Charles Hastings (English Physician) - Campaigning Work in Worcester

Campaigning Work in Worcester

Charles Hastings obviously had a close relationship with his home city, Worcester. He could have developed a very interesting, challenging and rewarding medical career anywhere, especially London or Edinburgh but he made a very conscious and obvious decision to invest his career in the locality where he had grown up.

In 1854 Dr Charles Hastings was seeking to put much of his own money into innovative, purpose designed living and working accommodation for Worcester's artisans. These 'modern dwellings' as he called them were well built, well designed houses of varied construction intended to replace often cramped, very old, crowded, medieval buildings and later cheaply built terraces and town houses which in Worcester were little more than slums by Hastings time where diseases such as typhus would break out in the right conditions, an all too regular development.

Cholera had broken out in Worcester many times. It spread throughout the city in 1832, claiming many lives and recurred in 1849 and 1853 taking children and workers of all ages. It is said that Hastings attended to people in every outbreak, personally seeing every single case and ministering to the sick and dying with no regard for his own health.

The new housing he had helped to introduce, for example in Copenhagen Street – now sadly demolished in turn – was having a dramatic effect on health with the death rate dropping by 45% in a decade. However he was facing a great reluctance on the part of Worcester City Council to introduce even simple measures, as we see them today, such as introducing clean water to their houses, pumps and streets. In fact it was 1872 before legislation was on the statute books for clean water to be piped into most metropolitan areas, Worcester included.

Sir Charles was also forthright critic of hydropathy.

He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1850 for his pioneering work, resolve and social conscience.

Among his children was George Woodyatt Hastings.

He also founded the Worcester museum of Natural History, hoping that it might inspire the younger generations following him to have at their disposal a valuable facility in which they could further their studies and gain an insight into the wonders of the world around them and a greater understanding of how to improve it for the greater good.

In the last years of his life Hastings was the first chairman of the ill fated Worcester, Bromyard and Leominster Railway and during his tenure the operating company had spent £20,000 on line without purchasing the necessary land or signing a contract with the construction company.