Under the tar-sealed road that runs into Linwood Cemetery you can still
see the old tram rails, faint lines running off the Butterfield Avenue car
park toward the graves. They built a tram line straight into this cemetery
so that coffins could ride to their burials — and they built a tram hearse
to carry them. Four coffins it could hold, neatly. And, as far as anyone
can tell, it never carried a single body.
The cemetery opened in October 1884 on what was then lupin-covered sand
dunes well beyond the city, out near the Corporation rubbish dump. The
doctors of the day had decided it was not "advisable on sanitary grounds"
to keep burying the dead in town, so the dead were sent out to the dunes.
The first person buried here wasn't there for the reason you'd think:
Sarah Ann Freeman, the sexton's wife, died two days before the cemetery
officially opened, and on 10 July 1884 the Mayor and councillors came out
to watch her lowered into Block 2, Plot 1.
The council built a tram line out from the city, across the sandhills
where Pages Road now runs, and in 1885 it built its hearse: a tram car
fitted out to accommodate four coffins at once, so the poor could bury
their dead more cheaply than any funeral director would charge. It must
have looked like a saving. But the poor, who had been expected to welcome
cheap funerals, would not accept the vehicle — however neatly it might
accommodate four corpses. They wanted the proper thing, pulled by the
proper horses, gliding through the streets as funerals always had. A
hearse that ran on rails, rattling along past the shops on the way to the
graveyard, was not the proper thing at all.
So the tram hearse sat. The rails into the cemetery were recommended for
removal in 1888, and never lifted — they stayed, sinking under the sealed
tar. The hearse itself lingered in the council's hands for sixteen years.
In August 1901 it was finally sold, for three pounds, to a quarry owner
named Samuel Andrews, who planted it beside the main road and used it as a
store for explosives. Seven years of blasting powder in a hearse meant for
four coffins.
Then the Andrews sons, Hastings and George, had a better idea. They built
a wooden pontoon, floated the hearse out onto it, added a galley, and
fitted the four coffin cradles with bunks — four bunks, and a collapsible
table for meals. Every summer they moored the old tram hearse out in the
harbour and lived on it, sleeping exactly where coffins were meant to
sleep, three pounds' worth of civic failure turned into a boy's summer
houseboat. The exact phrase the council had used was that the hearse could
hold up to four corpses; the boys made sure it held four happy ones
instead.
Today thirteen mayors lie in this cemetery, along with members of
parliament, bishops, men from the First Four Ships, and the Peacock family
who gave the city its fountain. And under your feet, under the tar, run
the rails of the line that came here for the dead — with the hearse that
the dead refused to ride, out there somewhere across the harbour as a
houseboat.
Source
Wikipedia