The Local Historian Volume 39 No 3 The Local Historian Volume THETLHEOCAL HISTORIAN JOURNAL OF THEL BRITISHOCAL ASSOCIATION FOR LOCAL HISTORY August 2009 www.balh.co.uk Volume 39 No 3 Urban government in the industrial age • London vestries 1780-1830 • The politics of urban improvement in Huddersfield • Engineering sanitary reform in Victorian Lincoln • Alexander Hathorn, the Huddersfield agent for the Ramsden Estate (photograph of portrait The Latin Project • Loyalty in Elizabethan Cumberland • Local history internet sites • by Broadhead in the Huddersfield Art Gallery collection, reproduced with the kind permission Lionel Munby and Margaret Gelling; appreciations of their lives and work of Kirklees Council Culture & Leisure Services) [see article by David Griffiths, pp.193-207]. Front Cover: The area south-east of Lincoln cathedral from Giles’ 20-inch coloured plan, with examples of contours [pecked lines], sewer routes and gradients (including curving junctions). The numbers in circles represent the intended depths of sewer trenches at selected points, the deepest in the city at 24.6 ft, central and close to the south edge of this section. The small numbers are heights at the surface above the local datum. The colours blue and red represent sizes 4 and 5. Size 4 was to be 15x9 inches if egg-shaped brick sewer, 12 inches diameter if a circular earthenware pipe; size 5 was to be 9x6 or 7.5 inches (from ms plan in personal copy of Giles’ 1849 report, from the Local Studies Collection, Lincoln Central Library, courtesy of Lincolnshire County Council) [see article by Dennis Mills, pp.208-218]. The Local Historian is published four times a year, in February, May, August and November. Single copies may be purchased for £5 including postage and packing. For more information and enquiries about The Local above: part of the large-scale coloured plan showing Gadsby’s Court, at the back of Gadsby’s shop, Historian and the British Association for Local History, please visit our website at www.balh.co.uk or write to 38 Sincil Street, Lincoln, with cramped housing, piggeries, privies, close to pumps [dust holes = BALH PO Box 6549, Somersal Herbert, ASHBOURNE DE6 5WH. ash pits]. Sincil St runs along bottom edge of this section: from lithographed drawing 3 in Giles’ Articles for possible inclusion in The Local Historian should be sent to the editor, Dr Alan Crosby, 77 Wellington 1849 report; Street, PRESTON PR1 8TQ. A style-sheet, ‘Notes for contributors’, is available on request. We welcome articles below: part of the large scale coloured plan showing artisan/shopkeeper terraces below the on any subject in the field of local history, and the editor is always pleased to discuss ideas for contributions and to advise on their preparation. County Hospital. The vertical line shows the position of the geological section Giles published as drawing 1 to help demonstrate the drainage problem. His house was within less than 200 yards of All books for review, and journals for listing in the ‘Recent publications in local history’ section, should be sent the west end of Maud’s Hill Terrace: from lithographed drawing 2 in Giles’ 1849 report (both to Dr Evelyn Lord, Book Reviews, PO Box 649 CAMBRIDGE CB1 0JW. from the Local Studies Collection, Lincoln Central Library, courtesy of Lincolnshire County The Local Historian is printed by Salisbury Printing Company Limited, Greencroft Street, SALISBURY SP1 1JF Council) [see article by Dennis Mills, pp.208-218] THE LOCAL HISTORIAN • ISSN 00245585 • Volume 39 • Number 3 • August 2009 • CONTENTS Editorial ALAN CROSBY 178 Aspects of urban government in the industrial age The London vestries 1780-1830: part 1 A.D. HARVEY 179 Building an alliance for urban improvement: Huddersfield 1844-1848 DAVID GRIFFITHS 192 Local studies in sanitary reform: the importance of the engineering aspect Lincoln 1848-1850 DENNIS MILLS 207 The Latin Project ANN RYCRAFT 218 ‘The riders of Renwick’: loyalty to the flag in Elizabethan Cumberland RICHARD BROCKINGTON 224 Sources for local history Local history internet sites: an update for 2009 JACQUELENÉ FILLMORE 228 Appreciations: the life and work of two great figures in local history Lionel M. Munby (1918–2009) David Short 236 Margaret Gelling (1924–2009) Alan Crosby 238 Review articles Three recently-published diaries Kate Tiller 240 Local history and war Evelyn Lord 243 Landscape archaeology and landscape history Graham Winton 246 Reviews 251 Liverpool’s inconvenient imperial past (ed. Haggerty, Webster and White) Alan Crosby Historic buildings of Stevenage (Ashby, Cudmore, Killick) Adam Longcroft The impact of the first Civil War on Hertfordshire (ed. Thomson) David L. Smith Lowestoft 1550-1750 (Butcher) The history of Ipswich (Twinch) Frank Grace Woodstock probate documents 1530-1700 (ed. Crutch, Smith, Taylor) Heather Falvey VCH East Riding vol.8 Sledmere and Northern Wolds (Neave) Roger Bellingham Cartulary of Hospital of St John the Evangelist Cambridge(ed. Underwood) Claire Cross The Midland Peasant (Hoskins) Oxford Companion to Family and Local History (ed. Hey) Evelyn Lord Recent publications in local history 260 •EDITORIAL • The enduring attraction of sewage is one of the fixtures of local history. Few subjects are as effective in drawing a good audience to a talk a local society, few themes retain the attention of students so successfully and, as a I found by listening in to a school visit at a Welsh castle recently, nothing so grips the imagination of children. But of course sewage, and all that went with it—schemes for new sewerage systems, public health crises, heartbreaking levels of infant mortality and deplorably bad housing— was among the hottest issues in social policy and domestic politics during the 1840s and 1850s. Generations of historians have researched and analysed the process whereby, slowly and at huge cost, civilised standards of urban living were gradually adopted and enforced in the second half of the nineteenth century. But there is still so much to discover. The emergence of effective local government, a seemingly unglamorous topic, was a fundamental change in Victorian society, but local circumstances were everywhere different. Sanitary reform and the improvement of public health was a crucial force in that process, but in researching individual communities the impact of particular personalities, the power of landowners, the influence of the local press, and the prevailing social and economic context are all of direct relevance to the process. As with so much else in local history, we can delve beneath the generalisations to find the specifics—the detail of what actually happened—and then, maybe, that detailed analysis in its turn informs the wider view. In this issue of The Local Historian there are three articles which I have collectively entitled ‘Aspects of urban government in the industrial age’. Arnold Harvey, in the first part of a detailed investigation of the London vestries of the Georgian and Regency periods—that extraordinary jigsaw of authorities which constituted the local government of the world’s largest city. He shows how the force of personalities, the legacy of centuries of organic evolution, and the almost paranoid government fear of the mob helped the shape the development of the capital. In his analysis of Huddersfield, one of the archetypal fast-growing industrial towns of the early Victorian period, David Griffiths highlights the role of the landowner in determining the emergence of urban government, and points to the often bitter political arguments which raged over the wisdom and merits not only of different policies towards pressing social problems, but also of the structures of administration themselves. Dennis Mills takes a fresh look at the sewerage issue, suggesting that although many local historians have investigating urban sanitation in the 1840s and 1850s, few have paid sufficient attention to the engineering dimensions, and to the part that civil engineers played in helping to resolve public health problems in the context of local government policy. Each of these articles demonstrates that continuing research on this familiar topic can provide new insights and understandings, and that—as Dennis Mills points out—other local historians can research their own communities and contribute to our knowledge of this crucial period in our history. But remember—reading some of the contemporary material requires a strong stomach! ALAN CROSBY 178 Aspects of urban government in the industrial age Parish politics: London vestries 1780–1830 (part 1) A. D. HARVEY Introduction At the beginning of the nineteenth century the metropolitan area outside the City of London—south-east Middlesex, north-east Surrey, north-west Kent and south-west Essex—was administered primarily by the vestries of over ninety ecclesiastical parishes.1 Some were still largely rural, built up only along the main roads leading out of the City. Others, such as Chelsea, where there were extensive nurseries, or Kensington, on the eastern edge of ‘the great garden … for the supply of London’, were substantial communities set amid greenery: Chelsea had a population of 11,604 in 1801 and 32,371 in 1831, and Kensington grew to over 20,000 inhabitants by 1831.2 From Hyde Park to Bow the built-up area extended without a break, though there were still odd corners in which to erect new dwellings. Altogether fourteen metropolitan parishes outside the City of London had populations of over 20,000 in 1801, and eighteen had over 30,000 in 1831 (including two, St Marylebone and St Pancras, with populations of more than 100,000). These parishes were major administrative entities—the civic leaders of St Luke’s Middlesex referred to themselves as ‘the Inhabitants of this extensive parish inferior in population only to six Cities and Towns in England and Wales’.3 Most of the surviving public buildings erected by nineteenth-century vestries belong to later in the century, but the vestry offices of St Martin in the Fields at the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square, blending harmoniously with the grand buildings all round the square, date from before 1830.