George Cockburn

London's National Maritime Museum owns a portrait of Sir George Cockburn (1772–1853) as painted by John James Halls in 1817. Admiral Cockburn poses confidently in his Royal Navy uniform, one hand on his hip, the other resting on the butt of his sword, but the most striking feature of the painting is its background. Admiral Cockburn is taking his ease in front of a city in flames. The sky behind him is black with smoke. The great occasion memorialized by this painting is perhaps Cockburn's greatest achievement in a long and successful naval career. The city burning behind him is Washington D.C.

The War of 1812 is, I have found, a war remembered very differently by the nations who fought in it. As a schoolboy, I was taught that America had never lost a war, and my later college courses in American history put the 1812 conflict down as a rather inconclusive draw. When I lived in Canada, I found that Canadians remembered the War of 1812 as a great victory of British North America against American aggression. In Britain, the War of 1812 is such a minor footnote that to have a conversation about it, I often have to remind my British friends that it happened at all. For Britain, 1803 to 1815 is memorable as the era of the Napoleonic and Peninsular Wars, and war with France had been happening more or less continually since 1793. A conflict with America in that time was a minor event, and Britain devoted scant resources to prosecuting the war at the time and devotes little classroom time to teaching about it.

The truth is that America was never very united in fighting this war, and waged it largely with militia forces who were less and less effective the farther they were sent from home. New England kept trading with the British and even sold provisions to British forces in Canada. The Canadian forces were also mostly militias, but were defending their own territory against invasion and more than held their own. The Americans failed in most of their military objectives, signed a peace treaty in which neither side achieved any territorial concessions or policy changes, and had their greatest victory (at New Orleans) after the peace treaty had been concluded.

I think that all three perspectives are reasonable. The U.S. didn't clearly lose this war, but they surely did not win it. The forces of Upper Canada, Lower Canada, and other provinces won their part in the war. And to Britain, the war was an insignificant inconvenience.

The British Navy overall was vastly superior to the American one, but had more serious opposition to contend with in Europe. When the modest British forces in North America did want to make a point, they succeeded. The blockade of the Chesapeake Bay, with the eventual raid on Washington, was the best example of this. Among the buildings set ablaze was the White House, where Dolley Madison, the first lady, famously stayed behind to rescue a full-length portrait of George Washington. She was among the very last people to leave the executive mansion before Cockburn and his forces arrived.

Much of Cockburn's biography makes for rather dry reading: When and where he served, dates of promotion, and only a few accomplishments of interest to a storyteller like me. Besides burning Washington D.C., he conveyed Napoleon to his imprisonment on St. Helena and was governor of that island for a time. At the end of his naval career, he entered politics as an MP in the House of Commons. None of this tells us very much about the man's character.

There are two anecdotes, though, that make me feel that I might be able to take his measure. One is an event that he might not even have been present at. During the burning of Washington, one of the institutions that went up in flames was the Library of Congress. But at the Patent Office, Superintendent of Patents William Thornton stayed behind to plead his case with the British officers. He convinced them that patents were of such value to the world that it would be a pity to burn them to punish one nation. The Patent Office was spared. Was Cockburn there to make this call? Even if he were not, his command was such that his junior officers felt confident about coming to such a reasonable decision.

More significantly, Cockburn showed that he knew how to be reasonable even in the case of being personally insulted. The National Intelligencer was a Washington newspaper that had written many negative articles about Cockburn, branding him “The Ruffian.” An officer of His Majesty's Navy, a ruffian! Cockburn entered the newspaper's building with the intention of burning it down. However, he was met by a delegation of women from the neighborhood, who were afraid that if the newspaper building burned, their homes would catch fire as well. So Cockburn, an officer and a gentleman, ordered that instead of being burned, the National Intelligencer building was to be knocked down brick by brick. And to ensure that no further insults to his character would follow any time soon, Cockburn ordered that the typesetter's trays were to be scoured for every instance of the letter C. These were destroyed, and it would be a long time before the paper could again print the name Cockburn.

Admiral Cockburn rests in the smallest of the three catacombs of Kensal Green Cemetery, under the colonnade. The free-standing colonnade is falling into ruin, with weeds growing from its stone roof and the concrete of its walls crumbling so badly that memorial markers hung on the walls to honor the dead have fallen off and shattered. The structure is such a hazard that it is surrounded by a fence to keep away the curious, so that the colonnade has become, sadly, one of the shabbier neighborhoods of the cemetery.

Thomas Wakley

The Lancet is one of the world's most important peer-reviewed medical journals. The name of the journal refers not only to the medical blade for cutting out diseased tissue, but for the tall, narrow lancet windows that admit light. From its earliest issues in 1823, The Lancet has been not only a publication about new developments in medical practice, but also a voice for reform. In recent years, the journal has used the context of Bill Clinton's impeachment to raise the question of what young people believe does or does not constitute "sex," and examined the implications for public health. The Lancet also published the controversial statistical survey that attributed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths to the 2003 invasion of that country. The journal is at the forefront of combatting medical practices, such as homeopathy, with a poor record of clinical validation.

But The Lancet might not have existed at all if not for the attempted murder of its founder.

Thomas Wakley (1795-1862) was the youngest son of Henry and Mary Wakley, prosperous farmers in Devon. He moved to London in 1815, qualified as a surgeon in 1817, and set up a private practice. With the help of his future father-in-law, a wealthy merchant, Wakley was able to purchase and take over a thriving established practice in the West End, along with a 15-room house near Oxford Circus. Wakley married Elizabeth Goodchild at St. James's, Piccadilly. Still in his early twenties, Wakley was positioned for a comfortable and conventional career in medicine.

To understand what happened to Wakley to alter the direction of his life, one must remember that Europe at this time was still smouldering with revolutions and revolutionary ideals. Among the revolutionaries was Arthur Thistlewood, whose travels to the United States and France had exposed him to revolutionary societies and convinced him that Britain, too, needed to be shaken from its ancient foundations. There was a lot that was rotten in British government at the time. Parliament was hardly representative of the populace, thanks to suffrage limited to large landholders and geographic constituencies that hadn't changed with shifts of population. For example, the county of Lancashire with a combined population of nearly one million in half a dozen cities sent two representatives to Parliament, whereas Old Sarum in Wilshire, home of just one eligible voter, also sent two representatives. But the real driver of unrest was probably the economic depression in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Wages fell by as much as two thirds, while new taxes drove up the price of food. Revolutionaries found sympathy among many ordinary people.

Arthur Thistlewood and his compatriots were furious over two recent events. One was the Peterloo Massacre. In 1819, some 60,000 residents of Lancashire gathered at St. Peter's Fields in Manchester to protest their under-representation in Parliament and to elect an unauthorized MP. On the orders of the local officials, soldiers moved to arrest the leaders of the protest, and the culmination of the ensuing confrontation was a cavalry charge into the crowd. Fifteen people were killed, and hundreds, including women and children, were injured. The government's response to an outraged press and populace gave rise to Thistlewood's second grievance: the Six Acts. I think of it as the Patriot Act of 1819. The Acts said that any meeting advocating radical reform constituted "an overt act of treasonable conspiracy." The Acts limited many civil rights, exerted pressure on the press, and made seditious writing punishable by transportation out of Britain for a period of fourteen years.

Not content with organizing meetings, which would be illegal now anyway, Thistlewood endorsed a plot to assassinate government ministers at a dinner party. What he didn't know was that the dinner party was a sham concocted by a police informant, a double-agent in Thistlewood's group. The police went so far as to place newspaper notices about the dinner to convince Thistlewood and his conspirators to proceed with the plan, which had all been the idea of the informant to begin with.

The first attempt to arrest Thistlewood and the radicals in his group was botched. Thistlewood killed a policeman with a sword before making his escape. Soon after, he was hunted down and jailed. Those conspirators who did not cooperate with the prosecution were hung, and reportedly their heads were removed from their corpses by an anonymous "surgeon." In fact, this mutilation was probably performed by a hospital porter cum body snatcher named Parker, not a surgeon at all.

However, "surgeon" was the operative word for some of Thistlewood's escaped compatriots, and rumors pointed them in the direction of a young doctor living in the West End as the man who had decapitated Arthur Thistlewood. They intended to have their revenge upon the establishment.

On 27 August 1820, the young Dr. Wakley had a headache. He treated it by applying leeches to his temples and tying a tourniquet around his head. A stranger called at Wakley's door, asking to confer about one of Wakley's patients. The stranger then asked if he might have a glass of cider, and when Wakley obligingly went to the cellar to fetch some, the stranger admitted a group of masked men. The assailants knocked Wakley unconscious with a blow to the head --- the tourniquet may have prevented the blow from killing him. They kicked him and stabbed him. When Wakley came to, his house was ablaze. He escaped, but the house and its contents, including the Wakleys' wedding presents, were a total loss.

Wakley was heavily insured, but the insurance company accused him of staging the assault and setting the fire himself. Wakley took them to court, but in the meantime he and his wife had to seek much more modest lodgings. The Wakleys moved to the poorer neighborhood of Newport Street, off the Strand, where Wakley tried to establish himself again as a doctor. However, he had a hard time making ends meet. The residents of his new neighborhood could hardly afford his services, and on top of this he was distracted by his legal fight with the insurer and was still recovering from his injuries.

Several factors may have combined to motivate Wakley to try his hand at medical publishing. Elizabeth Wakley had expected to live in rather better circumstances and urged him to find an alternative to medicine. While living on Newport Street, Wakley had befriended William Cobbett, a radical journalist and reformer. Finally, in 1823, Wakley met Dr. Walter Channing, one of the founders of the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, who seems to have encouraged Wakley in his scheme of starting a new medical journal in London. Channing may even have bankrolled the effort.

The Lancet published its first weekly issue on 5 October 1823. The journal was the only medical weekly in Britain, and it was successful almost immediately.

Wakley's battle with his insurance company ended in victory for Wakley. He was awarded full compensation and costs, but the move to Newport Street had already changed the direction of his life.

Wakley went on to have a remarkable career, building on his publishing reputation to get himself elected to Parliament as a reformer. In Parliament, he made an impression with his impassioned speech in defense of six laborers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who had been sentenced to transportation for organizing to resist a reduction in their wages. He pushed through legislation that required government to pay for expert medical consultants to assist coroners, who at that time had legal training but no expertise in medicine. While still serving in Parliament, Wakley was elected coroner himself, the first medical man to take the post. He ran on a reform platform that promised to investigate all suspicious deaths, and in office he earned the enmity of workhouse managers when his investigations into accidental deaths exposed the terrible conditions at these institutions. Among Wakley's admirers were Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackery.

Wakley is not buried at Kensal Green, though his corpse is deposited there. That is, his coffin rests, along with those of his wife and daughter, in one of the niches of Kensal Green's catacombs under the Anglican chapel.

Kensal Green Cemetery stories

Below is a biography of John Cumming. He is buried at the Kensal Green Cemetery near our London flat, and I visited his grave in preparation for writing a story that is intended as a collaboration between his spirit and mine.

He is one of many famous Victorians at rest in Kensal Green, and I hope to write many such collaborations. The first such story, "The Peach at the End of Days," has just gone out to subscribers to www.shortshortshort.com.

John Cumming

John Cumming (1807-1881) must have been impressive in the pulpit. As a young man of twenty-four, while he was working as a private tutor, he was invited to preach a sermon at a small Presbyterian church, Crown Court at Covent Garden. This sermon so impressed the congregation that they asked Cumming to become their pastor, and he was duly ordained. He was to spend the rest of his career as the Crown Court pastor, but he had a reputation that extended far beyond his little London church.

Besides his preaching, Cumming was known for his good works and his bees. Under his leadership, Crown Court converted a nearby barn into a “ragged school” for indigent children, where children who would otherwise have been on the street were housed, fed, clothed, and educated. Some 16,000 children are said to have benefited. Besides caring for the poor, he was an avid bee-keeper, publishing a series of letters to The Times, signed “Beemaster,” which were later the basis for a book.

But it was his sermons and related writings that most impressed London. Cumming was a handsome man with a high forehead and dark, flashing eyes. His manner of delivery was dramatic. Tennyson parodies a preacher, said to be Cummings, in his poem, “Sea Dreams.” The preacher gestures dramatically, intones, “Thus, thus with great violence!” as he acts out the destructive deeds of an apocalyptic angel. The content of his sermons and his riveting performances helped to grow Crown Court into a congregation of 500. When the church building was being renovated in 1847, services were moved to Exeter Hall where crowds of up to 4,000 attended. The police were called in to assist with controlling the traffic at the end of these services.

As Tennyson's parody indicates, a favorite theme for Cummings was the end of the world. He wrote a series of books based on his reading of Genesis and Daniel showing that the world would end between 1848 and 1867.

Whether true or not, a story circulated that damaged Cumming's reputation as a believer in his own predictions. It was said that shortly before his 1867 deadline for the end of the world, he was busy negotiating a new twenty-one-year extension on his mortgage.

Cumming followed the 1867 disappointment with more books proclaiming that the end times were nigh, but his congregation gradually shrank until each Sunday he was delivering his sermons about the end times (and against Catholicism) to only fifty parishoners.

His grave site is one of the most neglected corners of Kensal Green Cemetary, where a dense stand of trees and ivy have grown up among the monuments. Navigating this area is hard, since the pathways that usually serve as reference points are completely overgrown. It seems as if the earth itself repudiates Reverend Cumming: The ivy covers headstones and gradually eats away at them. Now the stones are illegible. In a few centuries, they will be gone entirely. The trees, the mosquitos, the birds nesting above the vine-tangled ground all seem to say, We are still here.