The Minute Book for the Burial Committee of Hull Corporation for the year 1883 provides some evidence about the two detached burial grounds on Sculcoates Lane serving the Georgian church of St. Mary’s Sculcoates. They state that the churchyard adjacent to the church was declared full in 1817 (this slightly contradicting Greenwood’s date (s.p.b.) but no great matter) and that in that year three acres of lane south of Sculcoates Lane was acquired as a detached burial ground (s.p.b.). As shown in the photo above, parts of the perimeter brick wall of 1817 survive, this entrance off the Lane would have originally been gated.
This detached burial ground was used up to 1864 the Minutes tell us. This is interesting because not only was the population of Sculcoates parish increasing rapidly in the 19th century (s.p.b.) but also growing public health standards would not allow graveyards to become ‘stuffed-full’ as had been the case centuries before.
In 1864 the vicar of St. Mary’s allocated seven acres of glebe land on the other side of Sculcoates Lane for a second detached burial ground. The reason for this little bit of history in the Minutes was that in 1883 the Hull Town Clerk recommended that this site should be purchased as ‘ one of the cemeteries of the Burial Board of the Borough’. Whether he meant both burial grounds either side of Sculcoates Lane or just the most recent one is not clear to me, anyway the site on the south side of the road had become a disused burial ground so would have been managed by the Board anyway.
A minute of the Burial Board Committee in 1891 included St. Mary’s, Sculcoates in its list of disused burial grounds, presumably this referring to the three acre site south of Sculcoates Lane as some headstones in the seven acre site north of the Lane record dates into the 20th century.
(to be continued)
Point of View 2 – There is compelling evidence that this corona virus ‘jumped species’ (wild animals to humans) in the environment of a Chinese ‘wet market’. It distresses me to describe these barbaric places which can be read about and viewed on the internet by googling ‘wet markets’. In these open-air markets live animals are dismembered and slaughtered with no regard for their feelings, what we regard as pet animals the same, creatures caught in the wild and those factory farmed. This is a huge human culture v. animal rights issue, but on this occasion the result didn’t stay within national borders. It is morally and ethically wrong that such places/practices should exist anywhere on the planet and I saying so we shouldn’t be advised to ‘balance’ possible economic outcomes against taking a stand.