History

The above photograph is of the Cemetery House and Chapel taken around 1961. Image by kind permission of www.picturethepast.org.uk  .

Text with thanks to Ann Featherstone.

In the early 1990s members of the Ilkeston and District Local History Society became aware of the deteriorating site of the Cemetery on Stanton Road, Ilkeston. A number of Society members began clearance of the overgrown vegetation and this revealed more of the interesting memorials to past inhabitants of the town. This led to some initial research into those who lay in the burial ground and also into the history of the Cemetery itself. The following is an taken from the booklet published by the Society.

In this country, providing burial space was never a problem until town and city populations outgrew existing churchyards. Ilkeston's population increased rapidly from the 1860s, and there was insufficient burial space available in St. Mary's parish churchyard and in the smaller chapel yards, such as the Baptist Chapel on South Street. Added to this, the growing body of Non-conformist and Roman Catholic worshippers in the town were understandably unhappy about the lack of a non-denominational cemetery.

It was Matthew Hobson, miller, grocer and life-long Non-conformist, owner of Field House (now the site of South-Est Derbyshire College) and much of the land adjoining it, who established the Ilkeston General Cemetery Company in 1863. When his wife, Hannah, died in 1862, she was interred in the grounds of Field House, rather than St. Mary's churchyard. It was some four years later, in 1866, when the Cemetery was fully and securely established, that Mrs. Hobson's remains were exhumed one night nd re-interred in the Cemetery on Stanton Road. The burial record notes simply 'Night'.

Social class was never far away during the nineteenth century. In Stanton Road Cemetery, graves might be purchased in three categories - First, Second and Third class. First class graves were on the higher ground at the entrance to the Cemetery, where the ground might be bought outright. Many of the larger monuments and family plots are found in this area. Second class graves ranged across the middle section, the cheapest, Third class graves were located at the back of the cemetery. There might be as many as seven or eight interments in these graves before they were recycled, when the grave was cleared and the process begun again.