C (20:33)

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B (21:02)

Edu okay, I'm back. By 1801, London had a population of about 1 million people, and this population rapidly grew to 2.5 million by 1851, due to migrants traveling in from all over Europe and beyond. The dead in these days were primarily buried in churchyards, but these were rapidly filling up beyond capacity and could no longer accommodate the massive influx of folks in need of burial. The situation was so dire that bodies were just beginning to be packed into vaults. A gravedigger named William Chamberlain at St. Clement's testified to the House of Commons in 1842 that the ground was so full of bodies that he couldn't make new graves, quote, without coming into other graves. He and his fellow gravediggers were instructed to chop up the coffins and bodies to make room for new ones. He said, quote, we have come to bodies quite perfect, and we have cut parts away with choppers and pickaxes. He continues, we have opened the lids of coffins, and the bodies have been so perfect that we could distinguish males from females. And all those have been chopped and cut up. During the time I was at this work, the flesh had been cut up in pieces and thrown up behind the boards when which are placed to keep the ground up where the mourners are standing. And when time mourners are gone, this flesh has been thrown and jammed down and the coffins take away and burnt. He also mentions one day I was trying the length of a grave to see if it was long and wide enough. And while I was there, the ground gave way and a body turned right over and. And the two arms came and clasped. And the two arms came and clasped me round the neck. End quote. A likely story, but then again, who am I to doubt him? He's the expert here in corpse jamming. Okay, guys, I'm sorry. I'm gonna. I'm going for it. I need to tell you a few more details of this ilk apart from smashing up coffins with bodies and just lighting them on fire or jamming them down, as it were. Sometimes bodies would just be thrown into basements of churches. For example, I gotta tell you about ynon Chapel. This was a place of worship on Clements Lane, which is today St. Clement's Lane, which happens to be quite near the Strand Bookstore that was built in 1823. The upper part of the church was dedicated to worship and the lower part was just a big room for dead bodies. Not a crypt per se, just a big space where bodies were simply shoved. This basement vault and the top floor were separated only by floorboards. Over the course of about 20 years, this church packed not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands of bodies. Up to 12,000 bodies into its basement. A man named Walter Thornby wrote a book in 1887 called Old and New London. And in this book he describes this church. He says the basement quote, soon became filled with coffins up to the very rafters, so that there was only the wooden flooring between the living youth and the festering dead. End quote. It is said that the Reverend offered low price burial fees and there were at least 20 packins. I don't think you can call them burials a week. It is said that the parishioners breathed the noxious fumes of rotting flesh from the room below for years before the bodies were discovered. People would often faint and vomit due to the fumes. According to Katherine Arnold, the parishioners could even taste the air, describing it as an acrid oily smell slick on their tongues. Resulting from the humid corpse fog in the church. It created a sort of artificial weather system. Meat exposed to this atmosphere turned putrid after an hour or two. It's kind of wild to think that I left the church because I read the Bible and simply didn't like what I read. Imagine not leaving a church packed with 20,000 dead bodies with its own artificial weather system of corpse gases. Faith is a magnificent thing for some, I suppose. Incidentally, in 1847, once the situation was brought to the attention of the House of Lords, whose members went to visit the church to find out what in God's name was going on there. They were refused entrance, so they didn't push the matter and just left. But in 1847, a prominent surgeon purchased the church and had all of the bodies removed to Norwood Cemetery where they would be reburied in a single grave. He described the removing of bodies as a pyramid of human bones exposed to view separated from piles of coffin wood in various stages of decay. And up to 6,000 people came to spectate the removal of the bodies. This church was again sold and bought by a circus impresario who fitted it out to be like a theater for pantomime and a circus. But after being informed that not all bodies had actually been removed, there were still a couple left behind, he backed out of the purchase. Eventually it was turned into a cabaret like establishment, otherwise referred to as a quote, low dancing salute where it was advertised that you would be dancing on the dead. The advertisement also states, no lady or gentleman admitted unless wearing shoes and stockings. In 1849, the London Hospital maintained its own graveyard until 1860. Once that burial site was filled to capacity, housing for the medical staff were simply built on top of them. The graves were not too far below the surface, and this made for some very unsettled safe ground conditions. In Catherine Arnold's book, the Necropolis Book, she says the remaining part of the burial ground became a garden for nurses and medical students, complete with tennis court, where they were in the habit of capering about in their short times off duty, and where sometimes it happened that the grass gave way beneath them. An ordinary occurrence when the subsoil is inhabited by coffins. The idea of Victorian nurses capering about playing tennis on the grounds of an old cholera hospital garden and like falling through the ground into coffins, is a nightmare that I very much want to have. Apart from the jello ified corpses smelling terrible and collecting in not just places of worship or hospital grounds, they were also extreme exploding. The cheap, tight coffins that folks were buried in were dangerously pressurized from the gases of decomposing individuals. The result could be subterranean infernos. A fire beneath the Church of St. James on German street started from exploding bodies that burned for days. I've mentioned before, one of my favorite shows was the Frankenstein Chronicles. It was starring Sean Bean. It takes place in more of like the 1820s, 30s ish. And he takes a job of a porter of bodies. A coffin explodes in one scene and hits him with shrapnel that gets stuck on his sides. It's pretty gross. To prevent these coffins from becoming incendiary devices, sextons of churches became required to, quote, tap the lids, ensuring there was enough space between the coffin and lid for explosive gases to release. That gravedigger who gave the horrid detail about cutting up bodies a bit earlier, he was testifying to the House of Commons. Because by this time, the 1850s, things were getting completely out of control in regard to the haphazard internment of the dead throughout the city, contributing not just to the smell, but the rapid spread of cholera. Due to the leaching of this disease into groundwater from the tightly packed corpses, Something simply had to be done. So in 1852, the Burial act of 1852 was passed. This act required new burial grounds to be approved only by the Secretary of State, and also enabled the Secretary of State to close metropolitan London London churchyards to any new burials. And the newly formed necropolis and National Mausoleum Company was formed with the ambition to create London's one and only burial ground on the outskirts of the city where, quote, solitude herself might here find retirement. As the company stated, however, being 23 miles from the center of London in Brookwood, it could take up to 12 hours to get to this cemetery by horse drawn funeral cart. So a quicker and more convenient solution was the Necropolis railway line, dedicated to the transportation of bodies and mourners to the cemetery. And if you'll follow me through this very large group of folks who have gathered outside the Necropolis railway line, we'll take a short trip with them while I tell you a little bit about the line itself. This particular group of about 5,000 or so people are Londoners of Indian descent. And this one is one of the largest funerals the train has and will ever carry. The year is 1891 and the burial of Charles Bradlaugh will take place today. He was a member of Parliament of Northampton, very vocal advocate of Indian self government, and a very popular figure among the Indian community in London. The community wasn't very large at this time. It was estimated to be about 46,000 or so in those days. Oh, okay. It appears the train is now pulling up here. Just take my hand. There's also a very important figure on this train who I hope that we'll get to meet. Oh, just watch your step there. But in the meantime, I'll tell you a little bit more about the history of this train. In 1852, the Brookwood Cemetery opened. It was designed to create a perpetual feeling of spring. The trees and plants were selected for this purpose. And with the creation of the necropolis train in 1854, mourners and their deceased loved ones could travel to the cemetery in under 50 minutes. The station was built at 188 Westminster Bridge Road, between Westminster Bridge and York street, at which which is now Leak Street. It was close enough to the river Thames for bodies to arrive at the station by river if need be. The nearby bridges made it easy for mourners to travel by road to the station. And the station had its own built in mortuary so the deceased could arrive early and wait to be transported when the mourners arrived. Isn't that nice? Funeral parties would soon depart at Waterloo and wind through the woodlands and countryside towards Surrey, A picturesque trip thought to be peaceful for those in mourning. When I searched newspapers for information about the Necropolis, I found thousands of mentions, specifically in obituaries. For a time, virtually all obituaries in London added the time and date that their Necropolis train would be departing. The Necropolis train station building where mourners would board the train still exists, although the train does not. It closed in the 1940s due to greater competition from newly built cemeteries around London. And it's up for sale last I checked. For £4.2 million you can own this 750 square meter building or give it as a gift to a certain spooky podcaster who would greatly appreciate it. But. Oh, okay, we are almost to the cemetery, but I brought you along on this trip for a reason and I think, I think you'll appreciate it. Okay, there are two men getting in a fight over there. As you can hear. Yes, on a funeral train, the fight is between a Hindu gentleman and an atheist. But look to your right at the man watching them fight. That is a 21 year old Mahatma Gandhi. Wait for it. Biting does not solve anything.

A (33:51)

You.

B (33:51)

You two need to get a grip. I thought it would be funny to see Gandhi tell some folks to get a grip. Also never seen him roll his eyes before. Okay, end scene. This really happened, by the way. I didn't make that up. I don't know if he told him to get a grip, but everything else is true. Okay, let's now talk about how the corpses of London helped to shape the building of the London Underground. You may notice, if you are a daily rider of this train, an otherwise inexplicable shift in direction in the Piccadilly line passing east out of South Kensington. As Katherine Arnold states, the tunnel carves between Knightsbridge and South Kensington stations because it was impossible to drill through the mass of skeletal remains buried in Hyde park. End quote. The 1960 century builders of the underground couldn't even hack their way through the hundreds of years of packed plague victims. Intertwining bones. The tube deviates. Excuse me. Tube deviates southwest by northeast to avoid the interlocking knots of skulls, ribs and femurs tangled in the earth. The railway began construction in 1863 using gas lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives. London's Circle line was completed in 1884 and most of the lines the City South Railway, Waterloo and City Railway, Central London Railway, Great Northern and City Railway were completed between 1898 and 1904. The men who built these systems were referred to as navvies, derived from navigator. It was said that there were more than 200,000 men working around Britain to build these lines, most of them being former tin miners from Cornwall or farmers from Scotland or Ireland. Pay was low but consistent. But the hours Were long in often dangerous and horrid conditions. They dug through the streets of London from Paddington to Farringdon. They used a method called cut and cover where a trench would be dug below an existing road track would be laid and shored up on either side by a lining of brick. The trench would then be roofed and the road rebuilt on top. When they came upon bodies, they would do their best to dig through them, but if they could not, they would diverge, as in the case with that sharp shift on the Piccadilly line. And although I wasn't able to find many personal accounts of these poor folks digging through bodies to build this railway from the period, there are plenty of accounts from those continuing to build the railway lines today. Those digging the Crossrail, London's new underground commuter line. The largest Crossrail dig, it's across from Liverpool street station was once London's first municipal graveyard. First used in 1569 during another outbreak of bubonic plague. It went on to become the resting place places for radicals, non conformists and migrants. It closed due to overcrowding in the 1700s. 10,000 people are buried there. When digging up the space for the rail line, eight skeletons per cubic meter were found. Graves within graves. According to the crossrails lead archaeologist quote, there's a lot of death here in Liverpool street. End quote. In the Victorian era, two railway stations were built here and later merged into one. They unearthed over 5,000 skeletons that date back to the Roman era. A few hundred yards away in Spital Fields. Spitalfields. Spital Fields were more than 10,000 medieval skeletons that were unearthed between the 1990s and 2000 2007. These were victims of a volcanic eruption in 1258 that disrupted the climate and harvests. A priest at this time, the 1200s named Henry D. Knighton wrote of the time, quote, the pestilence was immense, insufferable. End quote. 1800 bodies have been removed from the Crossrail dig so far. Carver, the lead archaeologist, believes there are more than 3,000 or so. And their excavation isn't just for the purpose of building a new train line. The lead archaeologist wants to know if there were Africans or Asians or new world visitors walking London's streets centuries ago. He wants to know what they were drinking and smoking. They want to learn more about the plagues that ravaged the area. Of all of the thousands buried in this area, only two were buried with slabs that bore their. Richard Whiter, a grocer in 1583 who died of burning jaw which sounds horrible, don't know exactly what that was. Sadly, I couldn't find the name of the other person that was found. This area was also where Bedlam's hospital was located, Europe's first insane asylum, and many of the dead here are also from that hospital, although the archaeologists believe that they will never find the names of those poor souls there. Once these bones have been thoroughly studied, they will be reburied near the mouth of the Thames Estuary on Canve island in Essex. The lead archaeologist will ensure a plaque will be dedicated to their memory when the Crossrail is complete, he said. We are hoping that everyone who walks down here will know that these people were here. Today was a tough one, tougher than most I'd say. So here is something to make you feel a little bit better. I mentioned that the Necropolis eventually closed down because of more competition, inspired by more cemeteries that were opened around London in the Victorian era. These are called the Magnificent Seven. They are Abney Park, Brompton, Highgate, Kensal Green, Nunhead, Tower Hamlets and West Norwood Cemeteries. The architects of these cemeteries took inspiration from the beautiful Pierre Lachaise cemetery in France and included extensive landscaping, mature trees, diverse plant life, intricate funerary sculptures and gardens. These cemeteries were so lovely that it became a semi established custom for visitors to picnic among the graves. Now that folks weren't to be packed into church basements or overcrowded churchyards anymore, families could finally spread out a bit and create gorgeous mausoleums, beautiful ornate headstones and skull sculptured monuments. It's so nice to know that after so many hundreds of years thanks to the Victorians, you can now enjoy a lovely picnic and a cup of tea with your deceased loved ones in a beautiful place. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please rate this podcast on Spotify. Leave me comments, share it with your friends and join my Patreon. If you would like to hear it ad free by going to myvictoriannightmare.com Be kind to yourselves and I will see you in your nightmares.