More on Public Houses, Insane Asylums & Cholera

Another Diary as part of mapping Nottingham’s Creative Quarter.

Continuing the joyful themes of my last Diary, which contemplated the Duke of Devonshire (Public House), the General Lunatic Asylum (Dakeyne Street and now closed, the inmates having transferred in Victorian times to Nottingham Borough Lunatic Asylum) and, finally, the 1832 Cholera outbreak that lead to both St. Mary’s Rest Garden and the explosion of humanity as it flooded out of Nottingham Town and (initially) into St. Ann’s.

Above is The Vine Public House, and the first in recent times that we have met that is both historic and still trading.

Above is the Information Board fastened to the pub. The next picture is an outhouse at the rear of the pub, and possibly where the Smithy was located.

In the previous diary we discovered via the Southwell Church History project that by 1861 the large open-field immediately outside of Nottingham City’s walls, known as Clay Field, had been enclosed & laid out with a street-plan. A new Church Parish of St. Lukes was established with the parish-church foundation-stone laid on the corner of Carlton Road and St. Lukes Street in the same year. The Vine is positioned at the other end of St. Lukes Street where it meets Handel Street and Liverpool Street. It is likely, therefore, that the building was built much earlier than the 1876 date given by Home Breweries for it’s establishment as a pub.

The Mentally Ill and Tea & Alcohol

Lunatics were treated pretty badly in the UK before the 1808 County Asylum Act, largely being subject to mechanical restraint within the Workhouse system. That Act allowed Counties to levy a rate to fund the building of County Asylums such as the 1812 Dakeyne Street General Lunatic Asylum. However, many Counties ignored the law.

The 1845 Lunacy Act fixed deficiencies in the earlier Act that allowed Counties to ignore the law. Counties were now legally obliged to provide Asylum for their Lunatics. 20 County Asylums were built between 1808 & 1845, whilst more than 60 Asylums were built between 1845 & 1890 (when yet another new Lunacy Act was passed, causing a further 40 Asylums to be built). The Nottingham Borough Lunatic Asylum was built in 1880.

Nottingham Borough Lunatic Asylum was closed as an Asylum and as Duncan Macmillan House in the latter part of the last millennium became the HQ for an NHS Trust that looked after Psychiatric institutions throughout Nottinghamshire & surrounding counties (I provided Network support there in the early part of this Millennium). The wards were closed & all hospital documents were transferred to other institutions. Some friends of mine got access to these docs before final transfer, and one aspect within them got reported to me:–

• Female patients each got 1 pint Tea each day
• Male patients each got 1 quart Ale each day

Why?!

Finally I was able to make sense of this information after considering the story of John Snow & the 1854 Cholera Outbreak which featured a Water Pump handle. John Snow was a physician and widely considered to be the world’s first epidemiologist. Before John Snow, the Victorians broadly understood contagious diseases such as Cholera to be spread by foul air (a polite way of saying “the smell of sewage”). Snow conclusively proved that it was spread by water. In the course of that search he discovered that folks that worked in Breweries, or drank ale or beer in preference to water, also did not catch the disease.

Adding it all up, it is clear that these curious stipulations for Nottingham’s Lunatics was so that any water-borne contamination would be rendered inoperative and, considering the ravages that every town in the kingdom was suffering, it is clear that whoever made these stipulations had advanced medical training. It is also curious to consider that the English predilection for tea-drinking was a foundation for good health.

Update 21 June 2022

Mapillary has changed it’s download URLs & therefore all links within my diaries that use photos that I’ve stored with Mapillary are broken. I’m slowly going through to update them. The new URLs are terrifyingly long, but show OK on my screen (and I also hope on yours).