Death, where is thy style?
To walk around a Victorian cemetery is to relive painful histories. The grandiose and imposing graves record family deaths: the grandparents, the parents, and then the children – numerous, often dying in infancy, sometimes all dead decades before their parents. Tragedies cast in stone. For the Victorians, death was an everyday occurrence and yet an event – a cause of grieving but also, since they believed in the Resurrection, a cause for celebration. When they could afford it, they built grand memorials to their dead; when they couldn’t, they erected a simple stone over a grave which they would tend and visit regularly. Today, death is a nuisance. We have lost the language of grieving and see no reason to celebrate. Other societies preserve elaborate death rituals – holding wakes in Ireland, dressing the body for epic funerals in Naples, inviting the dead to return for an annual feast day in Mexico – but the British have nothing, just a drab ceremony and a trite verse on a dull stone.
Our failure to respond is best expressed in the death of memorial design. Modern cemeteries are desperately dull. The local authorities which run them are preoccupied with ease of maintenance, and impose rigid restrictions on the width, height and position of memorials. Wholesalers produce stones which meet these requirements and masons add the inscriptions, often cut by machine and with little regard for letter form. Hugh Meller, in a study of London cemeteries, sums up the grimness of the modern cemetery, in this instance Barkingside in Ilford: “The ground is flat, the tombstones feeble, planting is scant and buildings nil. A centrepiece has been formed by an ugly structure that resembles a wishing well but actually houses a dripping tap. Dull anonymity prevails. Functionalism reigns supreme in a world that the Victorians would find hard to recognise.”
Churchyards also impose restrictions on memorials. The Church of England’s Churchyards Handbook lays down size requirements, bans “raised kerbs, railings, plain or coloured stone chippings, built-in vase containers, figure statuary, open books and bird baths”, and, while permitting crosses, sets its face against “undue repetition of the supreme Christian symbol”. Circumventing these restrictions is a lengthy and arduous process. If you wanted to erect, say, a pyramid to mark your grave, you would have to battle against bureaucracy for years. Even if the land was your own, there would be a succession of planning and environmental health hurdles to overcome.
“We are currently experiencing the lowest ever point in memorial design,” says Sam Weller, spokesman for the Memorial Advisory Bureau, which represents the stonemasons. “A major reason for this is the degree of regulation exercised by the authorities. There is very little interesting memorial design being done, and even if you had an interesting one you’d have difficulty finding somewhere to out it up.” But Weller does not see the current poverty of memorial design as merely a local authority plot. He also pinpoints cultural factors which, he says, have undermined memorials and prompted the rapid growth in cremation (almost 70% of Brits are now cremated, the highest proportion in the western world).
“The two great wars caused a lot of people to die who shouldn’t have,” says Weller. “The slaughter was too painful to bear, and the Victorian celebration of death no longer seemed appropriate. A feeling of impermanence and rootlessness began to replace the Victorians’ sense of history and continuity.” Demographic factors also played a part: the population became more mobile and, as a result, family graves disappeared and plots were less well tended. Those cultural changes have made it possible for local authorities to impose their functional view of memorialisation with little or no resistance. And the trade, too, has offered no alternative view: funeral directors and masons do very nicely out of mass=produced stones and machine-cut inscriptions and see no reason to introduce art into the equation.
Richard Kindersley – one of the few stonemasons who still designs individual memorials, cuts inscriptions by hand and uses indigenous stone rather than shiny, anonymous marble – believes the trade is exploiting consumer ignorance. “People have no experience of memorials,” he says. “They only buy a memorial once or twice in their lifetime. It’s not like buying a video, where we know all about the prices and what’s good and bad. It’s in the interests of funeral directors and masons to keep it secret. When someone dies you have a corpse and you don’t know what to do. You have terrific grief and no mental discrimination at all, so you welcome a funeral director who will take everything, including commissioning the memorial, off your hands.”
Kindersley’s approach is very different from that of most funeral directors, who will offer a package including transport, coffin and memorial (they usually have contacts with a mason and will take a cut of the amount paid for a memorial). The average cost of dying these days is around £1,500 all in. Kindersley’s more personal approach increases the price of memorials by about 50%, but he argues that it is worth it. “Memorials immortalise people’s immediate grief, and the sculptor must try to guide clients when they come to commission a memorial, so that it will have lasting value.”
Kindersley’s memorials are very beautiful, but also very simple. He is suspicious of Victorian attempts at grandeur, and sees himself reverting to the simplicity and artistry of the local masons who produced memorials in the 18th century. They usually did stone work in an area covering two or three villages, and would have known the person they were memorialising, making the gravestone a personal statement about the individual. He strives for something similar. He visits the person commissioning the stone, usually a close relative, talks about the individual who has died, builds up a mental picture of him or her, and chooses lettering to match that person’s characteristics, such as informal, expressive lettering for a creative person. “I try to express thoughts and ideas in letter form,” he explains. “I did a memorial for two children who were killed in a tragic accident, and I tried to choose lettering which would reflect the childlike joy of being alive.”
Kindersley’s memorials work because the lettering and the size and type of stone are in harmony. The contrast with memorials where the stone has been bought in from a wholesaler and a gilded inscription added is stark. Kindersley calls the latter method “typing in stone”, with no thought given to the size of the letters, the letter spacing or the shape of the stone.” Despite the simplicity of the shapes he adopts, Kindersley still has to face trial by red tape, especially in local authority cemeteries which, he says, rule out virtually anything with any character. “It’s crazy that they want to bring everyone’s standards down,” he says. “The fear of someone making a mistake means it’s impossible to produce anything wonderful. That’s a very negative view of design, and the consequence is that 99% of modern stones have no charm and absolutely nothing to recommend them.”
Stonemasons such as Kindersley and John Skelton, a Sussex-based mason specialising in memorials, see themselves continuing the work of Eric Gill and Gilbert Ledward, who between the wars attempted to counter the move towards the use of imported stone and the mass production of memorials. They are trying to bring personality and individual expression into design, and to produce a memorial which reflects the character of the person being remembered rather than the tastes of some distant wholesaler. Working in parallel with the masons are landscape architects who want to get away from the uniformity of modern cemeteries and memorial gardens, and produce designs with character and appeal. Brian King, who is currently designing a new crematorium memorial garden in Essex, is highly critical of both the quality of landscaping in most cemeteries and of the memorials themselves.
“They are tasteless and appalling,” he says. “I dislike the imported stones, which I find inappropriate, and I dislike the crudeness of the lettering and the use of gilt. The authorities seem to want to standardise not only the style of the lettering, but even the number of initials and letters on the memorial. Such impertinence is outrageous. My solution is to eliminate cheap memorials, which look tawdry, and to group names on a larger piece of stone, so that you have within the gardens sculptural features which will make for variety and create a garden with atmosphere and dignity.”
Atmosphere is precisely what the great Victorian London cemeteries such as Kensal Green, Highgate and Brompton have in abundance. They were founded in the 1830s and 40s in the wake of rapid urbanisation, were privately owned and gave free rein to the egos of the deceased and the imaginations of sculptors. Temples, pyramids, obelisks, reclining figures, instruments for musicians, bridges and statues of all kinds combine in a curious harmony.
Being buried in one of the great cemeteries was a mark of social success, and competition kept the leading cemetery companies up to the mark. This is not to suggest privatisation as a possible present-day solution – Westminster’s cut-price sale of several of its cemeteries has shown that this can be a disastrous option – but the vision of the Victorian cemetery planners and the aesthetic appeal of diversity and self-expression do hold lessons for the bureaucrats who run modern cemeteries.
The designs of the Victorian period are in many respects an aberration: the result of a combination of new money, new cemeteries in which the memorials themselves were in competition, the Gothic revival championed by Pugin and Ruskin, and Victorian confidence and self-esteem. Their memorials are sometimes overblown, but they reflect a celebration of life, a capacity for grief, and a respect for the past and the people who lived then which we have lost.
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