150 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK (25 SEPT - 1 OCT 1873)
This week's many stories include the advent of the pail toilet in St Helens, the fearsome butcher in the marketplace, the Sutton pub whose floor was stained with blood, the man who bit off part of a woman's lip, a gardener's finding of stolen silver plate and the stunted creature in Ormskirk Street that held onto a big bobby's beard.
We begin on the 25th with the prospect of modernity coming to St Helens! On that day a special meeting of the council's Health Committee was held to consider the recommendation of their sub-committee that the pail toilet system should be fully adopted in the town. That was now in use in Manchester, Salford, Birmingham and a few other large towns – but the Health Committee resolved to ask the full Town Council to only adopt it in St Helens "tentatively". They felt that one district of the borough should trial pail toilets to ensure that the system worked well prior to extending it to other parts of the town.
The pail was a portable bucket that was situated in an outhouse or shed and positioned under a toilet seat. The contents of the bucket (called night soil) were emptied by the local authority and sold off at auction for composting into fertiliser. It was a step away from the flush toilet but a step up from unsanitary closets and middens that were then standard in St Helens. The middens were the dumps containing human waste. These were converted into uncovered ashpits through being mixed with ashes to reduce the pong and keep pests away.
They didn't do a great job in keeping away disease, however, as the ashpits would drain into the sewers. That led to the areas surrounding the pits becoming soaked with the waste products, causing offensive smells and, at times, sickness. The St Helens Newspaper wrote:
"The same system in most towns is found to be undergoing a course of universal condemnation, the present waste of valuable manure being excessive, and the increased evil arising from the pollution of streams being such as to tax to the utmost the resources of the respective sanitary authorities."
The Health Committee was now receiving and releasing detailed stats as to the St Helens mortality rates for the previous four weeks. During the most recent period there had been 96 deaths in total. These were mainly all from disease, with 28 from what was known as zymotic fevers, including 2 from measles, 8 of scarlet fever and 14 from diarrhoea. Fifty-seven of the ninety-six deaths were children aged under five and of these twenty-one were less than twelve months old.
The fortnightly meeting of the Prescot Guardians – who were responsible for the paupers living in Whiston Workhouse (pictured above) and in the community – also took place on the 25th. There were complaints that their new hospital was being built too slowly with only three bricklayers on the job and it was claimed that a clerk of works was being paid £2 per week to simply watch them.
Their Medical Officer of Health also had a complaint to make about the parents of dead children that had died from infectious disease. He said it was a common habit at the child's funeral for the parents to ride in the same vehicle as the coffin and he wanted to warn the public that doing so was a dangerous practice.
The St Helens Newspaper this week described John Watkinson as an "idle vagabond" and he was sent to prison for a month for simply sleeping in Pilkington's boiler house. Edward Harris was also in court charged with begging in Derby Street in Prescot and he was sent to Kirkdale Gaol for seven days. That was in spite of him telling the Bench that he had been discharged from the army on account of heart disease and as he could not work had thought it better to beg than to steal.
According to Slater's Directory of 1869, there were 52 separate butchers' premises in St Helens – including market traders. Each place could have more than one person calling themselves a butcher and so there must have been many people at that time in St Helens hacking away at meat. Some were young and wild, such as John Leyland.
Some were young and wild, such as John Leyland, and St Helens Petty Sessions heard this week that there was not a butcher in the market that was not afraid of the man. Two witnesses told the court of hearing Leyland threaten to seriously harm a butcher called John Webster, after the young man had interfered after Leyland had struck his father. John Leyland was ordered to find two sureties of £5 each for a month to guarantee his good behaviour.
Thomas Peers was also summoned to court – but failed to show up to enter a plea. The man had until recently been the landlord of the Bowling Green Inn in Sutton and presumably had been sacked. That was after an incident that the police said had left the floor of the pub stained with blood and the place in a very disorderly state. "Every thing was knocked about and in confusion," reported PC Clarke. The landlord was also drunk and in his absence Thomas Peers was fined 10 shillings and costs.
Quite often if the police interfered in a street fight the two combatants forgot their quarrel and joined forces against a common enemy that was interrupting their fun. That happened this week when William Simpson and an unknown man fought it out in Ormskirk Street in St Helens. PC Harrison told the court that the incident had occurred near the Prince of Wales Vaults and he had apprehended both fighters.
But they turned on him and he said he was thrown down in the scuffle. One of them got away but he managed to hold on to Simpson. A passing joiner called William Abercrombie gave evidence of seeing the officer "down on the flags" outside the Independent Chapel with William Simpson holding PC Harrison fast by his beard.
The Newspaper's report then stated: "The bench having asked the prisoner if he had anything to say, the ingenious youth simply commented on the likelihood of a stunted creature like him overthrowing so large a man as the constable." Simpson was fined 20 shillings and costs with the alternative of a month in prison.
The St Helens police needed to be big and strong to take the violent drunks that they arrested to the police station. When John Langley and John Tibo were arrested for disorderly conduct in Liverpool Road, the two constables that arrested them said the pair had fought and kicked as fiercely as they could as they were escorted to the station – presumably while wearing handcuffs.
It was only with the greatest of difficulty, they said, that they got them locked up. Both Supt. Ludlam and Inspector Whiteside stated that the conduct of the prisoners was exceedingly violent. The pair was sent to prison for a fortnight for the assaults on the police and fined 5 shillings and costs each for their drunkenness.
Peter Ward of Parr did not turn up to court to face a charge of using a dog in pursuit of game. He had apparently done a runner – or as the Newspaper put it: "The defendant did not appear, and it was said in court that a report of his flight was abroad." Many landowners employed part-time game watchers to keep an eye on their land and liaise with their gamekeepers.
A watcher called Thomas Kilshaw said he had been in Glade Hill Wood and seen the man and his dog on the land. A gamekeeper called William Hill corroborated and said he had subsequently been threatened in a pub. In his absence Peter Ward was fined £5 or two months imprisonment and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
In the St Helens Petty Sessions on the 29th, John Reynolds was charged with biting a piece out of the lip of Ann Dillon during a drunken quarrel. The pair's Greenbank row had begun when Mrs Dillon chastised the middle-aged Reynolds for using bad language to a child.
The man reacted badly to the telling off which led to Mrs Dillon striking him. Reynolds then retaliated and in the struggle they both fell down. It was while the couple was scuffling on the ground that the man was accused of biting the woman's lip. Both antagonists had been drinking and John Reynolds was fined £2 and costs or had to serve two months in prison.
At the same hearing a labourer at Sutton Copper Works called Patrick Conroy was sent to prison for a month after being charged with stealing 17 shillings 10d – despite being handed the money by the firm's pay clerk. Conroy had gone to collect his wages but had only been entitled to 5s 3d. However, the pay clerk had mistaken him for another workman of the same name and paid him the 17s 10d which Conroy decided to keep.
One might have thought that biting a piece out of a woman's lip was a more serious crime than not returning money that you had been given. But the latter was treated as theft, which in Victorian times was generally considered more serious than lower-level violence.
Recently there'd been a break-in at the house of the Rev. William Mocatta of St Thomas's Church in St Helens in which a collection of silver plate had been stolen, as well as two coats and a shawl. The coats were quickly found but not the rest of the booty. That was until the 30th when James Hulme was mowing clover in a field near the church's cemetery.
He stumbled across the stolen shawl that had been hidden away in the grass and inside of it Hulme discovered the stolen plate. The farm labourer also found a small crowbar, which had been used to force open a window at Rev. Mocatta's parsonage in Boundary Road and gain entry. The St Helens Newspaper wrote:
"It is pretty evident that the burglars hid it [the silver] in the field immediately after the raid on the house, intending to remove it at their leisure; but the activity of the police baffled their scheme. When the theft was made known, the officers began their inquiries, and soon fixed their attention on certain suspicious characters; but before they were able to weave a reasonably strong net the suspects fled from the neighbourhood, thus justifying, to all appearances, the wisdom of the selection made by the police."
And finally, St Helens Town Council's monthly meeting was held on October 1st and it was decided "by acclamation" – as it was reported – that the Mayor be invited to lay the foundation stone of the new Town Hall in what would become Corporation Street and a committee was formed to organise the event.
The meeting also decided to allow telegraph poles to be installed in the street in order that Parr Copper Works could be connected to St Helens Post Office. In the discussion it was stated that Gamble's chemical works in Gerards Bridge also had their own private telegraph wire connection.
St Helens Newspaper courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include a drunken man's fatal freak in the canal, the drowning outside of a Cowley Hill pub, the heavy sentence for sleeping out in Bridge Street and the St Helens turner that spent 60 years working for the same firm.
We begin on the 25th with the prospect of modernity coming to St Helens! On that day a special meeting of the council's Health Committee was held to consider the recommendation of their sub-committee that the pail toilet system should be fully adopted in the town. That was now in use in Manchester, Salford, Birmingham and a few other large towns – but the Health Committee resolved to ask the full Town Council to only adopt it in St Helens "tentatively". They felt that one district of the borough should trial pail toilets to ensure that the system worked well prior to extending it to other parts of the town.
The pail was a portable bucket that was situated in an outhouse or shed and positioned under a toilet seat. The contents of the bucket (called night soil) were emptied by the local authority and sold off at auction for composting into fertiliser. It was a step away from the flush toilet but a step up from unsanitary closets and middens that were then standard in St Helens. The middens were the dumps containing human waste. These were converted into uncovered ashpits through being mixed with ashes to reduce the pong and keep pests away.
They didn't do a great job in keeping away disease, however, as the ashpits would drain into the sewers. That led to the areas surrounding the pits becoming soaked with the waste products, causing offensive smells and, at times, sickness. The St Helens Newspaper wrote:
"The same system in most towns is found to be undergoing a course of universal condemnation, the present waste of valuable manure being excessive, and the increased evil arising from the pollution of streams being such as to tax to the utmost the resources of the respective sanitary authorities."
The Health Committee was now receiving and releasing detailed stats as to the St Helens mortality rates for the previous four weeks. During the most recent period there had been 96 deaths in total. These were mainly all from disease, with 28 from what was known as zymotic fevers, including 2 from measles, 8 of scarlet fever and 14 from diarrhoea. Fifty-seven of the ninety-six deaths were children aged under five and of these twenty-one were less than twelve months old.
Their Medical Officer of Health also had a complaint to make about the parents of dead children that had died from infectious disease. He said it was a common habit at the child's funeral for the parents to ride in the same vehicle as the coffin and he wanted to warn the public that doing so was a dangerous practice.
The St Helens Newspaper this week described John Watkinson as an "idle vagabond" and he was sent to prison for a month for simply sleeping in Pilkington's boiler house. Edward Harris was also in court charged with begging in Derby Street in Prescot and he was sent to Kirkdale Gaol for seven days. That was in spite of him telling the Bench that he had been discharged from the army on account of heart disease and as he could not work had thought it better to beg than to steal.
According to Slater's Directory of 1869, there were 52 separate butchers' premises in St Helens – including market traders. Each place could have more than one person calling themselves a butcher and so there must have been many people at that time in St Helens hacking away at meat. Some were young and wild, such as John Leyland.
Some were young and wild, such as John Leyland, and St Helens Petty Sessions heard this week that there was not a butcher in the market that was not afraid of the man. Two witnesses told the court of hearing Leyland threaten to seriously harm a butcher called John Webster, after the young man had interfered after Leyland had struck his father. John Leyland was ordered to find two sureties of £5 each for a month to guarantee his good behaviour.
Thomas Peers was also summoned to court – but failed to show up to enter a plea. The man had until recently been the landlord of the Bowling Green Inn in Sutton and presumably had been sacked. That was after an incident that the police said had left the floor of the pub stained with blood and the place in a very disorderly state. "Every thing was knocked about and in confusion," reported PC Clarke. The landlord was also drunk and in his absence Thomas Peers was fined 10 shillings and costs.
Quite often if the police interfered in a street fight the two combatants forgot their quarrel and joined forces against a common enemy that was interrupting their fun. That happened this week when William Simpson and an unknown man fought it out in Ormskirk Street in St Helens. PC Harrison told the court that the incident had occurred near the Prince of Wales Vaults and he had apprehended both fighters.
But they turned on him and he said he was thrown down in the scuffle. One of them got away but he managed to hold on to Simpson. A passing joiner called William Abercrombie gave evidence of seeing the officer "down on the flags" outside the Independent Chapel with William Simpson holding PC Harrison fast by his beard.
The Newspaper's report then stated: "The bench having asked the prisoner if he had anything to say, the ingenious youth simply commented on the likelihood of a stunted creature like him overthrowing so large a man as the constable." Simpson was fined 20 shillings and costs with the alternative of a month in prison.
The St Helens police needed to be big and strong to take the violent drunks that they arrested to the police station. When John Langley and John Tibo were arrested for disorderly conduct in Liverpool Road, the two constables that arrested them said the pair had fought and kicked as fiercely as they could as they were escorted to the station – presumably while wearing handcuffs.
It was only with the greatest of difficulty, they said, that they got them locked up. Both Supt. Ludlam and Inspector Whiteside stated that the conduct of the prisoners was exceedingly violent. The pair was sent to prison for a fortnight for the assaults on the police and fined 5 shillings and costs each for their drunkenness.
Peter Ward of Parr did not turn up to court to face a charge of using a dog in pursuit of game. He had apparently done a runner – or as the Newspaper put it: "The defendant did not appear, and it was said in court that a report of his flight was abroad." Many landowners employed part-time game watchers to keep an eye on their land and liaise with their gamekeepers.
A watcher called Thomas Kilshaw said he had been in Glade Hill Wood and seen the man and his dog on the land. A gamekeeper called William Hill corroborated and said he had subsequently been threatened in a pub. In his absence Peter Ward was fined £5 or two months imprisonment and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
In the St Helens Petty Sessions on the 29th, John Reynolds was charged with biting a piece out of the lip of Ann Dillon during a drunken quarrel. The pair's Greenbank row had begun when Mrs Dillon chastised the middle-aged Reynolds for using bad language to a child.
The man reacted badly to the telling off which led to Mrs Dillon striking him. Reynolds then retaliated and in the struggle they both fell down. It was while the couple was scuffling on the ground that the man was accused of biting the woman's lip. Both antagonists had been drinking and John Reynolds was fined £2 and costs or had to serve two months in prison.
At the same hearing a labourer at Sutton Copper Works called Patrick Conroy was sent to prison for a month after being charged with stealing 17 shillings 10d – despite being handed the money by the firm's pay clerk. Conroy had gone to collect his wages but had only been entitled to 5s 3d. However, the pay clerk had mistaken him for another workman of the same name and paid him the 17s 10d which Conroy decided to keep.
One might have thought that biting a piece out of a woman's lip was a more serious crime than not returning money that you had been given. But the latter was treated as theft, which in Victorian times was generally considered more serious than lower-level violence.
Recently there'd been a break-in at the house of the Rev. William Mocatta of St Thomas's Church in St Helens in which a collection of silver plate had been stolen, as well as two coats and a shawl. The coats were quickly found but not the rest of the booty. That was until the 30th when James Hulme was mowing clover in a field near the church's cemetery.
He stumbled across the stolen shawl that had been hidden away in the grass and inside of it Hulme discovered the stolen plate. The farm labourer also found a small crowbar, which had been used to force open a window at Rev. Mocatta's parsonage in Boundary Road and gain entry. The St Helens Newspaper wrote:
"It is pretty evident that the burglars hid it [the silver] in the field immediately after the raid on the house, intending to remove it at their leisure; but the activity of the police baffled their scheme. When the theft was made known, the officers began their inquiries, and soon fixed their attention on certain suspicious characters; but before they were able to weave a reasonably strong net the suspects fled from the neighbourhood, thus justifying, to all appearances, the wisdom of the selection made by the police."
And finally, St Helens Town Council's monthly meeting was held on October 1st and it was decided "by acclamation" – as it was reported – that the Mayor be invited to lay the foundation stone of the new Town Hall in what would become Corporation Street and a committee was formed to organise the event.
The meeting also decided to allow telegraph poles to be installed in the street in order that Parr Copper Works could be connected to St Helens Post Office. In the discussion it was stated that Gamble's chemical works in Gerards Bridge also had their own private telegraph wire connection.
St Helens Newspaper courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include a drunken man's fatal freak in the canal, the drowning outside of a Cowley Hill pub, the heavy sentence for sleeping out in Bridge Street and the St Helens turner that spent 60 years working for the same firm.
This week's many stories include the advent of the pail toilet in St Helens, the fearsome butcher in the marketplace, the Sutton pub whose floor was stained with blood, the man who bit off part of a woman's lip, a gardener's finding of stolen silver plate and the stunted creature in Ormskirk Street that held onto a big bobby's beard.
We begin on the 25th with the prospect of modernity coming to St Helens! On that day a special meeting of the council's Health Committee was held to consider the recommendation of their sub-committee that the pail toilet system should be fully adopted in the town.
That was now in use in Manchester, Salford, Birmingham and a few other large towns – but the Health Committee resolved to ask the full Town Council to only adopt it in St Helens "tentatively".
They felt that one district of the borough should trial pail toilets to ensure that the system worked well prior to extending it to other parts of the town.
The pail was a portable bucket that was situated in an outhouse or shed and positioned under a toilet seat.
The contents of the bucket (called night soil) were emptied by the local authority and sold off at auction for composting into fertiliser.
It was a step away from the flush toilet but a step up from unsanitary closets and middens that were then standard in St Helens.
The middens were the dumps containing human waste. These were converted into uncovered ashpits through being mixed with ashes to reduce the pong and keep pests away.
They didn't do a great job in keeping away disease, however, as the ashpits would drain into the sewers.
That led to the areas surrounding the pits becoming soaked with the waste products, causing offensive smells and, at times, sickness. The St Helens Newspaper wrote:
"The same system in most towns is found to be undergoing a course of universal condemnation, the present waste of valuable manure being excessive, and the increased evil arising from the pollution of streams being such as to tax to the utmost the resources of the respective sanitary authorities."
The Health Committee was now receiving and releasing detailed stats as to the St Helens mortality rates for the previous four weeks.
During the most recent period there had been 96 deaths in total. These were mainly all from disease, with 28 from what was known as zymotic fevers, including 2 from measles, 8 of scarlet fever and 14 from diarrhoea.
Fifty-seven of the ninety-six deaths were children aged under five and of these twenty-one were less than twelve months old.
The fortnightly meeting of the Prescot Guardians – who were responsible for the paupers living in Whiston Workhouse (pictured above) and in the community – also took place on the 25th.
There were complaints that their new hospital was being built too slowly with only three bricklayers on the job and it was claimed that a clerk of works was being paid £2 per week to simply watch them.
Their Medical Officer of Health also had a complaint to make about the parents of dead children that had died from infectious disease.
He said it was a common habit at the child's funeral for the parents to ride in the same vehicle as the coffin and he wanted to warn the public that doing so was a dangerous practice.
The St Helens Newspaper this week described John Watkinson as an "idle vagabond" and he was sent to prison for a month for simply sleeping in Pilkington's boiler house.
Edward Harris was also in court charged with begging in Derby Street in Prescot and he was sent to Kirkdale Gaol for seven days.
That was in spite of him telling the Bench that he had been discharged from the army on account of heart disease and as he could not work had thought it better to beg than to steal.
According to Slater's Directory of 1869, there were 52 separate butchers' premises in St Helens – including market traders.
Each place could have more than one person calling themselves a butcher and so there must have been many people at that time in St Helens hacking away at meat.
Some were young and wild, such as John Leyland, and St Helens Petty Sessions heard this week that there was not a butcher in the market that was not afraid of the man.
Two witnesses told the court of hearing Leyland threaten to seriously harm a butcher called John Webster, after the young man had interfered after Leyland had struck his father.
John Leyland was ordered to find two sureties of £5 each for a month to guarantee his good behaviour.
Thomas Peers was also summoned to court – but failed to show up to enter a plea. The man had until recently been the landlord of the Bowling Green Inn in Sutton and presumably had been sacked.
That was after an incident that the police said had left the floor of the pub stained with blood and the place in a very disorderly state.
"Every thing was knocked about and in confusion," reported PC Clarke. The landlord was also drunk and in his absence Thomas Peers was fined 10 shillings and costs.
Quite often if the police interfered in a street fight the two combatants forgot their quarrel and joined forces against a common enemy that was interrupting their fun.
That happened this week when William Simpson and an unknown man fought it out in Ormskirk Street in St Helens.
PC Harrison told the court that the incident had occurred near the Prince of Wales Vaults and he had apprehended both fighters.
But they turned on him and he said he was thrown down in the scuffle. One of them got away but he managed to hold on to Simpson.
A passing joiner called William Abercrombie gave evidence of seeing the officer "down on the flags" outside the Independent Chapel with William Simpson holding PC Harrison fast by his beard. The Newspaper's report then stated:
"The bench having asked the prisoner if he had anything to say, the ingenious youth simply commented on the likelihood of a stunted creature like him overthrowing so large a man as the constable."
Simpson was fined 20 shillings and costs with the alternative of a month in prison.
The St Helens police needed to be big and strong to take the violent drunks that they arrested to the police station.
When John Langley and John Tibo were arrested for disorderly conduct in Liverpool Road, the two constables that arrested them said the pair had fought and kicked as fiercely as they could as they were escorted to the station – presumably while wearing handcuffs.
It was only with the greatest of difficulty, they said, that they got them locked up.
Both Supt. Ludlam and Inspector Whiteside stated that the conduct of the prisoners was exceedingly violent.
The pair was sent to prison for a fortnight for the assaults on the police and fined 5 shillings and costs each for their drunkenness.
Peter Ward of Parr did not turn up to court to face a charge of using a dog in pursuit of game. He had apparently done a runner – or as the Newspaper put it:
"The defendant did not appear, and it was said in court that a report of his flight was abroad."
Many landowners employed part-time game watchers to keep an eye on their land and liaise with their gamekeepers.
A watcher called Thomas Kilshaw said he had been in Glade Hill Wood and seen the man and his dog on the land.
A gamekeeper called William Hill corroborated and said he had subsequently been threatened in a pub.
In his absence Peter Ward was fined £5 or two months imprisonment and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
In the St Helens Petty Sessions on the 29th, John Reynolds was charged with biting a piece out of the lip of Ann Dillon during a drunken quarrel.
The pair's Greenbank row had begun when Mrs Dillon chastised the middle-aged Reynolds for using bad language to a child.
The man reacted badly to the telling off which led to Mrs Dillon striking him. Reynolds then retaliated and in the struggle they both fell down.
It was while the couple was scuffling on the ground that the man was accused of biting the woman's lip.
Both antagonists had been drinking and John Reynolds was fined £2 and costs or had to serve two months in prison.
At the same hearing a labourer at Sutton Copper Works called Patrick Conroy was sent to prison for a month after being charged with stealing 17 shillings 10d – despite being handed the money by the firm's pay clerk.
Conroy had gone to collect his wages but had only been entitled to 5s 3d. However, the pay clerk had mistaken him for another workman of the same name and paid him the 17s 10d which Conroy decided to keep.
One might have thought that biting a piece out of a woman's lip was a more serious crime than not returning money that you had been given.
But the latter was treated as theft, which in Victorian times was generally considered more serious than lower-level violence.
Recently there'd been a break-in at the house of the Rev. William Mocatta of St Thomas's Church in St Helens in which a collection of silver plate had been stolen, as well as two coats and a shawl.
The coats were quickly found but not the rest of the booty. That was until the 30th when James Hulme was mowing clover in a field near the church's cemetery.
He stumbled across the stolen shawl that had been hidden away in the grass and inside of it Hulme discovered the stolen plate.
The farm labourer also found a small crowbar, which had been used to force open a window at Rev. Mocatta's parsonage in Boundary Road and gain entry.
The St Helens Newspaper wrote: "It is pretty evident that the burglars hid it [the silver] in the field immediately after the raid on the house, intending to remove it at their leisure; but the activity of the police baffled their scheme.
"When the theft was made known, the officers began their inquiries, and soon fixed their attention on certain suspicious characters; but before they were able to weave a reasonably strong net the suspects fled from the neighbourhood, thus justifying, to all appearances, the wisdom of the selection made by the police."
And finally, St Helens Town Council's monthly meeting was held on October 1st and it was decided "by acclamation" – as it was reported – that the Mayor be invited to lay the foundation stone of the new Town Hall in what would become Corporation Street and a committee was formed to organise the event.
The meeting also decided to allow telegraph poles to be installed in the street in order that Parr Copper Works could be connected to St Helens Post Office.
In the discussion it was stated that Gamble's chemical works in Gerards Bridge also had their own private telegraph wire connection.
St Helens Newspaper courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include a drunken man's fatal freak in the canal, the drowning outside of a Cowley Hill pub, the heavy sentence for sleeping out in Bridge Street and the St Helens turner that spent 60 years working for the same firm.
We begin on the 25th with the prospect of modernity coming to St Helens! On that day a special meeting of the council's Health Committee was held to consider the recommendation of their sub-committee that the pail toilet system should be fully adopted in the town.
That was now in use in Manchester, Salford, Birmingham and a few other large towns – but the Health Committee resolved to ask the full Town Council to only adopt it in St Helens "tentatively".
They felt that one district of the borough should trial pail toilets to ensure that the system worked well prior to extending it to other parts of the town.
The pail was a portable bucket that was situated in an outhouse or shed and positioned under a toilet seat.
The contents of the bucket (called night soil) were emptied by the local authority and sold off at auction for composting into fertiliser.
It was a step away from the flush toilet but a step up from unsanitary closets and middens that were then standard in St Helens.
The middens were the dumps containing human waste. These were converted into uncovered ashpits through being mixed with ashes to reduce the pong and keep pests away.
They didn't do a great job in keeping away disease, however, as the ashpits would drain into the sewers.
That led to the areas surrounding the pits becoming soaked with the waste products, causing offensive smells and, at times, sickness. The St Helens Newspaper wrote:
"The same system in most towns is found to be undergoing a course of universal condemnation, the present waste of valuable manure being excessive, and the increased evil arising from the pollution of streams being such as to tax to the utmost the resources of the respective sanitary authorities."
The Health Committee was now receiving and releasing detailed stats as to the St Helens mortality rates for the previous four weeks.
During the most recent period there had been 96 deaths in total. These were mainly all from disease, with 28 from what was known as zymotic fevers, including 2 from measles, 8 of scarlet fever and 14 from diarrhoea.
Fifty-seven of the ninety-six deaths were children aged under five and of these twenty-one were less than twelve months old.
There were complaints that their new hospital was being built too slowly with only three bricklayers on the job and it was claimed that a clerk of works was being paid £2 per week to simply watch them.
Their Medical Officer of Health also had a complaint to make about the parents of dead children that had died from infectious disease.
He said it was a common habit at the child's funeral for the parents to ride in the same vehicle as the coffin and he wanted to warn the public that doing so was a dangerous practice.
The St Helens Newspaper this week described John Watkinson as an "idle vagabond" and he was sent to prison for a month for simply sleeping in Pilkington's boiler house.
Edward Harris was also in court charged with begging in Derby Street in Prescot and he was sent to Kirkdale Gaol for seven days.
That was in spite of him telling the Bench that he had been discharged from the army on account of heart disease and as he could not work had thought it better to beg than to steal.
According to Slater's Directory of 1869, there were 52 separate butchers' premises in St Helens – including market traders.
Each place could have more than one person calling themselves a butcher and so there must have been many people at that time in St Helens hacking away at meat.
Some were young and wild, such as John Leyland, and St Helens Petty Sessions heard this week that there was not a butcher in the market that was not afraid of the man.
Two witnesses told the court of hearing Leyland threaten to seriously harm a butcher called John Webster, after the young man had interfered after Leyland had struck his father.
John Leyland was ordered to find two sureties of £5 each for a month to guarantee his good behaviour.
Thomas Peers was also summoned to court – but failed to show up to enter a plea. The man had until recently been the landlord of the Bowling Green Inn in Sutton and presumably had been sacked.
That was after an incident that the police said had left the floor of the pub stained with blood and the place in a very disorderly state.
"Every thing was knocked about and in confusion," reported PC Clarke. The landlord was also drunk and in his absence Thomas Peers was fined 10 shillings and costs.
Quite often if the police interfered in a street fight the two combatants forgot their quarrel and joined forces against a common enemy that was interrupting their fun.
That happened this week when William Simpson and an unknown man fought it out in Ormskirk Street in St Helens.
PC Harrison told the court that the incident had occurred near the Prince of Wales Vaults and he had apprehended both fighters.
But they turned on him and he said he was thrown down in the scuffle. One of them got away but he managed to hold on to Simpson.
A passing joiner called William Abercrombie gave evidence of seeing the officer "down on the flags" outside the Independent Chapel with William Simpson holding PC Harrison fast by his beard. The Newspaper's report then stated:
"The bench having asked the prisoner if he had anything to say, the ingenious youth simply commented on the likelihood of a stunted creature like him overthrowing so large a man as the constable."
Simpson was fined 20 shillings and costs with the alternative of a month in prison.
The St Helens police needed to be big and strong to take the violent drunks that they arrested to the police station.
When John Langley and John Tibo were arrested for disorderly conduct in Liverpool Road, the two constables that arrested them said the pair had fought and kicked as fiercely as they could as they were escorted to the station – presumably while wearing handcuffs.
It was only with the greatest of difficulty, they said, that they got them locked up.
Both Supt. Ludlam and Inspector Whiteside stated that the conduct of the prisoners was exceedingly violent.
The pair was sent to prison for a fortnight for the assaults on the police and fined 5 shillings and costs each for their drunkenness.
Peter Ward of Parr did not turn up to court to face a charge of using a dog in pursuit of game. He had apparently done a runner – or as the Newspaper put it:
"The defendant did not appear, and it was said in court that a report of his flight was abroad."
Many landowners employed part-time game watchers to keep an eye on their land and liaise with their gamekeepers.
A watcher called Thomas Kilshaw said he had been in Glade Hill Wood and seen the man and his dog on the land.
A gamekeeper called William Hill corroborated and said he had subsequently been threatened in a pub.
In his absence Peter Ward was fined £5 or two months imprisonment and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
In the St Helens Petty Sessions on the 29th, John Reynolds was charged with biting a piece out of the lip of Ann Dillon during a drunken quarrel.
The pair's Greenbank row had begun when Mrs Dillon chastised the middle-aged Reynolds for using bad language to a child.
The man reacted badly to the telling off which led to Mrs Dillon striking him. Reynolds then retaliated and in the struggle they both fell down.
It was while the couple was scuffling on the ground that the man was accused of biting the woman's lip.
Both antagonists had been drinking and John Reynolds was fined £2 and costs or had to serve two months in prison.
At the same hearing a labourer at Sutton Copper Works called Patrick Conroy was sent to prison for a month after being charged with stealing 17 shillings 10d – despite being handed the money by the firm's pay clerk.
Conroy had gone to collect his wages but had only been entitled to 5s 3d. However, the pay clerk had mistaken him for another workman of the same name and paid him the 17s 10d which Conroy decided to keep.
One might have thought that biting a piece out of a woman's lip was a more serious crime than not returning money that you had been given.
But the latter was treated as theft, which in Victorian times was generally considered more serious than lower-level violence.
Recently there'd been a break-in at the house of the Rev. William Mocatta of St Thomas's Church in St Helens in which a collection of silver plate had been stolen, as well as two coats and a shawl.
The coats were quickly found but not the rest of the booty. That was until the 30th when James Hulme was mowing clover in a field near the church's cemetery.
He stumbled across the stolen shawl that had been hidden away in the grass and inside of it Hulme discovered the stolen plate.
The farm labourer also found a small crowbar, which had been used to force open a window at Rev. Mocatta's parsonage in Boundary Road and gain entry.
The St Helens Newspaper wrote: "It is pretty evident that the burglars hid it [the silver] in the field immediately after the raid on the house, intending to remove it at their leisure; but the activity of the police baffled their scheme.
"When the theft was made known, the officers began their inquiries, and soon fixed their attention on certain suspicious characters; but before they were able to weave a reasonably strong net the suspects fled from the neighbourhood, thus justifying, to all appearances, the wisdom of the selection made by the police."
And finally, St Helens Town Council's monthly meeting was held on October 1st and it was decided "by acclamation" – as it was reported – that the Mayor be invited to lay the foundation stone of the new Town Hall in what would become Corporation Street and a committee was formed to organise the event.
The meeting also decided to allow telegraph poles to be installed in the street in order that Parr Copper Works could be connected to St Helens Post Office.
In the discussion it was stated that Gamble's chemical works in Gerards Bridge also had their own private telegraph wire connection.
St Helens Newspaper courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include a drunken man's fatal freak in the canal, the drowning outside of a Cowley Hill pub, the heavy sentence for sleeping out in Bridge Street and the St Helens turner that spent 60 years working for the same firm.