Formation of The London Necropolis Company
Despite the opposition, on 30 June 1852 the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Act 1852 was passed, giving the Brookwood scheme Parliamentary consent to proceed. The former Woking Common at Brookwood, owned by the Earl of Onslow, was chosen as the site for the new cemetery. To prevent the LSWR from exploiting its monopoly on access to the cemetery, the private Act of Parliament authorising the scheme bound the LSWR to carry corpses and mourners to the cemetery in perpetuity and set a maximum tariff which could be levied on funeral traffic, but did not specify details of how the funeral trains were to operate.
By this time, Broun and Sprye had lost control of the scheme. On 1 April 1851 a group of trustees led by Poor Law Commissioner William Voules purchased the rights to the scheme from Broun and Sprye for £20,000 (about £1.38 million in terms of 2012 consumer spending power) and, once the Act of Parliament had been passed, founded the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company on their own without regard to their agreement with the original promoters. These trustees proved inept, wasting large sums of money; meanwhile Richard Broun lobbied vigorously against the "misrepresentations and ambiguous assertions" of the new trustees. With financiers sceptical of the scheme's viability Voules and his trustees were unable to raise the funds to buy the proposed site from Lord Onslow. In early 1853, amid widespread allegations of voting irregularities and with the company unable to pay promised dividends, a number of the directors resigned, including Voules, and the remaining public confidence in the scheme collapsed.
Broun's scheme had envisaged the cemetery running along both sides of the LSWR main line and divided by religion, with separate private railway halts on the main line, each incorporating a chapel, to serve each religion's section. The new consulting engineer to the company, William Cubitt, rejected this idea and recommended a single site to the south of the railway line, served by a private branch line through the cemetery. The company also considered Broun's plan for dedicated coffin trains unrealistic, arguing that relatives would not want the coffins to be shipped separately from the deceased's family.
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