Philobiblon

Just to show I’m not making it up, this is what my bicycle looked like when it reached home this evening, after riding between Weybridge and the Brookwood Cemetery along the Basingstoke Canal – i.e. unsealed nearly the whole way. We were fairly lucky with the weather in the morning; less so in the afternoon. But I made a potentially important discovery. Once you are wet and muddy, it can’t get any worse, and it gets rather fun, in a “mad dogs and Englishmen” kind of way.

This was a London Cycle Touring Club event, and it was the historic destination that led me to try the tougher two-star option, having previously been a one-star rider. The cemetery was founded in 1852, to take, it was intended, all of London’s dead. (Detailed history here.)

Indeed, many of the churchyards and crypts, including that of St George’s Suffolk, (nor the Catholic Cathedral) were emptied and the dead of various ages brought here. The dead of St George’s haven’t had much luck, however, or maybe their gravediggers were slack, because above is the joint memorial for them. It is, or rather was, an obelisk – a nasty case of subsidence has toppled the stones.The cemetery overall (at least the non-military sections) has that faintly romantic air of dereliction – quite why the fact that these dead are now neglected and forgotten has that emotional effect, but it always seems to. Left is a gorgeous built chapel, with very fine stone-work, now sadly closed up with concrete blocks.

Brookwood rather missed out on the celebs – who seem to mostly be buried in Highgate; perhaps its best one is the rather sad Duchess of Argyll – who was at the centre of the famous “headless man” photos in her salacious divorce from the duke, her second husband.

Also introduced to the court was a list of eighty-eight men the duke believed had enjoyed the duchess’s favors; the list is said to include two government ministers and three royals. The judge commented that the duchess had indulged in “disgusting sexual activities”. Lord Denning was called upon by the government to track down the “headless man”. He compared the handwriting of the five leading “suspects” (Duncan-Sandys; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; John Cohane, an American businessman; Peter Combe, a former press officer at the Savoy; and Sigismund von Braun, brother of the German scientist, Wernher von Braun, also a distant relation of Baron Martin Stillman von Brabus) with the captions written on the photographs. It is claimed that this analysis proved that the man in question was Fairbanks, then long married to his second wife, but this was not made public.

She’s buried in this rather undistinguished grave with her first husband, Charles Sweeney, an amateur golfer, who she chose to marry rather than Charles Guy Fulke Greville (7th Earl of Warwick). Whatever else was said about her, she wasn’t a gold-digger, and in fact she lived out her life after the spectacular divorce in less than comfortable circumstances, in rented rooms in London.The other main celeb, if you can call a saint that, is St Edward, suggested as a candidate for the “least significant king of England. His “remains” were rediscovered in 1931, but it took decades before they found a new home, in the care of a Russian Orthodox Order of monks, in the chapel left.Suggested accompanying reading: Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels and The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin. (The railway had a dedicated line here until the Second World War, when the station at Waterloo was bombed. The line has now been pulled up.)