Westgate Cottages constitute an apparently unpromising subject for study, but they illustrate a feature of working class housing in nineteenth century Louth: the rapid turnover of tenants. This tended to be forgotten in the twentieth century, when an increasing proportion of tenants were long-term occupiers, because they enjoyed rents below market level by living in council houses or houses that were covered by the Rent Acts.
Location and History
Westgate Cottages comprised two terraces each of seven small (four room) houses and occupied a site on the west side of the short street now known as Irish Hill, which runs from Westgate to Crowtree Lane. The street was not shown on the 1808 town map but was shown on the 1834 map with one building, probably a barn, on part of the site later occupied by Westgate Cottages. The site is not identifiable in R1823. The cottages were shown on the 1839 map. When built, the cottages had at least one well, which was found to be impure in 1878, and by the 1870s a sewer was available. Gas was provided at some unknown date. The earliest formal record of the name “Irish Hill” seems to be the 1906 revision of the 25 inch Ordnance Survey map.
The cottages were first recorded in R1838 (numbers 382358-382371), all occupied and all owned by Bellamy & Co. On the 1838 new valuation they were all put at £4 5s, except for two valued at £4 10s. They had previously been valued at £1 10s, which shows that in 1838 they were not absolutely new; a construction date of 1835/6 seems likely. No voters in the vestry poll of 1834 gave Westgate Cottages as their address.
Bellamy & Co were brick makers, apparently a partnership between Pearson Bellamy and others unidentified. Pearson Bellamy was primarily a plumber and glazier. (His full name was Nicholas Pearson Bellamy, but Nicholas was usually dropped; he should not to be confused with his son, Pearson Bellamy, the architect of Louth Town Hall.) Presumably the firm built Westgate Cottages cheaply by using their own bricks and tiles. The tiny site (roughly a sixth of an acre) would have cost them well under £50. The cottages were offered for sale in 1848 and R1851 shows them owned by “Dunn”, probably William Allison Dunn, a bank agent.
The new 1838 valuations placed on Westgate Cottages indicate that, by the standards of the time, they were reasonably well built, significantly better than the terraced houses in Cannon Street or those in Spital Hill. Nevertheless, when an auction sale was attempted in 1871 the best bid was only £510 for the fourteen cottages plus 700 square yards of building land. The properties were withdrawn and the subsequent sale price is not known.
In 1937 Louth Borough Council made a clearance order under the the Housing Act 1936. This meant that the occupiers were expected to leave so that the owner could demolish all buildings on the site. On 1 October 1937 the sanitary inspector reported that all of the cottages were occupied and that the total number of of occupiers was 28. The cottages were probably demolished in 1938/9.
Occupiers
The 1841 census provided the first evidence of occupations of the householders in the cottages: four labourers, five other men employed respectively as a carter, a bricklayer, a miller, and two blacksmiths plus three women: a dressmaker, a woman aged 80 and a housewife, probably to be identified with the wife of an absent millwright. The other two cottages were unoccupied on the census day.
These were not the sort of people likely to be listed in mid-nineteenth century directories and there no such listings in the directories up to 1861. The points of reference are therefore R1838, R1851, the censuses of 1841, 1851 and 1861 and the burgess rolls of 1840, 1844, 1846 and 1860. The last of these categories were limited by the exclusion of female ratepayers and male ratepayers that had lived in the town less than three years or were in receipt of poor relief. Accordingly the omission of a name from a burgess roll was no proof of absence.
None of the 14 ratepayers listed in R1838 was listed in the burgess roll for 1840. Only four were recorded in the 1841 census. There is uncertainty about the remaining ten, but two appear to be identifiable with persons that had died before 1841, three appear to have been living within a mile of Westgate cottages and the other five cannot be traced in the 1841 census.
The nearest approach to an early long-term resident of the street was Henry Andrews, a journeyman blacksmith, who arrived after 1838 but was recorded in the 1841 census, the burgess rolls for 1844 and 1846 and the 1851 census; however, the burgess roll for 1860 showed him in Newbridge Hill, as did the 1861 census. Apart from Andrews, none of the householders to be found in 1841 still lived in the street in 1851. Of the 1851 householders two were still present in 1861, but neither appeared in the burgess roll for 1860.
The Irish
The 1851 census showed squalid accommodation standards. One of the cottages was unoccupied but the total recorded population of the other 13 was 100 persons, including 62 born in Ireland. Most of the male residents were farm labourers. Irish immigration into England increased greatly in the 1840s. In addition to the ordinary harvest work the rapid construction of railways increased the demand for labourers. More important than this was the failure of the Irish potato crop in 1846 and subsequent years. Fearing starvation, whole families took the ship to Liverpool and then spread out over the country looking for work and begging. Many of the Irish were used to living in mud cabins much inferior to Westgate Cottages. That said, the press reports of Louth magistrates dealings with vagrants and beggars in the 1840s indicate that the great majority were not from Ireland from other parts of England.
The population density probably resulted in a temporary deterioration in the condition of the buildings: the 1861 census showed six of them unoccupied.
The 1871 census showed 12 cottages occupied, one by a tenant that had been a householder in 1861. The Irish element in the community long continued; as late as 1901 the census showed three householders born in Ireland and the last available list of residents, Wiggen’s directory of 1927, which showed all 14 cottages occupied, included John Raney, roadman (1862-1929), who may have lived there all his life. He was the son of Thomas Rainey, born in Ireland but living in Westgate Cottages in 1861.
As might be expected from the character of the street, press reports of Westgate Cottages were uniformly dark, mainly reports of small fines imposed for criminal offences of the drunk & disorderly type. More seriously, in 1856 there was a fight between two Irishmen in which one bit off the whole of the underlip of the other; this resulted only in a fine of 30 shillings. In 1896 Rebecca Dent of Westgate Cottages contracted with the mother of a workhouse baby to look after him for three shillings a week but at the age of six months the baby was found to be emaciated and bitten by vermin. Dent was sentenced to imprisonment for one month. In the same year David Gillman, a labourer, severely wounded his stepson with a knife and was given a 12 year sentence. Other reports were of deaths including suicides in 1894, 1911, and 1931. The last press reference to Westgate Cottages seems to be in May 1938, when one of the residents committed suicide by putting her head in a gas oven.