Graveyard
Gravestones include some for victims of the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864, which include resting places for the Watson, Price and Atkinson families who perished in the Great Inundation. The inscription on the Atkinson grave reads: “Ezra and Maurice, their son aged 15 and 9 months ... also William aged 13 and 4 months who perished by the bursting of the Bradfield reservoir, March 12 1864.” The church's original benefactors Ann and Elizabeth Harrison are both buried in the churchyard with a gothic memorial over their graves.
Another grave which caused controversy and was mentioned in the local press at the time, is the so-called “Cricketer’s Grave”. This is the final resting place of Benjamin Keeton, a well known cricket player in the area who played for the Hallam Cricket Club. When he died in 1871, aged 47, he requested that his grave should mark his devotion to cricket as well as his place of burial. His widow Fanny abided by his request and had a gravestone carved with cricket stumps, bat and ball on it. However the stone caused some controversy with the vicar and certain parishioners thinking it unsuitable for a graveyard. The stone was knocked down at one point, but replaced after a public meeting showed the majority to be in favour of it remaining in the churchyard.
The graveyard contains a large open area with no gravestones, this is the site of the burials from the nearby South Yorkshire Asylum (later to become Middlewood Hospital). Several hundred patients from the asylum were buried here in Victorian times with no memorial as it was then considered a disgrace for a member of family to be in an asylum. Many ceremonies were carried out with just two people present, a minister and a grave digger. There is a memorial to 23 servicemen who died of wounds while been treated at the nearby Wharncliffe War Hospital which the asylum became between 1915 and 1920. Another interesting grave is that of Dr. T. Allan Taylor who developed the high nickel alloy steel needed for the production of the jet engine by Frank Whittle in the 1930s.
Read more about this topic: Wadsley Parish Church
Famous quotes containing the word graveyard:
“I see those two hearts, I’m afraid,
Still. Cool here in the graveyard of good and evil,
They are even so to be honored and obeyed.”
—James Merrill (b. 1926)
“We thought it would be worth the while to read the epitaphs where so many were lost at sea; however, as not only their lives, but commonly their bodies also, were lost or not identified, there were fewer epitaphs of this sort than we expected, though there were not a few. Their graveyard is the ocean.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Miss U.S.A. is in the same graveyard that [Amanda Jones] the twelve-year-old is. Where the sixteen-year-old is. All the past selves. There comes a time when you have to bury those selves because you’ve grown into another one.”
—Amanda Theodosia Jones, U.S. beauty contest winner, Miss U.S.A., 1973. As quoted under the pseudonym “Emma Wright” in American Dreams, Prologue, by Studs Terkel (1980)