The volunteer members of the Cherishing Sidmouth working party Cemeteries are a very active group indeed.
One of their number, Liz Dicker, has penned a piece for the Sid Vale Associations’ spring 2025 magazine on “How Sidmouth got its cemetery” – which is now lodged, with permission, in the CSC history webpages. With the opening snipped reproduced here as a teaser:
As a young medical student the Medical Officer of Health for Sidmouth in East Devon made the national papers for his heroic actions in a train crash rescuing and treating the casualties. However, in 1875, Doctor Pullin now an established member of the town’s Local Board like his physician forebears, was to raise tempers to fever pitch in creating a scandalous slur on the town’s reputation.
Liz has written more of late. Here is the full piece, again published with permission, put together this spring for the Plymouth Talking Newspaper:
On Thursday mornings Sidmouth Cemetery comes alive for a couple of hours as cars, bicycles and shank’s pony bring a team of volunteers from all corners of the town to cherish our cemetery. We are the Cherishing Sidmouth Cemetery group and we scatter around the graveyard in our yellow hi-vis waistcoats like a flock of feeding canaries. East Devon District Council drops off dumpy bags and collects them later in the day full of brambles, woody material, invasive plants and ivy. Litter, strimmer plastic and dog deposits go in the bin.
The Cemetery opened in 1879 when the parish churchyard was nearing capacity and now occupies a substantial acreage on a steeply sloping hillside with a wonderful view across to the even higher steeply sloping hillside of Salcombe Hill. At the bottom the River Sid, surely the shortest river in the country at six and a half miles long, continues to cut its shallow way down to the sea.
Sidmouth, in earlier centuries, was a small fishing village until it was discovered by cultured and sociable people seeking to escape from disease ridden cities and it is in Sidmouth Cemetery where they lie, shoulder to shoulder, fisher folk and gentry now classless in death.
Over the years the cemetery has been planted up with the statuesque trees both native, like the avenue of Scots pines, and exotics, like the American Yellow Buckeye and the Winter’s Bark whose vitamin C treated the scurvy of the crew of a ship bringing it back from South America.
The job with a high priority for the Cherishing group is following the Council’s grass cutting team as they mow and strim to rake off the cut grass the workers leave. It’s a noisy job and grass flies everywhere. This happens six times a year and no one envies them. We rake up the cut grass to stop the accumulation of thatch that cuts off light and air to the soil. This allows seeds and small wild plants to push through the grass and fulfils one of our aims to increase the biodiversity of this spacious green area. You could almost say that we are pushing up the ox eye daisies!
In spring time we can encounter slow worms both large and small twined through the grassy stumps as we rake and a host of hunting spiders, ground beetles and ants; the latter being the food source for the shrieking green woodpecker that nests in the woods on the top of the hill. A survey last April found forty-seven native flowering plants.
There is always something to do. Tracey, she of the cloud of grey hair, loves the long border that runs alongside the road to the chapel. It has been planted with trees and glorious camellia bushes in the distant past and faces north so gets little sun but the plants that we’ve put in between seem to thrive. Invasive plants including bindweed and three-corner leek flourish and Tracey takes the lead in keeping them under control while leaving insect-supportive wild plants, like native versions of buddleia, hellebore and the indomitable primroses to fulfil one of our aims of increasing biodiversity. I particularly like the ribwort plants that stand tall with elegantly arching stems like drumsticks. As children we wrapped the stems around the dark tear drop florescence and fired them at each other like bullets from a gun.
The oldest area of the cemetery dates from the eighteen hundreds and this area has been left to grow wild. Statuesque trees dominate the view here with a few gravestones visible between them. It would seem that only a limited number of burials here could afford a headstone and with unseen obstacles and undulations under the long grass it is unsafe for us to enter most of this area. Long canes of brambles assume arching mounds and saplings of many kinds spring up here and there. Volunteer Derek maintains his great grandparent’s grave in this wild area beside one of the pathways.
At the higher part of our work area is a strip of three rows of the oldest gravestones that is safe to move amongst and it is here you might find Tim, Malcolm and Kevin tunnelling into the greatest of the bramble heaps to find and expose gravestones. We leave the brambles intact as much as possible because of their value to wild life. Ivy clambers over some of the cemetery stones and we clear any parts of the identification covered by it leaving the back and sides as shelter for snails, spiders, wood lice and house flies. Who knew that house flies spend the winter hiding out here and, when the first rays of spring warm the stones, they blacken the monuments with their numbers.
Mick and Ann are our biodiversity advisers. They make sure that we do no harm in the way we work enforcing the aim that man’s tidy is not another’s loss of habitat. Mick says ‘we manage but not manicure’ and we ‘maintain access to all the graves’. I announced one day that I was planning to clear those great lumps of earth that stand firm around the area getting in the way of the grass cutting. His shocked reply was that they were the surface creation of the rare Yellow Meadow Ant that lives wholly underground. So it was back to raking grass then.
Many people exercise their dogs here and occasionally stop to chat. Their complimentary comments cheer us up considerably and we share them with each other during break times. This is also when Amanda has a chance to tell us of the progress of the issues that she takes on when things don’t always go our way. She’s our warrior queen.
Tess and Liz are gardeners and often work in the overgrown shrubbery that runs along the top of the 20th century burials dividing it from the modern extension above. There in the 21st century burials there are fewer gaps in the ranks of smart gravestones attesting to the greater prosperity of more modern times; cremation is now an increasingly popular alternative to burial.
There’s no doubt that being amongst the dead of the past does create an atmosphere that calms the soul. There was one occasion that affected us all and occurred when we were walking wearily back to our start at the end of the session. Mick spotted a sapling in a grave space and decided to cut it down there and then. We all stood around waiting when someone, alarmed, spotted two faces looking up at us through the grass. All of us crowded around ripping turf and handfuls of soil away to reveal two stone angels assisted by doves lifting a figure in a flowing robe up to heaven. The whole was resting atop a large stone cross, long fallen from its plinth and lost to the world except for the heavenward angel faces.
There are so many important life stories here from war graves of men and women gone before their time to people with illustrious careers who moved here near the end of their lives together with a whole lot of ordinary people who made Sidmouth what it is over the last 150 years.
I sometimes bring my library book here and sit on one of the benches amid the wild flowers and butterflies. The wonderful view across the valley does distract somewhat. I’m old now and I feel a connection with the people buried there some of whom I knew. Being here is like greeting old friends. I won’t be joining them though. The sea that delighted my early years and still thrills me today will get my ashes.
Liz Dicker
28th March, 2025
For the Plymouth Talking Newspaper
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