Alan Bennett and Tennyson in Poets' Corner

Poets’ Corner seems to be popular this month. The Times Literary Supplement has just published a provocative item suggesting we have simply forgotten many of the writers commemorated there. ‘How many visitors to Poets’ Corner today,’ asks NB, the back-page columnist of the TLS, ‘recognise the name of Thomas Shadwell, whose monument was raised circa 1700?’ Well, as it happens, I do. Shadwell has a cameo appearance in Dyden’s Dunciad, and I memorised the following couplet for my finals, hoping it might come in useful—as at last it has done:

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

            But Sh——— never deviates into sense.

Meanwhile The London Review of Books has been publishing extracts from Alan Bennett’s diary of the past twelve months. Last September, we now learn, Bennett was recalling a conversation he had had in 1995 with the then Dean of Westminster Abbey, Michael Mayne. The Dean had asked Bennett (who at the time was making a documentary about the Abbey for the BBC) whether he thought Philip Larkin and J.B. Priestley deserved to be commemorated in Poets’ Corner. Bennett admits that while he considered Larkin ‘an obvious yes on the strength of Church Going, let alone the rest’, he’d been lukewarm about Priestley. Today Priestley still isn’t there, and no doubt has now missed his chance—about which Bennett confesses he is filled ‘with regret and self-reproach’.

Deciding Abbey business in an informal way that has irreversible consequences echoes a letter sent by an earlier Dean, George Granville Bradley, to Charles Eamer Kempe, the celebrated stained glass designer, in March 1894:

My dear Kempe

   You see I treat you as an old Rugbeian & dock you of the ‘Mr’!

   I am sure that I may privately ask your opinion on a matter in which I rather distrust my own judgment - & Somers Clark, whom I sometimes surreptitiously consult is away.

   We are laying down a gravestone over Tennyson.

   It is to be very simple  - black Irish marble.

   I thought a plain cross

                                   +  †

Then the name

      Alfred

Lord Tennyson

born August &c

died October &c

& just a wreath of laurels below.

  

   Lady T rather likes to have the laurel wreath on the +. but wd not that suggest to the ordinary mind the couronne d’epines [crown of thorns] rather than the laureate ship?

   I told her that I should take some good counsellor’s opinion.

   It will be of course in a much trodden part of Poets’ Corner i.e. the S transept close to Chaucer’s monument.

   I should much value a hint from you & I am sure that you will forgive me.

   Mr Pearson has been very ill – is better; but still poorly. I may see him on Wednesday & it wd be a comfort to have my own views strengthened by a better guide than myself.

   I shall not leave here till after post comes in on Wednesday morning – unless something unforeseen happens. I’ve no vehicle or wd. drive down.

   Forgive me.

   Very truly yours

   G G Bradley

Dean Bradley (1821-1903) was an interesting character. Like Kempe, he had been educated at Rugby, and had returned to teach there while Kempe was a pupil. He later became Headmaster of Marlborough, then Master of University College, Oxford, and was finally appointed Dean of Westminster in 1881. Up to that point he had been best known for his revised version of a school textbook on Latin Prose Composition, always referred to as ‘Bradley’s Arnold’. Hence, when his appointment was announced in the press, Punch published a caricature, showing Bradley as a butterfly rising above what looks like a church with a mortar board atop its steeple, but actually has the name Marlborough just legible on its roof. Bradley had a reputation as a progressive and reforming Headmaster, but on the ground lies a bundle of birch twigs wrapped around with a piece of cloth on which appears the word CHRYSALIS. The caption, punning both on his notoriety among schoolboys – his name a metonym for enforced translation of passages from English into Latin – and on his elevation to the deanery at Westminster, echoes Peter Quince’s astonishment at seeing Bottom the weaver transformed into an ass: ‘BLESS THEE! THOU ART TRANSLATED!’

Bradley and Tennyson had been a two-man mutual admiration society: when the poet sent his son Hallam to Marlborough, he declared that he had sent him ‘not to Marlborough but to Bradley’. Bradley for his part returned the compliment by naming his daughter Emily Tennyson Bradley. So it isn’t surprising that he took such a personal interest in designing an appropriate memorial to go over the resting place of Queen Victoria’s favourite poet.

His letter to Kempe is revealing. When he cheerfully admits that he sometimes consults the architect and Egyptologist Somers Clarke surreptitiously, he opens up a world of Cathedral intrigue recognizable to anyone who has read Trollope’s Barchester novels. The logical person to have advised the Dean was the Abbey’s Surveyor of the Fabric.  In 1894 this was John Loughborough Pearson, but he – as the letter explains – had been seriously ill. But even with Pearson indisposed and Somers Clarke away, Bradley might have consulted his friend, the architect George Frederick Bodley. After all, it was Bradley who had brought in Bodley at University College to build a new Master’s Lodging (1879); and when Pearson died three years later, it was Bodley whom Bradley appointed to succeed him. But perhaps it was from previous dealings with Bodley and Pearson that Bradley had discovered it was useful to have a second, discreet, architectural ear to bend when occasion required – as here, in the matter of Tennyson’s tomb. Perhaps, too, he was being cautious in case Bodley suggested a wholly different (and much more elaborate) design; he had already designed a fine memorial brass tombstone in the Abbey for the architect George Edmund Street, who had died in 1881. Whatever the reason, the opening and closing sentences of his letter suggest this was the first time Bradley had consulted Kempe confidentially on a question of religious symbolism.

Attached to the letter, in the Kempe Trust archives, is a small pencil sketch on a torn-off piece of Whatman’s fine wove Original Turkey Mill paper. The sketch is in Kempe’s own hand, and shows two ideas for an appropriate Poets’ Corner tombstone. While both develop the Dean’s original idea of a cross and a laurel wreath, neither incorporates the stricken widow’s wish for a wreath to be placed over the cross. How Kempe replied and whether he even sent any sketches to Westminster is not known; but in any case Tennyson’s memorial stone, as seen today, displays no cross, and no wreath, just name and dates. The final decision seems to have been a compromise of a peculiarly Anglican kind. Neither Dean nor widow got their way – and all were satisfied.

Adrian Barlow

[Notes:

·      For the discussion of Poets’ Corner, see J.C., NB, TLS 22.1.16, p.32

·      Alan Bennett recalls his conversation with the Dean in his diary for 2015, now published in the London Review of Books, vol.38, no. 1 (7 January 2016) p.6

·      Tennyson’s tombstone can be seen in an extract from Bennett’s documentary about Westminster Abbey here, on YouTube.

·      Tennyson’s comment about sending his son to Bradley not to Marlborough is quoted in Niall Hamilton, A History of the Chapel of St. Michael and All Angels, Marlborough College, Wiltshire, (1986), p.17

[illustrations: (i) The Punch cartoon (Vol. 81, 1 October 1881, p.154), drawn by Linley Sambourne; (ii) inside pages of Bradley’s letter to Kempe (31.3.1894); (iii) Kempe’s pencil sketches for Tennyson’s tombstone (1894). Illustrations (ii) and (iii) © Kempe Trust.

I first published a shorter version of this post, entitled ‘Kempe and the Case of Tennyson’s Tomb’, on the Kempe Trust website.

I have written about Westminster Abbey twice before:

World and time: pity about the Abbey

On Boadicea, William Cowper and Westminster Abbey

On Boadicea, William Cowper and Westminster Abbey

Boadicea and I first met sixty years ago. On my fifth birthday, my father took me to London ‘to see the sights’. He made it sound, and feel, like a rite of passage.  In addition to the Changing of the Guard, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey and Big Ben, he made sure that I saw the statue of Boadicea in her chariot, which stands on a plinth at the Victoria Embankment side of Westminster Bridge. Dad had been born in London, and liked to think of himself as a Londoner, though he’d not been much older than five himself when his parents moved to Hastings, shortly after the start of the First World War.

Boadicea stayed in my memory: my father had a book he had somehow kept from his own childhood – a child’s history of London entitled London Bells and What They Tell Us (Blackie & Son, 1911) – and when we got home that evening, he gave it to me, and in it I found the chapter on Boadicea.  I had just learned to read, and this was the first bedtime book I ever read by myself.

I visited Boadicea again last week.  She still rises magnificently above the Embankment traffic, pointing towards Big Ben and urging her bare-breasted daughters and her unseen army onwards against the Romans. She is heading straight towards the Palace of Westminster, and the blades attached to the wheels of her (entirely non-historical) chariot would still easily scythe their way through the crowds that nowadays make Parliament Square all but impassable.

Forgotten (by me) and almost unnoticed by everyone else are two short lines on the river-facing side of her plinth:

REGIONS CAESAR NEVER KNEW

THY POSTERITY SHALL SWAY.

The message seems wholly inappropriate. Surely, Boadicea was revolting against oppressive imperialism? Yet here she is, apparently being celebrated as the mother of the British Empire. One has to remember that ‘Boudica’ means Victory, and that the memorial was originally designed as a tribute to Queen Victoria, who in all other respects (apart from a disposition to bad temper) resembled the Queen of the Iceni not at all. Prince Albert enthusiastically supported the project, even lending horses from the Royal Mews for the sculptor, Thomas Thornycroft, to use as models.  Thornycroft* had worked on this giant sculpture for many years, but it was not finally cast in bronze and presented to the nation until 1902, seventeen years after his death.

The lines on the plinth are by William Cowper, who seems an unlikely poet to have been attracted by Boadicea or indeed to have been an enthusiastic imperialist. But in an eponymous eleven-stanza poem, the Queen, having been humiliated by the Romans who beat her and raped her daughters, visits a Druid who predicts that the Roman Empire will be eclipsed by her glorious descendants:

Then the progeny that springs 


From the forests of our land, 


Armed with thunder, clad with wings, 


Shall a wider world command. 



Regions Cæsar never knew 


Thy posterity shall sway, 


Where his eagles never flew, 


None invincible as they.

This reassures Boadicea no end; and, although she is defeated in the ensuing battle, she dies (according to Cowper) hurling scorn at the Romans:

Ruffians, pitiless as proud, 


Heaven awards the vengeance due: 


Empire is on us bestowed, 


Shame and ruin wait for you!

Unexpectedly, I came across Cowper again later the same day, having gone into Westminster Abbey to look for a window depicting George Herbert. But here I must pause: it is many years since I last visited the Abbey, the place Joseph Addison once called ‘this great magazine of mortality’. I’ll never go again. After paying £18 admission – does any other cathedral or abbey, mosque or temple in the world demand such a fee? – everything conspires to make visitors feel unwelcome. We are herded like sheep; barriers everywhere pen us in, making it difficult to move from one part of the Abbey to another; and the rudeness of some of the vergers and guides shouting (“What makes you think you can use cameras in here? Can’t you read?”) at uncomprehending overseas visitors is as embarrassing as offensive. If the Abbey authorities treat visitors as tourists to be fleeced, they should at least allow them to do what tourists like to do: take photographs.

There are, of course, exceptions. A kindly green-begowned volunteer – taking several short cuts not permitted to lesser men - led me from one end of the Abbey to the other, where I eventually found George Herbert, sharing a window with William Cowper. Both poets in their time had been scholars of Westminster School.  This window looks down on St. George’s Chapel, which is where the Coronation throne has lately been re-sited – minus, however, the Stone of Scone. It used to be there. London Bells has a chapter on Westminster Abbey, about a group of small boys (“The children took off their caps and went in slowly”) on a visit with their teacher:

Then they saw the chair in which the King sits when the crown is put on his head for the first time.  “What is that big stone under the chair?” asked one child. “That is the stone on which the Kings of Scotland used to sit when they were crowned. An English king brought it here long ago. The Scots used to say that the Kings of Scotland would again be crowned on that stone. And that saying came true after the death of Good Queen Bess. For the King of Scotland became the King of England also. Ever since that time the two countries have had the same king.

Tactfully put. Writing this on the morning after Scotland voted No to independence, I am glad that what the author of London Bells, And What They Tell Us said in 1911, the year of George V’s coronation, still applies, for good and aye.

* Thornycroft was the founder of a family of sculptors. His wife, Mary, was a favourite sculptor of Queen Victoria, and his son, Hamo (also a sculptor) was Siegfried Sassoon’s favourite uncle. It was Hamo, indeed, who introduced Sassoon to Thomas Hardy.

[illustrations: (i) Boadicea and her daughters, by Thomas Thorneycroft; Victoria Embankment, 1902 (ii. & iii)  Title pages from London Bells

© Text and illustrations copyright Adrian Barlow 2014