Necropolis: London & it's Dead (23 page)

The LNC’s private Act received Royal Assent on 30 June 1852, incorporating the company and outlining requirements for setting up the cemetery. But it was to be another eighteen months before it progressed. Twenty thousand pounds worth of shareholders’ money was ‘squandered’ (according to Broun). Time was lost; public confidence failed; the architect’s surveys turned out to be all wrong, and had to be done again. Rumours and suggestions abounded of double-dealing and rigged voting among shareholders. Eventually, angry shareholders rebelled and, in July 1853, a committee of enquiry was set up to enquire how far the directors had fulfilled their duties; to ascertain the present state of the company and its future prospects; and to decide whether an entire change of the executive body was necessary. These proceedings installed a new spirit of confidence. A list of shareholders was drawn up and twelve new directors appointed. The surveys recommenced, this time in the capable hands of LNC’s consulting engineer, Sir William Cubitt (1785–1861), who set out to ring-fence the land and consult with the LSWR on the best connections for the existing railway line while taking into account the nearby road connections with Guildford and Pirbright.

By 1854, the company had leased land from the London South Western Railway near Westminster Bridge Road for the site of the private station, despite objections from local residents who were not best pleased at living next to a station for the dead. Adjacent to
LSWR’s viaduct into Waterloo Station, this was designed by William Tite and William Cubitt, at a cost of £23,231 14s 4d.

In Woking, the LNC acquired 2,200 acres of land from Lord Onslow, and set about transforming 500 acres with an ambitious programme of landscaping and planning. The chapels were designed by Smirke, the Anglican Chapel being Tudor-style, with a small tower and spire, loop windows, open pointed roofs, and a Gothic pulpit. The floors were paved with blue and red Staffordshire tiles, which resembled a tessellated pavement.
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The London Necropolis opened on 13 November 1854. It was an ambitious project, since George Stephenson had only launched the first passenger train service in 1830. The first through train from Waterloo to Southampton did not take place until 1838, only six years before the London Necropolis Company opened its private station at Waterloo. There was considerable doubt as to whether the noise and clamour of a railway station was appropriate to Christian burial.

The LSWR carried coffins from the private station down the main line. There were separate hearse cars for Anglicans and Dissenters, and, in keeping with Victorian notions of social propriety, three classes of carriage for the living and the dead. A First Class corpse received a higher level of customer care and a nicely decorated carriage. Trains ran straight into the cemetery grounds. There were two stations, each for different parts of the cemetery, North for Dissenters and South for Anglicans, adjacent to the corresponding chapels. The South Station was licensed and in addition to catering for funeral parties, offered afternoon tea to visitors strolling in the cemetery; it also operated as a pub, which did much to reconcile the locals to the giant cemetery on their doorstep. Porters and their families lived here, with the porter’s wife catering for upwards of 100 mourners, with tea, coffee, homemade sandwiches and cakes.
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Brookwood received the dead from overcrowded London parishes, in a series of subdivisions, many of which resemble old-fashioned churchyards with their hedges and lych-gates. St Anne’s,
Soho; Bermondsey; Chiswick; St Margaret’s, Westminster–all have cemeteries within a cemetery. Brookwood had fulfilled its promise to play a major part in alleviating the burial problem in the metropolis. Another part of its remit was to provide a home for members of different faiths. As well as accommodating Anglicans and Dissenters, Brookwood was one of the first cemeteries in Britain to offer burial facilities to Muslims and Sikhs. By contrast, London’s Jewish community had long established their own burial grounds.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish cemeteries were in an enviable condition compared with those of the churchyards. As a result of Judaic law, they were never overcrowded. The law states that burial must take place within twenty-four hours of death, that the body must be six feet from the surface, and that only one body is allowed in each grave. It is forbidden to place one coffin on top of another.

In the Middle Ages, English Jews had only been allowed one burial ground, known as the Jew’s Garden, outside London Wall near Cripplegate. When the Jews were expelled from England in 1290, the land passed to the Dean of St Paul’s. Milton lived there while writing
Paradise Lost.
The location’s origins lived on its name, Jewin Street, until it was destroyed in the Blitz.

At the time that Brookwood was being established, there were a number of Jewish cemeteries across London, from Brady Street, Bethnal Green–wherein lie the remains of Nathan Mayer de Rothschild, founder of the great banking house–to Willesden, West Ham and Fulham. West Ham Cemetery is dominated by the magnificent Rothschild Mausoleum, built by the grieving Ferdinand for his wife Evelina, who died in childbirth less than a year after their marriage in 1865. Many of the inner-city graveyards, such as the one at Fulham, have been closed for over a century, and are tucked away behind shops and offices. These little graveyards have kept their secrets, Jewish law ensuring that they remain undisturbed.

At sixteen and a half acres, the Jewish Cemetery at Hoop Lane near Golders Green (the only Sephardic cemetery now left in London), was the largest of London’s Jewish cemeteries when it was built in 1895. The Lombardic redbrick architecture complements that of Golders Green Crematorium, opposite. Sephardic Jews (Jews of Mediterranean origin who arrived in England in the seventeenth century) place their gravestones flat, a tradition dating from the days when Sephardic cemeteries were often in swampy ground. It is not customary to plant flowers or foliage in Sephardic cemeteries, which lends a certain stark grandeur, particularly on a bleak winter’s morning. Ultimately, this reflects a different attitude towards death and burial. According to Jewish law, burial takes place in a plain, unadorned coffin, whether one is a Rothschild or a pauper.
THE BODY RETURNS TO THE EARTH
,
AND THE SOUL TO GOD WHO GAVE IT
is a regular Hebrew inscription at the entrance to many Jewish cemeteries.

The Quakers, or the Society of Friends, also made a conscious effort to protect their dead. Reporting to a Parliamentary Committee on the standard of their burial grounds in 1843, the Quakers maintained that they still had plenty of room in their graveyards, and that their coffins were buried at least seven feet below the surface. In keeping with their religious principles, the Quakers maintained their own burial grounds, rather than allowing them to become commercial enterprises. The Quakers stood apart from the Victorian funeral tradition in other ways. In many cases, they dispensed with tombstones altogether; and when they did allow this custom, the stones were small, regular, and half the size of conventional ones; and bereaved families were discouraged from wearing mourning.
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With the exception of Bunhill Fields, Dissenters’ burial grounds did not survive. According to Isabella Holmes:

The East London Railway has swallowed up the graveyards by Rose Lane Chapel, Stepney, and the Sabbatarian or Seventh Day
Baptists’ Chapel in Mill Yard, by Leman Street; the Medical School of Guy’s Hospital is on the Mazepond Baptist Chapel ground; the site of one which adjoined the London Road Chapel, S. E. is now occupied by a tailor’s shop…the Baptist Chapel and burial ground in Worship Street, Shoreditch, forms part of the goods depot of the London and North Western Railway; a similar one in Wapping is now a milkman’s yard.
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St Pancras was particularly popular with Roman Catholics; the eastern end of the cemetery even became known as ‘Catholic Pancras’. It was said that St Pancras was the last church in England after the Reformation whose bell still tolled for Mass, and that Roman Catholics were burned at the stake there during the reign of Elizabeth I. Many French Catholics who fled to London after the Revolution were buried at St Pancras, including bishops, aristocrats and, intriguingly, ‘the Chevalier d’Eon, the unfortunate nobleman whose sex was a matter of so much dispute during the last century’.
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London’s hospitals had their own burial plots, some dating back to the mediaeval period when they were founded. Conditions were so grim during the early nineteenth century that patients were expected to provide a sum towards funeral expenses on admission. Bart’s demanded 17s 6d and Guy’s £1, while Bethlem Hospital was the steepest, requiring an entrance fee of £100. Friends or relations of the deceased were expected to remove and bury the body, which often led to bitter feuds as competing relatives held out for the life insurance. Unclaimed bodies were buried at the hospital’s expense and, of course, these unwanted corpses were easy pickings for the Resurrection Men.
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The London Hospital had its own burial ground, from 1849 until it was closed by order of the Council in 1854, although burials continued until about 1860, with porters acting as gravediggers. The Medical School, the Chaplain’s House and the Nurses’ Homes
were built over the graveyards. The remaining part of the burial ground became a garden for nurses and medical students, complete with tennis court, ‘where they are in the habit of capering about in their short times off-duty, and where it sometimes happens that the grass gives way beneath them–an ordinary occurrence when the subsoil is inhabited by coffins!’
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The Royal Hospital, Chelsea, a sanctuary for injured and retired soldiers founded by Charles II, had its own burial ground at Royal Hospital Road. While the majority of residents were male, including one Pensioner who lived to be one hundred and three, there were two female Chelsea Pensioners buried here, Christina Davis and Hannah Snell. Davis (1667–1739) was Irish, and joined the army to search for her husband. Captured by the French, she saw action at Blenheim, and was wounded at Ramillies, where her gender was discovered. Presented to Queen Anne in 1712, Davis was given a pension, and three volleys were fired at her funeral. Snell (1723–1807) alas, was not so fortunate. After serving in the Army and the Navy while searching for her husband, she published her memoirs in 1750 and took to the stage. Sadly, there was to be no distinguished retirement for Hannah, who ‘died insane’.
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Criminals were buried with the minimum of ceremony. The social reformers Henry Mayhew and John Binny visited the burial ground of Millbank Penitentiary in 1862, where, in the cholera epidemic of 1848, ‘so many corpses were interred that the authorities thought it unhealthy’. Prisoners were buried at Victoria Cemetery, Mile End, instead:

We entered the sad spot, and found the earth arranged in mounds, and planted all over with marigolds, the bright orange flowers of which studded the place, and seemed in the sunshine almost to spangle the surface. At one part were three tombstones, raised to the memory of some departed prison officers; but of the
remains of the wretched convicts that lay buried there, not a single record was to be found. It was well that no stone chronicled their wretched fate, and yet it was most sad that men should leave the world in such a way.
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Mayhew and Binny also inspected the convicts’ burial ground at Woolwich Arsenal.

We thought it was one of the dreariest spots we had ever seen…we could just trace the rough outline of disturbed ground at our feet. There was not even a number over the graves. The last, and it was only a month old, was disappearing…it is perhaps well to leave the names of the unfortunate men, whose bones lie in the clay of this dreary marsh, unregistered and unknown. But the feeling with which we look upon its desolation is irrepressible…As we walked along we were told that under our feet dead men’s bones lay closely packed; the ridge could no longer contain a body, and that was the reason why, during the last five or six years, the lower ground had been taken.
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Ordinary convicts were buried anonymously–but there was a peculiar refinement for ‘those who had paid the extreme penalty of the law’. Prisoners executed at Tyburn, a few yards west of Marble Arch, were buried on the spot. At Newgate, executed murderers were interred in a passageway that led between the prison and the Old Bailey. They were buried under the flagstones, their coffins filled with quicklime to speed up decomposition, and with no other memorial than their initials, carved into the wall.

Once the inner-city burial grounds had been closed in 1852, the question arose as to what to do with deceased prisoners. The following clause was inserted into one of the Burial Acts:

…in every case in which any order in Council has been or shall hereafter be issued for the discontinuation of burials in any
churchyards or burial-ground, the Burial Board or Churchwarden, as the case may be, shall maintain such churchyard or burial-ground of any parish in decent order, and also do the necessary repair of the walls and other fences thereof.
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The
Book of Church Law
, 4th edition, ruled: ‘By his induction into the real and corporeal possession of his benefice in general, a Rector or Vicar becomes invested with freehold rights in all the land and buildings, which are enclosed within the churchyard fence or well.’
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This meant that the vicar had exclusive access to the churchyard, but whatever power he had, it was up to the churchwardens to see that the churchyard was kept ‘in decent order’. The new legislation made it illegal to build on any ground that had been set apart for interments, but ‘a carriage and horses was frequently driven straight through this law’.
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Some graveyards were sacrificed for new streets or even railways, leading to the popular novelist Captain Marryat’s observation that, ‘The sleepers of the railway are laid over sleepers in death,’ and inspiring the music-hall song ‘They’re Moving Grandpa’s Grave to Build a Sewer’.