In 1842 George Holyoake became the last person to be convicted of blasphemy after giving a steamy lecture at the Cheltenham Mechanics Institute, an establishment that was set up to help give working men a more rounded outlook on life. The lecture, by all accounts, was as crisp as a 3-iron down the middle of the fairway; the problem came in Q&A, during which our George gave it to God. Cue pandemonium and a frantic scramble for the fire exit. The Cheltenham Chronicle went for George hard, and he was very nearly frog-marched in chains all the way down the A40 to Gloucester nick.
Holyoake was a newspaper editor and is cited as being the figure who first coined the term secularism; a term invented to describe his views on a social order separate from religion. He was all about the present, truth; take it as you see it. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was devoured. Auguste Comte, the French philosopher big into positivism – a philosophical theory based on natural phenomena, where information is derived from sensory experience – also featured heavily on the shelves in the snug. After a long career writing, editing, publishing, chairing committees and poking the clergy, God finally caught up with Holyoake who keeled over one sunny morning near Brighton pier, on 22nd January 1906. His body was shipped up to London and he was buried in Highgate Cemetery.
Now Highgate Cemetery is something else; one of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries in London, Grade I listed, a nature reserve and bucket list destination for anyone big into burial grounds. Elizabeth Jackson was the first one in, and lots of others have followed since. About one hundred and seventy thousand, all stuffed into a thirty seven acre site near Archway tube. The cemetery was opened in 1839 and solved the problem that many inner city cemeteries had at the time. They were full. Too many bodies. Fingers had started poking up making the grass difficult to gang-mow. Verges were scruffy and the faithful had started to complain. An architect was found, his orders given, and there followed Highgate cemetery.
Like many of the other Magnificent Seven, Highgate soon became fashionable. The place to be seen. People were dying to get in and burials became sought after affairs. And the Gothic tombs, popular during the Victorian age, were soon pulling in the crowds. That the cemetery is on a south facing slope on Highgate Hill affording the dead, and the picnicking weekenders, sweeping views of the City, perhaps helps explain its popularity. So too the trees, the wild flowers and shrubs; all of which have taken root without any human intervention. Foxes love it. So too voles and hedgehogs. Birds come from miles around to sit in the trees and squawk. And Good Lord does it have some bodies in it. Where to start?
Roger Lloyd-Pack, he’s in there. You know Lloyd-Pack: ‘If it’s a girl they’re calling her Sigourney after an actress, and if it’s a boy they’re naming him Rodney after Dace’. Lloyd-Pack aka Trigger, from Only Fools and Horses. Then there’s George Eliot, the poet and writer and author of Middlemarch, reckoned to be – by none other than Martin Amis – to be the greatest novel in the English language. George Eliot was actually Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under George as she was keen to break the stereotype; to smash the stale and, largely male, view that women could only write about fluffy, peach scented, love-stories full of jodhpurs and married men. A few vaults up and there rests Michael Faraday, the scientist who gave the world electricity, a man who had no formal education. He educated himself by reading books like Isaac Watts’s The Improvement of the Mind. No wonder his picture made the study wall of Albert Einstein; even great minds need inspiration. Then there’s George Michael, he of a tight white T-shirt and Wake me up before you G0-GO fame; and Jeremy Beadle, he of Beadle’s About and You’ve been framed, fame. The most famous resident though, unless you are in awe of Tom Smith who invented the Christmas cracker, is the bearded Karl Marx; the philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, fully revved-up socialist revolutionary and – one might imagine – one very lively dinner party guest. ’What was that Karl? Yes of course! Tonic in this one, or straight up like the others?’ His three volume effort, Das Kapital, which proposed that the motivating force of capitalism is the exploitation of all of us minions, remains one of the most cited works in the social sciences.
And then, there is the small matter of the Highgate Vampire.
On 2nd November 1968 the London Evening News ran a somewhat disturbing report that some graves had been desecrated in Tottenham Park Cemetery and one poor bod had had an iron stake slammed through his, or her, coffin. The stake had been aimed well, and plunged right on through the sternum. Ouch. No one was caught and it was quickly assumed, given this was all pre-CCTV, to be the work of the Highgate Vampire. Who else. A few years later a local resident, one David Farrant, stirred the pot when he wrote in to the local newspaper saying he had seen a mysterious grey figure lurking in the bushes, as he was walking home from the pub. He wanted to know if anyone else had seen something similar. Lots of people replied. It turned out that there had been sightings, lots of them. There were reports of a tall man in a hat, a woman in white, a figure wading into the pond, and pale faces peering through gates. There were stories of bells ringing, and hoarse voices calling out names from the shrubbery. Another man, this one a Sean Manchester, confidently fingered Farrant’s mysterious figure as the vampire. The media, assuming a slow news week, went for it. Big time.
Manchester rose to the occasion, talking up the vampire as being the King of Vampires, thick in the business of black magic. Farrant and Manchester traded verbal jibes, both claiming they would expel the ghostly presence and, on Friday 13th March, they were outside the cemetery talking gun-barrel down the ITV news camera, and into the homes of North London. Showtime. Given this was the pre-Netflix age of just four TV channels, a lot of people saw the ITV news as they ate their tea, and a few hours later an unruly mob was bull rushing the gates, hoping to catch their first exorcism. The grey figure, however, was nowhere to be seen, and everyone went home disappointed.
A few months later the charred and headless remains of a body were found, and a few nights after that, Farrant was found lurking in the bushes carrying a crucifix and a wooden stake. It appears he was arrested but released without charge. Crackpot. Manchester too, was up to no good. He broke into a family vault and pulled open a coffin. He too had a stake but apparently, as he shuffled his feet to get a better footing, holding the stake high above his head with both hands, he was persuaded by his sentry to think a bit. ‘Good idea mate? Sure you want to do this? Pub? Manchester reluctantly shut the coffin, and left, leaving some garlic and incense in the vault instead.
And that appears to be that. No more. To this day, the Highgate Vampire remains at large, putting the willies up gangs of truculent teenagers walloping litre bottles of cider in the woods, long after their parents have gone to bed.
Mind your eye if you’re out late in Archway.
And leave the stake at home.
Hepburnsays 