Cemetery Archives: St. Mary’s Cemetery Battersea

St. Mary’s Cemetery is situated in the middle of heavily trafficked roads and surrounded by housing, providing a pretty and almost rural oasis in the midst of the town. Fortunately, the pair of Gothic chapels with their porte cochere have survived intact, though only one is still in use, and the general standard of maintenance is excellent. One could wish that Wandsworth Council would repair unstable monuments, instead of removing them and leaving patches of strangely empty ground, but perhaps this is asking a little too much.

The bereaved of Battersea seem to have taken the Hallmark-style poem on the gravestone to depths rarely seen elsewhere: there are some truly excruciating examples of not quite scanning here:
Only a step removed,
We soon again shall meet, our own
Our dearly loved,
Around the Saviour’s feet
being, with its misplaced line breaks, amongst the more painful.

There are a few monuments worthy of note. A pair of angels hold a scroll in memory of Matthew Whiting. The sculpture of a large flaming urn over the grave of Zoroastrian Kaikhoshru Puntheki. And the foot of a cross has a few lines in memory of "an honest politician": surely that one is unique.