Modern Wayside Shrines

Abstract

Tony Walter in his note in response to Susan Drury (Folklore 107, 106-7) mentioned the now common practice of leaving floral tributes at the site of a fatality, with specific reference to the Hillsborough Disaster and the Kings Cross fire, adding: have no idea how recent or old this folk custom is. I suspect that the custom existed before 1989 but that the massive TV coverage of 'the Anfield Pilgrimage' disseminated the idea across the country. Other examples of public expressions of grief or mourning by mass floral tributes are: Southwark Bridge, London after the Marchioness Disaster; the bridge near the motorway site of a coach accident in which twelve children and a teacher from Hagley School were killed; and more recently the school at Dunblane, Scotland, where a gunman shot and killed children at the school in 1996. The TV coverage of the Anfield case could be said to have disseminated the idea of marking the site of a fatality with flowers, but the idea was certainly around before 1989. * After the Aberfan disaster in 1966, when the local school was destroyed by an avalanche of coal waste, wreathes were sent from all over the world, enough to make a cross a hundred feet tall (The Times 28 October 1966. Quoted Vickery 1995, 146). * A tree by the side of the A10 in Enfield, Middlesex, has for many years had flowers bound round its trunk; and in Suffolk, on the bank of the A14, the bereaved family of a car crash victim planted a cross of daffodil bulbs which emerged as flowers every spring.(1) * The tree on Barnes Common into which a rock musician crashed in 1973, causing his death, is festooned with photographs, flowers and ribbons by his fans. These personal remembrances appear to be fairly recent, becoming more and more common in the last fifteen or so years. However, they do represent a continuation of a tradition, as the following examples show: * A note in Folklore (1910) draws attenion to four sites in Sussex, Surrey and Oxfordshire where crosses were cut in turf, and maintained, to mark the site of fatalities (Freire-Marredco 1910). * Correspondence in The Antiquary of 1896 describes a number of cases of crosses being cut in the turf or painted on a wall at the site of a fatality (Letters 1896). Eliza Gutch and Mabel Peacock's Lincolnshire volume of the County Folklore series also mentions the practice (Gutch and Pea- cock 1908, 239). * I know of only one extant cross painted on a wall in Britain (I should be glad to hear of any others). This is a white cross painted on a garden wall beside the A83 through Ardrishaig, Argyll, which marks the place where a doctor was stabbed by a mentally disturbed man in about 1926. The cross is regularly repainted by persons unknown.(2) * There is a bright blue cross alongside the A816 Lochgilphead to Oban road, just outside the village of Kilmartin, which marks the place where an elderly Tinker woman was found dead after having been hit by a speeding motorist and knocked into the stream alongside the road.(3) * A 1914-18 War Graves wooden cross, with a metal label identifying it as the marker for the grave of Piper John Townsley, 1st and 8th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, stands beside the A83, Glasgow to Campbeltown main road. A hawthorn has been planted beside the cross (and now stands around eight feet tall). The families of the war dead were often given the wooden grave marker when it was replaced with a standard headstone. This marker may have been given to the Townsley family, the largest and most well-known tinker clan in the area and noted pipers, which was used to mark the site of the death of one of the family (Piper Townsley's mother, who died after being hit by a car according to one local story). My informant has stopped at this cross several times, after noticing that an Earl Haig Fund poppy had been stuck into the cross, and each time noticed that pennies had been laid along the arms of the cross. …

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