Surface Drains
We have no record of when the first primitive surface-water drains were installed in Poyntzpass. Gratings allowed the rain to drain from the road surface, and it eventually flowed into the canal.
However, many people in the village covered any gratings close to their house, typically with old sacking, because of the stench coming from them. This, of course, made things even worse, as it prevented rainwater from entering the drains and flushing them clean, so the stench and insanitary conditions persisted.
Between the late 1800s and 1910, the lack of proper drains and sewers in the village was one of the hottest topics of public complaint. As with so many issues related to public health during his tenure, demands for the authorities to do something were led by the doughty Dr W. R. McDermott, Poyntzpass’s long-time dispensary doctor.
The Effect Of Animal Fairs
As this extract from the Newry Telegraph shows, he campaigned on the issue from as early as 1889. It also typifies the response by the powers that be – no further action!
Before the opening of the livestock saleyard on Railway Street in 1961, animals were simply bought and sold in the main street on market day. The quantity of animal waste deposited on the street must have been immense. Washing the street after a fair was impractical – the only nearby source of water was the single hand-operated pump in the square; there was no piped public water supply. And if it rained on market days, huge quantities of animal slurry would be washed into the already inadequate street drains and finally discharged straight into the canal with no treatment, causing dreadful pollution.
Local Government Reformed – No Change!
Local government reform, and the transfer of the responsibility for local services from often-corrupt grand juries to elected county and district councils came as late as 1898. Most of Poyntzpass came under the wing of Newry No. 2 Rural District Council, while the smaller ‘Far Pass’ fell under Banbridge Rural District Council.
Various schemes were proposed for installing new sewers, carrying the waste to a treatment plant, and finally discharging only relatively clean, treated water into the canal were proposed, but time after time they came to nothing.
The ‘Great Poyntzpass Sewer Disputes’ are worth a long article by themselves! The saga is typified by an item in the Newry Reporter of 20th August 1907, which reports on a Council discussion on a break in the sewer “…opposite Mr McShane’s public house” and the fact that it was caused by the Council’s own traction engine. It concludes (as so often) with the telling words “No action was taken”.
Dr MacDermott Takes On … Everyone!
Dr MacDermott grew more and more angry about the laisez faire attitude of the councils and started to publicly protest in the late 1890s, complaining both to and about the Newry Board of Guardians, his own employers! As documented in the Newry Reporter in September 1898, he blamed some recent cases of typhoid on the Guardians, letting them have it with both barrels!
“Today I visited Francis Carson’s house, Carson being the complainant to me in respect of an open grating right opposite the door of his shop, which of course is kept open. I found a week ago that a man cleaned out the hole under the grating, took out a lot of ill smelling stuff, and has left it lying ever since on the street to be washed back by the rain. Carson has to keep the grating covered with a sack to keep the stench from coming into his house. There is now a child ill in the house. After the warning Mr Dorman, his assistant, and the road man have got, I consider that they must be judged guilty of culpable negligence in a very serious matter. I do not like using strong language, but apparently nothing but a charge of manslaughter will make them do their duty. Previous to the late Muzzling Order enforced by the police and judicial penalties, scarcely a week passed without children being brought to me torn with dogs, and the farmers were losing sheep and lambs to the value of hundreds of pounds…Until something of the same sort is done in respect of…public authorities responsible for dangerous nuisances, until they are summarily prosecuted by the police, I venture to say that there will be no effectual remedy for what I complain about.”
The doctor’s very public call to have Mr Dorman prosecuted seems to have had a positive effect; in June 1899, Dorman reported:
“I have made a careful inspection of the sanitary condition of Poyntzpass. I was unable to find any sewers[1] in the town. Some of the houses have drains connected to the nearest surface water pipes, in other cases the slops and other refuse matter from the houses is thrown out onto the backyards and sinks into the subsoil, and where there is no back accommodation this matter is thrown into the nearest street gully. As a consequence, the sanitary condition of part of the town is very bad and it is important that a system of sewers should be laid down at once, and a gulley fixed in each yard with connexion to the sewerage system.”
Nothing was done … and nothing continued to be done for almost another full decade
It is worth quoting in full Dr MacDermott’s angry letter to the Newry Reporter dated 8th August 1908, over nine years after Dorman’s report, under the headline “THE POYNTZPASS SEWERS AGAIN!” (Upper case emphasis is mine)
“Will you kindly allow me to explain my position as to the above stereotyped heading, a position which has been grossly misrepresented. As well as I can make out Poyntzpass, the village alone, has paid since the local government act came into force £800 in rates and, in addition, a sum of from £400 to £600 has to be credited to it as its proportion of the several grants out of Imperial revenue in aid of local expenditure. Now the amount expended on the village out of this sum of £1,200 to £1,400 pounds has been a mere trifle for poor-law purposes, properly chargeable against the village, and certainly not more than £60 to £80 for public works. The latter item may indeed be not more than £30, as the streets are county roads, which would have to be kept up under any circumstances. I have found by inquiry that, in general, the small Irish towns not under the Towns Improvements Acts are “salted” in the same way as Poyntzpass. I know very well that nowadays such flagrant injustice is to be remedied not by appeals to reason but by the methods of the passive resistors, cattle drivers, and the female suffragists. I defer, however, to the spirit of justice and reason so far as to appeal to it. If coarser means are necessary to remedy the abuse that is not my fault. The injustice of course leads to another. As the law stands, a private person who does not abate a nuisance when noticed by the local authority to do so is prosecuted and fined. I have acted as a prosecutor in such cases.
But the County and District Councils are the worst offenders in this respect, and, as far as I know, the law does not touch them. Some time ago a sewer here fell in. A butcher killed beasts in an entry near at hand, and several yards of stagnant sewage stained with blood was exposed for a week under our eyes and noses. The butcher was noticed to abate the nuisance, and immediately did so. The District Council was noticed at the same time of the nuisance for which it was responsible, but all that was done was to cover up the sewer in the state it was in, and so it has fallen in several times since. My object now is not with Poyntzpass in particular, but to get a financial arrangement whereby the small Irish towns shall be treated as the larger towns, and allocated by the County Councils a certain proportion of the excess rates they pay, the proceeds to be applied to their own proper purposes. As things are now, they are simply robbed by local bodies, on which they have no real representation. For my part I am willing to leave the Poyntzpass sewers to remain as they are until the plundering of the small towns is put a stop to. In the discharge of my duty, I have been exposed, in common with other medical officers, to vulgar abuse in the press and at the local bodies. We do not notice that much since the general public are intelligent enough to understand that men whose duties bring them in conflict with selfish interests are met with abuse in proportion, as they cannot be met with reason and courtesy.”
A public meeting was held in the village in 1908 to complain about the state of the village’s drains. It was addressed (of course!) by Dr McDermott, who claimed that the annual per capita death rate from infectious diseases in the village was twice that of London!
On 11th August 1908, the Belfast News-Letter published a letter, signed by many residents, demanding that Newry No. 2 RDC should act. Dr MacDermott described four recent cases of diphtheria, which he ascribed to the drainage problems.
On 1st December, William McKillop, MP for Armagh South, tabled a question in the Westminster Parliament.
“I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether ratepayers of Poyntzpass, County Armagh, have sent two petitions to the Local Government Board for Ireland praying that a sworn inquiry might be held by them into the defective sewerage of the village; and whether, seeing that both the local sanitary officer and the Local Government inspector have reported upon and condemned the system so far back as 1904, and that there has, in fact, been an outbreak of scarlatina in the district, he will take any steps to secure an inquiry into the matter with a view to a remedy being applied.”
Poor Mr Dorman Is Underpaid! (he says)
On 7th January 1909, the Newry Reporter published another letter of protest. Just three weeks later, on the 29th, and with immaculately poor timing, County Surveyor Dorman appeared in front of a committee to examine his request to have his salary of £800 a year plus £200 travelling expenses increased by £75!
On 10th April 1909 the Newry Reporter published a 1½ broadsheet-page report entitled “POYNTZPASS SEWERAGE SCHEME. ITS REMARKABLE HISTORY” detailing all the reports, enquiries, proposals, rejections, inaction etc. spanning the previous 10 years. The report preceded the opening of a sworn enquiry starting on 16th April in Poyntzpass courthouse into the alleged negligence of Newry No. 2 RDC over that period.
Newry No. 2 RDC had proposed a very comprehensive sewerage scheme; it was also very expensive and there was endless wrangling as to who should bear the cost – Poyntzpass electoral district or the RDC.
Dr MacDermott vociferously opposed this scheme, which may at first seem odd. However, he contended that the real problem was, and always had been, the dreadful surface water drainage in the village; if this was fixed, most problems would be solved.
Secondly, he believed that the proposed scheme would be a total waste of money until the village had a public piped water supply, and the great majority of houses in the village were connected to it. Otherwise, there would not be enough water to flush away the waste – every single drop of water each household used still had to be carried from the village pump!
There was also the issue of the expense of connecting each house, first to the piped fresh water supply and then to the sewer. In the event, a piped fresh water supply was still at least two decades away and even once it had been provided, householders were slow to connect to it.
In January 1912, Dr McDermott was once more in hot pursuit of Dorman, who, on the face of it, does seem to have been a singularly incompetent civil engineer:
“There were two places in Poyntzpass to which his [Dorman’s] attention had been directed – the discharge of road drainage opposite the school and the discharge of road drainage into William Griffith’s garden…Mr Dorman brought in a plan and specification…and how they came to be passed he did not know…instead of remedying the two nuisances complained about it created two more.
Mr Dorman ran a new drain up to the well of the public pump, and he might as well have emptied the street drainage into the well at once, as he made a big hole within a few feet of the well. Next Mr Dorman laid a double pipe all along the street and discharged that pipe into a pool at the canal bridge, in spite of warnings of the Harbour Trust to the County Council that it must not be discharged there…Thus there were now four nuisances to be remedied instead of two.
Mr Dorman now submitted a new specification, and his [Dr McDermott’s] object in appearing that day was to prevent the council passing that specification…There had already been £300 of the money of the ratepayers of the Rural District chucked away on it, and would likely be another £100 is they allowed Mr Dorman to carry on…He told the Local Government Board Inspector that he would recommend…to have the management of the place transferred from the Armagh County Council to the Armagh Lunatic Asylum…(Laughter)”
Even in 1916, things still rumbled on. In April, a Newry No 2 RDC meeting was told that the Clerk had written to Mr M Canavan, a Railway Street butcher, for not having a proper slaughterhouse, and for contaminating the sewers with animal blood. Canavan replied, stating that they had been misinformed, that no blood was allowed to enter the sewer, being either fed to pigs or mixed with straw and spread on the land.[2] He continued…
“Surely you know more about the drainage of Poyntzpass than to ask me to provide a new slaughter-house, with drains and sewerage complete, when you know a very well there is no water supply or means of flushing, and that the existing drains are lying stagnant and rotten, except when there is a very heavy fall of rain to wash them out. Hoping this explanation will be satisfactory.”
Canavan’s letter evoked laughter in the council, and no further action was taken. Clearly, they knew the long-running Poyntzpass sewerage saga all too well!
A partial system of sewers was installed in the early 1920s. In February 1923, the Frontier Sentinel reported:
“…the sewer…in Poyntzpass would be completed on…Tuesday. They had been able to get a water supply to flush the sewer which they had not been able to get before. A well, ten feet higher than the mouth of the sewer had been discovered on the road side, and it was proposed to construct a concrete tank and pipe the water round by the corner of the church to flush the sewer.”
Even after proper sewers had been installed, many houses were not connected for decades; it was simply too expensive. And many houses had not yet installed the piped water supply necessary for a flush toilet; that too was too expensive. Dr John Clarke[3], who grew up in Railway Street in the 1930s, and later emigrated to New Zealand, recalls:
“…the toilet arrangement was, to put it mildly, unsatisfactory. The toilet was a shed in the large garden behind the house…There was no water supply to the house or toilet, and the toilet contents had to be buried in the garden.”
It was not until the early 1950s that full-scale sewers with proper waste treatment were finally installed in the village. The scheme had been approved in principle in June 1939, but all activity stopped for the duration of the war. In 1946, approval was given once more, and the council was instructed to draw up detailed plans.
In early March 1952, the Frontier Sentinel reported that tenders had been invited
“…for the construction of a complete system of sewers for the town of Poyntzpass, together with a Disposal Works consisting of Screen, Storm Overflow and Grit Chambers, Imhoff Tank and Sludge Drying beds…”
In March 1952, the Newry Reporter noted that the Newry No 2 RDC had accepted a tender of £11,697 from John Morgan of Mayobridge to implement the Poyntzpass scheme, and in January 1953, the Frontier Sentinel reported “satisfactory progress on sewerage scheme at Poyntzpass.”
In September 1955, Patrick Watters of Poyntzpass was appointed as “part-time caretaker of the Poyntzpass sewerage works” on an annual salary of £75 by Newry No 2 RDC – about 60 years after Dr MacDermott had started his very vociferous campaign! Frank Watters, Patrick’s son, recalls that his father had the task on placing lamps along the route of the sewer trench each night so that no person or vehicle fell into it.
The sewer route ran through the ball alley and ruined part of the floor. The route also went through the remains of the Bennet family’s 19th century tannery. However, the nuisance from animal fairs held in the main street remained.
In December 1951 the Portadown Times had reported that the Ministry of Health had suggested to Newry No. 2 RDC that a ‘fair green’ should be purchased at Poyntzpass, after complaints from Jim Jemphry and others about the unsanitary state of the streets after cattle grading and sale days.
That issue was finally solved with the opening in 1961 of the saleyard.
[1] He is making a distinction between surface water drains, which were simply to prevent house being flooded by heavy rain, and proper foul sewers designed for human waste.
[2] As the old saying went, no part of the pig was wasted, not even the squeak!
[3] See “Random Tales From My Early Life” by John Clarke, BIF Vol 17, 2022 (not yet available online)