John Renie's puzzling headstone

To cheer up a pandemic Christmas I got 536 Puzzles and Curious Problems by Henry Dudeney.

Henry was addicted to puzzles of all kinds. In the early twentieth century he was a prolific creator and publisher, and maths puzzles were his speciality. He was working long before calculators were invented, and the sophistication and challenge in his puzzles are astonishing. I came across him 50 years ago, and his puzzles have given me a lot of fun. (I know. Geek alert.)

I was intrigued by an odd puzzle which Henry had found. It concerned a gravestone in St Mary’s church, Monmouth. The stone looks rather like a word-search, and starting from the middle, is entirely made up of the phrase ‘Here lies John Renie’, repeated in every direction.

John Renie died aged 33 in 1832, and nobody knows why his gravestone is in this form. There are lots of theories, of course, but they are just that: theories.

Having read the puzzle, I had to see if the gravestone was still visible, and it is: 

This is the relevant part of it, and Dudeney’s challenge was to figure out how many different ways you can track through the phrase, moving for letter to letter. So how many do you think ? (Answer later.)

This is a very unusual memorial, and possibly unique.

The lower part of the stone tells us a little more about John Renie’s family:

 

 

His wife, Sarah, and his elder son James were both buried in London where they lived and worked. John ands his younger son died in Monmouth. In 1822, the year before his son’s death, John Renie was living in Monnow Street, Monmouth, and was listed in the town directory as a painter. He may have been a house painter, though at his son’s marriage he was described as a ‘gentleman’, a man whose rank mattered more than his profession.

We don’t know what the cause of his early death was, but in the early 1800s, a quarter of deaths were from tuberculosis, with John Keats being a famous, and similarly young, victim, in 1821.

James, the elder son, was a landholder and merchant in London, and later superintendent of the London City Mission, founded in 1835 to provide support and education for poor families.

So how many times can you read ‘Here Lies John Renie ‘ ? Let Henry Dudeney explain in his own words:

 45 760, or, if diagonal readings are allowed, 91 520

 Amazing, yes ? Henry was, annoyingly, usually right.

But he erred in one respect. He says that the stone gives John’s age as 32 at death. It doesn’t. It makes me think that perhaps Henry did not see the stone itself, but relied on a transcription.