17 May 1823: “Doncaster fertiliser manufacturers imported more than a million bushels of skeletons from Waterloo and other Napoleonic battlefields in 1822”
Yorkshire farmers, by George Walker (Walker 1814).
Yorkshire Observer. 1823/05/17. War and Commerce. Bradford. Get it:
.Unedited excerpt
If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.
It is estimated that more than a million of bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe to the port of Hull. The neighbourhood of Leipzig, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and of the horse which he rode. This collected from every quarter, they have been shipped to the port of Hull, and thence forward to the Yorkshire bone-grinders, who have erected steam engines and powerful machinery, for the purpose of reducing them to a granulary state. In this condition they are sent chiefly to Doncaster, one of the largest agricultural markets in that part of the country, and are sold to the farmers to manure their lands. The oily substance gradually involving as the bone calcines, makes a more substantial manure than almost any other substance, particularly human bones. It is now ascertained beyond a doubt, by actual experiments upon an extensive scale, that a dead soldier is a most valuable article of commerce; and, for aught known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread. It is certainly a singular fact, that Great Britain should have sent out such multitudes of soldiers to fight the battles of this country upon the continent of Europe, and should then import their bones as an article of commerce to fatten her soil!
Comment
Comment
1 million bushels is 36,368,720 litres of bone meal. Rupert Brooke’s most famous lines are from the subsequent age of mineral imports:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed (Brooke 1915/04)
A century earlier his body would have been carted home and used to grow turnips. More re the Bone Age in British agriculture, which lasted till the 1840s and bird and bat guano shipping and processing:
Bones were first used in Yorkshire [in 1774]. Shortly afterwards they were applied to exhausted pastures in Cheshire. Soon their use became so popular that the home supply was found inadequate; and they were imported from Germany and Northern Europe, Hull being the port of disembarkation. So largely were they used by English farmers, that Baron Liebig considered it necessary to raise a warning protest against their lavish application. “England is robbing all other countries of the condition of their fertility. Already, in her eagerness for bones, she has turned up the battle-fields of Leipzig, of Waterloo, and of the Crimea; already from the catacombs of Sicily she has carried away the skeletons of many successive generations. Annually she removes from the shores of other countries to her own the manurial equivalent of three millions and a half of men, whom she takes from us the means of supporting, and squanders down her sewers to the sea. Like a vampire, she hangs upon the neck of Europe — nay, of the entire world !—and sucks the heart-blood from nations without a thought of justice towards them, without a shadow of lasting advantage to herself.”
Different Forms in which Bones are used.
It may be pointed out that bones have done much to alter our system of farming, by helping to develop turnip culture. Used at first in comparatively large pieces, experience gradually showed that a finer state of division facilitated their action. Yet it was long before the prejudice in favour of rough bones disappeared; and it was not till 1829 that Mr Anderson of Dundee introduced machinery for preparing 1-inch and 4-inch bones and bone-dust. In the early days of their use, bones were fermented before being used, in order to render their action more speedy when applied to the soil; and this practice still obtains to the present day in some parts of the country among farmers. This fermentation was often effected simply by mixing the bones with water, and allowing the heap to lie for a week or two. In other cases the bones were mixed with urine or other refuse matter. The most important step, however, in the history of the treatment of bones for manure was the discovery in 1840, by Liebig, of the action of sulphuric acid on them — a discovery which led to the institution of the manufacture of superphosphate of lime by Sir John Lawes. The nature of this action will be explained in the following chapter, so that we need only say here that the efficacy of the manure by treatment with sulphuric acid is more than doubled (Aikman 1894).
Give me more:
The fertilising properties of an individual in the chemical stage of his existence, seem only to have been fully recognised since the memorable battle of Waterloo; the fields of which now annually wave with luxuriant corn unequalled in the annals of “the old prize-fighting ground of Flanders.” I have no doubt, however, that the cerealia of La Belle Alliance would have been much more nutritive if the top-dressing which the plain received during the three days of June, 1815, had not been robbed of its stamina by London dentists, who carried off the soldiers’ teeth in hogsheads; and by Yorkshire bone-grubbers, who freighted several transports with the skeletons of regiments of troopers, as well as troop-horses, to be ground to dust in Kingston-upon-Hull, and drilled with turnip-seed in the chalky districts of the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire. The corn of Waterloo is thus cheated of its phosphate of lime; but the spirits of Cyrus the Great and Numa the Wise, who had a fair knowledge of the fructifying capabilities of the “human form divine,” must rejoice in beholding how effectually the fertilising dust pushes the young Globes, Swedes, and Tankards into their rough leaves, that bid defiance to that voracious “Yorkshire bite,” the turnip fly (Anon 1832/03).
Curiously Thackeray doesn’t mention the London dentists in Vanity Fair.
Like cattle to the slaughter: Joe Foster points to the fate of the American bison, their bones were shipped east to fertiliser factories, inter alia. Some refs: Jim Murphy (Murphy 1995), P.L. Simmonds (Simmonds 1877), Henry Inman (Inman 1916), E.B. Gorton (Gorton 1890).
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Tags
Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.
- Agriculture (10) W/G ·
- American bison (1) W/G ·
- Battle of Austerlitz (1) W/G ·
- Battle of Leipzig (1) W/G ·
- Battle of Waterloo (7) W/G ·
- Bison hunting (1) W/G ·
- Bone crusher (1) W/G ·
- Bone meal (1) W/G ·
- Brooke, Rupert (1887-1915) (1), poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War W/G ·
- Calcium (1) W/G ·
- Delia radicum (1), crop pest known variously as the cabbage fly, cabbage root fly, root fly or turnip fly W/G ·
- 📌Doncaster (34) W/G ·
- Ecocide (1) W/G ·
- Fertilizer (2) W/G ·
- Guano (1) W/G ·
- Industrial Revolution (22) W/G ·
- International trade (17) W/G ·
- 📌Kingston upon Hull (74) W/G ·
- Land degradation (1) W/G ·
- Liebig, Justus von (1803-1873) (1), German scientist who made major contributions to agricultural and biological chemistry, and is considered one of the founders of organic chemistry W/G ·
- Limestone (11), a common type of carbonate sedimentary rock, generally formed from the accumulation of corals and shells in the sea, often containing fossils; unsuited for textile manufacturing because of the hardness of the water and the relative lack of springs and brooks on its fells and in its gills W/G ·
- Manure (2) W/G ·
- Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) (23), a series of conflicts fought between the First French Empire under Napoleon (1804-15) and a fluctuating array of European coalitions, which originated in political forces arising from the French Revolution (1789-99) and from the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), and produced a period of French domination over Continental Europe W/G ·
- North Riding of Yorkshire (51) W/G ·
- North Sea (20) W/G ·
- Phosphate (1) W/G ·
- Phosphorus (1) W/G ·
- Poetry (75) W/G ·
- 📌Port of Hull (19) W/G ·
- Steam engine (7) W/G ·
- Swede (1) W/G ·
- Turnip (3) W/G ·
- West Riding of Yorkshire (150) W/G ·
- William Makepeace Thackeray (1) W/G ·
Comment
Comment
1 million bushels is 36,368,720 litres of bone meal. Rupert Brooke’s most famous lines are from the subsequent age of mineral imports:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed (Brooke 1915/04)
A century earlier his body would have been carted home and used to grow turnips. More re the Bone Age in British agriculture, which lasted till the 1840s and bird and bat guano shipping and processing:
Bones were first used in Yorkshire [in 1774]. Shortly afterwards they were applied to exhausted pastures in Cheshire. Soon their use became so popular that the home supply was found inadequate; and they were imported from Germany and Northern Europe, Hull being the port of disembarkation. So largely were they used by English farmers, that Baron Liebig considered it necessary to raise a warning protest against their lavish application. “England is robbing all other countries of the condition of their fertility. Already, in her eagerness for bones, she has turned up the battle-fields of Leipzig, of Waterloo, and of the Crimea; already from the catacombs of Sicily she has carried away the skeletons of many successive generations. Annually she removes from the shores of other countries to her own the manurial equivalent of three millions and a half of men, whom she takes from us the means of supporting, and squanders down her sewers to the sea. Like a vampire, she hangs upon the neck of Europe — nay, of the entire world !—and sucks the heart-blood from nations without a thought of justice towards them, without a shadow of lasting advantage to herself.”
Different Forms in which Bones are used.
It may be pointed out that bones have done much to alter our system of farming, by helping to develop turnip culture. Used at first in comparatively large pieces, experience gradually showed that a finer state of division facilitated their action. Yet it was long before the prejudice in favour of rough bones disappeared; and it was not till 1829 that Mr Anderson of Dundee introduced machinery for preparing 1-inch and 4-inch bones and bone-dust. In the early days of their use, bones were fermented before being used, in order to render their action more speedy when applied to the soil; and this practice still obtains to the present day in some parts of the country among farmers. This fermentation was often effected simply by mixing the bones with water, and allowing the heap to lie for a week or two. In other cases the bones were mixed with urine or other refuse matter. The most important step, however, in the history of the treatment of bones for manure was the discovery in 1840, by Liebig, of the action of sulphuric acid on them — a discovery which led to the institution of the manufacture of superphosphate of lime by Sir John Lawes. The nature of this action will be explained in the following chapter, so that we need only say here that the efficacy of the manure by treatment with sulphuric acid is more than doubled (Aikman 1894).
Give me more:
The fertilising properties of an individual in the chemical stage of his existence, seem only to have been fully recognised since the memorable battle of Waterloo; the fields of which now annually wave with luxuriant corn unequalled in the annals of “the old prize-fighting ground of Flanders.” I have no doubt, however, that the cerealia of La Belle Alliance would have been much more nutritive if the top-dressing which the plain received during the three days of June, 1815, had not been robbed of its stamina by London dentists, who carried off the soldiers’ teeth in hogsheads; and by Yorkshire bone-grubbers, who freighted several transports with the skeletons of regiments of troopers, as well as troop-horses, to be ground to dust in Kingston-upon-Hull, and drilled with turnip-seed in the chalky districts of the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire. The corn of Waterloo is thus cheated of its phosphate of lime; but the spirits of Cyrus the Great and Numa the Wise, who had a fair knowledge of the fructifying capabilities of the “human form divine,” must rejoice in beholding how effectually the fertilising dust pushes the young Globes, Swedes, and Tankards into their rough leaves, that bid defiance to that voracious “Yorkshire bite,” the turnip fly (Anon 1832/03).
Curiously Thackeray doesn’t mention the London dentists in Vanity Fair.
Like cattle to the slaughter: Joe Foster points to the fate of the American bison, their bones were shipped east to fertiliser factories, inter alia. Some refs: Jim Murphy (Murphy 1995), P.L. Simmonds (Simmonds 1877), Henry Inman (Inman 1916), E.B. Gorton (Gorton 1890).
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Similar
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19 February 1866: The Diana, Hull’s first steam-assisted whaler and its last of any nature, leaves on its fateful voyage to the Arctic
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Comment
Smeaton’s scheme did not prosper. John Timperley:
Various schemes had been suggested for cleansing the dock of the mud brought in by the tide; one was by making reservoirs in the fortifications or old town ditches, with the requisite sluices, by means of which the mud was to be scoured out at low water; another by cutting a canal to the Humber, from the west end of the dock, where sluices had been provided, and put down for the purpose, when it was proposed to divert the ebb tide from the river Hull along the dock, and through the sluices and canal into the Humber, and so produce a current sufficient, with a little manual assistance, to carry away the mud. Both of these schemes were however abandoned, and the plan of a horse dredging machine adopted; this work began about four years after the Old dock was completed, and continued until after the opening of the Junction dock. The machine was contained in a square and flat bottomed vessel 61 feet 6 inches long, 22 feet 6 inches wide, and drawing 4 feet water: it at first had only eleven buckets, calculated to work in 14 feet water, in which state it remained till 1814, when two buckets were added so as to work in 17 feet water, and in 1827 a further addition of four buckets was made, giving seventeen altogether, which enabled it to work in the highest spring tides. The machine was attended by three men, and worked by two horses, which did it at first with ease, but since the addition of the last four buckets, the work has been exceedingly hard.
There were generally six mud boats employed in this dock before the Humber dock was made; since which there have been only four, containing, when fully laden, about 180 tons, and usually filled in about six or seven hours; they are then taken down the old harbour and discharged in the Humber at about a hundred fathoms beyond low water mark, after which they are brought back into the dock, sometimes in three or four hours, but generally more. The mud engine has been usually employed seven or eight months in the year, commencing work in April or May.
The quantity of mud raised prior to the opening of the Junction dock, varied from 12,000 to 29,000 tons, and averaged 19,000 tons per annum; except for a few years before the rebuilding of the Old lock, when, from the bad and leaky state of the gates, a greater supply of water was required for the dock, and the average yearly quantity was about 25,000 tons. As the Junction dock, and in part also the Humber dock, are now supplied from this source, a greater quantity of water flows through the Old dock, and the mud removed has of late been about 23,000 tons a year.
It may be observed, that the greatest quantity of mud is brought into the dock during spring tides, and particularly in dry seasons, when there is not much fresh water in the Hull; in neap tides, and during freshes in the river, very little mud comes in (Timperley 1842).
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