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From left: Phil Seaton with Leonard Grant, Sgt Grant's great-grandson, and PC Dave King |
Fitting tribute to VC hero cop after 141 years
New Journal’s story helps secure prestigious gravestone for former Kentish Town constable
BETWEEN a tribute of bagpipes and bugles, the last resting place of a VC-winning soldier who became a Met police officer was honoured on Tuesday – 141 years after he died in obscurity and was consigned to a common grave.
Detective work by a veteran Kentish Town PC and Highgate Cemetery’s assistant gravedigger – and some publicity from the New Journal – brought the country’s most senior policeman, Met chief Sir Ian Blair, and senior Army officers to honour the Highgate Cemetery grave of Sgt Robert Grant VC.
The ceremony, Sir Ian said, “rescued from obscurity a name that should be honoured”.
The gallant soldier’s oldest living relatives attended the event. Great-grandaughter Thelma Tarling, 92, who saw her ancestor’s medal for the first time, said: “I’m so proud of him, so very proud.”
Sgt Grant won the VC in India in 1857 for rescuing a comrade under fire, before leaving the Army and serving as a Constable in Kentish Town. He died in 1867, aged 30, and lay in a paupers’ grave with nine others in Highgate Cemetery.
No stone or monument marked his plot, “grave 15054”, which became a grassy pathway between the graves of the cemetery’s more well-known incumbents, including Karl Marx and sculptor Henry Moore.
But the research of Highgate gravedigger and historian Phil Seaton found the unacknowledged hero and prompted Kentish Town crime prevention officer Dave King to press Scotland Yard to honour a man who had served with the Met’s old ‘Y’ Division, based in Highgate, until he died of “inflammation of the lungs”.
On Tuesday, Colonel Simon Marr MBE, of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, was the first to honour the new headstone erected and rededicated in Highgate’s West cemetery. With soldiers from Sgt Grant’s old regiment currently serving in Iraq, he said: “It is apt and fitting that we should remember a hero that has gone before them.”
Sir Ian Blair said: “In those 30 years he pushed into that life a particular quality which both the police and the armed services cherish – pure, raw courage.”
At a Lauderdale House reception after the ceremony, Fusilier regimental secretary Captain Tony Adamson paid tribute to the research of Phil Seaton and PC King – and thanked the New Journal for publicising the campaign, which led to Sgt Grant’s family coming forward. |
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