When my parents married in 1951 their first home was a little flat on Ellington Road, where they shared a kitchen with the landlady. It was not an easy relationship.
However, as luck would have it, there was a great big council house not too far away that nobody wanted to live in. The cemetery’s Lodge Keeper had his own house down the road, and the official Gatehouse had stood empty for years, used for little more than storing old worn-out tools and leather boots.
My grandfather, a gardener with Ramsgate Borough Council, asked his bosses if they would be willing to let the house to someone other than the lodge keeper. And that’s how my parents ended up moving in.
Those old boots came in handy as they provided fuel for the back boiler in the old scullery kitchen where my mum would later stand me in the old butler sink that doubled as a baby bath.
The heavy front door with its big old key was under the arches and my parents used the ‘side gate’ at the front instead. That led into a small yard, where my mum kept the mangle for use on wash day. Immediately to the left stood a solid built ‘shed’, built into the long flintstone wall that separates the garden from both the house and the Council allotments. Between the shed and the outdoor toilet opposite was the gate in the wall that led into the garden. Next to the toilet was the door to the kitchen.
My dad procured an old door and window, and together with various bits of wood, constructed a shelter to cover in the space between the shed, toilet and kitchen. It meant the shed could be used for more than just storing the tin bath that would be brought into the kitchen on the weekly bath night.
When, in the 1960’s, councils nationally were having to install indoor bathrooms and toilets, that structure meant we were only provided with a bath upstairs as they deemed that the existing ‘outdoor’ toilet was already ‘indoors’.
Built in 1872, in the Late Gothic style, to match the Cemetery Chapel behind it, the old house was always damp and hard to heat. The kitchen back boiler was taken out in the very early ‘60’s but the wood burning stove in the living room remained. In the winter my mum would tempt me out of bed into the cold morning air by enthusing about the latest designs “Jack Frost” had drawn on my bedroom window overnight. The old, curved stone surround window openings meant no such thing as double glazing - secondary glazing and heavy curtains were the only options. The floor of the middle bedroom, over the main arch, was uninsulated and the bottom half of the 56lb bag of potatoes my parents stored in that room in the cold long winter of ‘62 froze (and stank when they defrosted and went rotten).
The original house benefited from its own well, right outside the kitchen back door, which my dad found by accident one day.
Electricity was eventually installed upstairs in the early ‘60’s. At the same time my parents had overnight storage heaters installed, so we could make the best use of Economy 7 cheap electricity. I still have vague recollections of my mum putting me to bed, with me on one arm and a candle in the other hand, carrying me up the winding circular staircase that even in daytime was lit only by a couple of very small Gothic style arched windows. Weird things happened once electricity was installed. After putting me to bed my mum would turn off the lights on the stairs, only to find them on again an hour later. She asked me if I was turning them on. I wasn’t. After a couple of months of this she once again turned the lights off at the bottom and shouted up the stairs “Stop It!”. And it never happened again.
Around this time, I alarmed my parents by telling them about the old man that would sit on my bed telling me stories. They were less alarmed when their enquiries locally revealed that my description of what he looked like matched those of the man who had previously lived and died in the house.
From being wheeled around in a pram and pushchair, the cemetery became my playground. My mum always felt it was a safe space and as long as I obeyed the rules of not walking on the graves, she was happy to leave me out there to play on my own. I loved crawling in amongst the bushes and making little imaginary homes. It was just as well my dad didn’t tell my mum what he told me: not to play in the bushes immediately outside the back steps that led up to the cemetery office, because that was the home of a man who was living there in a tent. And to stay away from the furthest outer walls because that’s where other people lived from time to time. She was utterly horrified when I told her only a few years before she died!
Footnote: my dad moved out in the early 1990’s, since when the house has had further internal modernisation.
Further information on the design and structure of both the Ramsgate Cemetery Chapel and Gatehouse can be found on the Historic England website.
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1085436?section=official-list-entry - Gatehouse
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1348349?section=official-list-entry - Chapel