Death of Young Daisy
How Downley Shocked the Establishment
On Saturday 7 February 1891, an article appeared in the Bucks Herald, describing the living conditions of a girl who had just died in Downley. The article is reproduced below.
A deplorable state of affairs was revealed at Downley, an outlying hamlet of West Wycombe, just lately, that is scarcely credible at this end of the nineteenth century – nor creditable at any time. A young girl had died suddenly of congestion of the lungs, and as she had not been attended to by a medical man an inquest was held to ascertain the cause of death. I am not going into that but I allude to it in order to show that much remains to be done before the sanitary condition of our villages is brought into the state even approaching what it ought to be.
Let us glance for a moment at the so-called house in which the jury had to view the body, and for which the tenant pays two shillings a week. At the door the visitor is met with a rush of poisonous atmosphere trying to escape from its confinement, and bearing with it the foulest stench that ever offended the olfactory nerves of [a] human being. Within, the state of the house is in accordance with the greeting at the portal. The furniture consists of a rickety article that does duty for a table, and the only thing in the shape of a seat is a piece of a broken chair. Through the smoky atmosphere, which pervades the room and produces a stifling sensation almost unendurable, may be seen heaps of filth and refuse thrown up into the corners.
Let us ascend. A few stairs that lack stability bring you into a small attic, low pitched and foul; and thence another short flight of steps conducted you to a second small room. Both these lofts are used as sleeping compartments; neither of them contains a bed, or a piece of furniture of any sort; but here and there may be seen a heap of filthy rags and a little straw. On the window panes is such an accumulation of cobwebs and dirt that the light of the sun can scarcely penetrate into the room. In this latter room lay the body of the poor child, wrapped in nothing more than a piece of ragged material that might be the remains of an old apron, and placed across a portion of a box and two worn out chairs.
I think we want a GR Sims [a London journalist] to tell us ‘How the poor live’ in country places as well as in London, and stir up the authorities to do something to remedy this deplorable, horrible of affairs, which never ought to be allowed to exist for one day. No wonder the Coroner said he had seldom been into a place as bad as this; but ought such fever dens to be permitted to poison the air with their pestilential odours, and brutalize the human beings who dwell in them? It is a disgrace to our boasted enlightenment that it should be possible to find anywhere in our land, in town or country, such a spectacle as I have thus briefly described.
Unfortunately, we don’t know which house in Downley is being described here, but it was probably on Commonside, Chapel Street or Moor Lane. The girl who died was 14-year-old Daisy Lloyd, the daughter of Elizabeth, 50, and Edward Lloyd, 65, a ‘hawker of pills’. The Lloyds had eight children, six of whom were still living with them when they moved to Downley from Aylesbury, some eighteen months earlier. In other words, eight people lived in this tiny house, which they rented for two shillings a week from a Mrs Dobson.
Daisy died on Friday 23 January 1891. With impressive speed, an inquest was held the following day in the Bricklayers Arms, and the coroner, Mr G. A. Charsley, had the jury view both the body and the cottage. A Wycombe surgeon made a post mortem examination, which makes for interesting reading if one is trying to diagnose cause of death: ‘The body was extremely fat. There were no marks of violence externally. The right lung was congested. The brain was congested on the surface.’ He concluded it was a natural and sudden death brought on by congestion of the right lung ‘that produced a syncope’. The coroner added that the cottage was unfit for human habitation, with would have exacerbated her congestion of the lung, as would the bad weather. The jury duly returned a verdict of ‘Death from natural causes’. Even so, our Bucks Herald journalist clearly felt poverty and governmental negligence were to blame.
In an interesting postscript to the case, Daisy’s father, Edward Lloyd, did not make an appearance at the inquest, and with a haste as impressive as the inquest, the Lloyd family promptly left Downley and returned to Aylesbury.