There are two Victorian cemeteries on Cemetery Road, E7.
One's open daily and the other's always closed.
Except yesterday the gate was open.
So I went in.
1)West Ham Jewish Cemetery
There's been a Jewish Cemetery in Forest Gate since 1857 when space got tight in Whitechapel. The New Synagogue and the Great Synagogue got together to buy land on the northern edge of West Ham's built-up area, north of the railway, just before the area was swamped with housing. Initially it covered five acres up to the edge of the borough but was later extended to 11, and Newham's boundary has since been diverted to include the lot. But there have been no burials here since the 1970s so the cemetery's long been 'closed' to protect it from vandalism, its perimeter defended by spikes, barbed wire and anti-climb paint. A lot of Jewish cemeteries in east London linger on behind locked doors.
So seeing the side gate open was most unexpected. I wandered in past two signs inviting me to take care, and ahead surveyed a long thin space with one central footway, packed to either side with graves and memorials in various states of repair. The ground was generally covered in gravel, which'd save on mowing, but someone was clearly visiting regularly enough to keep the worst of the weeds at bay. Most of the surviving gravestones had inscriptions in Hebrew and English in loving tribute to Esther, Mordecai, David or whoever, whose years of death were sometimes given in Hebrew (5679), more often not (1918) and sometimes in both styles. I wondered how far I could explore.
A white van had been parked just inside the entrance, its front seat empty, and I assumed this must be the gardener's. It wasn't because I soon met the driver walking back from the far end, somewhat surprised to encounter another visitor. He told me it's very rare the cemetery is unlocked but it is open on request, and somebody had done just that and I'd happen to come by at precisely the right time, so I was free to look around as long I was back out within half an hour. I worry now that if I hadn't seen him he might have eventually locked me in, and the walls looked as if they'd be just as hard to climb over getting out as getting in.
Deviating from the central spine seemed both unwise and unrespectable, so I stuck to what I could see from the path. I noted that most of the legible dates were over 100 years old. I passed a pristine war grave commemorating Hellmuth Frank, a musketier in the German Army during World War One (a Jew who wouldn't have been welcome in the second). I walked alongside a line of burials squeezed in along the path in 1972, which were the latest I found anywhere on site. And ahead was the rotunda of what's very much the cemetery's focal point, the Rothschild Mausoleum, where Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild buried his wife Evelina after she died in childbirth in 1866. The banker/MP/art collector/owner of Waddesdon Manor is said to have caught a cold while visiting her tomb in 1898, and all too soon was laid to rest beside her.
The Mausoleum was attacked by vandals in June 2005, its doors smashed open by iron bars and several gravestones smashed or toppled. The perpetrators sprayed their swastikas round the wrong way so were as stupid as they were anti-Semitic, but have never been caught so you can understand why the cemetery's long been locked away.
The central path then branches off to one side, close to the back of houses on Gough Road, through a less dense area where the mortuary chapel used to be. It's here that the cemetery opens out to double width because this is the 1880s extension, so graves and non-vertical monuments now spread out in all directions. But paths are few in number because in 1960 most of these were filled in by long lines of tombstones moved here from HoxtonCemetery, which had been closed for decades until housing pressures finally wiped it from the map. Never assume your final resting place will be final.
It felt inordinately special to be here, deep inside a 'closed' cemetery, sharing the space with a fox, several butterflies and another visitor I still hadn't seen yet. And yet all around were terraced Victorian houses whose back gardens looked out across this inaccessible view every day, a juxtaposition which must add a certain awkward frisson to any outdoor entertaining their residents convene. It was a five minute hike back to the entrance where I thanked the driver and checked out, allowing him to reverse the van through the gates and lock the place securely again. So then I went nextdoor.
2)West Ham Cemetery
This also opened in 1857 and is twice the size, and still in use so its gates are unlocked daily. It's a much more inviting space with shady pathways, freshly-mown grass, summer flowers and a wide variety of stone and marble memorials. Here the deceased might be named as Michael (Micky) or Nora Doreen (Chookie), an inscription might read 'Alan, love you to the moon and back' and two gardeners might be sitting on a bench enjoying a fag break. Again the cemetery stretches way back with no other entrances, forming a significant barrier to local perambulation, but within it's very much still a place to linger and remember. According to a laminated sheet pinned up outside the cemetery office a total of 180,483 interments had taken place here up until the end of 2009, which is approximately half the current population of Newham, so that made me stop and think.
I was also the unintended witness to a large West Indian funeral. The hearse processed in slowly and made its way to a central glade, followed by a crowd of about 100 in mostly muted clothing. They clustered around the grave while the priest conducted the service, accompanied by the buzzing of lawnmowers on the other side of the cemetery because work must go on. I kept a respectable distance and wandered over instead to the wall adjoining the Jewish Cemetery, where a slight difference in height permitted an excellent view of somewhere you absolutely can't get into. Not unless you're really really lucky (or unless you ask).
