Fixing the Family Graves

Last weekend we travelled down to Swansea for a weekend away with my parents and sister. This was timed to celebrate my father’s birthday on 2nd March, and meant we were there for St David’s Day (he is called David because he was born the day after the Welsh National Day), and though I must have been there then as a child, I don’t remember, and it was quite an experience to get caught up in such outpourings of Welshness! That particular weekend it was made all the more exuberant because of the fact that Wales had been playing France on the Friday night in the Rugby Six Nations tournament – as soon as we crossed the Severn Bridge into Wales, the roads were eerily quiet and empty, and it felt like we were driving through the small hours, rather than 9 o’clock in the evening. Unfortunately Wales lost, and this gave rise to an awful lot of hanging and slow shaking of heads over the course of the weekend – and to shared moments between strangers that must have sounded rather enigmatic to anyone listening in who was not aware of the defeat in this game which is more of a religion than a sport in Wales.

It was tough getting out of London. As soon as I got to Brixton tube station, they were closing it because of signal failure at Stockwell – something that happens all too frequently while they work on the seemingly-endless “improvement works” (notice how these have been rebranded recently, so we can’t complain about disruption). I missed one bus, then piled onto another that came along soon after, and instead of going straight through to Victoria as I had initially planned, I made the split-second decision to get off at Stockwell and connect to the Victoria Line from there – I am sure this is what the signs up at Brixton had advised… As I was crossing the road, something felt not quite right, and I suddenly realised I had left our suitcase on the bus! With K’s wide angle lens in it and my father’s birthday present!! (my sister and I had his grandfather’s gold pocket watch refurbished – not exactly something you want to lose…) I ran like a fool back to the bus which had just pulled away from the stop but I banged on the door and yelled at the driver – “My suitcase! I’ve left my suitcase!” Fortunately, he opened the doors (they’re usually real sticklers about only opening doors at stops) and drove onto the next stop where I got off, having safely retrieved the suitcase. Phew. But then it turned out the Victoria line was suspended from Stockwell as well, and I can’t even remember now what I worked out I needed to do to get to my parents’, but of course by the time I did eventually get there (probably only about 20 minutes late in the end, having lingered in Wendell Park taking photos of crocuses wide open to soak up the sun) they weren’t quite ready to leave anyway. A quick stop at B&Q to pick up some provisions (we were also on a mission to clean and fix up the family graves) and then off to collect K at Richmond, which led us into horribly heavy traffic and took about another hour from there to get onto the motorway. But then we were off and, as always, heading out of London felt so refreshingly like sloughing off an old, tired skin…

We arrived late at our B&B – the very oddly-named Christmas Pie, but extremely cosy and welcoming, more like staying as a guest in someone’s house than somewhere you pay for. Excellent breakfasts too, and huge! Which was just as well as we had heavy work to do!

There are several family graves at Oystermouth Cemetery, in the wonderfully-named Mumbles, where my father grew up, once more of a sleepy fishing and holiday village than an outpost of Swansea, but this is where we spent most of our time (apologies to my father for saying this, but Swansea City proper does not have all that much to recommend it – though he’ll be the first to admit that the Council ruined it during reconstruction efforts after the extensive damage it suffered during the Second World War). Mumbles is lovely, on the other hand. Since no-one in the family really lives in or near Swansea any more (though that’s not strictly true) the family plots have got a bit run-down and overgrown, and on one of them, two of the corner stones had come loose, and my father wanted to fix them up before them went missing.

It was nice to see that the snowdrops had come out on our grandparents’ grave (significance of this mentioned in an earlier posting)


and that the new lettering had now been added to the headstone, so that my grandmother was finally there in her own right.


We set about picking out the fallen leaves and twigs and just generally tidying and cleaning and sprucing everything up.


Later on we went and spent a small fortune on daffodils to arrange on the top of the graves.

The real construction work was done on an older tomb higher up on the slopes of the cemetery, where two marble corner blocks had come loose, and K and my father mixed up some cement to stick them back on.


My father had once done a brick-laying course, and it turns out he can mix some good cement.


The Rev. Samuel Owen would be pleased to have his grave back in one piece, I am sure.


Oystermouth is a really lovely, atmospheric Victorian cemetery (it opened in 1883), which sweeps up the side of a steep hillside, and is surrounded by woodland. It has this wonderful avenue of large old cypress trees right down the middle of it.


Somewhat amusingly (at least, it’s amusing that such awards exist), it was shortlisted for the Cemetery of the Year Award in 2007. Quite a number of the old graves have been left to fall into ruin,


- the onus really is on the families to keep them up, and my father is just keen that, while we’re hale and able, we do what we can with ours. It really is a special thing to have a physical place where you can go and think about and remember your relatives – many of the people buried in these graves died before my time, or I only remember them very hazily from my childhood, but now my grandfather and grandmother are there, and though they’re in our thoughts and memories all the time, it really makes a difference to have a physical place to be with them. It reminded me of being in Syria during the Eid holidays in early December last year – after attending the Eid prayers at the local mosque, it is traditional for families to go and visit the family graves and to hang on them a wreath of an aromatic plant, a bit like rosemary for remembrance. I had two days off from the exhibition during Eid, and had arranged an overnight out-of-town trip to Krak des Chevaliers, Hama and Apamea (all of which was absolutely fantastic), but the driver I hired asked if we could meet an hour later than arranged (not by me!), to give him time to visit the graves. Then, as we were driving through northern Syria, all the cemeteries we passed were garlanded with these fresh green wreaths. It felt really special. I can’t really imagine what it would be like if your relatives’ ashes had just been scattered somewhere and you didn’t have an actual place to be with them. My grandmother was cremated (one of the most meaningful cremations I’ve ever been to) but I am glad her ashes were put in a casket and buried with my grandfather.

Having fulfilled our family duty, we went off for a big lunch of fish and chips, which surprisingly took a long time to find for seaside town, though we eventually ended up at Covelli’s, not far from where we started out. I can still feel the crispness of the batter on my haddock! It was wonderful! My mother and sister went off for a cup of tea (and secret birthday-card shopping) in Treasure – a shop which really cannot be missed during a visit to Mumbles (this was the shop window in honour of the rugby/St David’s Day - there was going to be a prize-giving the next day for the best dressed window, but we left before finding out who won...)


while K, my father and I went and clambered around Oystermouth Castle,


a rather impressive castle, dating from the 12th to 14th centuries, though sadly you can’t go inside since it is in too ruinous a state – my father says he has never known it open while he was growing up here, and doesn’t think his mother had ever been inside either. Some good views of the bay though from up here.


Swansea harbour has a very impressive tidal drop of about a mile.


We were so tired by the end of the day that we were almost falling asleep over our rather tasty dinner at Papa Sancho’s, home of the intriguing stonegrill cooking phenomenon, as well as being founded by, guess what, a former Welsh rugby star. Must have been all that sea air.

On St David’s day, the sun was shining, and we were back in Mumbles for a walk along the beach – though the tide was in when we started, so we didn’t actually get onto the beach until the very end. Le tout Mumbles was out doing the same thing, and it was all very jolly, with everyone sporting their daffodils (normally I get a load of funny looks if I go about with my daffodil in London), and the occasional leek.


We laughed at the interesting names on some of the boats

(this one's called 'Kangaroo Poo')

and saw the lifeboat coming back in from what must have been an exercise – it was really interesting to see how it gets hauled back in up the launching ramp, on what must be enormous chains.



My father can remember the boom going off in the bay to alert the lifeboatmen on duty that they needed to get their arses down to the boathouse. He said everyone else just stopped when they heard it.

We made our way to the end of Mumbles pier, built in 1898.


My father used to play here as a child, and apparently my great-grandmother and other relatives of her generation came here for entertainment. Nowadays there is a rather Disney-fied Welsh dragon slide


and some of those silly pictures with cut-out heads for your family to pose in for the cameras!


But it does have some rather fine Victorian ironwork.


We got down on the shingle and looked for nice stones – my mother found an enormous one to use as a doorstop, which no-one else offered to carry!


A last look at the Lighthouse (which dates from 1794)


and we wandered back along the bay to Mumbles, where the farmers’ market and “dragon festival” in honour of St David’s Day had really kicked off!

(and I always thought the Welsh were a short race...)

After some rather fine lamb burgers,


and some purchases of fine local produce, not to mention some free Welsh-cakes, we headed off to Joe’s ice cream parlour, home of legendary Swansea ice cream since the 1920s. My father remembers the owner, Joe Cascarini, always doing his accounts in the corner of the shop. This is a Swansea legend apparently – as is the ice cream, and I must say it was possibly the smoothest, creamiest vanilla ice cream I’ve ever tasted. I had a rather fine strawberry sundae.


We gave my father his birthday present,


which he seemed very chuffed with, and I was glad again for not having lost it on the Number 2 bus!! (Since then, my mother has bought him a chain to go with it from Ebay)

We stopped off briefly in Swansea city centre, for K to take photos of Swansea castle, another fine structure of which much less is standing than at Oystermouth – in fact, I had absolutely no idea there was another castle in Swansea! My folks went off to explore the Welsh Tartan shop (!) while I busied myself with taking photos of the fountain in the main square, where the water had been dyed red for rugby/St David’s Day. There were posters up everywhere warning people that “this dye could stain” (really?)! It was rather macabre actually, though compelling, and I couldn’t stop taking photos, just as most of the kids around couldn’t stop dipping their hands in, just to see if they came out red…


And then we set off back to London. It was good going until we got within spitting distance, and then the traffic almost came to a grinding halt – what you might expect, coming back into the Big Smoke at the end of the weekend, but much much worse than anyone had remembered it, and it took us an hour to get a couple of miles. The cause of the problem was revealed to be a major two-car collision at the junction with Chiswick. Rather horrible really – it looked as if it might have been fatal. So we didn’t get home quite as early as planned, but my parents managed to return the Streetcar we had hired, just in the nick of time. (That’s a great service by the way, and it has done us proud, not least on trips to Swansea – the first time being a car emergency in order to make it to my grandmother’s funeral on time. A bit of ring composition, here, perhaps?)

Happy 200th Birthday Mr Jones!

Today we did something rather unusual. We went to church. While that in itself is pretty unusual (though the third time I have been to church in as many months!), that wasn't the half of it. Today was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Owen Jones (1809-1874), the Welsh architect and designer whose theories of design and polychromy were fundamentally inspired by his early experience of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, where he lived and studied for six months in 1834, and whose magnificent publications of its buildings during the 1840s were the first major work to employ the newly invented technology of chromolithography, in order to represent his theories of the use of primary colours in the original decorative scheme of the Islamic palaces. These books were also almost single-handedly responsible for the Victorian discovery of the Alhambra and of 'Moorish' design, and were perpetuated through all his later work, at the Crystal Palaces at Hyde Park (for the Great Exhibition of 1851) and at Sydenham, where he designed and erected an 'Alhambra Court' - a 3D version of the Alhambra palaces in microcosm, in the heart of south London, in the Grammar of Ornament, which became an immensely popular and widely-used design textbook, and in the foundation of what became the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I have the great privilege to be a curator. Jones is very current in our thoughts these days, since the 19th-century revival of Islamic Spain and dissemination of its designs, primarily through his work, will form the fourth chapter of the book I will soon be writing, and my colleague Abraham Thomas has curated a display which will open at the V&A on 28th March (until late November), in time to celebrate his bicentenary. During the second half of this year, we will be working together on turning this display into a fully-fledged touring exhibition. More on that anon, no doubt.

So Abraham had the bright idea, because Owen Jones's birthday fell on a Sunday - today - to attend the service at Christ Church in Streatham, which was designed and built in the Byzantine style (though with Islamic inflections) by Jones's brother-in-law and protégé, James Wild, in 1841 - the V&A has several of Wild's original designs in the collection, for instance here. Jones conceived the interior design, of which all that survives is the painting in the apse ceiling, and the decoration of the capitals.


This church is basically at the end of our street - it's a 20-minute walk up Brixton Hill. I had tried to visit it before, during one of the two-week breaks I like to take from work in the summer, in order to explore London - but I had come at a time when the church was closed and there was no getting in. I had made a note of the vicar, Father Tricklebank's (what a fantastic name!), contact details, and Abraham got in touch and let him know that we were coming. There was quite a contingent of us: myself and K; Abraham and his girlfriend; Kathryn who did her PhD on Owen Jones and is our fount of all knowledge; Sonia who is working at the V&A on Indian textiles and has discovered interesting links to Owen Jones through the history of the Museum's collecting (which you can read more about in her recent article, here); and Charles, who was one of our curators of prints and drawings until his retirement a few years ago, and another expert in the 19th century.

Father Tricklebank put us on the order of service, and even mentioned us in his address - he had been doing a spot of reading, in preparation for our visit, and brought attention to the fact that Byzantine and Islamic styles had been employed in the design and decoration of the church, and that this regard for other faiths and cultures was reflected in the congregation of the church today, which is largely African and Afro-Caribbean. It was gratifying to see so many people in the congregation - as Charles commented, about as many as you might expect on a slack Sunday in 1846... There was also a baptism on the order of service, of a very sweet Nigerian baby who was being christened with the fantastic name of Chisom Pureheart Obiesie. It made you think of Arthurian legends, and the setting was right for that! This was the first baptism I had ever been to. It was very high church - I think they are Anglo-Catholics, and I must say I found it difficult to distinguish between this and the memorial service we attended for Ralph Pinder-Wilson last month at the high Catholic church of Our Lady of Victories. K went up to take Communion - I am never sure if he does this out of genuine residual faith, or if it is because of his academic interest in the working of churches. Probably a bit of both.

After the service, they welcomed us to look around and take pictures, and go up to the gallery, to get a closer look at the capitals and organ (which had Egyptian-style papyrus designs on its pipes). Several members of the congregation came up to ask us more about Owen Jones and the history of the church. The layout of the church reminded me of the synagogue we had visited during Open House weekend last September, the New West End Synagogue in Bayswater, also High Victorian and decorated internally in a neo-Byzantine style, but from the 1870s - indicating how influential, but also avant-garde, Wild's church at Streatham had been.

After milling and looking for half an hour or so, we went off to lunch at Brazas on Tulse Hill, which was really an excuse for K and I to try a relatively recently-opened local restaurant which several of our neighbours have raved to us about. It was excellent - very much a place to be returned to many times. This even led to talk of celebrating Owen Jones's birthday every year, or founding a gastronomic society in his honour!

After a somewhat lazy lunch, the others, very commitedly, set off to travel to Kensal Green Cemetery, one of London's great Victorian cemeteries, where Owen Jones and other Victorian worthies of his generation are buried. We wandered gently home, having taken absolutely no form of transport other than our feet all day. How wonderful!

This week in 1809 was a vintage week for births - Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on Wednesday! Some other names came up over lunch, but the only one I can remember now is Edgar Allen Poe. Sadly Owen Jones is not quite so renowned these days, and is not getting any of the press coverage that Darwin is getting (the BBC are doing a whole season on him!). We're doing our bit though, in our own little way. Happy Birthday Mr Jones!