[8]. The laying out of four more churchyards is in hand.
The other grounds laid out by the Association have been squares, vacant sites, and churchyards not used for interments. In addition to these, grants have been given, amounting to many hundred pounds, towards the laying out of some fourteen graveyards, and seats, &c., for another twenty-eight, besides which the Association has secured the opening of many more and has saved others from being built upon.
One year the income of the Association amounted to over £11,000. This was due to a shower of wealth from the Mansion House Fund for the Employment of the Unemployed. The Earl of Meath, at the Mansion House Committee, boldly promised, with a smiling face and a sinking heart, that if a grant were made to it the Association would find labour at once and use up the money in wages. I remember being sent for to Lancaster Gate in this emergency. It was no easy matter then and there to provide the work, and the money could not be spent on materials. But within a few weeks hundreds of men were employed, and their food arranged for into the bargain. This process was repeated the following winter (1887-8), but since then the Mansion House Funds have been smaller and their distribution far more careful, while the Association has had to depend for its income upon the subscriptions and donations of its members and friends.
There are now within the metropolitan area ninety burial-grounds actually dedicated to the public as recreation grounds, and being maintained as such under the Open Spaces Act of 1881, or by trustees, or under agreement with the vicar, &c., including four that are Board School playgrounds. To those who remember these places before they were converted the transformation is wonderful. One Sunday in the year 1878, the Rev. H. R. Haweis told his congregation at St. James’s, Westmoreland Street, that in a hasty walk through their own parish burial-ground in Paddington Street, Marylebone, he had met “orange-peel, rotten eggs, cast-off hair-plaits, oyster-shells, crockery, newspapers with bread and meat, dead cats and five live ones,” and that on the grave of one Elizabeth Smith, “in the very centre of the churchyard,” he found “twelve old kettles, two coal-scuttles, three old hats, and an umbrella.” Some of the congregation doubted it, but they went to look, and found it true. This particular ground was laid out as a garden by the St. Marylebone Vestry in 1886, the Association providing £200 and the wages of the labourers. I remember, in a paper I wrote some ten years ago, describing a similar ground (and there were, and still are, many such in London)—I think it was St. James’s, Clerkenwell. This is also now a neat garden, towards the laying out of which, in 1890, the Association gave £50 and several seats.
A CORNER OF ST. JOHN’S GARDEN, BENJAMIN STREET.
I have already referred, in previous chapters, to some of the more interesting of the graveyards which have been laid out as open spaces. There is a very charming little garden in Benjamin Street, near Farringdon Road, which belongs to the parish of St. John’s, Clerkenwell. It was consecrated in 1755 by the Bishop of Lincoln, acting for the Bishop of London, having been conveyed to trustees as an extra parochial burial-ground, the site being a gift to the parish by the will of Simon Michell, who died in 1750. After being closed for burials it fell into the hands of a member of the Clerkenwell Vestry, and was covered with workshops and rubbish until the then Rector, the Rev. W. Dawson, instituted proceedings against him, secured the land, laid it out by public subscription (in 1881), and maintained it at his private expense. It is now in the hands of trustees, and the Holborn District Board of Works and the Clerkenwell Vestry contribute towards its upkeep. Several other gardens in London have had a somewhat similarly checkered history. The burial-ground in Hackney Road belonging to Shoreditch has a quaint old building in it, once the parish watch-house, and used as a temporary hospital at the time of the cholera visitation. A new-gateway has lately been made at St. James’s, Ratcliff, leading into the churchyard garden, erected as a memorial to the late vicar, the Rev. R. K. Arbuthnot, who spent very many years in the parish and died in harness. A special service was held on November 30, 1895, when the choir walked in procession through the grounds, the ceremony ending by the singing of the Rev. H. R. Haweis’s hymn, “The Homeland.” The gate was dedicated by the Rural Dean, Prebendary Turner, present Rector of St. George’s in the East, and opened by Sir Walter Besant. Greenwich and Woolwich Churchyards, which were laid out by the Association, the cost of the latter being borne by Mr. Passmore Edwards, are both fine gardens, Woolwich is especially attractive, as it stands high above the river, with an extensive view. H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge opened Greenwich Churchyard, and H.R.H. the Duchess of Fife opened that of Woolwich. St. James’s Churchyard, Bermondsey, was extensively used for airing clothes before the Association laid it out.
In this matter of the conversion of churchyards into public gardens there has, indeed, been a wonderful change in public opinion. It used to be necessary to visit the clergy and to ask them to allow the grounds to be laid out, with the result, usually, that the request or offer was declined. But a new race of clergy seems to be springing up, and such men as the present Rectors of Woolwich, Walworth, and Bethnal Green no sooner came into possession of their livings than they wrote to the Association, begging that their churchyards might be taken in hand. The new Rector of Bethnal Green, already well known as the “head” of Oxford House, not only asked the Association to lay out his churchyard but also made a Christmas present of it to the Vestry, and ere long it will be a most useful open space. And this has happened in very many places, most of the parish churchyards being new public gardens, except Camberwell, Rotherhithe, Battersea, Clapham, Wandsworth, Kensington, Wapping, Homerton, and a few others; but there are still several district churchyards which it would be very advantageous to lay out.
To return to some of the quainter spots. In the burial-ground of St. George the Martyr, Bloomsbury, there stands a private gentleman’s dissecting-room. Hackney Churchyard includes the ground surrounding the tower of the older church (St. Augustine’s), while Bermondsey Churchyard includes the cemetery of the Abbey. The little playground in Russell Court, Drury Lane, which was a graveyard attached to the parish of St. Mary le Strand, is immortalised as “Tom all alones” in Dickens’ “Bleak House.” This was “that there berryin’ ground,” where, said poor Jo, “‘they laid him as was werry good to me’”—the place “with houses looking on on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate....
“‘He was put there,’ says Jo, holding to the bar and looking in.