In January 1729, the London Journal reported on the premature burial of a milk woman’s daughter from Enfield. The report stated that
some people at the funeral thought she looked fresh, and taking a looking glass, and applying it to her lips, they fancied they perceived a dew on it as from breath, but the cruel mother mock’d and reviled them, and swore she should be buried, and so she was; but this coming to the ears of a near relation, he got the grave dug up, and the coffin open’d, when she was found with her knees drawn up, and the nosegay in her hand beaten to pieces with struggling for life. A surgeon was sent for to bleed her, but it was then too late.
A woman was nearly buried alive in the Church of St Giles Cripplegate. The case was mentioned in the 1870s by Henry Wilby, a medical writer who referred to it as an example of the possibility of premature burial. The woman fell into such a deep coma that she was believed to be dead and she was laid to rest in the church crypt. A devious sexton, who had designs on stealing her wedding ring, also inadvertently saved her life. At night he sneaked into the crypt and tried to remove her ring finger with a knife. The pain was so great that the woman screamed and caused the sexton to run away in terror. The woman managed to climb out of her coffin and stagger home. Her family must have thought they had really seen a ghost when she turned up on the doorstep. She lived for many more years and gave birth to four more children. Wilby offered this case in the genuine belief that it would alert people to the dangers of premature burial. There were so many apocryphal stories about such burials, however, that it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.
Fears of premature burials had been particularly rife in Germany and France and had generated many debates as well as a spate of devices for security coffins. In Britain the hysteria had not been as widespread, although by the early nineteenth century an increasing interest was aroused as literature and sensational accounts from Europe became available in English. Some of the more well-to-do sections of society started to make provisions against such a diabolical fate. One method was to delay burial and leave the deceased lying in their caskets for a period of time. The Duke of Wellington who died on 14 September 1852 was not buried until 18 November, two months after his death. Other methods of securing death and making sure that the body had no hope of reviving were particularly gruesome. Requests in wills were made to have the coffin filled with lime, or to have the head amputated or the throat cut. Elizabeth Thomas of Islington left instructions to her physician to pierce her heart with a long metal pin.
The combination of high death rates, growing morbid sensitivities, publications and the popularity of Gothic horror and ghost stories helped to fuel fears of premature burial. Elaborate methods were devised to prevent the possibility of being buried alive. A simple method of allaying premature burial anxiety was to place crowbars and shovels in the deceased’s caskets, the idea being that if they revived they could dig their way out. Another device involved a pipe that went through the ground and into the casket and could be used for emergency communications. Wealthy families even hired servants to wait by the pipes and listen for calls for help. Some also had coffins fitted with special nails that, when driven, punctured capsules of poison gas. It seems that the Victorians were preoccupied not only with the ritual of death but also with the state of death.
The most popular device by far, however, was the Bateson Revival Device. It was advertised as ‘a most economical, ingenious, and trust-worthy mechanism, superior to any other method, and promoting peace of mind amongst the bereaved in all stations of life. A device of proven efficacy, in countless instances in this country and abroad.’
George Bateson was a nineteenth-century inventor and his device consisted of an iron bell mounted on the lid of the casket just above the head of the body. The bell was connected to a cord through the coffin that was placed in the dead person’s hand in case of a last tremor of the ‘deceased’ which would then sound alarm. The ringing would also depend on some attentive gravedigger being sufficiently close to hear it and come to the rescue. There is no evidence or record that this device actually saved anyone’s life but at least it enjoyed enough sales for many years to earn Bateson a good financial return. Despite having a genuine fear of premature death, Bateson clearly distrusted his own invention because in his will he asked to be cremated. He became so obsessed with the fear of death that it was believed he was driven mad and subsequently committed suicide in 1886 by dousing himself with linseed oil and setting himself on fire in his workshop.
In 1896 Arthur Lovell, a spiritualist and quack, founded the London Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial. Its aims were to raise people’s awareness of the risks of premature burial, the scientific study of death and a commitment from the medical profession that no one would be buried alive. William Tebb and Walter Hadwen were leading members of the Society. Tebb had been a vocal opponent of vaccination which he put on a par with alcoholism, smoking and lust as among the most evil elements in society. In 1905 the Society began its journal, The Burial Reformer, which contained sensational stories of near-escapes from premature burials. Tebb claimed that he had found evidence of 219 cases of narrow escapes from premature burials, 149 actual instances and a dozen where people were either dissected or embalmed before they were dead. Circulation figures for The Burial Reformer have not been recorded but the Society managed to recruit two MPs into its ranks who attempted to push through an unsuccessful bill in 1908 to safeguard against premature burial. The Society started to decline after 1910 and in 1936 its few remaining members merged with the Council for the Disposition of the Dead.
The superstition and the fears of earlier societies had been dispelled by rationalists of a more enlightened age. However, responses to the slaughter in the First World War triggered, as Jay Winter writes in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995), a revival of traditional forms of expression. The revival of interest in spiritualism during and after the war was one such expression. Soldiers claimed to see the sightings of an angelic army at Mons and the purveyors of ‘psychic photography’ claimed to capture the spirits of dead soldiers hovering above the living. The return of apocalyptic and biblical themes were, it seems, a response to exceptionally traumatic events.
8
Death and Disaster
Many books have been written about the disasters and catastrophes that have affected London and carried off its citizens, sometimes in huge numbers. We cannot do justice to such events within the confines of a single chapter. We will not, for example, examine the impact of the Black Death or the Great Plague on London at any length. Instead this chapter deals with events that perhaps are less well-known, that offer features of particular interest or are peculiar in some way. In some cases, these disasters led to no more than a handful of deaths.
The worst storm in its history hit Britain on 26 and 27 November 1703. Its effects in London were described by Daniel Defoe, an awed but fascinated eye-witness. Ironically, this hurricane hit London when much of it had recently been rebuilt after the devastation caused by the Great Fire. The decision had been made to employ less flammable materials in the rebuilding but it seems that much of the work was rushed and bodged. In addition, many of the new buildings were taller than their predecessors which may have channelled the wind and increased its turbulence. Massive amounts of structural damage occurred. Chimney stacks crashed into the streets or through roofs into houses, whole buildings collapsed, tiles flew in all directions, sometimes embedding themselves deeply in whatever was in the way, lead from church roofs curled up like rolls of carpet and was flung long distances and spires and pinnacles tumbled, smashing to smithereens in the streets.
Death was unpredictable and capricious in its choice of victims. A watchman going about his business in Ratcliff Highway was crushed by a falling chimney. A successful businessman died when part of his house in Hackney collapsed. Two children were fatally injured by collapsing masonry in Whitehall. There were some miraculous escapes, however. A child was killed
in its cot only a few feet away from its parents’ bed; they survived physically unscathed. A serving maid was injured seriously but survived to be rescued because some rafters had arrested the fall of a chimney stack. Around 8,000 people died in England, but the exact number of fatalities in London is not known. It may have been the surprisingly low figure of about twenty in the built-up area. Defoe estimated that more than twenty died on and around the River Thames, particularly in the Pool of London where vast numbers of ships were reduced to matchwood. Some houses and shops were looted and some voyeurs walked the streets to ogle at others’ misfortunes, but within days it was ‘business as normal’ in London. This seems to have been a leitmotif of the way Londoners have coped with death.
Oliver Cromwell’s head was possibly another of the victims of the ‘Great Storm’. In July 1661, the bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw and Ireton – regarded as the most culpable regicides – were exhumed, hanged at Tyburn and buried there. Their heads were parboiled and then impaled on poles on the top of Westminster Hall. The story, which may well be apocryphal, goes that Cromwell’s head was still there in 1703. It apparently blew down in the storm and fell into the street where it was found by a sentry. Although time is unlikely to have been kind to the head, the sentry presumably knew what it was and decided to take it away and hide it; perhaps he thought it had some value, or less likely, that he might find a use for it some time. When he died, his wife sold it to a collector of curios and its subsequent fate and exact whereabouts constituted a conundrum for many years. The current consensus is that it is interred in the wall of Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge.
The River Thames used to freeze over with some frequency in the days when it was wider and more sluggish, partly because its flow was impeded by the piers of Old London Bridge. When they could, Londoners in huge number used to venture onto the ice where innumerable ‘Frost Fairs’ were held on the frozen river. Everyday activities took on a new and novel aspect when they could be carried on from the middle of the river. In 1564, for example, a football match was played on the ice. In 1608 booths for business and pleasure were set up, and in 1683 a row of shops was erected which included a printing press enjoying a ready sale for novelty items produced on the river. The last great Frost Fair was in the winter of 1813–14. For sixteen continuous days a solid mass of ice blocked the Thames from Blackfriars to London Bridge. Sheep were roasted in mid-stream and sold in slices promoted as ‘Lapland Mutton’. The thaw arrived unexpectedly and huge pieces of ice broke away carrying stalls, swings, traders and revellers with them. Many of them drowned.
Risks are inherent in going into frozen water and over the centuries, a considerable toll has been taken in the lives of the foolhardy, the stupid or the simply unlucky. Cold snaps also took a regular, if less spectacular, toll of London’s poorer and more vulnerable citizenry who starved when food supplies of fish and grain stopped because ships were unable to use the river. Others simply froze to death when supplies of seacoal were interrupted. Many employers temporarily shut their businesses and laid their workers off. This caused enormous privation and led to illness, starvation and death.
Over the centuries, Old London Bridge was the scene of large numbers of fatalities. Fire was a constant hazard. In either 1212 or 1213, the records being unclear, a fire broke out in Southwark. Londoners have always been keen on free entertainment and when the southern portion of the bridge caught fire, sizeable crowds came onto the northern or City end of the bridge anticipating a conflagration that they would be able to tell their grandchildren about. They approached as near as they dared when to their horror the buildings at their end also ignited, possibly because of sparks. Caught between a flaming Scylla and an equally fiery Charybdis, many panicked and squeezed into the openings between the houses, leaping into the river or attempting to climb into the boats which rushed to their assistance. Some of the boats were simply overwhelmed by the numbers and capsized. Many of their occupants and those who had dived into the river were swept to their death in the fierce currents. The number of fatalities is not known but is likely to have run into several hundreds.
In 1450, during Cade’s Rebellion, London Bridge was at the centre of desperate hand-to-hand fighting during which the insurgents, who were mostly from Kent, attempted to capture the bridge in order to gain access to the City. The defenders controlled a drawbridge which was part of the structure and so the rebels set fire to the houses on the bridge in an attempt to force the defenders to retreat. Unfortunately, many of the occupants were in the houses sheltering from the fighting. Substantial numbers were either immolated or drowned when they leapt off the bridge.
In 1632 a maidservant had an accident with a bucket of hot ashes in one of the houses at the northern end of the bridge. The bridge burnt merrily away for a couple of days although fortunately on this occasion there seems to have been little loss of life.
The piers of Old London Bridge were protected by large timber starlings, or cutwaters. These had the effect of channelling the current through the arches of the bridge with considerable force and making the passage of the bridge not unlike the shooting of a weir. Great skill was required by the Thames watermen to navigate these openings successfully, particularly when the tide was turning. Circumspect passengers, and they included Cardinal Wolsey and Doctor Johnson, were content to disembark on one side of the bridge and resume their journey on the other. The watermen, of course, had little option but to shoot the bridge and over the years large numbers of them paid the ultimate price. When he was Secretary of the Navy in the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys did not want to be seen to be a sissy and on his journeys to and from Westminster and Greenwich he always shot the bridge, but never without his heart in his mouth. Hazards like white water attract hotheads and there were many occasions on which men, mostly young and sometimes the worse for drink, ordered the watermen to shoot the bridge. Passengers and watermen often died as a consequence of this foolhardiness.
In 1641 Queen Henrietta Maria’s barge was passing under London Bridge when it hit an obstruction and capsized. All on board were saved with one exception. This was Anne Kirke who was Woman of the Bedchamber to the Queen. Anne seems to have been liked by all who knew her and her death was commemorated in verse. The prestigious position she held also meant that she was one of the very few people who died shooting Old London Bridge who also had her likeness reproduced in a portrait.
In 1689 John Temple committed suicide under the bridge. He owed the important public posts he held to nepotism. There was, of course, nothing unusual about this but being of a sensitive nature he had become seriously depressed after badly fouling up one after another of the various duties he was entrusted with. He ordered the waterman to shoot the bridge and when the boat reached the roaring cataract he jumped overboard and immediately sank out of sight. This is not surprising because he had filled his pockets with stones.
Not all of those who died at Old London Bridge necessarily drowned. In 1762 records tell of a man who was crossing when he was killed by a brickbat accidentally dislodged from a house on the bridge that was being demolished. The carriageway across the bridge was narrow before all the houses and other buildings were removed and in 1758 a woman and her child were crushed to death by passing traffic. Apparently this was by no means the first time that fatalities of this sort had occurred. The building of the replacement for Old London Bridge was started in 1824 and completed behind schedule in 1831. Forty men either drowned or were killed some other way during its construction.
The winter of 1866–7 was exceptionally cold. Once again, appalling hardship including starvation was experienced by many and looting and bread riots broke out in the most deprived areas of London’s East End and Dockland. Others saw the extreme weather conditions as a chance for fun and games: thousands headed to London’s parks to skate on their lakes and ponds. On 15 January 1867, despite warnings posted in Regent’s Park telling people not to go on the ice, hundreds ignored them. With a sudden loud crack, the ice broke
and many of them were precipitated into the water. There was little that attendants or the horrified onlookers could do because the lake was deep at that time. Forty drowned or died from the cold.
The Savoy Palace was a huge mansion originally built in the thirteenth century close to the Strand and constantly updated and improved until it became a hospital for the poor in 1505. It suffered many vicissitudes until the site was cleared around 1820. All that now remains is the Savoy Chapel. The Palace belonged to the widely hated John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (1340–99) and was attacked by Wat Tyler’s supporters during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. Many of its valuables were destroyed or thrown into the Thames, but random looting was not allowed. Thirty-two men who eagerly helped themselves to the Duke’s wine were trapped in the cellars and left to die of starvation as a punishment.
In 1780 London was racked by the Gordon Riots. They lasted about a week and the ostensible cause was a protest against measures that Parliament was taking towards partial emancipation of the Catholic population. As can happen with riots that occur over such a long period, many who took part had either forgotten what the riots were about, or in some cases neither knew nor cared anyway. For some, rioting was little more than an excuse to embark on an orgy of destruction and looting, for others it was a form of entertainment. Among the places that were attacked and set on fire was Langdale’s Distillery in Holborn. Some rioters broached the casks and simply drank themselves into permanent oblivion with their mouths at the bungholes. Others lay in the gutters and lapped up the gin as it coursed down the nearby streets, in some cases consuming so much that they never woke up. More horrible was the fate experienced by those who drank themselves into near-insensibility in the gutters but were still conscious enough to experience the agonies of immolation when they were overwhelmed by streams of burning gin.
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