Grave

Nick Cohen writes:

The turning of the memorial to merchant seamen drowned in the two world wars into a playground for revelling bankers this Christmas is hard to better as an example of the way we live now. Or as an argument against the way we live now. By allowing partying amid the monuments to the dead, the authorities are asserting three propositions that have become so accepted that we have forgotten to be shocked by them: that there's nothing that money cannot or should not be able to buy; that government can ignore any scruple in its search for revenue; and that no one can gainsay the determination of plutocrats to celebrate their self-enrichment as the highest form of human achievement.

Visit Trinity Square Gardens and you may understand why a few at least are astonished. Even an atheist has to accept that he is stepping on a kind of sacred ground, hallowed by the memory of men who disappeared beneath the waves. The garden forms a self-contained space just behind the Tower of London. Facing the Thames is a pavilion in the neoclassical style – 21 metres long and about 10 high – designed by Edwin Lutyens. Outside on the pediment, the dedicatory inscription emphasises that what you see is all the drowned sailors have left.

1914-1918
TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND TO THE HONOUR OF TWELVE THOUSAND OF THE MERCHANT NAVY AND FISHING FLEETS WHO HAVE NO GRAVE BUT THE SEA

Inside are the names of the seamen arranged alphabetically under their ships. Long before the building of the Vietnam Veterans' Monument in Washington DC, Lutyens found a way to emphasise individual sacrifice and suffering without unnecessary ostentation. After the Second World War, the architect Sir Edward Maufe attached a semi-circular sunken garden to the back of Luytens's pavilion. On its walls, masons inscribed the names of 24,000 men lost in the Atlantic and Arctic convoys. A smaller memorial commemorates the merchant seamen who died in the Falklands War.

The council promised to "maintain the peace, quiet and spiritual values of the gardens for the enjoyment of present and future visitors". In that aim, it succeeded. The garden is a place where office workers and the relatives of the dead alike can come and find a tranquil space amid the hubbub of the capital. Although no one noticed until a few months ago, it is also a valuable piece of real estate. The overcrowded square mile of the City is packed with buildings and space for entertaining is hard to find. I don't wish to exaggerate the deprivation. The City has restaurants selling everything from haute cuisine to fast food, corporate dining suites in office blocks and pubs and bars aplenty. But if a business wants to show off to hundreds of clients or a CEO wants a Christmas party where he can impress all his underlings by displaying the wealth at his command, there are few spaces large enough for conspicuous consumption on a grand scale.

A company called Moving Venue, whose "passionate and professional team" hosts parties at what it describes as "unique and prestigious" locations for all kinds of wealthy clients, noticed the gap between supply and demand and saw money in the memorials. It applied for permission to cover the lawn of Trinity Square Gardens with a vast marquee. The roof will be transparent so carousers can gaze up to trees Moving Venue staff will decorate with Christmas lights. Richard Beggs, the managing director, told me that no celebration was too extravagant for his company to contemplate. He could host feasts for 300, 400, 500 or more if required. How much per diner? I asked. It depends. If the customer wants the best food, the finest wines, the most expensive cocktails, he could supply them if the price was right.

His tone became a tad defensive as I questioned him and I detected a note of puzzlement. The partygoers would not be dancing on top of the monuments but in the garden around them. He was proposing to free an illiquid asset and monetise what until now had been nothing but a worthless, if revered, patch of grass. Isn't that what anyone in his position would want to do and should want to do? Tower Hamlets council has forgotten its promises about maintaining peace, quiet and spiritual values and looks as if it will give the party organisers a licence to let rip. From mid-November until the week before Christmas, it will allow live music, recorded music, dancing and booze, booze, booze from 11 in the morning until gone midnight. Jim Fitzpatrick, the local Labour MP, and Trinity House, which has been watching over the interests of mariners for five centuries, protested. The council's licensing office told them that their concerns about respect for the memory of the fallen were not valid objections.

Its crude calculation is no different from that made by successive governments. Whitehall let the City roar because its euphoric traders generated tax revenues. Even when it crashed, they preferred holding on to the hope that the party could somehow catch fire again to cleaning up the mess and beginning the task of reform. Like Gordon Brown and George Osborne's Treasury, the council needs money. If City banks will pay to party in the grounds of its war memorials, it will pocket the rental fees and push the dead and their relatives to the back of its mind.
I cannot find a better way of explaining the fault of the bankers, the party organisers and bureaucrats than to say they lack proper modesty. Puffed up by a culture that celebrates self-enrichment they have no real sense of their significance.

Like Charlie Gilmour when he swung on the Union flag at the Cenotaph, they do not understand that just because they are rich it does not mean that their lives are more worthwhile than the men and women who died without enjoying their advantages; that although it is a cliché to say that they died so the bankers, the Gilmours and the rest of us might be free, the cliché remains true for all the corniness it carries. But then I suppose "those who have no grave but the sea" offer no opportunity for gain. You cannot turn them from an illiquid to a liquid asset, slice, dice and monetise them. The dead cannot generate an income, so all who want to make a profit can safely forget that they ever existed.