The ‘first principal’ timber staging erected by contractors, the Butterly Company, to enable them to construct the roof of what was to be William Henry Barlow’s record-breaking space – St Pancreas station. It was to be a record that would hold for the next twenty years. The day work rate for men working on the job as laid down by the Midland Railway in the contract was – per day of ten hours – labourers 5s 2½d, plumbers 8s 4d, slaters 7s 11d. Whilst the roof was spectacular with more than 2½ acres of glass, the interior was initially quite rudimentary with simple raised platforms either side of numerous lines of rails.
Old St Pancras Church was a venerable antiquity dating back to around AD 600. It is believed to be possibly the earliest site of Christian worship and burial. It had had a chequered, and sometimes beleaguered, history – and it was about to have so again, thanks to the Midland. Writing in 1854, social researcher George Godwin, when addressing ‘the graveyard question’ (which had by that time been debated for a number of years), wrote:
The appearance presented by the ground of Old St. Pancras’ parish is very extraordinary … An account of the number of bodies here deposited would startle the most apathetic. St. Pancras’ ground is truly a distressing sight. The stones – an assembly of reproachful spirits – are falling all ways; the outbuildings put up on its confines are rent, and the paved pathways are everywhere disrupted, such is the loose and quaking state of the whole mass. The practice of pit-burial is still continued in this ground. When we were there last, we found a hole with six coffins in it, waiting its complement of about double that number!10
Not long after this the Act which prohibited any further interments in churchyards within towns and cities came into force.
Less than a decade later the Midland swept into town. ‘For its passenger station alone it swept away a church and seven streets of three thousand houses,’ wrote Frederick Williams in his History of the Midland Railway: A Narrative of Modern Enterprise. (Now it is thought to be more like 4,000 houses.) ‘Old St Pancras churchyard was invaded, and Agar Town almost demolished.’11
The Midland held that they displaced just 1,180 ‘labouring persons’. A more realistic number is believed to be around 32,000.12 There is no doubt that Somers Town was a ‘mean neighbourhood’, nor that Agar Town was a truly dreadful, unwholesome place, as Williams describes, ‘… mountains of refuse from the Metropolitan dust-bins, strewn with decaying vegetables and foul-smelling fragments of what had once been fish, or occupied by knackers’ yards and manure-making, bone-boiling, and soap manufacturing works, and smoke-belching potteries and brick-kilns …’ Those that lived there were held to be the poorest of the poor and, therefore, by social definition of the time, the lowest of the low. It has to be remembered that, for these desperate people, this place was their home, and yet for an extra sum of £200 (on top of the original £19,500) paid by the Midland to the owner of the land – for the convenience of not having to deal with the individuals themselves – the slums were totally cleared; the people, being weekly tenants and with no rights in law, were cast out without any compensation.
‘Scorched earth’– in order to make way for the new, first they had to do away with the old. To create St Pancras Station, seven streets of houses and thousands of homes were swept away and Agar Town almost completely demolished. A general view of the clearance with gas works at the side.
A fascinating research paper by Steven Swensen, ‘Mapping Poverty in Agar Town’, shows that not all were ‘vagrants’ or unemployed, as was often inferred. Amongst the 477 occupations identified for those displaced, were many respectable crafts, tradesmen and women, and, ironically, several categories of those in employment on the railways – railway clerk, railway office-man, railway labourer, railway lamplighter, railway porter, railway lamp maker, railway foreman, railway engineer (driver), railway guard and railway police constable amongst them. W.M. Thomas, writing in Household Words in March 1851, confirms this, stating that Agar Town ‘is close to the terminus of one of the great trunk railways, where a large number of men, officers of the company and labourers are employed.’
This depiction from the Illustrated London News shows work for the Midland railway terminus in the churchyard of Old St Pancras Church. One can see the hoardings which were supposed to conceal the distasteful work of removing the coffins, from passers-by. On the left, men are working on a raised temporary platform of wooden scaffolding which serves as a roadway for the conveyance of the materials to construct the bridge, so that no carts or barrows will make their way among the graves. Frederick Williams (1876) writes of the business, ‘On every hand were huge mounds of earth; heaps of burning clay; the fragments of streets; and labourers digging in holes below the level of the earth intent on something; but what that something was, no-one could divine.’
Whilst the living were easily dispensed with, the dead required a different approach. Once the Midland set to work they discovered a great many bodies needed to be moved out of the burial ground. Special procedures were, supposedly, set in motion. Application had to be made to the solicitors and the engineer of the company, and all work was stopped until an Order could be obtained for the proper removal of the remains. Despite these special procedures, terrible things had already happened in graveyards in London.
Where there was a need to ‘unbury’ the dead, it was the usual practice ‘to place a person in authority there, of some position, education, and feeling, in order to prevent unnecessary violence to the feelings of the living by the unnecessary disturbance of the remains of the dead.’13 In London, when the railways had obtained ‘a faculty for making cuttings through city churchyards’, it was the Bishop of London who was responsible for overseeing the decent reburying of the dead. In this instance, however, the Bishop passed it to the architect, Mr (later Sir) Arthur Blomfield. We know something of the nature of this, and what had happened at St Pancras through the writings of novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, in the work The Life of Thomas Hardy.14 Hardy, who had originally intended to be an architect, was living in London, and working as an assistant at Blomfield’s well-known and respected firm. Hardy writes that Blomfield confided in him about his concerns relating to how a railway company had previously ‘got over him somehow’ when ‘cutting through a graveyard’. Despite being told that all the bodies removed had been reinterred he said, ‘there appeared to be nothing deposited. The surface of the ground lying quite level as before.’ Blomfield confessed that he had also heard rumours of ‘mysterious bags’ being full of ‘something that rattled’, and of visits or ‘cartage to bone-mills’. ‘I believe these people are all ground up’ he told Hardy.
It was not the only time that a railway had cut its way through a cemetery with dire consequences. Years earlier, in 1844, Frederick Engels wrote:
In Manchester there is a pauper burial ground in the Old Town on the other side of the Irk. This too is a desolate piece of waste ground. About two years ago a railroad was carried through it. If it had been a respectable cemetery, how the bourgeoisie and the clergy would have shrieked over the desecration! But it was a pauper burial-ground, the resting-place of the outcast and superfluous, so no one concerned himself about the matter. It was not even thought worthwhile to convey the partially decayed bodies to the other side of the cemetery; they were heaped up just as it happened, and piles were driven into newly-made graves, so that the water oozed out of the swampy ground, pregnant with putrefying matter, and filled the neighbourhood with the most revolting and injurious gases. The disgusting brutality which accompanied this work I cannot describe in further detail.
That graveyard was called Walker’s Croft, and it served the large and much used Manchester Workhouse (built 1792) in nearby New Bridge Street. Engels writes of the workhouse and the graveyard as viewed from a nearby Dulcie bridge:
The background is furnished by old barrack-like factory buildings. On the lower right bank stands a long row of houses and mills; the second house being a ruin without a roof, piled with débris; the t
hird stands so low that the lowest floor is uninhabitable, and therefore without windows or doors. Here the background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool and Leeds railway, [actually the Manchester and Leeds]and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse, the ‘Poor-Law Bastille’ of Manchester, which, like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon the working-people’s quarter below.
The cemetery was originally a close, called Walker’s Croft, part of which had been used as a playing field by the Free Grammar School.15 It was sold, by the charity’s trustees, to ‘the churchwardens of Manchester’.16 Walker’s Croft was consecrated and in use from 1815. It was bought to replace the ‘New Burial Ground’ which had been used for ‘interring poor persons having no family place of burial.’ This had become completely full and was closed in 1816. 17 It is often written that many of those buried in Walker’s Croft are known to have been victims of the cholera epidemic that hit Manchester in 1832, however, records show that the year in which the high numbers of burials excited a separate entry was, in fact, 1830 – the year a typhus epidemic came again to Manchester.18
From 16th of January 1815 (the date of consecration) to 26th of February, 1835
19,950
From 28th February, 1830 to Oct. 31st 1830
8,352
From Nov.1st 1835 to February 22, 1839
4,944
Total
33,246 19
Walker’s Croft burial ground was purchased in 1839, by business magnate Samuel Brooks for the Manchester & Leeds Railway – the chief constituent of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway (incorporated in 1847). The station was completed five years later. Manchester Victoria Station was designed by George Stephenson and, when it opened in 1844, it consisted of one long single storey building alongside a platform with a single line bay at each end. ‘For the next sixty years it underwent a continual process of enlargement.’20 It is now believed that a considerable part of the cemetery lies under the existing Platform 2.
In London Arthur Blomfield had learnt his lesson. He was determined nothing dreadful would happen again. So, despite the raised voices of locals in opposition to this ‘desecration’, and questions raised in Parliament regarding the sanctity of the dead, when the Midland Railway decided to cut through the churchyard and that of its neighbour, St Giles, an action that would require ‘the removal of many hundreds of coffins and bones in huge quantities’, he set up a system of ‘superintendence’ that could not be ‘got over’. He set a clerk-of-works in the churchyard, who was to never leave during working hours. As the removals were effected by night and in case the clerk-of-works might be lax or late, he deputised Hardy to go on evenings at uncertain hours, to see that the clerk-of-works was performing his duties. In addition, Blomfield himself was to drop in at unexpected moments during the week.21
Manchester Victoria Station is built upon ‘a pauper burial-ground, the resting-place of the outcast and superfluous’, to use Frederick Engels’ description. Built originally for the Manchester & Leeds Railway (which was chief constituent of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, incorporated in 1847), one can see the simple 1844 station. The two maps highlight the extensive development over the years.
Hardy attended the graveyard between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. each evening, as well as at other ‘uncertain hours’. There, after nightfall, by the light of flare lamps, and protected by high hoardings that served to hide the grisly proceedings from passers-by, Hardy watched as the exhumations went on and on. Those coffins that held together were carried to the new ground ‘on a board merely’, whilst new coffins were provided ‘for those that came apart in lifting, and for loose skeletons’. It was macabre work indeed. Hardy recalled how, when one coffin fell apart, they found one skeleton but two heads, and that ‘the man at St Pancras with two heads’ remained a joke between Blomfield and himself even after he had left London and gone home to Dorset to write.
It was well-known that many ‘foreigners’ were buried in the old graveyards, some of high-ranking status, and another ‘black’ episode is recorded, telling how they found:
… the corpse of a high dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church in France. Orders were received for the transshipment of the remains to his native land, and the delicate work of exhuming the corpse was entrusted to some clever gravediggers. On opening the ground they were surprised to find the bones, not of one man, but of several. Three skulls and three sets of bones were yielded up by the soil in which they had lain mouldering. The difficulty was how to identify the bones of a French ecclesiastic amid so many. After much discussion, the shrewdest of the gravediggers suggested that, as he was a foreigner, the darkest-coloured skull must be his. Acting upon this idea, the blackest bones were sorted and put together, until the requisite number of lefts and rights were obtained. These were reverently screwed up in a new coffin, conveyed to France, and buried again with all the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of the Roman Catholic Church.22
This ecclesiastic was not the only notable person buried there. The Dublin Evening Mail tells of, ‘A host of British and Irish Nobility … many illustrious French, among them princes, archbishops, bishops, and Marshals of France’, whilst the Louth and North Lincolnshire Advertiser ponders on the seeming indifference to the fact that the grave of William Godwin and his first wife, Mary Woolstonecraft, were to be affected.
That Hardy was touched by this totally extraordinary experience can be seen in his work, The Levelled Churchyard – although thought not to be written about St Pancras, the words appear to hit the mark for those poor disturbed souls:
O passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!
We late-lamented, resting here
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
‘I know not which I am!’
This ash tree in St Pancras Churchyard, London, has become known as the ‘Thomas Hardy tree’ as it bears a plaque explaining his involvement in the dismantling and removal of the headstones, the graves and their inhabitants to make way for the Midland Railway terminus. The jumble of headstones brings home the human reality of the destruction.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Midland Railway was not the only railway company to cause a ‘human jam’ in their efforts to stake a place in the metropolis. The South Eastern Railway was another. It also wanted to come to town and needed to cross the River Thames into London’s heartland at bustling Charing Cross. When they mooted this in 1857, it was viewed as ‘a great public improvement … the benefit to the Metropolis and to the now most crowded thoroughfare … cannot be too highly estimated,’ reported Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, in September that year. To enable this to happen, South Eastern Railway formed the Charing Cross Railway Company. The route it would need to take was via Southwark, by St Saviours Church (now Southwark Cathedral), before crossing Hungerford Bridge over the Thames. It meant purchasing a lot of property. On the north side of the river, this included Hungerford Market, a rather cramped site for the terminus and the existing Hungerford Bridge, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and described in glowing terms by the New York Times: ‘The bridge is remarkable in having the largest span of any suspension bridge in Great Britain, – 70 feet main span, and two side spans. The cables are chains of bars, and not wire, as in the Niagara bridge.’23(Ironically the chains were sold on by the South Eastern Railway to the Clifton Bridge Company for Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge.) On the south side the company secured Borough Market, nearby St Saviours Church, as well as sixteen almshouses and burial ground close by. (Cure’s College almshouses were founded in 1584 by Thomas Cure, saddler to Queen Elizabeth I.)
The Morning Post outlined the route to its readers:24
The railway will touch some property owned by the President and Governors of the College [?] of the Poor of St Saviours Southwark. It consist
s of a number of almhouses built around and enclosing a burial ground. These small houses have been erected with monies left by various charitable individuals … their windows look out only upon the burial ground as though the donors wished always to keep before the tenants the salutary lesson of their mortality. Leaving these abodes of cheerless poverty … the railway skirts along the backs of small houses in Park Street and then traverses the Borough-market.
Cure’s College almshouses were founded in 1584 by Thomas Cure, saddler to Queen Elizabeth I. Almost 8,000 bodies had to be disinterred and removed from the burial ground. They were conveyed by night, on the Necropolis Railway, in specially constructed large boxes which could contain many bodies, to Brookwood Cemetery, Woking.
From its beginnings, the new company was very aware of its ‘purse-strings’ and of keeping to a realistic budget. Right from the first ordinary general meeting, when monies were reported very specifically, it was recorded that, ‘railway estimates have proved fallacious in so many cases that the directors have exercised more than usual care in this instance …’ Dr Samuel Smiles (perhaps better known for his railway writings than his position as Secretary of the South Eastern Railway Company) had written reassuringly to the Board of Directors regarding the proposed outlay and possible healthy dividends. Unfortunately, like any railway enterprise, the Charing Cross Railway Company had several nasty financial surprises along the way, especially being forced to purchase outright St Thomas Hospital, its outbuildings and grounds for £296,000. No wonder then, that when they met another totally incalculable ‘expense’ the person in charge of that operation sought to do it in the most economical way.
Death, Dynamite and Disaster Page 7