The Medical Officer of Health, on inspecting the place, found a horrible condition of things. But with many precautions against loosing some virulent epidemic in the locality, the human remains were removed and re-interred elsewhere, and, it is stated, part of the ground was built over.
Fuller particulars were given as to the Peel Grove Cemetery. The ground, several acres in extent, had been leased by a pawnbroker and started as a cemetery as a speculation. The statements made by the writer in the Times are specially illuminating. The cemetery was opened about 1840 without consecration. The Bishop refused to consecrate the ground as burials had taken place in it already, and as some difficulties were consequently experienced, the speculating pawnbroker acted, it is said, for some years as chaplain.
Ultimately, somehow or other, a chaplain was appointed.
About 20,000 persons had been buried in it, six deep, and packed as closely as it was possible to pack them—not even earth between the coffins, so anxious was the owner to economise space; large numbers who died of cholera in 1849 having been buried there.
The last interment took place in September, 1855.
In 1883, the ground having served one financial purpose, it became desirable to utilise it for another financial purpose, and the proposal was made to erect houses upon it, and an agreement was entered into with a builder for the erection of blocks of dwellings thereon. This builder commenced excavations for the purpose of laying foundations, and he had sent in drainage plans for a block of industrial dwellings to the Vestry of Bethnal Green.
“Is such an obvious violation of the laws of health and decency to be permitted?” said the writer.
“The Vestry are alive to the situation, and appear to be willing to do all in their power to avert the catastrophe. But the law on the subject is by no means clear…. It is little short of scandalous that such doubts should exist. It is repugnant to every feeling of decency and propriety to invite human beings to live in densely packed crowds over a charnel-house.”
The sanitary condition of any city or district must, as has already been pointed out, depend very largely upon the system of local government in existence at the time, and its efficiency or inefficiency.
This was specially true of this great metropolis with its millions of people, its vast extent, its great diversities.