Year 10 GCSE Coursework Essay - The Black Country

The sweet makers were interesting at the time. They used all sorts of things to just get colour for the their sweets. For example, they used tarmac for the colour brown and for red they used beetles blood. They did not know or did not care that it was a serious danger to health until people (children mostly) started becoming ill from them.

The housing in the Black Country at those times ranged from back to back slums for lowly working class or 3rd class people to upper class posh houses which land owners, employers and just very rich people lived in.

These back-to-back houses or, slums I should say, had 12 rooms, 6 on the ground floor and 6 on the first floor. Each room normally consisted of 16 people (obviously very cramped). These houses were everywhere in major city such London, Manchester and Birmingham. It is like this because the slums are easy to build and cheap. Landowners and builders preferred profit than healthy living. There was only one privy to a back-to-back house, so imagine approximately 200 people living with just one toilet. That is why disease was big in the slums, cholera especially.

Most of the things in the Black Country I found realistic but apart from the mine. The walls of the mine when knock are hollow but I think the Museum did this due to health and safety regulations. Also the streets of the Black Country were too clean. In those times you would see human excretion on the floor in front but no one would care, obviously due to health and safety regulations again.

One of the sources I used in this essay was an extract from the Dudley Board of Health Report 1852. This source was very reliable, full of detail and easy to read. In the report it clearly states that the streets was very unsuitable to live but as housing was needed, so nobody cared. It says that, “streets were full of foul and disgusting things such as the remains of animals”. Diseases were spreading at an incredible rate.

The extract also reported about how working in places such as the mine and iron workshops affected people who worked their. Serious and fatal accident happened regularly because of hardly or no inspections of the workplaces. In the mine, the death toll rose from falling coal and stone. And in ironworks smelting accidents and sometimes explosions kill many. These smelting accidents are not always fatal but you can lose a limb from them.

The conclusion of this report talks about the sewage and drainage systems are limited and defective construction causes major problems. Also the conclusion talks about the supply of water, about its improperness. The company that supplies the water withheld it from the poorer inhabitants. In other words, only the rich and wealthy can have a good and reliable source of water.

And lastly, the sanitary condition of the inhabitants is proved by the medical and other evidence to be exceedingly bad, and that of the official registers, for many years past, discloses rates of mortality so high as scarcely to be paralleled by the unhealthiest places in England and Wales.

I reckon that only a medical group or a university in the area was the only ones that could actually read. And the author may have wanted to prove to be eager and reliable to his fellow colleagues.

Another source I used in this essay was an extract from 1891 Dudley Census. This extract tells me about the people once lived in and around the Black Country. It tells me their names, age, where they live (4 Brewery Street for example), position in the family if they had one, place of birth and occupation.

I used the information from this to tell you about how people were living in urban areas such as Dudley. Not surprising the rich families’ children had scholar for occupation. Half the people listed in the census lives in Brewery Street. This tells me that Brewery Street is major suburban estate in the Black Country.

It also tells me that only one family occupies each house. This shows that Brewery Street is a wealthy street not some back alley slums. The heads of the families either have their own business or are too old to work. There is something in the census that none of the people today cannot ever relate to, little or none of the wives of the families do not work.

The drawback of the census is that it can be inaccurate. No one knows exactly if there was a Mr and Mrs Morgan or if Fredrick Wilton was a labourer. I reckon it is untrustworthy but not entirely though. You can get some very useful information of a typical family in the Black Country in the 1891.

I believe it is in between the Board of Health report and the Census. Not that the trip to the Black Country Museum was not helpful but I think that the museum could have been the size and likeliness as describe by the extracts form the Board of Health report and the Census.

I have decided that the sources and the trip to the museum as a combination is the best method of learning about the urban living condition of late 19th century in the Black Country. The Board of Health report tells you about the living conditions of the housing and the streets, the census tells you about the status of families living in different areas of the industrial town of Dudley. And the museum give you the opportunity to see for yourself what life was like in those times. So as my summary of this essay I think that all the sources available to me and the trip to the Black Country Museum gives you a very good and proper idea of what was Dudley and Black Country like in the late 19th Century.