Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Notes on the Text
- Who's Who in the Narrative
- Introduction
- 1 Town and School, 1875
- 2 Local Society and Local Government
- 3 Local Medicine and Local Doctors
- 4 Typhoid: The First Two Outbreaks, 1875
- 5 Winter 1875–6
- 6 Spring 1876
- 7 Summer 1876
- 8 Autumn, Winter and Spring 1876–7
- Aftermath and Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Uppingham Union Membership 1875
- Appendix 2 Abstract of Sums Raised by RSAs
- Notes
- Note on Sources
- Works Cited
- Index
8 - Autumn, Winter and Spring 1876–7
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Notes on the Text
- Who's Who in the Narrative
- Introduction
- 1 Town and School, 1875
- 2 Local Society and Local Government
- 3 Local Medicine and Local Doctors
- 4 Typhoid: The First Two Outbreaks, 1875
- 5 Winter 1875–6
- 6 Spring 1876
- 7 Summer 1876
- 8 Autumn, Winter and Spring 1876–7
- Aftermath and Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Uppingham Union Membership 1875
- Appendix 2 Abstract of Sums Raised by RSAs
- Notes
- Note on Sources
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The wishes of both Wortley and Earle for more harmonious times were not yet to be realized. The fragile truce after the ratepayers’ revolt was soon tested as the controversy resurfaced in the national press. The anonymous ‘Paterfamilias’ returned to the attack with an inflammatory diatribe in The Times on 28 August. Reminding readers of all the events and specialist reports of the past year, he stated that the school had ‘at once carried out all [Rawlinson's suggestions] with unsparing care’. By contrast, the plans of Rogers Field for the town improvements ‘were adopted by the local sanitary board … but no effectual effort has been made to carry them out’. Warning that there was still no guarantee that the school would be able to return even after Christmas ‘unless more activity is displayed in remedying the original evil’, he called for an end to ‘mischievous and harmful delay’, criticized the trustees for being supine and described:
… the spectacle of a great school under a man of admitted originality and power … whose masters had spent over £80,000 on buildings over the previous twenty years … driven from their rightful home to an obscure Welsh village, at the extremity of the land, leaving, like the old Phocaeans ‘their fields and Penates and beautiful Temple’ to lie waste and desolate.
Bell wrote to Jacob that this had:
acted like a blister, and some of the Authority were very unhappy about the ‘lies’ it contained. It was debated whether there should be a reply, but it was thought best to leave it alone, because ‘while the school can get fair space allowed in the Times for anything they have to say, the S.A. would have their letter mutilated and pushed into a corner’.
But ‘An old inhabitant’ did decide to reply. He wrote to the Stamford Mercury on 1 September, listing the small number of deaths in the town in recent months.
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- Typhoid in UppinghamAnalysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–7, pp. 151 - 166Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014