St Nicholas' Church, Brighton - Churchyard

Churchyard

St Nicholas Church is surrounded by a graveyard with many old tombs. It has not accepted any new burials for many years, and was landscaped by the council in the mid-20th century, although most of the tombs of significant historical interest were left undisturbed and all of those monuments listed below have Grade II status.

The oldest memorial is that of Captain Nicholas Tattersell. He took King Charles II from Shoreham harbour to France in 1651 in Surprise, a coal ship he captained. See here for full details of the King's escape from the Battle of Worcester and his passage to Fécamp in Normandy. Upon King Charles's return to Britain in 1660, he granted Tattersell a pension of £100 per year, and Surprise was transferred into the Royal Navy's fleet and renamed The Royal Escape.

John Weiss of John Weiss & Son, the eminent surgical instrument makers, was entombed here in 1843. Weiss had an abiding fear of being buried alive and to ensure his death he devised a metal spike which would penetrate his heart when the lid was lowered on his coffin.

Phoebe Hessel, a famous 18th- and 19th-century resident of Brighton, is buried close by. She fell in love with a soldier, William Golding, at the age of 15, and disguised herself as a man to enlist alongside him in the British Army after he was sent overseas. The concealment of her sex was so effective that she served for 17 years until voluntarily revealing the truth to her commanding officer's wife and being discharged; even after suffering a wounded arm at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, she was not discovered during her treatment. She became a well-known figure after moving to Brighton following the death of Golding in the 1760s, and lived to the age of 108—being granted a special pension by the Prince Regent, and travelling in the procession during his coronation as King George IV.

Martha Gunn, one of the town's best-known residents in the 18th and 19th centuries, is also buried in the churchyard. She was the most famous of Brighton's dippers, who helped non-swimmers bathe in the sea (using horse-drawn bathing machines) in the decades after Dr. Richard Russell's advice became popular. Dippers had to be of the same sex as their client (or "bathee"), and Martha Gunn was well regarded for many years by locals and visitors, with her size and strength being a particular advantage in this difficult physical task.

Anna Maria Crouch, a noted singer and actress contemporary with Hessel and Gunn, is commemorated by an impressive stone urn. For much of her career, she was associated with the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, taking both singing and speaking parts in various plays. However, her romantic life was also noteworthy: she married a Royal Navy lieutenant in 1785 after a brief elopement in Ireland the previous year, but took an Irish actor and operatic singer, Michael Kelly, as a lover shortly afterwards. Husband, wife and lover lived together for a time in a ménage à trois, but Anna Maria Crouch also had a relationship with the Prince Regent; and when she later moved to London with Kelly, the Prince was a frequent visitor to their house. She died in 1805, at the age of 42.

Other people important in the history of Brighton to be buried in the churchyard include Sake Dean Mahomet—an Indian man who introduced the Turkish bath to Britain, was appointed masseur and bath attendant to both King George IV and King William IV, and lived to 102; and Amon Wilds, one of the most important architects of the Regency era, who provided Brighton with much Regency architecture. Meanwhile, the actress Dame Flora Robson, noted for a long career on stage, television and film, is commemorated with a memorial stone in the churchyard. She lived in a house in Wykeham Terrace, a short distance from the church, for some years until her death in 1984.

The first extension to the churchyard was built in 1824, across Church Street to the north. This has been converted into a school playground. Another modest extension was made in 1831, but the most significant change came in 1841 when land to the west of what is now Dyke Road (then named Church Hill) was acquired and used to form a much larger burial ground. This western extension was laid out by Regency architect Amon Henry Wilds and contains a series of burial vaults with Grade II listed status.