The cholera plague of 1832

Cholera plague of 1832

A page from the St Helier burial register in the days after the outbreak started in August 1832 - a third of the victims babies a few months old

This article by Peter Cook was first published in the magazine Jersey Life in 19968

During the 19th century four great cholera epidemics swept across Europe. The disease, first identified on the Continent in 1817, was worse earlier in the century, for then it was little known and killed on average half the people who caught it.

In 1832 came the first serious outbreaks. In England Oxford and Newcastle were worst hit. In France cholera spread to the Channel ports, including St Malo.

Isolated community

At the time, 17 years after Waterloo, Jersey was a very isolated community. It was also very poor and a place dangerously vulnerable to the disease.

The town of St Helier was insanitary and the major part of its population lived in overcrowded conditions and suffered from malnutrition. The island had a population of 36,000, and just under half lived in St Helier.

The summer of 1832 had been a hot, dry one. On 5 August there had been no rain for 53 days. On 7 August, hours after the drought had broken, the first case of cholera was reported to the island's Medical Officer of Health, Dr G S Hooper.

An enlightened medical man, he had been aware of the danger before. The previous year he had warned the Committee of the Board of Health about St Helier's frightful slums and shocking drainage.

The most serious problem was geographical. The upper parts of the town, the smarter, residential areas, drained off naturally into the low, poorer quarters of town, the Vingtaine de la Ville, which surrounded the harbour. Here the less privileged section of the island, their ranks swollen by a recent influx of English and Irish labourers, lived in appalling conditions.

Cabot's Yard

In a report to his board only months before cholera arrived, Dr Hooper had drawn attention to the most frightful area of all - Cabot's Yard in Sand Street

He vividly depicted the 'dreadful stench' which rose from the houses in the yard during hot summer days. He also explained how 'the drain of the yard runs down over the ground between two rows of dirty low houses' and how 'this drain then empties in a large hole at the end of the yard, where it remains stagnant'.

Nauseating in summer, conditions were worse in the spring and autumn, for then heavy rains would flood the foul drains into those same dirty, low houses.

Before the epidemic broke out, Dr Hooper predicted that the yard 'will certainly be the first quarter for cholera'.

In early August he was proved right. One of the first victims came from the yard and during the first five days of the outbreak, two-thirds of the yard's inhabitants went down with the disease. After that they were all removed to other living quarters on Gallows Hill (Westmount).

Poverty

Living conditions were, of course, a primary cause of cholera's rapid spread, but there was a more general one as well - the poverty of Jersey's townspeople.

Dr Hooper had also referred to this in advance:

"It would be difficult to find a place where, in proportion to its magnitude, intemperance had more votaries, or where poverty, demoralisation and squalid misery prevailed to a greater degree.'

This was the Jersey of August 1832, and it was an island which was to know the misery of a three-month plague. By 24 August cholera had spread to Georgetown and Gorey; by 18 September, after cases had been reported in every parish except St Mary, its hold had seemed to wane, until there was a resurgence in Gorey and St Helier. Only in the second week in October did the epidemic finally cease.

For all this time there was a newspaper column headed 'Cholera Morbus'. Underneath were listed the victime the disease had killed.

By far the greatest number of dead and dying came from St Helier's Vingtaine de La Ville. Of the 311 town fatalities, 267 had lived in this south-east district.

As in other communities, the death rate was high. That autumn 43 per cent of the people who caught cholera died from it. It affected 1 in 40 of the population - 356 women, 316 men and 134 children under the age of 15.

It was the worst outbreak of the century in Jersey. In 1848 only 250 would die, and in 1869, rather fewer, but the 1832 outbreak killed 350.

Country folk escaped

Surprising as well as horrifying was the course charted by the disease. Generally the poor townspeople succumbed while the healthier, more prosperous country folk escaped. Grouville had 72 cases, many in the expanding town of Gorey, and St Martin had ten. Only St Mary had none at all.

In part this was attributable to the lack of communications between St Mary and the rest of the island; in part it was due to the closing of the market at St Helier during the epidemic, which put a stop to travelling. Even so, the parishioners of St Mary had remarkably good luck.

Even more amazing was Jersey's second town, St Aubin, which also escaped unscathed. Only three miles across the bay from St Helier there was not a single sufferer. This, too, was attributable to the better class housing in the district, but it was a remarkable escape, nevertheless.

Only 37 of the 348 island deaths occurred in the country parishes outside St Helier. Later in the century it was to be the same story. It was always townspeople who suffered worst because they lived in the most frightening conditions.

Dr Hooper made this very clear in 1832 but the lesson was not learned. A few hundred more had to die before anything was done and it was only towards the end of the 19th century that the congested town area was improved.