The Tyranny of Numbers

by David Boyle

  Working up to 12 hours a day, wearing out subordinates and almost never taking a holiday, Chadwick moved slowly towards his goal – making scores of enemies along the way. He was now fighting rearguard actions against other campaigners who thought the solution was better building regulations, engineers who disliked amateurs designing sewage systems, and doctors who thought it was a matter of preventing infection. Chadwick never believed in the idea of germs. Anyone who counts finds it hard to distinguish between causes and effects, and Chadwick was no exception. It was ‘miasma’ which caused disease and cleanliness was the cure. ‘All smell is, if it be intense, immediate acute disease,’ he wrote, and until his death he never doubted it.

  By 1847, the first Public Health Act was making its way through Parliament to set up a General Board of Health. It turned out to be only just in time.

  IV

  In the months before the new law, Chadwick had been hurrying to get his reports out and to persuade the government to take over London’s rival sewer commissions – useless squabbling bodies, some of them set up in the time of Henry VIII – knowing that a cholera epidemic was creeping across Europe. In the face of this looming catastrophe, and the outright hostility of the doctors and the press, he worked night and day to prepare his Nuisances Removal Act, giving special powers to the new board. As the MPs debated the bill, the first deaths were reported from Berlin.

  He had one stroke of luck. ‘He never asked a favour of his superiors that did not smack of ultimatum,’ wrote one of his biographers, but at long last, Chadwick finally was given a superior he could work with. The evangelical campaigner Lord Ashley may have been given to pious exclamations and public prayer, but he had forgiven Chadwick for sinking his Ten Hours Bill – and became an enthusiastic ally as chairman of the board.

  By the summer of 1848, the board was ready. No minutes were taken at meetings because of the urgency of sending out questionnaires and circulars. By September, the first case of cholera was reported in Sunderland. The traditional quarantine regulations, which Chadwick so ridiculed, were put into effect. Then on 28 September, his nuisance removal powers came into force for the first time, the superintendent of quarantine lost his authority, and Chadwick sent out his first house visitors to check out the filth. The doctors raged. The Lancet described Chadwick’s behaviour as ‘buccaneering piracy against medicine’.

  The epidemic slowly withdrew, but by the following summer it was back with a vengeance. This time it covered the whole country, killing as many as 14,000 people in London alone. As it made its lumbering approach, on 5 July 1849, a fearful letter appeared in The Times. It came from part of the former Rookery of St Giles, near where New Oxford Street currently runs, where 2,850 people were squeezed into 95 houses in little over an acre. It was to be the front line of the new battle:

  We live in muck and filthe. We ain’t got no privez, no dust bins, no drains, no water splies, and no drain or suer in the whole place. The Suer Company, in Greek Street, Soho Square, all great rich powerfool men, take no notice watsomedever of our complaints. The Stenche of a Gully-hole is disgustin. We al of us suffer, and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us.

  It was a battle. Many of the Poor Law guardians and the parishes refused to carry out his expensive instructions. Orders to clean up cesspools went unanswered. In Whitechapel they even ordered doctors not to visit the sick. At Tooting’s pauper school, where deaths in their crowded unventilated four-to-a-bed dormitories were running at 20 a day, they refused to remove the children. When Chadwick’s medical inspector reported that the dormitories were built over a stagnant sewer ditch, he took the law into his own hands and sent a force of 50 navvies to put things right with pickaxes and scoops.

  Even the instructions to close the overflowing graveyards were being ignored. Worse, the parishes were winning the court cases brought against them by the board. And the board’s decision to use quicklime on the bodies caused riots and widespread rumours that doctors were poisoning the water supply to reduce the population. ‘We must not parley,’ wrote Ashley to Chadwick at the height of the action. ‘The necessity for action is immediate, urgent, paramount to all law, right or interest. At once refuse to receive deputations, and direct law to act instantly. I will take any amount of responsibility.’

  By the beginning of September, deaths had reached 2,000 a week and the system of house-to-house visits came back into effect. The inspectors found many homes where adults and children were blue in the face, dying in each room. The battle was also taking its toll on the board. With London emptied of anyone who could afford to leave, their officials were slowly succumbing to illness and exhaustion. Even Chadwick had collapsed with suspected cholera, and for two weeks alone in the office, Ashley struggled to run the operation by himself, praying each morning – reverting in Chadwick’s absence to very un-Chadwickian language. ‘We are now in the City of Plague,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and still by God’s love under his shield and buckler.’

  When Chadwick returned, able to speak only in a whisper, it was to hear that the Treasury had refused to let him appoint more inspectors. That day 500 people died in London alone.

  But it was becoming clear that the epidemic had broken and on 6 November, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation for general thanksgiving. This time, The Times was firmly on the side of Chadwick and the centralizers. ‘The parochial officers did nothing – absolutely nothing,’ they said reviewing the disaster:

  They left the graveyards festering – the cesspools seething – the barrels of blood steaming in the underground shambles – the great mounds of scrutch putrefying in the Bermondsey glue yards … They rejected the medical officer’s counsel, even mutilated his reports and only in the fifteenth week of a mortality unparalleled for two centuries did they consent to the nomination of the domiciliary inspectors.

  Their behaviour had paved the way for Chadwick’s schemes for what The Times had previously dubbed ‘French centralization’. With the epidemic over, he settled down to extending his powers over the dirtiest towns in the country, designing new drainage systems, testing alternative water supplies for London from Richmond, Windsor and Farnham – even hiring a barge to spray sewage from the Bridgwater Canal, as an experimental method of disposing of London’s muck.

  He set up the Health of Towns Association and launched a campaigning publication (with his usual gift for the snappy title) called Weekly Sheet of Facts and Figures. And to fill its pages, across the country stalked his inspectors with their measuring rods and tables of data, recording the filth, testing it against the mortality statistics, interviewing the local doctors, and filing their reports back to Chadwick. ‘The town is old, and is in as bad a condition as Whitehaven, and I don’t know if I can say anything worse of it,’ reported inspector Robert Rawlinson from Hexham. ‘I am staying at the best Hotel in the town, but there is no watercloset, only a filthy privy at some distance, the way to it being past the kitchen. I have just been out in the dark and rain blundering and found someone in the place.’

  And so on and so on as the resistance clamoured around him, until once again, it forced him from office. Opposition came again from the parishes, from the trade unionists – ‘meat not sanitary regulations’, they chanted – and from the slum landlords and property owners who resented the expenditure being demanded of them. It came from the Private Enterprise Society, which believed Chadwick was at the heart of a giant socialist conspiracy. And increasingly it came from the engineers, led by Robert Stephenson and Joseph Bazalgette, who had their own plans for much larger brick-built sewers.

  Before the next epidemic had burned itself out, Chadwick and his colleagues would be turned out of the board, and poor old Southwood Smith would be sacked without a pension, at the age of sixty-six. Their downfall came at the hands of their new minister, the ex-officio president of the Board, Lord Seymour, the heir to the Duke of Somerset. In two years of office, Seymour came to only three meetings. And in July 1854, with cholera back in Britain, h
e attacked the board in the House of Commons. ‘The whole thing is perfectly monstrous,’ he said. ‘Some engineer whom no one else would employ, or some medical man whom nobody would consult, would be anxious to have the Health of Towns Act applied to his district; he would then get a few signatures …’ There followed other wild accusations – junkets to Paris, ‘interfering with everybody and everything’.

  A storm of hate crashed around Chadwick. ‘Every county, town, and village may obtain universal health and a large income from the sale of sewerage on one condition,’ said an anonymous diatribe in the magazine Engineers and Officials. ‘Unquestioning, blind, passive obedience to the ukase, decree, bull, or proclamation of the autocrat, pope, grand lama of sanitary reform, Edwin Chadwick.’

  And that was that. He was pleased to get a letter from Lord Palmerston thanking him for the ‘indefatigable manner’ in which he had performed his duties, until he discovered that Southwood Smith had received exactly the same letter. Chadwick got a pension of £1,000 a year. In the final 36 years of his life, he never had a proper job again.

  V

  The great cholera epidemic of 1848–9 was the high point of Chadwick’s life. The problem was that, for all his figures, he had got the problem wrong. Not disastrously so: the epidemic broke out in the same house in Leith as it had in 1832, and in Bermondsey next to the same ditch. His measures were right, but for the wrong reasons. The germs he so ridiculed were in fact responsible, as Dr John Snow discovered when he ended the outbreak in Soho by removing the handle of the water pump in Broadwick Street. Only in their final epidemic despatch, on 18 September 1849, did Chadwick’s Board of Health suggest that drinking water should be boiled. He never relented and clung to the idea that epidemics were caused by dirt to the end of his life

  As he got older, he became duller and even more obsessed with drains. He was shunned by the debating societies the Victorians so enjoyed because he would keep bringing every discussion back to the same thing. ‘Mr Chadwick, the subject is taxation, not drainage,’ said the irritable chairman at the Political Economy Club. And when he ran across the French emperor Napoleon III in Paris, he addressed him as ‘Sire’ like a medieval courtier, and then lectured him about sewage manure. Then was offended not to get an invitation back the next day.

  His most frustrating battle, to create a sewage system for London, was finally won by his enemies the engineers after the Great Stink in July 1858. The smell from the Thames was then so bad that the windows of the House of Commons had to be hung with sheets of lime. The MPs left in despair, having voted to let the Metropolitan Board of Works borrow £3 million to do what they liked with. As a result, it is now Bazalgette’s gigantic brick sewers that form the Victoria Embankment.

  Chadwick reverted to the traditional Utilitarian pursuit of developing crazy ideas. He set up committees to campaign on army health, telegraphs, firefighting, better paving and especially drill in schools. He campaigned for votes for women and for every school to have its own gym and swimming pool. He also tried to arrange to suck pure air from towers down to the polluted cities, to abolish spelling lessons in schools, and to train fire horses to leave their stalls and run to the fire engine as soon as they heard the alarm. He twice stood for Parliament, coming bottom of the poll.

  He died on 6 July 1890, the grand old man of sanitary reform. ‘I cannot tell you,’ he told a reporter in his last newspaper interview a few months before, ‘how strongly I believe in soap and water as a preventative of epidemics.’ His legacy had been recognized with a knighthood a few months before his death, despite years of letter-writing to the government asking for a peerage. His obituary in The Times recognized that if he had killed in battle the number of people he had saved, he would have had a whole army of statues erected to him. He got precious little, considering that his friend Ashley got Shaftesbury Avenue named after him and had the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus erected in his memory.

  Yet it was Chadwick who laid the foundations, not just of drainage, but of a sensible graveyard system, a dispassionate civil service, a system of local government and much else besides. More than anybody else he was responsible for the falling death rate, but also for the Victorian obsession with measuring things. Everything could be quantified. The government was doing it, and from the 1830s, the new statistical societies were sending out their amateur counters in house-to-house surveys of school books, bible ownership, religiosity, illness, house design, sleeping arrangements, crime and anything which appealed to them, publishing table after table in closely argued pamphlets and reports. ‘The first and most essential rule of its conduct is to exclude all opinions,’ said the first prospectus of the London Statistical Society. The new measurement only dealt with facts.

  If you open the issue of Illustrated London News which described Chadwick’s work on the Health of Towns Commission in 1848, you can find the precise number of Christmas parcels brought into London by railway (17,209), the number of children in the Clapton Orphan’s Asylum (168), the length of the cane used to hit Queen Victoria on the head in Piccadilly (27 inches), the amount of tobacco imported (26 million pounds) and the number of Americans christened ‘George Washington’ in the previous half century (over 30,000). You can find the amount of rancid butter seized, the number of evictions in Galway, the number of potatoes eaten at the annual meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society, and on and on. It is the symptom of a scientific age, confident that it can control the chaos around it with the unrelenting application of facts and measurements.

  But it went further than that. Since the invention of clocks, measurement was also a way of controlling an unruly population. ‘It has been suggested to me that the Railway Timetable did much to discipline the people at large,’ wrote the historian G. M. Young in a footnote. ‘I think this is true.’

  So do I. Measuring things even controlled people’s emotions and dampened their spirits. Witness William Jacob, Comptroller of Corn Returns, speaking at an early meeting of the London Statistical Society: ‘A more general diffusion of accurate knowledge regarding the state of public affairs would tend to check that excitement and party spirit which has often been created by misrepresentation or exaggeration, and has produced an annoyance to the government.’

  In short, the Victorian population was inspected, preached at and counted, and the very chief of the counters, fighting ancient prejudices, superstitions, tradition and emotion, was Edwin Chadwick. There was something almost naive about it all, like a child who obsessively counts the cows in a field or the wheels on a railway engine. ‘Side by side with his powerful intellect there was much that was childlike in his disposition,’ wrote Chadwick’s daughter Marion in 1928. It was an interesting remark, given John Stuart Mill’s description of Bentham as ‘a boy to the last’. There was indeed something childlike about the idea that pleasure or utility, let alone the sheer complexity of life, could be subsumed into numbers.

  There still is. And it was this issue that brought the greatest propagandist of the age into the argument. Charles Dickens shared many of the ideals of the Utilitarians – ‘I saw 30,000 children hunted, flogged, imprisoned, but not taught,’ he wrote in 1850 – and he was eventually persuaded to ally himself to Chadwick’s cause, but he despised their obsession with facts, believing that dry definitions missed out the spark of humanity which make the difference. His novel Hard Times stands as a testament to the case against counting, as relevant today as it ever was. There was something of Chadwick in the monstrous figure of Thomas Gradgrind, hardware merchant and Utilitarian, the man who believes that only demonstrable countable facts are important. Yet you can define something precisely, count every attribute and measure it in every way, Dickens implied, and still not know much about it.

  He describes how the warm-hearted circus girl Sissy Jupe is adopted into Gradgrind’s dry as dust household. Sissy knows all about horses because she was brought up with them, but asked to define one in class and she finds herself tongue-tied and overshadowed by one of her mor
e experienced fellow pupils. ‘Quadrapud,’ he says. ‘Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth …’

  ‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Gradgrind, turning back to Sissy. ‘You know what a horse is.’

  Bizarre measurement No. 5

  Cat Unit

  (Minimum fatal dose per kilogram of cat, an American method of standardizing pharmaceuticals in 1910.)

  * * *

  Proportion of cars on Albanian roads believed to have been stolen elsewhere in Europe (1997): 80 per cent

  Average time spent by British people in traffic jams every year: 11 days

  Chapter 5

  The Feelgood Factor

  By psychology’s ‘mortal’ sin, I mean the sin of deadening, the dead feeling that comes over us when we read professional psychology, hear its language, the voice with which it drones, the bulk of its textbooks, the serious pretensions and bearded proclamations of new ‘findings’ that could hardly be more banal, its soothing anodynes for self-help, its décor, its fashion, its departmental meetings, and its tranquilising consulting rooms, those stagnant waters where the soul goes to be restored, a last refuge of white-bread culture, stale, crustless, but ever spongy with rebounding hope.