Grove Road Cemetery

On what was a very warm June day, a group of around twenty-five members and guests were given a guided walk around Grove Road Cemetery.
Paul Jennings writes: My guided walk was inspired by Malcolm Neesam's researches, supplemented with my own work on the burial registers from 1864 to 1920. The Cemetery was opened in 1864 in what was then a largely unbuilt area, after concern that the existing one at Christ Church was becoming overcrowded. The very first burial was of a seven-year-old girl. Sadly, infants and small children made up a large proportion of those interred over the years. After looking at the white marble memorial to the First World War dead of Bilton, recently restored and relocated from the Methodist Chapel opposite the Cemetery, we then visited a wide variety of graves. These included some of the town's most influential citizens, like Richard Ellis and George Dawson, both builders responsible for some of Harrogate's loveliest developments and others who made their mark, like the historian William Grainge or John Farrah of the toffee business. We also took in less well-known figures, some of whom reflected Harrogate's attraction to people from other lands, like the ex-slave Thomas Rutling of Tennessee, who made his home here after touring Europe with the famous Fisk University Jubilee Singers, German band leader Otto Schwarz who collapsed and died at the station and the Italian Crolla family who similarly entertained with their barrel organ. The dead of two world wars are also represented and we saw several Commonwealth War Graves and a monument to Donald Bell, who won the Victoria Cross and whilst buried in France is remembered in Harrogate. Also Alfred Bruce, a former pupil of Harrogate Grammar School who drowned along with five other soldiers on a training exercise preparing to cross canals in Belgium and France. He is buried here in a quiet shaded corner. To date there have been over 12,000 interments and there are over 5,000 graves. Burials still take place here, but infrequently. The former cemetery lodge is now a private house. There is so much to see and learn in old graveyards and cemeteries and an incredible variety of styles of monument and many of course who have no monument at all. As they were originally intended, not just as places to bury the dead, but for the living to walk in, to remember and to reflect, so we can do the same today.