THOUGH the
Churchyard is by no means a large one, it is yet much larger than it was,
having been added to from time to time. It is doubtless this necessity for
enlargement that has robbed it of any really old tomb stones, all that remain
being comparatively modern, and not of any remarkable interest…..The earliest
date seems to be 1705.
John
Kennedy ‘A History of the Parish of Leyton, Essex’ 1894
Although
considerable efforts have gone into cleaning it up over the last few years St
Mary’s still has one of the untidiest churchyards I’ve seen in London. Until
relatively recently the place was overgrown with shrubs, brambles and ivy to
the point of being almost impenetrable in places. Drug addicts used the
undergrowth as a screen from prying eyes and thorns and spines on the brambles
were much less of a hazard than broken glass and discarded needles to anyone
braving the scrub to try and find a grave. The rampant flora also toppled
graves and pulled down memorials, often aided and abetted by local gangs of youths
with nothing better to do. But the Friends of St Mary’s churchyard and the
Leyton History Society cleaned the burial ground up, clearing out much of the
undergrowth and hopefully stacking the parts of toppled memorials together as
though one day someone might go to the bother of reconstructing them. Although
the mounds of carefully sorted rubble do give the unfortunate impression of a
bomb site the churchyard is now a relatively pleasant place to spend time in, a
secluded oasis in the centre of Leyton. So pleasant in fact that the street
drinkers have now abandoned their former refuge in the park and now congregate
with their cans of cheap yet potent Polish lager at the back of the church.
John
Kennedy, the author of ‘A History of the Parish of Leyton, Essex’ was the vicar
of St Catherine’s in Leytonstone, opened in 1893 on Hainault Road. His own church had no burial ground and his dismissive
account of St Mary’s churchyard may be coloured by the tinge of envy. As London
churchyards go it is relatively large and there are currently two listed
monuments, the Tench and Moyer memorials; at the time Kennedy was writing Sir
John Soane’s memorial for Samuel Bosanquet hadn’t succumbed to hooliganism and
Sir Thomas Bladen’s sarcophagus was still standing on the path behind the alms
houses….. ‘not of any remarkable interest’ indeed! Even his earliest dated
tombstone is wrong – set in the outside wall of the church is what must have
once been a freestanding headstone embellished with a skull belonging to 70
year old Mr Gilbert Kennedy (not a relation of the vicar of St Catherine’s as
far as we know)) who had died on February the 20th 1693.
On
Saturday 27 May 1905 the Tower Hamlets Independent and East End Local
Advertiser carried an intriguing article on another lost monument:
THE STRANGE MONUMENT.
The Strange vault in Leyton Pariah Churchyard has been opened, and many have
had the opportunity of going inside to see the twelve coffins there, including
that of Sir John Srange, Master of the Rolls, who died in 1754. The woodwork of
this coffin has entirely disappeared. The names of the deceased are being engraved on the outside of the tomb. A gentleman in the City,
interested in Leyton, has contributed E2O towards the expense.
Sir
John Strange who, according to John T. Page in his ‘Epitaphs, curious, notable
and historical” (which, as far as I can tell, remains unpublished except as
excerpts in newspapers of the early 1900’s) “started his career as a
solicitor’s clerk carrying his master’s bag to Westminster - and finished as
Master of the Rolls.” Strange’s supposed epitaph is still well known and
frequently makes the sort of lists and collections of unusual arcana that find
so welcoming a home on the internet (‘Funny Epitaphs From History’ ’10 Most
Hilarious Tombstone Epitaphs’ Examples of Funny and Bizarre Epitaphs’ etc). Sir
John’s ‘most hilarious’ epitaph is:
“Here lies an
honest lawyer, that is Strange.”
The
fact that this is still in the top ten of most amusing epitaphs almost 300
years after it was written underlines the generally low standard of graveyard
humour. When they bother to mention where he is buried most accounts claim that
Sir John is buried in the Rolls Chapel. This is not true, he is most definitely
buried in Leyton. Neither the inscription on his grave in the churchyard nor
his memorial inside the church (which is written in Latin) bears the famous
epitaph, which seems to be an early example of an urban myth. 
There
has been a church on the site of St Mary’s since at least 1200 when it was
granted along with the rest of the manorial holdings to Stratford Abbey. For
many years it was a poor Essex parish with the vicarage worth a mere 40
shillings a year in 1254, rising to £7 12s in 1535 and just £30 in 1604. The
value of the living then didn’t rise at all for the best part of 60 years,
making it difficult for the parish to recruit a clergyman. By 1669 the parishioners
had to raid their own pockets to find £69 a year to add to the £30 living to
secure the services of the parish’s most famous incumbent, the antiquary John Strype, who died at the age of 94 in
Hackney in 1724 but being brought back to Leyton to be buried. In the 18th century Leyton’s combination of
bucolic charm and proximity to London made it a favoured location for country
seats amongst the merchants and bankers of the city; the population of the
village and the relative wealth of its clergyman exponentially expanded as a
result. By the 1760’s the existing churchyard was too small to comfortably
accommodate the increased number of burials produced by a burgeoning
population.
The
vestry minutes of 1762 record an approach to Colonel Gansell to see whether he
would be willing to sell the freehold of “a piece of the garden ground
belonging to the Workhouse, not less than 80 feet in length, & the whole
width for the enlargement of the Churchyard,” to which Colonel Gansell’s
response was, yes. (This may well have been the same piece of ground, adjacent
to the churchyard on which Colonel Gansell’s father, in 1718, “on the occasion
of enlarging his garden… dug up two acres of ground, and found under the whole
very large and strong foundations : in one place all of stone with considerable
arches, and an arched doorway (about ten feet high and six feet wide)
ornamented with mouldings, with steps down to it: in many of the foundations
there were great quantities of Roman tiles and bricks.” Gansell senior on ordering
a pond to be dug also discovered “some old timber morticed together like a
floor was discovered, with several Roman coins, Consular and Imperial, and some
silver Saxon coins.” Some time previously, John Kennedy tells us, “a large urn
of coarse red earth had been found” in the churchyard itself.). Over the next
fifty years the vestry acquired further parcels of land including a row of
cottages and the gardens of the alms houses, which were incorporated into the
churchyard. There were no further opportunities for enlarging the churchyard
but the local population continued to grow exponentially as the former village
was gradually absorbed by the monstrously swelling capital. The vestry made the
best use it could of every square inch of ground but the churchyard inevitably
soon became filled to capacity. By 1896 the Borough council passed a closure
order prohibiting ‘forthwith and entirely’ any further burials within the
parish church and the churchyard.
In
February 1928 the Reverend James Glass and Stewart Wilkins, the sexton of St
Mary’s, were summonsed by Leyton Borough Council for carrying out an illegal
burial in the churchyard. The case was unusual enough to attract national
attention when the startled vicar found himself in the dock at Stratford Police
Court accused under the Burial Act 1855 of permitting a burial in unauthorised
ground. The court was told that it had come to the notice of the council that
burials were going on at the churchyard and in July the previous year they had
written to the vicar who had replied with a promise that it would not happen
again. On September 30 a Corporation superintendent had carried an impromptu
inspection and “saw in the churchyard an open grave, and part of coffin
exposed. He saw a pick or fork sticking into it, the lid was off, and the
contents were covered with mould” (Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer 23
February 1928). The grave had been dug to accommodate a Mr Frank Fox, late of
High Road Leyton, who was originally from Sheffield but had relative already
buried in the churchyard. His widow had begged the sexton to find a place for
her husband and the ever helpful Mr Wilkins had done just that. The Reverend
Glass’s lawyer claimed that the vicar had been away for the three days during
which the burial had been arranged and had only arrived home when the funeral
was about to take place. He said the vicar had not accepted any fee for
carrying out the burial service. When the sexton was called to the witness box
he admitted to having received £10 1 shilling from Mrs Fox of which 1 guinea
was paid to the vicar for his burial fee and the rest paid out to the
gravediggers or on other disbursements. The Police Magistrate fined the vicar
and the sexton £5 each and 10 guineas costs. As neither of them committed any
further offences against the Burial Act 1855 Frank Fox became the last person to
be interred in the churchyard.
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