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
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