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HARROGATE UNDER THE
COMMISSIONERS (1841-1884)
The Baths and Wells -
Rival Authorities -
The Stray -
The Commissioners at Work
- Some Sidelights on the Town
The
"Commissioners for the Improvement of High and Low Harrogate,"
appointed first under the special Harrogate Act of 1841, were the
main factor in the ordered development of the town during the next
forty-three years. Those who put them into office were almost all
the ratepayers, for a voter's qualification was an assessment for
the Poor Rate of only, £3. The minimum qualification for
Commissioners was a good deal higher; they must be rent-payers of
£35 or property-owners of £20 a year. There were 21 Commissioners, 7
of whom retired each April, and the elections were held by
paper-vote. The arrangement was democratic enough, though people
still considered that if a man had large financial interests in the
neighbourhood he would be all the more likely to safeguard the
interests of the community and so should be chosen as their
representative.
It
is a common practice, but far from a wise one, for governments to
decry the doings of their predecessors, and for the most part the
Borough Councillors of 1884 appear to have followed this fashion in
their estimate of the Commissioners. Since then, the sins of
omission and commission of later times have not escaped comment.
Experience shows that mistakes will occur in any business that is
worth doing, but they should not be allowed to obscure the positive
achievements of past (or present) governing bodies. As Yorkshiremen
say "A man who never makes a mistake makes nothing."
The
problems the Commissioners were called upon to deal with were
largely new, and pretty considerable. The population grew during the
period from some four to twelve thousand people, and a good many of
these, not being Harrogate-born, needed time to become, as the word
now goes, absorbed. It is true the Improvement Area was to remain
the same for the forty-odd years, except for the small extension in
1870 to include the West End Park (as far south as the present St.
George's Road) which was built upon after the demolition of the
railway-line there in 1862, but the Commissioners saw the two
one-time village Harrogates grow to meet each other and to form a
more or less compact built-up area.
The
new population needed a greatly increased water-supply, such as
could not be obtained within the town itself. Then, although in the
earlier century Harrogate had been notably free from epidemics (it
had escaped the cholera outbreak of 1832), the retention of the
scavenging and drainage system of 1841, adequate as it had been,
would have been suicidal afterwards. Again, some method of
town-planning had to be introduced for the securing of ready
communications and hygiene. Houses could no longer be built to an
unreasonable height when they were in streets, or erected as they
had been at any odd angle and in almost 'any place. When the streets
were laid out, with a regulated building-line, they had to be
effectively lighted at nights. A police force had also to be
organised. The township part-time Constable, who then carried on a
grocer's shop as his main business, could not cope with the
conditions of the crowded season, nor with the host of navvies who
invaded the town during the making of the railway-lines in 1848 and
1862. The greatly increased use of the Stray demanded detailed
regulations, and the Baths and Wells needed organising and
extending. To remove the eye-sore of the booths that appeared on the
Greens at High and Low Harrogate, a town Market was highly
desirable.
The
Commissioners did do all these things - or at least saw that they
were done. The suspicion that they did them satisfactorily is
confirmed by the fact that the town's visitors constantly increased
during the period (they were estimated at 20,000 in 1858). and the
influx of permanent residents - retired folk, men of property,
business men from Bradford and Leeds - showed no sign of slackening.
A Bradford business man who came to live in
Harrogate,
George Rovers, showed his respect for the towns of his work and
leisure by building and endowing his pleasant and roomy Almshouses
(near Victoria Avenue) in 1868 for guests from both places. The
Commissioners, after long hesitation, allowed private companies to
undertake the important duties of supplying both water- and gas. It
is not clear, however, that this action of theirs was an error of
judgment. The shareholders of the Waterworks Company received no
return on their capital for many years and bore a loss that would
have fallen on the ratepayers had it been a public undertaking. It
may not always be unwise to allow citizens to use their own
initiative even in the supply of public services.
The Baths and Wells -
Rival Authorities -
The Stray -
The Commissioners at Work
- Some Sidelights on the Town
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