On Friday morning a paper sign had been stuck to the granite base of the funeral monument of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery. The sign, home-printed, read, “You can destroy Marx’s gravestone, but you cannot destroy his ideology” and was signed by the Turkish Revolutionary Path movement. I was standing in front of the monument with Ian Dungavell, the chief executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust. “Normally we take signs down,” he said, “but on this occasion, I think we’ll leave it.”
It had been a long week for Dungavell, an Australian-born expert in Victorian funerary monuments, who took over the running of the private cemetery and its 53,000 graves six years ago. It began with him trying to clean off the blood-red enamel paint that had been used to deface the Marx monument last Saturday, the second attack to make headlines across the world in a couple of weeks. The painted slogans made reference to a “doctrine of hate”. Though saddened and shocked by the vandalism, the aesthete in Dungavell quite admired the attention to detail. “Unusually, whoever did it had got the letter spacing right,” he said. There was no need for regrettable hyphenation in “architect” or “oppression”.
The paint itself is not a great concern. Quite a lot was cleaned off before it dried, and there was something calming about scrubbing at it while members of global revolutionary movements assembled in vigil nearby, to sing the Red Flag. Much more of a problem was the second recent hammer attack on the 1881 family headstone that had been incorporated into the 1956 monument. In the first hammer attack, the vandal hadn’t reckoned with the thickness of the marble, but he or she appeared to have returned with a lump hammer. Shattered pieces from the tablet, which bear some of the letters of Marx’s name and those of his five-year-old grandson, Harry Longuet, are in a box on Dungavell’s desk in his office, the former Victorian chapel of rest.
In the coming days, there will be a meeting of the executive committee of the cemetery to decide how to restore the marble, and to discuss whether extra security measures will be required. CCTV has inevitably been suggested. Though he does not want to be complacent, Dungavell is not entirely persuaded. “There are recent graves right by Marx where we have families visiting. I’m not sure they would welcome any cameras.”
Traditionally, he said, the cemetery’s best security had been the fact that it was a “living place”. It has 90,000 tourist visitors a year, who discover not only the resting place of Marx but also those of Douglas Adams and George Eliot and innumerable eminent Victorians. I live near the cemetery and often, in deadline despair or when gloom has settled, wander down past the Marx monument and the pilgrims taking clenched-fist selfies, through its gothically overgrown avenues, to read some of the inscriptions and find a bit of perspective. Not everyone shares that enthusiasm. I once made the case for the value of a £20 annual pass to the cemetery to a neighbour. “I’ll have a season ticket for there soon enough,” he replied.
Aside from the daily influx of visitors, the other best defence that the Marx monument has is its design. The sculptor and lifelong socialist Laurence Bradshaw took account of the likelihood of his statue being vandalised and employed “some of the techniques available to the military engineer”. He placed the brooding bronze bust high up on a plinth, using Cornish granite facing over a brick core. The design proved its worth when it survived a pipe bomb attack in 1970 (a subsequent threat by the National Front to restorers – “when you’ve repaired the statue of that commie bastard we’ll blow it up again” – proved hollow).
The Marx monument created controversy even before it was erected. The cemetery’s management demanded a payment of £2,000 from the Communist Party of Great Britain, which had already raised the funds to have it made, on the grounds that it was six inches too tall. There is an evocative film of the unveiling of the statue in March 1956. It represented something of a high-water mark for British communism, before the schism caused by Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest eight months later. JD Bernal, pioneer of X-rays and revolutionary socialist, gave the address. Bernal was a mentor of the young Eric Hobsbawm at Birkbeck College. Hobsbawm’s remains were buried just across the way from the Marx statue in 2012, opposite Claudia Jones, who created the Notting Hill Carnival.
Though the 1.5 mile perimeter of the east cemetery is surrounded only by a head-high wrought iron fence, Dungevall says that they don’t get rough sleepers among the sarcophagi. The few nocturnal visitors are mostly teenagers with a bottle of vodka, scaring themselves with tales of the “Highgate vampire”. There are at least two memorable accounts of more carnal activity, both fictional. The 1960s survivors in Linda Grant’s novel We Had it so Good dine out on the story of consummating their romance under Marx’s gaze; while Norman Stanley Fletcher once confessed, in an episode of Porridge, that his daughter Ingrid was conceived on the monument’s steps.
As well as the question of how to keep out nocturnal visitors, the other pressing issue Dungavell faces is capacity. At current rates of occupancy, he estimates that they have only around four years’ worth of grave plots available. Eternal rest in the vicinity of the father of socialism – and Jeremy Beadle – does not come cheap. The price of plots ranges from £20,000-£40,000. Demand, as ever, remains high.
