Museum archives: Smells of Steyning

Smells from earlier in our lives can linger attractively in our memories.  But not all the smells which Steyning men and women were familiar with in the past would be easy to live with now.

The agricultural nature of the community – and the smells that went with it – can be judged from reports on court proceedings during the 15th century. 'George Hillman has dumped dung on the High Street for the whole year' it says (for which he was fined twopence) and an even smellier occasion was when John Storod and John Broadwater had 'defective drains through which fetid water and other filth runs out of their close over the adjoining road to the nuisance of their neighbours.'

It must have been quite bad to be the subject of court proceedings because, of course, the townsfolk took the weekly invasion of the town by cattle and sheep on market day in their stride and, during the 18th century, the September cattle fair attracted as many as 3,000 animals from as far afield as Wales.

There must also have been a constant reminder of the proximity of human waste. There are no records of chamber pots being emptied out of windows: Steyning people would always have had access to gardens in which cesspits could have been dug. On one occasion in the early 17th century a child, given the task of emptying their chamber pot into the cesspit in their garden behind the High Street, dropped it and never recovered it: maybe it was just too stinky.

We can imagine this course of events because, not long ago, that small chamber pot was dug up and given to the Museum. Those people living close to a stream or drainage channel probably didn’t bother with the digging of a cesspit. A year or two before proper drainage was created in the 1890’s the state of affairs can be gauged by Colonel Ingram’s proposal to the Parish Council 'that the tenants of the land on each side of the ditches through which sewage passes should be asked to clear them out.'

The main industries in Steyning, with its agricultural base, were brewing and baking on the one hand and the slaughter of animals and the tanning of leather on the other. In the mid 19th century there were two breweries and three bakers in the town with their warm and comforting smells. But slaughtering and tanning were a different matter. Two of the butchers had their own slaughterhouses. With no refrigeration, on a hot summer’s day, the heaps of bones at the back of the slaughterhouses would have begun to ‘hum' with flies buzzing all around – even if the bones were, eventually, taken up Newham Lane and buried.
 
The smelliest place, however, was the tannery. John Durrant’s wife said that the smell was unbearable when he came in from a day’s work; she would get him to strip and wash and would then, if he had spent the day shifting fleeces, remove the ticks from his back.

Untreated skins, still with traces of hair, fat and gore on them would be obtained from the slaughterhouses before being converted into leather and parchment and sometimes animals were slaughtered on site. The skins were immersed in deep pits filled with tannin rich liquids derived from oak bark and, for the finest leathers, with a product called 'puer' – dog’s excrement to the uninitiated.

For a while a vinegar bottling plant sat beside the tannery so, with that powerful combination of smells, it’s not surprising to hear that young Diana Samuelson, when riding in to Steyning, could never persuade her pony to turn down Tanyard Lane – although she would already have passed the gas works with its own distinctive smells.

We probably shouldn’t end without reflecting on the changes which frequent showering and cosmetics have made to our lives. A lady told us that the popular and crowded town dances held before and just after the War were always something of an olfactory ordeal – so not all smelly memories were good ones.

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