• Source: Gunnersbury Cemetery

Gunnersbury Cemetery, also known as Kensington or New Kensington Cemetery, is a cemetery opened in 1929. Although it is owned and managed by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, it is geographically located within the London Borough of Hounslow, at 143 Gunnersbury Avenue in Acton.




History


A triangle of land between the Gunnersbury Avenue and the Great West Road, part of the Gunnersbury Park, was bought in 1925 from the Rothschild family by the Royal Borough. The cemetery was founded soon afterwards, in 1929, on the former parkland.




Location and facilities


The cemetery is situated adjacent to Gunnersbury Park and covers about 8.9 hectares. It has numerous floral displays and shrubberies, and a chapel. The cemetery's buildings, including the chapel, are simple brick structures. A Garden of Remembrance serves as the place for the interment of cremated remains. There is also a Book of Remembrance for memorial inscriptions. Gunnersbury Cemetery is the location of the main office for both the Borough's cemeteries (the other being the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Cemetery, Hanwell).

A notable landmark at the cemetery is a monument, in the form of a black obelisk, dedicated to the Polish victims of the Katyn massacre. It was designed by Louis Fitzgibbon and Count Stefan Zamoyski. This monument was unveiled on 18 September 1976 amid considerable controversy. During the period of the Cold War, successive British governments objected to plans by the UK's Polish community to build a major monument to commemorate the massacre. The Soviet Union did not want Katyn to be remembered, and put pressure on Britain to prevent the creation of the monument. As a result, the construction of the Katyn monument was delayed for many years. After the local community had finally secured the right to build the monument, no official government representative was present at the opening ceremony (although some members of parliament did attend the event unofficially).
Gunnersbury cemetery also contains the graves of 49 Commonwealth service personnel of World War II.
There was a notable sculpture by Nereo Cescott in the cemetery, but it was destroyed by vandals prior to 1994.




Opening hours






Burials


Notable interments include:

A plot dedicated to the 24th Polish Lancers Regiment and their families
Luranah Aldridge, English opera singer.
Denzil Batchelor, British journalist, writer, playwright and broadcaster.
Stanley Bate, English pianist and composer
Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, Polish general, during World War II, commander of the Warsaw uprising and Polish Commander-in-Chief. Reburied in Powazki Military Cemetery, Warsaw, in 1994.
Hugh Burden, British actor and playwright
William Davison, 1st Baron Broughshane
Charles Benjamin Dowse, 8th Bishop of Killaloe
Matila Costiesco Ghyka, Romanian prince, novelist, mathematician, historian, philosopher and diplomat
George Humphreys, British civil engineer
Robin Hyde, New Zealand poet, novelist and journalist
Harold Brownlow Martin, Australian pilot on the Dambuster raid
Charles Langbridge Morgan, British playwright and novelist
John Ogdon, English pianist and composer
Vera Page, victim of an unresolved murder
Carol Reed, English film director
Hubert Ripka, member of the Czechoslovak Government 1940-1948
Prince Vsevolod Ivanovich of Russia
Kazimierz Sabbat, Prime Minister and President of Poland in Exile
Kazimierz Sawicki
Dr Hans Henrik Bruun, engineer, barrister
Matthew Smith, English painter
Marda Vanne, South African actress
Aston Webb, English architect
Saeed Jaffrey, British-Indian Actor, OBE (1995), Padma Shri (2016, posthumously)




References






External links


Official entry on the Royal Borough's Libraries
A map of the cemetery

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Gunnersbury Cemetery
• Gunnersbury Park
• The Ross Sisters
• Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski
• Matila Ghyka
• List of Polish war cemeteries
• Murder of Vera Page
• Saeed Jaffrey
• Natasha Bagration
• List of Katyn massacre memorials