Richard Grainger's Family Tomb
by Cyril Winskell
Photo: Cyril Winskill
It was the demographic changes early in the 19th century with the huge increase in munitions workers from the banks of the Tyne that in 1831 led to the consecration of land and the building of a new Chapel of Ease and graveyard in the parish of St John, Newcastle. This subsequently became know as St. James, Benwell. The land for the chapel yard was donated by John Buddle, who lies buried in a vault designed by John Dobson but without any monument or inscription above ground level. The Chapel of Ease, 1831-3, by John Dobson, which today is the Nave of a much-enlarged church, was built with stone gifted by John Hodgson and erected by Richard Grainger. It came about that upon Richard Grainger’s death in 1861 he was laid to rest in the family tomb in the Chapel yard within a T shaped enclosure of Gothic style cast iron railings. Today this tomb appears in need of repair and some tender loving care. It is good that the church has now set up a group of local interested parties to find ways and means of enhancing the church and its closed churchyard. This could lead to the restoration to their former glory of the many memorials, not least Richard Grainger’s tomb.
Richard Grainger has other memorials too: A Drinking Fountain erected in Neville Street in 1892, in memory of Richard and Rachel Grainger by their daughter Rachel Elizabeth Burns, has been moved twice; once in the 1950’s to Thornton Street and then in 1981 to Waterloo Street within the pocket square of the Barnett Winskell town apartments. There is a plaque in St John’s church, Grainger Street and when The Grainger Town Project celebrated the bi-centenary of Richard Grainger’s birth in 1997 it funded the installation of a fine large plaque in the paving of GraingerStreet.
City and County
August 2009
