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Friends of Tunbridge Wells Cemetery at Hawkenbury
News
Planting the Wild Service Tree (Sorbus Torminalis) for the Queen's Jubilee. October 2021 by Chair of Friends of the Cemetery
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Ginkgo Tree planted to celebrate the Missionaries to China buried here
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We were awarded GOLD for the Large Cemetery of the Year in South & South East in Bloom!
This joins the Gold award for 2017
Living Memory Project
Dear Friends,
Thank you for all your support during the Living Memory project last Summer, together we marked the battle of the Somme and raised awareness of the UK’s 300,000 war graves.
Please find attached a letter from Lord Faulkner and Sir Jeffrey Donaldson thanking you for your participation in the project and asking you to continue with your support of the work of Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) in 2017.
We will be producing a newsletter highlighting the First World War Centenary events for this year and offering advice on how you can continue your remembrance activities.
Best wishes
The CWGC Community Engagement Team
Community
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Restoration of William Brentnall Grave
Press Release - 16th October 2015
Celebrating the “boundless energy” of the town’s Victorian engineer.
On Friday 16th October at 10.30 am local MP the Rt Hon Greg Clark, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, joined the Friends of Tunbridge Wells Cemetery to celebrate the repair of William Brentnall’s memorial. This has been a top priority on the Friends’ “to do” list ever since it was smashed by a falling tree. The generous help of Brentnall descendant, Carol Mellors, has now made this possible.
Greg Clark planted a winter flowering cherry tree beside the memorial to replace the one that did so much damage. He also met some of the people working together to conserve and enhance the cemetery. They included the office staff who handle bereaved relatives, the parks department staff who have recently added to the grounds a peaceful woodland memorial path, the memorials inscriptions group recording and researching the gravestones, the volunteer gardeners who have restored a corner by the children’s graves, the stonemason who repaired the Brentnall gravestone and the printer who helped the Friends produce the exhibition on display in the burial chapel and their two publications so far .
The first of these, published for Heritage Open Days in September (1), takes visitors round twenty interesting memorials close to the chapel. They include a stiff necked bishop and a royal mistress, a pioneer woman pilot and a survivor of the Siege of Lucknow, a feisty suffragette and the rescuer of the King and Queen of France fleeing the Paris mob in 1849. The second, published to mark the restoration of his memorial (2) is about Victorian self-taught engineer William Brentnall and the huge range of public works he carried out to benefit the town and rescue it from the toils of the Court of Chancery which had sequestrated its assets. When he died on 20th June 1894 the Kent and Sussex Courier published a lengthy article on his achievements saying “nothing appears to have come amiss to him”
Among his public works were the water supplies for the town, its sewerage and drainage, its lighting, the Grosvenor bridge, remodelling the Town Hall, the town’s first recreation ground, its brick pavements and the asphalting of its dusty roads, and of course the laying out of the cemetery. He was indeed, as one of his tributes put it, “a many-sided man”.
For further information: contact June Bridgeman 01892 525578 jbman@btinternet.com or Caroline Auckland 01892 515460 carolineauckland@btinternet.com
(1) A walk round some interesting memorials. Copies available from jbman@btinternet.com or the Cemetery Office price £3 (or £3.60 UK postage paid)
(2) William Brentnall 1829-1894, Surveyor and Engineer also available as above
Press Release
Bob Atwood June 2014
PRESS RELEASE 8 June 2014
A HIDDEN GEM OF TUNBRIDGE WELLS
The Victorian twin burial chapels at Hawkenbury were packed on Saturday 7th June 2014 with visitors to the exhibition and the guided history and nature walks organised by the newly formed Friends of Tunbridge Wells Cemetery. Flowers were laid at three memorials by the Mayor,
Councillor Ronan Basu, performing his last public engagement of his year of office, Minister
of State for Cities, Greg Clark, and Oliver Morris, partner in law firm Cripps.
One of these tributes was to the man who designed and laid out the cemetery in 1873,
William Brentnall, Town Surveyor. Last winter’s gales saw a falling tree smash the marble
cross that has stood for over 120 years above the spot where he is buried with his wife
Frances. Helping Greg Clark place some memorial flowers on the shattered monument was
Carol Mellors, a descendant of the Brentnall family.
Speaking about William Brentnall’s contribution Greg Clark said “ Something I am very
conscious of in my job is the vital importance of the right infrastructure. William Brentnall
was recruited in a hurry by the Local Board in 1870 to instal proper water supplies and
drainage for the town. They had been ordered to do so in a landmark environmental law case,
still quoted today about Tunbridge Wells effluent polluting the Somerhill estate . In the
years that followed, he installed new waterworks and the main drainage system we still enjoy
today. The benefits were immediately felt in a reduction in the many deaths especially of
young children through water borne disease. Among his other public works he built the
Grosvenor Bridge across the railway line that cut the town in two. It would be a fitting tribute
to his memory for the Council and Friends to get together to restore the monument of this
man who did so much for the health and well being of thousands of Tunbridge Wells people”
Chairman of the Friends, Robert Atwood, a former Leader of the Council said “Cherishing
Churchyards Week is an apt time to launch this venture. We want to encourage local people
to discover and cherish this peaceful and beautiful place, one of the largest pieces of open
space owned by the Council, with whom we shall be working closely”
The Friends plan to repeat the exhibition and series of walks during Heritage Open Days in
September. “I hope by then that many more people will have heard about us and come along
to enjoy exploring what has been called one of the most beautiful cemeteries in England”
Background Note: Opened in 1873 the cemetery has over 44,000 burials. A history group
has for the past two years been recording inscriptions on its many thousands of memorials
and welcomes anyone interested in helping with this work to contact them
For more information: Website foftwc.wix.com/foftwc
Robert Atwood: 01892 863704 ; robert.atwood@virgin.net
Pictures :Caroline Auckland 01892 515460 carolineauckland@btinternet.com.
History Group: June Bridgeman 01892 525578 jbman@btinternet.com
