The monthly Coffee Morning of Sarum U3A was held in our usual venue of St Francis Church Hall on Wednesday 18 July.  Members were asked to remember to collect any Newsletters together with their slips about activity groups.   Information was given out on the activities of groups including:- the Health Care Research Group, Outings, Bemerton Local History group meeting, a day trip to France and the Sunday Lunch group.

The speaker on this day was Ruth Newman, author of “Salisbury Past” and a Blue Badge Guide who was to tell the coffee morning about the results of the research she has been doing into the Cholera outbreaks in the middle of the C19 in Salisbury.  We were amazed to hear that Salisbury was a Cholera hotspot, the worst affected town of its size in the country. 

The population of Salisbury was growing fast, more densely populated than most of the big industrial cities and had open water channels flowing through many of the streets.  In the early C19 these channels were nothing more than open sewers and although the poor health record in Salisbury had been noticed over a long period, no connection had been made between the outbreaks of Cholera and the polluted water in the channels. 

Ruth showed copies of engravings of the uses which local people put the water channels to and also of the type of accommodation many of the inhabitants lived in.  The high death rate in the 1849 outbreak provoked an enquiry by Dr Middleton and Thomas Rammell and, as a result, in 1854 the filling in of the water channels began and a new waterworks was built. 

By 1860 houses had a clean piped water supply and the last water channel, in New Canal, was filled in in 1875.  By the end of the C19 Salisbury was one of the healthiest places in England.  The spin-off of the draining of the channels was the amazing number of artefacts, known as the “Drainage Collection” and now held in the Museum, which were discovered.

 This was an impressively research topic which generated a talk with contemporary pictures and statistics which made it all feel very real.  It left the audience relieved that they lived in 2007 rather than 1849 and in an era when medical knowledge had made such progress.

The next meeting is on Wednesday 15 August at our usual venue when the speakers will be Roger and Sandra Downton  on “In the wake of the Cockle Shell Heroes”.