The Body Hidden in the Garden
Shanna Riley March 25th, 2010
The famed Bank of England isn't the first place that comes to mind when one thinks of burial spots. However, what is now the Garden Court – built in the late 1700s – indeed was once hallowed ground in which bodies were interred.
The Bank was founded in 1694 and is the center of the United Kingdom's financial system. Its headquarters has sat in London's main financial district, on Threadneedle Street, since 1734. The present-day building was built there after the lease had run out on their Grocer's Hall location; the Bank's home for eleven years. At the lease's end it was decided to construct the new Bank on the former home and gardens of the Bank's first Governor, Sir John Houblon (1632-1712), who was interred, upon his death, in the church at St. Christopher-le-Stocks, which were adjacent to Sir John's home.
In 1781, by an Act of Parliament, the church and churchyard (cemetery) of St. Christopher-le-Stocks came into the Bank's possession. The parish of St. Christopher-le-Stocks, was, at that time, absorbed – along with five other parishes – into nearby St. Margaret Lothbury.
The first record to be found on St. Christopher-le-Stocks is dated at 1282, though its actual dedication date is in question. The original church having burned in the Great London Fire of 1666, it was rebuilt in 1671. Though the Bank claimed the church and churchyard in 1781, it was not until 1867 that the human remains of the old church's former parishioners were re-interred in Nunhead Cemetery in South East London.
The church's former graveyard became the Bank's famed Garden Court, a lovely area dotted with centuries-old lime trees and flowering rhododendrons that covers nearly three acres. The Garden Court also boasts a fountain, constructed in 1852 by then-governor Thomas Hankey, that sprays water from tanks located in the Bank, which are themselves supplied by a pure 330' deep artesian well.
Though the church was no longer operational, and the churchyard, then, no longer used, the hallowed ground was dug into one last time in 1798 for an unusual burial. One which was, then, forgotten until renovations uncovered a strange lead coffin in 1933; one so large that when it was moved to Nunhead Cemetery, it had to be placed in the catacomb as it was too large to fit in any of the vaults.
This last and unofficial resident of the former St. Christopher-le-Stocks cemetery was one William Daniel Jenkins, an employee of the Bank of London who succumbed to an unusual illness at the age of thirty-one in 1798.
Jenkins had worked at the Bank for nine years as a clerk and had made friends there. It was these very friends that carried out his dying wish – to ensure that his body, disfigured by the rare disease he eventually succumbed to – would not be stolen by grave robbers.
Though reports indicate that Jenkins's mind had begun to deteriorate and that he was consumed by a plaguing fear of his body being stolen by local surgeons or the goons they hired to carry out their grisly work, his fears were not at all unfounded.
During this time, cadavers were difficult – if not impossible – to come by for local, would-be doctors and surgeons, and those scientists that would experiment on the human body. This was known as "The Resurrection Times", a dark period in England's history that lasted from around 1750-1832; it was then that the passage of the Warburton Anatomy Act brought an end to the body-snatching.
The need for fresh bodies drove hundreds of lower-class citizens and low-class criminals to take on the trade of "sack-em-up gentlemen", selling the bodies they harvested to the highest bidder. Profits became quite high in the gruesome business; enough so that some individuals took to murder to more easily – and quickly – acquire bodies to sell.
Jenkins had reason to fear enough by the very nature of his dying, but his concerns were compounded by the fact that he had physical anomalies that scientists were eager to learn more about. Some were so eager to dissect Jenkins' lifeless body that bids had already been put out before he even drew his last breath.
Furthering Jenkins's apprehensions, no doubt, was hearing the tale of Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, who was stolen by anatomist and famed surgeon, John Hunter, before his friends had a chance to bury him in the Irish sea in 1783; the giant's remains now reside in the Hunterian Museum.
Daniel Jenkins suffered from a condition - known as acromegaly - that caused his height to increase rapidly and, at his death, stood at an astonishing 6' 7 ½" tall. Two hundred guineas had already been proffered by some scientists for the chance to poke around in Daniel's remains, and so – at his death – Daniel's friends requested permission from the Bank Directors to bury Daniel on the Bank site in the old churchyard. They allowed it, and the young man was quietly buried by his friends early one morning before the start of business.
Fast-forward some one-hundred thirty-five years, and workers excavating the Garden Court area for renovations and additions to the old Bank stumbled upon an 8' lead box in the far eastern corner of the garden, buried 8 1/2' underground. A metal plate told the workers it was the coffin of Mr. Jenkins. It read:
Mr William Danl. Jenkins. Died 24 March 1798, Aged 31
Daniel Jenkins had, it seemed, escaped the clutches of the ghouls and body-snatchers. His remains were moved, along with the long-vacated others of this old churchyard, to Nunhead Cemetery.
(Click here to see a photo of the unearthed coffin; from the "Bank Giant" page of the Bank of London Museum website. Daniel's coffin photograph and a story of his after-death tale are on display at the museum.)
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