Life and Death
in Exile
A day of exploration
Tuesday 19 June 2007, Refugee Week
Dissenters’ Chapel, Kensal Green Cemetery
“I thought yesterday was a splendid day - lovely venue and nice people and capped by the catacombs!”
“It was a lovely occasion and very special. Everyone made a great contribution.”
“It was all a journey into the unknown (literally!) to me yesterday for the Talk and Walk, with particular emphasis on refugees. It was an EXCELLENT day, from the generous cups of tea and clean loos… the speakers to the wonderful tour of cemetery.”
Foreword
On Tuesday 19 June, as part of Refugee Week, a ‘day of exploration’ was held at Kensal Green Cemetery, to look at issues relating to life and death in exile. A range of people gathered to listen to presentations in the Dissenters Chapel at the cemetery. After lunch, they went on a guided tour, visiting the graves of different people born abroad.
The day was organised by the Migrant and Refugee Communities Forum, the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery, tandem and artist Predrag Pajdic. Their contact details are listed at the end of this report. We are very grateful to the expert speakers, and all who came on the day, for joining us to reflect on and learn about this important and moving topic. We are also grateful to Refugee Week for their grant to help us run the day.
A display of by refugee photographer Maja Kardum was on show at the Dissenters Gallery throughout Refugee Week, and remained on exhibit until the cemetery’s annual open day on 7 July. A range of free publications and other information about asylum seekers was also on display in the gallery throughout this period. On the open day itself, a wide range of members of the public visited the cemetery and the gallery.
The following is an account of the morning presentations on 19 June. Visit the websites of the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery ( and tandem ( for more information about the cemetery and who is buried there, and for further copies of this report. For information on refugees and migrants in West London, contact MRCF ( You can also find out more about Maja Kardum’s photography through MRCF.
Contact the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery to arrange a guided group tour of the graves of exiles and immigrants (Chief Guiding Supervisor: 07951 631001).
Contents
1.Introduction
Ruth Wilson, Director, tandem
2.Welcome to the cemetery
Henry Vivian-Neal, Chief Guiding Superviser, Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery
3. From strangers to skeletons: a sketched history of London’s exile communities
Susie Symes, Chair, 19 Princelet Street, Museum of Immigration and Diversity
4.Illustrious exiles
Catharine Arnold, author, ‘Necropolis’
5.Questions
6.Introduction
Glenn Benson, Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery
7.A bridge between two worlds: cemeteries as ethnic homelands
Leonie Kellaher, author, The Secret Cemetery
8.Introduction
Glenn Benson, Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery
9.Traditions of exile burials and commemoration
Ken Worpole, author, Lost Landscapes
10.Questions
11.Reflections
Zrinka Bralo, Executive Director, Migrant and Refugee Communities Forum
12.Contact details
13.Speaker profiles
14.Useful publications
1.Introduction
Ruth Wilson, tandem
Welcome everyone to Kensal Green Cemetery. The purpose of the day is to explore issues around death in exile, and the cemetery here. While death in exile is a cause of sorrow, it is also an opportunity to celebrate the contribution of individuals and communities, and we hope that will also happen today.
I am welcoming you on behalf of various organisations: Migrant and Refugee Communities Forum, which is based very near here at Ladbroke Grove, and you will hear more about from Zrinka when she speaks later on. And the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery, who have welcomed this event and been very helpful. The artist Predrag Pajdic cannot be here today but sends his best wishes.
We have had a small grant from Refugee Week to help run this event, and we’d like to thank them for that – if you can, do make a donation to the Friends to help with the event.
Welcome to a special place – we are in this beautiful Dissenters’ Chapel, which Henry will tell you more about in a moment. Leonie, in your book someone says that when you enter a cemetery you enter another world, so welcome to another world, or perhaps another country. I hope that many of you will stay for the guided tour after lunch.
Introduces speakers.
2.Welcome to the cemetery
Henry Vivian-Neal, Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery
Kensal Green Cemetery was established in 1832, as the general cemetery of All Souls at Kensal Green. 70 acres are consecrated for Church of England, but here we are in the dissenters’ section. The cemetery has always welcomed all-comers. Now there are non-Church of England graves in the Church of England consecrated part.
Traditionally, the dissenters’ section was set aside for those who dissented from the Church of England.
The Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery was established in 1990, to care for and preserve the cemetery. We restored this building in 1997. Other projects include the restoration of monuments and the Anglican chapel.
3. From strangers to skeletons, a sketched history of London’s exile communities
Susie Symes, 19 Princelet Street, Museum of Immigration and Diversity
I am most passionate about the Museum of Immigration and Diversity – the only one of it’s kind in Europe. It takes a historic space but addresses issues that matter to all of us today. We have cousin museums in Russia, New York, South Africa, Bangladesh.
In the UK we address migration, asylum, exclusion, inclusion, issues of identity. There are very clear links between the importance and power of that sort of place and this sort of place [the cemetery]. I spent most of my life as a Treasury economist and worked in Brussels and think-tanks. I retired from that sort of life and wanted to put some of that experience to some sort of use – something useful to do and to deal with problems. I wanted to solve poverty and unemployment as an economist – so I thought maybe I could come at it another way.
I met a political refugee (1953) from Dhaka, he made his home in Paddington and worked in Brick Lane and Tower Hamlets working with poorer people. He surprised people by working with migrant communities in the East End. He tried to get me involved in making a museum which he had helped to found with a Bengali Muslim, Jewish rabbi survivor of the holocaust, a descendent of Huguenot refugees, and he himself was from South Africa as an apartheid campaigner and a Christian.
At that time I felt museums were about the past and culture and I was not interested. How does that help people today living in Tower Hamlets – to get job, to feed their children? Firstly he quoted the Bible, then a Bengali poet and philosopher. Then, he said what I want to do is I want immigrants today and refugees and their children to understand what they owe to the people who went before. I want them to realise about white Catholics from Ireland, and Jews from Eastern Europe, black men and women who fled from slavery, white protestants who fled from persecution. Huge amount of exclusion and prejudice.
I looked at my history books, I looked up refugee, asylum seeker, Irish, Jew - they weren’t there in the history books. Even Professor Eric Hobsbawn - a refugee himself – he might have a footnote, but that was all. That was very striking. The self-image of the British people and newspapers is of a Britain that’s homogenous, white and always been here. I believed that myself until I was about 38. I knew a bit – I had learnt a history that had Romans, Danes, Vikings, Normans etc. But somehow this British history that I’d learnt hadn’t been put together with my image of what Britain was and what I was reading in the newspapers. Here was a Britain that was being threatened by invading swarms of immigrants and asylum seekers! Its easy to deconstruct the “we’ve always been here” myth – but it’s true. But the interesting thing and important thing is that we who have always been here is an ever changing we. The ‘we’ keeps moving and changing as new people are coming for all the different reasons.
Throughout it’s entire history Britain has been made and shaped by immigrants. You see that particularly in East London – but also everywhere. Stories of arrival, settlement, exclusion, inclusion, assimilation and staying apart. You see people maintaining their routes and adapting to the society around them and changing the society around them. That movement around the globe is not just limited to UK – it goes to the very heart of what it is to be human.
Immigration is a very complex phenomenon and needs to be looked at from different perspectives. What it is to go into exile today. History is a very important perspective to understand the issues that confront us today. Understanding that long history of Britain breaks down the us/them divide. It helps us realise that the ‘them’ is very rapidly ‘us’ in a continuing process of movement between us and them. How much of our histories are shared histories. It helps you understand that what is at first seen as alien and different very quickly becomes an integral part of a changing society.
There’s a newspaper report that says “their alien looks and alien habits and language make them a ceaseless weight upon the poor among who them live. …whenever the foreigner comes in any numbers the neighbourhood in which he lives drops in character and tone…” It was written in 1800s about Jewish incomers. You find exactly the same things written about Huguenot incomers who fled from France – who bring the very word refugee into the language. People who found some of the great stockbrokers, Dolland & Atchinson, Bank of England – founded by Huguenots.
But there are other stories – when we remember the famous and inspiring – we also have to remember the other people. Another word entered the English language from immigrants, but here in North Kensington – Rachmanism. Peter Rachman was a man born in Poland, he escaped the Nazis, was put in a Russian labour camp. He came to UK with nothing and accumulated a massive property empire in North Kensington. He made his money by oppressing and exploiting other immigrants from the Caribbean and who, because of the colour bar, could not get rented accommodation. Rachman rented his properties to them and exploited them with poor accommodation, which they couldn’t complain about.
Michale Dufrantis came from Caribbean, and he started off as brave person who stood up against Rachman – he organised young tough men to stand up to him and then eventually became a slum landlord himself. He became Black power leader – Michael X.
Stories tell us about reality, complexity, ambiguity. There was a Black taxi driver interviewed after Rachman died who said ‘you can say what you like, but he gave us somewhere to live, when most English people didn’t want the blacks anywhere near them’.
Stories show us how the fabric of the area is woven through threads of all these lives. Beautiful threads and ugly jarring ones. We try to reflect that. It turns into physical spaces – like this one [the cemetery]. That continues to be shaped – added to - by new lives, new artists, new stories. Here by new deaths. Keep moving like society keeps moving. Capture our imagination. Share common humanity.
This is reflected this in a piece I wrote, an audio anthology about the area, to raise money for another charity. North Kensington is one of the most diverse and crowded areas in Britain. I wrote a piece that was read by Karen Buck, MP – will end with this [transcript not available].
4.Illustrious exiles
Catharine Arnold, author of ‘Necropolis’
Thank you for inviting me here today to contribute to the'Death in Exile' event at Kensal Green Cemetery.
I stand before you as a typical example of everything the previous speaker has been talking about - as someone of mixed Scottish, Welsh, Jewish and Anglo-Indian descent, married to a Jewish husband of Eastern European extraction and planning to go home tonight and share with him that typical English dish, a chicken tikka masala!
London has always been a city of émigrés and exiles, a melting pot, from the Romans to modern times. One of the most famous political exiles in history, Karl Marx, is buried not far away at Highgate Cemetery. But Kensal Green has many of its own stories to tell.
I'd like to start with a reference to Charles Blondin (1824 - 1897) the famous acrobat. Born Jean Francois Gravelot at St Omer, France,Blondin made his first performance at six years old as 'The Little Wonder'. Blondin was mostfamous for his numerous crossings of Niagara Falls on a tightrope. 110 ft long and 160 feet high above the water. Imagine the scene - the spray, thecrosswinds - a tightrope act in a circus is difficult enough, but in thoseconditionshis achievements were extraordinary. And he didn't just stop attightrope walking. On oneoccasion he trundled a wheelbarrow across. On another, his manager accompanied him - riding piggy back! His piece de resistance was to stop in the middle,whip out a camping stove, and cook himself an omelette! In 1861 Blondin appeared at the Crystal Palace,turning somersaults on stilts, on a tightrope suspended across the atrium 70 ft high!
Another great performer, Anton Ducrow, (1769 - 1849) rests at Kensal Green in a £3,000 grave denounced by'The Builder' magazine as a piece of 'monstrous coxcombery'.This elaborate tomb,decorated in the Egyptian style which was the burial craze of time, cements his reputation as a eccentric and flamboyant showman,'the colossus of equestrianism' who re-enacted scenes from the classics while leaping from the back of one horse to another.
I could alsomention the achievements of the Brunel family, but in researching this speech I came across another, sadder, tale ofdeath in exile which gave me pause for thought.
Josef Jakobs (1898 - 1941)was the last man in England to be executed as a spy at the Tower of London.
A German agent, he was parachuted intoBritainin 1941, but broke his ankle on the way out of the plane. Landing in Ramsay, Huntingdonshire. Effectivelycrippled, he fired a shot into the air to alert the authorities. Jakobs was discovered by members of the Home Guard, who handedhim over to the police. Taken to Wandsworth prison he was interrogated - he had a wireless transmitter on him and £500 in sterling and was assumed to be a spy, sent to England 'with intent to help the enemy.' Jakobs maintained that he was willing to help the British war effort and in effectbecome a double agent, but hefaced a court marshal, in camera,i.e. a military rather than a civilian court.
Jakobs protested his willingness to assist the authorities, and a petition was sent to the king, but he was sentenced to execution under the Treachery Act of 1940. Stillunable to stand, due to his broken ankle, Jakobs was placed in a brown Windsor chair before a firing squad of eight Scots Guards on 14 August 1941, and shot with eightbullets. A post mortem showed that he died from a shot to thehead.
Jakobs is buried at St Mary's Catholic cemetery [adjacent to Kensal Green] in an unmarked grave.He seems to havebeenparticularly harshly treated, given that most parachutists, if they survived, were treated as prisoners of war and interned. I'd like to think that these days someone in Jakobs' predicament would receive more humane treatment.His case remindsus that not every death in exile was a serene one at the end of a long life of accomplishment - but there is still room for him, here.'
5.Questions
Question: Do you start from the gravestone and work back?
Catharine: Initially I do research the famous names, but quite often I walk along and see a name and think “who is that?” and then go and find out more about them. Not just the famous and great and good, but sometimes those you know nothing about. A Victorian tomb with three generations of the same family in there. Part of the history it reflected would interest me. It grew from an idea. My book is like going for a walk around the cemetery.
Susie: People who die in poverty, forgotten, then somebody finds him, investigates his story – and then you find a black musician who was incredibly famous, a child prodigy, Beethoven dedicated music to him, buried here at Kensal Green. You find those stories as well.
Henry: My interest is the people as much as the landscape. I do everything that Catharine does, biography, Times obituaries, register of general cemetery company. It’s a fascinating exploration. There is a publication called ‘paths of glory’ put together by the Friends on people that we know about so far. A second edition is planned. More names are uncovered by unearthing graves, browsing in ledgers of the company. You spot names and go off and say where’s the plot – is there a monument and what’s the story?