The burial ground in front of Cure’s almshouses had been there for a very long time, and is believed to have served the parish of St Mary’s, Lambeth. All of those buried there had to be disinterred and taken for reburial elsewhere. Edward Habershon was the Architect to the Works in charge of this. His letter to Samuel Smiles regarding the disinterment and removal of the bodies is written in a ‘professional’ matter-of-fact manner, explaining his actions, calculations and delivery; but such a manner does not overcome the horror of the situation, rather it adds to the inhumanity of it. He writes:
27 October 1862
The College Burial Ground and the Charing Cross Railway Company.
I have now all the accounts of this matter and I send you a summary of them. I have been very careful to keep down the cost or it would have been double from the almost incredible number of bodies buried in the ground. The following short data will give you an idea of the whole:
There were at least 7,950 bodies removed. There were about 5,000 cubic yards of earth removed to the depth of 16 feet amidst an effluvium almost suffocating.
Finding the number so enormous and the cost of separate removal would be so great, I did it wholesale and had 220 very large cases made each containing 26 human bodies, besides children, and these weighed 4 ¾ cwt. There were 1,035 cwt of human remains sent in these cases alone. These were conveyed in the night and the Cemetery Company made arrangements for them. Each body has cost us less than three shillings. It was fortunate that such reasonable terms could be made at Woking Cemetery. 25
A more horrible business you can scarcely imagine; the men could continue their work by the constant sprinkling of disinfectant powder. Mine was no easy task for the Bishop, the Warden, the parishioners and particularly the relatives have watched the steps taken and the interviews with people and the correspondence has been great but all are more satisfied than could be expected.
I have added my own account … and I believe I have saved the company much expense … I shall require a cheque for £200 this week to meet these accounts. 26
Whilst Habershon wanted £200, the London Necropolis (the Cemetery Company) earned some £1,192 10s – a substantial amount of money from transporting the bodies in the dark of night,27 albeit at such a modest cost per corpse!
What happened overground also happened under it, and during the construction of the ‘Underground’ which went across London, the Metropolitan Railway Company also had its encounters with the dead. In 1860, it purchased all of the City Corporation’s land on the east side of the ‘new’ road called Victoria Street, near Farringdon Road. On the west side there had been Ray Street’s centuries-old pauper’s graveyard. During the development of the road, around 1855/6, the ‘inhabitants’ of this resting place were in the way, and had been disinterred and transferred to a vault on the east side and thus became the property, and problem, of the railway company. ‘The Met’ as the Metropolitan was nicknamed, had to battle constantly with the heavily used Fleet sewer, which criss-crossed the route three times, causing problems of logistics, leakage and flooding. In June 1862, a nasty incident is reported:
The creation of the Underground meant that sometimes it had to travel alongside the River Fleet sewer, which caused many problems including leakage, breakage and flooding. In June 1862 the sewer fell in near Ray Street and the flooding was so severe that it caused the collapse of the walls and shorings. It was many weeks before the situation was back under control, and the bodies stored there from previous removals at Ray Street Cemetery would also have needed attention.
Disaster occurred when a section of the sewer fell in near Ray Street, the tide of sewage inundating the ground on the west side of Farringdon Road and backing up behind the new retaining wall of the railway cutting. Despite concerted efforts over the next couple of days by the railway contractors and the Metropolitan Board of Works (as the new sewers authority), the wall began to fail, shores and scaffolding across the cutting were smashed and the cutting and tunnel as far north as Exmouth Street (Exmouth Market) were flooded. The vault holding the bodies cleared from Ray Street burial ground, which stood exposed on the east side of the cutting, was broken open by shoring which had been laid against it.28
It took the company several weeks to recover, and what did they do with the unfortunate dead? Well, we have some indication from a small article in Leisure Hour in respect of a ‘trip’ taken by the shareholders and members of public institutions affected by the project:
On the Saturday afternoon named [30 August] the eager shareholders and public [representatives of parishes through which the line passed] flocked to the Victoria terminus, and after some little delay mounted the carriages, first class, second class, and trucks, that had been prepared for them. In about 700 yards, all tunnel, passing under the old part of Clerkenwell and Bagnigge Wells, the graveyard of the paupers and their workhouse, passing huge black boxes full of bones, which were being care-fully and decently removed to some suburban cemetery.
‘Unburying’, and indeed ‘overburying’, the dead was an occupational hazard for many of Britain’s nineteenth-century railway companies – the consequences of which are still being felt today. Recent work for the Cross Channel rail link required the exhumation of 15,000 bodies from the ground beneath St Pancras Station. New work at Manchester Victoria Station also required numerous bodies to be disinterred and reburied elsewhere. A plaque, near Platforms 1 and 2, commemorates these much disturbed, departed spirits.
Notes
1 Simmons, J., The Victorian Railway, Thames and Hudson, 1995
2 Williams, Frederick, History of the Midland Railway: Its Rise and Progress, Strahan & Co., 1888
3 Ibid.
4 Including the station and the especially the Grand Hotel, which was not designed by Barlow
5 See also section of The Tay Bridge Disaster
6 Barlow received considerable help and advice on this from Rowland Mason Ordish, another outstanding Victorian engineer whose works include the Albert Bridge, Chelsea, and the Royal Albert Hall
7 ‘Agar Town and the Midland Railway’, Old and New London, Vol. 5, 1878, pp. 368–73, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45243
8 Trachtenberg, M. and Hyman, I., ‘Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism’, H.N. Abrams, University of Minnesota, 1986
9 This power came as part of their Act of Parliament
10 George Godwin, London Shadows, George Routledge & Co., 1854
11 ‘Agar Town and the Midland Railway’, Old and New London, Vol. 5, 1878, pp. 368–73, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45243
12 Swensen, Steven P., ‘Mapping Poverty in Agar Town’, The Nature of Evidence: How Well Do ‘Facts’ Travel?, London School of Economics, 2006
13 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, November 1857. The article was regarding the prosecution of an architect and builder who were in the process of the disinterment of a graveyard in Camden Town in order to build a new school
14 Whilst published under the name of his second wife, Florence Hardy, it is known that the majority of the work was by Hardy himself
15 Aston, Joseph, Metrical Records of Manchester: In which its History is Traced, London, 1822
16 Reports from Commissioners: 1826–27
17 Everett, J., Panorama of Manchester and Railway Companion, 1834
18 Epidemics Timeline – http://www.kdfhs.org.uk
19 Love, Benjamin, Manchester as it is, Love and Barton, 1839
20 Marshall, 1969
21 Hardy, Florence, The Life of Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, 1962
22 ‘Agar Town and the Midland Railway’, Old and New London, Vol. 5, 1878, from British History Online
23 New York Times, Friday 8 June 1860
24 The Morning Post, October 1860
25 See section on Brookwood Cemetery
26 Clarke and the R&CHS
27 Clarke, J., 2006
28 ‘Farringdon Road’, Survey of London, Vol. 46, South and East Clerkenwell,
pp. 358–84, 2008, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=119427
DYNAMITE
5
THE DYNAMITARDS
Dynamite! The word itself is dynamic. It conjures up feelings of excitement, power, anticipation, fear, terror. It promises action and delivers destruction, even death. It is, then, hugely ironic that the man internationally renowned for promoting peace is also the man who gave us ‘dynamite’.
Dynamite started life as nitroglycerine. This interesting compound was created, accidentally, by Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, in 1847, when he worked glycerol with a mixture of nitric and sulphuric acid. The combination produced an oily, colourless liquid which was highly volatile, and so unstable that the merest jolt, friction or impact could cause it to explode. Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), a Swedish chemist engineer, met Sobrero in Paris, some three years after this discovery, and was intrigued by its possibilities. Alfred’s father, Immanuel, had already worked with explosives, particularly gunpowder, in his construction of bridges. After Alfred returned to Russia, he worked with his father to turn this new explosive, nitroglycerine, into something more practical and commercial. A downward turn in family fortunes forced Alfred and his brother (Emil) to return to Sweden, where Alfred continued his experiments with the still highly dangerous compound, experiencing setbacks and several explosions along the way; Emil, amongst many others, was killed in one such in 1864. The breakthrough came when Nobel found that, by using kieselguhr (a type of soft rock, containing the remains of particular diatoms with cell walls of silica), which absorbed the nitroglycerine, he had a malleable, more predictable material which could be formed into suitable shapes for different commercial uses. Alfred Nobel called this substance ‘dynamite’ and patented it in 1867. To discharge the dynamite, he invented a ‘blasting cap’ or detonator which could be ignited by lighting a fuse. Nobel believed that his new dynamite would bring real benefits as it would cut the costs of many forms of construction work that required blasting, but it would also reduce the number of injuries and deaths resulting from the blasting process. For Alfred Nobel, dynamite was intended to be a force for good.1 Time has shown that it also became a force for evil, even a ‘weapon of choice’2 to those who wished to create havoc, cause destruction, instil terror and threaten life and limb. It was an invention that was to play a significant role on, and below, the streets of London.
The Underground
The ‘Underground’, or the ‘Tube’ as it is often referred to today, is, perhaps, one of the best known, and best loved, of all the Victorian inventions. It is as much a marvel today as it was at the time of its conception. ‘Punching the envelope’, ‘pushing the boundaries’ and ‘thinking outside the box’ are all modern day jargon for going beyond everyday thinking, and, with the Underground, the Victorians did just that, creating the world’s first under-the-ground railway.
Why would people even think of such a mad-hatter scheme – trains running alongside drains (another brilliant Victorian endeavour)? Well, London streets were chock-a-block. Crowded with street sellers and their wares, buyers, thousands of different horse-drawn vehicles, hand carts and pedestrians, and, in the midst of this melee, people trying to get to and from work. To deliver a standard above-ground railway into the city centre would have been an exceedingly expensive undertaking, in a period when money for railway enterprises was hard to come by. It would also have caused immense upheaval, displacing a great many Londoners from their demolished homes and businesses – the Underground was, therefore, a brilliant conception. The man behind the plan was Charles Pearson, a solicitor by profession. The Metropolitan Railway Company (or ‘the Met’ as it was commonly called) was formed by Act of Parliament in 1854, to deliver this groundbreaking project, with Sir John Fowler as engineer. Its purpose and function was to deliver travellers, particularly workers, from the mainline stations at the outer edges of London (London Bridge, Paddington, Euston, King’s Cross, Bishopsgate and Waterloo) into the city.
Work began in 1860. The Illustrated London News, perhaps to allay worries of the travelling public, wrote sympathetically of the enterprise:
It is intended to run light trains at short intervals and calling at perhaps alternate stations, and all risks of collision will be avoided by telegraphing the arrival and departure of each train from station to station, so that there will always be an interval of at least one station between trains.
The traffic is to be worked by locomotive engines of a novel and ingenious construction. In order to obviate the annoyance in the tunnel arising from smoke and the products of combustion, the locomotive will have no firebox, but will be charged with hot water and steam at a certain pressure to be supplied by fixed boilers at the termini, and will be furnished with a large heater to assist in maintaining the temperature.3
Although it is called the ‘Underground’, in fact it would be better named ‘the covered up’, as it was mainly delivered (from Paddington to King’s Cross) through the ‘cut-and-cover’ method, whereby deep trenches were dug into the streets along the route. The tracks were laid in the trenches and ‘as the cutting proceeded, the supporting shores were replaced with brick retaining walls and piers, backed with concrete and – for most of the way – covered over with elliptical brick arches or cast-iron girder roofs. A backfill of concrete, with a coating of asphalt, and earth on top, completed the work’4 – all strong enough to continue to carry its normal traffic when the road was reintroduced on the top. Some parts, as from King’s Cross to Farringdon are in open cuttings (except for a 222m-long tunnel beneath Mount Pleasant, Clerkenwell). It was quick, effective, cost-efficient and a great engineering achievement. (It did, however, create almost as many problems as it solved, caused enormous upheaval and chaos, and put many hundreds of people out of their homes.)
The Metropolitan Railway’s Underground was an engineering novelty and marvel. It used a ‘cut and cover’ method – literally cutting out, then covering over. This depiction shows the workings near Praed Street. It brings home just how ‘in the midst of the town’ it all was.
This fascinating map shows the route that the Underground would take, together with the proposed stations – Paddington, Edgware Road, Baker Street, Portland Road, Gower Street, King’s Cross and Farringdon Street. It also shows other ‘proposed’ railway developments, including that of the South Eastern Railway from London Bridge into a new terminus at Charing Cross.
Despite numerous setbacks, with excavations collapsing and serious problems of flooding due to the Fleet sewer bursting, the Metropolitan Railway Company opened its first stretch of underground line for business on 10 January 1863. (The Directors had formally celebrated the completion the day before, travelling along the line with invited guests and then a banquet at Farringdon Street Station.) The slightly less than 4 mile (6km) track ran between Paddington (originally Bishop’s Road), Edgware Road, Baker Street, Portland Road, Gower Street, King’s Cross and Farringdon Street Stations (it was later extended to Moorgate in 1865).
To accommodate the trains of the Great Western Railway (a major partner in the enterprise along with the Great Northern, and later, the Midland Railway companies), mixed track was laid, i.e. three lines (for standard – 4ft 8½in (1.435m between rails) and broad gauge – 7ft ¼in (2.14m between rails)). So enthusiastic were Londoners for this new, if untried, mode of railway travel that an estimated 25,000–30,000 people travelled on GWR stock pulled by new engines (designed by Daniel Gooch) along broad gauge track that day. Alfred Rosling Bennett, later to become vice-president of the Institute of Locomotive Engineers, recalls the first underground journey he made as a thirteen-year-old boy, only a few weeks after the opening:
Although laid with the mixed gauge of the standard 4 feet 8½ inches and the Brunel broad-gauge of 7 feet, it was originally worked exclusively on the latter, the G.W.R. providing Locomotives and carriages comprising new features. [They were gas lit.] The engines were arranged to condense the steam they used, or the greater part of it, cold
water being carried for the purpose in special tanks … placed under the boilers, putting the cylinders outside (an almost unparalleled thing on the broad-gauge), to make room for them. For many years the resulting hot water was discharged on the completion of each journey at Farringdon (subsequently also at Moorgate Street and the Mansion House) and replaced by cold. So long as this plan was followed the tunnels were comparatively fresh and clean, but after the Inner Circle was completed and engines ran right round, this frequent change and waste of water was found irksome and expensive and was discontinued, fresh water only sufficient for boiler requirements being taken. This got hot before use, and so ineffective for condensing. The foulness of the tunnels in the later days of steam was quite avoidable, but the Companies found it cheaper to defy public opinion than to trouble about the necessary precautions.5
Despite all the drawbacks, the ‘foulness’, the sulphurous smell, the ‘thick darkness’, inducing a claustrophobic feeling amongst the crowded hoi polloi (it was an egalitarian experience, where the moneyed mingled with their maids), it was a phenomenal success. It made more of London accessible, more quickly. It made the impossible possible: mass mobility of immense numbers through central London, without congesting its streets, in a much-reduced time and at a modest cost – 6d first class, 4d second class and 2d third class – the ‘tuppeny tube’ as it was known. This extraordinary achievement transformed London and Londoners’ travel habits, (many became ‘commuters’) and branded London as ‘special’.
Death, Dynamite and Disaster Page 8