The horse mystery

Having taken a short break in order to give my total patriotic support to the competitors in the various sports of the Olympic Games, I am now turning my mind to a topic which is mentioned regularly whenever the topic turns to the Hatfield Road Cemetery.

"You know there are horses buried there."

Really?

I first heard about this rumour several years ago, but it appears to have had a resurgence since the staging of Morpurgo's book "War Horse."

View west from the green burial area.

St Albans District Council's Management Plan 2008 also refers to this mystery: "Rumour has it that a large grave or pit at the back of the cemetery, and now surrounded by hedges, was used to bury horses, infected with anthrax, that died during the First World War.  However, there is no documentary evidence to support this theory."

This quote does state DURING the First World War; in other words, the war itself may have been incidental; it was simply a period of time.  If true, these would not have been horses returning from the front, but local horses.  But the question remains: why would the owner/s of any kind of animal have been granted burial rights in a burial ground designed and reserved for people?  It is true that "the back of" the cemetery did not come into use for burials until after WW1.  The copse of trees adjacent to the railway was there in an arial photo c1920, but the other tree planting along the boundary is more recent.  The ground south of the nearby path shows no sign of a fenced off area.

It is, of course, entirely possible that animals may have been buried in the field while it was still in agricultural use and before being purchased by the Council.

Many of use have talked around this subject without coming to any conclusion.  It may be one of those rumours which persist – just like the one which suggests Hatfield Road was part of the Earl Salisbury's  'gout road' which he paid for, or the one suggesting Owen's Brickworks supplied the bricks for the building of Hill End Asylum: neither of these appears to be true.

So, if you have any evidence which will lead to the efficacy of the horse story, or not, I would be delighted to hear from you.  You may have heard the story, but knowing the story is not enough.  If the evidence can't be found, then the horse story will have to remain one of Fleetville's legends.