Two love stories between gravestones

Grave of the Rossetti family (left) and Elizabeth Siddall (right) on Highgate Cemetery

Today I went on a guided tour through Highgate Cemetery, the most famous graveyard of the "Magnificent Seven" in London. Again there were many interesting stories about the life and death of the people who were buried there from 1839 onwards.

Among them two obscure love stories. One is the story of the love between painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his model and wife Elizabeth Siddall. She was the most popular model for the Pre-Raphaelites and, with her beautiful red hair, she appears in many pictures of this period.

When she died, Rossetti slid the only handwritten copy of his many love poems into her long red hair and the coffin was closed. Seven years later, when Rossetti feared to become blind and running out of money, he had her coffin exhumed to retrieve the manuscript.

True is that the poems were still in good order. Untrue, that her long hair had grown since her burial and had filled the coffin when it was opened again.

Tomb of bare-knuckle fighter Thomas Sayers

When Thomas Sayers won a fight against one of his colleagues, he decided to make a living out of his abilities. Unfortunately he later was heavily injured in the World Boxing Championship so that his friends collected money for his early retirement.

When he died, thousands of people gathered on the streets leading up to the cemetery. Neither his wife nor his children attended his funeral, so his beloved dog Lion, a bull mastiff, followed his coffin with a black neckband. In stone, he still guards the grave of his master.

I'm off to visit my friends Jessa and Chris tomorrow. Polly will take me to Bristol in her car. So the blogs that will be published in the upcoming days will have been written in advance. Keep your fingers crossed that this will work!