In Southern Cemetery with Romeo and Ellen Foster

Now there is a whole story behind cemetery monuments which I don’t begin to know enough about.

I know that those broken pillars which appear in Victorian cemeteries are not the result of vandalism but designed to signify a life broken and ended before its time.

Likewise angels I understand but this stone figure which sits not far from the entrance to Southern Cemetery has set me thinking.

Of course there may be no more significance than that it has the power to stop you in your tracks and reflect on those who are buried below who were Ellen and Romeo Foster, and Fred and Lillian Pawson.

The internments stretch from 1919 to 1937 and the connection is that Lillian was the daughter of Mr and Mrs Foster.

The romantic in pondered on the name Romeo and the big book which is such a feature of the monument but a search of cemetery symbolism seems to suggest simpler explanations.

An open book might signify that the stone is a kind of biography, or closed in recognition of the fact that the story of the dead is over.

And as these things work I have every confidence that someone will put me straight.

In the meantime the story of Romeo and Ellen is an interesting one.  They were both born in 1856 and married in St James the Apostle in Rusholme in 1876.

They had a daughter who was baptised in 1880 in the same church but who had died by the April of the following year.

A second daughter was born in 1885 who they called Lillian and it is she who married Fred Pawson in 1910 and was buried in the family plot 27 years later.

Romeo began work as an office boy, later describing himself as salesmen and by 1901 as a”yarn merchant and employer.”

We can track the family from Rusholme , to Urmston and finally Withington where Mr Foster died in 1928.

His successful journey from office boy to merchant resulted in him leaving over £50,000 on his death.

The early tragedy of the death of their was repeated in 1919 when Ellen died.  As yet I have no cause of death but there is the possibility that she died of flu during the influenza epidemic on 1918-1919.

A report by James Niven, the Medical Officer of Heath for Manchester commented that “its incidence was most evident in South Manchester.”

Now the Foster’s may not have yet been in Withington when she died but I think it may be so.

But here is one of the small mysterious attached to the family because they do not appear on the census record for 1911, not for that matter can I find any reference to Romeo before 1871 when he was living with his aunt in Rusholme.

I am minded to call up the death certificate for Ellen which will give her cause of death and address, but a little of me thinks perhaps I have done enough prying into their lives.

Instead their grave can be found in O Consecrated and is grave nunber 18.

Picture; the monument to the Foster and Pawson families in Southern Cemetery, September 2014, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* Report on the Epidemic of Influenza in Manchester, 1918-19. By James Niven, M.A., M.B., LL.D., Medical Officer of Health. 1919