of wealthy people who have only the most general notion of its
whereabouts, have perhaps never visited the place for which they
receive rent, and in short know their property only through their
agents.
"Instances have come to my knowledge of the very worst description of
property being thus held ignorantly and carelessly by wealthy persons.
Often for years we can get at no representative of the property other
than the agent or collector who receives the weekly rent for some
anonymous employer."
In his third Report to the Commissioners of Sewers he wrote:--
"It is easy to foresee the numerous obstacles which interested persons
will set before you to delay the accomplishment of your great task.
"When your orders are addressed to some owner of objectionable
property--of some property which is a constant source of nuisance,
or disease, or death; when you would force one person to refrain
from tainting the general atmosphere with results of an offensive
occupation; when you would oblige another to see that his tenantry are
better housed than cattle, and that, while he takes rent for lodging,
he shall not give fever as an equivalent--amid these proceedings you
will be reminded of the 'rights of property' and of 'an Englishman's
inviolable claim to do as he will with his own.'
"Permit me to remind you that your law makes full recognition of these
principles and that the cases in which sophistical appeal will often
be made to them are exactly those which are most completely condemned
by a full and fair application of the principles adverted to. With
private affairs you interfere only when they become of public import,
with private liberty only when it becomes a public encroachment.
The factory chimney that eclipses the light of heaven with unbroken
clouds of smoke, the melting house that nauseates an entire parish,
the slaughter-house that forms round itself a circle of dangerous
disease--these surely are not private but _public_ affairs.
"And how much more justly may the neighbour appeal to you against each
such nuisance as an interference with his privacy; against the smoke,
the stink, the fever that bursts through each inlet of his dwelling,
intrudes on him at every hour, disturbs the enjoyment and shortens the
duration of his life. And for the rights of property--they are not
only pecuniary. Life, too, is a great property, and your Act (of 1851)
asserts its rights."
"The landlord of some overthronged lodging-house complains that to
reduce the number of his tenantry, to lay on water, to erect privies,
or to execute some other indispensable sanitary work, would diminish
his rental--in the spirit of your Act it is held a sufficient reply
that human life is at stake--and that a landlord in his dealings with
the ignorant and indefensive poor cannot be suffered to estimate
them at the value of cattle, to associate them in worse than bestial
habits, or let to them for hire at however moderate a rent the certain
occasions of suffering and death."
"Seeing the punctuality with which weekly visitation is made for
the collection of rents in these wretched dwellings it would not be
unreasonable to insist on some regulations for the clean and wholesome
condition of his premises, water supply, and scavenging, &c."
Such a regulation would "render it indispensable to the landlord
of such holdings to promote cleanly and decent habits among his
tenants--even to obtain security for their good behaviour."
The picture thus presented of the sanitary condition of the people
residing in the "City" about the middle of the last century is--it
must be acknowledged--a terrible one; but it rests upon unimpeachable
testimony.
The very grave and serious conclusion, however, follows from it--that
if the evils were thus terrible in the "City," with a comparatively
small population, only a little more than a twentieth of that of the
metropolis, and where there was a local government with wide powers for
dealing with matters affecting the public health--how infinitely more
serious was the condition of things in the "greater London" with its
huge population, and where there was practically no local government,
and no punitive law for insanitary misdoings and crimes.
In some degree, the evils the people suffered under were of their
own making, though many excuses can be urged in extenuation. In
some degree, too, the people were unquestionably the victims of
circumstances. But in the main, they were the victims of other people's
iniquities. It was those circumstances which the Government should have
altered, or, at any rate, have endeavoured to control or modify--it was
the unlimited power to do evil that the Government should have checked
and curbed; but "greater London" was virtually left outside the pale of
remedial legislative treatment by Parliament.
CHAPTER I, PART IV
The great cholera epidemic of 1848-9 had deeply stirred public
feeling in London. It had destroyed 14,600 people (and diarrhoea,
its satellite, had destroyed many thousands more), and it had been
"accompanied by an amount of sickness and physical misery beyond
computation." But even all its horrors, and all the proofs it
afforded of the desperately insanitary condition of the masses in the
metropolis, were not sufficient to induce the Government to depart from
its policy of neglect, or to wring from Parliament measures which would
lay the basis for the alleviation of the sufferings of the working
population of the metropolis, or which would remove even a small part
of the evils which fell so heavily upon those least able to sustain
them, and least able to remove them.
The health of London was becoming worse every year. The number of
persons dying from preventable disease had been steadily increasing.
One gleam of hope there was, however. An increasing number of persons
were becoming interested in the health of the people, and were
awakening to the gravity of the subject, and to the public discredit
and inhuman scandal of the existing condition of things--an awakening
of interest which, in February, 1850, reached to the extent of a public
meeting.
The Bishop of London presided, and the meeting was rendered the more
remarkable by speeches from Lord Ashley, then actively pressing
sanitary and social questions forward, and by Charles Dickens.
Lord Ashley said:--
"The condition of the metropolis, in a sanitary point of view, was
not only perilous to those who resided in it, but it was an absolute
disgrace to the century in which they lived. It was a disgrace to
their high-sounding professions of civilisation and morality. They
were surrounded by every noxious influence--they were exposed to every
deadly pestilence.... The water they drank, the air they breathed, the
surface they walked on, and the ground beneath the surface, all were
tainted and rife with the seeds of disease and death....
"Let them look at another abomination--the existence of putrefying
corpses in graveyards and in vaults amidst the habitations of the
living--an abomination discountenanced by all the civilisation of
modern days, as it was by that of the ancient days--the practice of
intramural interments.
"Could anything be worse than the graveyards of the metropolis? Under
a surface of ground not amounting to 250 acres there had been interred
within thirty years in the metropolis far more than 1,500,000 human
beings. What must be the condition of the atmosphere affected by the
exhalations from that surface?...
"And what were the financial and social consequences of allowing such a
state of things to exist?
"At least one-third of the pauperism of the country arose from the
defective sanitary condition of large multitudes of the people...."
Charles Dickens said:--
"The object of the resolution he was proposing was to bring the
Metropolis within the provisions of the Public Health Act, most
absurdly and monstrously excluded from its operation.... Infancy was
made stunted, ugly, and full of pain; maturity made old; and old age
imbecile.
"He knew of many places in London unsurpassed in the accumulated
horrors of their long neglect by the dirtiest old spots in the dirtiest
old towns under the worst old governments in Europe.
"The principal objectors to the improvements proposed were divided into
two classes.
"The first consisted of the owners of small tenements, men who pushed
themselves to the front of Boards of Guardians and parish Vestries,
and were clamorous about the rating of their property; the other class
was composed of gentlemen, more independent and less selfish, who had
a weak leaning towards self-government. The first class generally
proceeded upon the supposition that the compulsory improvement of their
property when exceedingly defective would be very expensive....
"No one," he went on to say, "who had any knowledge of the poor could
fail to be deeply affected by their patience and their sympathy with
one another--by the beautiful alacrity with which they helped each
other in toil, in the day of suffering, in the hour of death.
"It hardly ever happened that any case of extreme protracted
destitution found its way into the public prints without our reading
at the same time of some ragged Samaritan sharing his last loaf or
spending his last penny to relieve the poor miserable in the room
upstairs or in the cellar underground. It was to develop in the poor
people the virtue which nothing could eradicate, to raise them in the
social scale as they should be raised, to lift them from a condition
into which they did not allow their beast to sink, ... to cleanse the
foul air for the passage of Christianity and education throughout the
land, that the meeting was assembled. The object of their assembly was
simply to help to set that right which was wrong before God and before
man."
The realisation of this object, noble as it was, was not easily
attainable.
The Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields said that "the difficulty of
legislation in these matters was to hit the medium between the rights
of property and the rights of humanity." He might have added, with
truth, that the difficulty had so far been met by sacrificing the
rights of humanity to the rights of property.
Lord Ashley had pointed out that they "had to contend with ignorance,
indifference, selfishness, and interest;" or as Lord Robert Grosvenor
more vigorously expressed it, in a phrase which should live in history
as giving the key to the mystery of the slow sanitary evolution of this
great city, they had to contend against "vested interests in filth and
dirt."
One thing was already absolutely clear, that it was hopeless to expect
anything from the spontaneous action of land-owners or house-owners.
"They knew it was quite impossible," said the Bishop of Chichester, "to
bring the owners of even one small court or alley, much less the owners
or occupiers of any large district, to concur in any measure for the
general good of their particular locality."
The fact was that nothing but the imperative directions of the law
would secure the removal of evils or curtail the practice of infamous
abuses--and even when the law was enacted for their remedy, nothing
but its rigorous enforcement with adequate penalties would make it
effective.
As the result of the meeting, a deputation waited on Lord John Russell,
the then Prime Minister. His reply was not encouraging.
"In this city," he said, "there is very naturally and properly great
jealousy of any interference either with local rights or individual
will and freedom from control."
That great jealousy proved to be so powerful that nothing was
attempted by the Government except an abortive effort to deal with the
loathsome and insanitary evils of intramural interments where vested
interests were neither powerful nor loud voiced.
The Act was so defective that it never came into operation, and two
more years elapsed before the Government again essayed to deal with the
subject. And in the meanwhile that most horrible evil was permitted to
work its will upon the dwellers in the metropolis.
To the enthusiasm of an individual, and not of the Government, was due
the first effective attempt to grapple with one of the widespread,
deep-seated evils which were working such havoc among the people. The
most disastrous and vicious forms of overcrowding were at the time to
be found in the so-called Common Lodging Houses--the sink of insanitary
abominations.
These were the temporary and casual abodes of the dregs of London
humanity--of the tramps, and the unfortunates, and the mendicants
and criminals, male and female--when they could afford the penny or
pence to pay for their night's lodging. In most cases these houses
were low brothels and hotbeds of crime and moral degeneracy, their
foul and filthy condition making them great sources and propagators of
contagious and loathsome diseases.
In the "City" the authorities had power to regulate and control them.
Not so, however, in the metropolis. There, no one had any authority in
the matter, nor was there any authority for any one to have.
Lord Ashley, truly discerning that the one and only way of dealing with
this evil was by regulation and constraint, introduced a Bill[43] and
actually carried it through Parliament, and two years later got another
Act[44] embodying amendments which made it more effective.
What the Common Lodging House owner or keeper--anxious to secure the
utmost profits from his property and regardless of all consequences to
others--would not do, he was, by those Acts, made to do.
The houses which he devoted to this purpose, solely for his own
profit, were placed under the control and inspection of the police,
and had to be registered as "Common Lodging Houses." Overcrowding in
them was checked by restricting the number of inmates who might be
in each room; regulations (confirmed by a Secretary of State) were
made, and steadily enforced, for the separation of the sexes; for the
proper cleansing of the houses; and for compelling the keeper to give
immediate notice of fever or any contagious or infectious disease
occurring therein. The accumulation of refuse was to be prevented,
and provision had to be made for adequate sanitary accommodation, for
better drainage, and for sufficient water supply.
A very brief experience showed that great practical benefits resulted
from thus regulating these houses, and the amount of sickness and
mortality in them became astonishingly small, considering the character
of their inmates and the localities where they were situated; and
inasmuch as the number of such houses was nearly 5,000, and the
population in them about 80,000, the benefit was a really substantial
one.
How obstinate and pertinacious was the opposition of house-owners, or
middlemen, to regulation and supervision of any kind is illustrated
by a case reported by the Assistant Police Commissioner.[45] The
owner of certain premises in St. Giles' had been often applied to,
without success, to remedy some gross sanitary defects therein which
had resulted in the loss of life by fever. Brought to bay at last,
at the Police Court, and ordered to remedy the evil, he said that he
was willing to do all in his power to abate the nuisance ... but, "he
thought he ought not to be dictated to as to the way his property was
to be managed." His words embodied the predominant spirit of the time.
"There are," wrote the Assistant Police Commissioner in commenting upon
this case, "owners of property whom nothing but the strong arm of the
law can move."
Unfortunately the Act did not go far enough. Single rooms occupied by
families did not come within its scope. They constituted an enormous
proportion of the habitations of the people, and they were allowed to
continue the prolific cause of sanitary evils and of physical and moral
degradation.
Limited in its scope though the Act was, it afforded nevertheless
one great object lesson--the lesson which since that time has been
consistently preached by all who had actual experience as regarded the
sanitary condition of the people of London--the lesson that the worst
of the sanitary and social evils could only be effectually grappled
with, on the one side by the supervision and regulation and constant
inspection of the houses in which the poorer classes lived, and upon
the other side by insistent compulsion of house-owners to maintain a
certain standard of sanitation and cleanliness in those houses.
That, however, was a course which Parliament for many years did not
think it desirable to adopt, and which, when adopted in a tentative
and half-hearted sort of way, suffered the usual fate of sanitary
legislation--that of being neglected, opposed, evaded, or thwarted by
land-owners, house-owners, middlemen, and by hostile local authorities.
Lord Ashley also originated and succeeded in the same Session in
obtaining from Parliament another Act of notable interest, namely,
"The Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act,"[46] which aimed at
increasing the quantity of houses for working men by facilitating the
establishment of well-ordered houses for such persons.
It gave power to vestries to adopt the Act, and thereafter to purchase
or lease land, and to erect houses thereon for the working classes, and
to borrow money on the security of the rates for this purpose.
In advocating his plan in the House of Commons he enforced the
importance of the reform. He said:--
"Until the domiciliary condition of the working classes were
Christianised (he could use no less forcible a term) all hope of moral
or social improvement was utterly vain. Though not the sole, it was
one of the prime sources of the evils that beset their condition;
it generated disease, ruined whole families by the intemperance it
promoted, cut off or crippled thousands in the vigour of life, and
filled the workhouses with widows and orphans."[47]
He specially mentioned one of the objections urged to this proposal for
the construction of better houses--an objection which since then has
invariably found expression when any amelioration of the housing of the
working classes has been proposed to be done by a public authority.
"It was said those matters ought to be left to private speculation.
He should much object to that. Private speculation was very much
confined to the construction of the smallest houses, and of the lowest
possible description, because it was out of these the most inordinate
profits could be made. Private speculation was almost entirely in that
direction."
He might have added that "private speculation" had hitherto had a
completely free field in the sphere of housing, with all the evil
results visible before them, and that it had aggravated and intensified
the evil instead of removing or mitigating it.
The debate in Parliament was interesting, as it drew from the Home
Secretary an expression of the Government view of the situation.
"After all," said Sir G. Grey, "it was not to the Government, it was
rather to the efforts of individuals, and associations of individuals,
that they must look for real and general improvement among the great
body of the people. All that the Government could do was to remove
obstacles in the way, and to present facilities by modifications of the
law more useful than direct legislation."[48]
An "association of individuals" had already been formed--"The Society
for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes"--and work of
this class had to the extent of over £20,000 been carried out by it.
The new piles of buildings erected were eagerly availed of by people
of the working classes, and in a sanitary point of view they at once
demonstrated their very satisfactory immunity from disease.
The Act, however, being a voluntary or adoptive Act, was not likely
to be adopted and put into force by those by whom a certain amount of
financial liability might be incurred as the result. As a matter of
fact it never was put in force by any vestry, and it remained a dead
letter.
It was memorable, however, as embodying for the first time in
legislation the idea that the housing of the people was a public matter
with which a public authority might properly concern itself, even to
the extent of competing with private enterprise, and pledging the rates
as security.
The supply of water to London, both as regarded quality and quantity,
had, since the epidemic of 1848-9, been engaging the attention of
Committees of Parliament, the belief that the epidemic of cholera had
been increased and propagated by the filthy and impure water having
given an impetus to the demand for ameliorative measures. In 1852 an
Act[49] was passed by which the companies taking their water from
the Thames were required to remove their intakes to some place above
Teddington Lock, where the tide would not affect it, and the sewage of
London would not be intermixed with it. This was a considerable step
in the right direction, for though the river above Teddington Lock
received the sewage of many large towns and villages, it was at least
free from contamination by the sewage and filth of the metropolis.
Other improvements were also enacted. Reservoirs within a certain
distance of St. Paul's Cathedral were to be covered in, and all water
intended for domestic use was to be filtered before being supplied to
the consumer; and provision was also made for a constant supply of
water by every company within five years after the passing of the Act.
But the companies were given five years within which to effect the
removal of the intake from the foulest parts of the river to above
tidal reach--and thus for a wholly unnecessary term the cause which
had wrought such havoc among the people was permitted to continue its
disastrous effects.
CHAPTER I, PART V
The epidemic of cholera in 1849 had failed to produce any lasting
effect upon the local authorities or the public opinion of London, and
the nemesis of renewed neglect and indifference was once again to fall
upon the metropolis.
Cholera had kept hovering about. In 1852 a number of suspicious cases
occurred in various districts. In 1853 suspicion passed into certainty,
and the disease assumed the form of an epidemic--as many as 102 deaths
from it occurring in the first week in November. Then it died down.
In the following year it again appeared in more severe epidemic form
over the whole of the metropolis. On one day--September 4th--there
were 459 deaths from it. The climax was reached in the second week in
September (almost the identical date on which the epidemic of 1849
occasioned the highest mortality) and there were 2,050 deaths from
it.[50] In that one month 6,160 persons died from it, and from July
1st to December 16th, when it at last disappeared, there was a total
mortality from cholera alone of 10,675 persons.
Every conclusion which had been arrived at as regards the disease
during the previous epidemics was confirmed by this third great
epidemic, and many previous theories passed into the region of proved
facts. Cholera was once more proved to be a filth disease, and in the
main confined to filthy localities. The more defective and abominable
the methods of drainage, the larger the number of victims. The filthier
and more contaminated the water supplied for drinking and household
purposes, the more numerous the cases, and the more virulent the
disease. This was demonstrated beyond further question.
The mortality on the south side of the Thames was above threefold
what it was on the north side; and both as regarded water supply and
drainage, South London was in a worse sanitary state than North London.
The water consumed by the population there was generally worse than
that on the north. Lying lower, too, the drainage had less chance of
being conveyed away, and in the miles upon miles of open sewer ditches
it was left to rot and putrefy in close propinquity to the houses and
to poison the air.
And the most remarkable proof was afforded by the effects of the
consumption of water taken from different sources.
In 1849 both the Lambeth and the Southwark Water Companies pumped the
water they supplied to their customers from the very foulest part of
the Thames--near Hungerford Bridge--with equally disastrous results.
In the course of the following years the Lambeth Company removed its
source of supply to a part of the river above Teddington Lock--the
Southwark Company, however, went on as before. In the epidemic of 1854
the inhabitants of houses supplied with the water by the latter company
suffered eight times as much as those supplied by the better water
of the Lambeth Company, whilst the number of persons who died in the
houses where the impure was drunk was three and a half times greater
than that in the houses where the purer water was supplied.
Of all the conclusions arrived at by those who had been engaged in
combating the disease during this epidemic, the most important was
that where cholera had become localised it was connected with obvious
removable causes, and was in fact a preventable disease.
Most unfortunately, and reprehensibly, many of those who could have
done most to prevent it failed signally to take action.
Once more, and this time in an accentuated degree, the widespread
prevalence of the disease, and the frightful mortality, were distinctly
due to the inertia, laxity, or deliberate neglect of those local
authorities who by law were charged with the duty of cleansing
localities and removing some of the causes of disease.
The General Board of Health, of which Sir Benjamin Hall was President,
did all that it could do. Medical inspectors were appointed by it to
visit all the parishes most severely affected; and the fullest and
minutest instructions were issued to the Boards of Guardians as to the
course they should pursue, and the action they should take.
But several of the Boards of Guardians took no notice of the
instructions sent them; others sent unsatisfactory replies. In not one
of the parishes in which the epidemic was most fatal was the preventive
machinery, sanitary and medical, organised in accordance with the
instructions; and although some parishes did more than others, yet,
speaking generally, the administration of the sanitary and medical
relief measures by the Boards of Guardians was inefficient in character
and extent, except in some of the larger and more healthy parishes
where they were least wanted.[51]
At Rotherhithe, the Guardians declined to proceed with the removal of
nuisances as entailing a useless expense. At Deptford, where cholera
was at the worst, no Inspector of Nuisances was appointed, even for
the emergency. Nor did Greenwich, where it was also bad, appoint
one. In Bethnal Green, where memories ought to have been bitter,
the authorities practically did nothing, although promising almost
everything.
In Lambeth, the parish was left without any adequate protection against
the epidemic; and it was only after urgent remonstrances by the Medical
Inspector, and after his threatening to place himself in communication
with the coroner in any cases of death occurring in localities where
the proper cleansing measures had not been carried out, that he
succeeded in obtaining the adoption of measures even to a limited
extent.[52]
In Clerkenwell, the Guardians utterly disregarded the recommendations
of the Board of Health, and from the first there was an openly
expressed determination not in any way to be interfered with by the
Board.
And the disastrous state of affairs was, that the Nuisances, &c.,
Removal Acts gave the Board of Health no power to enforce upon the
Guardians the execution of the regulations made.
The whole sanitary administration--so far as any existed in London--was
in a state of chaos, and the various local authorities were able,
with absolute impunity to themselves, to ignore and even defy the
General Board of Health. Of these authorities, as has been already
said, there was a multiplicity, and it was no infrequent occurrence
to find the administrative authority of some of them in the hands of
parties directly interested in the continuance of the existing state
of matters, evil though those were. In fact, the "vested interests
in filth and dirt" were a power in local administration in "greater
London," and the practical result was that the great majority of the
population of the metropolis were left without any protection against
the ravages of epidemic or other preventable diseases.
The indifference of Parliament, moreover, had left London without any
effective or systematic sanitary supervision; and in no part of it,
except the "City," was there any officer conversant with the effect of
local influences on the health of the population, or who could advise
as to the sanitary measures which should be adopted.
The Board of Health having had it brought home to them that, with their
limited powers, they were unable to introduce order into this chaos, or
to enforce even the most elementary precautions against the spread of
the disease, their President addressed a letter on the 29th of January,
1855, to Lord Palmerston, the then Home Secretary (and a few weeks
later the Prime Minister), in which he set forth the exact state of
affairs as ascertained by his own observation and by the experience of
some of the best and most well-informed medical men in London.
In this letter he summarised the main causes of the insanitary
condition in which the people of London were forced to live.
He wrote:--
"The evidence on the localising conditions of cholera given in the
report of Dr. Sutherland points to the following as among the more
prominent of the removable causes of zymotic disease.
"Open ditches as sewers. Want of sewers. Badly constructed sewers
accumulating deposits and generating sewer gases.
"The pollution of the atmosphere in streets and within houses from
untrapped drains, from sewer ventilating openings in streets, and from
cesspools, whereby the air was contaminated and the sub-soil saturated
with filth.
"Want of house drainage.
"The absence of any organised daily system of cleansing, and the
consequent retention of house refuse in or near dwellings.
"Bad water, badly distributed. Unwholesome trades. Unwholesome vapours
exhaled from the Thames. Cellar habitations.
"Neighbourhoods, the houses of which are closely packed together
with narrow overcrowded streets, alleys and courts so constructed
as to prevent ventilation. Houses structurally defective, filthy,
unventilated, and overcrowded--absolutely unfit for human habitation."
And several others which need not be here enumerated.
"Lastly, and applying to all these--multiplicity of local authorities,
and the want of sufficient powers in such authorities to deal with
these evils."
"Great as these evils are in London," he wrote, "... there is not one
among them that cannot be remedied if proper steps be taken.
"The first and most obvious necessity in the metropolis is to sweep
away the existing chaos of local jurisdiction."
Included in that chaos were two Boards with great powers of taxation
over which the ratepayers had no control.[53]
One of them consisted of the persons appointed under the Metropolitan
Building Act of 1844, who, at a cost of £24,000 a year, entirely
neglected their work. The other, the Commissioners of Sewers,
who had demonstrated their utter incapacity, the cost of whose
establishment was "something extraordinary," and who in the five years
of their existence had only attempted one great work--"the Victoria
Sewer"--which cost a large sum, and which not many years after fell to
ruins.
The great epidemic of cholera, its attendant panic, its gruesome
accompaniments, its revelation of the actual condition of the masses,
and of the rottenness of the local authorities, and the growing outcry
against the iniquity of such a state of things in a civilised and
Christian country, brought matters to a head.
The state of the Thames had also become a greater danger than ever to
the community, and a more unbearable nuisance.
As described by _The Lancet_ in July, 1855:--
"The waters are swollen with the feculence of the myriads of living
beings that dwell upon the banks, and with the waste of every
manufacture that is too foul for utilisation. Wheresoever we go,
whatsoever we eat or drink within the circle of London, we find tainted
with the Thames.... No one having eyes, nose, or taste, can look upon
the Thames and not be convinced that its waters are, year by year, and
day by day, getting fouler and more pestilential.... The abominations,
the corruptions we pour into the Thames, are not, as some falsely say,
carried away into the sea. The sea rejects the loathsome tribute, and
heaves it back again with every flow. Here, in the heart of the doomed
city, it accumulates and destroys."
And the Government, compelled at last by the force of events to take
some steps for the better sanitary government of the metropolis, and
for remedying some of the evils the people suffered under, decided on
taking action.
Acknowledging the necessity for giving local government to "greater
London"--the "City" of course already had its own--it proposed the
creation of a central authority which should deal with certain matters
affecting London as a whole, and local authorities which should deal
with local affairs affecting their own localities.
And, in 1855, a group of measures giving effect to these views, and
containing also what amounted to a sanitary code similar to that in the
Public Health Act already for years in force in England, was passed by
Parliament.
Those most important measures marked the end of one great period in the
sanitary history of this great metropolis.
Of that period it is to be said that there is none in the history
of London in which less regard was shown for the condition of the
great mass of the inhabitants of the metropolis; no period when the
spirit of commercialism recked so little of the physical condition
and circumstances of those upon whom, after all, it depended; no
period when the rights of property were so untrammelled by any
consideration for the welfare of human flesh and blood; no period when
private individuals not alone so strained, for their own advantage
or aggrandisement, the utmost rights the law allowed them, but far
exceeded those rights, and too often successfully filched from the
public that to which the law gave them no right.
Never had there been a time in which the rights of property had been
more insisted upon and exercised. Never a time in which land-owners,
house-owners, and builders did as freely as they liked with their own,
regardless of the injury or damage inflicted upon others; nor in which
manufacturers carried on, without interference, trades for their own
benefit, which were not merely offensive, but actually death-dealing to
their neighbours.
And throughout this period the people in their daily lives and
circumstances were absolutely unprotected by any public authority, or
by any local governing body. There was no one to help them to contend
against the extremest exercise of real or even assumed rights.
In this period London, the metropolis, had grown up, and had not
merely been permitted by the Government and the Legislature to grow up
practically without government, guidance, supervision, or restraint,
but it had been absolutely denied any system of local government, and
so been denied all provision for the sanitary needs of the community.
In 1835 a large and liberal measure of municipal self-government was
given to all the cities and towns and municipalities large and small of
England and Wales--many of them not a tithe so populous as the great
parishes of London--and a governing body, elected by the ratepayers,
and with almost all the essential powers of local government, was
instituted in each. But the Municipal Corporations Act expressly
excluded the great towns which surrounded the walls of the "City" and
which constituted the metropolis, and the law continued to recognise
them only as rural parishes.
Twelve years later, namely in 1847, the Towns Improvement Act was
passed, by which towns of much smaller size were given facilities
for obtaining considerable powers of local government. By it general
sanitary provisions were framed, which, with the sanction of
Parliament, might be applied in any town for the management by the
local authorities of the supply of water, of drainage, of the paving,
cleansing, and lighting of the streets, and the prevention of fires;
and for the regulation of buildings, of slaughter-houses, of public
baths, and of the interment of the dead.
But even this more limited but still liberal system of local government
was not extended to London, and once more the metropolis was excluded.
The "City" did not wish to extend its own borders, and the authorities
of the "City" viewed with dislike the idea of the creation at their
very gates of local bodies which might develop into formidable rivals.
And so "greater London" was left by successive governments and by
Parliament to scramble along as best she could, and to suffer.
And just as there was no local government so were there practically
no laws safeguarding the sanitary condition of the people except the
temporary and imperfect ones provided by the Nuisances Removal and
Diseases Prevention Acts of 1848, and such very limited protection as
the common law afforded.
The Public Health Act of 1848--a sanitary code in itself--was an Act
for England and Wales alone. The benefits it conferred were refused to
London; and, as a consequence, the masses of her people were doomed to
continue in circumstances of the utmost misery; year by year tens of
thousands of her citizens were sent to an unnecessarily early death,
and ten times their number were made to undergo diseases which even
then were recognised as preventable.
And all the time that she was thus left without a local government,
without any permanent sanitary laws, other forces were at work
inflicting ever-widening evil, and intensifying already existing evils.
The population had increased by leaps and bounds, and the increasing
trade of London had brought great numbers of workmen to the metropolis.
The necessity for offices and warehouses had led to the substitution of
such houses for houses previously used as residences.
And so the growing population was forced to herd ever closer together,
houses were packed thicker and thicker, and, in the central districts,
every available spot of ground was built upon. And the overcrowding of
human beings in those houses, and all the attendant ills, increased
countless-fold. And the result was unparalleled, indescribable,
unspeakable misery of the industrial and working classes, and of the
lower and poorer orders.
Not merely years, but generations of neglect and indifference on the
part of the governing classes had multiplied and intensified in London
every evil to which the poorer classes of a nation are liable.
For long the great process of social and economic change at work
in "greater London," and all that it entailed, was let go its own
way--a way which, in default of the regulation and the alleviation a
government should have given it, was beset with creakings and groanings
like those of some badly constructed piece of machinery; only instead
of machinery, inanimate and insensitive, they were the groanings, the
agonies, of suffering thousands and tens of thousands of sick and
perishing people, sinking annually into the abyss.
All through the earlier half of the nineteenth century, in fact,
London, the great metropolis, was left to evolve itself so far as
regarded the public health and sanitary condition of the people.
The tremendous import of such deliberate inaction by Parliament, and
by successive Governments, is even now only partly comprehended. But
the nemesis has been truly a terrible one. The injury wrought was in
many ways irreparable, and we are still reaping the crop of evil sown
by such seed--are still far from the end of the appalling consequences
such a disastrous policy has entailed.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See Parliamentary Papers, 1837-8, vol. xxviii. and P.P. 1839,
vol. xx. p. 106, Dr. S. Smith.
[2] 1840. P.P., vol. xi. p. 13.
[3] Commission for inquiring into the state of large towns and
populous districts, 1844.
[4] Dr. Southwood Smith, P.P. 1845, vol. xviii.
[5] Royal Commission, 1853-4, p. xii.
[6] The Metropolitan Paving Act, 57 George III. cap. 29.
[7] See Report of Vestry, 1856-7.
[8] See Special Report of the Vestry, 1889, p. 208.
[9] Report of Commission of 1845.
[10] J. Phillips, p. 63, Metropolitan Sewers Commission, 1847.
[11] See P.P. 1854-5, vol. liii. p. 249, &c.
[12] Report of Medical Officer of Health for Clerkenwell, 1856.
[13] See Report of Medical Officer of Health for St. Giles'.
[14] Report of General Board of Health, 1850.
[15] Report of Select Committee of the House of Commons, P.P. 1838,
vol. xxviii.
[16] 38 George III. cap. 40.
[17] An opening only a foot square cost an additional 8s. 3d. tax per
annum.
[18] 1843, Commissioners on State of Towns. Evidence of W. E. Hickson,
p. 436.
[19] Select Committee, 1840. Evidence of J. Pennethorne, p. 166.
[20] P.P. 1854, vol. xlv. p. 2. In part of the parish of St. Marylebone
only there were 1,132 underground or cellar dwellings.
[21] See Hansard, vol. cxv. 1851 (Lord Ashley's speech).
[22] P.P. 1850, vol. xxi. p. 179 (Dr. Grainger).
[23] P.P. 1850, vol. xxi.
[24] Dr. T. Lynch, Medical Officer of West London Union (Holborn).
[25] P.P. 1849-50, vol. xxi.
[26] Hansard, 1840, vol. liii. p. 1110.
[27] 3 and 4 Vic. cap. 29.
[28] Expenses to be charged upon Borough Fund, and receipts to be
paid into same.
[29] 9 and 10 Vic. cap. 96.
[30] 11 and 12 Vic. cap. 112.
[31] P.P. 1850, vol. xxi. p. 4.
[32] Metropolitan Sanitary Commission, 1848, 2nd Report.
[33] Hansard, 1848, vol. xcvi. p. 392.
[34] "Vested rights in crowded houses, deadly stenches, putrid water,
foggy courts, and cesspools." See "Health by Act of Parliament,"
_Household Words_, 1850, vol. i.
[35] P.P. 1850, vol. xxi. p. 42.
[36] P.P. 1850, vol. xxi. p. 110.
[37] In London in 1832-3 (population 1,682,000), the attacks were
14,144, the deaths were 6,729. 1848-9 (population 2,206,000), the
attacks were about 30,000, the deaths about 14,600, so that in the
last epidemic the deaths were more numerous than the attacks in
1832-3, whilst the attacks were more than double.
[38] Dr. Grainger, P.P. 1849-50, vol. xxi.
[39] P.P. 1850, vol. xxi. p. 147.
[40] This was rendered illegal by the amended City Sewers Act of 1851.
[41] See P.P. 1854-5, vol. x., General Report of Medical Council.
[42] Simon, 1st Report, 1849.
[43] 14 and 15 Vic. cap. 28.
[44] 16 and 17 Vic. cap. 41.
[45] P.P. 1854, vol. xxxv. p. 7.
[46] 14 and 15 Vic. cap. 34, 1851.
[47] See Hansard, 1851, vol. cxv.
[48] Ibid.
[49] "The Metropolis Water Act, 1852," 15 and 16 Vic. cap. 84.
[50] See P.P. 1854, vol. xlv. p. 22.
[51] See P.P. 1854-5, vol. xlv., Reports of General Board of Health.
[52] Ibid.
[53] See speech of Sir B. Hall in 1885 in House of Commons, Hansard,
vol. cxxxvii. p. 715.
CHAPTER II
1855-1860
THE Act "for the better Local Management of the Metropolis"[54] which
was passed by Parliament in 1855 was the turning point in the sanitary
history and evolution of London.
It put a term to the chaos of local government in "greater London"
and swept away the three hundred trumpery and petty existing local
governing bodies. It created a legally recognisable metropolis by
defining its component parts and boundaries. It established a definite
system of local representative government in that metropolis for
the administration of its local affairs. It conferred upon the new
authorities not only the powers vaguely possessed and imperfectly,
if at all, acted on by their predecessors, but a considerable number
of new ones. It laid the basis of an organisation for the sanitary
supervision of the inhabitants of each parish of greater London.
And with the object of making provision for the effective treatment
of some of the numerous matters affecting London as a whole--matters
of a general and not of a local character--with which smaller local
authorities could not possibly deal, and with the further object of
securing a certain uniformity of administration by the new local
authorities, it founded a central governing body for the metropolis.
Simultaneously Parliament passed a new "Nuisances Removal Act for
England"[55] which was made applicable to London, and which, coupled
with the health provisions in the Metropolis Local Management Act,
bestowed upon the metropolis a sort of code of sanitary laws in some
degree similar to those enjoyed by other parts of England.
And also an Act[56] making stricter provisions as to the construction
of buildings in the metropolis.
Though three Acts were thus passed, they formed but separate parts of
one general plan of reform.
Some little detail must be gone into as regards the system of local
government thus initiated.
For government in purely local matters--in each of the twenty-three
largest parishes, definite Vestries, as distinguished from parishioners
meeting in open Vestry, were constituted, the members thereof being
elected by the householders of the respective parishes rated to the
relief of the poor. The total number of members on any Vestry was not
to exceed one hundred and twenty, and each year one-third of them were
to retire, and an election to be held to fill their places.
And as there were many parishes so small that to have constituted
them separate local governing authorities would have perpetuated all
the evils of small areas of local government, these small parishes
were grouped together into "districts" of a fairly large size, for
each of which--some fourteen in number--there was to be a governing
body entitled "The Board of Works for the ---- District," the members
thereof being elected, not directly by the electors, but by the smaller
Vestries constituting the District.
These new local governing bodies were thus representative bodies,
the Vestries elected directly by the ratepayers, the District Boards
indirectly elected; but both were constituted "the sanitary authority"
for their respective areas, both were charged with the administration
of local affairs, and so the term "Vestry" and the "District Board" may
be taken as synonymous.
The central body which was constituted for dealing with matters
affecting London as a whole was named "The Metropolitan Board of
Works."
It was not directly elected by the ratepayers of London, but was
elected by the aforesaid local authorities and by the "City."
It consisted of forty-five members. Three were elected by "the
Mayor, aldermen, and commons of the City of London in common council
assembled."
Each of the six largest Vestries elected two of their members to it;
the other Vestries one each, and the District Boards of Works elected
the remainder.
It was thus representative of the whole of London--City and Metropolis
included. Each year one-third of the members were to retire, and
one-third to be elected in their place.
This central Board was charged with many important duties affecting
London as a whole. Foremost amongst them was the first essential of any
sanitary well-being--the improvement of the sewerage and drainage of
London.
This new body superseded the Commissioners of Sewers, and was specially
charged with the task of designing and carrying out "a system of
sewerage which should prevent all or any part of the sewage within
the metropolis from passing into the river Thames in or near the
metropolis: and also make all such other sewers and works as they
may from time to time think necessary for the effectual sewerage and
drainage of the metropolis."
It was also given general control over the sewage works, and power
to make orders for controlling Vestries and District Boards in the
construction of sewers in their respective parishes.
Furthermore it was given power to make, widen, or improve, any streets
or roads in the metropolis for facilitating the traffic, and certain
powers of prohibiting the erection of buildings beyond the regular line
of buildings. It was given power, too, to make bye-laws--for regulating
the plans, level, and width, &c., of new streets and roads; for the
plans and level of sites for building; for the cleansing of drains, and
their communication with sewers; for the emptying, closing, and filling
up of cesspools; for the removal of refuse, and generally, for carrying
into effect the purposes of the Act--all which bye-laws were to be
enforced by the Vestries and District Boards.
Thus it was given large powers to deal with many of the matters
which most affected the public health. But in some other such
matters--essential for the effectiveness of the whole scheme--it was
left strangely helpless. It was given no power to appoint a Medical
Officer of Health for the metropolis to advise it as to matters
affecting the health of London as a whole; or to appoint Inspectors of
Nuisances to ascertain information upon sanitary matters and to carry
out various sanitary duties.
But, gravest and most deleterious defect of all, no authority was
conferred upon the Board to compel any negligent or recalcitrant
local authorities to carry out the duties imposed upon them by
Parliament or by bye-laws of the Board. Those authorities might with
absolute impunity neglect to carry out even the imperative directions
of Parliament as embodied in the Act, and thus what Parliament
emphatically enacted "shall" be done might be left undone, with the
most disastrous consequences to the public health, not merely of the
particular parish, but to the great community of London.
The omission of some such provision made the Vestries practically
independent bodies, and arbiters as to the administration or
non-administration of various important provisions of existing or
future Acts of Parliament, and afforded them the opportunity, so freely
and widely availed of, of not performing duties against their own
opinions or interests.
As regarded these newly created local authorities--the "Vestries" and
the "District Boards of Works"--the powers and duties conferred upon
them were extensive.
All the powers and duties of the previous local authorities as regarded
paving, lighting, watering, and cleansing, or improving any parish,
were transferred to them.
The sewers, other than the main sewers, were vested in them, with the
contingent duty of maintaining, repairing, and cleansing them, and
they were given power to put sewers in every street. Also, they were
given power, under certain circumstances, to compel owners of houses,
"whether built before or after the commencement of this Act," to
construct drains into the common sewer.
Furthermore, no house was to be built without drains constructed
to the satisfaction of the Vestry, or without sufficient sanitary
conveniences, and they were directed to cause open ditches, sewers, and
drains of an offensive nature, or likely to be prejudicial to health,
to be cleansed, filled up, and covered. And they were required to
appoint scavengers to collect the dirt and rubbish, or to contract for
its removal.
And each of the authorities was to appoint one or more Medical Officers
of Health, whose duty it should be to inspect and report periodically
upon the sanitary condition of the parish or district, and who would
act as medical adviser to the Vestry in all matters relating to the
public health, and was also to appoint one or more Inspectors of
Nuisances to report as to the existence of nuisances or disease, and
perform various other duties in connection with the sanitary condition
of the parish.
Provision was also made for the prevention of the sale of food unfit
for human consumption.
The Sanitary Inspector "might at all reasonable times inspect and
examine any carcase, meat, poultry, game, flesh, fish, fruit,
vegetables, corn, bread, or flour exposed for sale," and in case the
same appeared to him to be unfit for such food it might be seized, and
the magistrate might order it to be destroyed, and the person to whom
it belonged, or in whose custody it was found, should on conviction be
liable to a penalty of £10.
By "The Nuisances Removal Act for England" the word "nuisances" was so
defined as to include any accumulation or deposit which was injurious
to health, "any premises in such a state as to be injurious to health,
any pool, ditch, water-course, cesspool, drain, or ashpit, &c., so foul
as to be a nuisance or injurious to health."
The right to give notice to the sanitary authority of the existence
of a nuisance was extended, and the process was facilitated. Notice
might be given to the sanitary authorities by the person aggrieved,
by the sanitary inspector, or by a constable, or by two inhabitant
householders of the parish; and certain powers of entry were given
to the local authority or their officer. The justices who heard the
case might require the person offending to provide sufficient sanitary
accommodation, means of drainage, or ventilation, to abate the
nuisance, or to whitewash, disinfect, or purify the premises which were
a nuisance, and could inflict a fine for contravention of the order of
abatement; and, if the nuisance proved to exist were such as, in their
judgment, to render a house unfit for human habitation, they were given
authority even to prohibit the using thereof until it was rendered fit.
Furthermore, as regarded certain noxious trades, including
slaughter-houses and manufactories causing effluvia, which were
certified by the Medical Officer of Health to be a nuisance, or
injurious to the health of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, the
owner or occupier of the premises might be proceeded against, and, on
conviction, fined.
Against the monster evil of "overcrowding" Parliament made an attempt
to legislate specifically, thus formally recognising the necessity for
dealing with it.
"Whenever the Medical Officer of Health shall certify to the local
authority that any house is so overcrowded as to be dangerous or
prejudicial to the inhabitants, and the inhabitants shall consist of
more than one family, the local authority shall cause proceedings to be
taken before the justices to abate such overcrowding, and the justices
shall thereupon make such order as they may think fit, and the person
permitting such overcrowding shall forfeit a sum not exceeding forty
shillings."
And an effort was also made to curtail the practice of living in
underground rooms and cellars by defining what such a room or cellar
was, and making liable to a penalty "whoever let, occupied, or
knowingly suffered to be occupied, any room or cellar contrary to the
Act."[57]
As money was essential for the working of the Acts, over and above
that for which rates could be levied, power was given both to the
Metropolitan Board of Works and to the Vestries and District Boards of
Works to borrow money on the security of the rates, and repayable by
instalments, "provided always that no money should be so borrowed by
Vestries or District Boards without the previous sanction in writing of
the said Metropolitan Board."
There were to be auditors of the accounts of the local authorities, who
were to be annually elected at the same time and in the same manner as
members of the Vestry.
Finally, each Vestry and District Board of Works was to make to the
Metropolitan Board of Works an annual report of its proceedings,
including a report from the Medical Officer of Health; and the
Metropolitan Board was to make an annual report of its proceedings, and
present a copy to one of Her Majesty's Secretaries of State.
The third of these Acts, "The Metropolitan Building Act, 1855," amended
the existing laws relating to buildings in the metropolis, and laid
down an elaborate code for the regulation and supervision of all new
buildings. Most of this code related to the structure--the thickness of
walls, &c., &c.--and had primarily in view the security of the house
from destruction by fire. Only a few sections in the Act related to the
infinitely more important matter of adequate provision for the health
of the inhabitants, and those dealt with it in the most niggardly way.
A minimum of one hundred square feet was laid down as satisfying the
requirements of open space for air and ventilation around a dwelling; a
minimum of seven feet in height was held to satisfy the requirements of
any room in a house.
And the supervision of every building, and every work done in or upon
any building, was entrusted to the "District Surveyors"--officials
taken over by the Metropolitan Board from the previous body, appointed
under the Building Act of 1844, which had distinguished itself by its
incapacity.
These Acts practically laid down the framework of the machinery of the
sanitary government of London, and struck the first real blow at the
roots of the insanitary condition of the metropolis.
The callous indifference and inaction of generations had left not a
mere Augean stable to be cleansed, but a great city over 100 square
miles in extent and containing two and a half millions of people, and
the new authorities, when they came into existence, had not only to
meet the daily needs of a vast existing population, but to make good
the neglect of centuries, and to build up a sound and effective working
system of sanitary administration.
The task lying before them was one of enormous proportions, for on them
rested the responsibility of effecting the sanitary redemption of the
millions of the metropolis--as well as the infinitely greater duty of
safeguarding future generations from similar sufferings and wrongs.
It was, moreover, a task of almost superhuman difficulty, for arrayed
against reform and amelioration were the powerful forces of "vested
rights in filth and dirt." And adding to the difficulty was the huge
inert mass of ignorance, and poverty, and helplessness of masses of the
people.
One principle contained in these Acts was of pre-eminent
consequence--namely, the responsibility of "ownership." Hitherto owners
had effectually escaped all responsibility as regarded the sanitary
state of their property, and had dealt with their property exactly
as they pleased, and regardless of the consequences to any one but
themselves.
Parliament now formally recognised and definitely laid down the
principle that the "owner" was the person responsible for the
insanitary condition of his property; and in addition declared that
individuals would not in future be allowed to deal with their property
in such a manner as to cause injury to the public health.
But declaration of principles was one thing--their enforcement was
another. Unfortunately, those who were charged with their enforcement
were too often the persons directly interested in resisting reform,
and in very many instances, where even a partial enforcement of these
principles was attempted, the action was resented and vigorously
resisted.
The Metropolis Local Management Act came into force on January 1,
1856, and the Central Authority--the Metropolitan Board of Works--and
the local authorities--Vestries and District Boards--having been duly
elected, entered upon their duties.
The first and most urgent work which the Metropolitan Board was
charged to carry out was the main drainage of the metropolis, and at
the outset, the new Board directed its efforts almost exclusively to
the highly technical task of devising and considering and adopting
plans for the construction of a great system of sewerage which should
intercept the flow of sewage into the Thames, and should convey it by
other means to a safe distance below London, whence it might flow into
the sea.
Any plan had, however, to be approved by the Chief Commissioner of
Works. To him the Board submitted three plans, but none of them
received such approval, and the matter was at a deadlock until 1858,
when an Act was passed removing the veto of the Chief Commissioner of
Works, and at the same time giving the Metropolitan Board power to
raise a loan of £3,000,000, which up to that time it had no power to do.
Within a week from the passing of that Act, the Board determined on a
plan, and began arrangements for carrying it out.
The plan adopted was to intercept all the sewage flowing into the
Thames within the area of the metropolis, and to convey it by sewers
to a distance, and to discharge it into the river at such a condition
of tide as should take it still further out, so as not to return and
become a nuisance to the metropolis. The proposed interception on the
north side was by three main sewers, discharging at Barking--the upper,
the middle, and the lower, with branches; on the south side, by two
main sewers, discharging at Crossness.
As the result of the Act there had been transferred to the Board 106
miles of main sewers on the north side of the Thames with 33 outlets
into the river, and 60 miles on the south side with 31 outlets. A
considerable number of these were offensive open sewers, others
were defective in design and construction, whilst all required
reconstruction to make them effective, and to fit them for connection
with the new system.
The Central Authority had thus a heavy task before it, and one which it
would take years to perform.
The local authorities, with simpler duties to perform, were able to get
quicker to work.
They appointed "Surveyors" in each parish to look after the
multifarious duties in connection with the paving, lighting, and
cleansing of the streets, with scavenging, and the removal of house and
trade refuse, and with the construction and maintenance of local sewers
and drains. In a sort of way some of this work had been done by the
previous petty authorities; parts of it, therefore, were more or less
familiar, and so not wholly new.
But wholly new, and of very great importance, were the appointments
which the new local authorities had to make for their districts of a
Medical Officer of Health, and of one or more Inspectors of Nuisances
to help him.
The duties of the Medical Officer of Health were carefully prescribed
by the Act. He was to inspect and report periodically upon the sanitary
condition of the parish; to ascertain the existence of diseases
increasing the rate of mortality; to point out the existence of any
causes likely to originate or maintain such diseases, as well as to
suggest the most efficacious mode of checking and preventing their
spread, and various other important sanitary duties.
These appointments were duly made, and some appointments also of
Inspectors of Nuisances.
Herein was involved the clear recognition of another principle of the
utmost consequence--that of inspection--a principle very naturally
held in abhorrence by all sanitary misdoers. It had previously been
put spasmodically into operation, and with the best effects, on the
occasions when Asiatic cholera was approaching or raging in the
country, but when the panic had subsided it was promptly dropped, and
every one was practically left free to commit any sanitary enormity
with impunity. Henceforth, however, there would be the contingency of
being found out for breaches of sanitary laws, and the eye of the law
would, at least theoretically, be upon sanitary law breakers.
The majority of the Medical Officers of Health entered energetically
on their work, and thenceforward a constant light was thrown upon the
sanitary condition of various parts of the metropolis by men who lived
in the closest and most unceasing contact with the devastating evils
afflicting the masses of the people. All were not equally efficient
or energetic--all were not equally communicative--but the reports of
many of them are full of interesting facts, of acute and instructive
comment, and of wise counsel; and though holding office at the
pleasure of their employers, many of these officers were courageously
independent and outspoken in their criticism and advice.[58]
Unfortunately, the reports had practically no circulation beyond the
members of the bodies to whom they were made, if even they were read by
them, and the recommendations made therein were too often absolutely
ignored by those bodies, or, for reasons of self-interest, opposed.
To us now, however, these reports are of the greatest value, being
in many respects the most valuable official records existing on the
subject. We learn from them, better than we do from any other source,
as regards the various parishes of London, the nature, and in some
measure the extent of the evils which existed, and the causes of those
evils; we find in them opinions expressed and reiterated as to the
best way of remedying those evils, and accounts of the results of the
efforts made to remove or cure those evils.
The reports set forth facts demonstrating the appalling misery
which the great masses of the people of the metropolis endured; the
loathsome foulness in which vast numbers of them habitually lived, and
were allowed to live; the dreadful hardships they had to suffer; the
fearful moral and physical contamination they underwent; the terrible
death-roll--in great part preventable--and the ten or twenty-fold
larger roll of victims of preventable illnesses and epidemics, with the
consequent poverty which sickness entailed.
We can bit by bit piece together from these reports a realistic picture
of the sanitary condition of London as a whole during the successive
periods of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and we can
discern the action of the silent, steady, and irresistible economic
forces which unintermittently dominated that condition. North and south
in the metropolis, east and west, it was all the same, varying only in
intensity, in extent, and, in some degree, in form; a harrowing and
almost incredible story. And the remarkable concurrence of testimony
from men acting independently of each other, and resident in wholly
different parts of London, justifies the fullest confidence in
statements uniformly harmonious.
The metropolis is so large a place, with such marked differences
between its component parts, differences in situation, and physical
characteristics, and degree of development--differences in wealth and
poverty, and in the occupations of their inhabitants--that the attempt
to trace any special branch of its history is beset with the greatest
difficulties.
Especially is this the case when the subject treated of is so complex
and comprehensive as that of the public health.
It is manifest that all parts of the metropolis cannot be described
simultaneously--whilst to go "seriatim" into the history of the public
health in each separate locality would, by the very weight of detail,
fail to convey an impression of the subject as a whole.
The same objections apply to a "seriatim" historic treatment of the
different branches of the public health.
Moreover, the action of the central authority has also to be described
in its proper place.
And, still more important, the action of Parliament, and the principal
Acts of Parliament relating to matters affecting the public health,
either directly or administratively.
How then can the subject be best treated with the object of presenting
the main facts of the sanitary evolution of London, and deducing from
them the lessons of experience and guidance for the future?
Probably by a sort of compromise between these two methods--taking
groups of districts instead of separate districts--and groups
of matters pertaining to the public health, instead of separate
subjects--and, furthermore, dealing with the whole subject in certain
definite periods. Groups of parishes have already, for certain health
purposes, been classified into central, eastern, northern, western, and
southern. That classification can be adhered to here.
And inasmuch as almost the only reliable statistics as to many matters
relating to the public health are those afforded every decade by the
census, the narrative can best be treated by taking decennial periods,
and utilising the reliable information of the census for the deduction
of conclusions which on any other basis might be unsound. This method,
then, though in many respects imperfect, is adopted as probably the
best for tracing the sanitary evolution of the great metropolis.
Foremost among the central group, but standing by itself, and in the
main outside the scope of the legislation, was the "City." To the
description of its condition already given nothing need be added beyond
the statement of the fact that the great economic forces at work
therein were displaying their results in the "City" itself in very
striking manner.
Under their potent influence the population there had begun to rapidly
decline. In 1851 it had been 127,533. In 1861 it had come down to
111,784. The number of inhabited houses was likewise rapidly declining.
In 1851 there had been 14,483; in 1861 there were 13,218. Under the
irresistible demands for greater business and trading accommodation,
the inhabited houses there were being rapidly converted to the more
profitable purpose of business offices, or warehouses.
As the number of business premises and shops increased in a locality,
so did the better-to-do residents leave it, and migrate to pleasanter
or more healthy localities. Some of the houses thus vacated became
promptly tenanted by numerous families of a lower, or even the lowest
classes; until they too were converted to business purposes, and their
inhabitants once more turned adrift to seek other habitation. Some of
these people secured in the neighbouring parishes residence in one or
part of one of those jerry-built and insanitary constructions which
land-owners and builders were erecting as rapidly as possible upon
any unbuilt ground which they owned, or which they could lay hands
upon--the majority contented themselves with squeezing somehow into
tenement houses already overcrowded.
It cannot be too constantly borne in mind that this was one of the
great forces in unceasing action in the metropolis, extending its
sphere of action step by step, and stage by stage, and that as years
went on, the various districts of the metropolis were, one and all, in
varying degree, subject to the accompaniments and consequences of its
different stages of growth. And the transition was further aggravated
by the natural increase of population, and by another great force--the
unceasing flow of immigrants into the metropolis, the majority in
search of work, others of food given by charitable people, or of any
other chance good thing or adventure that might turn up.
And so, on January 1, 1856, the new local authorities of the metropolis
began their great task. And about forty Medical Officers of Health
began to examine into and inspect their respective districts, and to
inform or advise their respective authorities.
What did these men find when they got well into their work? What
opinions did they form as to the fearful facts with which they were
promptly brought face to face, and the great social problems with
which they were confronted? And what did they and their employers, the
Vestries and District Boards, do to carry out the legislation which
Parliament had at last enacted?
The first impression of one of them was that the possessor of the
office of Medical Officer of Health[59] could never become popular,
"his functions bringing him into constant collision with the apparent
interests of many influential persons;"--in other words, with vested
interests.
Others took a less personal and wider view of their duties. Thus one of
them[60] wrote:--
"We have to remodel an old system--a system on which has been for
centuries engrafted by slow degrees all the undesirable elements we now
wish to eradicate."
Another[61] was impressed by the vast amount to be done even in his own
parish:--
"From what I daily witness, I make bold to state that this Vestry has
a Herculean task to perform to abate all the nuisances of Rotherhithe;
nuisances which have grown uninterrupted for ages, and have become
inveterate customs with many."
If it was a Herculean task in one parish, and that a small one, what
was the task for the whole of the metropolis?
Another,[62] after a few years' experience of the working of the Act,
summed up the actual position--the very kernel of the case--when he
wrote:--
"The working of the Metropolis Management Act might often be
characterised as a war of the community against individuals for the
public good."
And that is what, undoubtedly, it amounted to. Hitherto the
"individuals" had had their own way unchallenged and unchecked, and
countless thousands of the community had been sent to their doom. Now,
in a sort of way, it was to be a war--a very just and necessary, and on
the part of the community a bloodless war--to enforce upon land-owners,
and house-owners and house-middlemen, obedience to the principle that
"property has its duties as well as its rights," and that those
individual rights should not be exercised--as they had hitherto so
cruelly been--to the mortal injury of vast numbers of the community.
And there was yet another aspect of their work being a war. It was war
against disease and filth, and all the causes of insanitation, and
against the consequent human suffering and misery, and degradation, in
some of the very worst forms.
That, unfortunately, was a never-endable war. Great successes might be
won--complete and final victory never.
The central group of parishes and districts outside the "City"--and
lying to the north and west of the "City," consisted of St.
Luke, Clerkenwell, Holborn, St. Giles', the Strand, and St.
Martin-in-the-Fields, with a population of close upon 288,000--about
one-ninth of that of the metropolis. Already in four of these, under
the influence of the economic forces already described, the population
was decreasing. Every portion of this central group was densely
populated, and it contained two of the most crowded of all the areas
of the metropolis--the Strand, which stood highest, and St. Luke's,
which had "the questionable distinction" of being the second most
densely populated parish. In St. Giles', which was "amongst the oldest,
most densely peopled, and most deteriorated portions of London," the
population in 1851 "did not appear capable of further increase, the
district being incapable of expansion either by packing closer or by
the addition of new houses."
The eastern group consisted of the parishes or districts of Shoreditch,
Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, Mile-End-Old-Town, St. George-in-the-East,
Limehouse, and Poplar.
In Whitechapel the population was stationary; in all the others
increasing.
The northern group of parishes and districts consisted of Hackney,
Islington, St. Pancras, St. Marylebone, and Hampstead.
In every one of these the population was on the increase, slightly in
St. Marylebone, very rapidly in most of them, notably so in St. Pancras
and Islington.
The western group consisted of Westminster, St. James', St. George
(Hanover Square), Paddington, Kensington, Fulham, and Chelsea.
In St. James' the population was decreasing (having reached its apogee
in 1841); in Westminster it was slightly increasing; in all the others
rapidly increasing.
The southern group, with a population roughly of about 700,000,
consisted of the whole of that portion of the metropolis which was
situate on the south side of the river. Beginning on the west,
there was Wandsworth (which included Battersea), then Lambeth,
Camberwell, Lewisham, with Woolwich and Plumstead on the extreme east,
then Greenwich, Rotherhithe, Bermondsey, St. Mary, Newington, St.
George-the-Martyr, Southwark, St. Saviour, Southwark, and St. Olave, in
Southwark.
Many of these were still mostly country.
The various parishes and districts of the metropolis differed
remarkably in their rate of increase of population. In all, the number
of births was in excess of the number of deaths, but as this excess
in no way accounted for the increase in many of them, the rest of the
increase could only be accounted for by immigration--immigration either
from other parishes or from outside London.
And as it was with population so it was with the houses in which the
people dwelt.
In most of the central parts of London, houses crowded every available
scrap of land, squares and open spaces being few and far between. Where
there should have been streets of good width, there were narrow lanes
of houses; where there should have been thoroughfares, there were
cul-de-sacs; where there should have been space for through currents of
air and for light, there were brick walls stopping both light and air.
Figures giving so many houses to the acre convey little actual idea of
the density of houses. Far more suggestive is such a statement as that
made by the Medical Officer of Health in Limehouse (1861) that: "There
would be no difficulty in marking out courts and alleys where the
problem would seem to have been with the originators, how to enable the
greatest number of people to live in the smallest amount of space." Or
the description of St. Giles',[63] where, "exclusive of mews, there may
be counted on the map upwards of seventy streets, courts, and alleys,
in which there is no thoroughfare, or which are approached by passages
under houses." Nor is it a matter of surprise that this state of things
should have come about, when hitherto there had been practically no
check whatever upon building.
"It is to be regretted," wrote the Medical Officer of Health for
Mile-End-Old-Town about his own district (1856), "that the great
increase in the number of habitations should have been allowed to take
place without some municipal direction, or some supervision competent
to supply its place; the general salubrity of the district would
certainly have been better secured.... But every owner of a piece of
ground has had the opportunity of making the most of it for his own
advantage and in real opposition to the public good."
In nearly all the non-central parts of London houses were increasing
rapidly.
"Bricklayers are spreading the webs and meshes of houses with such
fearful rapidity in every direction that people are being gradually
confined within narrow prisons only open at the top for the admission
of what would be air if it were not smoke.
"Suburban open spaces are being entombed in brick and mortar mausoleums
for the suffocation as well as for the accommodation of an increasing
populace."[64]
Thus in Islington there were 13,500 houses in 1851, and 20,700 in 1861;
in Kensington 6,100 in 1851, and 9,400 in 1861.
But what evoked comment was, that the evils of one sort or another
connected with the crowding of houses together were being perpetuated.
"Not only is it to be deplored," wrote the Medical Officer of Health
for Whitechapel, "that the houses in most of the poor neighbourhoods
are already too closely packed together, but the evil is increasing:
for wherever there is a vacant spot of ground, more houses are built,
thereby still further diminishing the healthiness of those already
existing" (1860-1).
From Hampstead--still but little built on--came a complaint of "the
tendency among builders to cover the new ground as thickly and at as
little cost as practicable."
In Wandsworth "houses were erected and new streets formed without due
regard to sanitary requirements, and in situations where good drainage
seems impossible."
In Fulham, "cottages out of number were constructed in the excavations
of old brick fields with the soft refuse of bricks, habitations run in
swamps and quagmires, and their foundations three parts of the year
sopped with surface water."
Efficient sewerage was so manifestly the basis of all wise sanitation
that the want of sewers, and the abominable condition of those which
existed, were general subjects of complaint.
The Strand boasted of being "one of the best sewered districts in the
metropolis," which, however, was not saying much for it. And in St.
Giles' the sewerage was stated to be good, and "much above the average
of the town."
But such reports were quite exceptional. In Hackney, the principal
sewer was the former Hackney Brook, which, from the increase of the
population, and the drainage from other sewers, houses, cemeteries,
and cattle-market, had become a foul open ditch--with very trifling
exception wholly uncovered--and "emitting pestiferous noxious effluvia."
In St. Marylebone, the sewers, themselves insufficient for the
requirements of a growing population (1858), were, in many cases, so
shallow as to cause rather than remove evil, for in certain places they
flooded the basements, and in more than one house was witnessed the
curious spectacle of the daily use of pumps to remove the foul liquids,
as in leaking ships.
In Paddington (1857-8), "the principles of good town drainage were
completely ignored. The sewers were those which had been constructed
at intervals, previous to 1846, in a piecemeal and unsatisfactory
manner, as the thoroughfares were formed, without any regard to the
requirements of the adjoining streets." The general direction of these
sewers was "extremely defective. Numbers of them have a fall towards
the summit or highest level of the street through which they pass; the
bottoms are very irregular, running up and down and forming successions
of hills and hollows."
In Fulham, there existed scarcely the trace of a main sewer, open
sewers and filthy ditches, conveying some part of the sewage to the
river, the rest remaining in the cesspools.
In Hammersmith, not only were sewers and ditches in a most fearful
state of nuisance, but there was also "a morass of several acres in
extent, having no outlet, which received the sewage from a large
area, the noxious emanations from which must be regarded as highly
detrimental to health."
On the south side of the river matters were still worse. The greater
number of the southern districts were situate nearly on the same level
as high-water mark, if not indeed below it, and they differed from the
other districts of London in their marshy character, their low level,
and in the want of proper drainage dependent on that low level. The
whole district suffered under the effects of a tide-locked, pent-up
system of sewerage.
In Greenwich, a very large number of streets were without main sewers.
In St. Mary, Newington, "the great fact meeting us at every turn has
been the large number of streets without main sewers therein."
Rotherhithe, which lay from four to seven feet below high water, was
exceptionally bad. The largest portion of the parish had no drainage
whatever. There were about fifteen miles of open ditches which had
been converted into open sewers, called in some official documents
"Stygian pools," and serving "the double debt to pay of watercourse
and cesspool." Among the ditches "one of the foulest in the whole
neighbourhood of London" was the King's Mills stream, about one and
a half miles long, which had not been cleansed for ten years. The
sewer in Paradise Row was "in reality not a sewer," but "an elongated
cesspool a mile in length," and during twenty hours daily it was
waterlogged. The very boundary line of the parish for a long distance
was "a wide, filthy, black, open sewer."
In part consequent on the lack of sewers, house drainage was either
non-existent or fearfully defective. In every part of the metropolis
the evil was evident.
In Clerkenwell the "drainage was either none or very imperfect.
Numberless houses do not drain into the sewers." In St.
Martin-in-the-Fields, "in the old streets and courts the drainage was
the same as it was when the houses were built, some as far back as the
reign of Elizabeth, and many in that of Charles I."
In St. George-in-the-East (1856), "it is astonishing how few houses
have availed themselves of the sewers."
In Paddington, "the condition of the house-drains is far worse than
that of the sewers. They include every possible variety of geometrical
construction, from a circle to a square. Some have fallen in; others
are choked with filth."
In Lewisham (1856-7), "in several places there are reported to be
nuisances of the usual character ... cesspools, no water, &c.--stinking
ditches filled with sewage which can get no further--every abomination,
and people apparently doing what they pleased as regards getting rid of
their filth."
Nor was it only in the poorer parts of London that the house-drainage
was bad. In St. James' (Westminster) the Medical Officer of Health
wrote (1861):--
"For the last two or three years the worst cases of neglected drainage
have not been in houses inhabited by the poor, but in those inhabited
by the wealthier classes of the community. It is to me frequently a
matter of great astonishment to find how regardless those classes are,
whose circumstances can command every comfort of life, of the sources
of disease and death. This is not only seen in neglect of attention to
drainage, but also in the neglect of ventilation."
Nor was care being taken to provide drainage even to houses which were
in course of erection. The Medical Officer of Health for Hackney, which
was a growing district, reported (1858-9):--
"Building operations have recently been carried on with considerable
activity, numerous new streets have been laid out and built on....
Unfortunately there have not been, and there are not at the present
time, any means whereby the construction of proper drainage works could
be enforced before the erection of buildings along the line of new
streets, and the consequence has been that, to avoid the heavy cost
of constructing effective sewers, the drainage works have been almost
everywhere but very imperfectly carried out, and in many cases not even
a brick has been laid for these purposes."
The internal condition of the houses was very bad.
In Clerkenwell, where there were over 7,000 houses, many of them were
"quite unfit for human habitation"; not more than one-third were "in
a satisfactory state." In Bethnal Green there were "disease-inviting
houses"; in Whitechapel, such was the bad condition of many of the
2,734 houses which were inspected, that "they ought to be condemned as
unfit for human habitation."
In St. George-in-the-East, "the sanitary condition of the
dwelling-houses is deplorable."
Lambeth contained a greater number of inhabited houses than any other
parish in the metropolis--nearly 22,000. The Medical Officer of Health,
after the very limited inquiry possible within the first year of work,
reported the unwholesome condition of 1,638 of them.
From figures such as these--and they related to only a tiny fragment
of the whole--one can get some measure of the way the sanitary
condition of the houses throughout London had been neglected, and the
indifference of the owners to the condition of the premises they let.
Mention has been made of the vast number of cesspools which existed
in London before the passing of the Metropolis Local Management
Act. The investigations of the various Medical Officers of Health
soon demonstrated that the previous estimates of their prevalence,
and of the disastrous consequences they entailed, had been in no way
exaggerated.
Their disastrous results were at once recognised.
The Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel, in his report for 1858,
wrote:--
"I must now direct your attention to the most important subject, in
a sanitary point of view, which can be brought before you. I allude
to the existence of _cesspools_, more especially such as are situated
either in the cellars of inhabited houses, or in the small backyards,
which are surrounded by the walls of houses filled with lodgers....
"No cesspool ought to be allowed to exist in London, for wherever there
is a cesspool, the ground in its vicinity is completely saturated with
the foul and putrefying liquid contents, the stench from which is
continually rising up and infecting the air which is breathed by the
people, and in some instances poisoning the water which is drawn from
the public pumps....
"I am thoroughly convinced by the result of experience, that the
existence of cesspools and overcrowding are the chief causes of
ill-health."
And the Medical Officer of Health for Camberwell wrote:--
"... Of all the abominations which disgrace and pollute the dwellings
of the poor, the imperfect, rarely emptied, and overflowing cesspools
are by far the worst ... they not merely poison the atmosphere without,
but pour their emanations constantly, silently, deadly, into the
interior of the houses themselves."
Upon the quality and supply of the water which was essential for the
life of the people, and upon which their health, and cleanliness, and
sanitation absolutely depended, the information supplied by the Medical
Officers of Health as to their respective districts brings home, far
more than any general descriptions do, the full import and actualities
of the great evils endured by the people, and the disastrous
consequences entailed upon them.
As to the water from the surface and tidal wells, which large numbers
of them used and consumed, the opinion, though expressed in various
terms, was unanimous.
From Shoreditch (1860), the Medical Officer of Health wrote: "I have
hardly ever exposed a sample of town spring water to the heat of a
summer day for some hours without observing it to become putrid."
In St. Giles' (1858-9), "the water of the wells was not deemed good
enough (on analysis) for watering the roads." In St. Marylebone "44
public wells supplied water which was for the most part offensive to
taste and smell." In Kensington (1860) "all the well waters of the
parish were foul." In Rotherhithe (1857), "The water from the tidal
well smelt as if it had recently been dipped from a sewer."
The Medical Officer of Health for Lambeth declared (1856) that "the
shallow well waters of London combined the worst features--they
represent the drainage of a great manure bed."
The people were driven to the use of the water from these wells owing
to the deficient and intermittent supply of water by the various Water
Companies--water supplied for less than an hour a day by one single
stand-pipe in a court containing hundreds of people--water supplied
only every second and third day, and none on Sundays, the day of all
others on which it was most wanted; and the house-owners had provided
no cisterns or reservoirs of proper capacity, and the Vestries had not
compelled the house-owners to do so.
In some parishes hundreds of houses had no supply at all. In some
houses which had a supply the tenants were deliberately deprived
thereof by the Water Companies, because the house-owner had not paid
the water-rate.
The defective supply had the disastrous effect of putting a constant
premium upon dirt--dirt of person, of room, of houses, and their
surroundings. And such drains and sewers as there were, were
insufficiently flushed.
Time after time the consequential evils were pointed out, and Water
Companies and house-owners were vigorously censured. But the censure
had little practical effect.
The great inconveniences and evils, however, evoked the expression of
opinion that the duty of supplying water to the community ought to be
in the hands of the community.
Even in 1844 it had been pointed out that:--
"Water is as indispensable for many purposes as air is for life itself,
and its supply ought not to be allowed to depend on the cupidity or
caprice of landlords or Water Companies."
And the Metropolitan Sanitary Association had enunciated the
principle:--
"That inasmuch as water is a prime necessity of life, attainable in
large cities by combined effort only, and not to be denied to any
without injury to all, its supply should not be dependent on commercial
enterprise, but be provided at the expense of the community for the
common benefit."
And the Medical Officer of Health for St. George-in-the East wrote in
1856:--
"The water supply of your Parish is in the hands of a Joint Stock
Company, called the East London Water Company, and is managed by
persons who represent solely the interest of the shareholders, whose
only anxiety is of course the dividends--the consumers are not
represented at all. This appears to me to be a strange anomaly, a false
position, and a monstrous inconsistency--as great as if the sewerage
of London were committed to a Joint Stock Company. But so it is, and
however great the danger, the Vestry has _no available_ remedy whatever
in its hands."
The principle had been conceded by Parliament so far as England was
concerned--the large cities and even small towns having been authorised
to undertake the supply of water; but London, the capital, was denied
the power to do so--the duty was given to private companies, and the
population of London was left to undergo untold sufferings.
The quality of the water supplied by most of the Water Companies
after the intakes had been removed to above Teddington Lock, and the
filtration thereof before distribution for domestic use had been made
compulsory, was considerably improved.
But the filthy and dangerous character of the receptacles provided in
many houses for it undid much of the good which would have come from
the improvement in quality.
The description given by one of the Medical Officers of Health was in
the main true:--
"There is disease and death in the tanks, wells, and water-butts."
Thus, in the great primary necessities of the public health--efficient
sewerage and drainage, decent houses, good ventilation, pure air,
a pure and ample water supply--the general conditions were almost
inconceivably bad.
These evil conditions, however, were far from constituting the whole of
those under which the people of London suffered.
Over and above them all was one which compelled the attention of
the Medical Officers of Health the moment they had entered on their
duties--"the gigantic evil," "the monster evil" of overcrowding.
Not the mere crowding of houses together, evil though that was, but
the overcrowding of people in those houses, and still worse, the
overcrowding of the rooms of those houses by human beings. In every
part of the metropolis there was overcrowding; worst in the centre,
and the parts nearest the centre of London, but existing in the outer
districts where houses still were comparatively few and population
small. Centre, East, North, West, South, there was overcrowding,
differing only in extent and acuteness of form.
"Soon after I was appointed as Sanitary Adviser to your Board," wrote
the Medical Officer of Health for Holborn (1856-7), "I found, dwelling
in houses which were undrained, waterless, and unventilated, whole
hordes of persons who struggled so little in self-defence that they
seemed to be indifferent to the sanitary evils by which they were
surrounded.
"It is too true that among these classes there were swarms of men and
women who had yet to learn that human beings should dwell differently
from cattle, swarms to whom personal cleanliness was utterly unknown,
swarms by whom delicacy and decency in their social relations were
quite unconceived...."
He mentions some instances too horrible to quote, and says: "Such were
instances that came within my own knowledge of the manner and of the
degree in which persons may relapse into habits worse than those of
savage life, when their domestic condition is neglected, and when they
are suffered by overcrowding to habituate themselves to the lowest
depths of physical obscenity and degradation."
In St. Luke "the houses swarmed with their human tenants." In Bethnal
Green "our crowded streets and courts are becoming more crowded." In
St. Pancras "in many houses the overcrowding is very great, each room
being occupied by a family."
In Islington, so overcrowded were some of the houses that the Medical
Officer of Health had met with as little as 220, 190, 170, down to 135
cubic feet of air available for each occupant of a room.
In Rotherhithe "almost all the houses were overcrowded with inmates."
In Westminster, the Medical Officer of Health gave (in 1858) fifty
examples of overcrowding in his district. In one house, in a room
13 feet long by 9 wide, and 7 feet high, there were 5 adults and 3
children; and in a lower room in the same house, 10 feet long by 9
wide, and 8 high, there were 4 adults and 5 children.
There are no statistics whatever showing even approximately the number
of cases at that time in which a single room was occupied by a family,
but it is certain that vast numbers of families had to be content with
that limited accommodation. Nor was that even the worst--for, in very
many cases, more families than one lived in a single room, or the
single family took in one or more lodgers.
Life under such circumstances must have been, and was, awful. The
Medical Officer of Health for St. Giles' wrote:--
"The houses whose rooms are occupied by single families were last year
in a condition of squalor and overcrowding which it is difficult to
conceive surpassed....
"In Lincoln and Orange Courts, the most glaring violation of the laws
of health and of the requirements of civilised life was found. For
instance, there are several small rooms in the backyards of Church
Lane.... Each of the rooms measures about 10 feet by 8, and between 6
and 7 feet high. Each of them serves a family for sleeping, cooking,
and all domestic needs.
"... The air of these rooms was unbearable to a visitor, and to open
the window was only to exchange one foul emanation for another."
And the Medical Officer of Health for Clerkenwell wrote (1856):--
"In thousands of instances in this district, living, cooking, sleeping,
and dying ... all go on in one room....
"If a poor man gets married he is pretty sure to have a large family
of children, and at the present rate of mortality several will die of
zymotic disease.
"Hence, when a death occurs, the living and the dead must be together
in the same room; the living must eat, drink, and sleep beside a
decomposing corpse, and this in usually a small, ill-ventilated room,
overheated by a fire required for cooking, and already filled with the
foul emanations from the bodies of the living and their impure clothes.
"This is an everyday occurrence in Clerkenwell, and constitutes a
formidable evil."
So great was the pressure for accommodation of some sort or kind, that
even the cellars and kitchens in the basements of the houses were
occupied as dwelling-places and overcrowded.
In St. James', "the worst feature of the overcrowding was the very
common practice of residence in cellars or kitchens. In the majority of
cases the places are quite unfit for human residence.
"... A cellar in St. Giles'," wrote the Medical Officer of Health for
that district in 1858, "has been the by-word for centuries to express
a wretched habitation unworthy of humanity.
"Dating from the time of Charles I., the underground dwellings of our
district attained the acme of their miserable notoriety from the pen
and pencil of Fielding and Hogarth.
"... The Building Act of 1844 contained stringent clauses against
the use of such rooms unless they possessed requisites of area and
ventilation, such as were out of the question in the cellars of St.
Giles'.
"The Metropolis Management Act (1855) repeated the prohibition of 1844,
and in defence of the public health the Board have lately put this
statute in force. This has been done without compromise. As separate
habitations for occupation by human beings at night 'a cellar in St.
Giles'' is no longer to exist."
This was written in 1858, but in the following year he wrote:--
"The profit derived from letting the basement of these houses as
dwelling-rooms was too strong a temptation for their owners, and many
of the kitchens were let again as soon as the Inspector had reported
them emptied."
In the Strand (1856) underground rooms and kitchens were inhabited
"notwithstanding that District Surveyors are numerous, and that the
Metropolitan Building Act is in operation."
In Westminster, "an examination of various portions of the parishes
shows that large numbers of the poor occupy premises whereby they are
not only deprived of the required quantity of air, but being situated
below the level of the street, the ventilation is insufficient, the
rooms generally damp, and when closed for the night the atmosphere is
perfectly insufferable--mostly kitchens and cellars, evidently never
intended to be used as sleeping rooms" (1858-9).
The causes of the dreadful overcrowding which existed so extensively
were many and deep-seated--springing from the very roots of the social
and economic system. And they were of great force and widespread in
effect.
The cause to which the various authorities and Medical Officers of
Health directly attributed it was the one immediately before their
eyes--namely, the pulling down of houses which hitherto had afforded
shelter, of a sort, to the people.
As the Medical Officer of Health for St. Olave, Southwark, said
(1860-1):--
"To effect street improvements--to build warehouses, or for some other
purpose--the habitations of the working classes are broken up without
any provision being made for them elsewhere. They are therefore driven
by necessity to crowd into other houses in the same neighbourhood
perhaps already overcrowded."
An actual illustration was the case reported by the Medical Officer of
Health for Limehouse:--
"The London Dock Company have, for the purpose of enlarging and
improving their docks, pulled down not less than 400 houses in the
parish of Shadwell, the homes of not fewer than 3,000 persons of the
poorer classes.
"... The neighbouring parishes are now suffering from an augmentation
of their already overcrowded population."
The District Board of St. Saviour, Southwark, stated that the evil of
overcrowding "can scarcely be exaggerated, whether it be regarded in a
physical, mental, or moral aspect."
The principal of the causes are:--
"(1) The arbitrary power exercised by railway companies in ejecting the
labouring classes from their homes without any obligation to provide
for their domestic convenience.
"(2) The existing law of (poor law) removal, any break in the three
years' residence in the parish rendering them liable to removal to
other distant parishes."
The latter had, however, most probably, but very small effect.
A great cause was that described by the Medical Officer of Health for
Shoreditch:--
"There is a constant and rapid flow of population into Shoreditch. It
is in this circumstance that I see one of the most alarming dangers to
the health of the district.
"The area does not enlarge, and yet year after year dense crowds of
human beings are packed and squeezed into that limited area. The
growth of the population has far outstripped the growth of the house
accommodation.
"The immense majority of the immigrants are precisely of that class
which most largely increases the dangers of disease by thickening the
population. You are largely burdened with the pauperism of other and
wealthier districts. The burden is doubly grievous; for it taxes your
property, your labour, and gives strength to the elements of disease
amongst you.
"It is probable that there is no spot in London more crowded with life
than many places in Holywell or St. Leonard's.
"Typhus--a disease more terrible than cholera--has made itself at home
in the parish."
And the Medical Officer of Health for Fulham wrote (1857):--
"... The daily necessities of the labourer's family draw so heavily
on his earnings as to leave only a very small sum for the payment of
rent, and hence the most limited house accommodation is sought for and
endured...."
The most powerful cause of all, however, was, undoubtedly, the
overpowering instinct of self-preservation, or, in other words, the
need of working, no matter under what conditions, for the only means
of obtaining food for themselves and their families. That, as a rule,
necessitated their being near the work to be done--and rather than lose
that work any conceivable hardship or abomination would be put up with.
Another of the great causes of overcrowding was high rent.
"It must not be imagined," wrote the Medical Officer of Health for the
Strand (1858), "that this system of overcrowding is altogether a direct
consequence of a state of poverty. It certainly does not appear to be
so, for among the Metropolitan Districts the Strand ranks seventh in
order of wealth.
"The overcrowding seems to be partly a result of the high rental which
the houses and rooms of many parts of the district--so peculiarly well
situate for business purposes--command, and partly of the 'middleman'
system, in which so many of the houses in the occupation of the poorer
residents are let.
"The 'middleman' system, which obtains so largely in this metropolis,
in the letting of houses of the kind referred to, is ruinous in its
action upon the working classes. The rent paid for a single room often
exceeds a sixth or fifth of the total income of the family...."
In a case in Bow Street Police Court it was given in evidence that 21,
Church Lane, St. Giles', was rented of the owner for £25 a year--that
the rents recovered from the sub-tenants were £58 10s.--and the rents
received by these sub-tenants from lodgers £120 per annum.[65]
Overcrowding was not confined to the sleeping places of the people, for
the same causes which cramped the available space for people at night,
cramped also the space for very many of them during the day when they
were away from their so-called homes.
Of the overcrowding in factories and workshops, where so many of the
working classes spent their days, and of the insanitary conditions in
which they there worked, no mention is made in these earlier reports
of the Medical Officers of Health, not because there were not any, but
because the inspection or regulation of factories and workshops did not
come within the sphere of their duties. Evidence in plenty there is on
this branch of the subject in later years from those who could speak
with authority in the matter, and it will be referred to hereafter,
and that the state of things then described is equally applicable to
this period is an inference so legitimate as to be tantamount to a
certainty. That the bad conditions under which the workers worked were
a great contributing factor in the insanitary condition of the people
is a fact as to which there can be no question.
Mention is made, however, of the overcrowding which existed in another
large section of the community--namely, the overcrowding of children
in some of the schools. The Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel
reported that there was much overcrowding, and in his report for 1857
gave some instances of it in his district:--
18, _Charlotte Street_.--In a room 8 feet high, 7 wide, 10 long: 14
children and 1 mistress = 37 cubic feet each.
17, _Charlotte Street_.--Matters still worse; the room was underground;
10 feet wide, 10 long; about 7 feet high; 35 children and 1 mistress =
20 cubic feet each.
2, _Gorelston Street_.--672 cubic feet; 31 children and 1 mistress = 20
cubic feet each.
In such cases the atmosphere must have been a rapid poison to those
breathing it.
There was another powerful contributory cause to the general
insanitation of London, namely, the defilement of the atmosphere which
people had to breathe. As one of the Medical Officers of Health said
some years later:--
"We should remember that the air we breathe is as much our food as the
solids we eat and the liquids we drink, and as much care should be
taken that it is free from adulteration."
London was already the greatest manufacturing city in the world, and
the great volumes of smoke proceeding from the numerous factories
undoubtedly deteriorated the quality of the air. But it was the noxious
vapours proceeding from the various processes of manufacture classified
as "noxious trades" which rendered the atmosphere in many parts of
London dangerous to health.
Many were the descriptions given of the almost intolerable evils. Thus
the Medical Officer of Health for Rotherhithe reported in 1857:--
"In the mile length of Rotherhithe Street there are no less than nine
factories for the fabrication of patent manure, that is to say, nine
sources of foetid gases. The process gives out a stench which has
occasioned headache, nausea, vomiting, cough, &c. Many complaints have
been made by the inhabitants."
From St. Mary, Newington, "the terrible effluvium of bone-boiling is
freely transmitted over the district."
Some manufacture in a yard in Clerkenwell (1856-7), which had existed
until lately, was "one of the most abominable, exceeding anything that
the imagination could picture."
And in every parish or district of London there were slaughter-houses.
"There are too many slaughter-houses in crowded districts," wrote the
Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras (1856-7). "It is impossible
that slaughtering of animals can be carried on amongst a dense
population without proving more or less injurious to the public health.
"This it does in several ways--by occasioning the escape of effluvia
from decomposing animal refuse into the air and along the drains, and
by the numerous trades to which it gives rise in the neighbourhood
which are offensive and noxious, such as gut-spinning, tallow-melting,
bladder-blowing, and paunch-cleansing."
Even in the Strand District there were (1856)--
"Nuisances arising from various branches of industry, the slaughtering
of sheep and calves in the back-yards, and even in the cellars and
kitchens, and the keeping of cows in the basements under private
dwelling-houses, conditions which continue to exist in the most crowded
parts of this district, and should on no account be permitted in such
a district:" whilst in Westminster "pig-keeping existed to a very
considerable extent."
In some of the outer parishes the "foetid emanations" caused in the
process of brickmaking added to the general impurity of the air.
There were many other local causes of impurity of the atmosphere, some
even caused by the Sanitary Authorities themselves. Thus the more
thorough scavenging and removal of the filth of streets and houses,
vitally necessary as that was, resulted in the accumulation of great
heaps of filth in crowded centres.
Thus the Medical Officer of Health for Fulham reported that:--
"The collection of dust heaps, and dust contractors' depôts, constitute
a most injurious and offensive nuisance--enormous quantities of animal
and vegetable matter are heaped together, from which the most noxious
effluvia constantly arise."
And the Medical Officer of Health for Rotherhithe pointed out (1858)
that:--
"It is little use causing our own dust to be carted away if Rotherhithe
is to become the receptacle of all the ashes and offal of a large
neighbouring parish (Bermondsey). On a piece of land near the Viaduct
there stands an immense heap of house refuse, covering an acre of
ground at least, and forming quite an artificial hillock, the level
of the surface having been raised 12-14 feet. The bulk of the heap is
composed of ashes with a due admixture of putrefying vegetable matter
and fish."
A little later he reports it as 1-1/2 acres in extent, averaging 15
feet high, in one place as high as 20 feet.
How to deal with these noxious or offensive trades was felt by some of
the Medical Officers of Health to be a great difficulty.
"We have the health of the community on the one hand," wrote the
Medical Officer of Health for Lambeth; "the great manufacturing
interests on the other.... We have all a common right to an unpolluted
atmosphere, and it is our bounden duty to withstand any encroachments
on that right. The personal aggrandisement of the manufacturer must not
be achieved by the spoliation of the property, the comforts, and the
lives of his poorer neighbours....
"But the manufacturing interest is not a thing to be trifled with.
Destroy the manufactures of Lambeth, and you starve its population.
There are nuisances of more benefit than of injury to the community,"
and he rather deprecated "a crusade against those interests, the
untrammelled prosecution of which has raised this country to its
present proud pre-eminence."
Some of the Medical Officers of Health expressed decided views on the
subject (1857):--
"Those who follow unwholesome trades led on by the thirst of gain,"
reported one Medical Officer of Health, "have no right to poison a
neighbourhood and swell its mortality."
The Medical Officer of Health for the Strand wrote (1856):--
"... The protection of the public health which has been committed to
your charge is, beyond doubt, of infinitely more importance than, and
should far outweigh the interests of, private individuals how numerous
soever they should be."
The Nuisances Removal Act, 1855, had given the local authority power on
the certificate of the Medical Officer of Health to take proceedings
against an offender, and had provided the means for inflicting a
penalty. And in some instances it was used, for the Medical Officer of
Health for Hackney reported:--
"Several proprietors of noxious trades having omitted to adopt the best
practicable means for preventing injury to health, in some cases legal
proceedings were taken against them."