Narrow Windows, Narrow Lives E-Book

Sue Wilkes

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 348

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

Working families in Victorian Lancashire had few choices. Work; starve; or face the workhouse and the break up of their family. Narrow Windows, Narrow Lives recreates everyday life for textile workers, canal boat families, coalminers, metal workers navvies and glassblowers using contemporary eyewitness accounts and interviews. It depicts the dire state of towns and the dreadful hazards workers faced on a daily basis. Who was the 'knocker-upper'? Why did families eat 'tommyrot'? Why couldn't 'Lump Lad' sleep soundly in his bed? Men, women and children endured incredibly long working hours in appalling conditions – but their toil helped make Britain 'Great.'

Leseprobe

Frontispiece: Map of Lancashire by Thomas Moule, c.1850. Nigel Wilkes Collection.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the many people who have helped me with the research for this book. Special thanks are due to the unfailingly helpful and patient library staff at Manchester Central Library and in Cheshire Libraries, and the David Owen Waterways Archive (Ellesmere Port Boat Museum) for kind permission to photograph their historic boats. And also the Red Rose Steam Society at Astley Green Colliery Museum, for kind permission to use photographs of this unique site, and Ron Clarke for permission to quote the verse of English folk song Navvy Boots from his collection of folk songs at www.tadpoletunes. com. My working copy of Children’s Employment Commission 1842: Report on Mines was courtesy of Ian Winstanley’s Coal Mining History Resource Centre (Picks Publishing).

The biggest ‘thank you’ of all is to my husband Nigel, without whose help, patience and support this book would not have been possible.

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: The Workshop of the World

2 Home, Sweet Home

3 Canal Fever

4 Railway Mania

5 King Cotton

6 Finished Off

7 Going Underground

8 From Pins to Propellers

9 Clear as Glass

10 Time Off

11 A Brighter Future?

Select Bibliography

Places to Visit

Copyright

Map of Inland Navigation, Report of Factory Inspectors, 1875.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: THE WORKSHOP OF THE WORLD

We live in an age of nostalgia. Long-disused waterwheels and the brick carcases of cotton mills have new leases of life as museum exhibits, places of pilgrimage for history fans, or just somewhere to take the family on a wet Sunday afternoon. Costumed interpreters bring the past to life for today’s reality TV generation, but it takes a powerful leap of the imagination to transform these clean, sanitised visitor centres into the hives of industry of Victorian times. Newly oiled steam engines recreate the steel hearts of the factories, hissing and clanking, but the hushed whispers of the people who worked there have long since faded away.

The aim of this book is to provide some snapshots of everyday working life for families living in Lancashire during the white heat and aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. Few of these families’ individual stories have passed down to us; even if they were able to read or write, they would have been too busy earning a living, and trying to feed and clothe themselves and their children.

Lancashire has long considered itself the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Many of the entrepreneurs who created change, such as John Kay, Arkwright and Crompton were born here. Britain’s first ‘real’ canal, the Bridgewater Canal, opened in 1761 and the first ‘intercity’ passenger line, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, opened in 1830 (with the dubious distinction of causing the first death on the railways, when the unfortunate Mr Huskisson died after falling under the wheels of Stephenson’s Rocket.)

One of the biggest problems of the Industrial Revolution was that it was a one-way street. As each new invention or innovation was introduced, there was no going back, as the handloom weavers and block printers found to their cost. And as each improvement was fed back into the system, progress accelerated even further. Increased efficiency in the iron-smelting and casting processes meant that large machines such as steam engines and textile machinery were now possible. The new steam engines demanded coal to feed them; as the miners dug deeper and deeper to find coal, the engines helped to pump water from the mines. The first steam engine or ‘fire-engine’ (as it was then known) in Lancashire is thought to be a Newcomen engine, employed by the Case family to pump water from their colliery near Prescot in 1719. Advances in machine tool making meant that by the mid-eighteenth century tools could be made to an accuracy of one ten-thousandth of an inch, enabling the construction of ever more complex machinery.

But there was a human cost as the Revolution careered on. Historian Eric Hobsbawm has described the consequences of industrialisation as a ‘social catastrophe’. People flocked to the towns looking for work in the new factories, and the population of towns such as Manchester, Preston and Liverpool skyrocketed. Workers were crammed together into a crazy labyrinth of badly built housing with no amenities, while just a few streets away, the well-to-do lived in villas with gardens. Poet Robert Southey painted a grim picture of Manchester in the early nineteenth century:

The dwellings of the labouring manufacturers are in narrow streets and lanes, blocked up from light and air … all built of brick and blackened with smoke … buildings among them as large as convents … where you hear from within, as you pass along, the everlasting din of machinery, and where when the bell rings it is to call wretches to their work instead of their prayers.

It did not escape the workers’ notice that while fortunes were being made by their employers, they lived a life of grinding poverty, at the mercy of every tiny fluctuation in the economy, every hiccup in the price of their daily bread. But they had no voice in Parliament; they were forbidden to ‘combine’ and form trade unions; they received little or no education. Large towns like Manchester, Warrington and Blackburn didn’t have an MP until after the Great Reform Act of 1832, and even then, the new Act restricted the vote to householders rated at £10 p.a., so working-class people were still not enfranchised.

For many, direct action was the only way to attract attention to their plight, in spite of the terrifying consequences if they were caught by the authorities. This was the age of the Luddites’ machine-breaking exploits. Food riots broke out in Manchester, Bolton, Oldham and Ashton in the spring of 1812. At Oldham, colliers from Saddleworth and Hollinwood smashed their way into food shops and sold provisions at fair prices. Four people were later hanged at Lancaster Castle for their part in this riot, including fifty-four-year-old Hannah Smith, who climbed onto a butter cart at Ardwick and sold off the butter cheaply. Another four people (one a sixteen-year-old lad) were hanged for burning down a weaving factory at Westhoughton. Two men who broke into a grain mill at Worsley and stole flour were transported for seven years.

Further unrest during the poor trading conditions of 1816, and an attack on the Prince Regent in 1817, led to the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act (which protects people against arbitrary imprisonment without trial) that year; it wasn’t restored until January 1818. Samuel Bamford, a weaver and Radical activist from Middleton, was arrested and imprisoned for his political views. The government, with the spectre of the bloody French Revolution as an ever-present warning, slowly tightened its grip.

Many workers held the touching conviction that if only those in power were fully apprised of their sufferings, all their troubles would be addressed. This notion led to the ‘Blanketeer’ march of 1817. Famished cotton weavers and spinners from Manchester intended to walk all the way to London, taking blankets with them for sleeping at night; and to present a petition to the Prince Regent himself, asking for help. The men set off from St Peter’s Field on 10 March, but the authorities’ response was swift: scores were arrested and imprisoned by the militia before they reached Stockport. A few stragglers reached as far as Ashbourne in Derbyshire; only one Blanketeer, Abel Couldwell from Stalybridge, reached the capital.

But it was the Peterloo Massacre that defined the age, crystallising opinion on both sides of the social divide, and becoming a rallying cry for discontent for years to come. The story has been told many times, but it’s worth repeating again because it was both a flashpoint and an awful warning to the working classes of the perils of even peaceable, well-organised demonstrations.

On the morning of 16 August 1819, around 80,000 people, including women and children, dressed in their Sunday best, gathered at St Peter’s Field. Waving banners inscribed with dangerously inflammatory messages such as ‘Universal Suffrage’ and ‘Vote by Ballot’, they waited to hear speeches on political reform by the noted speaker, Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt. The crowd was in a happy mood; it was a grand day out, on a beautiful sunny day. The local magistrates, alarmed by the size of the gathering, called in the Manchester & Salford Yeomanry, who’d been drinking in the nearby pubs while awaiting orders, to arrest Hunt. The people in the crowds were tightly packed together, and the soldiers’ horses had difficulty getting through. The cavalry either panicked and lost control, or they wanted to teach the Radicals a lesson. Their sabres glittered wickedly in the sunlight as they cut down and trampled the unarmed, peaceful civilians. Samuel Bamford witnessed the havoc as the cavalry charged the crowd, ‘their sabres were plied to hew a way through naked held-up hands, and defenceless heads; and then chopped limbs, and wound-gaping skulls were seen; and groans and cries were mingled with the din of that horrid confusion’.

Hanging Corner, Lancaster Castle. Several handloom weavers like Hannah Smith were found guilty of rioting in 1812, and sentenced to death or transportation.

It took just a few minutes to disperse the people. St Peter’s Field was left almost deserted, strewn with ‘caps, bonnets, hats, shawls, and shoes, and other parts of male and female dress; trampled, torn and bloody’. Over 400 people were injured in the chaos that day; about fifteen people died (though accounts vary widely), including Mary Heys from Oxford Road and two-year-old William Fildes from Kennedy Street.

In the aftermath of Peterloo the government, undeterred by widespread condemnation of that terrible day’s events, introduced the Six Acts to suppress discontent and possible revolution. The Acts forbade the carrying of arms, and meetings for the purpose of drilling and military exercises; gave magistrates the power to enter property looking for weapons; restricted public meetings of more than fifty people; and further muzzled the Press by making working-class and Radical periodicals liable to stamp duty. The government even employed spies and agents provocateurs to keep them informed of any discord. Its whole policy was based on repressing the people, instead of addressing their grievances and easing their hardships.

The struggle for reform did not die on St Peter’s Field. The ill-fated Chartism movement, which campaigned for annual Parliaments and universal suffrage (but only for adult males, not women), was swelled by the widespread distress of the economic depression of the early 1840s. A visitor to Manchester commented that ‘the absence of smoke from the factory chimney indicates the quenching of the fire on many a domestic hearth’. The dreadful hardships of 1842 led desperate workers to strike. Unrest spread across Lancashire; militant workers smashed the plugs on the boilers in the factories so that the machines were at a standstill. But the Plug Plots failed, and the men were starved back to work.

So protest, whether violent or peaceful, was unavailing; ordinary working people were trapped in a cycle of never-ending toil, just working, eating and sleeping. No help was to be expected from government; the doctrine of laissez-faire (‘leave well alone’) was then paramount. Economists and politicians were convinced that free trade was vital, and that market forces alone should decide wages.

Families must have felt that no one cared whether they lived or died. Yet steps towards reform were being taken, even if they were painfully slow, and resisted at every step by the greed of manufacturers and landowners. But there were a few enlightened voices within Parliament. Cotton-spinner John Fielden’s workers had a ten-hour working day long before the Ten Hours Act became law. Richard Cobden, who owned a calico-printing factory in Sabden, campaigned against the Corn Laws which kept the price of bread artificially high. And the evangelical Lord Ashley, son of the 6th Earl of Shaftesbury, helped form the Children’s Employment Commission and campaigned for factory and mines reform.

Journalists and writers of differing political persuasions reported from the front line of the class war. There was William Cooke Taylor (1800-1849), who argued that children were better off working in the factories rather than starving in the streets. There was Angus Bethune Reach (1821-c.1851), investigative reporter for the Morning Chronicle, and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), son of a cotton manufacturer, whose Condition of the Working Class in England is still a classic. And there was the novelist Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865), the wife of a Unitarian minister, who witnessed the deprivation of the early 1840s first-hand. Mrs Gaskell’s depiction of workers’ lives in Mary Barton (1848) caused a furore in the Tory press and brought loud denunciations from the cotton masters. Here the Davenport family, having pawned all their possessions because the factory is closed after a fire, are reduced to living in a cellar. John Barton and his friend have gone to help:

It was very dark inside … on going into the cellar inhabited by Davenport, the smell was so foetid as almost to knock the two men down … they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet, brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up; the fire-place was empty and black; the wife sat … and cried in the dank loneliness …

With no welfare state to keep them from destitution, people’s daily bread depended on whatever work they could get; bad as conditions were at the coal face or in the dye-works, families with no work were in an even more pitiful condition.

A system of parish relief – the Poor Law – had existed since Elizabethan times. People who were unemployed but able-bodied got assistance in their own homes – known as ‘outdoor relief’ or the ‘dole’ – or were helped to find employment. But in the south of England, as the numbers of the poor reached record levels, those aided by the Poor Law were increasingly condemned, and accused of being feckless and improvident. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, which the government hoped would reduce waste and relieve the burden on ratepayers, introduced a centralised system of relief and workhouses, under which the inmates had to work in return for shelter and food. (Workhouses had been around for years – there was one recorded in Manchester in 1776 – what was new was the government’s insistence that every single parish or Poor Law Union should have one, and use it.)

Paupers were demonised; they must be too bone idle to earn their own living if they needed outside assistance. There was no allowance in the official mind for the aged or infirm; all were punished for being poor. The workhouses were deliberately designed to deter applicants; couples who had lived together for years and hoped to spend their declining years together were separated. Parents were parted from their children; even brothers and sisters were torn apart, because different ages and sexes were segregated. Inmates wore uniforms, and were forbidden to speak at mealtimes. The food was monotonous, and the workhouses were cramped, comfortless prisons for the destitute.

But the implementation of the new Poor Law hit problems in northern counties such as Lancashire and Yorkshire. Local magistrates and parish officials resented interference from London and believed the old system of relief worked well. Economic conditions in the northern manufacturing districts differed from the southern counties. If factory doors closed because trading conditions were bad, hundreds of people were thrown out of work at once, and there was nowhere else for the workers to find employment.

An Anti-Poor Law movement was set up, and the Poor Law Commission met with bitter resistance when it tried to implement the new system. Faced with intransigence by local authorities it backed down, and outdoor relief under the old system actually increased for a time, especially for hard-pressed handloom weavers. Also, because so many workers were out of work simultaneously in times of depression, it simply wasn’t practical to house them all in one place, so outdoor relief was offered in exchange for manual labour, such as stone-breaking.

The relieving officer at the parish of Colne needed a military guard when handing out relief. Not only to protect him from families who didn’t qualify for relief, but also from those who did, because their relief was being reduced as distress became widespread, and the parish officers looked after more and more pauper families. Everyone suffered when the factory workers were unemployed; the shopkeepers and dairy farmers had no one to buy their goods, and faced ruin if times didn’t improve.

Families would and did starve rather than face the inhumane workhouses, or ‘Bastilles’. William Beech, a Stockport handloom weaver in the 1840s, had a family of seven children. The family had only earned an average of 7s a week for several weeks; they lived on potatoes boiled in their jackets, and had to find rent of 2s a week. The Poor Law guardians wanted to take two of the children into the workhouse, but Beech’s wife cried, ‘You may as well take my life as take my children; I would rather die than part with them; I’d rather go with ‘em; you may take us all and welcome.’ She spoke for many other hard-pressed families.

But workhouses were there to stay: an ever-present nightmare for the labouring poor. Workers had little choice but to accept whatever work they could get, no matter how hard or long the hours required.

A select few rose from the workers’ ranks by dint of hard work and luck, such as Abel Heywood, son of a ‘putter-out’ to weavers. He founded the newspaper The Poor Man’s Guardian, started a highly successful wallpaper business in 1847, and was twice Mayor of Manchester. Sir Elkanah Armitage was one of Lancashire’s success stories, a shining example of the Victorian ideal of ‘self-help’. A farmer’s son, born in Newton Heath in 1794, he began work at a cotton firm at eight years old, rose to become Mayor of Manchester in 1846 – and was a notoriously hard boss. He set up Pendleton New Mills, a power loom factory weaving cotton prints, and he was given a knighthood by a grateful Establishment after helping to suppress the 1848 Chartist riots. This pillar of the Victorian establishment locked his workers out for more than thirty weeks in 1850-1851, after his weavers asked for their pay to rise to the same level as other local mills. Not content with the lock-out, he brought pressure to bear by evicting families from tied housing, and took workers to court if they intimidated ‘blacklegs’. Starving and demoralised, they never struck again. However, he was responsible for many public works in Manchester such as the Waterworks Bill, and he helped the effort to feed cotton workers in the Cotton Famine of 1861-1865, caused by the American Civil War. But countless other workers who tried to ‘better themselves’ failed and sank back into obscurity.

For the purposes of this book, in order to compare and contrast the everyday lives of workers in different industries, I have used the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ fairly loosely. Technological advances in iron, steel and glass manufacture continued long after the first ‘Industrial Revolution’ of the 1780s-1830s. As late as 1860, however, many families worked much in the same manner as their forefathers: only three in ten people worked in industries which had undergone great changes since the late eighteenth century. And new inventions did not necessarily change working practices overnight; it was many years before the power loom was perfected and became widespread. Families were living with the consequences of industrial change throughout Queen Victoria’s reign. The debate about whether families were better off after the introduction of the factory system was a hot topic at the time, and still continues today.

Why should we care what happened to these people? Author L.T.C. Rolt, writing in the late 1960s, declared, We are still living in the Industrial Revolution. Even now, in the twenty-first century, countries like China and India are currently in the throes of their own Industrial Revolution, with its attendant pollution and other issues. Men die routinely and horribly in mines deep below ground and children are used as sweated labour in many parts of the world. In 2002 it was estimated that worldwide, 170 million children worked in hazardous industries such as mining and quarrying, and of these, 111 million were under fifteen years of age. There are still lessons to be learned from the way the Victorians tried to tackle these problems, and the consequences when they ignored them.

This book is an attempt to summon the ghosts of long-vanished workers: colliers, cotton workers, navvies and others, and paint a portrait of their daily lives. The main chapters give the historical background for each trade in order to set the workers’ lives in context, before going into more detail on everyday life. Because son followed father down the pit, or daughter followed mother into the mill, families’ whole lives revolved around their work to an extent unimaginable today, when the maximum generally permitted working week is just forty-eight hours.

But there are so many stories that can never be told, because no one took the trouble to write them down. We can catch glimpses of some workers from contemporary accounts in newspapers; usually only when they were killed or injured. But from the 1830s onwards, investigators for the children’s employment commissions and factory reports began interviewing the workers, shining a searchlight into the darkness of the mines and the dank, squalid workshops.

Still, we get only the tiniest vignettes of ordinary people’s lives as they step briefly into the limelight, then vanish back into the mists of history. Children like seven-year-old Hellin, worked ‘beyond his strength’ by his block-printer father; he fell asleep on the cold, hard flagstones one morning after a night shift. He regularly worked from six in the morning until eleven at night. Young coal waggoner ‘Lump Lad’ couldn’t escape from the pit even in his sleep; he dreamed that the mine roof was tumbling in on top of him. Teenager James Salisbury was so tired after working a thirty-two-hour shift at an india-rubber plant that he fell into his machinery; he didn’t survive.

The same tragic chorus was repeated not just across Lancashire, but all over industrialised Britain. This book is dedicated to all the unsung heroes and heroines – men, women and children – the cogs in the machinery of the workshop of the world.

CHAPTER 2

HOME, SWEET HOME

1849: A cellar dwelling in Angel-Meadow, Manchester.

Angus Bethune Reach, investigative reporter for the Morning Chronicle, chokes on the stench as he steps down into the cellar. He stays close to the police officer and landlady who are showing him round; the landlady carries a candle, the only light in the pitch-black vault. Damp pours down the walls; the flickering candle reveals several beds; one contains two boys, another a drunken old man. In another bed, a fully dressed man snoozes contentedly next to a large calf. Reach mops his brow, sweating in the warm, fetid atmosphere.

The police officer suddenly stoops down. ‘What’s this?’

Reach comes closer, eyes widening as he tries to comprehend the sight before him. A hole has been scraped out of the bottom of the earthen cellar wall, just large enough to accommodate an old man, who’s lying on his back on some mucky straw. His face is barely two inches below the ceiling of this living grave.

The landlady shrugs. ‘If we didn’t let him crawl in there, he’d have to sleep on the streets’.

People living in towns in Roman-occupied Britain enjoyed better bathing and sanitation facilities than Victorian town dwellers did. From the highest to the lowest stratum of Victorian society, families were in danger from disease and vermin, surrounded as they were by the stench of cesspits. Even the Queen and her family suffered from attacks of typhoid and diphtheria; her husband, Prince Albert, died prematurely at the age of forty-two from ‘bowel fever’, as typhoid was then known. And if the Royal Family wasn’t safe from disease in the middle of the nineteenth century, how much worse must it have been for ordinary working families?

It’s important to remember that despite the advances in industry, agriculture was still the country’s biggest employer; many more families still worked in the countryside than in the fast-growing towns. As late as 1851, more people (almost 1.8 million) worked on the land than worked in heavy industry, cotton and wool industries put together.

But Britain was on the move. Farm workers looking for regular wages (or dispossessed by the Enclosure Acts) and poor Irish immigrants poured into the industrial towns in search of work. However, rural labourers didn’t leave behind picturesque ‘chocolate-box’ country cottages when they moved into the town slums. Many rural families lived in hovels no better than mud huts.

A cottage occupied by an agricultural labourer’s family in the 1840s typically consisted of two rooms. During the day the family huddled in one room with all their worldly goods: pots and pans, dirty washing and a washtub, and agricultural tools. The windows, if glazed, were probably broken, and crammed full of rags to keep out the wind. Every nook and cranny in the walls was similarly stuffed in an attempt to keep in the warmth. The other room was the bedroom for the family, including the children and often a lodger. If there were no outbuildings to house the family cow or pig, they shared the family’s domestic ‘comforts’ and added their own contribution to the atmosphere indoors. There would be no window in the bedroom, and the only light filtered in through chinks in the part-thatched roof.

Cottages were built with mud, clay or stone walls. Floors were earth or stone, often below ground level and consequently damp and cold. Rain seeped through thatched roofs and turned earth floors into a welter of mud. Frequently, these floors contained decades of accumulated filth and garbage and were breeding grounds for disease. Many rural cottages had no running water and no drains.

If the families moving from these conditions into the towns had hoped for a bright new start, they were going to be disappointed. At this time there was nothing to stop a builder buying a plot of land and squeezing on it as many houses as he could fit, with no drains, sewers, running water, or pavements.

New houses sprang up in the towns to accommodate the growing population, swollen every week by rural labourers looking for work. Manchester doctor James Kay-Shuttleworth reported that the population of Manchester and Salford grew from just under 109,000 in 1811 to over 150,000 in 1821: an almost 40 per cent increase in just a decade. Ten years later, the district held almost a quarter of a million people. Liverpool too was growing fast; its population of 63,000 at the turn of the century had swollen to 175,000 by the 1841 census.

This was the age of the building entrepreneur; building clubs and speculators hurried to buy land, put up houses as quickly and cheaply as possible and watch the profits roll in. This Monopoly-style development led to dire consequences for the families who came to live in these jerry-built houses.

Houses were built with walls only half a brick – just over 4½ inches – thick. In one street in Manchester the walls were so flimsy it was nicknamed ‘Pickpocket Row’. Another street was flattened in a single night after being struck by a storm. To maximise profits, the landlords did not bother to maintain or repair their properties; many dwellings lasted at most forty years before becoming derelict.

These houses were the notorious ‘back-to-backs’, built in rows of two. The houses in the first row had a door at the front but none at the back, sharing their rear wall with the houses behind. These houses behind the first row had no front door, only a back door opening onto a narrow alley and facing a similar row of houses.

The older properties in the towns were worse still, especially in the so-called ‘closed courts’. In these masterpieces of town planning, there was no gap between two streets of houses, just an enclosed square or court; the outside world was reached from the court via a covered passageway. These courts were rarely, if ever, cleaned; the atmosphere inside was dreadful. ‘The air simply cannot escape’, Engels noted grimly, ‘everything quietly lies where it is thrown, there is no cause for wonder at the filth and heaps of ashes and offal to be found here.’

Unpaved, undrained streets were augmented by mud and pig manure from the piggeries kept by ‘porkers’. These entrepreneurs rented the space in the closed courts from the local inhabitants to keep their pigs on. Since the pigs rooted about and fed on all the scraps and refuse from the houses, the reek from the piggeries was unbelievable.

Drainage gutters in the streets were choked with filth; rainwater accumulated in stagnant pools or ran into cesspools, which then overflowed. Factories, slaughterhouses and gasworks each added their own distinct smells and waste to the all-pervading murkiness, polluted the air and piled further muck into the streets.

The valley of the River Irk in Manchester was one of the nadirs of the Industrial Revolution. Black as ink from dye-works’ effluent, the river flowed past and gathered the refuse from tripe-houses, catgut manufactories, tanneries, pigsties, and bone-mills. The contents of nearby sewers and privies swelled the tide of filth as it meandered under the town bridges and was impeded by weirs. People lived along the banks of this revolting stream in a maze of pauper houses and closed courts. The stench from the river was said to be ‘unendurable’ from 40ft away; in the heat of summer it must have been beyond imagination.

But the families who arguably suffered the most from the lack of decent drainage and sanitation were those who lived in cellar dwellings, the ‘black holes’ of the industrial age.

All the ordure and liquid from the streets drained straight into these cellar dwellings, which were below ground level. One Liverpool family slept in a bed over a well 4ft deep in the bottom of their cellar home, which the privies in the street above drained into. There were over 8,000 cellar dwellings in Liverpool alone, inhabited by approximately 38,000 people – so the cellars were crowded as well as damp. Engels estimated that around 40-50,000 people lived in cellar dwellings in Manchester and its suburbs.

Some of the poorest Irish immigrants in Manchester lived in ‘Little Ireland’, a swampy area near the River Medlock. The cellars there were damp, occasionally flooded, and dark. These dank holes, 9ft or 10ft square, had ten or more people living in them; there were no beds, so straw or shavings were used for bedding. On average in Little Ireland, two privies were shared between 250 people.

Because of a shortage of affordable accommodation, overcrowding was a problem in many homes, not just cellar dwellings. Victorian reformers were shocked by cases of incest and illegitimacy, the result of entire families, young and old, all sleeping together. The worst overcrowding occurred in lodging houses, inhabited by itinerant workers, tramps and beggars. Six, seven, even eight people regularly shared beds in these ‘fever dens’, and disease spread quickly under these conditions.

So what did Victorian families use for ‘petty accommodation’ as it was euphemistically termed?

Out in the countryside, the only available privy might be a wooden seat over a hole dug in the ground. Alternatively, some made use of a ‘privy midden’ – a hole in the ground lined with brick or metal – but these often leaked, sometimes contaminating the water supply. Some privy seats had several holes, with smaller ones for children’s use. Nationally, cesspools and privy middens were the rule rather than the exception; these were rarely cleaned out, because this was not just an expensive task but an unbelievably smelly one.

Families with no access to a privy simply threw the contents of their chamber pots into the street or onto a dung-heap, which was left to decompose outside.

At least in rural districts, the smell might be blown away by the wind, but in the crowded town slums, the problems caused by lack of sanitation multiplied immeasurably. Thousands of families in major towns lived without access to any kind of privy; in Wigan, another witness reported seeing human dung-heaps ‘allowed to grow to an immense size’. But the old saying, ‘Where there’s muck, there’s brass’ had also migrated into the towns: in the 1840s, more than 300 people in Manchester earned their living by picking over the refuse and dung-heaps.

There were few empty buildings, because any available room would be rented by some poor soul, but completely uninhabitable ones were used as privies by families. Alternatively, the ground floor of a building might be used, by common consent. Where privies did exist, they were shared by whole streets of families. Kay-Shuttleworth reported that in Manchester’s Parliament Street in 1832 there was only one privy between 380 people; the same street also had cesspools, covered only by an open grid, right next to the houses. Even in well-to-do homes, such as the novelist Mrs Gaskell’s house in Plymouth Grove, Manchester, primitive sanitation caused terrible smells and worse; in 1865 she and her family became ill due to problems with the cesspools under their home.

Cesspools and privy middens were gradually replaced by earth or ash closets, which consisted of a privy seat with a receptacle beneath containing ash or earth. In rural districts, the contents of the privy container could be buried in the garden. Privy middens in towns like Manchester were replaced by ash closets or the Victorians’ secret weapon: a bucket. The ‘pail or pan’ system was simple to understand and a godsend for streets with no mains sewerage or water supplies. Each house was supplied with a pail or pan, which was regularly collected by the local authority or private contractor, cleaned out and disinfected, then returned. In towns ‘night-soil’ – the contents of the pails, or the earth or ash closets – was collected by the night-soil men. Since many town houses, particularly the infamous ‘back-to-backs’, had no back door, the privy contents had to be carried through the house to be emptied, which must have been upsetting for proud housewives. The night-soil was sold to farmers for manure.

Although the first patent for a water closet was taken out by Alexander Cummings in 1775 and improved upon by Joseph Bramah in 1778, a century later they were still a rarity in working-class homes. This was not necessarily a bad thing, since Victorian water closets could be lethal if not fitted with a proper stink-trap. Manchester passed a bylaw in 1845 insisting that every new house built should have a separate privy, but there were still 38,000 privy middens as late as 1869. Around this time, Liverpool, too, had over 30,000 houses without a flush toilet. However, there was no point in installing a water closet unless there were sewers to dispose of the waste products.

Where sewers did exist in the early nineteenth century, they were often badly designed and inefficient, square-sided rather than round, poorly maintained, and inadequate for the needs of the growing population. In some towns it was actually an offence for privies in private houses to be connected to the mains sewer; any householder taking such a liberty was fined. Some authorities believed it was physically dangerous to connect houses to mains sewers as gases might leak into the home. Sewer gases could asphyxiate the unfortunate user, if he wasn’t put off by the smell from the drains, which were often defective. Explosions in the sewers, causing physical injury to workers, were not unknown; they must have raised a few eyebrows on the streets above, too.

The construction of proper sewers was a major engineering project, and both landowners and ratepayers objected to the expense. But even in towns where the benefits of mains sewerage were recognised, the sheer magnitude of the task meant building was slow. Dr Duncan, Liverpool’s first Medical Officer of Health, noted in the early 1840s that although the vast sum (by Victorian standards) of £100,000 had been spent constructing new sewers for Liverpool, many main streets still lacked access to the network, as did most streets in working-class districts.

Another prerequisite for the installation of domestic water closets was, obviously, a decent water supply; but piped running water was still a far-off dream for working families in the 1840s. Drinking water in town and countryside was obtained from a variety of sources. Rainwater was collected, or water was pumped from wells, or stagnant pools or springs were used where available. However, water supplies were often contaminated by sewage oozing into them from cesspools and privy middens.

For most people, come rain or shine, summer or winter, every single drop of water for drinking, cooking and washing had to be carried into the house in a pail from the nearest pump. Only the more affluent houses might have piped water inside the home. In the towns, a street of houses might have just one tap in a yard to serve all the families, or none at all. Water was so hard to come by in some places that it was sold by the bucketful by water carriers; it could cost three halfpence, a sizeable deduction from a weekly wage. An imperial gallon of water weighs about 10lb, so an average two-gallon bucket weighs 20lbs. It would have been extremely hard work carrying enough water for a family’s needs up one or more flights of stairs.

With just one tap to a street, queuing for water was an everyday chore for women and their children. But if all the family were at work from early morning until late at night, queuing for and carrying water from the taps might sometimes be too much work to cope with. And even where street taps were provided by local water companies – in Manchester, it was at a cost of 6s per house per annum – the company often only supplied water for a few hours every day. Water theft was commonplace.

Rainwater butts were also used in towns like Manchester to collect water, but because of atmospheric pollution, the water was ink-black. The middle classes filtered this water, but poorer people had to use it as it was. And no one in their right mind would want to use water from such appallingly polluted rivers as the Medlock or the Irk. Canal water was used where available for washing and cleaning, but it stank after being hoarded for a few days.

Washing equipment in working-class houses was pretty basic. Clothes were washed in a large washing tub or ‘dolly’ and agitated by a large wooden ‘posser’ or ‘peg’. This looked like a three-legged stool with a broom handle stuck through the middle, with a handle crosswise at the top. A washing board, a large wooden board panelled with ridges of corrugated zinc or wood, was rested on the bottom of the tub and clothes scrubbed up and down against it.

Clothes were usually ‘bucked’ prior to washing: treated with stale urine or water and potash to remove grease and dirt. Hot water for the wash was boiled up in a copper or cauldron on top of the stove, if the home owned one. Soap was a relatively expensive item, because it was taxed until 1853. As an example, a family of seven in 1841 might spend 10d a week on soap, including children; compared with 2s 8d on rent and 5s 3d on bread or flour, from a total weekly income of 16s.

Soda was used to soften water in hard water areas. After washing, the clothes were ‘blued’ with a special blue dye to give a good colour to whites, then starched to stiffen the fabric before ironing. Water was wrung out from the clothes using an upright iron mangle. Housewives who didn’t own one of these took their washing down to the local washerwoman.

A heavy flat iron heated on top of the kitchen range or grate was used for ironing. Clothes were dried on hedges or lines in the countryside and on lines strung out between the buildings in towns. Working people’s clothing was difficult to dry; usually men wore fustian (coarse, heavy cotton) trousers and jackets; women wore cotton print dresses. Flannel shirts were worn to try to keep out the cold.

It must have been heartbreaking for the town housewife to see her nice, clean washing blackened with soot and grime from factory chimneys and smoke from domestic chimneys. An eyewitness described a contemporary view of Manchester as: ‘Forests of chimneys, clouds of smoke and volumes of vapour’, with no sky visible, just a dark grey haze, and clouds like ‘fleeces of black wool’. Wigan in the 1840s was described as ‘anything but cheerful; the coal smoke being amply seconded in dinginess by the pavement covered thickly with dark dust’. St Helens, ‘ill-paved’ and ‘dirty’, was a mass of ‘tall chimneys and dense smoke’, which joined forces with the noxious vapours from Muspratt’s alkali works.

Despite the appalling conditions surrounding them, many housewives fought valiantly to keep their home and family clean. They scrubbed their furniture with soap or sand and water, cleaned windows, and donkey-stoned or hearth-stoned (using a kind of yellow cleaning brick) their front doorstep. Since many houses had no drains, all the waste water from washing and cleaning was simply thrown out into the street. However, if people worked at the factory from early morning until late at night, they did not have time to clean. When the Ten Hours Act (1847) was introduced limiting work in the cotton mills to ten hours a day, one of the benefits noted by the workers themselves was that they could use the evenings after work to clean their houses.