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15
Some of the houses are registered as common lodging houses, and let
to tramps and others who pay 3d. each for a night's lodging. From
the construction of these houses, no current of air can pass through
them.
The water closets are mostly common to many inhabitants, and are
extremely filthy, 8 of these tenements containing 88 human beings, till
lately, had no closet accommodation at all; they have no back yards,
no water supply, and no drainage. Some of them are so overcrowded
as to allow only 112 cubic feet of air for each inhabitant, (and
with no facilities for changing the air,) instead of from 500 to 1,000
cubic feet, which are required for the proper maintenance of health.
In one dark room, (containing only 1,008 cubic feet of air, being
112 feet for each person) I found a family of nine persons, the father
ill with Pleuritis. Another has five persons with 1,232 ft., 240 to each.
A third, eight persons with 1,600 cubic feet, allowing 200 to each person.
A fourth, eight persons with 1922 cubic feet, allowing 250 to each
person. A fifth, seven persons with 1,008 cubic feet, allowing 178 to
each person.
The people inhabiting these courts are mostly the lowest Irish,
whose habits are very filthy, although I have caused new closets to be
erected, panned, trapped and supplied with water.
Human excreta still lie all over the courts, in the dust-bins, and in
every corner of the place, and the new closets are continually in a
filthy condition: the iron taps which have also lately been placed there,
to allow the people to obtain good supplies of water, have been
hammered down so as to become useless. "With such a condition of
things, we cannot be surprised that the people are lost to all sense of
common decency; that half the amount of sickness that occurs among
the poor of the whole town is found in these buildings; that the death
rate is 36 per 1,000 per annum, that is to say, double what it is in the
whole parish; and the mortality among infants under five years of age
at the enormous ratio of 61.3 per cent. of the total deaths, while more
than half the deaths take place from Zymotic diseases.
I cannot better conclude this subject than by quoting a report made
to the General Board of Health, wherein it is stated that " Jenning's
Buildings, though a source of continual profit to the owners and speculators
in such houses, are the principal cause of the high Poor-rate
paid by the inhabitants in other parts of the parish, which would
undoubtedly be reduced but for this and some other smaller nests of
pauper houses."
I have shown you in several of my reports, that in such places, men,