Sheffield's not-so-grim reaper

“People say to me, ‘you live in a cemetery, how spooky,’ but it’s not the dead people who you have to worry about in life, is it? It’s the people who’ll club you on the head or hit you with an axe.” 

I’m on the phone with Steve McLean, who has worked as the caretaker of the St Michael’s Cemetery in Rivelin Valley since the day he arrived in Sheffield, all the way back in 1997. While Steve — or Graveyard Steve, as his friends in the pub call him — has already spent several hours showing me round his home and place of work in person, I soon find I have more burning questions to put to him. Artists throughout the ages have sprinkled their paintings with memento mori: visual reminders of the fact that one day all of us will take our last breath. But what kind of person could make their entire career a sort of memento mori? To spend their days, as Steve has, tending to the dead.

It’s hard to imagine this now, but there was a time when St Michael’s was almost completely wild. Steve can still trace the scars on his palms from the five years he spent clearing dense tangles of brambles and thorns in the grass surrounding the Victorian cemetery chapel. Overhanging branches and stooping trees left the area in constant shade. 

He didn’t take photos of the ‘before’, so I have to take his word for it. During those five years of excavation, he spent evenings in his workshop at St Michael’s lodge — the cottage at the entrance of the cemetery, where he lives with his wife Bridget — fixing strimmers that had been destroyed by the overgrowth. “I used to make attachments that were lethal,” he says, recalling the sharp blades he fixed onto makeshift poles to try to attack the brambles and nettles. “It was blood, sweat and tears.” Did he ever feel like he’d bitten off more than he could chew? “You know, it never fazed me,” he says.

Steve is a cemetery groundsman. In fact, it seems he might remain a cemetery groundsman until he ends up in a cemetery himself. Officially, he retired in 2020 — but it’s unclear if this made much difference to his daily schedule. Since then, no new groundsman has been appointed (except for the contractors who visit in the summer months) and he still spends a lot of his time tidying up the place. If you’ve ever walked along the Rivelin Valley, there’s a good chance you may have crossed paths with Steve, perhaps even chatted to him while he’s tending to graves or planting wildflowers on the verges. He walks with a slightly hunched posture, talking in a continual stream that rarely dries up enough for me to interrupt with a question.