Not A BRHG Event
Elaborate funeral ceremonies became very important to middle-class Victorians, with increasingly meticulous rituals designed to mark the passing of family members. However, for the Victorian poor, things were very different. After the introduction of the 1834 Poor Law Act the customary pauper funeral, subsidised by the parish, came under government scrutiny as a financial and symbolic ‘extravagance’. Instead the need for Poor Law Unions to both save money and demonstrate disgrace in death of […]
In 2012 Bristol Radical History Group launched a project to research into the thousands of unmarked graves of paupers from the Eastville workhouse (at 100 Fishponds Road) who were buried in nearby Rosemary Green. In 2014 the Eastville Workhouse Memorial Group (EWMG) was formed to commemorate and memorialise the 4,084 people who lived and died in Eastville workhouse and were interred at the site between 1851 and 1895, along with another 118 inmates' bodies which were sold to medical schools. In […]