Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

Upon the urgent representations of the Leeds Sanitary Association, the council of our borough was persuaded last year to elect a medical officer of health, and since his election I believe that the council has shown some readiness to give real attention to duties which are, perhaps, the most important it has to perform for the poor. On his arrival the medical officer found 1,500 bedrooms over privies, 500 or 600 cellars used as habitations, a large number of inhabited hovels, which were scarcely fit for dog kennels, and a state of overcrowding naturally to be expected in a town which has increased in number by about forty per cent during the last twenty years, and which must always have been ill-provided with labourers’ houses. For the well-paid artisan cottage houses have sprung up in all directions and with great rapidity. Owing to municipal neglect, however, almost all these are built back to back, and are of the flimsiest material and workmanship. They frequently contain privies under bedrooms, and in many other cases only avoid this by the simple device of having no privies at all. Still, the well-paid artisan does secure something like a home. The unskilled labourer, on the other hand – the job porter, the hawker, the costermonger, the rug-maker, persons whose livelihood is uncertain, who are improvident or destitute – these, whose number equals or exceeds the number of the skilled classes, get housed as they can. After prowling about by day after such sustenance as the fowls of the air may bring them, they crowd together by night in dank filthy hovels, huddling in heaps like wild animals to comfort their wretched bodies with a little warmth. What builders will compete for the profit of housing such starvelings as these? What builder will risk his hardly-won capital and the provision for his wife and children on dwellings for such wandering hapless creatures? Instead of returning him the high profits and good security of the better kinds of cottages, such dwellings, if properly built and repaired, offer a low and ill-paid dividend and a low security also. If these, and such as these, and if the class of unskilled labourers just above these are to be housed wholesomely, they cannot be housed at a tempting profit. Low rents, troublesome collecting, and incessant leakages tempt no one. It is absurd, therefore, in the ears of any one who knows what a large town is, to hear members of parliament solemnly denouncing all interference with private speculators.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations:

• ER: East Riding
• GM: Greater Manchester
• NR: North Riding
• NY: North Yorkshire
• SY: South Yorkshire
• WR: West Riding
• WY: West Yorkshire

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Original

Upon the urgent representations of the Leeds Sanitary Association; the Council of our borough was persuaded last year to elect a medical officer of health, and since his election I believe that the Council has shown some readiness to give real attention to duties which are, perhaps, the most important it has to perform for the poor. On his arrival the medical officer found 1,500 bedrooms over privies, 500 or 600 cellars used as habitations, a large number of inhabited hovels, which were scarcely fit for dog kennels, and a state of overcrowding naturally to be expected in a town which has increased in number by about forty per cent. during the last twenty years, and which must always have been ill-provided with labourers’ houses. For the well-paid artizan cottage houses have sprung up in all directions and with great rapidity. Owing to municipal neglect, however, almost all these are built back to back, and are of the flimsiest material and workmanship. They frequently contain privies under bed-rooms, and in many other cases only avoid this by the simple device of having no privies at all. Still the well-paid artizan does secure something like a home. The unskilled labourer, on the other hand,-the job porter, the hawker, the costermonger, the rug-maker, persons whose livelihood is uncertain, who are improvident or destitute, these, whose number equals or exceeds the number of the skilled classes, get housed as they can. After prowling about by day after such sustenance as the fowls of the air may bring them, they crowd together by night in dank filthy hovels, huddling in heaps like wild animals to comfort their wretched bodies with a little warmth. What builders will compete for the profit of housing such starvelings as these? What builder will risk his hardly-won capital and the provision for his wife and children on dwellings for such wandering hapless creatures. Instead of returning him the high profits and good security of the better kinds of cottages, such dwellings, if properly built and repaired, offer a low and ill-paid dividend and a low security also. If these, and such as these, and if the class of unskilled labourers just above these are to be housed wholesomely, they cannot be housed at a tempting profit. Low rents, troublesome collecting, and incessant leakages tempt no one.

387 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• 1863–1875 cholera pandemic (2) ·
• Affordable housing (3) ·
• Allbutt, Clifford (1836-1925) (22), Dewsbury-born physician (Leeds Infirmary 1861-89), inventor of the clinical thermometer, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge 1892-his death ·
• Back-to-back house (4) ·
• Cholera (3) ·
• Epidemic typhus (2) ·
• Epidemiological Society of London (1) ·
• Epidemiology (2) ·
• Fuel poverty (3) ·
• Leeds City Council (32) ·
• 📌Leeds (235) ·
• Poverty (16) ·
• Public health (7) ·
• Public housing (3) ·
• Sanitation (3) ·
• Typhus (2) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 18 February 1934: Leeds Labour triggers the first rent strike against a council by announcing higher rents for well-off tenants and possible free housing for ex-slum-dwellers
• 30 August 1935: Praise for Leeds’s slum clearance schemes
• 9 July 1903: Clifford Allbutt, late of Leeds, tells a Bradford sanitary congress to reject the view that (preventive) medicine is antagonistic to the survival of the fittest
• 2 March 1830: Leeds Corporation prosecutes its own waste contractors, Messrs Kelly, and a Woodhouse Moor landowner, who have been colluding in the illegal dumping of faeces
• 23 January 1888: Dr Henry Arthur Allbutt of Leeds launches a crowdfunder against being struck off for the affordability of his obstetrics and gynaecology manual for women
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• 27 June 1933: Norman Harding (4) of Burmantofts, Leeds, meets his baby brother, Keith, for the first time
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• 23 August 1933: John Betjeman witnesses the opening of the Leeds Civic Hall
• 11 March 1974: Bradford councillor and would-be property developer John Foers denies trying to “Poulson” Gary Rawnsley, chair of the planning committee