It may be noted that the last 228 houses in the above list have only 33 closets among them. — B. Seebohm Rowntree
A large proportion of the closets in the working-class districts of the city take the form of midden privies. [Note: According to the Report of the Medical Officer of Health, there were 6418 midden privies in York at the end of 1900.] In these the closet and ashpit are combined, the refuse from both accumulating in a brick-lined pit. From the point of view of public health there is no doubt that midden privies are unsatisfactory, even when they are frequently cleansed. Until January 1901, however, the Corporation made a charge of about Is. each time an ashpit or midden privy was cleared, thus giving the householder a strong inducement to allow refuse to accumulate for as long a time as possible.
In his report on the prevalence of typhoid fever in York, drawn up at the request of the Local Government Board in 1900, the Medical Officer of Health says:
Taking the whole of the cases into consideration, I find that the majority were associated with the existence of midden privies, most of which were more or less foul or leaking, with uncemented walls and floors, in not a few instances with dilapidated walls, most of them permitting of the pollution of the adjacent soil. The cementing of the walls and floors with many of the privies is insufficient to prevent pollution of the soil, as it is often cracked and so permits soakage ; a large number of them are found inches deep in liquid filth, or so full of refuse as to reach above the cemented portions of the walls.
At the time when the present investigation was being made (1899) the condition of many of these midden privies was extremely foul. The description given by the Chief Sanitary Inspector of Glasgow regarding the midden privies of that city applies equally to those in York: "None," he says,
but those who have spent days in the slums can adequately realise the difierence it makes when an ashpit can no longer with truth be called a midden. To be in one of these midden-courts when the satellite of cleansing is busy at his operations can only compare with the experience of poor FalstafF in Mrs. Ford's buck basket,' that there is the rankest compound of villanous smell that ever ofiended nostril.' The midden even in its undisturbed state, if the weather is mild, smells to heaven' every hour of the day, and no housewife with any remnant of an olfactory nerve will open her window if it be 15 feet from it."
In the case of not a few houses in York the closet is only separated from the pantry by a partition wall 4 inches thick. [184/187]
Links to Related Material
- From Inconvenience to Pollution — Redefining Sewage in The Victorian Age
- Sanitation and Its absence
- Chadwick's Report on Sanitary Conditions
- London Nightmen (cesspool-sewermen)
- Good Intentions, Unexpected Consequences: Thames Pollution of and The Great Stink of 1858
- Punch on Thames Pollution (1859)
Bibliography
Rowntree, B. Seebohm (Benjamin Seebohm). Poverty, a Study of Town Life. London, Macmillan: 1902. Internet Archive online version of a copy in the Harvard University Library. Web. 2 July 2022.
Created 5 July 2022