On this day … 17 June 1876

A very brief notice in the ‘To Let’ columns of the Preston Chronicle mentioned the now-forgotten trade in ‘night soil’, the Victorian euphemism for the contents of the town’s privies. The night soil collectors went from house to house, emptying the privies, the contents of which were sold to farmers in the neighbourhood to manure their fields.

It was still a ‘healthy’ business in the 1870s because so many houses in the town were still not connected to a sewer. Night soil collection was an improvement on the practice of earlier centuries, when the night soil was simply added to the midden heaps beside most houses in the town.

Earlier in the nineteenth century, cesspools served for many streets, as was noted in a report by a government inspector who visited the town in 1849. Some did not have the benefit of even a cesspool:

‘Sergeant-street and Gilbert-street, were in a most objectionable state. Between the back houses there were only two alleys, both of which had been converted into sewers. Many of the privies had not even cesspools, but the dirt was allowed to run into the alleys, and was wheeled away off the premises. There was also no water in the street. … The reason why people did not complain of their filth was, that they had lived so long in them as not to know it was so, and they did not seem aware of the horrible condition in which they were living.’

‘In Richmond-street, the main drains were in a very miserable condition. There were cellars to the houses, and behind them was an open ditch, and the privies were discharged into it. The yards were in a most dirty state.’

But even this was not the worst, as William Livesey, Joseph Livesey’s son, pointed out to the inspector:

‘… there was one class of houses which the inspector seemed to have overlooked altogether. They were a certain class of houses, the privies of which were built inside the house, and they had no back yard at all. The stench arising from them, in warm weather, was intolerable, even to parties passing in the street; and what it must be to others, living inside, he would leave them to judge. The owners had, apparently, no regard for decency or health. The privies were the common privies, without any improvement whatever, and were situated under the stairs. One was called “Solomon’s Temple,” near the Unicorn.’

But some people were aware of the horribleness, as the following notice handed to the inspector shows:

‘… a memorial from Christ Church Ward, signed by fifty-four persons, complaining of nuisances caused by cesspools and house-drains, and the overflow of the cesspools, which was deposited and allowed to remain in the ditches adjoining North and South Meadow Lanes, from West-cliffe, Stanley-terrace, Fishergate-hill, Spring-bank, and Bow-lane.’

The inspector was impressed by the sentiments expressed by the householders he met:

‘In going through the town, he found that the people had generally a good deal to say worth listening to, and one and all agreed that if the thing was once put decent, and they could keep their places of abode cleanly without working their hearts out, they were willing to do it.

‘The interior of the houses was generally clean … on the whole, the chances were, that in an ordinary house they would find some pains taken to keep the rooms decent and clean. There was everything to show that if the government of the town would give drainage and water, the poor would do their part in keeping themselves clean …. This, he found, was universally the case.

‘If they talked to the owners of small house property, it was but to be told that Providence meant the poor to be dirty; and if they were put into palaces of gold or ivory, dirty they would remain.

‘Certainly, if they put an Irishman into a dirty place, dirty he would remain; but, if they put an Irishman into a clean house, he would keep it clean. If this was so with the Irish, surely it would be the same with the Saxon English.’