There’s a new book. It’s called The Life of Hull General Cemetery Lodge and Other Stories.
The book covers the story of how the Cemetery Lodge, the jewel in the crown for the cemetery, was created but also the sad story of its loss to the forces of ‘progress’ in the 20th century. This building, the first commission of the noted Hull architect, Cuthbert Brodrick, was a creation in the Victorian Gothic mode. Its fairy tale castle effect was a highlight of the town. Yet within a a lifetime it was swept away.
Other stories in the book cover the struggle to create the Cemetery; the story of how the destruction of most of the headstones during the development of the cemetery in the 1970s took place and finally, a revisiting of a celebrated walk around the Cemetery by John Symons in the 1880s.
It’s available at Amazon and is priced at £10 post free.
The other books in this series are also still available from Amazon. These are a Short History of Hull General Cemetery, priced at £7. The War Dead of the Cemetery, priced at £10. Public Graves, Workhouse Graves, Catacombs and Crosses, priced at £7 and finally A Short History of Burial in Kingston Upon Hull from the Medieval Period to the Late Victorian Period. This is also priced at £7.
With the nights drawing in, what better way to spend them by reading about cemeteries and death. Go on, treat yourself for Halloween. At the worst you can always burn them to keep warm.
Pete Lowden is a member of the Friends of Hull General Cemetery committee which is committed to reclaiming the cemetery and returning it back to a community resource.
This is the third and final part of ‘the Creation of Hull General Cemetery. As I said at the beginning of the first part it was originally written in 2015. It was published in the Hull Civic News in 2016/17. I’ve tweaked it and enlarged parts of it here. I can do that here without worrying about ‘how can I fit that on the page?’ or ‘that image is in the wrong place’. However, in the main, it’s the same story that I originally wrote. That’s why, at the end, there is the reference to Hull City of Culture. For when I wrote this, that was still in the future.
As we know Hull General Cemetery played a small part in that pageant. It was used as a backdrop to some acrobatics. The cemetery itself was used as a low-rent Hammer House of Horrors setting. No effort was made to highlight the architecture or culture artefacts in there. No attempt was made to hold up to a wider audience the history of the site.
Post 2017
Here we are now, four years after that whole cultural festival year, and one year after it officially ended. The heritage aspects of the cemetery are still under threat. From indifference on the part of the Council with regard to the irreplaceable heritage aspects of the site to a group of people who ‘know’ that they are right and who feel that a Sycamore is more important than the headstone of the first woman photographer in Hull. History was seen as important by all groups when the City of Culture was in full swing.
Now, in a place where it is most vulnerable, it is under attack. A short sighted view. The site is big enough for both heritage and nature but right now the pendulum is far and away on the ‘nature’ side. A little appreciation of the valuable assets that can be lost forever if we don’t take some care now is imperative.
Culture Wars
There’s a great deal of discussion lately about ‘culture wars’. There’s one taking place right now in the Hull General Cemetery. I know which side I’m on.
Anyway I hope you enjoy this final part of the site’s beginnings.
The first shareholder’s meeting
On the 21st November 1845 a full general meeting of shareholders was undertaken. Amongst other things, this meeting voted to allow the directors of the new company to raise a loan for £5,000, as the land from Mr Broadley was for sale at £6,000. This loan would have allowed the Company to act on this purchase without straining their shareholders.
It was fine establishing a Cemetery Company but a cemetery needed land to pursue its business. That was the next task at hand.
In early December the Directors of the Company reported in the local press that,
‘upwards of 150 of their townsmen are already subscribers to this intended beautiful and well-ordered place of undisturbed repose for the Dead of all classes of this large community.’
The land for the proposed Cemetery were two pasturages. These were situated at the crux of Newland Tofts Lane or Princess Bank, as it was sometimes known as, and Spring Bank leading westwards. This part is now known as Spring Bank West.
The site was owned by Robert Wood in the last decades of the eighteenth century. It had been farmland since the medieval period when it had been drained by the creation of the Julian Dyke in 1404. The land passed to Robert Carlisle Broadley in 1804. By the time the Company were trying to buy it Henry Broadley appeared to own it.
Copyhold
A meeting took place between Mr Thompson and Mr Irving for the Company and Mr Broadley at Beverley in mid-January 1846. The sale of the land had already been agreed but this meeting was about the enfranchisement of the land. It appeared that Mr Broadley owned the land yet it was ‘copyhold’ land. Mr C.S.Todd had been informed of this development late in December 1845 and had informed the Directors. Yet another unforeseen cost to the Company.
Copyhold was probably one of the last vestiges of feudalism.
Wikipedia explains
It is best explained by this Wikipedia entry;
‘The specific rights and duties of copyholders varied greatly from one manor to another and many were established by custom. Initially, some works and services to the lord were required of copyholders (four days’ work per year for example), but these were commuted later to a rent equivalent. Each manor custom laid out rights to use various resources of the land such as wood and pasture, and numbers of animals allowed on the common. Copyholds very commonly required the payment of a type of death duty called an heriot to the lord of the manor upon the decease of the copyholder.’
The cost to the Cemetery Company
These legal duties were eventually phased out over the nineteenth century. However at this time the landowners were still gripping such vestigial rights tightly.
In this instance the manor was Cottingham and the Company would need to pay a significant sum to the Lady of the Manor. Mr Broadley, in recognition of his ‘error’, offered £100 towards this enfranchisement cost. Later still this sum was increased to £250. Perhaps this shows how much the sum involved was. The final cost was £529 7s 6d to the Company.
On the 4th February 1846 a conveyance was agreed. The parties being Henry Broadley and the Board of Directors of the Company. These were John Solomon Thompson, William Irving junior, Thomas Abbey, Charles Stewart, Benjamin Ansley Tapp, John Malam, and George Robinson. The cost of this conveyance was £5,566 5/-. This was to be paid back in annual instalments over five years at an annual rate of interest of 4%.
Making enemies
By December 1847 this debt had been reduced to £4,489 10s 4d and that is where it stood for the next six years. The Company failed to pay this debt off during Henry Broadley’s life time. His sister Sophia, who had inherited Henry’s property, agitated for this debt to paid off. It was finally paid in 1853. Once again, through stupid self-interest or possibly lethargy, the Board had made an enemy. Sophia would be instrumental in providing the land for the the Division Road Cemetery in the 1860s. Once again the Company had provided the impetus behind a serious competitor for custom.
Changes afoot
Meanwhile back in 1846. The Board was influenced by a visit Mr Thompson had made to Kensal Green Cemetery in London. From this visit he was intent upon making the Cemetery as splendid as it could be. The Board agreed.
In February an advert for designs from architects was placed in the local press. This finally showed that the cemetery would become a fact of life rather than just an aspiration. The Hull Advertiser noted this in an editorial of the same edition that began with the words,
‘It affords us no little satisfaction to notice the actual commencement of operations for carrying out this long-needed improvement.’
Promenade…again
The same article went on to say that,
‘The site, running parallel with the Spring Bank, is well chosen; and a delightful promenade, by improving the present bank and the road in front of the Old Waterworks, might, with a moderate outlay, be provided for our busy population; in fact the whole of the road from the Zoological Gardens to its termination at the entrance gates of the intended cemetery, is capable of being made an attractive adornment to the town.’
The idea of the promenade would linger on until Mr Garbutt took it in hand some 30 years later with his Avenues project and General Cemetery would play little part in that plan.
The Cemetery moves from being a hope to a reality
The Hull General Cemetery was fast becoming an established fact. It was soon to exist to cater for the town of Hull.
The winner of the competition to design the Lodge and Chapel for the Cemetery was a young architect called Cuthbert Broderick. The story of the Lodge and its history will feature as another article later this year.
In the April the Directors had invited the shareholders to look at the designs for the laying out of the cemetery grounds. By the 8th May the designs for the cemetery buildings were approved unanimously by the Directors with Cuthbert Broderick being hailed by the press as, ‘our talented young townsman.‘
In this month too a war of words with the Holy Trinity Churchwardens had apparently been amicably settled. This spat had erupted due to the fact that the church would only receive the minister’s fees for officiating at a service in the Cemetery. When they opened a grave in Holy Trinity churchyard or the Castle Street burial ground the costs of the burial were collected by the church. A meeting between the Directors and the Churchwardens appeared to resolve this issue.
John Shields
On the 13th August 1846 it was noted in the minute books that John Shields had approached the Board as to his employment by them.
This was coup of the first water. Here was an experienced cemetery superintendent asking for work. Not only that but York General Cemetery was held up as a model of planning and efficiency. Here was a great chance for the Company to progress further with an an astute guiding hand helping the Board.
You may be surprised to know that, for once, the Company did the right thing. The Board unanimously approved the appointment of John Shields as the first superintendent of Hull General Cemetery at the board meeting of 26th September 1846. His salary was £90 per annum and the Board would pay for his accommodation until the Lodge was available. After that he would live rent free on Company land. He would remain as the Cemetery Superintendent until his death in the 1860s.
His first job
At that very meeting when Shields was informed of his appointment he was also given a number of tasks.
As you can see, he was instructed to mark out the ‘first field’. The site, as you know, was divide up into two fields for the purposes of pasturage. The first field ran from, what is now Princes Avenue up to just past where the Cholera Monument stands.
The second field would eventually contain the Quaker burial ground, the Workhouse mound and the 5 acres that were eventually taken by the Hull Corporation for Western Cemetery. The approximate dividing line between the two fields is marked by the drainage pit in the Quaker plot.
He was also asked to cost the hard core he would need to use for the laying out of the paths in the Cemetery as well as attend to the Newland Tofts drain. The Board wneeded his expertise and knowledge. The local press were not slow in recognising what a find John Shields was for the Cemetery.
The Deed of Settlement
It would have been easy for the Company to have taken its eye off the ball though and miss out on John Shields. Other matters were pressing.
The Board were concerned at the delay in receiving their Deed of Settlement from the Registry of Companies in London. Without this deed much of what they proposed to do was technically illegal. The solicitor C.S Todd was often moving back and forward between London and Hull during this summer.
Eventually the precious document was received. This news was quickly advertised in the local press. The Hull General Company now existed in reality. It now owned the land for the Cemetery. It was progressing with the drainage and laying out of its grounds. Finally, the Company was registered as a corporate entity. In essence it could now begin to exercise its reason to exist; the burial of the dead.
Cottingham Drain
Running concurrently with all of this was a step undertaken by the Company to tender a contract to widen and deepen the drains and to join them to the Cottingham Drain. This was an ambitious undertaking.
Not just by the length of the scheme, but that the tender specified that the drains would be, ‘brick-barrelled’. This would obviously cost more than simple soak away drains or cuttings. The remains of the Cottingham Drain may be seen still as the grass verge running parallel with Queen’s Road.
Culverted and covered in the mid 1960s it still empties into the River Hull close to the High Flags point on Wincolmlee. You used to be able to see it from Scott Street Bridge but with the removal of that bridge that sight has gone forever..
The lodge, chapel, trees and shrubs
The same day tenders were appearing in the local press for the construction of the lodges and the chapel. The following week tenders for supplying ‘ornamental forest trees’ and,
‘evergreen and deciduous shrubs, sufficient for planting and laying out of the grounds of the company’.
Later that same week the contract for the draining work was awarded to Mr. Benjamin Musgrave. The tender for the erection of a temporary cottage was given to Mr John Darley. The cottage was for the purposes of a night watchman. Theft was just as prevalent then as now, whatever people say about the ‘good old days.’ In September a spade was stolen from the grounds.
All of this industry was recognised and applauded in the local press. On the 23rd October the tender for the provision of the fencing of the site was advertised for. The press reported that,
‘the directors do not pledge themselves to accept the lowest tender’.
This implied to the eager public that the Company desired quality as it had in all other aspects of the development of the Cemetery.
This ‘desire for quality’ did not last. When the estimate for building a wall around the cemetery hit the Board’s table it was found expedient to go for fencing instead.
The same day that the fencing tender was advertised it was reported that a trial grave had been dug on the site. Some 8-foot-deep, it had been excavated to test the drainage and that it was “thoroughly dry”.
It was also reported that only 63 shares were left to purchase by future subscribers. It was stated that any subscriber could either have their share as an investment or relinquish it for a vault in the cemetery in lieu of their subscription. Over the lifetime of the Cemetery may shareholders cared to do this.
Progress
An extraordinary meeting of all shareholders took place on the 26th November 1846. This was to ratify a number of issues that the Directors of the Company had undertaken. One of these issues was the agreement with Holy Trinity Parish to sell some of the Company’s land to the joint parishes of Holy Trinity and St Mary’s. The land identified would be consecrated and encompass about 10 acres at the western end of the Cemetery. This agreement met with approval by the shareholders.
The Company had no idea what trouble this issue would lead to.
The meeting was also a time for the Directors to acquaint the shareholders with the progress they had made on their behalf. The temporary cottage was to be erected at a cost of £70. The contract for draining the cemetery grounds was settled on the sum of £159 6/- whilst the outer draining was contracted to be £400. A well was sunk in the work yard.
The erection of a pump house and installation of a steam engine for the maintenance of the draining of the cemetery was contracted for £195. The chairman, Mr J.S. Thompson, thought this, ‘is one of the cheapest things I ever met with.‘
Holy Trinity burial space
Backtracking slightly, a week before this extraordinary meeting, a public notice had appeared in the press. It was placed there by Charles Frost. Charles Frost was a noted Hull historian, second only to Sheahan in my eyes. He is also buried in Hull General Cemetery and his headstone was destroyed in the ‘clear-up’ of the 1970s.
He was acting as solicitor for the Church Wardens of Holy Trinity Church. The notice was informing the public that the church was seeking an Act of Parliament. By this Act they were hopeful of selling Castle Street burial ground and purchasing the westernmost 10 acres of the Hull General Cemetery.
Castle Street burial ground to be sold
One has to wonder who on earth would want to buy Castle Street which at that time was simply a large cess-pit of the dead. One also has to wonder at the temerity of the Church to even consider doing this. With little or no thought for the parishioners or their loved ones who they had buried in there.
This very idea shows how the Church at that time viewed the disposal of the dead and why the Hull General Cemetery was so needed. The Church put forward the idea that the bodies would be exhumed and re-interred but the families would not be consulted on this.
When the press reported the Extraordinary meeting of the shareholders of the cemetery it was this point that was deemed to be the most important.
Not the Promenade again!
On the 18th of December the old chestnut of the Promenade surfaced briefly in a letter to the Hull Packet from “A Pedestrian” in which he stated that improving the south side of Spring Bank by the Council would provide,
‘a pleasant walk of about half a mile, with two interesting objects in it, viz the Zoological Gardens and the new Cemetery.’
The correspondent then went on to say that his scheme would be to,
‘buy land from the Cemetery northwards, including all Tofts Lane to the Cottingham Drain, and make that into a handsome promenade.’
That this actually occurred some 30 years later shows that this idea did not simply originate with Mr Garbutt when he laid out the Avenues.
The church starts to get cold feet
All was not plain sailing for the Cemetery Company though. In February 1847 the plan that had been agreed upon with the Churchwardens of Holy Trinity for the church to have the western end of the Cemetery came to an abrupt end.
The vicar and his wardens disagreed between themselves who was to fund the £100 needed to present their Act of Parliament to the appropriate parliamentary committee.
Eventually one of the Churchwardens, a Mr Mitchell, felt duty bound to put sureties, with provisos, for the £100 up himself. He stated that he still felt that the vicar had acted in bad faith.
This, however, would not be the end of this matter.
Enter the Government Surveyor
On the 29th January 1847 the Surveying Officer for the parliamentary committee, George Hammond Whalley, gave notice in the local press that he would be surveying the site of the cemetery on the 10th February. He would also be inspecting the other burial places in the town.
As part of his role he would be conducting a hearing with interested parties on this issue.
The Hull Advertiser Editorial
On the 4th of February the Hull Advertiser ran an editorial. It occupied almost one full page.
In this piece, it was obviously troubled by what it thought was a degree of duplicitous on the part of the church. It would be proved to be correct.
The editorial warmed to its task. It cited horrific sights in supposedly holy places.
The editorial also flagged up the prospective Act of Parliament devised by the church authorities although it appeared to not hold much faith in it.
It also informed the public of the intended visit of the surveying officer and the reason for his visit.
And finally, it pointed the way forward using the example of the Hull General Cemetery as a solution.
The surveyor did not attend on the 5th but attended on the 12th of February. He inspected not only Holy Trinity burying ground, the vaults of the church but also the cellars of the house in King Street that abutted the burial ground. He also visited the site of the new cemetery. Not that it did him much good.
The night before his visit and his hearing for the proposed Act of Parliament. a disaster waylaid all the plans. A man-made disaster and based solely upon money.
Disaster
The next day, in quite measured tones, The Hull Advertiser advised its readers that the necessary Bill in parliament to grant the necessary Act of Parliament to set up the part of the cemetery that was to be religiously endowed was dead.
At an impassioned and rowdy parishioners’ meeting the day before, the resolution to apply for the new Act to set up this cemetery was voted down by angry parish members who did not want to increase their church rates.
At 3.00 p.m. on the day of his inspection the Surveying Officer was informed of this decision and refused to hear any further evidence on the subject. In fairness to him there was no point in continuing the hearing. The hearing had been expressly called for by the proposed Act. With the idea of the Act dead in the water his role was effectively complete.
John Solomon Thompson doesn’t miss his chance
It didn’t stop the Company representative, John Solomon Thompson, from extolling the virtues of the Cemetery. The Surveying Officer was impressed with the site and said so in his report but this had no bearing upon the proposed Act brought by the Church authorities.. Charles Frost, placed in an invidious position, could only say to Mr Whalley that he could not present any evidence in support of the Act. Mr Whalley therefore concluded the meeting and left the town.
Never trust the church
The Cemetery Company now showed that they had had enough of dealing with the religious interests. They would not enter into any further agreements with the churches as to leasing or selling them any land.
This meant that when the burial grounds were closed in Hull by Order in Council in 1855 Castle Street was granted an extension. By 1860 it was ordered to close by the Inspector of burial grounds.
Once again it was given an year long extension because it was close to providing a new burial ground. It closed in December 1860. The new burial ground was Division Road.
On the 18th February the Company gave notice to the occupier of the second field of the site. They were now showing that they would use the whole of the site for their own purposes.
Another shareholder meeting
There was general shareholder meeting on the 5th March 1847. The progress that the Cemetery Company had made was laid out to the shareholders.
The drainage works was now complete on the site. Both the Spring and Derringham Ditches had been widened and deepened and this work was almost finished. The fencing off of the site was almost complete. The laying out and planting of the ground were proceeding.
Finally, the chairman brought the shareholders up to date by mentioning the recent visit of the Parliamentary Surveyor,
In late March the Hull Advertiser paid a visit to the site and commented favourably on it, stating that there were,
‘Already upwards of 3,000 ornamental trees, deciduous and evergreen and shrubs, have been planted, together with 100 of the newest and best sorts of standard roses.’
It also said that a temporary chapel had been constructed until the more permanent one could be built. In April the tender for contracts to erect the lodge and entrance gates were advertised in the press.
The first interment?
On the 16th of April the first interment, that of the child of a Mr Smith, a draper of the firm Marris, Willow and Smith in Whitefriargate, took place.
There is however, another story here. For those of you who have seen the first page of the Burial records of the Cemetery one thing stands out. The second burial recorded took place before the first one.
How could this happen?
The second burial, that of William Irving, was a re-interment from Fish Street Chapel. This took place on the 14th April. William Irving was one of the founder members of the Cemetery Company. He was the first chair of the Provisional Committee, and he took over as the Chair of the Company later when John Solomon Thompson resigned.
This re-interment may have been planned well in advance. For instance, the brick lined vault would have needed to be excavated and built in preparation for the child’s remains. William Irving may have probably been hoping for the ‘glory’ of having the first burial taking place in the Cemetery.
Imagine his chagrin when Thompson arranged with John Shields to have Mr Smith’s daughter interred so quickly.
The local press made amends though.
A real promenade
The Cemetery was also becoming a place to visit. Hull, at that time, had no public parks where you could while away the time. The Botanic Gardens, established in the early nineteenth century, were available. At least to those who could afford to pay the entrance fee. As was the Zoological Gardens but the entrance fee was still a drawback to the poorer classes.
The Cemetery, however, was free to enter and enjoy – if that’s the right word here. The Company had spent a considerable amount of money on landscaping and it looked like the townspeople were appreciative of it.
On the 23rd April, the day before the article above, a long-awaited advert appeared the local press.
It announced that the Hull General Cemetery Company were proud to say that the cemetery was, ‘now ready to receive interments.’ The advert went on to say that the rates for their services would be published soon. And they were. 10,000 copies of them too!
A week later, on the 28th April, an impressive funeral took place.
Undertaken by nearly 200 stonemasons of one of their brethren, the procession began at Carr Lane and proceeding up Spring Bank to the graveside. In some ways it set the tone for many other funerals that the Hull General Cemetery hosted over the next 130 years. Stonemason of the Cemetery
The official opening
Although the Cemetery was open for business, its official opening ceremony took place in the June of that year. It was an occasion of great pomp and ceremony with all of the local dignitaries being present.
The local press recorded the occasion.
Various objects were interred within the foundation stone. The press recorded what these were.
On top of the bottle was placed a brass inscribed plate.
None of these items survived the demolition of the Lodge in 1927 except for one. This was a list of the original shareholders. It’s held now in Hull History Centre.
However, there may be one other item from this ceremony that survives.
As stated above, the Mayor, Mr Jalland, laid the foundation stone of the lodge ‘in the presence of a numerous concourse of spectators, principally of ladies,’ on the 2nd of June 1847.
Where is the trowel?
In laying the foundation stone he used an inscribed silver trowel as stated above. This trowel was specially made for this occasion.
In the minute books of the Company it is mentioned.
The silver trowel, made by Mr Northern of Lowgate, was presented to the Mayor.
It is my belief that it still resides in some cupboard or cellar within the Guildhall. A tangible reminder of the day that Hull began to dispose of it’s dead with dignity.
The Foundation stone was laid. And now there were, as usual, a number of speeches. Following those was a brief prayer by Rev. James Sibree. He would later write so movingly about his time spent in the Cemetery during the Cholera outbreak in 1849.
Finally, as the Hull Packet, almost apologetically recorded, ‘and the doxology having been sung, the assembly dispersed.‘
The end of the cemetery
After a long and hard struggle, with one or two missteps along the way, Hull now had a cemetery. The cemetery it had needed for the past thirty years. It served the community well for the next century or so.
By the time I was kicking through the fallen leaves on my way to Hull Fair it had long given up its pre-eminent place for burials to the municipal cemeteries. It became secluded and a haven for wildlife. Its wilderness appealed to the poetic and the historian. Its decay appeared to enhance its beauty. It wore its shabbiness with a genteel pride. No amount of skilful artifice could have manufactured it.
In 1972 the Hull General Company was finally wound up.
The final burial, of an urn of ashes, took place in 1974. I worked with the man who interred it. I can show you where this happened.
Some five years later the clipboards and the bulldozers of the Council moved in. An historic part of our shared heritage was destroyed. In about an 18 month period, what had taken over 130 years to produce, was gone. And to create…what? A Monumental Loss
Welcome to Hull, City of Culture 2017.
Isn’t it one of the paradoxes of life that what was once thought to be unimportant becomes very important but only when you’ve lost it?
Pete Lowden is a member of the Friends of Hull General Cemetery committee which is committed to reclaiming the cemetery and returning it back to a community resource.
This is a short news item about the availability of the Hull General Cemetery books. These were written by Bill Longbone and myself regarding certain aspects of Hull General Cemetery history.
There is a side bar on this site. If you click ‘More’ a drop down menu shows a number of items. One of those items is ‘books’. It advises you that you can buy the books from Amazon.co.uk or The Head Gardener on Spring Bank.
Unfortunately this information is no longer accurate. The books are now out of print and there are no plans to reprint them. The Head Gardener does not have any copies and Amazon doesn’t either. Hull Central Library may have some copies as they bought some from us at cost to sell on. I wouldn’t know how many copies they have left if any.
There are copies of the first two books in some Hull City Council libraries. The Hull History Centre has the full set, so if you’re a bit short of the ‘readies’, and you’re desperate to read our ‘deathless prose’, you could try that option.
The good news is that I do still have a few copies left. And when I say a few I mean just that. There are two of the War Dead of HGC, one of the Public Graves etc and one of the Short Introduction to Hull General Cemetery and that is it. If you want to buy a copy of the War Dead, they are £8 each and the Public Graves and the Short Introduction are £5 each. As you know all monies go to the FOHGC.
Not clever marketing
This is not a clever marketing ploy. No one can ever accuse us of being clever! If we were clever we would never have had anything to do with the cemetery in the first place.
These Hull General Cemetery books are rare and will not come back, and if they do (very unlikely!!), definitely not in their present format. Factors such as time, inclination and general weariness are against their resurrection.
Brexit is, not surprisingly, another factor which may make the printing / publishing of them (previously done in Poland) either uneconomic or inflate the price. And we always wanted the books to be ‘pocket money’ priced. So grab them while you can.
Here’s how. Send an email to the website and we’ll arrange something from there. First come, first served.
Who knows, in a few years one of these books could be your pension nest egg! Well, maybe not. But, on balance, probably safer than Bitcoin. At least we guarantee, that whatever happens in the future, you will still have a book to read.
Pete Lowden is a member of the Friends of Hull General Cemetery committee which is committed to reclaiming the cemetery and returning it back to a community resource.
The catacombs of Hull General Cemetery are now long gone. Nothing remains of them. (see the link below)
Unlike the Eleanor Crosses. Let us examine their history here.
Thompson and Stather
We’re fortunate in having a reasonable idea of who built the crosses. The firm of Thompson and Stather were an engineering firm in Victorian Hull. This firm had a long relationship with the Cemetery in its early days. The Stather in this firm was Thomas Stather. His brother John was equally as successful in his business enterprise. Their stories will be published on the website at a later date. Suffice to say here that, in terms of Hull General Cemetery, both brothers and their families are buried there.
As an example of Thompson and Stather’s relationship with the Cemetery Company, in August 1852 the firm were approached by the Company. They were asked to make some new gates for the Cemetery. These listed gates still survive and may be seen on Spring Bank West. They also completed a number of other contracts for the Company. Thompson and Stather were one of the foremost engineering firms of the Victorian Hull. So it stands to reason that the Cemetery Company would have dealings with them.
Family tragedy
In 1863, Thomas Stather’s wife, Elizabeth, died. She is buried in the Cemetery. The grave is a brick lined vault. Luckily it still has the headstone. Or should I say it has a large Eleanor cross on a plinth erected upon a sandstone kerb set. The cross is made of cast iron. It was the first one erected in the Cemetery and was made by her husband’s firm of Thompson and Stather.[1]
How do we know this? Local resources are scarce on these matters. We do have a newspaper report that quite clearly speaks of the erection of the cross in the cemetery. This newspaper report is shown below.[2] Thomas Stather’s wife of over 25 years, Elizabeth, died on the 1st April 1863. On the 11th September that year the cross had been erected on the grave where Elizabeth lay. I would suggest this is as concrete a proof as one may wish for.
Fig 1: 11th September 1863, Hull Packet.
Fig 2: Thomas Stather’s grave. The site of the first Eleanor Cross erected in Hull General Cemetery
The second Eleanor Cross
The second Eleanor Cross is situated about 50 yards west of the main gates of the Cemetery. It celebrates the grave of the Mason family. The plot was initially bought by Benjamin Burnett Mason. He was born on 16 Feb 1822 in Hull. The son of master mariner Samuel and Martha Mason (nee Green), he was baptised at Holy Trinity on the 9th April 1822.
Benjamin married Anne Green on 19th June 1844 and they had 2 sons, Benjamin William, born in 1846, and Samuel Burnett born in 1850. In the 1851 census Benjamin and his family were living at Northgate in Cottingham and he is listed as a wine merchant and ship owner. He was successful in his business enterprises and established a large wine and spirit business in Lowgate. Its premises eventually extended close to the quays of the Queen’s Dock, now the site of Queen’s Gardens. He also was successful in the community. He became a JP and a Guardian of the Poor. Not content with that he turned his hand to history and was the author of a book entitled The Brief History of The Dock Company. Throughout his life was also an active member at the Minerva Lodge of Freemasons.
The move to Hull
The family moved from Cottingham to a new home at 3, Grosvenor Terrace on the Beverley Road, which is now numbered 113 Beverley Rd. A grand address in its day. It was then on the outskirts of Hull and was situated just outside the village of Stepney.
However, like all Victorian families whatever their circumstances, tragedy was never far away. On the 2nd December 1863, the eldest son, Benjamin William died at the family home from scarlet fever. He was only 18 years old. It is believed that this is when the second elaborate cast iron ‘Eleanor Cross’ was erected in Hull General Cemetery. This would have been some three months after the first cross was mentioned in the press.
There is no record in the newspapers of this new cross being erected. Nor any record in the Company’s minute books or any other documentation to confirm this. However, it appears to fit the bare facts as outlined above.
When was it erected?
We know the original cross was erected in or before the September of that year. The death of Benjamin William Mason took place in December. During the consequent sorrow that almost certainly gripped the family, it is conceivable that the family seized upon making a significant gesture to mark the passing of their son. I would suggest that they commissioned the cross on their family tomb at this time. The erection of this cross was probably appropriate and timely. Grief was something that the Victorians often felt needed to be reflected in ostentatious display and the erection of this cross certainly does do that.
Fig 3: The site of the family home on Beverley Road, 2018. Just out of the picture to the left is ‘Welly Club’.
Benjamin’s wife, Anne, was buried in the family grave, dying from bronchitis on the 7th February in 1874 aged 57. Benjamin’s younger son, Samuel, eventually joined the family company, and continued to work in the business.
Benjamin died of bronchitis on the 12th January 1888 aged 65. Samuel died in Cairo, Egypt on 19th Jan 1894 and was buried there. Samuel’s widow, Mary Ellen, was buried as cremated remains in the family tomb, the final interment under this Eleanor Cross.
Fig 4: Mason’s Eleanor Cross.
The saddest story of all?
The final Eleanor Cross is perhaps the most poignant story of all. It is the smallest of the three crosses and it stands on top of a grave dug for just one person. Yet it is a public grave. A strange occurrence and the only instance known in Hull General Cemetery. As the reader knows, public graves rarely have any kind of memorial upon them. To have a cast iron monument on it is unheard of. Let’s examine the facts of the story.
We need to go back in time a little to fully explain the Crosses’ story. In the East Riding a farmer by the name of George Peacock Harrison, 1808-1885, and his wife Ann, 1807-1872, lived in the village of Gembling, near Driffield. He farmed approximately 400 acres and employed over a dozen farm workers, so he was an influential man in that neighbourhood. Throughout their married lives, he and his wife had eight children. The two we need to focus on are his third child and second son, George Peacock, 1839-1916, and his seventh child and sixth son, Jonathan, 1846-1887.
The 1851 census
As can be seen in Fig 21, G.P. Harrison’s family is gathered around him. Jonathan being four years old, but there is no sign of George Peacock junior. This was because he was absent at school in Hampshire. There is no record of any other of the children being so favoured.
By the 1861 census, George Peacock senior and his wife have moved to another farm at Wharram of 1000 acres. Their two daughters and William Christopher, the third son, went with them. His previous holding was now being run by his son George Peacock junior. No other family member resides at this time at the Gembling farm.
A George Peacock Harrison had appeared at the Assizes on a charge of rape but, according to the Barnsley Chronicle of 15th December 1858, the Grand Jury, ‘ignored the Bill’ and he was allowed to go free. We have no way of knowing which George Peacock this was but the offence was against a woman in Wharram, so it may well have been George Peacock senior who was in the dock.
Fig 5: 1851 Census record for George Peacock Harrison and family.
The death of George Peacock senior
The younger George Peacock was unmarried. This personal situation continues through the 1871 and 1881 censuses and his father continues to work the Wharram farm. In October 1885 George Peacock senior died.
Fig 6: Probate of G.P Harrison senior.
As the sole executor George Peacock Harrison junior could administer his father’s estate as he chose and this is what he proceeded to do.
Let’s just take a look back at Jonathan. He was born in 1846 and baptized that same year in the local church.
Fig 7: Jonathan Harrison’s baptismal record, May 1846.
Other than the entry on the 1851 census we lose track of Jonathan. He doesn’t surface in any of the censuses of 1861,71 or 81. Yes, there are characters who could conceivable be him but they are far removed from the family settings.
In the dock
The next we hear of Jonathan is in a court case. Reported in the Driffield Times in the July 1887. As can be seen in below, Jonathan appears to have had an altercation with his brother George Peacock Harrison junior. During this altercation he committed criminal damage to his brother’s house. The problem appeared to revolve around the will of their father, and money that Jonathan thought was his due. Being legally summoned by his brother must have been difficult for both sides. It was further exacerbated by Jonathan refusing, or being unable, to pay the fine. This resulted in a custodial sentence of one month for him.
The final straw
This appears to have been the final straw for Jonathan. He obviously removed himself to Hull for the next and final part of this sad story. We find Jonathan next having died aged just 40. Only four months after his release from prison.
Fig 8: 2nd July 1887, Driffield Times report of Jonathan’s offending.
Jonathan’s death
Fig 9: Jonathan Harrison’s Death Certificate.
Jonathan died four days before Christmas Day 1887 and of Cystitis which was a disease that he could easily have contracted whilst in prison. As can be seen, he was earning his living as a cotton spinner at the time of his death and his place of work was the Royal Infirmary in Prospect Street. This was work that he would have been detailed to do as his place of residence was the Hull Workhouse. He would have been an out-worker for that institution, paying for his placement and meals by this form of work. He would, therefore, have been accorded a pauper grave.
The final gesture
Jonathan, surprisingly, lies in a grave that was purchased for one burial. Exceptional and unique for a public grave. The purchaser was a certain George Peacock Harrison. Jonathan was buried on the 23rd December 1887. The rest is conjecture. Was this purchase by George a belated gesture to his dead brother? Had he done his brother wrong? We don’t know. What we do know is that after the burial and the purchase of the private grave for one person only, the grave was surmounted by an iron Eleanor cross.
Fig 10: Grave space of Jonathan Harrison, purchased by G.P. Harrison. It is the third row from the left, fourth space down. No. 6610, Compartment 48.
Not by Thompson and Stather
A smaller version and less detailed than the Thompson and Stather ones true, but a good monument. Thompson and Stather were both dead by this time and the firm dissolved. George would have probably ordered a similar cross for his brother from someone who said they could do the job.
Fig 11: Grave number and the purchaser’s name, how many burials and for how many. In this case there is one burial and the grave is stated to be full.
The purchase of the iron monument appears to go beyond grief, and perhaps touches upon a deeper remorse, maybe even fuelled by guilt. We shall never know. George Peacock Harrison continued working the farm at Gembling but in the early part of the 20th century he emigrated and spent his remaining years in New Zealand. He died at Cartertown on the 9th March 1916. We don’t know what was going on in George’s mind. We can only guess. My guess is that this purchase of Eleanor Cross is due to remorse. The only indication of this may be found in the burial register of the Cemetery where he was listed as the informant,
Fig 12: Hull General Cemetery burial register, December 1887.
Melancholia or remorse?
As you can see, George Peacock Harrison cites his brother as being a ‘gentleman’ and his cause of death as ‘melancholia’. Hardly a cause of death then as now. Much more probably a symptom of how George was feeling at registering his brother’s death with the Cemetery, and at the same time purchasing the burial plot for his younger brother. The brother whom he had taken to court. who had gone to prison as a result of these court proceedings. The brother who eventually ended up in the workhouse where he died.
Yes, I would think there was a lot of melancholia, but I think it was George who was suffering from that, rather than Jonathan.
And that is the end of this short journey examining the Eleanor crosses of Hull General Cemetery.
Fig 13: Jonathan Harrison’s grave with its monument.
Pete Lowden is a member of the Friends of Hull General Cemetery committee which is committed to reclaiming the cemetery and returning it back to a community resource.
Part 2 of the *serialisation of ‘Public Graves, Workhouse Graves, Catacombs and Crosses‘ by Friends of Hull General Cemetery members Pete Lowden and Bill Longbone. See our Books page for more information on buying this and other books written by Bill and Pete.
Fear
Many older people used to have a morbid fear of entering the Western General Hospital, or, as it later became, the Hull Royal Infirmary, after its move in 1972, from Prospect Street to Anlaby Road. Kingston General Hospital on Beverley Road suffered a similar fate. It’s quite unaccountable.
My grandmother Jane, on my maternal side, was born in 1883 and died in 1956, so I barely knew her. She had an accident, a fall, not long before her death, and had to go into Western General.
My mother always recounted the story that Jane was beside herself with fear and begged with the ambulance people not to take her. On the whole it seems irrational. Why would someone feel fear of a place where people were hopefully going to make you well again?
The Workhouse
This reaction becomes more understandable, however, if one remembers that both of these buildings served as Workhouses for the parishes in which they stood, and that this fear was twofold. Most everyone of my grandmother’s generation would have wanted to avoid having to reside in the Workhouse.
This is not the place to give a detailed account of the workings of the New Poor Law of 1834, suffice to say that it made the sick, poor and the unemployed who could no longer fend for themselves, and who previously would have sued for outdoor relief, no longer eligible for that kind of support. They now must present themselves at the workhouse and reside there if they wanted support.
There were many more ramifications and additions to the above but put simply the New Poor Law created institutions that the disadvantaged of early Victorian society must have recourse to. The choice was simple but stark. Go to the Workhouse or starve.
So, one can see how an antipathy to a building that, until only recently, had been an object of fear, could cloud one’s judgement. My grandmother’s generation would never forget the fear of such institutions.
However, a more troubling fear for her generation in relation to the Workhouse was the fear of dying in there. Let’s examine how and why that fear was created.
Grave Robbing
Firstly, we need to examine what appears to be a totally different subject: grave robbing. On the face of it such an act of desecration lacks reason. Without taking into account the moral aspect, why would anyone want to steal such a thing? What could be the value in such an act?
Well, of course, to us today, a corpse is something that, quite frankly, we wouldn’t want to keep around the house. Apart from the obvious legal problems, the health issues would be something that we perhaps shouldn’t dwell on. To us a corpse, even of a loved relative, is something that we would want to dispense with quickly to the appropriate authorities. In the past however such ‘items’ were seen in a very different light.
Ruth Richardson has a title chapter in one of her books that perhaps exemplifies that specific difference. This title states, ‘the Corpse as a Commodity’ and that is the clearest explanation of the rise of grave robbing. Again, we are left with a question. Yes, O.K., people robbed graves and stole the bodies but who bought them and why? The answer to this question is a little clearer. The buyers of dead bodies were the medical profession.
Let’s explain how this strange state of affairs came about.
Once again, we have to turn to religion for the beginnings of this foul state of affairs.
The Romans, pagan Saxons, Vikings and many other peoples practised cremation as a form of disposal of bodies. With the rise of Christianity, which had appropriated the burial practices of the Jews, the body had to be buried whole.
Resurrection
The idea behind this was that upon resurrection the body would rise to face the Lord. So burial in the ground became the norm, especially in the Old World. Running alongside this idea was that bodily remains of the dead were to some extent sacrosanct and could not be examined
In pre-Christian Roman times there had been no such strictures and anatomical examinations had taken place, most notably by Galen in the first century CE. Along with Aristotle’s teachings these two men provided the basis of much of medical knowledge throughout the medieval period and only with the Renaissance in the 15th century did it begin to be questioned.
However, by this time the idea of challenging such orthodoxy, which had by now the blessing and backing of the Papacy, could quite easily lead to being accused of heresy and burning at the stake. Such conditions did not encourage original thought.
Still, the pursuit of knowledge pushed the darkness back. Harvey in England, by using some of his own dead family, showed that blood circulated throughout the body and others too worked to understand the bodies that they stood up in.
However, there was a bottle neck in this voyage of discovery and that lay in the basic material with which they could work with: the human body itself.
The Murder Act
Anatomy of pigs, sheep and horses could only carry the explorer so far. So, the basis of the value of a human body began to become apparent. In 1752 the Murder Act allowed all who had committed murder and been found guilty to be executed and their bodies to be given to medical schools for dissection.
Unsurprisingly, this limited addition to the small number of legally acquired bodies failed to supply the medical schools with the ever-increasing demands of their over-subscribed anatomical dissecting lectures.
Fig 1: May 25th, 1830, Hull Advertiser. A regular occurrence in Hull from the mid 1820’s onwards
One of the things that our society has recognised for a long time, even without Adam Smith’s help, was the mechanism of supply and demand of commodities. Be it crack cocaine, bootleg liquor or organ transplants, if there is demand for such things, someone will step forward to supply the product.
Enter the grave-robber.
It’s not the point of this piece to relate the story of grave robbing although it is particularly interesting and my family has a small part in it. Suffice to say that it was a thriving industry and met a need.
There were some legal niceties that it showed up as well, not least of which was that, was a corpse anyone’s property?
As such their activities demanded legal changes and the result of this was the Anatomy Act. This Act was passed in 1832, and such was the popular feeling against, not only the graverobbers, but members of the medical profession, that this Act took precedence over other matters in Parliament.
The Anatomy Act
The Great Reform Act of that year took second place to the Anatomy Act’s passage. The Act historians point out was effectively the beginning of parliamentary representation by the people. Yet it was elbowed out of the way due to the increasing fear of the grave robber.
With the passage of the Anatomy Act the bottom fell out of the market in dead bodies and many were the wails of grief from the grave robbers accompanied by sighs of relief from the relatives of the recently deceased.
The medical profession did not join in these waves of conflicting emotions as they now had what they wanted: a legal method of obtaining corpses to practice on.
Where was this fund of dead people going to come from?
Why the poor of course.
Fig 2: A tomb in Nunhead Cemetery, 2019, still having its protective grill-work to stop the corpses being stolen by grave robbers. Nunhead was opened in 1840 so the risk was still present then.
One of the clauses of the Anatomy Act, implemented on the 1st August 1832, was that the poor of the workhouses who had the misfortune to die whilst in those grim Bastilles could supplement the murderers as victims of the dissectors.
This idea, first put forward by William Mackenzie, an ophthalmologist, of Glasgow went like this:-
Mackenzie’s suggestion was capacious: the body of anyone who died in an hospital, workhouse, poorhouse, house of correction or foundling hospital in any designated large cities, or, if supply was short , in any town or countryparish should be available for dissection as long as they were “unclaimed by immediate relatives” or who had “declined to defray the expenses of burial”.
the work of the dead, thomas w. laqueur
These ideas struck a chord. Not least with two influential people. One, Edwin Chadwick was the ‘brains’ behind the New Poor Law and also someone who took an interest in, amongst many things, the sanitary issues affecting the growth of towns in this industrial age. One of those sanitary issues was the disposal of the dead.
The other person, less well known but just as influential was Thomas Southwood Smith, a doctor and public health reformer who had already published a paper entitled, Use Of The Dead To The Living in 1827.
When he read Mackenzie contributions, he was mildly supportive but was moved to comment:-
Those who are supported by the public die in its debt’ and that they should be ‘converted to public use.
ibid
Where he differed from Mackenzie was that he thought that only the unclaimed bodies should be used and eventually this is how the Act was formulated.
The Act also had to satisfy the legality of acquiring bodies. Upon dying in the Workhouse, the body was, in effect, in the lawful possession of the Workhouse. If unclaimed within 48 hours then the Workhouse could see fit to seek whether the neighbouring medical schools would like to take the body. For a fee of course.
And this is where problems lay.
The Workhouse Poor
All one needed was a combination of an unscrupulous Workhouse master and an equally unethical medical student or school and the system could be exploited. In this situation we probably see the root of the fear that my grandmother’s generation and the generation before her so profoundly feared.
The slab of the Mortuary could beckon so easily. However, if relatives dissented from allowing their relative from being used in this way then the law allowed the body to be buried ‘on the parish’ without going through the rigours of dissection.
The problem with this was that the dissent had to be in writing and the levels of literacy within the population of the average Workhouse was depressingly poor. One wonders how may grieving relatives would have been spared by the use of a cross on the bottom of the form.
Once again, it’s not the work of this piece to examine the workings of the Anatomy Act here, suffice to say it was one of the most brazen Acts of Parliament that was specifically aimed at one group of people to their detriment.
Its justification was that the Act advanced science but it also showed what society felt about the poor amongst them. Both Richardson and Laqueur see the passing of the Anatomy Act and the passing of the New Poor Law Act two years later as twin attacks upon the poor.
As Laqueur pointedly states:-
‘The Anatomy Act of 1832 was the corporeal correlative of the despised 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.’
P.360, Laqueur op. cit. also Richardson, op. cit. and her article ‘Why Was Death So Big in Victorian Britain?’ in Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Ritual and Bereavement.
So now we come to the Workhouse and its burial places, to the ‘pauper grave’, so beloved of the Victorian novelist, the shame to be avoided at all costs. This is not to be confused with the ‘Public grave’.
Any inhabitant of the workhouse could be buried in a public grave. As long as the burial fees were paid by whomsoever, a pauper could be the occupant of a public grave.
A pauper’s grave, on the other hand, was one that was paid for by the parish via the Workhouse administration. It had similar aspects to a public grave in that it could not be bricked nor was it usual to allow memorials upon them, though of course that was dependent upon the cemetery rules.
Where it differed was mainly in the way the funeral was dealt with, the burial rites etc, which would have been minimal. There are stories of coffins being taken from the workhouse on carts in batches to the cemeteries.
Hull General Cemetery
This did not happen in Hull to my knowledge once Hull General Cemetery was opened. I’ll explain about this later.
The first interaction between the Hull General Cemetery and the workhouses situated in the Hull area took place in the December of 1847. This was some two months after the consecration of the cemetery took place.
At a special meeting of the Sculcoates Guardians held at the workhouse on Beverley Road on the 9th December a resolution was passed, the wording of which, with its lack of punctuation, was this:-
The practice of crowded interments within the precincts of large towns having by the evidence of the most talented medical men and chemists of the day, taken before Parliament, been clearly shown to be most injurious to the health of the living as well as tending to the spreading of disease, pestilence and death amongst the inhabitants surrounding the districts wherein such crowded interments take place. That it is the imperative duty of this Board toput an end so far as they can to the countenancing of any future interments with the existing fearfully crowded graveyards of this Borough; and therefore from and after the first day of January next all future burials under the control of this Board shall take place within the grounds of the Hull General Cemetery Company and that the Governor of this house is hereby instructed and authorised to take the necessary steps for carrying this resolution into effect. – a note was also read from the Governor inviting the Directors to meet the Finance Committee of the workhouse in reference to the Interments of the dead at the Cemetery.
Hull General cemetery minute book 1845-1854
This was a more successful arrangement. However, there was a twist in the tail.
Part of the conditions on which the burials will take place in the cemetery is that the Company only charge 1/- to the workhouse authorities or to the friends of the deceased paupers for a search for a burial for any length of time back and certificate thereof and that the cemetery Company convey the bodies in a hearse at their own expense from the Workhouse and also from the residences of the out poor to the cemetery and remove the bodies within 3 hours after notice of death being left at their offices in Bowlalley lane.
ibid
Victorian melodrama
This arrangement created some problems for the Company in the future, and in the interim it cost the Cemetery Company £37 3s 4d for the purchase of a hearse. Due to this agreement I can say with some assurance that the pauper funerals of the Victorian melodramas were not the norm in Hull.
In March of the following year at the AGM of the Company the chairman stated;
Your directors have, as stated in the public newspapers, concluded arrangements with the Governor and guardians of the poor of Hull and with the Guardians of Sculcoates Union by which the whole of the paupers from the Hull and Sculcoates workhouses are now interred in the cemetery.’
ibid
This went down well with the shareholders but was not strictly accurate because, as we have seen, an arrangement was made with Hull, but no firm arrangement had been made with the Sculcoates board as yet. Indeed, there never was a formal arrangement with this Poor Law Union. The Sculcoates Guardians could still call upon the southern cemetery in Sculcoates Lane to cater for their burials, an option that the Hull Workhouse were denied.
In the same speech the chairman went on to say;
In making this arrangement your directors have not been actuated by any mere feeling of profit to the Cemetery but from a sincere desire (so far as in them lay) to aid the authorities of the town in their laudable efforts for sanitary reform by removing from the overcrowded grave yards of this place all such funerals as those referred to and thereby unedifying to that extent an evil so often complained of in local journals.
Hull General Cemetery minute book, 1845-1854
Good Business
These altruistic sentiments, not motivated by this ‘mere feeling of profit’, may be taken with a pinch of salt. If the Company really were so moved by the town’s problems, they would no doubt have donated the land freely so it would be wise to dispense with taking too much notice of this speech. It was business that led the two sides together. It was good business for the Workhouses in that it removed an issue that inconvenienced their working routine, and for the Company it guaranteed a steady custom at a time when it needed such a reliable income stream.
Both Workhouses and the Company appeared to be happy with these arrangements until, as seemed almost inevitable in the Company’s dealings, a disagreement arose over, of all things, a change in the times of when paupers’ funerals took place. Reverend James Sibree, the nonconformist chaplain of the Cemetery Company, requested, in the September of 1854, that such kinds of funerals take place at 3.00 p.m. rather that the previously arranged 4.00 p.m. An innocuous request the Company obviously thought but, being them, they decided to raise the stakes and the fee that they wanted for the interment. So, they informed both sets of Poor Law Guardians of these changes in early September.
The Hull Board agreed, no doubt reluctantly, to these new changes, as it was their principal job to keep the poor law rate down for the rate payers. The Sculcoates Board reacted in a very different manner and,
declined to concur in the alteration but should consider themselves at liberty to bury paupers dying chargeable to the union in any burying ground they might think proper.
HULL GENERAL CEMETERY MINUTE BOOK, 1854-1889
The superintendent, John Shields, informed the board that the Sculcoates Board had sent no paupers for burial since the Company had sent them the initial letter, and the Sculcoates Board continued in this way for the rest of the life of the Cemetery. Where the Company misjudged the situation was, as mentioned earlier, the Sculcoates Board had other options for burial places and in being high handed the Company lost a reliable source of revenue.
At the AGM in March 1856 the chairman informed the shareholders that they were in negotiations with the Hull Board of Guardians. By the September of that year those negotiations had reached the point where a plot of land was being inspected.
However, both sets of negotiators must have been hard to please for no deal was struck for another three years. This covenant signed by the Hull Board and the Company was celebrated at the following year’s AGM with the chairman stating,
Your directors have pleasure in informing the shareholders that the pending arrangements with the Governor and Guardians of the poor have been brought to a successful conclusion and that the necessary deeds for carrying out the same have been engrossed and are now waiting completion by the governor and guardians here, your board and the poor law board in London who have signified their assent to the arrangement between the parties
Hull general cemetery minute book, 1854-1889
The details were that the Workhouse authorities were to pay £35 rental per annum for one acre where the poor of the united parishes of Holy Trinity and St Mary’s would be buried. The Cemetery Company accepted that they would drain and plant the site and the Poor Law Guardians would continue paying the same fees as they had done since the Cemetery opened.
And there we have the origins of the workhouse area in Hull General Cemetery, with its obelisk to John Fountain, the chairman of the Poor Law Guardians, and the chief negotiator with the Company back in the 1850’s, who was buried, at his request, amongst the paupers, which sits there still.
1902
In 1902 the area was increased with the area to the north of it being used for workhouse burials, both consecrated and unconsecrated. Kelly said that the area had been raised by tons of soil being dumped there over the years and that some of it would need to be removed. One of the directors suggested that he would enquire of the Education authorities to see whether it could be used in the construction of some of the Board Schools.
Fig 3: Workhouse ground, Hull General Cemetery, 2017 looking north.
In 1911 and in 1917 inspections of the Workhouse area by the Guardians were not successful and complaints arrived in the board room. In 1911, the Guardians,
suggested that an attempt might be made to remedy the inequalities of the surface of the burial ground by levelling it as far as practicable. The secretary having promised to do the best he could do to the ground in that regard, the sub-committee declared they would be satisfied
hull general cemetery minute book, 1889-1924
Kelly, the secretary, did what he could, and in 1917 the Company refuted any complaint from the Guardians about the state of the workhouse ground. Kelly, however, conducted a survey of the ground, relaying this back to the board in 1918.
The secretary made a report on the Workhouse Burial Ground. The position as regards room for further interments and the financial aspect of the company’s working of the ground. It was pointed out that the yearly sum for the use of the ground and its upkeep and the sums received for the services and labour involved in conveying the dead and their burial in the ground are under the present conditions of greatly increased costs of horse keep. The company practically keep the horse for the single purpose of fetching pauper dead for burial and labour which is quite inadequate and unsuitable. RESOLVED that the secretary to write a letter to the Governor and Guardians of the Poor pointing out the facts and that he submits a draft of such letter to the Company’s chairman for approval before sending it to the Board of Guardians.
ibid
A letter from the Board to the Guardians was approved and sent in October 1918, and the reply, just before the Christmas that year, appeared to accede to the Company’s request and agreed,
an increase of 50% in the charges for the conveyance to the Cemetery and burial of deceased paupers in the workhouse burial ground for a period of six months from the 20th November ultimo.
hull general cemetery minute book, 1889-1924
However, the area designated for workhouse burials could not be increased still further and the Company,
approved a letter drafted by the sec. to be sent to the Hull Board of Guardians giving them an intimation of the nearness (about 3 months hence) of the time when the workhouse burial ground will no longer be capable of receiving bodies for interment.
ibid
By the October of 1920 a new agreement was in place, relating to the workhouse area being full in the near future and the minutes of the Board, with their lack of punctuation. recorded this.
Adverting to the visit of the committee of the Board of Guardians previously reported and to the letter of the 9th June last in answer to the committee’s request containing the offer of the company when the present arrangement ends, namely to provide the necessary graves, dig and fill in the same and give the necessary attention at each burial for a fee of 10/- per body plus the minister’s fees which is at present 2/6d leaving the Guardians to arrange for the conveyance of the bodies to the cemetery and for bearers as is the general custom, the company being at liberty to say where each grave shall be made and not to be obliged to set apart any particular part of the cemetery for the exclusive burial of these bodies and that these terms subsist for 12 months and then be subject to revision. The secretary reported that the offer had beenaccepted by the Guardians with the single modification that it should be for 6 months only.
hull general cemetery minute book, 1889-1924
This modification should have given an inkling to the Company of how the Poor Law Guardians’ thoughts were moving.
The Last Internment
The last interment in what is now known as the workhouse area took place on the 26th November 1920. From now on the Company would try to slot in workhouse graves as and where it could in the steadily diminishing area left to the Cemetery Company.
That this situation was not, for whatever reason, something the Guardians were completely happy with must have been obvious to the Company. It therefore probably came as no surprise, in the April of 1921, with the letter stating that the agreement would be terminated,
on the 26th May, the Guardians having arranged with the Hull Corporation for such burials at the Corporation’s Northern Cemetery.
ibid
From this date the Cemetery Company had no further workhouse burials. It was the end of an era.
And now we come to the question often asked. How many people were buried in this area?
Without scanning the burial records of the Cemetery Company and counting each individual interment it is difficult to be precise.
But let’s get a related issue out of the way here that could conceivably cause some confusion. This is that some workhouse interments would, due to the relatives or friends of the deceased claiming their body, have been buried in public graves.
So not all workhouse interments were in the area designated as the workhouse burial plot.
Also remember that prior to the agreement of 1859 workhouse burials would have taken place across the cemetery in the aforesaid public graves but these would have been pauper funerals.
Therefore, a precise tally of workhouse burials throughout the cemetery would necessitate a strict tallying from the burial records.
The Final Mystery
Another issue which would again cloud these calculations is how many people were buried in each grave?
This is a very debateable issue. C.S. Todd, the Company solicitor, gave evidence to a government inspector, that when the cemetery was initially laid out there had been one or two ‘test’ graves dug to ascertain the drainage.
He said these had been dug to a depth of 14 feet. This is a considerable depth.
From my own experience working as a gravedigger, this would have allowed up to seven adults to be buried in one plot. If one then brings in the prospect of young or still born children, into this equation, who, by their very nature take up less space than an adult, we may have up to 20 plus corpses in a single grave.
So just counting the grave spaces doesn’t really get us much further in this endeavour. So, we again come back to the fact that to gain any precision in this venture an accurate, line by line, accounting of the burials has to be undertaken.
I have not taken this route. I have used the approximation method, and for that matter, Michael Kelly used a similar method when the workhouse area was close to being full. We have no real idea why he computed this equation, although he did appear to enjoy making calculations sometimes for their own sake.
In 1900 Michael Kelly calculated that there were 150 workhouse burials per annum.
I presume that he computed this figure from the burial records although whether this was on the basis of the previous year or a running average of so many years, we have no way of knowing.
If we take this figure, and knowing that workhouse burials stopped in April 1921 I believe we can make some reasonable guesses.
Knowing also that the Cemetery, serendipitously opened its gates in April 1847, this allows 74 years for workhouse burials to have taken place in the Cemetery.
Remember, this is for the full cemetery not just the workhouse area. The multiplication of 150 workhouse burials per annum by the 74 years that the burials took place gives us an impressive 11,100 workhouse burials out of the 54,000 plus burials that took place in the Cemetery during its life time.
Is this a reasonable figure?
It would equate to close to 20% of all burials in the Cemetery were workhouse burials, be that in public graves or parish ones.
If we accept that the poor were probably more likely to die than the affluent, or even the ‘just about managing’, this figure reflects this.
Another factor to take into account is that we have seen that the Sculcoates Board of Guardians withdrew from using the cemetery in the 1850’s.
How many more workhouse interments would there have been if they had continued to contribute for the next 60 years or so? I think we can safely say that it would have compared well with the Hull Board’s mortality figures.
Which means that the cemetery could have been up to 40% full of workhouse burials and this figure should surely bring home graphically the inequitably of Victorian society.
However, that last part is conjecture. Michael Kelly, as mentioned earlier, was intrigued by this computation and returned to it in 1914.
Here are his calculations in Fig 4: As you can see, he was trying to see how much space was left, as by this time, space was at a premium in the cemetery. That is why his calculations are predominantly in square yards. His base figure here is 4,840 square yards which is one acre and thereafter he is attempting to take area from this base figure to account for roads, tree and used grave spaces. However, he has done some of the heavy lifting here in that he appears to have counted up the workhouse interments in this area. He states that at the end of 1914 there were 9716 interments.
He also computed the grave spaces used and came to the conclusion that there had been five interments in each grave. That would be 10 feet deep which is a good depth on a site that is prone to waterlogging due to the proximity of both the vestigial remains of the Spring Ditch and the Derringham Dyke. I know that 10 feet was the maximum depth that municipal graves were dug so the likelihood of this figure being accurate is reasonable.
Fig 4: Michael Kelly’s written notes and calculations regarding the workhouse ground in Hull General Cemetery. Not dated but the ‘end of 1914’ is written.
However, as can be seen in his notes, Kelly can’t make the figures fit his original estimate of 4,840 square yards. With 20 trees, and a space, ‘rd mont’, which I take to a space around John Fountain’s obelisk he comes to the figure 44 grave spaces. He feels this equates to 310 square yards.
The roads in this part of the site he had already felt covered 420 square yards. He then took this figure from his base figure, leaving him 4,110 square yards.
Where the difficulty seems to have appeared is that, after working out the interments, and allocating them the grave spaces, this figure comes to more than an acre, 4,857 square yards, never mind his reduced figure of 4,110 square yards.
And again, if we look at the note Kelly originally wrote,
Therefore, a greater average than 5 must have been put in grave.
see fig. 4
Later he crossed out ‘a greater’ and substituted ‘of’ for ‘than’ changing the meaning of this note. Strange behaviour you may think. These were after all rough notes, written on the back of part of the Cemetery’s stone masonry work books. Why did he make these changes?
Of course, we may never really know the answer to that question, but I would suggest that, during this period the Company was trying to sell the Cemetery to the municipal authorities.
As a result of this, at least twice in the first decades of the 20th century and possibly more often, the Company had to open its books to the Corporation’s inspection, no doubt including all paperwork.
The inspections were undertaken by Mr Witty, the Cemetery superintendent at Western Cemetery, so there was no way of pulling the wool over an inexperienced eye, even if Kelly had wanted to.
Why he ‘doctored’ the note on the Workhouse area in the way outlined above seems pointless as, if necessary, Mr Witty, could take his time and count up the burials as Kelly had done.
I may well be wrong and there could be another explanation for his actions in this way, but it is difficult to get to the bottom of it.
So, with this final mystery, the story of the Workhouse burial area in Hull General Cemetery comes to an end. The area stands now as mute testimony to a time in British society when being poor, destitute and helpless was viewed as a bigger crime than many others on the statute books.
It highlights what the outcome is when we talk of Victorian values today, and perhaps can make us think of the people who were the victims of a society that judged people by how much money they had, rather than what they were worth as human beings.
In this way, this acre of ground, with its approximate 10,000 plus burials in it, gives us an opportunity to stand back and take stock of what is important in our society today. They may be mute but their silence still shouts loudly to us.
Part 1 of the *serialisation of ‘Public Graves, Workhouse Graves, Catacombs and Crosses‘ by Friends of Hull General Cemetery members Pete Lowden and Bill Longbone. See our Books page for more information on buying this and other books written by Bill and Pete.
If like me, you acquire, almost by default, the printed word in many forms, there comes a time when, to avoid negotiating moving to the living room from the kitchen without knocking into towering piles of books or newspapers, something has to be done.
About six months ago whilst leafing through a number of magazines before they went to the charity shops, I came across an article from the 2018 Heritage Open Days brochure. I’d missed it before so I sat down to have a quick read.
The article talked about public graves in Hull General Cemetery and by mentioning ‘communal coffin’ it implied that poverty was the deciding factor in their place of rest. Still later in the article the phrase used was, ‘Some 20,000 of them (burials) were probably buried in public/pauper or workhouse graves.’
The conflation of ‘public’ and ‘pauper’ caused me to blink.
This is factually incorrect I thought. As it was, I had already been preparing an article on this very subject and this gave me a delicate kick up the backside to get it done. Here it is.
Communal Coffin
Let’s dispense with this idea of a ‘communal coffin’ immediately. In the middle ages you would have been fairly wealthy to merit a coffin although recent archaeological work in Hull at the Blackfriargate site found the use of coffins quite common. Still that could have been untypical of the population at large. By the time of the Restoration in the 1660’s, and it is common knowledge that Charles II did his utmost to help the woollen industry by decreeing that all bodies should be buried in a shroud, it was beginning to be normal for people to be buried in a coffin.
There is still a communal coffin that resides at Easingwold but experts say this is probably of Tudor or maybe early Stuart make. There were no records of this coffin ever having being used in the parish records and it may simply have been kept as a historical artefact. Richardson cited, that it was seen as an oddity in 1820.
By the time of the opening of Hull General Cemetery everyone was buried in a coffin. It may have been poorly made, simply of unfinished boards, but no one had to suffer the indignity of simply a shroud burial. Even the people who died from the Cholera epidemic in 1849 in Hull were not subjected to that.
Workhouse coffins were a fact. Indeed Dickens remarked upon a workhouse funeral in Oliver Twist and, even though he was wanting to use his artistic licence to show how degrading the funeral was, for example the bearers having to trot to the grave side and the funeral dress that was lent to the relatives being taken back by the undertaker at the grave side, the body was still given a coffin. I hope that clarifies that particular issue.
One of the other common misconceptions that people jump to when investigating their family history is that they believe that if the burial record states the person being investigated was buried in a public grave then they were poor. Apart from the problem of assigning an absolute definition of the term ‘poor’, or even a relative one, and I’m not getting into that, there is little evidence to suggest that the choice made to be buried in a public grave was in any way something to deplore.
Uncle Tom and Antie Elsie
When investigating burial practice before the modern era we must be careful that we don’t take our modern values with us. One of those modern values is that a family will be buried together in the family grave. We would look askance if Uncle Tom was buried some years later after Aunt Elsie’s funeral in another part of the cemetery. How can that be? Surely there’s been some mistake? Well, yes, now there probably would be some administrative error. But in the past, it would have been the norm.
Let me explain that. Simply put family graves were the province of the rich and wealthy from the middle ages onwards. Of interest here is that prior to 1100 even the rich and famous were buried in public graves. Yes, they may well have been placed in vaults in an abbey or parish church but those vaults were, under the ledger stone, communal.
And of course, history can play tricks on even the best laid plans. For instance, there is no exact spot known of where the remains of King Richard I, or his father Henry II are buried. William the Conqueror’s grave was destroyed in the French Revolution leaving a leg bone and that is of dubious provenance.
Of course, the burial of a family member was still just as important to the people left as it is now. The desire to be buried within the same grave as a loved one is, and was, natural and to the best of their ability the church would attempt to meet that need, and their attempts to succeed would probably match how high up the social scale the advocate was.
Disposal
However, the disposal of the body, once sanctified and cleansed by the rites of the church, was, in the final analysis, a secondary thing in medieval times. The body was seen as the vessel of the soul, an entity much more important that the mere body. And it was this entity that occupied the thoughts, feelings and hopes of the living. For they too would meet such an end. This led to the cult and imagery of Memento Mori but that’s another story.
In the medieval period, especially after the Black Death, the notion of purgatory began to take precedence. This notion, put simply, was that upon death, the soul would be weighed. If no sin was found, something thought to be highly unlikely in most cases, then heaven beckoned. If the soul was sinful then it was cast down into eternal damnation. The vast majority of souls however would be found wanting, in that they were not pure nor were they entirely evil, and therefore they were placed into purgatory. This was believed to be a kind of limbo.
The theory was that a soul in purgatory however could be helped by intercessions from the living. So, a family could pay for prayers to be said, candles burnt and chants to be sung that would help the soul eventually reach heaven. In some senses during this period, until the Reformation, it could be said that the dead and the living were constantly in touch with each other.
Wills often stipulated that so many prayers etc, should be sung for the dead soul departed. Entire sections of buildings were erected and attached to churches to enable such ‘chants’ to be exercised. Thus, were born the chantries, one of which still exists attached to the south side of the Minster.
The church also profited from this, so encouraged this practice. Monks and friars to sing, candles to burn, all had to be paid for and the church reaped the benefit. This was one of the many issues that lead to the Reformation in Northern Europe including England.
The Reformation
With the Reformation, the idea of purgatory was stamped out. The essence of Protestant belief was that no amount of intercession on the part of the living could affect the departed soul’s brush with God. The only way for the soul to go to heaven was to do good in the present world whilst alive. The bond between the living and dead was broken.
Of course, after nearly a millennium of Christian teaching, it was always going to be difficult to change such embedded beliefs. Unsurprisingly the threat of death at the stake or worse can ‘encourage’ a change in viewpoint. And so, it did. The idea of praying for a soul to escape purgatory vanished quite quickly. The funeral now became the focal point of grief and sorrow. The protestant faith frowned upon lavish funerals. It felt that a simple burial was enough because the corpse was simply the refuse left behind.
But human nature being what it is, the family began to want ‘extras’ at the funeral to demonstrate their grief. So began the undertaking business. The first adverts for undertakers are usually cited as beginning after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and they are definitely quite numerous by 1680.
In this way the disposal of the body became, perhaps, more important than the soul, as the family left on earth could not influence the soul’s date with destiny, but they sure could influence how the corpse was disposed of! And if it made Mr & Mrs Jones next door sit up, well, all to the good.
However, this ostentatious display, and I’m again really talking here of the wealthy and the newly emerging merchant class, was just that. To be seen and marvelled at. Once the body was in the ground, well, the observers couldn’t marvel at that, so it was ignored. The very wealthy of course could take the next step and devise lavish family mausoleums but often these were in their own grounds. However, this is not to miss the beginning of memorialisation that started to take hold at the very top of the apex of society around this time.
By the beginning of the 18th century, memorials began to become more common, although still restricted to the top 2 or 3 % of the population. Often, they became flooring for the inside of churches whilst the body commemorated shared a communal vault space in the crypt below the church or chapel.
The Charnel House
For the common people, they still retained their inalienable right to be buried in their parish church yard. Of course, space in them was always at a premium. Which leads us nicely to the concept of the charnel house. Charnel houses were common throughout the medieval period and perhaps even earlier in more populated areas. Sometimes known as ossuaries, they were, in essence, where the overspill of the cemetery around the church was removed to. Their use enabled the church yard to continue without having to continually expand.
It was the role of the sexton, when another burial was to take place, to seek a space to bury this body. And he did this by using a large rod, possibly metal but more usually oak, and thrust it into the soil until he located …. nothing.
Knowing that a burial would have taken place there in the past, he knew that the coffin had decayed and thus the body would have had time to become disarticulated. He then dug down to the required depth, probably no more than 3 feet, and removed the bones of the body and took them to the charnel house and eventually to storage in the crypt of the church. By this method the church yard could continue to function.
Let’s just take a minute to examine what we have here. This method obviously helped the community. The people still had their inalienable right of burial in the parish. The community was fully aware of the removal of bones from the graveyard, and indeed knew that they could have been of a distant relative or ancestor yet this ‘sacrilege’ was not only tolerated but accepted as a necessary part of the functioning of the church yard.
It is obvious that this community did not place more reverence than was necessary on a pile of bones. This practice was common until the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the 1740/50’s when church yards in urban areas began to break down under the massive increase in population that began in this period.
Memorialisation
Another factor that began to fracture this system was the rise of memorialisation. If a stone was placed upon a grave then it was felt, probably quite rightly by the buyers of the stone, that Uncle Tom should continue to stay in the grave if the stone above the grave said he was there. Remember we are still talking of something like 10 to 15% of the population at most and probably less.
Unfortunately, with the increase in population and the increase of memorialisation the system that had allowed the church yard to function began to collapse. With this radical change began the advent of the cemetery, divorced from the church yard. Examples in Hull and Sculcoates of this are Castle Street for Holy Trinity, Trippet Street for St Mary’s and Sculcoates South Side for St Mary’s, Sculcoates. This innovation eventually led to the establishment of Hull General Cemetery and the municipal cemeteries in the city.
Christianity
From the beginning of Christianity until the 20th century, the vast amount of people who died were buried in graves that were essentially public ones. The entire churchyards of the Minster and St Mary’s would have been public graves until their closure to further burials in 1855. Yes, there may well have been memorials erected to family members, but owing to the confined space, the space beneath may well have had interlopers.
That the Hull General Cemetery Company sold both public and private graves upon its opening is quite clearly stated in its pricing. And that approximately half of the ones sold were public shouldn’t surprise us as this was the norm. Yes, it was a cheaper option for the distressed family than the purchase of a family plot, and this factor cannot be ignored and such a factor is still relevant in choosing a funeral and grave today.
However, it was still a decorous burial as opposed to the much cheaper, but more grotesque, option of a burial in the churchyards that were still open, or in Castle and Trippet Street’s burial grounds that were just as over filled and noxious.
That people chose the option of a public grave in Hull General Cemetery therefore shows that they were not so much counting the pennies but actively choosing another better option for their loved ones.
Below are two examples of family grave headstones. One is from Hull General Cemetery and one is from Nunhead Cemetery in London.
They are examples of their kind. They advertise that they are family graves by having it inscribed upon the stone. It is and was a status symbol, and as the grave costs more than the average grave, the owners wanted to make people aware of that fact. In much the same way that someone would leave their ‘super-duper’ phone lying around or leave their Porsche keys ‘casually’ on the coffee table these days. It was meant to make you stare and be jealous and maybe aspire.
Fig 1: Image of a Family Grave in Hull General Cemetery.Fig 2: Image of Family grave, Nunhead Cemetery. This one even gives the address of the family
The decline of the public grave was essentially a 20th century phenomenon, and even there, economics had a trump card to play.
1970s
I worked in cemeteries in the 1970’s and I was often intrigued by the concept of ‘perpetuity’ when applied to graves. It was explained to me that these people had bought a grave but that only applied for 85 years and after that, if the council wanted to, further bodies could be buried in it if there was space. These further bodies would not necessarily have been related to the other occupants.
So, the ‘public’ grave continued but under another name and probably, in time, will make a comeback, as land for burials becomes more difficult for local authorities to utilise. Now, about the ‘pauper’s’ grave. Well that’s a whole other story. Maybe when I’m next clearing stuff out I might remember to tell that one.
