Thomas Hardy's grave is located within
the churchyard of St Michaels, Stinsford,
Dorset. His first wife Emma was
buried here in the graveyard and on his own death in 1928 his heart was buried
in her grave, simultaneously, his ashes, after his cremation at Woking, were interred
in Poets' Corner,
Westminster Abbey,
London. (it is often said that the surgeons cat ate the Thomas's heart and
that it had to be substituted with another). Thomas Hardy wished for a Stinsford
burial and had discussed it with the vicar. Rev H.G.B. Cowley. Not that it was
a reversion to religion from one who had called God "that vast imbecility".
The village churchyard was necessary for Hardy's sense of history and family.
"I shall sleep quite calmly at Stinsford, whatever happens," he had
written. Others thought differently. Sydney Cockerell and Sir James Barrie intervened
with the Dean of Westminster to arrange an Abbey funeral. The Hardy family were
enraged, with cousin Theresa telling reporters: "I am grieved that they are
going to take poor Tom away to London. He wanted, I know, to lie with his own
folk in the churchyard yonder." It was Cowley, the Stinsford vicar, who suggested
what Robert Gittmgs calls "a gruesome though historic compromise".The
heart was to be cut out, to go to Stinsford, and the body would be cremated at
Woking, on 14 January 1928, with the ashes being taken to Westminster Abbey, for
burial the following day in Poets' Corner.This solution ignored the weight of
popular superstition, firmly rooted in the peasant stock of Hardy's family, that
a body should be buried intact. Kate Hardy found it "another staggering blow",
and Edward Codd called it "repellent". The pubs of Dorchester relished
the whole bizarre concept, with jokes ranging from one about a cat jumping on
to the mortuary slab and eating the freshly removed heart, to problems at the
resurrection: "Almighty, he'll say, 'Ere be the 'eart, but where be the rest
of 'ee?'" The Abbey service, Robert Gittings writes in The Older Hardy, was
organised by Macmillans and became a shambles, with a "chaos of wrong invitations
and uninvited gate-crashers, 'a sick horror' for years to Florence". Neither
did the weather help. "Before the service was due to start the colour overhead
had deepened to a brown such as London often suffers on dull days," The Times
reported. It was not quite what Hardy had expected: "And mourn the yellowing
tree: for I shall mind not, slumbering peacefully". Terry Coleman raised
the point in an interview with Betjeman for The Guardian- "At the time he
wrote that, the last three were alive, and nor are they buried there now. He says
the names were put in out of euphony, not malice But Mellstock is really Stinsford,
where Hardy's heart is buned. The grave rests alongside that ofhis father and
mother and other members of the Hardy family. In 1937 his second wife, Florence,
was also buried here. His second novel "Under The Greenwood Tree" (1872)
has as its setting the village of Mellstock, his fictional name for Stinsford.
The church features largely in the action of the story which makes use of many
memories of the past learnt from his parents. He wrote many poems about the church
and its choir including "Afternoon Service at Mellstock".
Thomas
Hardy's Grave 
