Growing awareness of workhouse graves

geography allows, is very expensive and disruptive, as shown in Edinburgh.

If an authority invests such large amounts of capital, there is a natural tendency to arrange for it to fulfil the promised benefits and reluctance to abandon it subsequently. It is worth pointing out that trams were a common sight earlier in the last century, but were all withdrawn by about the 1960s. Although they have been reintroduced in some places, in Sheffield for example, this has been helped by the local geography.

The other interesting point offered about trams is the ability to run without overhead wires, but no mention of how they pick up their renewable electricity, and no evidence for the claim of one fifth the energy of a bus (the electricity has to be generated somewhere). Do they run on batteries, which need recharging, or fuel cells or some other source of electricity? We are not told. If an aim is to reduce diesel emissions, then buses (and cars) powered in the same way as the proposed trams would achieve this, but without the trouble of digging up roads to lay tracks, which would then be unnecessary.

Trams have attractions, but the value for money argument appears tenuous.

It is good that people in Bath are waking up to the existence of the old Workhouse Burial Ground at Wells Road, Odd Down, next to St Martin’s Garden School. Over 3,000 bodies were buried there in late Victorian times in unmarked graves, yet there is not even a board to tell you what the field is.

The only crime of these people was their poverty. They include my great-grandfather Charles and his wife Ann. Charles had come from Chewton Mendip to earn his fortune in Bath. They worked hard all their lives but were unable to save money to keep them in old age. So off to the Workhouse they went. And in the Workhouse they died. The story of Charles and Ann is included in my new book A West Country Homecoming (Hobnob Press, 21 October 2020).

Every first Sunday in the month, from 11am, a small group of us are walking the field at Odd Down reading out the names of those who are buried there. It is a sad but necessary task. Perhaps at a time when we are all learning how to care, more people will take notice

The Workhouse/st Martin’s Hospital site at Odd Down story is told in a pdf file on the Bathscape website: www.bathscape.co.uk/learn/