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| Robert Baker reported into the social conditions of Leeds in 1842. His observations were included in Owen Chadwick's report to the Poor Law Commissioners. These reports raised social awareness and paved the way for Britain's first Public Health Act in 1848. |  The Victorians collected much valuable data commenting on the lives and conditions of the poor (Punch cartoon, 1894)
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Edwin Chadwick, Secretary to the Poor Law Commissioners, used local investigators to provide evidence of urban public health conditions, and a doctor, Robert Baker, provided the information below about Leeds.
Leeds was typical of the rapidly growing manufacturing towns of the 19th century. Long established as market town for the sale of cloth, it exemplified all the characteristics of industrial environment, with a local government system faced with unique demands of its resources and abilities.
Of the 586 streets of Leeds, 68 only are paved by the town, ie, by the local authorities; the remainder are either paved by the owners or are partly paved, or are totally unpaved, with the surfaces broken in every direction, and ashes and filth of every description accumulated upon many of them... of the 68 streets... 19 are not sewered at all, and ten only partly so; nay it is only within the three or four years past that a sewer has been completed through the main street for two of the most populous wards...a population of 30,540 persons...Here and there stagnant water, and channels so offensive that they have been declared to be unbearable, lie under the doorways of the uncomplaining poor...
As a local doctor Robert Baker had experienced the severe cholera outbreak of 1832, by 1838 as a town councillor, had contributed to a statistical survey of the town and went on to become a factory inspector by 1858. A middle-class professional expressing his social class's concern and desire for environmental and spiritual improvement, but perhaps also with that paternalistic role of one looking in from the outside.
One cannot but notice the moral and social as well as the physical effect which an attention to the architecture and order of cottage houses and the good arrangement of the streets has upon the health and habits of the people.
His report contains a variety of information - case studies, statistics, tables, descriptions and anecdotes, as well as analysis and personal comment. For example notice here the general comments, the assumption of the basic standards expected of housing and the detail of street life:
In the manufacturing towns of England... additions have been made without regard to either the personal comfort of the inhabitants or the necessaries which congregation requires... neighbourhoods have arisen in which there is neither water nor out-office, not any conveniences for the absolute domestic wants of the occupiers... the streets present architecture of various orders, causeways, dangerous on account of steps, cellar windows without protection, here and there posts and rails, and everywhere clothes lines intersecting them, by which repeated accidents have been occasioned... many cases of broken legs by these unprotected cellars, and by horsemen dismounted by neglected clothes-lines hanging across the streets, were recorded.
Baker was not the only person writing about Leeds. Victorian journalists, social commentators such as Engels, novelists (Dickens found it a very unpleasant place), and travellers who kept diaries have all left accounts which have much in common with that of Baker. Then there were illustrators and mapmakers providing another perspective. There is very little of the voice of the poor themselves. Only with increased literacy and the popularity of oral history in the last 50 years have personal stories become more widely accessible.
In one cul-de-sac... there are 34 houses, and in ordinary times, there dwell in these houses 340 persons, or ten to every house; but as these houses are many of them receiving houses for itinerant labourers, during the periods of hay-time and harvest and the fairs, at least twice that number are then here congregated. The name of this place is the Boot and Shoe-yard, in Kirkgate, a location from whence the Commissioners removed, in the days of cholera, 75 cart-loads of manure, which had been untouched for years, and where there now exists a surface of human excrement of very considerable extent, to which these impure and unventilated dwellings are additionally exposed.
He also highlighted the offensive smells from bone mills and slaughterhouses, the smoke from dye-houses, engine-furnaces and tobacco-pipe furnaces, and the effect on health from cesspools and uncollected rubbish. It was the concern about 'exhalations' from these that alert the reader to the state of medical knowledge. Cholera caused the most panic, but typhus, or 'fever', and tuberculosis were the more common, with their origin and infection patterns only gradually becoming understood.
Here is unwitting (unintended) information about the attitudes of the past. In Baker's description of the Bank area he notes the effect of having a good landlord and then presents a comparison.
...the dark and dank cellar, inhabited by Irish families, including pigs, with broken panes in every window-frame, and filth and vermin in every nook. Here with walls unwhitewashed for years, black with the smoke of foul chimneys, without water... sacking for bed-clothing, with floors unwashed from year to year, without out-offices, and with incomes of a few shillings a week, derived from the labour of half-starved children or the more precarious earnings of casual employment...
Notice the reference to the Irish. Here is the beginning of discrimination. Contemporaries saw them as outsiders - a different nationality, accent and religion, without settlement and therefore without access to Poor Law relief. Working at the lowest end of the occupational spectrum as labourers and in the flax mills of the town - those hot, dusty and humid factories avoided by all but the most desperate. Their status was linked to poverty and dirt, making it easier to regard them as separate, less deserving of a place in society and responsible for their own miserable state. Who would take action to improve the conditions of the poor and what would be their motive - religious teaching, philanthropy or the fear that polluted water and fetid air would spread its invisible dangers into everyone's lives?
Chadwick saw himself as the father of public health reform, collecting together reports from around the country and presenting them to Parliament. Its findings raised sufficient concern for trigger a Royal Commission to look in to the conditions in town in 1844, leading to the first Public Health Act four years later.
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