The Night Soil Men

I knew we were eventually going to find a job that made the night watchman look appealing, and I think this might be it: the night soil men.

If you have never heard the term before, as I had not until fairly recently, you could perhaps be forgiven for thinking it has something to do with gardening. It does, eventually. Unfortunately, there is a fairly important stage involving human excrement before we get anywhere near the garden.

Before modern sewer systems became widespread, enormous quantities of human waste collected in privies, middens and cesspits beneath or behind houses. Those cesspits eventually filled up, which meant somebody had to open them, physically remove the contents and carry it away, usually while everybody else was asleep.

I absolutely have questions.

BEFORE YOU COULD FLUSH IT AWAY

To understand why night soil men existed, we first have to forget almost everything we are accustomed to doing in a bathroom.

Historic England describes a system in which outside privies were commonly built alongside subterranean cesspits when waste could not be discharged into flowing water. In Victorian terraced housing, alleyways were sometimes deliberately provided behind rows of houses partly so the men emptying those cesspits could reach them.

I had never thought about those little back lanes in that context before. Imagine designing a row of houses and having to consider access for the men who would eventually arrive to collect everybody’s poo. Suddenly, worrying about where to put the wheelie bins feels comparatively sophisticated.

The arrangement was much older than the Victorians. Historic England records the Tudor term gongfermour, or gong farmer, for somebody employed to clear human waste from cesspits and privies. They worked at night and were expected to take the contents beyond the town boundaries, so Britain had been finding job titles for this particular problem for centuries.

By the nineteenth century, rapidly growing towns and cities had made the problem enormous. London’s population roughly doubled between 1800 and the 1850s, while the systems dealing with its waste had not kept pace. More people meant more houses, more cesspits and, very obviously, more poo.

WHY WERE THEY CALLED NIGHTMEN?

The soil part makes sense once you know what was being collected. The night part was considerably more literal.

Emptying a cesspit was not something anybody particularly wanted to happen in the middle of a busy street during the afternoon. The smell alone was reason enough to keep the work to hours when fewer people were around, and nightwork was regulated so that it took place within permitted hours. Henry Mayhew, documenting London labour in 1851, noted that the police were expected to prevent the work being carried out outside those legal times.

While households slept, gangs of men could therefore be working in yards, alleys and behind houses removing the accumulated contents of their privies. We have now spent several articles imagining Britain after dark: the watchman walking his beat, the lamplighter making his way along the street and the railway workers keeping trains moving through the night.

Meanwhile, several streets away, these poor sods were opening the cesspit.

History really does benefit from widening the camera angle.

HOW DID YOU ACTUALLY EMPTY A CESSPIT?

This is where the job becomes considerably worse.

Mayhew watched a gang of nightmen working and recorded the process in surprising detail. The work was generally divided between a holeman, a ropeman and two tubmen, and those names describe the jobs rather more accurately than I would have liked.

The holeman was the person who eventually went down into the cesspit. The ropeman operated the rope used to raise the container, while the two tubmen carried the full tub away to the waiting cart.

At the beginning of the job, flagstones or flooring covering the cesspit had to be removed, sometimes using a pickaxe. If the waste was high enough, the tub could simply be dipped into it from above. As the level dropped, the tub was lowered by rope and, eventually, a ladder went in with it.

The holeman then climbed down.

I am now extremely comfortable with my current employment.

Once inside, he loosened the contents and shovelled them into the tub. The ropeman hauled it back to the surface, and the tubmen inserted a pole through its handles, lifted it between them and carried it on their shoulders to the cart. They then repeated the process until the pit was empty.

This was not somebody arriving with a hose and a machine. It was four men, a tub, a rope, a shovel and the deeply unfortunate understanding that one of them was going to have to climb inside.

MAYHEW WENT TO WATCH THEM

Henry Mayhew did something I am very glad we do not need to do for The Midnight Archive and actually went out at night to observe a gang at work.

Large horn lanterns were placed around the open cesspit, with additional lanterns hung from poles. Mayhew described the surrounding houses as almost completely still while the men worked below them. At one point, a nearby window flew open, a night-capped head appeared, an irritated curse was directed towards the workers and the window slammed shut again.

Apparently, getting your cesspit emptied was necessary right up until the people emptying it disturbed your sleep.

Mayhew found the smell, even on a frosty night, “literally sickening” at first and said it left him with a headache. The nightmen themselves were considerably less impressed by his reaction, with one apparently describing the smell as refreshing.

I appreciate becoming accustomed to the conditions of your workplace, but I am not prepared to accept “refreshing” here.

THERE WAS GIN

Another detail I was not expecting was the catering.

Mayhew records that householders commonly provided the nightmen with bread and cheese, beer and sometimes gin while they worked. One labourer told him that a bottle of gin shared by the gang was considered a fairly standard allowance when clearing a gentleman’s cesspool.

Which means that at some point in Victorian London, four men could be standing around an open pit of human waste in the middle of the night, eating bread and cheese and passing round a bottle of gin.

There are historical scenes nobody puts in costume dramas, and frankly this is one of them. I also cannot decide whether the gin sounds like an excellent idea or the worst possible idea when one member of the group is about to descend a ladder into a cesspit.

IT WAS A PROPER BUSINESS

Nightwork was unpleasant, but it was not some informal arrangement involving whoever happened to own a shovel.

There were specialist contractors and businesses offering the service. The Wellcome Collection holds a trade card for William Woodward, who advertised himself as a nightman, carman and chimney sweeper, which feels like an extremely ambitious selection of household problems for one man to take on.

If your day was going badly enough, William could apparently deal with both ends of the house.

Nightmen also worked alongside rubbish carters, sweeps and other people involved in removing the enormous quantity of waste produced by a city. Mayhew regarded them as part of a much larger hidden workforce keeping London functioning without most residents paying much attention to how it happened.

That part feels surprisingly modern. We are still extremely good at enjoying clean streets, working drains and disappearing rubbish without thinking very often about who makes those things happen.

SOMETIMES THE CESSPIT WAS INSIDE THE HOUSE

This detail has spoiled my evening slightly.

Not every cesspit was conveniently placed at the end of a nice accessible garden. Mayhew noted that depending on where it was situated, the nightmen sometimes had to carry the full tubs through the garden and through the house to reach the cart.

Imagine lying in bed knowing that process is taking place downstairs. I would simply move.

The earlier history is not much better. London Museum records centuries of disputes involving leaking and overflowing cesspits, including Samuel Pepys opening his cellar door in 1660 and stepping into sewage that had overflowed from his neighbour’s toilet.

I have complained about neighbours before. I withdraw everything.

SOMEBODY WANTED THE POO

Now we finally reach the gardening, because night soil had value.

Historic England records that the contents removed from domestic cesspits were commonly sold to farmers as fertiliser. The nightmen were therefore not simply collecting waste and throwing it away; they were part of a chain that moved nutrients from towns back onto agricultural land.

Technically, this was recycling. A deeply unfortunate form of recycling, admittedly, but recycling nonetheless.

Reports from the nineteenth century also describe collections of dung and other waste being deliberately retained because they had a commercial value as manure. The problem was that allowing human and animal refuse to accumulate around densely populated housing came with fairly obvious disadvantages. An 1840s government investigation found overflowing privies, open middens and cesspools containing mixtures of night soil, ashes and decomposing household rubbish in towns across Britain.

Apparently, one person’s valuable fertiliser could also be everybody else’s appalling back garden.

THE SANITATION PROBLEM WAS GETTING WORSE

The problem was not simply that nineteenth-century cities smelled awful, although they very much did. Human waste was accumulating close to homes and finding its way into streets, drains, rivers and drinking water.

During much of the century, the dominant explanation for diseases such as cholera was miasma, the belief that disease was spread through foul or poisonous air. Considering the smell surrounding some of these places, I can understand why that theory was persuasive.

Unfortunately, cholera was not particularly interested in whether something smelled bad. Contaminated water was the danger.

John Snow’s work during the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak famously linked cases of the disease with water from the Broad Street pump. Acceptance of that explanation was not immediate, but later outbreaks reinforced the connection between contaminated water and cholera.

That changes how you think about the men emptying the cesspits. They were not microbiologists and did not know about Vibrio cholerae. They were doing a job that existed for older practical reasons because pits filled up and the contents had to go somewhere. Nevertheless, physically getting human waste away from densely populated homes mattered.

THEN FLUSHING MADE THINGS WORSE

This is one of those pieces of history where an obvious improvement initially created another problem.

Water closets became increasingly common during the nineteenth century, which was considerably nicer for the person using the toilet. Unfortunately, flushing something away from your house does not mean it has ceased to exist.

London’s old drains and sewers had originally developed largely to carry rainwater and other waste water. As more water closets were connected, greater quantities of sewage were pushed into those systems and ultimately towards the Thames. Historic England notes that flush toilets effectively shifted the waste problem out of individual houses and into the city’s sewers and river.

Humans had become very good at making the poo disappear from sight. We had not yet mastered what happened next.

THE GREAT STINK

By the 1850s, the Thames had become the destination for a staggering quantity of human, industrial and animal waste, and then came the hot summer of 1858.

Water levels fell, sewage accumulated along the exposed banks and weeks of heat effectively baked the contents of the river. The resulting smell became known as the Great Stink. It was reportedly bad enough to make people physically sick, and attempts were made to soak curtains at the Houses of Parliament in chemicals to block the smell.

Years of poorer Londoners living beside cesspits, sewage and contaminated water had failed to produce quite enough urgency. Then Parliament itself had to smell it, and suddenly infrastructure became extremely interesting.

Legislation providing money for a new sewer system was rushed through, and engineer Joseph Bazalgette oversaw the enormous network that would intercept sewage before it entered the central Thames and carry it further downstream.

Predictable, perhaps, but effective.

FROM A TUB AND A ROPE TO A CATHEDRAL OF SEWAGE

The contrast between the old and new systems is extraordinary. Only a short time earlier, gangs of nightmen had been hauling tubs of waste out of cesspits by rope. Bazalgette’s system involved around 82 miles of new main brick sewers feeding a huge network of smaller drains, together with enormous pumping stations.

One of those was Crossness, which opened on 4 April 1865 in a ceremony attended by the Prince of Wales. Around five hundred guests came to see the enormous beam engines begin working, after which they were treated to a banquet. The surviving account even mentions turtle soup.

I realise the Victorians were celebrating a major engineering achievement, but there is still something magnificent about opening a sewage pumping station with royalty and turtle soup.

It also shows how dramatically the scale had changed. The old answer to a full cesspit was a man climbing into it with a shovel; the new answer was infrastructure beneath an entire city.

THE NIGHTMEN DID NOT VANISH IMMEDIATELY

Large sewer schemes did not make every cesspit disappear overnight. Britain contained different systems, different levels of infrastructure and enormous numbers of existing homes, so the change was gradual.

As water-borne sewerage became more widespread, however, the old nightwork became less central. Edwin Chadwick had already noted in 1842 that the growing use of water closets connected with sewers was reducing the number of nightmen required in London, although he also recognised that until better sanitation existed, the work they performed was still necessary.

That is perhaps the fairest way to look at them. They belonged to a sanitation system we would never willingly return to, but within that system somebody still had to do the job.

THE PEOPLE WE DO NOT PUT ON POSTCARDS

I started reading about night soil men because the name made me laugh and because I genuinely could not believe that there had once been people travelling through cities at night collecting human waste from beneath houses.

There were, and more importantly they were not vague figures pushing carts through Victorian fog. They were people with specific jobs. One held the rope, two carried the tub and one climbed into the pit.

They worked by lantern light while people slept a few feet away. They were sworn at for making noise, offered beer and gin, carried tubs through houses when there was no other route and dealt with the part of urban life everybody produced but nobody wanted to see.

We remember Bazalgette, and rightly so. His sewers were an extraordinary engineering achievement and much of the system he helped create still serves London. The men who dealt with the waste before that transformation are far easier to overlook because there are no grand monuments to the holeman and nobody recreates a night-soil cart as part of a cosy Victorian Christmas scene.

Yet every city produces waste, and before pipes, pumps and treatment works could carry it away, somebody had to stand beside an open cesspit in the middle of the night and remove it one tub at a time.

I am very happy to let him have that job.