Tuesday 28 February 2023

Gangsters, the most inebriated woman in the world, flatulent Lord Mayors and Olaudah Equiano; Chingford Mount Cemetery, Old Church Road, E4

 

Chingford Mount was opened as a non-conformist burial ground by the Abney Park Cemetery Company in 1884 when the 32 acres of the company’s first cemetery in Stoke Newington were starting to become a little overcrowded.  “Forty-four years ago-on the 28th May, 1840 the Lord Mayor of London opened the burial-ground at Abney-park,” reported Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper on 25 May 1884, “with the marvellous growth of the Great City, so rapid have been the funeral marches to the grave, that its thirty acres are being swiftly swallowed up. Accordingly, the limited company to which the ground belongs has secured a fresh estate of seventy-eight acres, and thirty-three of them having been enclosed for the purpose of sepulture, another Lord Mayor yesterday opened what is to be known as Chingford Mount Cemetery. It occupies a fine position on the first hill beyond the valley of the Lea, and is approached by good roads from Clapton, Tottenham, and Walthamstow. A grand avenue of elms opening on the ivy-covered ruins of old Chingford church forms a picturesque feature of the locality.” The tree lined avenue is still there, the original elms have gone and been replaced by London planes.

The cemetery was formally opened by the flatulent Sir Robert Fowler, twice Lord Mayor of London, in a ceremony which he enigmatically described as “sad and interesting”. (Frank Harris demolished Sir Robert’s reputation in ‘My Life and Loves’. The learned mayor was described in the first D.N.B. as “a perfect storehouse of quotations from orators and poets, Greek, Roman, and English” but Harris characterises him as “a large man who must have been five feet ten at least in height and much more in girth” who at a society dinner “ate like an ogre…. smacking his lips and hurrying again to his plate, intent on cutting and swallowing huge gobbets of meat while the veins of his forehead stood out like knotted cords and the beads of sweat poured down his great red face!” The result of the gourmandising was an attack of fetid flatulence that drove the hostess, “as pale as death”, from the dining room in search of fresh air.)  According to Lloyds Weekly “After the chaplain, the Rev H. Varley, had read some appropriate passages of Scripture, Dr. Llewelyn Bevan delivered an address, referred to burial customs in ancient times, and pointing out how the harsh restrictions with respect to those who had died unbaptised, who had committed suicide; or were ex-communicated, had led to the divisions which were now to be found in " God's Acre." We have only to look back a hundred years to find a tax on burials, the impost being levied on a sliding scale, by which four shillings was paid for a "common person," and as much as fifty pounds for a duke. Wise reforms have stayed man's tyranny from being carried down to the grave, but there is ample room for improvement in our burial customs. Would not the opening of this new cemetery afford a timely opportunity for the introduction of more simple ways for showing reverence for the dead?”  Chingford certainly offered a simpler, and cheaper, way of burying the dead; fees at Abney Park were 20 shillings for a child and 40 shillings for an adult and a private cost £3 3 shillings, but at Chingford children could be buried for a little as 4 shillings and adults from 10 and private graves started at £1 1 shilling. Further enticement to use Chingford were Sunday burials, banned at Abney Park, but available there from 1887; “this concession to the wishes of many East End residents is evidently already fully appreciated, especially by working-class people and middle-class traders, many of whom find exceedingly inconvenient to leave their employment and business during the week-days in order to attend the funerals of their deceased relatives,” said the  Hackney and Kingsland Gazette of 2 March 1887, “these are times when East-enders can ill afford to lose day’s wages, even for so needful a purpose; and the Sunday interments, which, as above stated, have already commenced, will sure to prove a great boon to the bereaved.”

There are no outstanding monuments at Chingford Mount, Dr Llewelyn Bevan would be pleased to note that simplicity became an indelible feature of the cemetery. Meller and Parsons in London Cemeteries praise the trees rather than the memorials, “some of them are magnificent,” they say, especially the avenue of planes. The cemetery was used for a couple of mass reinterments following closure of burial grounds elsewhere. In the late 1930’s Ram’s Episcopal Chapel was scheduled for demolition;

Over 200 years ago, shortly after George II became King, an Irishman disagreed with the churchwarden of Hackney (London) parish church. He wanted to occupy pew 13. They refused to let him do so. Mr. Stephen Ram, banker, son of Sir Albert Ram, of Dublin, therefore, built his own church some few hundred yards away. Every Sunday since then services have been held, but Ram's Episcopal Chapel, Homerton, is now a dangerous structure, and it to be demolished. (Beeston Gazette and Echo - Friday 22 July 1938)

The burial ground of the chapel was emptied of its occupants who were all reburied in Chingford.

In 1898 The famous Whitefield Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road was demolished and rebuilt on a larger scale. This meant removing the bodies from the burial ground, including that of John Whitefield’s wife Elizabeth. The St. Pancras Gazette of Friday 24 January 1908 ran a story commemorating the 10th anniversary of the new tabernacle;

The rebuilding of the chapel in 1898 necessitated the removal of a large number of coffins and human remains, under a license issued by the Home Secretary. In excavating underneath the back part of the chapel, extensive vaults were found. These had at various times been cleared out, and the coffins placed in three large brick chambers in the rear, which were then bricked up. One of them had been thus closed for 65 years, and another for over 40 years. On opening those chambers 200 coffins were found, of all sizes and in all conditions. They had been placed in piles one upon another, and those towards the bottom were in many cases crushed out of shape.

The front part of the chapel enclosed a large piece of ground, in which many graves and brick vaults had been made. Some of the wooden coffins discovered here were very sound, but contained nothing but bones in nearly every instance. One iron coffin was found quite intact except for rust. Here also was discovered the mummified body of a woman, resembling marble in appearance, and as hard, but very light in weight, apparently having undergone some system of embalming. There was no plate remaining on the coffin.

The coffin of Mrs Whitefield (1768) was quite sound. It was made of solid cast lead, half an inch thick, with the handles and plates soldered on. It was exceedingly heavy. The whole of the coffins and remains were placed in large packing cases, close upon 300 in number, and reinterred at Chingford Mount Cemetery, Mrs Whitefield's being placed in a separate grave.

The lead coffin containing the remains of the Rev. A. M. Toplady (1778) was discovered in an earth grave as sound as when first deposited there. Being at an unusual depth it was not removed, but remains under the floor of the new basement hall encased in concrete, the exact spot being marked by a suitable tablet.

The last resting place of Olaudah Equiano, the one-time slave who became a writer and abolitionist, was a complete mystery until 2018 when Professor Vincent Carretta of the University of Maryland discovered his burial entry in the register of Whitefield’s Tabernacle. According to the register he was buried on 6 April 1797 in the chapel burial ground. Unless his coffin was missed during the clear out of 1898 then his mortal remains are now buried in a mass grave in Chingford Mount. 

The most famous graves in the cemetery belong to the Kray Family; twins Ronnie and Reggie, their brother Charlie, mother Violet and Reggie’s first wife Frances who committed suicide in 1967 at the age of 23. The Kray’s are of course England’s most famous gangsters; small time petty crooks who used violence and intimidation to become big time crooks and who became national celebrities as night club owners when crooked landlord Peter Rachman sold them a gaming club in Knightsbridge, Esmeralda’s Barn in the early 1960’s. When they weren’t hobnobbing with celebrities at their club, intimidating their rivals or extorting money out of anyone with a business interest in the West and East Ends, they were indulging hubris by killing anyone who got on their nerves, most famously George Cornell at the Blind Beggar in Whitechapel, allegedly for having called Ronnie a “fat poof”. Then there was Frank ‘the mad axeman’ Mitchell who the Krays sprung from Dartmoor prison in December 1966 but killed when he became a tiresome nuisance. And finally Jack ‘the hat’ McVitie who Reggie stabbed to death at a party in Evering Road in Hackney. McVitie was a member of the Kray gang and his death caused disquiet in the ranks – they must have all wondered who might be next. The answer was no one – Scotland Yard arrested the twins in May 1968 and they spent the rest of their lives behind bars becoming national anti-heroes in the process.   

In 1898 one Jane Cakebread was buried at the cemetery. According to the South Wales Daily News of 10 December “The funeral of this notorious old lady was mournful in its desolation at Chingford Mount Cemetery on Friday morning. The body of the woman whose name was known to many thousands of persons in all parts of the country was consigned to the grave with but one mourner, and he was Mr Thomas Holmes, the North London Police Court missionary, who had for years striven to do her good in life. He carried with him a simple wreath of flowers, and placed it reverently upon the coffin, which bore the plain inscription Jane Cakebread died Dec. 3, 1898. Aged 64." And why was 64-year-old Jane Cakebread notorious? Because she was, according to the London newspapers, the most inebriated woman in the world. She had an astonishing 281 convictions for drunkenness or disorderly conduct and spent almost 12 and a half years in total behind bars because of her alcoholism. When imprisoned she would sing her favourite hymns or recite portions of the Bible.  Her memory was sharp; she could quote two chapters from the Book of Job.   She prayed on her knees, only to rise from those prayers and spew obscenities.  Lady Henry Somerset tried to save her by taking her into her temperance home. Cakebread created chaos and was thrown out after three weeks. At her next court appearance Lady Henry suggested to the magistrates that the inebriate needed a psychiatric assessment. Her response when she was removed to Hackney Infirmary was to try and bite one of the guards and to kick Dr Gordon, the medical officer in the chest, breaking two of his ribs. She was eventually confined to an asylum where, deprived of liberty, fresh air and gin, she died.   

A better-behaved ‘old’ lady had been buried at the cemetery in 1887. This account is from Aberdeen Press and Journal of Thursday 24 February;

DEATH OF "MOTHER KETTLE." - Mrs Flanders, alias "Mother Kettle," whose face was familiar to thousands of men, women, and children, who have of late years visited Epping Forest, died a few days ago, and at the end of last week her remains were interred in Chingford Cemetery. The deceased, who was said to be the only licensed female driver of public conveyances kept for hire, could always be seen during the summer months in charge of a waggonette drawn by a pair of horses, in good condition, and well harnessed, and she knew all the favourite spots in the Forest. She was specially pointed out to the Queen when Her Majesty opened the Forest, and "Mother Kettle" was very proud of the distinction with which she had been honoured. Deceased was only 52 years of age.





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