The Caped Crusader has come and gone, villains have been vanquished and webs rewound, Gotham City has returned to normal – as normal as it gets in Glasgow, the latest backdrop for the fictional home and derring-do of the superhero.
Whether any of the city will be recognisable – indeed, whether the scenes filmed in and around the Necropolis and Glasgow Cathedral will make the final cut of The Batman – we’ll have to wait to discover when the film premieres next year. Rumours abound that the Cathedral will be blown up, hopefully just a polystyrene version on a lot somewhere, or in CGI. And that the central character, played by Robert Pattinson, will be seen scooting through the ancient graveyard on his Batbike, dodging bullets, before shinning up the 60ft sandstone column high on the hill and confronting John Knox. Or perhaps this is just wishful thinking.
The Necropolis may not have the scale, the hauteur and mythology of the Père Lachaise in Paris, on which it was loosely modelled, or the famous inhabitants like Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde, but for atmosphere and dank creepiness it can’t be bettered. On a dark, howling night, the moon shrouded and the rain battering in, its 37 acres are the perfect place for a horror fan with nerves of titanium, avoiding the vampires and the boys with bottles of Buckie.
Back in the day, qualification for entry – apart from the obvious one – was simply that you were wealthy.
The land was owned by the Merchants House of Glasgow, wealthy businessmen who had made their money in tobacco, weaving, commerce, and the buying and selling of slaves. Glasgow was then the second city of the empire and the merchant barons wanted to bequeath to the city, in their names, a cemetery to rival the Parisian one. They even went further afield for their inspirations, or copying, to the Ponte dei Sospiri, the Bridge of Sighs, in Venice, which is also the colloquial name given to the Glasgow one linking Cathedal Square, and crossing what was then the Molendinar burn, to the city of the dead. Thousands of funerals have crossed this bridge, passing from time into eternity.
John Knox, the father of Presbyterianism and the Scottish Reformation, perched on his eyrie on what was then the Fir Hill, predates the creation of the cemetery. He’s not actually buried there, but, prosaically, beneath a car park in Edinburgh. But over the centuries he has looked down on the city, bible in hand, as the dead mounted around him, until the 50,000 plots were filled.
At the Père Lachaise they’re rather more practical. Plots are leased for 30 years and if the family doesn’t renew the lease then the grave is dug up and another body deposited. A million people have been buried there, but another three million more may have had a spell there.
Knox had his own French connection. He and a garrison of Protestant religious dissenters in St Andrews were captured by the French, who had been enlisted by Mary of Guise, the Queen Regent and mother of Mary, Queen of Scots, who ruled for her then young child. Knox spent two years chained to benches and rowing on French galleys, from Scotland to the Seine and Rouen and back to Scotland and, after 19 months in the galley prison, freedom.
The preacher was not a great feminist. His most famous work is The First Blast Of The Trumpet Against The Monstrous Regiment Of Women, which argued that whatever else they couldn’t be, women certainly couldn’t be monarchs. And he vociferously campaigned for the execution of Mary, when she became Queen, for allegedly conspiring in the murder of her estranged husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley.
There was surely personal animus because Mary was regally miffed that Knox had not sought royal permission to marry his second wife Margaret. The fact that he was 54 and she 17 did not seem to be the issue, merely propriety, nor did it appear to harm his legacy.
The first person to be buried in the Necropolis was Jewish, a jeweller called Joseph Levi in 1832. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scotland’s most famous architect, isn’t buried there but his first individual creation, a Celtic Cross, is over the grave of Andrew McCall, a high-ranking member of the Glasgow police.
The cemetery, with its winding, tree-shrouded paths up and down the hill, has around 5,000 mausoleums, tombs, monuments and follies, including one by another local architect, Alexander “Greek” Thomson, creator of St Vincent Crescent among other landmarks in the city. One of the more random memorials is for William Miller, known as the “Laureate of the Nursery”, who wrote the kids’ nursery rhyme Wee Willie Winkie.
There is also the grave of Marion Gilchrist, the first female medical graduate from the University of Glasgow in 1894. And Corlinda Lee, the Queen of the Gypsies, who is said to have read the fortune of Queen Victoria.
In 1980, the French film director Bertrand Tavernier set his movie Death Watch in Glasgow, with graphic scenes in the Necropolis as well as the Cathedral and City Chambers. It found little honour in this country at the time. It’s a chilling sci-fi tale set in a future where there is almost no death, but still grinding poverty. When Katherine (Romy Schneider) is diagnosed with an incurable illness she becomes a celebrity, and is offered a fortune if she allows her last days to be filmed and made into a reality TV show.
Without spoiling the plot, and it is not a joyful one, she runs away to Glasgow and is befriended by a young Harvey Keitel who, unknown to her, has had a surgical procedure which implants a camera and transmitters behind his eyes. The footage is, of course, being sent to the TV network. The film features many hand-held camera shots around the Necropolis and wider city, including the first Steadicam shots in the UK, and was much copied by other directors.
The late Harry Dean Stanton played the head of the TV network and Max von Sydow was also in the cast, as was the young Robbie Coltrane, then penniless, who got to drive around Glasgow in a Cadillac. His character, fairly obviously, was the “Limo Driver”.
Tavernier described the film as a declaration of love. “I was falling in love with Scotland,” as he put it. “I wanted a certain kind of urban destruction, an urban beauty. The tremendous beauty of some of those streets, the atmosphere: you had a feeling of what it had been like 20 years, 40 years, a century ago. It was a city of the working class, and that leaves scars, that leaves memories, which are very strong and it’s why I wanted to set the film there.”
The film was written for Schneider, who died of a heart attack in 1982, aged 43, just two years after the film came out. Addressing Stanton, she has the best line in the film, which crackles and resonates still today. “For you, everything is of importance and nothing matters.”
The two male leads, Keitel and Stanton, became well-kent in the fleshpots of Glasgow during the filming. The late Glasgow actor Freddie Boardley, who lived in Maryhill at the time, recalled: “I woke up in my flat with a raging hangover. Harry Dean Stanton was asleep on my sofa.”
It’s not known which, if any, sofa Pattinson graced, or even if he was in Glasgow for the filming. But one thing’s for sure: when the movie comes out visitors, by the bushel, on the trail of The Batman will be filing through the graves of Glasgow’s Necropolis under the unforgiving gaze of John Knox.
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