The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [109]
Cholera claimed its first English victim in Sunderland on 20 October 1831, arousing fears of riot and anarchy among the poorer members of the population. However, the plague was no respecter of persons: it hit rich and poor alike. During the first two years it killed over 22,000 people in a spectacular and devastating attack on a country which was entirely unprepared for it.
Since the first years of the Industrial Revolution nearly a hundred years earlier Britain’s population had increased by 100,000 a year. Most of the extra people arrived or were born in the rapidly growing industrial cities of Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and London. The rate of migration to the urban centres encouraged the hurried and slipshod building of dangerous, unhealthy, jerry-built dwellings for farm labourers, who were anyway used to primitive conditions in the countryside. Houses had to be built close to mills and factories if time and travel were to be saved. The mills and factories could not operate until the houses were built, so accommodation was erected as close to the workplace as possible. Here the builders crammed in as many tenements or back-to-back terraces as they could. In their haste, they dispensed with the need for foundations and skimpy local materials were commandeered for use in self-supporting walls.
Initially, the new dwellings were planned on the village model, with one house, or sometimes half a house, per family. The rising tide of numbers soon altered these plans. As land near the canals or rivers ran out and the migrants poured in, sub-letting and the taking of lodgers became common.
As the wealthy departed for the newly growing suburbs, the poor crowded into the city centres. Many of the new tenements stood round a common ‘court’, an open space where stood the only well, often deep in undrained filth. The courts also housed herds of pigs living in their own dung. In the unpaved central area lay stagnant water, as well as waste and refuse thrown out of the windows for the pigs. People without accommodation lived in these open courtyards. In Liverpool, when cholera struck, no fewer than 60,000 people inhabited unprotected open spaces. Those who did so were only marginally worse off than the 40,000 who lived underground, sometimes twelve to a cellar, in conditions of unspeakable degradation.
Water was obtainable from the well by means of a single common pump for one or two hours a day and usually not at all on Sundays. It was fought for, even though as often as not it was filthy with waste from polluted rivers or sewers. By the time cholera first struck, every major river was dirtied either with effluent from mills and factories or with untreated sewage. Originally, large towns had flat-bottomed brick sewers, designed only to handle excess water overflow in times of flood. Human waste was deposited in dry privies and periodically carted away. From 1750 on, however, with increasing use of the apparently healthier water-closet, the waste found its way into the sewerage system in rapidly accelerating amounts. No sector of the city was immune. Even Belgravia stank.
A street in Exeter, where people live in a lean-to shed among the pigs which they rear, and where there is no drainage.
Death at the local pump. The prevalent source of cholera was contaminated water.
In the courtyards standards of health were appalling, due to the already weakened state of those who lived there. Many families were chronically underfed. Damp conditions rendered them easy prey to rheumatics and diseases of the chest. Lack of space obliged many to use the same bed. Contagion and incest were rife. In the factories, working long hours in insanitary conditions, breathing dirty, humid air among open machinery that often mutilated the user terribly, men, women and children were driven