The success of Kensal Green spawned many imitators including, among the best known, Norwood, Brompton, Highgate, Nunhead, Abney Park and Tower Hamlets. Each of these is enormously interesting and has its own distinctive character, but no detailed historical or architectural description of these cemeteries will be attempted here because there is a wealth of published material dealing with Victorian burial in general and with individual cemeteries. The best general surveys are probably those by Curl2 and Meller,3 while a good example of the second genre has been written by Barker.4
An influential voice in cemetery design was that of John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843). He was a landscape designer who brought his skills to bear on the planning of ‘gardens of rest’. In 1843 he published On the laying out, planting and managing of Cemeteries and on the improvement of Churchyards. He recommended a systematic approach to the number of graves to be provided per acre and to the drainage and upkeep of cemeteries. As far as he was concerned, Kensal Green had paid insufficient attention to drainage and this was having a damaging effect. He praised Abney Park for its trees and indeed he laid a great emphasis on designing and maintaining London’s cemeteries as public amenities, to be enjoyed in much the same way as Londoners enjoyed their existing royal parks.
Not all religious groups wanted their burials to take place on land consecrated by the Church of England. Nonconformists had their own burial sites and these were often small and attached to the places where they worshipped. Most have disappeared but one of the largest remaining and most interesting is Bunhill Fields. An added distinction is that it is the only cemetery within the City of London. It seems that in the sixteenth century it became a repository for bones from the charnel house of Old St Paul’s Cathedral, at which time it became known as ‘Bonehill’. In the seventeenth century it became a burial ground for dissenters. Among its most illustrious occupants is William Blake (1757–1827), poet, mystic and artist. He has a monument but the specific location of his interment at Bunhill Fields is unknown.
London’s many Jews required their own burial places and some of them appeared very early on. In Alderney Road, Whitechapel E1, for example, is a cemetery dating back to 1697 which catered for the local Ashkenazi community. Another close by, surrounded by a forbidding high brick wall topped with broken glass and easy to miss, is in Brady Street. This was opened in 1761. Judaic law required space between coffins and insisted on graves being at least 6 feet from the surface and meant that their burial grounds never became as overcrowded and hazardous to health as those of the Church of England. London’s Sephardic Jews also had their own places of burial and there are two, both tiny, in Mile End Road, E1. One of them, the Jewish Old Sephardic Cemetery, was opened in 1657 and is the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Britain.
A common practice was the re-interment of human remains from earlier burial places in later cemeteries. Many churches in the City of London and in inner-city areas elsewhere around London suffered from depopulation and declining congregations and were demolished, their burial grounds being closed and their contents removed and relocated to purpose-built cemeteries. An example is the City of London Cemetery in E12, a huge place founded in 1856. It contains human remains from the churchyards of St Andrew, Holborn; St Sepulchre, Newgate; Christ’s Hospital Burial Ground, Newgate Street and Newgate Prison, which was demolished in 1900. The New Southgate Cemetery, N11 has the reinterred remains of bodies previously buried at the Savoy Chapel in the Strand and St Michael Bassishaw in Basinghall Avenue, EC2.
Special burial places were needed during serious outbreaks of pestilence. When the Black Death was at its height in London in 1349, the need to inter the huge numbers of dead led to new sites being brought into use in the form of communal burial pits. It is known that one of these was where the Charterhouse now stands in EC1 not far from the Church of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield.
The Great Plague reached its height in August and September 1665. Daniel Defoe, in A Journal of the Plague Year, estimated that 100,000 died during this outbreak. He mentions Londoners afflicted by the plague wandering out of the City in despair and confusion and sometimes collapsing and dying after only a mile or two. The people nearby would then dig a rough-and-ready grave and push them into it unceremoniously with long-handed poles which enabled them to keep the victims at a distance. This meant that many unrecorded burials took place in the environs of London. Some certainly took place at Stoke Newington. Generally, however, huge pits were dug and bodies simply thrown into them without coffins or grave-clothes. One of the most important of these pits was in Aldgate Churchyard. It was over 20 feet deep and 1,114 bodies are known to have been placed in it between 6 and 20 September 1665. Other sites where plague pits existed include Seward Street, EC1; Holwell Row, EC2; Moorfields, EC2; Park Street, SE1 and another close to the present Golden Square, W1. Dozens of others existed, some recorded and others unknown. From time to time, excavations for new buildings reveal human remains in quantities suggesting the presence of a plague pit.
In the 1850s there seems to have been a general sense that the nation needed a more appropriate last resting place for its most illustrious citizens than that afforded by Westminster Abbey and its motley and overcrowded collection of memorials and interred remains. Various suggestions were put forward including one by Sydney Smirke for a ‘National Edifice to Receive the Monuments to Illustrious Men’, to be sited close to the Serpentine in Hyde Park. This building would have borne some resemblance to a scaled-down version of Salisbury Cathedral. Nothing came of this proposal nor of the suggestion that part of the new Palace of Westminster should be devoted to commemorating the lives and housing the remains of the country’s most worthy citizens.
The feeling that Westminster was an appropriate location for a national mausoleum did not go away and debates continued. The Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887 came and went and still no decision had been made so recourse was had to that stalwart bastion of indecision, delay and obfuscation – a Royal Commission. The Commission’s deliberations were prolonged and came to nothing because of the country’s preoccupation with the Boer War. In 1903 a proposal for a ‘National Monument’ in the shape of a pyramid emerged once again. Artists’ impressions show a structure of truly monumental ugliness, which was to be located in Hyde Park. More interest was generated by the ‘Imperial Monumental Halls’, the name tentatively proposed for a scheme that was the brainchild of John Pollard Seddon and Edward B. Lamb. Apart from the proposed name, there was nothing else tentative about the proposal. The building would have been dominated by a great Gothic steeple with an openwork spire reaching 550 feet and totally overpowering Big Ben and the Victoria Tower of the Palace of Westminster nearby. Funeral services for the country’s most eminent citizens would be held in Westminster Abbey from which it would be a simple matter to move them in solemn procession and lay them to rest in the ‘Imperial Monumental Halls’. These had the space for not only the remains of all foreseeable future worthies and their memorials, but they could also be used for relieving some of the overcrowding in Westminster Abbey itself. Truly this would have been a national mausoleum.
A mausoleum can be defined as a purpose-built, substantial structure intended to contain one or more tombs. The earliest English mausoleums date from the first half of the eighteenth century and tend to be found in the grounds of private estates where they were designed not just to house the dead, but also to be looked at and to be a sublime feature of the landscape.
In the garden cemeteries established around London, starting with Kensal Green, those who bought burial plots were allowed to erect more-or-less whatever monument they desired. This led the rising middle class, the nouveaux riche whose social status did not necessarily match their financial means, to spend conspicuously on their memorials. What better way to impress the living than to build a mausoleum that clearly cost a lot? Good taste was not always uppermost in the minds of those who were to occupy these places. Consequently, the great Victorian cemeteries
of London witnessed the appearance of an eclectic farrago of funerary buildings taking their inspiration from the Gothic, the Italianate, the Greek, the Egyptian, the Byzantine and random mixtures of any of these or other buildings that quite simply defy categorisation. Building materials included a variety of stone, polished marble, brick, the terracotta so beloved of the Victorians and even cast iron. Major architects were sometimes employed to design these structures.
As might be expected, London has a large number of fine mausoleums. There are many published guides and gazetteers to the London cemeteries and no attempt therefore is made to list these buildings here. Most of the cemeteries opened in the nineteenth century contain examples which will reward the efforts of those who go looking for them.
The prize for containing perhaps the oddest mausoleum of all might very well go to Mortlake Roman Catholic Cemetery which is coyly hidden away in an obscure part of SW14. Here lovers of the eccentric seek out what at first glance looks like an Arab tent. This is exactly what it is meant to look like. It takes the verisimilitude to the extent of making a good job of imitation guy ropes and creases in the fabric. It is, however, made of stone, not of canvas, and is a mausoleum containing the remains of Sir Richard Burton (1821–90) and his wife, Isabel. They were a real oddball couple. Burton was a ferocious-looking man who had a mastery of an amazing number of little-known languages and dialects and a passion for exploring remote and seldom-visited parts of Asia, South Africa and South America which often involved him ‘going native’. When not engaged in exploration, he earned a crust doing translations and he is credited with the first English version of the Arabian Knights. He went on to translate The Perfumed Garden which his wife destroyed in a frenzy of prudishness. Eager to make amends for this censorious action, she had his body shipped back to England after he died at Trieste. She had little money but somehow managed to persuade friends to pay for a mausoleum in which he, and then she in due course, could be laid to rest. This mausoleum she designed herself, which is perhaps blindingly obvious. It was a dual-purpose building. Lady Burton sometimes conducted séances inside the mausoleum.
The idea of a huge cemetery serving London but sufficiently distant to preclude the possibility of it ever being subsumed within suburban development, first surfaced at the end of the 1840s. Enough land would be bought to provide for the burial needs of London into the foreseeable future and the distance from the metropolis would ensure that the land would be cheap and the site would pose no health hazards to Londoners. The place chosen was Brookwood near Woking in Surrey and the venture went ahead in association with the London & South Western Railway Company. They were interested in what looked like regular and steady business. The London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company (later the London Necropolis Company), for its part, was interested in the cheap means of transport that the railway company offered. The idea of this giant necropolis took on added urgency following the cholera outbreak of 1848–49 which killed close on 15,000 Londoners.
It would not be true to say that the concept of this rail-served necropolis met with universal approval. The Bishop of London found the idea of cadavers from widely differing social classes all travelling in the same train from London quite offensive. Considerations of social class pervaded the practices of the Necropolis Railway. Tickets and services for three classes were available and had to be bought for all travellers – living and dead. The deceased of course needed only a one-way ticket. The coffins appropriate to the different classes of travel were readily distinguishable by the quality of workmanship and ornamentation, and also by the degree of care shown by the Necropolis Company’s staff when loading and unloading them. To attract business, fares for coffins and mourners needed to be cheap. In fact, the fares were so cheap that it was quite common for London golfers who liked the golf-courses around Woking, to disguise themselves as mourners and travel in the necropolis trains to save money. How they disguised their golfing paraphernalia does not, unfortunately, seem to have been recorded.
A special annexe was built at Waterloo station. This consisted of two platforms, one for mourners and the other for coffins. It lay on the southern side of the station and from it trains ran down the main line of the London & South Western Railway Company to Woking where a short branch line took them directly into the necropolis. This had two stations. One was for Roman Catholics, Jews, Parsees and the various nonconformist sects and the other for Church of England customers. At Waterloo, the station had a decorative entrance arch with ornamental gates and an iron parapet bearing the words ‘Cemetery Station’.
A brochure issued by the Necropolis Company invited the bereaved, when the service was finished, to pause and admire the rustic scenery, to be invigorated by the fresh country air and to contemplate the ‘noble site of which their departed relative or friend had become a tenant’. A daily train started to operate on 13 November 1854 and the service was well used for many years. The Necropolis Company’s station at Waterloo was destroyed in an air raid during the Second World War.
The Brookwood Necropolis Railway is well known. A similar service which has received less attention was that established by the New Southgate Cemetery and Crematorium Company which opened a cemetery at Colney Hatch in 1861. This company had the admirable objective of helping those people who could afford only the most simple of funerals. An agreement was reached with the Great Northern Railway Company for the building of two stations, one at Maiden Lane in the Copenhagen Fields area just north of Kings Cross, the other at New Southgate. The railway company agreed to put on special trains for the conveyance of coffins and mourners.
The building at Maiden Lane was designed partly as a mortuary and partly as a railway station. The body could lie in hygienic conditions until the time of the funeral and mourners were allowed access at reasonable times to pay their last respects. On the day of the funeral, instead of the normal lugubrious procession through the streets, the coffin and its accompanying party were conveyed directly to the necropolis station on Maiden Lane. The journey took fifteen minutes. A charge of 6d was made for transporting the coffin, necessarily a single ticket, while returns for the mourners cost 1s 6d. Unlike the Brookwood Necropolis Railway, this venture was never a success and trains ran for less than ten years. Part of the necropolis station at the London end was still visible in the 1950s. At one time the Corporation of London and the Eastern Counties Railway Company were planning a branch line and special station at the City of London Cemetery at Aldersbrook, E12, but nothing came of this scheme.
The Royal Hospital Chelsea Burial Ground, SW3 is little known. It only covers one acre and was founded in 1692. Around 10,000 people were laid to rest there before it closed as a burial ground in 1854. This may be a small site but there have been some interments with appeal for lovers of the curious. Three old soldiers now buried at Chelsea lived to the ages of 112, 111 and 107 respectively. One of these centenarians must have been a lusty old fellow because he married when aged over one hundred. Equally piquant is the fact that among other interments are those of two women, one of whom died in 1739 and the other in 1792, who served in the army for some years before their true sex was discovered.
Mention should be made of catacombs. Nine London cemeteries including Highgate, Abney Park, Brompton and Kensal Green possessed these modular houses of the dead. They were below ground and usually consisted of a vaulted passage built out of brick. Some had cells in which only the coffin ends were visible. Others, deliberately more ostentatious, had shelves on which the coffins were readily visible. These coffins were of lead, often elaborately decorated and draped in velvet. These were meant to be viewed and admired. There was a short-lived, rather mawkish vogue for paying admission to visit these grisly surroundings.
New provision for the burial of the dead could be an attraction to the still living. In 1831 new vaults were constructed at St Martin-in-the-Fields on which the Sunday Times of 12 June 1831 reported:
The new vaults under St Martin’s burying ground are the
most capacious structure of the sort in London … they consist of a series of vaults, running out of one another in various directions; they are lofty, and when lighted up, as on Tuesday, really presented something of a comfortable appearance … crowds of ladies perambulated the vaults for some time, and the whole had more the appearance of a fashionable promenade than a grim depository of decomposing mortality.
Tucked away in the north-east corner of Hyde Park is a pet cemetery. In the 1880s, the dog belonging to the Duke of Cambridge was run over by a carriage near Hyde Park and he had the animal buried there, starting a fashion which meant that up to the 1950s, something like two hundred other pets were laid to rest there, each with an individual headstone. As might be expected, there are more dogs than any other animal buried there but a few cats and even the odd parrot, goose and monkey make up the numbers.
NOTES
1. Dickens, C., Bleak House, quoted in Meller, see below, p. 7.
2. Curl, J.S., The Victorian Celebration of Death, revised edition, 2000.
3. Meller, H., London Cemeteries. An Illustrated Guide and Gazeteer, 3rd edition, 1999.
4. Barker, F., Highgate Cemetery: Victorian Valhalla, 1984.
6
Death and the Afterlife in the Arts
Death has been depicted in art for thousands of years. In England Christian art represented death through a range of forms including wall paintings, stained glass, effigies, manuscripts, tapestries, carved tombs and headstones. As the commemoration of death became more secular, other artefacts accompanied the process of grieving: jewellery, mourning rings, brooches, lockets, furnishings, sculptures, paintings, memorial cards, song sheets and funeral apparel such as gloves, hats, handkerchiefs and fans. The living were reminded of their own mortality by the presence of burial grounds and the memento mori (‘remember you are mortal’) on tombs, in music and chants and in funeral art and architecture especially after the recurring bubonic plague pandemics from the 1340s onward.
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