Grove Road Cemetery, Harrogate
Grove Road Cemetery, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, was formerly known as Harrogate Cemetery. It was established in 1864 after the spa town expanded and the graveyard at Christ Church became full. The cemetery once had a pair of chapels with spires, designed by Thomas Charles Sorby. Although they were admired by local residents who felt it enhanced the town view, they were demolished in 1958. However the lodge and gates, also designed by Sorby, remain.
The cemetery contains more than thirty military graves and memorials of those who died in service, including those who did heroic deeds, those who suffered accidents, and those who died of the 1918 influenza, many of them in their twenties or thirties. They include the grave of Sergeant Major Robert Johnston, who took part in the Charge of the Light Brigade. There is also the "Bilton Boys" monument to eleven soldiers from Bilton and High Harrogate, who died in the First World War. There are various elaborate memorials in the cemetery, dedicated to the town's worthies, such as Robert Ackrill, George Dawson, Richard Ellis and David Simpson, who contributed much to the town, besides gravestones of significant local artists, architects and historians. Also of interest are the gravestones of former slave Thomas Rutling and long-distance kayaker Fridel Dalling-Hay.
Grove Road Cemetery has suffered several issues in the past three decades, such as the death of six-year-old Reuben Powell, who was killed by a falling tombstone while playing there. The incident initiated the felling of thousands of cemetery memorials across England, which continued for several years until the panic ceased and councils were advised to use discretion regarding historical monuments and consideration of the bereaved. There has also been an issue of dog-fouling across the graveyard.
Early history
By 1861, Harrogate was a growing town which needed a second cemetery in addition to the one attached to Christ Church. On 20 June 1861 the Harrogate Improvement Commissioners discussed the matter at the Town Hall, and approved the site between the present Grove Road, and the line of the former North Eastern Railway Company. The site for Harrogate Cemetery was purchased in 1862. The commissioners specified "two chapels, a lodge a surrounding wall with gates". It was to be laid out as per their instructions, with the western half of the plot reserved for Anglican interments, and the eastern half for non-denominational burials. The competition for the design was announced in August 1862, and Thomas Charles Sorby won a premium of £20 for his design of "delightful little gothic buildings". The total cost by 1863 was £5,000.Chapels and lodge
The cemetery once had two chapels with spires, designed by Thomas Charles Sorby of London, at a cost of £5,000. The chapel doors faced roughly south towards the main graveyard area, with the cemetery gates on Grove Road behind the two buildings. John Peele Clapham laid the foundation stone for the non-denominational chapel ' on 23 May 1863. One of the ministers who spoke at the ceremony was Rev. John Henry Gavin, the first minister of West Park Congregational Church, Harrogate. Gavin was to be buried there himself at age 38 in 1868. Having processed from the National School to the cemetery with interested parties including eleven clergymen and various Burial Board members, the Bishop of Ripon consecrated the episcopalian half of the cemetery and the Anglican chapel ' on 23 April 1864. Although the Harrogate Historical Society noted that the chapels formed an "attractive feature in the landscape", they were both demolished in 1958 to create more burial space.The lodge was sold following a resolution by Harrogate Borough Council in 2016.
21st-century events
Graveyard incident
At 7:30pm on Friday, 7 July 2000, six-year-old Reuben Powell died when playing in Grove Road Cemetery with "many" other children. A, hundred-year-old gravestone "fell to the ground, trapping him underneath... it took three men to lift the slab off Reuben's body". Safety officers said later that, "only a small push or tug would have been needed to dislodge the heavy sandstone slab". There had been previous such incidents in graveyards, but it was this one which had far-reaching consequences.Harrogate Council had already carried out a safety survey of Grove Road Cemetery in 1999. This was "part of a memorial safety audit on all ten council-run cemetery sites in Harrogate". In consequence, the council had been "carrying out a programme of improving safety in cemeteries was expected to take several years". Soon after the incident, Councillor Michael Johnston said, "Parents should discourage their children from playing in graveyards". An enquiry into the incident was instigated. The inquest took place on 18 April 2001. The coroner Jeremy Cave ruled that it was an accidental death, and said that he "hoped lessons will be learned". Councils then feared a "legal test case over unsafe gravestones", because the child's parents had said that, "the council had failed to act soon enough to prevent their son's death, and possibly others". Harrogate Council hastened to speed up their five-year safety programme in cemeteries, and it promptly "had 6,000 potentially unsafe slabs placed on the ground".
The incident at Grove Road Cemetery affected many other graveyards, whose gravestones were soon lying flat in response to Coroner Cave's ruling that lessons should be learned. For example, at St Andrew's Church, Aysgarth, Richmondshire, many of its hundreds of gravestones were uprooted and laid down, causing distress to the bereaved of the parish. However its congregation, assisted by the researches of Alastair Dinsdale, argued that the safety problem had been caused by modern limestone mortar or cement which was soon weakened by weathering. They advocated a return to the 19th-century, deep, gravel-filled trench, into which the stone was "battered" in, making it as "solid as a rock". They said the solution was urgent because "If they are left face upwards the water and ice gets into the inscriptions and damages them".
File:Charles Farrar Forster grave 001.jpg|thumb|right|1894 grave of Rev. Charles Farrar Forster, in Harlow Hill Cemetery, 2014
Following the Grove Road Cemetery incident, an improvement notice was served on Harrogate Council, "requiring it to accelerate its memorial testing programme". Seeing this, many councils feared claims of maladministration if they did not lay down their gravestones quickly. A 2010 study by Luke Bennett and Carolyn Gibbeson suggested that some over-zealous councils, possibly spurred on by the insurance industry, had risked damaging historical artefacts and distressing the bereaved, because the monuments were left lying and were not reinstated. On some occasions there had been complaints, by the bereaved and by newspapers, of desecration. By 2010 the panic was subsiding. The Health and Safety Executive, which had advised the laying down of the stones, revised its position to say that "cemetery owners should have regard to their own industry best practice on the issue", and later revised it again, to say that "the memorial safety risk should be seen in context – and the issue handled with the utmost sensitivity", supporting a consistory court decision in Leicester, 2006. However, as of 2022, many gravestones were still not reinstated. Grove Road Cemetery was tidied by the council in 2021, but it still had some monuments lying down.
Dog fouling
In February 2022, a mother tending the 1997 grave of her five-year-old daughter in Grove Road Cemetery was distressed to see a dog "defecating over all the graves". The dog had been brought into the cemetery by its owner who let the animal off its lead and sat on a cemetery bench. Although only guide dogs are permitted in the cemetery, and other dogs are banned by Harrogate Council signs, as of 2022 there were "multiple complaints of fouling" on the site by dogs who were let off their leads. Council dog wardens responded:Please remember this is not an area for walking your dog. It is a graveyard where people will want to pay their respects to their loved ones. Please be considerate of this... Our aim is to keep the district clear of dog fouling and stray dogs through an effective cleaning regime, encouragement, education and enforcement of responsible dog ownership. We regularly clean up badly fouled public areas and streets and maintain more than 250 dog waste bins and 1,000 litter bins.
Bilton Boys War Memorial
In 2018, the "Bilton Boys" monument to eleven soldiers of Bilton and High Harrogate, who were killed during the First World War, was discovered by councillor Paul Haslam in the undergrowth of Grove Road Cemetery. It had originally stood in the grounds of the former Methodist chapel in Grove Road, and had been relocated across the road to the cemetery when the chapel was converted into flats. The white marble monument was in a degraded and dismantled condition, lying "almost forgotten" on a pallet, with its bronze soldier figure missing. Following a campaign by Haslam, the monument was restored at an estimated cost of £25,000, and reinstated inside the cemetery. Its bronze soldier was replaced with a cap. Wreaths were laid on the monument on Remembrance Day, 2021. The names recorded on the monument are: Fred W.C. Horner, Reginald Jones, Charles V. Bell, John W. Fishburn, Percie Balme, Willie Hutchinson, Herbert Gibson, Geoffrey G. Hewson, Henry M. Partridge, C.A. Arrowsmith, and Reginald Burnett.Individual military memorials
Grove Road Cemetery contains 37 identified casualties from the First and Second World Wars, including at least 32 Commonwealth war graves relating to the First World War, and four from the Second World War, plus other military graves and memorials.Gustaaf Adolphe Bekaert
Soldaat 1 kl Gustaaf Adolphe Bekaert, of the 6th Belgian Light Infantry, or Belgian Land Component, a master linen weaver of Ghent in civil life, is buried in Grove Road Cemetery. He was "struck in the neck and lungs by shrapnel" while defending a fort at Antwerp. He was taken to hospital at Ostend, then transferred to Harrogate Hospitals, where his cousin was one of his fellow refugees. His decease at Beaulieu Hospital was the first death of a wounded soldier at the Harrogate Military Hospitals. His funeral included a two-and-a-half-hour mass at St Robert's Church, Harrogate, and was the second military funeral of the war, to take place in Harrogate. His wife and child had been left behind in Ghent. His funeral was attended by "many of the Belgian refugees, as well as many of the Belgian soldiers in the town".The cortege was preceded by a number of Belgian soldiers from hospitals in the town, at the head of whom floated the Belgian flag, surmounted by a pennon of black crêpe. About a 100 Belgian refugees, mostly wearing black armlets crossed by the Belgian national colours, took part in the procession. The Mayor of Harrogate was among those who followed... The procession from to the cemetery was headed by the Yorkshire Hussars band playing the Dead March in Saul. Volleys were fired over the grave by a detachment of the Yorkshire Hussars, and the buglers gave The Last Post.