The two funerals of Thomas Hardy

The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy died, aged 87, on 11^th January 1928 at Max Gate, his home on the edge of Dorchester, Dorset. His final full-length novel, “Jude the Obscure” had appeared as long ago as 1895, but he continued to write poetry almost to the day he died, clocking up around 1,000 poems during his lifetime.

At his death he was regarded as one of the foremost literary figures of his age. Although he was never knighted he did receive one of the highest honours that a writer could be awarded, namely membership of the Order of Merit in 1910. If anyone merited a place in Westminster Abbey’s Poets Corner it had to be Thomas Hardy.

A dilemma and a compromise

However, Hardy himself had other ideas and he had expressed a wish to be buried alongside his parents, grandparents and first wife in the churchyard at Stinsford, only a few miles from both his current home and the cottage in which he had been born and had spent his early years. This desire was echoed by the surviving members of his family.

The call for a more public funeral was led, oddly enough, by Hardy’s own literary executor, Sydney Cockerell, who chose to ignore Hardy’s wishes. The great and the good soon leapt on the bandwagon, with luminaries such as Sir James Barrie (author of “Peter Pan”) and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, being of their number. The Dean of Westminster was at first reluctant to agree, as he was aware of Hardy’s unconventional religious and moral views (as expressed in novels such as “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” and “Jude the Obscure”), although he really had little choice but to allow the request.

Back in Dorset, however, the response was far from enthusiastic. Thomas Hardy may have been a national figure but he was first and foremost a Dorset man, and that, according to the people of Dorset, was where he belonged. A compromise was needed, and this came from the Vicar of Stinsford, the Rev Cowley, who said that, because Hardy was at heart a local man, his heart should stay in the locality.

This solution was therefore adopted. A doctor opened Hardy’s body and removed his heart which was then placed in a small casket. The rest of his body was taken to London for the Westminster Abbey funeral.

So, at 2pm on 16^th January 1928 two very different ceremonies took place. This was only five days after Hardy had died, but it was still possible for hundreds of people to drop what they were doing and give Thomas Hardy a magnificent send-off.

At Westminster Abbey

Hardy’s remains were accompanied into the Abbey by both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition (Ramsay Macdonald), together with literary figures including Sir James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Rudyard Kipling and A E Housman. The body had already been cremated, so the casket that was buried in Poets Corner only contained Hardy’s ashes and a spadeful of Dorset soil.

In Dorset

At Stinsford, after a service in the church, Rev Cowley carried the casket containing Hardy’s heart along the short path from the church door to the grave in which Emma Hardy had been buried in 1912. He was accompanied by Thomas’s brother Henry (who would find his own place in the family plot later that year) and the path was lined by as many local people as could fit into the confined space. Hardy’s heart was placed alongside Emma’s coffin, where it still lies with the inscription on the grave recording that “Here lies the heart of Thomas Hardy OM”.

There was actually a third service held that day, at St Peter’s Church in Dorchester, which gave the people of the town their chance to pay their respects.

There is a story that is resurrected from time to time to the effect that Hardy’s heart was not actually buried in Stinsford Churchyard at all. When the doctor extracted the heart, so the story runs, he left it on his kitchen table when he had to answer a knock at the door. When he returned, he saw to his horror that his cat had found the heart and was making short work of it. He therefore substituted a pig’s heart from the local butcher’s shop, and that is what ended up in the casket. It’s a good story, but one that has “urban myth” written all over it. One can believe it or not, as one wishes, but surely Thomas Hardy himself would have been highly amused by it had it been true. It is just the sort of story that he would have liked to tell.

© John Welford

A Tradition of 1804: a short story by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy is known as the author of a series of lengthy novels, which are not always an easy read. However, he also wrote a considerable number of short stories which modern readers might find more approachable. Here is an account of a particularly brief short story.

A very short story

“A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four” was one of the stories published by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) under the title “Wessex Tales”. Although most of the stories had appeared in a collection dated 1888, the final set of seven tales was published in 1912. Of these, “A Tradition of
Eighteen Hundred and Four”, at seven pages long, is easily the shortest. Hardy wrote the date “Christmas 1882” at the end of the story, which was when it first appeared in print (under a slightly different title, with “Legend” for “Tradition”) in an American Christmas annual. 

A summary of the story

The narrator of the story, following an introductory couple of paragraphs in the author’s voice, is “old Solomon Selby”, who retells an experience from when he was a child. After the story has been told, Hardy tells the reader that Solomon has been dead for ten years, so the time gap of about 70 years from then back to the events of the story makes perfect sense.

Solomon says that his father had been a shepherd all his life and lived “out by the Cove”. This can be understood to be Lulworth Cove, on the Dorset coast about midway between Weymouth and Swanage. It is a small, almost circular cove with a narrow entrance that is today a noted feature of the “Jurassic Coast”. As a child, Solomon had lived in a remote shepherd’s cottage, and the years he remembers best were 1803-5, because he was then of an age “when a child’s eyes and ears take in and note down everything about him” and also because those years were at the heart of the Napoleonic Wars between Great Britain and France.

People in England, and especially along the south coast, were particularly worried about the threat of invasion from France. They knew that Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered most of the continent of Western Europe, was intent on defeating Britain. Solomon relates that his father, when droving a flock of ewes to Sussex, had been able to see the French coast and caught sight of the sun glinting on the accoutrements of the vast army that Napoleon had assembled on the beaches and which he was preparing for the invasion. It was believed that some 160,000 men and 15,000 horses would make the crossing on a fleet of 2,000 flat-bottomed boats, which were being built as part of the preparations.

Solomon introduces his uncle Job, a sergeant at foot, who reckoned that the invasion would take place on a calm night, using oars rather than sails. Napoleon’s problem was where he should land his troops, and, according to uncle Job, there was a lot of speculation about where this was likely to be. Most people agreed that the shortest crossing, towards Dover, was the least likely, given that that part of the coast would be the most heavily guarded, but there were plenty of other possibilities. Napoleon’s knowledge of potential landing places and troop concentrations was known to be slight, so people were wary about French spies coming ashore to “case the joint”.

The story then focuses on a night early in the year when the sheep flock needed to be tended right round the clock because the ewes were lambing. Young Solomon was called upon to help his father at such times, standing in for him when the latter needed to rest. On the night in question uncle Job had paid a visit to the house and, when it was Solomon’s turn to go out to the sheep-fold on the hill above the Cove, offered to accompany him. They settled down to rest in some straw with uncle Job telling the boy stories about his past adventures until Solomon fell asleep.

When he woke up, uncle Job had himself fallen asleep and Solomon became aware that there were two men, in military uniform, standing about twenty yards away. He watched by the light of the Moon as they looked at a roll of paper, pointed at various features, and spoke in a language which Solomon could not understand. 

He woke uncle Job and pointed the men out to him, having suspected that they were two French generals come to spy out the lie of the land. However, when uncle Job saw them he soon realised that one of the men was Napoleon Bonaparte himself, which was soon obvious to Solomon when the light from the Frenchmens’ lantern fell on the famous face that the boy had seen so often in pictures.

Uncle Job cursed that he did not have his flintlock pistol with him, and so Napoleon and his companion were able to slip back to their boat and escape, watched by Solomon and his uncle, to a larger boat waiting outside the Cove. Solomon ends his story by simply stating that, having reported the incident, uncle Job heard no more about it, and also saying that the expected invasion never took place. However, he remained convinced that Lulworth Cove was where the French army would have landed had it ever done so.

Could it have happened?

Hardy concludes with a paragraph that states, as mentioned earlier, that Solomon has been dead for ten years, and that his account was not generally believed “due to the incredulity of the age”. 

In his preface to the 1919 edition of “Wessex Tales” Hardy added a note to the effect that this story was purely fictional and that he had always thought it highly improbable, but that he had since been told that the tradition was a real one and that some people believed that Napoleon had actually visited the English coast on a spying mission. It is possible that this legend was not well known in Dorset, where it is hard to imagine that Hardy would not have been aware of it, because Hardy had originally set his story in Sussex and only moved it to Dorset between the different editions of the “Tales”. On the face of it, Sussex, with its long stretches of deserted low-lying coast, seems a more likely location for such an event, and the idea of Napoleon Bonaparte considering the prospect of sending 2,000 boats into Lulworth Cove, which is relatively small, seems little short of bizarre!

As a story, “A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four” is not particularly memorable. It contains only one surprise, no characterisation worth mentioning, and little in the way of plot. It is simply a “what if” kind of story that poses a question that is interesting as far as it goes, and it is well written in that it keeps the reader’s interest, but that is probably the most that can be said about it.

© John Welford

The Three Strangers, a short story by Thomas Hardy

“The Three Strangers” is one of the stories included in Thomas Hardy’s collection of “Wessex Tales”, originally published in 1888, but the story first appeared on its own in “Longman’s Magazine” and bears the date of March 1883. Its first readers in Hardy’s native Dorset would have been well aware of the hard times then being experienced in the rural areas and would therefore have related sympathetically to the conditions hinted at in the story, which was set in the 1820s during a similar period of agricultural distress.

The setting is an isolated shepherd’s cottage on the downs not far from the county town of Casterbridge (Hardy’s name for Dorchester). The house, named Higher Crowstairs, is in an exposed location and therefore bears the brunt of all the wind and rain from whatever direction it may come. The weather is bad on the March night when the events of the story take place, during a celebratory party following the christening of the shepherd’s youngest child.

The reader is introduced to the residents and guests in the cottage, who number nineteen in all. Everything is very friendly and convivial in the cramped space of the cottage’s living room, where there is just enough space for dancing to the music of a violin and serpent (a wind instrument in the shape of a snake). Meanwhile, a stranger approaches the house and waits until the music dies down before knocking on the door. He is welcomed inside by the shepherd, sits in the chimney corner to dry off, and is given tobacco and the loan of a pipe. He tells the company that he is from “further up the country”.

He has hardly had time to get settled when there is a second knock at the door and another stranger comes in. He says that he is on his way to Casterbridge but would appreciate shelter from the rain, plus a mug of mead (an alcoholic drink made from honey) which he is sure the shepherd’s wife must have as he has seen her beehives outside. She is reluctant to give him much of this, but the shepherd is more hospitable and continues to refresh the stranger’s mug, much to his wife’s displeasure.

There is then a discussion as to what the second stranger’s profession might be, given that the shepherd’s wife has become very suspicious of him. The second stranger makes a game of it by dropping clues such as “the oddity of my trade is that, instead of setting a mark upon me, it sets a mark upon my customers”. He then starts singing a song, with words of his own, that soon tell the reader (and then the assembled company), that he is the new hangman who is about to start his duties at the local jail.

People start whispering among themselves that he has come on this night because there is to be a hanging at the jail in the morning, this being of a poor man from several valleys away who, being unable to get work at his trade of clock-making, and with his family starving, had stolen a sheep and been arrested. Sheep-stealing was a capital crime before 1832, and it is clear from the conversation that the sympathy of the locals is with the man who is about to be hanged.

There is then a third knock at the door and another man enters, begins to ask the way to somewhere, but then catches sight of someone else in the room, turns deathly pale, and runs off. The firing of a gun is heard in the distance, and the second stranger, now revealed as the hangman, tells everyone that this is a signal that a prisoner has escaped from the jail, at which everyone assumes that it must be the condemned man, and that he must be the man who has just arrived and left in a hurry on seeing the hangman, although this ignores the fact that he could have had no idea as to what the hangman looked like.

One of the guests at the party is the local constable, who is called upon by the hangman to organise a search party, which he proceeds to do. All the males rush off, lanterns in hand, while the women go upstairs to attend to the baby who has started crying in distress at all the noise and hullaballoo. With the room empty, two people return, these being the first two strangers who proceed to help themselves to cake and mead before shaking hands and going their separate ways.

The search party eventually catches up with the third stranger, and there is a wonderfully comic interlude as the constable, who has clearly never been in such a situation before, proceeds to make an arrest, although the only words that come to mind for such an occasion are: “Yer money or yer life”! The man is then escorted back to the cottage, where two officers from the jail and a local magistrate have arrived. The constable presents his prisoner, only to be told that he has the wrong man.

As the reader might have guessed by now, the description of the wanted man fits the first stranger, not the third. The arrested man explains that he is the brother of the condemned man and had been on his way to visit him at the jail for the last time before his execution. On entering the cottage it had not been the sight of the hangman that had agitated him but that of his brother, and it was his fear of giving the game away and betraying the escapee that had caused him to flee the scene. Needless to say, the condemned man is never seen again, much to the relief of all concerned bar the hangman.

Hardy gives the impression that “The Three Strangers” is based on local folklore, as is evident from the concluding line: “The arrival of the three strangers … is a story as well known as ever in the country about Higher Crowstairs”. Be that as it may, it certainly has elements that fit the tradition of local myth, such as the familiar pattern of simple country folk outwitting the machinations of authority, which is a theme that has always proved popular. There are also echoes of the Christmas story, involving as it does the celebration of a birth, shepherds, the visit of three people from afar, and even a Herod character in the form of the hangman.

To a modern reader the story does not start well, due to Hardy’s convoluted prose style that produces the opening: “Among the few features of agricultural England which retain an appearance but little modified by the lapse of centuries may be reckoned the long, grassy and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases, as they are called …” Hardy is more readable when giving dialogue rather than description, but the story is six pages old before the first character says anything.

However, the effort of persevering is worthwhile, because once the story gets going it flows along at considerable pace. Particularly notable are the humour surrounding the constable, mentioned above, the interplay between the shepherd and his wife over how generous they should be towards the strangers, and the characterisations of the first two strangers. The overweening pride of the hangman, who rejoices in his trade, and the contrasting coolness under pressure of the condemned man, are very well done, with the scene in which the two return to the empty cottage and then part on amicable terms being a memorable one, especially as it lets the reader into a secret that is withheld from the other characters.

Given the dramatic nature of the tale, and the reliance on a single scene for most of the action, it should not surprise anyone that Hardy later dramatized the story as “The Three Wayfarers”. It was first performed in 1893 and by was staged by professional companies several times during Hardy’s lifetime.

All in all, this is a very enjoyable story that is worth the trouble to discover and read.

© John Welford