Stokes on Scotland

Published on Sunday 11 September 2005 01:11

WHEN I moved to Glasgow, more than a decade ago, one of the first tourist trips I took in my new adopted city was to the Necropolis, that magnificent, crumbling, 19th-century cemetery that sprawls over a good-sized hill on the eastern edge of town.

Its mausoleums and monuments, tributes to those members of the Victorian middle class who transformed Glasgow into one of the richest cities in the empire, soon became a regular stop on the itinerary I would construct for any pals I could persuade to visit me, along with fact-finding trips to other historic architectural gems such as Bar 10, the bar at Rogano, and the Horseshoe Bar.

Invariably the Necropolis would get its visit towards the end of a Sunday afternoon, after we had all stayed up late on the previous couple of nights. My friends and I would turn up at the cemetery in the gathering gloom, a little tired and, I must confess, often a little hungover. Standing in a graveyard, regretting the excesses of the previous evening always seemed to me to be a great way to round off a weekend of boisterous fun. I would send my grateful guests away pondering the fleeting nature of life and the inevitability of their own death. The perfect host, I think you will agree.

Even a decade ago the place was looking, well, a little decayed, its grandeur a little faded. Ten years on, the grandeur has faded further. In fact, in places it's getting so faded that it hardly counts as grandeur at all. It is very sad to see.

One man who feels the pain of this decline more than most is Nigel Willis, a grand old gent who would not look out of place atop his own monument in the Necropolis. Willis, with historian and writer Ronnie Scott, author of Death by Design, a guide to the cemetery, is one of the founders of Friends of the Necropolis. The friends are a group of private citizens who came together this summer to highlight the plight of this historic monument, owned and run these last 40 years by the city council, and to try to arrest its decay.

But Willis is more than a friend to the Necropolis, he is a relation. Many of his illustrious forbears have their own monuments in the cemetery. Indeed, in Necropolis terms he is aristocracy.

His most famous ancestor is James Ewing, a West Indies merchant who was also the first MP to be elected for Glasgow after the Great Reform Act of 1832, and a former Dean of the Merchants' House, the society of local businessmen that funded the construction of the Necropolis.

It was Ewing who hosted the meeting in July 1828 at which the leaders of the Merchants' House decided to press ahead with the project. It was modelled on the, even by then renowned, Parisian cemetery Pre Lachaise. His reward was one of the prime spots high up on the hill, next to the statue of John Knox. You can pretty much measure people's status at the time in the feet and inches between their last resting place and the Reformation leader's memorial.

"James Ewing was my four or five times great uncle," says Willis, who is forced to refer back to the family tree to confirm that it was just the four. Down the hill from him is a grandfather, "two or three greats, probably two", the Reverend John Dick. Among others is a three greats grandfather, James Merry, and a pair of Humphrey Crum Ewings, one two greats, one three. The junior of these, another West Indies merchant, died on the family estate in Demerara, Guyana. To ensure his remains would stay in a decent condition on the journey back to the Necropolis, he was shipped home in a lead-lined coffin filled with rum.

Wandering around with Scott and Willis - which you might be able to do next weekend, when the friends set up camp at the cemetery for Doors Open Day - provides a ready flow of such tales. Every stone in this place has a story, but some of them remain intriguingly obscure. One monument shows a group of four young children grieving before the grave of their beloved mother. But there is no name on the stone other than that of the sculptor.

Down at the dilapidated Jewish section - interestingly the first burial in the cemetery was that of a Jew, Joseph Levi, in 1832 - Scott points out the grave of Morris Reubens. The stone leans against the wall, outside the official boundary of the Jewish area. "He was not allowed inside because he married a Christian," says Scott. "Tut, tut," says Willis.

Elsewhere you can see the first mausoleum to be built in a British cemetery, as opposed to a churchyard; a merchant's memorial to his dead 13-year-old daughter; a monument to William Miller, the author of Wee Willie Winkie; some early Charles Rennie Mackintosh and a reasonably well-preserved piece by Alexander 'Greek' Thomson. Everywhere you can see the evidence of decay: recently toppled headstones, 'Danger: keep out' signs, and graffiti.

Neither Willis nor Scott seems particularly keen to explore the reasons behind the Necropolis's decline. This is understandable. Much of the blame must lie with the successive Glasgow councils that took over the running of the cemetery in 1966, when the Merchants' House handed it over, along with an endowment worth some 500,000 in today's money. But for the friends, the current city administration remains their best hope if they are, in Willis's words, "to stop the rot".

Yet it is hard to ignore the feeling that the Necropolis has lost out under the council because of its image as an elite cemetery, a celebration of the prosperous Victorian middle class. "It is a giant advert for merchant capitalism," says Scott. Not something that was particularly highly thought of in the city chambers in the 1970s and 1980s, when the rot set in. But despite its image, the cemetery actually holds thousands of 'ordinary' Glaswegians. Some 50,000 people are buried within it, although there are only 3,500 headstones. But there was, no doubt, some discomfort about how many of these people - plantation owners and mill operators - made their money and, perhaps, a limited appreciation of how much they ploughed back into Glasgow.

Things have changed. Even Labour councillors these days know you can't run a city without a prosperous middle class. But the real reason the Necropolis is back in favour is money. It's not, though, a new respect for old money, it is the realisation that this monument could be a major draw for tourists.

Ironically, the council's new interest in the cemetery, while a source of hope for the friends, is also their biggest concern. There is a fine line between preserving something like the Necropolis and restoring it in such a way as to destroy the very things that make it special, including some of that evidence of decay. It is a line the council seems quick to cross.

In recent weeks cheap wooden fencing has been put up, probably just as a temporary measure. But the council has also installed a row of cheap-looking, and already chipped, bright-grey granite blocks along one of the pathways, without consulting the friends. "They are completely inappropriate," says Willis.

Even before he became a friend, Nigel Willis would visit regularly and tidy up the family graves. What really saddens him is that so few others seem to do the same. "Most of the families of those buried here have completely lost touch," he says. "It would be great if we could get them interested again, if they saw the state it was in they would get a real shock."

Maybe that is the saddest Necropolis tale of all. How a cemetery that was set up and run as a private enterprise, and that functioned as a monument to individual endeavour, has been lost to those who owe their current wealth and good fortune to the entrepreneurial successes of their ancestors. That is some hangover.

Friends of the Necropolis (www.glasgownecropolis.org); Doors Open Day (www.doorsopendays.org.uk).

• Magnus Linklater is away