Slow Decline
Unfortunately, the very legislation that removed the previous competitors to Hull General Cemetery also paved the way for its downfall. One of the major aims of this legislation was to allow local authorities to set up their own Boards of Health. Most local authorities moved to do this. Initially seen as a means to avoid the spread of diseases such as cholera and typhoid within the tenements of Victorian cities and towns, to begin with the local authorities concentrated upon improving sanitation and housing.
However, the Act also allowed local authorities to create their own Burial Boards. In Hull this body initially negotiated with the cemetery company to purchase grave spaces within the cemetery grounds but it quickly moved to lease and then purchase from the company the western part of the Hull General Cemetery’s land. This purchase occurred in 1862, and although this piece of land was still administered by the Hull General Cemetery Company, this was the beginning of the present Western Cemetery. This was the first of Hull’s municipal burial grounds and, by its very nature, did not have to make a profit as it was funded by the public purse. A point not lost on the cemetery company.
Throughout the 1870’s and 1880’s the annual shareholders’ meetings are peppered with statements implying that the local authority was undercharging for its graves and therefore making the cemetery company’s charges uneconomic, implying that the rate payer was being ‘swindled.’
What these meetings also show however is that the company continued to pay out large dividends to its shareholders whilst not investing in any new land for burial. In 1854 a proposed extension to the north was mooted to cover roughly the area that Welbeck Street now stands upon. Indeed, the cemetery company went so far as to secure a private Act of Parliament to achieve this end. However, these plans came to nothing and, as mentioned above, the company had leased out and then sold its westernmost holdings. In effect it could only expand to the north and it failed to grasp that opportunity
Looking back, it almost seems, even at this early stage of its life, as if the Cemetery Company realized that the game was up and aimed to gather as much money from the venture whilst the going was good. That profit in a venture like this depended upon selling new graves must quickly have been evident and without the land available for new burials that simply could not happen. The company’s failure to expand is hard to understand in those terms and one must draw the conclusion that the directors had seen the writing on the wall for their enterprise. As such, in hindsight, the seeds of the cemetery’s decline were sown within a decade of its opening.
The busiest burial period for the cemetery was in the decade 1870 to 1880. In 1887 there were almost 9,000 burials, a peak that was never reached again. In 1897 there were just over 5,000 burials and the 20th century saw the numbers dwindle still further until the cemetery eventually closed with the final burial taking place in 1972.
One could argue that the decline had set in earlier with the failure of the Company to invest in further expansion but now the decline began to be felt, and more importantly, seen in other ways. The decision to sell the Princes Avenue frontage to builders in the first decade of the 20th century was simply the first indication of retrenchment. The decision to demolish the lodge designed by Cuthbert Broderick, to close the original entrance and create another one less grand further along Spring Bank West in the 1920’s highlighted that the cemetery company was retreating and the following 50 years from then appears to be a process of scarcely managed decline until its demise in the early 1970’s.