Abney Park Cemetery - Famous People: Burials & Associations in The Park

Famous People: Burials & Associations in The Park

Most noticeably, William and Catherine Booth, founders of The Salvation Army, are buried in a prominent location close to Church Street and next to their son Bramwell Booth and various SA commissioners, including Elijah Cadman, Frederick Booth-Tucker, George Scott Railton, the Army's first Commissioner, Theodore Kitching and T. Henry Howard, its Chief of Staff.

Earlier in the 19th century, one of the hottest issues for political and social reform was the abolition of slavery, and Stoke Newington and the Quakers, separately and together, played a prominent role in this. Indeed, William Wilberforce himself planned to be buried in the village at St Mary's Church with his sister, his will being overturned on his death since parliament considered a state funeral at Westminster Abbey more fitting. Wilberforce's son-in-law, the abolitionist lawyer James Stephen, was also a frequent visitor, as his father lived at the Fleetwood Summerhouse adjacent to Abney Park. Dr Thomas Binney, the 'Archbishop of Non-conformity', has a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery that shows him at the Anti-Slavery Society Convention (with Josiah Conder); Binney is buried close to the Church Street entrance in Abney Park Cemetery. Christopher Newman Hall, who was influential on the side of slavery emancipation in the American Civil War, is buried here with his father. So is the Rev. James Sherman, who wrote the introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe's hugely influential Uncle Tom's Cabin. The novel was partly based on Josiah Henson, whose escape to freedom in Britain was assisted by the philanthropist Samuel Morley, who is buried in the cemetery. The Rev. Joseph Ketley, a Congregational missionary and abolitionist in Demerara, is also interred here, as is Rev. Dr John Morison, patron of the escaped slave and influential African-American autobiographer Moses Roper.

Recently rediscovered is the grave of Olaudah Equiano's daughter Joanna Vassa, as he was a well-known former slave who worked for abolition. Jamaican emancipation is represented directly by the Rev. Samuel Oughton and the Rev. Thomas Burchell, who only narrowly escaped death at the hands of the planters; and their underlying Baptist support by Nathaniel Rogers M.D. A deacon at the Burchell Baptist church, the African Samuel Sharpe, became a Jamaican hero. Aaron Buzacott, the second Secretary of Anti-Slavery International, originally known as the Anti-Slavery Society, is buried here. At Abney Park Cemetery there are also some of the early settlers in Britain from the four corners of the world, such as the African, Thomas Caulker, the son of the King of Bompey (now Sierra Leone), who signed an anti-slavery agreement that became part of an Act of Parliament in the 1850s; and Leota, a native of the Samoa Islands whose life in London was due to the work of the London Missionary Society who sought to build schools and bring scripture to the inhabitants of the South Seas. Abney Park is one of the main burial places of 19th century missionaries; here, for example is the burial place of William Ellis, John Williams' wife and son, Dr Walter Henry Medhurst, and Edward Stallybrass. Also Sarah Buzacott, the wife of Aaron Buzacott the elder, who was a teacher at the London Missionary Society college at Rarotonga in the South Seas. Many nonconformist divines are also buried here, for example Dr Alexander Fletcher, 'The Children's Friend'.

The evangelist Emily Gosse is buried in a simple grave near Dr Watts' Mound. Close to Church Street is the burial of one of the cemetery's early Director and Trustees, one of the first two Members of Parliament for Hackney Sir Charles Reed FSA. Close by lies his father Dr Andrew Reed (1788–1862), a student of Rev. George Collison and founder of the London Orphan Asylum. In 1834, along with the Rev. J. Matheson, Andrew Reed was sent to the Congregational Churches of America by the Congregational Union of England and Wales as a deputation in order to promote peace and friendship between the two communities. He spent six months in America and during his stay there Yale University conferred upon him an honorary Doctorate of Divinity. This strengthened the Congregationalists' transatlantic links, ensuring the Rev George Collison's son a welcome when he visited to gain ideas for Abney Park cemetery's design from Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Here too is the Welsh MP Henry Richard, a mid C19th Secretary of the Peace Society, instrumental in encouraging the first university in Wales at Aberystwyth along with its founder Sir Hugh Owen, whose own memorial is to the east of the Abney Park Cedar Circle. Also buried here is Betsi Cadwaladr, a Welsh nurse who worked in the Crimea with Florence Nightingale. The Peace Society is well represented at Abney Park; two of its other C19th Secretaries, Rev. Nun Morgan Harry and Rev. John Jefferson are also buried here. Rajendra Chandra Chandra, Professor of Calcutta Medical College and physician, is also buried here with his wife.

Pioneering fire fighter James Braidwood, credited with forming the first municipal fire brigade; Edward Calvert, painter; engraver and painter and novelist Isabella Banks; newspaper editor and playwright George Linnaeus Banks; and the African-Jamaican Baptist missionary Rev. Joseph Jackson Fuller, are also buried in the Park. So too are Rev William Brock D.D., John Hoppus D.D. of University College London, and John Harris D.D. and Robert Halley of New College London.

Amongst the theatre and music hall performers resting at Abney Park are George Leybourne, Nelly Power, Albert Chevalier, G. W. Hunt, Herbert Campbell, Dan Crawley, Walter Laburnum and Fred Albert. These graves are cared for by the theatre charity The Music Hall Guild of Great Britain and America.

Other burials at the cemetery include the Chartist leader and publisher James "Bronterre" O'Brien, whose life and work is celebrated at the cemetery each year, especially by the Irish community and those in the Labour Movement; Dr John Pye Smith, the first dissenter to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; Mary Hays, the feminist writer and friend of Mary Wollstonecraft; Eric Walrond, the African-American Harlem Renaissance writer; and Thomas William Robertson the dramatic author. John O'Connor Power (1846–1919), Irish Member of Parliament for Mayo, orator, barrister, radical journalist and author of 'The Making of an Orator' is buried here with his wife's family. A Victoria Cross recipient from the Indian Mutiny, Private John Freeman, is buried here.

In a different way, Susanna Bostock is remembered, largely due to the dominance of her life-sized marble lion alongside a path close to the chapel. Along with the Wombwells, the Bostocks were mainly responsible for bringing Asian and African animals to the attention of the Victorian public. For part of the year giraffes lived close to the cemetery at a small farm in Yoakley Road.