Spital cemetery

Created by Victorian philanthropists in 1857, the cemetery celebrates its 160th birthday this August.
Now, a group of campaigners, the Friends of Spital Cemetery, hope to recreate its original purpose - as a place to be enjoyed.
Acting chair, Liz Cook, said: “It is beautiful - the Victorians designed it to make people think they were in Eden.
“Original Victorian cemeteries were laid out like gardens to provide local people with somewhere to go and enjoy.
“At that time you didn’t have public parks so people liked to come somewhere where there were trees and it was peaceful.”

Group historian, Janet Murphy, 75, says the cemetery was originally set up because there was no room left at the Parish Church.
“Chesterfield had to find somewhere else to bury its dead,” she explains.
“So the council and Tapton township decided to create what is now Spital Cemetery.”
After the two campaigners are joined by local historian Lyn Pardo Roques and group secretary, Margaret Hersee, together we take advantage of a glorious spring day to journey through centuries of fascinating local history.

Nearest the chapels at the centre of the cemeteries are buried the great and the good of Victorian Chesterfield.
The first owners of the Derbyshire Times, Wilfred and WH Edmunds, are there, alongside Thomas Philpot Wood who helped create Queen’s Park.
A short distance away are the graves of John Bradbury Robinson, who created Robinsons packaging company, and Thomas Carrington, who founded Wingerworth Ironworks and set up a school on the site of what it now Spire Infants.
There are also war graves - 33 from the First World War and eight from World War Two.
One, Charles Miles, returned to the town from Canada with his parents specifically to fight in the Great War.

But the history of the cemetery certainly doesn’t begin in 1857.
A skeleton found in the garden of a house across Hady Hill in 2000 was found to be from the late 12th or early 13th century.
Lyn, who has written a book about the history of Spital, said the burial was ‘clearly a priest’.
“We thought it was from around 1400 but it was eventually radio carbon dated to much earlier than that,” she explains.
“People now think it could actually be the priest who founded the leper hospital which we know was on this site in the middle ages.”

When the cemetery opened in 1857, the first gravestone laid was for 40-year-old surgeon, John Holland, who himself was on the burial committee.
However, the first recorded burial is Mary Ann Bridgett, aged two weeks, who was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in August 1957.
Further up the hill, five girls who died in a fire while performing at the Picture Palace in 1911 are buried.
Headstones for all six were paid for and installed after a recent campaign by local man, Dave Sheldon.

In terms of the future, the current rumour that the Lodge and the two chapels have attracted interest is for the moment just that - a rumour.
The group are supportive of local man Ed Fordham’s plan to use the chapels as a centre for creative and technical industry, but getting people to enjoy and value the cemetery is their main aim.
“I want it to be somewhere people can enjoy going for strolls and take pleasure in nature,” says Liz.
“In an increasingly pressurised world that is an important need for people I think - to be peaceful.
“Because of council budget cuts, we think the friends group has an increasing role to play in looking after what is important to the community.
“For any children currently being brought up in Chesterfield, this cemetery is hugely significant in terms of their sense of history.”

Janet agrees: “The grand graves are interesting, of course - but there are also many graves of ordinary people who have gone out into the world from here.
“One of my favourites is in memory of a woman from Chesterfield who died in Swift Current, Canada.
“It just shows everything that was going on in the town at that time. It documents the history of Chesterfield.”
To find out more about the Friends of Spital Cemetery, visit www.facebook.com/FriendsofSpitalCemetery.
A special ‘Cemetery Day’ celebrating 160 years of Spital Cemetery will take place on Saturday, August 19.