The Academy’s Matthew Flinders Medal and Lecture recognises scientific research of the highest standing in the physical sciences and honours the contributions of Australia’s early scientific researchers.
Captain Matthew Flinders was the first person to circumnavigate Australia in 1803 and gave Australia its name.
More than 100 places and landmarks are now named after Flinders including the Flinders Ranges, Flinders Street Railway station, Flinders Island and Flinders River.
Earlier this year 2021 medal awardee and former Academy President Professor Andrew Holmes AC travelled to Donington village in Lincolnshire, England, with his wife Jenny.
There, they witnessed the reinterment of Matthew Flinders’ remains at his birthplace. The remains were discovered beneath London’s Euston train station in 2019, 205 years after Flinders’ death.
This is their account of the historic ceremony.
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It was a grey overcast day as we set off with our Cambridge friend on the approximately one-and-a-half-hour drive from Cambridge to the village of Donington in Lincolnshire.
The purpose of our visit was to attend the reinterment service of the mortal remains of Matthew Flinders in a crypt in the village Church of St Mary and the Holy Rood in Donington, near Spalding, where he was baptised, and where many members of his family are buried.
Flinders left the village to join the British Royal Navy when he was 15. His talent as a cartographer was spotted whilst he was sailing to Tahiti on the breadfruit expedition with William Bligh! Ten years after enlisting he was appointed Commander of the HMS Investigator and in July1801 sailed to what the Europeans called ‘Terra Australis’ to begin a careful and comprehensive survey of the coast.
On his second journey, he completed the circumnavigation of the continent, established that Tasmania was a separate island, named the country Australia (much to the chagrin of Joseph Banks, who perhaps for this reason abandoned support for him) and created maps of the coastline that are valued to this day for their accuracy.
There were adventures (one involving a shipwreck off the coast of Queensland and a long journey in an open rowing boat back to Port Jackson to secure help), but finally in December1803 he was returning to London when he put his small, unseaworthy ship (HMS Cumberland) into port at Ile de France (now Mauritius), being quite unaware that England was again at war with France.
The French Governor promptly imprisoned Flinders, and his incarceration ended only after six-and –a-half long years of negotiations on his behalf. He returned to London in poor health, surviving just long enough to have his bound journal, A Voyage to Terra Australis, placed on his deathbed in 1814.
His funeral service was held at the church St James’s Piccadilly, with a a burial ground in Camden, close to what became Euston Station. During an expansion of Euston station westward in the 1840s, the identities of up to 40,000 graves were lost in perpetuity.
His daughter, Anne Petrie recalled:
“Many years afterwards, my aunt Tyler went to look for his grave, but found the churchyard remodelled, and quantities of tombstones and graves with their contents had been carted away as rubbish, among them that of my unfortunate father, thus pursued by disaster after death as in life” [1]. It transpired that Flinders had in fact been buried in an area untouched by Euston’s expansion, but unfortunately there was no headstone marking the grave.
Some two hundred years later, in January 2019, an exciting discovery was made. During the construction of a new platform for the HS2 railway, in the vicinity of Euston Station, the excavations were closely monitored by archaeologists who wanted to take advantage of “an extraordinary opportunity to study contemporary life and death in London” from an earlier era.
Led by Robert Hartle, the archaeologists made use of the City of Westminster Archives to locate plot 2 J 70 (second ground, lot J, number 70) as the site of Flinders’ grave. They kept a very close watch on excavations in that area and their vigilance was rewarded when a breastplate was revealed bearing the name Captain Matthew Flinders RN.
As a captain in the Royal Navy, Flinders had been entitled to a lead breastplate that then stood the test of time for over 200 years. Hartle set about building a new coffin with his own hands for the reinterment ceremony in Donington, and the full story is recounted (with excellent photographs) in his article on the web [2].
As one of the archaeologists remarked, it was an honour to be following in the footsteps of Flinders’ grandson, the Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, credited as being the ‘father of modern archaeology’.
Donington was the birthplace of Matthew Flinders and following the discovery of his remains in London, the citizens of Donington rallied. A committee was formed headed by a redoubtable lady called Jane Pearson, and work began on the campaign to bring him home!
One of the unexpected consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic was that it gave the team time to raise significantly more funds to hold an even grander ceremony. On Saturday 13 July 2024 in the village church, that is exactly what happened. We went, expecting to find the proceedings interesting, but what we found went far deeper—it was a highly moving ceremony.
Although it was a grey day, the village of Donington was anything but grey!
Australian flags and Union flags were everywhere—bunting lined the streets, and a craft market sporting several kangaroos filled the market square, guarded as ever by a statue of Flinders and his little cat, Trim. If you’ve not read the story Flinders wrote about his cat Trim whilst a prisoner of the French, we recommend it wholeheartedly.
Every local man, woman and child seemed to be out, on car parking duty or nudging strangers from far afield towards the church, pointing out landmarks like his birthplace or selling postcards to support the event!
The air hummed with festivity and goodwill. The church was full. There were lots of Australians (South Australia was represented by their Governor, the Hon Frances Adamson) and all around were men in suits, women in hats, brass and braid glinting everywhere.
South Australia was fortunate to receive the gift of the original lead breastplate from the Flinders family.
Special music, a gun salute, the Bishop of Lincoln in all his finery and, unforgettably, young naval ensigns, solemn faced, marching slowly as they carried the coffin into the nave, then later lowered it into the prepared burial vault.
If you are interested in watching the service, you can do so on YouTube [3]. We suggest you fast forward to here which is just before the naval pallbearers enter the church. That moment took many of us by surprise; it was incredibly moving. But so was most of the service [4].
After the service we wandered around the church—like so many English village churches, it was filled with fascinating displays—before joining the great and the good outside for afternoon tea, South Australian wine, general mingling and a few speeches. Three great granddaughters of Flinders Petrie were present and a great grandson, John Flinders, read a poem that began, “I saw the name Flinders when I was in Australia/ It was a street in Melbourne …”
As Peter Fitzsimons noted in his article in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled, A Hero’s Welcome for Flinders, Two Centuries Too Late, it was strange that neither the Minister for Defence, the Hon Richard Marles, nor the Australian High Commissioner, the Hon Stephen Smith, both of whom were in the UK at the time, were present at the ceremony.
Finally, on Sunday 14 July, after viewing the Magna Carta in Lincoln Castle, we went next door to Lincoln Cathedral, for an evensong service specially dedicated to the guests from the previous day.
It too was a very special experience, followed by delicious home-baked treats and wine which we enjoyed in the cathedral cloisters. We had opportunities on both days to meet Flinders family members, local supporters of the ‘Bring Him Home’ campaign, learn from Robert Hartle about that thrilling moment of discovery, and reflect on the life of a most remarkable man.
References
© 2024 Australian Academy of Science
