“HAVING enjoyed your article on George Cuitt, the engraver, I went to find his grave in Masham churchyard,” says Trixey Slade, of Ripon. “It is completely neglected.”
She is completely correct.
READ MORE: MEET GEORGE CUITT, THE YORKSHIRE PIRANESI
In the bright July sunshine, the lush green grass beneath a brilliant blue sky, the churchyard in the corner of Masham’s square is beautifully maintained. Its headstones seem to be following the course of the lives of those they memorialise. When they were newly erected, they were straight and proud, but now they lean gently at a variety of angles as the passing years take their toll, and their faces are being slowly worn away by the weather.
Not that everyone has been so impressed by them.
Masham church in the 1960s
In his history of Masham, published in 1865, John Fisher wrote of the churchyard: “There are great numbers of gravestones, dating from the year 1691, the great majority of which are, in point of design and workmanship, really execrable, and but few of them are even tolerable.
“Bad however as the gravestones themselves are, the inscriptions placed upon many of them are still worse.”
Mr Fisher was particularly outraged by the way “a very plain old country farmer is made to address his “wife and children dear” in the following doggerel:
“Mourn not, my wife and children dear,
I am not dead but sleepeth here,
My debits is paid, my grave you see,
Stay but awhile then follow me.”
Mr Fisher was particularly aggrieved about the grammatical error in the third line.
Demanding that the vicar should do something to edit out the most execrable of the headstones, Mr Fisher then drew attention to that of bellringer George Thornberry, who died aged 84 on September 18, 1810.
“Although better than the other in point of composition, it is open to severe criticism on account of the very flippant way in which it treats the very serious subject of Death,” he said.
“Here lies an Old Ringer
Beneath this cold Clay
Who has Rung many Peals
Both so serious and gay
Thro’ Grand-Sires and triples
With ease he could range
Till DEATH call’d his Bobb
Brought round his last Change”
Campanologists may well find all manner of campanological gags – and hopefully no clangers – hidden within the eight lines. For instance, a “bob” is a command which instructs the bellringers to alter the order in which the bells are played.
The bellringer’s headstone can still be found in the churchyard, although it leans at a Pisa-esque angle. In fact, it can be easily found because there’s an excellent map of all the graves just inside the church door, and it is mentioned in the £2 church guide.
The guide also points to the memorial to William Jackson, who was born into a milling family in Masham in 1815 and became an apprentice tallow chandler in the town before making his name as an organist and chorusmaster in Bradford. He died in his home there called Masham House in 1866 and although he is buried in Bradford, he got a fine plinth in his hometown cemetery.
The guide also highlights the headstone of Julius Caesar Ibbetson, who was born prematurely in 1759 in Leeds when his 19-year-old mother died after slipping on ice and falling. He was saved via a caesarean section, “hence the unusual middle name which he strove to suppress throughout his life”, says his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). This doesn’t explain why someone – presumably his father, Richard – thought it appropriate to saddle him with a first name which, when used in conjunction with his medical middle name, would always link him to a Roman emperor.
Anyway, Julius became a successful self-taught artist, spending a couple of years as draughtsman to the British embassy in Peking, before his wife died in 1794 leaving him with three children. The responsibility caused him to have a breakdown from which he was rescued by William Danby, of Swinton Castle, near Masham. Danby became his patron and he settled happily in Masham for the last 15 years of his life.
“His watercolours are prized for their delicacy and sureness of line,” says the ODNB, which also hails him as the “Berchem of England” after a 17th Century Dutch master.
The engraver George Cuitt, in 1817. Taken from George Cuitt (1779-1854): England's Piranesi by Peter Boughton and Ian Dunn (University of Chester, £35). Picture courtesy of the Grosvenor Museum, Chester)
But the church guide doesn’t mention “England’s Piranesi”, as George Cuitt was hailed. Cuitt was born in Richmond in 1779 and inspired by the etchings of Italian maestro Giovanni Piranesi, took up the artform. In 1804, he became a drawing teacher in Chester, but in 1821 moved back to Yorkshire with his wife, Catherine, from Ripon, to be nearer to their families and their wealthy Richmond patrons.
George built them a home just beyond the Masham churchyard wall, and from there produced his most highly regarded etchings, of Yorkshire abbeys. With his eyesight deteriorating, he gave up etching in 1840 and devoted the rest of his life to his garden.
He died in 1854 and was buried in the churchyard beside the wall at the bottom of his garden. His distinctive-shaped headstone bore the words: “His memory lives in his works and in the hearts of his friends.”
Today, as Memories 635, his memory lives in a 427-page catalogue of all of his works which the University of Chester has just published after nearly 30 years of research by the author, Peter Boughton.
But his headstone must have topped from his grave because the new book has a picture of it propped up, appropriately, against his garden wall.
George Cuitt's headstone is under there somewhere
Now, though, it has been lain flat. The nettles and the brambles have crept over it and the debris from a nearby yew has covered it. Recently, the annual strimming of the churchyard – a nature conservation area – has taken place so that with the map, we were able to locate it and brush the cloak of greenery from it.
The headstone is revealed after we brush the debris from it
“Perhaps with the current publicity surrounding the book, something could be done to rescue it,” says Trixie.
Even if George Cuitt doesn’t get a 10ft high memorial or a headstone with a rhyme of dubious poetical merit upon it, it would be appropriate if one of Masham churchyard’s most well known residents is not completely forgotten about.
An undated aerial view of Masham with the church at the bottom with George Cuitt's self-built house immediately to the right
READ MORE: EVIDENCE OF THE FIRST DOMESTIC CAT IN BRITAIN FOUND IN NORTH YORKSHIRE
George Cuitt's headstone is somewhere beneath the yew tree; the house he built can be seen over the churchyard wall
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