HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE HO2074 11/26/02 "CAMLEY STREET CEMETERY APPEAL" ================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 08:18:45 -0500 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Hardy & the Camley St Cemetery (St Pancras Station) Greetings all, I had this letter today. I hope you'll take action on this issue. If there are any campaigners among you I'd be the first to sign my name to a petition. Many thanks, Rosemarie ---- I am not sure if you will feel able to take any action over this issue, although as it is one which Thomas Hardy would probably have had strong feelings over, you might like to consider it. The issue concerns the imminent destruction of the Camley St cemetery close to St Pancras station in London. Developments connected with the building of a new rail terminal mean that the site of the cemetery will be obliterated. Thanks to a specific act of parliament granted to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link company, archaeologists are being ejected from the site having completed only part of a major excavation designed to recover the interred bodies for scientific examination prior to appropriate reburial. The company now propose to employ clearance contractors who will use mechanical means to gather the bodies together prior to reburial in a charnel pit. I have copied an article from the London Evening Standard to the bottom of this message, giving further information. As I am sure that you know better than I, Hardy was involved in an earlier threat to the site and it is for this reason that I thought that you might find it appropriate that you should make some representation in favour of the proper treatment of the cemetery and the graves. A campaign to ensure the proper treatment of the site is being co-ordinated by Dr Mike Heyworth of the Council for British Archaeology - he can be contacted at: MikeHeyworth@britarch.ac.uk and will be able to give you further information regarding the best people to address e-mails and letters to. Yours sincerely Chris Cumberpatch BA PhD Archaeological Consultant cgc@ccumberpatch.freeserve.co.uk This is LONDON 26/11/02 - News and city section Graves destroyed by Chunnel diggers By Geraint Smith, Science Correspondent, Evening Standard More than 1,000 graves are being destroyed by contractors building the King's Cross Channel Tunnel terminal in what government advisers have called "a desecration" and "an outrage against human dignity". Archaeologists excavating human remains from up to 2,000 graves have been suddenly ordered off the site of the Camley Street Cemetery at St Pancras as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link company (CTRL) prepares to start digging them out. They had completed work on only about 100 graves. The experts wanted to identify the graves and then contact living relatives of the dead. They also believed they could gather vital information which would help build up a picture of life in London during the Industrial Revolution. "There will be many people alive who have relatives buried in this graveyard," said Simon Thurley, chief executive of the government archaeology watchdog English Heritage. "The archaeologists were excavating these remains with respect, as they are required to do. Normally that is done using sheets to protect the remains from public view, and with meticulous care. "Now, instead, the company will be sending bulldo zers straight through the lot, loading the soil, bones, bits of coffin and name plates into what they call a muck- away truck. Archaeologists will then pick over them for bones. "It is a total desecration of human remains. If this were happening anywhere else - if it were an aboriginal cemetery somewhere, for example - there would be an outcry. It is outrageous that they can just drive through a churchyard - people's grandparents and great-grandparents - in this way." English Heritage is powerless to act, despite what it says is the invaluable record the graveyard contains of life in London, with the most recent of the graves dating from 1854. CTRL - which operates under a special Act of Parliament, giving it virtual carte blanche - has obtained a Home Office licence to remove the graves, although English Heritage says it is missing the usual clause insisting on their "respectful and dignified removal". A CTRL spokesman said: "It has been known for many years that essential CTRL works at St Pancras would involve the removal of human remains and we have all the relevant permissions required to do so. We are working with a competent specialist contractor to find the most appropriate methods." Mr Thurley, formerly the head of the Museum of London, dismissed the company's explanation that the "limited" period available for the archaeological investigations had come to an end. "You can be certain that if they had had some other type of problem like an underground gas main they would have taken the time to go round it properly." Archaeologists had been allowed only three weeks to work on the site. They had originally been told that they would be allowed to excavate from August until mid-January and had so far excavated only about 100 graves. Employed by the developers, they have been forbidden to talk about the site. Harvey Sheldon, head of the archaeology pressure group Rescue, said: "In effect, the company decided that there was too much archaeology there and called the archaeologists off." According to English Heritage's chief archaeologist, David Miles, the decision will also destroy an invaluable record of the population of London during the crucial period of its expansion. "The remains are well preserved. We are dealing with people for whom there is documentary evidence. We know who they were, often what jobs they did, and what they died of. They included rich and poor, immigrants and natives. "The bodies already excavated have been showing very interesting pathologies, and we now know that burials like these are enormously important historically." The row echoes that surrounding the building of St Pancras Station in the mid-19th Century, when the Midland Railway company cut through the same graveyard, disturbing 40,000 graves. The public outcry that resulted led to the appointment of the novelist Thomas Hardy to ensure that the remains were correctly treated. "It seems today that little has been learned. It is of great concern that this may set a precedent for the way early modern burial grounds are treated," said English Heritage. ========== From: Jcphardysoc@aol.com Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 12:19:50 EST Subject: Re: Hardy & the Camley St Cemetery (St Pancras Station) Dear Forum Members I was interested, but alarmed to read the posting regarding Camley Street Cemetery, usually known as Old St Pancras churchyard. This was formerly the principal burial ground for much of North London, with inhumations dating back at least to medieval times. You may be interested to read the appended note I prepared in connexion with the Hardy Society's visit to the churchyard earlier this year, desribed by Fran Chalfont in the October 2002 Journal, p38. On this occasion, we met some of the archaeologists working on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link route; but we were given to understand that there would be only a minor encroachment on the churchyard. A picture of the 'Hardy Tree' surrounded by displaced tombstones may be found on the Old St Pancras church website: www.stpancrasoldchurch.org.uk This has the text of 'The Levelled Churchyard' with 'wrenched memorial stones' wrongly transcribed as 'wretched memorial stones'; but it's otherwise an interesting website. Best wishes John Pentney Hardy and Old St Pancras Churchyard One of the most bizarre tasks Hardy had to perform as an architect's assistant occurred in 1866-67 on behalf of his employer Arthur Blomfield, when he had to supervise the removal of bodies from Old St Pancras churchyard. The construction of the Midland Railway's extension from Bedford to London in the 1860s led to much disturbance of the ancient and overcrowded burial ground. However, it was cheaper to purchase part of the graveyard than the gasworks on the other side of the railway. The approach tracks to St Pancras station encroached on the eastern side of the churchyard, which was originally crossed on a viaduct; but even greater disturbance was caused by the construction of a 'cut-and-cover' railway tunnel linking the main Midland line with the Metropolitan Railway's 'widened lines'. This tunnel, which passed through deeply stratified layers of burials in Old St Pancras churchyard, is currently used by Thameslink trains between King's Cross Thameslink and Kentish Town stations. More of the churchyard was acquired to widen the railway in 1890; and in 1909 the approach track viaduct was converted to an embankment. Recently, a small portion of the southern side of the churchyard has been lo! st in connexion with the construction of a new Channel Tunnel Rail Link terminus at St Pancras. A great scandal arose when it came to public notice that the removal of the bodies for re-interment elsewhere was being carried out by the contractors irreverently and carelessly. The Bishop of London therefore appointed Blomfield (the son of a bishop himself) to superintend the exhumation and reburial elsewhere of the bodies (mainly of paupers and European political refugees) in a decent fashion. Much of this task was delegated to the young Hardy, who gives a graphic account of the often gruesome work in The Life. He seems to have drawn on this memory in his poems 'The Levelled Churchyard' and 'In the Cemetery', although the former was written when he was living at Wimborne where the Minster churchyard had had many of its gravestones cleared away or reused for paving in the 1850s. However, the reference to human jam is much more redolent of Hardy's St Pancras experiences. Sources consulted: Barnes, E.G., The Rise of the Midland Railway, George Allen & Unwin, 1966; re-issued by Peter Kay,1999 Betjeman, J. & Gay, J., London's Historic Railway Stations, John Murray, 1972; re-issued by Capital Transport, 2002 with additional material by Alan A. Jackson Hardy, F.E., The Life of Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, 1962 [Largely written by Hardy himself] Simmons, Jack, St Pancras Station, George Allen & Unwin, 1968 John Pentney, April 2002 ========== Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 13:02:20 -0500 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Re: Hardy & the Camley St Cemetery (St Pancras Station) Thanks John for a wonderfully informative letter. Would you be interested in starting up a petition? The electronic part (email) should be relatively simple if folks are willing to divulge their names and email addresses to the petitioner. The non-electronic part may be more arduous but the world of Hardyans is huge-- so it's certainly worth a try. I've just received a response to my earlier posting from the Archeological Consultant, Chris Cumberpatch (-- what an appropriate name) thanking TTHA for its assistance in this matter. I do hope you'll be able to move this forward, and thanks again for a critically important posting, With every good wish, Rosemarie ========== From: Jcphardysoc@aol.com Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 13:05:52 EST Subject: Re: Hardy & the Camley St Cemetery (St Pancras Station) Dear Rosemarie Thank you for your e-mail. Yes, I am willing to assist with a petition in support of the proper archaeological recording of the burials. The situation is typical of unjoined-up government in Britain, with the official government agency English Heritage in dispute with a statutory company building the CTRL backed by the government. The CTRL has become a flagship project for new Labour, particularly as it has failed to deliver in other areas of transport e.g. the fiasco of railway privatization. It was the public scandal provoked by the irreverent treatment of the St Pancras burials that led to Blomfield's and Hardy's involvement in 1866-7 (Hardy has the wrong date in The Life) and it seems that history is repeating itself. Lack of respect for the dead when family history is increasingly popular, plus the loss of valuable scientific data from the skeletal remains would probably be the best angles to emphasise in any petition. Hardy was of course not anti-railway per se in the manner of Wordsworth who with Ruskin inveighed against railway developments in the Lake District (but Wordsworth was not above investing in railway company shares); and as a keen traveller seems to have enthusiastically embraced the new technology. However, he would probably be horrified by this latest desecration of the dead - his black humour in poems like 'The Levelled Churchyard' was probably his way of coping with the gruesome spectacle he must have witnessed at St Pancras. I shall start by e-mailing Chris Cumberpatch and Mike Heyworth of the Council for British Archaeology, giving them my note on Hardy's involvement, and asking how they would like any petition organized. The Forum should be a useful tool for this. With best wishes John ========== From: Jcphardysoc@aol.com Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 15:18:58 EST Subject: Fwd: letter to The Times re St Pancras Return-Path: Received: from rly-xi02.mx.aol.com (rly-xi02.mail.aol.com [172.20.116.7]) by air-xi04.mail.aol.com (v89.21) with ESMTP id MAILINXI42-1128103537; Thu, 28 Nov 2002 10:35:37 -0500 Received: from srv01.UK.Britarch.ac.uk ([194.119.144.162]) by rly-xi02.mx.aol.com (v89.21) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINXI29-1128103516; Thu, 28 Nov 2002 10:35:16 -0500 content-class: urn:content-classes:message MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Subject: letter to The Times re St Pancras X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.6249.0 Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 15:34:35 -0000 Message-ID: X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: Thread-Topic: letter to The Times re St Pancras Thread-Index: AcKW8vOhHkhDm3O5TlCyJbNU9P+2OwAAAPtQAAAm7dA= From: "Mike Heyworth" To: X-Mailer: Unknown (No Version) John Would you be prepared add your name (and that of the Thomas Hardy Society) to the following letter to go to The Times for publication? I would be grateful if you could let me know ASAP. Many thanks With best wishes Mike Sir For favour of publication Mass clearance of former St Pancras burial ground We call for an immediate halt to the mass clearance of thousands of human bodies that remain on the site of the former St Pancras burial ground in London, currently the subject of extensive development work as part of the construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Due to delays elsewhere in the construction process the time available for lifting the burials has been slashed. Normal exhumation and reinterment procedures have been abandoned, and the planned archaeological work has been drastically cut back. We know from the limited archaeological work already undertaken on the site that it is still possible through coffin plates to identify individual remains, such as the last Bishop of Avranches. However, the bodies are now being removed by bulldozer and dumped off-site for cemetery clearance contractors to salvage the recognisable bones. Any bodily integrity will inevitably be lost, and the remains are not being accorded the dignity and respect which they deserve. In the 1850s construction of the Midlands Railway in the area of the cemetery caused a public outcry at the removal of headstones leaving graves without individual identity, as recorded by Thomas Hardy in his poem The Levelled Churchyard. In the 21st century a cavalier attitude to community, spiritual and archaeological issues is even less acceptable. It is no way for major infrastructure projects to be conducted. Yours etc CBA, etc === Dr Mike Heyworth, Deputy Director, Council for British Archaeology Bowes Morrell House, 111 Walmgate, York YO1 9WA, UK tel 01904 671417, fax 01904 671384, web www.britarch.ac.uk === ========== From: Jcphardysoc@aol.com Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 15:19:28 EST Subject: Fwd: letter to The Times re St Pancras Return-Path: Received: from rly-xe03.mx.aol.com (rly-xe03.mail.aol.com [172.20.105.195]) by air-xe05.mail.aol.com (v89.21) with ESMTP id MAILINXE53-1128110309; Thu, 28 Nov 2002 11:03:09 -0500 Received: from srv01.UK.Britarch.ac.uk ([194.119.144.162]) by rly-xe03.mx.aol.com (v89.21) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINXE36-1128110249; Thu, 28 Nov 2002 11:02:49 -0500 content-class: urn:content-classes:message MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Subject: Re: letter to The Times re St Pancras X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.6249.0 Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 16:02:11 -0000 Message-ID: X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: Thread-Topic: letter to The Times re St Pancras Thread-Index: AcKW8vOhHkhDm3O5TlCyJbNU9P+2OwAAAPtQAAAm7dAAAPaxAA== From: "Mike Heyworth" To: X-Mailer: Unknown (No Version) John Things are moving ... Apparently Rail Link Engineering had an emergency board meeting last night and have now called a halt to the work at the former St Pancras burial ground. They have provisionally agreed to refrain from using JCBs and to return to proper exhumation after consultation with the Council for the Care of Churches, but archaeological input has not yet been addressed. We need to keep the pressure on to ensure that the planned archaeological work is reinstated, but the letter to The Times is probably now not needed in its current form. Meetings will be taking place over the next day or two to firm up agreements on the way forward. I'll keep you posted. best wishes Mike =================================================================== Dr Mike Heyworth, Deputy Director, Council for British Archaeology Bowes Morrell House, 111 Walmgate, York YO1 9WA, UK tel 01904 671417, fax 01904 671384, web www.britarch.ac.uk =================================================================== -----Original Message----- From: Mike Heyworth Sent: 28 November 2002 15:35 To: 'Jcphardysoc@aol.com' Subject: letter to The Times re St Pancras John Would you be prepared add your name (and that of the Thomas Hardy Society) to the following letter to go to The Times for publication? I would be grateful if you could let me know ASAP. Many thanks With best wishes Mike Sir For favour of publication Mass clearance of former St Pancras burial ground We call for an immediate halt to the mass clearance of thousands of human bodies that remain on the site of the former St Pancras burial ground in London, currently the subject of extensive development work as part of the construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Due to delays elsewhere in the construction process the time available for lifting the burials has been slashed. Normal exhumation and reinterment procedures have been abandoned, and the planned archaeological work has been drastically cut back. We know from the limited archaeological work already undertaken on the site that it is still possible through coffin plates to identify individual remains, such as the last Bishop of Avranches. However, the bodies are now being removed by bulldozer and dumped off-site for cemetery clearance contractors to salvage the recognisable bones. Any bodily integrity will inevitably be lost, and the remains are not being accorded the dignity and respect which they deserve. In the 1850s construction of the Midlands Railway in the area of the cemetery caused a public outcry at the removal of headstones leaving graves without individual identity, as recorded by Thomas Hardy in his poem The Levelled Churchyard. In the 21st century a cavalier attitude to community, spiritual and archaeological issues is even less acceptable. It is no way for major infrastructure projects to be conducted. Yours etc CBA, etc === Dr Mike Heyworth, Deputy Director, Council for British Archaeology Bowes Morrell House, 111 Walmgate, York YO1 9WA, UK tel 01904 671417, fax 01904 671384, web www.britarch.ac.uk === ========== Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 23:03:32 -0500 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Re: Fwd: letter to The Times re St Pancras Dear John, I don't know how the Thomas Hardy Society might respond to this request but as the President of the Thomas Hardy Association I would be grateful if you would ask members to send you their names and pledges of support by private email. The same goes for members of the TTHA Forum. TTHA doesn't sanction any kind of blanket policy or decision-making which has not gone before the Board of TTHA Vice Presidents and Directors for approval and even then it would not be possible for that same Board to speak on behalf of its members without gaining their individual vote on this particular issue. I would be grateful if you would convey this information to Dr Heyworth. In the meantime I'm sure Forum members will respond to his call for support, via yourself, as they see fit. I would ask members not to respond to this petition on TTHA's Forum but by personal email only to yourself at: Jcphardysoc@aol.com or to Dr Heyworth at www.britarch.ac.uk I will also respond to you privately on this matter. Thank you, and with every good wish, Rosemarie At 03:18 PM 11/28/02 -0500, you wrote: >John > >Would you be prepared add your name (and that of the Thomas Hardy Society) to the following letter to go to The Times for publication? ========== From: Jcphardysoc@aol.com Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 10:10:21 EST Subject: Re: Threat to Old St Pancras Burial Ground Dear Forum Readers With reference to Rosemarie's posting of 29 November and earlier Forum postings on the subject, may I urge all of you who are concerned about the threat to Old St Pancras burial ground to e-mail your objections direct to me at: jcphardysoc@aol.com or to Dr Mike Heyworth of the Council for British Archaeology at: mikeheyworth@britarch.ac.uk These objections can then be forwarded to the appropriate bodies concerned such as English Heritage and Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) contractors. In addition to the Hardy connection, I would suggest you emphasise the lack of respect shown to the dead by the mass bulldozing of human remains and the loss of valuable scientific data. It's quite amazing how much information can now be derived from skeletal remains such as evidence for disease and diet in the past. As Rosemarie says, you will be objecting in a personal capacity rather than expressing official policy of either TTHA or the Thomas Hardy Society. With best wishes John Pentney ==========