While studying the minutes mentioned in the last blog I came across evidence of such a story, this unresolved. Hull City Council Burial Committee had, in 1881, ordered 10 dozen young trees to be planted in their cemeteries and disused burial grounds, those in Castle St. Burial Ground ‘so as to make it a more agreeable place of resort for the inhabitants’. By this time the area on which Portland St. estate now stands was a maze of little streets created during the early days of Hull’s urban sprawl, so the redundant Holy Trinity Cemetery on Castle St. (s.p.b.) would have been like a local park, this near the hustle-and-bustle of Railway Dock.
On 23rd November 1881 it was reported in committee that men planting trees in Castle St. Cemetery had found a number of boxes buried one to three inches below the surface, each box containing the body of an infant or young child. The site of this discovery ‘near the wall, close by the dead house’ had not been used for official burials for over 10 years. One box/body had only been buried a week or so before (it is not clear from the minutes whether this was an opinion of the workmen or an official conclusion of the Coroner). Members of the Committee, and indeed the Town Council became alarmed by this discovery and sought advice from the Home Office in London. In the interim the bodies had been removed to the Corporation Mortuary.
Committee minutes for December 1881 record that the Secretary of State had replied to the Town Council advising that the Castle St. tree planting should continue and that the bodies be re-interred elsewhere. The Minute Book continues to record business up to October 1884 with no further mention of this matter.
This then would seem to be an example of Victorian pragmatism in the wake of unfortunate events – accepting that then they had none of the modern means of finding identity. Whoever had buried the infants (at various points in time) had, perhaps, provided a service for distressed mothers by burying them in consecrated ground, and also avoiding burial fees. Or was there some other explanation?