FT269

The long walk from the gates of Brompton Cemetery in west London to the chapel – 617m (over a third of a mile) – gives ample time for reflection. You’re surrounded by hundreds of splendid monuments, most of them Victorian, and many of them tilted as if the occup­ants of the graves beneath them had made a bid for freedom. Your thoughts start turning to the transience of life, the imminence of death.

But any sombre musings are dispelled by the ridiculous disjunction between the squirrels scampering over the tombs and scurrying up almost to your feet, and the crows as big as ravens stomping defiantly across the dead straight path in front of you. They all look suspiciously well fed. And even at 10 in the morning there are people using the cemetery for their leisure: cycling or jogging or taking their dogs for a walk, young mothers with babies and small children playing amongst the memorials to long-gone lives, and the odd vagrant stretched out on a bench as if rehearsing for residency.

It was the perfect setting for “Death in Legend and Tradit­ion”, the Folklore Society’s conference, held over the first weekend in September.

The interior of the 1840 chapel is magnificent, with eight tall and sturdy Corinth­ian pillars supporting a beautiful dome; but it’s a slightly shabby grandeur, with paint peeling from the circular walls. It also has the worst acoust­ics I’ve encountered in any church or sacred space. After struggl­ing to hear the first two speakers through the distortion and echo, I was told that you could only hear clearly if sitting within the columns – but no one at first seemed to make the connect­ion that the speaker also had to be within the columns…

It took me a while to realise that the screen was a heavily creased grey plastic sheet; the sharp regular folds gave a highly apposite impression of stone slabs behind the pictures.

There were 10 speakers on the Satur­day and two on the Sunday morning, between them proving that (on the whole) scholars can be enthusiastic and enthusiasts can be scholarly. There’s no way to cover them all; I’ll just highlight some of the little details that stick in the mind.

Speaking on “The Unquiet Dead of England”, Scott Wood, organiser of the excellent South-East London Folklore Society, related accounts of a dead husband in Buckinghamshire who kept trying to get into bed with his wife; several murder victims gushing blood to identify their murderers; and a cheery corpse in Deptford, south London, who would rise from his grave and call for a pot of beer to share with the watchman. In a nice throwaway line at the end, he suggested that most of the unquiet dead in England “had the decency, like most ghosts, night hags and grey aliens coming to abduct you, to appear to you in your bedroom” – presumably a talk for another time.

Gail-Nina Anderson, regular FT and UnConvention contributor, presented some delightfully macabre details about artists painting their subjects from the corpse: sometimes you have to pinch the cheeks to bring the colour to them. But the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti didn’t prop up his late wife Lizzie Siddal to paint Beata Beatrix as some have claimed; neither is it true that when Lizzie was exhumed five years after her burial, to retrieve the manuscript copy of Rossetti’s poems which he had lovingly tucked between her cheek and her hair, her body was perfectly preserved and her red-gold hair filled her coffin. No surprise with Gail-Nina, her talk also encompassed a Lego version of Millais’s Ophelia, Edgar Allan Poe, whose wife was painted from her corpse, a self-confessed Highgate Vampire-slayer, Dracula and Jack the Ripper – all jolly fun.

Helen Frisby told of Victorian customs and superstitions surrounding death, particularly when the body is laid out in the front parlour, in the liminal state between death and burial. FT’s resident ghostwatcher and Society for Psychical Research member Alan Murdie asked whether we can find anything in accounts of ghosts to suggest life after death, and concluded that the last century of research has not come up with any convincing explan­ations for ghosts – though SPR research, he said, seems to show that ghosts are fairly stupid.

Two speakers related customs around the death of unmarried women. Peter Robson, reading extracts from Thomas Hardy, asked if it was just a Dorset custom for a peal of bells to be rung after the funeral of an unmarried woman, as it would be for her wedding. Rosie Morris gave a fascinating talk based on her PhD research on Maidens’ Garlands or Virgins’ Crowns, Chaplets or Wreaths. Originally made from fresh flowers, and later from more permanent substances including strips of wallpaper and silk ribbons, these were carried in front of the coffins of unmarried young women. “Aspatia’s Song” in Beaumont and Fletcher’s A Maid’s Tragedy (1610) has the lines:

“Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew
Maidens, willow branches bear
Say I died true.”

In the ballad “The Bride’s Burial” (1675), the unfortunate woman dies at her own wedding, and so is buried both a maiden and a wife:

“A garland fresh and fair
Of lilies there was made
In signs of her virginity
And on her coffin laid.”

Possibly the most astonishing revelation of the conference is that this custom still survived through the 20th century; there are examples of Maidens’ Garlands from 1953, 1973 (shown on film) and 1995.

Derby storyteller Pete Castle told a number of stories about death, including the European folk tale “Godfather Death”, and sang the late-17th-century ballad “Death and the Lady”. South London songwriter Nigel of Bermondsey brought the first day to a close with four of his songs, including “Crossbones”, about the unconsecrated cemetery for prostitutes and other social outcasts near Southwark Cathedral, and “Bury My Heart at Bermondsey”, a song commissioned by a local undertaker.

What do we do when the cemeteries are full but people still require burial? Sunday began with Andrew Bennett, chairman of a government enquiry into cemeteries, explaining the perennial diffi­culty of getting governments and local authorities to deal with the issue. The enquiry’s recommendation to reuse graves where there had been no interment for 75 years met with popular hysteria, with even the Daily Telegraph headlining their story “Bodies to be stacked double in old graves”.

The final speaker, Dave Evans, showed that this was no new taboo, quoting an epitaph on a Merovingian grave in France: “No hand should violate the ‘rights of the grave’ until the voice of angels resounds.” His talk centred on the recent burial of the skeleton of the early 19th-century Joan Wytte of Bodmin, which had been exhibited in a museum for many years, but it widened into other reburials. Indigenous peoples of North America and Australia have reclaimed remains from other countries; we learned later that two or three Native Americans buried in Brompton Cemetery had been repatriated in recent years. But what about the remains of early people in our own green and pleasant land? Pagans and academics are working together in the group Honouring the Ancient Dead for the respectful re-interment of remains kept in cardboard boxes in museum storerooms.

The conference ended with the laying of a wreath on the gravestone of the antiquarian William J Thoms, who coined the word “folklore” in 1846, foll­owed by a tour around the cemetery led by Rob Stephenson, long-time organiser of the London Earth Mysteries talks, who is a committee member of the Friends of Brompton Cemetery.

As with any good conference, it’s the coffee breaks, lunch and the evening in the restaurant and pub that bring it alive as you catch up with old friends and meet new and fascinating people. Chief among these for me was the amazingly active Jacqueline Simpson, who this year, at nearly 80, has been appointed Visiting Professor of Folklore at the Sussex Centre of Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy at the Univers­ity of Chichester, West Sussex. Having encountered her sharp mind and wit over lunch, I regret that she didn’t give a paper. Neither, surprisingly, did the conference organiser, Jeremy Harte, expert on faery lore and much else.

Just before we left, as Rob Stephenson was giving us the story of one monument, a squirrel leapt up on the next one and started haranguing him. And after two days on death in legend and tradition, none of us found this the least bit strange.