Disposal! with Jimmy Branagh (Unedited)

Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: Herr Jimmy, care to take the stage?
Philip Underwood: Howdy folks
Jimmy Branagh: Oy dun think it will fit in me pocket!
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: Heh.
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach applauds
Jimmy Branagh waves
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: Your Grace.
Mr.Tenk applauds
Liz Wilner: Baron 🙂
Philip Underwood waves to Jed.
Philip Underwood waves to Sophie.
Jimmy Branagh glances at the Baron
Sophie Cloud: ((I’m sorry, but I can’t stay… the plumber has arrived! I’ll have running water again!!))
Ceejay Writer: ((Yay!))
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach makes a cheerfully impatient gesture at Herr Jimmy
Jimmy Branagh: Well, or seems no announcement an’ stuff today, so … off we go!
Mr.Tenk: ((it’s all fun and games until the water stops!!))
Jimmy Branagh: Welcome everyone, an’ thenks faw comin’!
Jimmy Branagh: As always, Oy’ll drop th’ urchinspeak so’s ya don’t need a translator.
Wildstar Beaumont: 🙂
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach chuckles
Jimmy Branagh: Before we begin, I would like to give all credit to Lee Jackson, author of the book DIRTY OLD LONDON, from which much of this material is derived.
Ceejay Writer: 😀
Jimmy Branagh: And so …
Jimmy Branagh: We Babbagers and others of the Steamlands reside here in comic-book Victoriania. Despite our canals and crunchy, palpable air, our regions are shining examples of cleanliness when compared to our sister cities found in that annoying “other” world. It amuses when someone occasionally expresses a desire to actually live in the RL version of our play here.
Jimmy Branagh: In the real 19th Century, they would not.
Jimmy Branagh: As an example, humans in groups produce an unimaginable amount of waste. Consider that of an urban area early every morning of every day. The huge amount produced by say … 20,000 people, all within an hour or two. Consider that much of it in the poorer neighborhoods was dealt with by simply tossing it out a nearby window. Egads.
Jimmy Branagh: But that is a story for another day.
Jimmy Branagh: As well as sewerage, another “waste removal” problem plagued London in the 19th century: the disposal of the dead. There was little dispute about the means. Burial was the norm; cremation a peculiar foreign custom. The difficulty lay in finding room for an ever-increasing number of corpses. The capital’s burgeoning population, upon their decease, were filling up its small churchyards, burial grounds and vaults.
Jimmy Branagh: The consequences, wherever demand exceeded supply, were decidedly unpleasant. Coffins were stacked one atop the other in 20-foot-deep shafts, the topmost mere inches from the surface. Putrefying bodies were frequently disturbed, dismembered or destroyed to make room for newcomers. Disinterred bones, dropped by neglectful gravediggers, lay scattered amidst the tombstones; smashed coffins were sold to the poor for firewood. Clergymen and sextons turned a blind eye to the worst practices because burial fees formed a large proportion of their income. Macabre scenes awaited those who pried too closely into the gravedigger’s work:
Jimmy Branagh: “I saw them chopping the head of his coffin away; I should not have known it if I had not seen the head with the teeth; I knew him by his teeth; one tooth was knocked out and the other was splintered; I knew it was my father’s head, and I told them to stop, and they laughed …”
Jimmy Branagh: Clearance of long-buried bones had always taken place; but the growing demand for burials in crowded grounds meant the work became ever more grisly.
Jimmy Branagh: Moreover, by the 1840s London’s overcrowded churchyards (and the older, small commercial grounds in the centre of the capital) were not only seen as posing a logistical challenge, but damned as a source of “miasma”. Sanitary reformers quite mistakenly believed that the stench from poorly interred decaying bodies was poisoning the metropolis. The practice of urban burial was touted as a profound menace to public health.
Jimmy Branagh: For the middle- and upper-classes, one answer was to remove their dead to commercial “garden cemeteries”, spacious parks built in the semi-rural suburbs, such as Kensal Green (to your left – opened in 1832) and Highgate (1839). Such places, however, were well beyond the means of the urban poor.
Jimmy Branagh: George Alfred Walker – who would acquire the nickname “Graveyard Walker” – a surgeon who took up practice in the slums of Drury Lane in the mid-1830s – determined to address the “miasma” question.
Jimmy Branagh: Walker believed that foul-smelling burial grounds produced much ill health in the neighbouring population. He did not deny the influence of sewers, poorly ventilated housing, and the like – but he was certain that graveyard miasma was an important, much neglected predisposing cause of disease. In 1839 he began a long campaign to end “intramural interment”, commencing with a pamphlet entitled Gatherings from Graveyards.
Jimmy Branagh: The key to the problem was gas emanating from rotting corpses. The existence of such gases was undisputed – sextons and undertakers were often called up to “tap” coffins in church vaults, drilling a hole to prevent them breaking open with explosive force. Walker dutifully recorded the effects of leaking miasma on the constitution of gravediggers, ranging from general ill health (“pain in the head, heaviness, extreme debility, lachrymation, violent palpitation of the heart, universal trembling, with vomiting”) to sudden death. Gas could, indeed, prove fatal: graveyard workers who broke into bloated coffins were occasionally suffocated by the release of “cadaverous vapours”.
Ceejay Writer gags
Jimmy Branagh: The overall argument in Gatherings was that concentrated graveyard gases caused instant death in man and beast; foul-smelling grounds, constantly releasing more diffused miasma, did not produce sudden death – but they debilitated those living nearby, according to their level of exposure and individual resistance.
Jimmy Branagh: Walker was a skilful propagandist, adept at utilising grisly detail to grab the attention of the reader. His favourite example of malpractice was Enon Chapel ( on your left), situated in slums north of the Strand.
Jimmy Branagh: This dubious place of worship, established in the 1820s largely as a burial speculation, contained a modest cellar in which the deceased were laid to rest in their thousands (ie. corpses were regularly surreptitiously cleared away). Mangled coffins in the chapel vaults produced unclassifiable “body bugs”, which sprang from the corpses and lurked in hair and clothing. Worshippers reported foul aromas and “a peculiar taste” during services, praising the Lord with a handkerchief pressed to their nostrils. Some redundant remains were dumped in a sewer that ran directly under the building.
Jimmy Branagh: Walker recounted such cases before Robert Slaney’s Health of Towns committee in 1840. He then met the Bishop of London (“no satisfactory conclusions could be arrived at”). He petitioned the home secretary, denouncing graveyards as “laboratories of malaria … so many centres of infection, constantly giving off noxious effluvia”. It was, he claimed, only the differences in locality, atmosphere and individual constitution that rendered such gases a “slow or energetic poison”.
Jimmy Branagh: The MP William Mackinnon, who had listened to Walker’s evidence at the Slaney inquiry, presented the petition and successfully moved for a select committee on the subject. Thanks to Walker’s agitation, the burial problem would receive detailed parliamentary scrutiny.
Jimmy Branagh: The Mackinnon inquiry of 1842 covered similar ground to Walker’s reports. Among other things, the select committee confirmed the reality of Walker’s accounts of gross and gruesome scenes in churchyards and vaults:
Jimmy Branagh: “I have seen them play at what is called skittles; put up bones and take skulls and knocked them down; stick up bones in the ground and throw a skull at them as you would a skittle-ball.”
Jimmy Branagh: The medical evidence, however, was not emphatic. James Copeland, censor of the Royal College of Physicians, stated that burial grounds were probably the most important factor in generating ill health among the poor, but focused on the effect of liquefying, decomposing bodies on local wells and water supply. George Collier, another doctor, affirmed that graveyard miasma would “depress, impair and enervate the human frame”, and was a predisposing cause of fever of the “low typhoid kind”. The committee chairman agreed – that there was a link between miasma and fever – but would only go so far as to say: “I should presume that over-crowded burying-grounds would supply such effluvia most abundantly.”
Jimmy Branagh: The connection, in other words, seemed likely but not definite. Others noted alternative explanations for the prevalence of fever in the slums – the stench from sewers and the general dirt. A doctor at King’s College Hospital, located next to a notoriously ill-managed burial ground, said that his patients suffered “no inconvenience”.
Jimmy Branagh: Despite these equivocal findings, the select committee ultimately endorsed Walker’s miasmatic claims. Distrust of stench won the day – for there was no doubting the awful aroma that arose from certain grounds. As one gravedigger eloquently declaimed: “I [have] emptied a cesspool, and the smell of it was rose-water compared with the smell of these graves.”
Jimmy Branagh: Mackinnon recommended immediate action: the prohibition of urban burial, with legislation requiring parishes (or unions of parishes, as under the Poor Law) to build their own large cemeteries at a safe distance from the centre of the metropolis. If necessary, he would bring forward his own bill in parliament, recommending a penny rate to pay for new cemeteries, and a central board of health to oversee parish arrangements.
Jimmy Branagh: Mackinnon would doggedly raise the need for legislation over the next few parliamentary sessions, only to be repeatedly rebuffed. Walker, meanwhile, although he had hoped for more from the government, refused to be downcast. He was a remarkably determined individual and continued his campaign in letters, pamphlets, petitions and lectures. His technique was repetition, constantly assailing the public with ever more gruesome facts, recycling tales of graveyard degradations, seeking out new examples. He formed a Society for the Abolition of Burial in Towns, modelled on the Health of Towns Association, which attracted a small but dedicated membership.
Jimmy Branagh: By the late 1840s, it was generally accepted that urban graveyards were a danger to human health. There was a growing orthodoxy about miasma; and Walker himself had done much to convince the public. Punch magazine would personify graveyard miasma, in doggerel, as ‘The Vampyre (NO SUPERSTITION)’, (‘To work vengeance and woe is his mission of dread. Upon those mid the living who bury their dead’).
Jimmy Branagh: It was the resurgence of cholera in the capital that finally persuaded ministers that action was needed. The interment question passed into the hands of another long-time public health campaigner, Edwin Chadwick. Parochial authorities in Lambeth, fearing imminent government intervention, slashed their burial fees – the ‘1st class ground’ reduced from 27s to 16s, the “2nd class” from 16s to 6s – a rather grim clearance sale.
Jimmy Branagh: The resultant 1850 Metropolitan Interments Act was Chadwick’s attempt to bring in his earlier plan for “national cemeteries”. It remained a remarkably radical scheme, but the public’s enthusiasm for the sanitary cause, and the threat of cholera, persuaded the Whig government of the day to hastily accept what the previous administration had so emphatically rejected.
Jimmy Branagh: (s = shilling)
Jimmy Branagh: The stated intent of the legislation was to close church vaults, churchyards and burial grounds within the metropolis. One or more large public cemeteries would be established in their place, situated beyond the built-up city and managed by a central commission. The ground would be divided into consecrated and non-consecrated, with one chapel for the established Church, another for Dissenters – just like at Kensal Green.
Jimmy Branagh: The price of funerals would be regulated on a sliding scale, suitable for the different social classes and the clergy compensated for the loss of burial fees, based on their income over the previous three years. Likewise, owners of closed burial grounds and cemeteries would be awarded appropriate compensation. This included Kensal Green and other new ‘garden cemeteries’ – none of them anywhere near full – which Chadwick might easily have proposed to nationalise. Instead, he preferred to buy them out, close them and start from scratch.
Jimmy Branagh: Chadwick’s most novel proposal – attempting to address the complaint that the poor would struggle to afford travel to distant cemeteries – was to suggest that the “chief metropolitan cemetery should be in some eligible situation accessible by water-carriage”. The suggestion that new cemeteries might be located alongside railway lines – conveying coffins and mourners by rail – had long been mooted as a solution to the expense of travel, although some considered the idea lacked dignity.
Jimmy Branagh: Chadwick, whilst not ruling out contracting with railway companies, believed that steam-boat funeral barges would resolve the issue in a stately fashion. He was perhaps inspired by Kensal Green’s never-realised plans for a water-gate by the Regent’s Canal. Walker rejoiced – this was the scheme he had long supported as the solution to the burial problem. But it would prove completely unworkable.
Jimmy Branagh: The great problem with Chadwick’s plan for nationalisation was the level of compensation that would have been required to buy out existing commercial interests. Ultimately, the Treasury refused to back the scheme and new, simpler legislation was drafted in 1852. Parishes were empowered to take out 20-year government loans to build garden cemeteries around the outskirts of London – or rent space in existing suburban grounds. Meanwhile, foul burial places in the centre of the metropolis – whether parish or private – could be closed by order of the secretary of state.
Jimmy Branagh: The government was keen to show that the new legislation was practical and effective. Within the first year of the Metropolitan Interments Act’s operation, the home secretary, Lord Palmerston, had issued closure notices to nearly 200 sites. This produced harsh words from the Bishop of London, who noted that 36 out of 43 available grounds had been closed in the East End, creating intense pressure on the remaining sites, while parochial cemeteries were still under construction:
Jimmy Branagh: “… the corpses of children were frequently carried to the places of sepulture in cabs, and that it was no uncommon sight to see a string of such vehicles, filled with dead bodies, waiting at the gate of an unconsecrated burial-ground, until they could be admitted. He need not say that on such occasions the solemn services of the Church were performed in a slovenly, irregular and indecent manner …”
Jimmy Branagh: The owners of private grounds closed by the government were not inclined to go quietly; they were, after all, losing the entirety of their business. A certain Mr Jones, proprietor of the New Bunhill Fields in Upper Street, Islington, proclaimed (quite falsely) that Palmerston’s notice had instructed him not only to close but to clear the ground. He began to disinter bodies, perhaps hoping to build on the site. The children in a nearby school were treated to the sight of broken coffins, bones and “slimy matter, alive with maggots”.
Liz Wilner: goodness
Jimmy Branagh: In 1856, Jones was found to be taking down tombstones and monuments, “selling them for what they would fetch”. The instructions from the Home Office were that the site should be covered with two feet of earth, sown with grass and intercut with asphalt paths, to create pleasant walks for the public. Instead, by 1858, the walls had been demolished, brickwork removed, and the ground given over to a local scavenger, to use as a rubbish dump. The local sanitary inspector noted, “It was about 60 yards square, and there were from 6,000 to 10,000 loads of rubbish on it.”
Jimmy Branagh: Abandoned burial grounds, like any empty plot in the metropolis, were liable to become dumps – whether for household rubbish or, in the worst districts, “ankle deep … with excrement, thrown out from the houses” – and other sites would meet the same fate.
Wildstar Beaumont: thanks God for Mr. Biggins who keeps the undergrounds of New Babbage clean and tidy 🙂
Jimmy Branagh: Fortunately, while the owners of speculations lived down to their rather grubby reputation, London’s vestries defied Walker’s low expectations. St Pancras, a large and prosperous parish, bought Horse Shoe Farm in Finchley in 1853 – two miles from its northern boundary – and opened it as the first large-scale parish cemetery in June 1854. The cemetery itself was very much in the garden style, “visited by large numbers of persons, as it is laid out like a splendid park, and its walks afford the advantages of a perfect promenade”.
Jimmy Branagh: Fees in new parish cemeteries varied from district to district, but a common grave at the City of London Cemetery at Little Ilford cost only 8 shillings 6 pence when the cemetery opened (albeit with “1st class” graves going for 17 shillings 6 pence). This was no trifling expense – and there were travel costs – but the price was comparable with what might have been paid at small commercial grounds in the East End. Those vestries unwilling to or incapable of making their own separate arrangements to build a new cemetery could either amalgamate into unions, buy space in the joint-stock-company cemeteries or cut deals with their neighbours. St Mary Islington, for example, home to Jones’s rubbish dump, bought some of the St Pancras cemetery for its own use.
Jimmy Branagh: Within the space of a few years, large parochial cemeteries, nestling on the edge of the city, were an accepted part of the London landscape. They were spacious, well ventilated, and proper regulations ensured that graves were deep and well maintained: any threat from miasma was neutralised.
Jimmy Branagh: George Alfred Walker surveyed the scene, then quietly withdrew from the public eye. He would eventually retire to North Wales, where he died in 1884. An anonymous 1890s’ memoirist, recalling Walker and his “doctor’s shop” on the corner of Drury Lane and Blackmore Street, would describe him as “a great favourite in the neighbourhood … on account of his kindness to the poor”.
Jimmy Branagh: By the 1860s, garden cemeteries surrounded the metropolis on all sides, both commercial and parochial. Many of the old, disused private burial grounds would also eventually become garden cemeteries, of a sort. During the 1880s and 1890s, local authorities, the LCC and the Metropolitan Public Gardens, Boulevard and Playground Association began to clean up and reopen old burial sites. Their tombstones cleared to one side, they were remade as public parks, small breathing-spaces for Londoners.
Jimmy Branagh: In some cases, decay would follow. Famous garden cemeteries, like Highgate, built as a sanitary commercial alternative to foul local burial grounds in the 1830s, filled up, failed to pay dividends to shareholders, and fell into disrepair during the 20th century, suffering from theft, vandalism and general indifference. Some of their grand chapels were demolished; others now stand forlorn and ruined amid the tombs, ghostly hollow shells. The managed decay of the likes of Highgate Cemetery bears little relation to the pristine plans of its progenitors. The forest that has swallowed Abney Park mocks the original design for an arboretum, where every plant was carefully labelled to elevate the public taste.
Jimmy Branagh: Indeed, the notion of the cemetery as “a great theatre for public taste” – a phrase used by John Bowring MP in the Mackinnon inquiry – has fallen completely out of fashion. Victorian statuary crumbles away. Plain tombstones and grass lawns are now the unchallenged norm; minimalism is the key. The greatest change in the post-Victoria era, of course, has been not aesthetic, but the gradual acceptance of cremation (first proposed by a few radical thinkers in the late 19th century).
Jimmy Branagh: Yet, despite the ravages of time, changing customs, vicissitudes of fashion, the Victorian garden cemetery still survives in its various forms, one of the great legacies of the 19th century.
Jimmy Branagh: And that, I’m afraid, is the end of my notes. I’m afraid I dreadfully misjudged the time necessary.
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach applauds
Wulfriðe Blitzen applauds
Jimmy Branagh: You may now proceed to discussion and libation. Thank you for your attention.
Liz Wilner: that was fascinating, Jimmy!
Oriella Charik claps
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: I am nearly surprised you did not dress the Salon as a cemetary.
Jimmy Branagh: Thank you.
Jimmy Branagh: I considered it Herr Baron, but time is innteresting these days.
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: Did you encounter any information about water table issues with either the old or new cemetaries?
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: I am reminded of the problems of the riverside communities like New Orleans and St. Johns.
Jimmy Branagh: Not on this run. I’m sure the information is available however.
Ceejay Writer perks up when she realizes Libation is a choice now.
Mr.Tenk applauds and has an idea for a salon next year
Wildstar Beaumont: great talk Jimmy!
Jimmy Branagh: Yes, I undestand when flooded the coffins pop out of the ground in New Orleans like jumping beans
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach raises an intrigued eyebrow at Herr Tenk’s loud thought.
Ceejay Writer: YEs, Jimmy. A nauseating and disturbingly brilliant talk!
Jimmy Branagh: Thank you Admiral
Jimmy Branagh bows
Liz Wilner sips from wineglass in one hand…delicately sniff the fragrant nosegay in other hand
Ephemeria: Thank you very much master Branagh
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: No other questions?
Jimmy Branagh: I should try a happy subject next time.
Jimmy Branagh: Never done.
Jimmy Branagh chuckles
Sebastian Neverwas: You?
Mr.Tenk: /can/ you???
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach chuckles
Wildstar Beaumont: 🙂
Jimmy Branagh: “Children’s games in the Victorian Age”
Liz Wilner: it’s sad that the tombstones or markers were just moved or thrown out…I hope some records were kept
Jimmy Branagh: Oh wait, some of those were nasty too.
Ceejay Writer: There’s so many birth/death/census records online, I wonder now how complete they are.
Liz Wilner: exactly
Jimmy Branagh: The LDS have been collecting/compiling them for ages.
Liz Wilner: 5th great grand ma is under a sidewalk somewhere
Ceejay Writer: *Nods* They have. I’ve sorted through their stuff for some of my family lines
Jimmy Branagh: I would think they have quite a record
Ceejay Writer: I’ve got records back to the 1200s on one line, thanks to LDS
Jimmy Branagh: Wow
Ceejay Writer: I know right? Gives me goosebumps. A woman named Deliverance Crisp.
Liz Wilner: !
Liz Wilner: where was she from?
Ceejay Writer: Pontypridd Wales, actually.
Liz Wilner: interesting!
Ceejay Writer: It can be addictive, once you find a decent rabbit hole to jump down!
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: That’s a remarkable record.
Jimmy Branagh: My mother got into it. Traced us back to thr 1760s.
Ceejay Writer: And yet I have no clue who my dad’s dad was. *shrug*
Ceejay Writer: 1760s is a great accomplishment. Not the best of info out there for the most part
Wulfriðe Blitzen: Its very interesting when you start researching. Then the back ups arrive via the DNA thing and suddenly its gets jawdropping
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: Jawdropping, bitte?
Oriella Charik: My earliest family record is a marraige in 1663
Jedburgh Dagger: it can get squirrelly. Especially when they like using the same first name in the same family
Wulfriðe Blitzen: I’ve got 4th cousins I didn’t know about in America
Ceejay Writer: I’ve heard those DNA tests can be very high in errors, but someday I’ll get it done anyway
Wulfriðe Blitzen: And then you get more DNA results and now they can see where you’re family *originated* down to the region
Jimmy Branagh: Just remember the data goes right to the FBI files.
Ceejay Writer: Some of the Mormon records only list the husbands name. The wives weren’t worth noting.
Liz Wilner: apparently we are all related to Charlemagne
Jimmy Branagh laughs
Ceejay Writer: Liz, WE ARE.
Ceejay Writer: Also we are all related to Attila the Hun
Liz Wilner: according to some statistical thing
Jedburgh Dagger: So all those untested rape kits out there…
Wulfriðe Blitzen: The only people who complain about errors are people who don’t like the hard facts destroying their perception of their history
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: I saw a calculation once that we are all no further than 52nd cousin to each other.
Ephemeria: Indeed in one way or another we are all related to Charlemange
Oriella Charik: 50% of Americans are descendants of Bad King John of England
Jimmy Branagh: Those guys knew how to have fun.
Liz Wilner: Jimmy!
Liz Wilner: lol
Wulfriðe Blitzen: Hahaha
Jimmy Branagh chuckles
Oriella Charik: The other 50% are not at all surprised at this
Ephemeria: Oh, men!
Ceejay Writer: Family can be so awkward.
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach chuckles quietly
Liz Wilner: hehe
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: Before the hour runs out completely, if anyone should like to appreciate our speaker today, please pay the tipbot in front of the lectern.
Ceejay Writer: This has been disgustingly fascinating. I expect nothing less from our Jimmy. 🙂 I must be off now, to take fifteen showers.
Jimmy Branagh: LOL
Liz Wilner: lol
Wulfriðe Blitzen: Jimmy’s talk certainly was good to clear out one’s sinuses :p
Ephemeria: (Grins)
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: Heh.
Jimmy Branagh: Thanks Miss Ceejay! Don;t forget between the fingers
Ceejay Writer waves goodbye to all (I’ll remember Jimmy)
Liz Wilner: ni ni Ceejay 🙂
Jimmy Branagh: hehe
Wildstar Beaumont: well … it is easy to show … if we go back just 30 generations, that would be 2^30 ancestors for each of us. that’s around one billion people. Of course most of them are the same common ancestors
Wildstar Beaumont: so, we are all cousins 🙂
Ephemeria: That’s indeed the idea, my dear Beaumont
Liz Wilner: I must insist that I am not some in bred!
Liz Wilner: lol
Wildstar Beaumont: LOL
Wildstar Beaumont: I think that past third cousin is is no longer considered inbred 🙂
Ephemeria: I tend to agree, there is not much DNA in comment than
Ephemeria: I’ll have to do the calculation of course (shy smile)
Jimmy Branagh: So Miss Liz has the stage next month! What do we have to look forward to, Miss Liz?
Liz Wilner: Well…it will be about British Sporting Life Art…in honor of the upcoming Royal Ascot in June 🙂
Jimmy Branagh: Ahhh …
Ephemeria: Oh, spiffing!
Liz Wilner smiles
Jimmy Branagh: Bring out the kilts
Sebastian Neverwas: Will you be taking the Salon outdoors? I don’t think there’s room in here for those sort of ladie’s hats.
Ephemeria: And Hats!
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach chuckles
Liz Wilner laughs
Ephemeria: or horses for that matter
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: We will actually be in a new building next month.
Liz Wilner: oh?
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach nods
Jimmy Branagh: We have a winner?
Ephemeria: Thats a surprise
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: Herr Tenk decided on one that suited his taste.
Sebastian Neverwas: Will the maze make the move?
Liz Wilner: splendid 🙂
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: I believe it does.
Sebastian Neverwas: Excellent.
Sebastian Neverwas: Well thanks for the talk! Have a good evening, Babbagers.
Jimmy Branagh: Thanks for coming, awl!
Ephemeria: Goodnight master Neverwas
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach: I hope to see you all next month.
Philip Underwood: Thankes Jimmeh!
Wildstar Beaumont: thank you again, Jimmy ! good night everyone