1
Twice Told Tales – Cemeteries and Gravestones in the News
October 2013
Compiled by Mike Bieling
Our travels on the London Underground this summer took us past Liverpool Street Station several times,
and at street level, we saw the construction going on there as part of London’s massive new Crossrail
commuter rail project. In the course of extensive excavations near the station, archaeologists have
uncovered a 16th century graveyard associated with the notorious Bethlehem, or “Bedlam”, Hospital for
patients with mental disorders. About 4,000 of perhaps 20,000 burials are expected to be disturbed by
the works, and artefacts going back to the Mesolithic have been discovered at the site. This story
appeared on the UK’s Mail Online website of August 8th:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2386683/Bedlam-graveyard-unearthed-beneath-City-LondonCrossrail-dig-reveals-bones-patients-notorious-asylum.html
Some time ago, I mentioned an article about a Muslim father, and now his son, who for decades have
lived in and faithfully maintained the European Christian cemetery in Kabul, Afghanistan, even in the
face of criticism and threats during the Taliban years. This story, from the New York Times website of
August 3rd, describes the life of Khwaja Naqib Ahmad, the Kabul municipal employee responsible
for the increasingly-onerous task of collecting unclaimed bodies, in particular those of suicide
bombers, giving them a decent burial, and tending the burial ground he uses for them:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/world/asia/a-days-toil-in-the-suicide-bombersgraveyard.html?_r=0
Facebook friend Kay Patterson recently forwarded me several photographs from Owen Phillips
Photography France Facebook page, which I’ve since enjoyed looking through for his many artistic
cemetery pictures from France and Italy, as well as of ruined houses and workshops and broken
machinery. I hope that all of you are able to view photos and albums posted on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/#!/OwenPhillipsPhotographyFrance
Another item to come to me from the Vintage WTF Facebook page was this strange photo. Evidently a
promotional shot, it shows four men variously dressed and perhaps constituting the entire ownership
and production staff of the enterprise, demonstrating the strength of a “Guy’s Cement Coffin
(patented)”. When I saw it, I joked that it depicted a delegation of farmers from Iola, KS, demonstrating
their theory that the dead should be buried standing upright, so more can be planted to the acre.
However, no one laughed:
https://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=502016043219206&set=a.488376567916487.10737418
28.488371957916948&type=1&theater
A story came up on the website of the NY Daily News of June 24th about the problems encountered by a
Council Bluffs, IA, man when he tried to sell some assets of a now-defunct lodge of the Oddfellows
organization to pay off its tax bill. Amongst these items was a handsome antique coffin, complete with
2
skeleton, which he posted for sale on Craigslist for $12,000, promptly attracting the attention of the
police. It turns out the skeleton had been donated to the IOOF Lodge by a doctor back in the 1880s
(judging by the photo, it was likely the medical man’s anatomical specimen) and later placed in the
coffin for safekeeping. The present owner lacks the documentation to legally sell the unidentifiable
remains, so at the time of writing, he was hoping that the local medical examiner would keep them:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/man-sell-antique-coffin-craigslist-skeleton-article1.1380996
I saw many things that impressed me on our travels in Britain this summer, but one thing that truly
stopped me in my tracks was a bronze cast of sculptor Patricia Cronin's extraordinary "Memorial to a
Marriage", on permanent exhibition at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. Cronin has
revived a classic monumental form to express both traditional memorial and contemporary political
concerns, and done so with great intelligence and cool elegance. Although Cronin and her wife, Deborah
Kass, are still alive and well, their grave in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, on which one of the bronze
casts of this monument stands, is one of the most visited there. A conversation with a couple of
Facebook friends about "bed memorials" led me to look into the whole story and put together this
album about an important work for those interested in contemporary forms of memorialisation:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.630228703676075.1073741841.100000668530081&type
=1&l=4978a651ce
The Hyperallergic arts website posted an article by Allison Meier on October 10, 2011; about the
placement of the bronze cast on the Cronin-Kass plot after the marble original was removed to prevent
further weathering:
http://hyperallergic.com/37601/memorial-to-a-marriage-woodlawn-cemetery-patricia-cronin/
My look at “Memorial to a Marriage” also led me to other photos of the Cronin sculpture and of a
number of interesting monuments from different eras featuring couples, and especially recumbent
couples, including this nice collection from the TaphoTribes blog of November 13, 2012:
http://taphotribes.blogspot.ca/2012/11/nor-demons-down-under-sea.html
At the same time, I came upon the sculpture, "Asleep", by Peter Schipperheyn, an Australian sculptor, in
a March 26, 2012, post on the Cult of the Weird website. This single nude female figure in carrara
marble was commissioned in 1987 by Christina Matheson as a memorial to her husband Laurence, who
is buried in Mount Macedon Cemetery, Mount Macedon, in the state of Victoria, Australia. I was
interested to learn that, although this work is reminiscent of Patricia Cronin's "Memorial to a Marriage"
and in part seems to carry a similar symbolic message, it pre-dates Cronin's work by 14 years:
http://www.cultofweird.com/art/laurence-matheson-asleep-gravestone/
On October 10th, my friend Bob Greenhouse posted an entry from the College of Rock and Roll
Knowledge on Facebook, entitled “R.I.P. Eleanor Rigby”, including this photo of the gravestone of the
song’s namesake, who died on October 10, 1939. Her name is inscribed on her grandfather's gravestone
in St. Peter's Church Cemetery, Woolton, in Liverpool. John Lennon first met Paul McCartney at a church
garden fete here on July 6, 1957, and McCartney showed Lennon how to tune his guitar. The two
teenagers are said to have spent quite a bit of time hanging around St. Peter’s, and perhaps spent some
3
of it as I did, trying to work out the family relationships described on this stone. The use of Eleanor’s
name was apparently a last-minute change from “Miss Daisy Hawkins”.
Earlier this month, the Necropolis Cemetery - The Sleeping Suburb Facebook page shared a link to a
fascinating page devoted to the cemeteries of Berlin, Germany. I wasn't yet involved in cemetery studies
when I used to visit there and, despite my German family background, German cemeteries have
remained a relatively unknown quantity to me. The Necropolis' recent postings of photographs of
monuments in Berlin and in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne have reminded me of that fact, and that
they are, as one should expect, different from those produced by other European cultures.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/-Cemeteries-of-Berlin-/602959159728140
The Weather Channel website posted a photo collection on October 16th entitled “Eerie Cemeteries Left
to Nature”. Five cemeteries – Mount Moriah Cemetery, Philadelphia; Wardsend Cemetery, Sheffield,
England; Woodland Cemetery, Newark; the Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague, Czech Republic; and Mount
Jerome Cemetery, Dublin, are featured, with galleries of up to 20 photos on each page (change pages
using the upper blue arrows, scroll through photo galleries using white arrows in corner of viewer):
http://www.weather.com/news/science/creepy-abandoned-cemeteries-photos-20131015?pageno=1
4
Das Schicksal – Hugo Lederer, marble, 1905
Speaking of German cemeteries, the colour photograph of this grim sculpture was posted on Facebook
on October 19th by The Necropolis Cemetery, the Sleeping Suburb, who credited it to the Parkfriedhof
Ohlsdorf. The Parkfriedhof Ohlsdorf, which opened in 1877, is in the Ohlsdorf district of Hamburg and at
391 hectares, claims to be the world's largest "Park Cemetery", which I understand as something
equivalent to our Victorian Garden Cemetery. The cemetery’s Facebook page is well worth a look, with a
magnificent photo gallery of hundreds of pictures of sculptures, mausolea, tombstones, the Jewish
section, the International War Graves, and other interesting features, all with a distinctly Teutonic bent:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Parkfriedhof-Ohlsdorf/291707084230074
The Google translation of the Parkfriedhof Ohlsdorf ‘s Wikipedia page is very informative, too:
http://translate.google.ca/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedhof_Ohlsdorf&p
rev=/search%3Fq%3DParkfriedhof%2BOhlsdorf%26biw%3D1350%26bih%3D578
The comment attached to the B&W photo says "This sculpture bears the name "Fate". It was created by
sculptor Hugo Lederer (1871-1940) of Berlin in 1905. It ornamented (!) the garden of the Eduard Lippert
family until 1956." As far as I could determine, it does not mark the grave of any particular individual. It
stands in an open space in front of the Kretschmer Mausoleum (now the Schroeder, due to German laws
allowing new families to assume “sponsorship” and use of old tombs), the largest non-aristocratic tomb
in Northern Europe, but the cemetery is actually dense with monuments on some 235,000 graves.
The comment attached to the colour photo says "This is the sculpture "Fate" ... from the rarely-seen rear
view. A being with both male and female physical characteristics drags a dead young woman and a dying
young man by their forelocks." Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any further analysis or
interpretation regarding the intended symbolism of this brutal and disturbing work. A query to the
cemetery brought the reply, “In the vernacular, it is the cruel countess. The Fate, a goddess, grinds a boy
and a girl by the hair behind her. The girl has given up the fight; the boy tries to cling firmly on the
ground. This Art Nouveau group had its original location in a small garden. It came to Ohlsdorf in 1956.”
I found another article that referred to Lederer's work as "Neo-Baroque", and mentioned a number of
sculptors who were influenced by him. To me it speaks of the inevitability of the sacrifice of young men
and women, an ominous message to have been putting about in pre-WW I Germany. The "Bismarck"
bust and some other works I saw on the Hugo Lederer website strike me as distinctly proto-Fascist.
Mike Bieling lives in Duncan, BC, Canada, and can be reached at oldcemeterian@shaw.ca