Salisbury in the age of cholera; w e mustnt frighten the readers By - - PDF document

Salisbury in the age of cholera; we mustn’t frighten the readers By Ruth Newman slide 1 Title Slides 2 and 3 Salisbury, image and reality Research into a local topic is often rewarding, sometimes frustrating and occasionally totally baffling. The cholera epidemic of 1849 in Salisbury appeared to be a straightforward, well documented area of local history. In that year 192 people died from cholera in the city in just under two months - one in every 45 inhabitants. No other town of comparable size in England suffered to the same extent. Slide 4 Map showing Salisbury as a cholera hotspot in 1849 Slide 5 Naish's map of Salisbury revised edition 1751, showing the open water channels Visitors to Salisbury complained increasingly about the open water courses which ran through virtually every street of Salisbury and gave the city its dubious title ‘The Venice of England’. The channels, constructed in the 1220s and 1230s, provided a unique system of water supply and drainage for both domestic and industrial use. By the early 19th century they were little more than open sewers. Asiatic cholera was a new disease of the 19th Century and struck England in several epidemics: 1831-2 and 1848-9, with further outbreaks in 1854 and 1866. The cause of cholera was still unknown in the first half

• f the 19th century and there was no understanding that the disease

was spread by water. Because of the open water channels, cholera spread like wildfire. Slide 6 Open water channel in Castle Street In 1831 there was only one recorded case of the disease in Salisbury, but the city was less fortunate in 1849. The Board of Health report written in 1851 by the government inspector Thomas Rammell provided details that between 17 July - 10 September 1849, cholera claimed 192 lives in the city and over 1300 cases were relieved at the Infirmary.1 Much of the city was affected but the poorest overcrowded areas suffered most. When I began my research from the local paper, The Salisbury and Winchester Journal (hereafter The Salisbury Journal) I already had data detailing the cholera dates and deaths in each city street. slide 7 Deaths from cholera in Salisbury plus details quantifying the

• utbreak of cholera in the city. Rammell (1851) Appendix II and III,

116-117 I wanted to see what the local newspaper might add to my research and the results were totally unexpected. The Salisbury Journal first reported cholera on 14 July 1849 and included several recommendations to prevent the disease eg ‘a simple remedy’ of ‘20 grains of opiate of confection and a little peppermint water’. Residents should stay calm because ‘a nervous dread of the attack is one

• f the predisposing causes’.

In the same issue there was a report on an inquest on Reuben Morris who died in Vidler’s Court off Castle Street and whose death was attributed to epidemic cholera. Vidler's Court was described: ‘Eight

houses, one double privy, one pump . . . several pigsties and a collection

• f dung, admixed with human excrement. The floors of the houses are

two feet below the surface of the court, which is not drained ...There were several deaths from cholera'. But just a week later The Salisbury Journal reported that the disease was 'thankfully abating'.2This assertion bore absolutely no relation to Rammell’s figures of the numbers relieved at the Infirmary or the lists of deaths. Further confirmation of the impact

• f the disease can be found in the memoirs of William Small, a 19th

century painter and glazier, who recorded that he ‘wrote 50 or 60 coffin plates for . . . people that died of the cholera 1849’.3 After the 21 July nearly all accounts of cholera disappeared from The Salisbury Journal, although the death lists were long, but no causes of deaths were given and no reports on inquests. Indeed on the 28 July The Salisbury Journal felt able to report with 'much pleasure . . . that the general health of the inhabitants is very satisfactory', this when the 1851 report showed 51 deaths from cholera and 150 new cases at the Infirmary in the preceding week. There was paranoia in Victorian England about cholera which could strike with alarming rapidity, a paranoia fuelled by such examples as the Salisbury butcher who was at his market stall one day and was dead 24 hours later.4 Contemporaries were puzzled and alarmed that cholera appeared to be no respecter of class. The (London) Times’ report on Salisbury on 2 August, stated that ‘the sickness . . . pervades the whole

• city. Deaths have occurred in nearly every street [including] . . . the

most respectable'. Amongst those who died in the city were two young children of a brewer, a vicar, organ builder, cabinet maker and the ‘beloved wife of Mr. James Smith, Editor of The Journal, aged 30’. Nine

people died who were resident in Salisbury’s exclusive Cathedral Close including the young surgeon, Dr Richard Brassey Hole.5 Slide 8 Plaque to Richard Brassey Hole, Salisbury Cathedral, south nave aisle By mid-August nearly 150 people had died from cholera,6 although The Salisbury Journal chose not to acknowledge this fact. But on 18 August, all was revealed in a Salisbury Journal editorial which referred to criticisms in 'The Times' attacking the local paper for its censorship of all news about ‘the progress of the cholera in this city and neighbourhood’. The Times had published not only full lists of deaths, but also wrote of the wealthy fleeing the city and the severe economic downturn. The local paper attempted to justify its news blackout: Slide 9 Full text of quote ‘Believing as we do that such publication would be prejudicial . . . we have purposely refrained from comments on a topic painful to the majority of our readers . . . No one in Salisbury during the past month . . . can have either been indifferent to the progress of the cholera or insensible to its awful results.’ After this, there were reports in The Salisbury Journal, and a time was set aside for a ‘Local Fast’, a day of ‘solemn prayer and humiliation’,

• bserved by all the city’s churches, with business entirely suspended.

Prayers were offered ‘to stay the pestilence which has carried death and desolation into so many houses and caused so many melancholy and painful bereavements.’ By the end of September cholera had disappeared from the city and there were few references to it. The impact of cholera on the city

The cholera epidemic of 1849 had a considerable impact on public health reform in Salisbury. It is said that ‘panic is the parent of sanitation’ and the ‘curious features’ of the disease frightened many in

• authority. According to The Times, 'seemingly healthy and respectable

persons were carried off very suddenly; many persons in infirm health and apparently predisposed to disease having wholly escaped'. The national newspaper also noted that ‘Salisbury, which receives . . . all the waters of Wiltshire' has suffered five times its usual mortality, and significantly that ‘the localities which have suffered most severely in this part of the country are situated on the banks of rivers. Wilton, Salisbury, Downton and Fordingbridge are instances of this and these cases confirm the theory of the propagation of the disease by the rivers’.7 Salisbury's great champion of public health reform was local surgeon Andrew Middleton who battled against all the odds to eliminate Salisbury’s title of ‘The English Venice’. Slide 10 Minster Street An inquiry was carried out by a Board of Health Inspector, Thomas Rammell in June 1851 (see Slide 7); his report provides a detailed and indeed lurid account of the evils of Salisbury’s poor sanitation. Everything he found endorsed Middleton’s opinions, and gradually improvements came. The water channels were slowly drained and deep sewers built and by the 1860s most houses had a piped water supply. The death rate dropped, seemingly miraculously, from nearly 28 per 1000 in the 1840s to 17 per 1000 in the 1870s. Middleton, still fighting to close the last of the ditches in 1868, wrote: ‘I shall always be happy to plead guilty to any charge of having caused the destruction of the “English Venice”, since by that destruction a “New Salisbury” has been

created, and very many hundreds of human beings saved from untimely death'.8 Slide 11 Blue Plaque to Andrew Bogle Middleton Research into the 1849 cholera epidemic in Salisbury shows the potential dangers of depending on local newspapers for reliable information where such a sensitive subject is involved. In Salisbury, fear

• f cholera and the impact on the city, especially its effects on the

increasingly confident middle classes, caused a conservative provincial paper to retreat into a news blackout. Vested interests were almost certainly at work applying pressures on the editors of The Salisbury Journal to conceal the true facts of the epidemic. It took the unprecedented attack through the columns of The Times to force The Salisbury Journal to admit its censorship and to revert to honest reporting. For the researcher, the unexpected is always fascinating, and when coupled with other documentation, such censorship increases awareness of a particular catastrophe such as this.9 With thanks to Adrian Green, director of Salisbury Museum, for permission to use Museum images

1 Rammell, Thomas W, 1851. Report of the General Board of Health on a preliminary inquiry into the

sewerage, drainage, and supply of water , and the sanitary conditions of the inhabitants ... of Salisbury. london: HMSO, 116-117

2 Salisbury Journal, 14 & 21 July 3 Howells J and Newman R, William Small’s Cherished Memories and Associations, Wiltshire Record

Society Vol 64, 2011, p204

4 The Times, 17 July, 1849 5 Salisbury Journal, 28 July, 1849 6 Rammell, 116-117 7 The Times, 8 August, 17 September, 7 November 1849 8 Middleton, A B, 1868, Salisbury: the English Venice. The town ditch and the lost canal thereof.

Salisbury: Brown

9 I have chosen not to make comparisons with Covid-19 but several aspects are striking: the fear of a

new virus with no known cure affecting all classes, but with some suffering disproportionately; the

spectre of disastrous economic consequences and even the parallel of authority managing information to its own advantage.