Interment and disinterment : a further exposition of the practices pursued in the metropolitan places of sepulture, and the results as affecting the health of the living : in a series of letters to the editor of the Morning Herald / by G.A. Walker.
- Date:
- 1843
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Interment and disinterment : a further exposition of the practices pursued in the metropolitan places of sepulture, and the results as affecting the health of the living : in a series of letters to the editor of the Morning Herald / by G.A. Walker. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![who have unfitted themselves by their abominable practices to be members of a civi- lised community—but who, nevertheless, are considered, in the common acceptation of the term, respectable. It has with me long been matter of deep regret that the ministers of religion, who are, from their opportunities and position in society, so well calculated to head a reform of so important a character as this, should have depended upon the statements of others rather than upon their own examination. This, however, has been done, as may be readily proved by a perusal of the evidence given before the Select Committee on this subject. Thus the evidence of the Rev. J. E. Tyler, Rector of St. Giles’s Church, at page 76, answer 1463, is calculated to throw discredit upon the testimony of others, from the positive and decided contradiction given to certain statements made before the members of the Committee. The reverend gentleman, in speaking of the practices pursued by two men, who are called grave-diggers, in this churchyard (they ought to be termed grave desecrators), says, in answer to a question from Lord Mahon (1463), that a “ very respectable person of the name of Andrews, one of the most employed of all the undertakers, declared he had never seen anything of the sort; no indecency, nothing improper, and no removal of any body or any coffin. The same sort of attack had been made seven years before, and there was another last year, under the signature of ‘ Anti- Pestilence.’ It was a mixture of history, facts, and deductions, all of which were equally false. ” In answer to question 1477, from Lord Mahon, asking the witness if he had any observation to make with reference to the remarks of Pennant, in his account of Lon- don, in page 157 :—[“ I have.” says Pennant, “ in the churchyard of St. Giles’s, seen with horror a great square pit, with many rows of coffins piled one upon the other, all exposed to sight and smell; some of the piles were incomplete, expecting the mortality of the night. I turned away disgusted at the view, and scandalised at the want of police, which so little regards the health of the living as to permit so many putrid corpses, tacked between some slight boards, dispersing their dangerous effluvia over the capital to remain unburied?”] Answer—“What took place in Pennant’s time I have no means of ascertaining, but a total change had taken place, I believe, long before I came to London.” “ Sir William Clay, 1506.—You do not know in what period of time, on the average rate of burying in the old churchyard, the ground would be again occupied ?—No ; but I have been in the habit of asking, * If we go on at this rate, will not the ground be soon full?' and I have been answered, * No, the ground will never be full.’ ”* Sir, the question and the reply are equally remarkable and important. I leave them to the consideration of your readers. Pennant's History of London was published in the year 1790, his complaint, urged with so much force, and, I doubt not, with so much truth ; against the practices employed in the churchyard of “ St. Giles” then, applies with equal force to the cemetery belonging to the parish, at Camden Town now. Some months since I visited this place. An open pit dug under the wall, dividing the cemetery from the workhouse, was full nearly up to the surface with pauper bodies ; the buzzing of myriads of flies in and over this pit might be heard at a considerable distance from its mouth. With Pennant “ I turned away disgusted at the view.” A short distance from this pit I found projecting into four open private graves four coffins, the tops of which were not more than 9 inches from the surface. “ Yet,” says the Rev. Mr. Tyler, “ a clergyman lives there, who is the sexton, and who takes a great interest in it, and makes it as acceptable as he can. I have con- sidered all his arrangements very judicious.”—Answer 1543. On the 16th of July, 1842, passing St. Giles’s churchyard in company with my friend, Dr. E. Johnson, at a quarter to 5 o’clock, p.m., we noticed a grave- digger at work on the south-east side of the church, and about 10 yards from the corner thereof. A large mound of dark earth was being thrown up from a grave which he was employed in making. My friend and I distinctly saw four entire sides of “ grown” coffins brought up ; portions of coffin wood recently shivered * Some 200 years since the churchyard of St. Giles-in-the-Fields was first employed as a burial-place. The parish of St. Giles, at that period, did not contain more than 2,000 souls. The census of 1821 gives the population of the united parishes of St. George’s Bloomsbury, and St. Giles-in-the-Fields, at 51,793. In the former case, the mortality being at the rateof3 per cent. per annum, sixty bodies would be annually buried—in the latter, one thousand five hundred and fifty-four bodies would require graves every year. c](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21915441_0015.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
