Story
Living Among the Dead
Right: David, Glenys, Richard and Pauline of the Slater family
Introduction
When the St John’s and Westgate Cemetery Board bought the land from Richard Grainger to create St John’s in the 1850s, they not only commissioned the building of the chapels, but of the lodges on its perimeter too. These were to house the cemetery offices and provide homes for the workers and their families; the gravediggers, cleaners and superintendents and this continued right up until the 1980s. But what was it like to live in the city but grow up behind the cemetery gates?
North Lodge and Westerholme
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The Slaters
Four generations of our family have lived in St John’s Cemetery. Our great grandad Edward Slater, grandad George William Slater and dad George David Slater all rose through the ranks to become superintendents and charge men.
We lived in North Lodge next to the main cemetery gates and then moved into Westholme, the old farmhouse, where our father had spent most of his childhood and always wanted to go back to.
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Living in the cemetery was like living in the country to us – we had a big garden at North Lodge, it was much bigger back then, but it’s now been taken over for grave spaces, all planted out with vegetables. It was a good place to live. We had all the green space to play in – loads of trees to climb. It gave me a love of the outdoors and of old buildings that I still have today.
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The fact that it was full of dead bodies never bothered us at all – we just grew up with it – it was normal to us. Standing watching the funerals come in the cemetery gates and it was our dad’s job to lead the cortege down to the chapel and to the graveside. It’s led to a feeling that death is just a fact of life.
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People used to ask us if we were afraid of ghosts or if we ever saw any, but we didn’t. We weren’t spooked out. Our dad used to say, “It’s not the dead that hurt you, it’s the living.”
We always had wisecracks from the kids at school “What’s it like to live in the dead centre of Newcastle?!” My teacher nicknamed me the vampire, which kind of stuck, especially when I went to work at the blood bank after I left school!
One story that dad told – one of the gravediggers was digging a grave late one afternoon and it was heading towards knocking off time. He hadn’t got his watch with him, so he popped his head out of the grave to ask a passerby the time, and then watched that man scarper out of there at the speed of light!
There was a cemetery cat, Tiger, and she was always giving birth. We’d re-home all the kittens and keep some for ourselves. We always had lots of pets – cats, rabbits, and rescued animals from the cemetery, pigeons, Cedric the seagull, and one day dad brought us a guinea pig he’d found abandoned by a graveside.
North Lodge and Westerholme
The Watson family
Me husband Malcom, was the last gravedigger to live in the cemetery. He used to dig graves all by hand, they were that close together that you couldn’t get machines in to do the job, and he’d plant up the borders making it look nice. In the summer he would leave the house at 7am and not get back in ‘til 8pm at night, because that’s when they’d hand cut the grass, working with sickles and scythes. When he was digging a grave he had to use a lot of brute force, the soil was really hard. His hands were always callused.
One day me husband was digging a grave and he came to the back door and says “Can you get us some clean clothes and fetch them to the back door”, so I did and gave them to him and said “Oh, you stink!” and he said “So would you an all if you were digging a grave and went through the bugger and went down into a mineshaft!” I said, you’re not putting those in my washing machine, so we had to bin them!
There were some proper slip ups… One day John Postlethwaite, another gravedigger, slipped and fell into a grave on top of the coffin at a funeral – the whole of Cruddas Park knew! One day my son was on his new little mountain bike coming down a path – a grave had just been dug and it had boards over it. All I could see was a bike and a little voice shouting “Ma”. He’d headed down the hill, hit the boards and braked too late and ended up in the bottom of the grave.
It didn’t scare him. I suppose that was with his dad being a gravedigger – you get used to it.
One winter there was ice on the ground, and there was a coffin coming up from Buddle Road, it was only round the corner so they decided to carry it up instead of hiring a car. One of the blokes slipped and the coffin fell on the ground and it went straight down the road – it looked like someone was driving it – and round the corner and stopped right in front of this woman at the bus stop. She just
screamed and legged it into town – I think she got there before the bus!
Eileen
Watson family photographs
I felt privileged to grow up in the cemetery, because I felt like I had my own playground that was surrounded by this big fence.
And although there were graves there, I never understood until I was 16 and lost me grandad, I didn’t really realise what death was.
I used to go out on my bike and rollerskate around the paths, and we had great fun playing hide and seek ‘cos there were so many good places to hide.
I used to walk around and see me dad at work but I never disturbed him because he looked at his job as being very important. He used to ring the bell in the chapel at 4 o’clock to let people know the cemetery was shutting and one time I had the privilege of ringing the bell with him – I think it was more me dad really, I was just hanging onto the end, but he told me I’d done a good job!
Tara
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