To acknowledge the spookiest month of the year, October’s item of the month is our stuffed brown rat. A fitting symbol of Swindon’s long-running battle against urban pests, this specimen is on display in our history of Swindon Gallery “A Tale of Two Towns” (no pun intended).
The relationship between humans and rats has always been uneasy at best. From the catastrophic reality of the bubonic plague to the fable of Hamelin, our opinions of rats have always been clouded by notions of disaster, disease and decay. The brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) inspires fear and disgust (and also, perhaps grudgingly, a little admiration). Rats live wherever we live and are a reflection of our own meaner, dirtier nature. They are also adaptable, intelligent, and fiercely protective of their families. They have become part of the lexicon: to call someone a rat is a base insult; to rat on someone is a despicable act. Rats, it seems, have a habit of infesting history and language.
Swindon’s rat problem in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may not be on the same scale as the great plagues of the past, but it was evidently enough of an issue for the powers that be to introduce some creative methods of pest control. One such measure was the ‘ratting party’. Throughout the nineteenth century the Swindon Boards of Health had been fighting a losing battle against rat infestation, and by 1902 they had begun to enlist the help of Swindon’s residents. People were invited to convene at Rodbourne Sewerage Farm with the intention of catching and destroying as many rats as possible.
The efficacy of these ratting parties is open to debate; what is known is that rodent infestations continued to be a problem throughout the twentieth century. In 1920 the Evening Advertiser ran the following succinct story:
Rat Week - It was decided by the Town Council that a rat week be held at Swindon and that the Rat Officer be authorised to make a payment of 1d. per tail for all rats caught within the borough.
Eight days later the paper ran another story suggesting that, while the Council’s pest controllers had been successful during Rat Week, ‘private enterprise has been woefully lacking’: only one tail had been collected, despite the Rats and Mice Destruction Act (1919) making it an offence to have rats on one’s property without attempting to eradicate them. ‘Rat Week’ was revived throughout the 1920s and 1930s and usually took place in the autumn. The Advertiser reported that 9,000 rats were caught in 1929. Similar stories appeared regularly well into the 1950s.
Rats aren’t the only pests to beset the town - in 1923 a plague of several million crickets caused havoc to residents in the vicinity of Savernake Street refuse tip, a story that was reported in the national papers - but they are certainly the most enduring.