The Great Majority: Body Snatching and Burial Reform in 19th-Century Britain

Enon Chapel was located in the same street. A Baptist dissenting chapel, opened in 1823 as a speculative venture, it had begun to offer cheap burial in its basement. Soon the congregation was contending with an “abominable” stench and saprophagous corpse flies crawling sluggishly from the cracks in the wooden floor. Some fainted from the smell; many left services with insidious, miasmatic headaches. When another reformist venture — the building of drains — required entry to the basement, it was discovered that 12,000 corpses had been stuffed into a space measuring 50 × 30 feet (15.2 × 9.1 m). The “master carman” William Burn testified that he had helped remove some of its contents when the sewer was built. Men repairing the road surface of Clement’s Lane had “asked me to give them a few baskets of rubbish [to fill potholes], which I did, and they picked up a human hand.” The bones got as far as Waterloo Bridge, where they were used as landfill to shore up the construction of Waterloo Road: infrastructure built on the bones of the city’s impoverished dead. Long after the inquiry had concluded, Walker purchased the lease on the abandoned Enon Chapel and paid for an estimated 20,000 more bodies to be reinterred in a garden cemetery outside the city.