook was getting soggy and the raindrops on my glasses were making it hard to see (I eagerly await the day someone invents windscreen wipers for specs!). Here from my vantage point I could look out over the cemetery. As you look towards the chapel with its domed grey roof, the colonnades sweep round like two wings, enclosing a circular space where the graves are more crammed together than

 ever in a mash of grey, black and white with the odd splash of dark red marble. Follow the colonnades round and you pass wall vaults covered with black plaques, most of which are broken and faded beyond legibility.

Against the southernmost edge of the graveyard is Stamford Bridge football ground, silent today. Last time I was here you could hear fans chanting and singing, a great roar of human life breaking into the stillness. Today there is nothing but the hiss of the rain. Even the birds have fallen silent.

Reginald Alexander John Warneford

On the way back from the chapel I came across an unusual gravestone depicting a small plane and a sinking airship, dedicated to one Reginald Warneford who was ‘accidentally killed’ in 1915. I had assumed that this meant some kind of airship accident, but I googled the man’s name when I got home and – as is so often the way – the truth turned out to be far more interesting. Warneford was a First World War pilot, part of what was then the Royal Navy Air Service (which combined with the Army’s Royal Flying Corps in 1918 to form the RAF) who had a short life but was awarded both the Victoria Cross and the French Legion d’Honneur. 

On June 7^th Warneford downed a German zeppelin over Belgium singlehanded – the scene depicted on his gravestone. The airship exploded, overturning his plane and stopping the engine so that he was forced to make an emergency landing behind enemy lines. But within 35 minutes Warneford had repaired his plane and flew back to base. It was this action that saw him decorated by Britain and France – but just 10 days later he was killed in a flying accident while ferrying an aircraft between bases. He was only 23 – the same age as me.

This is by no means the only military gravestone in the cemetery – I’ve already mentioned William Howe Hennis the Waterloo veteran and there is a big memorial to the Chelsea pensioners at the north end of the graveyard. There is also a separate war cemetery, full of rows of those familiar white rectangles, slightly curved at the top, marked with a regimental badge and a cross, like a miniature version of the famous burial grounds in France. I assume these stones commemorate local men who are buried elsewhere as the majority of them date from 1915 and as far as I’m aware there wasn’t a movement to repatriate large numbers of those killed in WW1. Those killed in the ‘South African War 1893-1902’ and the Second World War are also included amongst the graves.

An amazing range of regiments appear among the inscriptions; the Welsh, Gloucestershire, Lincolnshire, North Staffordshire and Middlesex regiments are just a few that I counted. Then there were members of the Rifle Brigade, the Royal Fusiliers, Grenadier Guards, Irish Guards and Cameronians (Scottish Rifles), not to mention members of the RAF, Veterinary Corps and Medical Corps. There is also a single soldier from the Czech army, whose gravestone, shaped like a triangle with a squared-off top, stands just outside the black railings on the other side of the path. 

In the middle of the military section is a huge cross on a grey platform, gleaming bright white and higher than most other monuments in the cemetery. Pyramids of black cannonballs stand on each corner of the block and the end of a cannon butts up against each side. What strikes you about this part of the cemetery is that it is so well cared for. All of the stones are clean and white, the grass is neatly trimmed – it is a stark contrast from the tangled brambles, fallen or broken monuments and sheets of ivy that I saw among the Victorian graves.

Amazing enormous mausoleum - Bram Stoker
take note; very much a des-res for an upwardly-mobile vampire!

By now it had pretty much stopped raining and in a tree near the military cemetery I saw four or five birds that were very different to the fat pigeons and noisy rooks that I had seen all over the graveyard; high in the branches, almost cartoonishly bright against the grey-white sky, were some green parakeets, eating seedpods – it was this loud crackling that had drawn my attention upwards. They look deceptively exotic with their bright green feathers, yellowish tails, red beaks and a pink stripe around their necks like a collar, but they are actually fairly common in London – I often see them in the trees as I walk to my nearest tube station. 

If you walk along the edge of the war cemetery and past the Chelsea Pensioners’ memorial you are almost back at the square gatehouse, leading back into the noise and rush of Old Brompton Street. Before ending this posting I’d like to share today’s winner for the Best Name on a Gravestone competition – it was a close run thing and honourable mention goes to my runner-up, Moncrieff McKenna (d.1951) but first prize has to go to a gravestone I found round the back of the left colonnade: one Acton Smee Ayrton, MP for Tower Hamlets (d.1886). The same stone also lists his nephew Holroyd Chaplin (d.1917) and Holroyd’s son Nugent (d.1918). Amazing.