King Cholera ......... stories of Public Health

I have been reflecting on those awful diseases that stalked our cities, towns and villages just over 170 years ago.

Of these Cholera was regarded by many as the worst and was often referred to as “Deadly” or “King Cholera” It is an infection caused by contaminated food and water. The main symptoms are diarrhoea and vomiting, and if untreated will continue until the patient becomes severely dehydrated. In the final stages a cholera victim will bring up what was called rice water and is almost clear liquid with fishy smell and resemble living skeletons.

Its impact was always going to be worst in the overcrowded and unsanitary parts of the city where large numbers were crowded together in back to back housing and narrow enclosed courts.

Span Court off Artillery Street is a fine example of a court and survived into the 1960s.

There are vivid descriptions of these places in the 1840s by writers like Frederick Engels, Leon Faucher and Dr Kay, as well as official reports.

The Report of the General Board of Health on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848 & 1849, drew attention to the fact that in the Market Street district of Manchester half the cases of Cholera were from the inhabitants of courts and cellar dwellings, which were in close proximity to open privies where the water supply was of a “poor quality” often served several cottages and was generally only “turned on for an hour day”

More revealing are the case notes of Dr Henry Gaulter who experienced the first outbreak of Cholera during the May to December of 1832. He kept a detailed record of the first three hundred patients he attended describing their physical condition, the onset of the disease and their living conditions but was forced to abandon the exercise as the numbers increased.

 Here are the fit, not so fit and in many cases undernourished residents of streets which were overcrowded and dirty, like Martha Chorlton aged 57 of 10 John Street Ancoats, who lived in a “locality, crowding, filth, &c. Street in a very populous and poor neighbourhood.”*

Or Thomas Cavanagh aged 5 and his mother Elizabeth who lived at 5 Wakefield-street Little Ireland which “fronted an open area but an impure stream whose channel does the function of a sewer, passes by the door to adjoining field where it collects and stagnates: house and inhabitants very filthy: three children and two adults on a straw bed.” 

And so it goes on but not all the streets were dirty and not all those who would contract the disease were poor. The rich had servants who may have had relatives in the more depressed parts of the city and might walk the disease in by the servant’s entrance.

Nor should we forget that the wealthy often lived in close proximity to run down areas. So that very posh set of late 18th century houses on St John Street off Deansgate was just  next door to Spam Court and surrounded by roads where there was overcrowding and Cholera.

Perhaps also we should be careful not to over state the impact of the disease on the city. There were just over 142,000 people in the city of which according to Gaulter 1,325 died.  But then there is the danger of falling into that callous numbers game which judges deaths in terms of statistics while for the individual just one death is a tragedy.

And the chances were that for those who contracted it death was a pretty strong out come. So for those who caught Cholera in Manchester over 50% would die while in Chorlton on Medlock the figure was 38% and in Salford 30%. These are not odds that I would fancy.

Nor I think should we feel that it was just the cities and towns that suffered. Rural areas were equally unsanitary and diseases like typhus and typhoid were according to the Poor Law Commissioners real threats in the countryside.

Which of course brings us to Chorlton, and in the next few weeks I shall be reporting on child mortality, sickness and public health in our own township but in the meantime I am happy to say that the worst is over here on Beech Road.

Picture; Span Court, south side of Artillery Street, J.Ryder, 1965 m00211, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass & New Wakefield Street, Little Ireland today from the collection of Andrew Simpson

 Sources, Gaulter Henry, The Origin and Progress of the Malignant Cholera, 1833, London, & Appendix A, To the Report of the General Board of Health on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848 & 1849, 1850, London

* Gaulter

The other side of the divide ...... rural poverty

It is easy when reflecting on the story of British Home Children to assume that the poverty, and awful housing conditions which formed the backdrop of so many stories was exclusively played out in an urban setting.

Sutton's Cottage, 1894 which dated from the late 18th century

The writings of Dr Kay, Frederick Engels, Leon Faucher, and a host of other social observers along with newspaper accounts and official reports all draw you into the mean alleys, narrow streets and closed courts of our towns and cities where “poverty busied itself”.

And it was once fashionable to compare these grim landscapes with a rural idyll.

Of course the reality was very different.  Agricultural wages were much lower, work was seasonal and the homes of farm labourers could be as bad as any industrial slum.

Most were wattle and daub cottages made by filling in the space between a wooden frame with walls made of woven branches covered with a mix of mud, and straw.

Such houses were easy to build and equally easy to maintain, but there could be disadvantages to living in them.  The porous nature of walls meant they were damp and crumbling clay meant endless repairs.

According to a later Parliamentary report “Many of them have not been lined with lath and plaster inside and so are fearfully cold in winter.  

The walls may not be an inch in thickness and where the lathes are decayed the fingers may be easily pushed through.  

Interior of a cottage, 1930s

The roof is of thatch, which if kept in good repair forms a good covering, warm in winter and cool in summer, though doubtless in many instances served as harbour for vermin, for dirt, for the condensed exhalations from the bodies of the occupants of the bedrooms....”  *

Floors made of brick or stone were laid directly on the ground and were almost invariably damp, and in the worst cases reeked with moisture.  Once the brick was broken, the floor became uneven and the bare earth exposed.  

This might be compounded where the cottage floor was below the ground outside or the floor level was uneven which caused problems of drainage.   Even the proudest wife and mother must have been reconciled to damp and dirt which were the result of such floors.

Upstairs of a one up one down cottage, 1930s

The only heating would come from the open fire or stove which might have been combined with a cooking range.

On damp days when the coal or wood was wet the smell would permeate every room in the house.

During the winter months the unheated bedrooms were particularly unpleasant places.  On the coldest nights ice would form on the inside of windows.

Cottages of this design were often limited to four rooms, and some may have had only two, with the family living downstairs and sleeping on the upper floor.  In some cases access to the bedroom was by ladder rather than stairs and in many cases bedrooms were left open.  One surviving cottage in Chorlton from the eighteenth century did have a staircase which opened out to a big bedroom giving little in the way of privacy.

As for sanitation this would have been equally primitive.  Nationally the rural picture was grim with privies often draining into open channels which themselves got blocked with refuse and so flowed too slowly to allow the waste to disperse.

19th century cottages

At Stourpain, a village near Blandford in Dorset several labourers’ cottages fronted an open gutter which was fed from channels running down the side of the houses which served the privies and pigsties which were positioned above the cottages.

A state of affairs which meant that the “cottages are nearly surrounded by streams of filth” ** and while this may have been an extreme case the same report observed that in most of the cottages “the dirt of the family is thrown down before or behind the cottage; [and]  if there is any natural inclination in the ground from the cottage, it escapes, if not it remains till evaporated.” ***

Now while this may have been during the middle decades of the 19th century conditions in some rural areas were still slow to improve.

Pictures; Sutton’s Cottage circa 1892, photograph from the Wesleyan Souvenir Handbook of 1895 in the collection of Philip Lloyd, and interior of a farm cottage, 1930s, 19th century cottage, Bari Sparshot

*British Parliamentary Papers 1893-4 XXXV V,1, page 103 quoted from Gauldie Enid Country Homes p532  The Victorian Countryside edited by Mingay C. E Vol 1 Routedge & Kegan Paul 1981 ISBN 0-7100 1009734 5

**Report of  Special Assistant Poor Law Commissioners on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, HMSO, London 1843,  page 21, Google edition page 40

***Mr Austen Poor Law Page 21