If there’s one thing that “Borrow’s Gypsies” were keen on, it was big gravestones. And in the days before family historians started roaming churchyards with a camera, one of these stones – unusually – caught the eye of an illustrator instead. Not only that, but the illustration was published by the Gypsiologist Francis Hindes Groome in his book In Gipsy Tents in 1880 and so has thankfully been preserved for us.
Standing in Cathcart Old Churchyard, Renfrewshire, Scotland – now a suburb of Glasgow – the monument marked the grave of a child called Logan Lee [D46].
Logan died a very long way from Cathcart. For his death has been traced at Taylor’s Hill, Galway in Ireland on 25 September 1872. His Irish death certificate simply states that he is ‘the child of a Gipsy’, having suffered from scrofula for five years. The informant is neither his father or his mother but an unknown Mary Curran, perhaps a Galway resident.
The inscription on Logan’s gravestone in Cathcart, as recorded in Groome’s 1880 book, read:
Here lie the remains of Logan Lee, the beloved son of John and Lavithen Lee and brother of Nathan Lee and grandson of Elijah Smith….He departed out of this world on the 25th day of September 1873 [sic] aged 12 years…Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God.
Groome also records that a Dr Smith, the minister of Cathcart, wrote about conducting Logan’s funeral: “A person of a very gentlemanly manners and appearance called on me on the day of his cousin’s death, to request that I would attend the funeral, and conduct it in the usual manner, with the addition of a prayer at the grave…I meet the party there, and took the service, for which they expressed much gratitude. Among the principal mourners were four females, completely enveloped in mantles of deep crape, who seemed much affected. On the following Sunday they all attended church in the same attire.”
But this mention of a cousin arranging the funeral on the day of death sounds a bit suspicious when you consider that there would have been no easy way for Logan’s family in Galway to communicate with relatives in Scotland so quickly. So perhaps Dr Smith was recalling the funeral of a different family member? More likely – I think – is that he is remembering the burial of a relative of Logan’s called John Cooper [C21] who died in the same year and reputedly had his own gravestone next to Logan’s. John died on 21 January 1872 in a tent behind Hope Terrace, Queens Park, Govan, Lanarkshire, aged 39. The informant was his cousin Thomas Reynolds [C11] (aka Smith, the son of Ambrose Smith and Sanspirella Heron). It’s understood that John’s monument described him as the ‘beloved husband and son of Sarah and Phoebe Cooper’.
The illustrator of Logan’s gravestone was a Lieut-Colonel Fergusson. He also wrote about the burial place in Notes and Queries on 19 December 1874: “The burial ground of this family is very neatly laid out, ornamented with the traditional cypress and yew. The tombstones are executed in excellent style, and the ground is enclosed with an exceedingly handsome cast-iron railing – the design vine-leaves and gilt clusters of grapes; the whole giving one the idea of a burial place of some very substantial and well-to-do citizen of the neighbouring town of Glasgow.”
The gravestone of Logan Lee, Cathcart Old Churchyard, Renfrewshire, Scotland.
I’m pleased to report that Logan’s monument still exists, although John Cooper’s seems to have disappeared, perhaps a victim to the vandalism that has hit the Churchyard in recent years or the growth of a large tree at one end of Logan’s grave. An archaeology team from Glasgow University conducted a survey of all existing gravestones in April 2010 and have taken a photograph of the stone. It still looks very much as it did in 1874 with the transcription clearly legible.
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