Ely Cemetery

Ely Cemetery. Fragments of Ely's past once lost but now found again...... Prior to the cemetery being transferred to the City of Ely Council, some years ago many of the cemetery's headstones were removed from their original positions, broken up and buried. Just why this was done, has become lost in the mists of time. Perhaps they had become unsafe but whatever the reason for destroying them the loss to local history and to the memory of those who once lived in Ely is enormous., In early 2020 while work was being done to prepare new ground for burials some of the headstones were uncovered. Almost all were beyond repair, but many inscriptions were intact and now the broken pieces have been placed in this area of the cemetery so that they can once again be visited and read., Of considerable interest are a number of Victorian children's headstones. In the early years of the cemetery well over half the burials were of babies and small children and the majority of their graves would not have been marked. But a number of intact stones have been unearthed bearing initials rather than full names. E.H. 1855 was Edward Howe. A boy of six who was only the thirty-third person to be buried in the cemetery. W.H.S. was William Harrington Smith, also aged six, who died in 1863 and W.C. who died in 1856 was William Gross. Several other stones await identification., Quite by chance two of the recovered headstones belong to Sergeant Majors of the local Volunteers. James Eckford (1806-62) was a Scotsman who before taking up his post in Ely had served with both the Scots Fusilier Guards and the 31st Regiment of Foot. Charles Chase (1828-96), a Sussex man by birth, served in-his post for almost a quarter of a century and it was said at the time of his death that he had done much to make the 4th Suffolk's, one of the best militia regiments in the country., Three other stones from 1896 are those of Alfred Joselyn (1877-96) the grandson of local com merchant Robert Joselyn, Albert Walter Cooke (1840-96) who was a Prudential Assurance Agent and lived in Waterside and Percy Aquila Alps (1868-96) a painter and decorator., Other fragments of masonry contain the names of James Cobbin (died 1892), William Blanchflower (died 1898) and James Nethercoat. A more intact headstone is that of Westcott Edwards (1875-1948) a retired tailor who lived in Deacons Lane, but the best preserved monument is that to Ann Richardson Sayer (1820-98). She was the daughter of a local innkeeper and a single parent, who raised a daughter in difficult circumstances.