The BBC Brings On Another Aborted Nun-Run Orphanage Scandal Before Its Time

Another day, another e-mail demanding I answer for another Brit Catholic orphanage "scandal" which, upon reading what was sent to me, is just the BBC doing what it's done before, holding Nuns who ran an orphanage to a far higher standard than they do secular institutions or, in fact, the horrific treatment of orphans, widows and paupers that was general in Britain in the 19th and early 20th century.   Also, holding the past, especially the pre-antibiotic past, in which infant and child mortality rates, especially in institutional settings and wherever people were poor, to modern expectations.

I don't, from reading what the BBC posted, know if there is an actual scandal attributable to the Nuns who ran the place.  And, apparently,  neither do they. 

The children were all residents of a care home run by Catholic nuns.

At least 400 children are thought to be buried in a section of St Mary's Cemetery in Lanark.

The Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, which ran the home, refused to comment on the findings.

The research by the File on 4 programme in conjunction with the Sunday Post newspaper focused on Smyllum Park Orphanage in Lanark.

It opened in 1864 and provided care for orphans or children from broken homes. It closed in 1981, having looked after 11,600 children.

A burial plot, containing the bodies of a number of children, was uncovered by two former residents of Smyllum in 2003.

Frank Docherty and Jim Kane discovered an overgrown, unmarked section of St Mary's Cemetery during their efforts to reveal physical abuse which they said many former residents had suffered.

In 2004, the campaigners said the Daughters of Charity told them their records suggested that children had been buried in 158 compartments in the graveyard.

Frank and Jim, who both died earlier this year, believed however, that the numbers were far higher as the nuns had indicated their records were incomplete.

The investigation by File on 4 and the Sunday Post indicates they were right; at least 400 children are understood to be buried in the plot.

"Oh my God, I've got goose pimples. It's shocking," said Frank Docherty's widow, Janet.

"He had been trying for years to find a figure and he didn't get anywhere. That's unbelievable."

The death records indicate that most of the children died of natural causes, from diseases common at the time such as TB, pneumonia and pleurisy.

Analysis of the records show that a third of those who died were aged five or under. Very few of those who died, 24 in total, were aged over 15, and most of the deaths occurred between 1870 and 1930.

Janet Docherty might find that shocking and unbelievable but, having looked at this kind of thing before and the general character of British "charitable" institutions of the period, especially the appalling system of death camps that the Workhouses were, none of it is surprising or shocking, including that rate of death, nor the fact that the dead were buried in a single location without any markers or records.  That was typical of the way of death, at all ages, but especially among infants and children, in British and other institutions of most of the time.  

If an inmate died in the workhouse, the death was notified to their family who could ,if they wished, organize a funeral themselves.  If this did not happen, which was often the case because of the expense, the Guardians arranged a burial in a local cemetery or burial ground - this was originally required to be in the parish where the workhouse stood...

The burial would be in the cheapest possible coffin and in an unmarked grave, into which several coffins might be placed on the same occasion. Under the terms of the 1832 Anatomy Act, bodies unclaimed for forty-eight hours could be disposed of by donating them for use in medical research and training - this was not specific to workhouses, but applied to any institution whose inmates died while in its care.  Deaths were, however, not always registered in the normal way. 

Pauper funerals were often without mourners.  At Bourne in 1901, the workhouse master reported that despite repeated invitations, workhouse inmates always declined to attend funerals.  This was perhaps a testimony to the old saying, "rattle his bones over the stones, he's only a pauper whom nobody owns."

And as to the dignity accorded to the graves of the poor, the unwanted, etc.

Following the closure of many of London's old parish graveyards in the 1850s, a number of new cemeteries - often commercially operated - were set up at out-of-town locations.  The most prominent of these were the London Necropolis....

In September 1883, the Times carried a report about the transport of pauper bodies to Colney Hatch Cemetery from Clerkenwell workhouse mortuary by an undertake's sub-contractor.  It had been alleged that a coach carrying five coffins three of adults and two of children had broken down on Exmouth Street with the coffins rolling into the road.  It was also claimed that, for the sake of economy bodies were kept in store until a batch of sufficient size was reached, resulting in offensive smells.  The coffins were said to be identified only by a name chalked on them and that during the journey the writing rubbed off  Although an investigation of committee of Guardians refuted the allegations it was agreed that the union should acquire its own hearse, coach and horses for the use at pauper funerals. 

I doubt they afforded markers for the infants and children who died in horrifically high numbers or even took much notice or bother to document where they were disposed of.  

I would suspect that if the BBC looked for bodies of infants and children at just about any British workhouse they would find similar if not worse practices under the auspices of the British government.  I have pointed out a number of times, the workhouse system was designed to starve the inmates, the food rations to the inmates was smaller than that given to prisoners.  Many children as well as adults died of starvation in them, they even recorded the deaths as by starvation so there was no secret made of it.  And I have pointed out that the law in Britain which allowed men to father children out of wedlock, relieving them of any obligation to care for them led to widespread infanticide, enough so that it was not uncommon to find bodies of infants dumped in the streets of London.  

And it was hardly just British institutions in the islands that fell under that appalling system of hatred of the poor and powerless, it is typical of institutions of the time.   

In order to know if this is a scandal, you would have to know how the children died, if their death rate was unusually high for the years and locations they happened in and if those deaths could have been prevented.   Without doing that this is not journalism.   Until that is done, it's holding Catholic Nuns to a higher standard than others who operated institutions.   

When Is The BBC Going To Look At The Scandal of Eminent British Scientists Advocating The Benefits Of The Deaths OF Infants And Children In The Same Time Period?  

You might want to look at this paper, Infant Mortality and the Health of Survivors: Britain 1910-1950 by Timothy J. Hatton to see that there was a real infant and child death scandal in those years and it wasn't one by created by Catholic nuns but in entirely secular scientists and politicians who asserted that a high infant and child mortality rate was socially beneficial, improving the stock of the working class.   You can read about that on pages 3-7 of the paper.  Two things, first is this quote from the eminent British sociological researcher, Seebohm  Rowntree's survey of the working class of York in 1901,  

[i]t is sometimes urged that although the individual suffering indicated by high infant mortality is considerable, it is not without some counterbalancing advantages, as sickly children are thus weeded out.  Even if this Spartan view is accepted, it must be remembered that of those who survive, a large proportion do so only with seriously enfeebled constitutions.

I will remind people who have read my blog that taking such a "Spartan view" had been promoted by Charles Darwin in The Descent of man in 1872 and it characterized his disciples, who by that time pretty much encompassed the large majority of the educated class of Britain and elsewhere.  That can be seen by fact checking this from the same paper. 

The most well-known protagonist of the selection view in the early twentieth century was the eminent statistician Karl Pearson.  Following Francis Galton he stressed the importance of heredity.  

"The selection view" was the assertion that natural selection, the deaths of those of "lesser fitness," especially as children, was beneficial for the surviving population, as asserted by biologists and others who believed in natural selection since it was first invented. 

If health was largely inherited, then elimination of the least fit at an early age would increase the average fitness of the survivors as well as preserving racial quality in the longer run [ after a brief discussion of problems with data collection it continues]... As he put it" "the only method by which data for different different districts can be compared is by endeavouring to fix the nature of the environment.  We want to know whether under a constant environment, the correlation between the death rates of infancy and of childhood is positive or negative." 

Only, Pearson was in little doubt that the actual deaths of infants and children was positive.  You can read that section of the paper to see how the scientific assertion that infants and children dying young was a good thing.  But there is little to no doubt that Pearson and other British and English language scientists and scholars asserted that there was an up-side to high mortality rates for the children of the poor and destitute.   I have mentioned before that Karl Pearson was the author of a pamphlet which decried the use of cesarean section because it kept too many babies and mothers alive who would have died in childbirth, on the assumption that such as did die were inferior and that their survival was a danger to the future of humanity.  What Darwin wrought in inventing natural selection is a real scandal but I don't expect the BBC or the people who find these kinds of scandals buried under Victorian orphanages - but only those run by Nuns - will want to look into. 

If a real investigation that takes into account actual evidence and compares it to the general child mortality rate in British institutions to see if the Nuns who ran the place were culpable finds a scandal, then I'll address the scandal.  As of now, just as in previous cases, the journalists haven't done that. 

I don't doubt this will be revisited in the coming days.  I wonder if, as the previous "scandal" in Tuam, if it will turn out that the orphanage was located in property of the local workhouse.  There was one in Lanark, I wonder how many children are buried in unmarked, undocumented graves who died there under British Government auspices.  I wonder if the BBC has ever done any reporting about that.