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Message: [QUOTE="Bob Godfrey, post: 229159, member: 136612"] In the grand scheme of things, no resting place can be final. All remains eventually go back into circulation one way of another, and most people I think are less inclined to let the dead stand (or rather lie) in the way of progress for the living once a suitable interval of time has passed - generally three or four generations, sufficient time for those who actually knew the deceased to have themselves passed from the land of the living. In the late 19th century during the construction of St Pancras Station (one of the great London rail termini) some 8,000 bodies, some of which were quite recent interments, were removed from their 'final' resting place in the local churchyard to more convenient resting places far away which didn't stand in the path of a revolution in public transport. Even very recently, St Pancras Churchyard has grown even smaller as more land has been acquired for civil engineering projects and more batches of bodies have been evicted. On these more recent occasions the bodies (some of which are themselves almost as 'recent' as the Titanic) have been subjected to what might be regarded as the indignity of close examination by archaeologists and historians armed with cameras and calipers. Even the earliest of the St Pancras exhumations were conducted with a degree of respect, but it has often been impossible to disinter bodies as individual units, particularly those which had been buried without coffins in ground 'saturated with decomposition'. Thus many of the removals were not of bodies as such but of batches of assorted human remains, and more often than not their tombstones were destroyed in the process or put to some practical use elsewhere. Thomas Hardy, who was one of the team which supervised the original excavations at St Pancras, summed up his observations in the poem [i]The Levelled Churchyard[/i]: We late-lamented, resting here, Are mixed to human jam, And each to each exclaims in fear "I know not which I am!" Where we are huddled none can trace, And if our names remain, They pave some path or porch or place Where we have never lain! If we're prepared to allow, for our own convenience, the disturbance and often disintegration of the bodies of thousands of ordinary and often anonymous Londoners, should we feel differently about the remains of people who died in shipwrecks? Is there something special about such deaths and such remains? I have no strong views either way, just offering food for thought. . [/QUOTE]

Verification: In which year did the Titanic sail?