The Brompton Cemetery Lord Kilmorey file documents the story of how the Irish peer Francis Jack Needham, 2nd Earl Kilmorey, sought permission to build a magnificent Egyptian style mausoleum in Brompton Cemetery for his mistress Priscilla Hoste in 1853, then subsequently moved the mausoleum and resold the land 10 years later.

This should have been a simple task, but unfortunately for Lord Kilmorey the cemetery had recently been nationalised. As a result he not only had to cope with the terminal illness and death from heart disease of his beloved Priscilla, but also an increasingly bureaucratic tangle of Victorian red tape.

Lord Kilmorey’s mounting exasperation with the system is palpable and the cemetery manager Mr Ruddick although superficially polite is at times rather less than helpful, especially towards the end of the correspondence.

Two letters from the file regarding Mr Ruddick’s wage increase to £300 a year have been included to show a comparison with the cost of the mausoleum- which cost £30,000 plus the cost of the site- a huge amount of money for the times.

Not only was Lord Kilmorey a controversial figure due to his relationship with Priscilla Hoste, but also there were rumours that the Egyption style Courtoy Mausoleum built for three spinsters in the adjacent Circle number 3 in 1853 may have been intended as an experimental Time Machine and it is possible that the cemetery authorities did not want another one! The Courtoy Mausoleum is still at Brompton Cemetery and its position can be seen between areas M and Q on the current Cemetery site map.

When Brompton Cemetery was nationalised in 1850 the Right Honourable Lords Commissioners at the Board of Works at Whitehall Place became involved in decision making, which generated an enormous amount of extra paperwork. As a result there was a great deal of quibbling about the size of the plot between Lord Kilmorey, Mr Ruddick and the various Whitehall civil servants, and it eventually cost him £1030,16-9 on the basis that it would take the place of 90 single graves. However when Lord Kilmorey moved the Mausoleum to the grounds of his house at Chertsey Park in Weybridge in1863, following another long discussion he was only paid £150 for the same piece of land.

It seems that this happened because Whitehall and the Cemetery Board needed to make as much money from the sale as possible because the cemetery was failing financially, among the documents are letters in which they find various excuses for offering £150 despite it being a fraction of what he had originally paid. The 1870 letter to the philanthropist and landowner Sir William Clarke in Australia seems to suggest that the government may have been thinking of denationalising Brompton Cemetery and had been looking for possible buyers. However this did not happen and Brompton Cemetery remains the only nationalised cemetery in Britain.

The Kilmorey Mausoleum was moved a second time to Gordon House in Isleworth, Twickenham, where it still stands today.