Necropolis: London & it's Dead (16 page)

An artist recalled that the view from his Chelsea studio was marred by the corpse of a dead dog, thrown up every day by the tide, each time in a more advanced stage of decomposition. The wit Sydney Smith noted that, ‘He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women and children on the face of the globe.’ And a cartoon of the day, entitled
Monster Soup
, shows a horrified woman looking down a microscope to discover the pullulating fiends breeding in a drop of Thames water.
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The development of piped water led to the popularity of flushing water closets, which emptied directly into the Thames. Instead of going into cesspits, human waste was being recycled in drinking water. There was also an element of sleaze involved: many MPs were reluctant to see the private water companies closed down since they had shares in them.

Although medical experts, such as George Walker, were aware of the relationship between pollution and disease, it was not until 1854 that the pioneering investigator Dr John Snow (1813–58) finally established the link between cholera and contaminated water. Snow observed that he had attended many patients, but never caught the disease himself. He also noted that cholera seemed to affect the alimentary canal before the patient began to feel ill–and concluded that it must be swallowed in some way. His
Mode of Communication of Cholera
was published in 1849, but it was not until the particularly virulent epidemic of 1854 that his theories were vindicated, and he was able to prove that one outbreak of cholera had been spread by a common pump in Broad Street, Soho, poisoned by sewer water.

During the cholera epidemics, London’s burial grounds became even more of a threat to public health. There was a general outcry that the churchyards were too full and that there was no longer any room for the dead. The expert on death and the Victorians, James Stevens Curl, notes that during epidemics, churchyards became ‘scenes of the most appalling horror, where bones would be heaped on bones, and partially rotted bodies would be disinterred to make way for a multitude of corpses’.
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In an effort to contain the disease, coffins were filled with lime, and the shrouds dipped in coal tar.
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However, the authorities, admitting at last that there was a correlation between outbreaks of disease and the state of the burial grounds, drew up plans to burn the bodies of cholera victims directly after death–but this had to be abandoned after angry mobs opposed the suggestion.

Finally, spurred on by a combination of the cholera epidemics and the scandal of Enon Chapel in particular and London’s graveyards in general, Walker and Chadwick were able to make their case before the Commons. In 1842, a Royal Commission was sitting on the question of the Health of Towns and the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes, and a Select Committee had been convened to ‘consider the expediency of framing some legislative enactments to remedy the evils arising from the interment of bodies within the precincts of large towns, or of places densely populated’.
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Chaired by Sir William MacKinnon, MP for Lymington, the committee sat from 17 March to 5 May 1842, and conducted sixty-five examinations. Witnesses included clergymen, the Bishop of London (C. J. Blomfield) and Sir Benjamin Brodie, President of the
Royal College of Surgeons. Dissenting ministers, doctors, sextons and gravediggers would testify to the appalling conditions which led one commentator to observe that: ‘The dead are killing off the living.’ The burial reformers had waited a long time for this moment.

With his killer details and incisive turn of phrase, George Walker was a star witness. Although some of his reports appeared to be exaggerated, and were criticized by opponents to closure who had their own agenda, Walker’s message got through. As part of his evidence, Walker circulated a pamphlet on Spa Fields, Clerkenwell. While some Anglican ministers still conducted funerals there, Spa Fields had become so repellent that the Bishop of London refused to consecrate it. Eventually, Spa Fields was purchased by a Lady Huntingdon, who employed one of her own chaplains, enhancing the ground’s snob appeal. This ground was, said Walker, ‘…saturated with the dead. No undertaker can explain it, excepting by a shrug of the shoulders. I can confirm, from frequent personal observation, that enormous numbers of dead have been deposited here.’ It emerged that bodies were burned behind a brick enclosure, and gravestones moved about to give an appearance of emptiness in certain parts of the ground. Spa Fields was designed to hold 1,000 bodies. Walker calculated that, by burning coffins, mutilating remains, and using vast quantities of quicklime, at least 80,000 corpses had been buried there.
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William Chamberlain, a gravedigger at St Clement Dane’s, testified that the ground was so full that he could not make a new grave without cutting into old ones. The bodies were so perfect he could distinguish the men from the women, and they had to be chopped up, and thrown behind the boards which were placed to keep the ground up where the mourners were standing. Once the mourners had departed, the flesh was thrown in and jammed down.

Chamberlain’s assistant said that on one occasion, he found his colleague chopping off the head of his own father. Another
admitted: ‘One day I was trying the length of a grave to see if it was long and wide enough, and while I was there, the ground gave way, and a body turned right over, and the two arms came and clasped me round the neck!’

Quite apart from the public health consequences of overflowing graveyards, Walker was also concerned about the working conditions of gravediggers. They literally took their lives in their hands. Walker collected details of many deaths and illnesses directly attributable to contact with human remains in a state of putrefaction. The more experienced, when they opened a coffin, immediately fled to a safe distance, and stayed there until the corpse gas had been sufficiently dispersed to allow them to continue their unpleasant work in comparative safety. Another custom was to burn paper or straw in graves and vaults, while some men swore by a mouthful of garlic. Gravediggers suffered from bad health and alcoholism: notoriously heavy drinkers, it was claimed they couldn’t perform their grisly task without spirits.

A transcript of the proceedings records the gravedigger William Miller bearing witness to conditions at Globe Fields burial ground in Mile End:

Chairman:
What is your occupation?

Miller:
A jobbing, labouring man, when I can get anything to do.

Chairman:
Have you been a gravedigger in Globe Fields, Mile End?

Miller:
Yes.

Chairman:
Have many pits been dug in it for the depositing of bodies previously interred?

Miller:
Yes.

Chairman:
Where did they come from? Out of the coffins which were emptied for others to go into the graves? Were the coffins chucked in with them?

Miller:
No, they were broken up and burned.

Chairman:
Were they bones, or bodies, that were interred?

Miller:
Yes; the bones and bodies as well.
Chairman:
Were they entire, or in a state of decomposition?
Miller:
Some were dry bones, and some were perfect.
Chairman:
What did you do with them?

Miller:
Chucked them into the pit.

Chairman:
What sort of pit?

Miller:
A deep, square pit, about four feet wide and seven or eight feet deep.

Chairman:
How many bodies did you chuck in?

Miller:
I cannot say, there were so numerous; each pit would hold about a dozen.

Chairman:
How many of these pits did you dig?

Miller:
I suppose I dug a matter of twenty myself.
Chairman:
How near to the surface of the earth did these dead bodies or bones come?

Miller:
Within about two feet.

Chairman:
What is the size of this ground?

Miller:
It is rather better than half an acre.

Chairman:
How many bodies are buried in that ground within a year?

Miller:
I cannot say; I suppose there are fourteen thousand have been buried in that ground.

Chairman:
How long has it been open?

Miller:
Since the year 1820.

Chairman:
Do you recollect any circumstance which occurred there about the month of October, 1839?

Miller:
Some boys were at work there; a policeman on the railroad happened to see them in the act of taking some bones out of baskets, and got a policeman in the police force of the metropolis, and sent him in and seized the boys with a bag of nails and plates off the coffins, going away to sell them, and going to sell the bones.

Chairman:
To what purpose are the bones applied?
Miller:
I do not know.

Chairman:
What is done with the wood of the coffins?
Miller:
Burned for their own private use.

Chairman:
By whom?

Miller:
By the sexton.

Mr Cowper:
Is it burned in the sexton’s house?
Miller:
Yes.

Sir William Clay:
What was done with the iron or metal handles of the coffins?

Miller:
They were burned on the coffins when I was there, and were thrown out among the ashes about the ground anywhere.

Mr Ainsworth:
Were you in the habit of performing this grave digging without the use of spirits?

Miller:
No; we were obliged to be half groggy to do it, and we cheered one another and sang to one another.

Mr Ainsworth:
You found the work so disgusting you were obliged to be half drunk?

Miller:
Yes.
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Other evidence included a gruesome account of events at Church Passage, Aldgate, in 1838, when a gravedigger, John Oakes, was found lying at the bottom of a twenty-foot grave. A crowd gathered, and one young man, Edward Luddett, a fishmonger, volunteered to help. Ropes and a ladder were produced, and Luddett clambered down into the grave, intending to place the ropes under the gravedigger’s arms so that he could be winched to safety. But the instant Luddett stooped to raise Oakes’s head, he staggered as if struck with a cannon ball, collapsed and died. Another gravedigger, William King, made two or three ineffectual attempts to descend, but the air was so foul that he had to be drawn up again, and it was half an hour before the two dead bodies were brought to the surface with a hook attached to a rope.

At the coroner’s inquest, Dr Jones, a local surgeon, testified that every effort had been made to recover the bodies. It emerged that
this lethal pit was a paupers’ grave, and that graves such as these were kept open until there were seventeen or eighteen bodies interred in them. The court heard that, on this occasion, the only occupant was the body of a still-born infant. It was not the custom to put any earth between the coffins in those graves, except in cases where the persons died of contagious diseases, and in that case some slaked lime and a thin layer of earth were put down to separate them. The practice of digging deep graves had been adopted by order of the churchwardens five or six years ago. There had been instances whereby gravediggers could not go down a grave, owing to the foulness of the air, but the churchwardens had never been told of this. On such occasions, Oakes, and his predecessor King, were in the habit of burning straw, and using other means to dispel the impure air, before descending.

According to Dr Jones, the cause of death was suffocation, resulting from the poor air quality in the grave, composed of carbonic acid gas, generated from decayed animal matter. When asked his opinion as to the effect of keeping a grave open a couple of months, the doctor replied that the noxious effluvia from it must be very injurious to health and he hoped something would be done about it. The jury returned a verdict of Accidental Death in both cases.
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The burial reformers faced considerable objections from the clergy, both Anglican and Dissenting, who made money from burials and turned a blind eye to the horrific consequences. In response, Walker condemned the apathy of the established Church, remarking that ‘the sight of gold acts as an open sesame to the marble floors of our cathedrals and churches’.
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Walker’s critics accused him of being in cahoots with the private cemetery companies, while the cemetery companies condemned him for attacking their livelihoods. On more than one occasion, members of the medical establishment were wheeled in to give evidence against him. Dr Bentley Todd, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society, told the Select Committee that the Portugal Street burial ground,
damned by Walker as ‘a mass of putrefaction’ caused no inconvenience to King’s College Hospital, which overlooked the cemetery.

By May 1842, the Committee concluded that:

The Nuisance of Interments in large Towns, and the injury arising to the Health of the Community from the practice, are fully proved…No time ought to be lost by the Legislative in applying a remedy. The Evidence has also exhibited the singular instance of the most wealthy, moral and civilised community in the world tolerating a practice and an abuse which has been corrected for years by nearly all other civilised nations in every part of the globe.
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There followed resolutions on the provision of cemeteries for parishes, either single or amalgamated; the fees which should be charged; respect for those who wished to be buried in unconsecrated ground, such as Dissenters; and exceptions in the cases of family vaults, such as St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.