Necropolis: London & it's Dead (14 page)

‘The soil of this ground is saturated, absolutely saturated, with human putrescence,’ Walker noted incisively. ‘The living here breathe on all sides an atmosphere impregnated with the odour of the dead.’
⁸
The effluvia from Portugal Street were so offensive that people living in St Clement’s Lane were compelled to keep their windows closed. The walls of the Green Ground that adjoined the yards of local houses dripped with reeking fluid. Cholera, typhus and smallpox were rife.

In the course of his investigations, Walker interviewed an unfortunate man living at 33 St Clement’s Lane. Clinically depressed and terminally ill, he lay in the back room of a filthy house, his wife and family at his bedside. Glancing out of the window, Walker saw an open grave within a few feet of the house. ‘That’s just been made for a poor fellow who died in the room upstairs,’ said the man. ‘He died of typhus fever, from which his wife has just recovered. They have kept him twelve days, and now they are going to put him under my nose, by way of a warning.’

Children were the primary victims of these filthy conditions and there were numerous anecdotes of undertakers temporarily storing the bodies of newborn infants in their own premises until there were enough dead babies to make it worthwhile giving them a decent burial. St James’s Burying Ground, Clerkenwell, was excessively overcrowded. ‘The mortality among children in this neighbourhood has been very great,’ Walker observed. ‘This will not occasion surprise when the locality of the burying ground, and the filth and wretchedness of the major part of the inhabitants are duly considered…in the poor ground, little regard is paid to the
depth of the graves, or the removal of the dead. In this filthy neighbourhood, fever prevails, and poverty and wretchedness go hand-in-hand.’

Over 150 years later, George Alfred Walker’s evidence is still shocking. We examine it with a sense of outrage: how could such a state of affairs have been condoned, in the most progressive city in the world? Gladstone once said: ‘Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness, the tender mercies of its people, their loyalty to high ideals, and their regard for the laws of the land.’
⁹
From which we may conclude that the standard of living and dying in early Victorian London was desolate, to say the least. A lack of reverence for the dead collided with denial to ruinous effect. Burial grounds were so disgusting that the women of the family never accompanied the coffin to the graveside. And the poor lived in such squalid and overcrowded conditions that their grim interments were but an extension of their oppressed and miserable lives.

Investigating the conditions of migrant workers in the East End, George Godwin found a family of fourteen sharing one room in Rosemary Lane, near the Tower of London. In an apartment in Church-lane, St Giles’s, less than fifteen feet square, (about the size of the average modern bedroom),
thirty-seven
men, women and children were huddled together on the floor. In New Court, Charles Row, Whitechapel, which contained eight houses, there was only one water closet for 300 people. The houses were dirty, dilapidated, and teeming with vermin. Beds were no more than a bundle of rags. Swarms of children, complexions pinched by malnutrition, were dragged rather than brought up. Families got evicted on a daily basis. The rent was two shillings and sixpence a week, but the residents, many of them fresh off the boat from Ireland, seldom earned more than three pennies a day.

On the frequent occasions when a child died, the need to raise funds for the burial, combined with the Irish custom of keeping the corpse in the house until the funeral, meant that a child’s body
might lie among the living for a week. Dr Brouardel, a French physician, described the scene after a patient, who lived with his family in one room, died of smallpox. The doctor arrived to find a wake in full progress. ‘There were bottles everywhere,’ he wrote. ‘Even on the abdomen of the deceased.’ In some instances, the corpses of debtors were seized by bailiffs who refused to release the body for burial until the debts were paid.

Walker set up a Society for the Abolition of Burial in Towns, campaigning for the closure of the revolting inner-London burial grounds and the promotion of new suburban cemeteries, preferably municipal, ‘to remove as far as possible from the living THE PESTIFEROUS EXHALATIONS OF THE DEAD’.
¹⁰
Walker’s campaign attracted support from Sir Edwin Chadwick. A driven man, who worked fifteen hours a day and exhausted his subordinates, Chadwick had a characteristic Victorian devotion to the public good and turned his formidable intellect to the disgusting consequences of the city’s overcrowded graveyards with
The Health of Towns and the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes
(1842).

Although the relationship between the dapper, sardonic Walker and the dour Chadwick was a barbed one, their campaign flourished and attracted considerable public support. A correspondent to
The Times
claimed:

Passing along Portugal Street on Saturday evening, about ten minutes before seven, I was much shocked at seeing two men employed in carrying baskets of human bones from the corner of the ground next the old watch-house (where there was a tarpaulin hung over the rails to prevent their being seen, and where they appeared to be heaped up in a mound), to the back of the ground through a small gate.

Where this leads to I do not know; but I should be glad, through the medium of your invaluable journal to ask, why is this desecration? I feel more particularly than many might do, as I have seen twelve of my nearest and dearest relatives consigned
to the grave in that ground; and I felt that, perhaps, I might at the moment be viewing, in the basket of skulls which passed before me, those of my own family thus brutally exhumed. At all events, for the sake of the community at large, it should be inquired into.
¹¹

St Giles’s churchyard, where the first victims of the Great Plague had been buried, was infamous once again in the
Weekly Despatch
:

What a horrid place is St Giles’s churchyard! It is full of coffins up to the surface. Coffins are broken up before they are decayed, and bodies are removed to the ‘bone house’ before they are sufficiently decayed to make their removal decent. The effect upon the atmosphere, in that very densely populated spot, must be very injurious. I had occasion to attend the church with several gentlemen, on Tuesday; being required to wait, we went into this Golgotha; near the east side we saw a finished grave, into which had projected a nearly sound coffin; half of the coffin had been chopped away to complete the shape of the new grave. A man was standing by with a barrowful of sound wood, and several bright coffin plates. I asked him: ‘Why is all this?’ and his answer was, ‘Oh, it is all Irish.’ [St Giles’s had originally been consecrated as a Roman Catholic burial ground and was favoured by Irish immigrants.] We then crossed to the opposite corner, and there is the ‘bone house’ which is a large round pit; into this had been shot, from a wheelbarrow, the but partly-decayed inmates of the smashed coffins. Here, in this place of ‘Christian burial’, you may see human heads, covered with hair; and here, in this ‘consecrated ground’, are human heads with flesh still adhering to them. On the north side, a man was digging a grave; he was quite drunk, so indeed were all the gravediggers we saw. We looked into this grave, but the strench was abominable. We remained, however, long enough to see that a child’s coffin, which had stopped the man’s progress, had been cut, longitudinally, right in
half; and there lay the child, which had been buried in it, wrapped in its shroud, resting upon the part of the coffin that remained. The shroud was but little decayed.
¹²

Then, as now, Hanover Square was a good address. Yet, despite being in a fashionable neighbourhood, close to Marble Arch and surrounded by mansions, the burial ground of St George’s Church was in a repulsive state. According to the journalist Thomas Miller, in this ‘dimly lighted, breathless churchyard’, freshly-buried bodies were moved from the more expensive section to the paupers’ end, making room for more graves for which higher fees were paid. Families could never be certain that they were actually mourning their relatives. Miller describes headstones raised over the graves of strangers, as relations weep for someone they have never known, and the sexton and gravedigger watch from behind the nearby tombstones, clinking the silver in their pockets and chuckling. Meanwhile, the official residents had been removed, their remains serving as foundations for a new road, or ground up and sold as bone-meal for the market gardens of Kent.
¹³

Charles Dickens, who began his career as a Parliamentary correspondent, was quick to add his voice to the campaign. In
The Uncommercial Traveller
, he noted that:

Such strange churchyards hide in the City of London; churchyards sometimes so entirely detached from churches, always pressed upon by houses; so small, so rank, so silent, so forgotten, except by the few people who ever look down into them from their smoky windows: St Ghastly Grim, with a ferocious strong spiked iron gates, ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, wrought in stone. These skulls grin aloft horribly, thrust through and through with iron spears.
¹⁴

St Ghastly Grim or, to give it its real name, St Olave’s Hart Street, was the same church where Pepys had been frightened by the
graves of plague victims in January 1666. Despite the plague connection, the skull and crossbones date from 1633, and figure as a standard motif in a Dutch pattern book.

Dickens returned to the subject in his capacity as a novelist when he described ‘Tom All Alone’s’ in
Bleak House
. ‘Tom All Alone’s’ was actually Russell Court, Drury Lane, one of the most overcrowded burial grounds in London. Reached by a reeking little tunnel behind Drury Lane Theatre, it was surrounded by tall narrow tenement houses looking in on every side, rag and bone shops and a pawnbroker’s. Originally located below the line of the buildings, by 1839 the burial ground had risen to the same level as the first-floor windows of the adjoining houses. A plumber, called to put in a drain at the west end of the burial ground, was obliged to cut through the wall of one residence. When his crew took up the ground floor, a huge quantity of human bones were discovered, dragged there by the vast number of rats which overran the neighbourhood.

In
Bleak House,
Jo the crossing sweeper brings the tragic Lady Dedlock to the burial ground near ‘Tom All Alone’s’, so that she can locate the tomb of her dead lover:

By many devious ways, reeking with offence of many kinds, they came to the tunnel of a court and to the gas-lamp (now lighted) and to the iron gate.

‘That there berryin’ ground,’ said poor Jo, ‘they laid him out as was werry good to me. He was put there,’ says Jo, holding the bar and looking in.

‘Where? Oh, what a scene of horror!’

‘There,’ says Jo, pointing, ‘over yinder–among them piles of bones, and close to that there kitchen winder they put them werry nigh the top. They were obliged to stamp upon it to get it in. I could unkiver it for you with my broom if the gate was open; that’s why they locks it, I s’pose.’ Giving it a shake. ‘It’s always locked! Look at the rat! Hi! Look! There he goes! Ho! Into the ground.’
¹⁵

Believe it or not, the horrors of ‘Tom All Alone’s’ pale into insignificance compared with events at Enon Chapel. If name is destiny, there was definitely a clue to the Enon Chapel’s future when it was opened in April 1822. Ostensibly a reference to John the Baptist baptizing converts at Enon near Salim (John 3:23), Enon has a more sinister interpretation. According to Hitchcock’s
Bible Names Dictionary,
Enon means ‘cloud; eye;’ or, more ominously, ‘mass of darkness’. Enon Chapel was to be one of the most infamous exhibits in the case for reforming the burial laws.

Built over an open sewer which passed uncovered through the vault, Enon Chapel was located on the west side of Clement’s Lane, only yards away from one of the busiest streets in the world–the Strand. Access was through a gateway leading into a narrow and extremely dingy court, which opened out into Carey Street. It was surrounded by grim, dilapidated houses, crammed with the destitute.

Mr W. Howse, a Baptist minister, founded the chapel as a speculative venture. He opened the upper part for the worship of God, and devoted the lower to the burial of the dead. Worship there was a dangerous business; for members of the congregation frequently passed out–yet, because nobody guessed at the minister’s appalling secret, it never occurred to them that the cause of their sickness lay beneath a flimsy layer of floorboards, in the vault of the chapel.

In warm, damp weather, local residents were assaulted by a peculiarly disgusting smell. Occasionally, when a fire was lit in a nearby building, an intolerable stench arose, which did not originate from the drains. Vast numbers of rats infested the houses; and meat exposed to the atmosphere turned putrid after an hour or two.

Soon after burials in the chapel vaults, a peculiar long narrow black fly was seen crawling out of many coffins. This insect was followed a few months later by another, which looked like a common bug with wings. The unfortunate children attending Sunday School in the chapel above saw these insects crawling in vast numbers during the summer, and named them ‘body bugs’. The stench was frequently
intolerable. One eyewitness complained of a peculiar taste in his mouth during worship that had him retching into his handkerchief.

Although the precise sequence of events is uncertain, according to Walker the scandal of Enon Chapel was uncovered in 1839, when the Commissioners of Sewers decided that a new sewer had to be carried under the building. This involved covering up the open sewer in the vault. What they found was a charnel house. Mr Howse had succeeded in burying around twelve thousand bodies into a space measuring fifty-nine feet by twelve, at fifteen shillings a time. Called to the scene, Walker was appalled to find the vault crowded with corpses from floor to ceiling. Entered by a trap door, it was a ramshackle construction. The rafters supporting the floor of the chapel were not even covered with lath and plaster; only a thick wooden floor separated the living from the festering dead. Pits had been dug and vast numbers of bodies placed in them, covered only by a few inches of earth.