Dave Sinclair
7-19 March 2006, Bar Wall
photos...
Babies Graves
Photos from Everton Cemetery,
Liverpool 1995 - 2000.
During the 1990's Liverpool went through a number of social and political events that affected the consciousness of the city.
The 90's started off badly on the back of the Hillsborough disaster when nearly 100 Liverpool football supporters died, that was followed by the murder of Jamie Bulger which was followed by the Dockers dispute when 500 men were sacked for not crossing a picket line, Liverpool became a 'Scab Port'.
While this was going on Hospitals in Liverpool had been doing 'unofficial' post mortems on many of the babies that had died in the cities hospitals, keeping stockpiles of organs for experimentation.
My wife Liz and I had a stillborn baby in 1990, we were asked by the hospital if they could do a post mortem and we said what for? We don't know if they did or not but we decided not to find out - to let it go?
The Hospital and the Co-op funeral service took over and arranged a burial for us in Everton Cemetery where most of Liverpool's babies were buried, a number of them affected by the 'autopsy scandal'.
The cemetery was a very peaceful place on the outskirts of the city it smelled sweet of biscuits from Jacobs and jam from Nelsons.
About 1995 I started to notice trees decorated with baby's cuddly toys, poems, ornaments and oddments. The building of what to me looked like Pagan shrines. This sort of thing had happened before but this was on a much larger scale.
The display of public grief had become common since Hillsborough causing the city to be called 'self pity city' by cynical journalists.
Some cemeteries had a policy of not allowing this to go on and would take down what they called 'furniture' but staff at Everton cemetery would leave the toys on the trees and just clear away stuff blown down in storms.
The toys would start rotting and quite quickly lose their colour, then start to turn the colour of the trees.
In a city that was once quite religious, people were finding ways other than the church to work out their grief.
Most parents (mainly mothers) would go regular for the first year or so and add more toys. Then as time went on they'd go less and less until they'd leave it alone and just go on anniversaries. Eventually they'd forget anniversaries because they had other children and other birthdays to remember.
Although it still goes on to a lesser extent this festival of cuddly toy's peaked about 1999 and for whatever reason was on the wane by the next millennium.
2000 years after Jesus people where nailing Postman Pat and Po to trees.
I thought it was a lovely civilised way of dealing with grief, private and personal but also public.
Dave Sinclair
2005