High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Bazalgette had cut his teeth on great railway projects in the 1840s, but had also undertaken land drainage and reclamation projects. He had joined the Metropolitan Sewers Commission as assistant surveyor in 1849, succeeding to the post of engineer three years later when the incumbent, Frank Forster, died of stress and overwork. Bazalgette himself had come to work for the Commission while recovering from a nervous breakdown because of his exertions during the ‘railway mania’. What he found in his early days at the Commission will not have improved his mental health. He made unofficial inspections of existing sewers and found them often in a shocking state of repair and requiring wholesale replacement. It was during these years that Bazalgette and his colleagues updated a plan by Forster for a London main drainage scheme, a plan that would have to remain a pipe dream for want of funds or, indeed, of political vision.

  Another cholera epidemic in 1853 killed 10,738 Londoners. When the Metropolitan Board of Works succeeded the Commission in 1855, on an initiative by Sir Benjamin Hall, Palmerston’s First Commissioner of Works, Bazalgette became chief engineer, not least on the recommendation of his friend Isambard Kingdom Brunel. His plan was to build intercepting sewers along the north and south banks of the Thames, not tunnelling to build them, but running them along the contaminated beaches and foreshores and concealing them within new concrete embankments with roadways and public gardens above them. They would link up with his earlier plan for the London main drainage. His was not simply a scheme of sanitary improvement, but a massive infrastructure project that would also come to accommodate the underground railway from Tower Hill to Westminster. It was one of the most modernising projects in London’s history.

  Bazalgette wanted to build 1,300 miles of sewers to lead into a main network of three sewers north of the Thames, and two to the south, the main sewer network being 82 miles long. What was dumped miles downstream past Barking Creek was by that stage diluted by rainwater but was still untreated – and would remain so for many years – but at least the problem was removed from the seat of population. To assist the passage of the effluent Bazalgette built several pumping stations, at Chelsea, Deptford, in the Lea Valley and on the Erith marshes. His greatest stroke of genius, however, was to build his main sewers to a particularly wide bore. He had already plotted the size to account for a generous personal allowance of daily sewage for Londoners, but he then doubled it. As a result, modern London still uses Bazalgette’s infrastructure. He is the personification of the Victorian determination to build to last, and for the future.

  As well as a sewer running along the line of the river before diverting north-east near the Tower, another sewer would run from Kensington through the West End to north-east London, where it (like the Thames sewer) would link up in the Lea Valley with a sewer running through the expanding northern metropolis from Hampstead, which would carry on down to the river at Barking. South of the Thames, which was less populated, there would be two sewers, linking at Deptford before proceeding to outfall. The 82 miles of this main system had a capacity of 400 million gallons. Construction proceeded rapidly on all but the most important sewer, along the Thames, because of concerns about the cost and disruption to commercial life that its construction would cause. It was not until 1862 that Parliament agreed to what is now the Embankment being built from Westminster to Blackfriars, whence the sewer would divert up Queen Victoria Street to the City. The MBW was also overseeing road-building in the city, which coincided nicely with laying drains and sewers underneath.

  The northern network was functioning by 1868, the southern by 1875. Three major embanking projects were completed, beginning with the Albert in 1868, on the south bank opposite the Palace of Westminster, the Victoria on the north opposite it and leading up to Blackfriars in 1870, and the Chelsea in 1874. Once those tasks were completed Bazalgette oversaw the transfer of Thames bridges from private contractors, who collected tolls to fund their businesses, to the government: this required him not merely to value the bridges, but also design new ones; though his design for Tower Bridge was not built. The process of protecting London from being killed, literally, by its own filth had taken a typically Victorian course: endless wrangling among politicians about whether or not to spend the money, a final recognition of the inevitable caused by massive social change, and a determination to build what was necessary as permanently as possible.

  V

  The success of sanitary reform in London persuaded Parliament to apply the principle more widely across Britain, and to take a more active interest in the promotion of healthy living. The Sanitary Act 1866 compelled provision of sewers, water and street cleaning, banned overcrowding and set up Sanitary Inspectors. Such a measure was long overdue, and closed a loophole in the 1848 Act that enabled many towns to evade their responsibilities. Francis W. Newman, writing to Kingsley in 1851, described the way the sewers of the time worked: ‘Every running sewer has generated evil gas. So notorious is that fact that every sewer has holes which are periodically opened, to let out the gas against the unfortunate houses which happen to be near: did they not do so, the sewers would explode. Thus the sewers are worse than the cesspools, because they have so much greater a surface. The Sanitary Gentlemen say that ‘running’ sewer water generates no gas, but only odours. I do not yet believe them.’42 Bazalgette, who had an extensive private practice, was asked by a number of expanding towns to design their main drainage systems.

  An Act of 1835 had allowed large towns to become chartered and set up municipal corporations. By 1861 a total of 29 had done so, but the only obligation on a town that had been chartered under the new Act was to set up a constabulary. Like much legislation of the time it merely enabled, rather than compelled, the local authority to undertake certain actions. Even so long as the legislation was permissive it started to have an effect on improving not just quality of life, but also lifespan. The overall death rate in Liverpool fell from an average 31 per thousand between 1850 and 1855 to 25.6 per thousand in 1885. But in the 1850s slums still teemed in most British cities, and so long as they did lethal disease went with them. At this time, for example, the industrial canal in Bradford was so polluted, and giving off such toxic gases, that youths could set fire to it on hot summer days.43

  However, many of those same cities embarked on improvements, beginning with new municipal headquarters from which to direct the modernisation of the locality. The growing success of industry and the creation of wealth provided the money to start this process, and an idea of civic pride grew up in many newly expanded towns. This led to the building of town halls and other civic institutions. Towns such as Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Glasgow and Newcastle-upon-Tyne acquired great town halls and other municipal buildings that expressed the status of the community. More than a century and a half later, the image we have of many of those cities even today is rooted in the period of their greatest pomp in the nineteenth century, and tied to the success of the industries to which they were home.

  Cities grew in different ways and for different reasons. Manchester was built on the cotton trade, Bradford on wool. Joe Chamberlain’s biographer, J. L. Garvin, described the Birmingham of this era as a ‘dense, formless creation of the machine age . . . a powerhouse of moral and material energies.’44 The town was characterised in the early nineteenth century as a place of small manufacturing businesses, where the enterprises rapidly grew. If it became well known for anything it was the gun trade, and prospered abnormally during the Crimean War. But it also specialised in all sorts of metalwork, from the nibs for fountain pens to the screws made by Chamberlain’s family. It was a city that flourished on free trade, but which had to ensure it kept ahead of its rivals. Chamberlain’s own job, as a young man in the late 1850s, was to ensure that with the valuable patent rights for the new, pointed screws and their manufacture that his uncle and father had obtained from America, the firm could dominate not just the British market but Europe as well.

  This, too, was when steam-driven machine-made goods
improved the profitability of businesses and the prosperity of the city. Modernisation brought casualties, or at least men who had to adapt. The many small manufacturers of blunt-ended handmade screws whom Nettlefold and Chamberlain put out of business often ended up working in the factory of their nemesis: that was thanks to Joe Chamberlain’s success as a salesman, and the new markets he conquered, which managed to provide work for many who had not caught the tide of change. That was not the half of it, however: as Garvin recalls, ‘the work-people gained by larger and lighter buildings, better sanitary conditions, more regular employment, shorter hours and higher wages, as well as by the firm’s “welfare work”, far ahead of general example.’45 This was the progressive Birmingham that John Bright, having lost his seat in Manchester, would represent in Parliament, and of which Chamberlain would become a radical, and phenomenally successful, mayor.

  Bright and Chamberlain were at opposite ends of the Liberal spectrum, but had important things in common. Chamberlain, like Bright, lost his first wife when still young, in his case two days after the birth of the first son, Austen, in 1863. And, like Bright, Chamberlain threw himself into his work to anaesthetise the pain of his bereavement. This was not just at the screw factory. He was a deeply religious man – a Unitarian, whereas Bright was a Quaker – and used much of his spare time doing good works, and teaching in Sunday school. Yet he became a founder member of the Birmingham Liberal Association when it was formed in 1865, and that would become his political power base.

  Because of Bright’s association with Birmingham the city became a centre of the reform agitation in 1866–7: and it was then that Chamberlain felt himself drawn into politics. In August 1866, after the defeat of Gladstone’s Reform Bill, an estimated quarter of a million attended a reform rally just outside the city. Chamberlain was marched to the rally, and that evening heard Bright address a smaller, packed gathering in Birmingham town hall. After reform Chamberlain, like many other middle-class people, worried about the uneducated having the vote. What drew him into local government first and foremost was the need to provide schools for the poor in Birmingham. Around half the children in the city in 1867 received no education at all: and around half of the newly enfranchised were illiterate. Chamberlain was a founder member of the Education Society in the city, which pondered how best to improve matters.

  In a campaign reminiscent of Shaftesbury’s Ragged School movement, volunteers scoured the streets for children. There was a fund-raising drive to pay the fees of some of them: though the money raised was inadequate to the task. Chamberlain himself was deeply driven. ‘It is as much the duty of the State to see that the children are educated as to see that they are fed,’ he wrote in 1867, and added that ‘the enjoyment of this right ought not to depend on the caprice of charity or the will of parents.’46 The Society’s aims were free education for all those whose parents could not afford it, and an unsectarian education in all new or State-supported schools. His concerns anticipate the debate in 1870 over the Education Bill, but they are significant in his case as the motive force that brought him into politics.

  Chamberlain became a councillor in November 1869, not least to find a platform from which to advocate educational reform. His agitation during the passage of the Education Bill in 1870 has already been described. Once it was law, and allowed the subsidising of Anglican schools by dissenters and Nonconformists, he became even more aggressive in his political activity. He threatened to lead a rates strike in Birmingham and, along with numerous others, to have bailiffs come to seize his property rather than give a farthing to the maintenance of a denominational school. It did not come to this, because the Anglicans who controlled the school board in Birmingham lost their majority, and the Liberal-dominated council endorsed Chamberlain’s position. His was a powerful example, however, of how the ‘new men’ were determined to shape the new industrial cities of Britain, and not leave it up to an old Establishment or their representatives to do so instead. And, outside politics, the success of his business resulted in its building new works and setting up its own iron mills. By the early 1870s, for good measure, Chamberlain had taken over almost the entire Birmingham screw trade, first by buying up his main rivals, and then by crushing the minnows that were left.

  By late 1873 he had no rival for the post of Mayor, and determined to bring Birmingham, with a population of around 300,000, completely into the modern world. He determined on a programme of sanitary reform, new street lighting, and numerous architectural improvements. He used his considerable experience in business to find the revenues for the city to do all these things. He persuaded the council to agree to buy the two local gas companies that held the monopoly in the city. Running them like businesses and not, in the manner of twentieth-century nationalised industries, like social services, he turned a profit of £25,000 in the first six months of municipal ownership. As this profitability continued, so was the money found to improve Birmingham.

  Having accomplished this, Chamberlain then won approval for the compulsory purchase of the municipal water system, which was largely primitive and still a carrier of disease. The water companies had been less willing to sell than the gas companies. Chamberlain argued that natural monopolies ought not to be in private hands, but should be controlled by the representatives of the people. At least fifty or sixty other large towns now owned their water supplies, and had upgraded them and run them at a profit. Chamberlain did not seek to run the water supply in order to fund more improvements: he sought to run it in order to give everyone in Birmingham a clean, reliable supply, and to reduce the cost of it. This led to a wider improvement in sanitation and a new sewerage system. Then came the greatest health improvements of all: slum clearance, restrictions on the emission of smoke, and the extension of hospitals. He also had 100 miles of pavements renewed and gave a large sum of his own money for the improvement of the Art Gallery. Perhaps most significant of all, he ensured an assize court was established in Birmingham. Previously the perquisite of a medieval town, its establishment showed Birmingham had arrived.

  VI

  Much of the growth of cities after 1840 was directly attributable to ‘Railway Mania’. Not only could goods be moved more cheaply: so could people. For the first time ‘mobility of labour’ began to mean something. Nor were the benefits simply economic: minds were opened, and broadened. People who had scarcely strayed beyond the next village went across counties and countries. Some of them saw the country more widely than anyone had ever done: such as Matthew Arnold, whose itinerant life as a schools inspector entailed his spending undue hours in railway-station waiting rooms, but also allowed him to acquire a strong grasp of what England was really like.

  Engineers such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, architect of the Great Western Railway and designer of three great steamships, were synonymous with this movement. Scarcely less of an achievement was that of George Parker Bidder, who as well as helping to build the London to Birmingham railway also built the Victoria Docks in London, and was responsible for the expansion of the electric telegraph along the railway network and under the sea. Britain was expanding, but it and the world were shrinking. This social and industrial revolution was also driven by Robert Stephenson, remembered today for his feats of engineering railway bridges; and by Daniel Gooch, the greatest locomotive engineer of his day.

  Early on, governments saw the economic potential of the railways, but also the potential dangers: one prominent politician, William Huskisson, had been killed by Stephenson’s Rocket at the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway in 1830. Gladstone, as President of the Board of Trade in 1844, had introduced regulations specifying the standards to which railways should be built, to protect the public. In 1845 the average express train on the London and North Western Railway was travelling at an awesome 37 miles per hour, an almost shocking prospect for many.47

  It was easier to protect passengers’ physical safety, however, than to guarantee the financial security of investors. Also in 1844 Gladstone introduce
d a bill to regulate the commercial activities of railways, which made the provision of cheap travel for the lower classes a condition of running a railway (it became known as the ‘parliamentary train’). The law specified that ‘each company be required to run over their line on each weekday at least one train conveying third-class passengers in carriages provided with seats and protected from the weather, at a speed of not less than twelve miles an hour, including stoppages, and at a fare not exceeding one penny a mile for adults, children under twelve half price, and under three free, 56lb of luggage to be allowed without charge.’48 The provision of third-class accommodation was often beyond basic: in some instances simply planks set in a low wagon, which in a notorious accident at Sonning in Berkshire on Christmas Eve 1841 caused people to fall out and break their necks when the train was hit by a landslide; or people were conveyed in what were effectively cattle-trucks, standing up with no possibility of sitting down. Gladstone recognised that the railways would become a national resource, like the highways, and the bill also gave the government the power to buy any railways built subsequent to its enactment after a period of twenty-one years.

  Railways were not regarded as an unmixed blessing, even though they shrank distances and supercharged prosperity: the more rapid movement of goods facilitated trade and enhanced choice for consumers, and the greater ease of the movement of people around cities such as London, Manchester and Birmingham caused the development of suburbs. But suburbs eroded countryside, as the population of England and Wales grew by more than 10 per cent between 1851 and 1861. The railways themselves carved through hundreds of linear miles of hitherto untroubled rurality; they altered the cohesion of communities by linking villages to nearby towns; they created noise and, above all, change. They helped broaden horizons and create restlessness and curiosity. More prosaically, many people put their shirts on speculative ventures concerning the railways, and lost them.