Victorian Pet Cemetery

 

(Disclaimer: Joking aside, I fully understand the risks/dangers involved in these adventures and do so in the full knowledge of what could happen. I don't encourage or condone and I accept no responsibility for anyone else following in my footsteps. Under UK law, trespass without force is a civil offence. I never break into a place, I never photograph a place that is currently occupied, as this would be morally wrong and intrusive, I never take any items and I never cause any damage, as such no criminal offences have been committed in the making of this blog. I will not disclose location.  I leave the building as I find it and only enter to take photographs for my own pleasure and to document the building.  

Today I'm talking about this pet cemetery that I checked out a while ago. It's not really urbex, or on the same level as the other things I blog about, but it's quirky, different and hidden away from the public gaze. Some people know it's here, but many do not.

 

When I first said that I was going to do a blog about a pet cemetery, a shocking number of people responded with "I thought that was just a film," referring of course to the adaptation of the Stephen King book, Pet Sematary, which was misspelled on purpose, to use poor spelling to highlight the fact that the characters involved with the cemetery were just children. It creates a juxtoposition between innocence and the morbid, and it's actually quite clever. Or at least it would be, but evidently Stephen King doesn't get involved in political arguments on Facebook because then he'd know that poor spelling doesn't necessarily equate to youth. But that's another story! The point is, pet cemeterys are very real, and they were all the rage in the Victorian times. In fact the whole concept of pets really took off in the Victorian era, especially when it came to dogs.

 

Don't get me wrong, dogs have been around for thousands of years, as well as domestic cats, but humans bred them for a purpose. Dogs helped hunt and herd, and cats kept the vermin away. They were a utility, rather than a luxury. It was in the Victorian era that people started to say "Yeah, Snuffles is a cold blooded murderer... but he's cute too."

 

Apparently this cemetery only contains dogs, and as such the gravestones are all shaped like kennels. They're all collected in the grounds of an old hall, which is no longer in residential use, instead serving a purpose as a "business centre." More recently it was caught in a dispute over whether or not to turn it into a leisure centre. It's gone through numerous modifications, rebuilds and redesigns over the centuries, but from what I can tell there has been a building of some sort on that spot as far back as 1442, with the most significant rebuilds being in 1555 and in the 1700s. During all this, it stayed with the same family but was purchased by a countess in 1796. She had it up until her death in 1816, and a census from 1851 showed that it was then lived in by a royal navy lieutenant, his wife and their ten servants.

And as much as I'd love to explore all of their history, they're not really why I'm here. The pet cemetery owes its existence to Basil, a conservative MP who moved here in 1856 at the age of 41, with his wife and his horde of children. Now, their history has some interesting nuggets, so I feel the need to drop a quick disclaimer: This Basil is not the first Basil in his lineage, nor is he the last. It's a name that might get repeated and could get confusing, so I'll just refer to him as MP Basil, to differentiate him from the others.

 

However, I have to say, there's surprisingly little information readily available about this cemetery or MP Basil. Most stuff online just regurgitates the same terribly vague data. They mention Basil, briefly touch on his political career, and then list census data. So basically, they say that the 1861 census shows that Basil was married to a nameless woman, and that he had three daughters. And that's all the information anyone seems to have. They copy and paste the same slither of info, pose for a photo in the cemetery, and then call it a day... That wasn't really good enough for me.

As you can see, the graves all have a date, a name, and an acronyn etched into the side. Tiger is the oldest grave here, dating back to 1859, but what does GMW mean?

I do wonder, given the name, if Tiger was actually a cat, but I'm not about to dig it up to check. It's the GMW acronym on the side that interests me more. To my knowledge, nobody else who has documented the cemetery has really delved that deeply. It seems to be an overlooked detail, but I took the bait. Here we have an opportunity to learn more. 

 

It turns out GMW are initials, and that they refer to Basils eldest daughter, Gertrude. I suppose that shouldn't surprise me, but my initial assumption was that Basils offspring were children when their pets were buried here, and that he made the cemetery as a nice gesture for them. In actual fact, Gertrude was already eighteen when the family moved here, and 21 when Tiger was put into the ground. Given that context, it seems that the cemetery was nothing to do with Basil at all, and that it was all entirely Gertrudes idea. Sadly there's very little online about her, but she must have really loved Tiger.

Tiger actually has a hilarious legacy. This curious name has given rise to the rumour that this was actually a graveyard for a zoo that once existed nearby, and while it does sound appealing to think that an actual tiger is buried here, anyone who believes it is missing a crucial piece of evidence: Tiger died in 1859 and the zoo opened in 1965, over a century later! There's no connection! And dates aside, look at the space between the gravestones. Unless Tiger was the Tyrion Lannister of exotic cats, there's not one down there. 

 

The zoo itself has an interesting story though. From what I can tell, it was originally a pretty wholesome place, with newspapers from 1965 claiming that it attracted over 4000 people in the first few days of being open, in spite of the weather being abysmal. Old photos really make it look like the place to be. One of the chimpanzees was in a TV show called The Silver Sword, a show about children trying to make their way from Poland to Switzerland during the second world war after their mother gets arrested by Nazis. It sounds like the Animals of Farthing Wood, but with humans, and less morbid. 

 

Unfortunately the owner left the zoo to pursue a career in taxidermy. I guess living animals just weren't as much fun. The zoo ended up with new owners, and they seemed more interested in bringing in larger, more dangerous animals, like lions, tigers, leopards and pythons. A lion and python actually won world records for thir size, and while the lion is rumoured to also be buried here, an episode of the antiques road show shows the lion taxidermied and on display, so that rumour was also debunked. 

 

Anyway, from that point the zoo had a lot of scandal about it. Visitors not only described it as being run down, but according to Wikipedia, in 1981 the owner was fined £400 for "gross indecency with a nine year old boy." It seems a sickeningly mild punishment. Today we complain about short jail sentences, but any jail sentence is better than this! According to UK law, "gross indency" was any homosexual act that fell short of penetration. Rather annoyingly, the scandal seems to be more about the homosexuality than the age of the boy. Sadly this was an era where homosexuality and child molestation were considered synonymous, a word that anyone who still believes it won't be able to pronounce.

The zoos scandals didn't end there. In 1983 a tiger escaped the zoo, killed a bunch of other animals, and had to be shot dead by police. Some of their pythons were stolen too.

What is it with big cat zoos and scandals? I wonder if Carol Baskins husband is buried in this pet cemetery... 

The zoo closed in 1986, due to financial issues and losing their license. Despite the rumours, most of the animals were rehomed at Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire and at what's now Africa Alive in Suffolk.  Only four animals couldn't be rehomed- two bears, a lion and a blind puma. They were euthanised and put in a skip. The council came and got them. They aren't in this cemetery.

 

Back to the cemetery!

 

The second-oldest gravestone belongs to Quan. I thought Quan was an odd name for a pet, but apparently it's an old word for a creature that is out of control, indicating that Quan was probably quite energetic and boisterous. Quan is also a a word for a womans polite let-down during a first date, but somehow I doubt that the dog was named for that purpose. The initials on its grave are "ADW," and indicate that Quan belonged to Basils son Alexander.

 

See, all those regurgitating census information never mentioned Basil having a son. That's why it's important to look a little deeper. Of course Basil had a son. He wouldn't have just stopped at three daughters. These rich folk want male heirs to carry on the family name.

Alexander was nine when the family moved to the hall, and fourteen when Quan was put in the ground, so he absolutely lived and grew up in the hall. Based on the years, it can be assumed that Tiger and Quan knew each other, and that Alexander in his childhood wanted the two dogs to be buried in close proximity, following the example set by his older sister.

A year later, Cora was buried here. Her grave bears the initials EJW, for Eleanor. Eleanor was 15 when she came to live here, and would have been 21 when Cora died. 

Unfortunately I didn't realise that the initials were important until after I returned home, so I didn't photograph them on every grave. I have no idea who owned Nero or Kelpie.

Sweep, and Jack both bear the initials LHOW, for Basils youngest son, Lawrence. Lawrence is quite a tragic case, dying at the age of 27, having only been married for two years. He was the youngest in the family, being only five when they moved here. He was 24 when Sweep died, and 26 when Jack died, but he clearly didn't live here, instead choosing this place to be the final resting place of his dogs because that's what all his siblings were doing.

 

 A church that he presumably frequented had a stained glass window installed in his memory in 1882.

There is, of course, the question of what kinds of dogs were buried here. Dogs are the most diverse mammal on the planet, thanks to centuries of selective breeding. Dog breeds generally came into existence for multiple purposes. Jack Russels, for example, were initially bred in the early 1800s because fox hunters were having trouble differentiating their pooch from their prey, and the solution was to create a hunting dog that was white.

Interestingly, the existence of a dog breed relying on a practical purpose has resulted in a few dog breeds going extinct over the years. The Turnspit, for example, was bred especially to run in wheels that turned meat over a fire as it cooked. With technology making the Turnspit redundant, the breed fell out of use, and it was completely gone by the 1900s.

 

But in the Victorian era, peoples attitude towards dogs changed. Cats would follow behind, but being more independent they didn't become as popular quite as quickly. For fashonable women in Victorian England, a miniature dog was an indispensable fashion accessory. However these attachments are also said to have been fickle, as various breeds went in and out of fashion. Because of this, an entire wave of dog breeds came into existence in Victorian England during some kind of lapdog revolution.

 

Given the size of these plots, we can assume that these dogs were small. The women, like Gertrude and Eleanor, likely had smaller lapdogs that were popular with women at the time. There's probably a King Charles Spaniel or two buried here. Those were quite popular. Lawrence was an adult when he had Sweep and Jack, so it's fair to assume that these were small hunting dogs. Jack was probably a Jack Russel, let's be honest. Alexander was young when he had Quan, and that's not at all unusual either. In the Victorian era, it became common to introduce pets to young boys as a way to teach them to be responsible.

 

Zoes grave has the initials "KIW" and this really threw me because according to the internet, Basil had no offspring with those initials. Naturally, I started looking through his grandchildren, and his great-grand children, and all of their cousins, trying to figure this out. I was actually being incredibly stupid, and we'll get to that, but the journey is more important than the destination, and by trying to find out who KIW was, I stumbled across a peculiar family legend.

 

A book about the study of psychic occurences, published in 1920, has a chapter on premonitions, and briefly describes how the members of this family have always heard a mysterious knocking sound shortly before someone has died. The first recorded occurence happened in 1661 when Basils great-great-great-great grandmother heard a knocking on her door. Nobody was there, but her son-in-law died shortly after. 

 

On its own, this story isn't that remarkable. However in 1674, one of the three Basils alive at the time (it's unclear which) heard knocking again, once again coinciding with a death in the family. It became such a common occurrence that by 1784, MP Basils grandmother said that she'd heard a knocking in her house, to which her husband George, his health apparently failing at the time, simply said "Oh, that's the family warning. I shall die before sunrise."

And he did.

MP Basils father, similarly called Basil, died at the age of 91 in 1872. One of the servants heard knocking on the front door, but found nobody there. The butler also heard knocking on the pantry window and according to the story, The Dog started barking. One of the men working in the garden remarked "The old master will soon be gone and the dog knows it." The dog was right. Sadly itsname wasn't mentioned in the book but wouldn't it be awesome if it was buried here. 

 

And that brings us to MP Basil, who owned this cemetery. The book mentions that before his death in 1895, two of his daughters at opposite ends of the country, plus two of his neices, all heard myterious knocking the day before he died. And the mysterious saga doesn't end there, because the book adds that Trevor, Basils nephew, heard a mysterious knocking in 1919 at 9pm. When his servant couldn't identify the source of the knocking, Trevor said "Someone is going to die." The book then concludes that it was his cousin, Katherine Isabella. 

 

And spookiness aside, there's our answer! Trevors cousin would be Basil's daughter, and Katherine Isabella lines up with the initials on the grave. I'd been pretty stupid because the internet DOES mention a Catherine, but because they spelled her name with a C, she went under my radar.

 

Also, what a story! It might all be coincidence. It might all be hogwash. It might be a time traveller playing a prank. I don't know, I just love a good spooky story. 

Katherine was only ten when the family moved to this area, and she was 36 when her dog Zoe was buried here.

Interestingly, Nidd here is apparently named after a river.

Little Mab also confused me a bit because the initials on this grave were EJM. It's a completely different surname. I wondered at first if Little Mab perhaps belonged to the family who lived here afterwards, but Basils family didn't relinquish ownership until 1905, whereas Little Mab died in the 1880s. 

Basils mothers maiden name started with M, so I did start looking at her siblings to see if any cousins might have buried their dogs here. It's become apparent that only one of Basils children was actually still a child when their pet died, and some were even married and living elsewhere, so clearly this was the family pet cemetery and not just for the immediate household. However, Basils mothers siblings proved to be dead ends, as did even her grandmothers siblings, and beyond that I think the cousin territory would be a little too distant and murky for them to be relevant to this case. 

For now the M stands for Mystery.

To my annoyance, Little Mab wouldn't be the last grave to have the M surname either.

Poor Dick. That name's become as dead as this dog, hasn't it? You can't just let your dog go for a run and shout "Dick," when you want it to come back anymore.

Dear Old Rex deviates from the standard pattern of the graves, because it's the first to have "Dear old" prefix, and also the first to have "Semper Fidelis" engraved into the stone. That's Latin for "Always Faithful" and suggests that the owner was particularly fond of Rex. 

But who was the owner? EJM, of course. My mystery nemesis.

 I do wonder how Rex's stone got that crack in it too. It looks like the stone has been snapped in half.

Queenie's grave also says "Semper Fidelis," with the date of death being 1879. The initials on the side of Queenies grave read "WJM." How irritating! I must find out who these people are, and why they keep burying dogs on Basil W's land. 

 

I finally came upon the answer though. A newspaper article from 1895 told of Basils death. It details his will, and because he'd outlived his sons and one of his daughters, it only mentions the three remaining daughters, Eleanor, Francis, and Katherine (with a K) and then his grandchildren by his deceased son, another Basil. Eleanor is given a different surname, and there lies the answer. She got married in 1874, to a chap named Welbury. Evidently Queenie belonged to Welbury, while Rex and Little Mab belonged to Eleanor. Obviously they didn't live in this house. In fact by that point, only Francis still lived with her father, referred to as Fanny in the census. Curiously she's also the only daughter who doesn't seem to have a dead dog in this cemetery.

Once I knew that Eleanor had taken on a different surname, I was able to find out more about her.

She and Welbury were married by her own brother, who I'll call Rev Basil. He also seems to be one of the few siblings who doesn't have a pooch buried here. He was fourteen when the family moved here, so he absolutely would have lived here. It was his son, Also Basil, who inherited the hall when his dad, the MP Basil, died in 1901 (some sources say 1895... fucking internet.)

Rev Basil was a beloved vicar in his time though, and by far the one who gets the most media attention, due to being so damn lovely. The newspapers reporting on his funeral in 1886 described him as a very warm guy, saying that he won the respect and admiration of everyone he came into contact with. It wasn't just locals who attended his church, but people from further afield, just because he was more likeable than their own local viccars. 

 

The papers make mention of his three surviving children being in attendance of his funeral- Other Basil, another son, and another daughter. His father, MP Basil was also there, along with his brother, Alexander, and a few other people with the same surname of either him, or Eleanors husband, although Eleanor and her husband were not in attendance. While Rev Basil did have three children while working in Yorkshire from 1868, in 1873 the family moved to the coast where he had two more daughters, bringing their family to eight. He stayed at the coast long enough to establish a sunday school, before moving closer to this place in 1880 shortly before his first daughter passed away. She was only fourteen, and it's said that he never fully recovered from her death. His grief literally caused is own health to fail. The family moved to the south coast, and managed to spawn one more daughter, but he died just before her first birthday.

Annoyingly, a lot of the sources online give him completely different children to the ones that the papers say, and unwilling as I am to trust the mainstream media, a newspaper from 1886 is a primary source of information, not the internet. 

Eleanor herself, in 1899, had three stained glass windows installed in the local church in memory of Rev Basil. Along with supernatural knockings, window tributes seem to be the other family tradition.

Eleanors death is often misrecorded online as 1888, as the same date of death as her husband, Welbury. In actual fact she outlived him, as evidenced by her dedicating the windows to her dead brother. It's believed that she may have actually lived until 1915.

Following MP Basils death, the hall was inherited by his grandson, also called Basil, who trained as a barrister and fought in the first world war. He apparently didn't live here, and consequentially sold it in 1905.

 

 The couple that lived here next, Charles and Fanny, seem to have kept up the tradition of burying dogs here, but they've not styled the graves in the same way. In fact there's a noticable drop in quality. It's the 20th Century graves that are the hardest to read. However, we can see that the awkwardly named "Little Dick" was born in 1900, and according to this stone, died in 1920, although it's hard to know for sure because the stone is so faint. 

 

That seems like an unrealistically long lifespan for a pooch, so I had to look into it some more. Apparently while the average dog lifespan is 10-13 years, making it past twenty is not unheard of. The longest recorded dog lifespan was an Australian cattle dog who died in 1939 at the age of 29. 

Of course, the gravestone is faint so I might have just misread the dates.

 

While the date here of 1915 is still clear, it looks like the grave simply reads "dog," which is kinda sad, and a little unusual. Maybe there is a story to that. Maybe the dog was unidentified, but someone came across it and decided to have it buried here. This was an era where the automobiles were just starting to come into popularity but road safety was in its infancy. Maybe someone struck down a dog, and then arranged to have it buried.

But I am theorising there. Dog died in 1915. That's all we really know.

The homeowner of this period, Charles, died in 1919, and then by 1925 the hall was being lived in by Harold Mackintosh. You might not recognise the name, but you've probably enjoyed the impact this man has had on the world, because he's the toffee magnate who brought us Quality Street, Rolo, and a variety of other snacks. A quick google search of vintage Quality Street tins will show you the original title "Mackintosh's Quality Street" on tins about three times the size that they are today. The shrinkage can be blamed on Nestle, who bought the company in 1988. Fucking Nestle...

Dear Old Dandy is the most recent grave here, and the only one who doesn't predate Harold Mackintosh living here. It's fair to assume that this was his dog, the beloved pet of the guy who brought Quality Street to the world.

That's kinda cool.

I think, when it comes to people from history, we can read dates and facts, but finding where their pet is buried and knowing that someone had a puppy called Buncle humanises them so much more. They weren't just a bunch of data on a wikipedia page. They were humans, and they loved their pets just like we do today.

The more modern graves are faded considerably more, and this one at the front is so worn that there's not even a visible inscription on it. It's kinda sad really, that I can get enough information from the older graves to tell the story of an entire family, complete with bizarre paranormal legend, while the more recent burials go largely unacknowledged. Everything mattered to someone once, even the nameless pooch buried under this stone. 

One last task remained, and that was to climb the tree in the middle of the cemetery to get a birds-eye view.

In 1941 the hall became an anex to the hospital for injured soldiers, and as of 1946, the halls grounds were open to the public. Today, I think the hall is a business center, and the cemetery sits among the trees, gathering moss and going unnoticed, subject to rumours that it's a graveyard of zoo animals, all because a hundred years before the zoo existed, a woman named her pet "Tiger." That's pretty hilarious. I wonder if any ghostly knocking was heard before the deaths of the family pets.

 

Anyway, that's all I've got. God, I love those Victorians. Next time, I'm looking at a big underground thing beneath a town, and then a mansion. I actually need to return to that mansion for bits that I missed, so if covid restrictions lift in the time it takes me to write about a big underground thing, I'll head back up there. If not, I'll just have to do the mansion blog in two parts. Fingers crossed that things ease up a bit. 

 

In the meantime, follow me on social media! Some genius has created a perfect replica of early-naughties Myspace called Spacehey, so naturally I'm there to wallow in a mixture of nostalgia and relief that there are alternatives to the hellscape that is Facebook. I'm on Facebook too, and it's about as enjoyable as wiping my arse with a cheese grater. You can follow me there though. I'm more active on Instagram, Reddit, Vero the superior-algorithmed but inferior-sized userbase version of Instagram, and even Twitter. Yes, even Twitter. I'm determined to make that site useful somehow. 

Follow me on all of those.

 

Thanks for reading!