A supplementary report on the results of a special inquiry into the practice of interment in towns.Chadwick, Edwin
History
A supplementary report on the results of a special inquiry into the practice of interment in towns.
Chadwick, Edwin
Burial; Cemeteries -- Great Britain; Mortality -- Statistics; Public health -- Great Britain; Working class -- Great Britain
§ 110. The expense to the rate-payers of parishes for the transference
of the interments to the suburbs would be necessarily very high; the
expense of numerous separate parochial establishments, if only on the
scale of the establishments for the performance of the funeral ceremony,
and for such imperfect care of the ground as that given in those
described would be, at the least, between 25 and 30,000_l._ per annum.
The proposed regulation of the distance of cemeteries from human
habitations—that they shall in every case be two miles, not from houses,
but from the metes and bounds of London and Westminster, and “of any
other city, town, or borough,” as defined by the Municipal Act, and
“which shall contain more than 500 houses, the occupiers of which shall
be rated to the relief of the poor more than 10_l._ or upwards,” appear
to be made without any local examination, or reference to proper
observations or experience.—Vide post, §§ 162, 163, and 164. The metes
and bounds of several towns and places include common lands and sites,
sufficiently distant from any collections of houses, to be the most
eligible sites, and suitable soils for cemeteries, which according to
the best ascertained rule, should be at distances proportioned to the
numbers of inhabitants and probable burials, varying according to these
numbers, from 150 to 500 paces. All unnecessary increase of distance
must be attended with proportionately increased charges of interment to
the poorer classes: arrangements for preventing an increase of the
expense of conveyance of the remains to distant places of interment,
though practicable under general regulations for large national
cemeteries, would be impracticable on the plan of numerous places of
interment with small separate establishments. Mr. Jeffryes, an
undertaker, who chiefly inters the poorest classes in the Whitechapel
district, where the _parochial_ interments are generally diminishing,
was more particularly questioned on this topic.
What has been your experience in respect to the interment of people
of the working classes at cemeteries, and at a distance from their
residence, as compared with burials near their residence? At what
cemeteries have you interred persons?—At Mr. Barber Beaumont’s
cemetery, which is about a mile and a half from Whitechapel; and
also at the cemetery which is at the Cambridge Heath, Cambridge
Road. I have attended, but not on my own account, funerals at all
the other cemeteries—Highgate, Kensal Green, and others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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