Walking in London I often come across things that are new to me and you may not know about some of them either. A few days ago I was in Grosvenor Square and noticed this wooden pavilion and pergola on the east side, by the Italian embassy.
It is a memorial to the 67 British victims of the 9/11 attacks in New York. Each column is carved from an individual oak trunk. “Grief is the price we pay for love” is carved on the pediment. Buried beneath a memorial stone is a girder from the World Trade Centre. Its site is, for the moment, appropriate as the United States embassy is nearby. However, next year the new embassy, south of the Thames, in Nine Elms will be ready, leaving the area around Grosvenor Square with a number of American memorials. Will they move with the embassy? I don’t know.
I heard on the wireless an interview with Tim Oakley, a British explorer in Alaska. He has just led an expedition to the North West Passage, surprisingly the first time this had been traversed since Roald Amundsen’s first successful crossing in 1905. An unsuccessful attempt had been made by John Franklin in the middle of the 19th century. The entire expedition, 129 men including Franklin, perished. There is a statue of Franklin near Carlton House Terrace with a bronze relief on the plinth and an extremely misleading, in fact incorrect, inscription below. Oakley travelled lighter than Franklin: four men and twenty-two dogs.
The last word is an extract from the end of Tennyson’s In Memoriam.
If e’er when faith had fallen asleep,
I hear a voice ‘believe no more’
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’
No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying knows his father near.
Apparently, more people died looking for Franklin than were on the original expedition. Some bones were found on one of these expeditions and the remains of one of them – Lt. de Vicompte – are buried in the base of another sculptured memorial to Franklin, now in the vestibule of the Chapel in the Old Royal Naval College. This memorial was originally in the Painted Hall but it was felt not to be quite right to have a grave in the naval officers’ dining room and it was moved to the back of the Chapel, where no-one could see it. When I was involved at the ORNC, we thought the memorial should be seen so we moved it to the front to the chapel. But since it was, in effect, a grave, the remains had to re-buried formally. This was done at a rather moving service conducted by the local Bishop and attended by representatives of the families on the Franklin expedition. So poor Lt le Vicompte’s remains – assuming they were his- have been moved and reburied at least and, possibly, four times.
….and best wishes for a very happy birthday !
And to you, with three more candles to blow out.