EAST HILL BURIAL-GROUND, WANDSWORTH.
About the year 1687 between thirteen and fourteen thousand French Protestants, driven from home by the intolerance of Louis XIV., settled in London, some in Spitalfields, others in the district of St. Giles’ and Seven Dials, in Stepney, and in Wandsworth. There was a French church at Wandsworth, which subsequently fell into the hands of the Wesleyans, and the Huguenots who settled in this locality were chiefly engaged in trade as hatters. As a result of these settlements we find their graves in Bethnal Green Churchyard and other places, but especially in the East Hill burial-ground at Wandsworth, where many French Protestants of note were interred, and where there are some fine old headstones and altar tombs. It is a picturesque ground between the two roads, but, with the exception of a pathway through it, it is not open to the public.
Foreigners now have to be buried in the cemeteries, and many a strange service or ceremony has been held at the graveside of those who belong to other climes, especially, perhaps, in Kensal Green Cemetery, Norwood Cemetery, and the others that are non-parochial. The Jews and the Greeks are, I believe, the only communities of strangers who still keep up separate burial-grounds of their own in London.
CHAPTER IX
HOSPITAL, ALMSHOUSE, AND WORKHOUSE GROUNDS.
“Such ebb and flow must ever be,
Then wherefore should we mourn?”
Wordsworth.
When the Greyfriars, or Christ’s Hospital, was set aside for “poor children,” and Bridewell for “the correction of vagabonds,” St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City and St. Thomas’s in Southwark were devoted to the care of the “wounded, maimed, sick, and diseased”; and in these four benevolent institutions, which owe so much to the short-lived but truly pious King Edward VI., there was provision made for the burial of the dead. It must be remembered that the quadrangle of Christ’s Hospital, which is still surrounded by cloisters, was the burial-ground of the Greyfriars, but apart from this, for the boys of the school or the officers or servants, there was a small plot of ground set apart as a graveyard at the north-west corner of the block of buildings. This was demolished when the great hall was built, in 1825, and if any of its site remains it is only a limited piece of the courtyard on the north side of the hall and the doctor’s garden. A few tombstones are preserved in the passage leading to the doctor’s house. At this time was formed the additional burial-ground for Christ Church at the western end of the churchyard of St. Botolph, Aldersgate Street. But the churchyard adjoining Christ Church, and even the cloisters themselves, were used from time to time by the Hospital, and it was the custom in the last century for a “blue” to be buried by torchlight. His schoolfellows passed through the venerable courtyards and buildings in procession, two by two, and sang a burial anthem from the 39th Psalm, which must have been a most solemn and touching sight, and was “particularly adapted to the monastic territory” of the Hospital. It will be a sad day when this noble old school is torn from its rightful home in the City of London, and when the boys receive a “modern” education in a trim, new building, and wear the dull tweed suit and the school cap dragged on at the back of their heads; and it is well to impress again and again upon the Charity Commissioners and the Almoners of the Hospital that a very considerable portion of the site will not be available for building upon, as it will come under the provisions of the Disused Burial-grounds Act. The same remark applies with even greater force to the neighbouring hospital, the Charterhouse, where all the gardens and courtyards, including the Square itself and the little burial-ground which is still recognisable as such, have been used at one time or another for interments. I have explained how this came about in a former chapter.
