Glasgow Necropolis

Seated under the massive proportions of a handsome mausoleum erected to the memory of a distinguished citizen of Glasgow, we write the notes for this article on the Necropolis, a burying-place beautified by nature and art. It is a bright morning in January, and the bracing frosty air has quite a pleasant and exhilarating effect. From far down in the valley beneath comes the hum of busy city life, making the solemn stillness here quite a contrast to the active existence below. The view from this elevated situation is picturesque and interesting in the highest degree. Quite a forest of elegant spires, tall chimneys, and handsome erections form prominent objects in the scene. Sweetly sounding above the noise of vehicular traffic, is heard the pleasing chimes of the bells at the Cross, in happy harmony with the feelings of meditation and contemplation that occupy our musing thoughts at this moment.  Although the general aspect of this great city of the dead is pleasing visitors are forcibly reminded of the mutability of all mundane affairs by the various objects of interest around. The multitude of miscellaneous gravestones preach a silent sermon against feelings of pride and vanity, or inordinate ambitious projects. Under the numerous erections, ‘neath the weeping willow or splendid mausoleums lies the remains of departed genius and heroism. Every walk teems with items of weird interest, the memorials on vault and speaking of human greatness in all departments of the world’s business, levelled down here in the romance of death into the comparative obscurity of one common fate and resting place.

‘Dick Swiveller’ Glasgow Necropolis, Glasgow Evening Post, 7 January 1887

 

I only spent a couple of hours at the Glasgow Necropolis, which is nowhere near enough time to fully explore its 37 acres. Glasgow’s premier cemetery is found on the city’s second highest hill at the rear of St Mungo’s cathedral, and has good views of the south of the city. The hilltop is almost treeless the turf studded with large monuments. The biggest of these, a statue of John Knox which stands on top of a 58-foot Doric column, predates the cemetery and was erected by public subscription in 1825 when the site was still Fir Park and the city’s dead were still buried in churchyards and small burial grounds. 

In 1831 John Strang published ‘Necropolis Glasguensis’, advocating the creation of a garden cemetery in Glasgow, to be modelled on Pere Lachaise and built on the site of Fir Park.

It is a melancholy truth, that while the cemeteries of ancient and modern nation have boasted something that has wooed, and still occasionally woos, thither the most cynical of our race. the cineral depots of Scotland and particularly those of Glasgow, have, from their neglected state, fairly banished from their bounds even those in whose bosoms the tender feelings of affection and sympathy hold a paramount sway. Here the chief characteristics of the churchyard are, the noxious weed, the broken tombstone, and the defaced inscription; and hence the sepulchre, instead of proving, as it does elsewhere, either the solemn and affecting shrine of devotion, or the resort and consolation to weeping individuals, is little better than a disgusting charnel-house avoided by general consent, as if infected with a pestilence, and calculated even when entered to call forth rather the feelings of aversion and disgust, than of sympathy and sorrow.

John Strang ‘Necropolis Glasguensis’ 1831

Strang had been born in Glasgow in 1795. The son of a successful wine merchant, the death of his father when he was 14 left him with independent means and the financial means to indulge his love of foreign travel and his literary ambitions. Fluent in French and German his earliest published works were translations of Hoffman and other romantic writers with a bent for fantasy and horror. He also involved himself in the civic life of his home town, eventually becoming City Chamberlain in 1834, a position he held for 30 years. Necropolis Glasguensis is a short work, typical of the garden cemetery movement, which surveys the worldwide history of burial practices, deplores the state into which current funeral practices have sunk and the unhealthy and dialpitated state of churchyards, eulogises Pere Lachaise and argues for a local version of the Parisian cemetery to be built. The Merchants House of Glasgow were already considered opening a cemetery and had even identified Fir Park as a potential site; Strang was already knocking at an open door. The cemetery was opened in 1833, the same year as the Cemetery of All Souls in Kensal Green. Strang is buried in the Necropolis.   

The best entrance to the cemetery is behind St Mungo’s Cathedral where after passing an impressive pair of gates you see three modern memorials, one to still-born children, the second to the Korean War and the third to Glaswegian recipients of the Victoria Cross. To get into the cemetery proper you cross the Bridge of Sighs, which spans the Molendinar Burn, admire the ornate abandoned entrance to what was to have a tunnel through the cemetery (it proved impractical to build it alas) and then you start the stiff climb to the top of the hill. On the way you will pass the grave of William Miller (1810-1872) ‘the laureate of the nursey’ according to his headstone and the author of ‘Wee Willie Winkie’, a nursery rhyme was has steeply declined in popularity since I was a child.

The top of the hill is covered with impressive memorials. Charles Tennant, who died in 1838, is shown, twice lifesize, seated casually in a chair, legs akimbo, arms dangling at his sides in an open necked shirt and a muffler around his neck. Tennant was a chemist who started off his career in weaving, made his fortune coming up with an improved bleaching process for cloth and opened the St Rollox Chemical Works. His great discovery was bleaching powder, Calcium Hypochlorite, the smell of which we are all intensely familiar with, as one of its uses is to treat water in swimming pools, a process which releases chlorine. Next time you are in a swimming pool and you take a lungful of chlorine, remember Charles Tennant.   

Other noteworthy memorials include the marvellous, neo-Norman 1842 Monteath mausoleum, now fenced off with a warning sign announcing 'Danger Keep Out'. Archibald Douglas Monteath (1773-1842) served in the East India Company and is alleged to have ““made his fortune when an elephant carrying precious gems belonging to a Maharajah was captured and ‘relieved’ of its load by him.” (The quote is lifted from the Friends of Glasgow Necropolis website, they don’t give a source for it but do say that it is probably not true. It may have some basis in truth; officials of the East India Company were not averse to robbing the natives…) Then there is the Mughal style Wilson Mausoleum which houses the mortal remains of William Rae Wilson (1772–1849) lawyer, landowner and travel writer, who wrote books on Italy, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Spain, Sicily, Greece, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine. In this particular case, travel did not broaden the mind, according to the 1900 DNB he was “an upright man, a writer and a distributor of tracts, he was not of a specially tolerant spirit.”