Cottage Living . . . Part 1

What was probably the reality of country living for many people in Victorian times. Cottage near Whitney-on-Wye.

The following poem "Old Cottages" was written by a neighbour of Helen Allingham (Myles Birket Foster). After firstly describing the romantic vision of picturesque cottages, he follows on with this:

All these I know, - know too, the plagues that prey
On those who dwell in these bepainted bowers:
The foul miasma of their crowded rooms,
The fever that each autumn deals its dooms
From the rank ditch that stagnates by the door;
And then I wish the picturesqueness less,
And welcome the utilitarian hand
That from such foulness plucks its masquing dress,
And bids the well-aired, well-drained cottage stand,
All bare of weather-stain, right angle true, -
By sketchers shunned, but shunned by fevers too."

If you look at the paintings by Helen Allingham, of beautiful thatched cottages with roses round the door, you could be led to believe that their occupants had an interior which looked as if it came from Country Living. Sadly this was far from the case, as it outlined in the lines above. It is ever brought to mind for me when I look at the tiny outline of a ruined cottage which might have house a family of anything up to 10 children and parents, and sometimes the aged grandparents too. At bedtime they must have been stacked like sardines. When my mum and her 4 brothers and sisters came to stay with their cousins in Aberbargoed, they would be toe to nose in the bed - four heads one end and 4 the other with the cousins!


You have only to look at the headstones in any country churchyard - take Haworth, where the Brontes lived, as an example, to see that the average life expectancy was only 25 years, because there were SO many childhood and infant deaths from disease. At Haworth, the water supply for the village ran through the churchyard and it was said that the lower down the hill you were, the less chance of reaching adulthood a child would have. Headstones saying "and 10 children lost in infancy" or individual child deaths with the little one just a toddler of 1 to 4 years old. In Devon, in the village of Littlehempston, my g. grandmother lost her three children to disease in just 6 days - two of them on the same day. She asked to be buried with them on her demise. It was eight years before my grandfather was born and I always wondered whether she turned from her husband's advances because she couldn't bear the thought of losing another child. Diptheria, Scarlet Fever, Measles, Whooping Cough, TB, even Cholera and Typhus, could wipe out a whole family.

When you think of these cottages, do you see flagstone floors? The reality was that they were mainly bare earth, easily swept out, but in winter, rain seeping under the doorway (for the floors were often lower than the threshold and outer level) would soon turn the floor to tacky mud near the doorway. We have dreadful draughts in this house, from ill-fitting doors and windows, but think how it must have been in some cottages, with window frames stuffed with rags to keep the piercing wind out, and holes in the rotting thatch letting in the rain.

Sanitary arrangements were less than satisfactory, and an outside privy might well be shared by two or three large families. The contents were collected by the night soil men. I remember staying with the aunt and uncle of my ex-husband back in the 1970s, and they still had no bathroom or running hot water in the house, and the cold water had to be pumped into the sink with an ancient cast iron contraption. The toilet was in a tin shed up the garden, and you shared it with various gardening tools and a rat trap!

In the 1890s, a report on housing in certain villages in Dorset, Essex, Kent, Somerset, Surrey, Wiltshire and Worcestershire recorded that the average 2 storied cottage would have, downstairs, a living room 12 foot square by 6 foot high, and a small back scullery or pantry. Upstairs would have one decent sized bedroom and a smaller one into which the staircase often led - in fact, the staircase was quite often just a ladder. (Think Stack Square here, and the Coal House families, where the arrangement was much the same.) The upper floorboards rarely benefitted from a ceiling beneath them, so any sweeping (or washing) of the upper room would result in dust or water dropping down into the room below. Windows were sometimes of a design which would not open, and this must have led to unbearable stuffiness on a hot summer night. The thatch was often home to small birds, and insects, and I can still recall my dad telling me about one lad in Bovey Tracey who lived in a thatched cottage with a Hornets' nest in the thatch above his bedroom window. My dad was naturally somewhat wary of going to play at his place!


In some village communities, there was a village baker who would allow villagers to bring bread or the occasional pie or cake to be baked in the residual heat of his oven, once the loaves had been removed. Here in Wales in pre-range times, the primary cooking was done over an open fire using a cast iron cauldron. We have a roomy one downstairs, and there was a broken one in the brambles at the ruins of a cottage near Colomendy recently - someone had taken a hammer to it and smashed it in half. There was a particular way of loading the cauldron, with vegetables and perhaps a steamed pudding being hung in nets above the stew - which was more root vegetables with a scrap of meat and fat in for flavour and with dumplings floating on the top to fill up the corners. Luckier families would have a bread-oven for baking in, but these were generally confined to the farmhouses.

I shall try and get part 2 written for tomorrow . . .