The Most Famous Graves in Highgate Cemetery East - A Guided Cemetery Tour

I'm Jessica the Museum Guide and today I'm visiting the east side of Highgate Cemetery. This is part two. Last week I released a video about the west side so go ahead and watch that one first. It'll give you a lot of historical context but this side, while younger, is every bit as interesting. Now let's get started walking into the east side of the cemetery. Highgate West opened in 1839 and by 1854 a further 19 acres to the southeast of the original area was purchased. Here the east side opened in 1860. Over time 170,000 people buried in around 53,000 graves were spread across the east and west sides and as you'll see today people are still being buried here. I also just want to mention that I'm launching my Patreon finally in the next few days. I'll include the link in the description of this video when it's ready. Be sure to join if you want access to all kinds of exclusive content including in-person tours here in London and if you're new to my channel please like and subscribe here. I'm so very happy to have you. As I mentioned in my last video Highgate Cemetery may have a lot of newer graves but they are no less interesting. In fact the east side might even just be more visited than the west. Let's start here with Bruce Reynolds. In my last video I mentioned just how much I love a bust on a grave but how about a death mask? That's what you're seeing here. Now Bruce Reynolds is one of those criminals who carried out such an egregious crime that people can't help but kind of love him. Though he masterminded the 1963 Great Train Robbery he became a bit of a counterculture anti-hero. When he conducted the heist along with a team of 15 men it was Britain's largest robbery netting 2.6 million pounds which is equivalent to 69 million today. The gang tampered with the line side signals to bring the train to a halt and then attacked a royal mail train laden with cash on its way from Glasgow to London. Reynolds spent five years on the run in Belgium, Canada and Mexico before being caught and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in 1969, though he was released just nine years later. Of his crimes he said, quote, I was beginning to see the thief as an artist. Nothing could match the tension, excitement and sense of fulfillment. He compared the Great Train Robbery to the Sistine Chapel of Theft and you gotta respect that audacity. His son Nick isn't just a musician, he's also one of the only artists in the UK who still crafts death masks and I guarantee you've heard his son's music. His band Alabama Three, known as A3 in America, did the theme song to The Sopranos. You know the one, woke up this morning. If you'd be interested in a video on death masks and famous ones around the country let me know, it's one of my favorite topics. We'll be encountering a lot of gravestones today that have books on them, including this one for William Richard Foyle. Now if that name sounds familiar then maybe you've visited one of his bookshops. Along with his brother Gilbert, he founded the Foyles Bookshop in 1903 and their flagship at Charing Cross Road is still open today. And as I mentioned, there are a few different book graves that we're going to see. Wow, this one here just caught my eye. Philip Gould, a labor peer and strategist. Stunning sculpture here. Let's go and see another sculpture here. This one of Anna Mahler, a sculptor, passed away in 1988. She was the daughter of Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma. Gustav was an Austro-Bohemian romantic composer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but after his work was banned by the Nazis during World War II, it was rediscovered by a new generation in the 50s and now, even into the 21st century, he's one of the most frequently performed and recorded composers. Now Anna was only six when he died, but she too had a creative gift. She's a brilliant sculptor. She herself was also a model for her mother-in-law, painter Broncia Kohler-Pinell. You can see that here. Anna went on to become a bronze sculptor, creating busts of many of the musical giants of the 20th century, including Arnold Schoenberg, Arthur Schnabel, Otto Klemperer, and many others who were friends and peers of her father. She fled Germany after the Anschluss and took refugee in Hampstead, which is close by to the cemetery. She married five times and moved to Italy, but died here in North London while visiting her daughter in 1988. This sculpture is a copy of one of hers called Visions. Okay, I promised you more books, and here's another right here. Jim Stanford Horne. Now, not a lot of information is available about Jim's life, and he definitely was not a partner in the Penguin Book Company. Apparently, he just really liked to read. Now, if you have a look at the word partner, it is slightly off-center, right? It looks like it should be shifted a little bit over to the right, and some people believe that that's because this leaves room in case he had more than one partner, maybe, maybe if he outlived a partner. And some people have even gone so far as to say that this is a subtle clue that Jim Stanford Horne was gay. He was just age 34 when he died in 2010. The word partner could be very pointed, because remember, gay marriage wasn't legalized in the UK until 2014. Could be a political statement. This is a good point, too. Even if you're not famous during your lifetime, if you get a really interesting grave at a famous cemetery, you can become famous after death. Now, speaking of famous, here's one of the most famous graves in the cemetery. This is the grave of Douglas Adams, who has a huge fan base that come to visit him really regularly. So very few graves at Highgate inspire so much love and laughter as Douglas Adams, which you can see is be decked in pens, and even covered with a towel, a few towels. Part of this is paying homage to a beloved writer, but in the words of the man himself in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in the cosmos, there was also a planet entirely given over to ballpoint light forms. And it was to this planet that unattended ballpoints would make their way, leaving the ballpoint equivalent of a good life. Now, I promise you that I didn't actually do this on purpose, but I actually have a ballpoint pen with me. Hey, I see a couple of sharpies in there. That's not in the right spirit. Okay, here's my ballpoint pen. Let's add, let's add to the collection. In the UK, those are called biros, by the way. Sadly, Douglas Adams died of a massive heart attack after his regular workout, and he was just 49 years old. His memorial service was held on the 17th of September 2001 in St. Martin's-in-the-Field in Trafalgar Square, and it became the first church service broadcast live on the BBC website. Since then, his grave has been labeled with number 42, which is famously the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. And every year on May 25th, which is Towel Day, the cemetery allows people to bring their towels and place them by his grave. You can see there's still a few left, because of course, the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have is a towel. Like his pens, I hope he's somewhere out there in the cosmos leading the Douglas Adams equivalent of a good life. If you haven't watched part one of this video, which is the west side of Highgate Cemetery, I think it's a great time to stop and do that now. The west side of Highgate Cemetery was growing increasingly crowded, and there was a demand for more land. In part one of this video, it was pouring rain, but today, very sunny. It's a really interesting Jesus here. Up this narrow path here, we can see the monument to George Eliot. She wrote seven novels amongst the Middlemarch and Mill on the Floss, and in addition to writing under a male pen name, she refused to live a conventional life. Similarly to Radcliffe Hall, who's in the first video, she's another female author who wrote under a male pseudonym. Mary Anne Evans wrote under the name George Eliot. Scandalously and unconventionally for the era, she lived with the married George Henry Lewis as his conjugal partner for more than 20 years, and she called him her husband. This wasn't her first menage a trois arrangement, and it wouldn't be her last. He remained married to his wife and supported their children, even after she left him to live with another man and have children with him. Everybody was at it. In May 1880, 18 months after Lewis's death, George Eliot married her longtime friend John Cross, a man much younger than she, and she changed her name to Mary Anne Cross. She faced more than a side eye for her life choices. I think most interesting people do. The first part of the inscription on this grave is from the second and third lines of her own poem, The Choir Invisible, and it reads of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence. She died rather unexpectedly at age 61 in 1880. Now let's go to the grave of one of her closest friends and her former boss. Now there's a famous man on our right, don't think I haven't seen him, but we're going to first talk about this man here. Herein lie the ashes of Herbert Spencer. Passed away in 1903, and you can tell by the word ashes that cremation was getting more common by then. Now Spencer was an economist and writer. He actually edited the magazine The Economist. He was an early advocate of the theory of evolution. Not many people know that he coined the phrase survival of the fittest, not Darwin. He believed in limiting the government role in society and lifting all protection for workers and the poor. So it's rather funny that he's buried here so close to a man who championed the rights of workers. In fact, his grave says workers of all lands unite. And this of course is the most famous grave at Highgate Cemetery. This is Karl Marx. Karl Marx, though German, was expelled from his home country in 1849 for his radical political views and had to seek refuge in London where he lived for the rest of his life. His best known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto with Frederick Engels and his three-volume Das Kapital, which was mostly written in the British Museum, part of which which used to be the British Library. Marx and his wife Jenny von Westphalen and their children lived at 28 Dean Street, Soho from 1851 to 1856. They lived in poverty and only three of their seven children survived to adulthood. After Jenny died in 1881, Marx fell into increasingly poor health and passed away just 15 months later in 1883 when he was 64. He was buried in this area of the cemetery reserved for agnostics and atheists and he was originally buried in his wife's grave on a small side path, but in 1956 a new monument featuring this gigantic bust by the socialist sculptor Lawrence Bradshaw was installed in a more prominent location. Funds were raised by the Marx Memorial Fund set up by the Communist Party in 1955. In 1970 vandals planned to saw through the face of Marx's bronze bust before filling the hollow statue with explosives. His nose was sawed through with a fine hacksaw blade from within approximately a quarter inch of his nostrils. The bomb was made of bolt ends, crudely adapted fireworks and a fizzing cocktail of weed killer and sugar, but it wasn't successful and the damage to his nose was repaired. It is occasionally still vandalized, splashed with red graffiti and attacked with a hammer in 2019 and you can see the remnants, the repairs of that damage right there. This whole area around Karl Marx is surrounded by Marxists and revolutionaries from all over the world. Claudia Jones is right next to him. She was a Trinidadian civil rights activist and the founder of the Notting Hill Carnival, dedicated her life to fighting against racism and imperialism. Mansoor Hekmat, another prominent Marxist and he followed suit like Marx with a bust atop his grave, a much smaller one of course. He was an Iranian revolutionary and leader of the worker communist movement in that country in the 60s. After he formed successful workers parties and communist parties that opposed the Shah and the Islamic Republic of Iran, he was forced to his home country. His widow, feminist Marxist Azar Majedi, continues to fight for human rights in Iran. Another Iranian activist here, Manoucher Sebecian, passed away in 2013. Here's Dr. Yousef Mohammed Dadu. He was the chairman of the South African Communist Party. Iraqi communist leader You can see there are a lot of Marxists here. We're now walking amongst the narrower paths and less traversed graves to visit Marx's original gravestone. Remember Marx died in poverty and so by the 1950s, when his ideologies were some of the world's most influential, this area was not thought to be a grand enough resting place for such an icon. How kind of tragically poetic. There's one of the urns on the ground. Remember in part one of this video, I talked about how urns covered with a shawl represent the dividing line between life and death. I love it when I happen upon characters from my videos that I've covered in the past. And that's what's happened here with the grave of David Kirkcaldy, or if you're Scottish, it's pronounced more like Hakadi, but I have Rohtak Rs and harder Ls. Here it is here in loving remembrance of David Kirkcaldy, who died in 1897. He was an influential scientist famous for his breaking machine, where he would test industrial and transportation inventions for safety, which doesn't sound like a big deal to us today. But trust me, he saved a lot of lives. I visit his immense testing machine in my video about the 12 strangest museums in London, which I've just linked above. One bit of advice I have if you're planning to visit Karl Marx's original grave is to definitely wear some sturdy boots. And if it's been raining, be prepared for mud. And here down this modest path, just you can see here, the original resting place of Karl Marx and his wife. Ernestine Rose was a suffragist abolitionist and free thinker who's often called the first Jewish feminist, although I'm sure there were others. She was incredibly influential in the mid 19th century American women's rights movement, and she was a contemporary of famous suffragists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. She might be less well remembered than her fellow suffragists, but she's been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. And to this day, the Ernestine Rose Society aims to quote, revive the legacy of this important early 19th century reformer by recognizing her pioneering role in first wave feminism. Thanks, Ernestine. Great. We covered a lot of Victorian morning symbolism when we were on the west side of the cemetery. But here's one I didn't mention. These shaking hands. Some say that it means that we are shaking hands in an eternal farewell to this life, while others say that it means we shall one day meet again. Again, you can see graves in disrepair. Monuments and stones knocked over. A conscious choice to leave them like this. As I mentioned, so much of the foliage here is self-seeded. And I'm not sure if that's the case with this glorious rosebush sprouting out of this grave, but it sure looks beautiful. Here's one of my favorite graves at the east side of Highgate Cemetery. This belongs to Anne Juicin Crisp. Now, we don't know a lot about her, but she died at the age of 94 and she's buried with her dog, Emperor. And you can see here, there he is, her faithful dog, Emperor. I actually think that's very sweet. Maybe it's a future goal. Here's quite an unusual one, in memory of George Honey, who was a comedian, erected by his friends and fellow workers. Apparently, he was quite a well-known Victorian actor who appeared in a lot of plays and even in operas. Now, this is the main avenue of the southernmost point of Highgate East. Another glorious rosebush here. Now, at some of the famous graves, the landscapers have chosen to add extra little paths here. So let's walk up this way to this really remarkable grave sculpture here. Yes, we've seen a lot of symbolism, things referencing professions, but none is quite so obvious as this piano, which is for Harry Thornton. It's more than just a sculpture. It marks his resting place. He was a classical pianist who played for the troops during World War I, and he survived the Great War. However, just a few months later, he would join the more than 50 million people worldwide to fall prey to the great influenza epidemic between 1918 and 1920. Shockingly, more people died during that flu epidemic than in all of World War I. Let's see, it says, sweet thou art sleeping, cradle on my heart, safe in God's keeping, while I must weep apart. Puccini. Now let's head from one famous musician to another, not just a musician, also an impresario and a bit of a boy band manager. Yes, I'm talking about Malcolm McLaren. Here he is here, Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren, and I absolutely love the quote on his tombstone, better a spectacular failure than a benign success. I love that the MM there is kind of referencing Warner Brothers. That's all folks. Now Malcolm McLaren was a legendarily cynical fashion designer, and he was famous for managing the New York Dolls, Adam and the Ants, and Bow Wow Wow, but also for putting together the band The Sex Pistols. He liked the way that they looked, and he didn't really care about whether or not they could play instruments. And that's how somebody like Sid Vicious, who literally could not play the bass guitar when he started in that band, ended up so famous. That's why I call him a boy band manager. So in 1974, he operated the Chelsea boutique called Sex with his girlfriend Vivian Westwood, and they helped to shape early punk fashion. And in fact, that's why he started The Sex Pistols. He thought those boys looked good in his clothes and could help to make sales. He was only 64 when he died of mesothelioma in Switzerland, and a grand funeral was planned. I love this headline, look here, Anarchy Rules as Malcolm McLaren Funeral Draws Punk Glitterati. His coffin was spray painted with Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, and a horse-drawn carriage headed the procession from the deconsecrated St. Mary Magdalene Church here to Highgate. It was followed by an overflowing green double-decker bus destined for, quote, nowhere, and decorated with one of McLaren's favorite sayings, cash from chaos. The 200-strong funeral party hung out of all the windows, singing along to Sid Vicious's version of Frank Sinatra's My Way, and former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones addressed his old adversary directly. Dear Malcolm, did you take the money with you? Is it in the coffin? Do you mind if I come back tomorrow and dig you up? For anybody else, that would be deeply disrespectful, but for Malcolm McLaren, it's absolutely perfect. Now there's an interesting connection here to another grave. You may have already noticed a similarity between this headstone and the first that we visited today. That's because Nick Reynolds, yes, Bruce Reynolds' son, also cast Malcolm McLaren's death mask. I mentioned this in part one, but I am planning to do a similar video about Père Lachaise, where I just walk through and kind of narrate what I see. So let me know in the comments if you'd be interested in watching that. Sheila Gish, no relation to Lillian Gish, was a British actress who's most known for her role as Joanne in the 1995 London revival of the Stephen Sondheim Musical Company, and she won the Olivier Award for Supporting Actress. She was in a ton of TV roles and other stage roles, working right up until her death in 2005 from skin cancer. There's so many fascinating entertainers over on this side of the cemetery, and so let's meet another here, Hercules Belleville. He was born in San Diego in 1939 to an English father and an American mother, and he worked as a second director and producer with some truly great directors such as Bob Rafelson, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Julian Schnabel. But he was perversely proud of his one on-screen appearance in a strange cameo with Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski's Repulsion. That's a wonderful film by a truly horrible man. In Belleville's cameo, his arms emerge from the corridor wall to maul the French actress as she portrays a sexually repressed woman falling deeper and deeper into psychosis. He married his wife 48 hours before he died of cancer. His obituary in The Guardian sums him up, Hercules may have looked like a patrician dandy, but he was a great democrat, a great respecter of women, and a great human being. In a world where celebrity gossip has become a currency, he remained as silent as the grave to which he has now sadly gone. Now here's another beloved person for all of my British viewers, and people from around the world, you might know him as well, but he is much more famous here in the UK. Jeremy Beatle was an English television presenter renowned for his general knowledge, and he was the host of Win Beatle's Money, which was based on the US format Win Ben Stein's Money. I grew up watching that. Beatle lost his money only eight times in 52 shows. He also wrote a quiz for The Independent every Saturday. Now of course I didn't grow up here, but my notoriously unimpressed husband assured me that Jeremy Beatle was a genuinely good guy, and so that's quite a seal of approval. And had I lived here when he was around, I know I would have loved his quizzes. If you want a really deep cut, you can look it up. About 10 years ago I was on a British quiz show called Eggheads. Beatle also had Poland Syndrome, which made his right hand much smaller than his left, and he raised awareness and money for people with disability. His ashes are here with this stack of sculpted stone books, with the inscription, Writer, Presenter, and Curator of Oddities. I like to think of myself a little bit the same. Well this one is bound to catch your eye. It really does what it says on the tin. It belongs to Patrick Caulfield, an English painter and printmaker known for his bold canvases. He clearly had a very dark sense of humor, which I can get behind. His contemporaries included David Hockney and Alan Jones, and in 1964 he exhibited with the New Generation Show at Whitechapel Gallery, and that resulted in him being associated with the pop art movement. He didn't really like this label though. He called himself a formal artist instead, which does seem kind of vague to me. But he is forever remembered now, not only for his stained glass window that is inside the original Ivy and Covent Garden, but also for this iconic and much photographed grave. Quite poetic to see all the life here in this tombstone. Look at this amazing modernist grave marker. Yes, we can see the name here in this kind of Art Nouveau font, but look at these stone slabs. So unusual, especially compared to the Victorian surroundings. I just love this juxtaposition of old and new. This fascinating grave caught my eye as I walked by. Let's have a look at Captain John Henderson and his wife, Jessie. That was supposed to be my name. Beautiful. Look at the woman holding the anchor and the shield above. He was the commander of the HMS Worcester for 25 years. It was during Smith's command of the Worcester that Admiral Togo received his early training on board that ship. He became an admiral of the fleet in the Imperial Japanese Navy in the late 19th century, and he's considered one of Japan's greatest naval heroes. Now, here's a little bit of a tangential story, but you'll forgive me if I tell it. Later on, when Togo, now we're not talking about Smith, we're talking about one of his people, Togo, the admiral invited his vice admiral to put his hand into his loose-fitting trousers to take ahold of his family jewels. The vice admiral's nerves were instantly calmed when he felt Togo's jewels hanging loose, and therefore, he didn't have any anxiety about a coming battle. Ladies and gentlemen, that is workplace harassment. Don't do that today, but what a legend. You know, I love these modernist kind of stone sculptures. This one here to Ashton Gar-Lamb Fong, vet, brother, and son. Passed away in the year 2000. How amazing here, we can see Ethel May Collins topped by Saint George slaying the dragon. There's no clue here why her monument would be topped by Saint George. Maybe she was just an extremely proud Englishwoman? Regardless, I've never seen that on a grave before. It says, sacred to the treasured memory of friendship and of Ethel May Collins of Saint Michael's, who was called home in September 2nd, 1830. Lots of squirrels. Oh, there's another one. I imagine that would give you a fright if it got you off guard. Now we're going to go finish our tour of Highgate with two pioneers of film. And fittingly, they're just on either side of the path from each other. One here, and then this really elaborate monument here. Now let's talk about Karl Mayer first. I remember this name. Let's talk about Karl Mayer first. I remember this name from film studies. He wrote or co-wrote the screenplays to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Der Letzeman, Four Devils, and many other films directed mostly by F.W. Murnau. Mayer was a fundamental figure in the dramatic establishment of German expressionist cinema and Kammerspiel film. His memorial marker says here, pioneer in the art of cinema erected by his friends and fellow workers. As I mentioned, just across the path is another icon of early film, William Friese Green. He was an English inventor and a professional photographer, but was also a pioneer in motion pictures. He invented loads of different cameras in the late 19th century and went on to shoot films with them and even patent an early color film process all the way back in 1905. However, as a genius inventor, he spent all of his money on inventing and he went bankrupt, and he was jailed for debts and died in utter poverty. That was in 1921. His death was extremely dramatic. He was a mostly forgotten figure at the end of his life, and he attended a meeting of the cinema trade in London. The meeting had been called to discuss all kinds of controversial topics, and Friese Green got up to his feet to speak. He was an elderly man and in poor health, and he came forward, speaking loudly to be heard better, appealing for both sides of the argument to come together. However, shortly after he went back to his seat, he collapsed, and he died a short while later of heart failure. He only had one shilling and 10 pence in his pocket when he died, which was less than a pound. And he was surrounded by film industry execs who felt really guilty, who'd forgotten about his role in film technology. So they hastily staged a really grand funeral for him. People lined the streets to see him go by and a two minute silence was observed in some cinemas, and a fund went on to commission his grave. Friese Green didn't actually like to big himself up by this. He would have thought of all of this pomp as a bit too much for his tastes. He was notoriously humble and instead championed other inventors contributions. But you can see a little guilt goes a long, long way. Well, that's the end of our tour and of our two part series on Highgate Cemetery. Let me know in the comments below if you'd like to see similar videos about London's other magnificent seven cemeteries, Père Lachaise in Paris, or even the Glasgow Necropolis. And I'll see you the next time I'm at the museum or the cemetery.