More about the church
On this page, you can read about the history of the church, its garden and the cemetery.
The upkeep of the garden and the cemetery is costly, and all donations are welcome.
The Cemetery
QR CODES
Discover the rich history of the British’s cemetery residents.
In 2019 the archivist (Cevin Embling-Evens) from Holy Trinity Church Funchal, whilst looking through old records and papers, became interested in some of the people of the British cemetery.
After using this information to hold annual “meet the resident’s” events it was suggested to turn the information into QR codes that could be placed next to the graves giving visitors to the cemetery the opportunity to find the history of some of the famous people buried in the British cemetery.
You can see the scripts below on this website, and the codes can be read in the Cemetery.
Meet some of the residents of the cemetery:
The address of the cemetery: Rua Da Carreira, 235 – Funchal
The cemetery is open (weekdays only) from 10am – 1.00pm through the main gates and from 1.00pm – 4-00pm through the small green gate to the right (please ring the bell by pulling hard).
Any enquiries on existing burials in the British Cemetery should be made to the chaplain htcchaplain@gmail.com
In 1761 Mr William Nash, the first Consul-General of Madeira, asked the Portuguese Government if he might buy land for use as a burial ground for British residents. Prior to this time Protestants were not allowed to be buried in local cemeteries and were consigned to the deep off the coast near Garajau. An Order in Council from Lisbon dated 3 January 1761 gave approval for a cemetery in Funchal provided that it was located at the outskirts of the town; so Mr Nash bought a piece of land just outside the city wall, an area of ground centred on an old orange tree and known locally as A larangeira. The first grave dated from 1772 and was that of Mrs Shipcote, the wife of a taverner. Her great nephew, writing in 1841, recalls being present at her burial underneath the orange tree, with the tomb of Judge Miles, the second to be buried, lying alongside.
The New Burial Ground
British forces garrisoned Madeira during the Napoleonic wars from 1807 to 1814, and in 1808 General Beresford acquired another plot of land for military burials: this is the graveyard to the left of the main entrance to the current British Cemetery. As the Old Cemetery filled up, so the Military Cemetery was used for civilian burials and became known as the New Burial Ground. A new Register of Burials was begun in July 1809 showing the first interment to be that of Lady Sophia Bligh.
The Middle Cemetery
In 1851, with both burial grounds becoming crowded, a further area of land was acquired beyond the New Burial Ground – this is the Middle Cemetery.
The New Cemetery
In 1887, the Municipality of Funchal advised the trustees that the Old Cemetery was needed for a new street and approved the use of another plot of land beyond the Middle Cemetery: so, in 1890, the New Cemetery came into being. The gateway to the Old Cemetery was transferred to mark the entrance to this part of what is now called the British Cemetery, and the remains from old unmarked graves were interred in a common grave, marked with a tall obelisk, with the following inscription.
“This monument records the removal to this ground in the month of September 1890, of all the human remains, and memorials from the cemetery, which was acquired by the late British Factory of this Island in the Year 1765 and which was appropriated to civic purposes in the Year 1890 by the Municipality of Funchal. The remains unmarked by memorials were interred under this monument.”
The site of the Old Cemetery is now the Volkswagen dealership a hundred metres lower down the Rua Carreira.
Mortuary Chapel
In 1854 the trustees erected a small building for use by the custodian of the cemeteries and where the chaplain could change into his funeral robes. This building was converted into the Mortuary Chapel in 1861.
Summary
These bare bones of the history of the cemeteries hardly scratch the surface of a fascinating subject. Buried in the cemetery is William Reid, of Reid’s Palace Hotel fame; a tablet commemorates the troublesome Reverend Lowe, who caused immense disturbance on Madeira in the 1830s and 1840s and who died tragically at sea; the King of Bonny is buried here, as is Dr Paul Langerhans, discoverer of the Islets of Langerhans; and more recently we have restored the gravestone of Captain William Buckley, VC RN, the first to be gazetted with the award of the new medal, the Victoria Cross, in 1875, who, by living on Madeira for a few short weeks before his death in 1872, gave our cemetery the distinction of his memory.
The Church Garden
The church garden is a haven of beauty and peace, and is where we have our after service reception and music events.
In March 2008 the big north wall of the garden fell down, or part of it did anyway, and the structural engineer who inspected it said as it was built in 1820 it was time expired, and to pull the rest of it down before that fell down too.
It dawned on us that as the whole wall would need to be rebuilt the rebuilding would totally wreck the main working part of the garden, the part where we have the reception after services, dinners on the lawn etc.
A chance for something really exciting! A totally new garden?
So we approached Gerald Luckhurst MLI. MI Hort. APAP. Chartered Landscape Architect, (Gerald to us, a great character married to a Portuguese lady and they have four daughters, and, by the way he has just published a beautiful new book “Gardens of Madeira”). Gerald is based in Sintra on the mainland but has a branch here designing and maintaining gardens for among others the Pestana Hotel group, Reids and others.
Would he take us on? We are only a poor church! Design a new garden for us? A place of beauty, peace and tranquillity in the busy heart of Funchal?
Bless him, he did! But, we would have to do most of the work ourselves, and we did. This triggered the launching of the Garden Appeal to raise 30,000 euros to pay contractors to do most of the hard landscaping work, the drive pebbles which badly needed restoration, the lighting of the garden at night, and four new benches. Anyone who has built a new garden knows the huge amount of work involved, and we have a big garden!
While the new wall was built and faced in its lovely stone we had the use of the big digger, a lorry and four men for four days to remove all the overgrown, tired, clearance items that would not be in the new garden, eleven lorry loads! (Can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs comes to mind). Then the contractors set to building the stage, the pergolas, the new coffee distribution area, the wall for the bed (succulents, it’s hot) at the base of the big wall and the Contemplation Area. The new lawns were levelled but needed more topsoil, eleven loads, they looked just like either giant mole hills or a grave digging competition! And then it rained; we started to know how Noah felt, and poor Madeira had the raging storms of water everywhere. The garden was put on hold.
Eventually Madeira dried out, the soil was levelled and the lawns sown, 1000 sq. metres! The sowing of the grass was interesting, we found a chap who does the seeding of the Via Rapida banks. He arrived with a long wheelbase Land Rover towing a trailer with a large tank on it, in the back of the Land Rover were big bales of green cotton wool like fibre, bags of fertilizer, bags of football grass seed (rye grass) and a precious small bag of Kikuyu grass seed, it’s a tiny seed, from the USA (Kikuyu is a grass that is hard wearing, drought resistant, a rhizome spreading plant but very slow to germinate, hence the quick to germinate rye, the mother grass). All where put into the tank a hose put in and the tank filled with water. A paddle inside mixed it all together, a big fire fighting type hose with a spray nozzle was hoisted onto the shoulders of three men and a pump started and the man on the end literally painted the soil with a green slurry, wonderful! The rye germinated within five days and we had a brilliant green lawn! The Kikuyu has crowded out the rye now and taken over and has itself given us a lovely lawn, like walking on Wilton carpet!
In September 2010 we arrived at crunch time for planting. A call had gone out to our membership for plants from Gerald’s list. Palheiro Gardens sent us two truckloads of plants, wonderful, thank you. Members sent their plants but two days before Gerald was coming to do the placing of the plants. Susana, his manager on Madeira, sent down five large lorry loads of plants from their nursery, 1,500 plants, a gift to the Church! Gerald and Susana put them in their positions and fifteen of us ran around after them planting as fast as we could. Then it rained for two weeks, perfect.
Small details, finishing touches, have gone on since and our sub-tropical climate has worked its magic on the lawns and beds which are filling out and beginning to show skill of Gerald as a plants man. Every day brings new delights as his vision unfolds. A fulfilment of the wish for a place of beauty, peace and tranquillity in the heart of Funchal. Put it on your wish list as a must see destination.
The history of the church
The earliest record of an Anglican church service on Madeira dates from 1774, when the chaplain of a passing ship was prevailed upon to hold a service for the residents, who paid for his services with a gift of preserved citron. These random services continued until 1807, when Madeira was host to a garrison of British troops detached to the island to support it during the Napoleonic wars. The chaplain attached to the garrison, Rev Cautley, provided regular services for the residents in the consular chapel and was so popular – and the residents hoped that he would remain for many years – that he could well have been a principal reason for the residents to consider building their own church. This notion was first recorded at a general meeting of the British Factory on 30 December 1808, but it wasn’t until two years later, on 31 December 1810, that the formal resolution …”RESOLVED that it is expedient that a Chapel shall be built…” was agreed. The consul, Henry Veitch, was tasked with the work.
A fund was opened to finance the purchase of land and the build, the amount required was £10,000 and the lengthy subscription list contained the names of King George III, King Leopold I of Belgium, the Duke of Wellington, the Duchess of Bedford, the family of Lord Nelson and many ships, with the British Factory contributing some £400 per year (financed by levying a supplement on the sale of each pipe (about 500 litres) of Madeira wine!
The land chosen was chosen to be close to the original British cemetery in the Rua da Carreira; the land was bought in 1813 and building started in 1816. A brief peripheral anecdote tells how on 23 August 1815, the Consul went on board HMS Northumberland, the ship carrying Napoleon into exile on St Helena, presented Napoleon with a pipe of wine and received a gift (not a payment, according to Veitch) of gold coin in return. Napoleon died, the wine was returned, the coin was forfeit and an eye-witness account records how Veitch sealed it under the foundation stone of the church.
Henry Veitch was a forceful personality and the design of the church, by all accounts, is his alone. Whether he was influenced by a Portuguese law, which prohibited Protestant places of worship from assuming the external resemblance of a church, and so designed a building evocative of a library, senate house or lecture hall; whether he was influenced by his being a Freemason and designed in the style of round temple which had found favour with the Knights Templar, or whether he was a man of architectural taste and designed a neo classic structure according to the Classic Revival movement cannot be said for certain. Support for the first theory is that the church contains no steeple, bells or choir stalls; evidence of the second is in the presence of the all-seeing eye at the apex of the central dome and reflected around the gallery, and the third is obvious.
Sadly the Rev Cautley was not persuaded to stay on with the withdrawal of the garrison in 1814, but he did return for a brief period as chaplain in 1818/1819. By then the building of the church was well under way, although it took six years to complete, mainly, apparently, because of the constant differences of opinion between Henry Veitch and the financier. It was finished in 1822 and the first service attended by its first regular chaplain took place on 22 October.
During the 1800s the history of the church is peppered with interest as chaplains came and went in direct proportion to the pay being offered or withdrawn. Even then the residents seemed unable to afford a full stipend for the chaplain. The rebellious Rev Lowe displeased the congregation culminating in an appeal from the British Consul to Queen Victoria on 25 January 1847, requesting her to use her influence with the British Government to remove him; and as the British Government withdrew all financial support from the church in 1874. This latter is relevant today.
Following this separation, in 1875 the residents of Madeira met to form an Association to provide for the administrative and financial support for the chaplaincy; they drew up the first Constitution document, elected three trustees to care for the funds under their charge (then 6,000 guineas), two churchwardens and a treasurer and a three-man committee of management. Happy days (these nine posts were filled by the same three men!) The first Constitution has been superseded by others but the principles remain the same today and much of the wording of the 1875 original remains in the 2007 Constitution.
The church in the 19th century would have been attended solely by residents of the island. Although Mr William Reid and others were renting out a few villas on the island in the last half of the century, tourism did not really start until Mr Reid built his hotel, the internationally famous Reids Palace Hotel, which opened in 1890. Nowadays 90% of the congregation are tourists, and it is interesting to reflect on the changing attitudes of the times from the inception of the church until now. The church can accommodate 350 people.
In 1822 the British population on the island is estimated to have been around 700, which means that the church was built to accommodate half of the resident population. Nowadays our electoral roll hovers just over the 70 mark. Would our church have been built today by this slim number of believers? Probably not. All we can do is admire the fortitude of our forebears who raised the enormous sum (multiply it by 100 to get to the worth today) to leave us their legacy, a magnificent monument to their faith and determination.
Arriving at church
Original drawings
From the cemetery
From the church
The Church Organ
The church organ is an historic instrument. It is an early arrival in the development of the modern church organ. August Gern, the builder, has built beautiful, round sounding organs and this one is an excellent example. It is a versatile instrument with lots of lovely sounds from pipes crammed into a relatively small chamber.
An organ, be it a pipe or an electronic organ, is the most valuable item for insurance purposes after the church building. Like the building it unfortunately requires regular maintenance at a relative cost.
We’ve worked with some of the best companies.
The Trinity Rooms
The parish centre offers excellent facilities for both our Chaplain (who has a self-contained apartment) and for church and outreach use.
The ground floor consists of a function room, and a library named the Ranelow Room in memory of John Ranelow whose generous legacy enabled all of this work to be carried out. In addiion, a purpose built kitchen provides for church use and for outside caterers for events. we have regular coffee mornings, afternoon tea, social events (film suppers, Sunday Luncheons, etc) which are well supported.
Holy Trinity continues to function as a cultural resource for the whole English speaking community in Madeira.
In the Trinity room, we have…
- Lectures and bingo
- Meals and feasts
- Church Council meetings
In the library, we have…
- Books…
- Saturday coffee
- Film viewing
And the kitchen is, where all is prepared…
- Coffee and tea
- Meals
- Soup and bread