(suspenseful music) ♪ (host) Human bones can hide the most shocking of secrets.

(woman) Oh, my God, she's been killed.

(woman) She's been killed violently with a sword.

(host) Stories of slaughter, sacrifice, and disease.

(woman) Success was built on the broken bodies of children like these.

(host) Crimes covered up for hundreds or even thousands of years.

Somebody could've committed this murder and then jumped ship and never brought to justice.

I'm Dr. Tori Herridge, and I'm leading a team examining some of the UK's most mysterious archaeological burial sites.

There are so many unanswered questions.

Let's cut to the chase, is it a fertility ritual?

With bones as our only witnesses, mortuary technician Carla Valentine will help identify what happened to the bodies.

(Carla) To me, this is the most fascinating find.

(Tori) While archaeologist Raksha Dave gathers crucial evidence from key experts.

(Raksha) A line of small children's heads, that's absolutely bonkers!

(Tori) Across the length and breadth of the UK, we will reveal how our forebears lived, loved, and died.

(Carla) What was in her head, what were her thoughts and her dreams and her plans for the future?

(Tori) People long forgotten... Makes you wonder what brought her here.

...until now.

♪ (dramatic music) The luxury Victoria Gate shopping arcade in Leeds.

When archaeologists began digging exploratory trenches in a car park on this site in 2014, they knew they weren't digging virgin earth.

This whole area has been at the heart of the city of Leeds for over 200 years, its industrial heritage is well-documented.

But then they found the remains of children and teenagers, and those bones threw the reality of that history into stark relief.

♪ We are going to examine the bones of some of those children whose lives were cut short.

We will try to unravel their secrets.

What happened to them?

Why did they die?

♪ The excavation was right in the center of Leeds.

This is now a fancy shopping center, the Victoria Gate shopping center, but when it was being built, archaeologists excavated the remains of a Methodist chapel and churchyard.

It was called the Ebenezer Chapel.

(Carla) You say "Ebenezer," immediately just conjures up images -of Dickensian Britain.

-Yeah, well, I think that's key, because Methodists didn't build their own chapels until after the 1780s, so we're dealing with the 1800s here.

The graveyard surrounding Ebenezer Chapel was originally cleared in 1881, but when digging began five years ago, archaeologists discovered that not all the remains had been removed.

Professor Becky Gowland and her team from Durham University then examined these bones in detail.

We've got a 19th century chapel and graveyard.

What is so unusual about that, Becky?

On face value, there's nothing very special about it at all, and in fact, it was only when the bones were sent to my colleague at York Osteoarchaeology that she realized that there was something a bit special about this assemblage, and that's when she showed them to me, and we realized that actually they had a really interesting story to tell us about life in Leeds during this time.

How many skeletons were excavated?

(Becky) There's 21 skeletons at the site, 13 of these are children.

(Carla) And are all of these children?

(Becky) Yeah, so I've brought three along today, and these are representative of the site as a whole.

So there's a teenage girl here, there's a boy aged about eight to 10 over here, and then we've got a young girl over here.

There's an awful lot going on in this little body.

What we notice, first of all, is her size.

We immediately assumed she was about three to five years of age, and when we measured the bones, that seemed to fit.

(Carla) And that's what you'd expect, I suppose.

(Becky) Yes, until we looked at the teeth.

The teeth are actually a much more accurate indicator of chronological age, because they develop to a set timetable, and they're not affected by things like malnutrition.

So, when we looked at the teeth, we saw that she was, in fact, 8 to 10 years.

-Gosh.

-But the size of a three- -to four-year-old.

-When we look at the tibia here, -you can see why-- -So that's the shin bone.

(Becky) It's paper thin, and if you hold it, it's so light.

(Tori) It is so incredibly light and fragile, it just--you almost feel you could put your thumb through it.

(Becky) I've brought along the bone of a healthy child who was also 8 to 10 years of age just to compare the difference.

(Carla) So that's two shin bones from two different children -who were the same age.

-Absolutely.

(Carla) It's absolutely clear that there's a huge size difference there.

-They're so light.

-Should we take a closer look?

-Yeah, feel that.

-Let's see.

-It's really, really fragile.

-Oh, my gosh, absolutely.

Okay, so if we compare this to-- (Becky) If you look at the ends there, you can see that it's really very porous.

It shouldn't look like that, it should look nice and smooth.

(Tori) Does that give you an indication as to why she died?

(Becky) We can't tell the cause of death from the skeleton, unfortunately.

What we can tell is something about her life.

So we view the bones as an archive of an individual's life experience, and it's our job to try and unlock the information from that archive.

Now, the skeletons of children are particularly sensitive to adverse environmental conditions, whether these are social or environmental.

So they've been likened to canaries in the coal mine, so they're a sensitive indicator of overall population well-being.

And actually, even in some of the adult skeletons, we can see that they experienced a similar childhood.

I've looked at children from lots of different sites, and these are particularly bad, in fact, I think this is the worst.

(Tori) That is indicative, probably, of what's going on with the community as a whole tells us there is something about their lifestyles that affected their bones in such a dramatic fashion.

That's what we need to find out so we can understand what led to their untimely deaths.

(melancholic music) If the children of Ebenezer Chapel reflect the wider community during the 1800s, what was Leeds like back then at the height of the Industrial Revolution?

♪ Raksha is catching up with historian Keith Laybourn at the Corn Exchange.

♪ (Keith) Leeds from the 18th century onwards had been growing very rapidly.

Ten thousand people in 1700, probably the center of Leeds, probably something like 30,000 by 1800, 90,000 or 100,000 by 1850, so it's a rapidly growing town.

♪ Leeds is a very varied town.

It's got the weavers, it's got engineering, so it attracts a lot of people, a lot of skilled people, so it is a successful, prosperous community.

♪ (Raksha) I'm quite interested on the other end of the scale, though.

What about the poor at this time?

(Keith) Well, the poor--I mean, obviously, at this stage, I mean, industrial growth is occurring, people are prosperous, it brings people in, but of course, the employers are trying to get their workers as cheaply as possible.

So there's no equality, I mean, capitalism, after all, means inequality.

(soft music) (Tori) So where exactly do the children of Ebenezer Chapel fit into this picture of great wealth and inequality?

I'm meeting David Williams, who excavated the chapel and graveyard, to find out more about the area they lived in.

♪ So we are standing in the pub, in the Harewood Arms, and you were excavating around the chapel, which would've been, if the chapel's there, if we're here, ah, Tommy Hilfiger.

(David) Just across the way there, yeah, in Tommy Hilfiger.

(Tori) I don't think their ministers would have been particularly impressed.

We've just walked along this thoroughfare here, and that is Ebenezer Street.

(David) Yeah, it would've been quite a different place, really.

All these squares here are actually back-to-back houses, so there's no real kind of yards or gardens associated with them, they're just back-to-back houses, real dense amount of housing for people to live in.

(Tori) It really is dense, isn't it?

Seeing it on the map really rams it home, because that's the chapel, and on all sides, it's just house after house after house after house.

Seeing down this end of the map, wool clothworks, dye house, dye house, wool and clothworks, -that way is work.

-It is, yeah.

(Tori) But this way, where the chapel is, is where everyone would've walked towards on a Sunday.

Ebenezer Street would have, presumably, thronged with people heading that way.

(David) Absolutely, I mean, real large community, lots of people in all these houses, really busy, all the time, everywhere.

(Tori) So were you expecting to find what you found at the chapel?

(David) We had records suggesting that the graveyard itself had been cleared, so when we did find, then, that there were actually a few individuals still left in the graveyard, that is always a big surprise, really.

It is a quite sobering experience when you come across human remains, especially the ones we had there, which were children or young adults.

They're much more relatable, these Victorian individuals, than perhaps people from prehistory.

Does that make it harder or easier?

(David) I think it can make it harder in this way, you know, because you can almost make a personal understanding of what these people's lives may have been like.

(Tori) So what do we have here?

(Carla) So we know that we've got a Methodist chapel from the 1800s.

We've got a girl, 8 to 10 years of age, a girl who's 15 to 19 years of age, and then a boy of 8 to 10 years of age.

(Tori) It's interesting, isn't it, that it's a Methodist chapel, because at this time, Methodism was on the rise.

This was all part of a much wider social change.

It was, of course, the Industrial Revolution.

(pensive music) (Tori) The Industrial Revolution was a period of time when some people got an awful lot richer.

(Carla) And some people got an awful lot poorer.

(Tori) Well, yeah, quite.

And that map that David showed me, the houses all around Ebenezer Chapel were really densely packed, which makes me think these are working class people and not the wealthy elite.

Is that what the bones are showing?

(Becky) So for this period, there's an awful lot written about people's lives, but these are written by people who might have their own political agenda or they're certainly writing from their own perspective.

So if we want to find out how people lived during this period, we need to go directly to the source, and that's the skeletal remains.

And what these children are telling us is that life was really grim.

(Tori) But the poor have always suffered.

Why is the Industrial Revolution so special?

Is it really that unique?

(Becky) I've looked at a lot of skeletons of children from different periods over the years.

If I had skeletons from each of these different periods laid out in the lab and no one told me who was from where, I would absolutely be able to pick out those from this Industrial Revolution period.

(Carla) There's such a marked difference then.

-Yes.

-So what is it exactly that you're seeing on these bones?

(Becky) In particular, on this little girl, is vitamin D deficiency.

(Carla) Which we sort of-- we'd know as rickets, really, -wouldn't we?

-Yeah, absolutely.

And if we look here, you can see on both the left and right femora, you can see that it's twisted at the end.

It should go straight down and it's angled to one side.

The other thing that we can see is the bowed fibula here.

So this child would have looked quite knock-kneed, and their legs would have been bowed slightly as well.

(Carla) And this is from a lack of sunlight then, isn't it?

(Becky) Yes.

The majority of our vitamin D is made in our bodies on contact with sunlight.

The other indicator that we're seeing on this skeleton of vitamin D deficiency is on the ribs.

So, if we look at the ribs here, you can see that the ends flare out.

You can actually see that under the skin of the children as well, because it looks like little beads.

So it's sometimes referred to as rickety rosary, because it almost looks like a bead necklace.

That's absolutely fascinating.

What else are you seeing on this skeleton?

One of the other changes that we're seeing is vitamin C deficiency.

-You mean scurvy?

-Yes, yes, so something that we would associate with sailors more commonly.

So if we take a look at this skull here, you'll feel that it's very thick but also very porous.

So there's a combination of anemia and vitamin C deficiency.

So when a child is anemic, they're trying to produce more red blood cells, and they do this by expanding the marrow cavity.

-Hence the thick skull.

-Absolutely.

And then, with the vitamin C, that's where some of the porosity is coming in as well.

There are so many different deficiency diseases happening.

If you're deficient in one, chances are you are in another thing as well.

And is this unique to her?

Or is it something you're seeing in all of the children?

(Becky) Unfortunately, we're also seeing it in the other children at this site as well.

You've got rickets, you think lack of sunlight, but then you see the vitamin C deficiency, scurvy, and the fact that she was so tiny, and suddenly, I am thinking that diet is important here, lack of fruit and veg.

Maybe actually a lack of food at all.

Could it be that it was something in her diet that led to her dying so young?

(melancholic music) Raksha has come to meet food historian Angela Clutton at Leeds Cookery School to find out more.

(Raksha) Angela, what is the typical diet of a working class family in Leeds during the 1800s?

(Angela) The poorer you were, the simpler and less varied it would be, so we'd be thinking about very basic bread, simple vegetables, turnips, carrots, cabbage, and the quality of that food would've been pretty poor.

(Raksha) Why?

Why is that?

(Angela) It'd been coming in from quite a long way from outside Leeds, so in the more rural areas, so some of the food wouldn't have been as fresh as it needed to be.

Another issue with people having moved to the city in so great numbers was that they were moving further and further away from their natural food supply.

And so there was more-- more opportunity for slightly unscrupulous producers to adulterate food.

(Raksha) So how were they messing around with the food then?

(Angela) Well, they're putting in all kinds of things which were pretty much intended to make it cheaper to produce.

So bread was a really big one, because flour was so expensive, especially white flour, which had become really popular.

Replace some of that flour with other things, like chalk?

-No, no, surely not.

-Yeah, yeah, there'd be chalk, -and there would be alum.

-What's alum?

(Angela) Alum is a sulfite aluminium, another thing which you probably don't really want -in your bread.

-That doesn't sound great... (Angela) I know, so this is it.

So that's some powdered alum.

-That stinks.

-I know, I know it does.

-That absolutely reeks.

-But if you are able as a baker, it's gonna be really cheaper for you to make it, and so you can make more money doing it.

And there were no regulations stopping you at that point.

(Raksha) So is this stuff bad for you, then?

(Angela) It will make you sick, give you diarrhea if you have a lot of it, but the issue really is that it stops people being able to take in other nutrients from other food that they had, and that's the real problem.

If you're already not having very much, anything that stops you getting maximum nutritional benefit from it is a terrible thing, and especially for children.

It would be at an age where their bones were so much in development, and it would really, really have big impact on their ability to grow and their ability to grow strong bones and be healthy, so it was a huge impact.

I have had a go at making a loaf with some alum in it instead of some of the flour.

Want to try some?

(Raksha) Not really, but I'll give it a go.

Oh.

-It tastes like it-- -It tastes like it smells.

(Raksha) Horrid.

Horrid, horrid, horrid.

Would people have known that their food was being messed around with?

(Angela) The people that we're talking about who are having to eat this, not really.

It was just about getting through and trying to make sure the family had something to eat, something that would just stop that absolute hunger.

And so when you feel you can give your kids something, you're just gonna feel pretty happy about it and maybe not ask too many questions.

(soft music) ♪ (Tori) Hearing about all this adulterated food makes me absolutely furious.

You've got these poor kids, and they are suffering.

They've got rickets, they've got scurvy.

Our little girl is really small for her age, and that comes down to the fact that they are not getting enough food.

Now that's sad, but then the food they are getting has been messed with in a way that could actually make them even more sick just to make someone some money?

(Carla) At best, the food would have tasted disgusting.

But is it possible that maybe on the other end of the scale, some of these ingredients could have actually poisoned these children?

(Tori) Well, yeah, one or two, maybe, but all 13?

I don't think so.

(Becky) No, I don't think so either.

I think diet is clearly a factor, but I don't think poisoning is what's killing them.

If we have a look at our teenage girl, she also had rickets and she also has possible scurvy, so if we look here at the jaw, you can see this gray patch of woven bone here.

(Carla) And what do you mean by "woven bone"?

(Becky) Woven bone is the bone that is produced rapidly in response to, usually, some kind of inflammation.

If we look here at her ribs, you can see, again, there's these sort of light gray patches of woven bone.

Now these are on the inside surface of the ribs.

So this is where the ribs are in contact with the lungs, so the pleural cavity of the lungs, so when we're seeing woven bone there, it's telling us that she's got some kind of inflammation of the lungs.

(Tori) To have left its mark on the bone, you can't be talking about some sort of short, sharp infection, it's got to have been something much more chronic.

(Becky) We've been thinking more along the lines of something like pneumonia.

-Or could it be TB?

-We certainly have seen these kind of rib lesions with individuals that have suffered from TB.

And TB is a very, very nasty illness.

In fact, could it have been the TB that killed her?

(soft electronic music) TB was one of 19th century Britain's biggest killers.

To discover more about this deadly disease, Raksha has come to the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds.

♪ (Raksha) Why is TB so prevalent in Britain during the 1800s?

(Laura) Well, TB is a really contagious disease.

Once it's into an area, it can spread very, very quickly.

It spreads when people cough, you sneeze, you speak, spit, and when you get these sort of urban centers building up, then the disease can travel very, very quickly between people.

(Raksha) What are the symptoms of TB?

(Laura) It depends on what type of TB you have.

Some of them are actually symptomless, but can still kill you.

Quite often, though, it will lead to very heavy coughing, blood in the lungs, and you end up coughing up blood.

You lose a lot of weight, so you're gonna get thin, you get pale, you have rosy cheeks.

It's a really painful, potentially drawn-out way to die.

(Raksha) So what about doctors?

Did they have a cure for TB?

And how did they treat it?

There isn't a cure for TB, we don't know what caused it at this point.

It was very difficult to find a suitable medicine for it.

(Raksha) What's one of the things on the high street that you'd go and pick up for yourself?

(Laura) Whatever's available and whatever's promising the most, quite frankly.

A lot of these medicines claim to do all sorts of wonderful things, and you'd go for the one that seemed the most realistic.

(Raksha) And that's what you've got on these pots here.

Quite incredulous, really, just reading the front of them, 'cause they seem to cure everything from bad breath to sore heads, sore breasts even.

(Laura) Most of these products can cure almost anything, and if you buy it from the right person, they will guarantee to you that it will cure almost anything.

(Raksha) And what do these cures contain?

(Laura) Some of them are pretty hazardous by modern standards.

Either some sort of poison, which would work as an antibacterial agent, or it was a placebo.

Those are so often your choices.

So they didn't really know what TB was, and they certainly didn't have cures, did they?

(Laura) No, this is a point before antibiotics, but these people contended with all sorts of diseases.

You've got TB, diphtheria, dysentery, scurvy, rickets, all sorts of things are coming to Leeds.

Here I have a map to show you.

This is the town of Leeds showing the cholera epidemic which came in 1832.

Gosh, there was a cholera epidemic here.

(Laura) Yeah, a lot of urban centers got the disease.

So this is the Baker map.

So Dr. Baker was a Leeds-based physician, and he was trying to work out why it was that cholera was spreading across the city, and if you look right in the center of our map here, you'll see there's Ebenezer Street and the chapel at the end of it.

There's a range of dots here, which show the outbreak of cholera.

(Raksha) The blue spots, which are everywhere around Ebenezer Street, they're showing that there's signs of cholera and the red ones are for other diseases.

This is like a complete surprise.

I didn't think that there was another thing to add to the mix.

Gosh, it's like as though they had never even had a chance.

(Laura) No, yeah, the odds weren't good.

Cholera had a huge impact on the city.

It's an extremely difficult place to live, and diseases like cholera come in really, really quickly and unexpectedly.

(Tori) With this cholera map, Baker was trying to do something revolutionary, but it was clear, I think, to Baker at the time, just how much cholera was occurring in those streets.

Look at the area around the Ebenezer Chapel!

The place was rife with cholera!

It makes you wonder whether or not cholera could've killed these children.

(Becky) Well, it's definitely a possibility, but we've got a couple of problems here.

Firstly, we don't know if these children died in 1832.

We don't know that they died at the same time.

They could've died 30 years apart.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, cholera leaves no sign on the bones.

It kills very, very quickly, certainly within a week, so we can't tell.

(Tori) What is completely indisputable is just how much disease was rife in this area.

I mean, these streets are ridden with it!

What was it about the streets that these kids were living in that made them so vulnerable to disease?

(pensive music) The area around Ebenezer Chapel was once a maze of narrow streets and yards.

♪ A few city center courtyards still remain.

Raksha has come to one of them to meet Leeds historian Janet Douglas.

♪ (Raksha) Janet, I'm trying to get a sense of what it was like to live on Ebenezer Street.

In the Baker's report, it just sounds an awful place to live.

They've got this kind of sump where all the rainwater and all the stagnant water and sewage collects.

There's a story of somebody making a metal grate to put over the fire grate, because the stench is just so terrible.

It's like seeping through there as well.

I mean, is that an accurate portrayal of people living in these back-to-backs?

(Janet) Working class houses on Ebenezer Street, when they were new, although they were small, they were well-built.

They were reasonable houses in a period of time when, in Leeds at least, there was a housing shortage.

♪ More and more people are coming into Leeds.

Houses are getting more overcrowded.

And this puts enormous pressure on the housing stock.

These sorts of houses just go downhill from then onwards.

(Raksha) You have got a big transient population that are looking for cheap housing.

They don't particularly want to stay there very long, they're just going there for the jobs, so that means that they're not really looking after their property, are they?

(Janet) No, and neither are the landlords.

They did lack any facilities whatsoever, so there was no piped water, there was no sewerage, there was no what they always called privies.

-That's the toilet, isn't it?

-That's the toilet, yeah.

So there might be one in the yard shared by everybody, and the privies were never emptied properly, so you've got all this foul matter building up year after year after year, and it's that sort of thing, I think, that causes the disease rather than probably the houses themselves.

It's just not a housing problem.

What there is is a public health problem.

(atmospheric music) (Tori) From what Raksha found out, these back-to-back houses may have started out aspirational, but you just look at the pictures, you can easily see how they could become so overcrowded.

(Carla) I mean, they're only small buildings, and if they're back-to-back with windows only at the front, so there's barely any natural light.

So packed together, I mean, the whole area looks dark.

(Tori) The streets themselves were filthy and so were those courtyards, hence predispositions towards cholera.

You've got insanitary housing, you've got infectious diseases, you've got rickets and scurvy.

It's a really deadly cocktail.

(Carla) And surely that would be enough to finish anybody off.

(Becky) Well, let me stop you there.

I've got a little bit more information to show you.

So this is a skeleton of a boy aged 8 to 10 years.

The first thing that we've noticed is that he has two fractures.

A fracture to the rib here and there's also a fracture to the jaw.

What we can just about make out in the ends of this rib are the start of the bones just trying to knit together, so there's just some new remodeling of those bones, and it's exactly the same on his jaw.

(Tori) So something or someone has broken this poor little boy's rib and jaw bone at the same time.

I mean, has he got into a fight?

-Maybe he had an accident?

-Yeah, exactly.

Well, this is not a one-off.

If I show you this other rib here, you can see we've actually got another fracture.

But this one didn't occur at the same time because this is well-healed.

I don't know if you can make out that slight lump there on the surface of the rib.

That is a healed fracture.

(Tori) So it's another fracture to his ribs again?

-Mhm.

-You've got so few bones here, and yet in this small amount of material, you're seeing evidence for three different bone breakages, and that seems to scream to me of something like abuse.

(Becky) That's a distinct possibility, but there's another possibility.

So if I take you over here, that might provide us with a little bit more context.

There are some really interesting features over here on our teenage girl and also on our younger girl over here.

They both have vitamin D deficiency, so they both have rickets, and in our younger girl, we can see that in her lower limbs being bowed.

Now, over here, we've got bowing of the forearm.

That's really unusual.

The other interesting thing about this is that the bowing is just on the left side, so she's doing something like this habitually, and what's interesting is it's also exactly the same over there.

It's only on the left side.

(Carla) So that would indicate that they're both carrying out the same sort of activity then.

(Becky) It does, it strongly indicates that.

I haven't seen that before.

Usually, when you see bowing, it's usually symmetrical.

(Tori) Weight-bearing on their arms, but only on their left arms, which implies that they are maybe pushing down here, leaving their right hand free to do something else.

(Carla) And this is something that, presumably, would take a long time to happen.

This is not something that is happening overnight or even over one or two weeks, this is something that is ongoing and habitual.

(Carla) It's a mystery, I mean, is there anything else on the skeleton that can kind of help tell us what it is that she's doing?

(Becky) Yeah, so when we have a look at the teeth, on several of the teeth, you can see these grooves.

So this is on the incisor, which are one of the teeth at the front, and this suggests to us that she is passing something -through her teeth.

-Like thread or something?

(Becky) It could be a thread, but it seems too shallow, really, to be a thread.

It seems like it might be something a little bit thicker, so perhaps something like wool or flax, something along those lines.

(Tori) Well, there was a wool mill really close by to Ebenezer Chapel, and if you start to put these things together, then I think you can start to connect things.

You've got a boy with injuries, and then you have these two girls who seem to be doing something similar, the same kind of repeated activity that is causing just one arm to bow, and then you've got teeth.

Teeth are consistent with pulling wool through them, something which might happen at a wool mill.

So I'm sensing that you are coming to the same conclusion.

(Becky) We think it's a really strong possibility that these features are related to work and occupation.

(pensive music) (Tori) Now a museum, Armley Mill in Leeds was once the largest woolen mill in the world.

♪ (machine rattling) ♪ (man) It would've been common for children as young as six to be working in spaces like this.

(Raksha) Wow, six years old.

-Yeah.

-That is unbelievable.

(man) Children would be doing all sorts of different jobs.

One of the most common jobs is the scavenger roll.

You'd be crawling under here, moving around, and making sure that you're getting in, sweeping up the cotton and all those stray fibers, and getting out before the spinning machine comes back to its resting point.

(rattling) ♪ You have to make sure you're timing it right, making sure you've got exactly enough time to get in and get out.

If you leave too little, well, it can cause some really serious accidents, and children were caught between the rollers and these rails, and in some examples, their heads were crushed.

(crashing) Working alongside heavy machinery for such long hours, 12 to 14 hours, means that children naturally, these very young children, are going to have lapses in concentration, and that's when these accidents happen.

And then in the preparation rooms, you've got a lot of that dirt and dust coming out and really getting into the child's lungs.

Cotton lung built up over years of working in factories like this was incredibly common.

It would irritate the lungs as it was breathed in, and you had all sorts of irritations because of this work.

(rattling) (Raksha) I am wondering whether our children from Victoria Gate were working in a place like this, 'cause we're looking at the evidence on their bones.

They've got bowed arms.

You know, this kind of points to what they were doing day in, day out.

(Grant) Bowed legs and bowed arms were fairly common in child labor cases, and also there could be fractures and things from discipline, so from beatings or from disobedience.

(Raksha) That does actually fit one of the children that we have.

He's got a fractured rib and just looks like his jaw's been broken as well.

Physical punishments were common in factories and workshops.

You've also got pressure from the bosses in the rooms themselves, so they might be giving children a whack with a strap or with some wooden club or whatever kind of implement that they could find to make sure that they're keeping to their task and they're maintaining their standard of work.

(suspenseful music) ♪ (Tori) The evidence is compelling.

Look at that map.

Ebenezer Street is surrounded by woolen mills, dye works, and then look at the bones!

(Becky) We've got fractures that might be related to work injuries, we've got the bowed forearm, potentially someone working as a scavenger, pulling out all the bits of fluff from underneath the machinery.

We've got the notches, the wear in the teeth that might be thread being pulled through the teeth.

(Tori) Think of the rickets.

It's something that is linked to a lack of sunlight, and if you're working 13-hour shifts in a mill, you are not gonna see daylight probably even in the summertime.

It just seems clear to me that these kids would've suffered working there.

(Carla) These weren't just trivial injuries either.

I've seen specimens of scalps that have been ripped off small scavengers, because their hair's been caught in these revolving machines.

These were absolutely horrendous injuries they suffered.

Yeah, and then you've got the chronic stuff, things like cotton worker's lung.

(Becky) There were certainly lots of respiratory infections that people in the mill were getting, and the common one is known as cotton lung or byssinosis.

And we do have evidence here in these children of sinusitis, so they've got inflammation in their upper respiratory tract, but also, if we think about those rib lesions that we were looking at earlier in relation to TB, well, that could equally be related to chest infections from constantly inhaling these cotton particles of fluff.

(Tori) It seems to me that these poor kids did not have a chance.

I mean, was it simply that they were worked to death?

♪ (birds chirping) The results of an excavation in a country churchyard at Fewston in Yorkshire takes our investigation in a different direction.

Here too, archaeologists found the remains of children who had worked in the local mill.

But something about them didn't add up.

(woman) York Osteoarchaeology was employed basically to analyze the remains of the skeletons that were excavated, and we found some evidence that would be consistent with working in the mill, so for example, several of the teenagers and older children had new bone formation on the inside of the ribs, which is consistent with a lung infection, so possibly something like tuberculosis, and also they had signs of things like sinusitis, so working in these very enclosed environments.

We're also seeing things like rickets and scurvy and these pits and grooves in their teeth which would have formed at a much earlier age in their childhood.

So they were not necessarily relating to their immediate environment in millwork relating to an earlier stage of life.

(Raksha) So what do you think was going on there then?

(Anwen) These pattern of conditions were more consistent with what we tend to see in urban environments, so though initially we were thinking these were rural children, we were then thinking that their pattern of health is more consistent with urban deprivation, so we were a little bit puzzled about what was going on, really.

(atmospheric music) (Tori) Their members of the local community researching the Fewston Mill discovered it had been recruiting child labor from as far away as London.

♪ (Anwen) Essentially, a lot of these big mills, especially in rural areas, were finding it hard to find enough people to work for them, so they started looking further afield.

So they would go into the poor areas in the big cities, and they would often recruit children from workhouses.

A lot of them were born into poverty in places like London, experiencing that very deprived urban environment, lack of sunlight, et cetera, and then they're moving here, working in the mill, they end up dying and get buried here.

♪ Superficially at first, we thought they were the local children, we'd find out what life was like for the people growing up locally, it turned out what we were seeing was actually an urban childhood, basically.

♪ (Raksha) It's really interesting, isn't it, 'cause it's not actually the mill that's killing them necessarily, -it's their early life.

-Yeah, absolutely.

Their health was compromised before they arrived, and then they go to work in the mill, they're working incredibly long hours in really sort of unpleasant conditions six days a week, and their health just would not really have been able to withstand that kind of intensive work, and it would have predisposed them to developing all sorts of diseases.

Things like tuberculosis, et cetera, which would have all contributed towards their early death.

♪ (Tori) That's pretty sobering, the whole Fewston situation.

These were kids that were removed from their lives in London and brought hundreds of miles away.

(Raksha) I think it's really difficult to think of it in a modern way.

That's the construct of their times.

They were sent away to work.

I don't think that they imagined that they would end in such a way.

It's very tragic.

There's an article, I was doing a little bit of reading.

There's a report that a guy called Michael Sadler made to the House of Commons in 1832.

It's actually what led to the 1833 Factory Act, which was supposed to reform things for children in factories, and he interviewed a person called Elizabeth Bentley, and her answers, oh, they make me mad.

He asked her, he said, "What were your hours of labor?"

And she said, "As a child, I worked from five in the morning to nine at night."

And then he said, "What time was allowed for meals?"

"We were allowed 40 minutes at noon."

He said, "Had you any time to get breakfast or drinking?"

"No, we got it as we could."

"Did you have time to eat it?"

No.

We were obliged to leave it or to take it home.

When we did not take it, the overlooker took it and gave it to the pigs."

-Oh.

-And then he asked her, "Did it affect your health?"

And she said, "Yes," and basically the endpoint was it so badly affected her that by the time she was in her teens, she was unable to work anymore, and now she's in the poorhouse.

Those conditions in those mills, they were awful and they're gonna leave a mark.

They're gonna leave marks on the body, they're gonna leave marks on the bones.

But actually, when I chatted to Anwen, she told me that these children from London were already ill.

They were already predisposed to particular illnesses, malnutrition, there's rickets, there's scurvy.

And then they're going to Fewston, and they're working in these horrific conditions.

And what's interesting there is that when you then apply that same logic to our children from the Ebenezer Chapel burial ground, then you don't have to necessarily invoke the mill for cause of death if actually just being very, very poor and having a terrible childhood, there's not enough food, not enough sunlight, and enough care and attention is enough to mean you don't make it to adulthood.

(tense music) The thing about Fewston is I was expecting to find out that there was a link between our Ebenezer Street kids and the children at Fewston, because they were all millworkers.

Now, we think these children were working at a local mill and we know the Fewston kids were, and millwork was awful.

We had brutal overseers, appalling conditions, and long, long hours.

(Carla) Yeah, but despite that, not every single child that worked in a mill died early.

I mean, a lot of them went on to live for many years.

(Tori) Yeah, exactly, and so actually what seems to be the case is it wasn't so much the millwork as the fact that they were born into and brought up in appalling poverty.

(Becky) Yeah, that's right, and we're seeing this here in the little boy with the fractures.

If we take a look at his teeth, you can see there's lots of lines going from the tip of the crown all the way down the root.

And these lines are called dental enamel defects, or enamel hyperplasia, and they form when there's some kind of disruption in the child's life whilst the teeth are forming.

So briefly, the enamel will stop, and then it restarts and it creates this defect here.

I've seen a lot of hyperplasia on a lot of teeth, but I have never seen it this bad, and what's interesting to me about this one in particular is that we've got the lines going all the way down the tooth crown, but they're also going down the root, and I've never seen that before.

-And what does that tell you?

-Well, it's telling us that this child was never well.

From infancy right up until that point of death, he was experiencing adversity.

I've also seen these defects on some of the milk teeth, the deciduous teeth.

Now, these teeth are starting to form in utero.

That is telling us something about their mothers.

It's telling us that their mothers were also unwell.

And of course, that means that they aren't able to give their kids the best possible start in life either.

That kid is gonna be born already primed, primed for further illness.

Once you expand it to include those milk teeth, then you've got a much bigger picture.

It's not just the story of one poorly little boy, it's possibly the story of his mother, too.

You're seeing a sickly boy, sickly moms, you're seeing an entire community that's suffering.

(pensive music) (Raksha) Pediatrician Dr. Christian Harkensee has examined the teeth and bones of the children from the Ebenezer Chapel site.

He sees striking similarities with children he is treating today.

Just looking at the bones, I'm actually quite surprised that they managed to live that long.

(Christian) I'm surprised as well, and looking at the bones myself, they are so fragile, really kind of-- the term "rickety" describes it quite well.

We looked at the respiratory side of things on the ribs.

These look like almost bones of someone who is 70 years old and did lifelong work in industry, and these are only children.

That's quite shocking.

(Raksha) I'm guessing that being malnourished and being poor has an impact on everything in your life.

(Christian) Yes, and we see that nowadays in children as well, and it's sadly something that I see increasing nowadays in the children I see in hospital and in my clinic.

Although children may look well-nourished and sometimes even look overweight, often, they are malnourished.

Their parents are so-called working poor, so although they are in full-time employment, they are still earning below the poverty level.

A lot of my patients rely on food banks.

The food they receive there is often just processed food in tins.

That is not healthy.

(Raksha) And all of this has an impact on their life.

(Christian) We may not see that immediately, although we have seen morbidity and mortality in children increasing in recent years.

But the full effect of that we will only see when these children of this generation will grow up in 10, 20 years.

(soft music) (Tori) The thing about these kids is there is no single culprit to blame for their death.

Yes, there were unscrupulous mill owners and, yes, they were living in slums, and there was cholera and all other kinds of diseases around, but to pick one of those things is just not possible.

(Carla) These poor kids, their problems began before they were born.

(Becky) Yeah, we can see from some of the skeletal evidence that maternal health was really poor during this time.

So things like rickets and scurvy and evidence for malnutrition, that was all happening as well in utero, so they were born into biological disadvantage.

And this is going to then have a cumulative effect over their short lives, but also intergenerationally.

(Tori) And then, of course, that is going to then predispose them to work-related injuries.

It's remarkable, actually, because these children's stories are the story of the Industrial Revolution.

(Becky) Yes, this was a period in our history where the economy was really booming, the manufacturing industry was expanding rapidly.

Lots of people were getting very wealthy, but that success was built on the broken bodies of children like these.

(Carla) And it's a really sobering thought that conditions like rickets, malnutrition, we think that they belong to the past, to the Industrial Revolution, but they don't!

We're seeing a resurgence of them nowadays, and again, it's to do with poverty.

(Tori) When we started this investigation, I thought that we would learn about a single slice of time, but you put it really, really well.

Children are the canary in the coal mine, and if these children are an indictment of the times that they lived in, then the resurgence of diseases like rickets in our own time, what does that say about us?

(solemn music) ♪