WHILE she spends most of her days in Parliament sniffing out material for her Times sketches, in her down time Ann Treneman can be found exploring cemeteries and graveyards.

Following two collections of Parliamentary sketches Treneman’s third book, Finding The Plot, expands on this obsession providing a very personal selection of the 100 graves she believes no-one should miss.

She will be talking about both the stories behind the stones and the birth of her interest in ‘graving’ tomorrow.

“I find graveyards quite comforting,” she says as Big Ben rings out in the background.

“In the US (where she was born and raised before moving to the UK 30 years ago) they are a lot less exciting as you don’t have the amazing monuments and old fashioned names of the Victorians.

“I don’t find graveyards to be about death – they are more about life.”

The selections in her book reflect this – don’t expect to find lists of Ripper victims, or mass murderers.

Instead Treneman has highlighted writers, inventors, politicians, known and forgotten celebrities and fascinating monuments with real human stories behind them.

The book was inspired by a conversation with a retiring MP about Anthony E Pratt, inventor of Cluedo, whose grave Treneman had sought out in Birmingham for a story.

“If you’re choosing to have a gravestone you’re choosing to leave a part of yourself as a place in the world,” says Treneman. “If Mr Pratt didn’t have a gravestone which said ‘Inventor of Cluedo’ no-one would know who created the third most popular board game in the world.

“The guy who invented Hovis bread (Richard ‘Stoney’ Smith) has an amazing craggy stone in Highgate Cemetery, and without that we wouldn’t know about him.”

Some of her best finds were by accident – such as the grave in Minstead, near Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s final resting place, where a Mrs White had chipped away the word ‘faithful’ from her husband’s gravestone after discovering too late that he’d had an affair.

And some of the stories behind the most famous gravestones are equally as interesting.

Political thinker Karl Marx’s gravestone dominates Highgate Cemetery today, but when he died in 1883 only nine people were present at his funeral, and he only merited a very short obituary in The Times.

“In 1957 the Communist Party felt Marx’s grave wasn’t big enough and created this gargantuan tourist attraction,” says Treneman. “It’s everything he was against!”

 

Ann Treneman - Finding The Plot is at Lewes Speakers Festival All Saints Centre, Friars Walk, Lewes. Saturday, July 19, 8.30pm.

Festival pass, £80. One-day pass, £45. Two-day pass, £70. Single event tickets are £12.50. Call 0333 666 3366. Visit www.lewesspeakers festival.com for full line-up.