When unsanitary conditions led to Basingstoke typhoid outbreak

As a result, Dr Ballard of the Medical Department of the Local Government Board came to Basingstoke for three days in October 1871 to see for himself.

On December 28, 1871, he issued his Report upon the Sanitary Condition of Basingstoke. These were some of his findings.

He explained that a sewer ran along London and Winchester streets. It had one branch that ran down New Street which emptied itself into the River Loddon and another branch that ran down Wote Street into the basin of the Basingstoke Canal.  

An unknown number of houses had their water closets connected to drain into the sewers. 

For those not connected to the sewers or without cesspools, the sewage, which was mixed with blood from the slaughterhouses, could be seen running from the backyards across the footpaths into the gutters at the side of the roads to wind up in one of the branches of the Loddon. This was the case even in Church Street.

The branches of the River Loddon. (Image: Public Domain)

In hot dry weather, all those gutters and the slow-running Loddon, which was “nothing but an open sewer”, stank.

At the west end of Brook Street, the stream formed a wide pool of sewage, close to some new houses.

Both the bed of the river and the basin of the canal were silted up with sewage.

Due to the collapse of the Greywell Tunnel, which had acted as a dam, the canal basin and the canal itself for some miles, was a stagnant pool and was “a source of much offence to persons residing in the neighbourhood”.

Canal basin looking from Wote Street east to Eastrop Bridge. (Image: Contributed)

There was no main water supply, so most houses had their own well.

They also had their own cesspit or dead well for the reception of excrement and slops.

In the poorer parts of the town, several houses shared the same privy and cesspit.

Dr Ballard said that, without exception, every privy he examined was intolerably offensive and many were over full.

In Hadleigh Terrace, he found faeces floating in someone’s well that had been washed into it from an overflowing privy.  

He found that in many places, the homes of the poor were totally unfit for human habitation, being dark, dilapidated, low and unventilated.

He was particularly scathing about the condition of the 10 cottages in Totterdown Dell, behind Reading Road.

The people living in the 12 houses in Ford’s Buildings, “have no water but what they can obtain by dipping out of the Loddon. The water at the usual dipping place is turbid, and bubbles of gas rise on the least disturbance of the mud and decaying matter at the bottom”.

Ford's Buildings (Image: Contributed)

There had been many cases of people suffering from typhoid.

He said there could be “no question that the fever originated and spread out of the filthy emanations from cesspits and the contamination with excremental matters of the water which the people habitually imbibe”.

In Goddard’s Lane, which was a short street leading from Reading Road to Basing Road, there were seven cases of typhoid in one house, two of which were fatal, and three cases in the house next door.

They got their water from a shallow well in the backyard, which was close to a group of overflowing privies.

He said there could be no doubt that soakage from the privies found their way through the loose soil and into the well.

In the third house in the row, four people caught typhoid, one of whom had died.

The residents stopped using their well some time ago as it was contaminated by the nest of privies that surrounded it.

Instead, they were getting their water from a well in Basing Road that was close to the street gutter.

There was nothing to prevent the dirt from the street from flowing into it.

At the bottom of the well there was “a deposit which readily gives off abundant bubbles of gas when a little disturbed”.

The people who used the water said that after rain it was so thick as to be undrinkable. Yet this was the only well that was provided for the supply of eight houses.

Dr Ballard said that in all parts of the town the wells were surrounded by privy cesspits which were no more than three or four yards from them.

The soil in which those wells and cesspits were dug was either loose gravel or porous chalk.

This meant that “the well water must of necessity be everywhere more or less contaminated by excremental soakage”.

He summed up the situation with the memorable phrase, “In short, throughout the town, people are unwittingly drinking their own excrement”.