St.Pancras Old Church Yard
A) Jonathan Wild, learnt his profession of fence and racketeer in Newgate
Debtor’s prison. Made notorious by escaping from 4 prisons, his speciality was
ransoming the proceeds of burglaries back to their owners. When he was finally
executed in 1725, his friends buried him at the dead of night, next to his third wife
Elizabeth Mann. There is no grave stone as a few days later some of them dug him up
again and sold his body, nice and fresh, to surgeons for dissection. Today his skeleton
can be seen at the Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum, which is
directly opposite Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln Inn’s Fields. Wild’s colourful
life, and death at Tyburn, inspired many writers including; Daniel Defoe, Henry
Fielding, Arthur Conan Doyle and Bertholt Brecht.
B) The author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin, an early advocate of women’s rights and education, died in
1797 aged 38 from septicaemia after the birth of her second daughter Mary, who it is
said, 16 years later, held assignations here with Percy Bysshe Shelly, on the pretext
of visiting her mother’s grave. Abandoning his pregnant wife and year old baby
daughter Elizabeth Ianthe, they ran off to Switzerland together (accompanied by her
stepsister Claire Clairmont for company), all returning six weeks later penniless. Then
on 30th Dec. 1816, in an unsuccessful attempt to gain custody of his two little children,
they married with unseemly haste almost immediately after his wife Harriet had
deliberately drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. The bedtime story
“Frankenstein”, that Mary Shelley published shortly afterwards, inspired by her
visits to this graveyard and a terrifying thunder storm they had experienced in
Switzerland, may well have been a work of collaboration, with her husband reading
drafts and editing.
C) The gravestone of Charles Dickens’ headmaster can also be found here and he
used the location for the ‘body snatching’ scene in his “Tale of Two Cities”. As we
shall see later it seems that almost more bodies have been exhumed from this
graveyard than were buried here!
D) The architect Sir John Soane designed the tomb for his wife after she died in
1815; he joined her later in 1837. It is now quite rightly protected as a Grade 1 listed
monument, and was the inspiration for the design of our iconic red telephone boxes
by the son of Sir George Gilbert Scott, Giles. (There is a very fine early wooden
example just north of The William IV Pub on Hampstead High St.). Soane’s Bank of
England had a profound influence on other architect’s designs for future public
buildings, but apparently not on some “right Herbert’ who vandalised it with his later
‘improvements’. As the first purpose built public picture gallery, his design for
Dulwich set the standard. The government gave him an official civil service post with
John Nash. His lucrative private architectural practice enabled him in 1792 to buy a
house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which he later was able to extend into two
neighbouring properties. He filled them with his eclectic collection of superb examples
of antiquities, paintings and architectural salvage. Sadly he had been estranged from
his son since the death of his wife and so he left his Museum to the Nation as an
educational resource for young architects and for the enlightenment and enjoyment of
us all.
E) The St. Pancras and adjacent extension of St. Giles in the Fields
graveyards were closed for burials in 1854. The Midland Railway was then twice
permitted to encroach on hallowed ground. Having attempted to move most of the
human remains they then were able to run trains over the old graves. A young
Thomas Hardy supervised this work when he was working as an apprentice architect
before he found his true ‘metier’ as a writer. The head stones from the disturbed graves
have been arranged in a circle and the central tree can be seen struggling for space.
F) Most of the ‘less important’ gravestones had been moved by 1877, and following
the ideas advocated by Octavia Hill 1838-1912, the ground was levelled, trees planted
and the gardens we see today were opened by their champion and well meaning
benefactor and clearly pleased with her self, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts of
Highgate.
G) One of the more important graves left in the Grave yard can be seen next to her
rather unnecessary sundial. It is that of the GraveYard’s long serving treasurer; W.
Henry Savage.
H) It is most fortunate that the foreign fans of lemmings that cross Abbey Road,
NW8, who, like wildebeest crossing the crocodile infested Zambezi to make their
“killjoy was here” mark on the other side, have not yet realised that the photos for
‘Hey Jude’ and the ‘White Album’ were taken here by Don McCullin, with his Nickon
F camera, early one evening on Sunday 28th July 1968. Bring back the hollyflocks!