Hero doc’s view of Victorian Oldham

TV audiences saw how medical officer James Niven fought the spread of a 20th century flu pandemic in Manchester in “Forgotten Fallen” on BBC Four last week. But Niven first came to prominence as Oldham’s Medical Officer of health (MOH), a post he held for eight years.

And his final report to the borough’s Sanitary Committee reveals the many more diseases he had to contend with in Oldham’s crowded terraces and shops. Janice Barker reports on the health of Victorian Oldham.

Viewers who saw Bill Paterson as James Niven, Manchester’s Medical Officer of Health (MOH), fighting the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918, would have been impressed by Niven’s tenacity . . . and saddened by his apparent suicide.

Niven had retired three years earlier from his post with Manchester City Council, after 22 years. His body was found in the sea off the Isle of Man.

His clothes were found and a letter in his coat pocket said in the event of his death he wished to be buried at sea.

It was a tragic end to a life dedicated to preventing death, particularly in the working classes of Oldham and Manchester.

Niven rose to prominence during his years in Oldham, appointed MOH by the Sanitary Committee in 1886.

And his valedictory report to the committee when he left eight years later sums up what he had to deal with in a rapidly expanding borough, where mills were cheek-by-jowl with homes, drainage and rubbish collection rudimentary and fatal disease rife.

Niven, from Peterhead in Scotland, was educated at Aberdeen and Cambridge universities until 1877.

Records at Oldham Local Studies and Archives show that by 1881, he was an assistant medical officer at Deptford Smallpox Hospital, 29-years-old and unmarried. At some later point he moved to Manchester.

After his appointment in Oldham, he lodged with a widow, Ann McCalla, at 76 Wallshaw Street. His salary was £400 a year and he began work in January, 1886.

Oldham at that time was a boom town. Its population had more than doubled to 111,343, between 1851 and 1881. It rose by another 20,000 over the next 10 years.

But Oldham also had a high death rate — children under-five made up 50 per cent of them.

Niven said many homes were damp due to Oldham’s clay soil. He called for a damp-proof layer of concrete foundations, a damp-proof course in the walls, and an air space in the walls with ventilated bricks — improvements now taken for granted. He blames ash pits for the spread of disease and notes the “offensive condition” of the borough’s tips.

He had successfully called for the building of incinerators — or “destructors” at Rhodes Bank, which burned off “ashes, fish offal and market refuse.”

Niven also demanded that sewage should not be channelled into mill lodges and noticed how “effluvia from drains” caused a nuisance in Clegg Street in the town centre “particularly on Saturdays.”

In 1886, he noted how it was “impossible to prevent the contamination of the sale of milk.” He told dairies to cover it with muslin, and in 1888 he sent a card to all sellers, “which should be put up in a conspicuous position advising that milk must always be boiled before use.”

Two major fatal diseases concerned him — summer diarrhoea, probably food poisoning, and consumption or tuberculosis.

He blames summer diarrhoea on milk and contaminated foods and also fought to have TB made a notifiable disease which did not happen for many more years.

A lot of his time was spent at Westhulme Hospital, which had 100 beds but was overwhelmed twice during his Oldham employment, by scarlet fever in 1887 and smallpox in 1893.

Acute smallpox cases were taken to Quickmere and Chadderton fever hospitals, and he recommended that patients’ clothes were disinfected by steam.

He called for a specialist smallpox hospital to be built, which came later at Strinesdale.

Just as he arrived, Niven had to deal with an outbreak of typhus fever, which he suppressed by isolation at Westhulme. Measles are making a return today, but Niven had to contend with major outbreaks every two years which could be fatal to children.

His report shows that in 1893 there were 3,909 house-to-house inspections, and 3,052 rooms and 1,005 houses were disinfected by his department.

Communal ash-pit privies, shared by whole blocks of houses, appalled Niven. He encouraged the installation of the tippler toilet, flushed by waste water from kitchens and sinks.