Manchester: England’s “Shock City”

Manchester was a growing city as well. When the borough of Manchester was incorporated in 1838, it consisted of 4,293 acres; by 1913 the city of Manchester covered 21,645 acres of land.5Kidd and Wyke, “Introduction: Making the Modern City,” 9. As Manchester experienced this urban sprawl, which Manchester historians Alan Kidd and Terry Wyke argue “ushered in new ways of living and working and generated new ideas of economy and society,” large factories with huge chimneys were polluting the city’s air, creating the same ecological conditions that Cantlie would come to deplore in London.6Kidd and Wyke, “Introduction: Making the Modern City,” 1–2.

In 1827, when James Phillips Kay, a recent graduate of the University of Edinburgh Medical School, arrived in Manchester, he observed a city on the “precipice of a public health disaster,” with its crowded housing for the urban poor and alarming mortality rates.7Hunt, Building Jerusalem, 14. Describing the conditions of the city in his 1832 book The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, Kay reported that residents of the city were surrounded by “physical and moral evils” shaped by the crowded housing, yet hoped these might be “more easily avoided when we are distinctly conscious of their existence.”8Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, 3 Seeking to raise awareness of the dangers to public health, Kay reported that working-class “houses are ill soughed, often ill ventilated, unprovided with privies,” and in turn “the streets which are narrow, unpaved, and worn into deep ruts, become the common receptacles of mud, refuse, and disgusting ordure.”9Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, 13.

As reflected in these vile living conditions, Manchester was home to vast social inequalities, shaped by political and economic divisions between the rich and the poor, mill owners and mill workers, and factory workers and craftsmen.10Briggs, Victorian Cities, 86. Ethnic relations between the English and the Irish, who immigrated into growing Manchester for work in the booming cotton industry, were especially divisive. The poor Irish were often forced to live in multiple-family housing in a “little Ireland” near the Medlock River, surrounded by factories billowing smoke into their homes.11Briggs, Victorian Cities, 88. Kay, who connected recklessness and lack of self-respect with poor hygiene, singularly demonized the Irish for endangering the public health. According to Kay, the Irish “have discovered . . . the minimum of the means of life” and “taught this fatal secret to the population of this country.”12Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, 7 In actuality, of course, it was the extreme economic debasement of Irish immigrant laborers that forced them into the worst living environs in the city and to subsist on the meagerest of foodstuffs.

The politics of the period in Manchester were contentious. The old aristocracy and new industrial elites vied for control over local government during the first half of the nineteenth century, as workers often bore unhappily both the economic and environmental burdens of this feud.13Platt, Shock Cities, 56–63. By the 1840s, Manchester’s new capitalist elites tried to reform the economic and social identity of their city and tried to move past “the older image of the city as a cradle of wealth and of social disorder.” These captains of industry tried to present themselves as “energetic, tough, proud [and] contemptuous of the old aristocracy.” Yet, in building Manchester into the Cottonopolis at the center of a new industrial society, the result was to create a new “urban aristocracy” through their economic power that sought to maintain a liberal political economy that minimized costs for these new elites.14Briggs, Victorian Cities, 90.

The delineation of economic power in Manchester between mill owners and laborers had significant consequences for the urban ecology of the city and the health of the working classes. Expanding on Kay’s criticisms of the living conditions in Manchester in The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels graphically described the consequences of the class divisions of the city, using the language of “degeneration” long before Cantlie did. According to Engels, “in the working men’s dwellings of Manchester no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family life is possible; that in such dwellings only a physically degenerate race [emphasis added] robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality could feel comfortable and at home.”15Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, 63.

The living conditions in the Ancoats district of central Manchester perhaps most vividly highlight the severity of the overcrowding that Kay, Engels, and others lamented. Ancoats, an almost perfectly square district in the heart of Manchester that originated as a twelfth-century hamlet, was a hub of industrial productivity and the most densely populated area of the city, with a population of 53,737 in 1851.16Hylton, A History of Manchester, 89. As a residential district, Ancoats was developed with the sole purpose of housing the new urban working class.17Roberts, “‘A Densely Populated and Unlovely Tract,’” 15. Between 1790 and 1830, eight hundred new homes were built in this thirty-five-block district, squeezed between factories and warehouses to maximize land use and minimize costs.18Platt, Shock Cities, 51–52. As a result, the population of the district rose from 11,039 in 1801 to 31,600 in 1831 and to 55,983 by 1861.19Roberts, “‘A Densely Populated and Unlovely Tract,’” 16.

The consequences of overcrowding in Ancoats were horrific. According to Dr. Henry Gaulter, a physician at Chorlton-on-Medlock Dispensary describing the conditions that contributed to the 1832 epidemic of cholera in the district, Ancoats was “one of the worst and most thickly peopled districts of the town,” which allowed for the disease to thrive.20Gaulter, The Origin and Progress of the Malignant Cholera, 35. In January 1842, reformer and writer Joseph Adshead simply described a residence in Ancoats he visited as an “abode of wretchedness.” In this dwelling, a cellar, he observed nine individuals living together in a twelve-square-yard, seven-foot-high room that he deemed “unfit for the residence of any human being.” Still, the residents offered accommodations to another homeless woman and her two children, even though they could offer no more than “dirty shavings” to use as a pillow.21Adshead, Evidence (Tabular and Otherwise) of the State of the Labouring Classes, 35. Decades later, at the turn of the twentieth century, philanthropist and founder of the Manchester Art Museum T.C. Horsfall reported that many Ancoats residents still “walk badly and that very few breathe rightly. Cripples are very common.”22Report of the Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, 2:221.

While the city banned cellar dwelling in 1853 (despite landlords’ protestations), the problem of overcrowding remained, especially in Ancoats.23Roberts, “‘A Densely Populated and Unlovely Tract,’” 22. An 1889 study of the Ancoats district by water analyst and public health lecturer John C. Thresh described the living conditions in a state of “general dilapidation.” Thresh reported on narrow streets (no more than 17.5 feet between houses), defective drainage, vile odors, and rat-infested houses, none of which were newer than 1850. He described two- to three-story buildings, with a damp and musty cellar below, that still served as housing for the poorest residents. A family of eight might live in just two rooms of one of these dwellings. Thresh further reported that 360 of the 845 houses in the district only had one entrance, as many houses were built back-to-back to maximize land usage, which resulted in limited ventilation. Privies, whether within or adjacent to the residence, were, at best, poorly ventilated, resulting in “effluvia from the privy coming directly into the bedroom” with any draughts.24Thresh, “An Enquiry into the Causes of the Excessive Mortality in No. 1 District, Ancoats,” 132–33. Recent archeological findings from Ancoats have confirmed the grim reality of this overcrowding and poor housing that Thresh described, but also the origins of efforts to remove back-to-back housing as a corrective effort that began in the last decade of the nineteenth century.25Nevell, “Legislation and Reality,” 48–74.

Poor sewage and waste removal created additional ecological hazards to public health. In part, this was a failure of municipal government itself. Liberal municipal government officials in the first half of the nineteenth century purposefully denied working classes access to indoor plumbing so as to reduce the costs of property ownership for landlords.26Platt, Shock Cities, 210–11. And despite warnings from sanitary inspectors about the deteriorating environmental conditions in Manchester, municipal authorities were slow to act. They began developing indoor plumbing in wealthier city suburbs, beginning in 1852, but not in the poorer districts of the city center.27Platt, Shock Cities, 71–72. By 1868, among 67,000 houses only 10,000 had water closets (flushing toilets) and 38,000 had midden privies (flushless outhouses). When sewage was removed from houses (infrequently) it was often dumped into the Irwell and Medlock rivers. This contaminated the city’s water supplies, rather than draining away waste in an underdeveloped sewer system. Yet, despite constant attention to the problem of polluted water, it took roughly a half century, until 1904, for the city to fund a proper sewage treatment system.28Hylton, A History of Manchester, 169–73. As late as 1911, less than half of the houses in Manchester had water closets, forcing residents to rely on ash pits and midden privies for waste storage, resulting in the continuance of these waste removal problems.29Luckin, “Pollution in the City,” 214.

With coal-filled hills to the north, east, and southeast, Manchester’s topography was also ripe for the capture of air pollution emerging from the industrial environment.30Mosley, The Chimney of the World, 28. Black, smoky cloud cover made Manchester easily visible from miles away. Regular rainfall that combined with filth evaporated back into the smoggy clouds, which made the air around the city anything but pure.31Platt, Shock Cities, 445. Respiratory diseases were a frequent cause of death or disablement.32Platt, Shock Cities, 452, notes that in 1876, for example, one quarter of all deaths in Manchester and Salford resulted from lung disease, which was double the national average, and three times that of rural regions.

These ecological conditions shaped residential patterns and furthered public health inequities. The wealthy often fled the urban center of industry for cleaner residential suburbs. The poor, by contrast, found themselves living in absolute squalor.33Kidd and Wyke, “Making the Modern City,” 3; Platt, Shock Cities, 453–54. Thus, Manchester became the classic example of an industrialized city suffering from the urban penalty: simultaneously it was “the symbol of the new age,” and yet its residents suffered from a high rate of ailments, especially gut and lung diseases, caused by poor residential conditions and billowing smoke.34Mosley, The Chimney of the World, 2. Finally, frequent outbreaks of fevers also occurred in tandem with Manchester’s uncontrolled growth. Together these made Manchester an exemplar not only of the power of industrialization but also of its worst side-effects: large populations dwelling in slums, inadequate sanitation, factories spewing forth sulfurous smoke day and night, and toxic waste running out of dyeworks into the city’s waterways.

It was the responsibility of the Medical Officer of Health to do something about these problems. Yet, despite the permissive power of the 1848 Public Health Act, Manchester did not appoint its first Medical Officer of Health, Dr. John Leigh, until 1867. Leigh served as Manchester’s Medical Officer of Health until his death in 1888 and particularly concerned himself with smoke abatement and water-quality issues. In his first annual report, he condemned the city of Manchester for its “unenviable reputation as one of the most unhealthy towns in the kingdom.”35Leigh, Report of the Officer of Health for Manchester, 1868, 3. Still, Leigh made it his mission to improve the living conditions of the city, though his efforts were often constrained by Manchester’s Liberal municipal government, which sought to minimize costs incurred by landowners.

In his second annual report, Leigh compared those who lived in Manchester’s cellars to “cave-dwellers,” noting that their lack of light and air produced “blanched and flabby children” who “grow up into the stunted men and women that crowd the streets of manufacturing towns.”36Leigh, Report of the Officer of Health for Manchester, 1869, 5. In an effort to tackle the problem of ill-ventilated housing, he sought to combat the problem through local efforts rather than with the aid of national legislation.37Roberts, “‘A Densely Populated and Unlovely Tract,’” 22. Empowered by the Manchester Waterworks and Improvement Act of 1867, Leigh declared the worst properties “unfit for human habitation” and compelled landlords to bring them up to livable standards through renovation, or to make use of the buildings for non-residential purposes. This began a gradual process of knocking down the walls between back-to-back houses or, in some cases, their full removal to create yards and space for exterior privies. By 1889, this strategy was abandoned in favor of the wholesale demolition and replanning of entire blocks of unsanitary dwellings.38Roberts, “‘A Densely Populated and Unlovely Tract,’” 23. With regards to waste removal, under Leigh’s tenure as Medical Officer of Health, the city began a commitment to shift away from the use of open cesspools to pail-closets, from which waste was collected and sold for commercial fertilizer; although environmental historian Harold Platt argues that this was “motivated more by the lure of turning losses into profits for the city’s troubled scavenger service than by a desire to improve the lives of the vast majority of its citizens.”39Platt, Shock Cities, 222.

An 1845 report from the Royal Commission on the Health of Large Towns, which was tasked with investigating smoke abatement in Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham, argued that second only to defective drainage, smoke was the most consequential nuisance in all three cities. The challenge to its mitigation, however, was that smoke abatement, unlike public waterworks, required significant costly investment by private interests (the smoke-producing factories).40Bowler and Brimblecombe, “Control of Air Pollution in Manchester,” 88. Nevertheless, Leigh took smoke abatement very seriously. He attributed extraordinary death rates in cities to coal smoke. According to Platt, Leigh did this to deflect “attention away from the massive contamination of working-class neighborhoods that had tons and tons of putrefying human wastes in their backyards.”41Platt, Shock Cities, 453. Leigh was empowered to act by the Sanitary Act of 1866 and obliged by the Public Health Act of 1875 to prosecute polluters whose chimneys were deemed to be a “nuisance.” However, too few industrialists were prosecuted for their failure to curb their emissions, particularly because the Act allowed for an exemption so long as factories’ furnaces were constructed to be “as practical” as possible with regards to mitigating emissions (which it was the purview of local authorities to determine). Even the maximum possible fines (£5) were also deemed too inconsequential to have a real impact.42Bowler and Brimblecombe, “Control of Air Pollution in Manchester,” 91–94; Mosley, The Chimney of the World, 167–72.

One final problem completely evaded Leigh’s effort, even though he was aware of it. This was the appalling reality that half of the city’s children were dying before the age of five.43Platt, Shock Cities, 217. While bronchitis and pneumonia resulting from coal smoke pollution were a leading cause of childhood deaths, curiously, Leigh did not blame public officials for this particular failure of public health and instead placed the responsibility for children’s deaths on their mothers, who town clerk Sir Joseph Heron believed in 1869 were “beyond the reach of mere sanitary legislation.”44Mosley, The Chimney of the World, 98–99; Annual Report of the Committee of the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association being a Summary of their Proceedings for the Year 1869, 8.

As I will argue in the following chapters, Leigh and Heron were wrong. However, a shift in public health policy in Manchester did not occur until after Leigh’s death in 1888. It would be his successors, Drs. John Tatham and James Niven, who began to blur the boundaries of public health inside and outside the home and shift the blame for poor health conditions away from “personal morality” and onto their actual root causes in urban environments, based on new discoveries in germ theory and disease etiology.45Platt, Shock Cities, 327. In so doing, they began a new age of social and environmental justice for the urban poor beginning in the late 1880s. Children, I will argue, were the greatest beneficiaries.