Machynlleth
School life
  The great sickness in the parish
Glossary
  The old records of the schools in the Machynlleth area record times of great sadness as well as the everyday events of Victorian life.
In times of rural poverty and fairly basic sanitary conditions, the health of the children was often under threat from diseases and infections.
One of the things which crops up regularly in the school Log Books is the occurrence of illnesses of many kinds.
In 1886 the Headmaster of Darowen school wrote of a problem which was spreading throughout the whole area...		 Sanitary conditions - the effect of dirt and infections on health.
 
 
  School diary entry
 

The entry reads:
"The attendance this week was considerably below the average owing to the great sickness that prevails through the parish".

The children of ordinary working families did not have the balanced diet that modern children have, and when they caught a disease this made it more difficult for them to recover.
There is more about the health risks faced by Victorian schoolchildren on the next page...

School closed for a month in 1891...