I must point out that as the excavations are now well under way, time is of the utmost essence.
Yours,
Prof. Margaret Winn, UCH London
—
To: Professor Margaret Winn
From: Dr Marcus Hemming, Wellcome Institute
Dear Prof. Winn,
This is very worrying news. I can’t provide absolute proof of what you want, but I can at least tell you what I know. To begin with, nobody has actually identified the Great Plague as definitely stemming from the bubonic bacillus. This was always assumed to be the case because the disease was thought to have originated in the Netherlands, from Dutch trading ships carrying infected bales of cotton. Bubonic plague is so-called because it causes swelling of the lymph ducts into ‘buboes’.
The first areas affected in London were down by the docks. It was assumed that the plague was carried in miasma—poisoned air—and most London dignitaries beat a hasty retreat to the countryside, leaving their subjects to fend for themselves. The Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, remained, but carried out his duties inside a specially constructed glass box. We now know that the disease was spread not by air but by blood.
The dead were buried beyond the city walls, one of the largest plague pits being situated in the so-called ‘Dead Ground’ at the Priory Hospital of the Blessed Virgin Mary Without Bishopsgate, known as ‘St Mary Spital’. Burial here stopped when it was discovered that the plague bodies were being placed on corpses from earlier graves, and there was a fear that this denseness of humanity under the ground might cause a return of the contagion. It was a long-held belief that sheer weight of numbers could somehow cause diseases to multiply even among the dead. If the site at Blackheath had previously been used to bury the sick, it could well have been exposed and used again for plague victims—but why carry corpses across the river for burial?
The number of deaths in South London was quite small, so if, as you say, a sizeable percentage of the dead ended up at Blackheath, a proportion must have been moved from the north side of the Thames. Bodies were only shifted after dark—it was commonly said ‘Grief by day, death by night’—and the journey would have required a great number of carts. But if the sites at St Mary, Charterhouse and St Botolph were full, the City officials may well have hired private contractors to rid themselves of the diseased under cover of darkness. I must say it has always struck me as odd that so many bodies could be placed in just three main sites, and I have wondered before whether alternative arrangements were made for their disposal without public knowledge.
I don’t suppose the nature of the site at Blackheath was pointed out on any maps of the time. The area grew extremely wealthy during the time of the slave trade, and it would have made the building of local property undesirable.
If this was indeed the case, and this Mr Whitby hired men to transport the dead to his pits, I start to share your concern, because the water table at Blackheath is surprisingly high given its elevation, and the preservation of the bodies requires two main factors, dampness and pressure (to create a vacuum). With both of these requirements being met, it starts to seem foolhardy to simply break open deep ground without expert advice.
There is something else that I am more loath to mention, simply because it seems so damned peculiar. Two centuries after the Great Fire eradicated the plague (actually the plague burned itself by killing off everyone in London with weak immunity—the fire merely acted as a cleanser) the Victorians hired a team of Romanian boys to dig up the bodies at Charthouse. They chose Romanians because this race was thought to be naturally immune to plague; their nation had no history of coming into contact with the pandemic. When the pit was opened and examined, Queen Victoria’s royal physician was summoned, and ordered the immediate resealing of the enclosure, but no official reason was ever provided for this act.
I’ve always wondered if he saw something there that disturbed him, something he could not make known to the general public.
I’m not in a position to make any further investigation into this subject, as you know. But I think you should continue to be concerned—for all our sakes. Do let me know how you get on.
Best,
Marcus
—
To: Michael Brooks
Site Manager, New Festival of Britain Project
From: Prof. Margaret Winn, UCH London
Dear Mr Brooks,
I have tried repeatedly to contact you by phone about the excavation of this site (to the east of All Hallows Church) without success. I understand you were offered the services of an epidemiologist who could advise you about the safe removal of any human remains you might uncover in the ground. Apparently you turned him down and continued digging prior to receiving EEC health & safety clearance. If this is the case, might I enquire on whose authority you made this decision?
—
To: Prof. M Winn
From: M Brooks
Site Manager, NFOB Construction Ltd.
Dear Ms Winn,
If you have any objection to this company’s code of practice, may I suggest you take it up with the Home Office, as they granted us permission to continue with the excavation in order to meet the construction deadline set out by the Home Secretary.
Yours etc
M Brooks
—
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Marek Schwarinski
Prof. Margaret Winn, UCH Health Advisor
WINN:
Could you state your name and position please?
SCHWARINSKI:
Marek Schwarinski, excavation worker, NFOB.
WINN:
This is the planned site of the New Festival of Britain.
SCHWARINSKI:
That is correct.
WINN:
Can you tell me what you saw at the site last—
SCHWARINSKI:
Thursday. We was digging out part of the site known as Quadrant 3—we’re divided into teams to work on different quadrants—
WINN:
And yours is where the lift shafts will be?
SCHWARINSKI:
Yeah, that’s right. We’re down about twenty-three feet and the going suddenly gets much easier. The ground is softer, like. There’s a lot of water down there, and we’ve got pumps in to drain it, so I’m thinking maybe we’ve hit an underground river, but there’s nothing marked on any of the site maps. I talked to the lads, but they couldn’t see nothing.
WINN:
What did you do?
SCHWARINSKI:
Got out of my digger to take a look. The ground under my boots was really soft and wet, it’s deep brown clay, and—this was like a horror film, this bit—I see what looks like a bundle of squashed rags pressed into the soil, so I turn over the nearest bit with my foot. And it’s a face. But really squashed, like, and the eyes was gone, but definitely a face, even with some wispy bits of hair on the skull. A girl I think.
WINN:
That must have been a shock.
SCHWARINSKI:
You see all kinds of shit on this job but yeah, I bricked it. Now, we’d leveled out a good sixty square feet of soil at this depth, so I had a look across the area, and there’s more of these brown lumps. It’s wall-to-wall bodies, crushed in together, head to toe.
WINN:
What did you do then?
SCHWARINSKI:
I went to see Mike, the site manager, and told him what I’d seen.
WINN:
And what did he say?
SCHWARINSKI:
He told me to keep digging.
WINN:
He didn’t suggest that you should stop work until an expert arrived?
SCHWARINSKI:
No, nothing like that. He told me not to say anything to the other workers.
WINN:
You didn’t think of removing the bodies and setting them to one side?
SCHWARINSKI:
It ain’t my job to do that. I only do what the site manager tells me.
How long did it take you to clear the site?
SCHWARINSKI:
About three days, ’cause it was just me and two other blokes. The rest was taken off to another quadrant. When we got to the next level—
WINN:
How deep was that?
SCHWARINSKI:
About another ten feet—when we got there, the bodies stopped appearing and the soil was just clay again.
WINN:
What did you do with the corpses you’d found?
SCHWARINSKI:
They got dumped in with the rest of the outfill.
WINN:
They didn’t go into special containers?
SCHWARINSKI:
No, nothing like that.
WINN:
And what happens to the outfill?
SCHWARINSKI:
It gets taken to the Thames estuary and dumped in the water. There’s a land project going on down there, a lot of building.
WINN:
Did everything get dumped?
SCHWARINSKI:
No, there was some stuff—
WINN:
Stuff?
SCHWARINSKI:
Bodies. The most complete bodies. They got removed and taken to a skip at the back of the church.
WINN:
Who decided to do that?
SCHWARINSKI:
I don’t know.
WINN:
How many bodies were there, would you say?
SCHWARINSKI:
A couple of dozen, maybe. They was all covered in mud, so it was hard to tell. The rest of the stuff, well, it was all mashed together, so it was hard to tell what all the bits were. I mean, there wasn’t nothing worth saving. No valuables or nothing.
WINN:
They were incomplete bodies. So the complete ones were removed. Do you know what happened to them?
SCHWARINSKI:
No. When we came back to work the next day, the skip was gone.
WINN:
Did Mr Brooks tell you not to speak about this?
SCHWARINSKI:
No, not really. He just said there used to be a graveyard there—a long time ago, like, and the land got built up over the years—he said it wasn’t anything to worry about, but it’s been bothering me, like. And then when you turned up—
WINN:
Mr Schwarinski, thank you.
—
From: Dr Daniel Thompson, Dept Head, UCH London
To: Professor Margaret Winn, UCH London
Dear Prof. Winn,
I have received a letter of complaint from a Mr Michael Brooks, the Site Manager employed by the construction company of the New Festival of Britain, saying that you have been entering his site without permission, and have attempted to conduct interviews with the excavation crew. Apparently you’ve been citing the health concerns of this hospital, and have made all sorts of wild accusations about what might happen should the construction workers find human remains while they’re digging. You’ve upset them so much that several members of their workforce have threatened to seek union representation over what they now see as breaches in the Health & Safety laws.
May I remind you that you are technically an employee of this hospital, and that your actions must be made justifiable to our board of governors? There are proper channels for this kind of complaint. If you need advice about how to handle the situation, please come to see me and we can discuss the matter in private. I have no doubt that your intentions were for the best, but next time please talk to me first, before acting rashly and endangering a massive public project which—I’m sure I have no need to remind you—is of primary importance to the survival of this government and to the spirit of the nation.
Daniel Thompson
—
Letter sent to: Dr James MacMillan, Royal Archaeological Institute
Dear James,
I can’t believe you’re still not on email, although given what’s been going on lately, maybe it’s a good idea that you don’t keep a record of our conversation.
Since we spoke on the phone, my office has been ransacked and someone has broken into my car. Luckily, the most important files pertaining to this situation were not in my briefcase at the time. I actually had them with me. You know why I’m pursuing this, but I must admit that so far all I have is proof that Health and Safety regulations were breached.
However, you can help me on a related but slightly different matter. Are you aware that an architect called Thomas Moreby was responsible for constructing the crypt and undercroft of All Hallows Church?
I need to know about this because Moreby was a man of strange beliefs—he thought the body lived on after death, that it was somehow inhabited by the spirits of those who had died of the plague—and that these undead beings would rise again if ‘expos’d to pure humours’. In other words, if they were disinterred and exposed to fresh air. We have a situation where plague victims have been removed from a pit and—well, I can’t tell you what happened to them, as nobody seems to know—I just wondered if you had come across any of Moreby’s architectural writings?
I’m dropping this off at your house, but perhaps you could call me when you get this.
Ever,
Margaret
—
Dear Margaret,
Forgive the scribble, and yes, I’m sorry about the lack of email but perhaps it’s for the best in this case. I tried calling you but got your machine—hate the bloody things. To answer your question, Thomas Moreby did indeed allow his beliefs to affect his buildings. His convictions concerning resurrection can readily be seen in outlines for a City of London crypt (thankfully never constructed) which could be opened from the inside by its ‘inhabitants’. He died in Bedlam, although it’s rather hard to work out if he was mad or whether he just annoyed the wrong people.
Moreby believed that the newly revived would inherit the earth because, despite having been inhabited by the contagious dead, they would have purer souls (having seen the Other Side, I presume). Quite where he got this belief system is a mystery, although I detect the influence of Hawksmoor in his Pagan outlook. According to a colleague of mine, he left instructions in his personal effects to build such a crypt for himself beneath All Hallows Church, but I suppose you already know that. I assume the idea was that when the time came, he would be resurrected along with his fellow ‘pure souls’.
In his handwritten notes to the publisher of Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe—a dreadful writer, of course, but an invaluable witness to history—points out that there were a great many strange beliefs among the survivors of the Great Plague and Great Fire of London. It’s hardly surprising, given the circumstances. What’s particularly interesting is that Moreby was also a closet Catholic with some highly influential friends in Parliament. A conspiracy theorist would no doubt start to feel uneasy here. If, as you say, the remains of the burial victims were secretly removed (for a second time!) under the instructions of the Committee for the New Festival of Britain project and interred inside Moreby’s crypt, it would suggest they were working within the guidelines set out by the Catholic church.
All Hallows is Church of England now, but the earliest building was not. Therefore, it’s not such a wild surmise to guess that Moreby’s crypt (if it still exists) has recently been opened and filled with the intact bodies of plague victims according to longstanding instructions lodged with the church. History has taught us that state and church are willing to collude openly when circumstances prove mutually beneficial. In this case, the government gets to expedite its plans for a feel-good event to improve national morale, and the church gets to keep taxes accruing from the property owned by Moreby which is still held in trust by the Duke of Leicester. Everybody wins.
This is of great academic interest, but hardly any help to you if what you most want to prove is that the health of ordinary citizens has been compromised by the exhumation.
Sorry not to be of more help. If there’s
anything else I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Best,
James
—
To: Janet Ramsey, Head of Current Affairs, Hard News
From: Prof. Margaret Winn, UCH London
Dear Janet,
Congratulations on your promotion. I hear the paper is going from strength to strength. I know you are no fan of the PM, and have a story lead for you that you may find interesting. There’s a health scandal brewing over the Home Secretary’s decision to waive public safety rules on the construction of the new Festival buildings. I didn’t want to drop the details in this email, so I’ve mailed them to you under separate cover. When you get the envelope you’ll find a number of interview transcripts I’ve recorded with the concerned parties. I have used false names in the document to protect their identities, as they would be at risk of losing their jobs should their views be made known. And in the current climate, who knows how long their opinions would stay on security files?
I also spoke to a friend of mine at the Royal Archaeological Institute, and it seems likely that the NFOB site managers removed bodies from the site and reinterred them under longstanding Papal instructions. What intrigues me most is that all of this information is on public file and readily available. It’s just that no-one has bothered to fit it all together. Do you remember a time when we used to have proper investigative journalism in this country? The great hacks of the past all seem to have been replaced by celebrity children writing about shoes, restaurants and handbags. God, it’s depressing.
I spoke to my superior here at the hospital, but he is a welcome caller at Downing Street and has basically warned me to leave the matter alone. I have spent eighteen years fighting ignorance and spin in matters of public health—my feelings about political interference are no secret, God knows—and I am damned if I’ll stand by while risks of this magnitude are taken, simply to make the nation feel good about itself again.
Red Gloves, Volumes I & II Page 4