In the early hours of a cold, black Tuesday morning, a clamour was rising in the heart of Clerkenwell. From the tiny hut at the burial ground of Spa Fields, thick, black smoke was pouring into the sky, dragging upwards a redolent stench that had pervaded the area for years. Local residents shouted and banged on the door of the outbuilding, as flames from the roof slashed and stabbed at a starless night sky. Local fire engine keeper John Walters pushed his way through the crowd, crowbar in hand, and loudly demanded to be let inside. Despite resistance the door swung open, and Walters paled at the dreadful scene that now confronted him. Human ribs and socket bones were blackened and smouldering in the fire, as along the wall stacks of coffin boards lined up to stoke the flames. The wood, still wet, was spattered with human remains, and the chimney was black and thick with coffin pitch.
The fire that night was nothing new. In fact, it had been burning there in the Bone House almost solidly for the last 25 years, producing such a malignant odour that some residents had been forced to move out of their homes, and those who stayed complained of recurring related illnesses. The foul stench clung to their clothes and hair, their nostrils burned, and their eyes streamed, but no amount of community concern was addressing the problem. The graveyard manager, Mr Charles Bird, had long claimed the smell was coming from what he termed 'an unwholesome nearby sewer' – but any local could tell you the true source. Spa Fields at the time was just under two acres of burial ground - enough, Bird claimed, to hold 2,500 bodies. For the last 50 years, they had interred an unbelievable yet conservative estimate of 1,500 bodies per year - to a total of 80,000.
Tom Smith was head gravedigger at Spa Fields, just as his father had been before him. By all accounts he was a particularly unpleasant individual, known to sell the clothes, hair, and teeth stolen from corpses within days of their burial. They would then be stripped of their coffins before being re-interred as tightly as possible to make room for new bodies. Smith's graves were packed so densely that even at a depth of 25–30ft, bodies would lie just inches below the surface, releasing pestilence and disease into the local atmosphere. New graves were opened right on top of occupied ones, with no regard for what or who was to be found under the next shovel. Often in the digging of a new grave, they would mutilate seven or eight bodies underneath. By the time they reached the bottom, a putrid pile of flesh weighing up to 170 lb would be left at their feet. This they would bail out with buckets, and what couldn't be mixed into the soil would be burned. Smith and his crew buried up to 40 bodies per day, during which up to 30 graves would lie open at once, their contents exposed to the public for sometimes days at a time. Eventually, the burial ground custodians began to look for more effective remedies to their overcrowding problem, and thus began the nightly fires.
Headstones would regularly be relocated or removed altogether to give the appearance of empty space in the grounds. For years, locals had witnessed Smith's gravediggers dragging bodies out of graves by the neck with ropes, chopping them up with shovels, dumping them back into graves, or mixing body parts straight into the soil. Tom had once been seen by a local woman, Harriet Woods, dragging a woman's corpse from its resting place by the hair, and also jumping up and down on coffins to try to make room for more. She had confronted him, outraged at his contemptuous treatment of the dead, to which he responded, "I should have your old bones before long!"
As well as the stench and the smoke, there were other more serious consequences to come from the nocturnal activities in the burial ground. Rancid fluids from the site ran into a nearby drain, polluting the water, and the air was ripe with the noxious gases of decomposition. Many people in or close to the graveyard became ill and died as a result. Diarrhoea and fever were five times worse in the surrounding streets than anywhere else in the parish, and the presentation of these was unusually aggressive and violent. Harriet lost five of her eight children living next to Spa Fields, two of them in the same day.
One man who was particularly disturbed by the graveyard's activities and the impact on the health of the local community was Drury Lane surgeon, George Alfred Walker. Walker had made many visits to the graveyard and the local residents of Spa Fields in his role as the founder of the Society for the Abolition of Burials in Towns. In 1839, he published a study called Gatherings from Graveyards, which questioned how Bird was managing to accept so many burials in such a small area. His further research only fuelled his concern, and his findings were so outrageous that in 1843 he made a representation to the House of Commons asking them to deal with the issues at Spa Fields. Five hundred local residents and concerned citizens signed their name to the request.
In the same year, back at the bone house, a gravedigger named Reuben Room was being given his marching orders. He had worked at the burial ground for six years, but now found himself dismissed after a disagreement with Smith turned sour. Room was not going quietly, and insisted on digging one last grave before he left. His daughter had recently passed away, and as a poor man with few options, Room had been forced to have her buried in Spa Fields. Having seen first-hand and participated in the debauched practices of the graveyard, he refused to leave without her. Eventually, Bird called for the local police to remove Room, but when they arrived, Reuben quickly explained to them the nightly goings-on and his motives for this unusual request. Constables Webb, Henry, and Martin were directed to the bone house, where they later told a police court they witnessed firsthand that coffins and flesh were being routinely burned.
In December of 1839, John Walters was called to his first of two fires at the graveyard. On arrival, he noted Stephen Bishop in the bone house tending to a fire. Bishop was the night watchman and had been tasked with keeping the fire burning in the grate for the last 17 or 18 years. When he started, he would often eat his meals in the bone house, but over time he had begun to wear gloves to protect his hands, and claimed he "could never eat in there now." Of all the men who had a hand in this industrial scale desecration, it was Bishop who fed each limb and plank to the flames. When the wood was too wet to burn, he would take the more combustible deal coffins of stillborn babies and use them as kindling to keep it going. And so it was that on January 2nd, 1844, John Walters found himself yet again outside the burning bone house, calling to be let in to extinguish the fire.
The fire was extinguished again, but never for long, and community discontent only grew. A month later, local pawnbroker and silversmith Robert Watt organised 150 residents from the local community to petition the police to intervene. Inspector William Penny attended the scene shortly after and again confirmed what no man could deny – bodies were burning in Spa Fields, as well as shrouds and coffin wood. He would later say that he had passed the burial ground many times on his nightly rounds, and always encountered the same fire burning, and the same acrid smell. All the while, George Walker was becoming more and more vocal about his own feelings on the matter.
A paper called The Builder ran a story on the graveyard on the 22nd of February, which laid out all of the activities Walker had witnessed in the graveyard and his firm belief that the graveyard management were nothing but heartless ghouls, disposing of corpses in a most horrific fashion in order to maximise their own profits. He exemplified Bird's callousness in describing his use of interrogation around stillbirth burials. Bird knew that if he could make someone admit their baby had breathed before expiring, then he could charge more for the burial. This was only one facet of Bird's ruthless and greedy nature. Walker continued to call for a blanket ban on burials in dense urban areas and cited Spa Fields as one of the strongest examples of the risks such activity posed to local residents.
By now, the heat was really on for Charles Bird. The locals, the police, and now this prominent surgeon were all breathing down his neck about the goings-on in the graveyard, but Bird wasn't going to take it lying down. He responded to the heavy scrutiny with outraged denials and even published a letter in response to Walker naming him a liar and threatening to sue him. He printed reams of pamphlets seeking to discredit Walker, claiming that the allegations were all malicious and unfounded. Eventually, Bird came forward and made a bold statement of his own. A flyer was circulated claiming that any person who wished to open the grave of a relative would be allowed to do so free of charge in order to dispel the 'wicked rumours' which plagued the burial ground. This looked great on paper, but in reality it was not so straightforward.
Reports that Bird was charging people excessively for this very service quickly began to circulate, and outright refusals were also not uncommon. Spa Fields was not consecrated ground, and as such was a cheaper alternative to the other local options. Many poor people felt they had no choice but to put their relatives’ remains there, and many more felt this was just another opportunity for Charles Bird to further exploit those same desperate people.
One woman named Harriet Jessie Nelson arrived at the graveyard flyer-in-hand one Monday morning to ask for her late husband's coffin to be opened, in order to put her mind at rest. This was, at first, hastily agreed - until Harriet pointed out that she knew the exact spot of her husband's burial. At this point, Bird refused to allow the gravediggers to go any further, telling Mrs. Nelson that he knew with 100% certainty that this ground had "not been turned for ten years." She begged them to open the grave, but Bird cruelly dismissed her, saying, "You have enough teeth to dig the grave yourself!" Hearing the commotion, and having Harriet explain the situation to them, three young men in the vicinity agreed to raise the body for her. They had dug several feet into the grave, but the putrid odour of the contaminated soil overwhelmed them, and they had to stop. In their digging, they had not located one single piece of a coffin. When she asked about this, the gravediggers laughed and asked how she could expect anyone to still be down there after a year or two.
Things began to reach fever pitch for Charles Bird in February 1845, when Watt and locals again signed a petition, this time to the district police court. Having had no luck engaging the local parish on the matter, they decided to escalate the issue to a higher authority. Watt asked the court for "the suppression of practices of a most abominable nature... in the Spa Fields burying ground." Various witnesses shared their testimony, including Inspector Penny, John Walker, Reuben Room, and other local residents. The volume of witness accounts and corroborating information made the petition impossible to ignore, and despite the lengthy protestations from Charles Bird, the parish confirmed its intent to prosecute Smith, Bird, and his predecessor Mr. Green. By March 1845, the scandal was so widely exposed that Bird had no choice but to cease the appalling activities in the graveyard.
Every newspaper and corner gossip was spreading the news so thick that burials at Spa Fields dropped from 40 a week in January to just four a week in March. The entire parish was consumed with the scandal. One grisly letter appearing in the Morning Chronicle on March 26th gives an account of a resident who lived at Spa Fields around 1805, and even then recalled bodies disinterred and fed to pigs while the coffins burned. There was no way for the burial ground to continue its historical operations, and finally the bone house fell silent. The coals finally fizzled out in the grate, and the noise of breaking wood no longer shattered the night. Neighbours congratulated and thanked George Walker for all his efforts, telling him they were finally able to sleep in their own beds again.
Walker continued to campaign for the end of town burials for a further six years before the 1851 Burials Act was finally signed into law, prohibiting any new burials in built-up areas of London. Eventually, in 1853, the Spa Fields burial ground was closed forever. By the time London County Council acquired the land in 1885, not a single headstone remained there. In 1886, the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association turned the land into a park and children's playground, which it remains to this day. A park-keeper's hut now marks the spot where the bone house stood.
But for a small plaque at the entrance gate, the story of Charles Bird and the Spa Fields Burial Ground is all but erased. Perhaps, on a cold January morning, when smoke and ash mingle in the sky, we will remember the nefarious Mr. Bird, and the heroic Doctor Walker who finally brought him to task.