Sir Eoin O Fada
Gold Member
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Australian Politics
Posts: 3821
New England, NSW
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India is improving, just as Australia and England have improved.
My English great grand parents hailed from Stourpaine in Dorset.
I have visited the place and it is a most charming rural village, neat, clean and very welcoming.
The ancestors left there in 1856 and no wonder, for it made the pages of the Illustrated London News
William and his wife, Jane were my first English ancestors in Australia andthey came from Stourpaine in Dorset. Stourpaine in its day was briefly famous having made it to the pages of the Illustrated London News of the 5th of September 1846, but for all the wrong reasons; " Of one of the villages, Stourpain, about midway between Blandford and Sturminster Newton, the Times Correspondent gives this lamentable account:--
"The first feature which attracts the attention of a stranger on entering the village, is the total want of cleanliness which pervades it. A stream, composed of the matter which constantly escapes from pigsties and other receptacles of filth, meanders down each street, being here and there collected into standing Pools, which lie festering and rotting in the sun so as to create wonder that the place is not the continual abode of pestilence-indeed the worst malignant fevers have raged here at different times. It may be sufficient to add for the present that the inside of the cottages in every respect corresponds with the external appearance of the place. The wages here in very few instances exceed seven shillings per week.
"Another fruitful source of misery, as well as immorality, is the great in-adequacy of the number and size of the houses to the number of the population. and the consequently crowded state of their habitations, which in Dorsetshire generally, and in Stourpain particularly, afford the most limited accommodation.
"The want of proper ventilation in these houses must be to the last degree detrimental to the health of the inhabitants; the atmosphere, especially of the sleeping apartments. to an unpractised nose is almost insupportable. It is, perhaps, worthy of remark that dishes, plates, and other articles of crockery, seem almost unknown; there is, however, the less need for them, as grist bread forms the principal, and I believe only kind of food which falls to the labourer's lot. In no single instance did I observe meat of any kind during my progress through the parish. The furniture is such as may be expected from the description I have given of the place - rickety table and two or three foundered chairs generally forming the extent of the upholstery. Want, famine, and misery, are the features of the village, and yet I am credibly informed that the peasant of the Vale of Blackmore and the western parts of the country is as hungry, emaciated, and squalid a being as the denizen of Stourpain.
"From this picture of a Dorsetshire parish, it may be readily gathered that apathy and indifference on the part of the landed proprietor, and the grasping and closefisted policy of the farmer, are the causes of the prevailing distress. The default of the one is apparent in his neglect to provide proper habitations in which the labourer may bring up his family in comfort and decency. In no county, notwithstanding the universal increase of population, is the want of new cottages so apparent, and the neglect of the landlord, in this point at least, so conspicuous. The latter, in withholding from the man who serves him a just and reasonable reward for his services, is acting neither wisely nor honourably. Both seem to have forgotten, or at least to have shut their eyes to the undoubted fact, that one of the surest methods of consulting the public advantage, is to secure to the lower class comfort and competence."
Charming😇😇😇
- Furthermore it is also recorded that the workers in the fields were so poor that, in summer, they [both male and female] worked naked to save their miserable clothing and would run and hide if a stranger appeared on the road.
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