Benches - HAMPSTEAD HEATH 2012

Monday, 22 January 2007
"Rest In Peace" - The Times Magazine

Like many addicts, it started with a single line. Except, in my case, it was on a bench, a little way off the main path on Hampstead Heath.I suppose I’d dabbled before, often glancing at a name – an Ethel Campbell or a Dorothy Rather – and spending a moment creating a backstory. Sometimes it was easy, with Ethel, for example, being a “vegetarian, socialist, pacifist”. Sometimes it was hard: Dorothy Rather may have “fed the birds”, but was that her life, I’d wonder; was that it?One morning in May I had a stronger hit. Dragged across the Heath’s dense network of paths by the mutt, I stumbled across the king of memorial benches. It said, in upper case: “‘THEY COULD DO WITH A BENCH HERE’, LEWIS GREIFER 1915 - 2003”.I was hooked: seven stark words conveying character, humour – and utility. It was almost a haiku.I spent the rest of that day scouring the Heath for benches, taking pictures.

In their reduction of a life to a line, the dedications were funny, touching, aspirational, literary, even didactic.

Many were a Greek chorus expressing sentiments previously unspoken: “Take one day, rest a while, and pretend the world is just for you”, “Live life as a monument to your soul”. Others offered transcendence: “May this bench bring peace to all who rest on it.”

Humour was sometimes light – “I don’t do walks, please be seated” – and sometimes dark: “For Mr Jo and His Dogs.

Dead, Gloriously Dead!”Professions (particularly actors and pilots) were popular, most spectacularly the multi-tasking “artist, dancer, potter, traveller, analyst and lover of trees.” And sadly, more than a handful were dedicated to children: “A very special child, who played and walked on the heath during her short life, missed and loved by
Single names intrigued me most. They seemed to combine a breathy intimacy with cold impersonality: who on earth was Marianne? Who the devil were Tom and Lee?I’d probably never know so, deciding to broaden my investigation, looked to the coast for inspiration. In Deal, Kent, I discovered that many of the benches along the seafront had corresponding maritime themes: there was the woman remembered against the “ever changing sea and sky”, and the man who, rather bleakly, “turned on his side and slowly drowned.” Further afield, in Wales, just by the castle of Llanstephan in Camarthen, one says: "He loved the sea, and it claimed him."You might think this a very British tradition, but, over the pond – from Boston in New England to Edmonton, California – benches are big business too, although one suspects that our taste for humour, subversion and wood may have been replaced by recycled plastic numbers (at $250!) with prosaic inscripted plaques – not quite the snapshots of life they are here.

And spare a thought for the eighty souls in purgatorial wait for remembrance on the Heath, all hoping that one of its 475 benches will (happily?) be available soon. “Dozens will be freed up at the end of next year,” says an official, “following a ten year cycle that was introduced in 1997 to cope with demand.” A decade’s lease may not seem much, but at least it includes maintenance, compared with the two meagre years offered by Dover District Council in Deal.And when did it all start? The oldest “top rail” on Hampstead Heath, now archived, dates back to just 1944. According to English Heritage’s Jenifer White, however, there are benches in existence in Patterdale (Lake District) that celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee (1897), and even one dating as far back as 1881 in the Isle Of Wight: “This shows that the idea in itself was at least current then,” she says, “and post-first world war cemetery aesthetics as well as the development of remembrance gardens must have stimulated ideas for other forms of memorialisation.” My father, the historian Richard Emms, believes they could even date back as far as the Great Exhibition (1851), or at least the open air movement, led by the National Trust in the late 19th century, which saved open spaces for the public. He adds: “The outdoor memorial as a secular retreat from churches may have been adopted by the free thinkers of the day such as Darwin and Huxley – and much later, George Bernard Shaw.”

And if we are all striving for happiness, a memorial bench, when we’re gone – which is always too early – is like a bus stop en route.“They Could Do With A Bench Here”Lewis Greifer, 1915 -2003A renowned TV scriptwriter during the golden age of British television from the mid 1950s to the late 1970s, London-born Lewis Greifer’s work included two of the greatest shows of all time: The Prisoner and Dr Who. He was also a true lover of Hampstead Heath, not just because of its beauty, but because, according to his son Josh, it belongs to the people. “My father was municipally minded, a committed socialist.”For the last fifteen years of his life, following a stroke, Lewis had a bad leg and lungs, and couldn't walk far without sitting and resting. Each bench encountered would become a marker. On walks near Kenwood House, the family would often hear him say, as he stood leaning on his cane, catching his breath, "they could do with a bench here", “a sotto voce suggestion to the Parks Authority”, as Josh succinctly puts it.“I felt it was the best way to remember him,” says his widow Nan, 81, who is Polish. “He didn’t want a stone somewhere and to be buried among strangers. I was offered this spot by the authorities, which was overgrown with brambles, so I came over with my gardening bits and cleared it in an afternoon. I was very excited: this is exactly the place he would have liked. We meet here regularly but on the anniversary we drink vodka, we celebrate. He loved life.”“

“He’d always watch a game – in fact it was an overriding passion that was a key to his life. He would often compare football to socialism.”But behind the interest in human stories was also an enthusiasm for the utility of benches. “My dad attested to that in his final years,” says Josh. “Benches are about functionality: they need to be used. Unlike a gravestone, a bench shows that somehow you’re still part of the world, you have a purpose and a function.”Nan loves seeing people on the bench. “I saw a young man asleep with his rucksack on recently, lying here. I like seeing it used.”Whilst the Greifers are not a religious family, Nan says they are sticklers for traditions. “Lewis died on the 18th of the month so every 18th I visit the bench. Sometimes I think of a very sad Verdi opera we once watched together. Lewis wasn’t emotional – we were both very private people – but on that one occasion we were sitting there crying, and that’s how I remember him, because it was the end of his life. Two weeks later he died. It was the only time in nearly 50 years that I saw him cry.”“You know what?” she says, “I just thought of that again now.”The McElligotts“In memory of Hannah’s love of the mountain. May her spirit ride free. HRH McElligott 1984 – 2005”L-R Bobbie, Jonny, Gilly McElligott"She loved working with kids on the mountains,” says musician Gilly McElligott of his daughter, Hannah, who tragically took her own life last year. “They’d chant, “we want Hannah, we want Hannah”.

”The first time we came there were twelve of us and we had strawberries and champagne.”“She would have loved the fact that we were opening Bolly for her,” laughs Gilly.Bobbie looks across the mountain: “A week before she died she ran into my bedroom and said, 'I love you Mum, I love you' and I hang on to that, I don't think she had plans to do it at that point I really don’t – ”“But with the edge of hindsight you remember details that you wouldn’t otherwise,” says Jonny, “like the way she smoked and drank because she knew she didn't want to live any longer...the way she wore caps in the house so people couldn't look into her eyes…”During Hannah’s final months, medication for her depression seemed to be having severe consequences. “She used to say, ‘I can't laugh, I can't think anymore,’” says Jonny, “she’d say she'd lost her soul, the devil had stolen her soul.”“Hannah shouldn't have had any drugs at all,” says Bobbie, “but we don't blame anyone, we don't blame ourselves, we don’t feel any shame because at the time everyone was genuinely doing their best to help her.”On the day of her death, Hannah was due to play the whistle onstage with Gilly at the local pub. “The last time I saw her alive she blew me a kiss,” he says. “I still wish I'd made her play with me that day.”Hannah had also arranged to pick her mother up in the car from work at half past five.

”There’s a pause.“It’s what she could have done, what she could have been, that’s what cracks me up,” says Bobbie. “It’s the little triggers that do it, like when the info arrived through the post on her course that was meant to start in September. But I know, when I get upset, that it doesn’t last forever.”“We don't wallow,” says Jonny. “Even now, when you go in the house, it’s like you're getting a hug from Hannah.” He smiles.“She was a wonderful girl,” concludes Gilly, “When I go, I want my ashes to be scattered from her bench.”BRYAN EVANS & MICHEL ROH“In Loving Memory of Mum & Dad Evans, January 3 1979.”L-R Bryan Evans, Michel Roh“We weren’t into graves but wanted somewhere we could go, and something we could look at now and again,” says Bryan Evans, 75, of the decision to dedicate a bench to his parents outside the library in Deal, Kent. “They were keen readers – her favourite book was Lorna Doone, his was The Cruel Sea – and so it seemed the obvious choice.”Mum and Dad – otherwise known as Anne and Bob Evans – grew up opposite each other in London’s East End before marrying in 1925. The family’s “comfortable lower middle class” life was shattered one evening in 1953, when the twenty-two year old Bryan announced he was moving in with his male lover. “We didn’t speak for six months after that,” Bryan remembers, “out of sadness really. Dad just didn’t have the vocabulary to argue.”A few years later, in 1960, Bryan met Michel at a gay dinner party in Finsbury Park, and this time whisked him straight home to meet the folks.

STEPHEN EMMS is strangely attracted to park benches…

Deep within the sylvan swathes of what Hampstead-dwellers fancifully term Middle Heath, lies a bench. Shielded by a prehistoric oak with claw-like roots, it’s fingered by moss and dirt and bird droppings. On the bench, however, is a remarkable inscription: ‘For Mr Jo and His Dogs. Dead Gloriously Dead.’
Which got me thinking, during a damp walk on the Heath with the mutt, about these memorials: how can a line on a bench – attributed, after all, to a dead person – be so, well, joyous? How can it provide a snapshot of a character; of a life? Take this example: Who calls themselves ‘Mr Jo’, for a start? And what about the dogs? Did they all pop their clogs together? Maybe his death was a release, its benign nature resounding across the heavens. Or were he and his canine companions actually hated? Dead, gloriously dead, indeed.