Swanmore’s oldest graveyard 

Swanmore’s tiny Quaker burial ground is one of the earliest in England dating back to the days of Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth. 

George Fox, founder of the movement, had his first revelation that "there is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition” in 1647 and became convinced that it was possible to experience Christ without the aid of ordained clergy. By 1652 he was travelling around England – as well as the Netherlands and Barbados – preaching his message of direct contact with Christ and attracting converts to his Society of Friends.

In those days Swanmore was a small hamlet in the parish of Droxford and attending church each Sunday involved a two mile trek there and back. Under the Commonwealth Droxford’s Church of England rector, Nicholas Preston, had been replaced by a Presbyterian minister, Robert Webb. Maybe it was his lack of popularity or the four mile walk each Sunday that persuaded many villagers to adopt George Fox’s teachings, for very soon there was a thriving Quaker community in and around Swanmore.

Quaker children were unbaptised, while their parents who refused to pay the tithes (one-tenth of annual income) demanded by the church were denied the right of burial in the churchyard. The solution was to create private burial grounds on farms or in gardens and in 1657 Richard Suet (or Sewett) a cordwainer (a shoemaker who made new shoes from new leather) offered the orchard at the bottom of his plot as a burial place for his fellow Quakers.

According to Canon John Vaughan, Rector of Droxford writing in 1909, it was very likely that Suet’s cottage acted as the Quaker Meeting House in those early days. Later a circular meeting house (now lost) was built at neighbouring Jervis Court Farm.

Four years after Hannah Goddine’s 1657 burial in the orchard, Richard Suet’s infant son Joseph was laid to rest there. In 1663 he made over the plot of land – for one pound and eight shillings (£1.40) – to three trustees to be used as a Friends’ graveyard. The trustees where Robert Ryves, yeoman of Swanmore, Thomas Penfold, blacksmith of Bishop’s Waltham and Thomas Walter, maltster also of Bishop’s Waltham. A year earlier both Thomas Walter’s son John and Robert Ryves’ wife Ann had been buried in the orchard.

Thomas Penfold was later arrested for refusing to pay towards the repairs of Bishop’s Waltham church and imprisoned in Winchester in appalling conditions, for three and a half years before he died. He, too, was buried in the orchard in 1668.

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During the 1670s Quakers were actively persecuted and in those years the Society of Friends’ records list 27 burials in Swanmore’s tiny graveyard. After the Act of Toleration in 1689 the graveyard was rarely used, although Richard Gringo from Titchfield was buried there in 1703.

In the following centuries the now disused burial ground was forgotten and neglected becoming – in Canon Vaughan’s words – “a fowl run and rubbish corner”. He spearheaded a campaign to restore the graveyard and with the help of the two Misses Gladstone (Catherine d.1921 and Florence d.1935 ) who lived at Hampton Hill House it was restored and, handed back to the Quakers in 1908.​

The Society of Friends, however, had little desire to maintain its upkeep and it again fell into disrepair. By 1937 Michael Westbrook, who lived at Longwood on Hampton Hill, had begun taking care of the plot. It was in the process of being formally transferred to him by the Society of Friends when he died, so his daughter Mary Macfarlane, who lived at Hampton Hill Cottage, took it over. An old name board listing those buried on the site and possibly erected by Canon Vaughan and the Gladstone ladies, was later found in poor condition by Mary’s children (Susan and Michael) who repainted it; spellings of the names on both the original and current versions of the board do not always match those on the Society of Friends records.

Today the burial ground is owned by Mary Macfarlane’s grandsons Ewan and Angus Mackay, who maintain the plot and name board and occasionally scatter their relations’ ashes there.