The Village Pump

There was no piped water supply to the village until 1893 at the earliest, and individual houses were only connected into the supply after that.

Before then, everyone had to rely on either well water, or from the various streams around. Farmyards would have had a pond for the livestock and cottages might have had a tank in the yard (or perhaps collected rainwater from roofs).

The OS maps of the village for 1901 show various locations for the wells. Perhaps you know where they might have been; some may still be there but simply capped off.

Many towns and villages had a village pump, often with a horsetrough alongside. In many cases, these were very elaborate in cast iron, sometimes with a canopy and drinking fountain, often inscribed with some form of memorial. We don’t know of anything like that in Whitchurch though.

The first Medical Officer of Health for the Cardiff Union Sanitary Authority was Dr FW Granger. He was appointed in 1875 and wrote annual reports on general health conditions. They were not very encouraging and he was very aware of the potential of possible epidemics of typhoid and similar diseases. In the early years he had a number of unfit wells in Whitchurch closed, and tried desperately to have livestock removed from rear garden yards. In 1883 and he reported that he was ‘constantly waging war with the house owners, who often resort to all sorts of artifices to delude us to prevent their pigs from being removed’. The sanitary authority had powers to remove the pigs, but not the pigsties!

In 1882, he reported that Whitchurch was served by two public pumps and by private wells. Ernest Broad in his well-known article ‘Old Whitchurch from End to End’ says that in Old Church Road at the corner by the boy’s school stood the village pump. We wonder how old this was, and what form did it take? Was there a horsetrough with it? The sketch below shows what a pump and trough might have looked like. Many of these pumps were made in the nineteenth century by specialist cast iron manufacturers in Scotland, and we might have had one. Does anyone know?

And, where was the second public pump that Dr Granger mentioned? Ernest Broad also suggested in his article that the first cottage in Brook Road had a (communal) pump at the back of the house for water. Was this the row of thatched cottages where Jupps Sweets factory was?

Now that the factory has gone, and replaced by an office block, I can’t imagine that the pump still exists, but does anyone know? Perhaps this wasn’t the pump referred to by Dr Granger and that there was another perhaps located on Waun-tre-Oda. Does anyone have any ideas?

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