Found in an old Newspaper clipping from the Grimsby Telegraph. I
would feel mean to keep it to my self.

"Are the Stories which our elderly relatives hand down to us, spiced and 
embellished that we might believe them the more readily?  Winifred HARTLEY, 
now living in Scartho, is the granddaughter of the late Charles CORRINGHAM 
once principal of the firm CORRINGHAM and DAVY of Maude street, Grimsby.
And she believes he "buried the victims of the plague in a communal grave," 
In Grimsby, further, it is an enduring memory of her cousin Kitty COLLINGWOOD 
(who, she tells me, is 95) Mrs.. Hartley's grandmother often spoke of it.
Mr. Corringham was among other things, un undertaker.

But the plague.......?
Yes, indeed.... By any other name.

Victorian Grimsby was notoriously an unhealthy place. There were epidemics... 
Cholera, typhoid fever, scarlet fever.  But early in 1871 a Londoner with 
Smallpox came to stay with his sister who kept a pub in the Kents Street area. 
On January 25 his disease was confirmed. But he passed it on to those who sat 
with him in the pub. One died.

The man's bedding was taken to a spare land in Garibaldi Street to be burned. 
But no one told the local children and in the hour before a match was put to 
it they played on it.  And then they went to school.  And people went to sea 
on trawlers infecting the entire crews.  In the Parish of St. Andrew's Freeman 
Street and in New Clee, 1500 cases of Smallpox occurred.

Apart from one other place (Near Sunderland) Grimsby's smallpox epidemic was 
the worst in Britain.  So it is highly likely that Mr. Corringham was pressed 
into this ghastly service, proving that the things we are told in our youth 
are often perfectly true.  Mrs. Hartley tells me her Grandfather, to stiffen 
his sinews for the job, soaked dark shag tobacco in whisky and chewed it whist 
burying the corpses.  "It worked," she adds, "but he developed a taste for the 
stuff!"
 
Footnote: In 1889 there was another smallpox epidemic, its putting down in no 
small part attributable to the efforts of John WINTRINHAM (1840-97) for which 
he was made a Freeman of the Borough.

I seem to remember that the later epidemic centred on Seaview Street in 
Cleethorpes and was brought by a holidaymaker.