Anglican Chapel, colonnade, Kensal Green Cemetery, London

The Cemeteries & Sanitation:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness (June 18th-24th 2015) tour provides three opportunities – Brompton Cemetery, Highgate Cemetery and West Norwood Cemetery – to see Victorian catacombs.  Here, in lead-lined coffins, the Victorian dead lie awaiting the Second Coming.  A third site, Kensal Green Cemetery, also has a fine set of catacombs, though these are currently being restored.  Indeed, it is still possible to be buried in the catacombs at Kensal Green:  according to the Friends’ website [http://www.kensalgreen.co.uk], “both private loculi and shelves or vaults for family groups” are still available.

A catafalque is the raised base on which a coffin rests before and during a funeral service.  In the Anglican Chapel at Kensal Green, the catafalque acts as a lift, lowering coffins into the catacombs below.  The original mechanism, installed in or soon after 1837, was based on the cider press, and proved difficult to operate with decorum:  the two sides had to be screwed at exactly the same speed or the catafalque tilted and jammed.

The engineering company of Bramah & Robinson provided an improved coffin-lift design for West Norwood Cemetery in 1839, using smooth and silent hydraulic power to give the deceased a dignified exit through the floor.  The proprietors of Kensal Green Cemetery were so impressed that they replaced their original lift with a Bramah & Robinson hydraulic lift in 1844 for £200, half the cost of the original.

Highgate Cemetery [http://www.highgate-cemetery.org] also used a hydraulic lift to lower coffins from the south chapel to a tunnel into the East Cemetery to save the cortège crossing the public road, Swains Lane.

The West Norwood coffin lift is unusable, but is beautifully illustrated at
http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/sites/w/west_norwood_cemetery/index.shtml.  The Kensal Green lift was restored to working order by the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery in 1997:  http://www.kensalgreencemetery.com/cemetery/index4.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Brompton Cemetery, London

Victorian governments hated nationalisation.  The upper-class Lords and Commons, Liberals and Conservatives alike, believed in their different ways in what we’d now call “small government”.  Every possible public service in the emerging urban society – roads, railways, utilities – was operated by private joint-stock companies authorised at arm’s length by Parliament.  Almost all operations that were government-controlled were directed in the name of the Crown – the armed services, police, the Royal Mail and even the Ordnance Survey.  Perhaps this is what Margaret Thatcher meant when she referred to “Victorian values”.

Brompton Cemetery [http://www.brompton-cemetery.org] in West London is an unusual and unequivocal example of Victorian nationalisation.

It was constructed in 1836-40 – in the same decade as Kensal Green, Highgate and Nunhead Cemeteries – on a flat site between the Fulham and Brompton Roads, to a design by Benjamin Baud that suggested an open-air cathedral with a magnificent central avenue leading to the chapel, based on St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, at the east end.  The approach to the chapel is embraced by twin colonnades, suggesting Bernini’s great piazza.

Baud’s scheme proved over-ambitious, and the cemetery company’s shareholders became increasingly restless, so that when the Metropolitan Interments Act of 1850 closed the insanitary London churchyards and provided for government purchase of company cemeteries, they jumped at the chance to offload the liability of the cemetery’s shaky finances.

Ironically, a further Metropolitan Burials Act of 1852 effectively reversed government policy by obliging local authorities to set up municipal cemeteries, but by that time the negotiations over Brompton had passed the point of no return, and so the place has remained the only government-owned cemetery in the UK.  As such it is part of the Crown Estate, and is administered by the Royal Parks.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Kew Bridge Steam Museum

The Kew Bridge Steam Museum has been renamed the London Museum of Water & Steam.  I wonder how long it will take people – if they ever do – to stop calling it “Kew Bridge”.

This celebrated treasure-house of steam technology shows stationary pumping engines and other steam-age machinery, live and in action on a regular basis.  Such is the concentration of exhibits that the place runs seven days a week – not simply for periodic steaming days like most out-of-town steam-engine museums.

The pumping station was originally built by the Grand Junction Water Company, whose name disconcertingly advertised that they originally drew their water from the Grand Junction Canal:  after two inlets had proved to be polluted even by early Victorian standards, the Kew Bridge pumping station was built in 1838 to pump water from the supposedly cleaner River Thames to its existing reservoirs.

As demand increased a succession of beam engines were installed on the site, including two of the largest ever built, the 90-inch and 100-inch Cornish engines, and a strange beast that is effectively a beam engine, but with no beam – the Bull engine.

By the time the steam engines were finally decommissioned in 1945 the Metropolitan Water Board, realising that here was a ready-made museum of steam, took the enlightened decision to preserve the site.

The Kew Bridge Steam Museum [http://www.waterandsteam.org.uk] grew from a trust founded in 1973 to enable volunteers to operate the site, and it has become a significant London tourist attraction, easily accessible by rail and providing entertainment as well as education all the year round.

I once took the members of what was then the Guide Dogs Adventure Group to Kew Bridge as part of a ‘Cemeteries and Sewerage’ weekend.  (This was for the people, that is, not the dogs – the engine-house cast-iron floors were not paw-friendly).  You can’t show blind people a beam engine without getting a bit greasy:  they need to sense the height and breadth of the thing and to feel its motion.

One blind teenager in the group asked if he could drive one and, sure enough, he was given the opportunity to grab the levers and make the earth move.  Health-and-safety might prevent this now, but at that time the people at Kew Bridge were able to provide a life-enhancing moment for a guy without sight who wanted the hands-on experience of driving a vast steam engine.

I can’t find the Guide Dogs Adventure Group on the web, but a story that’s founded in its work is at http://www.travistrek.org.uk/scott.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Temples of Sanitation, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Tomb of George Wombwell, menagerist, Highgate Cemetery, London

My favourite monument in Highgate Cemetery [http://www.highgate-cemetery.org/index.php/home] is the tomb of George Wombwell (1777-1850), the proprietor of the greatest travelling menagerie of nineteenth-century Britain, guarded by a statue of Wombwell’s much-loved and docile lion, Nero.

George Wombwell’s career began when he bought two boa constrictors that had accidentally landed at London Docks.  Showing them round London pubs made such a profit that he expanded his collection to fill fifteen showman’s wagons and toured the fairs of Britain.  When animals died he often had them stuffed, arguing that poking a dead animal was an even better experience than seeing a live one.

He was repeatedly invited to show his animals to Queen Victoria’s court.  After one visit he declined a gift from Prince Albert saying, “What can you give a man who has everything?”  On his next visit the Prince Consort presented him with something he hadn’t got, an oak coffin, which he promptly added to his exhibition at an additional admission charge.

There are other animals among the wealth of monuments at Highgate.  A horse with its head bowed adorns the grave of John Atcheler (d 1853), horse-slaughterer to Queen Victoria.  The other named animal that is commemorated on a Highgate tomb is the bull mastiff Lion, who belonged to Tom Sayers (d 1865), the bare-fist boxer.  Lion had been in effect the chief mourner at Sayers’ funeral, sitting alone in the leading carriage wearing a black crêpe collar.  Chris Brooks wrote an interesting account of Tom Sayers’ funeral, which drew larger crowds than the Duke of Wellington’s, in Burying Tom Sayers:  heroism, class and the Victorian cemetery (Victorian Society reprint from Victorian Society Annual 1989).

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.