HomePoverty in Victorian Belfast
Poor ground
A number of sections in the cemetery have been used for the burial of the poor.These graves, which belong to the council, are often referred to as paupers' graves, and have no headstones or any other form of grave marker.
There are many thousands of children buried in these sections, which hold 80,208 remains in total.
At the pinnacle of its wealth and industrial power, Victorian Belfast had, by percentage, a higher death rate per thousand than larger cities like London, Liverpool or Manchester for diseases such as typhoid and typhus.
This was due to a number of reasons, including:
- appalling housing and sanitary conditions
- the building of slum dwellings on sites previously used as dumps
- large numbers of open sewers, drains and cesspools
- inadequate supervision of the construction of streets
- ineffectual administration of Public Health Acts
- widespread poverty and hunger
- long working hours in mills and factories, especially for women and children
- inadequate health provision.
McCutcheon headstone
The McCutcheon headstone, which contains the remains of eight children, is a reminder of just how vulnerable children were in Victorian times.It was an age in which countless children died at birth and thousands more died in their early years from infectious diseases such as smallpox, chickenpox, mumps, whooping cough, measles, diphtheria, German measles, diarrhoea and tuberculosis.
