Welsh Journals

PUBLIC HEALTH AND THE COMMUNITY IN THE BOROUGH OF NEATH, 1835-60 IN the town of Neath, as with many other townships in the era before the Reform Acts, responsibility for the provision of public health facilities rested primarily with the surveyors of the highway or of the bye-roads. On behalf of the community, they exercised authority over the upkeep of the highways, public streets, footpaths and drains. This responsibility, forming as it did the common duty of the landowners and the 'most sufficient inhabitants of the parish', was widely disliked (and where possible avoided) because of the financial liabilities it could entail and through the ever-present possibility of ostracism for the zealous official by indignant rate- payers.1 There was, then, a widespread tendency on the part of the surveyors in Neath and elsewhere to limit their functions, as far as was practicable, to the preservation of existing amenities, at the risk of inertia where the spending of money might be con- strued as a personal obligation. In this they were much encouraged by the attitude of the courts, to which they, like all officers of the parish, owed loyalty. Both quarter sessions and the various borough courts exercised their administrative functions in judicial fashion, with the existing nuisance forming the basis of presentment and legal remedy. Initiative was thereby rendered unnecessary and inaction justified through the lack of due process of law. This tendency towards a negative approach had two main results. In the first instance, notions of precedence and custom, though defining the spheres in which the parish could move, also emphasised by default that area of activity where additional powers were required and, in the context of nineteenth-century urban legislation, ensured that the bulk of such new activities would fall to the reformed municipality. Secondly, and tending in the same direction, the traditional unwillingness of ratepayers alone to provide for improve- ments out of public funds led to the increased performance of parish duties by the corporation, relying on its own private income to carry on work that the public purse was unwilling to provide. These activities involved not only the long-standing and diverse responsi- bility for the upkeep of corporation property, but included such 1 This article is based on a section of my own unpublished thesis, 'Local Government in the Borough of Neath: A Study in Urban Administration. 1694-1884' (M.A. Wales [Swansea], 1970). As a result, I have been selective in the sources quoted in the footnotes following. For fuller annotation, I would refer readers to the thesis, pp. 215-56.