Nunhead Cemetery
8 images Created 17 May 2009
Nunhead's occupants were some of Victorian society's hoi-palloi: Chemist, Frederick Augustus Abel, inventor of cordite is there. So is the writer Hilda Caroline Gregg (1933) whose pseudonym Sydney Carolyn Grier wrote the first of 23 novels at the age of 13); Bryan Donkin (1855) inventor of the air-tight tin can; teenage chanteur Jenny Hill (1896) whose sweet voice delighted music hall crowds; horsepower magnate Thomas Tilling (1893) owning a stable of 4,000 horses and Alfred Peek Stevens (1888) who penned the earliest known use in England of the term O.K. ("Walking in the zoo is the O.K. thing to do.").
In the first 50 years of the 19th century the population of London more than doubled from 1 to 2.3 million. The city's dead were being stacked in overcrowded parish churchyards, leading to decaying matter entering the water supply leading to a series of cholera epidemics. All Saints Nunhead was consecrated in 1840 and was one of the seven great Victorian cemeteries established in a picturesque ring around the outskirts of London known as the Magnificent Seven.
Queen Victoria's 40-year obsession with grief taught a superstitious nation how to mourn, inventing a whole industry of hearses, mausolea, rings, lockets and silk gloves bought for the undertakers to wear. If there was a corpse in the house, mirrors were covered and the deceased was taken out feet first to stop the head looking backwards for others to follow ..
A blog story about the trip to Nunhead is at:
http://wp.me/p3fbj-59
In the first 50 years of the 19th century the population of London more than doubled from 1 to 2.3 million. The city's dead were being stacked in overcrowded parish churchyards, leading to decaying matter entering the water supply leading to a series of cholera epidemics. All Saints Nunhead was consecrated in 1840 and was one of the seven great Victorian cemeteries established in a picturesque ring around the outskirts of London known as the Magnificent Seven.
Queen Victoria's 40-year obsession with grief taught a superstitious nation how to mourn, inventing a whole industry of hearses, mausolea, rings, lockets and silk gloves bought for the undertakers to wear. If there was a corpse in the house, mirrors were covered and the deceased was taken out feet first to stop the head looking backwards for others to follow ..
A blog story about the trip to Nunhead is at:
http://wp.me/p3fbj-59
