Necropolis: London & it's Dead (15 page)

One explanation as to why families had permitted their dearly beloved to be consigned to such a hell-hole was the lingering fear of body snatchers. They genuinely believed their dead were buried safely, away from the threat of the Resurrection Men. Gullible people were willing to disregard their own health and safety rather than suffer the anxiety that their loved ones had been brutally exhumed.

The pretext was the security of the dead; the real object was money. There was also the fact that burial was relatively cheap at Enon. Up the road, at St Clement Dane’s, burial fees in the churchyard were £1 17s 2d for adults and £1 10s 2d for children, while Enon only charged fifteen shillings. Nor did Howse discriminate on the grounds of denomination. When it came to burial in ‘the dust hole’, all were welcome. This would include the children of Baptists. Unlike other Christian denominations, Baptists are not baptized automatically within weeks of birth. They have to attain a certain age before agreeing to undergo the procedure. As a result, many Baptist parents were anxious to secure graves for their children in the Dissenter cemeteries. It was either this, or the common grave. Walker visited ‘this Golgotha’ several times:

I was struck with the total disregard of decency exhibited–numbers of coffins were piled in confusion–large quantities of bones were mixed with the earth, and lying upon the floor of this cellar (for vault it ought not to be called ), lids of coffins might be trodden upon at almost every step. My reflections upon leaving the masses of corruption here exposed were painful in the extreme; I want language to express the intense feelings of pity, contempt, and abhorrence I experienced. Of the bodies found in the vault, not one was placed in lead. It was scarcely a Christian burial.
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Walker later told the Select Committee of 1842 that sixty loads of dirt and human remains had been carted away from the vault at various times, and thrown into the Thames. Vast quantities were used as landfill at Waterloo Bridge. Once, part of a load fell off in the street, and the crowd picked up a human skull.

Howse had also resorted to quicklime (commonly used to break down animal carcases for swift burial). But quicklime did not devour coffins. Howse and his wife burned these for firewood.

The authorities had the chapel closed down but left the bodies to rot, oblivious to the consequences. In 1844, a new tenant, a Mr Fitzpatrick, moved in. As the kitchen ceiling was too low, he hired a builder, John Mars, to moonlight on Sunday afternoons. It was on just such a Sunday that Mars decided to lift all the flagstones, from the front of the house to the back, to lower the level of the kitchen floor. At this point, he made a grim discovery: huge quantities of bones. Mars’s solution was barbaric but practical: he dug down another two feet in the chapel, and stashed the bones in the hole.

The building, renamed Clare Market Chapel, was let to a sect of teetotallers, who used it for tea-dances. These bizarre occasions were referred to locally as ‘
dances on the dead
’, where the giddy hoofed it over the mouldering remains, the previous generation turning to dust beneath the dancers’ feet.

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Walker eventually took possession of the chapel in 1847. Exhumation commenced, and a pyramid of human bones was exposed to view, separated from piles of coffin wood in various stages of decay. About 6,000 people visited the site before four cartloads of bones were removed, and the human remains were decently interred in one pit at the recently opened Norwood Cemetery, at Walker’s own expense. The coffin wood was piled up and burned.

Fear of body snatchers led many families to inter their dead in appalling places like Enon Chapel. The lamentable state of London’s burial grounds, with their cheap, shoddy coffins and shallow graves, made corpses easy prey for the Resurrection Men. These ghoulish figures had been operating since the late eighteenth century. Far from resting in peace, Londoners feared that they would be disinterred, and their remains sold to anatomy schools. The prevailing Christian belief that bodies must remain intact for Resurrection made dissection particularly repulsive.

As a discipline, anatomy originated with Andreas Vesalius, who produced prints of dissected men in his
De Humanis Corporis Fabrica
, 1543. Henry VIII granted the College of Barbers and Surgeons (precursor of the Royal College of Surgeons) the right to take four hanged criminals a year for dissection. The bodies of criminals were the only legal source of cadavers, but by the eighteenth century, demand had outstripped supply. The science of anatomy was essential for doctors, particularly surgeons, who needed a thorough understanding of the human body in order to operate successfully. William Hunter (1718–83) ran the first anatomy course in London in 1747, joined by his brother John in1748. A dissection room was established at St Thomas’s in 1780, with Guy’s and Bart’s soon following suit. By the 1790s, there were about 200 anatomy students in London. By the 1820s, over 1,000 were working their way through 800 corpses a year.

Medical ethics did not stretch to questioning the source of cadavers, and dead bodies were accepted on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ basis. In some cases, anatomy students were asked to provide their own cadavers. Bodies were snatched from Tyburn Gallows, still warm, triggering riots from a populace disgusted by the anatomists’ activities.

The first prosecution for body snatching, but by no means the first case, came in 1777, when an attempt was made to steal a fresh corpse for dissection from the churchyard of St George the Martyr, Southwark. Although many body snatchers were ignorant louts, a professional class emerged who justified their activities on scientific grounds. Body snatching required skill, as well as guts. Far from opening the grave, they would dig an aperture through which the body could be removed, leaving the coffin and shroud intact. Taking these was construed as stealing, but a corpse had no intrinsic monetary value, unlike a dead pig or a sheep, the theft of which could mean transportation. The corpse was rolled up in a sack and carried away. The dire condition of St Pancras Cemetery, which was memorialized in Thomas Hood’s
poem, ‘Jack Hall’, made it a favourite with body snatchers. As Jack lies dying, with twelve doctors hovering round for his body, he confesses that:

I sold it thrice,

forgive my crimes!

In short I have received its price

A dozen times.
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Deterrents against body snatching included iron coffins, and a series of cage-like devices, such as the one discovered in the crypt of St Bride’s, Fleet Street, which could be placed over the fresh grave to prevent the casket being tampered with. In 1819, a Mr Gilbert attempted to have his wife buried in St Andrew’s Burial Ground, Gray’s Inn Road, in an iron coffin, as he had ‘a great dread that her remains might be despoiled’. When the vestry demanded a £10 fee, a legal battle ensued, on the grounds that iron coffins, being durable, required a longer lease of the ground. Gilbert won his case on a technicality, but it was over a year before the remains of Mrs Gilbert, which had been placed in the St Andrew’s charnel house, were safely interred.
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A less dramatic method of body snatching involved women posing as relatives and claiming the bodies of paupers from workhouses and hospitals. The latter, which had their own burial grounds, were convenient for body snatchers, and anyone else who needed to procure a fresh corpse for an anatomy demonstration at short notice. Laurence Sterne, buried in a pauper’s grave at St George’s, Hanover Square in 1768, allegedly turned up on the anatomist’s slab at Cambridge University two days later, only for the surgeon, Dr Charles Collignon, to recognize the author of
Tristram Shandy
and release the body for a second, permanent burial.

In the fourth of his series of engravings,
The Stages of Cruelty
, Hogarth gives us a vivid depiction of a public dissection at the
‘Company of Surgeons’. The anti-hero, a murderer, lies on the table, grimacing as if in pain. The noose is still round his neck, while one student pokes a scalpel in his eye, another knifes his chest and a third teases his intestines into a pail.

By 1828, a ‘Bill to prevent unlawful disinterment and to regulate schools of anatomy’ was proposed. Eminent surgeon Sir Astley Cooper informed the Committee that there were 700 anatomy students in London, but only 450 bodies supplied officially. This number was inadequate, as each student needed to dissect between four and twelve. The eventual legislation allowed anatomists to use the bodies of anyone who was not claimed within forty-eight hours. This meant that paupers from hospitals, asylums and workhouses regularly ended up on the table.

Burke and Hare, the legendary Edinburgh body snatchers (who actually murdered their victims, rather than disinterring them), supplied Dr Robert Knox (1791–1862), a pioneering anatomist who fled Scotland in disgrace and was eventually buried at Brookwood Necropolis after a second career as a consultant pathologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital.

The last celebrated body-snatching incident in London concerned Messrs Bishop, Williams and May, from Bethnal Green, who, in 1831, attempted to sell the body of a fourteen-year-old boy. At King’s College, a suspicious demonstrator concluded that the body gave the appearance of an unnatural death and tipped off the police. The gang was remanded, and the boy provisionally identified as one Carlo Ferrari from Piedmont, with the crime being dubbed ‘The Italian Boy Murder’. However, the gang later admitted that the lad was from Lincolnshire, and had been driving cattle to market at Smithfield when they kidnapped him. At Newgate, Bishop and Williams were sent to the gallows for their crime; their corpses–splendid specimens, apparently–went straight to the anatomists’ table.

The disgusting state of the existing burial grounds, lingering fears of body snatchers, and the atrocity of Enon Chapel should have been enough to bring about a change in the burial laws. But it took another, even more terrible event, to effect reform. Two centuries after the Great Plague, London was terrorized by a series of epidemics.

In the days of my youth, the world was shaken with the dread of a new and terrible plague which was desolating all lands as it passed through them, and so regular was its march that men could tell where next it would appear and almost the day when it might be expected. It was the cholera, which for the first time appeared in Western Europe. Its bitter strange kiss, and man’s want of experience or knowledge of its nature, or how best to resist its attacks, added, if anything, to its horrors.

This account by Mrs Stoker, in a letter to her son Bram, also demonstrates where the author of
Dracula
derived his chilling turn of phrase.

Asiatic cholera spread across Europe from the Far East, first reaching England in 1831. Helpless, the Government did nothing beyond calling a day of national prayer and fasting, while clerics declared that the epidemic was a vengeance from God for London’s wickedness. By autumn, 5,000 people had died from the epidemic, but still no counter measures were taken. A second outbreak in 1848 compounded the already grisly condition of the burial grounds. Over 14,000 people died in London alone.

As with the Great Plague, it was the poor who bore the brunt of this epidemic. Thomas Miller, who lived in ‘the land of Death’–Stoke Newington–referred to cholera as ‘the dreadful disease which caused almost every street in the metropolis to be hung in mourning’.
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At Fore Street in Lambeth, the residents ‘looked more like ghouls and maniacs than human beings’. At high tide, their doorways had to be blocked with boards to stop the river getting in,
and the surgeon would make his way to patients along planks laid over two feet of water. At the Tooting ‘child farm’, 180 out of nearly 1400 pauper children were wiped out within days, undermined by starvation, impetigo and scrofula.
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Cholera is a silent killer. One of its most terrifying aspects is its stealth. Early symptoms, including mild fever and gastric upset, seem inconsequential, but the disease can prove fatal within hours. Cholera takes its name from the Ancient Greek word for roof gutter. The violent diarrhoea which characterizes the disease was likened to the effects of a powerful rainstorm. People died swiftly and in terrible pain. Regulars shook hands outside the pub, went home, and were never seen again. The aspiring paterfamilias moved into the bigger house he and his wife had dreamed of, only to find that Death moved in with them, and the family was plunged into penury overnight. Small children, scarcely old enough to walk, found themselves dressed in black and trying to understand why their father had been carried away in a box and their mother would never wake up. Orphaned and penniless, they were destined for the workhouse. In some houses, everybody died. After the building had been closed a few days, other tenants moved in, and they perished too, since the mercenary landlords never divulged the fate of their predecessors. The dead were removed at night; sometimes twenty people were buried in one grave.

The medical profession was defenceless against cholera, with doctors clinging to the theory of ‘miasma’, the conviction that disease broke out when the air became polluted with waste. As rubbish rotted in the street during the long hot summers, it gave off a strong smell, which they believed caused the disease. Chadwick himself subscribed to this theory, maintaining that ‘all smell is disease’.

Far from eliminating the outbreak, sanitation only made conditions worse. Water companies such as The Chelsea Waterworks Company, incorporated in 1723, ‘for the better supplying the city and liberties of Westminster and parts adjacent with water’ sourced
their product direct from the Thames. In 1827, Sir Francis Burdett complained to the House of Lords that:

The water taken from the River Thames at Chelsea, being charged with the contents of the great common sewers, the drainings from dunghills, the refuse of hospitals, slaughterhouses, colour, lead and soap works, and with all sorts of decomposed animal and vegetable substances, rendering the said water offensive and destructive to health, ought no longer to be taken up by any of the water companies from so foul a source.
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