Man found hanged in Ladywell Cemetery

A man was found hanged this morning in Brockley & Ladywell Cemeteries. The News Shopper reports:

The passerby called the police and the ambulance service after making the grim discovery in Ladywell cemetery at around 8.30am.

The victim was pronounced dead around 45 minutes later.

Nearby residents reported seeing emergency services in the area as people made their way to work.

A spokeswoman for the Met Police said the man's death is not being treated as suspicious.

Dawn chorus of the Dead - Campaigners fight to save trees from graveyard shift

Campaigners in Southwark say this issue is their "3rd runway" & intend to fight the felling of the trees . pic.twitter.com/yQMMoMLa96

— Tom Edwards (@BBCTomEdwards) December 14, 2015

This is their Third Runway, nay their Vietnam!

Campaigners are trying to protect 30 trees on (ironically) One Tree Hill from being chopped down to make way for graves. This is an ongoing problem, with a shortage of space in Southwark for burial plots bumping up against a shortage of space for everyone else.

The living should take precedent over the dead. No more space for cemeteries. Cremate us and heat the local swimming pool with our bodies.

Thanks to Monkeyboy for the tip off.

Remembrance Sunday at Brockley & Ladywell Cemeteries

10.55am – 12noon

The Friends of Brockley & Ladywell Cemeteries will be holding its Remembrance Day event again this year. This will start at the Ladywell Cemetery Cross of Sacrifice at 10.55am and, after the two minute silence and wreath laying, proceed via two or three relevant points to the war memorial in the Brockley Cemetery for the laying of another wreath.

With thanks to BrocSoc for the information.

Greenspaces: Camberwell New Cemetery

At the end of St Norbert Road lies the neatly turned out Camberwell New Cemetery.

Created as an overflow for Camberwell Old Cemetery in 1927 its inexorable growth was temporarily halted when campaigners successfully staved off an attempt to expand it into neighbouring Honor Oak Rec.

Added to the Greenspaces map.

Wrenches, Trenches, and Stenches

Saturday 2nd & Sunday 3rd August, 11am-4pm
Ladywell Chapel, Ladywell Cemetery, Ladywell Road

This public art exhibition commemorates the start of the First World War. Women war artists were commissioned in the First World War, but had few opportunities to venture beyond
the domestic, social, and industrial operations on the home front.

This public art exhibition has commissioned seven women artists to give their unique perspective on the First World War from life on the front line, as well as on the home front. Each artist has produced 3 artworks: commemorating the start of the war in 1914; the middle of the war in 1916; and the end of the war on Armistice Day in 1918.

- Nicky Scott-Francis looks at the landscape of war based on research at the Imperial War Museum - particularly the fear of a gas attack.
- Jolanta Jagiello based on research from the Musei della Grande Guerra Open Air Museum in South Tyrol examines how deliberately setting off avalanches saw thousands of soldiers serving in the Alpine Front killed.
- Elisabeta Chojak-Mysko’s artworks focus on the heat of battle so that we should not forget.
- Sara Scott tells the personal story of her grandfather’s munitions factory and its contribution to the war effort.
- Louise Kosinska traces the love story between her grandfather in Belgium and her grandmother serving as Red Cross Nurse.
- Monica Wheeler highlights how families were divided by the war, serving on all sides.
- Jill Rock concentrates on her German family roots, interned in Britain for their own safety.

Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries Open Day, July 13th

The Friends of Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries celebrate their 7th anniversary with a open day on Sunday, 11am - 4.30pm.

Events will include guided walks of the cemetery, a photographic exhibition of monuments and wildlife and skull identification...

Century

Olive's Diary 1914 is a project to digitise the 100-year-old diary of a girl called Olive Higgins, who lies buried in Brockley Cemetery. The diary was written in 1914, when Olive was 16 years old. Eight weeks after she began writing, she was dead.

The man behind the project, Rob McGibbon, is Tweeting one extract from the diary each day, timeshifted by a century, until the last entry on February 25th. The BBC reports:

Mr McGibbon, a journalist and writer, said he became "completely captivated" when reading the newspaper cutting about her funeral that had been enclosed in the book.

"Because then I learnt she was buried in Brockley Cemetery [in south-east London] and it's the exact cemetery I used to look on when I was a little boy," he said. "I was about six years old and my grandfather moved into a flat overlooking that cemetery. So there was that extraordinary geographical connection that absolutely blew my mind and gave me goose bumps."

Thanks to Mike for the tip-off. Follow the diary on Twitter here.

Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries open day

Sunday, July 14th, 11am - 4.30pm

To celebrate their sixth birthday, the Friends of Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries have chosen to stage a photographic exhibition of monuments and wildlife in Ladywell Chapel and host guided walks, rather than dance on people's graves.

Details here.

Dawn Chorus 2013

Tom from the Hilly Fields Bird Champion project writes:

This years dawn chorus walk will take place on Thursday April 11 starting at 6am. This is an hour later than usual (by public demand), but should still be close to dawn as the clocks went forward last weekend. We will meet outside the cafe on Hilly Fields, walk around the park and then go on to Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries which together are listed as a Grade 1 Site of Borough Importance for nature conservation purposes.

Birds we can expect to hear on Hilly Fields include Blackbird, Robin, Wren and probably one of the Dunnocks which have been vocalising frequently in the last few weeks. In addition, we should hear Magpies chattering, Crows crowing, Blue Tits/Long-tailed Tits tseeping and, almost certainly, that 'Johnny Two Note' - the Great Tit. If we're lucky, we may hear a Mistle Thrush singing (seen but not heard so far this year) or a Great Spotted Woodpecker drumming its bill against a tree trunk.

Full details here.

David Jones in the Great Place

In Search of David Jones: Artist, Soldier, Poet by DavidJonesFilms

Mike writes:

Thought that you might be interested in a remarkable film on the life of Poet, Soldier & Painter David Jones (buried in Ladywell Cemetery). He is also the subject of a recently published book by Thomas Dilworth on DJ in the Great War, which recounts many incidents about his early life in Brockley. His family lived for a time at 115 Howson Road.

Florence: Brockley Cemetery High School Football Rules!

On Thursday, Florence and the Machine performed a Radio 2 gig at the Rivoli. Returning to the area that helped forge her musical career, lead singer Florence Welch remarked how much more moderner Brockley was than before:

It's so wonderful to be home - and here of all places... It is such a pleasure to be back at the Rivoli Ballrooms and also just to be back in Brockley. I actually spent quite a large bit of time here at one point, 'cause I was having music lessons here and I used to hang out in the graveyard. 

And actually, strangely a small bit of inspiration came from that graveyard 'cause I did used to do handstands and hang out there. And if anyone knows the lyrics to Only For a Night - a small portion of it comes from Brockley Cemetery. That and other cemeteries across England... 

But we've been home not for that long and actually driving through South London, just kind of... it's been really... South London, yes!

Brockley must have seemed bigger during her homecoming - and yet smaller for her drummer, who was held hostage by the Rivoli's lavatory: Welch explained:

“I didn’t know whether to say it on stage because I didn’t want to embarrass him, but he got trapped in the loo. He was screaming He got really freaked out. We could hear him – ‘Let me out’ – trying to bash the door down, and they had to take the door off its hinges."

Greenspaces: Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries

There’s you, and then there’s not you: and you are faced with the question of how you are going to spend that time. It’s so much more profound than any hypothesis about some pathetic garden with unicorns and hugs that goes forever. People don’t even know how to spend their Saturday afternoons. What do I want with eternity?
- Tim Minchin

The conjoined cemeteries (entrance at the corner of Ivy Road and Brockley Road), created in 1858 and covering 37 acres, lack the scale and Gothic grandeur of Nunhead cemetery but the shadow play of its most overgrown parts evokes magic and menace.

The pathways through the trees, dotted with Ozymandian tributes, are beautiful and humbling. Some of the more open parts are more like a funereal version of Cargiant.

The cemeteries are also an important habitat for wildlife, including butterflies, sparrowhawks and stag beetles.

Click here for the Friends of Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries website.

Brockley secures World Heritage status

The lesson of Apple is you cannot just listen to what people are saying they need because they are going to define everything they need in terms they already know: bigger, faster, cheaper. The true revolutionary creates a product or service before people can really define the need for that product or service. They anticipate where the market will go as opposed to simply reacting quickly to where the market is already going.
- Guy Kawasaki

Criticised after the iPhone 5 launch for having run out of ideas, Apple has confounded its critics once again by embracing the biggest idea of them all: 'Greater Brockley'.

Julian sent us this shot of the Evening Standard, which reports on the Apple Maps cock-up, resulting in London landmarks being shunted around:

Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery open day, July 22nd

The Friends of Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery are having a fifth anniversary 'Open Day' in Cemetery Chapel, this Sunday, July 22nd, from 11am-4.30pm.

There will be a photography exhibition in the Ladywell Chapel and guided walks, visiting the graves of sportsmen, poets, war veterans and local figures.

Brockley Dawn Chorus

An expert guided tour of Brockley birdlife in Hilly Fields and Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery.

Thursday 26th April, 2012 at 5am...that’s dawn. Meet outside the Bothy (along from the bowling green) Organised with Lewisham Rivers and People project: Chris.McGaw@Lewisham.gov.uk or 07850 713 974

Corinthian spirit haunts Brockley

The Friends of Brockley and Ladywell Cemetary have unearthed (not literally) a bona fide England football international buried in SE4, albeit one from the days when you could put 6 past Scotland in the morning, sink a few at the Kings Arms and then head off to notch up a century against a Combined Colonies XI. Click here to read the story of Harry Albermarle Swepstone, who not only played for the Corinthians but came up with the famous club's name.

The next guided tour of the Cemetery is on June 16th, from 6pm. Click here for details.

New corpse for Nunhead Cemetery

Nunhead is not the new Notting Hill.

The reviews are in: Hereafter, the Clint Eastwood-directed supernatural thriller that stars Nunhead Cemetery, is a stinker.

The film, released this week has variously been described as "slow, ponderous and as shallow as it thinks it is deep," and "an unholy embarrassment." And while you might say the same thing of the Richard Curtis effort, it seems unlikely that Nunhead's gates will rival Hugh Grant's front door on the film-lovers trail any time soon.

Brockley Miniplanets

Photographer David Jackson specialises in creating Miniplanet vistas and, having just moved to Crofton Park, has created a range of images of local landmarks, using the technique. This is Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery, click here to see Hilly Fields, Coulgate Street too.

Remembrance Remembered

Up The Line was a unique arts event to mark Remembrance Day, held in Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery. We spoke with the organiser, John McKiernan, founder of PLATFORM-7, about the night and his plans for the future:

The event went very well and it was only on the Friday I realised when watching the news how lucky we were with the weather. At 6pm, the skies cleared, the wind dropped and it became relatively mild. There were the usual pre-event problems that always occur but once we started it was very smooth and the performers were exceptional, really stunning experience.

The intention of this event is to have the audience consider the impact of war and consider its consequences not to try and influence them one way or another; it is for the individual to examine their own personal view. Hearing people at the end it seems this was achieved.

We did not have the large crowd at the beginning this year which worried those of us on the gate. Instead people came steadily over the period of the evening. Counting programmes, feedback from artists and others it appears that we had somewhere shy of 450 audience. What I found surprising was that I expected many people from last year to return with friends this year, but few that anyone spoke to had been in 2009, meaning this was a new audience in the main.

Listening to feedback from last year, the space between performers was longer to allow more time for reflection and personal thoughts, this appeared to have worked. The hydrogen cells performed fantastically and not having the sound pollution as well as CO2 pollution of generators allowed the oboe, flute and piano to waft across much broader areas of the cemetery making it very beautiful in the more remote sections of the path.

The Dead Rat Orchestra outside the gate expressing youthful excitement and anticipation captured the expectations felt by many young men in 1914 and Duncan Menzies Bagpipes quickly bought back the reality of what was to follow.

Some poems were repeated from 2009 although most of the performances were new. The different location for the film by Kai Clear with Harry Vendryes reading Albert Blackmore diary made a huge difference and was very powerful.

The amount of work involved in this event means that only with funding can it take place again. Lewisham was very helpful this year but are limited to how much they are able to be involved. In all, with performers, crew and volunteers we are talking almost 100 people working on the event, all unpaid. The amount of time they need to give up is enormous.

There has been a great amount of publicity regarding the poppy and its meaning and whether there is any relevance to Remembrance in the modern day. What most people do not realise is how our life today is so shaped by the events in 1914. It is also worth noting the decades leading up to that period and how many Europeans believed large warfare was a thing of the passed. No one aged 20 would have foreseen in 1913 two World Wars and 25+ million dead before they were 60.

Should funding appear for next year then we would like to expand more on how war damaged families, parents and children of men who died and were injured, also the impact on women, from the million spinsters, the affairs and the changes in the workplace.

Photo copyright John McKiernan.

Remembrance

To coincide with Remembrance Day, here is a letter from a St Asaph's Road resident following a bombing raid in September 1940. The letter was found by Tressillian James on the BBC 's People's War website:

My dear Win,

Just a line to let you know we are all safe although we have had a terrible time since Friday night.

Brockley had its first bombs Friday night 2 houses in Brockley Rd nearly opposite the water trough, Brakespear Rd Tressillian Rd St Cyripian’s Church etc... I had to walk home and about every hundred yards along OK Rd {Old Kent Road] had been bombed so you can imagine my feeling as what to expect in Brockley, the first signs came when reaching St Katherine’s [St Catherine’s church Hatcham in Pepys Road SE14] our church got 2 bombs and is a reck [sic] Vesta Rd 2 houses and a number of incendiary bombs in Drakefell [Road parallel to St Asaph], St Asaph [our home road] Avignon [a road intersecting with St Asaph] etc. one dropped outside Pattons [next door neighbours] but was a dud what luck.

Read the full letter here. And don't forget the unique Remembrance Day celebration "Up the Line" this evening at Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery, from 7pm.