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Hester Hammerton and Women Sextons in Eighteenth‐ and Nineteenth‐Century England

At eighteen years old, Hester Hammerton survived being buried alive in a graveside accident that killed her father, Sexton Abraham Hammerton. On 5 March 1730, at All Saints’ Church in Kingston upon Thames, the foundations of an ancient chapel gave way as Hester, Abraham and Thomas Jarman, her brother-in-law, buried George Hammond, a deceased parishioner. The rubble crushed Abraham and two others to death while Hester and Thomas remained trapped under the debris for at least three and possibly as long as seven hours.1 Contemporary English newspapers published reports of the deadly event and almost eighty years later, an antiquarian mentioned the accident in a book about ‘remarkable occurrences’ in Kingston. That text described Hammerton as ‘a stout masculine woman’ who not only ‘succeeded to her Father’s office’ but also proved instrumental in the conviction of two men who tried to steal valuable items from the church.2 Two different collections of ‘Remarkable Characters’, published in London in 1820, contained similar brief biographies about Hammerton. James Caulfield observed that some women engage in ‘occupations inconsistent to their sex and only befitting a man’. Both texts referred to Hammerton as the ‘female sexton of Kingston’ whose ‘great bodily strength’ allowed her to ‘dig all the graves and ring the great bell herself’. Multiple publications in the midto late nineteenth century included the same stories and emphasised that, although Hammerton was ‘manly’, she dressed like a lady for church services and protected her maidenhood.3 Writing in 1902, Walter Besant offered no such qualifications. He also omitted the accident and theft. Instead, in his history of eighteenth-century London, he presented Hammerton as ‘another singular case’ of a woman who tried to pass as a man. The significant point for Besant was that her manliness was consistent with ‘a woman . . . sexton and gravedigger [who] dug the graves herself’.4 For all these male writers, Hester Hammerton was an anomaly and her position as sexton was part of a performance of masculinity. While Hammerton’s life story arguably merited the tag of ‘remarkable’, her choice of occupation did not. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women sextons were ubiquitous in England, especially in the greater London area. By the end of the eighteenth century, every parish within London’s city walls and several without the walls had employed a woman sexton at one time or another. In Kingston, about ten miles from London’s Charing Cross, Hammerton was not the first woman sexton, nor