Necropolis: London & it's Dead (33 page)

Price attempted to claim damages against the police for preventing his son’s cremation, but was only awarded the nominal sum of one farthing.

Mr Justice Stephen’s ruling was the development the Cremation Society had been waiting for. Fortified by the Cardiff judgment, the Council of the Cremation Society circulated a document, informing the public that it was now prepared to proceed with the cremation of anyone requesting it.

However, the Society could not leave itself open to criticism. Sir Henry drafted three legal forms which had to be completed before a body would be accepted for cremation at Woking; these were designed to prevent the cremation of anyone who might have died under suspicious circumstances. Despite these precautions, the Council of the Cremation Society appreciated that official regulation was desirable and, on 30 April 1884, Dr Charles Cameron, Member for Glasgow, introduced a Bill into the House of Commons ‘to provide for the regulation of cremation and other means of disposal of the dead’. Dr Cameron was supported by Dr Farquharson, the Member for Aberdeen (another member of the Council), and the eminent surgeon Sir Lyon Playfair.

The Bill was opposed, however, not only by the Government but also the Leader of the Opposition. One hundred and forty-nine members voted against it, but the seventy-nine votes in favour were more than the promoters had dared hope for.

Meanwhile, the first cremation at Woking took place on 26 March 1885, using the Gorini furnace. According to Puckle:

In its perfect state, a light pine shell is provided in which the body reposes wrapped in a flannel shroud. The coffin is placed on a platform during the funeral service, at the conclusion of which, a mechanism set in motion by a lever in the chapel, carries the coffin out of sight of those present on its way to the furnace, where coffin and body are soon reduced to ashes by the intensity of the heat. To burn a special form of furnace-coke in a forced draught is a very different and much less costly matter than the old method of burning wood, as used by the ancients. If a sufficient demand existed to keep the modern type of furnace at the proper temperature, the cost of a cremation need not exceed half a crown.
³⁵

A Mrs Pickersgill was the first of three cremations that year. Mr Charles William Carpenter was cremated on 19 October and, in December, the body of a fourteen-stone woman was cremated in just one and a half hours.

During 1888, when twenty-eight cremations were carried out, the Society appealed for funds to build a chapel, waiting rooms and other amenities at Woking. Despite a subscription list graced by the Dukes of Bedford and Westminster, the appeal raised only £1,500. At this point, the Duke of Bedford sponsored the construction of the buildings, the purchase of further land and the creation of a thirteenth-century Gothic-style chapel, which was completed in 1891. By 1892, 253 cremations had been carried out and the cremation movement had been successfully launched in Britain.

In 1892, a second English crematorium opened in Manchester,
with the next opening in Liverpool in 1896. Under an arrangement with the Necropolis Railway Company, up to fifty bodies a day were leaving Westminster Bridge Road for the final journey to Woking. However, Londoners still needed a crematorium closer to home.

In 1900, the Council of the Cremation Society purchased 12 acres of land adjacent to Hampstead Heath for £6,000. Backed by a £4,000 bank loan, the Council of the Society assisted in the formation of a company by taking 2,000 ordinary shares of £1. In October, 1900, the London Cremation Company was formed, with the object of establishing a crematorium on the new site.
³⁶

The design of the new crematorium offered an architectural and artistic challenge. Existing crematoria were either ‘ecclesiastical or lamely Gothic’.
³⁷
As the showcase of the cremation movement, Golders Green had to be as beautiful as the great Victorian cemeteries it would, in part, replace. ‘Visitors would wish to take leave of their loved ones in appropriate surroundings, and the architectural style was of crucial importance in creating the ambience. While reassurance was important, so was grandeur and dignity; it was a delicate balance. While committed supporters of cremation looked for a dignified and glorious departure, sceptics might look for reassurance.’
³⁸

Sir Ernest George and Alfred Yeates were commissioned to design the buildings, which were constructed on a piecemeal basis as financial constraints allowed, i.e. a columbarium (a vault having niches for funeral urns) was built in 1911; a 240-foot cloister in 1914; a second columbarium in 1916 and a second chapel, in 1938. George’s architectural style was the perfect solution to the design conundrum. George was a RIBA Gold Medal winner, ‘one of the most prolific and respected of late-Victorian architects’.
³⁹
He favoured the ‘Lombardic’ school, derived from an influential Northern Italian style characterized by rounded arches, warm redbrick, terracotta and marble. George had designed many country houses in this style, as well as townhouses in Kensington inspired by
old Dutch and Flemish designs. Today, ‘Lombardic’ seems not so much Italianate as Londonish, in its slightly oppressive grandeur. The Italianate references are very different from those of Kensal Green or Highgate; there is no hint of Highgate’s Graveyard Gothic or Kensal Green’s Elysian Fields. Instead, the atmosphere is substantial, sombre, and as prosperous as a rose-red mansion block in a crescent behind Harrod’s.

In practical terms, Lombardic offered the ideal way of incorporating the crematorium chimney into the design, an essential item ‘which did not group happily with either Greek temples, Renaissance domes or Gothic chapels’.
⁴⁰
Bells were even hung in the tower for a further note of authenticity.

William Robinson laid out the gardens according to the criteria of his book
God’s Acre Beautiful
. His picturesque, Pre-Raphaelite gardening aesthetic favoured oaks, cedars and fir, with ‘crematoria located away from the garden cemetery itself, tastefully designed, screened by trees, adorned with creeper, rose trellises, sweetbriar or honeysuckle’.
⁴¹

In 1901, the first municipal crematorium in Great Britain was opened in Hull. This was a significant development for the Cremation Society. Hitherto, private individuals were, of their own accord or acting through the medium of the Society, responsible for combating prejudice against cremation, and for establishing existing crematoria. Now, for the first time, a local authority had acknowledged how important it was, both socially and economically, to provide cremation services for the community.

The following year saw an even more crucial event. In 1902, an Act of Parliament was passed, for the Regulation of Burning of Human Remains, and to Enable Burial Authorities to Establish Crematoria. Cremation had finally achieved governmental regulation and had become officially recognized in the highest quarters.
⁴²

In November of the same year, Golders Green Crematorium was officially opened by Sir Henry Thompson. The crematorium soon became a roll call of the great and good, and was particularly
popular with progressive and artistic individuals, including George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, (cremated here, but his ashes scattered at sea), Rudyard Kipling, Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and scientists Sir Alexander Fleming and Lord Rutherford. Sir Henry himself, who died on 18 April 1904, was cremated here, and a statue erected to his memory in the chapel.

Golders Green is a remarkable architectural achievement, combining a timeless appearance with a modern function. As its architectural historian Hilary J. Grainger has written ‘From the road, the crematorium looks like a collection of interesting buildings, behind a high wall, while, from the garden front it resembles a cloistered monastery, fitting into the landscape with all the natural ease of such buildings…the cloister recalls, appropriately, the monasteries which also aimed to provide space for contemplation and silent prayer for individuals and communities simultaneously.’
⁴³

In its extension of the Roman practice of cremation, and the imitation of the mediaeval cloister, Golders Green forms another link in the chain of London and the dead. Like the pagans and Romans, the dead are buried out of town, in urns, high on a hill, while the Italianate architecture recalls the role of the Church in burial during the Middle Ages. But, even as the magnificent cloister was being constructed in 1914, London’s treatment of the dead, and the London way of death was to change for ever.

12: OUR DARKEST HOURS

World War and the Decline of Mourning

Looking back at the First World War from a distance of sixty years, art historian Gavin Stamp wrote:

Over one million, one thousand members of the British Empire perished in the First World War; over eight million men died worldwide. The tropes and traditions of nineteenth-century mourning were inappropriate to a loss of such magnitude. It fell to the architects to put into tangible and symbolic form the sense of tragedy felt by survivors.
¹

One of the most painful aspects of the war was that the bereaved were left without a body to bury. Almost half the British dead were posted Missing, leaving their families with the agonized hope that they might one day return–alternating with the bitter knowledge that their remains were lost in the mud of France. Rupert Brooke’s meditation from his poem ‘The Soldier’ (1914),
That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England
was of little comfort to a grieving widow, left with no coffin to follow and no gravestone to visit. In many cases, when bodies
had
been identified, it would
have been impossible to return them. Mutilated by shells, the dead were buried where they fell, often to be disinterred by further enemy action.

In previous campaigns, only the bodies of officers were returned for burial. The rank and file casualties of Waterloo and the Crimea had been interred in mass graves. It was not until the American Civil and Franco-Prussian wars that the concept of military cemeteries for all participants developed.

Another complication was a refusal by the British Government to allow families to disinter remains from France and bring them home for reburial. The official line was that such an action affected morale, and that all ranks–officers
and
men–should be buried together as comrades.

By 1915, it was already clear to the authorities that the sheer scale of casualties demanded an organized scheme of burial. The War Office created a Graves Registration Commission headed by Fabian Ware (1869–1948), a former colonial administrator, devoted to locating and burying the dead. Originally run by the Red Cross but later transferred to the Army, the Commission negotiated with the French and Belgian governments about the grant of land for cemeteries once the war ended. In 1917, the Imperial War Graves Commission was established to care for all the graves of members of the Imperial forces who died in conflict throughout the British Empire. Ware sent the British architects Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944) and Sir Herbert Baker (1862–1946) to view the battle zone and make recommendations.

Lutyens, a humane and cultured man, was profoundly affected by what he found in France. In 1917, he wrote:

What humanity can endure, suffer, is beyond belief. The battlefields–the obliteration of human endeavour, achievement, and the human achievement of destruction, is bettered by the poppies and the wild flowers–that are as friendly to an unexploded shell as they are to the leg of a garden seat in Surrey. It is all a sense of
wonderment how can such things be. The graveyards, haphazard from the needs of much to do and little time for thought–and then a ribbon of isolated graves like a Milky Way across miles of country, where men were tucked in where they fell–Ribbons of little crosses each touching each other across a cemetery–set in a wilderness of annuals–and where one sort of flower has grown the effect is charming, easy, and oh so pathetic, that one thinks no other monument is needed.
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Given the scale of the carnage, a more permanent monument was required than this charmingly pastoral Milky Way. As Gavin Stamp has noted, although human life during the First World War seemed as expendable as shells, each life was eventually to receive a permanent memorial in stone. Before the Great War, Britain had few memorials compared with Germany and France. While Berlin and France had numerous nineteenth-century military memorials, London, wrote Stamp, ‘merely has a square and a bridge named after battles’. The First World War, however, inspired memorials on a colossal scale, in the Neo-classical tradition of Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren and the Napoleonic monuments of France. Even when the memorials incorporate the Christian symbol, as in the Cross of Sacrifice–originally designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and a familiar sight at cemeteries–they are essentially pagan, marking the cultural link between the heroes of the Ancient World and the doomed youth of the First World War, sent to their deaths steeped in the Classical ideal of sacrifice.

In his role of Principal Architect for France for the War Graves Commission, Lutyens oversaw the creation of 126 cemeteries, and designed the Great War Stone or Stone of Remembrance placed in all cemeteries, with its quotation chosen by Kipling (who lost a son in the war), from
Ecclesiasticus:

Their Name Liveth for Evermore.

In Britain, Lutyens’s most famous contribution was the Cenotaph. When the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, commissioned him to design a national memorial for the Peace celebrations in July 1919, the architect came up with the ‘Cenotaph’ or ‘empty tomb’. Originally a wood and plaster construction, bearing the legend
THE GLORIOUS DEAD
, it was only intended to be temporary–but at its unveiling, it provoked such a strong response from the public that it was spontaneously covered in wreaths to the dead and missing. Lutyens recreated the Cenotaph in Portland stone in 1920, and it still forms the centre of the Remembrance Day Service, held on the Sunday closest to Armistice Day (11 November) every year, and attended by heads of state and representatives of the armed and auxiliary services who gave their lives in both world wars and other conflicts.