A Childhood in the Cemetery
As we look back on the first 190 years of Sheffield General Cemetery and celebrate the great diversity of people who have lived, worked and been buried here, among those we remember is the last child to grow up within the Cemetery grounds.
This was Robert Mills Storrie, who was born in 1941 and was the son and grandson of the last two managers of the Cemetery Company. Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s as the third of four sons in the manager’s house, at the top of the Cemetery site, he enjoyed a unique insight into the life of the Cemetery in the post-war years.
His father had been a military man and, after the war, took to buying up surplus army equipment which he would take apart and attempt to reassemble, sometimes with explosive results! Robert himself recounts how he and one of his brothers found the keys to the Chapel and got in, even though this was strictly forbidden. The sight of a near collapsing wall and a candlestick with a skull was enough to frighten them off, the door was relocked, and not opened again until restoration work began.
In the late 1950s the Directors of the Cemetery Company decided they needed to ‘modernise’ and Robert’s father was asked to dispose of items in the Cemetery Office. Among these was a hand-written hymn by the well-known poet and hymn writer James Montgomery. Before it was thrown away Robert asked if he could keep it, which he did. He later donated the document to the British Library, while retaining a copy for himself.
You can see Montgomery’s hymn reproduced and read more of Robert’s fascinating childhood in Recollections of a Former Occupant which is published by Sheffield General Cemetery Trust and available to purchase for £3.00 here.