Digging into Glasgow's buried past

Published on Wednesday 6 July 2005 13:48

THE ITALIAN cultural historian Carlo Ginzburg has written that "the attempt to gain knowledge of the past is also a journey into the world of the dead". This has certainly been true for me, on my four-year journey of research into the origins of the Glasgow Necropolis, the first garden cemetery in Scotland.

As anyone who has ever undertaken research knows, you begin with what you know you don’t know, then quickly get to the stage of finding out facts and opinions that you didn’t know you didn’t know.

The two most surprising facts that I uncovered about the Necropolis during my research were that a remarkable number of ordinary Glasgow folk are buried there and that the cemetery quickly became a tourist hot spot.

One might think that this cemetery, like most others, is for the great and the good; they are for those with enough money to buy a plot and raise a monument. Certainly, in appearance it is an elite burial place, but scratch the surface (if you'll forgive the phrase) and almost the opposite is true of the Necropolis.

There are 3,500 tombs, holding from one person to whole families. Some of these, however, are cenotaphs, memorials to people who are buried elsewhere, such as one to the author of Wee Willie Winkie.

William Miller, whose monument in the Necropolis calls him "the laureate of the nursery", was buried in Tollcross church yard, in the east of the city. When his friends and admirers heard the news, they collected funds to purchase a fitting memorial in the Necropolis. It was the place to be seen dead.

In contrast to the modest number of tombs, there have been around 50,000 burials in the Necropolis. Even allowing for an average of five burials beneath each stone, which is a generous estimate, that leaves a considerable number of bodies buried in common graves.

Common graves were constructed with as much care as private lairs. First a long pit was excavated, perhaps 12 feet deep and nine feet wide. This was lined with brick, then a cast iron lip was securely fixed to the inside edge of the top of the lining. As the chamber filled up with coffins, cast iron grilles were riveted onto the lip, securing the coffins against any disturbance.

Everyone buried in the Necropolis, whether in an expensive family mausoleum or in a common grave, is fully recorded in the cemetery burial records. The information is available today in Glasgow's Mitchell Library.

The cemetery quickly became a visitor attraction soon after its official opening in May 1833. Within a few months the Necropolis was in the printed guides to the city and began to be recorded in the diaries and books produced by strangers going to Glasgow.

The first edition of McPhun's Guide through Glasgow, published in June that year, reported that the hill opposite the Cathedral "has been recently very tastefully laid out as a cemetery, and, much to the credit of the citizens, has met with very general support. If the stranger's time admits it, he will be gratified by ascending this interesting spot."

Three years later, the cemetery had its own guidebook. A Companion to the Necropolis was sold, according to the frontispiece, by booksellers in Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and also "at the gates of the Necropolis" – a clear indication of a ready market for the guide, both for the prospective traveller and the curious local.

Visitors, no doubt as gratified as William McPhun hoped they would be, recorded their impressions of the Necropolis. For example, Alexander Campbell, a Scots-born Presbyterian minister in America, visited in 1847 and recommended "the melancholy pleasures of a visit to this capacious and much adorned garden of the dead".

Ronnie Scott is currently completing a PhD thesis on the origins and early development of the Glasgow Necropolis. The journalist authored Death by Design: The True Story of the Glasgow Necropolis (Black and White, 2005), and is founding chairman of the Friends of Glasgow Necropolis.