There is a simple plaque in Westminster dedicated to Ignatius Sancho, a Georgian who, for having “had a grocery shop near this site”, finds himself buried in the churchyard of St Margaret’s, opposite the Houses of Parliament and just metres away from the walls of Westminster Abbey. For the thousands who tour the church every month, this will unfortunately be the extent of their knowledge of the man, since his name is virtually non-existent in popular culture.
The plaque does not mention the fact that Sancho was born on a slave ship, or that his extensive letters, having learnt to read and write under the guidance of the 2nd Duke of Montagu, contributed to the abolition of the slave trade. Nevermind the idea that he was an English patriot who called on American slaves to support British troops during the American revolution. There isn’t even a gravestone in Sancho’s name, since St Margaret’s’ churchyard was covered over with grass in 1880.
But that is the beauty of setting out to find a lost grave. You learn from the walk to the churchyard, and the church next to which it sits, so much about the time in which someone lived and how things have changed in the centuries since their death. The fact that the precise location of Sancho’s grave remains unknown – and that, my own efforts aside, he is not currently the subject of any real effort to find out – reflects his fall from the history books. The tragedy of his continued absence illustrates the miserable truth that, despite being a black abolitionist, he has been forgotten for failing to conform to the current orthodoxy.
My search for Sancho that led me to St Margaret’s was a form of “grave hunting”. (The real phrase should be “history hunting” or perhaps “cemetery tourism”.) It is not, as the name suggests, some gloomy obsession for goths or hippies, but an honourable endeavour for amateur historians. Cemeteries are libraries, art galleries and museums in their own right. There are few sights more beautiful than the romantic decay of an overgrown Victorian graveyard, sitting there to be explored and demystified.
It’s an activity which the Americans have in recent times much better understood. They value the theatre of cemeteries, treating them not just as deposits for the dead but as archives of local history and opportunities to represent themselves to the future. Only now is “grave hunting” beginning to go viral in Britain, with blogs reeling with information about people whose graves have been found under the bushes of local churchyards, people who have been deprived of their accolades.
One of these blogs recently took me to a tiny cemetery in Barnes Common, south London, to find a man called Alexander Joseph Finberg, who was crucial to cataloguing the art of JMW Turner. You might expect Finberg’s name to be clearly exhibited at the Turner gallery, but I went there too and found not a single mention. His gravestone sits alone and depleted with moss growing all over. To find it in a relatively empty patch, under a dying tree, was as instructive as Sancho’s nonexistent stone.
Just as Finberg’s grave was the final proof that he lived, “grave hunting” is the last defence against revisionist history.
It might be easy to rewrite the books, to censor movies and to chase historians out of universities, but it is much harder to wipe a burial record, to change the setting of a churchyard or to destroy the streets – the context – surrounding it. Our own graves may in time become neglected and forgotten, but we can hope that they will still be visible in centuries to come, when future generations of “grave hunters” try to find out whether we should be cancelled for the moral crimes we are ignorantly committing today.
