By the middle of the nineteenth century London was running out of places to put its dead. The answer, proposed by a private company, was to build a cemetery on open land in Surrey and carry the coffins there by rail.
The Horror
The London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Act received parliamentary consent on June 30, 1852. The company bought about 2,200 acres from Lord Onslow between Woking and Brookwood, and the westernmost 400 acres became the first cemetery. The cemetery opened on November 7, 1854, and the Anglican section was consecrated that day. The first scheduled train left the London terminus beside Waterloo on November 13, 1854. The first burial was of the stillborn twins of a Southwark couple.
The railway carried class into death. A coffin travelled for £1 in first class, 5s in second and 2s 6d in third. Pauper funerals sat in third class, with no right to a memorial. The living paid 6s, 3s 6d or 2s for a return ticket. At Brookwood there were two stations. North served the Nonconformist section and South the Anglican, and each had a licensed refreshment room. After an incident in January 1867, crews were given a free lunch limited to one pint of beer.
The scale of the work was not always dignified. In 1862 the Cure’s College burial ground in Southwark was cleared for construction of Charing Cross station. At least 7,950 bodies were packed into 220 containers, each holding 26 adults plus children, and sent to Brookwood at about three shillings a body. At least 21 London burial grounds were eventually moved there by rail.
The last funeral carried was that of a Chelsea Pensioner, Edward Irish, buried on April 11, 1941. On the night of April 16 to 17, 1941, during a raid, the London terminus was badly damaged. The station was officially declared closed on May 11, 1941.
The Legend
Popular retellings add colour that is not confirmed here: golfers riding the funeral train to a course on company land, and a drunken driver at Brookwood leaving the fireman to take the train home. Only the one-pint lunch rule after the January 1867 incident is documented in the source used, so the rest should be treated as story.
Gandhi’s presence is better recorded. Then aged 21, he attended the funeral of the atheist MP Charles Bradlaugh on February 3, 1891, and later recalled an argument at North station between a champion atheist and a clergyman.
The Modern Relic
The part of the narrow four-storey Westminster Bridge Road building that housed the company’s offices survives. The company sold the site to the British Humane Association in May 1947 for £21,000.
At Brookwood the branch line was dismantled and its trackbed became a dirt road and footpath. North station was demolished in the 1960s because of dry rot, and its site is heavily overgrown. South station burned in 1972 and the remaining buildings were later demolished. The site now holds a Russian Orthodox monastery and a shrine to King Edward the Martyr, which incorporate the surviving platform and former chapels. A memorial to the railway was erected at Brookwood in 2007. The main line through Brookwood remains in use as part of the South West Main Line.
