Digging up the past: Archaeologists reveal grim secrets of Angel Meadow, Manchester's filthiest slum

Dean Kirby

MEN reporter Dean Kirby (right) with his father John (centre), and Chris Wild from Oxford Archaeology North visit the site of Dean's great-great-grandfathers house at 112 Charter Street behind the new Co-op building


Archaeologists digging up the remains of Manchester’s grimmest Victorian slum near the new Co-op building have helped Dean Kirby make a surprising discovery – and bring to light a long-forgotten family tragedy ...

IT might just be a hole in the ground to any Tom, Dick or Harry passing in the street above. But this was the not-so-sweet home of my long-lost Victorian forefather, William Kirby.

He was a farm labourer who fled County Mayo in the west of Ireland following the potato famine and became a fishmonger in ‘Angel Meadow’ – Manchester’s filthiest and most violent slum.

At the height of the Industrial Revolution, this small area on a slope off Miller Street in the city centre had more than 20,000 inhabitants and was described as ‘hell on earth’ by the social reformer Friedrich Engels because of the shocking living conditions.

Now archaeologists digging at the site of the Co-operative’s new headquarters on Dantzic Street have made an astonishing find – William’s house and fish shop.

Their discovery comes two years after they also unearthed what could be the home of another ancestor of mine – a horse-dealer called Thomas McDonald – only 10 doors away.

William was my great-great-great-grandfather and he lived in his cramped shop at 112 Charter Street, the old name for Dantzic Street, with his wife Ellen and five children back in 1877.

Old maps and rent records have helped me to identify William’s two-storey home as one of the four buildings unearthed by the team from Oxford Archaeology North as they search for clues about life in the slum.

They were damp and overcrowded back-to-back houses with just two rooms measuring 10ft square, and with slate roofs and dank cellars.

William paid an extortionate weekly rent of four shillings and nine pence, but it was a step up the property ladder for him – just six years earlier he had been living in a cellar.

Site director Chris Wild from Oxford Archaeology North said: "These were among Manchester’s poorest housing conditions. A whole family lived here. They had a fireplace. Often they didn’t even have furniture. They were just living on straw on the floor.

"It was such a hideous, wet, horrible place to live, but it was these people who powered the Industrial Revolution in Manchester."
Clambering down into the hole in the ground with my dad, John, we were able to see the still-sooty bricks of William’s fireplace and peer into the dark entrance to the cellar where he possibly stored his fish.

The archaeologists have unearthed metal hinges, fragments of wooden door frames, broken bottles and, amazingly, a door key.

They have also found the site of the privy that William may have shared with 100 other people.

We can see that the walls between the houses were separated by the width of only half a brick. The cellars were entered via a dark passageway that was below street level.

It is astonishing to think that William would have warmed his hands on this very fireplace and that it might have given him some comfort from the world outside.

In these dark streets and alleyways lurked gangs of ‘scuttlers’ and the area was awash with vice according to a contemporary vicar who said only a quarter of houses on Charter Street were free from prostitution.

A reporter from the Manchester Guardian, who trod this very street in 1870, wrote about leaky roofs and doors smashed violently from their hinges – no longer offering protection from the rain or roaming thugs.

He warned his genteel readership: "It is all free fighting here. Even some of the windows do not open, so it is useless to cry for help. Dampness and misery, violence and wrong have left their handwriting in perfectly legible characters on the walls."

Thankfully, William fails to appear in any of the court or prison records of the time. Trust was the key to success for a Victorian fishmonger as there was a widely-held suspicion that fish and meat were tainted.

But death and disease lurked in every nook and cranny of the slum and, despite having a plentiful supply of protein from fish suppers, only three of William’s seven children in total survived to adulthood.

In fact, evidence from a death certificate shows that William and Ellen’s fifth child, also called William, died in this very house on February, 23, 1877 – 135 years ago. He was just two weeks old and his death was caused by convulsions, possibly brought on by an outbreak of fever.

By coincidence, the archaeology dig began on the anniversary of his birth and lasted only slightly longer than his short life.

But the bricks and mortar that will soon be hidden from the sunlight again tell nothing of the sadness that would have pervaded the house all those years ago.

William, who could not write, signed his mark on the death certificate in a shaky hand. His wife was to die from tuberculosis in Angel Meadow a decade later in 1887, while William died of chronic bronchitis and exhaustion at Crumpsall workhouse in 1902. He had survived famine, emigration, poverty, a tuberculosis outbreak and the horrors of the slum. I owe my existence to him.

William’s only surviving son, Michael, my great-great-grandfather, kept up the fish business and the family had a stall on the city’s Smithfield Market until the 1940s.

I left the dig with a brick from William’s fireplace – still covered in soot from the fire that kept him warm on a similarly wintry day.

If history teaches you anything, it’s that you should always keep the home fires burning.


Chris Wild explains more about the dig in the video below ...
http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/1487068_digging-up-the-past-archaeologists-reveal-grim-secrets-of-angel-meadow-manchesters-filthiest-slum