Of conkers in Nunhead Cemetery, and the Great Chorlton Burial Scandal

Even in daylight a cemetery can seem a bit of a scary place when you are nine and on a forbidden adventure.

Now I am not talking about village graveyards which by and large during the day and even at night are benign and not very intimidating.

Our own may have had many burials but was still small enough for the young and curious to see the farm houses and cottages to the east and west of its walls, the church directly ahead and hear the reassuring sounds of the Bowling Green Hotel behind it as well as the lights of the Horse and Jockey on the green.

No, I am thinking of those vast Victorian expanses of grass, trees, neglected internments and conkers.  Yes conkers, because when you are nine the beauty of the memorials and the tranquillity of the place are nothing compared to the huge numbers of freshly fallen conkers.

But to get them you have to enter the place without being seen which usually involved climbing over the high railings in the early evening so as not to come across any one.  But that in turn meant you ran the risk of forgetting the time and being caught as dusk fell, which is not so good an idea.

I remember one day late in September and a decision to get into Nunhead Cemetery where my friend Jimmy maintained there was always a huge pile to be had.  All went well until it became apparent that we had been caught out by the time and with the light fading fast it did not seem such an inviting place.  Moreover it was difficult to retrace our steps towards the safety of the outside and so bit by bit the tall trees and the imposing gravestones took on a more sinister and menacing appearance.

And it was with a degree of relief and a bit of shamefaced embarrassment that we found the railings and made good our escape down Linden Grove and home, sadly with less conkers that we had planned and a little later than we had promised our parents.

Looking back at those railings I am amazed we were able to get over them.

Now I have never been back to Nunhead Cemetery, which is a shame.  It was opened in 1840 by the wonderfully named London Necropolis Company.  By the time I was wandering through the place it was almost full and had all been but abandoned.  And as you would expect it slowly became an overgrown expanse of trees and wild life, which has in turn been rescued by the Friends of Nunhead Cemetery, http://www.fonc.org.uk/

All of which drew me into the story of the London Necropolis Company, Victorian cemeteries and our own here in Manchester.

“The London Necropolis Company (LNC), formally the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company until 1927, was a cemetery operator established by Act of Parliament in 1852 in reaction to the crisis caused by the closure of London's graveyards in 1851. The LNC intended to establish a single cemetery large enough to accommodate all of London's future burials in perpetuity. 

The company's founders recognised that the recently invented technology of the railway provided the ability to conduct burials a long distance from populated areas, mitigating concerns over public health risks from living near burial sites. Accordingly, the company bought a very large tract of land in Brookwood, Surrey, around 25 miles (40 km) from London, and converted a portion of it into Brookwood Cemetery. A dedicated railway line, the London Necropolis Railway, linked the new cemetery to the city.”*

And what followed were more of the same of which Nunhead was the seventh.
Manchester’s first municipal cemetery was opened in 1865 on the east of the city and was named after Mark Philips and was followed by Southern Cemetery in 1879.  Much the same reasons were there for the expansion of these big Victorian cemeteries.  Inner city church yards had become full and were endangering the health of the living.

In the small church yard of St John’s off Deansgate an inscription on the memorial records 22,000 were buried there during the  18th and 19th centuries,and  in Angel Meadow 44,000 people were interred between 1789-1816.

Here in Chorlton, our own Great Burial Scandal** highlighted the need for a large modern cemetery.  A Home Office inquiry in the November of 1881 uncovered grim reports of “human bones .... knocking about the highway. Only that morning a jawbone with teeth in had been picked up.” 

There were also past sextons who reported the difficulty in finding space to place a coffin and the ever present danger of unearthing past burials. William Caldwell described how he regularly “disturbed human remains in digging” and once before he “could get down to any depth I smashed into another grave, and I was flooded by liquor and human remains.”

All of which I suppose is a long way from conker hunting on a warm September evening in south east London, but then I no longer need to venture into such places.  The Rec opposite supplies all we might need which sadly is few, given that all my lads are now grown up and have long since exchanged a conker and string for far more mature pastimes.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Necropolis_Company

** http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Chorlton%27s%20Burial%20Scandal

Pictures; the parish churchyard and Southern Cemetery from the Lloyd Collection