Isabella M. Holmes

“ Are we ever to allow England to be divided like a chess-board into towns and burial-places? What we have to consider is how to dispose of the dead without taking so much valuable space from the living. In the metropolitan area alone we have almost filled (and in some places overfilled) twenty-four new cemeteries within sixty years, with an area of above six hundred acres; and this is as nothing compared with the huge extent of land used for interments just outside the limits of the metropolis. ”

“ One day I climbed a high, rickety fence in a builder’s yard in Wandsworth in order to see over the wall into the Friends’ burial-ground. No doubt the men in the place thought me mad,—anyhow they left me in peace.
I have often been assured that there is no possibility of a particular enclosure ever becoming a public garden by those who live, at a low rent, in the neighbouring cottage, on condition that they keep watch over the ground. ”

“ Very different to the fate of these hospital burial-grounds is that of another one I will mention. Facing Queen’s Road, Chelsea, is the long, narrow graveyard of the Chelsea Hospital. It is neatly kept, with good grass and trees. Here many a venerable pensioner has been laid to rest, and, although it can no longer be used for burials, it still serves to remind the living of their brethren who have gone before them. ”

“ The rich lavish their money on costly, almost indestructible coffins, which it would be far better to do without altogether, and on masses of flowers that die unseen, while the poor go into debt to buy mourning, which they often pawn before a month is over; and many a widow and family, who have a hard struggle to provide daily food, deny themselves the necessities of life, and sow the seeds of disease and want, in order to set up a tombstone or monument on a grave. ”

“ But as far as my experience goes, I have found that the people who chiefly object to the conversion of burial-grounds into gardens are those who stay at home. They have in their mind’s eye a picture of a well-kept cemetery, where burials take place every day, or of a sweet village churchyard, where the grass is soft and green and the graves are peaceful and undisturbed. One of the last things that I should ever wish to see is a village churchyard turned into the village recreation ground ”

“ I have attempted to show how many there still are, closed and idle, or being used for a totally wrong purpose, between Hampstead and Plumstead, Hammersmith and Bow; but they are surely, if but slowly, being reclaimed and changed, one by one, into places of rest and recreation for the living. The public mind has so far awaked to the necessity of securing all the breathing-spaces which may be had, that the smallest corner of land in which interments can have been said to have taken place now forms a subject of litigation if attempts are made to build upon it. ”

“ And they are worthy of the utmost respect, for they contain the ashes of some of the noblest citizens of London, some of its greatest benefactors and its hardest workers, those who have helped, stone by stone, to raise the great city to the height to which it has attained in its influence in the world. ”

“ Not that I wish in any way to defend the disturbance of human remains, for I hold that no ground in which interments have taken place should be used for any other purpose than that of an open space, and, apart from the legal and sentimental aspects of the question, human remains, in whatever state of decay they may be, are not fit foundations for buildings, nor is it seemly or proper to gather them up and burn them in a hole, or to cram them promiscuously into chests or “black boxes,” to be padlocked and deposited in other grounds or convenient vaults. ”

“ Every chronicler of London history who can lay claim to be called an antiquarian, from Fitzstephen, Stow, and Pennant, to the Rev. W. J. Loftie and Sir Walter Besant, has tried to gather up the fragmentary evidence which from time to time has come to light, and to form some picture of the condition of London in the earliest times. Many have gone in largely for invention, and have weaved what they supposed to be circumstantial stories from discoveries of the most trivial kind, but these fictions are not worthy of repetition. ”

“ If the cemeteries are not to extend indefinitely they must in time be built upon, or they must be used for burial over and over again, or the ground must revert to its original state as agricultural land, or we must turn our parks and commons into cemeteries, and let our cemeteries be our only recreation grounds—which Heaven forbid! ”

“ Such are the very scanty traces that have hitherto been brought to light relating to the burial-places of those who were amongst the worthiest pioneers in the making of London, and who occupied it before the time of the Christians who founded the earlier priories and churches. For as soon as these Christian institutions were established, it became the practice to bury the dead inside them or around them, and the cloisters and burial-grounds of the priories, and the churchyards and vaults of the churches, took the place of the more distant cemeteries and the more scattered graves. ”

“ The church itself is one of the most beautiful pieces of ecclesiastical architecture in London—a small Gothic building, admirable in its proportion. The old gate of the churchyard has skulls and cross bones on it, and in this ground were interred a vast number of the victims of the plague of 1665, which is said to have taken its origin in this parish in the Drapers’ Almshouses. ”

“ Peel Grove burial-ground is smaller than it was, and what is left is a builder’s yard about an acre in extent, the remainder of the space having been built upon. The very small ground by Ebenezer Chapel, near St. George’s in the East, is also a timber-yard, the chapel itself having long since fallen into disuse. Over half of the Globe Fields ground the Great Eastern Railway runs; the remainder is a bare yard, with several miserable tombstones in it and quantities of rubbish. It is fast closed behind an iron gate of colossal proportions, and it daily becomes more neglected and untidy. ”

“ An appearance of utter insignificance and an air of knowing where you are going and what you want, is the passport for all parts of London; and I have seen young men and maidens, one moment indulging in the roughest play, the next moment step off the pavement to let me pass. The clergy and others always seem to think their own people the very worst. “You don’t know what this neighbourhood is like,” I have heard over and over again, and I am thankful I don’t. ”

“ But the London disused graveyards are so different, that I believe it is only necessary to take these objectors (though they will never come) into a neglected ground, to point out to them the sinking graves, to help them to pick their way so that they may avoid the dirty rubbish lying about, and the pitfalls into which they may stumble, in order to convince them that the ground, if turned into a public garden, would be treated with more reverence and in a more seemly manner. Then show them a graveyard garden ”

“ It is often necessary, in order to see a graveyard, to go into one of the surrounding houses and ask for permission to look out from a back window. Such permission is sometimes refused at once, sometimes it is most kindly given. I remember arousing a divided opinion upon this matter by knocking at the door of one of the upper rooms in the almshouses in Bath Street. I wanted to see the ground used as a garden by the inmates of the St. Luke’s Lunatic Asylum in Old Street, and which was at one time a pauper burial-ground for the parish. ”

“ Apart from the question of the moving of tombstones, there are many people who think it irreverent for a ground once used for burial ever to be used for recreation; they do not like the idea of people walking about over the graves. This feeling is worthy of all respect. It is found largely developed among the Jews, and has prevented them, hitherto, from allowing any of their graveyards to be laid out as public gardens. ”

“ But it is not unusual for an employé innocently to acknowledge that there are bones under the ground upon which he is standing, whereat his master, if he knew of it, would be very angry. For it must be remembered that it is to the interest of the owner of a yard to keep the circumstance of its having been used for interments in the background, and he is not pleased if, when he wants to put up a wall or enlarge a shed, he is stopped from doing so by the enforcement of the Disused Burial-Grounds Act of 1834, as amended by the Open Spaces Act of 1887. ”

“ The whole establishment is very interesting, and not the least interesting part of it is this little cemetery, of the existence of which, in all probability, very few of the inhabitants of the surrounding streets have any knowledge.
I have visited one other convent burial-ground, and in each case it is necessary to go through the ceremony of being peeped at through a grating, and, when admitted, passed along passages and through rooms while the doors are locked behind, and only granted permission to see what I want after some time of waiting and a large amount of explanation. ”

“ In order to accomplish this herculean task it was the common practice to burn the older coffins in the minister’s house, under his copper and in his fireplaces. Between the coffins and the floor of the chapel there was nothing but the boards. In time the effluvium in the chapel became intolerable, and no one attended the services, but the vaults were still used for interments, so that “more money was made from the dead than from the living”—a state of affairs which existed in many of the private burial-places of the metropolis. ”

“ But the old plague-pits, the very crowded churchyards, and the private grounds where the soil was saturated with quicklime, the coffins smashed at once, and decay in every way hurried, are likely now to be less insalubrious than those grounds where lead and oaken coffins—specially intended to last for generations—are still in good preservation, and only occasionally give way and let out the putrifactive emanations. ”

“ Our London churchyards of to-day were once village churchyards, and were attached to quiet old churches which, with a few neighbouring houses, stood far away from the town and were encircled with fields. There are many now living who can remember walking from the City to St. Mary’s, Islington, by a footpath through the meadows, and such was also at one time the case with Paddington, St. Pancras, Hackney, Shoreditch, Stepney, Bow, Bromley, Rotherhithe, Lewisham, Camberwell, Wandsworth, Battersea, and many other parishes. ”

“ It is for the public to see that these provisions are carried out, not only for historical, sentimental, and sanitary reasons, but also because each burial-ground that is curtailed or annihilated means the loss of another space which may one day be available for public recreation; and considering that land, even in the poorest part of Whitechapel, fetches about £30,000 per acre, it is easily understood of what inestimable value is a plot of ground which cannot be built upon. ”

“ But if it is denied by the owners of these yards that they are burial-grounds there is one method of proving it which soon dispels all doubt, and that is by digging down into the soil. It will not be necessary to make any deep excavation before the spade turns up some earth mixed with human remains, which, once seen, are always recognisable.
Archbishop Herring adopted this plan, as he was anxious to know if any burials had taken place in what was always known as the “burying-ground” of Lambeth Palace, on the north side of the chapel, by the site of the smaller cloisters. ”

“ Can there be any more profitless mode of throwing away money than by erecting costly tombstones? They are of no use to the departed, and they are grievous burdens laid on the shoulders of succeeding generations. The only people who profit by them are a few marble and granite merchants, and a few monumental masons—and they might be better employed. ”

“ It is a charming little corner of a very pretty garden, a triangular grass plot edged with trees, not above a quarter of an acre in extent. It was formed in 1862 and first used in 1870, only five burials taking place in twenty-three years. It is, of course, merely for the interment of the nuns who, having given up the world and shut themselves into the convent, find their last resting-place within its precincts. ”

“ Some have advocated burial at sea; others, and among them Sir Seymour Haden, have pressed forward the advantages of using perishable coffins, wicker baskets, and the like—a suggestion as excellent as it is economical, for the sooner the earth and the body meet the better it is. Perhaps, in this scientific generation, some one may invent a totally new method of disposing of the dead, which will commend itself both to those who advocate cremation and to those who dislike it. ”

“ The chief place of interment for those who died of the plague in Southwark was the burial-ground in Deadman’s Place (now called Park Street) . Here vast numbers of bodies were buried. The graveyard was afterwards attached to an Independent Chapel, and many eminent Dissenters were buried there, for it soon became a sort of Bunhill Fields For South London. Now the carts, the trucks, and the barrels in Messrs. Barclay and Perkins’ Brewery roll on rails over the remains of the victims of the plague and the Dissenting ministers with their flocks. ”

“ Stepney Churchyard is very old; it is highly probable that there was a church there in Saxon times. The other churchyards in East London which can boast of considerable antiquity are Bromley, Bow, Whitechapel, and Hackney, although Sir Walter Besant, in his novel, “All Sorts and Conditions of Men,” says that the churchyards in East London “are not even ancient.” No doubt if he re-wrote that novel now he would alter many of his remarks. It is hardly possible to think that the eastern districts of London ever formed a “marvellous, unknown country,” or that Rotherhithe needed any “discovery.” ”

“ It is a picturesque ground between the two roads, but, with the exception of a pathway through it, it is not open to the public.
Foreigners now have to be buried in the cemeteries, and many a strange service or ceremony has been held at the graveside of those who belong to other climes, especially, perhaps, in Kensal Green Cemetery, Norwood Cemetery, and the others that are non-parochial. The Jews and the Greeks are, I believe, the only communities of strangers who still keep up separate burial-grounds of their own in London. ”

“ Foremost amongst the burial-grounds devoted especially to Dissenters is Bunhill Fields,—not the New Bunhill Fields in Newington, nor Little Bunhill Fields in Islington, nor the City Bunhill Ground in Golden Lane, not the Quakers’ ground in Bunhill Row—but the real, genuine, original Bunhill Fields, City Road. ”

“ Ann’s, Soho.—There is only one burying-ground belonging to this parish; it is walled in on the side next to Prince’s Street; close to this wall is the bone house; rotten coffin wood and fragments of bones are scattered about. Some graves are only partly filled up, and left in that state, intended, probably, for paupers. The ground is very full, and is considerably raised above its original level; it is overlooked by houses thickly inhabited. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood have frequently complained of the past and present condition of this place. The numbers of dead here are immense. ”

“ The Friends attend to all matters connected with their meeting-houses and burial-grounds at their six weeks’ meeting, and each of these grounds has been a Quakers’ graveyard from the beginning, not changing hands, first belonging to one community and then another, as has been the case with so many of the chapel graveyards. The members of the Society have also exercised a most praiseworthy self-control by not wearing mourning, by avoiding useless expense at funerals, and ostentatious tombstones, memorials, or epitaphs. ”

“ Another exception which proves the rule is at Oxford, where the Botanic Garden, which dates from 1622, was made on the site of the Jewish burial-ground.
They also strictly observed the sanitary laws respecting burial laid down for them, and their cemeteries have not been overcrowded. Burial is only allowed at 6 feet from the surface of the ground, and only one body is in each grave, one coffin not being placed above another; and this rule has been carried out in the Jewish burial-grounds in London—again with one exception. ”