Peter Ross - There’s always something to read in the library of the dead

WHEN I first moved to Glasgow, in the autumn of 1992, I took a room in a flat near the Necropolis, the sprawling, skin-crawling graveyard in which the longest-standing residents had, by that point, occupied solid homes for 160 years.

The 50,000 Glaswegians buried there meant it was three times as populous as the town from which I had come, and they excited my imagination just as any established community will preoccupy a lonely newcomer.

Even the name was thrilling. Necropolis. The Greek word is evocative and eerie, but the English translation – “city of the dead” – was, for me, a stunning notion. A city within the city, home to poets and provosts, merchants and magnates, the final resting place of eminent Victorians who had made Glasgow rich and now enriched its soil. You could imagine these grand corpses continuing to go about their solemn civic business, trading with one other, aloofly pursuing an isolationist policy with regard to the city outwith the cemetery gates.

The Necropolis was built on a hill behind Glasgow Cathedral. The first burial took place on September 12, 1832. Joseph Levi, a jeweller, had succumbed to cholera. In the years since, the cemetery has grown into a grand 37-acre fantasy of mausoleums and obelisks, over which the statue of John Knox, high on his plinth, cast a blank and baleful eye. I used to walk home through the lum-scented twilights and marvel at the silhouetted cityscape. Even when I couldn’t actually see the Necropolis, I was always aware it was there, a black spot in my peripheral vision. I think what was getting to me was the idea of so many human stories reaching their end in one place, each tomb a full stop. The Necropolis is a sort of distorted mirror image of the Mitchell Library, over in the west of the city, in which some burial records for are kept; both are repositories of fascinating spines.

If the Necropolis is a library then Ruth Johnston is among its most dedicated patrons. She has been walking there regularly for 35 years, ever since marrying and moving to Dennistoun, the area of Glasgow adjoining to the east. “I was astounded. I really was,” she recalls. A graphic designer by trade, she is the author of two guides to the cemetery, and as deputy chair of the Friends of Glasgow Necropolis will be taking some of the tours running as part of Doors Open Days next Saturday and Sunday ( www.doorsopendays.org.uk).

She has become obsessed with the Necropolis, and for her book, Afterlives, spent a long time researching the stories of many people buried there. It’s an act of resurrection; men and women long forgotten, their stones unvisited by descendants, taking on a new life because someone was interested enough to investigate who they might have been and write it down.

I meet Ruth on a sunny Friday afternoon. Glasgow is in frisky weekend mode, but the cemetery is mostly peaceful, the air disturbed only by mini-tractors driven by Nelson and Paul, the council gardeners responsible for keeping the place in horticultural order. They are engaged in a constant fight with ivy, which is always doing its best to obliterate the headstones and columns.

Not far from the entrance, Ruth points out memorials to Lord Kelvin, the eminent scientist, and to William Miller, “the laureate of the nursery”, who wrote the famous nursery rhyme ‘Wee Willie Winkie’. We walk up the hill to the mausoleum built for the three wealthy Buchanan sisters. Standing on top of it are four neds, straight out of central casting, clutching cans of superlager. They are on the lash, their pitbull is on a leash. John Knox, looming directly behind, looks like he might be tempted to lob his bible down at them.

The Necropolis has had problems with people using the mausoleums to drink, take drugs and doss down, and prostitutes have been known to bring clients here. Though it’s still not a place you would visit after dark, during the day its atmosphere is improved by the increasing numbers of visitors, including packs of goths, drawn by the ruinous aesthetics rather than because it’s a good place to get wrecked.

There is a strong sense, while walking through the Necropolis, of the way the past fades from view. William Motherwell is one of the many poets buried here who, true to poetic form, died before the age of 40. A frieze of his face is badly weathered and before long will have gone completely.

By contrast, the stories of the dead are sharp and striking. If anything, the passing of time has chiselled their strange archaic details into greater relief against the humdrum present. Ruth points out the memorial to John Henry Alexander, a man so interesting that other interesting people might as well stop trying. He’s cornered the market. Self-styled “the Great Wizard of the North”, Alexander was an actor, magician and theatre owner. He perfected and popularised the trick of catching a bullet between his teeth, and demonstrated this for both Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas I. His ventures in theatre ownership were less successful. The Theatre Royal on Dunlop Street was the scene of a horrible accident in 1849 when 65 members of the audience were crushed to death on a staircase. Alexander is said to have never recovered from this, dying two years later.

The Necropolis is full of such dramatic stories, and even little ironies such as the fact that the grave of Robert Kettle, president of the Scottish Temperance League, overlooks the Tennent’s brewery. For the architecturally minded, the cemetery also includes tombstones designed by Rennie Mackintosh and ‘Greek’ Thomson.

Essentially, the place is a prism through which we can view an important period in Glasgow’s history, and it’s really a shame it’s not better maintained and promoted as a visitor attraction. It is, surely, the very definition of pure dead brilliant. Ruth says it best though: “I would quite like to be buried here myself, I have to admit.”