[Report 1904] / Medical Officer of Health, Darlington County Borough.

  • Darlington (England). County Borough Council.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1904] / Medical Officer of Health, Darlington County Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the Borough of Darlington for the year ending 31st December, 1904. To the Chairman and Members of the Sanitary Committee. Gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you my Annual Report on the Health of the Borough of Darlington for the year ending 31st December, 1904, as required by the Local Government Board. It is difficult to find much that is new to fill the pages of such a document, and matters of fact, embodied in figures, rather than what is sensational must be dealt with in it. I shall as far as possible try to condense these facts, so that they may be presented to your view with as little circumlocution as I can. POPULATION. If the population were ascertained by a census every three or five years one might regard the statistical figures as fairly accurate which are dealt with in such a report as this, but when such long intervals occur between the census they can only be approximately so. It is important to take as accurate an estimate of the population as possible from various considerations. We know pretty nearly the number of inhabited houses in the Borough, pretty nearly the number that are built each year, and if we know these numbers we can easily compute the num- ber of inhabitants per house. In a former computation after last census our population was 4 8 per house. At present we hear a good deal about over- crowding, but where this exists I think it is in many cases due to the necessity of securing cheap rooms rather than dearth of houses. The houses that have been built in the last decade are superior to what were provided formerly for the working man’s family, and consequently are let at higher rents. Many of these houses are fitted with bathrooms and other conveniences, which greatly increase the price of erection, and of course the rent. I do not think that any small houses have been built of late years to let, say, at a weekly rent of three shillings or three and sixpence a week. When people with narrow means cannot find small houses, they prefer to rent one room at two shillings or half-a-crown a week. In this way the sub-letting of rooms produces over-crowding, and is a great evil, and detrimental to the public health. It is a difficult question to pro- vide houses for the class of people here referred to, as those who invest their money in this way find the class of population who live in cheap houses more unstable, more likely to run away without paying anything at all, and the collect- ing of rents from such people is more costly ; in fact, the property is unproduc- tive. As I have already said, the sub-letting of houses into tenements tends to