About a dozen years after the Leeds Township Cemetery in Burmantofts, Leeds, opened its gates for the first time in 1845, a fine monument was erected within its high stone walls to a Joshua Cawthra, who died on January 3rd 1856 at the age of 54. The opening bars of I know that my redeemer liveth, from Handel’s Messiah, were inscribed upon it, no doubt inspired by the design of the composer’s monument in Westminster Abbey, followed by ‘This Monument was erected by his musical friends’.
I first stumbled upon it quite a few years ago on a visit to what is today known as Beckett Street Cemetery, opposite the Thackray Medical Museum. It was one of the first publicly funded cemeteries in England, created to cope with the rapidly expanding population of the city, at a time when disposal of the dead was putting overwhelming demands on existing churchyards. Now closed for business, it is a fascinating place which has recently been cleared of invading brambles and sycamore saplings, with about 180,000 people buried in 28,000 graves, which gives an insight into the rigid class structure and religious divisions of the mid-nineteenth century.
I rediscovered the monument near Anglican Walk one autumn with some difficulty, just before the arrival of the teams of volunteers equipped with saws and strimmers, at a time when it was almost completely obscured by foliage. A rusty spike on the top indicated where some stone ornament had once been fixed. An empty can of glue at its base was the only tribute. I planned to find out about the man resting there with his wife and three of his children.
There was not much which was relevant on the internet, so I sent out emails, made phone calls and looked at eye-straining microfilm versions of the three local newspapers of the time at the Central Library – the Leeds Intelligencer, Mercury and Times. Soon, information and help was flowing in from descendants, librarians and local historians. My sincere thanks to all of them.
Born in 1802 in the village of Hightown, near Liversedge, he was listed in a directory for 1835 as a ‘singing master’, living at 11, Little Queen Street in the middle of a grimy and unhygienic Leeds. He was still there for the 1851 Census, with seven of his nine children: one had died and another had married. He was a ‘Professor of Music’, which puts him more or less in the category of ‘tradesman’, well below the gentry and a few rungs up from a labourer. The average age of death for a Leeds tradesman (in 1842) was 27, for a labourer 19. Cholera had rampaged through the city in the warm summer of 1849, many of its victims piled into unmarked graves in the Leeds Township Cemetery. Joshua and his family were lucky.
He must have had a beautiful voice: he was at one time the precentor of the Albion Chapel in Albion Street, moving on to the Belgrave Chapel after a new organ had been installed. Both of these are marked ‘Independent’ on the old maps, so he was probably not an Anglican to begin with, moving on, I am guessing, soon after the reconstruction and refurbishment of Leeds Parish Church in 1841 by the Vicar of Leeds, Dr Walter Farquhar Hook, when the Church of England was reasserting itself, much to the annoyance of the non-conformists, who formed the majority but who were obliged to subsidise the work through the church rate levied by the city authorities. The charismatic Dr Hook was a High Churchman and a Tractarian, but Joshua was the First Tenor for many years in the Parish Church choir set up by Hook.
He knew the composer Samuel Sebastian Wesley, installed by Dr Hook as organist and choirmaster at the Parish Church, and he must have been a frequent visitor to the Music Hall in Albion Street, the largest saloon in Leeds before the Town Hall was built. Was he there in 1854 when Mendelssohn's unfinished opera Loreley was performed? The famous soprano Susan Sunderland was there. It is probable that he knew her.
At the time of his death, he had moved a hundred yards or so to 32, Somers Street in the city centre. During an unspecified illness which lasted for a year, he was visited by many friends, who later organised a subscription for his monument. No evidence exists for what the topics of conversation were around his sickbed, but music must have been one of them: perhaps they mentioned the Grand Concert in aid of the Great Patriotic Fund which took place at the Albion Street Music Hall in February 1855. In the frozen Crimea, the Siege of Sevastopol was in progress. Was he well enough to sing in the concert? The work performed was Judas Maccabeus, conducted by William Spark.
Undoubtedly, the ‘musical friends’ would have seen the imposing columns which were rising just a few hundred yards from Somers Street on Mr Cuthbert Brodrick’s instructions. The young architect had been to Paris, where he had been impressed by the neo-classical façades of public buildings. There must have been speculation about what an oratorio would sound like inside the new building.
On Sunday, 6th January 1856, one hundred friends, along with boy choristers from the Parish Church, met outside his house to sing the funeral anthem by William Knapp, Is there not an appointed time. Most of those involved in the funeral proceedings would have been male, as was the custom at the time.
The procession then proceeded towards the cemetery, the mourners probably glancing up at the gritstone mass of the new Town Hall under construction, not to be opened until Queen Victoria’s visit in 1858, when the first Musical Festival took place. Joshua, had he lived on, would no doubt have sung with the Festival Chorus formed for the occasion.
As it approached its destination, the new Moral and Industrial Training School on the north side of Beckett Street - now the Lincoln Wing at St James’s Hospital - loomed large. It was soon to become the Leeds Union Workhouse. Large numbers of carriages and horses were parked nearby, because between two and three thousand people had gathered there to see off the popular vocalist. Men in frock coats and stove pipe hats, possibly along with a few bell-like women in very wide, flounced crinolines, with mantles and shawls to ward off the severe cold, watched as the cortege entered through the gate reserved only for Anglicans.
Some packed into the small chapel to hear Purcell’s anthem Thou knowest, Lord, and then over the grave was sung Luther’s hymn Great God, what do I see and hear. This, according to the Leeds Times of 12 January, “was an appropriate termination to the solemn ceremonial, the trumpet solo being performed by Mr Bowling in the unavoidable absence of Mr Spark.” That would have been the illustrious William Spark, famous organist, co-designer of the grand organ in the new Town Hall and the moving force behind the establishment of the very first Festival Chorus.
Joshua’s son Thomas was written down as a ‘warehouse boy’ in the 1861 Census, but music was in the family’s blood, because he was eventually to become the long-term organist at St Bartholomew’s in Armley, Leeds, famous in his time. And his son, also a musician, was named Thomas Handel Cawthra.
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