I’ve just added a new Secret London essay to my website. It’s about the Victorian funeral trains which carried hundreds of corpses from a special station near Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey between 1854 and 1941.
Nick-named The Stiffs’ Express, this service split its dead customers into three classes, offering each a different standard of coffin accomodation and loading arrangements at the station. Mourners were rigidly separated by class too, with a special smoked glass screen at the London station shielding the toffs from having to look at the much poorer passengers waiting on the third-class platform.
The trains began as a response to the 1848 cholera epidemic, which exposed how inadequate London’s existing cemeteries were, and closed only when the Luftwaffe bombed their rolling stock flat in one of the worst nights of the London Blitz. One of the most memorable funerals they hosted was that of Charles Bradlaugh, a radical secularist and campaigner for Indian independence whose Brookwood ceremony was attended by Gandhi.
If any of that sounds interesting to you, please click the link above.
NOTE TO MODERATORS: The site generates no income for me or anyone else. Therefore, I hope I might be allowed to mention it here. Thank you.
It’s funny you promote this now, Slade, because I only just discovered your link in your sig earlier this week and spent a very enjoyable afternoon learning about Stagger Lee and Martin Van Buren Bates, and was wondering when the death train article would be posted!Very very cool. I recommend this highly to others with an interest in the macabre.
Actually I was going to ask, have you read the works of William Roughead? He seems right up your alley – a Scottish lawyer / crime afficianado who in the early 1900s wrote about some of the rather ghoulish murders and crimes of past centuries. President Roosevelt was a big fan of his, in fact. Many of his nonfiction recountings are available here on Project Gutenberg if you’re interested. (Might make a good link for your site, actually.) I read them in the paperback compilation called Classic Crimes, edited by Julian Symons.
A similar service ran from Sydney’s Central station to Rookwood cemetery. This is the Mortuary station at Central, and there are some details of the operation of the cemetery line here. Train services to Rookwood ceased running in the late 1940s.
The main receiving station at Rookwood was later transferred to Canberra, where it now serves as All Saints’ Anglican church in the suburb of Ainslie.
To Sigmagirl:
I know Andrew Martin’s Necropolis Railway novel, but that’s the only one of his I’ve read. I spoke to him when I was originally researching my own piece, and you’ll find a couple of quotes from him at the end of the article.
To Johnny LA:
Thanks very much. I’m glad you’re enjoying the stuff.
To Choie:
William Roughead’s a new name to me, but from what you say he sounds well worth investigating. You can’t beat Scotland for a good real-life murder story, so I’ll check out the Project Gutenberg site you mention.
To Cunctator:
I’d heard of the Sydney funeral trains service, but it’s good to have a few more details. There was a second service operating in London too, this one from King’s Cross on a site that’s now been demolished to make way for the new Eurostar terminal. The twice-weekly King’s Cross trains took bodies up to the Great Northern Cemetery between about 1861 and 1867, but never on the same scale that the London Necropolis Company managed.
To Jjimm:
I wish I could find a way to get paid for it too, but for the moment I’m content to just get the material out to as wide an audience as possible and see what happens. With that in mind, if you have any friends who you think might enjoy PlanetSlade, please do point them towards the site.
Have you considered shopping it around to magazines as a filler article or freelancing articles in some way? I know you worked at different publications, but there are niche markets that might like them.
I have actually been thinking of doing that myself =)
To StGermain:
Don’t apologise - I’m glad you pointed it out. I must have proof-read that piece half a dozen times before finally posting it, but I still managed to miss that particular typo. I’ve corrected it now, though.
To Aruvqan:
I’ve been free-lancing for a quite a few years now, and that’s still how I earn my living. The beauty of my own website, though, is that it lets me tackle these particular subjects at the length I think they deserve - anything up to 15,000 words - and there’s very few paying magazines with the format or the inclination to run anything that long. Cutting the articles to a more manageable 1,500 words or so would make them far less appealing to me as a writer, and rule out providing the sort of comprehensive account of each subject I’m aiming to give.
Also, most commercial magazines demand a nice neat anniversary as the peg to hang any historical article on, so unless you’re writing about something that happened exactly 25, 50 or 100 years ago, your chances of selling the piece are pretty poor. The additional problem with niche magazines is that most of them have very little money, and their rates of pay - assuming they pay anything at all - reflect that fact.
I’m not complaining, because I’ve got plenty of other work to pay the bills, and it’s nice to have one outlet where I can let the material dictate its own needs and write it up exactly as I think it should be done. PlanetSlade has produced quite an encouraging response so far, both in terms of the number of visitors I’m getting and the enjoyment people get from the articles. That’s enough to be going on with, and if the exposure should lead to anything further down the line, then that’s gravy.
