Ann Treneman - Finding the Plot: 100 Graves to Visit Before You Die

I know what you are thinking. You want to know, as did almost everyone else who I have told about this book, how I got the idea for it and how I picked the graves. So first, the idea. In my day job, when Im not running around cemeteries, I am the political sketchwriter for The Times and, just before the 2010 election, I was chatting to an MP named Tony Wright who is, unlike some politicians, one of the good guys. He was standing down as Labour MP for Cannock Chase and we started talking about Birmingham. Did he know, I asked, that the inventor of the phenomenally successful board game Cluedo had lived in Bromsgrove? I had done a story on the man, with the marvellous name of Anthony E. Pratt, and had tracked down his grave which, at the time, also seemed under threat from the Brum mole population. Ah, said Tony, thats interesting; I dont think anyone has ever written a book about the best graves in Britain.

Hmmm, I said, well maybe that would be fun.

It is now almost four years later and, though its been fun, its also involved a lot of what I call graving (not to be confused with gravy, by the way), which I think should be a new verb.

So how did I choose them? The first was easy. That was Cluedo inventor Mr Pratt. So then, only ninety-nine to go. I learned, pretty quickly, that there actually had been many books published on famous graves, though none in this format. I talked to just about everyone I met about their favourite graves (I am sure you can see how popular I was making myself). Plus there were my personal quirks and favourites. I also looked through books and, feeling a bit like some sort of intrepid Victorian explorer, made my way through the extraordinary database of 4,500 British graves listed by the website Find A Grave. These were my basic rules for choosing:

• The list had to be eclectic and everyone on it had to be interesting. I mustnt let my personal obsessions intrude too much though readers will be able to discern some obvious ones (step forward James Bond).
• I had to include iconic, historical and architectural graves. So I had one for the Beatles (Eleanor Rigby) and the great plague (the Hancock family in Eyam). There are also graves that I chose purely for what they looked like, but I soon found that people with interesting graves were exactly that themselves.
• They couldnt be too depressing or upsetting. I put very few recent graves in my list and I thought long and hard about those that I did. For instance, I figure that Philip Gould, the political strategist who died in 2011 and wrote a book about his experience of dying, would actually want to be on the list. I was also wary of murder victims. This book is about lives, not deaths.
• The graves had to be accessible, if only for a few days a year. This ruled out the likes of the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore, which has been closed for years but, as a way of doing Queen Victoria, I did the grave of her servant (and who knows what else), John Brown.