The ‘Cholera Precautions’ poster in this 1892 photo of Newcastle’s Quayside is a reminder of one of the city’s most disgraceful episodes, when a local business helped to kill one and half thousand people a few years previously.
The summer of 1853 had been especially hot, drying out the Whittle Dean Water Company’s reservoir to the west of Newcastle, which supplied the town with its domestic water. The company also supplied the many industries that lined the banks of the Tyne, they were powered by steam and consumed huge amounts of water. The quality of this water was unimportant, so the Whittle drew it straight out of the river near Elswick rather than from their reservoir.
When fresh water was no longer available from their reservoir due to the drought, the company decided to switch their domestic customers to the bountiful supply from the river. The Tyne at that time was filthy, the factories, chemical works and leather manufacturers dumped their waste into it, and it was the destination of all the sewage from a town of 90,000 people. There was so much untreated sewage that it was said you could no longer swim in the river, you just went through the motions.
The company had been supplying people’s homes with this disgusting stuff for several weeks before the first cases of cholera were reported in September 1853. This added another potentially lethal ingredient to the town’s drinking water: the faeces of those who had the disease. The water was being consumed in people’s homes and passed through the sewage system back into the river, and then drunk again by others; a cycle that accelerated the epidemic.
Previous outbreaks of cholera in Newcastle had mostly affected the poorer classes, and it’s easy to understand why. The town was the most densely populated in the country. On a street called Sandgate, a few yards from where the photo was taken, 5,000 people were crammed into 350 houses. Only four of these properties had indoor toilets, everyone else shared a single public convenience by the roadside. The residents got all their water from another shared source, the Sandgate Pant.
But this outbreak was different, it affected everyone regardless of their wealth or social status, thanks to the Whittle Dean Water Company. The property developer Richard Grainger had recently built 400 new houses half a mile from this squalor in the town centre. The wealthy occupants of Grainger Town had all the mod cons, such as indoor toilets and fresh water taps, and now these taps were dispensing filth straight from the Tyne.
The 1853 epidemic ripped through the whole of Newcastle until it had run its course after a month or so. The causes of the disease and its means of transmission were poorly understood at the time, Newcastle’s Board of Health blamed strong drink and habitual drunkards for spreading it. Pub owners disputed this claim and urged their customers to fortify themselves with spirits, while a shopkeeper in the Bigg Market claimed his woollen underwear was the best prevention money could buy.
The puzzle was eventually cracked by a physician called John Snow, who had served his apprenticeship at Newcastle Infirmary. He was living in London during an epidemic there in 1854 when he identified a public water pump in Soho as being responsible for a spike in the number of deaths nearby. He deduced from this that cholera was a water-borne disease that could be prevented by providing a clean supply.
Unfortunately, this was a year too late for the 1,527 people in Newcastle who had been killed by the supply provided to them by the Whittle Dean Water Company.
• Photo credit: The picture was taken by Edgar G. Lee in 1892 at the east end of the Quayside and has been cropped.