Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery -- Notables

Notable personalities at Kensal Green Cemetery

Over 250,000 people have been laid to rest at the General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green, since 1833, as burials and cremated remains, in graves and catacombs. Amongst princes and paupers, the great and the good, the famous and the infamous, over 1500 notable personalities -- including over 550 with entries in the Dictionary of National Biography -- are buried at Kensal Green, from the children of George III to the servants of Queen Victoria. Engineers and artists, politicians and preachers, scientists and sportsmen, writers and actors, doctors and lawyers, financiers and philanthropists, explorers and wastrels, lie as neighbours in the aptly-named All Souls. Some 500 members of the titled nobility include the 5th Duke of Portland, the 9th Duke of Queensbury, three Marquesses of Sligo, and John De Courcy, Baron Kingsale, Premier Baron of Ireland, as well as Lord Palmerston's sister, Queen Victoria's god-daughter, the present Queen's great-uncle, and Mary Ann Thurston, nurse to the children of Queen Victoria, whose memorial was designed by HRH Princess Louise.

Notable personalities include the engineers Sir Marc Isambard Brunel and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Joseph Locke and Carl William Siemens; Charles Babbage, 'the father of computing', and Howard Staunton, designer of the modern standard chess set; the architects Decimus Burton and John Tarring ('the Gilbert Scott of the Dissenters'); the designers Owen Jones and Ossie Clarke; the merchants Andrew Pears, WH Smith and William Whiteley; the novelists Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray; the poet Thomas Hood and the clerical wit Sydney Smith; the artists Richard Bonington, Philip Calderon, Daniel Maclise, William Mulready, and John William Waterhouse; the illustrators John Tenniel and John Leech, and the caricaturist Leslie Ward ('Spy'); the Irish soprano Catherine Hayes and the West Indian-Polish violin virtuoso George Bridgetower; the composers Michael Balfe ('I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls') and Henry Russell ('A Life on the Ocean Wave'); the actors William Macready, Charles Philip Kemble, Fanny Kemble and George Grossmith; the funambulist Blondin, and the equestrian circus proprietor Andrew Ducrow. Kensal Green is the resting place of Lord Byron's wife, half-sister, publisher, best man and most faithful servant; and of some two dozen of Charles Dickens' close friends and relations, including John Forster, Frederic Chapman, Samuel Lover, and Mary Scott Hogarth.

Fifty of Kensal Green's best known personalities and monuments are featured in the Concise Introductory Guide, and virtually all of those listed below appear in the Friends' publication Paths of Glory; both publications are available by post, after the weekly Sunday tour, on our annual Open Day and from the office of the General Cemetery Company at the Main Gate during office hours. Both guides include a short biographical note on each individual; the Concise Guide offers a plan of the cemetery with locations broadly marked, while Paths of Glory includes with a line drawing of each monument, together with a grid reference and map to facilitate location.

As a ready reference, the principal names are listed here (with apologies to the many polymaths below), in the general categories of:

Architecture	Exploration	Medicine	Religion
Art	Funerary Arts	Military	Royalty & Aristocracy
Circuses & Spectacles	Gastronomy	Music	Scandal
Commerce	Heroics	Philanthropy	Science
Education	The Law	Photography	Sports
Engineering	Literature	Politics	The Stage