Child neglect is incomprehensible in any era, but as this harrowing story from the pages of the Eccles and Patricroft Journal from August 1916 sadly shows, it was not uncommon.
Isaac Morgan, a collier by trade, and his wife, Mary Ellen Morgan, appeared at Manchester County Police Court charged with neglecting their five children, aged three, seven, 10, 13 and a 14-month-old baby.
The court case came to light after a police raid on their home in Dawson Steet, Pendlebury which officers suspected was being used as a gambling den.
Men and boys of Dawson Street, Pendlebury pose for the camera © SLHL
What they found shocked both hardened policemen and NSPCC Inspectors.
When Inspector Munro and Inspector Rivers from the NSPCC examined the house they found it to be in a ramshackle, tumble-down state infested with vermin.
The children were described as being “in an incredibly filthy state”.
Dawson Street in Pendlebury today is mostly industrial © Google
The baby was “in an emaciated condition, with its face being covered in sores and requiring urgent medical attention”.
The horrified Inspectors said that if they disturbed their beds in the slightest way they could almost “walk away”.
The only food in the house was three loaves, a little margarine, a few potatoes, and some old bones.
Bolton Road, Pendlebury © SLHL
Mr J Crofton, for the prosecution, exclaimed: “Not what one would expect to find in the house of a man earning nine shillings a day and working six days a week.”
Inspector Munro told the court that when he saw the children on the night of the police raid, they were lying on a sofa covered with nothing but dirty rags.
100 years ago: House at ‘Peggy Brew’ in Patricroft declared dirtiest in Eccles
Furious, he told the mother to get the children to bed and said that they would return the next morning.
The next day they returned at 6.45am to find both defendants still in bed. Eventually Isaac Morgan opened the door and let them in.
This house of horrors revealed even more filth than was thought possible.
In the front kitchen there was a table, two broken chairs and an old sofa covered in verminous rags, upstairs was even worse with a bedstead and mattress where both parents and the toddler slept which was again “in a filthy condition”.
The second bed where the other four children slept was also riddled with lice and other unpleasant vermin.
Former site of Royal Manchester Childrens Hospital, Pendlebury – three roads away from Dawson Street © SLHL
Mary was accused of being addicted to drink by Inspector Rivers, who added that he had visited the house on several occasions and had seen no improvement.
He added, damningly, that there was “not a single washing utensil” in the house.
In his defence Isaac Morgan said that he worked hard and had tried to do as told by the NSPCC and “had washed the sheets on the children’s bed the week before”.
The Chairman of the Bench was not to be swayed and in sentencing Isaac and Mary Morgan jailed the pair for three months.
All five children were placed in the care of the local authority; the future for them would be the workhouse or an industrial school, where at the very least they would be fed and clothed.
Would this be preferable to the miserable, desperate conditions they were being forced to live in, despite the harsh regimes of the workhouse?
Main image (composite): View looking over Old Mill Street towards Dawson Street from St Augustine’s Pendlebury © Salford Local History Library (SLHL)
