Poo in nineteenth century York

 For Proust it was a madeleine, but for me it was nineteenth century scoria bricks.

I mentioned how sometimes in the walls of back lanes you could still sometimes see hatches, like oversize cat doors, that were associated with pail closets in the nineteenth century..

Well, I must have seen them somewhere else in the north of England, because apparently York never implemented a collection system for poo buckets. Which, given  that Ouse has propensity to flood in winter, and the very bad cholera outbreak in the 1830s, is surprising.

But perhaps that's not so surprising. When I first moved to York in the mid 1980's the railway works was still a major employer, as were Rowntree's and Terry's confectionery businesses, and the glass works - that made glass jars for the confectionery business had only just closed, so you would have expected that York had developed as an industrial centre as did other towns in Yorkshire.

However, that really wasn't the case. despite the arrival of the railway in the 1840s, York was, for a good part of the nineteenth century solely an ecclesiastical and administrative centre.

Industry, and the accompanying population growth, only really began in the 1880's, and so, while the middle classes of mid-Victorian York would have had access to flushing toilets that either dumped their contents in the river or in a local cesspit, the poor would have made do with a bucket and a midden at the end of the street that was probably periodically removed for sale as manure, or alternatively washed down the river when it flooded.

(This is why fieldwalking in England, especially with the aid of a metal detector, often turns up nineteenth century small change. Poor they may have been but not poor enough to search the poo bucket for a dropped farthing.)

However, the slow growth of the city in the Victorian era probably means that quite a few houses in York, especially those dating from after the 1880s when the city began to grow and sewerage provision improved, probably only ever had a flush toilet, even if it was one in the back yard. 

Certainly, our house in Darnborough Street, which dated from early Edwardian period had a brick built coal shed and disused outside flushing toilet that probably dated from when the house was built.

Even though it must have been excruciatingly cold in the depths of a bone chillingly cold foggy York winter, it would have represented a major improvement over pooing in a bucket and periodically emptying the contents in a midden somewhere ...

Scoria bricks

 In the early 1990s I lived on Lower Darnborough Street in York, in England.

The house was at the lower end of the street, and even though it never flooded due the river overtopping the staithes while we lived there, we had a few close calls when the Ouse had risen substantially after snowmelt on the Moors.

When there was a risk of flooding I would always walk down before bedtime to the junction between River Street and Clementhorpe to see how high the river was getting.

A couple of times the junction was under water and I cut down the back lane between Colenso and River street to get down to Clementhorpe.

The back lane was a normal, quite unremarkable back lane of the sort that are found all over England between streets of terrace houses that allowed access from the street to people's back yards and were often used by night soil collectors in the days before sewage, and more recently by bin men collecting rubbish as well as providing access for the men delivering coal in the days when coal fires were the main source of heat in homes in England.

Sometimes you can see still hatches like oversize cat doors in the walls of people's back yards - the idea was that the night soil collectors would open the hatch, remove the poo bucket and (hopefully) replace it.

I can't remember noticing any poo bucket hatches but I do remember that the lane was paved with these incised pattern hexagonal ceramic bricks that  looked a bit like engineering bricks.

 

Back lane behind Colenso St - Clementshall Local History Group

At the time remember noticing them and thinking that they looked pretty unique, and I started noticing them poking out in a number of places round about in the kerbside gutters that hadn't been fully tarred over.

Given my insatiable curiosity about such things, you might have thought I would have researched them at the time, but this was just before the internet became a thing, and there was no google, no wikipedia, and no search engines - even altavista was a year or two in the future, so I pigeonholed the topic, meaning to come back to it, but never did.

York, is of course short of local sources of building stone - which is why most of the old city is built of local brick, and I just sort of assumed that it was a sensible Victorian response to a shortage of hard stone to turn into cobbles, and probably made in the local brickworks.

It turns out I was wrong on both counts - unlike engineering bricks which are made of clay and fired at a high temperature, the scoria bricks were made on Teeside of slag from blast furnaces that resulted in a hard, durable and waterproof brick.

Apparently they were also used as ballast on ships and exported to the Netherlands, Canada, the West Indies and other places.

I havn't been able to find any record of their use in Australia, but when Launceston was debating the introduction of tram system in the early 1900s,  one of the city engineers wrote to a number of similar sized towns in Britain for details of their tramway systems.

One of the cities that replied was Darlington, which commented on the use of scoria bricks to surface the tramway between the tracks.

Historic photographs of the Launceston tram system suggest that they used a fairly standard infill, so they obviously decided not to follow Darlington's lead.

Postcards, chess and encryption

 I've written from time to time about cryptography and postcards. and how in the nineteenth century especially, some people would try and obfuscate the content of what was essentially an open medium to conceal what was being said, perhaps to conceal an assignation or other private arrangement.

Sometimes they would write the message in Latin or Greek, or use a simple substitution cipher, or else use some agreed set of code words to convey meaning.

However there is a subset of postcards that at first sight look to be encrypted but aren't.

People would sometimes play chess against each other by writing their moves on postcards and mailing them to their playing partner - for example, think of a clergyman in an isolated parish who had no one to play with, might play chess by post with a former playing partner now living elsewhere.

After all postcards were cheap to send, and provided the postal service was reasonably efficient it would be possible manage a couple of moves a week. Usually these postcards contain a couple of lines of conventional greeting and a chess move in algebraic notation.

You used to be able to see examples of chess notation in use in the chess columns of the more heavyweight newspapers, but nowadays chess columns have mostly gone the way of all flesh.

However, people still play chess with remote partners, but usually today they use a dedicated chess server, although some people have played chess by email or text message using chess notation.

Besides postcards with a little string of algebraic notation there are other more complex specialist postcards, often with a chessboard grid, produced by chess clubs for people playing chess by post.

Searching on ebay and etsy for examples, most seem to originate from the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe - no surprises there, the communists always took chess seriously, and date from before 1989.

I'm going to make a wild surmise here, that people in Eastern Europe playing chess by correspondence during the post war socialist period (a) felt it was safer to belong to a recognised chess club and (b) use an 'official' chess postcard to avoid attracting the attention of the security apparatus - after all no one would have wanted a visit from the Ministry of Certain Things as a result of an innocent chess game ...

So are we headed for a digital dark age?

 Yes and no.

My little blogpost yesterday about the slow death of the postal service brought to mind some of the problems brought about by the demise of physical documents.

While we can still read a 150 year old postcard we may struggle to read a 10 year old Microsoft chat message. 

For official records this not a great problem.

At a governmental level there have been a range of initiatives to avoid the loss of access to contents due to obselesence of both hardware and software.

And having worked in both digital archiving and digital preservation I know it can be done. But I also know it's not necessarily cheap.

In digital preservation there are two and a half problems - old hardware used to store the data, old and undocumented data formats, and once you've retrieved it, how to stop it happening again.

Data can be stored on a variety of physical media. Physical media has its own problems with degradation especially if it has been stored in a less than optimal manner, but on the whole most media from the last twenty or thirty years can be read if you have access to the correct device to read it.

Of course, access to the correct media is the key - and not all media is the same - take the humble 3.5" disk - could be written in the common DOS style 1.44MB format, the less common early Macintosh variable speed 800k format, or some strange format used by early Apricot computers (Long gone now, but once the flagship of the UK domestic PC industry and widely adopted by government and large hospitals at the time).

And sometimes the media is just weird - such as the strange 3" disks used by Amstrad PCW machines that were wildly popular in the UK in the late eighties and early nineties.

And of course the format that the data is written in can be incomprehensible to modern software, although both AbiWord and LibreOffice are quite good at reading a range of legacy word processor formats.

If you belong to reasonably well funded body, such as a university or government sponsored archive service this basically resolves to a set of technical problems, which when solved, allows you to extract the contents of text documents into a useful format. 

Mail can be trickier, but actually the original Unix mbox format was simply a lot of concatenated message bodies, it's usually possible to snip the messages apart with a little programming.

What however does the amateur or family historian do?

They don't have the expertise, or even access to suitable hardware to read all the notes that Aunty Ethel put together on her old Amstrad, or even her old Mac Classic using Claris Works.

Unless she printed them out and put them in a binder, they're essentially lost, so while we might be able to read Great Uncle Jack's letters, we can't actually read Ethel's notes and information gleaned from talking to family members.

And that's a problem.

Ethel may no longer be with us. If Ethel had done a reasonable amount of work talking to people who actually knew Jack, and perhaps interviewing them semi formally, we might have a valuable resource, which can't be repeated as the people who knew Jack have also passed on.

While the image of the amateur family historian might be of some bumbly old person in a battered cardigan (and that can be uncomfortably close to the truth in some cases) a lot of them do good work and are educated people who had professional jobs and who turned to family history in retirement as a way of maintaining their skills.

So a digital dark age?

For official records, probably not, always of course barring a major catastrophe. For small scale amateur history I think we are as technological drift means the paper trail of letters comes to a halt sometime after 1990 when people started regularly having computers at home ...

The lingering death of the postal service ...

 If, in the future, we ever want a date to mark when the postal service began a terminal decline, today, the 15th of April 2024 would probably do as well as any other.

Today is the day that Australia Post finally admitted that letter volumes were unlikely to ever recover, and reduced street deliveries to three days a week.

To be fair, it’s been a long time coming.

Hardly anyone sends personal letters any more - and most bills are emailed. Postcards, both picture postcards and as a way of sending a simple note have more or less ceased to exist.

No more Aerogrammes or letter cards, and a future generation will not experience the anticipation of waiting for a letter from a lover overseas. All gone.

One could of course wallow in nostalgia, but basically the letter service is gone, and unlikely to ever come back. These days the only things I mail are official documents that for whatever reason cannot be scanned and emailed, or on a couple of occasions I've sent a letter to deliberately circumvent a useless virtual agent on a company’s website where they still published a street address but not an email address or simple plain online contact form with no useless ‘helpful’ AI built in.

But I’m ranting.

The demise of the letter service does however provide a serious problem for archival research. Scanned letters and letter books can be easily read, and people did tend to keep letters, either as keepsakes from family members or for official purposes as proof that something happened or was agreed.

1879 Postcard - still perfectly readable

Email messages, WhatsApp messages and the rest less so. We’ve seen the Covid-19 response enquiry in Scotland grind to an inconclusive halt over missing WhatsApp messages, and I know of one major insurance case where the tapes supposedly holding crucial archived email correspondence proved to be unreadable.

And while people have raised concerns, we’ve never really come to any conclusions. But one thing is certain, while today we can read Great Uncle Jack’s letters home from his time in the International Brigades during the Spanish civil war, we won’t be able to read any of today’s messages home.

Having dabbled in family history, I can see that’s a problem, it’s not just the loss of colour and background to flesh out an individual, often, as in the case of our hypothetical Great Uncle Jack, it might be the only real proof of where he was and what happened to him ...

The Athenaeum ...

 A couple of weeks ago I tooted that I was starting back with the National Trust documenting the contents of Lake View House in Chiltern

Well, that's still happening, but due to a totally unforeseen event, the start of the project has had to be delayed until May, by which time it'll be working in thermals and fingerless gloves if the house is anything like as cold as Dow's pharmacy over winter.

In the meantime I've got another gig at Stanley Athenaeum, which comes under the Mechanics Institute of Victoria, documenting stuff that hasn't been previously documented - for example I'm currently working on the records of an anti logging protest group from the early Nineteen nineties just before the internet became a thing - so we've got faxes instead of emails and voluminous printouts of meeting papers rather than piles of word documents.

It's not all papers though, the Athenaeum has a remarkable book collection dating back to the 1860s, including an 1861 edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species, and other more practical publications such as Victorian guides to chicken husbandry, and neatly showcasing both the Victorian desire for self improvement, but also the need for people to learn new skills in a strange land ...

Mechanics Institutes are themselves quite interesting. In Australia Mechanics Institutes were often a more middle class thing and as well as self improvement provided a forum for people to meet and discuss ideas, which is why some were described as Athenaeums, such as in Chiltern and Yackandandah, or as a School of the Arts as in Wahgunyah, to give some local examples.

In some places in time they became public libraries with the buildings repurposed - Stanley is relatively unique in that, while it did serve as a library for the community the collection was never broken up or absorbed into a larger collection.

AI and family history

 I've dabbled in family history.

I wouldn't ever style myself as a genealogist, but during the pandemic when you couldn't go anywhere or do anything as  both a distraction and as a way of keeping my research skills up to speed I dabbled.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one to do this, and like a lot of people I signed up to one of the online family history behemoths.

Now, the one I signed up to, MyHeritage, had a lot of quite useful link building tools to automate searches and build family trees, and this is probably a situation where AI might be helpful in flagging spurious leads and resolving inconsistencies.

I'd bailed from big online family history companies before AI really became a thing, so I've no direct experience of the tools currently available, but at the time I bailed they were touting ways to colorise old photographs and also to assemble images of family groups by combining various group photographs.

Hopefully the exif data on the resulting images would make it plain that it was a synthetic image, but one can see the potential for mischief - 'oh look, there's great aunt Vera with Trotsky' - and the like.

Especially confusing if indeed great aunt Vera might actually have worked in Trotsky's office - think of the rabbit holes that could lead to.

Then this morning I came across the following toot:

So people are actually generating artificial images and using them as profile pictures for uncle Cuthbert.

At one level it's harmless if there's no identifiable photograph of Cuthbert, on another one it's something that makes me uncomfortable.

Some people in my family tree were undoubtedly black and some were mixed race.  And while I havn't pieced together all the evidence to say one way or the other, I may have Maori cousins.

The use of these AI tools is dangerous as it would allow people to airbrush history.

One of the reasons I have mixed race cousins is that a distant relation of mine owned slaves in Jamaica.

Not a pleasant thing to admit to, but there's no denying history.

And for that reason, I think there needs to be an understanding that manipulated images and generated images need to be clearly watermarked as such - yes of course sticking images together for a Christmas card is fine as a bit of fun, but we've got to be clear that it's only a bit of computer generated fun ...