Grave Matters

It took a third visit to find this rather prominent grave at St Nicholas’s Chiswick. It is in a part of the graveyard that I thought only had modern headstones.

Eleven men who fought at Rorke’s Drift were awarded the Victoria Cross. Wikipedia records the citation for Fred Hitch and another.

2nd Battalion 24th Regiment Corporal William Allen and Private Frederick Hitch.
It was chiefly due to the courageous conduct of these men that communication with the hospital was kept up at all. Holding together at all costs a most dangerous post, raked in reverse by the enemy’s fire from the hill, they were both severely wounded, but their determined conduct enabled the patients to be withdrawn from the hospital, and when incapacitated by their wounds from fighting, they continued, as soon as their wounds had been dressed, to serve out ammunition to their comrades during the night.

Near his memorial is a fine headstone to the artist William Blake Richmond and his wife. It is engraved on both sides and has illegible inscriptions from the Iliad and the Divine Comedy.

One of the rewarding things about writing here is the stimulation to see something unusual and investigate.

I was agog to find out what had happened to him at Heathrow. Remember I have been watching The Avengers and I imagined that he was engaged in close protection for a visiting Head of State and copped the assassin’s bullet. The truth is as sad for his family but more mundane; he had a heart attack.

Every decade there is an new architectural fad. In the 1970s it was Toytown (as in Noddy and Big Ears).

Now, adjacent, is the new craze – in this case pale brick but more often a speckled pattern. It looks fresh today, will it look good tomorrow?

The windows are set into the facade – like pissholes in the snow. Previous fads have been for wood cladding and, especially in the City, pale cement rendering. I do not think architecture should be frozen in time but, and there’s always a but, I do wonder what will happen to these trashy blocks of flats in your dystopian future; not mine, I’ll be dead. (Victorian and Georgian terraces are still lived in and are fit for purpose up to two hundred years after they were built; that’s the James Lees-Milne in me coming out.)