I love the Culbertson and Randall “Permanent” series books because they don’t strive to be comprehensive. Other cemetery guides become tedious lists of all the famous people jammed into a cemetery, but these books go for depth instead, collecting up biographies of a few choice permanent residents. It’s arguable you take more away from this series than the others, where either you recognize the famous names or you don’t.
While Permanent Londoners spends a fair amount of time on the Magnificent Seven cemeteries (Brompton, Highgate, Kensal Green, etc.), it really shines for poking around inside landmarks that make up in history what they lack in acreage. Four chapters explore Westminster Abbey; one covers the Poets’ Corner alone. Other chapters look into the Tower of London and St. Paul’s crypt. That’s worth the price of the book right there, as far as I’m concerned.
I also like that the book wanders as far as Windsor Castle, discussing the monarchs who chose to be buried at home, rather than in town.
My copy was published in 1996, but I see a more recent version came out in 2000. I hope someone allows them to update it for the current decade.
With over a thousand years of history behind it, Westminster Abbey is the repository of memory in the heart of London. Anyone who is anyone in the United Kingdom tried to get themselves buried in the Abbey for hundreds of years. Those who were buried elsewhere were often honored with a monument as grand as a life-sized sculpture or as simple as a plaque on the wall. One could spend hours wandering amongst the statuary inside the church and still miss many gems.
The abbey’s website says, “Taken as a whole, the tombs and memorials comprise the most significant single collection of monumental sculpture anywhere in the United Kingdom.” Unfortunately, photography inside the Abbey is prohibited. Some photographs of the monuments are available in the Abbey’s gift shop or in one of the souvenir guidebooks for sale. What is needed, though, is a serious photographic study of the wonders jammed cheek by jowl against the Abbey’s walls.
This book attempts to document some of the mortuary sculpture. Of necessity, the shades of gray in the photos blunt the whiteness of the marble and brighten the darkness of the shadows, so they don’t completely do justice to the Abbey’s treasures. Still, Blundell has a fascination with detail and uses tight focus to good effect, giving a sense of the way your eye bounces around the room, struggling to take it all in.
I like that the book includes capsule biographies of the people commemorated by the statuary. I wish the biographies were attached to their pictures, rather than arranged by number at the back of the book. The arrangement makes sense if you’re at the Abbey, working your way around the room and matching the photographs to the artwork. As a reader who might be interested in finding, say, Isaac Newton’s grave, the lack of alphabetization or an index means that I have to read through the biographies until I find him, then cross-reference back to the photo.
Still, until I can make my own collection of photographs from Westminster Abbey, I’m glad to have this book. It’s lovely, if frustrating.
The book is inexplicably out of print. I got my copy from eBay, but Amazon does have some used copies for sale: Westminster Abbey: The Monuments
Collegiate Church of St. Peter at Westminster, known as Westminster Abbey
City of Westminster, 20 Deans Yard, London, SW1P 3PA, United Kingdom
Telephone: +44(0)20 7222 5152 Founded: 960 Number of Interments and Memorials: 500? Open: Usually open to visitors from Monday to Saturday throughout the year. Hours vary, so check the daily schedule here: http://www.westminster-abbey.org/visit-us/opening-times. On Sundays and religious holidays such as Easter and Christmas, the Abbey is open for worship only. All are welcome to services. Admission: £16 for adults, £13 for students over 18 and seniors 60+, £6 children from 11 – 18 years old, children under 11 free if accompanied by an adult. Family discounts are available. Each of these entry fees includes the audio guide.
King Edward (later called the Confessor) was born between 1002 and 1005, son of Saxon King Ethelred the Unready. He was chased from England by Danish invaders and lived in exile in Normandy, where he vowed to make a pilgrimage to Rome if he ever regained his throne. When he eventually returned to England, he was crowned at Winchester in 1042. The Pope released him from fulfilling his vow on the condition he would found a monastery to St Peter. Edward chose to replace the old Saxon church at Westminster with a new building in the Norman style. It was consecrated on Holy Innocents’ Day at the end of December 1065, but Edward was too ill to attend. He died early in January 1066 and was buried before the High Altar in his new church. The Bayeux Tapestry shows his burial procession.
Westminster Abbey has served as the site of every British coronation since 1066. The tradition predates the modern Gothic building, begun by Henry III in 1245. The abbey is also stuffed nearly to bursting with mortuary sculpture, which it is –unfortunately – forbidden to photograph. The abbey’s website says, “Taken as a whole, the tombs and memorials comprise the most significant single collection of monumental sculpture anywhere in the United Kingdom.” Photographs of the monuments are available from the Abbey’s gift shop.
Effigies of kings and queens in Westminster
Seventeen British monarchs reside permanently in the Abbey, ranging from Henry III, whose heart lies at Fontevrault Abbey in France amongst the tombs of his ancestors to Henry VIII’s fourth wife Anne of Cleves, and Mary, Queen of Scots. Protestant Elizabeth I shares a tomb with her older sister Catholic Mary I beneath an epitaph that says “Consorts both in throne and grave, here rest we two sisters…in the hope of one Resurrection.” Apparently, Elizabeth’s coffin was stacked atop Mary’s. Elizabeth’s effigy is the only one visible.
Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey
Commoners such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Darwin, and Sir Isaac Newton were honored with burial in the Abbey. Charles Dickens was interred here against his will, rather than being allowed to be buried alongside his family in Highgate Cemetery. Composer Henry Purcell was buried in the abbey near the organ that he had played. George Frederic Handel requested burial in the Abbey in his will, since he had composed a hymn that is still used at every coronation. African explorer David Livingstone was offered burial in the Abbey after his death in Africa, so his attendants unearthed his body, embalmed it, and sent it back to England without its heart, which they reburied in his original grave. During the 20th century, coffins were no longer buried in Westminster. Actor Sir Henry Irving was the first to be cremated and have his ashes interred in 1905.
Other famous Britons are commemorated in the Abbey, although their remains lie elsewhere. Among these are Shakespeare (buried in Holy Trinity Church at Stratford upon Avon), Jane Austen (buried in Winchester Cathedral), William Blake (buried in an unmarked grave in Bunhill Fields, London), Lewis Carroll (buried in Guildford’s Mount Cemetery), Sir Winston Churchill (buried with his parents in St. Martin’s Churchyard in Bladon), Shelley and Keats (both buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome), and many more.
Some Britons were recognized many years posthumously with memorial plaques. Lord Byron’s memorial was placed in 1969. Oscar Wilde was recognized on a stained glass window unveiled on Valentine’s Day 1995. Poet and spy Christopher Marlowe received his acknowledgment on another panel in the same window in 2002, 500 years after his death.
American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was honored by a bust in the Poet’s Corner, the only American to be granted that honor. A statue of Martin Luther King Jr. stands in a niche beside nine other 20th century martyrs, including theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp.
The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior
At the west end of the nave lies the tomb of The Unknown Warrior. After the end of World War I, unidentified British servicemen were exhumed from graveyards in the Aisne, the Somme, Arras, and Ypres, then draped in the British flag. Brigadier General L. J. Wyatt, commander of British troops in France and Flanders, chose one, who was placed in a plain pine coffin. The others were reburied with honors. The chosen unknown was reburied in the Abbey floor on Armistice Day, November 11, 1920. Of all the graves in the Abbey, this is the only one upon which it is forbidden to step. Flowers or wreaths often surround it.
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Permanent Londoners: An Illustrated Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of London by Judi Culbertson
