Eleven Thousand Silent Playmates

Eleven Thousand Silent Playmates

Gravestones leant against the red brick wall like dockers waiting for work. For a long time now, the dockers have all been redundant or dead, but in the industrial boomtown of Middlesbrough in the early 1960s, only the cemetery was redundant and its dead were all but forgotten.

We’d play tigs-off-ground, jumping up onto those of the stones that leaned the least vertically.  There for a few seconds we were safe from the powers of the person who was ‘it’. Most were old and often decorated with mosaics of lichen. All had names and dates engraved that we never took the trouble to read. The ones I remember most vividly are the ones that looked relatively new and perhaps discarded too soon.

‘You know you’re playing on top of dead bodies!’ adults passing by would shout at us, usually laughing but sometimes having expressions of horror on their ashen faces. But that couldn’t possibly be true. It was only a five-minute walk from the street of Victorian terrace houses in which most of us lived. Deprived of gardens, this patch of green seemed the perfect safe place to congregate. A small slice of peaceful countryside on our doorsteps. Thoughts of embellishing the grownups’ warnings by making up ghost stories to scare our peers, as you might expect from excitable young children, never entered our heads. We didn’t know the truth.  

Almost a lifetime later I wrote a poem about meeting there with friends as seven-year-olds. Our group included a girl who assured us that she was going to marry George Harrison. Beatlemania had just got off the ground then but Patricia’s head had elevated much further up into the clouds. She was the first person I knew at school to feel the sting of a nun’s wooden ruler across the palm of her hand. The reason for this being that she had written I Luv George on the front cover of her sums book. I could remember her very well, I could remember our gang of friends playing on the swings and roundabouts in the park, but I couldn’t remember the name of the park. My writing seemed incomplete without it. So I fired up the internet machine, did a bit of rooting around and found some information that stunned and amazed me.

I read on the website of the Teesside newspaper, the Northern Echo, an article written in 2010 by a journalist called Julia Breen. She had reported that a local historian by the name of Steve Waller had extensively researched the history of Ayresome Cemetery. This was the very place where we would go to talk about Batman, eat Spangles and sometimes tune in to Patricia’s ramblings about her ongoing love affair with one of Britain’s four foremost pop stars. I was pleased to have established the name of the location, albeit a fairly obvious one, but I was fascinated by what followed in the article.

From a collection of archive documents, the researcher had discovered that since it was opened in 1854, more than 11,000 people had been buried in the graveyard. These had included some of the poorest members of the town’s population, some who had been mentally insane and many who had died from epidemics. It also contained the graves of a significant number of wealthy citizens such as politicians, industrialists, merchants and even the children of Middlesbrough’s founding fathers.

The cemetery had been opened to meet the needs of the town’s rapid expansion in the nineteenth century but in 1962, as even greater expansion took off and many old buildings we destroyed to make way for social and economic progress, it too became a victim. Graves and vaults were covered up or sealed, tombstones were uprooted and stacked around the perimeter, and its two neo-classical-style chapels were destroyed. The site became Ayresome Gardens, our idyllic playground.

I don’t remember there being a basketball court. Perhaps that was built later, on the spot where in my day there had been a football pitch. So I was shocked to learn that Mr Waller had unearthed evidence to suggest that dozens of cholera victims were buried beneath it, and that a nearby car park concealed the graves of fourteen children.

As children ourselves, we never paid much attention to those who warned us about the dead who lay beneath our new recreation area. The long rows of unloved headstones leaning in irregular stacks three or four deep were the only remaining feature to suggest that the gardens had once been a burial ground. I touched and saw them often, and even grazed my knees on them, but I never questioned their presence. Although my eyes were open they might just as well have been closed because their being there never seemed to me to be anything other than normal. My father was much more aware of them. They seemed to make him uncomfortable. He told me that they had been removed from their original individual locations because the people they had been put up in memory of had died a long time ago, so nobody came to see them anymore. Apparently the stones were smashed up and taken away in 1978 for safety reasons. Council officials were worried because children had been seen playing on them.

But I read in the Northern Echo article that the last burial to take place there was that of eighty-four-year-old Florence Gjers, the wife of a Swedish iron master. She had died in 1950, just twelve years before the cemetery had been decommissioned. There must have been families and friends who were still visiting their loved ones’ graves right up until the final weeks and days, and possibly even hours. It must have been heart-breaking for them. I suppose there were also living people with the expectation of one day being buried alongside their already deceased family members but who had to make alternative funeral arrangements.

Another remarkable discovery made by Mr Waller from the documents was the incredible symbolic artwork used when designing the graveyard’s layout. He suspected that Middlesbrough had wanted to spend some money to show off its newfound affluence. Apparently the design contained none of the usual uniformity of simple columns and rows, but twists and turns hiding special meanings such as angel wings, the letters AD, ancient gods of the Underworld, and in the centre, the Holy Grail.

Since the closure there has been no marker to say that remains of people equivalent in number to the current population of Ilfracombe lie there. Steve Waller, other historical researchers and Teesside residents have been campaigning for a blue plaque or more prominent permanent memorial to be erected in this place of so many unmarked graves.

I never liked living in Middlesbrough. To me it was a dark and dirty, noisy old place. The town was dominated by the steelworks and petrochemical plant and, even though we couldn’t see these toxic monsters from where we lived, we could see and smell the pollution that they spewed out around the clock. The fog on the Tees is all volatile organic compounds, as the old (imagined) song goes. Just as natives of Liverpool are Scousers and those born in Birmingham are Brummies, we are known as Smoggies. So I was glad that we moved away when I was eight years old. Since then the heavy industry has gone and along with it the pollution, but also the jobs and money that it generated for so long. There are much different problems there now.

Down the years I’ve met many other people from Middlesbrough who have always seemed genuinely warm, friendly, down to earth and funny. They’ve tended to look back on their no-nonsense, no-frills hometown with a lot of affection, reviving memories similar to my own. Comedian Bob Mortimer is an absolute legend in the world that spins round inside my head.

It’s more than thirty years since I was last there but my recent little trip down memory lane, sparked off by my hearing the song All My Loving in a café near where I live in Bulgaria, sent me flying back to those childhood days with my friend Patricia and her Beatle-to-be. This unexpected blast of nostalgia gave me an even more unexpected urge to return for a day or two. I particularly want to go back to Ayresome Gardens and pay my respects to the 11,000 people for whom, in my ignorance, I showed absolutely no respect six decades ago.

Image: You could be forgiven for thinking that this is the entrance to the town of Middlesbrough. Really, it’s the entrance to Middlesbrough Football Club’s old Ayresome Park Stadium which stood only 200 metres away from the house in which I lived for the first eight years of my life. It was demolished in 1997 and replaced with a small residential estate. My own photograph, of course.

Julia Breen’s article in the Northern Echo

Unearthing Secrets

The poem I wrote that subsequently prompted me to write about Ayresome Gardens’ dark secret

Making Do with Dusty Springfield