150 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK 19 - 25 MAY 1875
This week's many stories include the revenge of the 14-year-old street rough that liked to assault girls, some shocking death stats for 1874 are released, the strange reason a police officer was stationed in St Helens Cemetery, the feckless Feigh family are united in prison, the St Helens Newspaper feels that the town is going backwards and preparations are made for the forthcoming Newton Races.
This week the St Helens Medical Officer of Health, Dr Robert McNicoll, released his annual report for 1874 and it made grim reading. There had been 488 deaths last year caused by what were known as zymotic diseases, essentially fevers of one contagious kind or another. The scarlet fever epidemic in St Helens had been the biggest killer, causing 238 deaths and up from 92 fatalities in 1873.
There had also been a rise in whooping cough deaths, up from 9 in 1873 to 44 last year. Diphtheria had killed 14 in 1874; typhoid and related diseases had caused the deaths of 26 persons; diphtheria 14; diarrhoea 110 and measles 29. The only bright spot was that there had been no deaths from smallpox. But of the 1,532 deaths in St Helens during 1874, 864 of them had been of children under 5 years of age with half of that shocking number aged under 1.
Night soil was a euphemism for human faeces and was so called because a collector normally removed it at night from the privies, pits and pail closets that people used as toilets. Dr McNichol also detailed how many night soil collections there had been from ashpits. These were the dumps that contained the human waste and were mixed with ashes to reduce the smell and keep away pests.
Some houses shared an ashpit and during 1874, 5,340 of them that were attached to nearly 11,000 houses were emptied. But they appear to only have been emptied twice a year as just 9,735 loads were collected. Dr McNichol said the applications for such removals were considerable and more horses and men were urgently needed to undertake the work.
Whenever the St Helens Newspaper mentioned Denis Feigh they would always call him the notorious Denis Feigh. He was a bit of a comical character whose 60 or so convictions were mainly for drunkenness and minor theft, although there was a serious consequence to his activities. Denis's notoriety meant his three sons had no chance in life and they had often been brought to court charged with begging or stealing.
And their mother Margaret was not much better, having made around 20 appearances herself in the dock. She was back in court this week for creating a breach of the peace on the previous Saturday night. That was after her son James had been taken into custody for assaulting a policeman (and later sent to prison) and, as the Newspaper put it, Margaret had during the journey to the police station: "…followed them in a most excited state, and called on the crowd to rescue her son." Crowds always seemed to appear out of thin air when the St Helens police made arrests on a Saturday night!
On this occasion Margaret Feigh was not imprisoned but bound over to keep the peace. However, she needed to find sureties to guarantee her good behaviour. Later in the week two more of the Feigh brood – brothers Patrick and John – were each sent to prison for twenty-one days after being found sleeping in a shippon [cow shed] in Liverpool Street. The Newspaper wrote: "This makes five members of the family, namely father, mother, and three sons, who are now undergoing imprisonment in Kirkdale gaol." And so clearly Margaret had not been able to find the required sureties enabling her to be bound over.
It was disclosed in another case that in 1874 St Helens Cemetery had every day from May 1st until September 30th needed to have a police officer stationed there. Was it to be on the look out for body snatchers or rowdy funeral goers? No, the police had been there to catch people pinching flowers! This was revealed when Richard Delehunty was charged with wilful damage.
The Newspaper said PC Sewell had seen the 14-year-old: "…deliberately pluck a branch in bloom off a cherry tree, and he had also some others in his hand, with which he evidently intended making a bouquet." The damage was only estimated as having been a penny and Richard was ordered to pay that amount, a fine of 6d and court costs of nearly 8 shillings.
In March 14-year-old Richard Halligan had been sent to prison for 21 days for striking Catherine Atherton several times with a stick and breaking her nose. Catherine was employed at the Ravenhead Glass Works and had been with a group of girls returning home from work when she was attacked. Prison sentences for relatively low-level violence were not common.
However, the police had told the magistrates that street roughs like Halligan were regularly assaulting young women and so they decided to impose a deterrent sentence. Now out of gaol, Halligan sought revenge. The lad's target was Mary Livesley who had seen Halligan strike Catherine and had given evidence against him in court. Subsequently, he had frequently threatened Mary, including on the very night that he had come out of prison.
She had brought a summons against Halligan charging him with using threatening language. At the lad's court hearing it was claimed that he carried a thick stick with him and had threatened to use it to break Mary's nose, as he had done with Catherine. Halligan was ordered to find two sureties to keep the peace for six months or go to prison for another month.
In a highly critical editorial the St Helens Newspaper on the 22nd pondered whether for a town with 50,000 "souls" enough was being done for their "moral, intellectual, and physical well-being". The paper was satisfied with most members of the Town Council but thought some had qualifications "of the most mythical character, but who make up with verbosity what they are lacking in the more solid requirements".
The owner and editor of the hard-hitting paper was Bernard Dromgoole who is certain to have written the piece and also had stinging criticisms of the town's hospital and fire brigade:
"It is true that we have a Cottage Hospital, admirably designed for the suffering poor, but whose resources are sometimes devoured by persons whom it was never contemplated should be allowed to sponge upon the provision generously made for the maimed or the destitute. It is likewise true we have, nominally, a Fire Brigade, which generally manages to damage more with misapplied water, when it succeeds in applying it at all, than is done by the devouring element [the flames]; perhaps Water Brigade would be a more appropriate cognomen."
The Newspaper summed up its appraisal of the state of things in St Helens with these remarks: "One generation passeth away, and another cometh, and our hopes are buoyed with the anticipation that improvement will mark the progress from father to son, mother to daughter; but we look around in vain, retrogression rather than progression appears to be the order of the day."
Newton Races was being held in a couple of weeks and on the 24th the letting of sites for drinking bars and plots for booths took place. Publicans and fairground folk and others had to go to the grandstand on Newton Racecourse at noon in order to agree their site and cough up their rent in advance.
The vicar of St Helens was once quoted as saying: "Very many poor sinners have confessed to me on their death beds that they commenced their wicked career at Newton races". I'm not sure exactly what he meant but the races were renowned for drunken behaviour and a magnet for pickpockets and other criminals.
Horse racing had taken place on Newton Common from at least 1678 and continued until 1899 when Lord Newton accepted an offer from a syndicate to rent land in Haydock to establish a new course that we know as Haydock Park.
St Helens Newspaper courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include the Atlas Street house that had 26 residents, Queen Victoria gives her blessing for a discrimination-free Cowley Middle School, the bonnet stealing in Talbot Street and the man who was only fined after stabbing a bobby.
This week the St Helens Medical Officer of Health, Dr Robert McNicoll, released his annual report for 1874 and it made grim reading. There had been 488 deaths last year caused by what were known as zymotic diseases, essentially fevers of one contagious kind or another. The scarlet fever epidemic in St Helens had been the biggest killer, causing 238 deaths and up from 92 fatalities in 1873.
There had also been a rise in whooping cough deaths, up from 9 in 1873 to 44 last year. Diphtheria had killed 14 in 1874; typhoid and related diseases had caused the deaths of 26 persons; diphtheria 14; diarrhoea 110 and measles 29. The only bright spot was that there had been no deaths from smallpox. But of the 1,532 deaths in St Helens during 1874, 864 of them had been of children under 5 years of age with half of that shocking number aged under 1.
Night soil was a euphemism for human faeces and was so called because a collector normally removed it at night from the privies, pits and pail closets that people used as toilets. Dr McNichol also detailed how many night soil collections there had been from ashpits. These were the dumps that contained the human waste and were mixed with ashes to reduce the smell and keep away pests.
Some houses shared an ashpit and during 1874, 5,340 of them that were attached to nearly 11,000 houses were emptied. But they appear to only have been emptied twice a year as just 9,735 loads were collected. Dr McNichol said the applications for such removals were considerable and more horses and men were urgently needed to undertake the work.
Whenever the St Helens Newspaper mentioned Denis Feigh they would always call him the notorious Denis Feigh. He was a bit of a comical character whose 60 or so convictions were mainly for drunkenness and minor theft, although there was a serious consequence to his activities. Denis's notoriety meant his three sons had no chance in life and they had often been brought to court charged with begging or stealing.
And their mother Margaret was not much better, having made around 20 appearances herself in the dock. She was back in court this week for creating a breach of the peace on the previous Saturday night. That was after her son James had been taken into custody for assaulting a policeman (and later sent to prison) and, as the Newspaper put it, Margaret had during the journey to the police station: "…followed them in a most excited state, and called on the crowd to rescue her son." Crowds always seemed to appear out of thin air when the St Helens police made arrests on a Saturday night!
On this occasion Margaret Feigh was not imprisoned but bound over to keep the peace. However, she needed to find sureties to guarantee her good behaviour. Later in the week two more of the Feigh brood – brothers Patrick and John – were each sent to prison for twenty-one days after being found sleeping in a shippon [cow shed] in Liverpool Street. The Newspaper wrote: "This makes five members of the family, namely father, mother, and three sons, who are now undergoing imprisonment in Kirkdale gaol." And so clearly Margaret had not been able to find the required sureties enabling her to be bound over.
It was disclosed in another case that in 1874 St Helens Cemetery had every day from May 1st until September 30th needed to have a police officer stationed there. Was it to be on the look out for body snatchers or rowdy funeral goers? No, the police had been there to catch people pinching flowers! This was revealed when Richard Delehunty was charged with wilful damage.
The Newspaper said PC Sewell had seen the 14-year-old: "…deliberately pluck a branch in bloom off a cherry tree, and he had also some others in his hand, with which he evidently intended making a bouquet." The damage was only estimated as having been a penny and Richard was ordered to pay that amount, a fine of 6d and court costs of nearly 8 shillings.
In March 14-year-old Richard Halligan had been sent to prison for 21 days for striking Catherine Atherton several times with a stick and breaking her nose. Catherine was employed at the Ravenhead Glass Works and had been with a group of girls returning home from work when she was attacked. Prison sentences for relatively low-level violence were not common.
However, the police had told the magistrates that street roughs like Halligan were regularly assaulting young women and so they decided to impose a deterrent sentence. Now out of gaol, Halligan sought revenge. The lad's target was Mary Livesley who had seen Halligan strike Catherine and had given evidence against him in court. Subsequently, he had frequently threatened Mary, including on the very night that he had come out of prison.
She had brought a summons against Halligan charging him with using threatening language. At the lad's court hearing it was claimed that he carried a thick stick with him and had threatened to use it to break Mary's nose, as he had done with Catherine. Halligan was ordered to find two sureties to keep the peace for six months or go to prison for another month.
In a highly critical editorial the St Helens Newspaper on the 22nd pondered whether for a town with 50,000 "souls" enough was being done for their "moral, intellectual, and physical well-being". The paper was satisfied with most members of the Town Council but thought some had qualifications "of the most mythical character, but who make up with verbosity what they are lacking in the more solid requirements".
The owner and editor of the hard-hitting paper was Bernard Dromgoole who is certain to have written the piece and also had stinging criticisms of the town's hospital and fire brigade:
"It is true that we have a Cottage Hospital, admirably designed for the suffering poor, but whose resources are sometimes devoured by persons whom it was never contemplated should be allowed to sponge upon the provision generously made for the maimed or the destitute. It is likewise true we have, nominally, a Fire Brigade, which generally manages to damage more with misapplied water, when it succeeds in applying it at all, than is done by the devouring element [the flames]; perhaps Water Brigade would be a more appropriate cognomen."
The Newspaper summed up its appraisal of the state of things in St Helens with these remarks: "One generation passeth away, and another cometh, and our hopes are buoyed with the anticipation that improvement will mark the progress from father to son, mother to daughter; but we look around in vain, retrogression rather than progression appears to be the order of the day."
Newton Races was being held in a couple of weeks and on the 24th the letting of sites for drinking bars and plots for booths took place. Publicans and fairground folk and others had to go to the grandstand on Newton Racecourse at noon in order to agree their site and cough up their rent in advance.
The vicar of St Helens was once quoted as saying: "Very many poor sinners have confessed to me on their death beds that they commenced their wicked career at Newton races". I'm not sure exactly what he meant but the races were renowned for drunken behaviour and a magnet for pickpockets and other criminals.
St Helens Newspaper courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include the Atlas Street house that had 26 residents, Queen Victoria gives her blessing for a discrimination-free Cowley Middle School, the bonnet stealing in Talbot Street and the man who was only fined after stabbing a bobby.
This week's many stories include the revenge of the 14-year-old street rough that liked to assault girls, some shocking death stats for 1874 are released, the strange reason a police officer was stationed in St Helens Cemetery, the feckless Feigh family are united in prison, the St Helens Newspaper feels that the town is going backwards and preparations are made for the forthcoming Newton Races.
This week the St Helens Medical Officer of Health, Dr Robert McNicoll, released his annual report for 1874 and it made grim reading.
There had been 488 deaths last year caused by what were known as zymotic diseases, essentially fevers of one contagious kind or another.
The scarlet fever epidemic in St Helens had been the biggest killer, causing 238 deaths and up from 92 fatalities in 1873.
There had also been a rise in whooping cough deaths, up from 9 in 1873 to 44 last year.
Diphtheria had killed 14 in 1874; typhoid and related diseases had caused the deaths of 26 persons; diphtheria 14; diarrhoea 110 and measles 29.
The only bright spot was that there had been no deaths from smallpox.
But of the 1,532 deaths in St Helens during 1874, 864 of them had been of children under 5 years of age with half of that shocking number aged under 1.
Night soil was a euphemism for human faeces and was so called because a collector normally removed it at night from the privies, pits and pail closets that people used as toilets.
Dr McNichol also detailed how many night soil collections there had been from ashpits.
These were the dumps that contained the human waste and were mixed with ashes to reduce the smell and keep away pests.
Some houses shared an ashpit and during 1874, 5,340 of them that were attached to nearly 11,000 houses were emptied.
But they appear to only have been emptied twice a year as just 9,735 loads were collected.
Dr McNichol said the applications for such removals were considerable and more horses and men were urgently needed to undertake the work.
Whenever the St Helens Newspaper mentioned Denis Feigh they would always call him the notorious Denis Feigh.
He was a bit of a comical character whose 60 or so convictions were mainly for drunkenness and minor theft, although there was a serious consequence to his activities.
Denis's notoriety meant his three sons had no chance in life and they had often been brought to court charged with begging or stealing.
And their mother Margaret was not much better, having made around 20 appearances herself in the dock.
She was back in court this week for creating a breach of the peace on the previous Saturday night.
That was after her son James had been taken into custody for assaulting a policeman (and later sent to prison) and, as the Newspaper put it, Margaret had during the journey to the police station:
"…followed them in a most excited state, and called on the crowd to rescue her son."
Crowds always seemed to appear out of thin air when the St Helens police made arrests on a Saturday night!
On this occasion Margaret Feigh was not imprisoned but bound over to keep the peace. However, she needed to find sureties to guarantee her good behaviour.
Later in the week two more of the Feigh brood – brothers Patrick and John – were each sent to prison for twenty-one days after being found sleeping in a shippon [cow shed] in Liverpool Street.
The Newspaper wrote: "This makes five members of the family, namely father, mother, and three sons, who are now undergoing imprisonment in Kirkdale gaol."
And so clearly Margaret had not been able to find the required sureties enabling her to be bound over.
It was disclosed in another case that in 1874 St Helens Cemetery had every day from May 1st until September 30th needed to have a police officer stationed there.
Was it to be on the look out for body snatchers or rowdy funeral goers? No, the police had been there to catch people pinching flowers!
This was revealed when Richard Delehunty was charged with wilful damage. The Newspaper said PC Sewell had seen the 14-year-old:
"…deliberately pluck a branch in bloom off a cherry tree, and he had also some others in his hand, with which he evidently intended making a bouquet."
The damage was only estimated as having been a penny and Richard was ordered to pay that amount, a fine of 6d and court costs of nearly 8 shillings.
In March 14-year-old Richard Halligan had been sent to prison for 21 days for striking Catherine Atherton several times with a stick and breaking her nose.
Catherine was employed at the Ravenhead Glass Works and had been with a group of girls returning home from work when she was attacked.
Prison sentences for relatively low-level violence were not common.
However, the police had told the magistrates that street roughs like Halligan were regularly assaulting young women and so they decided to impose a deterrent sentence.
Now out of gaol, Halligan sought revenge. The lad's target was Mary Livesley who had seen Halligan strike Catherine and had given evidence against him in court.
Subsequently, he had frequently threatened Mary, including on the very night that he had come out of prison.
She had brought a summons against Halligan charging him with using threatening language.
At the lad's court hearing it was claimed that he carried a thick stick with him and had threatened to use it to break Mary's nose, as he had done with Catherine.
Halligan was ordered to find two sureties to keep the peace for six months or go to prison for another month.
In a highly critical editorial the St Helens Newspaper on the 22nd pondered whether for a town with 50,000 "souls" enough was being done for their "moral, intellectual, and physical well-being".
The paper was satisfied with most members of the Town Council but thought some had qualifications "of the most mythical character, but who make up with verbosity what they are lacking in the more solid requirements".
The owner and editor of the hard-hitting paper was Bernard Dromgoole who is certain to have written the piece and also had stinging criticisms of the town's hospital and fire brigade:
"It is true that we have a Cottage Hospital, admirably designed for the suffering poor, but whose resources are sometimes devoured by persons whom it was never contemplated should be allowed to sponge upon the provision generously made for the maimed or the destitute.
"It is likewise true we have, nominally, a Fire Brigade, which generally manages to damage more with misapplied water, when it succeeds in applying it at all, than is done by the devouring element [the flames]; perhaps Water Brigade would be a more appropriate cognomen."
The Newspaper summed up its appraisal of the state of things in St Helens with these remarks:
"One generation passeth away, and another cometh, and our hopes are buoyed with the anticipation that improvement will mark the progress from father to son, mother to daughter; but we look around in vain, retrogression rather than progression appears to be the order of the day."
Newton Races was being held in a couple of weeks and on the 24th the letting of sites for drinking bars and plots for booths took place.
Publicans and fairground folk and others had to go to the grandstand on Newton Racecourse at noon in order to agree their site and cough up their rent in advance.
The vicar of St Helens was once quoted as saying: "Very many poor sinners have confessed to me on their death beds that they commenced their wicked career at Newton races".
I'm not sure exactly what he meant but the races were renowned for drunken behaviour and a magnet for pickpockets and other criminals.
Horse racing had taken place on Newton Common from at least 1678 and continued until 1899 when Lord Newton accepted an offer from a syndicate to rent land in Haydock to establish a new course that we know as Haydock Park.
St Helens Newspaper courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include the Atlas Street house that had 26 residents, Queen Victoria gives her blessing for a discrimination-free Cowley Middle School, the bonnet stealing in Talbot Street and the man who was only fined after stabbing a bobby.
This week the St Helens Medical Officer of Health, Dr Robert McNicoll, released his annual report for 1874 and it made grim reading.
There had been 488 deaths last year caused by what were known as zymotic diseases, essentially fevers of one contagious kind or another.
The scarlet fever epidemic in St Helens had been the biggest killer, causing 238 deaths and up from 92 fatalities in 1873.
There had also been a rise in whooping cough deaths, up from 9 in 1873 to 44 last year.
Diphtheria had killed 14 in 1874; typhoid and related diseases had caused the deaths of 26 persons; diphtheria 14; diarrhoea 110 and measles 29.
The only bright spot was that there had been no deaths from smallpox.
But of the 1,532 deaths in St Helens during 1874, 864 of them had been of children under 5 years of age with half of that shocking number aged under 1.
Night soil was a euphemism for human faeces and was so called because a collector normally removed it at night from the privies, pits and pail closets that people used as toilets.
Dr McNichol also detailed how many night soil collections there had been from ashpits.
These were the dumps that contained the human waste and were mixed with ashes to reduce the smell and keep away pests.
Some houses shared an ashpit and during 1874, 5,340 of them that were attached to nearly 11,000 houses were emptied.
But they appear to only have been emptied twice a year as just 9,735 loads were collected.
Dr McNichol said the applications for such removals were considerable and more horses and men were urgently needed to undertake the work.
Whenever the St Helens Newspaper mentioned Denis Feigh they would always call him the notorious Denis Feigh.
He was a bit of a comical character whose 60 or so convictions were mainly for drunkenness and minor theft, although there was a serious consequence to his activities.
Denis's notoriety meant his three sons had no chance in life and they had often been brought to court charged with begging or stealing.
And their mother Margaret was not much better, having made around 20 appearances herself in the dock.
She was back in court this week for creating a breach of the peace on the previous Saturday night.
That was after her son James had been taken into custody for assaulting a policeman (and later sent to prison) and, as the Newspaper put it, Margaret had during the journey to the police station:
"…followed them in a most excited state, and called on the crowd to rescue her son."
Crowds always seemed to appear out of thin air when the St Helens police made arrests on a Saturday night!
On this occasion Margaret Feigh was not imprisoned but bound over to keep the peace. However, she needed to find sureties to guarantee her good behaviour.
Later in the week two more of the Feigh brood – brothers Patrick and John – were each sent to prison for twenty-one days after being found sleeping in a shippon [cow shed] in Liverpool Street.
The Newspaper wrote: "This makes five members of the family, namely father, mother, and three sons, who are now undergoing imprisonment in Kirkdale gaol."
And so clearly Margaret had not been able to find the required sureties enabling her to be bound over.
It was disclosed in another case that in 1874 St Helens Cemetery had every day from May 1st until September 30th needed to have a police officer stationed there.
Was it to be on the look out for body snatchers or rowdy funeral goers? No, the police had been there to catch people pinching flowers!
This was revealed when Richard Delehunty was charged with wilful damage. The Newspaper said PC Sewell had seen the 14-year-old:
"…deliberately pluck a branch in bloom off a cherry tree, and he had also some others in his hand, with which he evidently intended making a bouquet."
The damage was only estimated as having been a penny and Richard was ordered to pay that amount, a fine of 6d and court costs of nearly 8 shillings.
In March 14-year-old Richard Halligan had been sent to prison for 21 days for striking Catherine Atherton several times with a stick and breaking her nose.
Catherine was employed at the Ravenhead Glass Works and had been with a group of girls returning home from work when she was attacked.
Prison sentences for relatively low-level violence were not common.
However, the police had told the magistrates that street roughs like Halligan were regularly assaulting young women and so they decided to impose a deterrent sentence.
Now out of gaol, Halligan sought revenge. The lad's target was Mary Livesley who had seen Halligan strike Catherine and had given evidence against him in court.
Subsequently, he had frequently threatened Mary, including on the very night that he had come out of prison.
She had brought a summons against Halligan charging him with using threatening language.
At the lad's court hearing it was claimed that he carried a thick stick with him and had threatened to use it to break Mary's nose, as he had done with Catherine.
Halligan was ordered to find two sureties to keep the peace for six months or go to prison for another month.
In a highly critical editorial the St Helens Newspaper on the 22nd pondered whether for a town with 50,000 "souls" enough was being done for their "moral, intellectual, and physical well-being".
The paper was satisfied with most members of the Town Council but thought some had qualifications "of the most mythical character, but who make up with verbosity what they are lacking in the more solid requirements".
The owner and editor of the hard-hitting paper was Bernard Dromgoole who is certain to have written the piece and also had stinging criticisms of the town's hospital and fire brigade:
"It is true that we have a Cottage Hospital, admirably designed for the suffering poor, but whose resources are sometimes devoured by persons whom it was never contemplated should be allowed to sponge upon the provision generously made for the maimed or the destitute.
"It is likewise true we have, nominally, a Fire Brigade, which generally manages to damage more with misapplied water, when it succeeds in applying it at all, than is done by the devouring element [the flames]; perhaps Water Brigade would be a more appropriate cognomen."
The Newspaper summed up its appraisal of the state of things in St Helens with these remarks:
"One generation passeth away, and another cometh, and our hopes are buoyed with the anticipation that improvement will mark the progress from father to son, mother to daughter; but we look around in vain, retrogression rather than progression appears to be the order of the day."
Newton Races was being held in a couple of weeks and on the 24th the letting of sites for drinking bars and plots for booths took place.
Publicans and fairground folk and others had to go to the grandstand on Newton Racecourse at noon in order to agree their site and cough up their rent in advance.
The vicar of St Helens was once quoted as saying: "Very many poor sinners have confessed to me on their death beds that they commenced their wicked career at Newton races".
I'm not sure exactly what he meant but the races were renowned for drunken behaviour and a magnet for pickpockets and other criminals.
St Helens Newspaper courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include the Atlas Street house that had 26 residents, Queen Victoria gives her blessing for a discrimination-free Cowley Middle School, the bonnet stealing in Talbot Street and the man who was only fined after stabbing a bobby.