Walthamstow Cemetery Walks
Across the summer months of 2022 and 2023 the Branch undertook several walks around Walthamstow (Queens Road) Cemetery, visiting the graves and memorials to Great War casualties to be found there.
During the war years Queens Road was the only cemetery in what was then the town of Walthamstow (along with two small churchyards), and it became the last resting place of one hundred and nine soldiers, sailors and airmen.
In addition to the burials, there were at least one hundred and sixty-six commemorations on family graves of men who are buried or memorialised elsewhere. Many of these inscriptions are now lost, but thanks to the work of the Waltham Forest Family History Society in years past, their existence is recorded.
The cemetery, which covers a little over eleven acres and holds over sixty thousand burials, has been closed to new graves for many years, and now serves both as a place of remembrance and a peaceful green space in a dense urban environment, sympathetically maintained by the Waltham Forest Borough Cemeteries Department and the volunteers of the Friends of Queens Road Cemetery.
Based on his research into the service of 'Walthamstow Men' in the First World War, Chris Hunt selected six graves for the group to visit on the walks, each reflecting different aspects of the service, and ultimate fate of local men, with stories of wounds, disease and even suicide to be told.
One of the most fascinating tales was that of Private Walter Richard Melton Hart of the 3rd Dorsetshire Regiment. A Territorial in the RGA from 1912, he transferred to the infantry in October 1914. In the Battle of Hill 60 in April 1915 he received a serious head wound, leading to his discharge from the Army in May 1916, and death in the Union Infirmary in Leytonstone a month later. At some point, the information regarding his final resting place was lost to the authorities, so he currently appears in the United Kingdom Book of Remembrance, and the problem was further compounded by the fact that the cemetery plot passed into other hands, with the result that he now lies in a grave marked 'Ward' with no less than eleven burials above him. We are hoping that his presence in the cemetery will soon be recorded by the CWGC on the special memorial there to men known to be in the cemetery, but whose graves cannot be marked specifically.
With more than one hundred and forty First World War burials in nearby Chingford Mount Cemetery, we are hoping to make it the subject of further exploration in the future.
