Liverpool's Dead Interesting - Toxteth Park Cemetery

 

 

In 1855 a competition was held for the design of the proposed Toxteth Park cemetery and in March of that year it was reported in The Builder that the Burial Board had decided on designs by Thomas Denville Barry (1815-1905) of Liverpool for the buildings, and those of William Gay (1814-93) of Bradford for the laying out of the ground. Barry designed buildings for a number of cemeteries in south Lancashire including Heywood, Warrington, and Atherton in 1855, St Helens in 1856, Runcorn in 1858, and Liverpool (Anfield) Cemetery in 1860.
With the ground consecrated by the Bishop of Chester on Monday the 9th of June 1856, the first publicly funded cemetery in Liverpool, situated on Smithdown Road, was opened on that day by the Toxteth Burial Board, who had bought the land from the Earl of Sefton for £15,000 and spent a further £11,000 preparing it, which in today’s money, is approx. £2.5 million. The Northern Daily Times, dated Tuesday the 6th of July 1855 reported, 'The foundation stone for the church and chapel of Toxteth Park General Cemetery was laid at 3 o'clock on July 5th 1855, for the 'performance of the burial service according to the rites of the Established church and other religious denominations'. The article also stated that, 'A very large number of persons attended the ceremony and the chairman of The Burial Board, Mr Gregson, was presented with a silver trowel, who then buried a bottle containing journals of the day and ground plans in a place provided and covered with a plate." The first interment was that of Elizabeth Watling, the seventy years old widow of a surgeon who lived in Wavertree High Street. A further ten acres of land was later purchased as Liverpool's population was still expanding.

OS Map (1892) showing the cemetery alongside the Toxteth Park Workhouse

Within 57 years of the opening, over 144,000 people had been interred including Mary Billinge, reputedly the oldest woman in Liverpool, who was interred on the 26th of December 1863 at the grand old age of 112 years and 6 months.The cemetery contains consecrated Church of England sections and non consecrated sections, but there are no specific Roman Catholic areas. There were two chapels when the cemetery opened but only one is still standing, while both lodges are now private property. In the second half of the 19th Century, Toxteth Park was a very desirable place to live and that is reflected in the grandeur of some of the memorials there, some of which have been Grade II listed. Examples of those with listed status include the grave of Thomas Pennington, a doctor who died in 1887 and Patience Simpson, the wife of a lawyer who died in 1872. Other Grade II listed memorials include those of Sir John Bent, the owner of the substantial Bents brewery in Johnson Street and Mayor of Liverpool; Eleanora and Willam Gillespie; The Hetherington family of which William John Howard Hetherington was the first registrar of the cemetery; Dr James Sheridan Muspratt who founded the Liverpool College of Chemistry and Robert Rodgers a merchant.

The Hetherington Memorial

There are also the graves of Sir James Allinson Picton, promoter of a free library in Liverpool, ( more about him here - http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2020/11/a-liverpool-exemplar-sir-james-allanson.html ) William Cross, one of the biggest dealers in wild animals in the world; James Dunwoody Bulloch, a secret Confederate agent in the American Civil War; Joseph Cunard who entered business selling ships, lumber and goods and whose brother Samuel was founder of The Cunard Shipping Line; James Nicol 'Bully' Forbes, one of the most famous sea captains of his day, and the pride of the Black Ball line; Samuel Robert Graves, Liverpool Lord Mayor and MP for Liverpool, ( more here on his link to Liverpool FC  - http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2023/05/historical-liverpool-dwellings-annfield.html ); John Hulley instigator of the Olympic movement in England ( more on his life here - http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2020/09/a-liverpool-exemplar-john-hulley.html ); John 'Honest John' McKenna, the first manager of Liverpool Football Club; Thomas Ogden, founder of The Ogdens Tobacco Company; Agnes and John Rowe, a ship owner and merchant, and their son Alfred who booked passage on the Titanic as a first class passenger. His ticket cost £26 11s, about £1,679.00 in today's money, and some accounts suggested that he swam to a piece of ice where he was later found frozen to death. His body was recovered by the Cable Ship 'Mackay-Bennett'; and Hugh Owen Thomas, deemed 'The father of modern orthopaedic surgery',

In addition to the grand monuments, there are plenty of other headstones that tell tragic tales of working class lives lost too early. One of these is that of Thomas Williams, a 24 year old supervisor in the docks who drowned in 1905 when he was deliberately pushed into the River Mersey by a worker who he had fired. There is also that of James Thomas, a boilermaker who was killed when a gas cylinder exploded on board the Cunard liner Mauretania in 1914.

There are 274 war graves in the cemetery, with 227 of those being from World War I as well as many other gravestones whereby people killed in conflict that were buried elsewhere are mentioned. One of those is Albert Curphey, who was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and is remembered on his parent’s headstone.

see also :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2024/01/liverpools-dead-interesting-anfield.html