High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  It was clear that moral and religious as well as sanitary considerations were at work.

  Another speaker, Joseph Hume, quoted a Dr Reid on the subject ‘of the extent of the evil arising from the miasma of graveyards’.17 The doctor had ‘detected deleterious gases escaping from graves 20 feet deep, and stated that he had found the ground in many churchyards perfectly saturated with carbonic acid gas’. Hume said that the philanthropists who ‘employed thousands and tens of thousands for the benefit of people in foreign countries whom they knew nothing of, might turn their humane intentions to the position of their fellow countrymen at home.’ Graham, whose responsibility this was, however claimed that the British people would rather cling to their customs, and bury their dead among the living. He disputed that the existing graveyards spread ill health – he quoted the proximity of the House of Commons to St Margaret’s churchyard, and argued how exceptionally healthy everyone in that part of Westminster appeared to be.

  For all his talk of not offending ‘social and religious feelings’, Graham’s opposition suggested other considerations, notably the possibility of great public expense in buying land for cemeteries. He also sought to ridicule Chadwick, who had suggested precisely that policy, with the government taking over responsibility for the safe and sanitary disposal of corpses.18 Graham could not promise this: it is yet another example of his resisting inevitable change until forced upon him, and another reason why his historical reputation is poor. He was attacked by later speakers for ignoring the overload on some parish churches in urban areas to hold funerals: one spoke of a church where fifteen had been fixed for the same hour.19

  Lord Lincoln suggested suburban cemeteries would be impossible for the poor to use, because of the ‘very burdensome’ cost of moving the corpse and transporting the mourners ‘from St Giles’s to Hampstead or Harrow.’20 Lincoln also attacked Chadwick, claiming his proposals would ‘make the rich pay for the poor’, since a tax would have to be raised to pay for new arrangements. Graham returned to the dispatch box, and maintained again that ‘the remedy proposed by Mr. Chadwick appeared to him to be entirely inapplicable to the present feelings and wants of society’.21 He added that out-of-town burials were also ‘beset by equal difficulties arising from the objections of Dissenting bodies. To almost every Dissenting chapel there was a burial ground attached, in trust for all who worshipped in that chapel; and not only were their pecuniary interests thus involved, but their feelings also.’

  He continued: ‘If they determined that Churchmen and Dissenters should not bury in the accustomed places of sepulture, but at a distance from towns, then every poor individual wishing to attend his friend to his long home must forego a day’s wages; and in winter he must travel four or five miles from home and back. To attend a funeral would be extremely inconvenient, unless conveyances were provided; and if they were provided, the cost to the poor would be oppressive. There was a desire in the human breast of laying our bones beside those of our departed relatives and friends. This feeling . . . was stronger than reason, and was connected with the best sentiments of human nature.’

  IV

  Since 1815 it had been permissible for London’s domestic waste to be poured into the Thames. Coinciding as this did with a great expansion in the city’s population, and the development of industries on the south bank of the river, this could hardly have been a worse policy. Poor people lived in extreme squalor, many to a room, with nothing resembling modern conveniences. Those who either could not afford a cesspit, or to have them emptied, simply dumped waste in the gutters, hoping it would be washed away. Before the internal combustion engine the streets were strewn with horse manure, pushed into gutters by crossing-sweepers (who would be tipped a penny or two for their trouble by the quality as they crossed the road). Horse and human waste was carried out of the city every night, but this barely addressed the problem. It was also estimated that by the 1850s around 1,000 horses a week were being destroyed, presenting the problem of disposing of their rotting carcases.22 Within a little over thirty years, and not entirely because of the cholera epidemics, it was obvious that London’s effluent disposal policy would have to change, or there would be a calamity.

  Britain in the 1840s was still susceptible to cholera, because of the foul water recycled for drinking: 52,000 died in the outbreak of 1848–9, an estimated 14,000 of them in London, the capital’s problems exacerbated by an order to close all cesspits. The Public Health Act 1848, which made this order, also set up a central board of health, forced towns with a death rate of more than twenty-three per thousand to set up local boards of health, and allowed other towns to set up boards if 10 per cent wanted them. It also set up the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers in London, whose policy was strongly influenced by Edwin Chadwick, who also led it. It set about trying to empty all the cesspits in the capital – it was estimated there were 200,000 of them – and have all the effluent pumped into the Thames. The flush lavatory had been patented by Joseph Bramah in 1778 and by the start of the Victoria’s reign was found in most well-to-do households. Its popularity caused the amount of contaminated water to increase greatly, and cesspits routinely overflowed. This was before the physician John Snow argued in 1854 that cholera was waterborne, though others were slow to believe him, preferring instead to think it was airborne, passed on through a ‘miasma’.

  In 1854 Palmerston had told the Commons that the Commissioner of Sewers (Chadwick had long been relieved of his post because of a bureaucratic shambles at the Commission, and also because of a series of disagreements with the engineers) had made a plan that he ‘had thought might probably be adopted for the great arterial drainage of London in parallel lines, or at least in some relation to the course of the Thames, with a view of preventing the sewage of London from falling into the river’.23 A debate continued about the relative merits of small-bore against large-bore sewers, and Palmerston mentioned that the former, obviously, were cheaper. Henry Drummond, the MP for West Surrey, spoke of how cholera had been an ever-present threat for seven or eight years, and yet no one had done anything about it. There were more flush lavatories in London with each day that passed, and ‘the Thames was getting dirtier every day, because the more water that was introduced into the dwellings of the poor the more filth was driven into the Thames.’24

  Despite the plans to build new main sewers, the cost – a rate of three-farthings in the pound – was deemed too much. There were even plans to defray the cost by making the sewage suitable for agricultural purposes: but the plan in 1854 for the sewers along the Thames did not include ones branching out to take away the effluent from other communities far from the river. So still nothing was done, because the richest nation in the world would not afford the cost. That is not to say that the Commission was entirely inert; from 1849 to 1854 inclusive it laid 163 miles of public sewers and 366 miles of private ones. However, The Times reported in July 1855 that ‘there are yet urgently required about 400 miles of sewers’, and about another 20 miles ‘so defective as to require rebuilding’.25 The cost it estimated at £1,500,000, and it was proposed by the parliamentary committee examining the question that bonds be sold to raise the money, as had happened in Paris for the embanking of the Seine.

  Over the next three years this conversation occurred several times in the Commons, with demands routinely being made to set a date after which no sewer would be allowed to be discharged into the Thames. In 1855, following much public and press criticism of the state of the river, the Metropolitan Board of Works was set up by Act of Parliament to undertake the sanitary improvement of the metropolis. All the board lacked was money. ‘Londoners were warned years ago that this noble stream was not intended by nature for a sewer,’ The Times wrote in July 1855, ‘and that it was an abominable perversion of the gifts of Providence to use it so’.26 The paper pointed out the blindingly obvious: the more effectually people removed effluent from their houses, the more effectually they polluted the river, the only receptacle for it now that cesspit
s had been banned. It expressed its exasperation that, given the requisite engineering science was available (and as Joseph Bazalgette, the eventual engineer of the sewerage system, would point out, had been for half a century), the metropolis did not get on with it, and build the necessary drainage system to distant outfalls. The alternative – reopening the cesspools – was unthinkable, but the river could not go on being ‘so very foul, so very fetid, and so thoroughly defiled’. Nor was it only the Thames that was being defiled, but its tributaries as well.

  The individual parish councils, or vestries, along the river could not be expected to find the funds to cure this health hazard. It did not merely require sewers: it also required embanking the river on both sides from around Chelsea to the Tower, because the human and animal waste floating in the river would often be cast up, fetid and pungent, on the pebbly foreshore that ran along its course through the cities of London and Westminster. For the moment, Parliament had no inclination to vote funds for the project.

  The matter always became more urgent in the summer, especially during heatwaves. This became acute in June 1858, when the Thames and the urban creeks that flowed into it overflowed with sewage. The temperatures were in the 80s Fahrenheit most days, there was no rain to wash away the effluent, and the Thames was by mid-June estimated to be 20 per cent sewage ‘and much of it lay spread out over the mud banks, literally boiling in the sun’.27 Some who had to cross Westminster Bridge required smelling salts to do so. A correspondent wrote to The Times on 16 June that ‘I took my wife and a country lady up the river from London Bridge to Kew on Saturday last, and . . . the stench from the water was unbearable. Our country friend felt “awful queer” in such an atmosphere.’28 Another described the Thames as ‘a huge sewer’ and the smell ‘abominable’. Two days later another correspondent, a lawyer resident in the Temple, wrote that ‘if I open my windows in rushes the stench, and I imbibe large draughts of the poisonous matter . . . I am quite conscious of the fact that I am being killed by inches.’29 He was outraged that the government was doing nothing: ‘I want to know if they are waiting for a pestilence to break out before they will do any thing; if they think it will be quite time enough to commence their labours when the dead cart shall have begun its rounds.’

  On 15 June the shade temperature in London reached 91.2 degrees Fahrenheit. The next day it was 92.6 degrees. It was perhaps as well for the people of London that among the first to be affected by the mephitic smell from the river were members of the legislature. When the Irish MP John Brady said that MPs sitting in the Committee Rooms and in the Library ‘were utterly unable to remain there in consequence of the stench which arose of the river’, Lord John Manners, the First Commissioner of Works, simply shrugged his shoulders and replied that ‘the River Thames was not in his jurisdiction, and therefore not under his control.’30 This attitude was attacked as ‘nonsense’ by a Times correspondent, who wrote that ‘if it is not technically their business now, they can easily make it so; parliament is absolute.’31 A few days later, when the smell had become worse, Manners repeated that the river was nothing to do with him, or with the government, but for the Metropolitan Board of Works that had been set up under an Act of 1855 to coordinate the maintenance of London’s infrastructure. The board took a slow approach to the problem, causing one MP to propose putting its members on a river steamer, and sending them up and down the river to see – and presumably smell – the problem.32 There were warnings that if cholera came to London, with the present state of the river, there would be death on a scale not seen since the plague of 1665. Cartloads of fish were taken out of the Thames daily poisoned to death, whereas within living memory there had been salmon in the river.

  The problem was where to put the sewage, and how to get it there. Specialist engineers called in to advise the Board had said London would probably treble in size ‘in a few years’, so there was no point in half measures in building a new sewerage system. The cost would be £10 million or £11 million. A plan had been drawn up in 1855 for fifty-one sewers on the north side of the river and twenty on the south, to be in place by the end of 1860: but nothing had happened, because of a reluctance to spend money. In the Palace of Westminster canvas blinds inside the open windows were moistened with a mixture of zinc and lime to purify the air. Boatloads of lime were being spread over the mud banks by the river to try to neutralise the smell at source: the lack of efficacy of these measures should, however, have been manifest to anyone inhaling in the Palace.

  The smell became still worse. An aggrieved correspondent wrote to The Times on 21 June to speculate that ‘if the members of both our Houses were to be suddenly seized with English cholera a committee sitting over the vapourous exhalations of the Thames would soon report that the river must be purified, and the fiat, supported by personal considerations, would be carried out notwithstanding all opposing sponsorship.’33 A week later there was a call for a Royal Commission to embank the Thames and build sewers ‘without delay’.34 The works manager at the Commons had told the Speaker that ‘he can no longer be responsible for the health of the House; that the stench has made most rapid advance within two days’. The miasma had also taken over the law courts, then still in Westminster Hall and adjacent to it. A doctor appearing as a witness in a case there had said it was not safe to breathe the air, and not safe for those with business at the courts to remain there: malaria and typhus were an immediate threat. The Lord Chief Baron had pronounced that ‘the stench from the river is most offensive, and I think to take public notice of this, that in trying this case we are really sitting in the midst of a stinking nuisance.’35 There had been cases of cholera, and the smell stretched from Chelsea to Greenwich.

  Around 90,000,000 gallons of sewage were discharged into the Thames daily; only four times that amount of pure water flowed down the river, insufficient to dilute it. For £2.5 million the sewage could be carried 10 miles to Barking Creek; or could be taken 20 miles further east, and pumped into the sea – but that would lead to much of it being carried back up the river at flood tide. Sir Joseph Paxton mentioned the plan of Joseph Bazalgette, who had said that for £6 million he could take the sewage down to the German Ocean – the North Sea. ‘It was important that the matter should not be done in a niggardly way, and if London was to be drained it should be done effectually’; but he did not believe there was any need to embank the river.36 He felt it could be done with ‘intercepting sewers’ – which would intercept existing drains and take all their effluent as far as Barking Creek. Given the urgency, he could not see the point of a formal commission: the job should simply be done.

  Yet money remained the great obstacle. The estimate for the sewer laid down when Victoria Street had been built a few years earlier had been £12,000. It had in fact cost £70,000 and the sum was still rising, and some feared it would end up costing £200,000. Committing to two great sewers – one north and the other south of the river – would be a huge commitment of money. MPs realised the government would have to find the money to sanitise what was, after all, the Imperial capital. The works would take years; but would never be finished if they were not started. Meanwhile, The Times published a leading article venting the spleen of the upper-middle classes: ‘Foreigners have always been disappointed in London, but now-a-days they are astonished, not to say disgusted . . . London proper is becoming more foul and dingy and dilapidated and stinking every day. The Parisian, the Viennese, the New Yorker is surprised at the meanness of the houses, the closeness and smallness of the shops, and the general slovenliness and want of care which meet the eye on every side.’37

  Two days later a doctor from Bermondsey, John Challice, said that ‘I have daily persons consulting me who have been seized with nausea, sickness, and diarrhoea, by them attributed to the effects of the effluvia from the river. Some have complained that the peculiar taste remained on their palate for days.’ He warned that the river was becoming daily more poisonous, and that were an epidemic of cholera to occur its effects would b
e ‘unprecedented’.38 One MP after another piled on the tales of suffering to make the point that the taxpayer would have to fund sewers.39 However, the argumentum ad pecuniam could be applied in more than one way. George Bentinck, a Norfolk MP, deplored that the taxpayer should fund the sewers, when London was so wealthy, and London would be the main beneficiary. Disraeli, as Chancellor, agreed the government had no legal responsibility to tackle the Great Stink: but it did, he felt, have a moral one ‘to prevent public disaster’. He declared that ‘the time has come when it is absolutely necessary that action should commence.’40 He criticised Palmerston for setting up the Metropolitan Board of Works and then not funding it – it relied on rates collected from individual vestries, or parishes, in London, and these were inadequate for serious projects. He would ensure the Board was funded, and the Great Stink finally tackled. The next day Charles Greville recorded in his diary that ‘the foul state of the Thames . . . has suddenly assumed vast proportions’.41

  The deliberations of a parliamentary committee during July ended in the Commons voting the money for the project, requiring a 3d in the pound tax for forty years on the inhabitants of London. In 1859 the Metropolitan Board of Works embarked on the massive project. The main responsibility devolved on the MBW’s chief engineer, Joseph Bazalgette. Despite Snow’s strong arguments to the contrary, it was still believed that it was the ‘miasma’ from the smell that caused cholera, rather than the contamination of water by sewage. Bazalgette’s plan to take sewage far downstream before letting it out into the river – so far downstream that it would not be washed back up to the metropolis – removed the smell, but also, unintentionally, removed the problem. There would be one further outbreak of cholera – in 1866, in east London – but this was because of water from the polluted River Lea entering a reservoir. Once rectified – further proving Snow’s point about cholera being waterborne – London had no more epidemics.