The Report of the Board of Health brought to light many instances in which it seemed probable that cholera had been favoured, if not induced, by the water of wells contaminated with organic filth soaking through the ground or entering with the surface water. This was especially the case at Merthyr Tydvil. It was during the next cholera, that of 1854, that the question of contaminated water came into great prominence, in connexion both with wells and with the vast volumes of water supplied through the mains of water companies.
The Cholera of 1853 at Newcastle and Gateshead.
The third visitation of Great Britain and Ireland by Asiatic Cholera was in 1853-54. There had been none of it in any part of the kingdom since 1850; but it is not so clear that all other European countries, especially Poland, were equally free from it. Whether due to a new approach from Asia, or to a rekindling of smouldering fires, cholera appeared in the Baltic ports in the summer of 1853, and soon after reached the Tyne. For the third time a severe but localized epidemic was the prelude—this time at Newcastle and Gateshead, just as in 1848 at Edinburgh, Glasgow and the south of Scotland, and in 1831 at Sunderland and Newcastle.
In the cholera of 1849, which was the most general and the most severe visitation that England has had, Newcastle escaped with a light visitation and Gateshead with a moderate or average one, while Tynemouth (with North Shields) had about twice as many deaths as Newcastle and Gateshead together (12·9 deaths per 1000 inhabitants). In 1853 it was the turn of Newcastle—for no better reason, perhaps, than its escape last time. The very thorough and masterly inquiry by Messrs Simon, Bateman and Hume did, indeed, reveal a most unwholesome state of things; but the town was no worse or only a little worse than in 1849, when the cholera had dealt lightly with it, and it was probably an average sample of the insanitary condition of the greater English industrial towns in the time of their rapid growth and before the period of well-ordered local government had arrived. In some parts, such as Sandgate, the dwellings of the labouring class were “not fit to live in”; in the newer mean suburbs, it was found, as in Glasgow twenty years before, that cellars had become the dwelling-places of a class who in former times lived above ground. Those who had been dispossessed by the railways and other public structures had not been provided for elsewhere; so that, with more trade and better wages, the working class were worse housed than before. Overcrowding, for which the ports on the Tyne and Wear are still pre-eminent, was then most excessive. Only the better-class houses had the water laid on. Excremental offences to sight and smell were everywhere. There was a system of main sewers, passably good; but house-drainage or connexions with the main drains were quite casual. The scavenging of the town was greatly neglected. Piggeries, slaughter-houses and other such nuisances, were uncontrolled. The burial-grounds were over-full. With all this the death-rate of Newcastle could be low enough in a good year, such as 1844, when it was 20·9 per 1000; in the year of the Irish fever, 1847, it rose to 32·8; and in other years it fluctuated between those extremes, according to the nature of the seasons[1564].
The cholera of 1853 was a sudden explosion in the heavy stagnant atmosphere of the month of September. No one knew where the infection came from; there were, of course, ships arriving from the Baltic, but no particular source was ever traced. On the 30th or 31st of August, a case occurred of the rapidly fatal kind; before a week there were about a hundred attacks daily all over the town. From the 13th of September the deaths in Newcastle mounted up rapidly as follows:
| Cholera deaths | ||
| Sept. 13 | 59 | |
| 14 | 90 | |
| 15 | 106 | |
| 16 | 114 | |
| 17 | 103 | |
| 18 | 103 | |
| 19 | 111 | |
| 20 | 85 | |
| 21 | 68 | |
| 22 | 82 | |
| 23 | 60 | |
| 24 | 56 |
In the thirty days of September there were 1371 deaths, and some one or two hundreds more in the first part of October, when the infection ceased almost abruptly, the total of deaths to the 4th of November having been 1533. During the same time Gateshead with a population of 26,000, had 433 deaths, or in a ratio nearly equal to that of Newcastle. On the other hand Tynemouth, with a population of 30,000, had only twelve deaths, several of them in vagrants or other arrivals from Newcastle, the rest in a cluster of pitmen’s cottages on the outskirts of North Shields.
It was freely rumoured at the time, and was even repeated with much unction in so dry and deliberate a work as the report of the Registrar-General, that the cholera at Newcastle and Gateshead in September, 1853, was owing to the sudden contamination of the town’s water with sewage. The facts about the water-supply are as follows: Previous to 1848, Newcastle was supplied with Tyne water pumped up at Elswick, and passed through the settling tanks and filtering beds. In 1848 the Whittle Dean Water Company, incorporated in 1845, had their new supply ready, and the old company, with its pumping station at Elswick, was superseded. The new supply was collected from landward sources, and was apt to be peaty. There was a great demand upon it, especially for public works (it was supplied to comparatively few houses), so that the distribution in 1853 had increased 2½ times since the company began in 1848. They had extended their collecting area to meet this demand; but, owing probably to the drought, they found it necessary on the 6th of July, 1853, to resort to the old pumping-station at Elswick for about a third part of all the water that flowed daily through the mains. This had gone on for eight weeks before the epidemic began, and was promptly discontinued on 15 September, as soon as the possible danger from Tyne water was realized. The pumping-station was higher up the river than the only one of the Newcastle sewers that discharged in its vicinity. There were complaints about the water, but these appear to have been chiefly of the peaty colour or flavour, which came from the Whittle Dean part of the mixture. The water from the mains was not equally bad at all points, as if the suspected contamination might have occurred in its transit through the town. Also the water of some wells was complained of as offensive at the same time, which was the season of the year when the springs are lowest. Gateshead was also supplied by the mains of the Whittle Dean Company. It is clear from the report of the Commissioners that they considered the water of Newcastle and Gateshead to have been a very subordinate factor, if a factor at all, in the epidemic of cholera.