A guest post by London Historians Member, Jane McChrystal.
Entering Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park from Hamlets Way in Mile End, two of the first headstones you see mark the graves of “Dad” and another embossed with “Peace”. Probably the work of a local mason, these rather original memorials are a sign of increased prosperity among the ordinary people of the East End in the post-war period. To this day, East enders set great store by giving loved ones a decent burial, probably a hangover from the time when seeing a relative buried in an unmarked grave after a pauper’s funeral was a source of enormous shame.
Tower Hamlets LBC is responsible for its preservation and, at the same time, runs it as a nature reserve staffed mainly by volunteers. It remains, though, the final resting place of 350,000 East Londoners, buried there between 1841 and 1966. Originally known as Bow Cemetery, Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, is one of the Magnificent Seven, part of a group of burial grounds established around the outskirts of London by Act of Parliament in 1832. The problem of burying the London dead had been troubling architects since the Seventeenth Century. Wren and Vanbrugh both predicted that interring large numbers of bodies in London’s small church yards would eventually lead to awful consequences. Their concerns became a reality in the early Nineteenth Century, when epidemics began to spread through London as the water supply became contaminated with leakages of decaying matter from the overcrowded church yards, the result of a dramatic increase in the population from 1 million to 2.3 million over fifty years.
The Act was designed to encourage private companies to set up new cemeteries where families could buy a plot and bury their dead, safe in the knowledge that they would stay there in perpetuity, rather than being dug up at some point in the future for disposal who-knows-where, a common practice at that time when church burial grounds filled up.
The fine new cemeteries were established in Highgate, Abney Park, Brompton, West Norwood, Kensal Green, Nunhead and Bow. With their newly planted trees and carefully laid paths, they offered future generations of Londoners a haven for the quiet contemplation of their losses. Abney Park has its music hall performers, Highgate its thinkers and Kensal Green its scientists and engineers, while Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park is distinguished by industrialists, philanthropists and political activists.
Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park is bound by Burdett Road, Mile End Road, the 2c2 railway line, connecting Fenchurch Street to Southend, and Bow Common Lane. It stands in a busy, mixed urban environment, which is immediately transformed on entering the Cemetery Park by its woodlands, ponds and the abundant greenery tumbling over the ranks of monumental masonry which cover its acres.
The largest family memorial in the cemetery is a grade two-listed spire carved out of Portland stone erected in memory of Joseph Westwood. It overshadows the surrounding monuments, put up by less-moneyed Victorians who expressed their enthusiasm for gothic revival with draped urns, grieving angels, broken columns and anchors set loose from broken chains.
Westwood owned an iron foundry on the Isle of Dogs. His works included the Attock Bridge, built across the Indus in 1880 to connect the Punjab to the Pashtun region, forming a vital line of supply for British colonists. Westwood chose to live among the people – though separate from them – who laboured for him, in a substantial villa, Tredegar House on Bow Road until he died in 1883. The site of the house was later one of London’s first schools of nursing which is the site of block of luxury flats today.
The grave of Dr Barnardo’s three young sons stands in its shadow. The memorial to them, put up in 2016, also serves as a memorial to the five hundred children he rescued, who died under his care in the East End orphanage he founded. They are buried elsewhere in the cemetery. The death of all these children is a poignant reminder that, no matter how well-educated or affluent their parents were, all children were susceptible to dying from infections such as measles, which became so easy to treat after the discovery of penicillin.
Amongst the philanthropists buried in the cemetery, another notable individual is Miss Clara Grant, “the bundle woman of Bow”. Her grave is a short walk away from the primary school in Knapp Road, which bears her name. She was a pioneering head-mistress, who believed her pupils deserved to discover the joy of learning rather than enduring the Gradgrindian education deemed suitable for children in training for a life of servitude. Knowing that cold, hungry children cannot benefit from any kind of education, she set up the Fern Street settlement in 1911 for the aid of poor families. It stands there to this day for the same purpose.
She was quite a canny publicist who distributed farthing bundles of little treats to queues of children young and short enough to pass under an arch inscribed with the words:
‘Enter all ye children small, none can come who are too tall.’
Not the slickest of slogans, but press reports and photos of the little children waiting in line to claim their prizes must have made a powerful appeal to potential donors to Miss Grant’s causes.
The labour movement was another major force at work in East London in the fight for social equality and the grave of William Crooks memorialises the efforts of one eminent figure in the struggle. Crooks started out as a cooper and casual labourer in the dockyards and was responsible for forming the first effective trade union in Britain. The 1889 dockers’ strike, which he led, resulted in agreement to a minimum wage, the “Dockers’ tanner”. He went on to become the mayor of Poplar in 1901 and was elected to Parliament in 1903 as MP for Woolwich.
To the left of his grave stands a sober, rather modernist brick construction which honours the memory of the one hundred and ninety people killed in bombing raids in Poplar between 1940 and 1944, who are buried in the cemetery. The memorial serves a reminder to visitors of how the shift from fighting in trenches, on battlefields and at sea to aerial bombardment, made civilians the chief victims of war rather than members of the armed forces.
One particularly shocking example of this change is commemorated by the presence of the graves of some of the one hundred and seventy three people crushed to death on the stairs of Bethnal Green Underground Station on 3rd March 1943.
That evening, people were alerted to the possibility of an air raid and, as usual, made their way to shelter in the station. It was rainy and the stairs were slippery. There was no hand rail in the middle of the stairwell and the steps were unmarked and poorly lit. According to witnesses, the disaster occurred when a young woman with her baby stumbled, followed by the fall of an elderly man which created a domino effect in the press of bodies on the stairs.
There was no time even to panic. The alarms were false and no raid took place that night. The potential of such a catastrophe to undermine the nation’s commitment to war was so great that the government banned reports of its location and the number of casualties from the news. Survivors, rescuers and bystanders were discouraged from talking about it, understandable at the time perhaps, but a grave injustice nonetheless, to the dead, the injured and their families and friends.
Finally, there is the grave of Charlie Brown, publican of the Railway Tavern, an ex-boxer and “uncrowned king of Limehouse”. He was renowned throughout the East End as a benefactor, snappy dresser and collector of exotic objects for the walls of the pub, which his seafaring clients brought from the Far East and Polynesia. He died aged 72 in 1932.
At this distance it’s hard to pin down the precise nature of his charisma, but his funeral demonstrates its magnitude. It was attended by 16,000 mourners including the Mayor of Poplar and, bafflingly, Members of the Ancient Order of Druids. The police were drafted in to keep order, but the crowd’s respect for the Big Man held it in check, even after his death.
Bow Cemetery received the people of the East End for 125 years. Its foundation in 1841 provided a local solution to a London-wide public health emergency, but it was already being overtaken in 1875 by a new kind of “super-cemetery”, established four miles further east on farmland at Wanstead, which remains in use to this day.
Now that the citizens of East London are no longer interred in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, it has taken on a whole new lease of life as a conservation centre designed to engage the local residents with the flora and fauna it shelters. Run largely by volunteers, it is the centre of a continuing mission to restore the graves and discover more about the people who lie buried there for the benefit of their descendants. They maintain a careful balance between the interests of nature-lovers and people, like me, in search of East London’s history. I cannot recommend a visit too highly.
Fabulous informative post thank you!