page_title: Wadsley Parish Church
section_title: Graveyard
hierarchical_section_title: Wadsley Parish Church / Graveyard
caption_attribution_description: English: Headstone of Benjamin Keeton in Wadsley Parish Churchyard, Sheffield
context_page_description: Wadsley Parish Church is situated within the city of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. It is located on Worrall Road, 3 miles north west of the city centre in the suburb of Wadsley, which was formerly a village outside the city boundary. The church is quite unusual in that it is not dedicated to a saint. It is a grade II listed building.
context_section_description: Gravestones include some for victims of the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864, which include resting places for the Watson, Price and Atkinson families who perished in the Great Inundation. The inscription on the Atkinson grave reads: “Ezra and Maurice, their son aged 15 and 9 months ... also William aged 13 and 4 months who perished by the bursting of the Bradfield reservoir, March 12, 1864.” The church's original benefactors Ann and Elizabeth Harrison are both buried in the churchyard with a gothic memorial over their graves.
  Another grave which caused controversy and was mentioned in the local press at the time, is the so-called “Cricketer’s Grave”. This is the final resting place of Benjamin Keeton, a well known cricket player in the area who played for the Hallam Cricket Club. When he died in 1871, aged 47, he requested that his grave should mark his devotion to cricket as well as his place of burial. His widow Fanny abided by his request and had a gravestone carved with cricket stumps, bat and ball on it. However the stone caused some controversy with the vicar and certain parishioners thinking it unsuitable for a graveyard. The stone was knocked down at one point, but replaced after a public meeting showed the majority to be in favour of it remaining in the churchyard.
  The graveyard contains a large open area with no gravestones, this is the site of the burials from the nearby South Yorkshire Asylum (later to become Middlewood Hospital). Several hundred patients from the asylum were buried here in Victorian times with no memorial as it was then considered a disgrace for a member of family to be in an asylum. Many ceremonies were carried out with just two people present, a minister and a grave digger. There is a memorial to 23 servicemen who died of wounds while being treated at the nearby Wharncliffe War Hospital which the asylum became between 1915 and 1920. Another interesting grave is that of Dr. T. Allan Taylor who developed the high nickel alloy steel needed for the production of the jet engine by Frank Whittle in the 1930s.
caption: The Cricketer's Grave.
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