[Report 1901] / Medical Officer of Health, Barnsley County Borough.

  • Barnsley (England : Unitary authority). County Borough Council.
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1901] / Medical Officer of Health, Barnsley County Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    13/24 (page 13)
    We are still without any Bye-Laws enabling us to insist on the proper paving of courts and yards behind houses, which as I may remind you, I have on several occasions urged as very needful for the maintenance of proper cleanliness, and especially in a town in which from the frequent recurrence of Diarrhoea and Typhoid Fever after every warm summer, there is every reason to believe that the soil is in many such situations impregnated • with harmful microbes. During the year 119 new houses have been erected and certified by your Surveyor as fit for occupation, the majority being of the class with 4 or 5 rooms, with a certain proportion of small villa residences. Beyond the sewers needed for these new houses, no exten- sion of the sewerage system has been completed during the year, but tbe sewers now in progress from Blenheim Hoad and Park Grove in the direction of Park Road will eventually provide for the drainage of the houses in that part of the town, which at present drain into cess-pools. This district, with the Honeywell Fields and Smithies Lane, are the only important parts of the Borough not embraced in the system of sewers which finds its eventual outlet at the Sewage Farm at Monk Bretton Grange, where additions have recently been made to the means for disposal of the sewage bv the provision of Bacterial tanks and filters. These tanks and filters are reported to be working well and it is to be hoped that the experiment will prove a successful one, as the satisfactory dis- posal of the sewage of thickly populated places has so far proved one of the most difficult problems that Sanitary Authorities have to grapple with, and until that can be solved at a reasonable cost, and the water supply be put on a satisfactory footing, the general abolition of the privy-middens is hardly possible. By your costly water-works at Midhope, which we all hope will be completed in the current year, you have grappled with one part of this problem, and have for years been working at the other parts by your sewage disposal works, and by the gradual abolition of privy-middens, and the institution of water-carriage systems of one kind or another.