Wonderful Wiki’s entry for Margravine Cemetery is woefully out of date. Thanks to the ardour, hard work and pertinacity of The Friends of MC there are now four listed buildings/memorials and the cemetery has re-opened for burials.
You read about Abe Smith’s headstone last year in Down Your Way, now I have another that is listed. It is the easiest to spot as it is a bronze memorial that has turned green. It marks George Broad’s grave – but why in bronze? Broad was born in Kensington in 1840.
Can we digress? I have a friend (only one) who lives in Knightsbridge. She lives temporarily in New York but has a UK postal vote. Her ballot paper was re-directed to NY when she was staying in her London property. She was vexed at being disenfranchised, her Boston Tea Party spirit coming to the fore, but I re-assured her that in her Kensington constituency her vote was meaningless. In a 1988 by-election Dudley Fishburn (Conservative) squeaked home with a slender majority of about 800 votes. Otherwise the Conservatives have enjoyed a majority of at least 8,000 for donkey’s years, literally for ever. Last month Labour won by twenty votes, making Zac Goldsmith’s victory in Richmond, with a forty-three vote margin, seem like a landslide. Golly, did Theresa May send out the wrong message to lose Kensington. It was a vote by Rich Remainers against a hard-boiled Brexit and I find it hard to disagree.
Back to Broad. He trained as a bricklayer but then set up a foundry in Hammersmith in the 1870s. He cast this iconic monument; its proper name is the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain.
Eros is cast in aluminium, a world first in 1893, and the fountain in bronze. George Broad’s memorial in Margravine Cemetery was cast in his foundry by his son in memory of George and his wife, Caroline.
And now for a musical digression. Juke Box Jury ( a rip-off of a similarly named American TV show), had twenty-three million viewers when The Beatles were on the panel in 1963. The following year The Rolling Stones were on (although they made a panel of five) and Keith Richards later commented: “we didn’t give a shit…. we just trashed every record they played”.