About a quarter of a century ago these conditions called forth a movement which will be remembered with respect by future generations. This was the founding of the Cremation Society, and the building of the first British Crematorium near Woking, that, after a delay of doubt and difficulty as to the law, has been in use since 1885 for carrying out in an hour or so, with due decency and complete safety to the living, those chemical processes which, sooner or later, nature will work on us all, however we seek to hinder her slow operation. The late Mr. J. N. Tata, that beneficent Parsee millionaire who was not so rich in rupees as in culture and enlightenment, confessed to me that he looked forward with horror to the vulture burial of his creed, but that he would not indulge his own preference for cremation on account of paining his wife’s feelings. After all, she died a few weeks before his useful life ended, in Europe, and, as it chanced, he came to be buried at Brookwood. Some of the more enlightened of his community, I hear, are considering the question of substituting cremation for their repulsive form of sepulture. Devout Parsees have looked on fire as too sacred for such an office; but the objection of Christians is merely an ignorant prejudice, kept warm by the ashes of mediæval eschatology. The sentiment twining about a quiet country churchyard finds less deep root in a close-packed metropolitan cemetery, haunted by the hideous vulgarity of the undertaker’s art; yet even here thrives a superstition of half-savage regard for that part of us that yesterday made the tissues of a pig or an onion, and to-morrow may be passing into the meanest forms of life. A more truly Christian doctrine would inspire us to take care that our farewell to earth might surely do no harm to any fellow-man.
That prejudice has been so far broken down that several other Crematoriums are now open over the country, two close to London, welcomed by the Cremation Society as taking away much of its business, one by no means worked on commercial principles. In the course of twenty years, over twenty-five hundred bodies were consumed at Woking, many of them names of eminence: travellers like Sir Samuel Baker and Sir Henry Layard; physicians like Sir Benjamin Richardson and Sir Spencer Wells; authors like George Macdonald and W. E. Henley, Eliza Lynn Linton and “Edna Lyall”; artists like Watts and Burne-Jones; philanthropists like Sir Isaac Pitman and Dr. Barnardo; clergymen like H. R. Haweis and Brooke Lambert, all concerned in their last dispositions to set such a good example. Two dukes have been cremated here, with a due proportion of duchesses and other members of the peerage; a judge or two can be counted; and a crowning triumph of the Society would be to get a bishop among its clients. At the outset of the movement one bishop came forward to denounce it, but he was put to silence by a reminder how certain distinguished prelates had been cremated alive, so far back as Queen Mary’s time, with no presumable damage to their souls’ welfare.
As an original supporter of an enterprise that never sought to make money, I need not shrink from giving it bold advertisement. The one valid objection to cremation, that death by poisoning might be undetected, is obviated by the precautions all along insisted upon by the Cremation Society, which, along with its own aims, has advocated such more stringent examination into the cause of death as itself requires in every case. The proceedings are facilitated when, in lifetime, one has expressed a disposition for this kind of funeral. The cost of cremation has now been reduced to a few pounds, becoming lowered as the apparatus was more often used. The Golder’s Green Crematorium has almost extinguished the Society’s, which stands below the Knap Hill Barracks, and above the canal bank, a mile or two out of Woking, just beyond the church of St. John’s Hill. The building includes a chapel, where any religious service desired may be held, this and the final disposal of the remains being left to the friends of the deceased. The body, shrivelled up by a blast of hot air, is turned into a small handful of ashes, which can be preserved in an urn or buried in the ground, when its life is scattered through this world in the undying good or evil a man has helped to do. The Crematorium enclosure has a close-packed show of tiny tombstones and dwarf crosses, that give a strange effect, as of a dolls’ cemetery, so inveterate is the desire for some visible memorial of our loved ones. For my part, I should wish what is not my real self to be thrown out on any of the breezy commons about Woking—
That from his ashes may be made
The heather of his native land.
All this fair country has been used for sepulchres since, above the heaths trodden by funeral processions and cheerful warriors of our day, were heaped tumuli where long-forgotten chiefs “quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests.” The neighbourhood has some notable recent graves, besides those in the great gathering. Over the common to the west of Brookwood Cemetery is reached Pirbright, where, near the east end of the churchyard, Henry Stanley lies at rest beneath a huge block of rough stone, an appropriate monument for him whom the natives styled “stone-breaker,” in admiration of his masterful dealing with difficulties. At Frimley, on the Surrey border, is buried Bret Harte. A little to the south of this, beside Farnborough station, on a wooded hill rises a far-seen dome, miniature of that which covers the great Napoleon at Paris, this one crowning a Benedictine Abbey built to enshrine the tombs of Louis Napoleon and his ill-fated son. On the other side of the line is the home of the Empress who, one might think, had little reason to love sights that should sorrowfully remind her how many a French mother’s son may have been spared through her untimely loss. Yet here this bereaved exile was neighbour to our chief national manufactory of martial death.