(posted 7096 days ago)Times
November 14, 2004Katie Grant: Thanks, Uncle Frank, for losing your head
You just never know when the Jacobites are going to turn out handy. This week, under their auspices, I found myself most unexpectedly swept into the ambit of the lord mayor of London (not Red Ken, but the proper city chap) and, instead of supping tea on the train back to Glasgow, drinking champagne in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral.I was in the Puffin offices in the Strand, handing in the final proofs for Green Jasper, my latest children’s novel, when I decided to visit Paternoster Square by St Paul’s Cathedral to have a look at Temple Bar, the Christopher Wren gateway into London, which I knew was in the process of resurrection.
My ancestor Colonel Francis Towneley (Uncle Frank as we call him) figures large in the story of the bar — but it has a curious history even aside from his contribution.
Until 1878, there was always a gateway straddling Fleet Street to mark the boundary between Westminster and the City. There it stood until growing traffic congestion made it impractical and it was pulled down and dumped in a yard off the Farringdon Road. It caught the attention of Sir Henry Meux, a brewer who thought it would make a splendid wedding present for his new wife. And so he had it rebuilt as the gateway into his park in Hertfordshire, although it was an odd gift because the Bar ’s main claim to fame, and the reason for my interest, is the fact that its roof was used as an exhibition space for traitors’ heads. Lady Meux was clearly a wife with a sense of humour.
But she died, and he died and the great gate fell into terrible disrepair until the Temple Bar Trust was set up in 1976. Funded to the tune of £4m by the Corporation of London, stone by stone the Bar was carefully dismantled yet again and brought back to London last year.
Here is where the Jacobites come in, for the head of the last unfortunate to have his pitch-soaked bonce hoisted high on its roof was none other than my Uncle Frank.
As I stood watching the workmen, somebody asked me what I was doing and when I told him, he fetched the gaffer and before you knew it, I had an invitation to the opening ceremony the following day. Thanks, Uncle Frank!
He himself did not have my luck. After declaring it “better to die by the sword than fall into the hands of those damned Hanoverians”, he found himself on the Jacobite retreat, abandoned with his regiment in Carlisle. Hauled back to London, tried and condemned, he was hanged, drawn and quartered on Kennington Common on August 10, 1746.
That should have been the end of his story, but it was not, for, having decorated Temple Bar for 26 years, my ancestors nicked his head and whisked it back to Towneley Hall, Lancashire. Once home, they placed it in a basket which they handed round with the port after dinner so that guests could pay their respects. Eventually it was decided Uncle Frank needed a bit of privacy and he was popped in a hatbox and kept in the domestic chapel.
The hatbox was later sent to their bank in London, where it remained until the vaults were cleared during the war. Yet another journey north for poor Uncle Frank, but this time the family decided it was time he joined the rest of his remains in St Peter’s church, Burnley.
But Uncle Frank was not quite finished yet. In 1974 my mother asked for the vault to be opened so that we could see how his head was doing. Suffice to say that Uncle Frank was doing fine but also that a companion had appeared, for there were two heads in the tomb, one most certainly Frank’s — the pike-hole was still clearly visible — and the other unidentified.
Of such things, as I have discovered, books are made, and while I don’t suppose Uncle Frank would have been especially delighted to feel he would to end up the subject for a children’s novel, he would surely be pleased to know that one of his descendants was still raising her glass to his name. As for me, I’m just pleased my trip to Temple Bar turned out rather better than his.
Copyright 2004 Times Newspapers Ltd.