The Morthouse

Since exhumations are all the rage right now, I thought I’d share my favorite: Elizabeth Siddal, artist and model to the Pre-Raphaelites.

Siddal died of a laudanum overdose at the age of 32 in 1862 in London. Her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, left a journal containing the only copies of many of his poems in her coffin, tucking it away in her famous red hair.

This is George Mallory. Alive, in 1912.

Usually when I do my “This is So and So” posts, I show you a picture of them dead. That’s not the case here (though Dead George is a sight to behold): I like Alive George much, much better.

Mallory disappeared in 1924, on his third expedition to Mount Everest, along with his climbing partner, Andrew “Sandy” Irvine. It wasn’t until 75 years later, however, that Mallory’s body was discovered. On May 1, 1999, mountaineer Conrad Anker found Mallory’s frozen (and pretty much perfectly preserved) body on Everest. Here’s a video about it. It’s re-enact-y and overly dramatic, but it gives you an idea of how he was found.

From Wikipedia:

Within hours of beginning the search on 1 May, a frozen body was found by Conrad Anker at 26,760 feet (8,160 m) on the north face of the mountain. As the body was below where Irvine’s axe was found in 1933, the team expected the body to be Irvine’s, and were hoping to recover the camera that he had reportedly carried with him. They were surprised to find that name tags on the body’s clothing bore the name of “G. Mallory.” The body was remarkably well preserved, due to the mountain’s climate. The team could not locate the camera. Experts from Kodak have said that if a camera is ever found, there is some chance that its film could be developed to produce printable images, if extraordinary measures are taken.

Anker’s team held an Anglican service for Mallory and covered his body with a cairn. 

Image: George Mallory photographed at 38 Brunswick Square, London, age 25 or 26. Via Front Free Endpaper, whose post on Mallory is super, though NSFW (if you consider a very attractive man’s full back-al nudity NSFW).

chagalov:

W.B. Yeats on his deathbed, 1939 -by Georgie Hyde-Lees

entregulistanybostan:

W.B.Yeats. Foto incuded in The Yeats Gallery Exhibition, closed by Leonard Cohen - August 2010  -  More data

soircharmant :: sparklesdire

Yeats, probably January 1939

(via holdthisphoto)

New York circa 1911. “Grant’s Tomb. Rubber-neck auto on Riverside Drive.” Via Shorpy.

tuesday-johnson:

ca. 1867, “The Shirt of the Emperor, Worn during His Execution”, François Aubert

This grisly photograph depicts the bullet-riddled shirt of the Austrian Archduke Maximilian I, who was appointed Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III in 1864. Maximilian’s puppet regime lasted only three years; when the French army withdrew from Mexico in 1867, he was captured, tried, and executed by the nationalist supporters of Benito Juarez. Aubert, a French photographer working in Mexico, photographed Maximilian’s corpse and clothing, producing a sensational and somewhat gruesome record of the execution and the politically charged relics of the slain emperor.

via the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photographs Collection

tuesday-johnson:

ca. 1864-65, [carte de visite of mourners at grave of Gen. T.J. (Stonewall) Jackson. Lexington, VA]

via the Missouri History Museum

life:

April 30, 1945: Hitler commits suicide.

In the spring of 1945, LIFE’s William Vandivert was one of the first photographers to document the ruins of Berlin and the burned-out bunker beneath the city where Hitler and Eva Braun spent their final hours.

In his typed notes to his editors in New York, Vandivert described in detail what he saw. For example, of the sixth slide in this gallery he wrote:

“Pix of [correspondents] looking at sofa where Hitler and Eva shot themselves. Note bloodstains on arm of soaf [sic] where Eva bled. She was seated at far end … Hitler sat in middle and fell forward, did not bleed on sofa. This is in Hitler’s sitting room.”

Remarkable stuff — but, it turns out, only about half right. Historians are now quite certain that Braun actually committed suicide by biting a cyanide capsule, rather than by gunshot — meaning that the blood stains on the couch might well be Hitler’s, and not Eva Braun’s, after all.

Read more here.

life:

April 26, 1865: John Wilkes Booth dies

… or did he? As questioned by this LIFE Magazine article:

The cadaver shown on the opposite page is the mummy of a house painter named John St. Helen who committed suicide in Enid, Okla., Jan. 13, 1903. His mortal remains, embalmed with arsenic, are now a main attraction of Jay Gould’s Million Dollar Spectacle, a carnival traveling the Midwest. The carnival bills the corpse as that of John Wilkes Booth, the actor who shot Lincoln.

Officially, Booth was shot as he tried to flee a burning barn near Bowling Green, Va., on April 26, 1865, twelve days after the assassination. But the story persists that the man shot was not Booth, that Booth escaped and live for years in the Southwest. Usually he calls himself St Helens, though sometimes he said he was the son of Marshal Ney who, according to legend, fled France and settled in North Carolina. St. Helen confessed that he was Booth to Finis Bates, later Attorney General of Tennessee, who obtained his corpse after his death and rented it to carnivals. Bate’s widow sold it for $1,000. It has changed hands many times since, bringing bad luck to its owners. One went broke and was killed in a hold-up. The present owner, Joseph B. Harkin, a former Tattooed Man, lost a comfortable fortune since he bought the mummy for $5,000 in 1932. Since he joined Gould’s show last year, however, his fortunes have changed. The mummy is a big attraction.

In 1931 a group of doctors examined the corpse and found that it had certain marks which Booth had: short left leg, distorted right thumb, scar on neck. But these findings did not convince historians, who generally pooh-pooh the story, agree that this mummy is not and never was the body of John Wilkes Booth.

Dun. Dun. Dun.

Black teddy bear from England, ca. 1910. From the V&A Museum:

This teddy bear’s name is Blackie, for obvious reasons. It is an early English bear and may have been made to commemorate the death of Edward VII. Black is not a very common colour for teddy bears and is usually associated with a tragic event.

Love this article over at TIME—Top 10 Famous Stolen Body Parts—featuring Anne Boleyn’s heart, Geronimo’s skull, Napoleon’s penis, and more, including this tidbit:

the 16th century, St. Francis Xavier spent a lot of time on his feet, spreading the gospel throughout Spain, France, Italy, Malaysia, Japan, Sri Lanka and India, dying at sea en route to China. When a group of Christians disinterred his body a few months later, they were surprised to see it in a perfect state of preservation. But just as in life, his “incorrupt body” didn’t stay at rest for long. In its first public exhibition of corpse in Goa, India, in fit of reverence, a Portuguese woman bit off his big toe. Allegedly, the toe gushed blood, and she was caught when people followed the grisly trail to her home.

Kind of surprised that Juan Perón’s hands didn’t make the list.

Image: Painting of St. Francis Xavier in the Kobe City Museum, via Wikipedia.

obitoftheday:

Obit of the Day (Historical): Jesse James (1882)

One hundred forty years ago on April 3, 1882 Robert Ford, a member of Jesse James’ gang and living in James’ house, came up behind the famed outlaw and shot him in the head. Ford had hoped to claim the reward for James’ capture. (The novel, and later, film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, document this incident excellently - even as works of fiction.)

Jesse and his brother, Frank, fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War as members of “Quantrill’s Raiders” a group of guerilla fighters who gained a reputation for killing unarmed soldiers and abolitionists. After the war there were rumors of the James’ getting involved in various bank robberies- which often involved the murder of one or more people - throughout their home state of Missouri, but no confirmation.

The first robbery that Jesse James was confirmed to have taken part in occurred in 1869 when he and another man (presumably Frank) robbed the Daviess County Savings Bank in Gallatin, Missouri. James shot a teller for killing James’ former commander, “Bloody” Bill Anderson, during the war. Tragically, it was a case of mistaken identity and James shot an innocent man.

The James brothers, along with the Younger brothers (John, Jim, Bob, and Clell), would rob stagecoaches and banks throughout the Midwest untilt he mid-1870s. In 1874, the Pinkerton Detective Agency was hired to find the James-Younger gang, instead the Pinkertons, led by founder Allen Pinkerton, so bungled the case (including the attempted arson of the James’ home - which killed a half-brother and took off Jesse’s mother’s arm) that the James brothers actually gained sympathy. (It also helped that the editor of the Kansas City Star, had an agreement with James to report the James-Younger gang as modern day “Robin Hoods” in exchange for the exclusive stories.)

The James-Younger gang came to a crashing halt though with failed robbery attempt in Northfield, Minnesota in 1876. Jesse was not there, but the Younger brothers, who were drunk, lost two men and killed two other innocent bystanders. Eventually the state authorities hunted down and arrested the Youngers while the James’ escaped into hiding.

By 1882, the James’ were done with robbery but still wanted for various crimes in Missouri. Robert “Bob” Ford was more interested in money ($5000 for the capture of Jesse) than loyalty. After Ford killed Jesse he wired the governor of Missouri for his reward. Instead Ford, and his brother Charley, were arrested, charged and found guilty of murder but the governor pardoned the brothers…who also received a share of the bounty. Missourians were outraged.

James was only 35.

Random note: Bob Ford would open a saloon in Colorado. In 1892, Edward Kelley walked into the saloon, said “Hello, Bob,” and shot Ford in the throat. Kelley was sentenced to life in prison, having his death sentence commuted because of a petition signed by those who still hated Ford. Kelley was pardoned in 1902.

Random note 2: Jesse James’ son, Jesse James, Jr., would become a lawyer.

Random note 3: Jesse James’ last grandchild died in December 1991. She never knew her grandfather but knew her uncle, Frank.

Additional sources: thepioneerwoman.com, geneaology.com

(The image, above, is a stereoscope of Jesse James’ body on display. The other men are unidentified. The image is courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

obitoftheday:

Obit of the Day (Historical): Virginia Woolf (1941)

On March 28, 1941 English author Virginia Woolf put on an overcoat, placed stones in her pockets and walked into the River Ouse outside her home and drowned herself. Woolf, who had a history of depression, had only recently finished her final novel, Between the Acts.

Woolf, considered an innovator in the use of stream-of-consciousness, published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. Before she took her life she would publish eight more novels including To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando and Flush: A Biography, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel which mixed fact and fiction. (For Virginia Woolf’s complete bibliography click here.)

Woolf was 59 when she died. This is the letter she left her husband Sidney Woolf, to whom she was married for 29 years:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ‘til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

Virginia Woolf’s body was recovered on April 18, 1941. You can read her original New York Times obituary by clicking on the link at the top of the post.

(Image of two-year-old Virginia being held by her mother Julia Stephen, 1884, is courtesy of the Smith College Libraries. Here is the full citation: Reproduction of plate 36f from Leslie Stephen’s Photograph Album Original: platinum print, 20.0 x 14.0 cm. Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College)

I had no idea JFK was exhumed and reburied.

life:

Five decades later, the assassination of John F. Kennedy remains one of the few utterly signal events from the second half of the 20th century. Other moments — some thrilling (the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall), others horrifying (the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Challenger explosion) — have secured their places in the history books and, even more indelibly, in the memories of those who witnessed them. But nothing in the latter part of “the American century” defined an era as profoundly as those rifle shots that split the warm Dallas air on November 22, 1963, and the sudden death of the 46-year-old president.

Here, on the 45th anniversary of JFK’s March 1967 reinterment, when his remains were moved from his initial resting place to the permanent grave site and memorial at Arlington, LIFE.com offers a gallery of photographs (some of them never before published) from the deeply fraught funeral held mere days after Kennedy was killed.

While both ceremonies — the state funeral in ’63, and the reinterment three-and-a-half years later — were marked by sorrow, the rawness of the emotion evident in 1963 is still striking, and rending, today.

pytynia:

Faith Bacon

Ziegfeld Follies of 1931

As a burlesque dancer, she used such aids as ostrich fans, flowers and bubbles, all against an often smoky spotlight. In 1933, Bacon competed with Sally Rand as fan-dancers at the World’s Fair.

Death: Shortly after midnight on September 26, 1956, she was walking down the stairs of the hotel between the fourth and third floors and suddenly opened a window. As a friend grabbed at her skirt, she tore loose and jumped out the window. Her body landed on the roof of a one-story saloon next door. She was 46 years old. Her friend told reporters that Bacon “wanted the spotlight again. She would have taken any kind of work in show business.”

Her effects reportedly comprised “Miscellaneous clothing, one white metal ring, train ticket to Erie, Pa., and 85 cents,” and a pair of rented fans.

When relatives could not be located, the American Guild of Variety Artists claimed her body and arranged for burial.

(via timetravelteam)