Memorial to a much-loved bassist

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Andy Rourke mural, The Wheatsheaf, Oak Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester

Andy Rouke (1964-2023), the highly-regarded bass-player of the 1980s Manchester band The Smiths, died of pancreatic cancer, and the loss has had a huge impact on his fans and admirers.

Mike Joyce, the Smiths’ drummer, picked up his wife Bee’s suggestion of a wall mural as a way of commemorating Andy and his exceptional musical legacy.  He knew the exact image to capture his friend when they were both playing in the band, an image taken at the Caird Hall, Dundee by the photographer Nalinee Darmrong who had travelled with them on tour in 1985-86.  Other images from that time are at You’ve Got to See This Local Photographer’s Book About Her Teenage Years Touring With the Smiths – Washingtonian.

Mike Joyce recruited the Manchester muralist Akse P19 to render Nalinee Darmrong’s image in his precisely detailed manner.  His work has been enriching the local streetscape since 1992:  Akse P19 | Greater Mancunians. 

Andy Rourke frequented the Wheatsheaf pub on Oak Street in the Northern Quarter, and the current landlords, Robert Ashton and Lisa Booth, immediately offered the gable wall overlooking their car park with the approval of the building’s owner, Admiral Taverns.  Andy’s family gave their blessing to the project.

Against a black background, the 30 feet × 20 feet monochrome image is startling.  Nalinee Darmrong, who travelled from Washington DC to see the finished mural, characterised it as “hard to see, but…also beautiful to see”, “bittersweet but amazing”:  ‘Incredible’ mural of The Smiths legend Andy Rourke unveiled on side of Manchester pub – Manchester Evening News.

Mike Rourke’s crowdfunding campaign in conjunction with Pancreatic Cancer Action Network raised nearly £29,000:  Andy Rourke of The Smiths mural – a Creative & Arts crowdfunding project in Manchester by Mike Joyce. 

More information about this form of cancer can be found at Pancreatic Cancer UK – We bring more than hope and donations can be made to Donate to Pancreatic Cancer UK – Pancreatic Cancer UK.

Putting the heart in the city

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Leah’s Yard, Cambridge Street, Sheffield (2010) © Mike Higginbottom
Leah’s Yard, Cambridge Street, Sheffield (2024) © Hasna Khan

Leah’s Yard, so long unrecognised except by historians and industrial archaeologists, is at last established as the jewel in the crown of Sheffield’s game-changing Heart of the City development.

In an astute comment to an article in the Sheffield Tribune in October 2023, Robin Hughes pointed out that the prehistory of Heart of the City goes back to the 1960s when Sheffield City Council decided not to demolish much of the city centre to accommodate a ring road inside the inner ring road and awarded the flagship retail site on Cambridge Street to what was then Cole Brothers. 

Subsequent development schemes came and went, yet the beauty of Heart of the City, led by the Director of City Centre Development, Nalin Seneviratne from 2017, is its piecemeal but coherent configuration, which has respected many though not all the surviving heritage buildings.

Most people who think about it would describe Leah’s Yard as a set of “little mesters” workshops, where the myriad small craftsmen worked together in close co-operation at their highly specialised metal trades for which Sheffield has been celebrated for centuries.

In fact, in its early days Leah’s Yard belonged to single occupants, initially a toolmaker, George Linley, who occupied the site in either 1817 or 1825.  By 1842 it had become John Morton’s Coalpit Lane Horn Works, making handles for cutlery and knives.

(The coal pit was an outcrop where Furnival Gate now runs.  Coalpit Lane was renamed when the Duke of Cambridge laid the foundation stone of the Crimea Monument at the top of The Moor in 1857.)

The works remained a horn manufactory until a die-stamper, Henry Leah, took over in 1891.

The Leahs found they had more room than they needed for their business and let space to up to eighteen different tradesmen at one time.  By the beginning of the twentieth century Leah’s Yard was indeed a little mesters’ workplace.

Henry Leah’s son, grandson and great-grandson successively ran the place until 1976 when their business was amalgamated with Spear & Jackson.

The site was listed Grade II* in 1983 for its rarity and completeness.  This presented difficulties for development planners and arguably ensured that the heritage buildings around Cambridge Street should be incorporated in the new build.

Leah’s Yard had no future as a museum piece, and the patina of grime and grit has had to go.  I’m told that the restoration had more latitude than would have been possible in a historically accurate recreation.

Scrubbed up but outwardly intact, managed by local entrepreneurs James O’Hara and Tom Wolfenden, Leah’s Yard is already proving a magnet for high-end retailers and small businesses:  the digital news outlet Tribune has relocated to the Yard, as has the podcast creator Persephonica.

Leah’s Yard preserves a precious though not unique piece of Sheffield’s heritage, echoing the diversity of the industrial past.

Its significance deserves light-touch interpretative displays so that visitors can discover the meaning of the place.

Meanwhile, the planners’ next dilemma sits across the road, where the former Cole Brothers store is waiting for a fresh purpose.

Crossing the Forth

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Forth Bridge

I admire the video-maker Geoff Marshall, the anoraks’ anorak, for his voluminous YouTube documentaries about transport, delivered with clarity and relentless enthusiasm.  He’s a natural communicator, with the gift of talking about things that interest him in a way that appeals to listeners.  And his appetite for challenges means that he makes curiosities entertaining.

His recent piece about the Forth Bridge [I Went To The Top Of The Forth Bridge (youtube.com)] is typical of his work.  His reputation gives him access to the parts other enthusiasts can’t reach, and his videos are technically professional.  Watch for the electric kettle switching itself off on cue.

Until the rail bridge was built, the only way to cross the Firth of Forth between Fife and Lothian without going all the way upstream to Stirling was by ferry.  An 1818 scheme for a suspension bridge was dismissed by a critic because its “very light and slender appearance, [was] so light indeed that on a dull day it would hardly have been visible, and after a heavy gale probably no longer to be seen on a clear day either”.  The engineer Thomas Bouch began a rail suspension bridge (never a good idea) in 1878, but when his earlier Tay Bridge collapsed the following year – “badly designed, badly constructed and badly maintained” – the Forth project was immediately stopped.

The eventual Forth Bridge is an astonishing piece of engineering, a design made possible only by the availability of Bessemer steel, so big and powerful that its form expresses its function, the first unequivocally utilitarian structure in Britain since Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851.  Unlike Horace Jones’ London Tower Bridge (1886-94), the Forth Bridge couldn’t be dressed up as architecture.

Its cantilever design ensures its strength and safety.  The central cantilever was the largest in the world when it was constructed;  now it’s the second largest, overtaken in 1919 by the Quebec Bridge (Pont de Québec] in Canada [Pont de Québec vu du Parc aquarium du Québec – Quebec Bridge – Wikipedia].

It was never strictly true that the painters started at one end and when they’d finished went back to start again. 

There was a tunnel under the Forth, built upstream to connect Kinneil Colliery near Bo’ness with Valleyfield Colliery near Culross in Fife.  It operated from 1964 to 1982 and was filled in and capped when it closed.  The tunnel features for a few seconds at 3:19 in the film Forth – Powerhouse for industry (1964):  Full record for ‘FORTH – POWERHOUSE FOR INDUSTRY’ (1820) – Moving Image Archive catalogue (nls.uk).

There’s a comprehensive account of the Forth Bridge and the two later road bridges at The Forth Bridge (theforthbridges.org).  It’s incorrect to refer to the “Forth Rail Bridge”.  The rail crossing has historical precedence, opened in 1890:  it was followed by the Forth Road Bridge (1964) and the Queensferry Crossing (2017).

Geoff Marshall makes it possible to appreciate the sheer scale of the Forth Bridge by taking his camera to the top of a cantilever and climbing around the rail deck.  Sooner him than me:  I’m glad of his movie;  otherwise I’m content to cross the Forth Bridge in a comfortable seat on a train – as its designers intended.

However, it will soon be possible to enjoy views of the Firth of Forth at 367 feet above sea level, and to join a Bridge Walk, secured by the same sort of harness that makes it possible to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge:  Forth Bridge Experience (scotlandsrailway.com).

Utopian community

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Dartington, Devon: Henry Moore ‘Memorial Figure’, Dartington Church and Hall

Dartington Hall, north of Totnes in Devon, celebrates its centenary as a community in 2025.  It’s a magical place, where people of talent have created, educated and influenced life and culture in Britain and beyond in all manner of fascinating ways.

It grew from the vision of Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1974) and his wife Dorothy (1887-1968), who purchased the decrepit estate, with its grand house dating back to 1338, to found a charity dedicated to encouraging all forms of art, sustainable agriculture, social science and peace.

Dorothy Elmhirst belonged to the Whitney family, which had settled in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century and became fabulously wealthy after Eli Whitney (1765-1825) invented the cotton gin, transforming the economy of the slave-based cotton industry in the Southern states.  She inherited $15 million dollars at the age of seventeen.  She and her husband wanted for nothing, and sincerely wanted to make the world a better place.

Leonard was descended from a long line of Yorkshire gentry.  After service in the First World War and subsequent study in the USA, he met the Bengali poet, artist, social reformer and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and followed him to India as his secretary.  Together they founded an Institute of Rural Reconstruction in West Bengal.

When Leonard and Dorothy married in 1925, Tagore, who had travelled extensively in England, encouraged them to invest in the ideas of the Chinese-based Rural Reconstruction Movement and may have suggested Dartington Manor as a suitable site.

The Elmhirsts lost no time in improving the estate, employing the architect William Weir (1865-1950) to restore and adapt the existing buildings, including the Great Hall which had stood roofless for over a century.  Dorothy Elmhirst worked with the garden designers Beatrix Farrand and Percy Cane to transform the gardens.

The weaver Elizabeth Peacock created the wall-hangings for the Great Hall between 1930 and 1938.  The architect Walter Gropius adapted the interior of the Barn Theatre in 1935, in preparation for Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton, to start the Dartington Theatre School the following year.  The Henry Moore sculpture ‘Memorial Figure’ was installed in the grounds in 1947.

A cluster of practical and educational projects grew up and were placed under an umbrella organisation, the Dartington Hall Trust, in 1935.  All of them have adapted over the years, and some have closed down or moved away – the progressive Dartington Hall School (1926), the Dartington Hall Film Unit (1945), the Dartington International Summer School and music festival (1953), the Dartington College of Arts (1961), Dartington Glass (1967;  divested and renamed Dartington Crystal 1986) and the ecology-focused Schumacher College (1990).

The roll-call of prominent artists and innovators associated with Dartington is remarkable, beginning with Rabindranath Tagore’s initial visit in 1926.  Paul Robeson rehearsed his 1930 production of Othello at Dartington.  The potter Bernard Leach was involved in Dartington from its earliest days and taught there from 1932.  The influential dancer and teacher Rudolf von Laban arrived from Nazi Germany in 1938 and contributed to Dartington programmes until 1951.

The composer Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav, taught at summer schools between 1942 and 1951.  Benjamin Britten conducted his cantata St Nicolas in the Great Hall in 1949, the year after it was completed, and Igor Stravinsky visited the 1957 Summer School.

One of the most influential figures associated with Dartington was the sociologist and writer Michael Young, latterly Baron Young of Dartington, who arrived as a fourteen-year-old pupil at the School in 1929, was a Trustee for fifty years, 1942-1992, and wrote the history of the Trust, entitled The Elmhirsts of Dartington: the creation of an utopian community (1982).

The Dartington estate is a delightful place to visit, whether for a few hours or a few days, either to attend an event or simply be there:  Visit Dartington Trust: events, courses, walks, food and drink & more.

Victory over Blindness

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'Victory over Blindness', Piccadilly Station, Manchester
‘Victory over Blindness’, Piccadilly Station, Manchester

If you’re running to catch a train on the approach to Manchester Piccadilly station you may have to swerve out of the path of a line of soldiers in First World War uniforms.

The seven life-sized bronze figures are blind veterans, each following the leader by placing their hands on the shoulders of the man in front.  The leader wears a patch over one eye, suggesting that he may have sight in the other eye.

The group is a cast of Johanna Domke-Guyot’s statue ‘Victory over Blindness’, deliberately placed at ground level to engage the attention of passers-by, as a reminder of the sacrifices of the soldiers blinded in combat by artillery or gas.

Ms Domke-Guyot has experienced partial sight-loss since she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1994.  She chose to mount the group without a plinth “…because it means that a disabled or blind person can access it.  I want people to touch it;  I want it to be a people’s artwork.”

The original statue, completed in 2015, is located at the Llandudno Centre of Blind Veterans UK, which subsequently commissioned the Manchester cast, unveiled in 2018.

The charity, for a long time known as St Dunstan’s, was co-founded in 1915 by Sir Arthur Pearson (1866-1921), the first proprietor of the Daily Express, who had himself lost his sight through glaucoma.  Under its original name, The Blinded Soldiers and Sailors Care Committee, the charity aimed to provide sightless veterans with vocational training so they could live independent lives.

Sir Arthur’s 1919 memoir was entitled Victory Over Blindness: How it Was Won by the Men of St Dunstan’s.

The Blind Veterans UK website Blind Veterans UK, Rebuilding lives after sight loss – Blind Veterans UK portrays the continuing work of the charity in helping blinded veterans, irrespective of whether they lost their sight in action, to “regain their independence and live the life they choose”.

Wagon hoists

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Leeds Central Wagon Hoist, Tower Square, Leeds
Leeds Central Wagon Hoist, Tower Square, Leeds

The centrepiece of Leeds’ Wellington Place development is called Tower Square, because its unlikely landmark is a rare survival of Victorian railway technology, one of a pair of towers that housed hoists to move freight wagons up and down between the now-demolished viaduct approaching Central Station and ground level.

Built in 1850, the Leeds Central Wagon Hoist is now celebrated.  Thanks to the developer MEPC investing £1.5 million the derelict Grade II listed rarity has been turned into a free-entry mini-museum which tells the story of the defunct railway line and the vanished passenger station that closed in 1967.

This Yorkshire Post feature illustrates how much the site has changed – Leeds Central Station: What remains of Leeds city centre’s ‘other’ train station (yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk) – and the attractive displays inside the tower are enlivened with a soundscape of departure announcements and passing trains.

As far as I can discover, there are only two other surviving wagon hoists in Britain. 

One is easily viewed from Platform 8 of Huddersfield railway station.  Attached to the Grade II listed goods warehouse dating from 1885, this hoist is supported by cast-iron Doric columns and it seems that the lifting equipment remains.  An urban-explorer report dated 2015 shows the spacious empty interior but the photographer either couldn’t find or didn’t recognise the interest of the hoist:  Report – – LNWR/LYR Goods Warehouse, Huddersfield – April 2015 | Other Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk.

The other, also listed Grade II, is at Goole in East Yorkshire:  Coal Wagon Hoist, Railway Dock © David Dixon :: Geograph Britain and Ireland.

There are archive images of other wagon-hoists, no longer in existence, at –

The only moving-image footage I can find to show a wagon-hoist in action is a twenty-second clip in a documentary about freight transport in Sheffield:  Sheffields railway in the 60`s – YouTube (start at 5:12).  This footage, apparently dated 1966, lacks a title or credits, and explains why, with hindsight, the well-intentioned modernisation of archaic operating practices didn’t stand the test of time. Railway goods sheds and stations aren’t given as much attention as passenger stations, civil engineering works and rolling stock, but they are amply covered in John Minnis and Simon Hickman’s The Railway Goods Shed and Warehouse in England (Historic England 2016), free to download at Goods Sheds 140pp.indd (historicengland.org.uk).

Leeds’ secret garden

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Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds
Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds
Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds

After a day out in Manchester where we enjoyed the Castlefield Viaduct high-line garden, my friend Ann and I decided to take a day-trip to Leeds to look at the Monk Bridge Viaduct, which turns out to be a closely-guarded secret.

It’s remarkably difficult to find:  there seems to be no signage whatsoever, and street maps show where an abandoned railway crosses the River Aire but offer no indication how to approach the elevated former trackbed.

If we’d simply walked out of the station and turned left we’d have found it within a spacious housing development called The Junction.  But we’re from Sheffield.  How are we supposed to know?

The viaduct is worth seeking out, nevertheless, as a monument to the period when the new-fangled railways embellished their engineering with grand architectural decoration.

From 1834 onwards five separate railway companies converged on the flat land beside the River Aire as near as possible to the centre of Leeds, their approach lines criss-crossing and twisting in a cat’s-cradle over the river and the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.

The Midland Railway opened a terminus, Leeds Wellington Station, in 1846, while the other four companies shared a joint station, Leeds Central Station, in 1854 and built an east-west through line served by Leeds New Station in 1869 (renamed Leeds City in 1938).

In the 1960s British Railways concentrated all its passenger services in Leeds City (renamed simply Leeds) and subsequently Leeds Central was demolished and part of its viaduct approach replaced by Royal Mail House (1975 – reconstructed as West Central, 2003, and later West Point).

The surviving viaduct, including a stately bridge over the River Aire, has now become the spine of The Junction, a very smart residential development geared to people who work from home, and the former trackbed is ingeniously landscaped so that it doesn’t look like a corridor to carry railway lines.

Ann and I parked ourselves at a table in front of The Junc Shack, where a civilised queue of (presumably) residents and workers seemed content to wait for carefully prepared and courteously served food and drinks from Alfonso’s Cuban Shack, where the generously filled pastrami bagel proved to be a substitute for lunch.

On a fine day, within ten minutes’ walk of Leeds Station, The Junction is worth visiting. 

If you ask the Junc Shack crew nicely, they’ll show you how to access the splendid loos.

Exploring Turin:  Duomo

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Turin Cathedral, Italy: Chapel of the Holy Shroud

The Cathedral of St John the Baptist (Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista, Duomo di Torino) is worth visiting for the sake of an object that’s hardly ever seen – the Holy Shroud (Sacra Sindone).

The church interior is not particularly ornate.  The nave is plain, with Doric piers supporting round arches, the bulk of it built very quickly between 1491 and 1498 alongside a slightly older brick bell tower.  There is, however, a sequence of spectacularly Baroque side chapels, a huge organ case aloft in a transept, and a shrine to the twentieth-century Catholic local hero Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901-1925), due to be canonised in the centenary of his death from polio.

The domed Chapel of the Holy Shroud (1668-94) fills the space between the east end of the Cathedral and the adjacent Royal Palace. 

The story of the revered relic it was built to contain is unrecorded before 1354, when it was exhibited in the French town of Lirey about a hundred miles east of Paris.

It came into the possession of the Royal House of Savoy in 1453,  and was kept in the royal chapel at the Savoyard capital, Chambéry.  There it sustained fire-damage in 1532, and it was transferred to the new capital of Savoy, Turin, in 1578.

Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy (1634-1675) commissioned priest, engineer and mathematician Camillo Guarino Guarini (1624-1683), to complete the elaborate chapel that had been planned by his predecessor, Charles Emmanuel I “the Great”, Duke of Savoy (1562-1630). 

The floor of the Shroud Chapel is raised so that the interior Is visible from the nave, and both public pilgrims and royal visitors could gain access to the chapel on separate occasions.  Crowned by Guarini’s dome, a masterpiece of engineering, the Chapel was consecrated by the architect in 1680, but was only completed after his death.  It was finally ready to receive the Shroud in 1694.

At the time of the 1898 exposition of the Shroud it was photographed for the first time by an amateur photographer, Secondo Pia (1855-1941), who was astonished that the negative image provided detail invisible to the naked eye.

Following a fire in 1997, the Shroud is currently stored in a temperature- and humidity-controlled case in a side-chapel. 

Since 1998, the 500th anniversary of the Cathedral’s consecration, the Shroud has been shown much more frequently than before, in 2000, 2010, 2015 and (by live stream because of Covid) at Easter 2020.

At all other times visitors are invited to sit in front of a digital image of Christ’s face, an opportunity that is treated with the greatest respect.  Even the bambini fall quiet.

I respect the views of scientists who say the Shroud’s herringbone weave postdates the time of Christ, that the images are painted with identifiable colour agents such as iron oxide, and so on, but I also sense that we can’t possibly know the significance of this piece of fabric. 

There’s an ethereal quality about the image that defies logic, and hosts of visitors to Turin gaze with awe at what may be the face of their Redeemer.

Brunel’s starting point

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Paddington Station, London

It’s one thing to learn from the standard book about a historic building, but walking round it with the author provides a different level of understanding.

Steven Brindle’s Paddington Station: its history and architecture (English Heritage 2013) in its second edition represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of one of Britain’s most important stations.

I took the opportunity to walk round the station with Steven as part of a group of Victorian Society members on a Saturday afternoon amid the hubbub of trains arriving and departing every few minutes, high-volume PA announcements, assistance trolleys conveying people up and down the platforms and noisy families taking selfies in front of the statue of Paddington Bear.

Now the second busiest station in the UK (after London Liverpool Street), Paddington Station remains a monument to the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) who was chosen to plan and build the Great Western Railway after winning the competition to design the Clifton Suspension Bridge and making himself popular with Bristol grandees for assisting in managing the chaos caused by the Reform Bill riots of 1831.

Steven made the station’s original layout clear by starting his tour halfway down Platform 1, next to Marcus Cornish’s statue of Paddington Bear. 

This was the side from which the first trains departed, and the buildings planned by Brunel and designed by Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820-1877) largely survive, including the Royal Waiting Room, now the first-class lounge.

Brunel ensured that the Great Western Railway was at the forefront of Victorian technology though some of his ideas were in advance of practicality:  the seven-foot broad gauge finally expired in 1892 and his atmospheric railway lasted less than a year.  Nevertheless, trains still run between Paddington and the South-West as they have since 1838, from under the magnificent glazed train-shed that Brunel and Wyatt completed in 1854. 

Three spans of wrought-iron arches cover the tracks, supported by columns that were originally cast iron, replaced by steel in 1922-24.  The transepts which break up the vista were thought to accommodate turntable tracks for shifting early rolling stock, but thorough recent research casts doubt on this idea.

The Great Western Railway was at once innovative and conservative, so when the removal of the broad-gauge tracks made it possible to increase the number of platforms it was accomplished without compromising Brunel and Wyatt’s train shed.

I’d never fully grasped how the separation of the original four departure and arrival platforms worked until I followed Steven round and learned that Brunel’s buildings on the northern arrival side were demolished in the early twentieth century.

The north side of the station has been repeatedly altered, first with the arrival of the Metropolitan Railway terminus, tucked in the north-west corner, in 1863, then the Span Four extension (1913-14), which respectfully follows the proportions of the 1854 station, and again when new buildings were added by the company architect, Percy Emerson Culverhouse (1871-1953), in the 1930s.

In the course of its history the station has extended from four platforms to seventeen including through platforms for the Underground and the Elizabeth Line.

Steven Brindle couldn’t show us the most remarkable of his discoveries at Paddington Station, the remaining span of Brunel’s first iron bridge, over the canal at Bishop’s Bridge.   The actual ironwork is in store in Fort Cumberland near Portsmouth.  The story is at Bishop’s Bridge – Wikipedia.

L T C Rolt relates that at an early meeting of the Great Western Railway directors, someone cast doubts on the practicality of driving a railway all the way from London to Bristol, and Brunel replied, “Why not make it longer, and have a steamboat go from Bristol to New York and call it the Great Western?”

You can take a train from Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads, passing the Wharncliffe Viaduct, the Maidenhead Bridge, Sonning Cutting, Swindon and Box Tunnel – each of them a pioneering work of genius – to visit Brunel’s surviving steamship, SS Great Britain, in the dry dock in which she was built.

He was a truly remarkable man who lived a remarkable life.

Newburgh Priory

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Newburgh Priory, North Yorkshire: north front

Newburgh Priory, as the name suggests, was founded as a monastery of Augustinian canons who came to the site from elsewhere around 1150.

At the Dissolution of the Monasteries it was purchased by Henry VIII’s chaplain, Anthony Bellasis, in 1539.  It has remained the property of Bellasis’ descendants to the present day – taking a baronetcy in 1611, and the successive titles Baron, Viscount and Earl Fauconberg.

Thomas, 1st Earl Fauconberg (c1627-1700) married Oliver Cromwell’s daughter, Mary (1636 or 1637-1713) whereby hangs a tale.

Lord Fauconberg had an unerring instinct which side to back in the convoluted politics of the day.  He was a Roundhead in the English Civil War, but welcomed King Charles II at his Restoration in 1660 and when Charles’ brother James II was obliged to relinquish the Crown in 1688, the then Viscount Fauconberg supported the invitation to William of Orange to assume the Throne, for which he was made Earl Fauconberg.

In the aftermath of Charles II’s Restoration the corpses of three regicides, Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), Henry Ireton (1611-1651) and John Bradshaw (1602-1659) were exhumed and taken to Tyburn for post-mortem execution.  The details of this unpleasant event are at Cromwell’s Body | olivercromwell.org.  The three corpses were beheaded and the heads stuck on spikes above the parapet of Westminster Hall.

Cromwell’s head was said to have blown down from the roof in a gale sometime towards the end of the seventeenth century and was picked up and hidden by a sentry.  It passed through several “owners”, until it eventually reached the Protector’s alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where it was buried in an unmarked spot in the grounds in 1960 so that it would remain undisturbed.

There are bizarre stories of the identities and subsequent fates of the regicides’ headless corpses, contradicting the official version that they were buried in a pit below the gallows at Tyburn.

Alternative accounts of the location of Cromwell’s corpse began circulating in the 1720s, just as the events of 1660 passed out of the memory of the living:  it was said either to have been sunk in a lead coffin in the River Thames or buried at the battlefield of Naseby.

Alternative versions place its location in St Nicholas’ Church, Chiswick, where Mary, Lady Fauconberg and her sister Frances are buried, or in St Andrew’s Church, Northborough, where Oliver Cromwell’s widow, Elizabeth Claypole, is said to lie.

However, visitors to Newburgh Priory are shown a stone vault in the attic, where family tradition says the Protector’s headless corpse rests. 

Lady Fauconberg was said to have used her husband’s political influence to ensure that her father’s corpse was protected from further abuse.  It was quietly spirited away to Yorkshire and has remained undisturbed in the attic of Newburgh Priory to this day.

The Newburgh Priory family, now called Wombwell, have to their credit declined every request to open the vault and examine its contents.  It attracted the curiosity of King Edward VII as Prince of Wales when he stayed at Newburgh. He bribed the estate carpenter to break into the vault one night but was caught and like everyone else had to take “no” for an answer.