FAME

(from 2011)

The hit film and subsequent TV series FAME spawned a huge disco hit in 1980 – unsurprisingly entitled “Fame”. The lyrics included the words: “I’m going to live forever, Baby remember my name”.

I wonder how many readers of this blog can name the singer who had the original hit. If you are a child of the eighties you might manage it – Irene Cara actually. But if you didn’t give the answer before the buzzer went, the words “Baby remember my name” take on a certain irony.

The words of the song reflect a common human desire to want to be remembered – by someone – be it family or friends. And for others a bit more ambitious, the desire to even leave some kind of mark on “civilization”.

Looking back a century or more, the past masters at perpetuating their own memories had to be the Victorians in Britain. One only has to visit a 19^th century municipal cemetery to see some amazing memorials to “the great and the good” of Victorian society. It was put rather nicely by a newspaper columnist – if you can’t take it with you, at least you can show the rabble you once had it!

However, this yearning for terra firma immortality can be quite useful to others if their hobby is family history. Unless your ancestors were all serfs or ag labs (agricultural laborers), they often strived to leave their mark in some way. And even the ag labs left interesting records – if only parish payments for tribes of children born out of wedlock.

A branch of my wife’s family came from a small town we will call G. It is actually quite a famous place today, and it used to have a huge second-hand bookshop where I picked up stacks of material on the lunatic fringe of Adventism. But, I digress. Back in the early Victorian era, it was a small market town, and the key ancestor, JH, was mayor several times over. Looking at it objectively today, it was “big fish in small pond” syndrome, or as H G Wells would describe it, “in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is King”.

Trawling through the Town Hall archives we came into the era of photography, and there we found a picture of JH – a pompous gentleman, extremely stout, posing by a globe, and so very pleased with himself. When he died, the papers gave a suitable eulogy, and a team of black horses pulled the hearse down the main street. Although his grave – discovered while tramping around the cemetery in the rain - was not the grandest by far.  Perhaps his descendants had other uses for his money.

But while alive, JH did all he could to perpetuate his own memory. In his own honor, he donated to the town an ornamental drinking fountain. The ornate relief depicted a scene from the Gospel of John, chapter 4 – Jesus and the woman at the well at Sychar. Jesus talked of living water as a metaphor for everlasting life, and the woman – perhaps not the sharpest knife in the drawer – put the two together and came up with everlasting water...

The inscription below the image dwelt on JH’s beneficence and mayoral accomplishments.

Old newspapers showed that JH personally chose where his memorial should be installed –

directly in front of the gas works, as a fitting symbol of Victorian enterprise and progress.

Of course, as always, time moved on. The gas works ceased to be glamorous; they became the back end of town, and ultimately were abandoned and demolished. The frontage of JH’s fountain then languished as scrap metal in the corner of the council yard until an enterprising businesswoman with an eye to local history rescued it. By sheer chance we stayed in one of her properties for a vacation some years ago and an idle conversation rescued the subject. The big question had been what on earth were they going to do with it?

With a bit of lateral thinking, the council decided that it could go in the local bus station, fixed to the wall of the rather run down public toilets (or as US readers might prefer, rest rooms. However, in Britain, public toilets are not a place you would want to rest!)

So to this day, if you visit the town of G, JH’s proud monument to himself is firmly affixed to the wall of the local public conveniences. To our shame, we actually have a nice shiny photograph in our album of irreverent descendants pulling faces in front of it. (In the UK the technical term is “gurning”).

So what was that whirring sound we could hear? Probably JH spinning.

What was it that an ancient writer in Ecclesiastes wrote? – Fame? Ah – sorry Irene – Vanity of Vanities – all is Vanity.