But something deeper far than these;
The separation that is here
Is of the grave; and of austere
Yet happy feelings of the dead.”
On the south side of the Thames there are some other burial-grounds which should be mentioned here. Greenwich Hospital possesses no less than three cemeteries. In 1707 Prince George of Denmark gave a plot of ground for the purpose, measuring 660 by 132 feet. This is on the west side of the Royal Naval School. It is enclosed and full of tombstones. But in 1747 an extra two and a half acres, surrounding the old ground, were appropriated for interments. This space is well kept, containing some fine trees and only a few monuments. The gate from the school playground is generally open. Then there is the Hospital Cemetery in West Combe, nearly six acres in size, and first used in 1857. The burial-ground of God’s Gift College (Dulwich) is at the corner of Court Lane. It dates from about 1700, and is a picturesque, well-kept little ground, with several handsome altar tombs in it. The cemetery of Morden College, Blackheath (founded for decayed merchants about 1695) also exists. It is about a quarter of an acre in size, with about eighty tombstones, but the graves have been levelled, and the ground, though still walled round, forms part of the College gardens.
VIEW FROM THE ALMSHOUSES, WHITE HORSE STREET, STEPNEY.
There were several almshouse graveyards in London, including the “College yard” for St. Saviour’s Almshouses, Southwark, which is now a builder’s store-yard in Park Street, and over which the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway passes on arches, and one behind the Goldsmith’s Almshouses, now covered by the artisans’ dwellings on the west side of Goldsmith Row, Shoreditch. The frightfully crowded “almshouse ground” in Clement’s Lane formed part of the site of the new Law Courts; while one in Crown Street, Soho, adjoining St. Martin’s Almshouses, disappeared when the French Chapel was built, and has now been lost in Charing Cross Road. In order to enter the almshouses in White Horse Street, Stepney, it is necessary to pass through a graveyard, and it cannot be a lively outlook for the pensioners, who have gravestones just under their windows. It was connected with the Independent Chapel, and first used in 1781.
Perhaps the most interesting of these burial-grounds is one which belonged to the Bancroft Almshouses in Mile End Road. The fate of the asylum itself is well known; it has been replaced by the People’s Palace, and the improvement from an antiquarian or architectural point of view is nil. The recent interest taken in the proposed destruction of the Trinity Hospital in Mile End Road points to the fact that the pendulum of public opinion is now swinging towards the preservation of historical buildings. The graveyard of Bancroft’s Almshouses was a long strip on the eastern side. Part of it has been merged into the roadway. St. Benet’s Church (consecrated in 1872), Hall, and Vicarage were built upon it, and the bones of the pensioners are under the Vicarage garden. The northernmost point of the graveyard is enclosed and rooted over, and forms a little yard where flag-staffs, &c., are stored. But between this and the wall of the Vicarage there is a piece open to the road, with some heaps of stones in it and rubbish. There are, at any rate, four gravestones left, against the wall, and there may be others behind the stones; but I daresay it is only a very small proportion of those who pass in and out of the Palace who have ever noticed this relic of the Bancroft Almshouses.
In a large number of the London parishes it was necessary to have “poor grounds,” i.e., graveyards where bodies could be interred at a trifling cost or entirely at the cost of the parish; for, notwithstanding the great dislike of the poor to “a pauper’s funeral,” and the efforts they will make to avoid it, there always have been cases in which no other sort of funeral can be arranged. Some of the “poor grounds” were attached to the workhouses, others were merely a part of the parish churchyards, while others again were older additional burial-grounds secured by the parishes before the days of workhouses.