(Poverty by Gustave Doré)
William Turner (my third great grandfather) lived in Roper's Lane in Bridgwater. He was a worker at the brickyard. The work was hard, intermittent and paid very little in the way of wages. Some of the houses in this area were slums. There is a very good article from The Bridgwater Times which is transcribed below outlines what his living conditions would have been like when he was living there with his young family. By 1867 James' wife Mary Ann Crane had given birth to 8 children.
In 1849 a cholera epidemic swept through the streets where they lived, and in St Mary's Churchyard, graves which contained corpses were left open, ready to receive the next bodies. My fourth great grandfather James Bishop died in Honeysuckle Alley of cholera aged 47.
George Burge who is mentioned in the report, is also a distant relative.
1848 The Bridgwater Times
"George Burge, who lives in the first house I entered,
is an invalid, suffering from sciatica and
rheumatism, and totally incapable of working at his
trade, that of ship's carpenter. He has a sick wife,
and five sick children; the family and dwelling
exhibited a complete picture of want and desolation.
The parish allows this family 5s. and five loaves per
week, equal to about 7s. 6d.; out of this sum is to be
deducted 1s. 6d. a week for rent, leaving for the
decent subsistence per week of seven individuals just
6s., ‒ less than 1s. per week for each member of the
family. In the workhouse the average cost per week
of each pauper is 2s. 6d.. The house is approached
from Mary Street by an entry of about four feet in
width, at the end of which is a heap of ashes, and
there being no convenience attached to the house,
this heap serves the purpose of a water closet, and is
exactly opposite the entrance to the house, leaving
but a narrow space to enter the doorway. The house
contains two bedrooms upstairs, one of which is so
out of repair that rain and wind have ingress, and it
is consequently uninhabitable. There are also a
room and a back place on the ground floor. There is
no water on the premises, the inmates being obliged
to get it as they can. The premises want light,
ventilation, draining and cleansing. The rooms are
about twelve feet square, and all the family sleep in
one room.. .
In the next house I visited live a man and his wife
and six children. It contains one room and a small
pantry on the ground floor; upstairs there are what
are called two bedrooms, the landing of the stairs
forming one of them. The room downstairs measured
about ten feet by fifteen feet; the pantry is about four
feet deep – the two bedrooms are over the lower
room. In one of them sleep the eldest daughter who
has left her service through ill health and who is
about twenty-two years of age – her brother, about
sixteen years of age and four other children; in the
other the father and mother. The pantry is close to
the churchyard and instead of a window has an
aperture of about eighteen inches square stuffed up
with hay. There is no privy to this house and no
water on the premises. The smells of the new-dug
graves are frequently very offensive. I use the words
of the wife – "On one occasion when a grave was
opened, I never smelled such a breath; the flesh of
the former body was taken out with the hair on, and
the jaw bones were perfect. The coffin had been
broken in. I have seen children playing with human
bones outside the churchyard walls." There was no
back outlet."
Sometimes I marvel at how my ancestors managed to survive conditions like these, but survive and thrive they did.
