The interior of Holy Trinity Church on Yarm Lane in Stockton. c1990 
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
The interior of Holy Trinity Church on Yarm Lane in Stockton. c1990
The 1970″s educational film, “Cholera”s Coming” narrated by James Bolam studies the outbreak of Cholera and the actions of the locals to counter it. It is used extensively by secondary schools in the area studying the SHP GCSE “Medicine Through Time”
I see that Stockton now has a more modern connection to cholera namely the John Snow College of the University of Durham. Dr.John Snow is regarded as the Father of Epidemiology for his work on the epidemiology of cholera. Snow was born in York in 1813 and was one of the first students at the newly founded Newcastle Medical School in 1832.He later moved to London and besides being a pioneer anaethetist he studied the cholera epidemics of 1848 and 1854. Snow recognized that cholera is a water bourne disease and postulated a germ theory of disease (the causative organism ,vibrio cholerae,was identified later} He is famous for the incident of the Broad Street pump – the water from the pump was contaminated from a cholera victim in a house opposite. Snow caused the pump handle to be removed and the epidemic died out. In actual fact his meticulous research over many years covered sources of the water supply of the entire London area related to the incidence of cholera. Nevertheless there is a replica of the Broad Street pump in Soho near the John Snow pub (Snow ironically was teetotal) John Snow is widely considered to be the greatest British medical scientist of all time.
Panic struck Stockton in 1832, when out of a population of 7000, over 600 were stricken with “Cholera Morbus”, (which ravaged the North, for over 2 years) over 120 dying in August-Sept of that year alone in the Stockton Area. The Parish Church could not cope and Bishop Van Milder of Durham, had 3 1/2 acres of land to the south of the town concecrated as a burial site. The site was surrounded by trees and in 1834 the foundation stone of the Holy-Trinty was laid on the high ground to the North-West opening in 1835. Road development in the 1970s saw the burial site now Parliament Street car park
Can Bob Harbron throw much light on the fact(?) that there is a mass grave in the church yard. This was dug to cope with the number of victims of the plague. Allegedly it is situated behind the church halfway to the perimeter fence/wall.