Rectory Lane Cemetery, Berkhamsted

Edward Harvey Flower was born in Northampton in 1855, the son of railway clerk Cornelius Flower the younger and Emily Flower (née Lane).

In the 1861 census, Cornelius (by then a railway station master), Emily and young Edward were living (with a servant) at No 1 Ford Villa, Blisworth in Northamptonshire.

In April 1861 the family was visiting the Lane relatives’ Kings Arms in Berkhamsted, the inn that was run by his Lane relatives. On 22 April tragedy struck when Edward Harvey Flower died aged only six.

At the King’s Arms Inn, Great Berkhamstead, on Monday the 22nd ult., aged six years, Hervey. Ed. Flower, the only child of Cornelius and Emily Flower, and grandson of Henry Lane, of Great Berkhamstead

His grieving parents had a moving epitaph inscribed on the headstone which included lines from a poem by the American poet Lydia Huntley Sigourney, “The Lost Darling”:

Gone of God be still my heart what could a mother’s prayer in all the wildest ecstacy of hope ask for her darling like the bliss of heaven

Within months of little Edward’s death, Cornelius’s health had broken and he died in Berkhamsted in May 1865. Cornelius was buried in Rectory Lane Cemetery along with Edward. In 1877, his widow Emily Lane remarried a London bookseller, Edwin Barfoot. Emily died in Penge in 1901.