John Newlands’s Grave, West Norwood Cemetery

John Newlands (1837 – 1898) was a British chemist who discovered the Periodic Table. The son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister and his Italian wife, he was interested in social reform and during 1860 served as a volunteer with Garibaldi in his military campaign to unify Italy. Returning to London, he established himself as an analytical chemist in 1864 and in 1868 became chief chemist of James Duncan's London sugar refinery, where he introduced a number of improvements in processing.

Newlands was the first to identify a pattern (‘periodicity’) in the chemical properties of the elements. His Law of Octaves in which he arranged the existing elements by increasing atomic mass (which he likened to octaves of music), was ridiculed by many of his contemporaries and the Chemical Society refused to publish his work stating that ‘they had made it a rule not to publish papers of a purely theoretical nature since it was likely to lead to correspondence of a controversial character’. However a series of articles by Newlands were published from 1864 in Chemical News, an independent journal produced by the chemist Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), (discoverer of thallium), five years before the Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev (1834-1907) announced the discovery of what we now call the Periodic Table. The Royal Society awarded Newlands the Davy Medal in 1887.

The memorial was in a bad state of repair and the marble had weathered badly, with the lead letters illegible. As part of the restoration project, the stone was refaced and the memorial lettering cut & lead infilled to match the existing lettering.

The restoration project was completed in Autumn 2024, and John Newlands's living relative, Peter Newlands unveiled the grave alongside Dr Peter JT Morris.