A day trip to Canterbury-Dover
We finished our four-week trip of Europe and UK with a few days in London, arriving by train from Cheltenham on a Saturday afternoon. Very early the next morning, before the sun was up, we caught a big red double-decker bus from our lodgings in Paddington to Victoria station, and from there caught another bus to Canterbury, Kent. Travelling by bus was the only way to do this trip in a day – trains all seemed to be geared to travelling through to Europe and were very expensive. I was a bit apprehensive of catching a bus in London in the dark but each stop was announced along the way and we managed to get off in the right place! We then had a ten-minute walk to get to Victoria Station.
Flying southwards along the busy motorway through rolling, wooded Kent farmland down to the coast was altogether another experience: previously on our trip we had travelled by plane, train and car. The plus was that we sat high up and could see the countryside, the negative was that the tinted windows of the bus made it nearly impossible to take photographs of the scenery.
We arrived in Canterbury just after 9 am. Here we were met by a lovely local Gilley who was to let us into the locked Jewish Cemetery. First we walked up the High Street:
The Jews Burial Ground
The cemetery is rather hard to find, located behind high brick walls and some shops on Whitstable Road. you have to go down what seems to be a private drive between the shops and a house to find the gate.
Here we visited the graves of Dinah’s parent’s grandparents and her brothers, sister and brother-in-law: Frances and her husband Mordecai Nathan (both died 1841), Barnett (d 1866) and Julia Nathan (d 1886), Solomon Nathan (d 1841) Joseph Nathan (d 1856), Benjamin Nathan (d 1848), Fanny (d 1878) and Joel Abrahams (d 1867). There are other unmarked Nathan’s here too: Dinah’s brother Solomon had at least two children buried here; Henry (1837-1838) and his un-named baby daughter. Four of the interments were brought to be buried from afar: Solomon Lyon and his son Henry both brought from France, Benjamin from Portsea and Joseph from Exeter. There may well be other family here too, as the sources I consulted (Webster, Cemetery Scribes) have only listed those associated with Dover and legible headstones. The Nathan family who had ties to Dover for nearly 100 years has now got descendants scattered across the globe.
As well as the familiar headstones, I was also able to identify that of Joseph Nathan, the brother closest to Dinah in age. Joseph had died aged just 25 a few weeks after Dinah and Nathaniel married. Joseph’s stone was made of sandstone and has badly deteriorated so the wording is all but obliterated, however I was able to make out the first name ‘Joseph’. His stone was next to his grandparents and brother Solomon on one side and his parents on the next. In fact all of the Nathan family graves that are identified occupy a single row, along with one or two other burials, towards the back of the cemetery.
I had first come across images of the Nathan family headstones (except Joseph Nathan’s) on Cemetery Scribes. In my research I also came across Tina Machindo’s site Historic Canterbury. Tina has several pages about the jewish community in Kent, including the one about the cemetery and the synagogue. Tina kindly allowed me to use her photographs of Nathan family tombstones in To live a Long and Prosperous Life.
In correspondence with Tina I discovered that she had in her collection a letter written to a Nathan descendant: Kitty Glassman (nee Barnard) about the up-keep of the cemetery. Kitty was the grand-daughter of Dinah’s sister Kate and her husband David Barnard. It was Kitty’s parent’s B.I. and Abby Barnard who had been the last of the Nathan descendants to be in business in Dover. Tina kindly sent me a copy of this letter, the transcript can be seen on her website here.
It was incredibly moving to be in this place where so many of my forebears lie together. With finally seeing these headstones came the realisation that somehow a circle had now been completed – from when Dinah left England in 1864, as her great, great, great-granddaughter I was finally able to pay respects at the grave of her parents, which she was never able to visit herself, although she had undoubtedly stood here at the graves of her grandparents and siblings. I felt the ache of loss and grief and how difficult it must have been to be so far away from family in times of loss and felt tears well for Dinah.
At the end of my book I wrote of visiting Dinah’s grave in 2013 –
I had remembered to bring a stone—white quartz—and tucked it onto the ledge of what remained of her headstone. A sliver of white marble from the headstone lay there. I put it in my pocket. I found it there later when I absently slipped my hand inside: thin, white, crystalline and slightly dished like a shell. Limestone turns to marble under pressure.
I had kept this small fragment from Dinah’s gravestone in Greymouth, New Zealand since that visit in 2013. It sat above my computer for four years while I researched and wrote Dinah’s story. Now it had travelled with me on our journey across the world. It is the Jewish custom not to lay flowers at a grave, but instead to place a small stone in remembrance and to acknowledge your visit. I placed the fragment on Dinah’s parent’s gravestone. I also brought small white quartz pebbles for the other graves, carefully tucked away in our luggage and left them there too. A silent message: you are not forgotten.
Exploring Canterbury
After visiting the cemetery we went and found Hawks Lane, where Barnett and Julia Nathan were living at the time of Barnett’s death. Nearby is Jewry Lane, which is where (surprise) the Jewish community was situated before their expulsion from England by Edward I. Unfortunately the area where Julia was living when she died; Riding Gate (part of the city wall), has been redeveloped and lost to expanded roadway.
We also found the building where the Abrahams had their Glass and China shop, rebuilt after the devastating fire in 1865. (p116) The stone building on the corner of Mercury Lane survived, but the ancient half-timber medieval hostel (featured in Chaucer’s Tales) in which Abrahams shop was situated was engulfed along with most of the block. The re-built part is white-fronted block to left of the corner building.
We also searched and found the remaining building of the Canterbury Hebrew Synagogue, now used by Kings School as a recital room.
Canterbury was lovely and I really wished we could have looked at the cathedral, however as it was a Sunday there were limited entry times. The Cathedral is walled and you pay to get into the precincts, so you can’t even just wander around outside. We got small glimpses from various narrow and winding streets but it is quite different from the cathedrals and abbeys we saw in the Cotswolds which seem to have more green space around them.
The High Street in Canterbury is paved as a pedestrian precinct, and was delightful to explore, although there are many shops aimed at the ever-present tourists. To the east of the High street lay the Cathedral precinct and a warren of tiny streets and lanes, yet to the west we suddenly found ourselves in a modern shopping precinct, complete with chain stores and food courts, giving a weird sense that we had just time-travelled between two or more centuries.
Written in Ink and Stone 