News: Cholera outbreak in Paisley

Occasionally we receive unexpected deposits of records from unusual quarters, which shed new perspectives on particular historical events. Staff in the National Archives of Scotland (NAS) Government Records Branch recently catalogued a letter of 1832 (NAS ref. GRO1/691) which was deposited by the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS), the department of the Registrar General for Scotland.

The unusual aspect of the letter was that it was written over 20 years before that department came into existence, and is therefore their earliest record. How it arrived there is something of a mystery, but it is supposed that it was shortly after the introduction of civil registration in 1855, perhaps transferred by a local registrar.

The letter was written by Alexander Todd of Paisley to his brother Mathew Todd in Kilmarnock on 24 April 1832. The events reported record the devastating impact of a major outbreak of cholera in the town of Paisley. Alexander vividly describes the horror, fear and panic elicited by the outbreak, stating that the cholera is "within a very few doors of us", and that seven people in his street had died already, three of them on the same stair head. He also describes mass burials in the town Moss and an ensuing riot caused by suspicions that doctors were removing corpses from the burial ground. Three coffins were found empty when a mob dug them up to check, and the rioters caused damage to the doctors' premises and the local hospital. Hard on the heels of the execution of the notorious body-snatcher William Burke (of Burke & Hare infamy) in January 1829, the theft of bodies from graveyards would have been a matter of great public concern, which coupled with a rising death toll from a cholera epidemic, clearly resulted in severe public disorder in Paisley.

Further records about the riot, which took place on 26 March 1832, can be found in the criminal trial papers of the High Court of Justiciary, heard at Glasgow on 5 May 1832 (NAS ref. JC26/1832/188). These confirm that seven men were indicted for mobbing, rioting and assault. Of those tried, all were found guilty and sentenced to between 3 and 6 months imprisonment with hard labour. The trial papers provide details about where the rioters went and what they did, recording that they stole the hospital hearse and eventually destroyed it, and that various persons were assaulted, including a policeman. Some of the declarants claim that they went and "smoked a pipe" and chatted with the hospital officials in the middle of the riot, while another mentions going into the hospital and helping staff to pick broken glass off a dying man's bed.

The cholera outbreak of 1831 and 1832 was part of a European pandemic. It was particularly severe in the industrialised towns and cities of the West of Scotland, and affected Paisley in particular, where around 450 people died. The outbreak was made worse by a lack of proper urban planning, no clean water supply, and serious overcrowding in houses which were poorly constructed. A reply to Alexander Todd's letter from his nephew alludes to this when he reports that a female relative was injured when the house she was working in fell on top of her!

This major pandemic helped usher in a series of planning and health reforms, which in the longer term witnessed improvements in public health, utilities and sanitation, though it was not until the late 1840s and 1850s that a link was finally established between contaminated water and cholera. Before then, established opinion was that it was caused by 'miasma' or foul air. A definite impetus for improved sanitation and other public health measures was the establishment of the office of the Registrar General, whose statutory registration of cause of death information from 1855 provided firm evidence of the numbers of deaths due to disease in the major cities.

Most people consider GROS records to consist exclusively of statutory birth, death and marriage registers, old parochial registers and census information, and are primarily of genealogical interest. However the NAS holds a wealth of other GROS material which vividly reflects the history, character and social changes which took place in Scotland from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. These include correspondence with local registrars in the Registration branch files series (GRO1) and reports on annual inspections of registers (GRO2) as conducted by district examiners. The latter frequently comment on the local circumstances surrounding registered events, particularly deaths. Such records add variety, detail and colour to the vital events information recorded within the statutory registers.

Ironically, in the same year as the Paisley riots, Parliament introduced a new Anatomy Bill, which became law on 19 July 1832. The Act provided that anyone intending to practise anatomy must first obtain a licence from the Home Secretary. As licensed teachers, they accepted responsibility for the proper treatment of all bodies dissected in the building for which their licence was granted. Regulating these licensed teachers, and receiving constant reports from them, were four inspectors of anatomy, for England, Scotland, Ireland and London, who reported to the Home Secretary. They knew the whereabouts of every body being dissected. The principle provision of the act stipulated that a person having lawful possession of a body may permit it to undergo anatomical examination provided no relative objected. Had this act been in force earlier, it may well have helped to prevent the 1832 riots in Paisley.