In the middle of the nineteenth century, Castleford underwent a population explosion, as from near and far people flocked to the one-time village, attracted by the prospect of work in its fast-expanding bottle works and potteries. The population of 1,141 in the 1831 census (this being the figure for the old township of Castleford, which did not include Whitwood Mere, Glasshoughton or anywhere on the north bank of the River Aire) had jumped to 1,414 ten years later, reached 2,150 in 1851 and would total 3,876 by 1861.

To accommodate the incomers and their families, landowners threw up houses as quickly and cheaply as possible, most of them packed into narrow yards and courts at right angles to Aire Street, Bridge Street and Church Street – though these roads had yet to be named as such. Wade’s Yard, Powell’s Yard, Darling’s Yard, Phillip’s Yard, Stead’s Yard, Johnson’s Yard and more were hidden behind the properties in which the landlords might once have lived but which, by then, were more likely to be rented out to the butchers, grocers, shoemakers and beer sellers whose numbers mushroomed as quickly as those of their potential customers.

The houses themselves were cramped, often comprising no more than one living and one sleeping room – at worst with only one room for both night and day use – and badly ventilated, the majority with small windows on the side facing into the sunless yard but blank walls on the other three sides, where the house abutted on to its neighbours on either side and behind. Some had opening windows but in others there was no such facility: in either case it was almost impossible to get a flow of air through the house. They had no water supply, no drainage, no sanitation and nowhere to dispose of rubbish which could not be thrown on the fire.

Outside, the conditions were even worse: some yards were paved but where they were not the ground was merely a mixture of earth and ashes, and in all cases their drainage, if any, was no more than a shallow gutter. Into this was thrown waste water which, if the land happened to slope in the right direction, might run away to the street but, if not, was just as likely to gather in a foul, stagnant pool in the lowest corner. Within the narrow confines of the yards, often of necessity only a couple of feet from doors and windows, were crudely-built wooden privies, shared by several families, and ashpits: low brick open-topped enclosures into which were thrown not just ashes but food waste, floor sweepings and, indeed, any refuse which was not burnt.

Furthermore, many of the former rural dwellers who moved into Castleford brought with them the tradition of the ‘Christmas pig’ which they fattened through the year to provide the rare luxury of plentiful meat for the festive season – but now there were no cottage gardens in which to keep them. Instead, pigsties were built in the yards, cheek-by-jowl with the ashpits and privies, only adding to the stench, filth and flies. And if this was not enough, where the street-facing building was a shop or business premises, the refuse from whatever activity took place within it would often be dumped in the yard behind along with the domestic rubbish – and many of those businesses (twelve of them in 1853) were butchers, who slaughtered the meat on the premises had no other way of disposing of the blood, bones and offal.

In a number of these yards, a shallow well or pump was sunk to supply drinking water – but in too many cases the water was tainted by the filth which had seeped through the bare soil and had to be boiled to make it even semi-drinkable. Some families collected rainwater in rooftop cisterns, while many more relied upon water butts. As a last resort, especially in dry spells, there was the river – but the clear stream of the early nineteenth century was increasingly polluted by the waste products of the West Riding textile belt arriving via the River Calder, mingling with the noxious liquids produced by dozens of tanneries built alongside the Leeds tributaries of the Aire. The river was also prone to flooding, which left foul water standing in cellars and struck damp into the walls of hovels and better-built houses alike.

Out on the streets, the situation was little better. Road surfaces were the same mix of soil and cinders as those of the yards, but churned and rutted by horses’ hooves and cart wheels. There were no drains, simply shallow trenches at each side of the road, their course frequently blocked by householders infilling short sections to make causeways across to their premises, a practice especially prevalent when wet weather left the gutters filled with filthy water. Behind the houses in the yards on the west side of what became Bridge Street ran Willow Beck, but the tree-lined stream of years gone by had become an open sewer where domestic waste was added to the toxic liquid produced by a small coal gas works, which was set up on the south side of the railway opposite the station (then located on what became Bridge Street) shortly after the line had opened in 1840.

Such conditions were a breeding ground for ill-health and disease – but there was no authority capable of doing anything to prevent it. Into the late 1840s, Castleford’s government, such as it was, was still that of the old village, organised by a handful of parish officials on the back of decisions taken by a small number of church and village worthies at occasional ‘vestry’ meetings. The parish had very limited responsibilities for maintaining the roads and enforcing law and order, but neither the money nor manpower to meet the massive increase in demand brought on by the population boom, nor did it have any jurisdiction over private property. The poor law guardians – then based in Great Preston, of all places – had equally limited ability to provide aid in the very worst cases of poverty and illness, but the families of the glasshouse and pottery labourers, no matter how poorly paid, were left to fend for themselves.

A significant degree of influence over affairs was still held by the old lords of the manor of Houghton-with-Castleford, the Bland family of Kippax Park, from whom many of the landlords leased their land and whose permission was required to undertake any development upon it, a system unchanged since medieval times. It would have been possible for the Blands to use their influence to change Castleford for the better, except that their attitude appears to have been one of laissez faire, the hands-off approach that, despite many of its undesirable consequences, dominated economic, social and political thinking for much of the nineteenth century.

All this meant there was no-one to organise the emptying of middens and ashpits; no-one to clear refuse from the roads; no-one to unblock the gutters; no-one to enforce even minimum standards of building, hygiene, ventilation or sanitation. Human and animal waste, rotting food and butchers’ offal simply lay and festered where it had been dumped. Disease was endemic and infant mortality ranked with that of the worst city slums, with 28% of all deaths in the town between 1840 and 1849 being children under the age of one, a figure even worse than that for Liverpool. However, few of the landowners and businessmen who might have had the wherewithal to do anything about it considered the plight of the ‘labouring poor’ to be their responsibility. Although Castleford was far from unique in this respect – and its scale was as nothing compared to the teeming slums of Leeds or Bradford, for example – nevertheless, in few places could the resulting conditions have been any more miserable for the unfortunate people trapped in their midst.

The inevitable consequence of this grim state of affairs came to pass in 1849, when cholera broke out. The disease had struck Castleford before, in 1832, but this time, with hundreds more houses and twice as many people packed more closely together, the consequences were much, much worse. The first cases were reported to the Board of Guardians by their overseer for Castleford, John Wilton, in January and February, in response to which the board posted notices on the doors of the parish church and the two Methodist chapels, urging anyone “who had the slightest attack of Bowel Complaints” to report to the town surgeon, Dr Adam Jessop. Those who could afford to do so were expected to pay for whatever primitive treatment Jessop could give, while in the case of the “necessitous poor” he was told to treat them for free and submit his bill to the guardians.

However, there was nothing the doctor could do to stem the tide of cases so long as people were forced to drink and wash in contaminated water, so by the time the crisis abated in early 1850, 275 people had been struck down by cholera in Castleford and forty-six of them had died from the resulting diarrhoea, vomiting and dehydration. There were a further eighteen cases, with six fatalities, in Whitwood Mere; seven cases and four deaths in Glasshoughton; and eight cases, half of which proved fatal, in that part of Allerton Bywater township which lay immediately over Castleford Bridge between the River Aire and the canal.

During the outbreak, Dr Jessop attended to more than 200 people and ran up expenses of £250. In a foretaste of the repeated arguments over costs and who should meet them, which were to blight efforts to improve the town in coming years, some of the town’s ratepayers (at this time only property owners and businessmen – usually one and the same – paid rates) claimed many of those who benefited from free treatment had actually been in a position to pay and consequently, Jessop’s account was not finally settled until 1852. This was one of the issues which made him an outspoken critic of the people who were to run the town’s affairs in the years after the horrors of 1849.

Shaken by their powerlessness to combat the root causes of cholera and more general ill-health – and fearful of it striking again – the Board of Guardians sought outside help. In 1848, Parliament had passed the Public Health Act, which gave existing town corporations powers to raise rates for the improvement of water supplies, drainage and more general sanitation, and allowed for the creation of Local Boards of Health to do the same in towns which otherwise possessed little in the way of government institutions. This could either be done on the initiative of the townspeople or, if the annual death rate was above 23 people per 1,000 population (in Castleford it averaged 27 per 1,000 through the 1840s, with peaks of 34.5 in 1840 and a terrible 40.6 in the cholera year of 1849), then a local board could be imposed upon a town.

With this legislation in mind, on 13 September 1849 John Wilton, signing himself as “Guardian of the Township of Castleford”, wrote to the General Board of Health in Whitehall asking “Can you supply me the most recent Acts of Parliament on Sanitary Regulations”, while in a follow-up letter dated 14 December, he stated that more than 120 houses had been built since the 1841 census and that the population numbered some 2,000. He continued: “This village has been visited with the Cholera to an alarming extent and it continues to prevail, during the past weeks there have been several cases of Asiatic Cholera. The officers of the township have taken active measures to relieve the suffering and prevent the spread of the disease but to a considerable extent there are nuisances which they find difficult to remove.” Painting a bleak picture of the state of Castleford, he claimed the roads were in “a miserable state”, that cholera was “now prevailing to a fearful extent in houses without sanitation” and that “a great number of the houses are mere pigsties not fit for human beings to live in”.

  John Wilton’s letter of 13 September 1849

Wilton’s letter also reported that the rector of Castleford, the Reverend Theophilus Barnes, had only that day buried two more cholera victims, bringing the 1849 total of interments to 101 (deaths from all causes) compared with fifty to sixty in preceding years. And with it was enclosed a copy of a letter from Adam Jessop, which stated that there had been nineteen new cholera cases since 1 December, five of which proved fatal. He said the disease had broken out on 3 September, since when there had been “upwards of 100 cases and 30 deaths” despite a lull during November, adding: “Just to remind you the disease was also prevalent here in December 1848 and January & February 1849 when I had 14 cases and the disease also appeared in Wakefield prison about the same time.”

Realising Castleford’s problems were deeply-rooted and would not easily be resolved either physically or socially, Jessop claimed “there is some existing cause which can only be removed by a radical change in the village” before ending with a heartfelt plea for legislation to be enacted to save its blighted populace from the ravages of cholera and the conditions in which it bred. “It is now again in its worst form as today there are five more cases of Asiatic Cholera. Why are not means used to place this filthy, lost place under the proper ‘Act’?”

Adam Jessop would, no doubt, have been pleased to learn that just days later the initial steps toward relieving “lost” Castleford’s plight were taken when, having received the requested advice from Whitehall, the guardians called a meeting in early January 1850 and appointed “a committee of gentlemen” under the chairmanship of Theophilus Barnes to begin the process of establishing a Local Board of Health for Castleford. The first necessary step was to present a petition to parliament, signed by at least one in ten of the township’s ratepayers, requesting permission to set up a Board, for which the guardians and churchwardens charged with gathering signatures evidently found a receptive audience. The petition, which is preserved in the Public Record Office, contains sixty-five names encompassing the town’s chief industrialists, religious figures and landowners, including (presumably without any trace of irony) many of the landlords whose names were lent to the squalid yards and in whose death-trap houses so many of the cholera victims had perished.

John Wilton, meanwhile, was making sure the General Board of Health remained fully aware of the ongoing situation in Castleford: a letter dated 3 January informed the civil servants that cholera still had the township in its grip and that most of the deaths notified by Dr Jessop since the middle of the previous month “took place in a very confined yard or its immediate locality where the houses are miserable in the extreme, some of them not having sufficient roofing and others with cellars a foot or more deep of water while the houses themselves are not less than two foot below the public highway”. This is most likely a reference to the properties – a mixture of houses and lodging houses – around Johnson’s Yard and Phillip’s Yard, between what became Bridge Street and Willow Beck: in the latter yard there were nine houses sharing a single privy, together with a primitive drain leading into the beck, while the reference to the levels of the ‘public highway’ and neighbouring houses suggests the constant scattering of ashes on the road had banked it up to such a degree that water would run off it into the houses and yards.

At this time there were no local newspapers published in either Castleford or Pontefract, so it was in the Leeds Intelligencer (later to become the Yorkshire Post and then still a weekly paper) of 23 March 1850 that the following notice appeared.

PUBLIC HEALTH ACT 1848

NOTICE – Whereas, in Pursuance of the Public Health Act, 1848, the General Board of Health have directed BENJAMIN HERSCHEL BABBAGE, Esquire, one of the Superintending Inspectors appointed for the purpose of said Act, to visit the Township of Castleford, in the County of York, and there to make public inquiry and examine witnesses with respect to the matters following; that is to say,

The Sewerage, Drainage, and Supply of Water.

The State of the Burial Grounds.

The Number and Sanitary Condition of the Inhabitants.

The Local Acts of Parliament (if any) for the Paving, Lighting, Cleansing, Watching, Regulating, Supplying with Water, or improving, or having relation to the purposes of said Act.

The natural Drainage Areas.

The existing Parochial or other Local Boundaries.

The Boundaries which may be most advantageously adopted for the purposes of the said Act.

And other matters in respect whereof the General Board of Health is desirous of being informed, for the purpose of enabling them to judge of the propriety of reporting to Her Majesty or making a Provisional order with a view to the Application of the said Act, or any part thereof, to the said Township.

Now, therefore, I the said Benjamin Herschel Babbage, do hereby give Notice, that on the TENTH DAY of APRIL NOW NEXT, at Ten o’Clock in the Forenoon, at the National School Room, I will proceed upon the said inquiry, and that I shall then and there be prepared to hear all Persons desirous of being heard upon the subject of the said inquiry.

Dated the Eighteenth Day of March, 1850.

BENJAMIN HERSCHEL BABBAGE

Babbage was the son of mathematician Charles Babbage, who is often referred to as the ‘father of the computer’. An expert on water supply and sewerage, he had worked alongside Isambard Kingdom Brunel and would later move to Australia on government business, where he undertook much pioneering exploration in the south of the colony. His hearing into the state of Castleford and his accompanying forensic exploration of the town were about to bring to public attention the full scandal of the conditions so many of its inhabitants were forced to endure.

To be continued…

SOURCES

The majority of the documents and correspondence are in the Public Record Office, Kew, in file MH13/46. Some of the statistics are from Benjamin Babbage’s public inquiry report, a copy of which is in the West Yorkshire Archives, Wakefield, in file WYW1366. The notice announcing the public inquiry is from microfilm of the Leeds Intelligencer, in Leeds City Library.

Frank Fania with Aurora police said the three incidents took place within one block of each other near the intersection of South Chambers Road and East Ohio Ave.

The first incident happened on Thanksgiving Day, the second happened on Wednesday, and the third happened Friday morning.

“These incidents all happened in the early morning hours,” Fania said in a statement. “There are similarities with these cases which lead investigators to believe that the same suspect may be involved.”

[worldnow id=8021447 width=420 height=278 type=video]

Fania said the armed suspect broke into residences while the victims were sleeping before they were assaulted. He said the victim of the attempted assault scared the suspect off.

“He woke up the victim. When she woke up she started screaming and thankfully he ran away,” he said.

Police said they don’t have a good description of the suspects except that he is possibly a tall, thin Hispanic or light-skinned black man. One victim said he may have a “corn-row” hair style.

(credit: CBS)

Police ask residents in the area of South Chambers Road and East Ohio Ave to report to police any suspicious person, especially between midnight and 6 a.m.

Anyone with information on the cases is asked to call Detective John Wilton at (303) 739-6065 or Sgt. Rudy Herrera at (303)739-6250. Remain anonymous by calling Crime Stoppers at (720) 913-STOP (7867). You may be eligible to earn a reward of up to $2,000.

Dear Campus community:

The Police Review Board Report on Nov 9, 2011 is being published today on our campus homepage. You can link to  the report and a statement from me in response to the report at  http://www.berkeley.edu .

Robert J. Birgeneau
Chancellor

The report, and the chancellor’s response, are as difficult to access as possible without being super-obvious about it. First you have to go to the homepage, then you have to look around a bit because it’s not above the fold, it’s one of the tiny news stories down at the bottom. If you want to access any of the information it’s in PDF format, which adds a little inconvenience and makes it harder for search engines to find the information. You will need to search to find it, of course, because I presume like any news article it will be removed from the home page within a week or so. Moreover, you’ll notice that Birgenau’s note above doesn’t even include the URL of the news story, just a link to the homepage so if you don’t go looking for it right away you’ve got even more digging to do. (No digging here: feel free to read the police review report and Birgenau’s weak response in full.)

I happen to find this embarrassing. As a member of the Berkeley community, I’m ashamed that the administration is too craven to publicly own up to its mistakes and release the information about November 9th like it would any other piece of important news. But it’s pretending that the police brutality didn’t happen. It’s pretending that Professor Celeste Langan wasn’t pulled around by her hair, that my friend’s rib wasn’t cracked by a truncheon held by a UCPD officer, that my other housemates didn’t spend the week afterwards with breathing difficulties and torsos black and blue as though they had been in a car crash.

To paraphrase Utah Phillips, these people have names and faces and addresses. Robert Birgenau, George Breslauer, John Wilton, Harry LeGrande, Dan Mogulof, I’m calling you out. You are cowards. You should be ashamed of yourselves not only for allowing this to happen to the students you are supposed to educate and protect, but also for trying to avoid owning up to your dereliction of duty and incompetence.

And to be perfectly honest, this report isn’t particularly damning. Much of it covers bureaucratic failure:

While there was a group of campus officials with clear civilian oversight of the UCPD (specifically, the CMT [Crisis Management Team], whose creation was in response to the Brazil Report), that group did not have a clear chain of command nor did it supervise important details of the UCPD’s activities throughout the day. As well, neither the CMT nor the UCPD adequately communicated with each other or with the protestors on Sproul Plaza. And after the afternoon’s first use of force, and subsequent complaints, disconcertingly neither the UCPD nor the CMT specifically reconsidered the use of batons before again employing them in the evening. Significantly different from prior events, on November 9 the vast majority of members of the CMT were not new to their jobs, suggesting the campus leadership’s handling of the November 9 protests was not better than the past, even with the benefit of greater experience. (9)

They don’t even condemn the police brutality which characterized the day:

Videos of this encounter show that protestors who were pulled off the line were sometimes pulled off by their head and neck and some were thrown rather roughly onto Mario Savio Steps. These maneuvers appeared to be matters of expediency, and none of these protestors seemed to have been mistreated after they were pulled through the police line. (18)

Videos show some officers using batons on the back, sides, or buttocks of two protestors who appeared to be on their knees facing away from the officers and covering themselves for safety. The campus norms, PRT Principles, as well as UCPD § DR200, seem to make such police action improper. (19)

Improper? Improper? Not only that, but the review board actually praises this group of officers for not using their batons, because dragging people around by the head and neck and throwing them on the ground is less dangerous than truncheoning people near their vital organs.

Some members of the committee do not think that pulling protestors by their hair is consistent with campus norms; others believe it is effective and creates little risk of permanent injury. (21)

What’s damning is not the report. What’s damning is the fact finding which reveals how student protestors were treated, and the UC Berkeley administration’s total inability to even get a handle on the situation, let alone control it or protect anyone.

For the first time, they had helmets on, face screens down, and 36” batons out, held with both hands across their bodies. Some of the officers had large guns drawn, which were apparently filled with paint rounds to mark fleeing subjects. (17)

The police here used batons almost immediately and far more consistently. Within 20 seconds of arriving at the protestor line, at least five officers used tip strikes in an effort to break up the protestors’ linked arms or to move their line back. A tip strike is accomplished by holding the long baton like a shovel and thrusting it forward into the protestor. This series of baton strikes by some officers lasted continuously for 50 seconds, and included push strikes and pushing with hands in addition to tip strikes, which were the most consistent tactic. As with subsequent periods of baton use, almost all of the tip strikes visible on the videos are made to the midsections of protestors — in their stomachs, ribs, chests, arms, sides, and outer thighs. Some of the protestors wore backpacks to protect themselves, and police sometimes struck those. These areas fall outside the prohibited areas mentioned in police regulations, but may include some of the areas not recommended for baton strikes. (20)

It is not clear from the footage whether the arrestee is squirming or resisting arrest either. What is clear from the video is that at least one of the officers repeatedly struck the protestor with the tip of his baton while the protestor was lying on the ground. (25)

This stain isn’t going away any time soon, despite the administration’s attempts to wash it out.

When they say Berkeley is crunchy, I didn’t know they meant the students’ ribcages.

- Stephen Colbert

Wilton’s Music Hall , Graces Alley, London, E1. Photo © Roger Dean 2011

Life in the London Streets – Richard Rowe, 1881:

A music hall largely patronised by sailors is our next house of call. It is full of fog and tobacco-smoke, and fumes of steaming grog. Glasses are clattering, spoons clinking, tongues clacking. There is a hush for a moment or two whilst the trapeze performer, who is earning his bread by risking his neck, darts and swings in mid air. As soon as he has reached his perch, with patches of perspiration blotching his flesh-coloured tights, tables are thumped until tumblers and jingling spoons jump up in a staggering dance; the people in the lower part of the house thumping hardest, as if expressing their gratitude – not because the performer is safe, but because he has not missed his hold, and dropped on them and their “refreshments.”

[Wilton's is the oldest surviving Grand Music Hall in the world being opened by John Wilton in 1858. To read more of the venues history, to see information about forthcoming events or to see how you can help support this unique building you can visit the website by clicking here. R.D.]