NOW & THEN: Starcross in Danger - Covid-19 and Cholera

Pavel Fedotov's painting shows
a death from cholera in the
mid-19th century.
Wikipedia 30th April 2020

Today: Starcross is locked down to keep Covid-19 at bay – something that echoes reaction to the Cholera pandemic of 1849. Today we are de-facto self-imprisoned to keep the invisible enemy at arms, or two arm’s length. Covid-19 is a great fear we all share, echoed among the people of Starcross’s great fear some 170 years ago.

Then: 1849 In 1849 cholera was another existential threat to Starcross and all other British villages and towns. Cholera was the plague of early Victorian England, bringing fear and death wherever it struck. As an often fatal disease it had already ravaged Exeter. And, in 1849 a new cholera epidemic, the third in 25 years, was sweeping across Britain.

A July 1849 letter linked the cholera threat to Starcross to Brunel’s recently built railway embankment. The letter illuminates the universal fear of cholera as it paints a vivid picture of sewage and rubbish disposal in Starcross and the cholera danger they posed. It also throws light on life in Starcross, particularly the excremental and putrid state of its harbour and shoreline:

At this time of danger, when a dreadful visitation [cholera] is fast spreading over the country, when we see towns and villages are being fast added to those that were affected with cholera, it is the duty of every person and all the public bodies to use all means of prevention. At Starcross great nuisance exists of the  most dangerous kind. The travelling population that stop at the station is immense; persons arriving from a healthy district, and stopping here, have to inhale an atmosphere most destructive to health, the accumulation of putridity at this place is beyond belief, acres of most offensive matter being allowed to remain on the shore! Is it wonder that the village and the inns are now avoided, and the poor suffering ? The causes are :

1st. The whole of the drainage of the village empties itself upon the shore without a ditch or sewer to convey it into the Channel. 

2nd. A hard ridge, or bank, from the quay, opposite the principal inn, to the channel for the convenience of boats landing passengers, &c, but which is now unnecessary, as there is now a pier built, upon which passengers could, with the aid of steps, land at low water. 

3rd. In building this pier the piles are driven so close together as to cause the accumulation of sea weed, above and below, without means of escape, and an

immense quantity is thus detained on the mud in a state of putrescence. 

All these interruptions to the ebb and flow of the tide is a great injury; there are also several enclosures made by the South Devon Railway Company with apertures to admit the sea weed and mud, which cannot afterwards escape. 

The 1849 cholera threat to Starcross failed to materialise, but a July 1849 poster gives details of what the disease involved, being universally thought of as  being caused by inhaling air infected through putrefaction like that at Starcross.

Jon Nichol