THE TIMELESS BEAUTY IN DISCOVERY
HOW TWO AMATEURS FOUND THE RESTING PLACE OF WILLIAM BLAKE
If you look at any recent biography of the poet and engraver William Blake (1757-1827), you will learn that his mortal remains lie in the cemetery at Bunhill Fields, London, but that their exact location is unknown. Bunhill Fields, in the borough of Islington, is a remarkable piece of London history. “Bunhill” was originally “bone hill,” and that is just what it is — a very ancient burial-place, already built up slightly with the volume of human remains by the time of recorded history.
A property owner made the site available for nondenominational interments and pauper burials in the 17 th century; since most cemeteries observed religious exclusions, this made it a popular place of repose for the “nonconformist” dead of London.
Any such place would inevitably have come to contain the remains of many outstanding figures in English history, and so it is with Bunhill Fields, where Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan and Blake are the recognized celebrities. (I suspect the Rev. Thomas Bayes, inadvertent founder of an important tradition in modern statistics, gets an increasing amount of attention.) “Nonconformist” is a historian’s term of art with a specific meaning, but no one ever conformed less well to an established religion than the ecstatic, visionary Blake.
Because Blake’s particular dust had been thought irretrievably misplaced, I received the news with great astonishment this weekend that his grave has been located, and that on Sunday it was given a stylish new flat marble marker.
This wonderful surprise is attributable to the hard work of married Portuguese Blakeans living in London, Luis and Carol Garrido. The pair went to visit Bunhill Fields about a decade ago, and were surprised to discover that the monument to Blake at the edge of the green said, almost apologetically, that his body and his wife’s were “nearby.”
The couple took some offence at this vagueness, despite their rapturous appreciation of a beautiful place dedicated to the outsiders and dissenters of history, and they gently challenged the keeper of the graveyard, which closed for business in 1854 and is used as a park. The keeper, Robin Hatton-Gore, gave the pair the long-standing official story: no one knows exactly where poor old Blake is. But Hatton-Gore also remembered that one of his predecessors had thought he did know, and he offered to show the Garridos some of the confusing records in his custody.
I am not a religious believer, and I do not suppose it is of overwhelming importance that the exact location of Blake’s grave be known to posterity. But if angels ever intercede in human affairs, they were at work here — at the moment where that council employee showed a heap of maps, notes and ledgers to a curious landscape architect (Mrs. Garrido) and a lawyer (Mr.). Like a detective duo from a comic book, they set off with their combined skills to figure out the puzzle.
What they found was that the information about Blake’s burial had not been lost at all — only obscured by events and a few accounting mistakes. The old standing Blake “headstone” that tens of thousands have visited, with its elliptical language about William and Catherine Blake being “nearby,” was erected in 1927.
By the 21st century, no one still remembered that it had originally been placed above what was then still known to be Blake’s actual grave. Because of the misleading text on the monument, it was moved to a different spot in 1965, with no one aware of any error.
Other clues to Blake’s location had been lost as a consequence of the parkification of the cemetery, which, in turn, was a late response to wartime bombing damage of other parts of the green. The spot on which Blake had been buried had been recorded in original records according to a two-dimensional grid notation; the Garridos had to reconstruct the details of the grid and check their guesswork against other known facts of the gravesite.
They have not only found Blake himself, with a very high degree of confidence, but they appear to have established the resting place of his wife — a crucial artistic collaborator deserving of her own permanent marker.
The 1927 monument has Grade II heritage protection in its own right, and cannot be removed from its misleading place, but there will now be pathway marks leading Blakeans from the old monument to the actual grave.
Blake has been given a flat slab rather than a new headstone so as to offer minimal interference to children using the park for sport and play — a piece of London council legalism of which the author of Songs of Innocence would certainly approve.
The master has been fortunate in many ways, as the Garridos observed in the 2017 presentation of their evidence about the grave. The old documents show that no one else was ever buried above Blake in the same spot; no German bombs fell on that part of the ground; and all human remains were left alone during the 1965 renovation.
Best of all, the Garridos showed up while there was still some physical evidence around to aid them in their quest and confirm their findings.
“Blake being eternal,” they wrote, “it is not surprising that history should be on his side.”
INFORMATION ABOUT BLAKE’S BURIAL HAD NOT BEEN LOST AT ALL.