One response to the overcrowding of burial places was the removal of human remains to charnel houses or bone holes, sometimes known as ossuaries. There was an ossuary and chapel in the churchyard of Old St Paul’s; another was at St Bride’s on Fleet Street. Sometimes associated with them were endowed charnel-chapels where prayers were offered for the souls of the human remains interred there.
As early as the seventeenth century, John Evelyn (1620–1706), the famous diarist, expressed his concern that burials in London would eventually exceed the space available for interment and he proposed the creation of an extensive, purpose-built burial ground north of the City. Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723) advocated the building of a number of well-designed cemeteries around the periphery of London.
After the English Reformation, intermural burials became fashionable. Sometimes the burials were in family vaults. Headstones came into use in the sixteenth century and could be afforded by people of relatively humble social status. This drove many of those who were better off to emphasise their affluence by being buried inside the church. Intramural burial became virtually synonymous with social superiority. This in turn meant that not only was the churchyard overcrowded but the church as well. Sometimes recourse would be made to burial in vaults under the nave (the main body of the church). Enterprising clergymen used intramural burial as a source of income. At St Alphege in Greenwich, relatives paid for no fewer than 400 coffins to be placed in the rector’s vault between 1718 and 1800. At the church of St Peter le Poer in Broad Street EC2, which was demolished in 1907, the intramural burial fees in 1838 ranged from the most basic accommodation at £18 5s 6d to 100 guineas for a vault with accommodation for four. Further intramural burials were forbidden by national legislation in 1850.
English burial practices lagged well behind those employed on the Continent and they were put to shame when the vast landscaped and splendidly appointed Pere Lachaise Cemetery was opened outside Paris. Three grand schemes for London were proposed. The first was largely a copy of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery and included special provision against the depredations of the resurrectionists. This cemetery was to be in the Primrose Hill area. The second scheme was for a huge ‘Grand National Cemetery’ in the vicinity of either Primrose Hill or Shooters Hill. A major feature of this proposal was a series of grandiloquent buildings modelled on examples from ancient Greece and Rome, such as the Erectheum on the Athenian Acropolis. The allocation of burial space in this cemetery would have constituted a celebration of the class system: the centrepiece was to be a space reserved for the so-called great and good. Placed around them would have been a larger area given over to the burial of people of middling rank. The largest section of all, around the periphery, would have been devoted to those in humbler social positions. The third proposal was the most extraordinary. It envisaged an enormous pyramid, the top of which would have been higher than St Paul’s Cathedral. This was to be located in the Primrose Hill district and would have contained 5,167,104 alcoves in an enormous structure not unlike a honeycomb. It was believed that such a building would virtually eliminate issues of security and provide a dignified and hygienic solution to the question of how to dispose of the dead. This building which would have totally dominated the north London skyline was, of course, never built, nor indeed were the other two, but the fact that they were put forward as serious suggestions is evidence of the debate that was taking place on what was seen as an increasingly urgent matter.
A prominent critic of the existing situation was George Walker, a doctor with a surgery in Drury Lane, who systematically visited, observed and noted what he regarded as bad practice in London’s graveyards. In his district there were a number of grossly overcrowded burial grounds crammed in cheek-by-jowl with slum housing and small industrial premises. With the exception of Jewish and Quaker burial grounds, the Anglican, Nonconformist and private sites were overcrowded, unseemly and presented health hazards. Walker’s findings were published in 1839 in a book with the rather ponderous title: Gatherings from Grave-Yards, Particularly those of London with a concise History of the Modes of Interment among different Nations, from the earliest Periods; and a Detail of dangerous and fatal Results produced by the unwise and revolting Custom of inhuming the Dead in the midst of the Living. He recorded all manner of bad practices and laced his report with such horrors as:
In making a grave a body, partly decomposed, was dug up, and placed on the surface, at the side, slightly covered with earth; a mourner stepped upon it, the loosened skin peeled off, he slipped forward, and had nearly fallen into the grave.
Of a churchyard in Whitechapel, he wrote that ‘the ground is so densely crowded as to present one entire mass of human bones and putrefaction’. St Anne’s churchyard, Soho, was no better:
Here in this place of ‘Christian burial’, you may see human heads, covered with hair; and here, in this ‘consecrated ground’, are human bodies 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 grave diggers we saw … a child’s coffin, which had stopped the man’s progress, had been cut, longitudinally, right in half; and there lay the child … wrapped in its shroud, resting upon the part of the coffin which remained. The shroud was but little decayed.
For sheer unadulterated horror, nothing equalled what Walker found in the burial place beneath Enon Chapel in Clement’s Lane EC4, a private speculative venture set up in 1823. The burial chamber was separated from the chapel above only by floorboards. Walker graphically described repellent black flies living off the putrefaction of the bodies, which appeared in untold numbers in the summer during which the stench was simply intolerable. The children attending the Sunday school held in the chapel called them ‘body bugs’. Rats by the hundred infested the neighbourhood. There were rich pickings for them.
Walker and other critics spotlighted the activities of private speculative cemetery companies as being especially heinous. To attract business they undercut the burial charges of the parish churches. In doing so, they stooped to such dubious practices as using men to officiate at funerals who were not in holy orders, employing gravediggers who could only work when inebriated and placing bodies in graves so shallow that it was simple for thieves to steal the metal handles and lead components of coffins, to remove wood for sale as firewood, and worst of all, to remove bones which were ground down and used as fertilizer. In 1846 Walker published evidence that undertakers at the Spa Fields burial site in Clerkenwell clandestinely but regularly burnt corpses and coffins so as to free up more space for new interments.
For Walker, the solution was clear: what was needed was the total removal of the dead from the proximity of the living. In 1844 he established the Metropolitan Association for Abolition of Burials in Towns. No wonder he became known as ‘Graveyard Walker’.
Charles Dickens found a macabre source of interest in burial places. In Bleak House he has one of his characters, ‘Jo’, gazing appalled through the iron railings into a graveyard:
‘There!’ says Jo, pointing, ‘Over yinder, among them pile of bones, and close to that there kitchen winder! They put him very nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in … Look at that rat! Hi! Look! There he goes! Ho! Into the ground!’1
Provincial cities had led the way with the establishment of privately-funded cemeteries for those who could afford to pay; Liverpool had gained one in 1825 and Glasgow in 1832. In 1830 the London Cemetery Company was formed. The first result of its enterprises was the great cemetery at Kensal Green, founded in 1832, measuring 54 acres and then well outside the built-up parts of London. Its services were not cheap. A mausoleum could be secured for at least £1,000, a brick vault was available for £50 and even the most basic burial plot cost 30 shillings. What followed was a battle of architectural styles for funerary buildings which reflected the contemporary battle among those designing churches and public buildings between the advocates of what can loosely be described as the Greek Revival and the Goth
ic Revival styles. The Cemetery Company applied to the commemoration of the dead the same laissez-faire practice that prevailed in the world of economic and social policy. So the funerary architecture at Kensal Green is itself a monument to economic individualism as well as to stylistic eclecticism. Ecumenicalism was also evident at Kensal Green, not, it must be said, from motives of religious idealism, but out of a desire to maximise income by widening the potential clientele while restricting it to those who had the depth of pocket necessary to reserve a site. Some of the later private cemeteries provided burial plots at prices affordable to the less well-off. All may have been equal in the eyes of the Almighty, but inevitably social distinctions were honoured and there were clear demarcations between those parts given over to the burial of the commonality and the interment of those who had enjoyed greater material success in their lives.
The original plan for Kensal Green envisaged an exercise in medieval fantasy with a huge Gothic chapel, walls with towers and crenellations and even a working mock Gothic water gate. The intention was that funeral parties would be able to arrive at the cemetery on a branch of the Grand Junction Canal. Kensal Green became one of the sights of London and remains the sine qua non for those who are fans of Victorian funerary architecture.
The building of Kensal Green by no means eliminated the issue of how to bury London’s dead, a problem which intensified daily because of the growth of London’s population and also because of the mass deaths which occurred as a result of the outbreak of epidemic diseases through the 1830s and 1840s. Cholera was particularly prevalent and in 1832, for example, 196 bodies were interred in a burial ground opened up in Davenant Road, Whitechapel, after a localised but extremely virulent outbreak.
Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890), famous as the author of the ground-breaking Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, published in 1842, argued in a subsidiary report, ‘Interment in Towns’, that the disposal of the dead must not be left to private enterprise. He brought his usual thoroughgoing and meticulous scrutiny to bear on what developed into an examination of the whole issue of urban mortality, especially among the working class. He recorded many cases of corpses being kept unburied for ten days or a fortnight while the bereaved relations tried to scrape together the money for a funeral. Chadwick drew on the evidence of many witnesses, one of whom was an undertaker in the Blackfriars district. He described graphically the appalling health hazards that could occur where a cadaver was kept for some time in the one living room of a working-class hovel:
In cases of rapid decomposition of persons dying in full habit there is much liquid; and the coffin is tapped to let it out. I have known them to keep the corpse after the coffin has been tapped twice, which has, of course, produced a disagreeable effluvium. This liquid generated animal life very rapidly; and within six hours after a coffin has been tapped, if the liquid escapes, maggots … are seen crawling about. I have frequently seen them crawling about the floor of a room inhabited by the labouring classes, and about the tressels on which the tapped coffin is sustained. In such rooms the children are frequently left whilst the widow is out making arrangements connected with the funeral. And the widow herself lives there with the children. I frequently find them altogether in a small room with a large fire.
Another witness, an undertaker from Whitechapel, varies the theme:
When the corpse is uncovered, or the coffin is open, females will hang over it. A widow who hung over the body of her husband, caught the disease of which he died. The doctor told her she must have kissed or touched the body: she died, leaving seven orphans … A young man died not long since, and his body rapidly decomposed. His sister, a fine healthy girl, hung over the corpse and kissed it; in three weeks she died also.
While some of the conclusions of this undertaker might not be scientifically verifiable, Chadwick was clearly concerned not just with the physical but also the psychological effects of this ongoing close relationship between the living and the dead. He was perceptive enough to identify poverty as the main villain of the piece and as far as he was concerned, the prices of the services provided by undertakers were exorbitant and scandalous.
Chadwick’s proposed remedy was a radical one. He wanted central government to provide national cemeteries as part of a programme whereby the State would take responsibility for the nation’s dead from the deathbed until they were safely interred in their graves. His report dealt with the issue on a national scale but as far as London was concerned he argued that future burials in London should be in what he called ‘National Cemeteries’. An enlarged Kensal Green would become the ‘Great Western Metropolitan Cemetery’. This was very appropriate because it was just a stone’s throw from the Great Western Railway’s main line into and out of Paddington. A ‘Great Eastern Metropolitan Cemetery’ would be established at Abbey Wood, to the east of Woolwich. Access to this cemetery would be via the River Thames and Chadwick spoke airily about the building of a fleet of steamboats which would be able to transport up to ninety-six corpses a day to Abbey Wood. While Chadwick was respected for his hard work and undoubted integrity, he was disliked for his dogged persistence and because he could be extremely boring. He lived up to his reputation by bombarding all those in influential positions with letters or, when possible, personal harangues outlining the virtues and the minutiae of his scheme. Chadwick’s excessive zeal made his critics and enemies determined that he was not going to get his own way on this issue. They cited medical ‘experts’ who pointed out that if the proposals were to go through, the decomposing corpses buried at the Great Eastern Cemetery would produce over three million cubic feet of toxic gases or miasmas which could easily poison the inhabitants of London, so close by. A minimum of twenty-four miles from the metropolis was needed as a safety margin, they argued.
Chadwick’s scheme did not go ahead. Nevertheless, he was a powerful advocate of statism and the ‘force’ was with him, as they say. Private enterprise was under pressure because it had clearly failed to provide answers to the burial issue as well as to so many other aspects of public health or the ‘sanitary question’. Chadwick was a leading force behind the first Public Health Act which was passed in 1848. This provided for the creation of a central board of health with powers to create local boards up and down the country which would deal with public health issues in the areas under their jurisdiction. These issues included the disposal of the dead. Initially it was a permissive act. The act was not well-received and did not apply to London, extremely powerful vested interests seeing to that. Instead London was placed under the authority of the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers. For all that, the Public Health Act was immensely important as official recognition of the existence of social problems that could only be tackled through agencies of central government.
In 1849 London suffered a particularly severe visitation of cholera which only emphasised the inadequacy and inefficiency of existing methods of dealing with the dead in the metropolis. The state of burial places continued to be an issue and in 1850 the Metropolitan Interments Act was passed which gave the Board of Health powers to create new cemeteries, and to forbid further burials in churchyards which were full up. Remarkably, given the economic philosophy of the time, the Act had provision for the compulsory purchase of private cemeteries. In practice, the act was not very effective. Approaches were made to buy Brompton and Nunhead cemeteries but in the event only Brompton was purchased and therefore went on to have the distinction of being the only London cemetery to be owned by the State. Chadwick’s dreams lay shattered – he had ruffled too many feathers. In 1854 even the Board of Health lost its identity.
The problem of burying London’s dead did not go away just because Chadwick was put out to grass. Ironically, it was private enterprise that soon came forward with a scheme for an absolutely enormous cemetery to be built on a greenfield site at Brookwood near Woking in Surrey. In 1852 the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company bought the 2,000-acre site and planned, lai
d out and landscaped what to this day remains the largest cemetery in Britain. Most of those laid to rest at Brookwood were, at that time, from south and east London.
Also in 1852 what became known as the Metropolitan Burial Act was enacted. This abolished the Metropolitan Burial district and the responsibility of the General Board of Health for burial in London. Powers were instituted to prevent interment in any place in London where it was considered that such burials might be inimical to public health. No new burial ground could be opened in, or within two miles of, London without ministerial approval. Parishes could establish Burial Boards funded from the Poor Rate to buy land for use as cemeteries including unconsecrated ground for nonconformists. The City of London was given its own Burial Board and intramural burial was prohibited. A locally-devolved system of public cemeteries was put into place as opposed to the centralised system which Chadwick had so tirelessly advocated.
The Burial Boards soon got to work. The vestry of St Pancras was first off the mark and the result in 1854 was the purchase of a site at Finchley Common which in 1877 was extended to become the St Pancras and Islington Cemetery. This went on to become the largest of the Burial Board cemeteries in London. Shortly afterwards, also in 1854, the St Marylebone in East End Road, N3, the Westminster in Uxbridge Road were established, and the South Metropolitan Cemetery Company’s premises at Norwood were extended. In 1899 the Local Government Act created twenty-eight metropolitan borough councils under the umbrella of the London County Council and they took over responsibility for burials within the metropolis.
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