Skulferatu #141 - Tower Hill Scaffold Site, Trinity Square Gardens, London

 

While down in London for a few days, I took a walk one morning along the banks of the Thames to the Tower of London.  Walking around the perimeter walls and against the tide of tourists heading to the entrance, I made my way up to Tower Hill and on to Trinity Square Gardens, a small park of well-tended lawns and flowerbeds. It was quiet there away from the hubbub of the busy metropolis, with a few other people here and there and a couple of old blokes in suits sitting together on a bench sharing a flask of tea.  The tranquillity of the gardens was broken briefly when a tour guide, with a dozen tourists following behind her, wandered in to point out some rather grand memorials there that commemorate the Merchant Seamen lost in both world wars.  In under a minute, she and her little group hurried off somewhere else.

 

View from Trinity Gardens to the Tower of London

 

Tower Hill Memorials to First & Second World War merchant seamen

 

A carved fish on the Tower Hill Memorial

 

I wasn’t there to see these monuments though; I was there to see a memorial to the dark past of this little park.  Walking round the path I came to a corner shaded by tall trees where, amongst some low growing shrubbery, there were some rather unobtrusive plaques dedicated to the memory of a host of people.  For it was here that the Tower Hill scaffold once stood.  For over four hundred years it was the site of public executions where those convicted of anything from high treason to coin clipping met their end.  Many others, however, were executed for holding political or religious views that didn’t conform with those of whichever monarch was on the throne at the time.  It is estimated that around 125 people were executed here.

 

Tower Hill Scaffold Site

 

Tower Hill Scaffold Site

 

Memorials at Tower Hill Scaffold Site

 

You may wonder why the tour guide with her little posse hadn’t thought to lead them over to have a look at this, well it was probably because the most glamourous victims of the executioner’s axe didn’t lose their heads here. Those A-listers such as Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey were given the chop in the grounds of the Tower of London rather than here.  However, there were some big names in British history who met their ends on Tower Hill.

 

Memorial Plaque

 

Memorial Plaque

 

Memorial Plaque

 

Flowers

 

Probably the most famous person to be executed here was Thomas Cromwell.  He was once one of the most powerful men in England being the chief advisor to King Henry VIII.   He was a man who made many enemies during his illustrious career, and they brought about his downfall by persuading Henry that he was plotting against him.  He was condemned to death without a trial and was executed at Tower Hill on 28^th of July 1540.  Recently, his name has become much more widely known due to the Man Booker Prize winning novels of Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, and the television series Wolf Hall, an adaptation of the novels.

 

Another of the big names in British history to meet his end here was John Dudley, the 1st Duke of Northumberland.  He was the man who, after the death of Henry VIII, became the power behind King Edward VI.  When it became clear that the young King was dying, Dudley used his influence to persuade him to change his will so that Lady Jane Grey, who was Protestant and also Dudley’s daughter in law, would be named as his successor, rather than Edward’s Catholic sister Mary.  It didn’t turn out well.  Much of the nobility supported Mary’s claim to the throne and though Jane was proclaimed Queen she was deposed by Mary’s supporters a few days later.  Dudley was quickly arrested, found guilty of high treason and executed on 22^nd August 1553 at Tower Hill.  His son, the husband of the unfortunate Lady Jane, was executed at the same spot a few months later.

 

It wasn’t always those that went against the monarch that ended up facing the executioner’s axe here.  Thomas Wentworth, the 1st Earl of Strafford was sent to his death by Parliament.  Wentworth was a trusted advisor to King Charles I who made him the Lord Deputy of Ireland.  In Ireland, Wentworth’s main goal seemed to have been raising lots of cash for the Crown by seizing bits of land from various landowners.  This, and his rather arrogant behaviour, made him very unpopular there.  He was recalled to England by the King who needed his help in crushing a rebellion by the Scots.  Wentworth advised the King to recall Parliament (which basically only sat when the King needed something) to raise funds to crush the uprising, and he also tried to raise an army in Ireland. However, Parliament was reluctant to raise the cash and was quickly dissolved again.  Meanwhile, the Scots army had soon overrun parts of Northern England.  Unable to raise an army strong enough to deal with the Scots, the King was forced to make peace with them and pay their war expenses.  The King though was skint.  So, he had to recall Parliament again.  Those in Parliament were now pretty fed up with the King and especially with Wentworth, who was seen as a threat to the very existence of the Parliament itself.  Many in Parliament believed that Wentworth had been plotting against them and had intended to use the army he had raised in Ireland against them rather than the Scots.  To rid themselves of him, they had him impeached and charged with treason.  At his subsequent trial Wentworth skilfully defended himself and the impeachment failed.  Nevertheless, it was decided that he had to go, therefore the leader of Parliament, John Pym brought in a Bill of Attainder (an act that declared someone guilty of a crime without trial and also provides the punishment to be dealt on them).  This bill passed in Parliament and Wentworth was condemned to death.  On the 12^th of May 1641, Wentworth was beheaded on Tower Hill, with a huge crowd of onlookers attending to watch.

 

Execution of the Earl of Strafford, 1641 by Wenceslaus Hollar Bohemian

The Cleveland Museum of Art

 

A Short and True Relation of the life and death…

 

In 1780 the last executions were carried out at Tower Hill when three people were hanged there.  They were William McDonald, Mary Roberts and Charlotte Gardiner, who had been convicted of destroying a house and property during the Gordon Riots, a series of anti-Catholic riots that took place in London over several days.   After this, public executions in London mainly took place on the gallows at Tyburn, near Marble Arch.

 

After having a wander around the park and taking a few photos, I left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me in one of the metal links of the chain fence around the memorial.  

 

Skulferatu #141

 

Skulferatu #141 in link of chain fence

 

Skulferatu #141 in link of chain fence

 

Map showing location of Skulferatu #141

 

The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are -

 

Latitude 51.50977

Longitude -0.077892

 

what3words: gladiators.nods.discrepancy

 

I used the following sources for information on Tower Hill Scaffold Site –

 

A Short and Trve Relation of the Life and Death of Sir Thomas A Short and Trve Relation of the Life and Death of Sir Thomas Wentworth ... Who Was Beheaded on Tower-Hill, the 12. of May, Wentworth ... Who Was Beheaded on Tower-Hill, the 12. of May 1641. with Certaine Caveats to All Men, of What Degree Soever, to Take Warning by His Fall

1641

 

Coventry Standard - Monday 10 July 1780

 

Bath Journal - Monday 17 July 1780

 

Sheffield Independent - Thursday 08 June 1911

 

John Bull - Saturday 4 August 1934

 

Historic Royal Palaces - Tower Hill Execution Memorial

 

 

 

Skulferatu #129 - Brompton Cemetery, Old Brompton Road, London

It was a quick stop off in London and the sun was out.  With time to kill I wondered where I should go.  Maybe I should do something touristy like take a boat down the Thames, wander down Oxford Street, or pay a small fortune to visit the Tower of London, but hey, when in the sprawling metropolis why not visit a sprawling necropolis?  So, that is what I did and headed off to Brompton Cemetery.  A cemetery so crowded that in places the gravestones are almost touching each other.

 

View down Central Avenue to the Chapel

 

View down Central Avenue to the Chapel

 

Tomb and gravestones and cannonballs

 

Cannonballs and gravestones

 

A skeletal tree dancing in the sun

 

Brompton Cemetery opened its gates to its first resident in 1840.  It is one of the seven garden cemeteries in London that were created between 1833 and 1841 to alleviate the overcrowding in the city’s graveyards.  When it opened it was outside of London, and sat amongst the fields in the countryside by the sleepy hamlet of Brompton.  Now it is about a twenty minute Underground ride from the city centre. 

 

The cemetery was originally a privately run business, and in order to attract customers was designed to be an attractive place where one’s corpse could spend eternity.  I mean, who wants to rot away in unpleasant surroundings?  In order to achieve the pretty environment that those in the Victorian era would want to have their final rest in, the cemetery was given a formal layout, the buildings within it were designed in a classical style and it was landscaped with various types of trees. 

 

Under the Metropolitan Internment Act of 1850, Brompton Cemetery was bought by the government and nationalised, the only private cemetery to be purchased this way under the act.  It is Britain’s only Crown cemetery and is now in the care of the Royal Parks Agency.  Brompton Cemetery is still a working cemetery, and you can get buried there if you fancy it.

 

Poppies and gravestones

 

The dead crowd around

 

A mausoleum

 

Angel and crosses

 

Gravestones and catacombs

 

There are various movers and shakers and celebrities buried at Brompton Cemetery, such as the leader of the Suffragette movement, Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the Cunard Line, Samuel Cunard, the journalist, Bernard Levin, and the actor Brian Glover.  However, as I wandered around I wasn’t celebrity spotting, but rather looking for some interesting stories, something there is always plenty of in a big graveyard. 

 

The first one I found was through a rather intriguing gravestone dating from the First World War, it was that of Reginald Warneford, which as well as depicting the man buried underneath, also included a scene of a plane flying away from an exploding airship.  It turns out that Warneford was a bit of a war hero.  During the First World War the German Zeppelins were a complete menace, as my late Grandaddy recalled.  As a small boy he witnessed one dropping bombs over his home city of Leicester.  These attacks struck terror in the civilian population and the military authorities were unsure of how the airships could be stopped.  One day, Warneford, a young airman who had only been qualified as a pilot for three months was out on patrol in his plane somewhere between Ghent and Bruges when he spotted a Zeppelin.  Flying above it, he dropped six bombs at close range, with the last hitting the Zeppelin and setting it on fire.  The explosion from his bomb flipped his plane upside down and caused his engine to cut out.  He, however, managed to regain control of the plane and land it.  Slight problem though, he was deep within enemy territory.  Frantically he tried to restart his plane, and after fifteen minutes the engine came back into life.  He hastily took off and returned back to base.  There he received a hero’s welcome being the first man to destroy single-handily one of the dreaded airships.  For this he was awarded a Victoria Cross.  Sadly, this was awarded to him posthumously, as ten days after taking out the Zeppelin he was killed while he carried out a test flight on a new plane which broke apart in midair.   His body was repatriated to England where over fifty thousand people attended his burial at Brompton Cemetery.

 

Grave of Reginald Warneford

 

Detail of Reginald Warneford’s gravestone

 

As I wandered around the cemetery I began to notice a similarity between the wording on lots of the gravestones, the gravestones of many of the women.  Unlike those of the men, these said very little about them.  No acknowledgements of achievements or of the lives lived, but rather everything said about them related to the men in their lives, their husbands, fathers, or sons.  One of the gravestones I came across was for Lisette, who is remembered as being the daughter of John Scott, the niece of Colonel Scott of Gala and the wife of Professor William Gregory.  For a stone in her memory, it says nothing about her.  So, I thought I’d delve into some records and see if I could find out who Lisette was.  Lisette Scott was born in 1805 in Germany and was the second of three sisters.  She was well connected to various members of the British aristocracy, as on her father’s side she was related to the Lairds of Gala, at Galashiels in the Scottish Borders, while her mother, ‘Miss Munro’ was related to Sir Donald MacDonald, Laird of the Isles, and her maternal grandmother had been Lady in Waiting to the Princess of Wales, mother to King George III. Lisette took on the name Makdougall after the death of her cousin when her family inherited the estate of Makerstoun in Roxburghshire, and thus became Lisette Makdougall Scott.  Lisette was brought up in Scotland by her aunt and recalled her childhood as being a happy one.  She was an accomplished musician and was popular in fashionable society for her ‘wit and repartee’.  However, she was more interested in, and at home, in the world of science.  In 1839 she married William Gregory, Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh University, taking his name to become Lisette Makdougal Gregory.  While in Edinburgh Lisette and William both developed a common interest in Spiritualism, with William writing work on that, as well as Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism, all really trendy ideas at that time.

 

Grave of Lisette Makdougal Gregory

 

On her husband’s death, in 1858, Lisette moved down to London with her son.  There she became a bit of a name in the Spiritualist movement (a religious movement which believed that an individual's awareness persists after death, and that the dead can be contacted by the living through a medium).  Her house became a gathering place for Spiritualists with many séances being held there by various mediums.  During these séances furniture would move around the room and apparitions of the dead would appear.  Lisette herself was a ‘writing medium’, meaning that the spirits of the dead would take control of her hand and cause her to write what they wanted to say.  The Spiritualist movement is now seen by most as complete bunkum and was rife with charlatans and conmen, however Lisette seems to have been a true believer who wrote a couple of pamphlets on the subject and made contributions to the Spiritualist newspaper.  Outliving her husband, son and grandson, Lisette spent much of her later life communing with them in the spirit world at the many séances held at her home.  Lisette suffered much from ill health in her old age and died, or as her Spiritualist friends liked to say – entered into her new life with the birth of her spirit, on 24^th May 1885.

 

Moving on around the cemetery I came to a large mausoleum that dominates the area it stands in, and is supposedly a time machine or a teleportation machine, a stone TARDIS in which you can travel through time and space.  Unlike many of the other large monuments this one is not for some male grandee, but rather for a rather lowly born woman who inherited a large fortune from her ‘husband’.  Hannah Courtoy, who is interred here along with two of her daughters, was born Hannah Peters in around 1784.  She left home in 1799 to escape from her drunken and abusive father, taking on work in various unskilled and menial jobs.  Then, in around 1800, she was introduced by a mutual friend, Francis Grosso, to John Courtoy and was employed by him as his housekeeper.  At this time John Courtoy was in his seventies and in poor health, but was a very rich man.  He had come to Britain from France in around 1750 and made a lot of money as a wigmaker, wigs being all the rage at that time.  He then used the money he had made from wig making to become a money lender, and through this he became very wealthy. 

 

View over graveyard to the tomb of Hannah Courtoy

 

Tomb of Hannah Courtoy

 

360 View of graveyard around Hannah Courtoy’s Tomb

 

 Within six years of working for Courtoy, Hannah had given birth to three daughters; Mary, Elisabeth, and Susannah.  All were baptised with the Courtoy name and Hannah claimed that John was the father of all three.  However, rumours abounded that the father of the children was in fact Francis Grosso.  Hannah then took on John Courtoy’s surname, despite the two having never married.  From all accounts she had a considerable influence over the decisions he made, something probably made easier in that he appeared to be suffering from dementia during the last two decades of his life.  In 1814 Courtoy changed his will leaving the majority of his money to Hannah and her daughters, this superseded a will he had made in 1810 in which he had left the bulk of his fortune to his previous partner Mary Woolley and their five children.  In 1818 John Courtoy died.  There was then an almighty fight over the contents of his last will with Woolley and her children, along with Courtoy’s French relatives, all disputing the contents.  They claimed that the 1814 will had been made under Hannah’s influence when Courtoy was in the throes of dementia.  The legal arguments over the will dragged on for years until 1827 when Hannah and her daughters ended up with most of the money.

 

In 1849 Hannah died and a lavish mausoleum was designed by her friend, Joseph Bonomi, to house her mortal remains.  Hannah and Bonomi had both been deeply interested in Egyptian hieroglyphics and mythology, believing that through the teachings of the ancient Egyptians they could discover some of the secrets of the universe.  They had regularly spent hours together discussing the wisdom and beliefs of these ancient people.  So, when Bonomi designed her tomb he incorporated her interests into it by having it feature some Egyptian characters along with a roof resembling a pyramid like structure.  Then, many years later, as in almost one hundred and fifty years later, rumours began to surface that the mausoleum was more than it appeared to be.  An amateur historian looking into the history of the tomb stated that his research had led him to conclude that it was a time machine and had in fact been designed by a maverick Victorian genius, Samuel Warner.  He, along with Bonomi, had built this marvellous contraption with funding from Hannah.  The idea being that the best place to build this machine would be a cemetery, as it was unlikely to be disturbed for hundreds of years, meaning they could travel into the future and return discreetly.   Once out there, the rumours grew, and it is now speculated that the tomb is also a teleportation device.  To add to the air of mystery and intrigue, the keys to the mausoleum have been lost and it supposedly has not been opened for over 120 years.  Relatives of Hannah have suggested that they may try to have a new key made so that the tomb can be opened, and so it could be that the secrets it holds, or doesn’t, will be revealed sometime in the future.

 

Tomb of Hannah Courtoy

 

Doorway to the mausoleum – or portal to another dimension

Keyhole

 

Detail of designs on the mausoleum door

 

If you are ever wandering through Brompton Cemetery and you see a man in a top hat with sideburns, or a woman in an out of place vintage dress suddenly appear, it may well be because the rumours about the time machine are true.  Either that or you have stumbled across someone, probably me, on their way to, or back from, a fancy dress party.

 

I left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me on a ledge of the tomb, in the hope that it may be whisked back in time to ancient Egypt or forward into some Utopian future.

 

Skulferatu #129

 

Skulferatu #129 on a ledge of Hannah’s tomb

 

Map showing the location of Skulferatu #129

 

The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are -

 

Latitude 51.486134,

Longitude -0.191203

 

what3words: congratulations.ladder.season

 

I used the following sources for information on Brompton Cemetery –

 

Brompton Cemetery, The Top 100

The Royal Parks

2021

 

Ashbourne News Telegraph - Friday 18 June 1915

 

Torbay Express and South Devon Echo - Friday 06 January 1967

 

The Spiritualist – January 16th, 1880

 

Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult, and Mystical Research, No 231 - Vol V, Saturday June 6, 1885

 

Records of the Family of Gregory

P. S. Gregory

1886

 

Birmingham Daily Post - Saturday 24 October 1998

 

Courtoy’s Complaint

David Godson

2014

 

The Independent – Sunday 13 December 2015

 

Skulferatu #115 - Gabriel's Pier, Gabriel's Wharf, Southbank, London

 

On yet another of the hottest days of the year, I was on a short stay over in London before heading back home.  So, what to do in that heat?  Well, I did the most sensible thing I could do, and as usual, went out in it.  As I was staying near to the Thames, and the tide was low, I thought I’d make my way there and wander along by the shores of the river to do a bit of mudlarking.

 

I wandered along the white hot pavements by Waterloo, and then cut through the back streets until I arrived at Gabriel’s Wharf.  There I made my way past the trendy, overpriced coffee shops and eateries, to a set of stairs that led me down onto a sandy beach by the Thames.

 

Busy people at Gabriel’s Wharf

 

Gabriel’s Pier and the shoreline along the Thames

 

Gabriel’s Pier and a bit of beach

 

This little bit of beach was busy with sunbathers and lots of children who were swimming in the brown, swirling waters of the river.  Though I was wilting in the heat I wasn’t going to join them in the cool water, as I remembered the stories of old about how dirty the Thames was.  There was one in particular about a passenger boat that sank sometime in the eighteenth century.  The story goes that of the hundred or so passengers on the boat, around twenty survivors were pulled from the river.  Within a week they had all died, poisoned by the water they had ingested while in the Thames.  The story, like many, may not be true, but the river was once horribly polluted and dirty, and even though it has now been cleaned up massively, you wouldn’t catch me swimming in it.

 

Leaving the beach area, I walked under Gabriel’s Pier and followed the shoreline along the Southbank, past the OXO building and towards Blackfriars Bridge.  Scraping at the stone and mud with my feet I found a few clay pipe stems and bowls, and a couple of small stones that had been cut into a circular shape with a whole drilled in the middle.  What they were I had no idea, but stuck them into my pocket anyway.

 

Shoreline along the Thames

 

Finding a relatively dry outcrop of rocks I sat down to watch life on the river.  Tourist boats sped past whipping the shoreline with rough waves, a couple of barges ambled by, and a group of a dozen or so canoeists paddled along, bouncing merrily in the waves of the passing boats.  Seagulls soared over, screeching, and gabbling in the way that seagulls do, and up above on the walkways around the shore was the distant mumble of the thousands of people out and about in the hot, hot sun.

 

After daydreaming for a while on my seat of rock, I walked back along the shore to Gabriel’s Pier, which like Gabriel’s Wharf, is named after Christopher Gabriel, whose family business was based here from the 1770s until 1919. 

 

Gabriel’s Pier

 

Under the pier

 

In a tangled wooden thing that had been fixed between the struts of the pier, I left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me on my walk.

 

Skulferatu #115

 

Skulferatu #115 in a tangled wooden thing

 

Skulferatu #115 in a tangled wooden thing

 

Map showing location of Skulferatu #115

 

The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –

 

Latitude 51.508557

Longitude -0.109673

 

what3words: until.swaps.wiped