Royton Cemetery mass grave: Babies and children among 300 bodies found

Emperor , 5 hours ago

Before the 1980s, stillborn babies were taken away from families who were not given any details of what happened to their babies or where they were buried.

Medical staff would tell bereaved parents their children would be buried alongside “a nice person” who was being buried that same day – often without giving them the opportunity to say goodbye.

Instead, the babies were interred in mass graves.

That’s rough.

There was also no central registry of stillbirths which makes tracking them down difficult. My grandfather always claimed to have been one of twins but his brother, Anthony, was stillborn. We don’t even know if he existed (although my grandfather’s younger brothers both had sons called Anthony, which wasn’t a family name before that), let alone where he ended up.