Poo in nineteenth century York

 For Proust it was a madeleine, but for me it was nineteenth century scoria bricks.

I mentioned how sometimes in the walls of back lanes you could still sometimes see hatches, like oversize cat doors, that were associated with pail closets in the nineteenth century..

Well, I must have seen them somewhere else in the north of England, because apparently York never implemented a collection system for poo buckets. Which, given  that Ouse has propensity to flood in winter, and the very bad cholera outbreak in the 1830s, is surprising.

But perhaps that's not so surprising. When I first moved to York in the mid 1980's the railway works was still a major employer, as were Rowntree's and Terry's confectionery businesses, and the glass works - that made glass jars for the confectionery business had only just closed, so you would have expected that York had developed as an industrial centre as did other towns in Yorkshire.

However, that really wasn't the case. despite the arrival of the railway in the 1840s, York was, for a good part of the nineteenth century solely an ecclesiastical and administrative centre.

Industry, and the accompanying population growth, only really began in the 1880's, and so, while the middle classes of mid-Victorian York would have had access to flushing toilets that either dumped their contents in the river or in a local cesspit, the poor would have made do with a bucket and a midden at the end of the street that was probably periodically removed for sale as manure, or alternatively washed down the river when it flooded.

(This is why fieldwalking in England, especially with the aid of a metal detector, often turns up nineteenth century small change. Poor they may have been but not poor enough to search the poo bucket for a dropped farthing.)

However, the slow growth of the city in the Victorian era probably means that quite a few houses in York, especially those dating from after the 1880s when the city began to grow and sewerage provision improved, probably only ever had a flush toilet, even if it was one in the back yard. 

Certainly, our house in Darnborough Street, which dated from early Edwardian period had a brick built coal shed and disused outside flushing toilet that probably dated from when the house was built.

Even though it must have been excruciatingly cold in the depths of a bone chillingly cold foggy York winter, it would have represented a major improvement over pooing in a bucket and periodically emptying the contents in a midden somewhere ...