Updated 5 December 2024: This blog post was originally published 22 August 2024 as a work-in-progress draft post for my MA dissertation assessment. It has now been updated and the full account is published below.
Walking today through the modern housing of the Royal Mint Estate which now occupies the space between Royal Mint Street and East Smithfield that was once known as Rosemary Lane, it's hard to imagine the jumble of overcrowded courts and alleyways which once defined this heart of Irish Whitechapel. For the dissertation I wrote in the final year of my history BA back in 2023, I immersed myself in the experience of sickness and death in Rosemary Lane of 1848. That was the time of London's second cholera epidemic and was coincident with an influx of refugees from Famine in Ireland.
This blog post will explore the experiences of Whitechapel's Irish poor in the early days of public health. And how Irish cultural practices around death and dying clashed with the new practices of sanitary reform.
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1848: London's second cholera epidemic
Cholera induced a visceral fear in the nineteenth century, despite having lower overall morbidity and mortality rates than endemic diseases like typhus. The speed and randomness of cholera attacks gave epidemics a “sensational” aspect which galvanized calls for sanitary reform. The historian Christopher Hamlin makes a convincing argument in Cholera: The Biography that the disease was especially problematic for nations like nineteenth-century Britain because the legal and societal measures implemented to prevent the spread of this unpredictable disease were often at odds with prevailing liberal values of individualism and opposition to state intervention.
London had already suffered its first cholera epidemic in 1832 when 6,536 people died of the disease. Cholera returned in 1848, prompting the rapid passing of new legislation in an effort to prevent the spread of the disease: the Public Health Act for England and Wales and the Nuisances Removal and Disease Prevention Act for London.
“What a splutter will the act make in those places which have hitherto nestled in filth, and resisted all reasonable remonstrance on the score of injury to health!”
- ‘The Public Health Act’. Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, 7 Oct 1848, pp. 232-233.
Disease and the Irish poor
It’s worth reading that commentary in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal in full to see the speed with which it turns from plaudits for the Public Health Act 1848 into a broadside against “an evil which threatens to overpower all means of remedy”. That evil was “vast migratory hordes” of Irish paupers who represented “polluting streams…[carrying] disease and demoralization”.
This type of invective about the immigrant Irish poor was not unusual. A decade before the mass migration precipitated by the Great Famine of 1845-1852, the Irish poor in Britain were the focus of an appendix to the 1836 report of the Royal Commission into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland. One medical contributor to the report described his Irish patients in Birmingham as “the very pests of society. They generate contagion”.
Later in 1852, the magazine Punch published the cartoon "A Court for King Cholera" by illustrator and caricaturist John Leech, notorious now for his use of negative national stereotypes which often depicted the Irish as a simianised 'Ape-man'. Although there is no explicit reference to the Irish in this cartoon, phonetic reading aloud of the sign "Logins for Thravelers" clearly suggests Hiberno-English pronunciation.
1848: Famine in Ireland & migration to London
British western port cities like Liverpool are most often associated with the Irish immigrant presence in nineteenth-century Britain, but London actually contained the highest number of Irish-born out of all British cities in 1851. The spike in emigration from Ireland during the Famine years saw London’s Irish-born population increase from 75,000 in 1841 to almost 109,000 in 1851. These people joined a long-established but unquantifiable population of Londoners born to Irish parents, grandparents and those whose Irish origins dated back to the earlier eighteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Of all of London’s metropolitan districts in 1851, Whitechapel had the largest Irish-born population both in terms of absolute numbers (8,988) and population density (11.3%) alongside an Irish presence first established in the seventeenth century. The Irish presence was much higher in the streets and alleys of Rosemary Lane which was the heart of Irish Whitechapel. In the memorably-named Hairbrain-court, 60% of the residents in 1851 were born in Ireland and another 34% had Irish-born parents.
Disease and sanitary reform in East London
Like the rest of the other overcrowded districts of East London, Whitechapel also had a longstanding reputation as a place of poverty and “fever nests” where disease in general was rampant.
“East London was the battle ground on which the struggle for sanitary reform was waged at a national level, and through that struggle the poor came to be viewed in new and troubling ways”
- John Marriott, Beyond the Tower: A History of East London (Chapter 5, ‘The spectre of cholera, 1830-1875).
In December 1848, the deaths of four people from cholera in Rosemary Lane became a flashpoint in the battle for sanitary reform. Whitechapel’s Poor Law Board of Guardians had chosen to ignore the anti-cholera instructions issued by the General Board of Health under the new public health legislation. Rather than meekly accept this inaction, their Medical Officer and sanitary campaigner Doctor John Liddle took on the Whitechapel Board of Guardians with the support of the General Board of Health and the Coroner for the eastern division of London and Middlesex, Mr William Baker.
Newspaper reports of events surrounding the Coroner’s inquest held on 18 December 1848 reveal the circumstances under which the Whitechapel Irish and their near neighbours were living and dying during London's second cholera epidemic.
13 Dec 1848: An Irish Wake in Hairbrain-court, Whitechapel
In December 1848, one hundred and fifty seven people were living in thirty-two rooms across thirteen properties in Hairbrain-court, none of which were connected to the sewer that ran under the north-south thoroughfare of Blue Anchor-yard. A “scarcely bearable” smell permeated their homes, due in part to hydrogen sulfide gas emanating from the unpaved yards’ ash pits and cesspools and communal privies in the stairwells.
On 12 December, two women and a boy died from cholera without any medical attendance: Ellen Donovan aged sixty, Ellen Lyons (or Lyon) aged forty, and Patrick Shehan (or Sheen) aged four. The next day, a family in Hairbrain-court held an Irish wake for a grandmother and grandchild who were almost certainly Ellen Donovan and Patrick Shehan.
About twelve mourners gathered in a small top floor room to pay their respects to the “two dead bodies, dressed-up, and surrounded by blazing candles” and to talk, eat, drink and smoke together. The Irish practice in Whitechapel was to “form a canopy of white calico over the corpse, buy candles to burn by it, and place a black cross at the head of the corpse”, with the community helping to cover the costs of the wake and funeral.
The wake was disrupted when Medical Officer John Liddle unexpectedly entered the room with General Board of Health Inspector Robert Bowie.
The Irish family rejected Bowie’s efforts “to induce the visitors to leave” for breaking the cholera regulations which required rapid separation of the sick and the dead from the healthy and the living. It’s likely that the Irish of Rosemary-lane had an ambivalent relationship with their local Medical Office as Liddle regularly reported to the central authorities about what he considered “enormous evils connected with the Irish custom of "wakes".
On the evening of 14 December, Coroner William Baker viewed the dead bodies of Ellen Donovan, Ellen Lyons and Patrick Shehan and witnessed “the most agonising and appalling situations of others in a dying state in the same vicinity”. These included forty year-old Richard Poole who died “for want of other accommodation, in a [windowless] damp cellar” in nearby Sclaters-court, having been turned away from his and his wife’s “wretched lodging-house” in Hairbrain-court.
18 December 1848: A cholera inquest in Rosemary Lane
As was normal practice at the time, the inquest was a public event. The room used in the Windmill Tavern on Rosemary-lane was “filled almost to suffocation” for nearly seven hours. In what must have been an extraordinary reversal of local power dynamics, the Whitechapel Poor Law Guardians were effectively put on trial for cholera deaths in the most Irish part of Whitechapel.
The jury verdict in the Rosemary Lane inquest directly attributed the deaths from ‘Asiatic cholera’ of Richard Poole, Ellen Donovan, Ellen Lyons and Patrick Shehan to “the foetid and abominable conditions of the habitations…in the courts and alleys in which they resided”, charging the Whitechapel Guardians with “gross neglect of duty in not carrying out the orders of the General Board of Health”. However, at Coroner Baker’s recommendation, the words “gross neglect”, which were “tantamount to a verdict of manslaughter”, were changed to “very great neglect”. The Coroner had stressed in his opening statement that as this was the first inquest under the new public health law, he was “disposed to temper justice with mercy” on this one occasion.
William Baker had purposefully used the inquest into these cholera deaths in Rosemary Lane as a test case to try to force local authorities to either implement the new Public Health regulations or risk being found guilty of homicide. My surmise is that this explains why there are surprisingly few scapegoating references to the living habits of the local Irish population in newspaper reporting of the inquest and none at all in the General Board of Health’s approving comment on the Coroner’s actions.
After the inquest
In the histories of public health in Victorian Britain, the consensus is that the public health legislation of 1848 failed in the face of concerted opposition from local Poor Law authorities. However, in Whitechapel at least, the sanitary reformers secured a partial victory over the recalcitrant Poor Law Board of Guardians with the aid of the coronial inquest system and a campaigning Medical Officer.
However, deaths from cholera continued to rise in Rosemary Lane. The local Whitechapel authorities continued to attribute the deaths to “the inhabitants being of the lowest order of Irish, and very filthy”. By late January 1849, the Board of Guardians recorded that the Irish poor were no longer “disposed to place confidence in any of the Medical Officers” on the subject of cholera. I think this can be interpreted as an act of resistance by a marginalised population for whom there had been no real follow through on the threat of a homicide or manslaughter verdict for the Guardians judged responsible for deaths in their community. The Guardians turned instead to Whitechapel’s Roman Catholic clergy and asked them to “recommend habits of personal and domestic cleanliness” to their flock.
Remembering the 1848 Irish victims of cholera
Walking down Whitechapel High Street today, one of the few open green spaces is Altab Ali Park - named in memory of a young Bengali migrant murdered by racist attackers in 1978 beside what was then St. Mary's Gardens. This park had been created on the site of the Church of St. Mary Matfelon, the original medieval 'white chapel', which was destroyed in the Blitz in 1940. Like all other churchyards and graveyards in central London, burials ceased there after the Burial Acts of the 1850s due to the sanitary problems created by a lack of burial space and overcrowding amongst the dead.
The few gravestones still visible in Altab Ali Park today memorialise those whose families could afford the luxury of a private grave and gravemarker. However, the burial register of St. Mary Matfelon records many Irish surnames.
The day after the cholera inquest in the Windwill Tavern on Rosemary Lane, three of the dead were buried in the churchyard of St. Mary Matfelon on 19 December 1848: forty one-year old Ellen Lyon from Blue Anchor Yard and, from the workhouse, four year-old Patrick Shehan, and forty year-old Richard Poole. The final resting place of sixty year-old Ellen Donovan is yet to be found.
One of the great joys of historical research is the element of chance. Looking for a dissertation topic for the final year of my BA History, I spent an afternoon in the London Archives flicking through mid-nineteenth century records of Whitechapel's Poor Law Board of Guardians. When I first came across passing references to the "low Irish" in the Board meeting minutes, I had no idea that I was about to go down a research rabbit hole which would ultimately lead me to the cholera inquest of 18 December 1848. And the poignant realisation that a local park in Whitechapel was once the final resting place of many of the London Irish who came before us.
This blog post is based on only a small portion of my 10,000-word exploration of the London Irish as an immigrant 'other' in the early days of sanitary reform and public health in Whitechapel. If you would like to read my dissertation research report in full, feel free to get in touch at irishlondonhistory@gmail.com. (Note: This is not a formal academic paper as it has not been peer-reviewed or published. It was graded A** (92%) as the major element of the final year of my BA History).
Blog sources & further resources
Locating Rosemary Lane
The Ordnance Survey's 1848-51 London 1:5,280 Large Scale Town Plan - 42 sheets shows London at the time when people were fleeing the Great Famine in Ireland.
Sheet VII.SE contains the area of Irish settlement between Rosemary Lane (renamed Royal Mint Street in 1852) and East Smithfield.
This was demolished as part of the slum clearance programmes in the later 19th century but the historic map overlay function shows you how the current street layout still reflects the main thoroughfares that the Whitechapel Irish and new Famine migrants would have walked through.
Exploring the Poor Law in London
The London Archives has published a very helpful research Guide to Poor Law Records for London and Middlesex.
The London Archives online catalogue is freely available for searching. If you want to see original documents, you just need to register for a London Archives History Card first.
Cholera epidemics in London
For an analysis of how Britain understood and responded to the four cholera epidemics of 1832, 1848, 1854 and 1866, see the essay by Professor Pamela K. Gilbert, “On Cholera in Nineteenth-Century England”, on the website BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History.
London's Science Museum has a useful overview of the history of public health in Britain, including a feature on cholera in Victorian London.
You can see how cholera epidemics in Victorian London were reported in The Gazette, the official public record of the UK government.
For a detailed analysis of the John Leech cartoon of 1851 shown in the blog post, see Suzanne Nunn, 'A Court for King Cholera', Popular Narrative Media, 2:1 (April 2009), 5-21.
Cholera in Rosemary Lane, Whitechapel
The General Board of Health Report on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848 & 1849 (London: HMSO, 1851) is available to read on Internet Archive. It includes five references to cholera in Rosemary Lane, as reported by the local Medical Officers.
Irish death culture in the age of sanitary reform
It was not uncommon in mid-nineteenth century Britain for the poor to keep dead bodies of family members in their homes for several days because of the time needed to raise funds for the funeral and burial. This was a cause of great concern for the medical profession and sanitary reformers. The Irish poor were seen as particularly problematic because of their insistence on holding wakes.
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