Necropolis: London & it's Dead (18 page)

We should be very scrupulous as to the admission of every newfangled and patented contrivance into the sepulchral pale. King Death’s is a very ancient monarchy, and quite of the old regime. The lowering therefore of the coffin from the chapel into the crypt by means of Bramah’s hydraulic press, so highly extolled for its solemnity in some of the cemeteries, has too much of the trick of the theatre about it for the stern realities of the grave.
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This was not the only problem. The relatively primitive manufacturing processes of the 1830s meant that this apparatus was far from reliable, and there were complaints of noise and occasional complete malfunction. An entry in the minute book of the General Cemetery
Company dated Wednesday, 24 April 1839, refers to an irate letter to Mr Smith, demanding that the current malfunction be rectified within a fortnight, ‘or else!’
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In December 1844, the coffin lift was replaced by a new one, installed by Bramah & Robinson at a cost of £200. The new model worked on the hydraulic principle, with the considerable advantage that it operated silently.

Landscaped by Pugin senior, and a Mr Liddell, a former pupil of Nash, the grounds of Kensal Green Cemetery were as elegant as a London park and observed strict social divisions between the forty-seven acres of consecrated ground for Anglicans and the seven others allocated to Dissenters.

‘The left-hand road leads to the abodes of the Turks, Jews, Infidels, Heretics and “unbaptised folk”, and the right-hand, after passing among the beautiful and consecrated graves of the faithful, leads to the Episcopal Chapel. This Chapel is a beautifully executed work, in the same style as the entrance buildings and is fitted up in excellent taste.’
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According to
Mogg’s New Picture of London and Visitor’s Guide to its Sights
(1844) as ‘an elegant and beautiful sight, at a distance of three miles from Oxford Street’, the cemetery was surrounded on three sides by a massive wall and on the fourth by a handsome iron railing, which allowed a view of the surrounding countryside and the Surrey Hills. The area was ‘planted and laid out in walks, after the manner of Père Lachaise at Paris’.

The Bishop of London consecrated the forty-seven acres of the Anglican part of Kensal Green on 24 January 1833, a temporary chapel having been erected in the grounds until Griffith’s designs had been completed. The cemetery was an immediate success with the rich and famous, after the lavish burial of George III’s son, Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, on 6 April 1843. Appalled by the scenes at his brother William IV’s interment at the Royal Chapel, Windsor, the Duke had left strict instructions that he did not wish to be buried in ‘that stinking hole’. William IV’s ceremony had been a travesty. The diarist Greville described ‘a wretched mockery,
with a long tedious service miserably read by the Dean of Windsor; people of all ranks loitered around, chattering and sniggering’, while Hobhouse ‘did not see a tear in any eye: only the guardsmen, holding tapers and torches, looked solemn’. Instead, the Duke received a suitably uplifting send-off, and an imposing monument at Kensal Green.

When his sister, Princess Sophia, was buried opposite him in 1848, she lay beneath a sarcophagus designed by Prince Albert’s architect, Professor Ludwig Grüner.

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Families anxious to secure a plot in this ‘Belgravia of Death’ besieged the General Cemetery Company. By 1850, it was described as the only one of the suburban cemeteries yielding a good dividend to the proprietors. This was not just because of its middle-class clientèle. There was money to be made from paupers, too. The Annual Report of 1842 records that: ‘It has been found that seven acres will contain about 133,550 graves; each grave will receive ten coffins; thus accommodation may be provided for 1,335,000 deceased paupers.’
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Kensal Green was an immediate success, attracting the crème de la crème. The central drive and the area around the chapels, the most expensive parts of the cemetery, boast appropriately lavish tombs, large mausolea in a variety of architectural styles. These include the towering Gothic confections containing the remains of John Gibson (1892) and the Molyneux family (1864); Classical
telemones
(crouching male figures) (Sir William Casement, 1844), temples (John St John Long, 1834), and huge obelisks such as the one which celebrates the first head of the Metropolitan police (Sir Richard Mayne, 1868).

One of the most spectacular monuments is the £3,000 tomb of Andrew Ducrow, an Egyptian extravaganza that
The Builder
dismissed as ‘ponderous coxcombry’. Ducrow (1793–1842) was a showman, ‘the Colossus of Equestrians’, who wrestled with lions, re-enacted scenes from Napoleonic battles, and could lift four or five children using nothing more than his teeth. Also buried here are Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Sydney Smith, and novelists William Makepeace Thackeray and Anthony Trollope. W. H. Smith lies, appropriately enough, beneath a stone book.

In 1842, the social commentator Samuel Laman Blanchard was overwhelmed by this ‘beautiful garden of death’ which had sprung up so quickly. ‘It is scarcely ten years since the sheep were driven from their pasture, and already there have been about 6,000 interments.’
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Kensal Green provided a wonderful alternative to the inner-London funeral, taking place to an accompaniment of rattling wheels and hoarse cries, enveloped by a yellow fog. Fulfilling John
Claudius Loudon’s brief, it permitted escape from the choked charnel house to Blanchard’s ‘verdant wild expanse, studded with white tombs of infinite shapes, and stone-marked graves covered with flowers of every brilliant dye!’ Kensal Green was truly an ‘Asylum of the Dead’.

The decade between 1830 and 1840 constituted a golden age for the joint stock cemeteries. As they were constructed, the cemeteries came to resemble a jet necklace around the throat of London. The next big venture, the South Metropolitan Cemetery at West Norwood in Surrey, was consecrated on 6 December 1837 by the Bishop of Winchester. Sited on a hill, and designed by Sir William Tite, Norwood featured broad, sweeping paths, which led up to two chapels in Perpendicular Gothic.

One famous burial at Norwood was that of Baron Julius de Reuter (1816–99), originally Israel Beer Josaphat, who, as a humble bank clerk, founded a pigeon-post service which bridged a gap in the telegraph line between Aachen, Germany, and Verviers, Belgium. Arriving in England in 1851, Josaphat opened a news office in London, and in 1858 he persuaded English newspapers to publish his foreign telegrams, thereby changing the face of news-gathering forever by his founding of Reuter’s.

Norwood was also the last resting-place of Mrs Isabella Beeton, the original domestic goddess, and Hiram Maxim (1840–1916), inventor of the machine gun. However, impressive though they might be, Kensal Green and Norwood had competition. High above North London, on a noted beauty spot, a rival was taking shape…

All cemeteries are places of reflection, but Highgate is unique, with a spirit all its own. A fusion of brooding Neo-gothic architecture and ivy-shrouded masonry, it lies 400 feet above St Paul’s, looking out over one of the most mysterious and fascinating cities in the world. Perhaps there is something about the very location of Highgate which contributes to the cemetery’s magical atmosphere. Even today, it is full of hidden beauty and eccentricity, a haven from the strange disease of modern life. In his introduction to a collection
of essays, John Betjeman refers to Highgate as the Victorian cemetery
par excellence,
the ‘Victorian Valhalla’. This is a wonderful description, combining as it does the pagan imagery and Dickensian atmosphere of Highgate.

This place was once a country meadow. ‘Highgate means High Gate, and nothing more’, a contemporary guidebook informs us bluntly. The name dates back to mediaeval times, when the Bishop of London erected a tollgate to extort payment for travellers riding north from the forests of Islington. The little village gained a mention in August 1485, when the victorious Henry Tudor–soon to be Henry VII–picked up a crowd of supporters that grew exponentially as he advanced towards London, after defeating and slaying Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen received Henry in scarlet robes, with ‘a great number of citizens on horseback’.

It was on West Hill, near what is now the Whittington Hospital but was then a leper colony, that Dick Whittington heard the bells prophesy that if he turned back, he would become Lord Mayor of London.

Highgate had always been considered a healthy spot, removed from the pollution of London. In 1661, the Spanish Ambassador, Count Gondomar, excused his absence from the English Court pleading that he had retreated to Highgate to ‘take the fresh aire’. This was a popular remedy. A guidebook of the time notes that ‘divers who have been long visited with sicknesse not curable by physicke, have in a short time repaired their health by that sweet salutary air’.

It was in Highgate that Guy Fawkes conspired to ‘blow up King and Parliament, with Jehu and Powdire!’–the seventeenth-century equivalent of driving an ammunition truck onto St Stephen’s Green. Unaware that their leader was already captured, Fawkes’s confederates gathered on Highgate Hill to witness the atrocity.

Andrew Marvell, poet and spy, lived in Highgate, right opposite a house owned by Oliver Cromwell. Nell Gwynne was a resident during her affair with Charles II. And it was at the bottom of
Highgate Hill that the eminent sixteenth-century scientist, Francis Bacon, wagered King James I’s physician that he could preserve food by freezing it. Bacon left the carriage, bought a dead hen from a nearby house, and stuffed the bird with snow. Sadly, Bacon died days later, at nearby Arundel House, annihilated by pneumonia 400 years before his concept of frozen food was vindicated.

This land high above the rooftops of London has always appealed to writers. Long before the cemetery was consecrated in 1839, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt and Byron would stroll along Swain’s Lane, talking philosophy, poetry, women. According to the American writer Bartlett, Keats was making his way up the hill one morning in June, wondering whether to confide to his friends the true nature of his recent illness. As a medical student, Keats knew the implications of his symptoms. But before he could confess his fears that he had contracted tuberculosis, a wild-eyed Shelley bounded up, hallucinating on laudanum. Stopping to gaze upon the lovely scene spread out before him, tears streamed down his face as he exclaimed: ‘I have seen this all before! In the past–in some previous existence–where? Where?’
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For Shelley, this insight seemed a profound revelation. But there is something about Highgate, standing there, gazing out over the city, that inspires these reactions, even now.

Less than three years later Keats was dead, buried under a pyramid in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome. In ‘Adonais’, Shelley paid tribute with an exercise in Graveyard Gothic, which is equally appropriate to Highgate:

Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead

A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;

And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time

Feeds, like a slow fire upon a hoary brand;

And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,

Pavilioning the dust of him who planned

This refuge for his memory
…
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As Shelley observed in his Preface to ‘Adonais’, ‘It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.’
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A year later, Shelley himself was gone–drowned and cremated on a faraway beach.

The spot where Highgate Cemetery now stands, halfway up Swain’s Lane, was once the orchard of Ashurst House, built for Sir William Ashurst MP, Lord Mayor of London in 1694, on the Ashurst Estate. This in its turn was built on the remains of an earlier structure–the Banqueting House–first mentioned in 1647. An engraving of
A Prospect of the Seat of Sir William Ashurst at Highgate
, dating from 1710, shows an impressive Palladian mansion, with grounds laid out in the formal style, featuring avenues of trees, a fountain and terraces overlooking the Thames Valley to the distant horizons of Surrey and Kent. Beyond its walls, cattle graze on the slopes stretching down Swain’s Lane and Highgate Hill.
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After Sir William Ashurst died in 1720, the house became the Highgate Mansion School for Young Gentlemen. By the 1780s, the gardens had deteriorated to such an extent they were used for grazing, and by 1830, the house was a ruin. That year, the then owner, Sarah Otway Cave, sold what was left of the house to HM Commissioners for Building New Churches, who demolished it so that a new church could be built. The Church Commissioners invited the Neo-gothic architect Lewis Vulliamy (1791–1871) to build a new place of worship. Consecrated in 1832, the resulting Church of St Michael in its new white brick and stone was well built, spacious and lofty, with clerestory, buttresses, crocked pinnacles, and pierced parapet, and at the west end a tower and octagonal stone spire. The style was impure Perpendicular. It occupied the highest point on Highgate Hill and its tall spire was conspicuous for miles around. But St Michael’s lacked one essential thing–a churchyard.

Highgate was already fashionable–a trendy spot for promenading Londoners. A purpose-built cemetery adjacent to the new church on the west side of Swain’s Lane and in such a sought-after
part of London, was inevitable–and in 1839 it became a reality.

In 1836, Stephen Geary (1797–1854) founded the London Cemetery Company. An entrepreneur, architect and surveyor, Geary had turned his attention to cemetery design after witnessing the success of the General Cemetery Company at Kensal Green. A private Act of Parliament empowered the company to construct three cemeteries, not exceeding a total of 150 acres, in Surrey, Kent and Middlesex. The capital of the Company was limited to £100,000, consisting of 5,000 shares at £20 each. The newly incorporated London Cemetery Company opened an office at 22 Moorgate Street, London, and appointed Richard Cuttill as Managing Director.