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Where The Famous Are Dying To Get In |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Monday, 23 August 2004 |
By Richard Morrison
August 23, 2004
THESE are exciting times for the world's great burial-grounds. Grandiose Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where 2 million visitors flock each year to gawp at its 1 million residents – but chiefly to smoke dope round Jim Morrison's grave – celebrates its 200th birthday this summer.
And the French have been trumpeting its attractions, which are manifold.
Thirty-three years after his untimely death, the lead singer of the Doors is still the main draw. But those of a necrolatric bent will find that the cemetery also contains the graves of Proust, Chopin, Balzac, Moliere, Bizet, Piaf . . . and Oscar Wilde, whose tombstone is easily identified by the purple lipstick smudges left by gay admirers – a comparatively recent tradition that amuses his French custodians not one bit, since the lipstick is eroding the stone.
Pere Lachaise's bicentenary isn't the only momentous anniversary in the world of the dead. Yesterday, the City of London Cemetery – twice the size of Pere Lachaise, making it Europe's largest municipal graveyard – held an open day to mark the centenary of its crematorium. It is a gloriously leafy place, not in the City of London at all, but sprawling over 81ha near Epping Forest. But it must be admitted that its celebrity-count is not in Pere Lachaise's league. The most famous residents are footballer Bobby Moore and a couple of Jack the Ripper's victims.
So where, besides Paris, would you want to be buried if you craved famous neighbours? As a music lover I would find Vienna's Zentralfriedhof cemetery irresistible: it contains Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Strauss. Or possibly the lugubrious St Petersburg cemetery where Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky are buried.
But as an incurable fan of Romantic poetry I would also be tempted by Rome's Protestant Cemetery, where I could await the Last Trump in the company of both Keats and Shelley (or at least what remained of Shelley after Byron had finished burning him on the beach). Britain also has its valhallas of fame. Kensal Green Cemetery, near Paddington, arguably has a more varied roster of resident celebrities even than Pere Lachaise.
It includes a trio of famous Victorian novelists (Thackeray, Trollope and Wilkie Collins), two Brunels, W. H. Smith, Freddie Mercury and a couple of George III's children who had fallen out with their mad old dad and didn't fancy whiling away the long hours in eternity in his company at Windsor.
Even more fashionable among arty types is Golders Green Crematorium in North London, where the roll-call reads like the guest-list for the greatest Groucho Club party never held. Kingsley Amis, Sigmund Freud, Anna Pavlova, Peter Sellers, H. G. Wells, Peggy Ashcroft, Ronnie Scott, Ivor Novello, Keith Moon and Marc Bolan are all memorialised there.
But when it comes to spine-shivering spookiness, Highgate Cemetery, a couple of miles east, is top of the league. Quite apart from its tangled vegetation and eerie catacombs, it has so many oddities. Everyone knows Karl Marx is buried there, but not many realise that the monument to which generations of communists have paid homage is nowhere near the man's remains, which are on the side of the cemetery you can't usually reach.
Highgate was also the scene of a great Victorian scandal. Dante Gabriel Rossetti had his wife's grave reopened, at dead of night, seven years after she had committed suicide, in order to retrieve a notebook of his unpublished poems which he had impulsively buried with her, but now wanted to flog. That macabre incident, some say, was in Bram Stoker's mind when he was writing Dracula, since he located the busy tomb of the vampire Lucy Westenra in a London cemetery that is recognisably Highgate. Even today, if you know the book and linger there on a gloomy afternoon, it is quite easy to get spooked.
No wonder Stoker decided he would rather be buried in Golders Green.
The Times
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10532236%255E16947,00.html |
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