Worcester's toilets: putrid problems faced by people in the past

Because it’s all about the origin of the word “bog”. As in: “Where’s Dad?” Response: “He’s on the bog.” In other words the slang term for the toilet, lavatory, dunny, crapper or privy.

For the answer to this troublesome question, come with me back to the Worcester of the early 19th century. A time when the city’s population was starting to explode – and any other double entendre Carry On scriptwriters might come up with.

Wealthy citizens were moving out of their houses in the city centre and the gardens disappeared under cottages and workshops, which massed together using every conceivable space.

Birdport in 1910 with the Glovers Arms in Powick Lane in the left

To reach them, covered passages called “courts” led from the street fronts. Most of the courts had no water supply and few had any sanitary arrangements. For those that did, it was usually shared between a dozen or more families.

To make matters worse, cheek-by-jowl with the houses were private slaughterhouses and tradesmen carrying out their noisy work without any means of disposing of their waste.

The gutters became receptacles for putrid filth and often any space available in these courts was used for the disposal of the privies.

Read more: Murky past behind Pierpoint name

These were called “bogs”, presumably because they had the same consistency as the peat variety, and incredible though it may seem, were regarded as valuable assets. There was no control over housing and speculative builders were free to create back-to-back dwellings crowded together with no amenities.

In 1832, the Worcester Board of Health produced a report which confirmed there were “accumulations of filth” in almost every part of the city. It added: “So far as the mixens and dirt heaps are concerned, it is impossible to find words in which to describe their offensive state.

“Particularly offensive is the bog-hole in St Andrew’s Square and also the state of Farling’s Entry in The Shambles, where manure and filth of all description remains till it is perfectly alive.”

Fish Street in 1893. The property in the foreground was built in the 1600s and demolished in 1906

The account goes on to say that some bog-holes were so full, their content was spreading across the floor. Drains and what sewers there were had become choked up and pigsties were to be found everywhere. It must be remembered there were hundreds of horses about producing manure and many families kept a pig for fattening and eating.

In 1846, a second report by Henry Austin, secretary of the Health of Towns Society, said :”The City of Worcester may, at this present moment, be said to be practically without sewerage. In many of the lower parts of the city pools of liquid filth perpetually stagnate the surface of the streets or sink into the soil, there being no adequate drains for their removal.”

Austin recommended a complete system of small sewers and a waterworks which, for the cost of a penny a week, would provide each inhabitant with a constant supply of pure filtered water.

Even so some opposed on the grounds of unnecessary expense. However within two years there was an outbreak of cholera and that suddenly concentrated minds, eventually leading to decent sewers becoming bog standard.