24th April, 2019 History of Hull Cemeteries 19.

The photograph above shows the memorial (centre-right) in Hull’s Western Cemetery to the men killed in the R38 airship disaster of 24th August, 1921 (s.p.b.). Two front plaques list the names of the American servicemen one side and the British servicemen on the other. The memorial was erected (I believe) in 1923 and the stone remains pristine white.

As regards the issue of the relationship between Hull General Cemetery, in use 1847-1972, and Western Cemetery (s.p.b.s) the latter’s website states that in 1862 Hull City Board of Health acquired five acres of land from the Hull General Cemetery Co. and opened a ‘public burial ground’, this initially known as the Borough Cemetery. A relevant Wikipedia site adds that a chapel for Anglican rites was built on the site in 1862 and a chapel for Non-conformists in 1863. The relevant section of the reference O.S. map at Humber Historic Environment Record, Northumberland Avenue, Hull shows the locations of these two chapels which, unusually, were detached, but it is not clear which was which. Both have long been demolished (date unknown).

A Burial Committee (s.p.b.s) minute of January 1892 refers to a carriageway between Hull General Cemetery and the ‘old portion’ of Western Cemetery ‘purchased by the Corporation of the Company in 1862’ and requiring the Borough Engineer fix two gates in the fence between the two sites and that the ‘superintendent’ of Western Cemetery close the gates at the same time as those of  the General Cemetery (presumably the main gates facing Spring Bank West) were closed. In October 1892 it was agreed between the General Cemetery Company and the Corporation that the latter could use all paths and drives in the General Cemetery site for an agreed annual payment.

In September 1892 it was recorded that the average number of visitors to Western Cemetery across three successive Sundays was 1507, a figure which reinforces the notion of cemeteries as ‘places of resort’, more so as the ‘plantings would still have been in their early stages of growth.