A whole history of Hull literally buried is now being revealed and, as our sepultural excavation correspondent Angus Young reports, it sounds fascinating.

It’s an oasis of green next to Hull’s busiest road. At the moment there is currently no public access to Trinity Burial Ground thanks to the ongoing construction work on Castle Street. But people will once again be able to visit when the £200m highways upgrade is finally completed next year. One of the reasons the wider scheme has taken so long was the need to excavate part of the site to eventually make way for a new slip road.

Originally used by the parish church of Holy Trinity (Hull Minster), the burial ground was used between 1783 and 1861 after space immediately next to the church in the Old Town became limited. A team of 90 archaeologists sensitively excavated nearly 10,000 bodies which were subsequently re-buried within the grounds. Their work uncovered a cross-section of Hull’s population at the time and represented the largest ever scientific excavation of a post-medieval burial ground in Northern England.

As well as the bodies, personal items and coffins, they also discovered the footprints of various buildings including an 18th century prison, a 19th century timber yard and, most intriguing of all, a previously unrecorded limestone building which is thought to have been part of the 12th and 13th century settlement of Wyke.

Examination of the human remains has helped build up a detailed picture of the health of Hull’s population at the time through evidence of injuries and disease. The investigations were carried out under a special licence issued by the Diocese of York to main contractors Balfour Beatty who, in turn, hired Oxford Archaeology to carry out the excavation.

With the human remains reburied and work on the main A63 project now in its final stages, attention is turning back to the burial ground. A Balfour Beatty spokesperson said: “The Trinity Burial Ground redevelopment is going well. We have retained over 70 per cent of the area and are now working to complete the carefully-restored brick walls, with new landscaping, planting and pathways alongside returning a number of the original headstones which will be displayed to the public. The final layout and landscaping for the area will provide a welcoming  public space for the local community. The burial ground will be open to the public on completion of the scheme in 2026.”

As archaeologists continue desktop work to catalogue all their work, some of their finds at the site are currently on public display at Hull Minster and in the church’s Trinity Room cafe during normal opening hours.

Angus Young

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Our wartime reminiscences correspondent Angus Young has been listening to the fascinating memories of a Hessle Roader.

Kathleen Hartley was born In February 1941 when the intensity of German bombing raids on Hull was starting to increase. In the same month 20 people were killed in the city during attacks by the Luftwaffe. Kathleen’s mother Evelyn gave birth to her at the family home in Great Thornton Street. She joined three older sisters and a brother. A younger sister would be born in tragic circumstances two years later.

Kathleen explained: “Before the war my Dad worked on the trawlers. When the war started he became part of the Merchant Navy and in 1943 he was killed when a torpedo sank his ship.” Gilbert Edwards was just 42 when he lost his life. He had been a bosun on the Ellerman Wilson Line steamship Runo when a U-boat attacked a small convoy of ships 60 miles off the coast of Libya.

Back in Hull, it was decided to send a heavily-pregnant Evelyn to Gainsborough in Lincolnshire to give birth. Although she has no memory of it, Kathleen was about to be evacuated. “Two of my sisters and my brother were sent to live in Scarborough. They had a terrible time because the family they were with weren’t very nice. They ended up sleeping in a cellar. My other sister went to Huddersfield and I was sent to Malton. I was just a baby really so I can’t really remember it. I’ve always wondered who looked after me but I never got to know.”

After the war, the family were reunited back in Hull. “Our old house had suffered bomb damage so we couldn’t go back there, I think all the windows had been blown out. Instead, we moved into a house in Cambridge Street – six of us and Mum. That’s where I grew up. The house had two bedrooms, an attic, a front room and a scullery/kitchen. That was it. There was no hot water and we had an outside toilet and a tin bath. We all got washed in it once a week on a Saturday.”

To support her young family, Evelyn worked in a nearby soft drinks factory. She also washed trawlermens’ kits when they were back onshore for two shillings a bag and sold some of her own home baking to make ends meet. “We were definitely poor but we didn’t feel like that. Mum was a great cook and I don’t ever remember being hungry.”

Even so, she says the family were grateful for the support of the close-knit fishing community they were part of. “Mum and Dad were both from Hessle Road. Everyone seemed to know each other back then and I remember we got regular deliveries of free fish which I think came from the Fishermen’s Mission. We ate a lot of fish and drank cups of water. All of the furniture was given. One armchair had no back in it.”

Her childhood playground was the bombed ruins of St. Luke’s Church at the top of the street. “All the kids used to play there. We used to play ‘houses’, pretending it was really a big house. There was never any trouble. We would play out until the man came along to turn the gas lights on, that was the signal for us to go home.”

With their mother constantly busy, Kathleen and her sisters would also help out at home. “Every Saturday we would clean the house from top to bottom when she was at work. There were no vacuum cleaners back then, it was all done by hand with brushes. We didn’t complain because we all knew it was our job to do it. We just got on with it and made sure we did the best we could. We also cleaned the front step. Everyone did in those days, there was a real pride in keeping the front of your house clean and tidy.”

One day a parcel arrived at the house. Inside were a number of dresses. They were from America, donated as part of an extended wartime charity aid programme. “They were the most beautiful things I had ever seen,” recalls Kathleen, who thinks she was five or six-year-old at the time. Mum was so proud of how we looked in them that she insisted on getting a photograph taken of us wearing them.”

Kathleen left school at 15 and started her first job at Reckitts factory on the company’s famous blue laundry soap production line. “I hated it. I was stood eight hours a day breathing in blue and the foreman was horrible but I stuck it out for three years because it was money. I would give every pay packet I got straight to my mother. Then I got a job as a waitress at the Gainsborough restaurant in the city centre and I loved it. I was in my element because I’ve always been quite a social person and just love being around people.”

Now 84, Kathleen still works as a volunteer at the Hull Women’s Aid charity shop in Chanterlands Avenue. “It’s a very different world now. We had very little when we were young but, in a way, I think we learned to appreciate what we did have a lot more than perhaps younger people do these days.”

Angus Young

With two J.R.R. Tolkien statues being unveiled in the East Riding next month, we dispatched Hull Tour Guide Paul ‘Sméagol’ Schofield to reveal the author’s links with our city.

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Grim doesn’t cover just how bad conditions were in Charity Hall, as our Dickensian template correspondent Angus Young reports.

In his book Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens starts his story with the young orphan of the title being raised in a workhouse in the fictional town of Mudfog. The children working there are poorly fed and eventually lots are drawn between them to find someone to ask for another portion of gruel. Oliver loses out in the draw, forcing him to approach the workhouse master and utter the famous words: “Please, sir, I want some more.” Dickens’ Mudfog was based on Chatham in Kent but his workhouse could have easily been inspired by one in Hull which was built in 1698 off Whitefriargate.

Constructed in a quadrangle, Charity Hall featured four-storey blocks with an open yard facing onto Whitefriargate. Today the HMV music store stands where that entrance used to be while another entrance onto Parliament Street was also later built on when a new police station was constructed in Alfred Gelder Street.

The surviving part of the old station still sticks out like a sore thumb between Parliament Street’s stylish Georgian town houses. The workhouse was originally the result of a parliamentary act incorporating two local parishes – Holy Trinity and St. Mary’s. The legislation gave them powers to provide a building to manage their own system of poor relief.

It’s probably worth noting that Dickens also used an alternative title for his novel – The Parish Boy’s Progress, reflecting the influence of the church in the operation of such workhouses at the time. Hull’s Charity Hall initially housed destitute children – usually orphans – who were fed and received a basic religious education as well as learning to read and write until the age of six. Those aged six and over were required to work. Later adults were also admitted and a report written in 1798 records 41 men, 84 women and 82 children living there.

Two rooms in the hall were equipped for spinning and this seems to have been the main work activity. All the inmates young and old were also required to attend regular Sunday church services and an additional Thursday afternoon service held in the main dining hall where a visiting clergyman from one Hull’s churches would preach.

Other rules in the workhouse were strict. Anyone caught swearing or “in liquor” was immediately shackled in a wooden pillory in the main yard for up to four hours. Other punishments for rule-breaking included reduced food rations, extra work and a requirement to wear coarse yellow coats or gowns to signify their status. 

Another rule stated: “The children shall not take God’s name in vain or use any profane language. Those who shall be guilty of such crimes shall stand on a stool in the dining hall with the crime written in large letters on a paper which shall be pinned on their breasts and they shall only have bread and water that day. Such as are convicted of lying shall stand in the like manner, with the words ‘Infamous Liar’ on their breasts.”

The gruel Oliver Twist lived on in the Mudfog workhouse was also on the menu in Hull. Porridge and bread was served daily for breakfast, rice milk was the dinner dish on three days a week and supper usually consisted of more porridge. Some dinners also featured herring, beef or ox stew.

A bell was sounded at 5am each morning during the summer to signal the start of the working day and rang again at 5pm when it ended. In the winter, the hours switched to 7am and 6pm. All lights – usually candles – had to be out by 9pm during the summer and 8pm in the winter. Entrance gates to the workhouse were locked at the same time. Charity Hall operated as a workhouse for an incredible 154 years until 1852 when it was replaced by a new building for 600 inmates in Anlaby Road.

Conditions in the hall were regularly criticised in its later years and a series of incidents hastened its eventual closure. One involved a heavily-pregnant woman seeking admission being brutally assaulted while waiting to be interviewed in an office at the workhouse. The other also featured a pregnant woman who was refused entry and then promptly gave birth on the workhouse steps.

Today, apart from the odd-looking disruption to the western terrace of Georgian town houses in Parliament Street, there’s no trace left of Hull’s first major workhouse.

Angus Young

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