Necropolis: London & it's Dead (22 page)

On 19 February 1839, Baud was appointed architect–but his designs were changed, building specifications altered, and Isaac Finnemore, another landscape gardener working on the project, resigned. There was also an argument between Baud and the builder, Philip Nowell, with the Board taking Nowell’s side. Inevitably, building work was not completed in time for the consecration the following June, and ‘a disorderly appearance, caused by the fact that the building work was being carried out in bits and pieces, discouraged the public from making use of the cemetery’. Baud had difficulty completing his scheme, and the proposed Roman Catholic and Dissenters’ Chapels were never built.

In addition, Baud himself was becoming a victim of the Board’s financial mis-management, as it could not afford to pay him. Eventually, Baud was sacked, only to suffer litigation from which he never recovered. Turning his back on architecture, Baud had some success as an artist, but at considerable loss to Victorian design.

Despite its financial problems, Brompton flourished, becoming the last resting-place of Emmeline Pankhurst, the prominent Suffragette, and Dr John Snow, who, by ascertaining the cause of cholera, had brought to an end the ‘bitter strange kiss’ of epidemics that had choked London’s graveyards.

In 1852, Brompton became the first cemetery to be nationalized, when the Board of Health made it the subject of a Compulsory Purchase Order. The shareholders demanded £169,000 for the
cemetery, but were only offered £41,000. Only after the matter went to arbitration did they receive a meagre £75,000. The Compulsory Purchase Order represented the Government’s change in approach to burial. Ten years after Chadwick and Walker had appeared before the Select Committee of 1842, legislation had finally been passed to close the London burial grounds. One consequence of this was that Parliament was debating whether it was appropriate for cemeteries to be run by private companies. Sir Edwin Chadwick had always been opposed to the idea. He campaigned for municipal cemeteries and proposed a National Cemetery at Abbey Wood, to be run by the Government. The British public had developed a suspicion of ‘investors in death’ and the mood was one of further reform.

MacKinnon’s Select Committee of 1842 had simply suggested that burial in towns should be banned, and that municipalities be empowered to set up cemeteries on the outskirts. Chadwick went one better. He wanted all cemeteries to be municipalized and all ‘trading cemeteries’ or private burial grounds abolished. Noting the frequency of child murders, he required the certification of death to be improved, with new legislation enforced, meaning doctors had to state the cause of death before burial could take place (a step which was later incorporated in the 1848 Public Health Bill).

Ultimately, it was Chadwick who rang the death toll for private cemetery companies. He proposed the Metropolitan Interments Act(1850), a scheme whereby funerals would be made a public service, interments in churchyards and burial grounds would cease, and the joint stock companies be closed down. With characteristic reforming zeal, Chadwick recommended nationalizing Kensal Green, turning it into the ‘Great Western National Cemetery’, while a ‘Great Eastern Cemetery’ would be founded on the other side of London at Abbey Wood. Ninety-six coffins a day would be floated down the Thames from eight depots or ‘reception houses’ in London, much as corpses were ferried from Venice to the island cemetery of San Michele.

Chadwick’s extraordinary design for Abbey Wood included a stained-glass dome, encaustic tiles and a glazed section for wet weather.
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However, this scheme was unsuccessful. The Treasury did not consider it financially viable, and it was also rejected on the grounds of miasma, the noxious fumes which Chadwick himself believed caused disease. Convinced that twelve-thirteenths of a decomposed corpse passed into the air, the authorities were aghast at the prospect of 62,000 decomposing corpses annually blowing over 3 million cubic feet of putrescent gases back towards London. If a national cemetery were to exist, it was calculated that it must be at least twenty-four miles away.

With the inner-city graveyards closed, London had again run out of space to bury its dead. Ingenious solutions such as Willson’s Pyramid at Primrose Hill had been snubbed, although Sir Francis Seymour Haden FRCS (1818–1910) proposed using corpses as landfill for the Thames Estuary. Observing that the ground level of city churchyards had risen over the years due to the practice of interring bodies one on top of the other, he mused:

Is there no ground in the immediate neighbourhood of our own city that would be the better for this increase and for being thus raised? Along the course of our great river from London to the sea, for instance, have we not vast lowland tracts of rich alluvial soil deposited by that very river and capable of being drained, planted and beautified, in which, with equal benefit to the land and to ourselves, we may bury our dead for centuries? If, as we have seen, the surface of the Holborn Burial-ground was raised fifteen feet or eighteen feet by the interments within it of three centuries, why should not the lowlands of Kent and Essex be raised and reclaimed in the same way?
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To Haden’s surprise, his body-farming scheme never caught on. But by suggesting burial further away from London, he anticipated a trend. It was generally agreed that out-of-town burial was the
safest, most hygienic method of disposing of the dead. The suburban cemeteries of Highgate, West Norwood, Brompton and Kensal Green already conformed to this recommendation. But London was growing, spreading. Street after street of tall narrow brick houses climbed the high hills of Hampstead and Highgate, and sprawled outwards through Battersea and Clapham. The sheep were long gone from Kensal Green.

Burial grounds had to be further afield. The solution to this conundrum came from another great Victorian development: the railway. The time had come for Londoners to go to their last home far from the city itself–twenty-five miles away, to be precise, on the desolate heaths of Surrey. Chadwick’s vision of a national cemetery was eventually to be realized, in 1849, in the form of the Brookwood Necropolis at Woking. The last great London cemetery was not in London at all, but it had a vital part to play in the disposal of the city’s dead. The
Illustrated London News
approved:

To enjoy these beauties there needs to be the golden sunlight of the spring or summer day. We leave the dense city, and reach the open country with the speed of the winds. We pass villages, and cottages, and farms, fields, and open tracts of country; we see in the distance woods and heathery uplands. If it be summer, rivulet and little river and sedgy pool lie silvered in the sunlight, and wild flowers waft to us their scent from hedgerow banks, from fields, from blossoming heaths. By-and-by, the scene becomes wilder and more solitary. The dun heath reaches us on either hand, and we seem, whether so or not, to toll up a rugged ascent, to break speed, make pauses; and then on, on our difficult way. This sense of ascent adds inconceivably to the coming effect. In an instant the funeral train is unlinked from the giant power which led it on, and glides gently down into the undulating plain, which has thus been made one of the great burial-places of mighty London.

The whole scene is most varied and extensive, though a
succession of encircling hills bound this extent, and lend the charm of peacefulness and solitude. To the west and south these hills are very striking. Those towards Hampshire lie as we can see, amidst wild and solitary heaths, and bear to their summits traces of rugged nature; while those to the south are fringed by woodlands, and softened, to some degree, by cultivation.
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How different this cemetery seemed from the overcrowded London graveyards it was designed to replace. At over 2,000 acres, Brookwood in Surrey was truly a ‘City of the Dead’, a mirror of the metropolis, designed to provide a last home for every Londoner. A desolate heath transformed into a great garden of sleep, Brookwood Cemetery was modelled on Mount Auburn. Even today, nearly 150 years after its construction, and after vandalism and neglect have taken their toll, Brookwood epitomizes Loudon’s ideals. Laid out and planted by Robert Donald (1826–66), an admirer of Loudon, Brookwood is spacious, with decorous gaps between each grave and mausoleum. Pines tower 60 feet high; there are magnificent sequoias, slim birches and dense monkey puzzles. Carpets of beech mast and pine needles soften footfalls, but any movement sends skeletal twigs skittering eerily between the tombs.

In 1849, Sir Richard Broun and Mr Richard Sprye produced plans for the London Necropolis at Woking, in Surrey. It is difficult to imagine now, but in the 1840s, today’s commuter-belt was open country. Far from London, but easily reached by train, the Necropolis would be on a cheap, greenfield site, with plenty of room for expansion. ‘Devoted to the Continental usage of giving to each corpse a separate grave’, making it the most beautiful garden in the world.

Featuring a National Mausoleum Church, and catering for every sect, the Necropolis would provide burial space for all London’s parishes, and be large enough to contain ‘not only the thousands of coffins now lying within our numerous Metropolitan Churches, but also the coffins of all such dying in London, in this and future
generations’. This was an ambitious plan. In 1856, it was calculated that 1,200 acres would serve London (assuming a death rate of 60,000 per year) for ever. This worked on the principle of one body per grave, with the grave being reopened every ten years.
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Brookwood’s tranquil setting belies the acrimonious takeover battles involved in setting up the company. The vision was not realized without great cost, and those who suffered most were the originators of the scheme, as John Clarke has described in his excellent history. Broun and Sprye did not reap the benefits of their proposal. They set up a provisional company with four trustees. Under ‘a deed of agreement’ they were due at least £20,000 for their scheme. But the trustees brought in their own men, negotiated with Lord Onslow for the acquisition of 2,200 acres of land on Woking Common, of which 500 acres were used for the Necropolis, and negotiated with the London South West Railway–then set up their own joint stock company, cutting Broun and Sprye out completely! Broun eventually confronted the promoters in public and claimed that their prospectus was full of inaccuracies and misrepresentations.
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When the Bill to incorporate the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company was introduced in 1852, Broun and Sprye opposed it on the grounds that their rights had been ignored and that the Bill was inconsistent with the original scheme. They raised these issues:

Clause XI of the Bill allowed the LNC to sell surplus land. MP for West Surrey Henry Drummond claimed this was ‘a fraud on the public’, as the company would buy up land in Woking then sell it off to building companies.

Broun and Sprye objected to the amount of compensation offered to the commoners of Woking in return for losing their turbary rights (turbary is the legal right to cut peat or turf for fuel from common land). They reckoned £1,000 was enough, but in fact the LNC was willing to give £22,000–in the end it was £15,000. Henry Drummond felt that local people were insufficiently consulted
about the prospect of having an enormous cemetery on their doorstep, while MP for Guildford, James Mangles, opposed it outright, as he felt that the people of Woking were losing every acre of common land. Lacking in clout, local residents had no means to fight the Bill. Broun and Sprye also maintained that the high railway fares cited in the Bill, plus fees for clergy, would add £47,000 to the funeral expenses of Londoners buried at Brookwood.

Their petition failed. For one thing, the right to sell off land if demand was lesser than anticipated was a standard clause for many railway companies. And company architect Henry Robert Abraham had prepared detailed plans of the whole site as a burial ground which were enough to satisfy the Parliamentary Select Committee. A clause was inserted, however, to forbid the selling of land for building purposes–ostensibly to avoid the poor losing their cottages and becoming homeless–and the railway fares stayed low. The LSWR anticipated £40,000 a year from the extra traffic–10,000 bodies a year, plus mourners and visitors, on two or three trains in each direction, each day. With regard to clergy fees (required by the Cemetery Clauses Act), these were suggested at 6s 2d–or a single shilling in the case of pauper burials, which was lower than in many parts of London; this was a way of getting the clergy behind the Bill.

The Bill had its third reading in the Commons on 21 May 1852, partly because it offered a solution to the pressing problem of burial by creating a cemetery outside the metropolitan area. Henry Drummond MP was eventually satisfied with a clause protecting commoners’ rights.

Sir Edwin Chadwick opposed the Bill, objecting that the scheme was the invention of ‘vulgar projectors and a vulgar architect, a building speculation disguised as a public measure, which included amongst its proposals pit burial for paupers, the use of railway arches as mortuaries, and the transport of corpses in the common horse-boxes of the railway’. Chadwick also suggested that the Necropolis Bill was receiving favourable treatment because the
Solicitor General was involved in the project, ‘his brother-in-law, Mr Abrahams, being the architect’.
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When the Bill reached the House of Lords, it was sympathetically received, again because it offered a solution to the problem of burial. There was just one objection, from Lord Ashley, who found in it further evidence of private speculation in the burial of the dead. His main objection was the storage of thousands of corpses near Waterloo Station, close to housing, before they were transported to Woking. He also demanded to know what would happen if there were not enough burials to meet the expense of setting up the new cemetery.