History of Madeley / including Ironbridge, Coalbrookdale, and Coalport

by John Randall

THE CHOLERA.

If some memorable occurrences in local history may be termed ‘red lettered,’ the fearful visitations of this epidemic in 1832 and 1848 may be said to have been black, and very black lettered events indeed. The steady march of this dire disease from Asia over the continent of Europe towards our shores in 1831 created the utmost alarm of approaching danger, and led to precautionary measures being taken. Medical science however was at fault; contradictory advice was given; orders in council were issued and withdrawn; and people were at their wits’ end what steps to take. A rigid system of quarantine was at first enforced; and when the enemy did arrive it was ordered that each infected district or house was to be isolated and shut up within itself, and the inhabitants cut off from communication with other parts of the country; and ‘all articles of food or other necessaries were to be placed in front of the house, and received by the inhabitants after the person delivering them had retired.’ It was in fact the exploit over again of the gallant gentleman who proposed, as Milton says, to ‘pound up the crows by shutting his park gate.’ Clinging to the belief that the disease was imported and spread by contagion, few really remedial measures founded on the hypothesis of the low sanitary condition of the population—as bad drainage, ill-ventilated and overcrowded dwellings, offensive sewers, unwholesome water, and the thousand other kindred abominations which afflict the poor, were suggested. But feelings and sympathies were naturally with the patient and against the unchristian edict which said to him—‘Thou art sick, and we visit thee not; thou art in prison, and we come not unto thee’. Gradually too it dawned upon the minds of the authorities—as the result of observation and experience—that it was not so much from direct communication that persons were affected, as from bad sanitary conditions;—for persons were not consecutively affected who lived in the same house or slept in the same bed with the sick; and that children even suckled by mothers labouring under the disease escaped. On Wednesday, the 21st of March, 1832, there was a general fast for deliverance from the plague, as it was called, but it was pretty much the same as Æsop’s case of the carter who prayed Jupiter to get his cart wheel out of the rut; and the answer vouchsafed by Providence was similar—‘put your own shoulder to the wheel’, do what you can first to make the people clean and wholesome. We have no statistics or recorded facts to fall back upon, but so far as our knowledge and experience serves us we should say that the first victims in this neighbourhood were among men and women who led irregular lives, and who lived in dirty ill-ventilated homes, and in the decks and cabins of barges going long voyages, in which men slept and ate their meals; and persons on the banks of the Severn, who drank the polluted water of the river. A case occurred at Coalport, on the 21st of July, 1832, on board a barge on the Severn, which belonged to owner Jones; and it was thought prudent to sink the vessel to destroy the contagion. A man named Richard Evans also was taken with the cholera on board a Shrewsbury barge, and was removed to the “Big House,” as it was called, at the Calcutts, which had been hired and set apart by Mr. George Pritchard and others for the reception of victims. On the 23rd, Thomas Oakes, son of John Oakes, died on board Dillon Lloyd’s vessel, and during that month and the next the plague continued its ravages by the Severn. From an old diary we learn that a man named Goosetree, his wife, and three children, were seized on the 14th of August at the Coalport Manufactory, and died the same day; as also did a Mrs. Baugh and her mother.

The more ignorant of the people were suspicious of the doctors; Mr. Thursfield on the 23rd of July visited a house at Coalford, and offered a draught to a woman whom he suspected of shewing symptoms of the disease, but was beaten off by her daughter Kitty, who said her mother wanted food and not medicine. The doctor does not appear to have been popular judging from doggrel lines in circulation at the time—

‘The cholera morbus is begun
And Dr. Thursfield is the mon
To carry the cholera morbus on.’

A man named William Titley, whilst drinking, dancing, and singing this to a public house company, was taken with the disease, and died next day. William Fletcher, a carpenter, whilst employed in making the coffin intended for Titley, was seized, and died next day, and was buried in the coffin he had made for another. A few days after, on the 14th of September, Israel Weager, a barge block-maker, who wore dirty and greasy clothes, who was grimy and dirty also in his person, and worked in a wretched shed by the Robin Hood public house, was another taken about the same time who died. During the remainder of the same month, and those of October, November, and December, the cholera continued to find victims. Men drank hard to ward off the disease and sowed the seeds which brought it on. Men and women were taken ill, died, and were buried the same day; and some were probably buried before they were dead. One man, a well known cock-fighter at Broseley, was attacked with the disease, and so stupefied by brandy that he was supposed to be dead. He was taken to the cholera ground adjoining Jackfield church on the hill, and the rattle of the soil upon the coffin which accompanied the words “ashes to ashes” &c., roused him from his stupor, when the bystanders hearing a noise lifted the lid and the old cocker came forth. [253] We believe his name was William Roberts, judging from the diary before mentioned, and that the event occurred on the 14th of September; and that on the 1st of October his wife and two children died of the plague, and were buried the same day. At many places it was much worse than it was here. At Bilston, for instance, it raged so fiercely that forty-five victims died in one day; and not less than twenty for several days running; and their neighbours at Birmingham presented a waggon load of coffins, as being the most acceptable present they could make. It was bad enough here; church bells were tolling, hearses and cholera carts were in motion often, and at untimely hours, early and late, by torch light, or accompanied by the feeble light of a lantern; and a melancholy sadness settled upon all. Many journeys were made by the “cholera cart from the Workhouse” to Madeley church-yard, with just sufficient of the inmates of the house to convey the corpse to the hole dug for it. It must not be supposed however that the victims to this terrible plague were confined to the lower classes, many of the well-to-do were stricken and died: the sister of the present Lord Forester, we are informed by the diary referred to, died on the 23rd of July of cholera in London. At last the evil spent itself and subsided; it was a fearful curse, but it had the effect of convincing us that something more than fasts and well-seasoned sermons were needed to prevent or remove the epidemic: and so much was done by public attention being called to the effects bad sanitary conditions had on the physical causes of sickness and mortality, by Dr. Southwood Smith in 1838, and by evidence by Mr. Slaney, M.P., for Shrewsbury, who obtained a select committee to enquire into the circumstances affecting the health of the inhabitants of large towns, with a view to improved sanitary regulations for their benefit, in 1840, that the knowledge gained enabled medical men successfully to grapple with the epidemic when it again threatened to spread itself over the country in 1848.