The Mausoleum

The mausoleum is located in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, Wimbledon and contains Sir Joseph Bazalgette, his wife Maria, and five of their eleven children. The Portland Stone mausoleum features an obelisk, sitting above a vault, which is protected by heavy metal doors and contains space for 12 coffins, eight of which are occupied.

Unusually, the mausoleum was not built for the Bazalgette family. In fact, it was constructed 15 years before Sir Joseph Bazalgette was born, having been commissioned by John Anthony Rucker who died in 1804.  Rucker’s coffin occupies one of the nine spaces inside, and is the only person outside of the Bazalgette family to interred in the mausoleum.

Rucker was a banker and merchant who owned extensive slave plantations in Grenada, a former British colony in the West Indies. With no children of his own, he left most of his wealth to his nephew Daniel Henry Rucker, who inherited John Rucker’s estates and it is assumed the mausoleum.

We do not know how Sir Joseph Bazalgette came to purchase the eighty-year-old tomb, or indeed why he chose one already built for another family. We do know that the Bazalgette family lived locally and had a close relationship with the church – the graveyard of which, was already full when Charles Norman Bazalgette, Sir Joseph’s son, died. Descriptions of Rucker’s mausoleum suggest that Bazalgette heavily modified the structure, replacing a pyramid with a tall obelisk. The mausoleum signifies the resting place of two men whose work embodies the very best and worst of British history.