The disease struck Gateshead with terrifying speed: over Christmas night 1831, fifty-five people were seized and thirty-two died before dusk on Boxing Day. One doctor wrote, ‘the panic of the inhabitants was greater than I ever witnessed under any pestilence’. The Times described it as ‘the most terrific attack … in Europe. In the space of 45 hours 119 people were seized and 52 had died.’ It spread rapidly to surrounding villages. In Newburn, five miles from Newcastle, half the population was affected. A few days earlier it struck across the border.
Just before Christmas cholera was reported in Haddington in East Lothian. From there it spread to Edinburgh and Glasgow and then the Highlands and the North. Fear of infection led to bizarre practices. In Musselburgh, those who died were buried in a pit 30ft deep and the bodies and bedclothes of victims sprinkled with vinegar. Yet the disease claimed 250 victims within five weeks and fear of potential carriers turned into paranoia.
At Broxbourne a sick traveller was driven out to die on the roadside. A woman who fell ill dragged herself to her mother’s house. The locals heard of it, drove her away and the next day forced out her mother and burnt her home and belongings. The woman died fifteen hours later and the villagers were so terrified that none would help at her funeral. The undertaker left the coffin by the road for the doctors to deposit the corpse, used a hired horse and interred the body outside the village churchyard.
In many small fishing villages like Collieston there developed a communal neurosis. People shunned each other for fear of contagion. But worst affected of all was Edinburgh, where the local Board of Health, assisted by the city’s eminent medical fraternity, had made meticulous preparations. Despite this there were 2,000 cases and half died.
Glasgow raised a massive public subscription to finance measures against the outbreak and even closed theatres and churches. Yet cholera ran rampant through the slums, and in one week there were 800 cases and 350 deaths. It was the worst affected city outside London and four out of five nurses in the city hospital died.
Many once thriving centres were turned into ghost towns, their shops closed and their streets empty. Near Cromarty the dead were left unburied for fear of touching the corpses. People fled from the towns and lived in caves.
In this first outbreak about 10,000 Scots lost their lives. One great concern was that even the esteemed Scottish medical fraternity was totally at a loss as to how to deal with the disease. But there was one thing that was indisputable: the disease flourished in poverty and filth.
When it struck London the disease hit the people of Rotherhithe and Limehouse hardest, as they, according to one doctor, were in ‘the most abject state of poverty without beds to lie upon. The men live by casual labour and often get no more than four or five hours employment a week.’ Within the month there were over 500 deaths.
Leeds enjoyed the dubious reputation of being the filthiest city in England and cholera claimed 700 lives there. In Liverpool 1,500 died but this figure does not include those who sailed out of Liverpool. Optimistic about the prospect of life in the New World, many ended up wrapped in sailcloth, their corpses bobbing in the vessel’s wake.
The worst areas in Manchester were deemed so bad that many experts were convinced that the disease would destroy the entire working population of the city. These predictions proved overly pessimistic, though certain areas were decimated. Accounts of the progress of the disease in the city tell of characters who might have stepped off the pages of a Dickens novel.
In the garret of a lodging house in Blakely Street, one of Manchester’s most infamous thoroughfares, twenty boarders shared seven beds. The first victims were the wife of a black man, who performed at country fairs as a juggler, and ‘Long Jim’, a dissolute drunk, famous for the expertness with which he swallowed a sword a yard long. The next day ‘an inveterate old sot’, Jane Robinson, fell ill and the following morning a deformed little man called ‘Sailor Jack’, who went on crutches and who had lost his jacket in a drunken street riot the night before, began suddenly to complain of illness. Both were soon dead. The surviving lodgers fled in terror. One walked the eighteen miles to Warrington carrying a babe in arms. When she arrived in the market place she collapsed. Those who came to her aid found that the child clutched to her breast was dead.
Yet, of all the towns affected Bilston in the West Midlands inexplicably suffered most. All the medical authorities agreed that the town, built on high, well-drained ground, was exceptionally healthy. Yet one in six of the population contracted the disease and the epidemic created 150 cholera widows and 400 cholera orphans.
Cholera’s second visitation claimed even more victims than the other three. The disease was probably carried by sailors from Hamburg, one of the worst affected European cities. The towns blighted in the first wave were again stricken and in many instances it returned to the same streets and houses. In December 1848 it swept away 180 children in Tooting Poorhouse.
The third wave in 1853 is chiefly remembered because it brought a 33-year-old nurse to the attention of the British public. Florence Nightingale was in charge of cholera patients at the Middlesex Hospital. The great forbidding building catered for the East End’s slum dwellers. Swamped by an unmanageable number of patients, Florence did not allow her familiarity with suffering to dull her compassion. Some victims she remembered in particular: ‘The prostitutes came in perpetually, poor creatures, staggering off their beat: it took worse hold on them than on any. One poor girl, loathsomely filthy, came in and was dead in four hours. I held her in my arms and heard her saying: “Pray God that you may never be in the despair as I am in at this time”.’
Not long after, the British army in the Crimea was laid to waste by an outbreak of cholera. Some regiments lost 77 per cent of their strength and in total 30,000 died. Florence Nightingale’s efforts on behalf of the troops made her known throughout the world.
The final major outbreak of the century is associated with another Victorian hero. At the height of the epidemic a young man who was planning to travel to China as a medical missionary, arrived at the London Hospital. Thomas Barnardo’s experience of visiting the homes of the poor led him to found a boys’ home in Stepney, the forerunner of Dr Barnardo’s Homes. By the end of his life he had helped 250,000 children.
For some commentators, the public disorder that attended the disease was one of its most alarming effects. The Times spoke of cities thrown into ‘complete panic’ and in 1832 cholera riots occurred in London, Manchester, Exeter, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Sheffield, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Greenwick, Cathcart, Paisley and Dumfries.
The worst of these was in Manchester, where the unfortunate Mrs Butler and her two daughters were forced into the Knott Mill Hospital and locked in at night. The following morning all three were dead. Gruesome tales about the cause of their demise began to circulate and two weeks later a mob of several thousand filled the streets around the hospital. Those at the front were carrying a tiny casket containing a child who had died in the hospital. The parents had received the body in a sealed coffin and buried it without opening it. After the funeral, stories of the doctors murdering and dismembering patients began to circulate. The body was exhumed. The child was found to be headless.
The irate mob broke into the hospital, released the patients and destroyed the furniture. Both the police and the military were required to restore order. The Manchester poor blamed doctors for the spread of the disease. Many of the other contemporary theories now sound equally implausible, but a large body of medical opinion was convinced that conditions in the cities promoted the disease. The epidemic stimulated interest in the realities of working class life, something of which the majority of the middle classes were totally ignorant.
In turn, these revelations of the appalling living conditions of the poor spurred the sanitary movement of the 1840s, led by Edwin Chadwick. He believed in the need for hygienic housing, paved roads, piped water and efficient sewers. His campaigns and the fear of cholera were major factors behind the Pub
lic Health Bill, 1848, and legislation such as the Artisans’ Dwelling Act, which did so much to destroy the disease’s breeding grounds. But it was only in 1883 that the actual cholera microbe, the comma bacillus, was identified by a German doctor, Robert Koch, confirming the findings of Dr John Snow, who in 1849 put forward the theory that it was carried in water.
The immediate effect of the cholera outbreaks – the closure of many cellars – led to people crowding into the back-to-back houses built in courtyards – the next rung up the housing ladder. The back-to-back is constructed so that the back of one house is joined to the back of another and it shares two side walls with the adjacent houses. This was the dominant form of housing for the poor in the West Midlands, West Yorkshire and south-east Lancashire. Until the 1840s it represented seventy per cent of the total housing stock in Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham, Birmingham, Keighley and Huddersfield. The last back-to-back survived in Birmingham until the end of the 1960s.
Each row faced a courtyard with communal facilities – lavatories, wash-houses and ‘miskins’, where the rubbish was dumped. Most houses occupied a piece of land no more than 15ft square (5ft by 3ft). Cooking was at first on an open fire and later on a range. Often the flooring was of quarry tiles covered with a ‘peg rug’ – hessian sacking onto which women stitched old rags. Some had three storeys, with one room on each level. Rent was about 3s 6d a week in the mid-nineteenth century, or about a fifth of a labourer’s weekly wage.
Next came the ‘two-up, two-down’. These were also terraced houses but were ‘through-houses’, i.e. unattached to another house at the rear, with a front and a rear entrance. They were found everywhere – as common in the poorest parts of Manchester and Salford as in Northampton. The mortar between the bricks was a breeding ground for little brown bugs, ‘plaster beetles’, which were a constant menace to householders as they often infested food and fabrics. Floored with flag stones, the walls were whitewashed.
The typical living room was about 10ft square, with a fireplace in a chimney breast, an oven and a table. There was a tiny back kitchen, typically with a small table, a boiler and wall shelves. Coal was kept under the staircase. The bigger bedroom could barely accommodate two double beds and the smaller was only big enough for a single. It was not uncommon for families of twelve to live in such houses.
The position of the tenement in the housing hierarchy is ambiguous. Multiple-occupancy buildings were of two types – the purpose-built and those that started out as prestigious residences before being split up into living quarters for numerous families and then declining into slums. The former was common in the industrial areas of Scotland and was home to respectable working men, such as skilled craftsmen and engineers, as well as the poor.
Tenements in England tended to be large houses modified for multiple occupancy by a landlord who furnished them for a few shillings. The All Saints area in Newcastle in the 1850s was a good example. But the most infamous ‘rookeries’ were in London, at St Giles, Saffron Hill, Seven Dials and Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey. As late as 1900, conditions in London tenements were appalling. The rent for a room at the top of a Bethnal Green tenement, entered through a trapdoor, was 2s 6d a week – half what was paid by those living immediately below in two rooms. Water was carried from a tap in the small, communal back garden where the privy was located.
As the nineteenth century progressed, conditions improved. The 1844 Royal Commission on housing found that ‘though there was a great improvement in the condition of the houses of the poor as compared to thirty years ago, yet the evils of overcrowding, especially in London, were still a public scandal and were in certain areas more serious than they ever were’. The worst overcrowding was often found in small towns, where chronic shortage of housing was at its most acute. In the 1880s the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes found the worst examples in the smaller centres of population, such as Camborne in Cornwall and Alnwick in the north east.
The data on overcrowding in the industrial towns makes dismal reading. A survey of 800 Bury families in 1842 showed that in 200 cases 3 slept to a bed, and 4 to a bed in 61. In Bristol ten per cent of families occupied only part of a room and almost forty per cent rented a single room. Only twenty-five per cent enjoyed the luxury of two rooms. Similar results were found in the East End at the same time. But worst of all was the overcrowding in Liverpool. In one street the average number of people per room was over thirteen.
In this respect too, things improved after 1850. The situation in Glasgow demonstrates this. Whereas in 1871, thirty per cent of the city’s population occupied only one room, by 1891 the figure was down to eighteen per cent. It is also important to remember that conditions varied greatly both between and within different parts of the country. Even in Manchester the skilled workman might live in a house with a cellar, two living rooms, two bedrooms and a small garden. In Nottingham, lace-makers lived in far better conditions than the impoverished frame-makers. Similarly, in Kentish Town, London the skilled engineers lived in housing often indistinguishable from that of the lower middle class.
As early as 1840 enlightened towns appointed an Improvement Commissioner and a strong landlord might also exercise a beneficial effect. Engels cites the case of Ashton under Lyne, where the Earl of Stamford held sway: ‘The streets are broader and cleaner, while the new, bright-red cottages give every appearance of comfort.’ Then there were the philanthropists who pioneered improved housing and provided the best workers’ homes in the world. Their work preceded the improvements achieved by legislation and public authorities and set new standards and higher expectations.
The most feted of these is Robert Owen. Yet Owen didn’t establish the famous model village at New Lanark. The cotton manufactory founded in 1784 on the Falls of Clyde was the work of David Dale, Glasgow banker and manufacturer. His initial work force of 500 children came from the Edinburgh workhouse and was accommodated in a large, new, purpose-built house. To attract adult workers he built low-rent houses. By the end of the century he had 4 mills and over 1,300 employees, whose living conditions were excellent.
Owen bought the mills in 1793 and introduced a grocery shop, vegetable market, school, bakery and wash-house for his employees. He improved the existing houses and built new ones to higher specifications with larger rooms, good windows and solid walls. Children between five and ten years old were put into full-time education. Fellow industrialists regarded Owen as a misguided eccentric, yet he confounded his critics by increasing profits from a flourishing enterprise.
Such is Owen’s stature as a model employer that he has cast a shadow of obscurity over other philanthropists. In reality there are many who also deserve to be remembered, if only because they provided workers with housing so much better than the contemporary norm. Colonel Edward Akroyd, MP for Halifax, is one of these early improvers. His first model village was Copley, built between 1844 and 1853, two miles south of Halifax.
Akroyd had a keen appreciation of the natural and man-made environment and was anxious to protect it from violence. His workers’ houses were back-to-back but ‘built in a modified Old English style, approximating to the character of the old dwellings in the neighbourhood.’ In front of the cottages, facing a river, were allotments, flanked by a recreation ground, a neo-Gothic church, a school and playgrounds. A classroom served as the village library and newsroom.
His second venture was far more ambitious. Stung by criticism of his back-to-back houses, Akroyd was determined that Akroydon, near the centre of Halifax, should be beyond reproach. He commissioned the eminent Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott. Work on the two-storey houses, built in what Akroyd described as ‘domestic Gothic’, began in 1861. The stone and slate cottages overlooked a green. Initially comprising a living room, a scullery or wash kitchen, a main bedroom and children’s bedroom, later versions were even more spacious with a parlour and third bedroom. In an age when virtually all workers’ accommodation was rented, Akroyd took the revolutionary step of sett
ing up a home-ownership scheme.
Until recently, Sir Titus Salt was forgotten outside his locality. Then Bill Bryson, the best-selling travel writer, chanced upon Saltaire, north of Bradford, and restored interest in the alpaca-fabric manufacturer. Between 1850 and 1863 Salt created a living complex more spectacular than anything else in the country. His factory, built in the style of the Italian Renaissance, was the length of St Paul’s Cathedral and the whole settlement was designed to be self-sufficient. The workers’ cottages, with a living room, scullery and two to four bedrooms, were models of their kind. Water and gas were supplied and each had a private yard with a privy, coal store and ashpit. At his own expense he provided a school, hospital, chapels, reading rooms, public baths and a gym with Turkish baths.
Lord Lever’s creation at Port Sunlight near Liverpool, built in 1888, also caught Bryson’s eye during his tour of Britain. It incorporates a diversity of styles with houses either semi-detached or built in groups of four to six, separated by open spaces. George Cadbury, who built Bournville in 1879, also believed in the importance of space. By 1912 he had built 1,000 houses, none of which took up more than a quarter of its building plot.
From 1886 companies were encouraged to borrow at reduced rates from the Public Works Loans Commissioners to build workers’ houses. Philanthropists such as the American merchant George Peabody provided multi-storey blocks of one- to three-bedroom flats, usually with shared sinks and WCs. By 1887 the Peabody Trust had provided 5,000 dwellings and greatly improved living conditions in the centre of London.
The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House Page 3