The
Mystery Graves of Old Swan
In the
1970s plans were underway to demolish the old St Oswald's Primary School, Old
Swan (founded 1842 and re-built in 1855)
and create two modern, separate school buildings at the cost of
££400,000 . These two new buildings would contain the infants and junior
sections of the primary school. It is
the buildings proposed in the 1970s plans that stand today, the infants school
standing on St Oswald Street and the junior school standing at the junction of
Montague Road and Mill Lane.
It was
during the building of the new junior school that 3,561 graves were
discovered. It is clear that the
workmen and the council planners had little knowledge of these graves. It was only by chance that the parish
priest, Father McCartney had noted 'that six or seven graves lay at the bottom
of the garden'. The discovery of the
graves and the subsequent attempt by the city council to minimize disruption to
their schedule for building the school would lead to years of speculation and
wild rumours by locals and some misguided writers. Indeed two prominent Old Swan websites
cannot agree as to where the bodies were found or indeed when they were found.
Where
were the graves?
As
stated previously the plans were in place by 1970 to re-build the school on one
site but in two buildings. Work began
in 1973.
By 1974
(according to http://www.stoswaldoldswan.org.uk) the infants section of the
school (on St Oswald's Street) was complete and children had moved in. This site was built on top of a group of
streets and houses, the main one being Percival Street. The same website tells the finding of the
graves story relating to the junior section of the school, built on the corner
of Montague Road and Mill Lane, opened in 1981 after an 18 month delay.
The Ben
Travers article from 1981 celebrates the opening of 'St Oswald's Primary
School' – the name of the combined site but the pictures of the grave
exhumations supplied in the article are clearly of the junior school site. If there was indeed an 18 month delay on the
building of the junior school site then the work on that building must have
been started in February 1980.
Presumably it was during the 18 months previous to this that the graves
were exhumed. This being said, one
source says that the last body was removed to Anfield crematorium in 1975. Therefore it took another five years to
build the junior school.
The two
part nature of the site and the long
gap between the start of the work (1973) and its completion (1981) has clearly
been a cause of confusion for many people.
From the photographs in Travers article it is obvious that the 1979-81
junior school site is the location in which the graves where found.
This is
further proved by the maps below. In
these maps I have used;
an undated
OS map (reckoned to be post-1906).
a
tithe map from the 1830s.
a
modern GoogleEarth map from between 2000-2008
1) Travers, Ben 'The strange secret of
Old Swan' in The Catholic Pictorial, 6 September 1981
2) 'St Oswald's' from
http://liverpool-schools.co.uk/html/st_oswald_s.html [accessed 2009]
3) Travers, Ben 'The strange secret of
Old Swan' in The Catholic Pictorial, 6 September 1981
4) Ibid.
5) 'St. Oswald, King & Martyr - over
160 years of a parish' from http://www.stoswaldoldswan.org.uk/school4.htm
[accessed 2009]
6) 'St. Oswald, King & Martyr - over
160 years of a parish' from http://www.stoswaldoldswan.org.uk/graves.htm
[accessed 2009]
7) Hmtmaj on
http://www.yoliverpool.com/forum/showthread.php?2852-Mass-Grave-in-Old-Swan&p=167013#post167013 [accessed 2009]
Here is
the modern map I have highlighted two buildings, St Oswalds Church in RED. St
Oswalds Infants School in BLUE
Now
with the undated OS map, post 1906 but early 20th Century
Now the
1830s tithe map. Harder to make everything line up on this one..
The
Irish Potato famine, (An Drochshaol in Gaelic) happened between 1845 and 1852, thousands of poor
Irish fled their country to find a new life in England and the New World. As
you can see, there have been buildings on the land next to the church (around
Percival Street) since the 1830s. So
there is zero chance of the graves being part of a Potato Famine related
incident.
Also,
if the graves were located underneath Percival Street and were from a pre-1830
burial then why where they not discovered when the houses (which probably had
cellars and definitely had foundations) were built in the 1830s * The only conclusion is that the graves were
not on the site of the infants school.
Father
Patrick James McCartney, parish priest in 1973 is said to have noticed the
burials "at the bottom of the garden". We know that the church was
surrounded by a graveyard (hardly going to be called a 'garden') and the area
where the BLUE school is was already built on... this leads to the conclusion
that the priest is talking about the garden to the presbetry or parochial
house, on the rear left hand side of the church and with an extensive garden
over the old "Burial Ground (dis.)".
* In fact in the 1830s tith map St Oswalds Church had not been built, (built in 1842).
The
article then goes on to say "three feet beneath St Oswalds
scrubland". Hardly what you would call the land where 'Percival Street'
was. Scrubland is a weird phrase to use really on the post-1906 OS map there is
an area of trees to the south of the church/presbetry... but would that be
scrubland? And even stranger... there was no burial ground marked there...
I
suspect that the reporter was getting confused between scrub and garden but
still...
The
final proof... for me at least is what happens when I map the new Junior School
site onto the post-1906 OS map.
The
school building (in blue and to the left of the church in RED) covers half of
the disused burial ground as well as the 'scrub'. I imagine that as the site was cleared for
building there would be little to differentiate between the old scrub and what
used to be gardens.
What
were the graves?
It is
clear that the graves were located on a known burial ground. All that this proves is that the city
planners and builders did not do their homework.
I
surmise that somewhere between 1906 and 1956 (when Fr McCartney was at St
Oswald's for the first time) the disused burial ground was landscaped and
became the garden of the presbytery.
Gradually the old burial ground was forgotten about and the land simply
became a garden.
Ben
Travers report in 1981 says that the parish accountant (who Travers credits
with having over 25 years cemetery experience, whatever that means), said that
the coffins would have to be buried before 1840 because burial registration was
compulsory after that date. 9 This is
clearly an erroneous assertion as death registration (not burial) was in fact
compulsory from 1837. 10 Death
certificates are just that – they record the death and do not mention anything
about the burial.
Burial
registers have always been kept by the individual churches, there is no central
index of burial registers so it has never been made 'compulsory'.11 What the parish accountant was trying to say
remains a puzzle, we could, being generous just put it down to sloppy
journalism. It is perhaps this sole
piece of sloppy journalism that has kicked off the idea that these burials were
'plague pits' - to which various dates
have been ascribed from the 1600s to the 1800s. There is no evidence of plague burials and
the fact that many of the bodies were stacked in coffins sixteen-high
illustrates that they were probably not plague burials. Plague burials often did not have coffins
and were simply 'pits' into which bodies were thrown.
To
complicate the matter a fantastic tale was told by a local author in the
Liverpool Star & Merseymart in 2006.
This created many wrong ideas and first postulated the theory that the
graves were an massacre of Irish immigrants by the British government.
This
story caused a lot of angry correspondence to the newspaper, the most
noteworthy being from a Mr K. A. Williams, the Environmental Officer in charge
of the exhumation.
I
include his letter:
I HAVE
followed with great interest the recent articles in your paper with regard to
the mass grave unearthed in St Oswald Street, Old Swan.
The
principal officer delegated to be in charge of the entire operation was me.
When
the original gravestones had been removed and the bodies re-interred the
excavation continued beyond this boundary and it was at this stage other
coffins were found. Some plaques on the coffin lids had dates of 1859, however
this should not be considered to be a mass grave at any one time.
I do
not recall seeing bullet marks in the skulls and the authorisation to cremate
the bodies was implemented by the Home Office as the result of my request -
that it should be done in the interest of public health. I know all this to be
true - 'cause I was there!
K. A.
WILLIAMS, Gateacre, Liverpool. (Former principal environmental health officer
for Liverpool 1949-1989)
I also
include an interview he gave to the Maghull and Aintree Star & Merseymart
in 2006.12
"I
held my position from 1949 to 1989 and the first thing to note is that if you
wanted to build or extend on sacred ground you had to consult the Home Office,
which would in turn speak to the town clerk, who would then instruct me. The reason there were hoardings was that the
Home Office's principal instruction is total decorum, and in this case there
were houses on Montague Road overlooking the site. One comment was that these people had been shot
and the Home Office were covering it up.
The order to burn the bodies came from me and me alone - there were so
many that after getting permission to put more than one in a single coffin, and
re-inter them in Anfield I had to request permission for cremations. There were no bullet holes in the skulls,
and there were already gravestones at the site - it was a marked grave. This discovery was simply beyond the
boundary of that graveyard, extending much further than was realised -
thousands more bodies. Contrary to one
comment in the article, there were indeed coffins containing children
discovered.
There
is also the obvious point that if this was the massacre of
three-and-a-half-thousand people - why were they all in coffins with plaques
and buried in such an ordered fashion? This was not people who had been thrown
in a trench. Also, the date quoted for
this 'massacre' was 1848, but some of the coffins had plaques with 1859 on
them.” 13
9 Travers, Ben 'The strange secret of Old
Swan' in The Catholic Pictorial, 6 September 1981
10 A2A, 'Births, marriages and deaths' at
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/familyhistory/bmd/?WT.lp=fh-33501 [accessed
2009]
11 A2A, 'Research Guides' at
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/RdLeaflet.asp?sLeafletID=416&j=1
[accessed 2009]
12 The Star and Merseymart is a free local
newspaper that often prefixes its title with the area it is specifically for,
despite the odd local story the paper is essentially the same throughout
Liverpool/Merseyside.
13 'I gave order to burn bodies' from Maghull and Aintree Star &
Merseymart , Mar 2 2006
It
seems that a lot of the fuss about these graves came from a few major
misconceptions:
1. The
burial ground was unknown. -
It
wasn't, it appeared on a post 1906 map.
2. The
graves were unmarked. -
They
weren't, they had gravestones and plaques on them.
3. The
graves were 'mass' graves. -
They
weren't. There were certainly a lot of
coffins but they were stacked orderly with dates ranging over a number of
years.
4. The
graves were plague pits. -
No
evidence of this, it is pure speculation.
Also, why would plague burials occur right next to one of the oldest
major routes to Liverpool? The road to
Prescot runs right through Old Swan and would be the worst place to bury
contaminated bodies as travelers could easily catch the plague from the rotting
corpses.
5. The
graves were part of a cover-up. –
Liverpool City Council had to comply with the Home Office rules regarding treatment of buriels. Large screen were erected to hide the gruesome sight of thousands of corpses being exumed from the residents living opposite the site. Let's face it, could you eat your dinner whilst watching a mass exhumation across the road ?
6. Why was no archeological investigation carried out ?
The
graves were known about, there was no archeological mystery to solve.
I hope
I have made some things clear in this article – if you have anything further to
add please feel free to contact me on Fortinian (at) yahoo.com.
Fortinian
I would
like to thank Fortinian for this fascinating and well thought out article. If
anyone else wants to add an article about Old Swan and the surrounding areas,
please feel free to contact me
