‘Bye-Laws for the Regulation of Slaughter Houses’ Borough of Derby to which are prefixed The Provisions of the town improvement clauses act, 1847, 1859 (print).
In 1847, after constant debates about how the production and distribution of diseased cattle were impacting social and national society, the Towns Improvement clauses act of 1847 was implemented into derby’s society. This legislative act served to give Britain’s local governments the authority to make sanitary improvements and instil bye-laws to license, register and inspect slaughterhouses.[1] In consideration this act also worked as a report that went into legitimising other acts of different purpose, presenting the complicated nature of legislation within slaughterhouses.
Untangling the Relationship between the Slums and Slaughterhouses
‘The energy of the whole population is withered to the roots. Their arms are weak, their bodies wasted, and their sensations embittered by privation and suffering’. (Farr, 1819) [2]
Samuel Laing estimated around a third of Britain’s workers were ‘hovering on the verge of absolute starvation’.[3] This was because the urban class were simply making less than enough to sustain a living[4] and the state’s control of food prices[5] removed them from having the ‘regular’ options society usually had.
Due to this, residents of the slums were reliant on shops, pubs, cookhouses and street vendors for their food[6], presenting their vulnerability to catching diseases and dispersing these further.[7] Consequently, through the state’s provision and conditions for the working class, we can see the important but contradictory concern within the quality of urban food.[8] As the need for legislation on meat production by the state and local governments was meant for the welfare of societal efficiency yet these acts carried absent actions to actually help those in the slums and raised if they were even classed as apart of the national structure itself. Class emphasised the idea of fault and which narrative they were to adopt, was the urban poor either acting out of dire circumstances or having malicious and obnoxious intentions? [9]
Illustrated London News , 26 (748), 16 Jun. 1855, 600. Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland. In MacLachlan, I., ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, Urban History 34.2 (2007), p. 234.
The Social and Political ‘Need’ for legislation: The State and Upper Society vs the Urban Class
“The direct consequence of economic liberalism …. it has sprung up under a careless and loose state of things, and it is the duty of the State to interpose its authority for the prevention of adulteration’.[10]
Political
There were many political theories about the state enabling these corrupt practices through the liberal ‘Laissez Faire’ spirit in the economy.[11] As John bright argued by allowing free trade there was a normalisation within adulteration and diseased cattle as they became ‘a part of trade’ [12]. Thus, the source may not only reflect pressure for legislation but further how not all local governments shared the same political attitudes and the local leaders who had the power to control may have either failed or achieved their goal by backing the pragmatics with actions.
“This damaged the ‘moral and intellectual’ aspects of a person as well as the physical, thus ‘vitally affecting the well-being and prosperity of a nation.”[13]
Social
British slaughterhouse reformers campaigned to abolish private urban slaughterhouses and establish public abattoirs.[14] These calls for reform came from humanitarians, public health advocates and residents disturbed by the nuisance from livestock and slaughter activities.[15] Evidently, this class difference and lack of need or circumstance made butchers negligent.[16] Emphasising the bye-laws most probably was a desire from those who could see slaughterhouses as damaging to the economy as they were involved within the economy, to begin with.
The Requirements of the bye-laws within this act also reflected these common societal stereotypes between the urban class and the middle and upper classes with one seen as ‘burdening’ resources, progress and food and the other criticising slaughterhouses but based on smells and aesthetics adapted to their living requirement. Social and politics present the segregation in society and how efficiency is always questioned alongside laying the constitution down but the urban poor had a duty to be helped Therefore this page reflects a disparity between the downfall of society and also the need for efficiency as a collective.
Private Slaughterhouses vs The Public Abattoir
“The sale of live cattle at the centre of the metropolis was intolerable had become ‘a nuisance at once extremely dangerous’.[17]
In an age before refrigeration, many relied on local butchers to store meat on the hoof at their private slaughterhouses.[18] Effectively the slaughterhouse functioned as a dual butcher craftsman’s workshop and a live meat warehouse.[19] Yet it was by the sixteenth century, cattle and meat markets were being infiltrated by non-freemen (butchers who had not formally apprenticed).[20] Complicating the matter of why slaughterhouses have had attitudes adopted onto businesses that legislatively restrict them when they were once the providers of the economy.
The distinction between private slaughterhouses and public abattoirs was:
- Private slaughterhouses were typically small facilities that were owned and operated by independent butchers and located behind or beneath a retail meat shop. [21]
- Public abattoirs were large municipally owned facilities that included much more space and facility to kill and like old private slaughterhouses refrigerated storage for fresh meat. [22] The abattoir was a technology of social vitality, a machine for hygienic extermination, ensuring that only wholesome, tasty meat reached the public whilst also eradicating the ‘moral taint’ of the slaughterhouse by entirely cocooning death.[23] The abattoir was public in a very specific sense: it was permanently open to inspection by public authorities, while the public itself could simply forget about it. [24]
Interior of Private Slaughterhouse, early twentieth century. From C. Cash, Our Slaughter-House System: A Plea for Reform, 1907. Reproduced by permission of the British Library. In Otter, C., ‘ Civilizing Slaughter: The Development of the British Public Abattoir, 1850 -1910’, Food & History 3.2 (2005), p. 49.
Wallis, Henry, Abattoir at Montmartre, Prints and Drawings on paper, 1828, The British Museum, London. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1936-0421-22
Therefore, the constant battle of trying to replace private slaughterhouses with abattoirs[25], reflected how social meanings were key to the continuity of a business as all butchers were not killing meat unhealthily[26] yet these past practices which carried on categorised all private slaughterhouses as needing a restrictive constitution. Further, though the idea of the abattoir sounded better in this society the challenge of regulating meat production where its success depended on the locality again made abattoirs a risk of becoming private slaughterhouses by social definition in the longer term.[27]
Survival of the Slaughterhouses: How the state fell to compromising enclosure
Ultimately even after this long battle between the law and the practicality of butchers, the abolition of private slaughterhouses in 1927 counted no fewer than 16,000 small private slaughterhouses dispersed throughout England and Wales in 1933.[28] Showing this persistence of independent butchers and their desire to maintain control over the slaughter business they were in.[29] Without full sanitary legislation and local nuisance inspectors properly enforcing the law, butchers and the other offensive trades had no incentive to pursue anything other than self-interest.[30] This connects to the common idea of the Invisible Hand that when dozens or even thousands act in their own self-interest, goods and services are created that benefit consumers and producers.[31] Therefore, this potential survival of slaughterhouses in some localities and not others depended on the enforcement but also the understanding and wider known knowledge as many butchers who knew butchers in other towns discussed and met with confusing boundaries. By spreading this legislation in some areas of the nation such as those towns like London that did not allow this act yet it fragments the national message of unfairness.
Illustrated London News, 26 (748), 16 Jun. 1855, 601. Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, In Maclachlan, I., ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, Urban History 34.2 (2007), p. 234.
Conclusion
In sum, this page portrays multiple avenues of analysing the eighteenth-century associations of meat regulations within slaughterhouses, in particular with the social attitudes of connecting the slums with the negativity slaughterhouses received together. Overall this listing of legislations allows us to read the practicality of local governments having the power to implement regulations in their own areas, the unpracticality of whether this was just writing or action and the contradiction between local governments doing this for the ‘one goal’ of the nation whilst private slaughterhouses were treated differently all over the nation.
[1] MacLachlan, I., ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, Urban History 34.2 (2007), p. 241.
[2] Eyler, J.M., Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and Methods of William Farr ((Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 124.
[3] Burnett, J., Plenty and Want: A Social History of Food in England from 1815 to the Present Day (London: Scolar Press, 1979), p. 178
[4] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 240.
[5] Otter. C., ‘The vital city: public analysis, dairies and slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Britain’, Cultural Geographies 13.4 ( 2006), p.518.
[6] Otter, ‘The vital city: public analysis, dairies and slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Britain’, p.520.
[7] Otter, ‘The vital city: public analysis, dairies and slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Britain’, p.520.
[8] Law, M., ‘The Origins of State Pure Food Regulation’, The Journal of Economic History 63.4 (2003), p. 1123.
[9] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 239.
[10] Hassall, A. H., Food: its adulteration , and the methods for its detection (London, Longmans, Green, 1876), p. 849.
[11] Otter, ‘The vital city: public analysis, dairies and slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Britain’, p.519.
[12] Otter, ‘The vital city: public analysis, dairies and slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Britain’, p.520.
[13] Howard, R., An inquiry into the morbid effects of the deficiency of food, chiefly with reference to their occurrence among the destitute poor (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co and Taylor & Walton), p. 2.
[14] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 277.
[15] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 229.
[16] Harrison, B., ‘Animals and the State in Nineteenth-Century England’ The English Historical Review 88.349 (1973), 967.
[17] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 231.
[18] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 239.
[19] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 243.
[20] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 236.
[21] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 227.
[22] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 227
[23] Otter, ‘The vital city: public analysis, dairies and slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Britain’, p.528.
[24] Otter, ‘The vital city: public analysis, dairies and slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Britain’, p.528.
[25] Otter, C., ‘ Civilizing Slaughter: The Development of the British Public Abattoir, 1850 -1910’, Food & History 3.2 (2005), p. 47.
[26] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 243.
[27] Otter, ‘ Civilizing Slaughter: The Development of the British Public Abattoir, 1850 -1910’, p. 47
[28] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 243.
[29] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 230.
[30] MacLachlan, ‘A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London’, p. 230.
[31] Rothschild, E., ‘Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand’, The American Economic Review 84.2 (1994), p. 321.
Derby's Dark Corners 