WESTMINSTER ABBEY MEMORIALS & GRAVES

 

See Also: CLASS Intellectuals; GRAVEYARDS; MEMORIALS; AN, OLD, OLD, VERY OLD MAN; ROYAL GRAVES; ST PAUL's CATHEDRAL Monuments; WESTMINSTER ABBEY

The corpses of many of the people who are commemorated in Westminster Abbey by memorials have not physically been interred there. The historic standing of a number of professions can be gauged by when the Abbey started to commemorate their foremost members or inter their corporeal remains.

Location: The Sanctuary, Westminster Precincts, SW1P 3PA (orange, turquoise)

Website: www.westminster-abbey.org/about-the-abbey/history/famous-people-organisations

 

Doctors

Medicine as a profession did not begin to be held in any particular social regard until the mid-19thC. Originally, the corpse of the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728-1793) was buried in the Church of St Martin's-in-the-Fields.

Britain s cities were struck by a series of epidemics. These led to burial grounds and church crypts having corpses placed in them at a rate that was far higher than would have been the case otherwise. The General Board of Health became concerned that the sites were becoming reservoirs of disease and that they had been the sources of some of the outbreaks. Therefore, it sponsored the passage of the Public Health Act of 1858 into law. This required either that public crypts should be sealed or that they should be emptied.

The following year Dr Frank Buckland, who had trained at St George's Hospital, with which Hunter had been associated, realised that the measure furnished an opportunity for the anatomist's corpse to be re-interred in Westminster Abbey, of which his own father, William Buckland, was the Dean. The process of identifying Hunter's coffin, among the many thousands that had been placed in St Martin's crypt, took almost a month. (Another sign of the social rise of medicine was the ennoblement of Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic surgery, in 1887.)

See Also: CEMETERIES Brompton Cemetery; CLASS; PHYSIOLOGY The Hunterian Collection; PLAGUE The Great Plague of 1665, St Giles-in-the-Fields; WEST END CHURCH OF ENGLAND CHURCHES St Martin's-in-the-Fields

 

Engineers

In the northern aisle of the Abbey's nave is Engineers Corner. Located there are memorials to the likes of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859), John Smeaton (1724-1792), James Watt (1736-1819), Thomas Telford (1757-1834), George Stephenson (1781-1848) and his son Robert Stephenson (1803-1859).

 

The Percies

The Percy Dukes of Northumberland are the only family with the right of sepulchre in Abbey. Their vault is located below the Chapel of St Nicholas.

See Also: TOWNHOUSES, DISAPPEARED Northumberland House

Website: www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/elizabeth-duchess-of-northumberland-percy-family

 

Poet's Corner

As a royal official, the Clerk of Works, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) was buried by the eastern wall of the southern transept of Westminster Abbey. He was not buried there for any literary reason. In 1599 the poet Edmund Spenser's (c.1552-1599) corpse was interred nearby; he had drawn on Chaucer's work in his own. This helped to create a tradition whereby writers were buried in that portion of the building. Those whose remains have been interred there have included: John Dryden (1631-1700), John Gay (1685-1732), Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Robert Browning (1812-1889), Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). As a consequence, that part of the Abbey is known as Poet's Corner.

A prolonged delay between a writer's death and her/his receiving a memorial in the Corner was often the result of an unconventional private life casting, to the eye of the current Dean of Westminster, a shadow over the individual s candidacy. With time, the writer's work tended to be remembered more than her/his personal conduct and so the author s literary reputation was commemorated if not necessarily her/his person. The monument to Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey was not erected until 1740, over 120 years after the dramatist s death. (It would seem that successive Deans may have known something about him that the rest of us do not.)

A number of people who were not literary figures have also been buried in it: Tom Old Parr (c.1483-1635) who was reputed to have been 152 when he died, the composer George Frediric Handel (1685-1759), and the actors David Garrick (1717-1779) and Laurence Olivier (1907-1989).

See Also: GEOFFREY CHAUCER; LITERATURE

Website: www.westminster-abbey.org/about-the-abbey/history/poets-corner

Ben Jonson

The playwright Ben Jonson (1572-1637) lived in the residential part of Westminster Abbey's precincts, and was buried in the Abbey. He declared that Six feet by two feet wide is too much for me; two feet by two will do for all I want. The Dean obliged him by having him buried vertically rather than horizontally.

Website: www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/ben-jonson

Dylan Thomas

In 1977, when Jimmy Carter was the President of the United States, he attended a service at Westminster Abbey. After it, he was shown around the building. When he was shown Poet's Corner he asked where the memorial to Dylan Thomas was. There was not one. He was informed that this was because the poet had been a drunk and a womaniser and that such people were not commemorated in the Abbey. The president pointed out the shortcomings of numerous other people who were commemorated. The Dean was resistant to the idea of a memorial to Thomas. The politician asked whether he could influence the matter but was told that he could not because the Abbey authorities were answerable solely to the monarch. It took several years for the decision to be reversed but one was installed. It was unveiled on St David's Day 1982.

Website: www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/dylan-thomas

 

Soldiers

Buried in the Abbey are a number of soldiers who helped maintain royal dynasties. In 1660 the 1st Duke of Albemarle was responsible for ending the English Republic and the restoring of the Stuart monarchy. His grace has a grand tomb in the southern aisle of the Chapel of Henry VII. Underneath him are buried four Stuart sovereigns and a royal consort: King Charles II (1630-1685), Queen Mary II (1662-1694), King William III (1650-1702), Queen Anne (1665-1714), and Prince George of Denmark (1653-1708). They were all indebted to the duke for his actions.

The presence of the corpse of Field Marshal George Wade (1673-1748) is accounted for the role that he played in suppressing the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and thereby helping to preserve the Hanoverian dynasty from the Young Pretender.1

See Also: THE ARMY

1. The Young Pretender was a Stuart. His grandfather, King James II, had opted to flee Britain during the Revolution of 1688.

The Unknown Warrior

The Unknown Warrior was buried in Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day 1920.

In 1920 the music recording switched from being a mechanical technology to an electrical one. The first disc to be sold was of the interment of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey.

See Also: MEMORIALS The Cenotaph

Website: www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/unknown-warrior www.kesr.org.uk (The Kent & East Sussex Railway displays the railway carriage and oak coffin that transported the body from Dover Docks to Victoria Railway Station.)

A Known Warrior

In late 2003 it was reported that, at the start of the year, the casualty and compassionate unit of the Ministry of Defence had succeeded in identifying Agnes Spence, a resident of Kirkcudbrightshire, as being the niece of Private John Thomson, who had been killed during the Battle of Passchendale (October 1917). The soldier's remains had been unearthed at Molenaarelst in Belgium in 1998. She and other relatives were going to attend a reburial that would take place with full military honours.

The private's body was one of only two corpses that had been identified during the previous 25 years from the hundreds that had been recovered in Belgium. This was because the soil in which their remains were found was a wet clay, whereas in France the ground tended to be chalk which was drier, which meant that more collateral material survived. This could be utilised to identify associated human remains.

 

Timepiece-makers

Thomas Tompion (1639-1713) was the first clockmaker to be buried in Westminster Abbey.

See Also: TIMEPIECES

David Backhouse 2024