A Dying Art

Exploring West London’s Victorian cemeteries

Brits who grew up between the 1930s and 1970s will instantly recognise the names of Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin and Mr McGregor. They all belong to the beautifully-observed cast of characters created by early 20th century author Beatrix Potter. Potter published over 60 books and 250 million of her titles have sold worldwide. Her most famous stories were penned for children. Beatrix researched her characters with great care. And these names were chosen from – or at least inspired by – a selection of tombstones in West London’s Brompton Cemetery. 

Today Brompton is Crown Land (owned by the monarch) and is maintained by The Royal Parks, which manages London’s best-loved green spaces including Hyde, Regent’s and St James’s Parks. Brompton is one of the UK’s most important and high-profile garden cemeteries. Its 39-acre plot, complete with 35,000 memorials, is the resting place of over 205,000 souls. Although never envisioned as a garden or even as a semi-wild green space, Brompton is today a precious haven for local wildlife. It’s also a beautiful calm and car-free environment for the locals of busy Earl’s Court and Fulham. There are over 60 different species of tree here and 200 types of moth and butterfly. And yet Brompton still continues to function as a cemetery.

Brompton Cemetery features numerous elaborate Victorian-era tombs, monuments, and mausoleums, showcasing a range of architectural styles and craftsmanship. Copyright ES

Grand Mausolea

This impressive burial site comprises modest headstones, ivy-clad crucifixes, weeping angels and grand mausolea. There are Commonwealth war graves – the final resting place of combatants from both world wars. A dramatic central avenue is dominated by a domed and colonnaded sandstone chapel, modelled on St Peter’s Square in Rome. There are catacombs where, to this day, the Victorian dead lie in lead-lined tombs. Incredibly, some of these 19th century coffins are still adorned with the desiccated remains of their original funereal wreaths, placed there by loved ones some 160 years ago. These dark, damp and distinctly creepy subterranean chambers are occasionally opened to a curious public.

Brompton, like those of Highgate and Nunhead, was constructed as part of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ group of cemeteries. They were built in response to legislation in the 1850s forbidding human burial in the heart of the capital. Although today a thriving urban hub, Brompton in the 19th century was a leafy but distant suburb.  All seven of the just-out-of-town Magnificent Seven cemeteries were private commercial concerns, which met a growing demand for burial space in an expanding city. Wealthy Victorians demonstrated their faith, wealth and status with magnificent final resting places – some in the grandest of architectural styles.

The grave of Emmeline Pankhurst, who died June 1928, is situated immediately to the north of Central Avenue of Brompton Cemetery. Copyright ES 

Consecrated in June 1840, by Bishop of London Charles James Blomfield, the cemetery has some notable burials. All of life and death is here at Brompton. Leading Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst rests in a beautiful grave along Brompton’s central avenue. Her campaigning eventually led to women over 21 getting the right to vote in general elections. Legislation was finally passed in 1928, shortly after Mrs Pankhurst’s death. Nearby is actor and dramatist for theatre Henry Pettit, a realistic carving of him with his Victorian walrus moustache, adorns his tomb. He looks rather stern and buttoned-up and the epitome of a Victorian gent. Actually he was quite racy in his day. His raucous ‘burlesques’, including Faust Up to Date, parodied classic texts. These enormously popular and risqué shows pushed boundaries and entertained late 19th century audiences in London and New York.

 

The fastest man on earth. Percy Lambert rests in Brompton Cemetery. Public domain

A suitably automotive headstone commemorates racing driver Percy Lambert. He was the first man in the world to drive at over 100 miles an hour. Lambert was killed at Brooklands race track, in Surrey, in 1913 attempting to break the Land Speed Record. His ghost is said to haunt the race track to this day. The recently-restored tomb of shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland is the work of leading Victorian Arts and Crafts artist Edward Burn-Jones. It’s exquisite and remains the only Grade II* listed funerary monument in the cemetery.

Several of Buffalo Bill’s Native American show people were originally buried at Brompton.

Buffalo Bill Cody’s sensational Wild West Show wowed British audiences in 1887, with its daring horsemanship and rope skills. Cody even managed to meet Queen Victoria. A number of his performing troupe, including the famous Sioux chief Long Wolf, died during Cody’s British tour. They were buried at Brompton but were later (over 100 years later) exhumed, transported back across the Atlantic and re-interred, according to tradition, on tribal lands Stateside.

Royal Navy Sub-Lieutenant Reginald ‘Rex’ Warneford VC was the first person to shoot down an enemy airship during the First World War. Flying his French-built Morans-Saulnier Type L ‘Parasol’ monoplane, he attacked the German army airship, LZ 37 off the coast of Belgium in June 1915. It crashed in flames near Ghent, killing its Commander, Otto van der Haegencrew, seven crew members and two nuns on the ground. Just ten days later, Warneford died, aged 23, in a flying accident. His passenger, the prominent New York journalist Henry Beach Needham, died with him. Rex Warneford’s stone grave depicts a carving of his attack on the LZ 37 airship.

Barnes Cemetery exudes a romantic and forlorn air. Copyright @meetmrlondoner

Hard-to-find

A very different burial ground lies some four miles to the south-west of Brompton. Old Barnes Cemetery can also claim credit for being London’s hardest-to-find graveyard. It’s sandwiched between playing fields and scrubby woodland. Barnes is an affluent Richmond suburb boasting comfortable properties, green spaces and close proximity to the River Thames. The forgotten burial ground is gradually being reclaimed by nature as ivy clings to its ancient and crumbling tombs and trees and saplings sprout up in unexpected places.

Occasionally visited by the odd dog walker, relatively few people know the place. It’s old and overgrown and decidedly spooky. Although its carefully-managed decline is deliberate as this approach promotes wildlife. Like Brompton, it has Commonwealth War graves, although these uniform and always immaculate tombs are fewer in number here. Barnes also boasts some impressive funerary architecture. But graves tend to be smaller and the area itself is much more compact. The cemetery’s former chapel was demolished in 1966, when the place also lost its iron railings, at the hands of an uncaring local authority. 

The cemetery retains a romantic yet forlorn air, attracting the attentions of photographers and artists (as well as vandals) over the years. Like Brompton, Barnes is home to diverse species of fauna and flora. Among exquisitely-carved gothic monuments, there are some majestic yew trees here, a species traditionally associated with death and burial. You can also spot oak, cedar, ash, birch, pines and wych elm, and their saplings. Dark green holly, with its spiky leaves, is great for pollinating insects and thrives particularly well here. Birdlife is abundant and blackberries are bountiful on the cemetery’s boundaries in Autumn. 

 

Murderer and victim. Kate Webster and Julia Thomas. Public domain

Notorious murder

The impressive crucifix-topped monument to the wealthy Hedgman family (something of a local power-house) dominates the centre of the grounds. And naturally there’s a ghost. A spectral nun is said to hover over the grave of murdered Victorian widower Julia Martha Thomas, the victim of a sensational 1879 crime committed by her maid, Catherine (Kate) Webster. 

After killing the unfortunate Mrs Thomas by throwing her down the stairs, Webster dismembered her mistress and gradually disposed of the body parts locally. She then assumed Thomas’s identity before shortly being apprehended. Webster was convicted of murder at the Old Bailey in 1879 and was hanged in Wandsworth Prison. So notorious was the case that Madame Tussaud’s created a waxwork of the condemned maidservant to entertain a gawping public. Incredibly, Julia Thomas’s skull was found over 130 years later. Workmen discovered it in 2010 – during the re-building of a just-purchased local property, belonging to the naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough.

 

About the Author

Mr Londoner is Antony Robbins, broadcaster, writer and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. You can find Mr Londoner on Instagram @meetmrlondoner and here