LIFESTYLE & ARTS
17 ARTS NEWS
Ruth Johnston, chairwoman of the Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, pictured in the garden cemetery.
Johnston points to a solemn row of mausoleums that have been carefully restored by the Friends and the city council. One commemorates the “Three Misses of Bellfield”: Margaret, Jane and Elizabeth, the daughters of George Buchanan, a well-to-do figure in the cotton trade. Ten thousand pounds was left for the perpetual upkeep of their tomb. “This is all new stonework here,” she explains. “The balustrade was missing, there was quite a lot of work to be done.” The row also includes the 1837 Egyptian Vaults, designed by David Hamilton, where bodies were stored while their graves were being readied.
It’s a pleasant day for a walk round the Necropolis. We pass a jogger doing a steady circuit of the winding paths. A cluster of amateur photographers has been drawn to the monument to John Knox, a 12ft-high statue of him, Bible clutched in his right hand, atop a 58ft-high Doric column. The monument actually pre-dates the cemetery; it has stood here since 1825, when this immediate area was more of a formal park. Some 10,000 people gathered on this spot just to see the foundation stone being laid.
There’s a great view to be had from the top of the hill across the city. As we look, the sun appears from behind clouds and illuminates the city below. “This was the highest hill in Glasgow when the Necropolis opened,” Johnston remarks, “but places like Sighthill were absorbed into the city later, and that is even higher. But it is an amazing view.”
One of her favourite monuments is the one to the theatre impresario John Henry Alexander - “an amazing piece of sculpture”. It has figures representing tragedy and comedy, and Alexander himself is depicted wearing a wreath. Descendants of the family came here to bury ashes here as recently as 2012. In the same way is the monument to Malcolm Campbell studded with apples and other fruits.
As is the case with every graveyard, many of the headstones at the
A general view of the Glasgow Necropolis, which contains 3,500 monuments that reveal the stories of the city’s past luminaries.
Necropolis mark the deaths of infants, or of children who died too young. Mary Margaret, daughter of James Jeffray, professor of anatomy at Glasgow, was just nine when she died on April 22, 1839. Jane Milligan was two years and four months when she died on August 29, 1876: she was the daughter of Lieut-Col William Bannatyne and his wife Aimee. A nearby monument was erected in memory of James Clerk, a Glasgow merchant, who died, aged 62, in June 1872, “and of his infant son, who died 22nd October, 1859”.
We walk past wide stretches of grass, where unmarked graves lie. Here and there you make make out gentle undulations in the ground. We stroll past the monument to Walter Macfarlane I, who created the famed Saracen Foundry; he was buried here in 1885 though his monument, with his portrait in a bronze panel, did not follow for another 11 years. “These portraits aren’t so unusual, though they are mostly of men,” observes Johnston. “We used to have a bronze portrait of the Queen of the Gypsies [Corlinda Lee], but that has been stolen, and we have one of a woman peeping out from behind her husband’s profile, but apart from that there are no images of women here.” A short walk away is the monument to stockbroker David Edmund Outram, whose uncle, George, was an advocate, a humorous poet, and editor of this very paper.
Ruth Johnston continues her tour, pointing to more of her favourite monuments, to the riveting little details – the sculptor’s “sweet commissioned grace”, in Philip Larkin’s words – that she has grown to love. The Necropolis, she says, never quite loses its atmospheric beauty, and you can see what she means.