All About - History - Hitler Versus Stain

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Hannah was brought to the newly built
Liverpool Royal Infirmary, where she
died three weeks after her husband
Drawn from the drain
Chrissie Lawton
A recent trip to the Victorian
Childhood exhibit in the Liverpool
Museum got me thinking about
tracing my grandfather’s family. He
would have been about ten years
old in the 1900s, but we knew almost nothing
about his past, and he refused to speak about it.
The assumption was he had no family, which had
always saddened my dad.
After a brief search, I found him in the 1901
census, aged nine, living with his parents, George
and Hannah Lawton, and his three younger
brothers in an area of Liverpool called Much
Woolton. His father was a master painter and
plumber, and ran a family business in Woolton
Street. Further research revealed the business had
been in the family for three generations. As the
eldest son, my granddad would have been groomed
as an apprentice, just as his father and grandfather
had been before him. The emerging picture showed
a loving and prosperous family yet by the census
of 1911, the family had disappeared. What had
happened in those crucial ten years?
A logical starting point was to trace the fate
of my great-grandfather, George. I imagined that
the job of a Victorian plumber was not for the
fainthearted! Victorian Liverpool, like many other
industrialised cities, suffered poverty, overcrowding
and poor sanitation. Open ‘middens’, sewers and
drains were common and natural breeding grounds
for disease. Many areas around the northwest were
classed as “fever dens” of cholera and typhoid, and,
as a plumber, George would have been particularly
vulnerable. “Draw from the drain its typhoid germ,”
wrote Rudyard Kipling in 1884. Sure enough, death
certificates document not only George’s death
from typhoid in 1902 but my great-grandmother,
Hannah’s, as well. Tragically they had passed away
within a month of each other.
Clinical papers of the time report that the
insidious onset of typhoid was deceptive. With
an incubation period of about two weeks, and
marked by a flu-like malaise and headache, it was
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