The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [110]
Conditions in the mines were equally horrifying. As many as three thousand young girls hauled coal on their backs for twelve hours a day, in circumstances of brutality, debauchery and obscenity, often suffering harassment from the men who employed them. At the end of the working day there was little to do but fall exhausted into a filthy, crowded bed or on to the floor, to sleep until it was time to return to work. Wages were paid once a week and because of the lack of small coin in circulation they were often paid from the cash funds of local pubs and inns, whose proprietors agreed to the arrangement because of the tendency among the wage-earners to spend most of their money on drink. Even if the poor had wanted to spend their brief free time in other pursuits, there was little opportunity to do so. With no clubs or organised sport, drink was the only pastime for the illiterate, urban masses. Most of their income was spent on alcohol and funeral insurance.
A Punch cartoon showing the urban poor in a typical courtyard. A woman picks for food in a rubbish heap where boys have found a dead rat.
Girls and women, cheaper to employ than pit-ponies, carry coal in the mines.
In the autumn of 1831, when cholera struck England, hasty and inadequate preparations had already been made as the disease slowly moved towards the country. On 21 June 1831 a Board of Health was set up. It represented the first attempt to influence public health by local government action. There was to be a local board in every town or village. Each town would be split into districts. Special houses were to be established for the isolation of victims, although as it turned out quarantine would fail to stop the spread of the disease. Infected houses were to be cleansed by washing or scouring with lime, their windows and doors left open for many weeks after infection. Victims could be taken forcibly to isolation houses.
These preparations proved hopelessly inadequate. Apart from lack of understanding of the disease itself, the principal fault lay with the local authorities who were empowered to take sanitary measures in defence of their communities. Local Improvement Commissioners had been established since the middle of the eighteenth century, but overlapping areas of responsibility and vested interests made reform impossible. So too did the corruption endemic to urban society at the time. It was said that the man responsible for street cleansing in New York early in the nineteenth century had a million dollar fund to be used as bribe money. The major problem lay in the fact that the public authorities had failed to appreciate the scale and speed with which industrialisation and the move to the towns had occurred. Greedy developers with vested interests, seizing the opportunity for factory expansion, added to the chaos.
The nation-wide English riots of 1831, brought on by appalling living conditions, undemocratic political institutions and cholera. Though force was used to quell them, they brought about parliamentary reform within four years.
During and after the cholera epidemic of 1831, widespread riots throughout Britain woke the country to the urgent need for social change. The following year reform of Parliament was voted for in a tangible atmosphere of fear. The middle classes could see ‘anarchical, Socialist and infidel forces’at work in their own streets. However, they failed to see the connection with the inevitable effects of industrialisation. Apart from concern over conditions of child labour, the general feeling was that industry brought benefit to all. The fault was believed to lie in the nature and character of the lower classes and in their environment of ignorance and degradation. New committees established together with the reform of Parliament turned, for recourse, to the same source of help and guidance as had the medical profession in Paris twenty years before. They turned to statistics.
The science of statistics was to be used to study the actual condition of the population.