Wolvercote Cemetery

Wolvercote Cemetery is a cemetery in the parish of Wolvercote and district of Cutteslowe in Oxford, England. Its main entrance is on Banbury Road and it has a side entrance in Five Mile Drive. It has a funeral chapel, public toilets and a small amount of car parking. It was awarded plaques as a category winner of 'Cemetery of the Year' in 1999 and 2001.

The cemetery was opened in 1889 and now contains more than 15,000 burials. Along with the other Oxford public cemeteries it was expected to be full before 2021.^[1]

Sections

The cemetery has a number of sections for individual religions or ethnicities, including Baháʼí, Muslim, Jewish (first section dedicated 1894; extension 2000), Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Polish Roman Catholic, other Roman Catholic (the section in which the Tolkiens are buried) and Quakers.

There is an area for the burial of cremated remains, one for green burials and another for the burial of stillborns and infants.

Notable interments

Grave of J. R. R. and Edith Tolkien

Many notable people are buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, including many former academics of the University of Oxford.

Charles Umpherston Aitchison (1832–1896), Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab
Michael Argyle (1925–2002), social psychologist, and his wife Sonia
Sir Roger Bannister (1929–2018), middle-distance runner and neurologist who ran the first sub-4-minute mile
Sir Ernest Bennett (1865–1947), Oxford fellow, politician, explorer and writer
Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), Latvian-born philosopher, and his wife Aline
Benjamin Henry Blackwell (1849–1924), bookseller
E. J. Bowen (1898–1980), chemist
Włodzimierz Brus (1921–2007), economist, with his wife Lieutenant-Colonel Helena Wolińska-Brus (1919–2008), military prosecutor at show trials in Stalinist Poland in the 1950s
John Burdon-Sanderson (1828–1905), physiologist
Edwin Cannan (1861–1935), economist
Humphrey Carpenter (1946–2005), biographer and writer
Jaroslav Černý (1898–1970), Czech Egyptologist
Sir Thomas Chapman, 7th Baronet (1846–1919) and Sarah Junner (1861–1959), with inscriptions to the memory of their sons Frank, Will and T. E. Lawrence
Robert Bellamy Clifton (1836–1921), physicist
L. Jonathan Cohen (1923–2006), philosopher
Frank Cooper (1844–1927) and his wife Sarah Cooper (1848–1932), marmalade manufacturers
T. Lawrence Dale (1884–1959), architect and Oxford Diocesan Surveyor
Helena Deneke (1878–1973), Germanist, librarian, and bursar
Margaret Deneke (1882–1969), pianist, musicologist, choirmaster, and benefactor (sister of Helena)
John Louis Emil Dreyer (1852–1926), Danish-born astronomer
Edward Gordon Duff (1861–1924), bibliographer
Sir Michael Dummett (1925–2011), philosopher
Elizabeth Edmondson (1948–2016), author
Bill Ferrar (1893–1990), mathematician
Grace Eleanor Hadow (1875–1940), promoter of women's higher education
H. L. A. Hart (1907–1992), legal philosopher and professor of jurisprudence
Sir Thomas Erskine Holland (1835–1926), professor of international law
Walter Hooper (1931–2020), secretary to C.S. Lewis and Lewis's literary executor, in which role he wrote Lewis's authorized biography and edited his 3-volume collection of letters, as well as many other posthumously published works by Lewis
Albert Hourani (1915–1993), scholar of Middle Eastern history
Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001), poet
Sir Francis Knowles, 5th Baronet (1886–1953), anthropologist
Adam Koc (1891–1969), politician, colonel and journalist of the Second Polish Republic
Peter Laslett (1915–2001), social historian
James Legge (1815–1897), Scottish sinologist and first Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford
Eleanor Constance Lodge (1869–1936), historian and promoter of women's higher education
Paul Maas (1880–1964), Classical and Byzantine scholar
Michael Francis Madelin (1931–2007), mycologist
James McCann (1897–1983), Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland
Sir Henry Christopher Mance (1840–1926), electrical engineer, developer of the heliograph
Bruce Mitchell (1920–2010), Australian scholar of Old English
James Murray (1837–1915), Scottish lexicographer and philologist, primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary
Dimitri Obolensky (1918–2001), Russian prince and professor of Russian and Balkan history
Daphne Park (1921–2010), spy
William Henry Perkin Jr. (1860–1929), organic chemist
Sir William Schlich (1840–1925), forester
James Allen Shuffrey(1858–1939), Victorian and Edwardian watercolour artist^[2]
Franz Baermann Steiner (1909–1952), ethnologist
Sir P. F. Strawson (1919–2006), philosopher
J. R. R. Tolkien ("Beren", 1892–1973), author and academic, with his wife Edith ("Lúthien", 1889–1971) and eldest son John Francis Reuel Tolkien (1917–2003)
Dino Toso (1969–2008), automotive engineer
Brian Tovey (1926–2015), head of GCHQ
Francis Fortescue Urquhart (1868–1934), first Roman Catholic fellow of Balliol College in modern times
Mike Woodin (1965–2004), Green Party politician
E. M. Wright (1906–2005), mathematician

War graves

The cemetery includes the war graves of 44 Commonwealth service personnel: 21 from World War I and 23 from World War II.^[3]

References

^ Bannerman, Lucy (22 May 2019). "Oxford cemeteries face grave dilemma". The Times. London.
^ Gilmour, Lauren; Shuffrey, Margaret (2003). J.A. Shuffrey 1857–1939: An Oxford artist's Life Remembered. Rural Publications. p. 53. ISBN 0-9544858-0-7.
^ "Wolvercote Cemetery". Cemetery Details. Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Breakdown of figures obtained from casualties record. Date accessed 22 August 2012.