198 Van'at(07i and Correlation of the Human Skull 
Street*, but his business appears aftei'wards to Lave been removed to a house near 
the gate of the ground in Backchurch Lane. Sheen's Burial-Ground was closed 
April 1, 1854. A witness before the Select Committee on Improvement of Health 
in Towns in 1842 speaks of it as having been opened "some years ago-|-." In 
Chadwick's Report, 1843, it is stated to be .9080 square yards with 600 burials per 
annum and 300 burials per acre. It was thus a small ground, but if its depth was 
between 90 and 100 yards, it must have been about 100 yards broad, whereas on 
the maps after Greenwood it is given as a long thin strip hardly 15 to 20 yards 
broad. It was thus described by G. A. Walker in his Gatherings from Grave Yards, 
1839 : " This also is a private burying-place. The proprietor of this ground is an 
undertaker. He has planted it with trees and shrubs, which are sufficiently 
attractive, but the ground is saturated with human putrescence." 
Before I leave Walker's terrible survey of the state of the London graveyards in 
1839, I must refer to what he terms the " management" of these burial-grounds. 
Thus he gives on p. 199 an account of a Mile End private burial-ground belonging 
to an undertaker, where the coffins were dug up, the coffin furniture, nails more 
especially, sold to "dealers in marine stores," the coffin wood was apparently used 
as fuel, and the bodies, only interred about a month or six weeks, thrown into a 
deep hole in an obscure corner of the ground. In this way place was made for fresh 
interments in the better and more crowded part of the ground. This case was by 
no means an isolated one. " Management " and "clearance" went on in many of 
the crowded London graveyards before 1854. 
The problem before us then is this: a graveyard (now unrecognised as a cartage 
contractor's yard) existed some 30 to 50 yai'ds only north of the site where the 
bones were found. It was densely packed, its southern boundary is not very clearly 
defined and it appears to have been larger than the marked enclosure of the maps. 
Could there have existed a clearance pit outside of this graveyard, or could it have 
extended at some time some distance further south than the maps indicate ? If it 
can now be used as a mews, there is no reason why a portion of it should not have 
been sold off fur building purposes after being filled up in the first half of the 
nineteenth century. If this had happened our crania would date from 1820 say to 
1850. They would belong to the better class of denizens in Whitechapel, i.e. those 
who could afford to buy a grave and did not exercise their right as parishioners to 
be buried in St Mary's overcrowded graveyard. It must be remembered that there 
was a residential population of merchants, commercial men, master-mariners 
and such like living at that time between the Whitechapel and the Commercial 
* " P. Sheen : Cofflu plate cbaser and Undertaker, 80 Leman Street." He does not appear iu the 
London Directories before this date. 
t There was an " Ebenezer Chapel " at the east corner of Gower's Walk and Backchurch Lane, close 
on to the spot where Little Ayliff Street (now Little Alie Street) runs into the two. One of my local 
informants tells me that many interments took place at this Chapel : see preceding footnote. This 
probably accounts for Mrs Basil Ho'nies' statement that Sheen's ground was used by the Baptists in 
Little Alie Street and was then called Mr Brittain's burial-ground, " If so it existed in 1763 " (loc. cit. 
p. 327). This was possibly the Ebenezer Chapel ground. There is no sign of Sheen's ground on the 
maps before 1800. 
