The Night Soil Boats

I was reading an article referring to William Perry recently and it got mre to thinking ‘he had canal connections and might make an interesting blog’ so here it is.
William Perry better known as The Tipton Slasher, (1820-1880); born in Tipton in the Black Country between Wolverhampton and Birmingham, he worked on the canals but left it for prize-fighting. He became Champion of England from 1850 to 1857. He was finally defeated by the legendary Tom Sayers in 1857., William Perry returned to the canals. He died in1880 from 'lung problems'.

The Tipton Slasher was given this name later in his fighting career from the way his punches were known to cut and slash his opponents, but earlier he was also known also known as 'Capital K Leg' as a result of a physical deformity he had resulting from ricketts as a child.

He opened a pub in Spon Lane when he retired from prize fighting, it was called “The Champion of England”. It stood on a site by Chances Glass. He sold the pub and all his possessions to back himself in a comeback fight in June 1857 against Tom Sayers. He lost the bout after 2 hours of hard fighting. Loosing everything, he had to return to working on the canal.

The Slashers fighting career started early in life while working on the canals he regularly fought fellow boatmen on the many local canals in order to be first through the locks.
A statue stands in the town of Tipton, yards away from the canal at Tipton Green Junction, and only yards from his local pub the Fountain Inn. During his fighting career he trained under the acid baths in Owen Street. Some say he used to train with a Barbary ape. This is partly supported by the Black Country Museum who, amongst their collection they have “Objects range from the rare and unusual to the bizarre and include a stuffed Rhesus monkey associated with the Tipton Slasher.”
This all sounds very grand but a couple of points I’d like to make. When William Perry worked on the canals it was as a day boater, so none of the niceties of lace and plates and brass in a back cabin, but simple open day boats. He was not from boating stock as he was ‘off the land’ and this would have been looked on as quite a lowly form of employment with long hard hours and very little reward. Then there was the matter of the boats William Perry worked on. He worked on the ‘night soil’ boats, a cargo that put him at the very bottom of the career ladder. “What’s night soil”, I hear you ask. A little background information:-
Lets start by setting the scene, mid 19th century Tipton – large areas of terraced back to back housing – no sewage system/flush toilets. - No dustbins or council refuse collection – all houses cooking and heated with coal. A fairly typical set up would be a communal blue brick yard (called the ‘fode’) with out buildings including a ‘bog ‘ole (toilet) an ‘ess ‘ole (ash hole) and a miskin ( rubbish storage) this lead to the well known Black Country saying ‘To marry the miskin fer the muck on it, an get pissoned wi the stink on it’. Right back to night soil. Soil, because in those days you could not call it sh*t and night, because that’s when it would be collected so that people did not have to see or smell what was going on. In the middle of the night when everyone was asleep, the night soilers would come with their large wooden wheel barrows down the entry (covered passage between houses) and start by emptying the ash, of which there would be a lot, into the wheel barrow to be taken into the street where it would be tipped and arranged into a large circular band the centre of this circle would then be filled with the contents from the miskin, general household waste, and finally the contents of the bog ‘ole would be ladled out of the pit below the bog into the barrows and then into the centre of the ash circle. Finally the whole lot would be mixed as one mixes cement/concrete into a handleable commodity, and then shovelled onto tipping horse drawn metal carts. In turn these would be taken to the local night soil wharf where they would be tipped into open day boats for onward movement. Finally I hear you ask “what did they do with it”

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/256350.html
Night soil

Meaning
Euphemism for human faeces.
Origin
In many cities in the developed world human wastes used to be collected from storage tanks called privy vaults. The wastes were called "night soil" and were sold to farms as fertilizer. This practice continued until early in the twentieth century.

For those who don't know I will give the meaning of sh*t in my next blog, but untill then

Don't bang 'em about

Blossom