NIGHT SOIL MEN

By the middle of the 19th century, life in London had become hazardous to your health. The air was fouled by coal smoke; the graveyards were brimming with the urban dead, and the rivers were open sewers. Literally, tons of horse manure coated the streets. Cesspits contaminated streams and wells, leading to outbreaks of typhoid fever. One of the most unpleasant occupations of the day, of which there were many, was that of the ‘night soil man.’

Scavengers lived in a world of excrement and death. Unorganised, independent scavengers referred to as bone-pickers, rag-gathers, pure-finders, dredger men, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, toshers and shore man spread out in the London nights in search of organic materials to use to make money or for trade. ‘Pure’ was a polite name for dog shit, the night-Soil men cleaned up the human shit.

Before the creation of the flushing toilet, someone had the pleasure of writing ‘night soil man’ as their job. I’m sure this charming job title doesn’t need much description. Night soil is historically used as a euphemism used for human waste collected from cesspools, privies, pit latrines and septic tanks.

With waste removal, humans often take the approach of ‘let’s make it someone else’s problem.’ Such was the case with the human excrement that emptied into the Thames from water closets. But realising that London’s smells were killing tourism, officials employed night-soil men to remove the waste from under people’s homes. In the dark of night, the men would come in and remove the excrement so that people would not have to see or smell it the following morning.

Being a night soil man wasn’t exactly a dream career, but it paid well and worked well as a part-time job. Men usually operated in teams of four to remove night soil: one acts as a hole man, the other a rope man, and two tub men. The hole man was the one who crawled into the cesspool to scoop waste into a bucket. The rope man would then haul the bucket up and pass it to the tub men, who would take it to the cart.

It wasn’t just human faeces that once littered major city streets. Horse dung for one was difficult to remove. By the 1890s, 1,000 tons of horse dung was dropped onto London streets per day, a job that was often relegated to street children instead of professional night soil men.

The job could be dangerous; 19th-century accounts survive of individuals falling into cesspits and night soil vaults. Thanks to these men who worked through the night, via a system of buckets and carts, the products of London’s digestive system would be gone by morning.

As the men carted the crap away, leaving a trail of stench in their wake. In cities across the country, thousands of carts brimming with excrement rattled through the night streets.

But if the very act of emptying privies in the black of night wasn’t unappealing enough, working antisocial hours turned up some interesting events not listed in the job description. There were reports of night soil men catching burglars in the act, or being called to horrendous bloody scenes by members of the public to provide alibis!

Perhaps the most disturbing of all was the bodies. Men, women and children were found by night soil men regularly, most of whom were likely victims of murder. Often, the soil collectors came across the bodies of babies when emptying a soil pit.

The excrement was sold to farmers outside London to be used as a fertiliser. Although much of it ended up dumped in rivers, lakes, ponds, empty fields. Eventually, they learned how to extract nitrogen from excrement and use it to make gunpowder (There’s got to be a joke somewhere there!).