In November 1854, a train made its first journey from an annex to Waterloo railway station in central London to the county of Surrey in southeast England.
Instead of cheerful hikers seeking a bucolic respite in the countryside, the train carried passengers dressed in mourning.
The railway also did not transport suitcases or trunks. He carried coffins. Coffins with corpses. The train was heading to Brookwood Cemetery, near the town of Woking.
The first burial – twins who were stillborn, daughters of a Mrs Hall of Ewer Street, in the London neighborhood of Southwark – was in an unmarked grave, the standard for families who could not afford anything else.
The reason mourners made this 74km round trip to bury their dead is because the city of London had grown rapidly to 2.5 million people.
Although the capital had hundreds of cemeteries in church gardens, it was running out of space to house the dead.
Grave upon grave
“Many times in our walks through London we have seen cemeteries attached to churches, almost in all cases raised considerably above the level of the pavement, and, in some instances, above 1.5 m or 2 metres,” he wrote in 1852 the American author and academic David W. Bartlett.
“The reason was obvious enough: an accumulation of years of human dust, and that in the center of the largest city in the world.”
The number of bodies far exceeded the capacity of the cemeteries. St. Martin's Church, which measures 90 meters by 116 meters, received 14,000 bodies in 10 years.
William Chamberlain, gravedigger of St Clement's Church, London, gave evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee in Parliament in 1842.
He said the ground was so full of bodies that he couldn't dig a new grave “without bumping into other graves.”
He and his colleagues were instructed to cut up coffins and bodies to make room for new corpses.
“We found almost perfect bodies, and we had to cut off parts with axes and pickaxes,” he said. “We opened the lids of coffins and saw bodies so perfect that you could distinguish between men and women and they were all cut down.”
“During the time I was at that job, the meat was cut into pieces and thrown behind some boards that are placed to keep the ground high where the mourners are standing, and when they left, that meat was pushed down, and the coffins were taken out of there and burned.”
It was obvious why it was considered essential to create a cemetery on the outskirts of London.
In 1851, Parliament passed legislation known as the Burial Act.
The following year, the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company (LNC) was formed, with the ambition of forever creating London's only cemetery.
distance problem
The company went to great lengths to make this new cemetery on a Woking meadow so attractive that Londoners would not even consider burying their loved ones elsewhere.
A brochure promoting the site said it was so charming that “solitude itself could find its resting place here.”
The distance of 37 km between London and Brookwood meant that the traditional horse-drawn funeral carriage walking at its appropriate slow pace could take up to 12 hours to arrive.
Although Brookwood was the right answer to London's overcrowding, a better way had to be found to get the funeral procession there.
Fortunately, the newly established southwestern train line passed through the border of the cemetery.
The train route passed through Richmond Park and Hampton Court Palace, a landscape described by one of the railway's founders as “comforting” and, again, attractive to the wealthy classes.
Classes
But not everyone was convinced. The managers of the London and South West railway line, which ran from Waterloo station, were not very fond of the idea of their own passengers using the carriages that had previously been used to carry coffins and funeral processions.
The Bishop of London, Charles Blomfield, was also horrified by combining the railway line with burial services and told the House of Commons Select Committee that “the hurry” attached to train travel was incompatible “with the solemnity of a Christian funeral.”
The bishop was also concerned that the remains of those who had led “decent and upright lives would travel alongside those whose lifestyle had been morally lax.”
Social objections included some discomfort with the idea of mixing social classes as well as the mixing of different denominations or even completely different religions.
The solution was for the train traveling to the necropolis to be a separate service, with its own trains and timetables, with six separate categories of tickets for the living and the dead.
The coffins were spaced so that the bodies of Anglican worshipers traveled behind Anglican mourners, and the same with people of other religions or no religion.
There was first, second and third class. The first class allowed families to choose any site in the cemetery and, for an additional cost, the construction of a permanent monument. It cost about US$3.60, the equivalent of US$332 today.
Second-class funerals limited the choice of location, but cost about US$1 (today US$110). The third class was reserved for the poor and for those who were buried at the expense of the parishes.
The trains ran every day, and until the tracks reached the cemetery itself, a group of black horses pushed the cars there. A law prevented tickets from increasing, the price of which remained unchanged for the first 85 of the 87 years it was in operation.
They say that unscrupulous travelers who wanted to travel to Woking (including many golfers) dressed as mourners to take advantage of the cheap tickets.
The train service continued until World War II, when, on the night of 16 April 1941, in one of the last major air raids on London, the station was hit by high-explosive incense bombs.
Roads and buildings were destroyed.
After the end of the war, funeral train services were not restarted. Travel by automobile and hearses was more convenient and popular.
The London Necropolis Railway had reached the end of its days.
Today, the Westminster Bridge Road terminal building still stands as Westminister Bridge House, and the tracks and platforms still exist at Brookwood.
The national railway company also installed a special section at the site to commemorate the former service.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c72xp2zvz63o, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-12-16 11:10:06
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