Public Health in the South Wales Valleys

Today in our Welfare State, the availability of a free Health Service is taken for granted. Although conditions were better in the new valley communities which developed after 1850 than they had been earlier in the iron towns, there were still unsanitary conditions which led to diseases such as cholera, typhus and diphtheria, as this extract from a report of a Medical Officer of Health in 1893 shows:

The river contains a large proportion of human excrement, stable and pigsty manure, congealed blood , offal and entrails from the slaughterhouses, the rotten carcasses of animals, cats and dogs ... old cast-off articles of clothing and bedding, and boots, bottles, ashes, street refuse and a host of other articles . . . In. dry weather the stench becomes unbearable.

In particular, the rate of death of young children (the infant mortality rate) was very high in valley communities. In 1911 one of the highest rates in the whole country was in Aberdare where 213 children per 1,000 births, died, compared to an average for the whole of England and Wales of 122.

Many of those who survived infancy still suffered badly from ill-health. Edmund Stonelake describes here the health of some of his Classmates at the end of the 19th century:

almost covered with scab, and another who had a perpetual stinking discharge from his ears. 1 now know the scabby heads as ringworm. One boy of my own age, flatfooted, like a very old man, his face pale yellow, his large eyes protruding from their sockets' and his breath smelled so badly that other boys avoided him and were unwilling to sit next to him ...he died young ...

In the 1870s and 1880s Parliament passed laws to encourage local authorities to improve public health. Improvements did come but up to 1914 these were very slow and the effect of them was not to be felt for sometime.

Poor sanitation, lack of proper diet and bad housing were not the only causes of ill-health, of course work in the pit led to frequent injuries and crippling industrial diseases. The pit also led indirectly to deaths and accidents in the home. Midwives maintained that the main cause of premature births in South Wales was that expectant mothers had to lift heavy tubs of boiling water for their husband's bath. Children also suffered from this danger as one investigator reported in 1920:

Many deaths of children occur by their falling into tubs and being scalded while the on mother is preparing for the worker's bath. One of the ,coroners in South Wales has said "Every winter 1 hold more inquests on miners' children who die from scalds or burns than I do miners who are killed underground".