Sanitary Reform in Victorian Britain, Part II vol 4

Michelle Allen-Emerson, Tom Crook, Barbara Leckie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138756885
• eBook ISBN: 9781000559088
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Sanitary reform was one of the great debates of the nineteenth century. This reset edition makes available a modern, edited collection of rare documents specifically addressing sanitary reform. Each volume will begin with an introduction, and the documents presented have headnotes and endnotes provided. A full index appears in the final volume.

GEORGE ALFRED WALKER, INTERMENT AND DISINTERMENT (1843)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112754-1

George Alfred Walker, Interment and Disinterment; or, A Further Exposition of the Practices Pursued in the Metropolitan Places of Sepulture, and the Results as Affecting the Health of the Living: in a Series of Letters to the Editor of the Morning Herald (London: Longman, 1843), pp. ii-iv, 1–28.

By the time George Alfred Walker (1807–84) published Interment and Disinterment in 1843, his reputation as an authority on the worst abuses of Londons burial grounds was well established. Walker had published Gatherings from Graveyards in 1839, an exposé of urban burial practices with shocking tales of putrefactive vapours causing illness or sudden death. The book drew the attention of the Select Committee on the Health of Towns (1840), which, while it was devoted principally to problems of insanitary housing and the absence of sewerage, did address intramural burial with Walker appearing as a witness. Another Select Committee on the Health of Towns (Interment of Bodies) was formed in 1842, under the chairmanship of William Mackinnon, for the express purpose of investigating the public health risk posed by burial in congested cities. ¹ Within ten years legislation had been passed authorizing the closure of London’s burial grounds.

Walker’s campaign against urban burial was informed by both medical training and personal experience. As a student and practising surgeon in London of the 1830s, Walker would have been familiar with miasmatic theories of disease, which linked fevers to the inhalation of the gases of decomposition. Such understanding was likely reinforced in Paris where he continued his studies in 1836. ² While in Paris, Walker also visited the new suburban cemeteries such as Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse that had been established in response to the closure of urban burial grounds in 1786. The contrast must have been startling when he returned to London in 1837 and set up his medical practice in Drury Lane: there amidst a great deal of poverty were some of the most overcrowded and, to Walker’s mind, dangerous graveyards in the metropolis. Thereafter, Walker began the work of investigating individual graveyards in London and publicizing the many atrocities he found, including disinterment – or the removal and destruction of older corpses and coffins to make room for new ones – a common practice that lent its name to the title of the pamphlet here.

If Walker expected consensus around the proposal to remove all burials from the city, then he was sorely mistaken. Opposition immediately arose from both Dissenting and Anglican clergy, for whom burial fees formed a significant portion of income. ³ After the Health of Towns Committee concluded its work in 1842, a series of letters appeared in the nonconformist newspaper the Patriot objecting to the conclusions of the Committee. Walker s evidence in particular comes up for ridicule: ‘Mr. Walker is a poet of no mean pretensions. He has run to and fro among the tombs of the metropolis, peeping over walls and balustrades, through grates and gratings, surveying the spoils of mortality, till his fancy became inflamed’. ⁴ The attack does not go unrecognized in Interment and Disinterment in the preface to which Walker appeals to Dissenters to be guided by reason rather than prejudice. And yet Walkers achievement was to dissociate death and burial from a religious context and put them squarely within the discourse of public health reform: such a challenge to tradition, belief and sentiment was bound to meet resistance.

Notes

1. M. E. Hotz, Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 2009), p. 14.
2. P. C. Jupp, From Dust to Ashes: Cremation and the British Way of Death (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 31.
3. Ibid., p. 25; C. Arnold, Necropolis: London and its Dead (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 119.
4. Health of Towns: An Examination of the Report and Evidence of the Select Committee, of Mr. MacKinnon’s Bill, and of the Acts for Establishing Cemeteries around the Metropolis (London: John Snow, 1843), p. 40.

PUBLIC HEALTH ACT (11 & 12 VICT., CAP. 63), AUSTIN AND RAWLINSON, REPORT TO THE GENERAL BOARD OF HEALTH (1850)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112754-2

Public Health Act (11 & 12 Vict., cap. 63), Henry Austin and Robert Rawlinson, Report to the General Board of Health on ‘the Circumstances Attending the Revolting Practices that have Been Said to Occur in the St. Giles’s Cemetery, Situated in the Parish of St. Paneras’ (London: W. Clowes & Sons, 1850), pp. 2–8.

This Report from June of 1850 comes from that very brief period (1850–1) when the General Board of Health (GBH) was the responsible authority for first investigating and then administering metropolitan interments. In the autumn of 1849 with the recent cholera epidemic on the wane, the public and Parliament were finally ready to act on burial reform, and the GBH under Edwin Chadwicks leadership began preparing a bill. ¹ Much of the preliminary work – investigations and reports – had already been done by Chadwick himself and presented in the Supplementary Report on Interment in Towns (1843). And indeed an (impracticable) legislative solution followed quickly, as the Metropolitan Interment Act was passed in August, 1850. The Report by Henry Austin (1811/12–61) and Robert Rawlinson (1810–98) ² , secretary and inspector of the GBH, respectively, was clearly preparatory to the legislation.

St Giles’s cemetery, as distinct from the churchyard at St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, was established in 1803, adjacent to the churchyard of St Pancras; these extra grounds were obtained as ‘overflow’ burial space for a saturated churchyard. ³ As Austin and Rawlinson’s Report indicates, the cemetery and its rector had already received unwanted publicity in George Walker’s catalogue of horrors. In Walker’s Interment and Disinterment (1843; see p. 1 of this volume), the rector of St Giles’s, James E. Tyler, is singled out as one of ‘the ministers of religion, who are … so well calculated to head a reform of so important a character as this’, and yet who has turned a blind eye to the abuses in his own parish. A visit to the cemetery reveals to Walker an ‘open pit dug under the wall, dividing the cemetery from the workhouse … full nearly up to the surface with pauper bodies; the buzzing of myriads of flies in and over this pit might be heard at a considerable distance from its mouth’. Walker’s return to the scene three years after this, in 1846, is rewarded with a lurid eye-witness account from one ‘Mrs. Drew’: the scene she describes features in Walker’s Lectures Delivered at the Mechanics Institution (1847), and it is reinvestigated by Austin and Rawlinson for their 1850 Report.

On the one hand, there seems a kind of sense in the repeated inquiry: determine if St Giles’s cemetery is still in violation of laws of sanitation and human decency. On the other hand, the belatedness of the investigation approaches the ridiculous: what is the likelihood that complaints of disinterred body parts (issued by Mrs Drew) could be verified three to four years after the incident ? The poor treatment of pauper bodies at the cemetery is confirmed, incidents of disinterment are not. Although Chadwick had referred to the St Giles’s cemetery in his Supplementary Report, he explains that he did not personally visit the site; that omission, coupled with an unwillingness to rely on others’ accounts, may explain the need for Austin and Rawlinson’s investigation recorded here.

Notes

1. S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London: Methuen, 1952), pp. 352–3,381–3.
2. See ODNB for Austin and Rawlinson.
3. E. Walford, ‘St. Pancras’ Old and New London, 5 (1878), pp. 324–40, British History Online; S. Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 2004), pp. 130–1.

Public Health Act (11 & 12 Vict., cap. 63), Henry Austin and Robert Rawlinson, Report to the General Board of Health on ‘the Circumstances Attending the Revolting Practices that have Been Said to Occur in the St. Giles’s Cemetery’ (1850)

Gwydyr House, 13 th June, 1850.

My Lords and Gentlemen,

We have the honour to report to you that, in accordance with your instructions that we should examine into “the circumstances attending the revolting practices that have been said to occur in the St. Giles’s Cemetery, situated in the parish of St. Paneras” we proceeded yesterday to the spot, had a lengthened interview with the Rev. Mr. Tyler, the rector of St. Giles’s, the churchwarden, two of the trustees, and the vestry clerk and officers of the ground, and collected all the evidence on the subject that the time and circumstances would allow.

This ground was established by Act of Parliament, and was consecrated in 1803, and it is the same that, in consequence of complaints transmitted to the General Board, Dr. Milroy ¹ was directed to examine and report upon in November last.

In order to render clear the particulars that we have been enabled to gather, it appears necessary to repeat the most important of the accusations that have been made, viz., that, “on Friday, the 6th November last, Mrs. Drew, from the back room window of her house, which overlooks the grave yard, saw two men at work. The one was engaged in dismembering a recently-interred body, the other was digging a hole near the wall for the reception of the mutilated remains. Portions of the body, apparently quite fresh, together with the shroud, were extracted with a hooked fork, placed in a barrow, and removed to the hole. A human head, covered by and intermixed / with dirt, was next shoveled up – literally tossed up on a shovel and thrown into the barrow. When the body, thus broken up, had been concealed in the hole, it was barely covered with earth. A body had been buried in this grave five weeks previously, and I believe it (says Mrs. Drew) to have been the same body which was used in this inhuman manner.”

This statement is a verbatim extract from one of Mr. George Walker’s Lectures on the Metropolitan Grave Yards; ² and the circumstances that gave use to it occurred, not in “November last,” as would be generally inferred, but in November 1846 – between three and four years ago.

It appears that the portion of the burial-ground immediately adjoining the back gardens of the houses of Cook’s-row was that originally used for pauper interment; but that being found wet and unsuitable the burials had for many years been discontinued in that part. Just before the period of the complaint in question it was determined to drain this portion of the ground and resume the interments there. Some of the inhabitants of the contiguous houses appear to have been very naturally alarmed at the number of burials that were taking place immediately adjoining to their premises, among whom Mrs. Daly, who was otherwise called Drew, an Irishwoman, appears to have been the most excited, and the most active in complaint.

Although one or more of the neighbours interfered immediately that the above charge was made, and went into the burial-ground to examine into the facts, there appears to have been no evidence of any body, or portions of a body, having been removed, or of any second hole having, as alleged, been dug. There are upwards of 20 windows that overlook this portion of the ground, and the circumstances are stated to have occurred between 11 and 12 o’clock in the morning; yet the main facts rest solely on the statement of Mrs. Daly, the only collateral evidence in confirmation being that of Mr. Comyns, who speaks to having seen “the fresh blood of the recently-mangled corpse covering / a surface of a foot square on the wall of the workhouse of St. Pancras, down which it ran.”

On inquiry we found that both Mrs. Daly and Mr. Comyns had left the neighbourhood, and we were therefore not able to examine them. On questioning some of the neighbours who were resident there at the time of the occurrence, we were assured that although others interfered on the accusation of Mrs. Daly, that no one else was known to have seen anything to justify her charge.

In the account of the proceedings given by Mr. Walker, it is stated that the grave-digger did not deny the allegations, but “attempted to justify them on the plea of necessity and established custom.” We examined both the men who were employed on that occasion. They do not deny that, in digging there, they did find the bones and rotten wood of the burials that had taken place on this spot some 25 years before; and, as was their custom, that they re-buried them in the bottom of the new graves; that they were digging closely contiguous to the recently-made graves, but they positively assert that no recently-interred body whatever was disturbed, nor was there the slightest necessity for disturbing them, for there was abundance of untouched space all around.

The second charge, referring to the reprehensible manner in which pauper burials have been conducted in this ground is analogous to the statements made by Dr. Milroy, in his Report to the General Board, which we are enabled fully to confirm. Up to November last these burials took place in a plot of ground immediately under the walls of the St. Pancras workhouse, and this ground is now raised some three or four feet above the natural surface by the interments that have there taken place.

It was the custom to dig a grave large enough to hold two coffins abreast, and deep enough to contain a pile of from seven to nine coffins, or more if there were children. Thus each grave would contain from fourteen to eighteen adults. It has been alleged that these were piled immediately one above the other; but the / regulation would appear, at any rate, to have been, that each coffin should have a layer of a few inches of earth, sufficient to cover it. When one grave was filled, the next was dug immediately in contact, without any space of earth between, so that the whole tier of coffins previously interred on that side would be exposed to view.

After the complaints from the inmates of the St. Pancras workhouse, and Dr. Milroy s inquiry, the interments appear to have been immediately discontinued in this portion of the ground, before the order of the General Board on the subject was issued.

The pauper interments now take place on the opposite side; but the same objectionable system of burial still continues, with the exception that about nine inches of earth are left between each grave, so that the coffins are not exposed as before. These burials take place twice a-week, on Tuesday and Friday (the object of which is stated to be the saving of expense of conveyance), when the whole number are put into the grave together, and one service is read over them, as is not unusual. Should the grave not be full, it is temporarily covered with planks, over which a few inches of earth are spread. We had one of these graves opened. It was about two-thirds full, but the coffins were decently covered with earth. The number of pauper interments are said to be about 30 per month.

With regard to the charges that were made in October last by the inmates of the workhouse, as to the removal of coffins that had been interred in the pauper ground, we have received a copy of the evidence of the inmates of the workhouse originally given before the authorities of St. Pancras, and that subsequently taken before a joint meeting of the authorities of St. Pancras and St. Giles. The statements do not agree on some points. The whole of the women, however, in both examinations, keep to the main fact of having witnessed the removal of coffins. On the other hand, the grave-diggers as positively deny the whole of the statements, and motives are imputed on both sides. On examination of the general condition of portions of / this burial-ground, there can be no question that the system of interment which has been, and is still adopted, with the view to make the most of the space, is objectionable in the extreme, and that however erroneous or exaggerated these immediate charges may be, an indecent exposure of the coffins, an appearance of the want of common respect for the remains of the poor, and the escape of an immense amount of effluvia from such a concentrated mass of corruption, interred in a stiff heavy clay, always full of cracks in dry and warm weather, cannot fail to be the consequence of such a system.

It would appea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• I. Redefining Urban Burial
• II. Preserving Green Space for a Healthy City
• III. Clearing the Slums, Improving the Streets
• Editorial Notes