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employed by the General Board, and his expert exposure of the parish's
sanitary deficiencies dwarfed to insignificance Mr. Dean's earlier amateurish
observations on the subject. Mr. Ranger marshalled his facts
and figures in a much more telling fashion.
He remarked on the local increase in population - 20% in a decade
and on the relatively smaller increase in the number of houses in the
same period. He picked on overcrowding as a major evil in parts of the
parish. "The house accommodation of the poor is chiefly to be found in
lanes, courts and alleys, without drains, ventilation or a supply of water
and, in addition, much overcrowded; in some parts a family to a room;
hence we have a large amount of disease which, although not producing great
mortality, still is approbrious to the place and a heavy burden on the
ratepayers" He went on to cite examples. In Union Row, where there were
thirty-four houses with one-hundred and fifty-three persons, from thirty
to forty cases of fever had occurred in the previous autumn. In another
row of six houses (almost the only ones in the parish, so it appeared,
with rooms below ground level) there had been thirty-three cases of typhus.
As a particularly glaring example of the baneful effects of overcrowding
he mentioned Alfred Cottages, where a man, his wife and six children occupied
a single room: "the man ill in bed, one boy sick with smallpox
and the whole in a filthy state." He had found deficiencies in the
ventilation of houses on a wholesale scale; no fewer than twenty-three
courts, yards and alleys, comprising 256 houses and 1,198 occupants, were
so built up at the ends and backs as to preclude the possibility of through
ventilation. In regard to water - "an element with which the district
abounds in common wells, streams and rivers," - many of the sources were
so grossly polluted that "large masses of the poorer classes are destitute
of any supply, except upon purchase at rates of a farthing a gallon obtained
from distant streams through the agency of a dozen regular water carriers."
Of the public sewers he wrote "the general drift of the evidence adduced
showed that there are but few sewers, the inhabitants having availed themselves
of the river Moselle, the Carbuncle and other ditches." At least
BOO houses passed the overflow from their cesspools or privies direct into
the Moselle in its "tortuous course through the centre of the parish."
Every ditch and watercourse was fringed with privies and where there were
no ditches the sullage from cesspools and privy-pits was thrown into the
street. In one part of the village each privy was common to six houses
and for 486 houses accommodating 2,048 of the inhabitants the available
Privies amounted to 356 in all. Of paving, the parish could boast only
100 yards in the six miles; of footpath and kerbs, less than a mile in
fifteen miles of parish roads. He found it difficult to understand how
the local board of surveyors - "all of whom are unpaid and irresponsible"
could account for the expenditure of the £700 yielded by the highway rate
in the previous year.
It was a grim tally of defects for a parish priding itself on its
healthiness and modernity; where the inhabitants, for the most part, had
been thinking of sanitary reform merely in terms of some simple system of