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Mereweather was appalled by the conditions for
burying non-Catholics in Venice. Already in Semele,
published in 1867, he lets the heroine, visiting the Lido,
express her dismay at the desolate and unenclosed tombstones
of British Protestants who had been denied the privilege of
being buried in consecrated ground. He also criticizes the
British Government for not being paternal enough to obviate
such an indignity. (Mereweather adds that, at a
comparatively recent date, the mortal remains of the
entombed, but not the stones, had been removed to a
Protestant cemetery.)
Over the years, Mereweather made several attempts to remedy
the situation. The municipality had repeatedly offered to
provide a suitable ground but the promises were never kept.
In 1879, in connexion with the appointment of a new British
consul, Mereweather wrote to the Foreign Office asking for
assistance. He said that the available (German) cemetery had
"become so disgustingly full that the burial of fresh bodies
frequently necessitates the exhumation of long interred
remains". The only answer he received was that the new
consul was free to use his influence in the matter.
The situation in Venice would have troubled Mereweather
personally when he thought of his own future burial.
And what was happening in Bristol
would not have been to his liking either. Mereweather's
half-brother Samuel and father John had both been buried
in vault No. 70 in the church of St Werburgh, in 1839
and 1845 respectively. But this resting place was soon
to be destroyed.
In 1871, Bristol City Council proposed that the
church of St Werburgh, whose congregation was dwindling,
should be moved to one of the suburbs in need of a
church. This would also mean a great improvement in the
city with the widening of Corn Street and Small Street.
The matter was much debated, and, finally, in 1877 a
decision was made and most of the site was sold to
London and South Western Bank. John Latimer describes
how bodies buried in and below the church were treated:
The church "was taken down in the spring of 1878, when
forty large chests of human remains, and about a hundred
leaden coffins, were removed to Greenbank Cemetery ...
... The foundations of the new bank were carried down to
an unusual depth, and bones were found at such a
distance from the surface as to lead to a belief that
the cemetery of the original church was fully twelve
feet below the level of the fifteenth century edifice."
(The Annals of Bristol in the Nineteenth Century,
Bristol 1887, p. 461). The church itself was rebuilt in
Mina Road, some 2.5 km to the north-east (the building
is now a rock-climbing centre).
Mereweather’s neighbours, in Palazzo
Contarini Corfù, were George Frederick Greaves, late
Captain of the 60th Rifles, rentier, his wife Ann née
Richards and their large family. In 1871, one of the
Greaves daughters, Adela, married a Swedish lieutenant,
Carl Edward Arfwedson, and the young couple left Venice for
Sweden. In 1877, after seeking the advice of
Mereweather, chaplain and friend of the family, Ann
Greaves, now widow, decided to visit her daughter and son-in-law in
Stockholm. In the
beginning of August she arrived in Stockholm, and
installed herself in a summer house rented by her
daughter at Rålambshov. However, on 27 August 1877, Ann Greaves
died from heart failure. She was buried three days later
in a new grave, No. 2760, in Stockholm's Northern Cemetery (in
Solna); the arrangements were made by Carl Edward Arfwedson, her son-in-law.
On the day of the burial, on 30 August 1877, Henrik
Gerhard Arfwedson, younger brother of Carl Edward,
bought grave No. 2761 for 100 Swedish kronor (£5 10s.). According
to a transcript of the deed (in the National Archives in
Stockholm),
this grave was transferred to John Davies Mereweather on
3 September 1877.
All this happened within one week. Thus Mereweather,
immediately upon hearing of Ann Greaves's tragic death,
decided, in his grief, to secure the plot next to her
grave. He undoubtedly had great affection for her, feeling
guilt for having encouraged her to undertake the
journey. Mereweather would also have seen a solution
to the problem of his own burial which had tormented
him for so long.
On 16 July 1878 Mereweather, being a British and not
a Swedish subject, applied, through the Department of
Justice, for the approval of the transfer to him of the
grave deed. His request was granted by a Royal
resolution of 2 August 1878, and on 5 September 1878 the
cemetery administration registered the grave in
Mereweather's name.
In 1880 Mereweather made a payment of 400 kronor (£22)
for the perpetual upkeep of his grave. When he died,
nineteen years after the original purchase,
his body was cremated and the ashes were sent to Sweden, all
in accordance with his will. Grave No. 2761 was finally
opened to be ready for the burial by 1 p.m., Tuesday 28 July
1896. (The practice of human cremation emanated mainly from
Italy where experiments had started around 1870; professor Brunetti of Padua had showed his results at the exhibition
in Vienna in 1873. See
Modern Cremation, its History and Practice (London,
1889) by Henry Thompson.)
It should be mentioned that, although the family vault in St
Werburgh's was doomed to destruction, there would
have been a Bristol burial option: the Arnos Vale cemetery
situated in Brislington, some 3 km south-east of the
city centre.
In 1875, Mereweather's
half-sister Ann had been buried there in grave No. J143.
However, neither Mereweather himself nor Ann had surviving
Bristol family, so he may have been concerned about the
preservation, especially as Arnos Vale was run by a private
company for profit (as distinct from the Stockholm cemetery
which is run by the municipality).
For recent pictures of Arnos Vale, see below.
In Stockholm on the other hand, Mereweather had his heirs: Carl Edward Arfwedson and his children; one of the children was
Mereweather's godson Jacques Arfwedson. Today, one of Jacques's
grandsons is registered in the database as
contact person for grave No. 2761. And the contract for the
perpetual upkeep is still honoured by the cemetery
administration. Mereweather could hardly have made a
better choice for an
eternal resting place. |
