Gruesome London – graverobbing
Graverobbing is often thought to have been something that only happened in Edinburgh, where Burke and Hare carried out their depradations. (Not content with robbing graves, they also bumped off a few people who hadn’t died quickly enough.) But it was a problem in Victorian London, too.
Charles Dickens features a graverobber, the nastily named Jeremy Cruncher, in A Tale of Two Cities. We actually see him digging up the coffin – so does his young son, who admits to his father that he wants to be a bodysnatcher when he grows up. Obviously readers of Dickens’s novels wouldn’t have thought this scene ridiculously far-fetched…
There aren’t too many reminders of the London bodysnatchers. But take yourself off to St Matthew’s church in Bethnal Green and you can see a macabre reminder. At the corner of the road stands a watch house – dating from 1754. (It’s now on the corner of St Matthew’s Row and Wood Close).
The watchman was given a blunderbuss to defend the churchyard, with a reward of 2 guineas if he caught any bodysnatchers. Apparently the churchwardens still have the right to take a shot at you as long they give you warning – by sounding a sort of football rattle.
The watch house is a sweet little building, made of brick with contrasting white voussoirs of the two arches that contain the window and door of the ground floor. (Later, it was extended to house the parish fire engine.) But the innocent look of the building belies its macabre purpose.
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Andrea, in the basement of St Bridewells church is a display on grave robbery, complete with a metal coffin which was in vogue for a few years to deter robbery, it locked. The weight of the coffins , and cost, made it a short lived burial trend.