Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused To Let Go by Emily Cockayne

Author:Emily Cockayne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bushels of human and unhuman bones

In his Cyclopædia, published in 1814 and based on researches from the end of the eighteenth century, Abraham Rees detailed multipurpose horn and bone waste, the chunkier parts of which would be sent to the cutlers and turners to make toys, hafts, handles, dice and chessmen and other items.22 Bones collected from dustyards, butchers, marine store dealers, rag-and-bone men and slaughterhouses were processed in bone calcinatories to make bone charcoal and bone oil, and by establishments that made glue or size. Bones, and other animal parts such as ears and skin, went to various centres of reuse. The simplest of these turned out greases, fats and gelatines. Cooks used the ‘scrapings, shavings, and sawdust of bones’ to make jelly: a ‘well-disposed cow or sheep would not be niggardly in the bestowal of these gelatinous treasures – skin, membrane, tendon, ligament, bone, hoof, feet – all would yield gelatine’.23 Some animal matter went to soap-makers, and some was ‘manufactured into tempting jujubes and lozenges’.24

45. Small bone bottle. Author’s collection, photographed by Toby Sleigh-Johnson.

The boiling of semi-putrid fresh bones caused a nuisance.25 Baldwin’s Gardens, off Holborn, in central London, was not as idyllic as the name implies: in 1832 John Barber was convicted of nuisance after boiling ‘Bones Flesh Offal Grease and other offensive matter’ there.26 John Michael Bray, a bone merchant and comb maker, of Norwich, was accused of committing a public nuisance in 1835. Bray’s premises were located near another boneyard, the premises of a tallow chandler, a dye house and a yarn factory powered by a steam engine, all there before Bray arrived. During his trial it was asserted that the ‘smell from the boiling, and the stench when the liquor was emptied into the river was worse than all’. Mr Harmer, his erstwhile adjoining neighbour, had been ‘obliged to keep the windows and door shut’ on account of the horrid stench which came from the bones. Mrs Harmer was made sick by it for two years before the couple moved away. Other neighbours also departed. A watchman was forced to abandon his post. For the prosecution, a surgeon argued that the smell was ‘likely to produce affection in the bowels’. The neighbour whose complaint instigated the case claimed that ‘bones of various animals […] were heaped together in the yard with portions of flesh on them, until they became putrid, when they were boiled for the purpose of extracting tallow and fat’. Details of the operation emerge in the trial records. Fats extracted from the process appear to have been processed on site: there was a ‘soap office’ and a ‘chandling office’. The defence successfully argued that Bray remanufactured ‘worthless hoofs’ into combs, after being cut and boiled. The court was reminded that the business secured employment for fifteen local people. Some neighbours testified (somewhat implausibly) that they liked the smell from the boneyard, the superintendent of the gasworks among them. A surgeon called in by the defence stated that the ammonia was

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