In 1852 sixteen acres of agricultural land was purchased on high ground on the outskirts of Torquay. This was close to brickworks and potteries and near a place named after the Old English word for ‘hidden’: Hele.
It would be the location of the town’s new cemetery.
As Torquay developed during the nineteenth century, the town’s traditional burial ground of St Saviour’s in Torre (pictured above) had become overused and in 1850 a petition was raised to prohibit further burials.
Old medieval churchyards were also being seen as a source of ‘miasma’, a stench that was believed could poison residents. Reinforcing these concerns about a lack of space and disease were outbreaks of cholera in Torquay in 1832 and 1849. In one outbreak sixty bodies needed to be quickly buried in a mass grave. The Cholera Corner of St Saviour’s churchyard, now St Andrew’s, is still there.
Meanwhile, the non-conformist and Catholic communities of the Bay were growing, leading to an increasing demand for burial places beyond the medieval Anglican churchyards.
All agreed that a new cemetery was needed, but the resort’s new burial ground wasn’t going to be just a larger version of what had gone before. Torquay’s necropolis was to be something suitable for contemporary Victorian Britain; a modern cemetery for a modern town.
The most obvious difference was its location. Both St Saviour’s and St Mary Magdalene’s churchyards were in the centre of Torquay but town planners and architects across the nation had long been advocating burial outside of towns, the precedent being Ancient Rome. The new site consequently relocated mourning, removing the dead from the immediate realm of the living where they had their place at the heart of our community for well over a millennium. In place of the ‘communally owned’ Church, the new cemetery would be a private and profit-making enterprise, run by the Torquay Extra Mural Cemetery Company. This effectively privatised death and burial.
I
t was only in 1819 that the first cemetery not part of an Anglican parish church had opened in Norwich. Then in 1832 a bill was passed that actively encouraged the building of more burial grounds. Unlike traditional churchyards, these cemeteries were independent of a parish church and were first founded in the rapidly growing cities of Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Newcastle.
Seven cemeteries were founded in the capital and, as Torquay promoted itself as ‘Little London’, both residents and visitors expected corresponding provision in the nation’s premier resort.
Torquay’s first interment took place in the Nonconformist section in 1852. This was because the Bishop of Exeter, Dr Henry Philpotts, only allowed the consecration of the cemetery after the Anglican section was physically separated from any adjoining burial ground by a wall. Anglican internments then took place from June 1854.
At the same time, a chapel was consecrated for the use of Anglicans; a chapel for the Nonconformists wasn’t built until 1862. Such double chapels, one for Anglicans and another for Nonconformists, were common in Victorian cemeteries. As in life, the resort’s dead would be separated by religion.
These new burial grounds became known as ‘garden cemeteries’. The opening of Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris in 1815 was the model while in 1842 Scottish horticulturalist John Claudius Loudon published a book entitled ‘On the Laying Out of Cemeteries’. He advocated a grid-like structure with roads wide enough for carriages, and smaller paths for strolling. The impression was to be less of a spiritual place and more of a private, landscaped park, with a central chapel instead of a country house.
Before the 1840s there were no public parks and cemeteries came to be recreational and educational spaces, somewhere to visit, to reflect and contemplate. As businesses, they were designed to attract visitors with sculptures and horticultural art, with artists, architects and gardeners showcasing their work.
Reinforcing this idea of a place apart from the community, Torquay’s cemetery entrance was comprised of cast-iron carriage gates set in high walls near a stone lodge in Tudor Gothic style pictured above). Such entrances were elaborately fashioned, marking the fact that visitors were entering an alternative community of the dead. Here you could leave behind the busy mercantile town outside to enter a spiritual realm of contemplation.
Cemetaries quickly became popular as attractions in themselves. In 1859, Jules Verne visited Edinburgh’s Warriston Cemetery where he described the tombs as “like charming cottages where life flows past, leisurely and pleasant”. In the 1860s, Queen Victoria went for a carriage ride around Brompton Cemetery. Highgate and Kensal Green even had to employ their own private police forces to maintain order as the cemeteries became so busy with picknickers.
Celebrity was a particular attraction. One local example is the monumental white marble sarcophagus commemorating Isaac Merritt Singer of Oldway Mansion (p[ictured above). This Renaissance-style sarcophagus is ornamented with plants of symbolic significance such as maize, indicating Singer’s American origins. Also found here is the grave of George Marsden Waterhouse, Prime Minister of New Zealand, showing the town’s status as a place of retirement for many famous Victorians.
Yet there was no equality, even in death. A prominent plot within the cemetery indicated wealth and status, with graves a public extension of the household’s property. Indeed, the cemetery provided a secure and well-maintained place for families to establish permanent monuments to themselves. Victorian graves were consequently much more elaborate than their modern counterparts, incorporating symbolism in their design, often religious but also incorporating representations of a profession. This was a kind of immortality and, if necessary, worth incurring debt for a conspicuous display which particularly appealed to the resort’s middle class, keen to distance itself from the working class and to proclaim its advance.
The popularity of Torquay’s garden cemetery, however, didn’t last. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, people began to object to the crippling cost of funerals, monuments, and the rituals of ostentatious mourning. Technology was making the world more open, both psychologically and physically. There also came a reaction against Queen Victoria’s obsessive grieving for her husband and her withdrawal from public appearances. A new century and Edward VII’s succession in 1901 saw attitudes changing.
What made most difference, however, was the senseless waste of World War I which challenged the certainties of Empire and Faith. Almost immediately, lavish displays for the dead disappeared as we came to see the world differently.
As attitudes to death evolved, cemeteries began to be laid out differently. Headstones became more discreet and monuments less extravagant. Then we see the simple memorials to the twentieth century victims of conflict in the 136 burials of the First World War and the 97 from the Second World War (pictured above). Here was a new equality in death that replaced Victorian rivalries.
The greatest change in the post-Victoria era was, however, the gradual acceptance of cremation, first proposed by a few radical thinkers in the late nineteenth century. Although cremation was not illegal, the first working crematorium was built in Woking in 1879, it was not widely practised. However, in 1902 Parliament passed the Cremation Act which formalised the practice.
Always responsive to national change, in 1929 an area to the north of Hele Road was acquired from the Cary Estate. Here was built a crematorium. By 1968 more than half of all the dead in Britain were cremated; today, it’s around 80 per cent.
Times move on but Torquay’s vast necropolis is still there behind those high walls. Its many monuments and graves tell of the evolution of the richest town in the nation, while the combination of architecture, sculpture, landscape, wildlife and poetry makes the cemetery like no other place in the town’s historic environment. Do visit if you can.
‘Torquay: A Social History’ by local author Kevin Dixon is available for £10 from Artizan Gallery, Fleet Street, Torquay. or:
https://www.art-hub.co.uk/product-page/torquay-a-social-history-by-kevin-dixon
