The first half of the nineteenth century saw cholera epidemics which brought about scenes of horror in many graveyards with heaps of bones and partially rotted bodies being dug up to make way for even more burials.

Diseases such as smallpox, typhus, scarlet fever and even malaria were prevalent in the Bradford area and there were cholera epidemics in 1832, 1849, 1853, 1854 and 1856.

Nor was Bradford known as a clean town. James Smith In his report for the Health Of Towns Commission in 1844 concluded "...of Bradford I am obliged to pronounce it the most filthy town I visited." Central Bradford in the 1840's is described as having "courts, yards and dingy alleys with overflowing privies, open cesspits, pig styes and slaughterhouses and effluent laden watercourses".

But there were others who thought other things equally to blame. In 1849 Titus Salt, then Mayor of Bradford, commissioned a Report into the Moral Condition of Bradford which concluded that alcoholism and venereal disease ranked along side tuberculosis as the three major evils, to an extent even greater than smallpox.

In 1854, the year that Undercliffe Cemetery opened, a Report To The General Board Of Health included an account of the condition of the graveyards in the township of Thornton. John Ingham, Sexton of Thornton Church, described the overcrowding in his graveyard: "I have taken as many as five skulls out of a grave only four feet deep......we have taken out eight coffins to put in a ninth... we are compelled to take out coffins to obtain depth…many [coffins] would not be eight inches [deep]."

The joint stock companies who built and maintained private graveyards, such as Undercliffe, undoubtedly went some way to alleviating the problem but the ultimate answer would be the establishment of public cemeteries. But that's another story…