Ann Treneman wrote:
The news that the ashes of the physicist Stephen Hawking, an atheist, are to be interred in Westminster Abbey just confirms my theory that the great and the good often end up in, if not the wrong place, then a most surprising one. The abbey may indeed be the church of kings and queens but it is also a strange combination of grandmother’s attic and necropolis.
Charles Dickens is there despite the fact that he decreed: “I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious and strictly private manner.” But after he died, The Times itself insisted otherwise, though it is hard to think of a more ostentatious place.
Thomas Hardy only wanted a peaceful churchyard in Stinsford, the mythical “Mellstock” of his novels. “I do not, in truth, feel much interest in popular opinion of me,” he told his literary executor, “and shall sleep quite calmly in Stinsford, whatever happens.” But when he died in 1928, his executor and JM Barrie of Peter Pan fame decided it had to be the abbey (and as close to Dickens as possible). I have always thought that the solution, his heart in Stinsford and his ashes in the Abbey, is the definition of the classic
English fudge.
Too much gravity
I love the fact that Hawking had said that he wanted his epitaph to be the equation named after him. This formula, which is something to do with black holes, would provide the perfect antidote to the flowery gush that adorns the grave of Sir Isaac Newton in the abbey. “Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race,” it says (in Latin). Actually Alexander Pope wrote a better epitaph for Newton: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! And all was light.” But the abbey wouldn’t allow it. Let’s hope it goes for the equation.
