Church ghosts

I’ve written about Kempley before, an early Norman church to the north east of Monmouth. It boasts the final collection of early medieval wall paintings in all of Northern Europe, quite a boast. It’s also seeped in sadness and ghosts that linger in the mind. 

Just some of the wall and ceiling paintings. 

. As you walk down the nave, you step on the ghost of Ralph Wootton, a London coachman born in Cheshire in 1652. The question that immediately springs to mind how comes a London coachman get a prime burial spot and commemoration to boot in the church nave? A spot of investigation revealed this from the ‘Marriage Allegations’ 1703/4 

‘Marriage license allegation for Ralph Wootton of Kempley, aged abt 50 and Joan Maile of Kempley aged abt 69 23 December 1704’ Apart from the considerable age difference and the fact that poor Ralph died just two years later, you wonder about the story of these two people, and you wonder about the history that between them these two people lived through – from the execution of a king, Cromwell, the Restoration, William and Mary, and Queen Anne. Amazing.

But where Ralph and Joan are glamorous mysteries, the small and unobtrusive plaque above, and what it represents, is beyond sadness. The Great War plucked carpenters and ploughboys from obscure villages like Kempley, their bodies never returned. These are the forgotten men—but not in Kempley.

Fred Dyer

In 1889, Frederick (standing) became the first born and only son of six children wo William and Sarah Dyer, of the lower house, Kempley. As Corporal  (Gunner) in the Royal Garrison Artillery, his service took him as far away as India where, in Peshawar, near the very end of the war he died of Pneumonia. 

 

Bill Hodges grew up in Stonehouse Cottage, Kempley. He served in the Hereford Regiment, and served on the fields of Flanders and France. He lived to be the oldest of the nine sons, dying of pneumonia aged 32 in Flanders 1918.

Henry Charles Jones

Born in 1895, one of eight children, Henry’s mother ran the grocer’s shop at Rose View Cottage on Kempley Green. He volunteered in 1914 and joined the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. Lance Corporal Henry Jones aged 22 lost his life in Flanders 1917.

Menin Gate

Samuel Kirby

Kempley born and bred, his family home was 1, Stonehouse Oaks home of fellow service man Alfred Manns. Both men perished in the battles at Ypres, in 1915 and 1917 respectively. Sam was 24, his remains unrecoverable. With nothing to bury his name is recorded on the Menin Gate Memorial, Ypres.

Ben Lane

was first a cowman, working his way up to Head Gardener. Enlisting in the South Wales Borderers he served in Egypt and Mesopotamia where he died aged 30 on Valentine’s Day 1917. He is buried in a field at Shurmran Bend in Iraq

Frank Manns joined the South Wales Borderers in 1911. He was killed in action during the Gallipoli landings in April 1915, aged 22. It is likely he was buried at sea because they had not gained any ground to bury him in. His death is commemorated at Helles Memorial, Canakkale.

Bert Powell was born in 1889  lived in the southern end of Kempley. With his neighbour, Henry Jones, he joined the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in Hereford and served on the Western Front where he died aged 26. His grave lies in Laventie at the Rue-Du-Bacquerot No 1 Military Cemetery. Reading this, the hopeless sadness of the photographs put me in mind of an old but favourite poem

Elegy in a Country Churchyard

The men that worked for England 

They have their graves at home:

And birds and bees of England

About the cross can roam.

But they that fought for England.

Following a falling star,

Alas, alas for Englan

They have graves afar.

And they that rule in England,

In stately conclave met,

Alas, alas for England

They have no graves as yet.

GK Chesterton

I particularly liked the barbed final lines.

I'll stick with beans on toast

I’ve just finished ‘The Course of Empire,’ the first volume of Bernard DeVoto’s three volume History of America. It begins with the Spanish Conquest, followed in turn by the French penetration of the North American rivers and, getting in just in time, the English settlements on the Eastern seaboards bound in by the Allegheny and Appalachian Mountains.

 

 It’s an exhaustive and exhausting account, illuminated by evocative descriptions of landscape, and barely believable stories of individual explorers, mountain men and trappers. The impact on European ‘great power’ politics is also finely explained. The failure of C18th French bureaucracy to capitalise on what their explorers had handed them on a plate is also a lesson for our own risk averse bureaucracies.

 

The book’s one great drawback is the sheer amount of detail, a dense forest of facts with little space to breathe and worse, very poor maps. 

This is a crucial weakness because the joy of the book is the ‘Pin-the-Tail on the Donkey’ madness as early explorers tried to make sense of rivers and mountains in the ‘wrong’ place. Their over-riding aim was to discover river access to the West Coast as convenient as the Mississippi, the St Lawrence and other rivers on the Eastern Seaboard. So over-riding was the desire, wishful thinking influenced map after map of ‘the unexplored’— in particular rivers and mountains—for over a hundred years. This is both funny and potentially gripping but here the writing is over dense and the poor maps make it impossible to see the places referred to.

Eyes and mind tend to glaze with names of rivers, obscure individuals and tribes crammed within paragraphs—mentioned but inadequately developed. It’s hard to focus if interest diminishes with details not fully explained.

But what anecdotes! And what a story. When interest flares the book is hard to put down.

John Colter for example. One summer night in 1805 Blackfeet attacked him and his partner, Potts as they slept. They killed Potts but stripped Colter naked and told him to start running, giving him a sporting start before loosing their fleetest runners to catch and kill him. He ran barefoot over the cactus that had torn through the leather soles of previous explorers; he ran until blood gushed from his nostrils; he ran six miles in all until he reached the river. He dived into it and hid beneath one of several clumps of driftwood whilst frustrated Blackfeet howled and scanned the river for signs of life. That night he swam downstream until safe, striking land in the early hours of the morning, where he walked another seven days barefoot, naked and unarmed until he reached safety.

There are accounts of tribal cultures, the Takulli for example whose widows had to carry their husbands’ ashes on their backs for three years before being allowed to remarry. In describing the various Indian tribes, De Voto depends heavily on the accounts of these early explorers and his own early C20th perceptions; thus terms like fickle, child-like, savage and treacherous abound, along with recognition of their valour and skill in surviving the harshest terrains.

Perhaps the saddest parts of the book are the descriptions of a virgin wilderness, pristine rivers, and the vast herds of buffalo stretching to the horizon and more numerous than ants. They proved easy hunting but the Sioux and other tribes were masters of the utilitarian.  In late winter they would panic herds on to frozen rivers where the ice was weak and splintered under the weight. For weeks buffalo carcasses floated downstream under the ice, surfacing every so often where squaws would drag them to land. By then, the meat was badly decomposed, sometimes almost liquified—luckily a delicacy for the aficionado. I’ll stick with beans on toast.

Caravaggio

 

Two weeks ago, we parked our car in Newport and took a train and tube to the National Gallery to see the Caravaggio Exhibition. Because my wife is a member of the National Gallery we were able to enjoy a members only preview of the Exhibition—all two pictures of it: Head of John the Baptist and the newly discovered/attributed The Martyrdom of St Ursula. Being a grasping, hard-hearted soul, my first impression was ‘Just two pictures? We’ve paid carpark charges, train fares and the cost of a Tube ticket.’ Fortunately that first impression didn’t last very long.

We entered a dark room which heightened the effect of the two illuminated paintings. Because access was limited to members, there were relatively few there and you could press your nose to the picture, if you were weird. Not being that weird I took two photos (but no selfie)  and two more to be sure. Then, I thought, I’d better get my money’s worth. (I’m a philistine. My wife’s the art lover.)

I studied first one picture and began noticing things. I studied the other. And this is the beauty of being limited to just two paintings as opposed to wandering around amidst hundreds, seeing and not seeing, like a goldfish or butterfly.

Okay, so I’ve seen each picture twice. Was that it? Why were my wife and friend spending ages before each painting, and then returning time and again? FOMO struck, forcing me to follow their example. 

I read the explanatory blurb more closely: 

‘This almost monochromatic composition shows Caravaggio’s ability to reduce a story to its essentials. We are confronted with the horror of the severed head, the brutish power of the executioner, the old woman’s sorrow, and the complex revulsion of Salome who, at her mother’s bidding, had requested St John’s head on a platter.’ 

Head of John the Baptist

I saw all this and more, in particular the incredible brushwork on St John’s hair, and face, especially around the lips, as well as his use of light for dramatic effect.  

 

The Martyrdom of St Ursula

The painting  and subject were commissioned by Caravaggio’s patron Marcantonio Doria, whose stepdaughter was about to become a nun using the name ‘Sister Ursula.’ Inspiration or warning perhaps. Who knows? The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio’s last documented painting, depicts a scene from the legend of a Christian princess whose 11,000 virgin followers were massacred in Cologne by the Huns. Struck by her beauty, the Hun leader promised to spare her in exchange for ‘marriage’ which may be a euphemism. 

Whilst other artists may have painted a grand tableau maximising the 11000 virgins, Caravaggio focused on a small, dark, intimate space and somehow draws you into the drama as one of the spectators. The blurb highlights the importance of the hands, the guilty hand of the murderer, the outstretched hand of the bystander unable to stop the arrow, and Ursula’s hands framing the wound. Caravaggio paints himself in the picture--- the startled, open-mouthed soldier looking over Ursula’s shoulder. 

Little did he know he’d be dead, just a few weeks after finishing the painting.

Two near contemporary biographies, one by Giovanni Baglione (1556- 1643)

the other by Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613-1696) Both tell the same graphic story of his death.

The story of Caravaggio is well known, the bad boy of art who murdered a rival and fled Rome to be feted, despite the charge hanging over him, as one the foremost painters of his day. What’s startling is that apart from a very brief apprenticeship to a fresco painter, he had no formal training whatever and was entirely self-taught. 

His final months were dominated by tragedy. Caught in a tavern brawl he was hideously scarred on the face before being tossed between hope and despair. Believing he’d been pardoned by the Pope, he sailed back to Rome with his paintings and possessions. On landing he was mistakenly arrested and separated from his possessions, the boat sailing on without him. On being freed, the desperate Caravaggio rushed after the boat in the heat of an Italian summer and was struck down by a raging fever. While enthusiastic crowds waited for him in Rome, he died miserable and alone on a deserted Italian beach.

I realised again how lucky I was to enjoy what was an intimate preview after reading this account in London’s Evening Standard. Well worth reading, especially for the tributes from cinema greats like Martin Scorsese.