The Workhouse Graves of Hull General Cemetery

Part 2 of the *serialisation of ‘Public Graves, Workhouse Graves, Catacombs and Crosses‘ by Friends of Hull General Cemetery members Pete Lowden and Bill Longbone. See our Books page for more information on buying this and other books written by Bill and Pete.

Fear

Many older people used to have a morbid fear of entering the Western General Hospital, or, as it later became, the Hull Royal Infirmary, after its move in 1972, from Prospect Street to Anlaby Road. Kingston General Hospital on Beverley Road suffered a similar fate. It’s quite unaccountable.

My grandmother Jane, on my maternal side, was born in 1883 and died in 1956, so I barely knew her. She had an accident, a fall, not long before her death, and had to go into Western General.

My mother always recounted the story that Jane was beside herself with fear and begged with the ambulance people not to take her. On the whole it seems irrational. Why would someone feel fear of a place where people were hopefully going to make you well again?

The Workhouse

This reaction becomes more understandable, however, if one remembers that both of these buildings served as Workhouses for the parishes in which they stood, and that this fear was twofold. Most everyone of my grandmother’s generation would have wanted to avoid having to reside in the Workhouse.

This is not the place to give a detailed account of the workings of the New Poor Law of 1834, suffice to say that it made the sick, poor and the unemployed who could no longer fend for themselves, and who previously would have sued for outdoor relief, no longer eligible for that kind of support. They now must present themselves at the workhouse and reside there if they wanted support.

There were many more ramifications and additions to the above but put simply the New Poor Law created institutions that the disadvantaged of early Victorian society must have recourse to. The choice was simple but stark. Go to the Workhouse or starve.

So, one can see how an antipathy to a building that, until only recently, had been an object of fear, could cloud one’s judgement. My grandmother’s generation would never forget the fear of such institutions.

However, a more troubling fear for her generation in relation to the Workhouse was the fear of dying in there. Let’s examine how and why that fear was created.

Grave Robbing

Firstly, we need to examine what appears to be a totally different subject: grave robbing. On the face of it such an act of desecration lacks reason. Without taking into account the moral aspect, why would anyone want to steal such a thing? What could be the value in such an act?

Well, of course, to us today, a corpse is something that, quite frankly, we wouldn’t want to keep around the house. Apart from the obvious legal problems, the health issues would be something that we perhaps shouldn’t dwell on. To us a corpse, even of a loved relative, is something that we would want to dispense with quickly to the appropriate authorities.  In the past however such ‘items’ were seen in a very different light.

Ruth Richardson has a title chapter in one of her books that perhaps exemplifies that specific difference. This title states, ‘the Corpse as a Commodity’ and that is the clearest explanation of the rise of grave robbing. Again, we are left with a question. Yes, O.K., people robbed graves and stole the bodies but who bought them and why? The answer to this question is a little clearer. The buyers of dead bodies were the medical profession.

Let’s explain how this strange state of affairs came about.

Once again, we have to turn to religion for the beginnings of this foul state of affairs.

The Romans, pagan Saxons, Vikings and many other peoples practised cremation as a form of disposal of bodies. With the rise of Christianity, which had appropriated the burial practices of the Jews, the body had to be buried whole.

Resurrection

The idea behind this was that upon resurrection the body would rise to face the Lord. So burial in the ground became the norm, especially in the Old World. Running alongside this idea was that bodily remains of the dead were to some extent sacrosanct and could not be examined

In pre-Christian Roman times there had been no such strictures and anatomical examinations had taken place, most notably by Galen in the first century CE. Along with Aristotle’s teachings these two men provided the basis of much of medical knowledge throughout the medieval period and only with the Renaissance in the 15^th century did it begin to be questioned.

However, by this time the idea of challenging such orthodoxy, which had by now the blessing and backing of the Papacy, could quite easily lead to being accused of heresy and burning at the stake. Such conditions did not encourage original thought.

Still, the pursuit of knowledge pushed the darkness back. Harvey in England, by using some of his own dead family, showed that blood circulated throughout the body and others too worked to understand the bodies that they stood up in.

However, there was a bottle neck in this voyage of discovery and that lay in the basic material with which they could work with: the human body itself.

The Murder Act

Anatomy of pigs, sheep and horses could only carry the explorer so far. So, the basis of the value of a human body began to become apparent. In 1752 the Murder Act allowed all who had committed murder and been found guilty to be executed and their bodies to be given to medical schools for dissection.

Unsurprisingly, this limited addition to the small number of legally acquired bodies failed to supply the medical schools with the ever-increasing demands of their over-subscribed anatomical dissecting lectures.

One of the things that our society has recognised for a long time, even without Adam Smith’s help, was the mechanism of supply and demand of commodities. Be it crack cocaine, bootleg liquor or organ transplants, if there is demand for such things, someone will step forward to supply the product.

Enter the grave-robber.

It’s not the point of this piece to relate the story of grave robbing although it is particularly interesting and my family has a small part in it. Suffice to say that it was a thriving industry and met a need.

There were some legal niceties that it showed up as well, not least of which was that, was a corpse anyone’s property?

As such their activities demanded legal changes and the result of this was the Anatomy Act. This Act was passed in 1832, and such was the popular feeling against, not only the graverobbers, but members of the medical profession, that this Act took precedence over other matters in Parliament.

The Anatomy Act

The Great Reform Act of that year took second place to the Anatomy Act’s passage. The Act historians point out was effectively the beginning of parliamentary representation by the people. Yet it was elbowed out of the way due to the increasing fear of the grave robber.

With the passage of the Anatomy Act the bottom fell out of the market in dead bodies and many were the wails of grief from the grave robbers accompanied by sighs of relief from the relatives of the recently deceased.

The medical profession did not join in these waves of conflicting emotions as they now had what they wanted: a legal method of obtaining corpses to practice on.

Where was this fund of dead people going to come from?

Why the poor of course.

One of the clauses of the Anatomy Act, implemented on the 1^st August 1832, was that the poor of the workhouses who had the misfortune to die whilst in those grim Bastilles could supplement the murderers as victims of the dissectors.

This idea, first put forward by William Mackenzie, an ophthalmologist, of Glasgow went like this:-

Mackenzie’s suggestion was capacious: the body of anyone who died in an hospital, workhouse, poorhouse, house of correction or foundling hospital in any designated large cities, or, if supply  was short , in any town or countryparish should be available for dissection as long as they were “unclaimed by immediate relatives” or who had “declined to defray the expenses of burial”.

the work of the dead, thomas w. laqueur

These ideas struck a chord. Not least with two influential people. One, Edwin Chadwick was the ‘brains’ behind the New Poor Law and also someone who took an interest in, amongst many things, the sanitary issues affecting the growth of towns in this industrial age. One of those sanitary issues was the disposal of the dead.

The other person, less well known but just as influential was Thomas Southwood Smith, a doctor and public health reformer who had already published a paper entitled, Use Of The Dead To The Living in 1827.

When he read Mackenzie contributions, he was mildly supportive but was moved to comment:-

Those who are supported by the public die in its debt’ and that they should be ‘converted to public use.

ibid

Where he differed from Mackenzie was that he thought that only the unclaimed bodies should be used and eventually this is how the Act was formulated.

The Act also had to satisfy the legality of acquiring bodies. Upon dying in the Workhouse, the body was, in effect, in the lawful possession of the Workhouse. If unclaimed within 48 hours then the Workhouse could see fit to seek whether the neighbouring medical schools would like to take the body. For a fee of course.

And this is where problems lay.

The Workhouse Poor

All one needed was a combination of an unscrupulous Workhouse master and an equally unethical medical student or school and the system could be exploited. In this situation we probably see the root of the fear that my grandmother’s generation and the generation before her so profoundly feared.

The slab of the Mortuary could beckon so easily. However, if relatives dissented from allowing their relative from being used in this way then the law allowed the body to be buried ‘on the parish’ without going through the rigours of dissection.

The problem with this was that the dissent had to be in writing and the levels of literacy within the population of the average Workhouse was depressingly poor. One wonders how may grieving relatives would have been spared by the use of a cross on the bottom of the form.

Once again, it’s not the work of this piece to examine the workings of the Anatomy Act here, suffice to say it was one of the most brazen Acts of Parliament that was specifically aimed at one group of people to their detriment.

Its justification was that the Act advanced science but it also showed what society felt about the poor amongst them. Both Richardson and Laqueur see the passing of the Anatomy Act and the passing of the New Poor Law Act two years later as twin attacks upon the poor.

As Laqueur pointedly states:-

‘The Anatomy Act of 1832 was the corporeal correlative of the despised 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.’

P.360, Laqueur op. cit. also Richardson, op. cit. and her article ‘Why Was Death So Big in Victorian Britain?’ in Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Ritual and Bereavement.

So now we come to the Workhouse and its burial places, to the ‘pauper grave’, so beloved of the Victorian novelist, the shame to be avoided at all costs. This is not to be confused with the ‘Public grave’.

Any inhabitant of the workhouse could be buried in a public grave. As long as the burial fees were paid by whomsoever, a pauper could be the occupant of a public grave.

A pauper’s grave, on the other hand, was one that was paid for by the parish via the Workhouse administration. It had similar aspects to a public grave in that it could not be bricked nor was it usual to allow memorials upon them, though of course that was dependent upon the cemetery rules.

Where it differed was mainly in the way the funeral was dealt with, the burial rites etc, which would have been minimal. There are stories of coffins being taken from the workhouse on carts in batches to the cemeteries.

Hull General Cemetery

This did not happen in Hull to my knowledge once Hull General Cemetery was opened. I’ll explain about this later.

The first interaction between the Hull General Cemetery and the workhouses situated in the Hull area took place in the December of 1847. This was some two months after the consecration of the cemetery took place.

At a special meeting of the Sculcoates Guardians held at the workhouse on Beverley Road on the 9^th December a resolution was passed, the wording of which, with its lack of punctuation, was this:-

The practice of crowded interments within the precincts of large towns having by the evidence of the most talented medical men and chemists of the day, taken before Parliament, been clearly shown to be most injurious to the health of the living as well as  tending to the spreading of disease, pestilence and death amongst the inhabitants surrounding the districts wherein such crowded interments take place. That it is the imperative duty of this Board toput an end so far as they can to the countenancing of any future interments with the existing fearfully crowded graveyards of this Borough;  and therefore from and after the first  day of January next  all future burials under the control of this Board shall take place within the grounds of the Hull General Cemetery Company and that the Governor of this house is hereby instructed and authorised to take the necessary steps for carrying this resolution into effect. – a note was also read from the Governor inviting the Directors to meet the Finance Committee of the workhouse in reference to the Interments of the dead at the Cemetery.

Hull General cemetery minute book 1845-1854

This was a more successful arrangement. However, there was a twist in the tail.

Part of the conditions on which the burials will take place in the cemetery is that the Company only charge 1/- to the workhouse authorities or to the friends of the deceased paupers for a search for a burial for any length of time back and certificate thereof and that the cemetery Company convey the bodies in a hearse at their own expense from the Workhouse and also from the residences of the out poor to the cemetery and remove the bodies within 3 hours after notice of death being left at their offices in Bowlalley lane.

ibid

Victorian melodrama

This arrangement created some problems for the Company in the future, and in the interim it cost the Cemetery Company £37 3s 4d for the purchase of a hearse. Due to this agreement I can say with some assurance that the pauper funerals of the Victorian melodramas were not the norm in Hull.

In March of the following year at the AGM of the Company the chairman stated;

Your directors have, as stated in the public newspapers, concluded arrangements with the Governor and guardians of the poor of Hull and with the Guardians of Sculcoates Union by which the whole of the paupers from the Hull and Sculcoates workhouses are now interred in the cemetery.’

ibid

This went down well with the shareholders but was not strictly accurate because, as we have seen, an arrangement was made with Hull, but no firm arrangement had been made with the Sculcoates board as yet. Indeed, there never was a formal arrangement with this Poor Law Union. The Sculcoates Guardians could still call upon the southern cemetery in Sculcoates Lane to cater for their burials, an option that the Hull Workhouse were denied.

In the same speech the chairman went on to say;

In making this arrangement your directors have not been actuated by any mere feeling of  profit to the Cemetery but from a sincere desire (so far as in them lay) to aid the authorities  of  the town in their laudable efforts for sanitary reform by removing from the overcrowded grave yards of this place all such funerals as those referred to and thereby unedifying to that extent an evil so often complained of in local journals.

Hull General Cemetery minute book, 1845-1854

Good Business

These altruistic sentiments, not motivated by this ‘mere feeling of profit’, may be taken with a pinch of salt. If the Company really were so moved by the town’s problems, they would no doubt have donated the land freely so it would be wise to dispense with taking too much notice of this speech. It was business that led the two sides together. It was good business for the Workhouses in that it removed an issue that inconvenienced their working routine, and for the Company it guaranteed a steady custom at a time when it needed such a reliable income stream.

Both Workhouses and the Company appeared to be happy with these arrangements until, as seemed almost inevitable in the Company’s dealings, a disagreement arose over, of all things, a change in the times of when paupers’ funerals took place. Reverend James Sibree, the nonconformist chaplain of the Cemetery Company, requested, in the September of 1854, that such kinds of funerals take place at 3.00 p.m. rather that the previously arranged 4.00 p.m. An innocuous request the Company obviously thought but, being them, they decided to raise the stakes and the fee that they wanted for the interment. So, they informed both sets of Poor Law Guardians of these changes in early September.

The Hull Board agreed, no doubt reluctantly, to these new changes, as it was their principal job to keep the poor law rate down for the rate payers. The Sculcoates Board reacted in a very different manner and,

declined to concur in the alteration but should consider themselves at liberty to bury paupers dying chargeable to the union in any burying ground they might think proper.

HULL GENERAL CEMETERY MINUTE BOOK, 1854-1889

The superintendent, John Shields, informed the board that the Sculcoates Board had sent no paupers for burial since the Company had sent them the initial letter, and the Sculcoates Board continued in this way for the rest of the life of the Cemetery. Where the Company misjudged the situation was, as mentioned earlier, the Sculcoates Board had other options for burial places and in being high handed the Company lost a reliable source of revenue.

At the AGM in March 1856 the chairman informed the shareholders that they were in negotiations with the Hull Board of Guardians. By the September of that year those negotiations had reached the point where a plot of land was being inspected.

However, both sets of negotiators must have been hard to please for no deal was struck for another three years. This covenant signed by the Hull Board and the Company was celebrated at the following year’s AGM with the chairman stating,

Your directors have pleasure in informing the shareholders that the pending arrangements  with the Governor and Guardians of the poor have been brought to a successful conclusion and that the necessary deeds for carrying out the same have been engrossed and are now waiting completion by the governor and guardians here, your board and the poor law board in London who have signified their assent to the arrangement between the parties

Hull general cemetery minute book, 1854-1889

The details were that the Workhouse authorities were to pay £35 rental per annum for one acre where the poor of the united parishes of Holy Trinity and St Mary’s would be buried. The Cemetery Company accepted that they would drain and plant the site and the Poor Law Guardians would continue paying the same fees as they had done since the Cemetery opened.

And there we have the origins of the workhouse area in Hull General Cemetery, with its obelisk to John Fountain, the chairman of the Poor Law Guardians, and the chief negotiator with the Company back in the 1850’s, who was buried, at his request, amongst the paupers, which sits there still.

1902

In 1902 the area was increased with the area to the north of it being used for workhouse burials, both consecrated and unconsecrated. Kelly said that the area had been raised by tons of soil being dumped there over the years and that some of it would need to be removed. One of the directors suggested that he would enquire of the Education authorities to see whether it could be used in the construction of some of the Board Schools.

In 1911 and in 1917 inspections of the Workhouse area by the Guardians were not successful and complaints arrived in the board room. In 1911, the Guardians,

suggested that an attempt might be made to remedy the inequalities of the surface of the burial ground by levelling it as far as practicable. The secretary having promised to do the best he could do to the ground in that regard, the sub-committee declared they would be satisfied

hull general cemetery minute book, 1889-1924

Kelly, the secretary, did what he could, and in 1917 the Company refuted any complaint from the Guardians about the state of the workhouse ground. Kelly, however, conducted a survey of the ground, relaying this back to the board in 1918.

The secretary made a report on the Workhouse Burial Ground. The position as regards room for further interments and the financial aspect of the company’s working of the ground. It was pointed out that the yearly sum for the use of the ground and its upkeep and the sums received for the services and labour involved in conveying the dead and their burial in the ground are under the present conditions of greatly increased costs of horse keep. The company practically keep the horse for the single purpose of fetching pauper dead for burial and labour which is quite inadequate and unsuitable. RESOLVED that the secretary to write a letter to the Governor and Guardians of the Poor pointing out the facts and that he submits a draft of such letter to the Company’s chairman for approval before sending it to the Board of Guardians.

ibid

A letter from the Board to the Guardians was approved and sent in October 1918, and the reply, just before the Christmas that year, appeared to accede to the Company’s request and agreed,

an increase of 50% in the charges for the conveyance to the Cemetery and burial of deceased paupers in the workhouse burial ground for a period of six months from the 20^th November ultimo.

hull general cemetery minute book, 1889-1924

However, the area designated for workhouse burials could not be increased still further and the Company,

approved a letter drafted by the sec. to be sent to the Hull Board of Guardians giving them an intimation of the nearness (about 3 months hence) of the time when the workhouse burial ground will no longer be capable of receiving bodies for interment.

ibid

By the October of 1920 a new agreement was in place, relating to the workhouse area being full in the near future and the minutes of the Board, with their lack of punctuation. recorded this.

Adverting to the visit of the committee of the Board of Guardians previously reported and to the letter of the 9^th June last in answer to the committee’s request containing the offer of the company when the present arrangement ends, namely to provide the necessary graves, dig and fill in the same and give the necessary attention at each burial for a fee of 10/- per body plus the minister’s fees which is at present 2/6d leaving the Guardians to arrange for the conveyance of the bodies to the cemetery and for bearers as is the general custom, the company being at liberty to say where each grave shall be made and not to be obliged to set apart any particular part of the cemetery for the exclusive burial of these bodies and that these terms subsist for 12 months and then be subject to revision. The secretary reported that the offer had beenaccepted by the Guardians with the single modification that it should be for 6 months only.

hull general cemetery minute book, 1889-1924

This modification should have given an inkling to the Company of how the Poor Law Guardians’ thoughts were moving.

The Last Internment

The last interment in what is now known as the workhouse area took place on the 26^th November 1920. From now on the Company would try to slot in workhouse graves as and where it could in the steadily diminishing area left to the Cemetery Company.

That this situation was not, for whatever reason, something the Guardians were completely happy with must have been obvious to the Company. It therefore probably came as no surprise, in the April of 1921, with the letter stating that the agreement would be terminated,

on the 26^th May, the Guardians having arranged with the Hull Corporation for such burials at the Corporation’s Northern Cemetery.

ibid

From this date the Cemetery Company had no further workhouse burials. It was the end of an era.

And now we come to the question often asked. How many people were buried in this area?

Without scanning the burial records of the Cemetery Company and counting each individual interment it is difficult to be precise.

But let’s get a related issue out of the way here that could conceivably cause some confusion. This is that some workhouse interments would, due to the relatives or friends of the deceased claiming their body, have been buried in public graves.

So not all workhouse interments were in the area designated as the workhouse burial plot.

Also remember that prior to the agreement of 1859 workhouse burials would have taken place across the cemetery in the aforesaid public graves but these would have been pauper funerals.

Therefore, a precise tally of workhouse burials throughout the cemetery would necessitate a strict tallying from the burial records.

The Final Mystery

Another issue which would again cloud these calculations is how many people were buried in each grave?

This is a very debateable issue. C.S. Todd, the Company solicitor, gave evidence to a government inspector, that when the cemetery was initially laid out there had been one or two ‘test’ graves dug to ascertain the drainage.

He said these had been dug to a depth of 14 feet. This is a considerable depth.

From my own experience working as a gravedigger, this would have allowed up to seven adults to be buried in one plot. If one then brings in the prospect of young or still born children, into this equation, who, by their very nature take up less space than an adult, we may have up to 20 plus corpses in a single grave.

So just counting the grave spaces doesn’t really get us much further in this endeavour. So, we again come back to the fact that to gain any precision in this venture an accurate, line by line, accounting of the burials has to be undertaken.

I have not taken this route. I have used the approximation method, and for that matter, Michael Kelly used a similar method when the workhouse area was close to being full. We have no real idea why he computed this equation, although he did appear to enjoy making calculations sometimes for their own sake.

In 1900 Michael Kelly calculated that there were 150 workhouse burials per annum.

I presume that he computed this figure from the burial records although whether this was on the basis of the previous year or a running average of so many years, we have no way of knowing.

If we take this figure, and knowing that workhouse burials stopped in April 1921 I believe we can make some reasonable guesses.

Knowing also that the Cemetery, serendipitously opened its gates in April 1847, this allows 74 years for workhouse burials to have taken place in the Cemetery.

Remember, this is for the full cemetery not just the workhouse area. The multiplication of 150 workhouse burials per annum by the 74 years that the burials took place gives us an impressive 11,100 workhouse burials out of the 54,000 plus burials that took place in the Cemetery during its life time.

Is this a reasonable figure?

It would equate to close to 20% of all burials in the Cemetery were workhouse burials, be that in public graves or parish ones.

If we accept that the poor were probably more likely to die than the affluent, or even the ‘just about managing’, this figure reflects this.

Another factor to take into account is that we have seen that the Sculcoates Board of Guardians withdrew from using the cemetery in the 1850’s.

How many more workhouse interments would there have been if they had continued to contribute for the next 60 years or so? I think we can safely say that it would have compared well with the Hull Board’s mortality figures.

Which means that the cemetery could have been up to 40% full of workhouse burials and this figure should surely bring home graphically the inequitably of Victorian society.

However, that last part is conjecture. Michael Kelly, as mentioned earlier, was intrigued by this computation and returned to it in 1914.

Here are his calculations in Fig 4: As you can see, he was trying to see how much space was left, as by this time, space was at a premium in the cemetery. That is why his calculations are predominantly in square yards. His base figure here is 4,840 square yards which is one acre and thereafter he is attempting to take area from this base figure to account for roads, tree and used grave spaces. However, he has done some of the heavy lifting here in that he appears to have counted up the workhouse interments in this area. He states that at the end of 1914 there were 9716 interments.

He also computed the grave spaces used and came to the conclusion that there had been five interments in each grave. That would be 10 feet deep which is a good depth on a site that is prone to waterlogging due to the proximity of both the vestigial remains of the Spring Ditch and the Derringham Dyke. I know that 10 feet was the maximum depth that municipal graves were dug so the likelihood of this figure being accurate is reasonable.

However, as can be seen in his notes, Kelly can’t make the figures fit his original estimate of 4,840 square yards. With 20 trees, and a space, ‘rd mont’, which I take to a space around John Fountain’s obelisk he comes to the figure 44 grave spaces. He feels this equates to 310 square yards.

The roads in this part of the site he had already felt covered 420 square yards. He then took this figure from his base figure, leaving him 4,110 square yards.

Where the difficulty seems to have appeared is that, after working out the interments, and allocating them the grave spaces, this figure comes to more than an acre, 4,857 square yards, never mind his reduced figure of 4,110 square yards.

And again, if we look at the note Kelly originally wrote,

Therefore, a greater average than 5 must have been put in grave.

see fig. 4

Later he crossed out ‘a greater’ and substituted ‘of’ for ‘than’ changing the meaning of this note. Strange behaviour you may think. These were after all rough notes, written on the back of part of the Cemetery’s stone masonry work books. Why did he make these changes?

Of course, we may never really know the answer to that question, but I would suggest that, during this period the Company was trying to sell the Cemetery to the municipal authorities.

As a result of this, at least twice in the first decades of the 20^th century and possibly more often, the Company had to open its books to the Corporation’s inspection, no doubt including all paperwork.

The inspections were undertaken by Mr Witty, the Cemetery superintendent at Western Cemetery, so there was no way of pulling the wool over an inexperienced eye, even if Kelly had wanted to.

Why he ‘doctored’ the note on the Workhouse area in the way outlined above seems pointless as, if necessary, Mr Witty, could take his time and count up the burials as Kelly had done.

I may well be wrong and there could be another explanation for his actions in this way, but it is difficult to get to the bottom of it.

So, with this final mystery, the story of the Workhouse burial area in Hull General Cemetery comes to an end. The area stands now as mute testimony to a time in British society when being poor, destitute and helpless was viewed as a bigger crime than many others on the statute books.

It highlights what the outcome is when we talk of Victorian values today, and perhaps can make us think of the people who were the victims of a society that judged people by how much money they had, rather than what they were worth as human beings.

In this way, this acre of ground, with its approximate 10,000 plus burials in it, gives us an opportunity to stand back and take stock of what is important in our society today. They may be mute but their silence still shouts loudly to us.