Necropolis: London & it's Dead (31 page)

This refers to adipocere or ‘grave wax’–the insoluble fatty acids left as a residue of the pre-existing fats of animals, and produced by the slow hydrolysis of the fats in the wet ground. This is generally regarded as Browne’s one notable scientific discovery, well in advance of its rediscovery by Fourcroy in the eighteenth century.
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For Browne, it was ‘most natural to end in fire’, to be consumed and purified by the most powerful of the elements, rather than undergo a ‘visible degradation into worms’ and suffer:

the malice of enemies upon their buried bodies…Urnal enter-rments, and burnt Reliques lye not in fear of worms, or to be an heritage for Serpents; In carnall sepulture, corruptions seem peculiar unto parts, and some speak of snakes out of the spinal marrow…
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Cremation was first seriously contemplated in 1664, when it featured in
Philosophical Discourses of the Virtuosi of France
, and had many advocates on the Continent. The first recorded cremation in Britain appears to be that of Honoretta or Henrietta Pratt, a society matron who died aged ninety-three, on 25 September 1769. Honoretta left instructions in her will that ‘my Body be burnt upon the place where my late dear niece Ann Place lies buried’, which was St George’s Churchyard, Hanover Square. However, experts have argued that Honoretta’s was likely to have been a ‘chemical cremation’, accomplished with quicklime rather than fire.
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The
St James’s Chronicle
recorded that ‘her corpse was burnt to ashes in the grave by means of unslaked lime’, but later records suggest her request was overruled.

In 1816, Joseph Taylor, author of
Danger of Premature Interment
, commended Honoretta as:

An extraordinary female, whose mind was superior to the weaknesses of her sex, and to the prejudices of custom, being fully sensible, ‘that the bodies of the dead might be offensive to the living’.
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One of the most famous (or infamous) cremations of the nineteenth century was that of Shelley, who was drowned off the Italian coast in 1822. Shelley’s immolation was vividly described, with considerable poetic licence, by Edmund Trelawney in the latter’s memoirs. Given the poet’s flamboyant personality and atheistic views, one could be forgiven for assuming that Shelley had left instructions for this method of disposal as a dramatic ending to a romantic career, or that the Hellenophiliac Byron had been responsible for the funeral arrangements. In fact, Shelley was cremated in accordance with local by-laws designed to prevent the spread of plague, which ruled that anything washed up by the sea must be burned on the shore.

Shelley’s cremains were eventually buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, near the grave of Keats. A volume of Keats’s poetry had been found in Shelley’s pocket when the body was recovered, the pages doubled back, as though it had been thrust away in a hurry. When Mary Shelley died in 1851, his heart plucked from the flames of his pyre, according to Trelawney, was discovered among her possessions, wrapped in a page of ‘Adonais’, his lament for Keats.

Shelley was, perhaps, a romantic exception, and Trelawney’s grisly account of the scene might not have done the cremation movement any favours. It was to be the middle of the nineteenth century, when Londoners were all too aware of the problems facing overcrowded burial grounds, before cremation received any serious consideration. Loudon had predicted the rise of cremation in 1843, when he observed that it: ‘would soon account for the disposal of the great mass of the dead, much sooner than even most enlightened people predict. Every large town will have a funeral pire [sic] constructed on scientific principles, next to the cemetery; and ashes may be preserved in urns, or applied to the roots of a favourite plant.’
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By 1850, a paragraph in
The Builder
had noted that:

…an association has been formed at the City of London Mechanics Institution to promote the practice of decomposing
the dead by the agency of fire. The members propose to burn, with becoming solemnity, such of their dead as shall have left their remains at the dispersal of the Association.
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The year of 1869 marked a significant step forward in the acceptance of cremation, after a presentation at the Medical International Congress of Florence by Professors Coletti and Castiglioni ‘in the name of public health and civilisation’. Further papers appeared in 1872, with a model of Professor Brunetti of Padua’s cremating apparatus, the procedure being conducted in the open, going on display at the Vienna Exposition in 1873. The first serious experiments in early cremation had been carried out by Brunetti in Italy in 1869. Siemens later invented an indoor version. Germany was in the field early, erecting an apparatus in Gotha in 1878.

Between 1887 and 1906, nearly every country in Europe had a crematorium.
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The French installed ‘Gorini’ furnaces, using them originally for the destruction of anatomical parts from hospitals and smallpox victims. The first, erected in Paris, disgusted a Parisian commentator, who said it looked like a sewage farm.

Brunetti’s cremation apparatus at the Viennese exhibition attracted the attention of Sir Henry Thompson FRCS, surgeon to Queen Victoria, who returned home to become the chief promoter of cremation in England. In 1874, he published
The Treatment of the Body After Death
, in which he promoted cremation on public-health grounds, as ‘a necessary sanitary precaution against the propagation of disease among a population daily growing larger in relation to the area it occupied’. He also maintained that cremation reduced funeral expenses, spared mourners from the weather during interments and prevented vandalism. As a further inducement, he suggested the ashes could be used as fertilizer, a pragmatic solution endorsed by Mrs Holmes:

The most advanced cremationists advocate the use of the few remaining ashes as manure for some kinds of farm lands. Sir
Henry Thompson, a cremationist worthy of every honour, has referred to the great increase there would be in the fish supply if burial at sea were generally practised, a plan approved of by some
anti-
cremationists.
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Sir Henry offered another incentive. Cremation, he suggested, was the ultimate solution to premature burial, a fate which filled many with genuine alarm. In 1816, Joseph Taylor published
Danger of Premature Interment
, a lurid, sensationalist little book stuffed with anecdotes and apocryphal accounts of people revived after being left for dead: ‘proved from many REMARKABLE INSTANCES of People who have recovered after being laid out for dead, and of others entombed alive, for want of being properly exhumed prior to Interment.’

On the title page Taylor dwells with true Gothick relish on the horrors of this unlikely contingency:

To revive nailed up in a Coffin! A return to Life in Darkness, Distraction and Despair! The Brain can scarce sustain the reflection in our coolest moments. Amongst the most dreadful calamities incident to human nature, none sure is more horrid, nor can the thought be more appalling, than even
in idea
to be buried alive–the very soul sickens at the thought.
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So widespread was this anxiety that, at a cemetery near Frankfurt designed by Friedrich Rumpf (1795–1867), the architect planned in a mortuary chapel where bodies could be removed immediately after death had presumably taken place, in order that they might be systematically observed until putrefaction had definitely set in. Precautions included placing a bell-rope in the hand of the corpse, so that the person could call for help if they returned to consciousness; and an official was in constant attendance, his duty being to inspect the bodies from time to time.
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In 1896, the Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial was founded, designed to safeguard its members by arrangement with medical experts in various localities, who would scientifically certify death in accordance with certain tests laid down by the Association. Writing in support of this movement, Sir W.J. Collins MD, FRCS, said: ‘It is morbid sentiment that precludes the adequate consideration of the subject in this country, while it is only too easy to dismiss it with ill-directed jest.’
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Collins invited us to ‘suppose that a person has passed away’. He no longer breathes, his heart has stopped, and the doctor has pronounced life extinct. Perhaps some test has been applied, such as breathing on glass–a popular method–and there appears to be nothing to be done but arrange the funeral. It would be a shock, then, to be told on the authority of Dr Brouardel, an eminent French physician and former director of the Paris Morgue, that ‘the moment of death cannot be assumed to be identical with cessation
of respiration’ and that ‘many persons who no longer breathe have been recalled to life by means of care and skill’. Brouardel recalled the case of a man, executed at Troyes, whose heart continued to beat for an hour after decapitation, the body being accompanied from the scaffold with two doctors who testified to this fact. Brouardel also quoted a case where he had ‘exhumed at eight PM Philomele Jonetre, aged twenty-four, buried at five PM, in a grave six feet deep. Several persons heard her tap distinctly against the lid of the coffin.’ After being brought round with ammonia, it was clear that the young lady was not dead, but ‘like a candle, the flames of which had been extinguished, though the wick continues to glow. No definite sounds of the heart, but the eyelids moved in my presence.’
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Cremation, at least, ensured that nobody would ‘return to life in Darkness, Distraction and Despair’.

On 13 January 1874, Sir Henry Thompson called a meeting at 35 Wimpole Street, and drew up the following declaration to mark the founding of the Cremation Society of Great Britain:

We, the undersigned, disapprove the present custom of burying the dead, and we desire to substitute some mode which shall rapidly resolve the body into its component elements, by a process which cannot offend the living, and shall render the remains perfectly innocuous. Until some better method is devised we desire to adopt that generally known as cremation.
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Signatories included Ernest Hart, Editor of the
British Medical Journal
, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, Anthony Trollope and William Robinson, author of
God’s Acre Beautiful
. One of the Society’s aims was to simplify funerals:

It cannot be too clearly understood that it is most undesirable to convey the body in a heavy or costly coffin; a light pine shell is the best receptacle for the purpose of cremation. There is no reason why, for the funeral service, a simple shell should not suffice, but
it may be covered with a black cloth at very small expense, if preferred. There is a certain fixed but ample limit for the breadth and depths of this, which is not to be exceeded. When, however, it is intended to hold a funeral service in public, and with some degree of ceremony, before cremation, a more ornate coffin may be used if desired, but it should contain the shell described, which can afterwards be removed. When a funeral service is performed over the ashes after cremation, they should be placed in a casket suitable for the purpose.

A day’s notice being given, Messrs Garstin & Sons, the well-known undertakers, of 5, Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square, will provide a shell and remove the body in a hearse from any house or station within the four-mile radius from Charing Cross, to the Society’s crematory.
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By this simple act, the Cremation Society of England (subsequently of Great Britain) was formed. It was organized ‘expressly for the purpose of obtaining and disseminating information on the subject, and for adopting the best method of performing the process, as soon as this could be determined, provided that the act was not contrary to Law.’

The first duty of the Council of the Cremation Society was to ascertain whether cremation was legal in the United Kingdom. After a favourable response from legal experts, the Society decided to buy an appropriate plot of land on which to build a crematorium. The Society was offered a plot in the Great Northern Cemetery (New Southgate), which had its own railway station via a branch line of the Great Northern Railway, and the building would have gone ahead but for the Bishop of Rochester, who forbade the establishment of a crematorium on consecrated land. Instead, a plot was purchased from the London Necropolis Company at Woking, which was ideal, as the Necropolis Company had already established a funeral train service for its own cemetery at Brookwood.

Italian expert Professor Gorini was invited to Britain to supervise
the construction of a crematorium, assisted by William Eassie, Honorary Secretary of the Society. On 17 March 1879, the body of a horse was successfully cremated in less than two hours. When he saw how completely the horse had been reduced to ashes, Sir Henry Thompson observed that it indicated how swiftly a human body could be incinerated, without smoke escaping from the chimney.
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The residents of Woking, still reeling from the impact of the Brookwood Necropolis, were less than impressed by the idea of a crematorium on their doorstep, and a deputation, led by the vicar, lobbied the Home Secretary, Sir Richard Cross, to ban the development. The Home Secretary was not in a position to ban the construction of a crematorium, but he could threaten to prosecute the society if a cremation was carried out.

The cremationists also had another opponent in the form of Sir Francis Seymour Haden FRCS (1818–1910), inventor of the Earth-to-Earth coffin. Sir Francis was a consultant at the Chapel Royal and one of the founders of the Royal Hospital for Incurables. A stern critic of undertakers, Haden regarded coffins as a pernicious modern invention. It was better to rot.