This month’s anniversary is related to money. A subject the Company often found problematic.
On the 16th April 1847 the directors of the Company met for an adjourned board meeting. The subject? To examine the tenders received as a result of their advertisement for builders of the Lodge. I’m afraid they were in for a shock.
The Lodge, was to be the centrepiece of the entrance to the Cemetery In effect the Company was hopeful that it could be built for just over half the estimated cost. As you can see the cost of erection of the Lodge was, ‘so much more than contemplated’ to the Board. Was this simply penny pinching? Or was it that the whole enterprise had been seriously under-estimated from the beginning.
Lack of capital
After all, the Board had opted for only 1000 £10 shares to be issued This meant that the capital that the Company had to use was quite sparse. The Company had paid over half of that money over to Mr Henry Broadley to purchase the land that the cemetery was to to stand. Admittedly this was to be paid in annual instalments but the payment details were only over five years. Then another £3000 to drain the site, and to lay out and furnish with trees and shrubs.
No revenue was coming into the Company’s coffers at this time. The beginnings of a doubt was growing in the minds of the Board. Maybe the directors had bitten off more than they could chew. This feeling would only grow. What had seemed a good idea, and had the backing of many of the most influential people in the town, wasn’t turning into the money-spinner the shareholders had hoped.
By early 1848 the Company was asking its superintendent, John Shields, to see where he could make savings. He told the Board that he’d already let some staff go. The cemetery only became a going concern, and thus profitable, with the ‘visitation’ of the Cholera epidemic in 1849. It’s an ill wind , so they say.
The first of the cutbacks but not the last
The following day, the 17th, the Board agreed with Mr Wilson that he should build the Lodge for £1000.
I wonder what he missed out of the building to come to this reduction of over £500 off the original estimate.
Sadly, we will never know. What we do know is that every superintendent who lived in the Lodge moved out and lived elsewhere after a while. Perhaps that shows that those initial cutbacks may have had a long lasting effect of almost a century.
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.
Shame more attention was not made to costing and knowledge was not sort from people who knew what they were doing, it seems all very slip shod with little attention to the finer details.