The poem below has been sent to Wakefield Historical Society by Suzanne Webb and has been transcribed. Her mother worked for Yorkshire Water, and she believes that the poem may date from an anniversary of clean water coming to Wakefield which happened on 1st May 1888. Although the poem may have been written in the second half of the 20th century, it describes the state of the water in the 19th century. Just how bad it was is confirmed by James Fowler’s report to the Royal Commission in 1866.
Please note that the poem is Suzanne Webb’s copyright, we appreciate her permission to add the transcription here.
Wakefield Water in the Nineteenth Century
Over the brink of it,
Just try the stink of it,
Think how we drink of it,
Shudder and dread
There corpses are floating
While grim death sits gloating
To think how the living should sup of the dead.
Just look at the soap suds,
The dyewares, the logwoods,
Which comes down in great floods,
With gas-tar to boot>
While sewage from cess pools
The whole of the mess rules;
And rather detracts from its colour of soot.
Sometimes there are swimming
Dead bodies of women,
The black river brimming
With stench and with stink;
While dog, cat and kitten
Oh, shame it be written! –
Add flavour to savour the water we drink.
The slops from canal boats
Around and about floats,
And this down our dry throats
We thirstily pour,
With grease oil and sizing
The most appetising,
Mixed up with the fat from the mills on the shore.
The whole, when it comes to the wheel by the bridge
(You will know if you just put your nose o’er the ridge),
Receives such a stirring you think you can own
The many bad smells of the town of Cologne,
With fifty per cent added on the whole:
And you mutter a prayer for the good of your soul,
And think if you happen a stranger to be,
In a few years they’ll all be as black as the d—-,
For they who must drink
On this diet of ink
will find their complexions, instead of being pink,
Will assume such a gloom,
That there’ll never be room
For improvement, till each one is laid in the tomb
James Fowler reported to the Royal Commission on the condition of the Calder in 1866. Fowler had just been elected surgeon to the Clayton Hospital and Wakefield General Dispensary.
“In recent years on any warm day in summer, torrents of gas may be seen rising to the surface, and every now and then large masses of mud, which float for awhile and then, after the gas they contain has escaped and polluted the atmosphere, break up and are re-deposited, or are at once carried down the river, stinking and putrefying in their course. At the bridge there has been a water-mill for at least seven hundred years, and anyone interested in the smell of partially oxidized sewage should not omit to stand over the spray which ascends from the wheel. Masses of solid faeces may be seen at the grating through which the water is strained.
Today looking from the bridge westward, except in wet weather, is a large, open, shallow, almost stagnant pond of the most offensive character, with tracks of dark-coloured mud constantly exposed. The sewer of the town and the West Riding Asylum, with the refuse of the worsted, woollen, and cloth mills, malt-houses, breweries, brew-houses, slaughter-houses, dye-works, fibre mills, soap mills, and grease works enters by the drain just below; its surface covered with froth of every conceivable colour and degree of filthiness, overhung by willows, in whose branches are entangled and exposed to view the most disgusting objects. The scum may readily be traced down the river for a considerable distance.