William Mellor, a freelance journalist, recently attended a memorial service at the British Cemetery in Kathmandu, Nepal, after which he contributed this article to Nikkei Asia, a pan-Asian English language news service:
‘How a Nepal cemetery bridges Asia’s colonial era and contemporary society’
‘Burial ground highlights battle to preserve more than 1 million graves’
‘One recent sunny morning in the shadow of the Himalayas, I stood beside a grave in the historic British Cemetery in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, as a Gurkha soldier in full dress uniform played a haunting bagpipe lament.
The occasion was the 50th anniversary of the death of a 25-year-old New Zealander named Heather Horscroft who, like many foreigners before and since, had visited the fabled mountain paradise never to return home.
As with all good memorial services, it was a bittersweet occasion — moist-eyed reflection on the tragedy of a young life lost in a bus crash, but warm smiles at fondly recalled memories of an overland traveler with an infectious joie de vivre.
The serene surroundings further lightened the mood. Unknown to visitors and most locals, the 205-year-old cemetery is one of Kathmandu’s best-kept secrets. In the local context, it is a haven of tranquility amid the clamor of a teeming Asian city — a historical gem in which almost every gravestone chronicles a human story behind Nepal’s complex, ever-evolving interactions with the outside world.
But the cemetery’s significance stretches far beyond Nepal’s borders, highlighting an unlikely success story in a discreet battle to save more than 1 million graves in at least 1,000 often-decaying colonial-era civilian burial places spread across Asia.
Some foreign cemeteries in Asia are high-profile landmarks, or even tourist attractions. But those tend to be the immaculately manicured war graves maintained by the six-nation Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), such as two on the River Kwai in Thailand. The civilian cemeteries under threat have no such support. “It’s an enormous challenge,” says Peter Boon, secretary of the London-based British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, which has helped to fund conservation work on more than 100 graveyards.
In Kathmandu, Horscroft rests beside a cast of characters ranging from early 19th-century empire builders to mountaineers, missionaries, hippies and the swashbuckling entrepreneurs who pioneered Nepal’s vibrant 21st-century tourism industry. “He lived hard,” says the epitaph on the grave of Jim Edwards, co-founder of Tiger Mountain Pokhara Lodge, now one of Nepal’s best-reviewed resorts.
Some graves are topped by grand neoclassical Victorian tombs, others by simple concrete and brick tablets. All are surrounded by well-tended lawns, shady trees and riotously colorful, fragrant plants. The Himalayas form a dramatic backdrop. As one friend noted, it is a beautiful place to spend eternity.
It was not always so. Although those buried here hail from 16 different countries, including other parts of Asia, the cemetery remains the property of the U.K. government, 7,000 kilometers away in London. British bureaucrats’ reluctance to provide more than a dribble of funds for its upkeep left it in a near-derelict state before it was saved by rescue efforts.
Britain’s custodianship of the Kathmandu cemetery is a quirk of history that can be traced to 1814, when the British East India Co., fresh from colonizing much of India, clashed with the rulers of neighboring Nepal.
The so-called Anglo-Nepalese War is perhaps best remembered for being the first conflict in which Britain recruited and sent into battle the much-admired Nepalese fighters known as Gurkhas, who today still serve in the British and Indian armies, the Singapore police force and as elite royal guards for the Sultan of Brunei.
A less widely known outcome of the war is the 1816 treaty that forced Nepal to accept a British diplomatic presence headed by a “resident” in Kathmandu. In 1820, when the resident’s assistant, Robert Stuart, 27, died suddenly from what was described as “a violent cold,” he was buried on nearby waste land that would become the British Cemetery.
As Nepal kept itself otherwise aloof from the outside world, the British maintained the only diplomatic mission in Kathmandu for the next 130 years. Even after Nepal started to expand diplomatic ties and opened to tourists and investors in the 1950s, the cemetery remained the only foreign graveyard.
The conquest of Mount Everest in 1953 by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay lured mountaineers and trekkers. A decade later young travelers followed the hippy trail from London. Sadly, for many, dreams of conquering Himalayan peaks or finding a real-life Shangri-la in Nepal became a fatal attraction. Other visitors died in air crashes, including Hillary’s then-wife and daughter.
With repatriation of bodies impossible in the absence of mortuary freezers, the families of those who died had two options: burial in the British Cemetery or a do-it-yourself cremation on the banks of the Bagmati River. But even as demand for plots increased, the custodians in London declined to loosen the purse strings, insisting that local expatriate communities, not embassies, should be responsible for British graveyards scattered around the world. If that was not possible, they should be left to revert to nature.
The risk of that happening to the Kathmandu cemetery became clear in the 1970s. The family and friends of John Sims, a British financier who had died of altitude sickness after attempting to trek to Everest Base Camp, made much-needed donations for restoration, including providing headstones for previously unmarked graves. Yet within three years of that work being completed, an embassy official reported to London that the cemetery had once again “assumed a semi-abandoned appearance.”
What helped save it was the presence of a single grave. Army surgeon Gilbert Deatker was the British Embassy’s doctor when he died, aged 51, in 1942. An Anglo-Indian, Deatker had fought in Afghanistan in 1919 and been mentioned in dispatches for “gallant and distinguished services in the field.”
Unlike all the other plots in the cemetery, Deatker’s had been designated as an official war grave — the only one in Nepal — bringing it under the protection of the CWGC. After Deatker’s grave was located in the overgrown cemetery in 1980, the commission provided funds to replace his shattered headstone and for the surrounding area to be beautified.
The story of the decline and revival of the British Cemetery is well told in “Corner of a Foreign Field” (Vajra Publications, 2022), authored by British botanist Mark Watson and a former U.K. ambassador to Nepal, Andrew R. Hall. Watson and Hall were helped in their research by Lisa Choegyal, New Zealand’s honorary consul to Nepal, who has lived in the country since 1974 and knew the remarkable backstories of many who died during that time.
Can the occupants of the British Cemetery and the countless other graveyards spread across Asia now rest easy? While acknowledging that it is impossible to save all the old civilian cemeteries, Boon is cautiously optimistic, noting that many younger Asians are recognizing that colonial-era cemeteries are not just relics of European empires but part of their own heritage. “Local communities are holding the line, and we are supporting them,” he says.
In Kathmandu, British diplomats have in recent years increasingly embraced their custodial duties. At the memorial service I attended, the embassy supplied the Gurkha piper and was represented by Deputy Ambassador Luke Beaumont. Access to the cemetery has also been improved, which is good news for anyone wishing to take a look. For visitors to Kathmandu, it is an opportunity well worth taking up’.
William Mellor
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