Filthy : An Environmental History of the Three Towns in the Nineteenth Century

Dr James Gregory, University of Plymouth, April 2020

Email: [email protected] ​

Plymouth and its quays and ships, sailors and boatmen, slop-sellers and marine store-dealers, warehouses and wharfs, public-houses and eating-houses, mud and dirt – all are before us.1

Introduction

I am embarking on research and teaching in environmental history at the University of Plymouth through an evolving interest in nineteenth-century cultural and social histories of pollution, contamination, dirt and the responses they triggered, including campaigns for public hygiene. This started before the COVID-19 epidemic, but has taken on new resonance as I read the Victorian press reports of response to epidemics. What does this interest in ‘filth’ look like when the angle is local? Taking the lens of the Three Towns of Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse in the Victorian era – and away from the resources of local record offices such as ‘The Box’ which we had hoped to be opened for researchers shortly – what relevant local cases, controversies and discourses can be found through the local press or through the evidence generated by local and central government 2 activity, accessible through the internet and digitised collections? The answer to the question of what a history focused on rooting out the ‘filthy’ aspects to life in nineteenth-century Plymouth in this period might be about, is that there are many ​ relevant local dimensions, which may not be something to be proud about! These include the local history of cholera outbreaks in 1849, the ongoing efforts in the Three Towns to effect environmental improvements that included street cleansing, and to create an efficient sewerage system or water supply. Some of this response to urban dirt was long standing. The local historian Richard North noted in his (1871) of the streets, that ‘in 1634 they were so filthy that a royal ​ writ was sent to require them to be put in decent order’. But Plymouth experienced massive population growth in the nineteenth century, and a new scale of environmental challenges

1 The Land We Live in … vol.3, , Ireland and the Devonshire coast (: Knight, ​ ​ ​ 1847), p.125. 2 For research on Plymouth in this period, see V.F.T. Pointon, ‘Mid-Victorian Plymouth: A Social Geography’ Ph.D., Polytechnic South West (1989); A. Bond, ‘Working-class housing in Plymouth 1870 – 1914’, MRes thesis, University of Plymouth (2014); C. Gill, Plymouth, a New History: 1603 to the present day, 2 vols (Newton Abbott; David & Charles, ​ 1979). B. Chalkley, D. Dunkerley, P. Gripaios, eds., Plymouth: Maritime City in Transition ​ (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1991). 1

3 consequently emerged. North, again, is worth quoting on the subject of sewerage, which at an estimated cost of £35,000, transformed Plymouth from ‘one of the unhealthiest towns in 4 England into one of the healthiest’. This short essay, a contribution to Plymouth History Month in May 2020, draws on readily ​ available published sources: ranging from contemporary nineteenth-century guides to Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse; local histories published in the Victorian era; pamphlets by sanitary reformers; local reports of environmental nuisances and schemes of sanitation; reports in the engineering and building periodicals and medical journals of incidents in the Three Towns. The Medical Officer of Health reports from Plymouth (1895, 1897, 1900) and Devonport (1894, 1896, 1897, 1899, digitized and freely available via the Wellcome medical 5 history library) are also informative. A more extended essay would draw on the archives of local government as they dealt with environmental issues such as water supply, public health and ‘nuisances’. The environmental history would also consider how personally clean the inhabitants could be in this period when access to clean and cheap water was difficult. The Reverend Richard Warner, in A Tour Through 6 ​ , in the Autumn of 1808, had described Plymouth as a ‘dirty town’. Did this improve ​ notably during the century? This tour round the ‘grot spots’ of the Three Towns begins with an overview of the physical environment: some of which, of course remains with us (including the general tendency of the weather that followed from this). I then outline the most obvious moment when filth menaced the inhabitants, in the form of epidemics such as cholera and typhus. COVID-19 has made us acutely aware of zoonotic disease, and I next turn, very briefly, to the association made in official report and press coverage, between proximity to animals in the urban space, and disease-engendering filth. How a locality responded to these threats to public health in the Victorian era needs to be seen in the context of evolving national legislation on public health as well as local responses to public nuisances. So the issue of local politics and vested interests is next outlined. When we think of Victorian disease and its scientific responses, we might well think about the ‘Great Stink’ of the Thames in 1858, and the response through Joseph Bazalgette’s engineering solution. So I next consider the pressure of concentration (a serious factor in infection), and convey briefly a sense (olfactory and otherwise) of the state of the Three Towns’ sewage system through the nineteenth century. Water supply, pollution from industry, air quality, and, perhaps a surprising category, ‘moral pollution’ are then considered in their turn. I end the survey on the environment by very briefly noting one clean technology for energy, which had long been used in Plymouth.

i. The context in Plymouth’s physical environment

The neighbourhood of Plymouth provided a wealth of building material for quarrying, from granite, slate, limestone. Some of this material might be used for the paving that was intended to make the streets cleaner: the public narrative of the towns in the nineteenth-century was one of

nd 3 R. N. North, The History of Plymouth from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (2 ​ edn, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Plymouth: Brendon, 1873), p.139. 4 North, The History of Plymouth, p.270. ​ ​ 5 1895; F.M. Williams, Health of Plymouth during the Year 1897, see ​ ​ https://wellcomecollection.org/works/gx4gffus 6 R. Warner, A Tour Through Cornwall, in the Autumn of 1808 (Bath: Cruttwell, 1809), p.50. ​ ​ See also, J.H. Manners, Journal of a tour round the southern coasts of England (London: ​ ​ Triphook, 1805), p.215. 2 civic growth and improvement, from the irregular and haphazard building of old Plymouth to one where ‘elegant and commodious’ streets and street widening transformed the town, and 7 Plymouth Dock was transformed by Foulston into Devonport. Despite the elegance of its early nineteenth-century public architecture the topography of the Three Towns created problems for Victorian inhabitants, crammed into the land between Hamoaze, and Sutton Pool, so that one guide to Devonport and Plymouth described the streets of the town of Plymouth as ‘ill constructed, narrow, irregular, and some of them steep,’

Many of the bystreets are particularly filthy, especially those through which the water of the town is permitted to flow from a mistaken notion of its contributing to the cleanliness of them, but the effects produced by it are diametrically opposite, for the lower order of inhabitants, trusting to this stream of water removing all annoyances, are in the habit of throwing into, the street every 8 description of offensive matter.

Although one early-Victorian writer, Joshua Truscott, could see the positive side of Plymouth’s hilly nature for ensuring clean environment:

In this respect few towns possess greater advantages than our own for the speedy removal of the deposit in its sewers; for in consequence of the undulating surface of the ground on which the town is built whenever a smart shower of rain falls every nook and corner is so completely washed, that within half an hour afterwards it may be traced flowing into and through our harbour, on its way to nature’s great laboratory for purification – the ocean; yet with all those natural advantages (for we believe that art has had little share in our arrangements for draining the town and rendering it wholesome), we are not entirely free from noxious effluvia in some of our streets, especially when the wind changes to S.W. this probably arises from the want of hydraulic traps at the mouths of the branch drains leading into the main sewers. But it is not only of this occasional nuisance of stench in our streets and allays, [sic] that we have to complain; the smell sometimes finds its way into our kitchens and wash-houses, and thence spreads itself throughout our dwellings, in consequence of the excavations and apertures 9 made by rats.

It should be noted that Plymouth, while several of its streets were infamous for the dirt and vice 10 they collected (Castle Lane most notoriously, and one street was named Dirty Alley ), was not the only place with a reputation for dirty and narrow streets in the county. The dirtiness of

7 ‘Plymouth’, J. Thomson, Universal Gazetteer and Geographical Dictionary (revised edition; ​ ​ London: H.G. Bohn, 1845), p.775. 8 The Tourist’s Companion; Being a Guide to the Towns of Devonport, Plymouth, Stonehouse, Stoke, Morice-Town, and Their Vicinities: the Breakwater, Naval Arsenal, and Other Remarkable Objects: With a Directory (Devonport: Congdon, 1827), pp.3-4. ​ 9 J. Truscott, Prize Essay on the advantages of an abundant and cheap supply of fresh Water to large ​ towns, more especially with reference to Devonport (Devonport: Byers, 1847), p.23-24. ​ ​ ​ 10 W.H.K. Wright, ‘Historic Streets of Plymouth: The Names and Associations’, The ​ Antiquary, 14 (August 1886), pp.41-49 [p.47] which also refers to Mud Lane, and Dung ​ Quay. 3

11 several other towns was noted in one encyclopaedia entry on Devonshire for instance. The problem, as we shall see, was that increase in population that made the Three Towns, treated as 12 one urban cluster, the eighth largest in England by the census year of 1851. The civil engineer Robert Rawlinson’s report to the General Board of Health in 1854 showed concern about the climate, in Devonport he argued, damp and warm atmosphere encouraged decomposition, so that ‘the most scrupulous and extra care in the immediate 13 removal of all refuse matter’ was ‘more than ordinarily imperative’. And the rain (what Rawlinson’s report called ‘a moist atmosphere, and an excessive rainfall’) could at least be credited with keeping the town clean, as in the two closing lines from this excerpt from the satirical poet ‘Peter Pindar’ (the -born surgeon John Wolcot, 1738 – 1819):

It happed at Plymouth town so fair and sweet, Where wandering gutlers, wandering gutlers meet, Making in showers of rain a monstrous pother; Bartering like Rag-fair Jews, with one the other, With carrots, cabbage leaves, and breathless cats, Potatoes, turnip tops, old rags and hats: A town that brings to mind Swift’s city shower – 14 Where clouds to wash its face for ever pour –

The landscape, including man-made features, which I will turn to later, when discussing sites of industrial pollution and nuisance such as the waterworks and factories, were presented in a bird’s eye view engraving in the Illustrated London News, 14 September 1872. ​ ​

ii. Filth and infection: cholera, typhus and other diseases

Few of the streets of early-Victorian Plymouth were equipped with drains, and many houses lacked anything like a drainage system. Cholera was linked in the Victorian mind to population density and poor public sanitation; so that when the disease struck Plymouth, it was easy to assign causes for the severity of the epidemic. Thus the engineer to Devonport Water Company, Augustus Hamilton Bampton (1823 – 1857), associated ‘the peculiar track of the Cholera’ with Sutton Pool and , ‘the chief Outlets of the Sewerage of Plymouth … I can bear personal 15 testimony to the noxious effluvia arising when the tide is off’, in 1849. As a result the town of Plymouth was ranked the seventh in national unhealthiness in the 1840s. These conditions stimulated public effort through a local periodical called Plymouth Health ​ rd 11 See Topographical and Statistical Description of the County of Devon (3 ​ edition; London: ​ ​ ​ Sherwood, Neely, and Jones), p.155, ‘the streets in general are ill constructed, narrow, irregular, and some of them steep, and many of the bye-streets even filthy,’ George Cooke noted, though adding, ‘principally understood of the oldest part of the town’. 12 See Bond, ‘Working-class housing in Plymouth 1870 – 1914’, pp.11-23. 13 As extracted in Civil Engineer and Architects’ Journal vol.17 (1854), p.228. Rawlinson ​ ​ (1810-1898) was an engineer and sanitary expert whose photograph taken by Roger Fenton at about the time of the report on Plymouth, in the royal collection may be found here: https://www.rct.uk/collection/2500556/sir-robert-rawlinson-1810-1898 ​ 14 Appearing in Brother Peter to Brother Tom, an expostulatory epistle. ​ ​ 15 A.H. Bampton, The Drainage of Towns. A Lecture delivered at the Athenaeum, Plymouth, January ​ 25, 1849 (London: Whittaker, 1849), p.24. ​ 4 of Towns Advocate, a penny monthly produced by the local branch of the Health of Towns ​ 16 Association from January 1847. Local circumstances were reported by the Unitarian minister the Reverend William James Odgers (1810 – 1884), active in the local Health of Towns branch as lecturer on public hygiene to the poor. They were also reported in the early 1850s by an inspector appointed by the General Board of Health to look into Stonehouse’s sewerage 17 drainage, water supply and sanitary conditions. Plymouth experienced a major outbreak of cholera in 1839, the polymathic Llewellynn Jewitt’s history of the town (1873) recording the epidemic ‘carried off a large number of the 18 inhabitants’: 702 died between mid-June and late September. Ten years later, from early June to early November, cholera killed 819 in Plymouth, not including the deaths in the towns of Devonport, Stonehouse and Stoke Damerel. Temporary cholera hospitals were put up in Five Fields (later this would be the site for the Devonport Sisters of Mercy’s first permanent home, 19 the ‘House of Religion and Charity’).

Let the reader imagine (before the hospital was erected) a room, close and ill-ventilated. In it are lying nine persons afflicted with cholera in its most malignant form. The moans of the sufferers break upon the ear, and pierce the heart. Around, on the floor, is filth, from which a pestilential vapour fills the 20 room. No hired nurse can endure it.

Accounts of the cholera were provided by the local physician Dr Edward T. Roe for the Medical ​ Times: Roe resigned from the local Board of Health in September 1849 when a surgeon ​ apothecary, Derry, established a second cholera hospital in Westwell Street, in a ‘crowded 21 neighbourhood and bustling thoroughfare’. The registrars of births and deaths, James Wyatt and H.H. Heydon, provided the statistics for a large sheet of tables on the cholera in Plymouth and as a Dr W. Hamilton commented in the pages of the London Medical Gazette, ‘more than half ​ ​ were in the enjoyment of life, full of health, strength, and vigour, able to contribute their quota to the welfare of society; while of those who were immediately dependent upon them for

16 For coverage of the association, see , 14 January 1847 [p.3]. Odgers’ ​ ​ report was serialised in the monthly, in early 1847. It covered drainage, water supply, and ventilation. Odgers’ A report on the sanitary condition of Plymouth (Plymouth: Keys, 1847) is ​ ​ described in Boase’s Bibliotheca Cornubiensis as the continuously-paginated 7 numbers of ​ ​ the Plymouth Health of Towns Advocate. I have been unable to study this. Note also, the ​ ​ public lecture Unhealthiness of towns, its causes and remedies: being a lecture delivered on the 10th of ​ December, 1845, in the Mechanics’ Institute at Plymouth https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ts4vzpa9 17 Report to the General Board of Health on a Preliminary Inquiry into the Sewerage, Drainage, and Supply of Water, and the Sanitary Condition of the Inhabitants of the Parish and Town of East Stonehouse, in the County of Devon (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1853). ​ 18 L.F.W. Jewitt, A History of Plymouth (Plymouth: Luke, 1873), p.429. ​ ​ 19 ‘The Sisters of Mercy, Devonport’, The Churchman’s Companion, August 1849, pp.108-110. ​ ​ 20 ‘The Sisters of Mercy, Devonport’, p.109. 21 L.F.W. Jewitt, A History of Plymouth, p.442. W. Hamilton, ‘Supplementary Statistics of ​ ​ Cholera in Plymouth in 1849’, London Medical Gazette, n.s., vol. x (1850), pp.103-111; E.T. ​ ​ Roe, ‘The Cholera in Plymouth and its Neighbourhood in 1849’, The Medical Times, 3 ​ ​ August 1850, pp.116-117; 24 August 1850, pp.195-197; London Medical Gazette 44 (1849), ​ ​ p.512. 5

22 support by far the smaller proportion was taken.’ The Reverend John Hatchard’s memorial in St Andrew’s, erected in 1872, referred to his ‘labours during the prevalence of cholera’ in 1832 23 and 1849. Charles Creighton’s two-volume history of epidemics (1891 – 1894) discusses the spread of typhus (also known as ‘gaol fever’ or ‘ship’s fever’) through returning military during the Napoleonic era, with ‘war-typhus’ following an outbreak of dysentery in Plymouth when troops returned from the battle of Corunna in a ‘state of filth and rags’ in 1809. 241 were reported as 24 dying out of those 2432 who became ill. Typhus and related fevers were still associated with insanitary seaports such as Plymouth in the Registrar-General’s annual report of causes of death 25 in 1861. Other infectious diseases that took their toll on the nineteenth-century inhabitants of the Three Towns included measles and scarlatina (there was a ‘great epidemic’ of the former in 26 1879-80, in 1889 some 270 died of the latter in Plymouth). Small pox, reported in Plymouth in the mid-eighteenth-century also killed in the Victorian era, for instance in 1859, and was reported in the statistical returns on the health of the navy as ‘committing great ravages in Plymouth, 27 Devonport and the surrounding district’ in 1871. Unenviably Plymouth was in the top twenty towns for mortality in 1878, causing ‘the gravest alarm among the inhabitants’: ‘no observant person can pass through the streets without noticing the large proportion of people who are 28 wearing mourning’.

iii. Filth and livestock

We are acutely aware now, of the link between viral zoonoses and animals kept by for food. A glimpse of the problems caused in Devonport from animals as livestock – kept close to human habitation by butchers, for example, is conveyed by a letter from the surgeon Lorenzo Pastor Tripe (he changed his surname, ironic in this context, to Metham; he was a brother of the photographer Linnaeus Tripe) of Devonport, the secretary of the South Devon Sanitary 29 Association. I include this in the appendix to this paper.

22 ‘Statistics of Cholera in Plymouth in 1849’, p.106. 23 Hatchard (1793 – 1869), an evangelical, was son of the publisher (1769–1849); see L.F.W. Jewitt, A History of Plymouth, p.701. ​ ​ 24 C. Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2. From the extinction of Plague to the ​ ​ ​ Present Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894). Typhus had struck ​ Plymouth and Devonshire in the eighteenth century (1734-36), see Creighton’s discussion, pp.79-80. 25 Annual Report of the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in England (London: Eyre ​ and Spottiswoode, 1862), p.215. 26 Creighton, A History of Epidemics, p.618, p.681. ​ ​ 27 ‘Medical Statistical Returns of the Home Station’ in Copy of the Statistical Report of the Health ​ of the Navy, for the Year 1871, p.4. ​ 28 The Sanitary Record, 26 April 1878, p.264. ​ 29 Report of the Sub-Committee on the answers returned to questions addressed to the principal towns of England and , and on the objections from corporate bodies to the Public Health Bill (1848), ​ pp.53-55. See On the Sanitary Condition of Large Towns, a Lecture delivered December 16th, 1845, ​ at the Devonport and Stonehouse Mechanics’ Institute, by L. P. Tripe [Metham], M.R.C.S., and Secretary to the South Devon Health of Towns’ Association. He also published On the Sanitary ​ ​ Condition of Devonport. For research on Plymouth meat market in this period, see M.P. ​ 6

The Health of Towns Association’s report of 1847 stated that there were 80 pigsties and 12 slaughterhouses in Plymouth: the division between urban and rural environment was not so 30 clear cut at this point. The condition of the slaughterhouses was deplored in the inspector of the Local Government Board (and former naval surgeon) Dr Francis H. Blaxall’s report of 1879, instigated by an outbreak of diphtheria. Blaxall’s report stated that these ‘exhibited conditions of foulness totally at variance with the care which should be observed in carrying out a business that is concerned with human food’. That at Library Lane, a public slaughterhouse, was ‘so pre-eminently filthy as to render a visit to them revolting in the extreme,’ though the Western 31 ​ Morning News did not stint in publishing the details. ​ Horse transportation necessarily produced manure, and horses remained a major form of 32 locomotion into the late-Victorian era around cities and towns. They contributed to the nuisance of smells in the Three Towns when the weather or lack of cleaning caused problems for 33 sensitive members of the public.

iv. Local government

Critics of municipal government, then as now, complained of the personalities, ‘jobberies’ and inadequacies of local organisations. The imputation of ‘vested interest’ as a curb on environmental improvements in Devonport was publicly conveyed by the printing of the letter 34 from Lorenzo Tripe in 1848. Schemes for improvement had to contend with the vagaries of local politics: thus we are told in his obituary that Augustus Hamilton Bampton’s ‘several efficient and extensive plans for improving the water supply and the sewerage and indeed the town generally … in consequence of a difference of opinion in the corporation … were not 35 executed’. Responses to environmental problems that did not stop at the boundaries of the individual Three Towns were made difficult. When the problem required a concerted response, for instance the outbreak of small-pox in 1871, then there might be some effort at unity from the Three Towns’ separate sanitary authorities, but Plymouth, Storehouse and Devonport remained 36 separate sanitary districts. Christopher Bulteel, the surgeon to the Royal Albert Hospital in Devonport, spoke to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at its Plymouth and Devonport meeting in 1872, on ‘The Public Health Act 1872 with Special Reference to the

Phillips, ‘Market Exchange and Social Relations: The Practices of Food Circulation in and to the Three Towns of Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse, 1800 – c.1870’, Ph.D., University of , 1991. 30 For later pig-related complaints, see Western Morning News, 5 September 1883. This also ​ ​ noted ‘a disgusting smell of boiled rags’ at another works. For nuisances involving slaughterhouses, see Western Daily Mercury, 4 August 1863, p.4. ​ ​ 31 Western Morning News, 7 March 1879. ​ 32 F.M.L. Thompson, Victorian England: the horse-drawn society: an inaugural lecture (London: ​ ​ 1970). 33 E.g., Western Morning News, 9 August 1883, concerning the George Street cab stand. ​ ​ 34 Report of the Sub-Committee on the answers returned to questions addressed to the principal towns of England and Wales, and on the objections from corporate bodies to the Public Health Bill (1848), ​ pp.53-55. 35 Memoir of Bampton in Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers; with Abstracts ​ of the Discussions vol. XVII. Session 1857 – 58 (London: ICE, 1858), Appendix to the ​ Annual Report, p.93. 36 See The Lancet, 6 January 1872, p.26. ​ ​ 7 three Towns of Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse’. He thought that this measure preserved the worst of centralization and local government. More particularly, his paper, which led to an ‘animated discussion,’ pointed out the situation in the Three Towns:

it would probably never enter the minds of the members of this Association, who have honoured our towns by visiting us from a distance, that there would be any distinction of urban and rural between the three towns in which the present congress is being held. They would scarcely be likely to realize – what is, nevertheless, a fact – that, as they wend their way in our beautiful tram-cars from the urban district of Plymouth to the urban district of Devonport, they are passing through the rural district of Stonehouse … in point of fact, geographically continuous with Plymouth, attached for Parliamentary purposes, as a distinct township to the borough of Devonport, while in all other respects it is blessed with county organization, including county magistrates and police, surveyors of highways, absence of bye-laws, &c.; and for sanitary purposes, having no local board, it is essentially a rural district, and its sanitary authority is 37 now the board of guardians.

As Bulteel complained, Stonehouse had avoided for reasons of cost, adopting the Local Government Act, which made the local board a sanitary authority, instead appointing in 1866 a sewer authority, under the Sewage Utilization and Sanitary Acts which limited its powers to sewerage and water supply, i.e., meaning it had no power to make bye-laws. Bulteel was also concerned that unlike Plymouth, Devonport, Stonehouse had no ‘stringent bye-laws’ for dealing with the evils of prostitution so that Stonehouse ‘becomes a nidus to which these women flock from the sister towns.’ Bulteel wanted a single medical officer of health and public analyst for the Three Towns and used the local press to promote this measure, hopeful that the imputation of jealousy and the ‘impossibility of getting the three towns to act together in any object in which their common 38 interests are concerned,’ was a libel. Amalgamation in August 1914 would end the status of separate Urban Sanitary Authorities that Plymouth and Devonport enjoyed after the Local Government Act of 1888.

v. Filth: the consequence of human overcrowding

Apart from the close proximity of cess pits and privies to dwellings, and the pollution caused by livestock such as pigs, human overcrowding was rightly identified as a problem for human 39 health. Again the problems for viral infection caused by the density of human habitation is something COVID-19 makes us very aware of. According to the preliminary report of Robert Rawlinson in 1854:

In Devonport overcrowding produces excess of disease. The best form of sewers, drains, and water supply will not avail to the fullest extent, if this source

37 C. Bulteel, ‘The Public Health Act, 1872’, Transactions of the National Association for the ​ Promotion of Social Science Plymouth and Devonport Meeting, 1872, pp.359-374. ​ 38 C. Bulteel, ‘The Public Health Act, 1872’, p.374. 39 R. Rawlinson, Report ... on a preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, and supply of water, and ​ the sanitary condition of the inhabitants of the parish and town of East Stonehouse, e.g., p.22 on the ​ keeping of pigs, and privies, p.23. 8

of contamination is allowed to remain; medical men, relieving officers, and 40 others, bear their testimony to the fearful overcrowding of houses and rooms.

Ina passage of some eloquence, Edward Roe identified, in the context of the 1849 cholera epidemic the zone of the wharves, warehouses and poor, as the site of disease:

Here still stand the houses which in former times were the abodes of affluence, but now peopled by squalor, misery, and disease; and many a noble porch and ample hall may be seen in the narrow streets which once held a pampered, liveried crowd, but now receive the shadowy shrinking forms – half clad, half starved – of those whose utmost art scarce keeps gaunt famine from their doors. The houses are high, the streets narrow, the gutters always full, the beer and gin 41 shops numerous, and the air pestiferous.

He contrasted the fate of Plymouth in the two cholera epidemics with Exeter. Plymouth offered 42 a ‘hotbed of filth, misery, starvation, and disease’ (p.116). The situation was not notably improved two decades later (when the population of the Three Towns had expanded by over 20%) since Francis Blaxall reported on the filthy, poorly 43 ventilated dwellings of the poor in sublet decaying houses in many parts of Plymouth. He blamed the ‘wretched filthiness’ on the neglect of Public Health Act provisions against nuisances, 44 by the local sanitary authority itself. The Western Morning News had published a series of essays ​ on the ‘Crowded Corners of Plymouth’ in 1875. In 1891 the same paper reported on the tours of unsanitary Plymouth conducted by the mayor, the solicitor John Thomas Bond (in whose 45 mayoralty in 1898 the Burrator Reservoir was opened).

vi. Sewerage

The Three Towns had a problem with human waste. In mid-century Devonport, raw sewage was discharged into the Hamoaze from Morice-Town, Upper Stoke, from the sewer at the south end of Tamar Street (Robert Rawlinson quoted W.E. Bartlett, the surveyor to the Devonport commissioners on this). The consequence was the polluting of the shore from three outlets at Mutton Cove, the Dockyard Camber and North-corner. In the Dockyard, the sewage was in an uncovered state at the Camber:

40 R. Rawlinson, Report to the General Board of Health on a preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, ​ drainage, and supply of water, and the sanitary condition of the inhabitants of the parliamentary borough of Devonport (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1854), p.27. ​ 41 Roe, ‘The Cholera in Plymouth and its Neighbourhood in 1849’, Medical Times, 3 August ​ ​ 1850, p.116. 42 Roe, ‘The Cholera in Plymouth and its Neighbourhood in 1849’, Medical Times, 3 August ​ ​ 1850, p.116. 43 Western Morning News, 7 March 1879, p.4. ​ 44 Western Morning News, 7 March 1879, p.4. ​ 45 Western Morning News, 7 June 1875, 9 June 1875, p.3, 14 June 1875, p.3; Western Morning ​ ​ News, 19 February 1891, p.5. ​ 9

almost in the centre of the Dockyard, where the refuse remains uncovered for several hours at each tide; the exhalations are most offensive, not only to that establishment but to the town, as the prevailing winds from the west and south- 46 west blow up and through the sewer into the town.

Cesspits in gardens and fields between the homes and the Lake at Stonehouse also caused a nuisance in mid-century Plymouth. In many homes, the only way of transporting human waste was ‘tubs … from which it was given to scavengers,’ or collection from being mixed with the contents of ash pits. Human waste was mixed up with the soil on the parish quay in East Stonehouse, as mentioned in the memorial of inhabitants, dated 6 January 1853, which was sent to the Commissioners of the General Board of Health:

THAT your memorialists are owners and occupiers of property in the above-named parish, and in the immediate locality of Water Lane; at the bottom of this lane are situated quays, on which deposits of town soil, and filth of almost every description, not only from this town but from the neighbouring towns of Plymouth and Devonport are constantly being laid, and constitute a nuisance of 47 the very worst description.

In the 1840s, in the era of the Health of Towns Association, new houses were still constructed in 48 Plymouth without water closets, with ‘loose, earth-bottomed house and street drains’. Plymouth used the Local Board of Health to develop the sewerage system. The local branch of the Public Health Association published alarming news about the state of the towns in 1847,

Basket-street, with a population of three hundred and forty-eight people in sixteen houses, ​ ​ has a drain sixteen inches by sixteen inches through the street; but only two or three of the houses are properly drained. Some have only gutters running through ​ the passage into the street.

But it must not be supposed that all the houses in the better streets are well drained. Bedford-terrace is drained only by a covered gutter, which runs under the ​ houses into the road. The Rev. T. C. Hine, residing at No.12, in this terrace, says, ‘my library often stinks abominably from the drain.’ It is understood that the residents have made arrangements with the Commissioners for the removal of the nuisance. In George-place, Nos.1, 2, and 3, the occupants complain that their ​ ​ health is affected by the bad smells from the drains. In George-street, No.16, Mr. Whiteford states that ‘the pump-water is rendered unwholesome by leakage from the drains.’ In Drake-street, some of the house-drains go through the passages and ​ ​ cause most offensive smells. In Buckwell-street, some houses have no drains; others ​ ​ are so badly drained as to cause insufferable nuisance. Frankfort street, No.41, inhabited by twenty-six persons (two families being huddled together in one of

46 The local surveyor on the drainage, sewerage and paving of Devonport, quoted in Rawlinson, Report ... on a preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, and supply of water, and ​ the sanitary condition of the inhabitants of the parliamentary borough of Devonport, p.47. ​ 47 Reprinted in Report ... on a preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, and supply of water, and ​ the sanitary condition of the inhabitants of the parish and town of East Stonehouse, p.5. ​ 48 Report of the Sub-Committee on the answers returned to questions addressed to the principal towns of England and Wales, and on the objections from corporate bodies to the Public Health Bill, p.29. ​ 10

the rooms), the house-drain was stopped and the privy running over: hence the stench from the house, court, privy, and choked drain was insufferable. In some of the houses in Gasking-street, the drain runs through the house; and in one ​ ​ 49 instance there is a hole in the passage, for the reception of all the refuse.

The civil engineer and expert on water, Nathaniel Beardmore (1816 – 1872), who was based in Westminster, described the dirty pool at the lower part of Plymouth in 1848 in the following terms:

Its appearance in this part is almost similar to sewer water, and refuse is thrown into it by the adjacent inhabitants, so that it is of no kind of use as a cleansing ​ agent, but on the contrary, is productive of damp exhalations, where a portion of it might be turned to beneficial effect, by cleansing the low-laying sewers (if they be properly constructed) that empty themselves from Union Marsh into the tide 50 at Millbay ...

Coverage of sewerage and drainage in Plymouth in the national press during the 1850s 51 includes an essay in the Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal in 1854. A decade later, Rear-Admiral ​ John Monday, an inhabitant of Drake’s Ward living in Torrington Terrace, wrote to the printer Robert White Stevens the following letter, published in the Western Daily Mercury in November ​ 1864: about the state of the leat:

I have frequently seen dogs, filthy rags, &c, thrown in and have observed people washing dirty clothes there. Boys frequently go into the water. Whoever will take the trouble to go to the back of Torrington-place and look over the wall, just at the higher side of the leat, will quickly discover such abominations as will show that some ill-bred persons are in the habit of using the banks of the stream as a place of public convenience. The shower of rain which follows washes all the resulting pollutions, with the mud and filth from the roads, &c. into the stream. In wet seasons the water looks – as it was very aptly described by Dr Cookworthy before the House of Commons – like so much pease soup. Now, 52 can it be called pure? ​ ​

Other authorities claimed the water had improved, Jackson in 1872 telling his audience, ‘The organic matter in water should not exceed 1.5 grains per gallon. In the Plymouth water there is 53 only 0.54.’ The later history of the sewage system in the Three Towns includes the construction of ‘stink’ pipes to take away noxious gases, some of which still exist, dotted around the city:

49 The South Devon Literary Chronicle (Plymouth: Lidstone, 1847), pp.124-125. ​ 50 N. Beardmore, Letter to viscount Ebrington, M.P., &c. &c. on proposed Modifications and ​ Extensions of the Water Supply to the borough of Plymouth, with other consequent Improvements (Plymouth: Stevens, 1848), pp.5-6. 51 Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal, 1854, pp.228-229. ​ 52 Western Daily Mercury, 17 November 1864, p.5. ​ 53 ‘Public Health, Abstract of Mr G. Jackson’s Paper. Read March 7th 1872, Annual Reports ​ and Transactions of the Plymouth Institution and Devon and Cornwall Natural History Society ​ ​ (1873), vol.4, p.182. 11

54 including on the Barbican. In the 1880s the Plymouth system could be divided into two sewerage districts: eastern and western. The east discharged sewage into Deadman’s Bay, the west into Millbay. Another sewerage outlet was at Fisher’s Nose Point, with other outlets going 55 into Stonehouse Mill Leat, and into a watercourse into the . The admiralty also discharged 56 sewage from Mount Wise. The Royal Marine Barracks at Stonehouse derived its water from a 57 well which was polluted by neighbouring cesspits, according to a letter in The Lancet in 1868. ​ ​ Despite the expenditure on the sewerage system in the later Victorian era, the Local Government Board Medical Officer for Health, Dr Edward Ballard (1820 – 1897) claimed in a report of 1875 that Plymouth provided for him one of the two ‘most offensive heaps of town 58 refuse laid in a depot by a sanitary authority which I had the misfortune to inspect’. What excrement wasn’t piped out to the harbour and Hamoaze, was transported to the countryside, 59 with the transporting of Plymouth manure to the countryside around Beer Alston. If there was money in muck, then perhaps there were figures such as the mudlarks of London, looking for anything of value amid the sewage and refuse: The Western Antiquary in August 1881 published ​ the recollection about one ‘loafer’ from earlier in the century,

a dirty, ill-favoured man, who busied himself in picking odds and ends out of the gutters, from ash-heaps, and other unsavoury places. He used to frequent the water-side, where the town sewers disgorged themselves, and there grope about 60 for unconsidered trifles.

The problem remained one of inadequate private provision, for as one commentator said in the mid-1870s,

… the drains of the new houses were always laid down very well on paper; but nobody saw that they were carried out as planned; and only the other day the inspector, on a complaint of a bad smell in a parlour, advised the floor to be taken up, when it was found that the drain pipes were roughly laid end to end, and then overlapping to such an extent that there was a regular gutter formed under the floor. Such were the effects on the sanitary condition of the town of

54 See ‘Sewerage Scheme, Plymouth’, The Builder, 5 September 1891, p.196. See the concerns ​ ​ about the ventilation of the sewers, after a report by the civil engineer James Mansergh, in Sanitary Record 9, 1 November 1878, p.277 which linked sewer gas with typhus. ​ ​ 55 Lecture by the surgeon William J. Square, Plymouth Debating Society, reported in Western ​ Morning News, 16 February 1880, p.4. ​ 56 ‘The Admiralty and Devonport Sewage Outfalls’, Western Morning News, 26 November ​ ​ 1898, p.5. 57 ‘Bad Water and Its Influence on Health’, The Lancet, 8 February 1868. ​ ​ 58 Third Report in respect of the Inquiry as to Effluvium Nuisances arising in connexion with various Manufacturing and other Branches of Industry by Dr Ballard, p.308 ​ 59 ‘Plymouth Manure’, Western Morning News, 30 October 1893. See also F. Booker, The ​ ​ ​ industrial archaeology of the Tamar Valley (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1967), p.236, on ​ ‘dock dung’, ‘an evil-smelling compound of the sweepings of Plymouth and Devonport streets, fish waste, butcher’s offal and night soil’. 60 Western Antiquary, August 1881, p.82. ​ 12

the manner in which houses were run up by speculating builders, whose only 61 object was to sell them up as soon as they were supposed to be completed.

vii. Water supply

The channels are exposed to many sources of filth; and the difference is very sensible between the stream at , and at the entrance to Plymouth. The reservoirs, also, have not received 62 any modern improvement.

All that we want is an effective and compulsory system of house drainage and the water placed upon the system of constant and universal supply to render this town as healthy as any in the 63 empire.

Famously, and perhaps controversially, Sir organised the supply of fresh water to Plymouth from the river Mew outside Dartmoor in 1590, and control of the leat was vested in 64 the mayor and Corporation. The designers of the stained glass of the Guildhall, opened in 1874, chose the inauguration of the leat as one of the images on the southside windows. Free water was supplied at a few water conduits in the nineteenth-century town. But private houses were not connected to a steady supply of water in early Victorian Plymouth: it was reported that 65 there were 800 houses without access to town water in 1848. In Stonehouse in the same decade, there were public meetings to discuss encroachments on public water supply by building, and the risk to water purity through the construction of the cemetery at Mutley (overcrowded 66 burial grounds were another environmental nightmare for Victorians). The source of water for Devonport was streams fed by the West Dart, Cowsick and Blackabrook. The leat – formed about 1780 – was open to the air, and as Robert Rawlinson noted in the 1850s, the poor were forced to collect their water instead from springs, ‘in tubs, pots, pans, and other open vessels’. Water supply had caused controversy between the inhabitants of Plymouth Dock and Plymouth in the 1790s, and the story of the Three Towns’ water provision in the next century remained one of competing authorities, and large-scale local authority efforts such as the

61 ‘The Sanitary Condition of Plymouth’, Western Morning News, 25 April 1878, p.4. For later ​ ​ discussion, see the details in the report by E.A. Letts and W.E. Adeney, On the Pollution of ​ Estuaries and Tidal Waters, Royal Commission on Sewage Disposal (1908). ​ 62 A Hand-Book for Travellers in Devon & Cornwall. With maps (London: Murray, 1851), p.92. ​ 63 Roe, ‘The Cholera in Plymouth and its Neighbourhood in 1849’, Medical Times, 3 August ​ ​ 1850, p.117. 64 See D.J. Hawkings, Water from the moor (Devon Books, 1987); C. Gill, ‘Drake and ​ ​ Plymouth’, ch.6 in N.J.W. Thrower ed., Sir Francis Drake and the Famous Voyage, ​ 1577-1580: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of Drake’s Circumnavigation of the Earth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p.87; R.N. Worth, Sir Francis Drake and ​ the Plymouth corporation, the history of the Plymouth leat. Read before the Plymouth institution, and repr. from the Transactions of that society. For a general academic history of the subject, see J. ​ Hassan, A History of Water in Modern England and Wales (Manchester: Manchester ​ ​ University Press, 1998). 65 Report of the Sub-Committee on the answers returned to questions addressed to the principal towns of England and Wales, and on the objections from corporate bodies to the Public Health Bill (London: ​ Health of Towns Association, 1848), p.14. 66 Western Courier, West of England Conservative, Plymouth and Devonport Advertiser, 8 April 1846, ​ p.3. 13 construction of the Burrator Reservoir which replaced Drake’s leat as water supply for Plymouth in the late 1890s. Earlier in the century, provision of water had been left to private enterprise. The Devonport Water Company provided water freely to the workhouse and the orphan asylum in the 1840s. In 1847 Joshua Truscott was awarded the first prize for an essay, on the advantages of an ​ 67 abundant and cheap supply of fresh Water to large Towns, more especially with reference to Devonport. This ​ had been selected by the local mechanics’ institute of which Truscott was a member. He thought the water in Devonport was hard, whereas William Odgers described the Plymouth water supply 68 (as reported in no.4 of the Health of Towns’ Association Advocate) as soft, and remarkably pure. ​ ​ Water supply at this period included private wells, with the risk from contamination that followed,as well as the supply from companies such as Devonport Water Company. Collecting water from water butts was seen rightly as a poor substitute by Joshua Truscott, given the ‘smoke 69 and filth’ that abounded. The analytical chemist Henry Kelway Bamber F.C.S. thought the water good for manufacturing purposes, but liable to rust pipes unless they were internally lined 70 with asphalt, in 1869. Efforts to cleanse the towns and their inhabitants included provision of baths funded by a joint-stock company established in 1828 after an abortive attempt to establish ‘marine baths’ in the Hoe in 1824. The baths, with a handsome Grecian Doric front by John Foulston, were opened in 1830, fed by pipes from near the Rusty Anchor and augmented by a pump room when spa water was discovered. They offered swimming baths, plunge baths, showers, ‘medicated 71 vegetable vapour, sulphur water, and Harrowgate [sic] water baths’. They would be removed by 72 the expansion of the railway. Charles Bracken’s 1931 history of Plymouth would comment 73 about these ‘public amenities which Plymouth has never since possessed’.

viii. Polluting industry

Devonport was not a major site of manufacturing. It was claimed in the 1820s that contrary to supposition, Plymouth docks was not a polluted environment with ‘walls and buildings 74 blackened with sulphurous vapours,’ but instead had an ‘air of serenity, of order, of cleanliness’. Later writers in Plymouth recognised the pollution caused by burning coal: Truscott in his pamphlet advocating water power ‘on the principle of hydrostatic pressure from reservoirs,’ as a 75 neglected but cleaner source of power. Other forms of pollution were associated, as I outline

67 J. Truscott, Prize Essay on the advantages of an abundant and cheap supply of fresh Water to large ​ Towns, more especially with reference to Devonport (Devonport: Byers, 1847). ​ 68 Western Courier, West of England Conservative, Plymouth and Devonport Advertiser, 30 June 1847, ​ p.4. 69 Truscott, Prize Essay on the advantages, p.9. ​ ​ 70 British Association for the Advancement of Science, meeting at Exeter, Medical Press and ​ Circular, 8 September 1869, p.206. ​ 71 Wood’s Hand-Book to Plymouth, Stonehouse, Devonport ... Eighth edition (Devonport: Wood, ​ c.1858), p.25 72 See Royal Union Bath, Plymouth: part of the main street, etching by W. Le Petit after T. Allom, ​ ​ in Devonshire & Cornwall illustrated (London: Fisher, Fisher and Jackson, 1832), p.96; ​ ​ North, The History of Plymouth, p.229. ​ ​ 73 C.W. Bracken, A history of Plymouth and her neighbours (Plymouth: Underhill, 1931), p.230. ​ ​ 74 H.E. Carrington, The Plymouth and Devonport Guide (Devonport: Byers, 1828), p.18. ​ ​ 75 Truscott, Prize Essay on the advantages, p.19. ​ ​ 14 below, with the slaughter of animals, and the rendering down of animal carcasses, and with the development of manufacturing trades such as sugar refining. Just as with inquiries that led to reports on the state of public health in the context of cholera, investigation of industrial pollution and disease provides insights into the problems created by all sorts of trades and industries. Dr Edward Ballard’s report on the offensive trades in Plymouth for the Local Board, 76 in 1878, reported on the subject of an inquiry initiated in 1875. The manufacturing in Plymouth during the 1840s – 1850s included a sail-cloth establishment, sugar-refinery, glass-house, distilleries, starch factory, and soap maker. In 1848 the 77 latter was reported as producing 4,117,170lbs of hard soap. The starch manufactory, owned by ​ 78 Edward James, occupied the premises of a former Catholic nunnery (house and chapel). Soap manufacturing originated in Plymouth in 1818 and at one point there was a Soap and Alkali Works (c.1830). The Coxside soap works of Bryant, Burnell and Co., burned down in October ​ ​ 1850, the oil, tallow, and resin inside helping to feed the fire which started in the engine house. The Millbay works were the most extensive in the West of England, other companies included 79 the Victoria Soap Company, also at Millbay. Newspaper commentary provides a glimpse of the interior of the factory in the early 1860s:

The same cleanliness and precision was to be marked throughout. No waste, no refuse, about in any direction; the very floors, though dark, were scraped, lest a particle of the crude soap should be lost. We noted this, and were told that the scrapings and wastage, if neglected, would form a very serious item of expenditure in the year, if treated in any other way than as a material out of which 80 good was to be extracted.

I provide further detail on the soap industry in Plymouth in another short essay produced for the History Festival The sugar refineries which began in Plymouth in the early eighteenth century were carried out in the early nineteenth century by Bryant and Burnell. The refineries were reduced from three by 1864. The British and Irish Sugar Refining Company was based in Mill Lane. Sugar could cause a nuisance in manufacturing: one report of nuisance involved the ‘abominable smell which emanated from the Sugar Refinery finding its way down Old Town-street … even as far as Princess Square – at night particularly’. The defence of the sugar refiner came from its director: in order to stop this smell it would be necessary to shut down the factory. As Nicholson

76 Third Report in respect of the Inquiry as to Effluvium Nuisances arising in connexion with various Manufacturing and other Branches of Industry by Dr Ballard. He visited Plymouth gasworks in ​ 1875, Harvey’s establishment for distillation of tar in 1875, see p.121. 77 J. R. McCulloch, A dictionary, geographical, statistical, and historical, of the various countries, places, ​ and principal natural objects in the world, vol. 2, p.519. L.F.W. Jewitt, A History of Plymouth ​ ​ (1873), ch.13 covers oil mills, sail cloths, soap works, sugar refinery and distilleries, starch and black lead, biscuits, candle works. For the modern history, see C. Gill, Plymouth, a ​ New History: 1603 to the present day. The candle works was at Sutton Road, the former site ​ of Bryant, Burnell soap works (Coxside), and engraving shows this with three tall chimneys. On black lead, see James and Sons, Plymouth, in British Trade Journal (1890), ​ ​ p.321. Their brands included ‘James Black Dome Lead’. 78 Western Courier, 30 October 1850, p.8. ​ 79 See Western Daily Mercury, 6 November 1862; ‘Some Plymouth Industries’, The British ​ ​ ​ Trade Journal 5: 28 (1890), p.255. ​ 80 Western Daily Mercury, 6 November 1862, p.2. ​ 15 the director said, ‘The winds were not always in the same direction, and therefore they all got it in their turn – (a laugh) – and they must all bear it for the sake of the advantages which they 81 enjoyed from the existence of such manufactory in the town’. The sugar refinery burnt animal-charcoal. 82 Other factories in the 1860s include paper mills and manure works. The manufacture of artificial manure was carried out by several firms in Plymouth: Burnard, Lack and Alger (making superphosphates with bones acted upon by sulphuric acid), Norrington, and James Gibbs. The 83 Western Counties Manure Works was based at . The works at Torpoint (where there was also a gas works), established in 1853, were the subject of legal complaint in Nisi Prius Court 84 ​ in 1869. It had used acid to dissolve ‘green bones’ at one time. There were also complaints against the stench emanating from the chimney of Harvey’s sulphate of ammonia works – a firm that also made cement – in Coxside in 1864, the works manufactured ammonia using ‘ammonial liquor’ piped from the gas works (a by-product which had accumulated to a dangerous extent at 85 the gasworks), to which sulphuric acid was added. These industries all had an environmental impact in terms of water and air quality. See this matter-of-fact account from the Journal of the Society of Arts in 1876 of pollution caused by ​ industry and human bodily waste:

. PLYMOUTH – Population, 71,667; mortality; 20 62.​ – Water-carried sewage ​ contains refuse from dye and soapworks, is drained direct into the sea, below low-water mark; water-closets in use; middens not allowed, and ashes removed second day by contract. Total cost of for sewers up to end of 1874, £37,000, annual outlay for maintenance, £200; net annual cost for dealing with the sewage, £2,000; cost of scavenging in 1875 was £2,500. Discharging direct into the sea has been found in the locality to be the best method of disposing of the night 86 soil.

Trades associated with butchery caused offensive smells, thus the reported the case of a man summoned for conveying an uncovered cart of tripe wash, to a piggery, 87 through the public streets in June 1864. Trade ‘effluvia’ included pig-keeping and animal slaughtering: including fell-mongering, leather-dressing and tanning. These included Tanner of Plymouth (a fellmonger, also engaged in leather dressing and tanning), and Head of Stonehouse (who dealt with the manufacture of fish-liver oil alongside fellmongering and leather dressing). Edward Ballard also visited the fat-making firm of Tucker, of Plymouth, which distilled palm oil 88 and made composite candles too. Blood-related trades visited by Ballard included Riley of Plymouth. Complaints related to these trades were reported in the local press, such as the ​

81 Western Daily Mercury, 31 October 1863, p.8. ​ 82 Western Daily Mercury, 6 August 1864, concerning Devonport. ​ 83 Western Morning News, 9 March 1878. ​ 84 Western Morning News, 20 March 1869. ​ 85 Western Daily Mercury, 18 March 1864, p.4. ​ 86 Journal of the Society of Arts, 24: 1224 (5 May 1876), p.560. ​ 87 Western Daily Mercury, 21 June 1864, p.4. ​ 88 Annual Report of the Medical Officer: Supplement to the Annual Report of the Local Government Board 6 (1876): ‘Report by Dr Ballard on the Effluvium Nuisances arising in connexion ​ with various manufacturing and other branches of industry. Part I.’ 16

‘horrible nuisance’ in the area of Old Town Street in 1885, that ‘seemingly arises from the boiling 89 of tallow. The smell is intolerable, especially to those who reside in neighbourhood.’ The port authorities dealt with pollution caused by using the waters – nature’s great laboratory of purification, to repeat Truscott’s phrase – as a waste tip: for example the ditching 90 of barrels of animal refuse into the Hamoaze, as reported in November 1893. An Order in Council for the regulation of the covering this stipulated the following:

No ballast, stones, earth, clay, refuse, ashes, rubbish, dust, filth of any description, nor refuse from any quarry, mine, or pit, shall be unladen, cast, nor allowed to fall into the waters of the Dockyard port, nor into nor upon the banks, nor any portion of the shores of the said Dockyard port, nor into nor upon the shores of any rivers or streams discharging into the said Dockyard port by rain, tide, or otherwise.

Other sources of pollution linked to mining and arsenic works affected the local rivers and were brought to the attention of the public through press reports of meetings such as the Tamar and 91 Plym Board of Conservators. The urban environment became filthy through summer-time dust and winter mud: parochial responses included sprinkling the pavements with water (as Joshua Truscott noted). The ‘sweepings of Plymouth streets, night-soil, rubbish, &c,’ by the by, had formed part of an experiment in artificial manures at Regnothan Farm on the Earl of Falmouth’s estate, in the early 92 1840s.

ix. Air quality

The inhabitants of Plymouth are fortunate in having a place like the Hoe so near the town: here 93 is the favourite promenade, and the population swell forth to inhale the sea breeze …

Another aspect of the environmental history of the nineteenth century, and also something that in this era of ‘lockdown’ and shutdown of transport networks we are acutely aware of, is the quality of the air we breathe. Mention has already been made, above, of the nuisance of smells from industry as diligently investigated and reported by Edward Ballard, but domestic heating spewed out smoke and overcrowded dwellings meant that even if people opened their windows,

89 ‘Surely something should be done to put stop to its continuance. On whom does the duty devolve? Yours truly, E. S. S, Old Town-street, Plymouth, September 22nd, 1885’. 90 Western Morning News, 23 November 1893, p.5. From Mrs Robb’s establishment ​ apparently. 91 ‘Tamar and Plym Fishery Board,’ Western Daily Mercury, 7 January 1889, p.3. ​ ​ 92 The Farmer’s Magazine, 1844 9: 4, April 1844, p.427, quoting E. Head, An Essay On ​ ​ Artificial And Other Manures To which a Premium was awarded by Sir Charles Lemon Bart MP through the Cornwal Agricultural Association by W.F. Karkeek Secretary to the Association and Author of the Prize Essay on Fat and Muscle which the Premium of 20 was awarded by Royal Agricultural Society of England 1843 (Truro and London: Longman Brown Green and ​ Longmans, 1844). 93 The Stranger’s Hand-Book to the Western Metropolis; Containing a ... Description of Plymouth, ​ ​ Devonport, Stonehouse, and Neighbourhood, Including the Government Establishments: ... by a Naval Officer (Devonport: Wood, 1841), p.18. ​ 17

94 they ‘got nothing but stink’. On the other hand, there was a belief in the health-giving air of the 95 seaside, the ‘salubrious breezes that fan our healthful shores’. Henry Carrington, in his guidebook of 1828, called the Hoe the ‘lungs’ of Plymouth, where inhabitants inhaled the 96 ‘refreshing sea breezes’ after a ‘contracted atmosphere’. (Probably when he described Plymouth 97 and Devonport ‘reposing in smoky haze’ he was being poetic about mists and heat haze. ) John Butter (17091 – 1877), president of the Western Medical and Chirurgical Society and physician to the Plymouth Eye Infirmary, claimed in a pamphlet in the 1820s that the air of Plymouth was ‘mild, salubrious, and beneficial to invalids’ and similar claims were made by Granville that the mild and salubrious atmosphere earned the place the title of the ‘Montpellier of England’. But Robert Rawlinson’s mid-nineteenth-century sanitary report alluded to the 98 ‘gaseous contaminations of crowded dwellings’ in Devonport. Victorians were unsurprisingly preoccupied with ventilating homes and public edifices, as represented by the lecture in George Street Lecture Hall, by the sanitary inspector W.J. Addiscott in 1890, an associate of the Sanitary Institute, on ‘The Air We Breathe’. Addiscott referred to the medication or disinfection of air through a ‘Crosse ventilator which the lecturer described as allowing of medicated or disinfected air being thrown into the room the disinfecting fluid being held in a neat metal trough out of 99 sight’. The sea air was reported in guidebooks as source of enjoyment for promenading inhabitants, as the quotation heading this section indicates: in Devonport, Richmond Walk was 100 reported in the 1820s as ‘much frequented by the inhabitants, who here inhale the sea-breeze’. But Rawlinson’s report in 1854 had linked the climate in Devonport with an air that was readily tainted by decomposing matter. Taint of another sort concludes my look at filthy Plymouth, as I turn to the anxieties about the moral contamination caused by all sorts of groups classed as filthy and undesirable by social commentators, philanthropists and those with responsibility for law and order.

x. Moral pollution

Some commentary on the early-Victorian cholera epidemics in Plymouth linked the disease with the moral failings of inhabitants, Edward Roe in the Medical Times for instance, linking the ​ squalor of Stonehouse Lane (renamed King Street West) with its inhabitants, many of whom were ‘thieves, Irish tramps, and the lowest class of prostitutes’. The houses were dirty and dilapidated, their inhabitants, ‘offensive and unclean’. The West of England Conservative reported ​ that ‘vagrants of every class’ lived there, and that it was the ‘customary resort of the numerous Irish families, who come here in great numbers by the steamers, in the hope of gaining, by vagrancy in this country, that subsistence which they cannot, or will not earn by industry in their

94 Western Morning News, 7 March 1879, p.4. ​ 95 G. Granvile, A companion to the Plymouth and Devonport national breakwater (London: ​ ​ Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825), p.48. See J. Hassan, The Seaside, ​ Health and the Environment in England and Wales since 1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). ​ 96 H.E. Carrington, The Plymouth and Devonport Guide (Devonport: Byers, 1828), p.47. ​ ​ 97 Carrington, The Plymouth and Devonport Guide, p.121. ​ ​ 98 Butter, Remarks on irritative fever , commonly called the Plymouth dock-yard disease (Devonport: ​ ​ ​ ​ Congdon and Hearle,1825), p.138; Granvile, A companion to the Plymouth and Devonport ​ national breakwater, p53. ​ 99 The Builder, 5 April 1890, p.257. ​ 100 The Stranger’s Hand-Book, p.41. ​ 18

101 own’. While there was recognition in such discourse of the role of environment and poverty, moral failings were seen as playing a part, in the form of ‘habits’ and ‘the intemperance to which they surrender themselves’. As a historian of the nineteenth century, I encounter Plymouth in a national context in the work on the Contagious Diseases Acts. As a centre for the armed forces, Plymouth became a site for the enforcement of the act designed to control sexually-transmitted disease in the military. In this context, we see filth as a contamination caused by sexual activity: in which the sex worker tended to be blamed. But the ‘Anti-CD Acts’ movement focused on the outrage to female bodies caused by the enforcement of the legislation, as well as the sexual ‘double 102 standard’ that targeted women rather than male clients. For moral reformers it was not only brothels that were a source of moral contamination. Public houses and the drink trade were seen as sites of pollution for members of the temperance movement, as one work commented in 1841:

What surveying eye could trace the map of Devonport, and behold the many polluted streams which issue from two hundred and seventeen impure fountains [beer shops, pubs, breweries, wine and spirit vaults], spreading poverty, disease, and death – more baneful than the cholera, which once ravaged amongst the 103 inhabitants, without exclaiming, ‘what hath God wrought?’

xi. Alternatives to filth? Water-power

I end this rapid survey of filth and disease, nuisances and noisomeness, by highlighting one aspect where Plymouth was harnessing an alternative energy supply for several centuries. Joshua Truscott’s essay had advocated a sophisticated use of clean energy from water, but water wheels were still in operation at the start of the century in the locality. Water wheels were in use in Plymouth, still powered by the leat to grind corn in the early nineteenth century (the higher and lower grist mills at Drake’s place and Mill Street and Higher Malt Mill in Russell Street – used for 104 fulling). The Plymouth-born artist artist Samuel Prout painted ‘The Water-mill and Manor House near Plymouth’ for exhibition in 1808. In 1804 when there was case in Chancery about the funds made available from the Corporation to the Hospital of Orphans’ Aid, there were ten 105 mills on the leat. A malt mill had been converted to a mill for manufacturing.

101 ‘The Sisters of Mercy, Devonport’, p.108. 102 The key work is J.R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State ​ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 103 The history of teetotalism in Devonshire (Devonport: Hunt, 1841), p.76. ​ 104 The Picture of Plymouth; being a correct Guide To The Public Establishments Charitable Institutions Amusements And Remarkable Objects In The Towns Of Plymouth, Plymouth Dock, Stonehouse, Stoke and The Vicinity (Plymouth: Rees and Curtis, 1812). The mills appear in E. Stuart, ​ Lost landscapes of Plymouth: maps, charts and plans to 1800 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1991). ​ 105 The Law Journal Reports for the Year 1846: comprising Reports of Cases in the Courts of Chancery, King’s Bench, and Common Pleas, vol.24, Part I. Chancery and Bankruptcy (London: Holmes, ​ 1856), p.111.

19

By the time that Nathaniel Beardmore published his pamphlet in the 1840s, the mill-course which diverted water from Drake’s leat worked several mills on the way to Millbay. It was ponded up for a mill at the point where it fell into the tide at Millbay, unfortunately thereby causing pollution. In Devonport a wheel of 20-horse power was used to grind corn in Devonport leat only in the 1840s, as Truscott noted.

Conclusion This short essay used the freely or readily available online material provided by digitised government reports, local newspapers, local histories and pamphlets, to explore aspects of Plymouth’s nineteenth-century environmental history. The pollutions inflicted on the inhabitants of the Three Towns in that period were all too visible to the eyes or sensible to the olfactory organs: piles of animal and human excrement, choking smoke from industries, and filthy water courses. Today we have invisible pollutants and have knowledge of the airborne threats from bacteria and viruses that the Victorians were unaware of. Visible filth for the Victorians who believed for much of the period in the miasmatic theory of disease, linked rotting organic material ​ with disease and as I have shown, some commentary associated Plymouth’s climate to the danger of decaying organic matter. Town worthies: elected leaders, medical officers of health and other local members of the medical profession, and members of the public, endeavoured to improve the environment through public campaigns and public measures aimed at slums, and the provision of drainage and water to the towns as a whole. Other efforts to improve the environment not discussed here included public parks and cemeteries. National and local politics complicated the responses, the concerns of ratepayers often featured in public discussion.

20

Appendix

A letter from the surgeon Lorenzo Pastor Tripe, to the secretary of the South Devon Sanitary Association, 1848.

I have so much faith in the good sense of the individuals who compose the various councils, vestries, and boards, to whom are entrusted the duties of local government, that I am convinced you have but to show them that they are standing in the way of the common weal, to induce them cheerfully to submit to such changes as may be necessary. I am happy to perceive that you have entered fully on this part of the subject in the last number of your valuable journal, and I beg to offer you two or three instances, which may be adduced from this neighbourhood, as proofs of the impossibility of carrying out an efficient plan of sanitary reform without government superintendence. Whilst engaged in making a report on the sanitary condition of this town, a tradesman complained to me that the health of his family and workmen suffered, from a very large number of pigs being kept in a yard behind his house; they were fed with offal from a slaughterhouse adjoining, and a more disgusting nuisance I never witnessed. I asked him why he did not complain. He said it would be useless; at the same time mentioning the influence which would be brought to bear against him. I next asked why he did not appeal to his landlord. ‘That would be useless, too, he replied, “as the pigs are his best tenants.’ The landlord, a butcher, is a commissioner. ​ Again, I have visited to-day a house in the town, containing 111 inhabitants, which has been lately built: there is no privy or any convenience but a shed; the court is consequently flooded with filth, the fluid portion of which finds its way under the house into the gutter; the water in the well is so contaminated as to be unfit for use, although the inhabitants still have recourse to it — the consequence is, that a mother and her child have died of typhus, the father is dying, and other members of one of the families are ill. This house, too, belongs to a commissioner. ​ In another house I have attended three fatal cases of typhus, and two others which recovered. There is a privy, the solid contents of which find their way into a large pit, which is only emptied once in nine months, while the fluid contents are conveyed by a gutter, cut for the purpose, to a cesspool two feet square, cut out of the rock, and situated immediately outside the kitchen window; when the cesspool is full, the surplus finds its way under the house into the street. This is a large and much frequented public-house, and the property of a commissioner. ​ These instances might be multiplied ad infinitum; indeed, there is scarcely any property in ​ ​ the town which does not belong to some member of the local government or his connexions. But, Sir, I should not have troubled you with these remarks if I had not further evidence to prove how inefficiently the present system, or any proposed alteration, would work, if unaided by the experience of a proper authority, totally unconnected with the district. The property in this important town, which contains nearly 40,000 inhabitants, belongs exclusively to one family; it is almost entirely held on leases for three lives, with, sometimes, the right of adding a fourth. Under these circumstances, can we expect that any improvement should take place. Who is to be called upon to make drains and incur the other necessary expenses? The tenant, of course, will have nothing to do with it; the lord of the manor declines; and the proprietor of the house, whose interest depends, perhaps, on a single and aged life, says, apparently with good reason, “I shall not spend any more money about a house which may cease to be mine to-morrow.” Such was the language held to me by the owner of the public-house which I have just mentioned. Could local government deal firmly and fairly with such cases, presented, too, as they would be in this town, under every form of delicacy and difficulty. The experience of the past shows that they could not. Partiality, false economy, and vested interest would arise to frighten or seduce, as the case might be; and I feel confident that, however excellent and perfect the measure may be in other respects, it would, within a very short period, become a dead letter, if

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unaccompanied by Government superintendence. It therefore behoves you, Sir, and every friend of sanitary reform, to keep this point steadily in view, and to press it constantly upon the attention of every member of the legislature.

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Notes

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