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| A great view of the old Churchyard. |
The Sphere Newspaper 19th January 1957.
A DOOMED CHURCHYARD IN BIRKENHEAD Beyond the
precincts of St. Mary's Church in Birkenhead, Cheshire, rise the cranes and
sheds of Cammell Laird, the shipbuilders. In the centre background can be seen
the prow of a ship taking shape. The churchyard has been bought by Cammell
Laird for the construction of a new dry-dock.
A churchyard in Cheshire is to suffer the unusual fate
of transformation into a dry-dock. St. Mary's is a parish church in Birkenhead,
on the Wirral Peninsula opposite Liverpool. Just beyond the precincts lie the
workshops, docks and cranes of the busy shipyards of Cammell Laird. The site of
the church has been a place of worship for hundreds of years and about 1,900
people have been buried in the churchyard since 1719. The area involved is
3,100 square yards, about two-thirds of the churchyard. This land has been acquired
from the church authorities for Cammell Laird under a compulsory purchase order
of the Birkenhead Corporation, for the construction of a dry-dock which will be
able to accommodate some of the biggest oil tankers afloat. Workmen wearing
special clothing and supervised by medical and ecclesiastical officials will
undertake the task of disinterring and removing the remains of the buried dead.
These will be reinterred in a neighboring cemetery. St. Mary's Church was
consecrated in 1821, but the grounds contain the ruins of a priory which was
founded in the middle of the twelfth century by Benedictine monks. This foundation
survived 400 years, to be dissolved by Henry VIII at the Reformation. The ruins
will not be displaced in the construction of the shipyard.
