The Excavation of this Burial Ground has revealed a major source of information about Birmingham's Social History and some of what people had to live with during the Industrial Revolution.
In Birmingham in the UK, the city where I live there is a big project to build a 7 platform train station on the East side of town. The station will host HS2, a controversial project to build a rail line that connects London with the North. The 120 mile journey to and from London will take 45 minutes each way.
One problem that this has led to is that a major excavation of Park Street Burial Ground has had to take place which will re home 6500 of Birmingham’s Dead. The reason that the Burial Ground was created in 1807 was because the Cemetery at St Martin’s church was gradually becoming over run as the Industrial revolution kicked off. As early as the 18th century rural populations desperate for work as the Agricultural revolution automated their own day to day work, flocked to Birmingham.
In 1780 historianWilliam Huttonwrote‘…instead of the church burying the dead, the dead would have in time buried the church…’.
The population density vastly increased and St Martin’s, an Anglican Church, could not cope. As the revolution took hold, the type of people that came to find work changed. The need for labour attracted people from Ireland and so a largely catholic population came to the city. Of course the increase in population brought with it abject poverty and large numbers of poor families living together in unsanitary conditions meant that Cholera Tuberculosis and other conditions such as Rickets associated with poor diet and lack of sunlight in the polluted city and of course syphilis were common place.
Some of the families, in fact a lot of families could not cope and were often taken into a dreadful place called the Workhouse, which meant that they lost many of their basic rights as human beings and most often did not return. The insurgence of Irish people at this time cause a few people to campaign against these people and during the 1860s there were mass riots in Birmingham in the areas where Irish people lived. Many people were killed and the Irish were even blamed for causing the “Murphy Riots”.
Birmingham was a rough place to live and during the late 19th century a young population developed a gang culture and there were many gangs, called collectively “The Sloggers”, the pre cursor to what became known as the Peaky Blinders.
The deaths from disease, riot, gang warfare, industrial accidents and poverty meant that the overflow from St Martin’s churchyard was soon filled with 6500 dead.
My paternal grandfather and grandmother moved to Birmingham in 1918, from Cork in Ireland and so he was there when the City had swelled even further and lived in what were called the Back to Backs where it was not uncommon for around 60 people to have to share just two toilet facilities. Again TB would have been common and may have been the reason why my dad contracted TB at some point in his life, which led to my mother being seriously ill with it in the pre antibiotic era but was one of the few who survived.
So I was interested when I heard about the excavation project and it has revealed a host of information about Birmingham’s Social and also its perhaps not so Sociable History.
From the more rural earlier migrants to Birmingham porcelain plates have been found in multiple graves. This comes from a superstition that the devil could get you and plates were piled with salt and buried with the dead because it was thought that the salt would absorb the sins from their life and protect them from hell. This might be a precursor to the more familiar situation where spilt salt is thrown by the right hand over the left shoulder because allegedly the devil comes at you from behind and from the left.
Later graves are more likely to have crosses buried with the dead which is unusual but from a Catholic Tradition and nods to the Irish Catholic population that came to the City.
Birmingham became a centre for metal work and trade during the industrial revolution, making buttons, pen nibs, jewellery, had its own Coffin Factory which is now reopened as a museum. The really shocking thing is that people would have manacles placed inside a coffin. Why?
Well there was another industry that quietly went on in Birmingham. The Medical School anatomists were keen to learn as much about anatomy as possible (this is where I studied anatomy myself). If you were unfortunate enough to be taken into the workhouse you gave up your rights and your body on death would be sent to the medical school for dissection. This was still not enough and up until the 1830s, so called body snatchers would haunt Park Street Burial Ground to exume bodies. This was the reason that manacles were made, to try and secure the loved ones, so that there remains could not be disinterred and taken to the Medical School.
A lot of skeletons have been found with skull cases expertly cut with parts of the bodies removed, but one intriguing feature is that quite a number of skulls have been found where on opening the pre cut skulls, inside is found half a brick. I looked up the average weight of a human brain 3lbs and then I looked up the average weight of a whole brick 5lbs. It seems clear that whoever was doing this was trying to hide the fact that the brain was being removed from the skull for dissection. Maybe their was a service in weighing coffins before burial.
Another strange discovery has been finding a broken wine glass and also a marmalade jar inside some of the remains, this was aired on a BBC programme aired this week. It seems that this was probably mischievous medical students, another symptom of the massive trade in stealing bodies from the graves at Park Street Burial Ground, during the 19th century.
The medical school is situated on the west side of the City and has an underground link to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital aka The QE. When studying there, we would revise in the pathology museum, surrounded by thousands of bottled specimens and it would get quite spooky at night. We would often revise from 8am through until midnight. We would take an evening break and follow the underground tunnel to the QE to have an evening meal.
On night when coming back from our food we saw an unsigned lift and my friends and were discussing where it went. We decided to see, so we left the dark corridor and press the button to the one floor that the lift went to. As the door opened and our eyes were getting used to the gloom, we soon realised that we were in the Dissection Room with the familiar smell of formalin. It was 11 o clock at night. I still remember us pumping the lift buttons frantically to get the door closed.
Fortunately the security guards were so scared to go near the place, we were never found out!