Horses and house flies – a deadly combination

A new member of the Preston History Facebook group commenting on a recent post of a 1904 silent film showing horse-drawn trams in Fishergate said the town must ‘have had the best roses in Lancashire with all that horse poop’. In fact, it was about to be discovered that ‘horse poop’ was the cause of the summer diarrhoea that every year carried off scores of babies and infants.

Preston had the worst record of any large town in England for infant mortality, and three years after the silent film was screened the connection was finally made between the deaths and the house flies that fed on the heaped middens of horse manure in the stables that were found in the packed terraced streets of the town.

Nigel Morgan, in his book Deadly Dwellings, traced the discovery to the 1907 report of Dr Pilkington, the town’s medical officer, in which for the first time the blame for the deaths was pinned on the house flies: ‘Too often the milk is left uncovered. in a warm situation and exposed to the incursions of the swarms of flies which during the Diarrhoeal season begin to invade these dwellings …’

In his next annual report, Dr Pilkington was recommending remedies: ‘Since the house fyy breeds in rubbish. stable manure and decaying matter generally, it is obviously desirable that no collections of this kind should be allowed to remain in the immediate neighbourhood of a dwelling house …’

But there was no easy solution:

‘Until the services of the horse are entirely superseded by the motor engine, stables in a town cannot be altogether avoided, but certain restrictions are necessary with regard to the midden in which … the stable manure must be stored. Where possible, it is better that such manure should be removed each day, but in the majority of cases circumstances render such prompt removal difficult, if not impossible.’

And he faced opposition from, among others, the Horse Owners Association, which in 1912 argued that ‘the compulsory application of the order would be a very serious thing to the horse owners of the town, especially those with single or two horses.’

To a suggestion that the middens should be cleaned out twice a week, even some doctors objected, such as the Dr Rigby, who I think was the husband of the suffragette Edith Rigby, then living at No 15 Winckley Square, as Nigel recounts:

‘To this another councillor (Dr Rigby) replied that the evil was curing itself, since horses were going out of use, and the number of horse middens were reducing themselves automatically. A few years ago, he said, there had been twenty horses in Winkley Square, and now there were only two. As regarded the disease caused by flies, he thought the evils much overstated.’

But the problem did not lie in airy Winckley Square, but in the crowded terraces to the north and east of the town where horses were not going out of use and few cars were to be found, as the Horse Owners Association pointed out:

‘Most of the middens that were the greatest nuisance belonged to people who had only one horse and lived in the congested districts. But they were poor men. They had got to get a living by carting or coal dealing and the midden stock was worth 30 shillings a year.’

And then councillors, as so often in the past, pinned the blame on the women living in the poorest housing, with a Councillor Middlebrook, who Nigel pointed out lived in the country, arguing that ‘horse manure in itself was very healthy’. The fault lay with the mothers:

‘A fly might be an insect that spread disease. but he felt that the great cause of infantile diarrhoea was the slum property. In the poorest houses, where the mothers were careless and indifferent, the houses were not properly clean, and the food not properly protected. (Hear, hear.)’