On this day … 28 June 1879

An article in the Preston Chronicle shows that even near the end of the nineteenth century many people still got their milk from a cow kept in a backyard in a neighbouring street.

The Cow Sheds and Milk Shops Act had recently required all cow keepers to register with the local council. In Preston, the town council was told, some eighty-one cow keepers applied for registration for themselves and their approximately six hundred cows.

The concern of the act was that the cramped and unhealthy conditions that the cows were often kept in were a danger to public health.

In the Barrett’s Preston Directory for 1882 (pictured) there are 49 cowkeepers still doing business in the town, but by the time of Seed’s directory in 1904, only one was still advertising: Henry Robinson at 41, Eldon Street.

Mind you, when the councillors turned from their consideration of the accommodation for cows to the accommodation of the human inhabitants of the town, it would seem that in many cases the conditions were often just as unfit.

The councillors were told that some landlords were flouting the regulations that closed cellar dwellings which contravened the Public Health Act. The landlords were getting round the regulations when they were served with notice to stop letting a cellar for human occupation by selling them on. The new landlords would let the cellars again until the inspectors caught up with them.

These threats to the health of the town were among the reasons that Preston ranked so high in the national mortality tables, particularly for infant deaths.

But they were not the principal cause, according to Alderman William Gilbertson, a local solicitor and Conservative member of the council. The principal cause of the infant deaths was diarrhoea and the cause of that was insanitary conditions. And where were those insanitary conditions found, he asked?

‘He would point out that there were scarcely any deaths registered in streets which were occupied by the middle and upper classes. The deaths were principally in the streets inhabited by operatives, showing amongst whom those deaths from infectious diseases generally occurred.’

The Chronicle in an earlier issue, carried a pen portrait of Gilbertson, which would have been written by the editor, Anthony Hewitson:

‘In religion Mr Gilbertson is a Churchman; and in politics a Conservative … He is tenacious, hard to master, sharp-witted, critical, rather crotchety; looks chilly, methodical and weather-wise; likes small gossips at the end of Winckley Street.’

His special skill, apparently, lay in keeping a tight hold on the council’s purse strings, ‘He always likes to know where the coin has to come from when special money-spending is talked about’.

Hewitson, if he was the writer, complained that Gilbertson proved a challenge to his shorthand, because, ‘… he talks too rapidly, gets involved too often, and, in reporting phraseology, is a bad speaker to follow’.

There was no such difficulty in following Alderman Gilbertson’s thoughts about the living conditions of the ‘operatives’: if they simply followed the example of the middle and upper classes in hygiene, the town would not be facing a public health crisis.