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| Pigs and Pigsties |
| In 1849 journalist Angus Reach travelled throughout Britain and reported on the state of some of the major cities. Leeds did not do very well....... |
| Leeds has little or none of that hothouse appearance which to some extent distinguishes Manchester. It seems in its physical peculiarities a more substantial and slower growing town than its high-pressure cotton neighbour, and it possesses none of the metropolitan attributes of the latter. Leeds has no public parks. With here and there an exceptional spot, the suburbs extend in mean, clumsy, straggling streets out into the bare country. There are no such fair ranges of villas as those which in many quarters skirt the busy portions of Manchester: and the dwellings of the labouring class, to which I shall speedily call attention, are, in point of appearance, and of symmetrical outward an convenient inward arrangement, decidedly inferior to those of the cotton capital . . . |
| I proceeded to the neighbouring row of cottages recently erected. These had each a common room, a bedroom, and a cellar loom shop. In the first when I entered, two Irishmen were weaving a coarse sacking, and the wife of one of them was winding in the bare, scarcely furnished room on the ground floor. The tenant of the room told me that the row was all alike, and belonged to the gentleman for whom he was working. The two looms were fixtures; of course, therefore, he could not rent them without renting the house. The rent was stopped every week out of his wages. Whatever they were, much or little, the rent must always come out of them before he got his money. He believed that the work was given to him just to enable him to pay the rent (which was 3s weekly), and thus to make a good return for the money invested in the house; otherwise it would be cheaper for the master to get the stuff woven by power. His wages, with his wife to wind, were very small, not averaging above 9s or 10s the highest. |
| From another source, I learnt that many of the poor weavers inhabiting houses built upon a similar plan, and with a similar view, had suffered most severely during the last season of depression. It often happened that their wages were entirely absorbed by the rent, while the parish refused them assistance on the very reasonable plea that a man who was paying 3s of weekly rent could not be said to be an object of charity. Thus these poor people had no means of obtaining work, except from a quarter which would give it to them, only on condition that they paid back all or the greater part of their remuneration in rent. In good times, of course, a weaver need not be so hard-driven; but if a master having work for ten men, and being also the landlord of ten houses, says to twenty men seeking employment, "I shall give my work to the ten who will consent to live in my ten houses, and pay me a high rent for them" then assuredly the scheme, if it does not actually amount to the truck system, is a very close imitation of it. |
| In all my peregrinations in the manufacturing capital of Yorkshire, I have not discovered a single operative dwelling with a back and front entrance, and consequently a through current of air. One man, indeed, said that he thought a double house were more wholesome than single ones, because they were snugger and warmer: 'One heats the other,' he said, `like sleeping two in a bed'. |
| The illustration sums up the argument against the practice. In a large proportion of the houses in question, the family, except when all are grown up, sleep together in the higher room. Beds in the lower room are, however, not uncommon. |
| The furniture seldom shows the commonly existing neat comfort, or the less frequently occurring pretension, which marks Manchester tenements of different grades. A parlour kitchen can be made after its own fashion, a very cheerful apartment. Many a one I have recently visited, in which gleams of a good fire were playing on polished pot-lids and glancing crockery, arranged tidily and orderly upon the well scoured racks, the floor either carpeted with a decent drugget, or nicely and trightly sanded: many a house of this class, I repeat, I have lately entered in which the sensation of comfort was very decidedly in the ascendant. But in Leeds I have found as a general rule domestic utensils coarser and scantier, and the spirit of neatness and good housewifery manifested on rarer occasions, and in a slighter degree. . |
| The second and better class of houses, which form the minority, possess a sunken parlour kitchen, half the window of which only rises above the pavement. Above this apartment are placed two rooms in the ordinary manner. The sunken story is not quite a cellar and in many instances, I found it dry, warm and cheerful. When it exists the ground floor room is very generally half unfurnished, the family making the lower apartment the ordinary living place. Good cooking-ranges are abundant |
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| Water is seldom introduced into the houses; the stand-tap system being the usual one, each cook serving a greater or smaller number of houses according to the comparative poverty of the locality. The rents range for the medium class of dwellings, from is 6d to 3s weekly. The houses letting for the former sum are often old places, in bad repair, and with small close rooms. In almost every case the house door is the parlour door. Even in the very superior house, rented at 5s 6.5d by the cloth weaver, a visit to which I have above described, there was no lobby, the door only separating the best room in the house from the street . . . |
| The corporation of Leeds is, I understand, about to spend a very large sum (about £30,000 or £40,000) in the formation of an extensive system of paving, drainage etc., in hitherto neglected portions of the borough. Never were sanitary reforms more imperatively called for. The condition of vast districts of the opulent and important town of Leeds is such that the very strongest language cannot overstate. |
| Virulent and fatal as was the recent attack of cholera here, my wonder is that cholera, or some disease almost equally as fatal, is ever absent. From one house, for instance, situated in a large irregular court or yard - a small house containing two rooms - four corpses were recently carried. I looked about and did not marvel. The whole vicinage was two or three inches deep in filth. This seemed to be the normal state even of the passable parts of the place. In the centre of the open place was a cluster of pigsties, privies and cesspools, bursting with pent-up abominations; and a half a dozen paces from this delectable nucleus was a pit about five feet square filled to the very brim with semi-liquid manure gathered from stables and houses around. This yard lies on the south side of the Aire, not more than a gunshot from Leeds Bridge. |
| The east and northeast districts of Leeds are perhaps the worst. A short walk from the Briggate, in the direction in which Deansgate branches off from the main entry, will conduct the visitor into a perfect wilderness of foulness. Conceive acre on acre of little streets, run up without attention to plan or health - acre on acre of closely built and thickly peopled ground without a paving stone upon the surface, or an inch of sewer beneath, deep trodden - churned sloughs of mud forming the only thoroughfare here and there an open space, used not exactly as a common cesspool, but the common cess-yard of the vicinity - in its centre, ash pits employed for dirtier purposes than containing ashes privies often ruinous, almost horribly foul, pigsties very commonly left pro tempore untenanted, because their usual inmates have been turned out to prey upon the garbage of the neighbourhood. |
| Conceive streets, and courts, and yards which a scavenger (street cleaner) never appears to have entered since King John incorporated Leeds, and which gives the idea of a town built in a slimy bog. |
| Conceive such a surface drenched with the liquid slops which each family flings out daily and nightly before their own threshold, and further fouled by the malpractices of children, for which the parents and not the children deserve shame and punishment. |
| Conceive, in short, a whole district to which the above description truthfully and rigidly applies; and you will, I am sorry to say, have a fair idea of what at presents constitutes a large proportion of the operative part of Leeds. |
| I have seen here and there in Bradford spots very nearly, and in Halifax, spots quite as bad; but here it is no spot - the foulness over large sections of the town, particularly towards the suburbs, constitutes the very face and essence of things. |
| I have plodded by the half hour through the streets in which the undisturbed mud lay in wreaths from wall to wall; and across open spaces, overlooked by houses all round, in which the pigs, wandering from this central oasis, seemed to be roaming through what was only a large sty. |
| Indeed, pigs seem to be the natural inhabitants of such places. I think that they are more common in some parts of Leeds than dogs and cats are in others; and wherever they abound, wherever the population is the filthiest, there are the houses, the smallest, the rooms the closest and the most overcrowded. |
| One characteristic of such localities is a curious and significant one. Before almost every house-door there lies a little heap of boiled-out tea leaves, until of course, the pig comes upon the deposit. Although all the domestic refuse is flung out, you hardly ever see bones; but the teapot is evidently in operation at every meal. |
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Here and there, I ought to add, the visitor will, even in the midst of such scenes as I have tried to sketch, come upon a cluster or a row of houses better than ordinary, and through the almost invariably open doors of which he will see some indications of domestic comfort; but such buildings are the exceptions - and exceptions as they are, they rise out of the same slough of mud and filth, and command the same ugly sights as their neighbours. |
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There is I believe a Nuisance Committee in
Leeds. I inquired whether they were aware of even the most flagrant
of all these salutary enormities. Had their attention for instance,
been ever drawn to the practice of keeping pigs, or rather letting
pigs keep themselves in crowded neighbourhood? "Yes", I was answered by a gentleman much interested in the subject, "yes, I have reported these things over and over again, until I was sick and tired of reporting; but you see nothing has been done". |
| It is to be hoped that Leeds is on the eve of a sanitary revolution, and that what is true of the town today will be but historic a twelve-month hence. Things are at present so palpably bad, that even a small outlay would make an immense change for the better. Even if it be impracticable to construct at once a thorough system of house sewerage, or to lay down at once miles of substantial paving, it would be surely easy, by means of the police, to compel the observance of something like ordinary human decency in the habits of children, to clean out and render available revolting cesspools, and to make a devastating razzia amongst those foul nuisances - in a crowded and often a fever stricken locality - the pigs and pigsties. |
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