‘Times Past’

I’d forgotten how entertaining nineteenth century local newspapers can be. Reports of local council meetings include one member asking another if he’d like to take it outside, notebooks and papers being thrown – if there are such carryings on at present day council meetings, we don’t hear about them.

This is the Mayor of a certain borough in Kent, when a proposal to construct a sanitation system was under discussion This was in 1869, more than ten years after the Great Stink compelled Parliament to do something about the state of the Thames in London:

The next item concerned a local charity’s plan to build some public baths:

It’s all too easy to lose sight of what one had intended to research, among the reports of council meetings, magistrates’ court proceedings, coroners’ inquests, local entertainments, situations vacant and wanted, and all the other minutiae of life in a provincial town. But there is endless material for the novelist!