Necropolis: London & it's Dead (32 page)

Haden had proposed the Earth-to-Earth disposable coffin (cardboard or wicker), filled with aromatic herbs and grasses, which would break down quickly and allow the body to decompose faster, meaning the burial ground could be used again. Haden’s invention appealed to the London Necropolis Company, since the gravelly soil of Brookwood was particularly suitable for disposable coffins, and the Patent Necropolis Earth-to-Earth Coffin went on display at trade fairs.

In 1885,
The Queen
magazine compared Haden’s theories with the famous romantic story of Isabella. Immortalized by Keats, this is the tale of a romantic heroine who carries her dead lover’s head around in a pot of basil. ‘She might have conveyed her lover’s head from place to place without suspicion or offence, for the earth would have converted it into food for the plant that she was so fondly cherishing.’
The Queen
also revealed that a ‘sanitarian’ had
kept a dead dog in an open box in the middle of his sitting room. Covered with earth, within a few weeks the dog had resolved itself into carbolic acid and watery vapour without offence.
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Haden was virulently opposed to cremation. He believed it to be wasteful, expensive and polluting. In a series of letters to
The Times
in the 1870s, Haden condemned the proposal:

to drive into vapour the bodies of the 3,000 people who die weekly in Greater London alone, at a needless cost, an infinite waste and with an effect on the respirable air of the city…not to mention the problems of finding somewhere to put 3,000 urns a week.
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Haden referred to crematoria as ‘vomitaria’ and, in
Cremation: An Incentive to Crime
(1892), even tried to argue that, as a result of cremation, murders would go undetected as there would be no body to exhume for a post mortem. Sir Henry Thompson responded to these anxieties with a novel solution. For every corpse that was to be cremated, two carboys (large glass bottles with wicker frames) would be provided, in which the stomach and intestines could be preserved in the event of a post-mortem examination for poison. Haden criticized this in turn, claiming the system was open to abuse and ‘as to the sanitary side of the question–the less said about it the better…’
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From March 1879, the Cremation Society was restricted to lobbying activities, trying to change the public attitude to cremation. The Society received unexpected support from one member of the Anglican Church. Given that the Bishop of Rochester had forbidden the establishment of a crematorium on consecrated ground in Southgate, it was all the more surprising that the Bishop of Manchester advocated the practice in the same year. The Bishop had just consecrated a new Corporation cemetery on the south side of Manchester, but couldn’t help thinking two things: first, that this was a long way for the poor to bring their dead; and secondly, ‘here
is another hundred acres of land withdrawn from the food-producing area of the country for ever.’ Land should be for growing food, not burying corpses.

‘I hold that the earth was not made for the dead, but for the living. Cemeteries are becoming not only a difficulty, an expense, and an inconvenience, but an actual danger.’
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Where Mrs Holmes campaigned for cremation on utilitarian principles, William Robinson, author of
God’s Acre Beautiful
published in 1889, advocated ‘urn burial’ on aesthetic grounds, inviting us to imagine soft, green lawns; acres of ground disturbed only by the burial of ashes, not entire coffins; groves of trees instead of ‘hideous vistas of crowded stones’. Cremation was cheap, practical, and did away with ‘onerous charges’, and the grim spectacle of the Victorian funeral.

Urn burial could be carried out in graveyards the size of the present, overcrowded ones, for hundreds of years without ill-effects to the living. And the result would be to create beautiful gardens, in an extension of Loudon’s philosophy, with cemeteries truly becoming, as the Greek roots of the word suggest, sleeping places for the dead.
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Cremation also made burial in churches possible once more, without any of the revolting consequences of interring corpses beneath walls or in vaults. The great and the good could be buried at Westminster Abbey again, without it becoming a place of horror. In the unlikely event of a revolution, cremation would at least ensure that the English royal family escaped the fate of the French, as chronicled in the periodical
Vanity Fair
, where one Lord Ronald Gower describes the horrific desecration of the royal tombs at St Denis during the French revolution.
²⁷
This clever piece of anti-Republican propaganda, recycled to endorse the benefits of cremation, is a typical example of modern historian Matthew Sweet’s observation that the Victorians turned atrocity into entertainment.

The royal sepulchres of St Denis, located 17 kilometres north of
Paris, were the last resting-place of most of the kings and queens of France. The revolutionaries’ ‘work’–which consisted of smashing the tombs and throwing the remains into quicklime–commenced in October 1793 and lasted all month. The first corpse to be found was that of Henry IV, the once-beloved Henri de Navarre. Some curiosity, if not affection, for the old King seemed to have lingered among the body snatchers, for they propped him up against the church wall in his shroud, and he became something of an attraction. One of the Republican guards cut off the King’s grey moustache and placed it on his own lip. Another man removed the King’s beard, saying he would keep it as a souvenir. After this, the body was thrown into a huge pit of quicklime.

The following day, the corpses of Henri IV’s wife, Marie de Medicis, his son, Louis XIII and his grandson, Louis XIV, went in to the pit. The body of the Sun King was as black as ink. Louis’s wife, and his son, the Dauphin, followed.

Next day, the body of Louis XV’s wife, Marie Leczinska, was torn from its resting-place, as were those of the Grand Dauphin, the Duke of Burgundy and his wife, and several other aristocrats, including the daughters of Louis XV. All the bodies were in a dreadful state of decomposition, and in spite of the use of gunpowder and vinegar the stench was so great that many of the workmen were overcome and others had to continue their gruesome task.

By a strange coincidence, on 16 October, the very day that Marie Antoinette was executed at the Place de la Révolution, the body of another unfortunate Queen saw the light of day. The corpse of Queen Henrietta Maria, who had died in 1669, was taken from its coffin and added to the ‘ditch of the Valois’ as the ghastly pit had been named. That of her daughter, once ‘Belle Henriette’, came next, and then, in quick succession, those of Philippe d’Orleans, his son, the notorious Regent; his daughter, the no less notorious Duchesse de Berri; her husband and half a dozen infants, from the same family.

That same day, another coffin was cautiously opened. It was
found at the entrance to the royal vault, the customary position for that containing the late deceased King, and contained the remains of Louis
le bien aimé.
The body snatchers hesitated before withdrawing the corpse from its enclosure, remembering that Louis had perished from a terrible illness, and that an undertaker had died as a result of placing the diseased corpse in its coffin. As a result, the body was only removed from its coffin on the brink of the ditch, and hastily rolled over the edge: but not without the precaution of discharging guns and burning powder, and even then the air was putrid far and near.

This was only the beginning. The Republic Resurrectionists, as Gower dubs them, began with the Bourbons and still had to disentomb all the Valois, and further back, up to the Capetian line, and would not be content until the legendary remains of Dagobert and Madame Dagobert reappeared. They continued with the grim work, the corpses appearing like the line of royal ghosts seen by Macbeth: Charles V, who died in 1380, whose well-preserved body was arrayed in royal robes, with a gilt crown and sceptre, still bright; his wife, Jeanne de Bourbon, who still held a decayed distaff of wood in her bony hand; Charles VI, with his Queen, Isabeau de Bavière; Charles VII and his wife, Marie d’Anjou; and then Blanche de Navarre, who died in 1391; Charles VIII, of whom nothing but dust remained; Henri II; Catherine de Medicis; Charles IX–and Henri III.

And so the work went on, till one tires even of the details of the preservation of this or that king and queen. Can anything be more shocking than to know that all the horrors of decay and decomposition will remain even after two or three centuries have passed over the lifeless form, and that, supposing one has the ill luck to be thus coffined and one’s body removed, a black fluid emitting a noxious smell will run out from our last home, as was the case with those royal remains during that hot summer month at St Denis in 1793? Who, after reading such instances, can doubt that it is infinitely better that the dead should be quickly resolved into white and
odourless ashes than subjected to insult and degradation even much less shocking than the cases mentioned in the foregoing pages?

Despite these arguments, it seemed as if cremation would never become acceptable in Britain. ‘Cremation was regarded with repulsion by many, who knew it either mainly as a pagan method of disposing of corpses, or as a method of execution in former times for heretics, witches and female traitors, or as a means by which infanticides (of which there were very many in the nineteenth century) attempted to conceal the evidence of their crime.’
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But then, in 1882, the opportunity arrived to put the Society’s resources into practice. A Captain Hanham of Blandford, Dorset, asked the Society to cremate two members of his family–his wife, Mrs Hanham, who had died of cancer in July 1876, and his mother, Lady Hanham, who had died in her ninetieth year in June 1877. Both had left specific instructions that they were to be cremated, their objection to burial deriving from grim scenes when coffins in the family mausoleum became waterlogged after flooding.
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Once again, the move was blocked by the Home Secretary. He repeated his previous objections and, unable to comply, the Society had no alternative but to decline the Captain’s request. But Captain Hanham was not easily deterred. He promptly built his own crematorium on his estate, and proceeded to cremate his wife and mother on 8 and 9 October 1882. Since death, the bodies had remained in elm coffins, in lead shells, in the family mausoleum. When the time came, the coffins were placed in a simple and inexpensive furnace, on a platform of firebricks and iron, which allowed the flames to play freely, but without the ashes falling into the furnace. The elm coffins had to be burned first, requiring greater heat and more time than usual. The lead melted and ran through the furnace into the ashpits, and the white flames played round the strong elm shell, until that fell at a white heat over the body, of which, about an hour later, only the ashes remained.

Hanham wrote that the cremations were carried out:

without any nuisance to the neighbourhood and without the slightest unpleasantness to those who stood within two feet of the white flames which promptly resolved the bodies to their harmless elements…the act was well and quickly done in each instance, nothing being left but perfectly calcinated bones. The fragments of the larger ones looked like frosted silver, and they broke at a touch. I gathered the ashes of each body and placed them in a large china bowl, in which they will remain until urns of an improved form are ready; then they will be moved to the mausoleum among the trees on the lawn.

Compared with the contents of such Roman and other urns as I have seen, the ashes are greater in amount and much more perfectly preserved. This was owing to complete and quick combustion, and to the body being kept from direct contact with the fire. Every part of the bony structure is represented in the ashes, but without any definite form which would make them recognizable to any but experts. In size the remains vary from pieces 1½ inch long to ashes and fine dust.
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A year later, the Captain died, and he too was cremated. Despite frenzied speculation in the press, the Home Secretary took no action.

However, events took an extraordinary turn twelve months later, when a Dr William Price, ‘the Welsh Wizard’, attempted to cremate the body of his five-month-old son, Jesu Grist Christ, high on a hill above Llantrisant, ten miles north-west of Cardiff.
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Claiming to be a Druid, Price, aged eighty-three, performed the rites dressed in a white tunic. He placed the petrol-soaked body in a barrel and lit a fire, which was clearly visible from the road. Horrified onlookers summoned the police. One officer tipped the barrel over so that the body could be removed, and another man dragged it some twenty yards, where it could be covered with turf.

Dr Price went on trial at the Glamorgan Assizes in Cardiff, charged with cremating rather than burying his son. This was not
Price’s first time before the Bench. An outspoken Welsh Nationalist and former Chartist, he was more than capable of holding his own in court.
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Price was fortunate in his judge. Mr Justice Stephen, on his first circuit in Wales, had a progressive outlook and ‘objected to the criminal law being used to crush opinion’.
³³
In February 1884, Mr Justice Stephen made a groundbreaking pronouncement ruling that cremation was
legal
, provided no nuisance was caused to others in the process: ‘The burning of the dead has never been formally forbidden, or even mentioned or referred to, so far as I know, in any part of our law.’

Dr Price was acquitted, much to Stephen’s delight: ‘He was the strangest old creature, calling himself a Druid and an Archpriest…I was quite glad to let the old man off. It would have been such a pity to interfere with the last of the Druids.’
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