E.M. Lander is a firm of monumental masons operating from premises in the Harrow Road, opposite Kensal Green Cemetery. The firm’s connection with the cemetery dates back to 1838 when George Lander (c.1799–1861) undertook building work for the General Cemetery Company. Many of the cemetery’s monuments, however, are known to be by E.M. Lander, until recently a source of confusion. When J.S. Curl edited his monograph on the cemetery in 2000, the only E.M. Lander known to the volume’s writers was Edward Manuel Lander, who is buried in the cemetery and whose dates are 1836–1910. This would have made him too young to have executed two significant sculptural monuments dating to 1844, those to Major General Sir William Casement and to Emma Soyer (the latter being signed ‘E.M. LANDER / MASON TO THE CEMETERY’). Clearly there were two E.M. Landers and, according to English Heritage’s 2015 official list entry for the 1927 showrooms occupied by the current firm (E.M. Lander Ltd), the earlier of these two, the man who was responsible for the above-mentioned monuments, was George’s brother, born Manuel Lander but subsequently known as Edward Manuel Lander (1814–1884); the later E.M. Lander was George’s grandson. E.M. Lander Ltd was incorporated in 1916 and continues in business to this day, although the connection with the family ended about the time of the Second World War.
Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 215–16, 216–19; J.S. Curl (ed.), Kensal Green Cemetery, 2001, pp. 104, 117–118, 119, 142, 172, 184, 187, 193, 218, 229, 233–234 and n11, 262, 277, 279, 283; ‘E.M. Lander Ltd’s showroom’, Historic England Official List Entry; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, p. 716.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022