Necropolis: London & it's Dead (21 page)

Of course, Highgate Cemetery is also home to legions of the mundane people who, in the words of George Eliot, ‘rest in unvisited tombs’. John Galsworthy, who chronicled the fortunes of an upper-middle-class family in his
Forsyte
sequence, described a typical scene:

From that high and sacred field, where thousands of the upper middle classes lay in their last sleep, the eyes of the Forsytes travelled across the flocks of graves. There, spreading in the distance, lay London with no sun over it, mourning the loss of its daughter, mourning with this family, so dear, the loss of her who was mother and guardian. A hundred thousand spires and houses, blurred in the great grey web of property, lay there like prostrate worshippers before the grave of this, the oldest Forsyte of them all. Soon, perhaps, someone else would be wanting an inscription.
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Back in 1839, the London Cemetery Company had acquired 130 acres of land in south London from Richard Edmonds and William Warlters. Fifty-three acres were set aside for a cemetery, with a new road planned between Queen’s Road, Peckham, and Nunhead Lane. Located on a hill, 200 feet above sea level, the cemetery afforded magnificent views of London and the surrounding countryside. In those days, Nunhead was an Arcadian retreat; the name refers to the Nun’s Head Tavern, ‘favourite resort of smoke-dried London artisans’ which gives the district its name.
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Consecrated on 29 July 1840, the Cemetery of All Saints, Nunhead, featured cemetery lodges and gates designed by James Bunstone Bunning. Thomas Little (1802–59) won the design competition with his Gothic chapels (which were wrongly attributed to
Bunning by Pevsner). The Anglican Chapel was octagonal, with a short nave and transepts with a crypt beneath. Despite achieving ‘the balance of nature and architect’ that Loudon had advocated, with luxurious planting and the gradual addition of some fine tombs, Nunhead was slow to attract custom, perhaps as a result of its proximity to the South Metropolitan Cemetery at Norwood. Only nine burials were recorded at Nunhead in the first six months, and only one hundred and thirteen in the first full year, several of which were in communal graves. This dip in trade was much to the delight of George Collison, a founder of the rival Abney Park Cemetery. Collison had opposed the Act of Parliament that permitted the London Cemetery Company to operate more than one cemetery in the metropolitan area. But trade improved, and Nunhead Cemetery prospered for twenty-five years, with an average of two hundred burials a year.

Stephen Geary, whose vision contributed so much to the success of the London Cemetery Company, was just fifty-six when he died, in 1854, a victim of London’s final cholera epidemic. Of all the cemeteries he had been engaged on, including Nunhead, Brompton and Brighton, Geary chose to be buried at Highgate. And, like Highgate itself, Geary too became a victim of neglect. The relentless ivy engulfed many graves after the Second World War, his own included. It was only during conservation work, in the 1970s, that Geary’s flattened tombstone was recovered. When the dirt had been scraped away, it revealed the inscription:
STEPHEN GEARY ESQRE
,
ARCHITECT AND FOUNDER OF THIS CEMETERY
,
HAD DEPARTED THIS LIFE IN
1854.

8: GREAT GARDENS OF SLEEP

Death Moves to the Suburbs

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Stephen Geary’s demise was merciful: he did not live to witness the scandal which threatened to engulf the London Cemetery Company. On 5 July 1865, Edward Buxton, Secretary and Registrar of the London Cemetery Company, collapsed and died. Described as ‘respected and trusted’, the forty-nine-year-old Buxton had complained of feeling unwell earlier in the day, when he attended a
Board meeting. A few days later, the clerk at the London Cemetery Company’s head office in the City of London discovered a set of ledgers in Buxton’s office. Under careful scrutiny, it was established that Buxton had systematically embezzled the company over a period of many years. The late secretary had kept two sets of books, and those placed on the table at Board meetings were bogus.

The Chairman and directors called in their solicitors and accountants. Buxton’s Will, bequeathing his estate to his wife and child, was found to be invalid. Mrs Buxton was left destitute as a result of her husband’s dishonesty. The distraught widow was persuaded to abandon any claim she might have had on the estate, and eventually settled for a meagre payment from the Board: one pound a week for ten years.
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With cemeteries established in north and south London, speculators soon saw the importance of similar enterprises in the East End. Abney Park, Stoke Newington, was founded in 1840 by the Abney Park Cemetery Company (which later constructed Chingford Mount, Greenford Park and Hendon Park) on land donated by Lady Abney, a celebrated philanthropist. The Abney Park Cemetery Company headquarters were accommodated in magnificent Egyptian lodges at the entrance on Stoke Newington High Street, featuring hieroglyphs reading
THE GATES OF THE ABODE OF THE MORTAL PART OF MAN
.

Designed by William Hosking (1800–61) a professor of architecture and engineering, who was buried at Highgate, it covered thirty-two acres and was designed as an arboretum (literally, ‘tree garden’) as well as a burial ground, true to the spirit of Loudon’s ‘breathing spaces’. At its zenith, Abney Park fulfilled its brief as the lungs of London, eclipsing Kew Gardens with over 2,500 varieties of shrubs and trees, and over 1,000 species of rose bushes, laid out on a north-facing slope from an ancient track, now Stoke Newington Church Street, to Hackney Brook, later diverted into an underground sewer by Joseph Bazalgette.

Abney Park had another dimension: situated in one of the most
militant parts of London, it was not consecrated, drawing a clientèle from the growing ranks of the Dissenters and radicals who demanded another form of burial ground, now that Bunhill Fields was filling up.

Instead of being consecrated, Abney Park Cemetery was opened by the Lord Mayor of London on 20 May 1840. As a result, it attracted burials from all denominations and was particularly popular with Dissenters from the Anglican Church, including Methodists, Wesleyans and Baptists. Dr Isaac Watts, a famous preacher and a friend of Lord and Lady Abney, who was actually buried in Bunhill Fields, had a memorial there, near a ‘large and venerable oak’ where he liked to lie in the grass and compose his well-known hymns.

Lady Abney was very liberal in her religious views, and the cemetery is, with its church, open to all alike, and though its grounds were never consecrated, yet many rigid churchmen have been buried in it. There is no quieter burial spot within a dozen miles of London in any direction, and there are Cedars of Lebanon in it, wide lawns, and beautiful flowers. There is an old clergyman in the church, who is always ready to officiate for a small fee on funeral occasions. He is over eighty years old, his hair is like the snow, and he is a fit companion to such a solemn place.
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Mrs Isabella Holmes, our famous Victorian historian, observed that ‘If the mantle of Bunhill Fields has fallen anywhere, I suppose that Abney Park Cemetery claims the distinction. It has always been the favourite cemetery of the Dissenters, there being no separating line to mark off a consecrated portion.’
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Abney Park also addressed another important issue: where to bury the poor once the inner-city grounds were closed in 1852. In the 1860s, lower-middle-class families and above formed 20 per cent of the population, and the families of skilled workers 10 per cent, leaving the unskilled labouring classes and the labouring poor, the
agrarian and urban proletariat, to make up 70 per cent of the British people. According to the late Chris Brooks, an expert on Victorian cemeteries, the trustees of Abney Park Cemetery resisted the imposition of Anglican burial fees to mitigate the usually prohibitive costs of cemetery interment for working-class families.
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The company’s prospectus stated quite specifically that its object was to provide a cemetery which not only was available to all denominations, but ‘which shall be open to all classes of the community’. Abney Park was successful in attracting labouring-class burials, which took place in common graves between the perimeter paths and the boundary walls–‘All decent enough,’ remarks Brooks, ‘even if firmly demarcated from the bodies of the better off.’

The penultimate great London cemetery of this era, Tower Hamlets, was consecrated in 1841, enabled by an Act which permitted the City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery Company ‘to acquire land for the burial of the dead in St Dunstan, Stepney, and St Leonard, Bromley-by-Bow’. The Board included John Hammack, Chairman, surveyor and a local timber merchant, and Sir John Pirie, the Lord Mayor of London at that time. The company’s capital was limited by the 1841 Act to £20,000 divided into £10 shares, and it soon earned a handsome interest. The first burial was conducted on 4 September 1841. Over 500 burials were recorded in 1845, and by 1889, approximately 250,000 people had been buried there, the majority interred in common graves at 25s each,
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with ‘excellent financial returns derived from a policy of filling common graves as full as possible and packing them together as densely as possible’.
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The chapels, designed in 1848 by Thomas Wyatt and David Brandon, were:

in the early decorated period, with a belfry at one angle in which are some nicely ornamental windows; and at the sides are
attached cloisters for the reception of mural tablets, so constructed as to afford an effectual screen from the weather. The octagonal Dissenters’ Chapel is in the Byzantine style…beneath both chapels are dry and extensive catacombs.
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Famous residents included Charles Jamrach (1815–91), a well-known East End personality who imported exotic animals–his shop on the Ratcliff Highway (now The Highway running from the Tower to Limehouse) was much like a zoo. He survived an encounter with an escaped tiger in 1857, and on another occasion a brown bear escaped and was later found being fed bread and honey by two small girls. Also buried at Tower Hamlets was Hannah Purcell (died 1843), described on her obelisk as ‘relict of one of the last surviving officers of the Mutiny of the Bounty’, and Alfred Linnell, a Socialist campaigner. Linnell was attending a demonstration by the Law and Liberty League on Sunday, 20 November 1887–a protest against Government proposals to restrain free speech–when he was trampled by a police horse. Linnell died of his injuries a fortnight later, and received a massive funeral, organized by noted radicals Annie Besant and William Morris. Over 100,000 people followed his funeral procession, which stretched from Whitechapel to the cemetery.

Death was not always a successful source of investment. In one case, the sheer expense of construction brought a private cemetery to the brink of bankruptcy, from which it had to be rescued by the Government. This cemetery, which, according to historian James Stevens Curl, effectively destroyed one architect’s career, was Brompton. Consecrated on 15 June 1840, Brompton Cemetery was created by the West of London and Westminster Cemetery Company. It was opened as The West of London and Westminster Cemetery and still bears this inscription over the north entrance. Brompton covered just under thirty-nine acres of land between Brompton Road and Fulham Road in West London, on land
purchased from Lord Kensington. The land had previously been a market garden and consisted of nothing more than a flat, treeless rectangle, half a mile long.

Stephen Geary was appointed architect on 20 July 1837. Geary’s duties were the carrying out of all works ordered by the Board, his remuneration being 2½ per cent on work completed. Competitions were held for the best walls, chapels, catacombs and buildings, with one hundred guineas (£105) for the best design, fifty (£52.50) for the second and twenty-five (£26.25) for the third.

Benjamin Baud (1807–75), a pupil of Francis Goodwin, won First Prize for an imaginative design which exploited the linear nature of the site. Baud’s design was that of an immense open-air cathedral with a central ‘nave’ running up to a high altar, symbolized by the domed Anglican Chapel. Other features included colonnades flanking the central avenue, and a Great Circle, beneath which were catacombs with impressive cast-iron doors. Baud’s original plan was to have two ‘transepts’ on either side of the 300-foot Great Circle, inspired by the piazza of St Peter’s, Rome. These transepts would have been formed by two additional chapels, one for Roman Catholics and one for Dissenters. The imposing North Gatehouse on Old Brompton Road was built to look like a triumphal arch and represents the ‘great west door’ of Baud’s cathedral-inspired design. The cemetery’s layout was completely symmetrical, with two pairs of ‘aisles’ running parallel to the central ‘nave’, which was to be planted with lime trees, backed with a taller line of pines.

Baud, who had worked on the Houses of Parliament, was assistant to Sir Jeffry Wyatville at Windsor Castle. As Wyatville headed the Committee of Taste which judged the Brompton competition, there was some speculation that he influenced the judges’ decision. It was also suggested that it was inappropriate of Wyatville to have picked his own assistant as the winner!

John Claudius Loudon acted as a consultant and David Ramsay, who had already worked with Geary at Highgate, was appointed
landscape gardener on 5 December 1837. Ramsay had a nursery business in Brompton and supplied plants and materials. Problems began to emerge before the cemetery had even opened. Stephen Geary resigned on 7 January 1839, already preoccupied with Highgate, and demanded payment for the contribution he had made to Brompton. At this, the Board claimed his calculations as to the size of the cemetery were inaccurate. Geary’s solicitors demanded £498 4s, but the Board were only prepared to offer £100. Geary rejected this, and took the Board to court for £499, eventually being awarded £162 after considerable wrangling.