Since the opening of the Brighton Railway several funerals per railway have taken place, the bodies being placed in hearses on the line and the mourners accompanying it in the railway carriages.
Broun’s vision for his ‘City of the Dead’ went outside the dictates of contemporary thinking. He saw it as a ‘last home and bed of rest’ for all – ‘the high and low, the mighty and weak, the learned and ignorant, the wicked and the good, the idle and the industrious’ and believed they should lie ‘in one vast mingled heap … together.’4 (The description of ‘mingled’ is an unfortunate choice of word, as often in the nineteenth century, paupers and others would indeed be ‘mingled’ together in the same pit, or, perchance, even the same coffin, for want of space!) For others, whilst that may be fine once they were in the ground, how they got there was another matter.
The Bishop of London, the Reverend Charles Blomfield, was one of those, and when questioned by the House of Commons Select Committee in 1842, had not only strongly disagreed with the idea of travelling to one’s burial place in a train, he violently objected to any possibility of ‘persons of opposite character [being] carried in the same conveyance’, such as ‘a profligate’ with a ‘respectable member of church’, which would, he declared, seriously ‘shock the feelings of his friends’. Such delicacy was something that the London Necropolis Company (LNC) had also thought about and they set up, much to the amusement of Punch, what they called the ‘Railway System of Interment’. In other words, burial by railway class (first class, second class, third class), and this started, like all other railway journeys, at the departure station.
An article in Leisure Hour (1856) reassured its readers that all using the ‘Railway System’ received the same treatment no matter what their background, ‘with but the most trifling difference, the various class rooms are furnished precisely alike … there is the same privacy, the same quietude, the same respect for poor as well as rich.’ Further details of the arrangements, however, show that they were very definitely different. On the road level are ‘the range of third-class waiting rooms, well and appropriately furnished.’ (Note the word ‘appropriately’). ‘A massive and handsome staircase of stone leads to the next floor, which is devoted to the use of second-class funerals; it then ascends to the third floor, level with the railway platform, and on which lie the first class reception and waiting rooms’.5 Once at the cemetery, however, every ‘class’ of dead, even paupers, had their own guaranteed burial space.
Cemetery Station – was there ever a station of a more macabre nature? Death is in the air as the company offices at 188 Westminster Bridge Road building emblazons the sign ‘Necroplis Brookwood Cemetery’. The beautifully designed gates by Messrs Bailey add to the atmosphere. (John Clarke)
The LNC decided that the best location for the London terminus of ‘the black line’, as The Spectator called it, was Waterloo; its close proximity to the river and its water transport system being an added bonus. Work started on the first private necropolis station in May 1854, in an area between Westminster Bridge Road and York Street, and between arches 225–232 under the mainlines of the L&SWR, going into Waterloo. It was completed in October 1854 at a cost of £23,231 14s 4d. It had its own private access road which ran in from Westminster Bridge Road and out on to York Road, which allowed mourners to arrive conveniently and for the discreet disembarkation of the coffins from the hearse and delivery to the train; and, when volume of trade increased, for no holdups from vehicles having to turn around to go out. Both entrances had gated archways – that on the Westminster Bridge side was the more elaborate, also having the distinction of a pair of beautifully crafted iron gates, designed by Messrs Bailey, and originally made for the Great Exhibition in 1851. There were two designated lines enclosed by a shed.
A beautiful Victorian advertisement produced by the London Necropolis Company for the front cover of their brochure of 1899, showing a romanticised view of the funeral train at the cemetery grounds. Note, however, the link with ‘modernity’ with the telegram code and telephone number up in the top left-hand corner. (John Clarke)
During its lifetime, the York Street Station underwent a number of expansions and changes. Some were cosmetic, such as lining the arched entrance with white lightly glazed tiles, to dispel the gloominess of the approach. Others were more significant, such as the removal of the western wall of the shed, substituting it with an awning, in 1876. An extension of the platform occurred in 1877 and, more significantly, in 1889–90 the encroachment of the L&SWR’s enlarged ‘A’ signal box gantry, which needed to use the Waterloo end of the platform on which to site one of its new iron support stanchions. The major change came in 1899 when, desperately needing the site for its own expansion, the L&SWR agreed to provide the LNC with a completely new terminus at 121 Westminster Bridge Road (afterwards known as the Westminster Bridge Station), with a four-storeyed building, which also housed the LNC’s offices. This latter station continued to serve the company until it was hit in one of the heaviest air raids over London, during ‘the Blitz’ in the Second World War.6
The LNC’s cemetery, ‘Brookwood’, was consecrated on 7 November 1854, but did not open to the public for another week, on 13 November. It had its own branch line and two stations, ‘of a character as may be completed within a few weeks’.7 The ‘North Station’, within the Nonconformist section, was nearest the L&SWR’s main line, the other, ‘South Station’, was located in the Anglican consecrated area; both conveniently situated for the chapels. As well as the refreshment rooms, which would provide luncheons for the funeral parties, and serve alcoholic drinks, there were waiting rooms, ‘pauper’ rooms, toilets and living accommodation for staff of the cemetery. (Later these stations were used merely as refreshment ‘Bars’ but remained in use until the 1960s/70s.)
The Necropolis train supposedly ran every day (including Sundays, until the 1900s), but in reality it ran ‘as required’ – no funeral, no train – departing from London at 11.20 a.m. (11.50 a.m. from the 1870s) and departed from the cemetery for the return journey at 2.30 p.m. There were definite ‘regular’ trains on a Tuesday and Friday which could be used by the general public, but these were principally run to accommodate agreements with London parishes to take the unclaimed dead from their institutions and for ‘pauper burials’.
Initially, the LNC used funeral directors but very soon began to offer their own ‘full service’. A rather wordy, but very informative, advertisement appeared in The Times, 6 June 1856:
NECROPOLIS – Established by Parliament – WOKING CEMETERY – The Company act also as Undertakers – FUNERALS PROVIDED complete, including private grave. Statuary work, and every expense, as follows:– First Class £21 0s. 0d. Second Class £18 0s. 0d. Third Class £14 0s. 0d. Fourth Class £11 0s. 0d. Fifth Class £4 0s. 0d. Sixth Class £3 5s. 0d.
The above charges include the performance of the funeral from the house, with the usual furniture and attendants, but they may be considerably reduced by dispensing with the funeral cortege through the streets of London, and the Necropolis Company think it right to state that the arrangements of meeting at their private station in the Westminster Road has been introduced by them to relieve the public from unnecessary and costly display, and that it is now daily adopted and gives complete satisfaction.
Apply personally or by letter to the Secretary, 2, Lancaster Place, Strand, or any agent of the Company, either of whom will wait on the parties and undertake all the arrangements. The train leaves the Westminster Station daily at 11.20. Separate waiting rooms.
The company would arrange all – even sending out the invitations to attend! By 1870, the advertisements had become more concise, more simplified. One, in The Standard, 28 November, declared:
Funerals by Railway
The NECROPOLIS is accessible from London in 50 minutes by special train from the Westminster Road Station or by South Western train to Brookwood.
All expensive pageantry may be dispensed with and funerals conducted with simplicity
and economy unattainable elsewhere.
Whilst the ‘class’ of the travel ticket also decided the class of funeral, the site of one’s final resting place was determined by one’s beliefs – a member of the established Church of England, Conformist or Nonconformist. Being associated with any particular parishes, guilds, societies and communities would also decide one’s position within the cemetery. It was divided into many sub-sections, or ‘Allotments’ as the LNC described them in a brochure of 1890. There was, for example, ‘Actors’ Acre’, inaugurated on 9 June 1858, where both famous and impoverished theatrical persons were buried. The brochure boasts that a ‘number of persons who have secured themselves world-wide fame’ rest there but the first burial, on 13 November, was that of ‘pauper’ twin male babies born to Mr and Mrs Hore, of 74 Ewer Street, Barrow, paid for by the Diocese of Winchester.
Those of ‘world-wide fame’ connected to this book include: Frederick Engels, whose cremation took place at the Brookwood Crematorium; and Dugald Drummond, initially of the North British Railway, but latterly the Chief Mechanical Engineer of the L&SWR. Fittingly, his funeral train was hauled by a ‘D15’ class 4-4-0, No 463 – the first of the last locomotive class that Drummond had designed. Engine drivers carried his coffin from his home, in South Bank, to the train which had made a special stop at Surbiton. Alongside family and friends, over 200 L&SWR employees, and many officials and dignitaries of the company, attended the funeral. A memorial Celtic cross was erected on his grave in plot 38, off Church Avenue, and this has been restored in recent times (1994), thanks to the efforts of John Clarke and the local Co-operative Funeral Service.
A travel warrant issued by the Borough of Southwark for two persons to take the Necropolis train travelling third class; presumably family of William Clark. Many such warrants would have been issued to the paupers of the parish. (Southwark Local Studies Library)
The L&SWR had distinct areas set aside for its employees of all ranks – first class are located in plot 47, whilst second class reside in plot 48.8 The Nonconformists were buried in plots adjacent to nos 125 and 134. Clarke lists a number of individual employees along with their stories.
The ‘black line’ continued to work until well into the twentieth century, although it never carried the numbers so eagerly anticipated by its parent company. Its place in railway history is assured by the macabre character of its existence.
Notes
1 These two were not to be amongst those who eventually established the company
2 John Clarke’s book, The Brookwood Necropolis Railway, informs and provides most of the facts relating to the writing on this subject (unless otherwise stated)
3 Carlisle Journal, Saturday 23 October 1841
4 Clarke, J., 2006
5 Ibid.
6 See Clarke, J., 2006, for the very interesting details of this
7 As quoted in a report by William Moorsom, the LNC’s first Engineer, in Clarke, J., 2006
8 Clarke, J., 2006
4
‘UNBURYING’ THE DEAD
With the coming of the railways came also displacement, destruction and even desecration. Not least, when they came to town, and especially when that town was the capital, London. In order to make room for the new, it was necessary to get rid of the old, no matter what it was – homes, hospitals, antiquities and even graveyards. ‘Sordid vandalism’, as Punch termed it; or ‘mutilation’ as described by historian Jack Simmons,1 was given political assent – the needs of the railways were paramount. (It must, however, for the sake of a balanced view, be added that the ‘clearances’ often served the political will of the time and, for many, what came after was sometimes decidedly better than what was there before.)
The feisty Midland Railway savoured a good fight. Born from the needs of ‘plain, practical men’, who were small coal owners (according to Frederick Williams in his early canonical history of the Midlands), in order to transport their coal, it came out fighting for its territory and its lines, taking on the canal owners even before it took on other railway companies.2 Some hold, and have written, that it was formed in 1832 with the Midland Counties Railway; whilst more modern thinking finds that what has become known as ‘the Midland Railway’ came about through the amalgamation of three lines that had a common connection at Derby – the North Midland, Midland Counties, and Birmingham & Derby Junction, in 1844.
Once established, it became a railway of big ideas and big projects. It extended and extended (some, including its own directors often argued that it was ‘overextended’) in all directions, yet by 1850, whilst it had gained mileage security, it was still a relatively middleweight company. It had a myriad of lines, mostly centred on the East Midlands, with its headquarters in Derby, and whilst its trains ran over the London & North Western Railway lines, via Hampton Junction and Rugby into Euston, it needed its own independent access to London. It did not want to be dependent upon another ‘host’ and bitter rival, the Great Northern Railway Company, who were imposing heavy tariffs on goods carried by the Midland on its lines into London at King’s Cross Station.
A decade later, and with further extensions, the now heavyweight Midland began its push for the metropolis. Eventually yet another extension, from Bedford to London, gave them the independent access they wanted. In 1862/3, the Midland Railway Company secured an Act of Parliament – ‘St. Giles’s-in-the-Fields Glebe Act’ – to build a new London terminus. This was to become known as St Pancras Station – ironically right next door to arch rival, the Great Northern Railway’s, King’s Cross Station (opened in 1852).
The Midland were always a company prepared to ‘think outside the box’, for instance, doing away with second-class carriages, when all other companies clung to theirs thinking such a plan was lunacy. They also, somewhat surprisingly for a railway company, thought about the comfort of their passengers. Even in their early life, back in 1842, much to the chagrin of their shareholders who complained it was money ill-spent, they were ‘furnishing refreshment and waiting rooms, “more like drawing-rooms in palaces”, than places of comfortable accommodation.’3 Little wonder, then, that when they eventually arrived in London and claimed their place, they did it in the grandest style.
St Pancras, one of the iconic buildings in London, even today,4 was designed by the company’s one-time Engineer in Chief, who was at that time a retained consultant engineer, William Henry Barlow. Barlow’s name is most often linked with railways,5 but he had also assisted Paxton with his design for the ‘Crystal Palace’ building for the ‘Great Exhibition of Works of Industry and All Nations’ in 1851. The Exhibition was a celebration of Great Britain’s role in the advance of modern industrial technology, and the massive ‘Glass House’ was a wonderful example of such. It is more than likely that this experience of grandeur influenced Barlow’s thinking when he took on the design of the Midland’s landmark station – that, and the wish to grandly ‘outdo’ all other termini in the vicinity. Perhaps not too difficult against Lewis Cubitt’s more functional King’s Cross, but maybe more so against Euston’s (the first intercity railway station in London) ornate tone and spectacular Doric arch entrance, designed by Philip Hardwick. However, perhaps those that had the most influence were the single span roof designs being built at Charing Cross and Cannon Street, both designed by John Hawkshaw.
Barlow’s (and Rowland Mason Ordish’s6) finished building was stupendous. A nation already excited and amazed by ever-increasing engineering marvels, held its breath in wonder at this new masterpiece. Barlow’s design took engineering technology to the next level, as his immense train shed became the world’s largest enclosed space – a record it held for the next twenty-five years. ‘The span of the roof covered four platforms, eleven lines of rails, and a cab-stand twenty-five feet wide. It is 100 feet high, 700 feet in length, and its width about 240 [243] feet … it contains no less than two acres and a half of glass.’7 Trachtenberg and Hyman write of it:
Its 243-foot span was not an exceptional dimension for
bridges, as we know, but for an interior it was extraordinary, especially extended in depth to form the widest and largest undivided space ever enclosed. The skeletal transparency of the ferro-vitreous vault added a futuristic, magic dimension to the stunning space, especially as the vault was made to spring from the platform level where the passenger stood.8
Whilst the final outcome of the Midland’s London station was spectacularly wonderful, (the Grand Hotel there was designed by George Gilbert Scott) the beginnings were decidedly not. Indeed they were heavy-handed, cruel and gruesome. The Midland, with the power to purchase by compulsion or agreement,9 purchased twenty-seven acres from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and further acres from the Lord William Agar’s estate. The site the Midland had obtained was known as Somers Town and included Agar Town (in the Parish of Old St Pancras), and the graveyards of St Pancras and those of the adjoining church of St Giles. The problem was that the site where the terminus was to be built (according to the wishes of the Midland), could only be approached by tracks that would cross already heavily occupied ground. This was ground which was filled with houses and occupied by great numbers of ‘slum dwellers’, a canal, a much polluted river, a gas works, a newly built church and a very old and greatly over-inhabited graveyard.
Death, Dynamite and Disaster Page 6