Locksbrook - St Swithin's, Walcot

Overview
Opened
1864
Status
Closed
Number of Burials
29,847
Maintenance

Areas of this cemetery are cut every month, allowing access to most grave areas. Some parts of the periphery are maintained as conservation areas, where wildlife is encouraged to thrive. Under the guidance of a comprehensive Avon Wildlife Trust report Bereavement Services are leaving buffer strips of long grass to create wildlife corridors and are cutting hedges and grassed areas in rotation.

Access

It was possible to drive around the cemetery on the tarmacced paths. However, it was reported on 12-Dec-2024 that the Council had locked the gates due to cars being parked by people trying to avoid car parking charges. There remain five parking spaces by the gates.

Information
  

LKS Chapels

The cemetery was opened in 1864 with separate areas for Walcot and St Saviour’s wards. A further section for Weston opened in 1877. It has Anglican and nonconformist chapels with a cloister and a tower between them. There were 29,591 burials for Walcot ward with the first burial occurring on 17 Jan 1864. 

LKS War graves

From The Historic Guide to Bath by Rev. G. N. Wright (1864):

WALCOT CEMETERY, at Locksbrook, covers twelve acres; it was laid out by Mr. Milner, the landscape gardener to the Crystal Palace Company. The chapels, lodges, entrances, and other buildings, are from the designs of Messrs. Hickes and Isaac, of Bath, and are in the early decorated manner. The chapels are united by cloisters, from the centre of which rises a tower one hundred feet in height.

The Mr Milner referred to is Edward Milner (1819-1884) who was an English landscape architect who worked at Chatsworth for its head gardener, Joseph Paxton. He implemented Paxton’s designs and was superintendent of works for the re-erection of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in 1852. He also worked as an independent designer and a son wrote The Art and Practice of Landscape Gardening published in 1890.

LKS Nr burials per year

Number of burials per year

The numbering scheme of the graves is reported to be complex and not wholly consistent. The inconsistency arises because various paths were also used for graves and arbitrary numbers allocated, these being out of sequence with adjacent graves.

The number of burials in this cemetery did not drop sharply when Haycombe became the only ‘open’ municipal cemetery in Bath in 1937 and the rate only dropped significantly from the early 1960s.

LKS overall

Overall Layout

Notable People

 

 Plot 
Richard Saumarez (1791-1864)F13From a family from Guernsey. Joined the Navy in 1806 and saw action against the French in the Mediterranean and Baltic. Captain in 1824 and later Admiral, retiring in 1846. He has an entry in A Naval Biographical Dictionary by William Richard O'Byrne (1849) which relates various events in his naval career.
Cedric Chivers (1853-1929)DE171

Bookbinder and founder of Cedric Chivers Ltd. The works were at Portway, Combe Park, Bath and employed dozens of people binding and illustrating book covers. He had a subsidiary company in Brooklyn which he sold in 1924. Inventor of vellucent binding, a method of decorating (and protecting) a bookbinding using transparent vellum which he patented in 1885. Mayor of Bath 1922, 1924-1928.

Aspire to the Beautiful, The Life of Cedric Chivers by Brian Cole

Frederick Willliam Fortt (1851-1913)IEE581MD of Messrs Cater, Stoffell & Fortt which had grocery stores, restaurants and wine vaults in Bath. See Biscuits, Banquets and Bollinger: The History of Cater, Stoffell and Fortt Ltd by Andrew HIll (2013) and History of Bath Vol 14 pp 109-119
Frederick Gustav Adolph Horstmann (1828-1893)DN416Gustav Horstmann was an emigré clock and watchmaker from Prussia who founded the family business which became G Horstmann & Sons in Bath around 1856. Sons set up Horstmann Gear Company in 1904 based on an automatic gear box invented by one of them and later the Horstmann Car Company produced cars until 1928. Family and business records are held by the Museum of Bath at Work as well as an example of a car produced by the company. See Gustav Horstmann: Economic Migrant and Clock and Watchmaker, 1828-1893 by Stuart Burroughs in Bath History Vol 11 pp 83-97. The family's name persists in Horstmann Defence Systems Ltd and Horstmann Road.
William Alfred Nedham (1846-191)IEE34Assistant Commissioner of the Central Provinces India
Mumu/ Annie Jane Elwin (1840-1866)LHH157The inscription relates that she was a deaf and dumb African girl who was rescued in child-hood from a slave vessel and taken to the church missionary school at Charlotte, Sierra Leone. She later came to England where was became a servant in a missionary’s household.
Blattenguetta Herouy (1878-1938)IBB614Author, poet and Abyssinian Foreign Minister who accompanied Emperor Haile Selassie into exile in Bath. His body was exhumed on 4 Sep 1947 and returned to Ethiopia. The memorial survives and was restored in 2018.
Sir Andrew Clarke GCMG, CB, CIE (1824-1902)Grave IE 21, 11,4  and IE22, 12, 5 a massive bronze sarcophagus with an angelArmy (Royal Engineers), serving in Tasmania and New Zealand. In 1849 appointed private secretary to William Denison, Governor of Tasmania and New South Wales. In 1853 appointed Surveyor General of Victoria and a member of the Victorian Legislative Council and in 1856 elected to it. In the period 1859 to 1864 he was in the Gold Coast (Ghana), from 1864 to 1873 Director of Works for the Admiralty and 1873 to 1875 Governor of the Straits Settlements, from 1865-1880 he was on the council of the Viceroy of India, 1881 to 1882 Commandant of the Royal School of Military Engineering at Chatham from 1881 to 1886 Inspector-General of Fortifications in England.
Robert Nunez Lyne (1864-1961)ES145Born in 1864 at Paignton, son of De Castro Fisher Lyne and Penelope Wheeler. Scientist agriculturalist. Educated at Canterbury Agricultural College, New Zealand. In 1896 appointed Director of Agriculture, Zanzibar; In 1902 reported on the agricultural prospects of the Uganda Railway and was subsequently lent to the Portuguese Government to reorganise the department of agriculture, Mozambique and in 1910 appointed Director of Agriculture there; In 1912 became Director of Agriculture, Ceylon and in 1915 first principal of the School of Tropical Agriculture, Ceylon.
Stanley Brenton Von Donop (1860-1941)PPB311Sir; KCB, KCMG. Born at Bath son of Vice Admiral Edward von Donop and his wife, Louisa Mary Diana Brenton. In 1911, appointed Director of Artillery at the War Office. Master General of Ordnance 1913-1916. The failure of a battle in March 1915 was attributed to a shortage of shells and led to a reorganisation of production as well as political fallout that led to the appointment of David Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions. There are photographs of Sir Stanley in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection and an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Michael Hobart Seymour (1800-1864) & Maria Elizabeth Seymour (1803-1881)PPF100

Born in Ireland. Anglican clergyman and Secretary to the Irish Protestant Association. He migrated to England circa 1834 and lectured in London and was travelling secretary for the Reformation Society. In Bath in 1844 he married Maria Elizabeth, widow of Baron Brown-Mill (George Gavin Browne Mill), physician to Louis XVIII. (In her death notice in the Bath Chronicle she is referred to as Baroness Browne-Mill.) Rev Seymour contributed to newspapers, published pamphlets, wrote various books (including one on a pilgrimage to Rome), and lectured against the Catholic Church.

He has an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography which describes him as a ‘controversialist’ and ‘an untiring opponent of the dogmas and practices of the church of Rome’. The funeral at Locksbrook was reported in the Bath Chronicle of 2 Jul 1874 p8 and the list of attendees includes many Anglican clergy

Milton Wellings (1849-1929)CG209Prolific and world-renowned composer of ballads. Press articles from 1906 reported that he had become destitute and was starving as a result of having been ‘ruined by piracy’ and that he had been rescued by members of the musical profession (eg The Era 1-Dec-1906 p15). Despite this, he spent time in the St Marylebone workhouse in 1912. His obituary in the Bath Chronicle (2-Mar-1929 p15) was written by another lyricist, Fred Weatherly, famous for his ballad Danny Boy.
Horace Alfred Ford (1821-1880)FK164

According to the Cheltenham Archers:

The Cheltenham Archers club was founded in 1857 by the greatest target archer of all time – Horace Alfred Ford.

Ford first tried his hand at archery in 1845 and within only four years he had won the title of National Champion – a title which he was to win twelve times (eleven of those in successive years!).

Author of Archery: Its Theory and Practice which was first published in 1856.

Documentation

The burial registers for the Walcot section of Locksbrook Cemetery are held by Bath Record Office.

Locksbrook Cemetery - Walcot Section – Name index, P J Bendall [Bath Record Office]

Limitations

Only indexes to the burial registers, not the registers themselves, were available to volunteers to transcribe; the two volumes of the index 1865-1916 and 1917-1980 have year and name only while a separate index 1960-1998 also includes the letters and number which identify the location of the grave. 21-Jul-2023 The scanned images of the registers have become available today. The records are being updated but this will take some months to complete. By 5-Jan-2024 the records had been updated with addition of abodes, occupations, plot numbers etc.

A survey has been undertaken to identify the general layout of surviving memorials. This, in combination with a map held by Bath Record Office which gives the numbering scheme, is allowing maps of some areas to be produced. However, the (section, block, number) scheme for identifying a grave has a series of anomalies. The maps given here are drafts based on preliminary surveys.

 

Maps
Attachment Size
Overall 315.9 KB
Overall (1948) 10.35 MB
Section A 540.47 KB
Section B 736.5 KB
Section C 1.21 MB
Section D Part 1 2.31 MB
Section D Part 2 1005.34 KB
Section D Part 3 624.66 KB
Section E 1.2 MB
Section F 6.87 MB
Section G 911.62 KB
Section H Part 1 886.74 KB
Section I 2.16 MB
Section L 2.88 MB
Section P Part 1 (PP) 2.02 MB
Section P Part 2 13.34 MB
Section Q 13.06 MB
Coverage in Index
1864-2010

Cemetery Graves

If you wish to view and search burials within this cemetery, please visit the Bath Burial Index search page.

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