Buckingham
Road cemetery is unkempt and dilapidated though not, as many disused London
cemeteries are, wildly overgrown and returning to a state of nature. It perhaps
has more than its fair share of vandalised graves, dozens of memorial stones in
some parts of the cemetery have been toppled, altar tombs have been demolished and
most of the few statues are missing limbs, wings or heads. When local residents
and cemetery users complained to Redbridge Council in 2017 about neglect of the
site claiming it was potholed, strewn with litter, beer cans and the remains of
arson and fly tipping, a spokesman for the council responded by telling the
local paper that the cemetery “is squarely in the middle of the borough’s rough
sleepers and street drinking hot spot. Redbridge police, our own
enforcement officers as well as the rough sleepers outreach team visit
regularly to offer help and to keep order.” The council was, the spokesman
promised, going to fix fences and repair paths and access roads as well as clearing
up the rubbish “however carrying out this work is made difficult with the
number of rough sleepers on site and the area needs to be cleared of litter and
drug paraphernalia in advance.” Although there was evidence of at least one
rough sleeper when I was there last week, the unruly hordes of down and outs
cluttering up the place a couple of years ago seem to have largely moved on.
At around 1.00am on the 9th
September 2010 police were called to reports of an injured man on Ilford High
Road, close to the cemetery. They found a badly beaten 58 year old Git Singh
unconscious on the pavement. Following another call at 3.30am they picked up 43
year old Harteerth Singh outside the cemetery, also with serious injuries. Later that morning, when it was light enough,
the police returned to the area to search for evidence of the vicious attacks
on the two homeless men. This time they found they found the corpse of 31 year
old Harbarjan Singh who had died of horrific head and neck injuries inflicted
with a blunt, heavy instrument. The two
injured men soon recovered sufficiently to be able to identify their attacker,
57 year old Jaswinder Singh of Town Road, Enfield. The three men slept rough,
sometimes in the cemetery, sometimes in a car park belonging to nearby business
premises. A few before the murder the
three men had been involved in an altercation with Jaswinder outside a
supermarket. Being outnumbered he had been at the receiving end of a beating
that day and had sworn vengeance. Shortly
before midnight on the 8th September he had tracked the three down to the
cemetery and bludgeoned them with an iron crow bar while they slept. Jaswinder was an illegal migrant who had
entered the UK from India in 1995. He had previous convictions and served
prison sentences for violence in the UK and Germany. Authorities made four
unsuccessful attempts to deport him back to India after each conviction but he
was back in gaol
for another offence before the deportation order came through. “You
are obviously a man with a tendency to explosive and eruptive violence, quite
disproportionate to any perceived provocation,” said Judge Richard Hone at
Jaswinder’s trial at the Old Bailey. He gave him a life sentence, specifying a minimum
term of 24 years.
On
the 24th January 2018 Ilford police were called to A-Z Furniture and Carpets on
the High Road by 31year old shop worker Imran Muhammed. A surprisingly calm Muhammed,
who was bleeding from lacerations on his forearms, told police that he had been
robbed in the shop and slashed with broken glass by a group of unknown men.
Something did not quite add up for the investigating detectives and their suspicions
only increased a couple of days later when the wife of the 49 year old shop
manager, Seyed Khan, reported her husband missing since the evening of the 24th.
He had left his South London home in Thamesmead at 5.00pm to go to the shop and
had not come home that night. Police soon found Khan’s car parked nearby on the
High Road and a check of his phone records showed that he had made a call on
his mobile at 6.55pm probably from the shop. Muhammed claimed that he had never
shown up for work that evening. Khan’s wife told the police that he had told
her that he suspected one of the shop staff was stealing money and that he
intended to sack him. On the first of February the police began a thorough
search of the local area using tracker dogs. Buckingham Road Cemetery was a 10
minute walk away from the shop and it was there that the dogs found Khan’s body
hidden in undergrowth. When questioned Muhammed immediately admitted murdering
Khan. He told the police that he had killed his boss with an axe after he had
made sexual advances towards him. He said that Khan had tried to rape him on
more than one occasion and had also tried to blackmail. That night he snapped and
cleaved his skull open with an axe. He had then put in the body in a
supermarket trolley from the nearby Aldi, covered it with an offcut of carpet
and wheeled it up the road to the cemetery where he had hidden it amongst some
bushes. He then returned to the shop, cleaned up and painted over the
bloodstains on the wall, and then cut his own arms with a broken bottle before
calling the police to tell them that the shop had been robbed. When detectives checked Muhammed’s internet
browsing history they discovered that four days before the attack he had
searched google for ‘how to kill a man with a punch, ‘how to kill a man with a
hammer’ and ‘brain injuries’. The Old Bailey jury refused to believe that Khan,
a father of four, had sexually attacked Muhammed and convicted him of murder.
Buckingham
Road is one of the few cemeteries in the capital missed from that otherwise meticulous
and exhaustive work of reference Hugh Meller and Brian Parson’s ‘London
Cemeteries’. The reason for its absence is
probably a certain ambiguity over its status; is it a cemetery or merely an
overextended churchyard? Ilford became
an independent parish from neighbouring Barking in 1830 and the new parish
church of St Mary’s Great Ilford built the following year to a design by James Savage. The church had a
small churchyard which was used for burials and which quickly became filled
when the population of the parish began to grow at the end of the nineteenth
century. In 1880 the parish established a burial board which bought vacant land
behind the church and laid out a new cemetery, including a chapel (since
demolished). The first burial took place on 4th September 1881. The cemetery
was initially separated from the churchyard by a brick wall but this too has
been demolished. There are few distinguished people buried in the cemetery. Sir
Peter Griggs, a local house builder who laid out much of Ilford’s new estates in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and became the town’s first MP
has the tallest memorial surmounted by an angel (well out of reach of even the
most determined vandal). The artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare is buried
in his father’s grave (more of him another day) and the bird illustrator John
Gerrard Keulemans is buried in an unmarked
grave.
A toppled
grave in the centre of the cemetery marks the final resting place of 45 year
old George Ward, ‘a devoted husband, a loving father, a faithful friend’ who
died August 17 1928 at Ilford train station. George had worked for WH Smith’s
since 1897 and was manager of the station bookstall when he died. The Essex Newsman
of 25 August takes up the story:
ILFORD RAILWAY TRAGEDY. SMITH'S
MANAGER KILLED. Mr. George Ward, aged 45, of Madras Road, Ilford, who had been
manager of Messrs. W. H. Smith and Son's bookstall at Ilford station for years,
was knocked down and killed by a train last Friday. Mr. Ward was married man.
He was crossing the line to open a stall on the other side of the station, and
apparently did not notice the train coming. Dr. Ambrose held an inquest at the
Ilford Town Hall Tuesday, and in returning verdict of Accidental death. said:
Familiarity breeds contempt, and after twenty-seven years of dodging across the
line he tried to get across and was knocked down."
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