Local Mysteries with Tom Slemen, Maghull & Aintree Stra
LAST week I related how 3,561 bodies were found in a mass grave by council workmen who were digging up scrubland to lay the foundations of a school off St Oswald's Street in Old Swan.
To deepen the mystery, the Home Office told Liverpool City Council to cordon off the mass grave with 10-foot-high security fences and to cremate all of the corpses.
In 1995, several historians contacted Whitehall, hoping to discover why the Home Office had given orders to cremate the unknown dead of Old Swan, and a spokesman said he couldn't trace any records of the incident.
The puzzle then, of how 3,561 bodies came to be buried off St Oswald ' s Street, remains unsolved.
Victims of plague and cholera were dumped in pits often filled with quicklime, but the thousands of bodies found at Old Swan were not only placed in coffins, they had been buried in groups according to their age, which suggests all of the internments took place simultaneously.
So, were over 3,000 people massacred at Old Swan in the 1840s or a decade before?
If there had been some uprising, and the authorities had dealt with the revolt by massacring the dissenters, would they have afterwards buried the victims in coffins?
Thousands of poor people were disembowelled and hanged by the authorities in England during the Peasant's Revolt of 1382, but news of a massacre could not be contained, and would soon have spread across the country.
The only clue that seems to provide a solution to this mystery lies in several curious reports from council workmen who claimed that a few of the coffins did indeed bear name-plates.
If these reports are true, then this could point to an intriguing possibility never considered before; that the coffins were moved from another graveyard and reburied at Old Swan.
In 1838, the foundation stone to St George's Hall was laid and the site excavated for the hall's foundations lay adjacent to St John's Church.
div>
For work to proceed, many of the 27,000 coffins in St John's Churchyard had to be removed to make space.
The army of builders and civil engineers working on the St George's Hall project also suggested the unsightly St John's Church itself should be demolished. Now there was the problem of the church graveyard to contend with, and herein lies the clue to the origin of the mass grave.
http://icseftonandwestlancs.icnetwor...name_page.html
Bookmarks