A Description of Whitehaven - from Mannix & Whellan 1847

part 2

"In 1847 it was a large and opulent Sea Port and Market Town, in the parish of St.Bees, three miles north of the lofty promontory of St.Bees Head, is seated on the Irish sea, or rather at the mouth of that portion of it denominated the Solway Frith, in a small creek, which forms the harbour, overlooked on the other sides by green hills, which rise abruptly from the outskirts of the town.

 It was so inconsiderable a place in the 16th century as not to be noticed by Camden but by the exertions of the family of the Earl of Lonsdale, who have been lords of the manor for about two centuries, Whitehaven has risen from a few huts to a wealthy and flourishing sea port town. The ancestors of this noble family having discovered coal in the sides of the hills were not slow to avail themselves of the natural advantages for shipment of the produce of the mines, afforded by the projecting rocks on the south, which had previously attracted the notice of the few fishermen to the creek.

In course of time the working of these being prosecuted with spirit, great employment ensued, and better accommodation being required, pier after pier was added, the coal trade prospered, greatly to the emolument of the House of Lowther, and a town grew up, which has long held a distinguished rank amongst the commercial ports of Great Britain. It is laid out with much taste and elegance; most of the streets are broad and straight, intersecting each other at right angles; the houses are chiefly built of stone, and roofed with blue slate, and some of the public buildings are handsome and spacious structures."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Digging a little further for their background information might have provided further information perhaps from more reliable "official" sources.

To an ordinary and careless observer, Whitehaven may appear a clean town, when in fact,
according to the Parliamentary Gazette of 1845-46, it is described as follows.

"The town itself is one of the most handsome in all the northern counties: the streets being regular and spacious and crossing each other at right angles, many of the buildings are very neat, and the shops exhibit a degree of elegance seldom, till recently, seen in the north."

This may apply to the main streets, such as Lowther street, Duke street, King street, Scotch street and some others which are wide and open, with convenient foot-walks flagged, and the road way either paved or macadamized.

These streets are tolerably clean, and may be considered "convenient for purposes of business"; but even the houses here and the streets themselves, have no useful sewers or drains; they are generally confined at the back; and crowded with a poorer class of property; few have privies or ash-pits, and the inhabitants are compelled either to keep their refuse on the premises until removed by the scavenger's cart, or it is thrown out into the street.

But a casual examination of this portion of the town alone; will give no indication of its true state and condition; the back streets must be noticed, the courts and passages in confined places examined, the room and cellar tenements visited, the public lodging-houses inspected, and then such an amount of human wretchedness and misery will be revealed, as few persons in better circumstances would believe existed. Words written or spoken can not convey to the mind the
whole state of things, there must be sight and smell to aid and inform the imagination. The pen of novelist never yet depicted such a depth of utter wretchedness. There is a grim facetiousness about the names of the town and places in Whitehaven - Mount Pleasant, Solomon's Temple, Harmless hill and Rosemary lane."

It is obvious that the once beautiful Georgian town had fallen on very hard times by 1847. The reason is not hard to find as it was brought about by the rapid expansion of the population coming from the large increase coal mining in the town along with the restriction of available building land from Lord Lonsdale who did nor want the homes of the labouring classes encroaching upon his opulent accommodation situated on the outskirts of the town. He said "so far and no further." The only option was to in-fill the existing area with ever more buildings to house the expanding population.

A major problem with Whitehaven was the fact that there was no Town Council, this function was provided by the Harbour Commissioners but who saw their duty as running a successful harbour and not concerning themselves about the living conditions of the workers of the town. In fact they decided that the Parliamentary Public Health Act did not apply to their town. Eventually matters became so serious that one Committee of the House of Lords instigated an investigation into the high mortality & infection rates for the town. They appointed a Commissioner to investigate.

His investigations resulted in 42 page - plus appendices report prepared for the members of the House of Lords

His concluding paragraph reads:-

"That therefore the application of the Public Health Act is not only imperatively necessary, but will be of the greatest advantage, morally, physically, and pecuniarily, as the benefits will be reaped like by rich and poor.  The labourer will be relieved from much preventible sickness, poverty, and despair; the health of all classes will be improved, and the present oppressive rates reduced."

I have the honour to be,
My Lords and Gentlemen,
Your most obedient Servant,
ROBERT RAWLINSON.

It would appear that the people in control of the town of Whitehaven did not take kindly to the criticism, implied or actual, made in this HM Government report. Comparisons with Birmingham and even a comparison with the efforts made by the people of Liverpool to improve their town, along with such revolutionary concepts as Cost / Benefit analysis, passed by the Local Authority without impact. It can be seen from the Whitehaven Board of Health report for 1863 - that little improvement had been made in the meantime to the lives of the towns people, and " in every other respect the town of Whitehaven remains precisely as it was".

It is little wonder that the people left to seek a better life in the New World !

The Report
The full report makes terrible reading as the living conditions described are almost unbelievable, to understand this then see the extracts given in the article below

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

CONCLUSIONS
Whitehaven, from some cause or other, is overbuilt, that is the cottages are crowded together, without due consideration as to ventilation, light, or privy convenience.  The cellars and room tenements also afford, from their apparent low rental, facilities for overcrowding.  In many instances, courts were originally constructed with an open area or yard, say of 10 yards square, betwixt the fronts of the houses, but a demand for cottages arising, the owners built up blocks of them on these confined spaces leaving mere passages betwixt the houses. These secondary passages are entered by a covered passage from the street: many of these places have been converted into room tenements.

I made particular inquiry as to the reason of this fearful overcrowding, but could not obtain any satisfactory answer. The land surrounding the town was said to belong to Lord Lonsdale, and there was also said to be a difficulty in purchasing it.  But it is more probable the overcrowding has arisen from the thoughtless cupidity of owners of cottage property, and the want of power and disposition in the town authorities to control it.

The late condition of Liverpool, its confined and crowded courts and cellar tenements, may he taken as a parallel case.  Here it was not any difficulty in the purchase of land, but the cupidity of landlords and the apathy of local authority.  A local Act has emptied the cellar tenements, and instituted a controlling power in the construction of streets and courts ; and the health of the inhabitants is materially improved in consequence.

In many of the cellar tenements space has been obtained under the passage to the courts and yards. These have been arched over, and are added to the cellars but as the surface water and drainage of the courts and yards must find its way over the surface down the passages, and as the channels are frequently broken and out of order, the wet percolates through into the vault beneath, keeping it in a constant state of damp, the smell from which is most offensive, because all the liquid refuse of the court houses is mixed with the rainfall.  Yet in these vault-recesses human beings sleep, either on wretched beds, or on mere filthy rubbish and straw.

The overcrowding of houses in a town is most injurious to all parties, and to none more than to the owners of the property; for a degraded and wretched tenantry are the consequence, from which the rent is with difficulty obtained; the property soon becomes ruinous, and sinks with the occupiers into the fearful state detailed.  The nominally low rental of    "sixpence," "nine pence," " one shilling," and " one shilling and sixpence" a week is in reality extravagantly dear to the unfortunate occupiers, as every feeling of self respect is deadened, the constitution weakened, disease engendered, which ends in loss of work, from inability, and ultimate pauperism.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The following information was furnished by the Surveyor to the Commissioners.
Mr. Piele, chairman of the trustees of the Town and Harbour, stated :-

THE SEWERS
There is no general system of sewers; such as exist are cleaned by hand: there are no traps on any of them.  There is no power in our Acts to compel parties to use the sewers for house refuse.
There are no sewers or drains in the streets generally; sometimes, in hot weather, the channels become very disagreeable.

The Rev. Henry Lowther stated " The present drainage of the town is quite ineffectual, and, to speak correctly, there is no general system of drainage."

This evidence is from gentlemen who opposed the Inquiry on the plea that the Public Health Act was not needed in Whitehaven.

 In my personal inspection I found most painful evidence of the want of sewers and drains; every square yard of confined surface is more or less covered with refuse, and the privies and cesspools which exist are generally in the filthiest possible condition from the same cause. The town, from its peculiar position, rising on two sides of a valley, is well placed for efficient drainage, at the least cost most of the streets have a good fall, so that drains of a minimum size will answer.  Several plans for new sewers have, from time to time, been proposed ; but merely as an addition to those which are at present so imperfect and objectionable.

THE SUPPLY OF WATER
Whitehaven has several forms of water supply, as detailed in the evidence furnished by Mr. Piele and others; and it is worthy of consideration, that a town may have, as here, artificial and natural means of supply, and yet suffer the greatest possible inconvenience and privation, because it is given at isolated points, in stand-pipes, which are here termed fountains, and from pumps.

I examined a reservoir which supplied some of these fountains, and found it situated in the centre of a garden in High-street; it was divided by a rubble wall into two areas, the dimensions of one 123 feet by 36 feet, the other 39 feet by 36 feet. The ground on one side sloped towards the reservoir at an angle of about two and a half to one, commencing from the coping, so that all the surface, in fact, all the drainage, must pass into the reservoir ; there were several cart-loads of manure laid in a heap on this side at the time of my visit, not two yards from the water ; it was raining, and the liquid, in dark-coloured rills, was trickling into the water, the whole of which had a dirty muddy appearance, and in this state, unfiltered, it passed to the "fountains" for use.

Mr. W. Miller, one of the Harbour Trustees, gave his evidence on this Water supply as follows:

"I consider the want of water one of the greatest evils.  The reservoir from which the water is supplied to the fountains is in a very bad and filthy condition in summer, and I think much of the sickness and disease amongst the poorer class arises from this."

These fountains are upwards of a quarter of a mile from some of the crowded districts, and all are liable to fail in a very dry summer.

The present supply of water has been brought from springs in the neighborhood, without charge, by Lord Lonsdale. The quantity supplied is about 40 to 50 gallons a minute when the spring is full, but in the latter summer there is a scarcity felt, the springs run off during dry weather.

Lord Lonsdale has reserved to himself the right to this water, and he has taken it for use in the pits when the water has been very scarce. The present Lord Lonsdale has brought another supply into the town, but it is reserved for his own use if he should require it. This is also about 40 to 50 gallons a minute.

There is not a private house or cottage supplied with water, the water supply is at present very defective

The pumps are situated generally in confined yards; few have water fit for use, as it is either hard or vitiated with surface and cesspool refuse.  But most of them are broken or otherwise out of order

The Ginns District, comprising a population of 865 people, or thereabouts is equally unprovided with water, only four pumps were met with, and these were private property. There is no fountain in the neighbourhood, and the poor have a long way to fetch their water.

In Mount Pleasant District, containing 108 houses, with a population of upwards of 500 people, there are no pumps, and the water has to be brought from a considerable distance, and at great inconvenience to the poor people, up a long range of steps from the fountain in Quay street.

In looking over the entire town, comprising a population, along with that part in Preston Quarter, of about 16,000 people, we find there are only 11 public fountains; and, during the dry seasons, all classes of the inhabitants have frequently to remain waiting at them for a scanty supply of water to very untimely hours; indeed, in times of great scarcity, which do not in-frequently occur, parties may be seen at the fountains waiting for their turn to obtain a supply all night long.

 

Nev.Ramsden, April 2009