Early in 1889 the Burial Committee (s.p.b.s) appointed a chaplain on a yearly contract ‘for such interments as are not otherwise provided for’. Committee members also decided that the ‘New Cemetery’ (s.p.b.) should have built a urinal and w.c.s for men and women visiting the site, the resulting small building survives but is no longer in use.
My uncertainty as to the formal relationship between the Hull General Cemetery (see blog 25th March) and Western municipal Cemetery is made more so by a lengthy minute of Feb. 1889 stating that a fence had been put up between the two sites. However, there had been replanting and tidying in the H.G.C. site and that ‘thousands of un-numbered graves'(?) existed, this suggesting that the municipal authority then had some managerial role over the H.G.C. site.
Following recent epidemics it was also decided that anyone who died of an infectious disease the body was not to be taken into ‘Chapels in Cemeteries’.
By 1890, as with parks employees, friction arose over weekend duties and pay rates (see blogs History of Hull Parks). In that year Hull’s cemetery workmen asked for Saturday and Sunday work to be remunerated at ‘extra duty’ rate of pay. The Burial Committee agreed to this for Sundays but not for Saturday afternoons, this linking to the rise of team sports played on Saturday afternoons, increasingly in the municipal parks.
By 1890 there were the standard two chapels of rest on the Western Cemetery site.