Gone Now Are They Forevermore. By Uncle Monty.

Abney Park visitors count for many each day

He was a drug addict for years was the young married
29 year-old Dave Johnson who was having a quiet beer

with another visitor Ian Smith, 44, who is an Edinburgh-

born stonemason. We had quite a good chat we did. Dave,

now drug-free, is a fellow Anglican of mine with two little

daughters of his. While Ian is a member of the biblically-

ultraconservative Free Presbyterian Church. At Abney Park,

the unemployed and beer drinking Eastern Europeans

males walk there to shot the breeze and to lazy about all

day and every day it seems. So do some English on govern-

ment job seekers allowance who are hardly looking for a job,
obviously, if they dilly-dally all day long at Abney Park.
Geographically, many of the pathways have no directional

signs and so it is easy to go around and around in circles for

hours at a time if you get lost or wander off into the small

bypasses that make up the Victorian cemetery’s picture of
nature exploration and recognised conservation. Although

primarily an expansive Victorian cemetery, the park is
a public nature walk at where birds of every kind dwell
and thrive happily from tiny warblers to cheeky little red

robins and many other wonderful English bird species.

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Now for the main story, please read on:

Gone Now Are They Forevermore.

Story and Photos By Uncle Monty.

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How I landed up at London’s Victorian Garden Cemetery

at Abney Park was by simply getting off at the wrong bus
stop at Stoke Newington while alighting from bus No. 76.

I then more or less stumbled on the old burial place much

like we do so often in real life when we learn life’s tricks of

the trade by stumbling with many of our own silly and/or
serious mistakes. Landing up in a cemetery can be a fas-

cinating mistake, if you're still alive, or at least it was for

me on such a glorious early summer’s day like I found it

to be just only yesterday. Landing up dead in any kind

of cemetery is, of course, an entirely different story

of which only the living can tell and not the dead.
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Pastoral Scene from Abney Park Cemetery.

The first thing I bumped into at Abney Park was the un-

mistakenable burial marker (shown in my caption photo)

of General William Booth and his wife Catherine, who died

22 years before did her husband who was the founder of

The Salvation Army. Last year, incidentally, The Salvation
Army itself raised over one billion, yes, over one billion,
in worldwide charity dollars.
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The Sleeping Loin Memorial of the once famed

Menagerists Frank and Susannah Bostock. It is pro-

bably the most well-known feature at Abney Park.

To check the names of other eminent Victorians
and prominent Edwardians buried among the common
folk at Abney Park, simply visit the cemetery’s website:
http://www.abney-park.org.uk/stories/storyReader$5
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A Murdered English Policeman of 1909.
Police Constable Wm. Frederick Tyler (his gravesite
Shown above) was only age 31 when he was “killed at

Tottenham while doing his duty” on July 23rd, 1909.
He belonged to London’s Metropolitan Police. Also, I

came across the gravesite of London Fire

Superintendent James Braidwood, who at age 29 was

killed “whilst courageously performing his duty at the

Great Fire in Tooley Street, June 22nd, 1861.” A

number of British soldiers from the First and Second

World Wars are buried at Abney Park, too, like Lt.

R. J. Daniels of The Scots Guards, 1919, and Private

James Ladds of The Yorkshire Regiment, 1939.
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Thick underbrush and tall weeds hide many graves

I estimate that about 3,000 people are buried at

Abney Park Cemetery, which was originally the private

mansion property of, I believe, Sir Thomas Abney, Bart.

The first major statue to be erected at the park was

that of Dr. Isacc Watts, England’s greatest ever Hymn

Writer, who had been a life-long friend of Sir
Thomas. A very Christian cemetery in character I
think, it is full of classic English and Scottish surnames
so thus engraved like Harding, Read, Frost, Gould,
Hill, Webb, Spencer, Lock, Fuller, Kemp, Newton,
Rowe, Poole, Lacey, Harrison, Farrell, Browne,
Dickinson, Murray, Lynd, Steele, Ramsey,
and so on and so forth.

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Abney Park isn’t, above all, a lonely garden cemetery, but
rather it is "lived in", if you will, just about every day with scores
of nature lovers, touring families, and curious or accidental visitors

like me. There is nothing scary, either, about the place. It is in

many way like the living are being hosted by the silent dead

while "gone now are they forevermore” from their

once earthly form and living life.

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Abney Park statue of Dr. Isaac Watts was

England's greatest hymn writer of all times.

Aside from such fairly common homeland
surnames, I looked for the more unusual names on
the countless tombstones at Abney Park Cemetery.
Here are some I found: Charlotte Youle, age 20,
1858; James Cregey, age 31, 1883; son of Alfred
and Kelzia Cwilt, Aubrey, who died at Calcutta in
India, at his teenage age of 17 in 1854; Charles
Sweetinburch, 1917; Emily Rosina Ayton, 1972;
Henry Docwa, age 26, 1871; Edward Wessendorff
1931; Harriet Vooght, 1934; and Frederick Priddis,
1875. The large number of dead 19th and early 20th
century babies and young children buried at Abney
Park is evidence of poor health and medical care, I
suppose, for many of them at that time. Such examples
are Sarah Betteridge, age 4, when she died in 1842;
Lillian Maude Wimshurst, age 2, in 1865;
and Emily Lizette Yexley, age 14, in 1913.

I may add more to this story of Abney

Park, but for now I wanted to be sure

you got a litle whiff or flavour of such an

English cemetery garden that for years

has attracted both the living and the dead.

Truly, Uncle Monty.

+The 4th Sunday after Trinity, 2oo8.