To Hell with Habeas Corpus!; Dr Thomas John Barnardo (1845-1905), Barkingside

It’s a funny place to be buried, in the middle of a housing estate. It is true that Dr Barnardo has been here since 1905 and most of the houses are of relatively recent construction but it was still an unusual location when the good doctor first picked it out as final resting place. Instead of a cemetery or a churchyard he chose to be buried in the grounds of his Home for Girls in Mossford Green on the south-eastern edge of the site, in between two of the village greens and overlooked by cottage homes. Some of the original buildings on the site have been demolished and what is left has been converted into apartments.  The Barnardo’s charity could not resist the fund making opportunities afforded by untouched greensward and new houses and apartment blocks have sprung up on former playing fields. And so Dr Barnardo now lies among the living and the statue of Charity at the top of his memorial can look over the garden walls of the houses that hem her in on all sides.  Historic England say;

The monument is in the form of an exedra - a Greek term for an outdoor seat, which came to define a semi-circular recess in classical architecture. In ancient Greek architecture, exedra could incorporate bronze statuary and a stone bench, and were located in sacred places. The monument to Dr Barnardo follows the ancient tradition and comprises a bronze female figure on a granite plinth with tall granite quadrant walls, incorporating benches, on a stepped base. The figure represents Charity and has her arms around two children. On the face of the plinth is a high-relief bronze panel depicting an almost life-size group of three girls. Above is a portrait of Dr Barnardo in an aedicule, framed by foliage, ribbons, and the words 'IN MEMORY OF / 1843 DR BARNARDO 1905'. At the peak of the foliage is a heraldic lion and a crown, inspired by the crest on a ring worn by Barnardo in his lifetime.

Does anyone really remember Dr Barnardo anymore? In my childhood he was still a revered hero, one of those secular saints whose hagiographies were staples of improving literature for children; the man who saved countless urchins from the terrors of the East End streets at the tail end of the nineteenth century. In 1969 when Brooke Bond issued a set of 50 picture cards of Famous People 1896-1969 (one card with every packet of tea) Victorian philanthropists, missionaries and do-gooders featured heavily in Asa Briggs’ selection of the country’s most famous individuals of the previous century – Lord Shaftesbury, William Booth, David Livingstone, Florence Nightingale as well as Thomas John Barnardo.  As a child I thought the Barnardo card was rather sinister; Barnardo looked like he could be the twin brother of Dr Crippen or John Christie and where was he ushering those three children to through the foggy gaslit streets of East London?  

Thomas John Barnardo was born in Dublin in 1845, reputedly with Sephardic blood in the family on his father’s side, though his mother was a member of the Plymouth Brethren and the young Barnardo grew up as a strict Protestant, staunch to the point of zealotry.  At the age of 21 he moved to London planning to become a missionary in China. He enrolled in the London Hospital as a missionary medical student in 1867 but he never completed his studies or made his way to China. Instead he discovered the exotic East End and a population so godless and degraded that travelling half way across the world to China seemed superfluous. He began open air preaching on the streets of Stepney and Poplar and he began teaching at the Ernest Street Ragged School. Energetic and domineering he set up his own Ragged School in a stable and then acquired two cottages in Stepney Causeway which became known as the East End Juvenile Mission for the care of friendless and destitute children. He soon added another school in some old warehouses in Copperfield Road and acquired a magazine called the Children’s Treasury. When he wasn’t saving children, he was stopping East Enders from drinking. In 1872 Barnardo erected a large mission tent right in front of the Edinburgh Castle, a gin palace and music hall on Rhodeswell Road. Crowds of up to 2000 gathered nightly to hear the charismatic reformed drunkard Joshua Poole and his wife Mary inveigh against the evils of drinking. Business at the Edinburgh Castle suffered badly as a result of having two thousand temperance reformers camped out on its doorstep and within a few months the landlord threw in the towel and put his lease up for sale. The only person interested in acquiring the lease of a moribund public house was Dr Barnardo; he purchased it and after a refitting relaunched the ‘citadel of Satan’ (as he liked to refer to the Castle) as the British Workman’s Coffee Palace.  

The Barkingside Home for Girls was founded in 1873 when Barnardo married Syrie Louise Elmslie and the couple were given a 15-year lease of a 60-acre site in Mossford Green in Barkingside as a wedding present. It became the headquarters of ever-expanding philanthropic empire and, for a while the Barnardo’s home before they moved to a house called the Cedars in Hackney and finally to Surbiton.  His ambition, evangelical zeal and the strain of keeping his charities solvent sometimes made Barnardo less than patient with anyone who opposed his plans or stood in his way. He found himself facing increasing criticism, often from within the world of philanthropy. A pamphlet published by the Doctor’s critics, called Dr Barnardo’s Homes: Startling revelations made multiple allegations including that the homes were badly managed and the children cruelly treated, that the Doctor’s stories of rescues were grossly exaggerated, and the photographs he published were faked and that Barnardo had no claim to the title of ‘Doctor’. George Reynolds, an evangelical Baptist minister, denounced Barnardo's staging of the before and after photographs of the children which were used as fund raising materials alleging that Barnardo "tears their clothes, so as to make them appear worse than they really are. A lad named Fletcher is taken with a shoeblack's box upon his back, although he never was a shoeblack." Rather than sue his detractors for libel Barnardo opted to seek arbitration under an Order of Court. The judgement was largely in Barnardo’s favour but it was clear that Barnardo did indeed stage his rescue pictures and that he had no right to use the title Doctor having no medical qualifications.

The fount of all knowledge (Wikipedia) alleges that Barnardo made 88 appearances in court as a defendant – looking at contemporary newspaper accounts this number seems a little exaggerated but may be true given his insistence on appealing any cases he lost.  In October 1880 the resoundingly titled Merthyr Telegraph and General Advertiser for the Iron Districts of South Wales reported on an allegation of cruelty against the Doctor, “A quiet-looking lad of apparently 16 or 17 years of age, applied to Mr. Saunders at the Thames Police Court on Monday, for a summons against Dr. Barnardo for cruelly beating him. Applicant stated that he had for some time been an inmate of Dr. Barnardo's Home for Boys at Stepney Causeway, and had been made a sergeant amongst the lads in consequence of his good conduct. On Sunday night the applicant and some other lads stopped out after the evening service until 8.30. For this he was taken before Dr. Barnardo that (Monday) afternoon, and the doctor wanted to beat him over the hand with a large walking-stick. Applicant refused to submit to this, as it was his first offence. On this the doctor called in some men- five or six of them-and they caught hold of applicant and stripped him, and then Dr. Barnardo himself gave applicant a severe birching, hurting and bruising him very much.” At this point in the case the ‘a person’ who was apparently the manager of the Home stepped forward and explained to Mr Saunders that the lad was an apprentice at the Home who indeed been put in a position of trust but who then incited the other lads in the home into acts of rebellion against the Doctor’s regime. He admitted that the Doctor had wanted to give the lad some ‘banders’ for insubordination but as he had refused to accept this punishment there had been no choice but to birch him. Mr Saunders said that in that case there seemed to a matter to inquire into and granted the boy a summons. No sooner had the boy left the court then Barnardo burst “into court, and applied for a warrant against some lads, amongst whom was the one that had applied for the summons, for assaulting some other boys and for rebellious conduct at the home. One of the lads who had been assaulted being, it was stated, very ill through the way in which he had been knocked about.” The nonplussed magistrate declined to grant the warrants and instead “requested Inspector Lecocq, of the H division, to go down to the home and see the lads.”. I am unable to trace the outcome of Inspector Lecocq’s investigations. 

Eight years later in another illuminating case Barnardo was summonsed for assaulting “Eliza Whitbread and her sister [Dora] on the early morning of Tuesday week”. Eliza’s father was a Mr. Frederick Whitbread who had had a livestock yard at the railway arches at Stepney Causeway for forty years.  The access to his premises ran over land taken over by Barnardo’s Home for Boys and the livestock dealer soon found himself coming into conflict with the Doctor. Negotiations between the two parties foundered and the uncompromising philanthropist decided the matter by erecting an iron gate to prevent exit or entry to Whitbread’s premises on a Monday night in July. The following morning Whitbread discovered himself locked into his own premises and retaliated by getting his men to remove the gate. Eliza came out to find her father lying upon the gate, surrounded by Barnardo supporters who were trying to lever the gate back into an upright position using a crowbar. According to the Weekly Dispatch (29 July 1888) “she walked forward and took her father's arm. The men continued to raise the witness and her father till someone called out "Shame!" The witness begged her father to go and get legal advice, and he went away. Her sister then came out, and both of them were jeered at by Dr. Barnardo's boys. The witness and her sister were then joined by some of their own people. Dr. Barnardo had more than one hundred boys in uniform there, sixty dock labourers. and all the boys from his labour home. Having regaled them with bread and cheese, Dr. Barnardo said, “Clear these people off!" The people did not move. Dr. Barnardo then rushed at the witness and gave her a blow in the chest, knocking her back into a man's arms. An inspector, who was there, then came to the witness, and said, "Now, you are hurt, won't you go.” She replied that she must remain until her father came, when Dr. Barnardo again ordered the labourers to clear them off. They did not do so, when the defendant rushed at her a second time and pushed her. The boys then swept her away, and she afterwards went into her home. I She still felt ill from the effects of the blow, and she had a swelling in her breast.” The case was eventually dropped. 

Most of Barnardo’s court appearances were related to writs of habeas corpus granted to parents who were fighting to have their children returned to them after allowing them to enter one of Barnardo’s homes. Some of these court battles were sectarian in nature with the parents being funded and supported by Roman Catholic organisations who wanted to remove children with catholic backgrounds from the evangelical Protestant religious fervour of Barnardo’s Homes and place them in a more suitable Catholic Home. In 1892 for example Mary Ford was granted a writ of Habeas Corpus for Barnardo to produce her 12-year-old son Harry Gossage. The boy had been found homeless and destitute in Folkestone by a police constable and surrendered to Barnardo’s home. Barnardo alleged that the boy’s dead father was a Welsh Methodist and that his mother, who was Catholic, “was a person of drunken habits” who constantly neglected him. Dr Barnardo said that he could not produce the boy because he had been placed into the care of a Mr William Norton who had emigrated with him to Canada. Having lost his case at the Queens Bench Barnardo appealed to the House of Lords who gave him three months to comply with the writ. It was generally a feature of Barnardo’s defence to these actions that the mothers were women of low moral character and the children were no longer in the country. The 1890 case of Mrs McHugh who was seeking the return of her 11 year old son  John James Jones demonstrated just how far Barnardo was prepared to go to intimidate his opponets and how low he was prepared to stop in order to blacken their character in the courts. Mrs McHugh had lived for twenty years with the boy’s father but after he had abandoned the family she had been forced to place him into Barnardo’s care. She had later changed her mind and tried to retrieve him in order to place him in a Catholic school. Barnardo refused to give him up and when she threatened him with legal action he wrote her a letter “in which he said that if the mother persisted in her claim for the child he should make an investigation into her past life and bring all the matters which he discovered before the court.” Mrs McHugh persisted in her suit and when the case before the Queen’s Bench refused, Barnardo alleged that she was “of drunken, dissolute habits, and had used the boy cruelly”.  He had used private detectives to follow her and to find damaging revelations about her private life. The South Wales Daily News (5 November 1890) reported that Lord Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice, “observed that in support of Dr. Barnardo's case many witnesses were examined—detectives he called them who resorted to a system of shadowing the unhappy woman, peeping through keyholes and listening at chinks of doors, with the result that the charges against the woman completely broke down. The boy had also been interviewed in private by their lordships, and absolutely denied that his mother treated him cruelly. It was clear he was well cared for, and willing to remain under Dr Barnardo's care, but after the scandalous attack which Dr Barnardo had made on the character of the mother it was evident he was not fit to have the custody of the boy.” In another case involving a child called Martha Ann Tye, Barnardo failed to produce the girl when the writ for Habeas Corpus was served and told the court that she had been given over to a French-Canadian woman called Madame Romand. A furious High Court Judge told “Dr. Barnardo he had not taken sufficient steps to restore the child. Writing mild letters of the kind he did to a woman like Madame Romand, who stated she would defy the Court, Dr. Barnardo, and all England! (laughter)—was not the way to get the child restored to the mother. There was no answer to the writ, and if necessary Dr. Barnardo must go abroad and seek out the child and restore it to the mother.” (Buckingham Advertiser and Free Press 20 July 1889).  Needless to say he did not go abroad and Martha Ann Tye remained separated from the mother who wanted her back. 

Dr Barnardo died at the age of sixty at his home, St Leonard's Lodge in Surbiton, on 19 September 1905 after suffering a series of Angina attacks. His body lay in state in the old gin palace, the Edinburgh Castle, for three days from Sunday 24 September until the morning of his funeral on Wednesday 27 September. From Limehouse his funeral procession proceeded with great pomp and ceremony to Liverpool Street Station where a special train was waiting to take him to Barkingside;

DR BARNARDO. Impressive Funeral Ceremony. The funeral of Dr Barnardo took place today amid manifestations of general grief. Outside the Edinburgh Castle, where the body has been lying in state since Sunday, a huge crowd assembled, and were largely representative of the people whom the great philanthropist mostly benefited- The funeral cortege was formed at the Edinburgh Castle. The magnificent wreaths were first carried to the hearse, and the coffin followed, reposing on it being three beautiful wreaths, one of red roses from Mrs Barnardo, one of white roses from the deceased's children, and the other of forget-me-nots from the only grandchild. The imposing procession formed at half-post twelve. It was headed by the band of the Stepney Boys' Home, who played the "Dead March " in "Saul" as the remains left. The procession then moved in solemn silence through the streets. The sight was very touching, and brought tears to many eyes. There were 1800 of the boys and old boys from the various homes established by the deceased, and a large number of boy emigrants who are shortly proceeding to Canada. PATHETIC INCIDENT. One very pathetic spectacle was that where the cripples from the various homes were drawn up pay their last respects to their benefactor. Personal friends were the pallbearers, and these were accompanied by Mrs Barnardo and other members of the family and Lord Brassey, the president of the Barnardo Homes. The coffin was conveyed by special train from Liverpool Street Station to Barkingside, Ilford. The procession was there re-formed, and the remains were carried to the Girls' Village Home, where a service was conducted by the Bishop of Barking. The body will there lie in state until after Sunday. (Dundee Evening Telegraph - 27 September 1905)

It may have been his final resting place but Dr Barnardo had a final excursion to make before he settled down to eternity in Barkingside. On the 4th October, just a few days after the funeral, he was discretely conveyed to Woking to be cremated. His cremains were taken back to Barkingside and buried where his memorial now stands.

'The Resort of Thieves and Harlots'; Victoria Park Cemetery, Bethnal Green

All Victorian commercial cemeteries were based on the unsound economic premise of selling a finite resource (grave spaces) whilst accepting indefinite responsibility for the upkeep of the cemetery. In the short-term cemeteries did a brisk business selling grave plots in perpetuity but once space began to run short, sales declined precipitously and income no longer covered the costs of running the business. In response cemetery companies would ruthlessly cut costs, no longer maintaining their burial grounds and allowing them to become run down and overgrown but even so most of them eventually went bust. The Victoria Park Cemetery Company compounded the difficulties caused by a flawed business model by undercutting the prices of their rivals to generate sales; they went bankrupt just 8 years after the cemetery opened.   

The 12 acres of the cemetery were originally part of a much bigger parcel of land bought by Charles Salisbury Butler in 1840. Butler, who became Liberal MP for Tower Hamlets in 1852, came from a well to do family of Hackney landowners and his Bethnal Green purchase was intended to be sold as plots for speculative building in what was then the outskirts of east London. The building plots didn’t sell as briskly as expected and in 1845 he leased the undeveloped eastern portion of the land to the Victoria Park Cemetery Company who walled off their 12 acres, erected a gothic gate (which still stands) and built two chapels. Both chapels were designed by Arthur Ashpitel, a Hackney born architect who was friendly with the artist David Roberts and travelled to Rome with him, who designed the ornament cast on Big Ben and who built churches, almshouses, schools and pubs, almost exclusively in the predominant gothic revival style.

The new cemetery quickly ran into financial problems. Although demand for burial spaces was high in the over populated and unhealthy East End of London the inhabitants were also the poorest Londoners and could not afford the high prices being charged in places like Kensal Green, Highgate and Norwood. To make matters worse the much larger Tower Hamlets Cemetery had been open for business since 1841, was barely a mile away and was already selling cut price burial plots to East Enders. The Victoria Park Cemetery Company adopted a policy of never knowingly being undersold. Whatever the price was at Tower Hamlets Cemetery, they would sell cheaper. A freehold family grave that would have space for at least six burials went for £1 1 shilling.  The cost of a burial was a mere 10 shillings for an adult (with no charge for the ground) 5 shillings for a child and 1 and 6 for the still-born.  In a bid to attract business from the penny-pinching parish vestries responsible for burying paupers prices were cut even further. On 26 October 1849 the London Daily News reported on a meeting of the vestry of St George the Martyr in Southwark. Mr Day the vestry clerk read the report of a committee appointed to arrangements for the burial of the parish paupers following a Board of Health order to close the overcrowded Lock burial ground in Tabard Street and the parish churchyard. The report was brief and was mainly concerned with the charges made by cemetery companies for burial in common graves. The Nunhead Cemetery Company charged £1 for adults and 12 shillings for children, Norwood 17 shillings and 6 pence for adult paupers and 11 shillings for other poor persons, including children, the Tower Hamlets Company were a mere 9 shillings for adults but the Victoria Park Cemetery undercut the lot; adults 7 shillings, children under 10, 5 shillings and children under 5, 3 shillings. Unsurprisingly the vestry “upon this information the committee had unanimously resolved that it was desirable to accept the terms offered by the Victoria Park Cemetery Company, for the burial of the poor persons who might die in the parish; and they desired, in the event of the guardians of the poor adopting the same place of interment for adult paupers, to co-operate with them in making such arrangements as might best conduce to the decent and economical burial of the dead.”  

A grainy shot of the cemetery in its heyday from 'The London Burial Grounds' by Mrs Basil Holmes (1896)

The finances suffered a further blow in 1848 when it was discovered that one of the cemetery clerks, Walter Stuart Tonge, had been embezzling money from the burial fees. He was charged at Worship Street police court in October. According to Bells Weekly Messenger (14 October) “the prisoner has been employed to receive monies for the opening of graves. The utmost trust was reposed in him, a handsome residence was provided for him, and he was allowed a liberal salary. It was the duty of the prisoner to pay in to the company’s solicitor, from time to time, the amount he had received, and his conduct in this respect was apparently unimpeachable. At length certain discrepancies were discovered, which resulted in his being given into custody.” The magistrate was told that it was believed that he had stolen money from around half of the 900 burial fees he had received. The Company finally went bankrupt in 1853 but was bought out by one of the directors who continued to manage it much as before. With everything run on the cheap the cemetery was badly organised and the subject of constant complaints. On 02 January 1856 The Morning Advertiser reported on a meeting of the St. Pancras Board of Directors of the Poor held at the vestry hall in Camden Town. The meeting was ostensibly to discuss whether the parish should buy an omnibus from a Mr Bennicke to be used to convey poor parishioners to the new St. Pancras Cemetery at Finchley. When it was mentioned that Mr Bennicke’s omnibus was currently used to transport relatives to and from Victoria Park Cemetery the board of directors allowed themselves to be distracted by Mr Glazier’s vivid descriptions of the horrors perpetrated at Bethnal Green;

Victoria Park Cemetery, where the most disgraceful scenes and desecration of the dead were perpetrated every Sunday. In consequence of the cheapness and the facility of conveyance, sometimes as many as 130 bodies were interred on Sunday, and they were taken down in carts, cabs, coaches, vans, and every description of vehicle; and the interments were also conducted in an equally disgraceful manner. The bodies were piled one upon another in graves which would hold 30 each, like egg boxes, and with but little earth to cover them. This was the mode of conducting funerals at the cheap East end cemeteries to the prejudice of the respectably conducted parochial cemeteries like St. Pancras. He thought the Government ought to interpose to put a stop to such proceedings. 

A few months later, on 21 April The Times also reported on the calamitous condition of the cemetery;

The practices pursued at the Victoria Park Cemetery are really revolting. Mr. Holland visited this loathsome place one Sunday afternoon and "witnessed scenes of a very painful nature." He saw 30 or 40 coffins thrust into graves, and all were left uncovered while he stayed; the graves were very near each other, and the bustle was continuous and distressing. One quarter of the cemetery appears to be a mass of putrefying corruption, consisting of several thousand carcases, contained in coffins immediately contiguous in the same graves, and separated from those in the adjoining graves by a few inches of soil only, which are heaped up on each other partly below, partly above the natural level of the ground, and covered only by a few feet of open gravel. The quantity of putrid gas given off by such a mass of corruption must be far greater than the soil can absorb or decompose. Unfortunately, the Victoria Park Cemetery is exempted by act of Parliament from any order in Council to close it up. The proprietor, Mr. C. S. Butler, M.P. for the Tower Hamlets, has taken steps to remedy some of the evils pointed out by the inspectors, but the cemetery should, no doubt, be closely watched, as Mr. Holland recommends. The result of a subsequent visit (on the 3rd of March) is as yet undecided.

A bereaved father who signed himself H.R. wrote to the Clerkenwell News in September 1869 to “complain of a gross scandal of the management of Victoria Park Cemetery”;

I beg to call your attention to what I consider a cruel and shameful imposition. Having lost a dear child, I paid all the fees demanded to have it buried in Victoria Park Cemetery. When I and other mourners reached the cemetery, we saw the coffin placed on level ground. I asked the gravedigger if he called that burying. I was told he could not alter it, as he had to obey orders. Hurtful as it was to my feelings, I still insisted on having my child buried. My undertaker, seeing that I was persevering in the matter, took to me to the cemetery office, where I was told if I was not satisfied, I might have the child buried in a grave where I could see it covered. This I saw done; but I should like to know what is done with all those coffins left on level ground?

Charles Salisbury Butler MP had become defacto owner of the cemetery when the freehold reverted to him in 1853 when the first cemetery company failed. Despite the bad publicity he seems to have done little to ameliorate conditions in the burial ground. When he died in 1870 he was living between his Hackney Mansion, Cazenoves House in Upper Clapton, and 48 Prince’s Gate, Hyde Park a building that is now the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates. The cemetery continued to decline and it was finally closed in 1876 with almost 300,000 people interred, at bargain prices, in its 12 crowded acres.  The cemetery’s closure did not stop the complaints however. Here is the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette of 20 April 1887;

The present condition of the Victoria Park Cemetery, in the populous district of Bethnal Green, is a scandal which calls for public inquiry and condemnation. Walls have been demolished, and the headstones and mounds of thousands of graves broken down and removed, the whole extent of four or five acres having been reduced to barren and unseemly wreck and ruin. The mortuary chapel, in which the services of the dead were performed, has been literally pulled to pieces. One end is entirely demolished, the side walls partially torn down, the floor removed, and many of the heavy beams which supported it have disappeared. The iron railings round the tombs have been everywhere carried away. Monuments have been overturned, and even the kind and loving memorials of Colonist to his parents lie partly strewn about. Some of the graves have been broken open, and children have cast bricks onto the coffins. The place is reputed at night the resort of thieves and harlots; and a more disgraceful abuse of consecrated ground and a more horrifying contempt and neglect of the reverent sentiments with which the memory of the departed is in all civilised countries regarded it is impossible conceive. No burials seem to have taken place since 1872, and for fifteen years it would appear that neither care nor regard has been paid to the decent maintenance of this extensive ground. How different has been the conduct of the Vicar of Paddington in converting the disused churchyard there into a beautiful garden, with the headstones laid tenderly upon the verdant grass, and the whole area bright with flowers. Surely some better use may yet be made of this desecrated estate, which now disgraces the Metropolis.

In 1891 Charles Butler’s son the Revd. John Banks Meek Butler of Sussex conveyed 11½ acres of the cemetery to the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association and after demolition of the chapels and the removal of thousands of headstones the cemetery was reborn as a park in 1894. The Duke of York opened the renamed Meath Gardens (named after Lord Meath who was  chairman of the Gardens Association) on Friday 20 September in front of a large crowd before setting off to visit the Home and Hospital for Jewish Incurables, in Victoria Park Road.  There is little trace of the 300,000 people buried beneath the turf of the park, only a handful of headstones remain (I found two but they may be more) dotted around inconspicuously and a small bronze plaque to Bripumyarramin, aka as King Cole, the native Australian cricketer who died at Guys Hospital on 24 June 1864 and was buried here.

These Silent Mansions; A life in graveyards - Jean Sprackland (Jonathan Cape £16.99)

I am past the middle of my life, I heard myself say. The mansions of the dead kept their silence. It was one of those moments where you see your life as actual and finite: a long walk, perhaps, and you the walker with more than half the distance covered. A parent has recently died. Your children are living as you once did, as if there were no tomorrow. And then there’s you, somewhere in between, wondering how you got here, and trying to reconcile all the irreconcilable bits of your own history, to make a narrative out of these scattered episodes, wanting to look back and see where you’ve been.

Jean Sprackland

I can remember my life by the graveyards I have known. Through the stages of childhood and adolescence, and throughout my adult years, during momentous events and times of tumultuous change, and in the flat calm waters that lay between, there have always been the graveyards. Wherever I have lived, I have found them – some like cities, others like gardens, or forests of stone – and they have become the counterparts of those lived places: the otherworlds that have helped me make sense of this world.

Preface: Old Haunts

Graveyards “are the places where the stories are kept” says poet Jean Sprackland, an almost obligatory observation these days for any book of short pieces exploring cemeteries or other burial places and the lives, and deaths, of their inhabitants. Sprackland is a strong stylist and her prose is immaculate. Her collection weaves together taphophilia, nature writing and personal memoir and is beautifully readable. I felt an instant connection with the book because just a few pages in she takes us to St Mary’s in Stoke Newington, close to where she currently lives and the place where a name on a grave ignited my own fascination with burial places (the name was Isaac Furtado and Sprackland does mention him, briefly). Her piece, evocatively entitled ‘By flaming tortures tried’ focusses on the horrific fate of Elizabeth Pickett, 23-year-old daughter of former Lord Mayor of London William Pickett, who died on 11 December 1781 “in consequence of her Cloaths taking Fire the preceding evening.” When Sprackland reads about a now missing inscription on the grave:

Reader, if you should ever witness such an afflicting scene, recollect that the only method to extinguish the flame, is to stifle it with an immediate covering.

she is instantly put in mind of an old Brownie Guide Handbook from the 1970’s which contained “a step-by-step guide, with illustrations” on how to detailed instructions about how to put out a fire which hold of a person. I too remember my sisters copy of the same book. I suspect girls were more likely to conflagrate themselves by straying too close to open coal fires back in the days before the miners strike and central heating; flowing drapery and artificial fabrics like bri-nylon made every female a potential incendiary device.    

Sprackland’s observations of the natural world are as powerful as her cemetery stories or personal reminiscences. When she crouches to observe the lichen on a headstone “I’m instantly relocated to a different world”, she says, “a desert, criss-crossed with dusty roads. A patchwork of brown and golden forests. An old industrial zone with open chimneys, blasted and crumbling. A vast reef of silvery coral.” Her burial sites range across the whole country, Oxford, Norfolk, London, the Devon coats and her stories are poignant and often deeply moving; a recusant graveyard in the grounds of a Lancashire hall, bones and coins recovered from the wreck of a slave ship, the drowning of a seven-year-old boy in the river Dove in 1936 and an accidental death in Norwich cattle Market in 1897. ‘These Silent Mansions’ is beautifully written, endlessly fascinating and highly recommended. 

A Journal of the Plague Year; Cemitério da Ajuda, Lisbon

I took these photographs just over a year ago, on Friday the 13th December 2019, on a grey, overcast and drizzly day in Lisbon. Like most Lisbon cemeteries Ajuda occupies high ground in a very hilly city, with spectacular views down to the river Tejo but it can be horribly windswept and bleak in winter. I was in Lisbon dealing with some bureaucratic chores related to our forthcoming exit from the EU. It the week of the general election in England and the Portuguese were nearly as interested in the outcome as the British. Everywhere I went I was asked incredulously “Boris vai ganhar?” It was rather embarrassing to have to admit that “acho que sim,” yes Boris was likely to win. The election was on Thursday the twelfth so by the time I visited Ajuda I was already aware that it had been a complete rout for Labour and that my fellow countrymen had made it crystal clear that there were no second thoughts, the only thing that mattered to them was getting out of Europe. That day the question I was being asked was; “E agora?” What now? I didn’t know; Boris was already full of his bullshit about oven ready deals but it was hard not to believe that the only ones who were going to get stuffed was us. Brexit seemed like the biggest disaster that had befallen the country for decades. Little did we know that across the world in far flung Cathay some unfortunate citizens of the People’s Republic, in a then little-known city of 11 million people called Wuhan, were developing a high temperature and experiencing respiratory difficulties after being infected with a bat virus. It wasn’t until 3 January that the BBC first reported that the “Chinese authorities have launched an investigation into a mysterious viral pneumonia which has infected dozens of people in the central city of Wuhan…”          

It is at times like this that any notions of being in control of our own destinies are shown up for the delusions that they are. Our minor local difficulties with exiting the EU have faded into insignificance with our species inability to control an organism so simple in construction that it barely counts as being alive. Luckily it isn’t as virulent or as lethal as organisms responsible for previous pandemics have been but it is still a reminder that the black death may have happened several centuries ago but we are just as vulnerable as we ever were to death and disease and life is only marginally less precarious than it was back in the 1340’s. Official estimates say that 1.7 million have died so far of the disease that none of us even knew about a year ago. Many people think that Boris Johnson’s government has proved to be singularly inept in handling the crisis. We would all like to think that it could have been handled better but the reaction across the world has been pretty much identical – trying to enforce social distancing, closing down places where humans congregate, wear face coverings, wash your hands, cross your heart and hope you don’t die. The only way to control the disease is to stay away from each other and as a social species that is very, very difficult.

All our plans are in disarray; I would normally visit Portugal at least twice, often three times, a year. A trip planned for April had to be called off as did a family wedding scheduled to take place in July and then a final attempt to visit in October fell victim to the second national lockdown. I’ll try again next year. 

Ajuda cemetery is one of Lisbon’s oldest burial grounds, founded initially in 1766 by Queen Maria II for the poor of the parishes of Ajuda and Belem on the western outskirts of Lisbon. What had been an area of small holdings, manor houses, quarries and windmills acquired status after the earthquake destroyed the Royal Palace, the Paço da Ribeira in central Lisbon. The Royal family moved to a country house, the Real Barracca, high on the hillside of Ajuda which served as the primary royal residence until it was destroyed in a fire in 1794. The current Palace of Ajuda was later built on the same site. The cemetery was built by a royal official, Diogo Inácio de Pina Manique, between 1766 and 1787 and it became the final resting place of many royal servants. 

The entrance gate to the cemetery sports a pair of imposing finials with a sailing ship under full canvas and topped by a pyramid bearing a jawless skull above a swag of funeral drapery. Inside the entrance are four sculptures arranged in niches representing Truth and Strength flanking the gate on the right and Justice and Hope on the left. The cemetery chapels stands opposite the entrance and has four further niches with statues representing Prayer and Faith, Humility and Charity. The architect of the imposing entrance portico of Cemiterio de Prazeres, Domingos Parente, is buried at Ajuda along with Admiral Gago Coutinho, who made the first aerial crossing of the South Atlantic from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro with co-pilot Sacadura Cabral in 1922. 

A common Portuguese tombstone motif is the putto with skull, hourglass and extinguished torch. 

The sun did come out briefly whilst I was visiting Ajuda, hence the blue sky on this picture of the mausoleum of João Lourenço and family, hunter to Dom Luís I, King of Portugal from 1861 to 1889.

Pre-Raphaelite muses and premature death; the family life of George Waugh (1801-1873), Kensal Green Cemetery

 

GEORGE and MARY WAUGH d.1873 and 1886

Sq. 16. Statuary marble figure of a seated woman mourning over an urn and holding a bowl, over the inscription 'I am the Resurrection and the Life'. Tall rectangular plinth with inscription in lead letters. Epitaph on south side commemorates Fanny Waugh, first wife of the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, who died in Florence in 1866. Condition: poor, marble beginning to sugar, some lead letters missing.

Roger Bowdler “Kensal Green Cemetery; A Gazetteer of the Monuments.” (1998)

The baptism entry for George Waugh in the Scotch Church register 

A late photograph of George 

George Waugh was from a pious Scottish presbyterian background. He was one of the 10 children of Alexander Waugh the minister of the Scotch church in Wells Street (just off Oxford Street) and his wife Mary. He was baptised by his father at the church on 15 March 1801. Four of Alexander’s sons became ministers but George, after an education at Mill Hill school, started to train as a doctor at St Bartholomew’s hospital. He failed to complete his medical studies having fallen in love with his eldest brother’s sister-in-law, Mary Walker, and marrying her on 06 May 1829. Instead he became a very successful pharmacist with premises at 177 Regent Street where he became druggist to Queen Victoria. Mary had 11 children the first was born in July 1830 and barely survived a month dying on 07 August.  The unnamed son is commemorated as their ‘first born’ on their memorial in Kensal Green which says that his remains ‘here rest’ but if that is true he must have been buried elsewhere initially as the cemetery didn’t open until 1832. There are 3 more of the Waugh’s children buried in the family grave and recorded on the memorial, two girls who died in childhood, “Mary Walker their daughter who died 11 May 1839 aged 7 years and Isabella Foster their daughter who died 18 Feb 1853 aged 10 years,” and their son George “who was drowned while bathing in the sea at Slapton Devon on 24 Aug 1869 aged 34.” The details of George’s untimely demise are given in the Dublin Evening Mail of Friday 27 August 1869;

Drowning of a Barrister. A melancholy case of drowning occurred in the south of Devon on Tuesday evening. Mr. G. Waugh, a barrister, of London, was bathing in the sea at a spot between Dartmouth and Kingsbridge, in company with Messrs. Reynolds and Lucas, also barristers, when suddenly he exclaimed, "I'm drowning!" and he disappeared instantly. His companions, knowing was an excellent swimmer, thought he was joking when he uttered the exclamation. His body was picked up yesterday off the Start.

Mrs Mary Waugh nee Walker

At the rear of the memorial is an inscription commemorating another of their daughters, Fanny, who predeceased them, dying two months after the birth of her first child in Florence in 1866 at the age of 33 and buried there in the Cimitero Degli Inglesi.  Fanny was the first wife of the pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt who married her following a failed engagement to his model Annie Miller. Holman Hunt started to paint Fanny’s portrait just before the birth of their son in October 1866 but the picture remained unfished at her death in December. He sculpted her tomb himself and had her buried beside Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It is said that Mary Walker blamed Holman Hunt for her daughter’s death but when he returned to England with his infant son he moved into his father-in-law’s house at 15 Queensborough Terrace, Bayswater. There he completed the portrait of his wife with the aid of his memory and a photograph and Fanny’s paisley shawl, purple dress, and cameo brooch brought back with him from Florence.  He also painted a portrait of his mother-in-law and rather stern and forbidding she looks. One imagines the family were not pleased to see the increasingly intimate relationship that developed between their grieving son-in-law and their youngest daughter Marian Edith. George Waugh was dead before Holman Hunt dared to take Marian and his son back to the continent with him and marry her at Neuchatel in Switzerland in 1875. British law defined marrying the sister of one’s deceased wife as incest and the marriage caused a serious rift in the family. Holman Hunt’s pre-Raphaelite colleague, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, had once also been in love with Fanny Waugh. His feelings were, however, not reciprocated and when he proposed to Fanny she declined, marrying Holman Hunt the following year.  Woolner wooed another of George Waugh’s daughters, Alice Gertrude, and married her instead in 1864. When Holman Hunt married Marian, Woolner was one of his most vocal critics and never spoke to his brother-in-law again. Woolner and Alice had six children, four daughters (the eldest later wrote a biography of her father) and two sons.

Fanny Holman Hunt

As the for the rest of George’s children, the ones that weren’t dying prematurely or marrying pre-Raphaelites (or both in Fanny’s case), Margaret married a doctor and moved to Australia where she died in 1910, Emily married Thomas Key a solicitor and moved to Leatherhead where she died in 1911 and Alexander became a country doctor who bullied his wife and children and became known in the family as "the Brute". His eldest son Arthur was the father of Evelyn Waugh the novelist (N.B. or perhaps not, see first entry in comments below)    

Marian Edith Waugh before she married Holman Hunt

Toast Of The Town; Thomas King (1694-1737) St Paul's churchyard, Covent Garden

The parish register of births, marriages and deaths of St Paul’s in Covent Garden records the burial of one ‘Thomas King, from Hampstead’ on the 11th of October 1737. The newspapers recorded his passing in a short notice of just a couple of sentences; 

Derby Mercury 13 October 1737

With admirable alacrity an anonymous satirical design for his monument was on sale at sixpence in the print shops of St Martins Lane and Long Acre little more than a week after his funeral. The proposed memorial featured a statue of Tom dressed in an unbuttoned frock coat, reclining on an upturned punch bowl, his left arm propped up on the punch ladle. At his feet with arms upraised kneels the grieving figure of Black Betty, one of the coffee shops better known serving wenches. On the base of the memorial a panel shows a typical night scene in Covent Garden; in front of St Paul’s church two men fence, one with a sword and one with a staff, a woman tries to hold back the swordsman and in the back ground the night watch approach at a trot, presumably to arrest the two brawlers. Prints of this sort are always crammed with telling details. Figures of a drunken rake and a weeping whore stand either side of the main memorial. Behind it a stone pyramid carries the epitaph  "To ye Memory of their kind father T:K[in]g his loving Daughters D[ougla]s & Molly St[uar]t & Betty C[areless] Erect ye Monument", garlanded with lighted candles, smoking pipes and tobacco leaves. A banner at the top of the memorial reads ’coffee, tea and chocolate’ and a coat of arms shows Bacchus and a naked Venus and Cupid holding a shield with three cats surmounted by a cock mating with a hen bearing the motto ‘To Kiss & Scratch’. The print contained three columns of verse dedicated to the passing of the coffee shop proprietor and includes the lines:

….real grief declares, Tom’s Gone
For thee all bawds, all pimps lament
From every Bagnio sighs are sent
No form no outward show they seek
Their very looks their sorrows speak      

 

 

In his 1866 survey of the ‘Club Life of London’ John Timbs notes that King’s was “one of the old night-houses of Covent Garden Market: ‘it was a rude shed immediately beneath the portico of St. Paul's Church, and was one "well known to all gentlemen to whom beds are unknown." Fielding in one of his Prologues says: "What rake is ignorant of King's Coffee-house?"’… It is in the background of Hogarth's print of Morning, where the prim maiden lady, walking to church, is soured with seeing two fuddled beaux from King's Coffee-house caressing two frail women. At the door there is a drunken row, in which swords and cudgels are the weapons. Tom ran his coffee house with his wife, the infamous Moll whose anonymous biography, a 25-page pamphlet called the “Life and Character of Moll King”, is the main source of information on the couple. In The First Bohemians Vic Gattrell says:

In its time, the Kings’ was the best known of all the dives in Covent Garden, a pick-up place though not technically a brothel.  The only bed available was Tom and Moll's own bed in the loft, and when they went to sleep they pulled up the ladder. Couples who met there went to bagnios to conclude their business. Yet it was the Kings' enterprise that by the 1740s helped shift the location of upmarket sexual commerce from Drury Lane to the Piazza.”

According to the Life Tom King went to school at Eton and being expelled for some serious but unnamed misdemeanour became a waiter in a Covent Garden bawdy-house where he met Moll. She was the daughter of a St Giles’ cobbler whose mother peddled fruit and vegetables in the market. Moll started her working life as a barrow girl for her mother who had “several sweethearts before she was 14 years old.” Her inevitable seduction by a young gentleman led to sharing her favours with other young blades and eventually to a stint as a street walker in the company of the famous Sally Salisbury. When she met Tom in the 1720’s the couple contracted a Fleet Street Marriage (without benefit of clergy) and set up their market shed to sell coffee, tea and chocolate. The bill of fare at the Kings was less important than its role as a nocturnal assignation place for rakes and whores. It also attracted artistic clients including Hogarth;

According to J.T. Smith, a ‘large and spirited drawing in red chalk by Captain Laroon exhibiting the inside of Moll King’s’ hung in Horace Walpole’s house at Strawberry Hill (now lost), Smith also reported that he had been told by Benjamin West, Reynolds’s successor as the Academy’s president, who had it in turn from Hogarth’s friend Francis Hayman, that one night while Hogarth and Hayman were drinking at the King’, Hogarth noticed ‘two ladies whose dispute bespake a warm contest’ – women of he town, of course, “and, at last, one of them, who had taken a mouthful of wine or gin, squirted it in the other’s fae, which so delighted the artist, that he exclaimed “Frank, mind the b----‘s mouth!”’, Hogarth at once sketched the disagreement in his notebook and in 1735 resurrected it as an element in the Rake’s orgy in the Rose tavern.  (Gattrell p103.)  

Following Tom’s death in 1737 Moll successfully ran a series of bawdy houses despite the continual attentions of the authorities to her business and her person. When she retired she married a Mr Hoff and built three houses at Haverstock Hill. She died in 1747. 

        

A place of worship for the 'very destitute and degraded' people of Barkingside; Holy Trinity churchyard, Mossford Green

 

The first burial in the churchyard in the present register took place in 1840. By an unfortunate oversight, the earlier burials seem to have been mostly in the part of the churchyard near the road, and thus, as the pariah increases, the finer and more ornamental tombs have had to be placed at the back of the church. Could the position have been reversed, and the finest tombs placed near the road, the appearance of the church from the Vicarage and from the road would have been more pleasing, for some of these tombs are among the prettiest works of art in the parish, which is not perhaps saying much for the aesthetic taste of local builders. The parish church was built at a bad period -1840- and its style is a somewhat corrupt kind of Norman. There is a striking difference between this building and the real Norman - take for instance St. Bartholomew the Great at Smithfield.  After all it has a simple effect, and after London smoke, visitors from town admire its cleanly cream colour and simple decoration, Perhaps, as the Twentieth Century advances. and the true principle, of "art as the hand maid of religion," become more fully realised, it will be made more worthy of its position. Internally, also, it lacks architectural beauty.

Essex Guardian - Saturday 11 April 1903

Holy Trinity, Barkingside is the sort of building Pevsner inevitably had something disparaging to say about. If I could find my copy of the ‘Buildings of England – Essex’ I would tell you what it was but I seem to have mislaid it somewhere. The anonymous author of the 1903 Essex Guardian series ‘Where Ilford Goes on Sunday’ (to church of course, where else?) reckoned that the parish “has such an interesting history that the trouble is not how a find sufficient material, but how to confine the facts at our disposal into the limited space one article. Barkingside Parish Church, or Holy Trinity, Barkingside, to give it its full title, is a fine old edifice, standing in the middle of the parish. It was built nearly sixty years ago, and has a seating accommodation for about four hundred people. The outer walls of the edifice are almost hidden from view by the mass of ivy which has clung around it.” The ivy has gone and the ‘fine old edifice’ of 60 years is now 180 and has had a couple of facelifts. One added a chancel in 1898 and the vestries were added sometime last century. The churchyard was the only burial ground in the parish until 1923 when a new cemetery was opened next door to serve the growing community. I came here looking for the grave of the rather intriguing Reverend Wladislav Somerville Lach-Szyrma who was vicar of Holy Trinity from 1890 until his death in 1915 but despite the small size of the churchyard and the large size of his grave stone I was completely unable to locate it. I required a second visit and the help of the current vicar to finally track it down – but that is a story for another day.  

Thanks to the residents of Ilford who had written to the church commissioners in 1838, requesting that a new church be built for the ‘very destitute and degraded’ people of Barkingside, Edward Blore’s yellow brick ‘corrupt kind of Norman’ church was built in 1839-40 replacing an earlier church or chapel that was marked on maps as Mosfoot Parish Church. The oldest headstone in the churchyard carries the date 1790. Barkingside was a very rural parish, quite outside the ambit of the capital, for most of the 19th century; in 1876 James Thorne said the village was “merely a gathering of a few small houses along a crossroad, and a few others by a scrubby green; the inhabitants are chiefly engaged in agriculture.” He only noticed its existence because 3 years earlier Dr Barnado had been given the lease of Mossford Lodge as a wedding present and had opened his first home for girls there. The growth of the Barnado’s estate of children’s homes seems to have acted as a catalyst for more general growth in the area. In 1903 Barkingside Station, which is now on the Central Line, was opened by the Great Eastern railway. Memorials to the dead children of Barnado’s and to victims of railway accidents are both features of the churchyard.  

BARKINGSIDE. The Church and Unbaptized Children — Some unpleasantness was caused in Barkingside a few days since by the refusal of the Vicar (Rev. N. Perkins) to bury the unbaptised child of James Vince. The child was eleven months old. Through the intervention of friend of Vince’s, the Rev. W. Stepney, of Ilford, undertook to officiate, and he conducted a funeral service in the Methodist Free Church, and completed the service at the graveside.

Chelmsford Chronicle - Friday 27 September 1889

When the Reverend Perkins wasn’t refusing to bury unbaptised children his illiterate sexton was getting himself into trouble for burying still born babies without a proper death certificate after accepting a scribbled note on a scrap of paper from an unlicensed midwife as sufficient authority to carry out the interment:

A WARNING TO SEXTONS. - In consequence of some irregularities in the burial of a child at Barkingside, an inquest was held at the Maypole Inn, Barkingside, on Wednesday before Mr. C. C. Lewis, upon the body of a child named Cross, aged five days, son of Thomas Cross, a labourer. The father stated that his wife was delivered of twins on the 5th inst. (Monday), and was attended by Mrs. Staff (midwife). One of the children died on the following day, and the deceased died on Saturday. The body of the former was delivered to F. Linsell (the Sexton at Barkingside Churchyard) by the witness on Wednesday evening, and by him buried. Linsell asked witness for a certificate, and he gave him the piece of paper produced. This had written on it, "Baby died 5th August, 1889. Mrs. Staff." Julia Staff stated that the deceased was seized with a fit and died in a short time. Mr. W. J. Beer, surgeon, said the general appearances indicated death from convulsions. The Jury returned a verdict in accordance with the medical evidence. The Sexton (Linsell) attended before the Coroner, and expressed his regret for what had taken place respecting the burial of the first child, saying he was new to the duties, but he would take care that such a thing did not occur again. He quite understood that it was a stillborn child, and, being unable to read, he did not know what the purport of the paper handed to him was. The Coroner pointed out to Linsell the requirements of the Act in regard to the burial of stillborn children.

Barking, East Ham & Ilford Advertiser, Upton Park and Dagenham Gazette - Saturday 17 August 1889

There is a newer memorial in Barkingside Cemetery next door which at least carries the names of all of the deceased children:

In the Parish Churchyard, Barkingside, a monument was unveiled to the memory of 320 children of Dr. Barnardo's Village Homes interred there.

Essex Chronicle 1910

ILFORD MAN MUTILATED BY A TRAIN AT WEELEY. A fatal accident occurred to Mr. Thomas Fountain, of Barkingside, llford, at Weeley, on the Tendring Hundred branch of the Great Eastern Railway, on Monday evening. The unfortunate gentleman, who, with his partner, Mr. R. Roberts, of Barkingside, was constantly travelling on the line at this period of the year to purchase root crops, was hurriedly making his way to the station in order to catch the last train which was due. The deceased attempted to walk over the level crossing, in spite of his companion's dissuasions, to reach the up platform, although had he gone on the footbridge it would have been more expeditious. Mr. Roberts, who was some little distance behind, did not see what occurred, and thought his partner was safely on the train. Being unable find him, he called to Mr Rowan, the station master, who, on looking behind the train, saw the body of Mr. Fountain in a terribly mutilated condition, it having been carried a distance of several yards. The body was removed to the outhouse of the Railway Tavern, and about £10 were found in the pockets of the clothing. Mr. Fountain leaves a widow and family, he was about 55 years age. The inquest was held the Railway Hotel, Weeley, on Wednesday, by Mr. J. Harrison, coroner. Mr John Fountain, of White's Farm, Ilford, identified the deceased as his brother. He was dealer and farmer, and was a little near sighted, but was not deaf. Samuel Crowe driver of the train, stated that he did not feel the engine strike anything, and was not aware of the accident until he was informed at, St. Botolph's station. Police-Constable Skipper produced the property found on the deceased, which included £6 in gold coins. The jury returned a verdict of  Accidental death, but added a recommendation that the bridge should be moved to the other end of the station. The Foreman said that not one person in twenty went over the bridge. He himself had only used it once.  A Juror is said to have seen children crawl underneath goods trains. The Coroner said would forward the recommendation to the proper quarter.

Chelmsford Chronicle - Friday 04 December 1896

On Saturday afternoon Mr. Thomas Fountain, of Barkingside, who was accidentally killed on the railway at Weeley, was buried in the parish churchyard, Barkingside. There was a large attendance of the inhabitants; and the ceremony was conducted by the Rev. W. S. Lach-Szyrma (vicar), who gave appropriate address.

Barking, East Ham & Ilford Advertiser, Upton Park and Dagenham Gazette - Saturday 12 December 1896

Rhubarb & Arsenic, a cautionary tale; The unfortunate end of the Hickman family of Kensal New Town (St Lukes, Chelsea)

Thomas Hickman, who was thirty-three years of age, was originally a glass-worker, but for the last seven years he had been a constable of the metropolitan police, D division, which force he quitted about three months since, and since then has supported himself by carting home washed linen for laundresses, who abound in that locality [Kensal New Town]. On Sunday last they prepared a piece of baked mutton for dinner, with the addition of a rhubarb pie, to which they all sat down about two o'clock, and, as is the custom with many families of the poorer classes, they partook first of the rhubarb pie before the meat.

Morning Post - Friday 04 June 1847

In the late 1830’s London’s urban sprawl arrived at the open fields of North Kensington, on the far side of the Grand Union Canal and to the east of the new cemetery at Kensal Green. Middle Row in what was grandly called Kensal New Town was a new street of jerry-built cottages and laundries with West Row and East Rows to either side, Southern Row to the south and Kensal Road to the north. A set of two room cottages given the glorified name of Penton Villas was, in 1847, the home of the Hickman family. The 33-year-old patriarch was Thomas, a former policeman who now made his living by delivering laundry. He was married to Harriet and they had 6 children, 12-year-old Thomas, James who was 10, Harriet, 6, 4-year-old Mary Ann, John, 3, and 16-month-old Henry. At the end of May Harriet’s unmarried sister Caroline Bonamay, having just lost her situation as a live-in servant and with, for the moment, nowhere else to go, came to live with the family temporarily. 

The burial register of St Lukes showing the entries for the Hickmans on 04 June 1847

On Sunday 30 May the two sisters prepared a traditional Sunday lunch for the family of baked mutton and rhubarb pudding. Caroline took it upon herself to light the fire and not having any kindling, she rummaged through the kitchen cupboard and found a nearly empty bag of flour. As there was a second, much fuller bag of flour in the cupboard, she emptied the contents of the first bag into the second, noticing as she did so that the flour from the first was much whiter and finer. She meant to mention this to her sister but as she busied herself using the now empty flour bag to get the fire going, she forgot all about it. The dinner was duly prepared and at lunchtime the family sat down at the table to consume it, pudding first, as was apparently the habit of the lower classes.  The rhubarb pudding was demolished in short order but the mutton was never touched because as soon as the last of the pudding had been eaten the family started to feel unwell. Thomas Hickman went out into the yard and over to the railings surrounding the house of his neighbour Ann Sullivan.  Mrs Sullivan assumed that he had come to deliver the slice of rhubarb pudding he had promised her children earlier that day but instead Thomas begged for her help as he said the family had been taken ill. She went round to the Hickman’s cottage where she found them all in a very bad way indeed. She wasted no time in running to fetch Mr Abercrombie a local surgeon who came back to the house with her and immediately suspected poisoning on being told that the whole family had felt unwell after eating the pudding.

Mr Abercrombie quizzed the family about who had had access to the flour before the pudding was made and the pudding itself before it was boiled. No one but the family he was told. The question about the flour jogged Caroline’s memory and she finally mentioned that she had put something into the pudding supposing it to be flour. When she added that she had taken it out of the kitchen cupboard Harriet turned to her husband and said “Hickman, it must be some of the white powders you keep about in the house.” Her husband replied “Oh, then it is Nitrate of Silver”. Mr Abercrombie thought not, nitrate of silver is highly corrosive and was not likely to the substance responsible for the poisoning. “Then it must be the white arsenic,” Thomas said, adding that he thought it had been thrown away years ago. Mr Abercrombie briefly considered using a stomach pump to treat the family but decided that his apparatus was likely to become clogged and ineffective with lumps of half-digested rhubarb and pastry. He settled for a simple emetic; Thomas insisted on the children being treated first and himself last. Despite Abercrombie’s best efforts one of the boys died in the afternoon and Thomas and four of the other children all died within a short space of time just after midnight. Only Harriet and Caroline and 12-year-old Thomas survived.

Cottages in East Row, Kensal New Town similar to the Hickman's in Middle Row

THE POISONINGS AT KENSAL NEW TOWN additional particulars. The intense interest excited throughout the neighbour- hood of Kensal New Town, Kensal-green, &c, by the above unfortunate and melancholy occurrence, appears not to have in the slightest degree diminished, large numbers of persons having, from early yesterday morning, congregated in the front of the Penton Vilas, until late last evening, anxiously inquiring as to the state of the survivors, and discussing the circumstances connected with the tragical affair. The wretched state of the survivors of the family, pressed down by the effects of the poison they had swallowed, the loss of so many members, and of their natural protectors, induced the medical gentlemen attending them, to make a strong representation to the parochial authorities of St. Luke, Chelsea, on their behalf, which we are happy to say, was most warmly responded to by the parish officers, who immediately despatched Mr. Bush, the relieving-officer, who visited the cottage on Monday evening, and gave directions for their having everything that their destitute and weakened state required. No case has for a long time occurred in which the sympathy of the benevolent is more called forth than in the present, where six out of nine members of a family have been removed by the hand of death, and the remaining three, who have been reduced almost to death's- door, have no funds out of which to inter their deceased relatives, who must consequently be buried by the parish. Yesterday morning, in accordance with a warrant issued on the previous day, by Mr. Wakley, the Coroner for the western division of Middlesex, a post mortem examination of the bodies of Thomas Hickman, the father, and James Bonamey Hickman, the second son, was performed by Mr. Brown, the surgeon, of Kensal-green, assisted by, and in the presence of, Mr. Abercrombie, the surgeon who was first called in, Dr. Chowne, lecturer on medical jurisprudence at Charing-cross Hospital, Dr. Robert Barnes, of Notting- hill, a medical friend of Mr. Abercrombie, and Mr. Brown's assistant. The operation was performed in the front room of the cottage (which consists of only two rooms) in which all the six dead bodies were lying.

Morning Post - Wednesday 02 June 1847

Thomas Wakley the Middlesex Coroner (and founding editor of The Lancet) opened his inquiry at the Portobello Arms on Tuesday 01 June. After swearing in the jury he told them that “the affair was such an awful one, that it would require a few days for consideration, in order that a proper and cool inquiry might be made into the matter.” He ordered further post mortems to be carried out on the rest of the family and told the jury that they would be going to see the bodies that morning and once that had been done the inquest would be adjourned for a week. According to the Morning Post the jury “then proceeded to the cottage to view the bodies. The sight was a peculiarly distressing one. They were all lying in the front room, the father on a stump bedstead, the second son was lying on a deal table under the window, and the rest in other parts of the room. The Jury appeared much affected at the sight of a father and five children, all cut off within 22 hours.” The following day Mr Abercrombie carried out the additional post mortems requested by Coroner Wakley and on Friday June 4 the five deceased members of the Hickman family were all buried at St Lukes in Chelsea:

The funeral of the five children and their father, Thomas Hickman, took place yesterday morning, in the burial-ground of Chelsea New Church. Mrs. Hickman's mother, Mrs. Hickman's two sisters, including the unfortunate Caroline Bonamy, and one or two friends, followed the remains to the grave

London Evening Standard - Saturday 05 June 1847

Mr Wakley’s inquest was reconvened the following week and came to the following conclusion:

The Coroner examined the witnesses as to the terms on which Mr. and Mrs. Hickman lived, and with a view to ascertain whether at any time threats had been used by any member of the family. Having satisfied himself on these points, he went carefully through the evidence, expressing his conviction that the death of Hickman and hii family had been caused by the arsenic which had thoughtlessly been left about, but that Mrs. Hickman and Caroline Bo- namy were totally ignorant of its nature when they mixed it up with the flour of which the pudding was composed. The Jury unhesitatingly returned a verdict to that effect.

Morning Post - Thursday 10 June 1847