Burial ground consecrated (1872)

Post date: Aug 05, 2012 4:6:3 PM

Extract from Morning Post of 21st September 1872:

The Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday consecrated the new church of St. Faith, Maidstone, and will this day consecrate a new burial -ground for Wateringbury, near Maidstone. The Bishop (Suffragan) of Dover (Dr. Parry), and the Venerable the Archdeacon of Maidstone (Dr. Harrison), are visiting Maidstone with his grace. The Primate will ordain in Maidstone tomorrow (Sunday) and commence his primary visitation of the diocese of Canterbury, at Maidstone, on Tuesday morning next, the 24th inst.

TAB Notes

The Archbishop of Canterbury was Archibald Tait -born in Edinburg in 1811, at Balliol College, Oxford, became archbishop of Canterbury in 1868 until his death in 1882.

This is not in relation to Wateringbury Cemetery for which the land was not acquired until 1881 for a January 1882 consecration. I have no proof but at sometime in the mid19th century the Church acquired a piece of land which had previously been the Pound (for stray animals) . The vicar, The Rev.Grevile Mairis Livett, writing in the Parish Magazine in 1913 says

Mr. Henry Harris remembers the taking of the Pound into the churchyard, and connects it with the necessity of providing additional grave-space at the time of the cholera epidemic. This is interesting, but it must not be forgotten that influenza also exacted its toll of lives about the same time. The years of the cholera epidemic in England were 1849 and 1854. Influenza raged in 1848 and continued for about a decade with a severe epidemic in 1855, in which year there were 35 deaths in Wateringbury. The average number of deaths for the nine years ending 1856 was 28, and in 1857 the number dropped to 19, the average for the next eight years being only 20. (At the present time the average is 18.) These figures speak for themselves; but they do not help us to fix the exact date of the southward extension of the churchyard and the building of the present wall, which in the September Magazine I ventured to put at about 1853.

If the churchyard had been extended in the mid-19th century, then by 1872 they might have just got around to having this extension of the churchyard consecrated.