All Saints’ Church & Cemetery, Shillong

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All Saints’ Church, Shillong, before the 1897 earthquake

McCabe' grave (in 2003) reads "Robert Blair McCabe, Inspector General of Police who was killed in the Earthquake of 12th June 1897 aged 43 years". It is followed by four lines of a Medieval hymn attributed to Bernard of Cluny c.1145. Brief life is here, our portion, Brief sorrow, Short lived care; The life that knows no ending, The tearless life is there (Caption by Roger Bilham SeismoSoc)

The inventory of the pre-1937 (mainly British) graves is based on the fieldwork of Saihun Lang and Parvez Dewan, conducted with the aim of compiling an online record for the descendants of the British nationals buried in the All Saints’ Church & Cemetery, Shillong. Please fill in missing details; put categories, headings and sub-headings;and combine this with other articles on exactly the same subject. Readers can send additional information, corrections, photographs and even complete articles on new subjects to the Facebook page, Indpaedia.com. If found suitable, this additional information will be incorporated into the related Indpaedia article (with an acknowledgement) or a new entry will be created (also with due acknowledgement). Readers will be able to edit existing articles and post new articles directly on their online archival encyclopædia only after its formal launch. See examples and a tutorial.

An inventory of the graves and tombstones

All Saints’ Church & Cemetery Shillong

 

Row 1a

 

S.no.	Name	Birth	Homegoing	Details
1	Jessie May Honora Calthrop d/o Colonel C.W. Carr- Calthrop I.?		18/11/1902 age 22	Elegant, long, stone grave
2	Gilbert Turner	20/01/1866	23/09/1903
3	No details		30/08/1896	At a great distance from 2

2^nd last row left to right

 

S.no.	Name	Birth	Homegoing	Details
1	Charles Graham Francis, Lieutenant and Quartermaster		4/07/1894, age 26	The crucifix atop the has fallen off—presumably during the 1897 Assam earthquake.
2	HRW Thompson	12/08/1867	2/11/1922	Pretty HIS
3	Helen Sophia Augusta		23/10/1892	Very elegant HIS, Brown&Co. SCTS
4	Lorie Mackenzie Campbell		Age 7 weeks
5	Audrey Doris cursive letters, now gone, d/o Hugh Clifford Eustace and Alda Minnie Peterson	15/11/1913	7/06/1921	Headless hollow glazed sculpture, very elegant scroll ; P.Swaries & Co., Calcutta
6	Ranald David Davidson	9/06/1888	20/09/1889
7	1993			Grave from the 1990s
8	Joan Gordon w/o Henry S? P. Maxwell, Major, BSC [sic]	12/04/1865	12/02/1889	Stone grave that rises upwards in three layers or terraces.
9-10	1997 etc			Graves from the 1990s
11	Marjorie d/o Major Leslie Campbell and Meriel		3/11/1907, age 16
12	Patience only child of Clara and HGH Keene, Accountant General, Eastern Bengal and Assam		5/07/1908, age 21	Huge, elevated, stone grave
13	Noel Hamden Woods	30/06/1907	16/10/1907
14	William Shaw, Seaforth Highlanders and later Bandmaster 8 Gurkha Rifles		12//04/1907 age 54	‘Erected by his friend in Shillong’
15	Ingty			New grave
16	William (the metal letters that missing)			Llewelyn & Co., Calcutta. Designed like an elegant scroll
17	Duhaphy Khyriem
18	Arnold David (details blurred)
19	Gerald infant son of Gerald and Maud,		‘Stapled on Novr. 7th 1913’	P. Swaries & Co., SCTS
20-22	New graves

 

The graves in the last row are all post-1937

 

History: The Earthquake of 12 June 1897

Shillong 1925

“Gravestones in the cemetery in Shillong were tumbled, shifted and thrown (Photographed by S. K. Chakravarti). LaTouche chose simple shapes to document, whose measured shifts in position provided quantitative estimates of acceleration and ground velocity. Oldham returned in the dry season after the monsoon and documented further evidence of projected, snapped and displaced monoliths.” Caption by Roger Bilham SeismoSoc

All Saints’ Church shortly after the 1897 earthquake

 

Excerpted from

 

Tom LaTouche and the Great Assam Earthquake of 12 June 1897: Letters from the Epicenter

 

By Roger Bilham /  SeismoSoc, which contains Transcriptions of Tom La Touche’s letters 1882-1910

 

Mrs. May Sweet’s letter of the 28th June 1897

 

Mrs. May Sweet, in Shillong, wrote to her sister Mrs. Godfrey:

“At 5.30 on Saturday last, the 12th June was as usual, and 30 seconds afterwards was completely in ruins…

 

“When we got up to the mission we saw something of the terrible ruin, the poor missionaries, they were all on the road with their houses flat on the ground and old Miss Jones in a dying state.”

 

LaTouche’s letters to wife Nancy

 

LaTouche had arrived in Shillong late on 12 July, two weeks after Mrs Sweet's letter had been written, and as indicated in Sweet's letter there were no houses standing. People were living in the sheds where horses were normally quartered. On 13th July 1897. LaTouche wrote to his wife Nancy:

“Tomorrow I must begin taking measurements in earnest. There are a good many interesting things to be seen in the cemetery where several tombstones, great heavy blocks of marble or granite have been pushed sideways or twisted round and I have seen several gate pillars which have been thrown over…

It is most extraordinary that so few people were killed here, for by all accounts the houses came down with a roar almost at the beginning of the shock…
“Altogether I am very glad I came up here though it is sad to see the place as it is. They are all talking of removing the place [Shillong] 1000 ft higher up the hill where it ought to have been built at first. If they do that in another 20 years or so it will be a really fine hill station... You might to tell Mr. Spring that the church is now an entire ruin and of course the [?furniture] and windows are totally smashed, but the tombstone [singular? Just one tombstone?] is not much damaged.”   On 15th July 1897, LaTouche wrote: “I spent all the morning and part of this afternoon measuring the monuments in the cemetery; a great many of them have been thrown down or shifted. You might tell Mr. Spring that the cross over his wife's grave fell over but it is not injured in the least and can easily be put up again. The PWD [PublicWorks Department] are going to put everything there straight as soon as things are settled down a bit, and I spoke particularly today to the Exec. Engr. about Mrs. Spring's grave.”